"My father was a German," replied Schumer. "I speak four languages and half a dozen Polynesian dialects. One has to. Well, shall we get back? There is nothing more to be done here for the present."
CHAPTER IV
SCHUMER'S STORY
They rowed back across the lagoon to the camp, and there Schumer set to on the construction of his dredge.
Floyd had suddenly found an object of interest on the island almost as absorbing as the oyster bed, and that object was Schumer.
Schumer had seemed to him at first a simple trader bound up in trade, one of a class that swarms in the Pacific. Bound up in trade he undoubtedly was, but there was all the difference in the world between him and the others of his class that Floyd had come across in his wanderings.
Perhaps the hardest thing in the world to put one's finger on is personality, or the power that tells in a man's appearance, actions, and speech. Its essence lies in complexity, and is born of all the multitudinous attributes that form spirit.
Floyd watched Schumer working on the dredge, and wondered at his ingenuity and power over metal and wood. He had but little material to his hand—cask hoops and old ironwork from the wreck, and so on—yet he made the most of it, and did not grumble. He explained the mechanism of the thing when he had finished. He had set Isbel to work stitching the canvas bag which was part of the dredge, and she sat mysterious as a sphinx, working and listening to him as he talked.
Then, later on, as they smoked after supper and watched the stars break out over the lagoon, Schumer went on talking, now of trade and the wild work he had seen here and there in the Pacific.