I have good reasons for thinking that it had been planned originally for other purposes than that of merely sheltering a gang of indentured labourers. It was to have been the entrepôt or hub of a huge South Sea system, and from its central warehouses a whole empire of surrounding groups was to have been supplied. Indeed, the whole project had so far taken shape that large sheds had even been erected for the commerce that was destined never to come, and commodious houses raised for the managers and clerks whose contracts were still unwritten. I wandered at will through those crumbling rooms, some of which had never been occupied, though they were now in decay; and along the grassy street on which they had been made to face. I found a battery of four small cannon covering the approach from the pier; a dozen ship’s tanks filled with rain-water (the only kind obtainable on the island); and in a shuttered room I stumbled over a hundred Snyder rifles shining in the dark. But what riveted my attention most was the interior of a long, low warehouse full of wreckage. Here, in mouldering, unsorted confusion, had been thrown all that a dozen years had seen salvaged from the sea: binnacles, hatches, yards and canvas, old steering-wheels, blocks, and strange tangles of gear and junk that seemed scarcely worth the saving. Here were life-belts in the last stages of rottenness; odds and ends of perished cargoes; barrels of tallow; twisted drums of what had once been paint or varnish; some cuddy-chairs of the folding kind; and a quantity of boards, barnacled and water-worn. I must have spent the better part of an hour turning over all this stuff, and in reconstructing in my mind the bygone ships from which they had been taken; musing on the fate of those who had once sailed them so unwisely that Lascom Island had been their final port and its bursting seas their grave.
When at last I emerged again into the open air, I perceived with relief that our boat still lay beside the steps of the pier, for I had no desire to be left alone on Lascom Island even for a single hour. I counted for so little on board the ship that I had a panic fear that they might go to sea again without me, and I accordingly returned to the seamen who were smoking under the lee of a palm. We waited there a long time before we were aroused by the sound of voices and the sight of Old Bee and Frenchy walking slowly towards us. The old rogue looked pale and agitated; he had his arm through Frenchy’s, and was speaking to him with intense seriousness and a volubility quite unusual. He seemed pleading with the trader, urging him apparently to something distasteful, something that was perpetually negatived by Frenchy’s bullet-head and his reiterated “No, sare; no, sare; it is eempossible.”
“I’ll make it seventy-five a month,” quavered Bibo, “and all found.”
Again the Frenchman shook his head.
“Ask anysing else, sare,” he said; “but this, oh, no. But why not the boy?” he added.
“That young ass!” cried Old Bee.
“I won’t stay here alone, if that’s what you mean,” said Frenchy. “But if you’ll run down to Treachery Island and let me get a girl there, I tell you, sare, I will do it for the seventy-five. But alone? Good Lord! I’d follow Stocker in ze mont’.”
Bibo groaned aloud. “It’ll take a day and a half to run down there, and all of three to beat back,” he said; “and you might be a week getting a girl.”
Frenchy shrugged his shoulders. “Old Tom Ryegate’s there,” he said. “He’ll do ze thing quick enough if I make it worth his while. They say, too, that he’s in with the Samoan pastor there, Jimmy Upolu. Brice of the Wandering Minstrel told me he was at Treachery three years ago, and picked up ze prettiest woman in the island for sixteen pounds. Told me he gave four pounds to Tom, four to ze pastor, and the rest to ze woman’s folks in trade. He was in such a damned rush he couldn’t wait to cheapen things—just paid his money and went. But she was a tearing fine piece, he said.”
Old Bee hardly seemed to listen to him. “I suppose you don’t care,” he said bitterly, “but this business is going to put me two weeks behind and maybe lose me the shell at Big Muggin. Of all cursed luck, who ever had the match of it? First to last, this island has been a millstone round my neck, one everlasting drain and bother. What with the rats, and Charley Sansome’s D. T.’s, and the lawsuit with Poppenheifer, and this business of Stocker’s, I tell you, Frenchy, I’m clean sick of it. It’s just money, money, money all the time, and I don’t believe I’ve ever made enough out of it to buy me a suit of clothes!”