Floyd told.
Taking off his coat, and laying it on the sands, he began to remove the pearls, in their casings of cotton wool, from the pockets. He explained why he had placed them there, and, as he went on with the work, Schumer and the stranger, standing by, looked on.
Schumer up to this had been too busy to introduce the newcomer. He did so now.
"This is Captain Hakluyt," said he. "He's in this venture, as I will explain to you afterward. His firm owns the Southern Cross."
Floyd looked up, and nodded to Hakluyt.
The new man's face was not a certificate of character. There are faces that repel at first sight, and Hakluyt's was one of them.
He had the appearance, not so much of a man who was ill, but of a man who never enjoyed good health. Anæmic looking despite his exposure to sun and wind, he seemed unable to bear either the full light of the sun or a full gaze. He was continually blinking, and to Floyd in that moment he suggested vividly the idea of a sick owl.
It was the curve of the nose and the blinking of the eyelids that produced this impression. The eyes themselves were not at all owllike, being small and set close together.
The whole figure of the man matched his face, slight and mean, with shoulders sloping like the shoulders of a champagne bottle. It was a figure that no tailor could improve.
His hands, as he stood with the thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, showed lean and clawlike, birdlike. Birdlike is the term best suited for the whole man; light, restless, peering, and without grace, for it is a fact that the animal and the bird translated into human terms lose both grace and nobility. Man standing or falling by his approach or recession to the type, man.