It was a pink pearl, exquisite, lustrous, and almost, one might say, luminous. It was the size of a marble. Not one of those enormous glass marbles with colored cores which we all remember as objects of worship, but an ordinary, practicable, play-with-able marble of full size.
"Good Lord!" said Floyd.
Sru grunted.
To Sru all this lust for pearls was an inexplicable business. If it had been a hunt for colored beads, he could have understood it, but pearls to him had no more beauty than cod's eyes, and far less beauty than colored shells. Coming from a district where pearling was unknown, he had no idea, either, of the value of these things.
But even to Sru the new find was pleasing, because of its color, the vague luminous pink, the luster, the semi-translucency, and the perfect shape of the thing pleased him.
But they did not excite him. He could not understand that the lump of colored nacre that weighed, perhaps, two hundred grains, and was worth, perhaps, five thousand pounds, was the equivalent of mountains of plug tobacco, shiploads of cotton stuff, knives, guns, and ammunition, oceans of gin.
Floyd, after his momentary exclamation, controlled himself, turned the thing over in his hand as though it were some ordinary object, and then put it in the pearl box, carefully covering it with the cotton wool. He put the box in the pocket of his coat, which lay near by, and turned again to the searching of the last remnants of stuff in the trough. Nothing more showed, and, having washed his hands in the canvas bucket which Sru held for him, he put on his coat, and, having given him some directions as to the storing of the shell, returned across the lagoon to the house.
He knew that what he had in his pocket was worth all the stuff they had taken from the lagoon. Schumer had educated him on the subject of pearls, but even Schumer, with all his knowledge, could not have fixed the value of this splendid find, perfect in all parts, and weighing at least a hundred grains.
After supper he took it out of its box and examined it by the light of the fire. It was even more beautiful by the glow of the burning sticks than by the glow of the sunset.