“How much is it worth, skipper?” asked the tug's engineer.
“Not less than £1 an ounce——”
“No, sah,” cried Manuel, with an ex cathedra air, “twenty-two shillings, sah. Dat's what the captain of de Fanny Long Hobart Town whaleship got fo' a piece eleven poun' weight in Sydney last June. And I hear de boys sayin' dat he would hab got £1 5s. only dat dere was a power of squids' beaks in it—and dere's not many in dis lot, so it's gwine to bring more.”
He explained that the pieces of black shell, which looked like broken mussel shells, were in reality the beaks of the squid, upon which the sperm whale feeds. Then, for the benefit of those of the party, he and the two other ex-whalemen described the cause of the formation of this peculiar substance in the body of the sperm whale.
Lester took pencil and paper and made a rapid calculation.
“Boys, we'll say that this greasy-looking staff is worth only a pound an ounce—though I don't doubt that Manuel is right. Well, at £1 an ounce, it comes to eighteen hundred and eighty-eight pounds.”
“Hurrah for Mrs. Lester!” cried Lindley, the mate.
“She has brought us luck from the first, and now she has luck herself.”
The men cheered her again and again, for there was not one of them that had not a rough affection for their captain's violet-eyed wife. They had admired her for her pluck even in making the voyage to this desolate spot, and her constant cheerfulness and her kindness and attention in nursing three of them who had been seriously ill cemented their feelings of devotion to her. There was a happy supper party in “Wreck House”—-as Lucy had named her strangely-built abode—that night, and it was not until the small hours of the morning that the men went off to sleep on the tug, and left Lucy and her husband to themselves.
“I'm too excited to sleep now, Tom,” she said. “Come, I must show you the place where I found it. It is not a bit cold. And oh! Tom, I'm beginning to love this lonely island, and the rough life, and the tame seals, and the wild goats, and the fowls, and black Manuel, and, and—oh, everything! And look, Tom dear, over there at the lighthouse at Deal Island. I really believe the light was never shining as it is to-night. Oh! all the world is bright to me.”