The Pearl Fishers. H. De Vere Stacpoole
and dance, celebrating their victory. You see they did not know whom they were dealing with.
"From where we lay we could have picked them off like crows with our rifles. Of course, that would have meant they would have gone below and hid, and then at dark they'd have gone away. It would have sobered them, too, and I did not want that.
"So we let them be, putting our trust in the bottle, and we set to and made a raft with the help of some of the natives who were hiding in the bush with us.
"There was a little creek hidden from the schooner by a cape of coconut and pandanus trees, and we made the raft there, and a rotten raft it was; but it served our purpose, and when dark came down we shoved off, us four and two natives.
"The tide was with us; it was running out of the lagoon. The natives had canoe paddles, but they scarcely used them. Not a soul was on deck; they were all in the saloon drinking, and the noise was worse than a tavern on the Barbary Coast of a Saturday night. They wouldn't have heard us coming alongside if we had come blowing trumpets—which we didn't."
Schumer paused to refill and light his pipe. The lagoon was now a sheet of stars, and not a sound came but the murmur of the reef and the splash of a fish jumping in the lagoon.
"We came alongside, and in a minute we were over the rail—she had a low freeboard—every man of us. We didn't trouble about the raft, and she went out to sea on the tide.
"The saloon hatch was off, and there they were all crowded like bees in a bottle fighting and playing cards and drinking and smoking, and there as they sat we began to plug them with our Winchesters. We got six before the smoke of the firing hid them, and then we fired into the smoke and stood by to down them as they came up the companionway. They were plucky, but mad with drink, and they had no arms to speak of. One of them had a bottle in his hand, the only thing he could find to fight with; when he tumbled over into the lee scuppers he still held it unbroken, and I guess he went before his Maker with it like that.
"We settled them all with the exception of the bos'n. He skulked below, and I went down to find him. The saloon was clear of smoke and the swinging lamp was burning; dead men were lying everywhere, but no bos'n. He'd taken refuge in the old man's cabin and had barricaded the door, so that I couldn't kick it in—only managed to crack the paneling; so I began firing through it with my revolver, and then out he came with two bullets in him and a sheath knife in his hand.
"He gave me this cut before we had done with one another.
"The upshot was that every man of them was given his dose, and we took the schooner out of the lagoon, us four, with four Kanakas who joined the ship, and we had good luck all the rest of the voyage, though my arm inflamed so that I nearly lost it.
"So you see a trader's life out here is not all trading; one has to fight sometimes for what one gets, and to keep what one gets."
Floyd could not help thinking that Schumer's part in the recapture of the schooner had been more than he had stated.
"What's made you take to trading out here?" he asked. "You're a sailor, aren't you? At least I made the guess yesterday that you were a sailor first and a trader after."
"Yes, I began as a sailor. I served my two years before these new topsail yards made reefing child's work. I served in a Hamburg ship. What made me a trader? Well, I suppose it was the common sense that made me give up sailoring. I do not like hard manual labor. As I told you before, it was on the cards that I might have cast my lines in the newspaper world. Books interest me, written books; the world interested me, and I might have been the correspondent of newspapers. I am a fair linguist, and I can write simple English and picture fairly well what I see in words; yet I am a trader. I do not know why I am a trader in the least. It is the way of life that has come to me."
He ceased, and they sat in silence for a moment.
Floyd, looking round, saw that Isbel had vanished; she had slipped off to bed somewhere in the bush—slipped off like an animal. It was her characteristic that she was one of the shipwrecked party, yet remained apart. She helped in cooking and boat sailing and in other ways; but she lived her own life as an animal lives it, thinking her own thoughts, keeping her own counsel, speaking little. There was nothing about her of the childish and the light-hearted that stamps so many Polynesians, which is not to say that she was gloomy or too old for her years. She was just a creature apart, and had always the air of a looker-on at a game in which she helped, but which did not particularly interest her.
"The girl's gone," said Floyd.
Schumer looked round.
"Crept off to sleep; she'll sleep anywhere—in a tree or in the bush. I can't make out Kanakas. I've read a lot of stuff written about them, but there's always something behind that no one can get at. They are right down good in a lot of ways, and right down bad in others. Missionaries civilize them and varnish them over, but there's always the Kanaka underneath; they make Christians of them, but it's only on the outside. Look at that girl—she's only a child, of course, but a missionary has had the handling of her, and in the time we've been here she has turned right in on herself and gone back to her people, so to speak. She's not bad, but she's a savage, and nothing will make a savage anything else than a savage, except, maybe, on the outside."
"She seems pretty faithful and helps us all she can," said Floyd.
"Oh, she's not bad," yawned Schumer; "and she's a good deal of use in her way, and she's company of a sort, same as a dog or a cat. Well, I'm going to turn in."
He rose up and stretched himself, and looked at the starlit lagoon.
"It's funny to think there's maybe a fortune in pearls under all that," said he, "no knowing—but it will take some getting."
"We'll get it if it's there," said Floyd.
CHAPTER V
DREDGING
They were up at dawn, and the fire was crackling and the coffee heating before the sun had fully shown itself over the eastern reef line.
Schumer had been able to salve cooking utensils and some unbroken crockery ware from the Tonga, to say nothing of knives and forks and spoons.
It seems a small matter, but a knife and a fork make all the difference when one comes to food, even on an island of the Pacific—a plate, too.
Condemned to eat with one's fingers and to share a knife in common, one feeds, but one does not eat.
There was condensed milk for the coffee, ship's bread and salt pork fried over the fire. Isbel had collected some plantains; they went into the frying pan to help the pork. She had also gathered some drupes from a pandanus tree growing near the wreck, and served them on a big leaf.
"There's a whole lot of seeds aboard somewhere," said Schumer, as they breakfasted; "onions and carrots and so on; I must hunt for them, and when we have time I'll see how they grow here. You can grow anything on these islands. The soil's the best in the world; maybe because of the gull guano. We'll want all the native-grown food we can get here, if things turn out as I expect, for we'll have to feed the labor we bring, and natives aren't happy without the stuff they are used to. Corned beef and spuds are all very well in their way, but it's breadfruit and taro and plantains that are the stand-by. Fortunately there seems lots. You see all that dark-green stuff growing over there straight across the lagoon—that's breadfruit; big trees, too, and the coconuts aren't bad.
"When we get the labor we'll have a main camp over by the fishing ground. I've been thinking it all out. There's no natural water there, but I noticed yesterday a big rain pond in the coral; it must have been cut out by natives some time or another. The funny thing about these ponds is that the water is saltish at high tides, but gets fresh with the ebb. In some of the islands the natives stock them with fish, salt-water fish swimming in fresh.
"Then we have the fishing to fall back on, and the lagoon is full. Yes, we are not badly placed as things go."