The Pearl Fishers. H. De Vere Stacpoole
only an idea of mine, and now it's here, a fortune right in our hands."
Floyd got out the sculls and the boat moved south.
Schumer was right when he had said "acres of shell." An hour's prospecting gave them the fact that the whole southern area of this the western portion of the lagoon was shell. There were three main beds with coral between, millions and millions of oysters, tons upon tons of shell, and no man could say the possibilities in the way of pearls.
When they had finished prospecting they beached the boat, and taking shelter from the sun under the shade of a little grove of artus and pura trees, set to on the provisions they had brought with them.
Right across the lagoon from where they sat they could see their camping place and the tent, the wreck, and the opening in the reef all in the blue weather, and beyond the opening in the reef a glimpse of the great Pacific and the fringe of pearl-white clouds on the horizon.
"Well," said Schumer, as they finished their meal, "the stuff is there right enough, and it only comes now to the question of lifting it. We have no labor, or none to speak of. Of course, we'll dredge and dive so as to get as much samples as we can, but we want twenty men on the work, and I don't see how we're to do it without letting others into the secret. It's this way: Some time or another a vessel is sure to happen along here and take us off; well, if it does we must keep mum. Our object will be to get to Frisco or Sydney, and there get hold of some chap with money and form a little syndicate. That'll water the profits considerable; he'll want half at least. But there you are—what's to be done?"
"Nothing," said Floyd; "we can't move without labor, and even that's no use without a ship. To rig an expedition up at Frisco or Sydney will cost a lot, and you may be sure any speculator who puts his money into the thing will want to gobble most of the profits."
"Before we'd let him into the know we'd make him sign a paper," said Schumer, "stating his acceptance of our terms, and then we'd make him keep his bond with a pistol to his head. I don't trust the law alone, but the law backed by a derringer makes a pretty good security."
As Schumer spoke, Floyd, who was watching his profile cut hard against the sky, noticed for the first time the flatness of the cheek bones and the relationship between the nose and chin.
Schumer was a very quiet man in his speech and manner, yet there was about him an assured confidence speaking of great reserves of energy; and now for the first time, as though the thought of being robbed of his treasure had revealed it, there peeped out a new man; something of the bird of prey showed in that profile, something of the desperado found echo in his voice.
"Well," said Floyd, "there's no use in making plans till we have something to go on. Let's settle on our immediate business; we'll have to get oysters up and rot them in the sun to see if there's any show of pearls, and it seems to me that we are very well placed for that. Suppose a ship comes into the lagoon; well, she can't come within a mile of this beach on account of the shoal water, and she won't be able to see our work. I propose we stick to our old camp by the wreck, and come here every day to work. We can leave Isbel on guard at the camp, and if she sights a ship she can light a fire to give us warning."
"That's sense," replied Schumer, who had become himself again. "We can rot the oysters on the weather side of the reef, and we'll set to work on the business to-morrow morning. Let's get back now to the camp. I'm going to fix up a dredge. Did I tell you I was a bit of an engineer? I've had to be a bit of everything this time or that. I once edited a paper and wrote it mostly, from the poetry column to the produce. I guess I'd have written books if my lines had been cast in quiet waters. Trade has always kept me going, and here where there's palm trees and blue water enough trade turns up in oysters."
His eyes were fixed across the lagoon on the palms near the wreck; the hawk-like look had vanished, and he murmured half to himself the verse of Scheffel:
"Zwölf Palmen ragten am Meeresstrand Um eine alte Cisterne."
It was "Dun Tode Nah" he was repeating, and Floyd, who did not know the verse, knew the language.
"You speak German?" said he.
"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.
He was vague, rarely giving the names of islands or places, contenting himself with such wide terms as "It was an island south of the Marshalls," or "It was down in the Solomons." It was down in the Solomons that he had got the scar on his arm which he showed to Floyd.
"That's fifteen years old," said he; "it missed the artery or I wouldn't be here now. I was only twenty then and new to the islands, new to the sea also. I'd taken passage in a big schooner; two hundred and fifty tons she was, captained by a Yankee skipper, and manned by the biggest crowd of rascals that ever sailed out of Frisco to meet perdition.
"We put in at a big island southeast of Manahiki. I went ashore with the old man, the first mate, and two of the hands that could be trusted. We were all well armed, and lucky for us we were.
"It was the bos'n who started the trouble—a big, black-bearded chap, half Irish, quarter Scotch, with a tar brush somewhere in his family. Not a good mixture by any means.
"We hadn't been ashore ten minutes when this chap took the schooner. There were no preliminaries. She had a big brass swivel gun, and he turned it on the beach and let fly. He'd loaded her with a bag of bullets, and the first shot smashed the boat we'd landed in, smashed the only canoes in the place, and tore up the sand as if it had been plowed. Fortunately we had seen his game and scattered, but two natives were killed, and the rest took to the bush.
"So did we, and under cover of the leaves we watched what was going on in the schooner.
"They seemed pretty satisfied with themselves. They were sure against attack; they had smashed our boat and the canoes, and they were pretty certain we wouldn't try to board them by swimming, for the lagoon was full of sharks. They brought up grog and took to dancing on deck. Their object, of course, was to get away with the schooner and all the trade on board, change her name, and make for some port on the South American coast, and sell schooner and cargo and all. There was money aboard, too—the ship's money and some coin of the old man's, and fifty British sovereigns of my own hid in my bunk, though the beggars did not guess that.
"Yes, they should have knocked the shackle off the anchor chain and got to sea at once; they chose