"No good luck them pearl," Tai-Hotauri blurted out, rolling his head ominously. "He say he sell. Plenty schooner come. Then he make big hurricane, everybody finish, you see. All native men say so."
"It's hurricane season now," Captain War-field laughed morosely.
"They're not far wrong. It's making for something right now, and I'd feel better if the _Malahini_ was a thousand miles away from here."
"He is a bit mad," Grief concluded. "I've tried to get his point of view. It's--well, it's mixed. For eighteen years he'd centred everything on Armande. Half the time he believes she's still alive, not yet come back from France. That's one of the reasons he held on to the pearls.
And all the time he hates white men. He never forgets they killed her, though a great deal of the time he forgets she's dead. Hello! Where's your wind?"
The sails bellied emptily overhead, and Captain Warfield grunted his disgust. Intolerable as the heat had been, in the absence of wind it was almost overpowering. The sweat oozed out on all their faces, and now one, and again another, drew deep breaths, involuntarily questing for more air.
"Here she comes again--an eight point haul! Boom-tackles across! Jump!"
The Kanakas sprang to the captain's orders, and for five minutes the schooner laid directly into the passage and even gained on the current.
Again the breeze fell flat, then puffed from the old quarter, compelling a shift back of sheets and tackles.
"Here comes the _Nuhiva_" Grief said. "She's got her engine on. Look at her skim."
"All ready?" the captain asked the engineer, a Portuguese half-caste, whose head and shoulders protruded from the small hatch just for'ard of the cabin, and who wiped the sweat from his face with a bunch of greasy waste.
"Sure," he replied.
"Then let her go."
The engineer disappeared into his den, and a moment later the exhaust muffler coughed and spluttered overside. But the schooner could not hold her lead. The little cutter made three feet to her two and was quickly alongside and forging ahead. Only natives were on her deck, and the man steering waved his hand in derisive greeting and farewell.
"That's Narii Herring," Grief told Mulhall. "The big fellow at the wheel--the nerviest and most conscienceless scoundrel in the Paumotus."
Five minutes later a cry of joy from their own Kanakas centred all eyes on the _Nuhiva_. Her engine had broken down and they were overtaking her. The _Malahini's_ sailors sprang into the rigging and jeered as they went by; the little cutter heeled over by the wind with a bone in her teeth, going backward on the tide.
"Some engine that of ours," Grief approved, as the lagoon opened before them and the course was changed across it to the anchorage.
Captain Warfield was visibly cheered, though he merely grunted, "It'll pay for itself, never fear."
The _Malahini_ ran well into the centre of the little fleet ere she found swinging room to anchor.
"There's Isaacs on the _Dolly_," Grief observed, with a hand wave of greeting. "And Peter Gee's on the _Roberta_. Couldn't keep him away from a pearl sale like this. And there's Francini on the _Cactus_. They're all here, all the buyers. Old Parlay will surely get a price."
"They haven't repaired the engine yet," Captain Warfield grumbled gleefully.
He was looking across the lagoon to where the _Nuhiva's_ sails showed through the sparse cocoa-nuts.
II
The house of Parlay was a big two-story frame affair, built of California lumber, with a galvanized iron roof. So disproportionate was it to the slender ring of the atoll that it showed out upon the sand-strip and above it like some monstrous excrescence. They of the _Malahini_ paid the courtesy visit ashore immediately after anchoring.
Other captains and buyers were in the big room examining the pearls that were to be auctioned next day. Paumotan servants, natives of Hikihoho, and relatives of the owner, moved about dispensing whiskey and absinthe.
And through the curious company moved Parlay himself, cackling and sneering, the withered wreck of what had once been a tall and powerful man. His eyes were deep sunken and feverish, his cheeks fallen in and cavernous. The hair of his head seemed to have come out in patches, and his mustache and imperial had shed in the same lopsided way.
"Jove!" Mulhall muttered under his breath. "A long-legged Napoleon the Third, but burnt out, baked, and fire-crackled. And mangy! No wonder he crooks his head to one side. He's got to keep the balance."
"Goin' to have a blow," was the old man's greeting to Grief. "You must think a lot of pearls to come a day like this."
"They're worth going to inferno for," Grief laughed genially back, running his eyes over the surface of the table covered by the display.
"Other men have already made that journey for them," old Parlay cackled.
"See this one!" He pointed to a large, perfect pearl the size of a small walnut that lay apart on a piece of chamois. "They offered me sixty thousand francs for it in Tahiti. They'll bid as much and more for it to-morrow, if they aren't blown away. Well, that pearl, it was found by my cousin, my cousin by marriage. He was a native, you see. Also, he was a thief. He hid it. It was mine. His cousin, who was also my cousin--we're all related here--killed him for it and fled away in a cutter to Noo-Nau. I pursued, but the chief of Noo-Nau had killed him for it before I got there. Oh, yes, there are many dead men represented on the table there. Have a drink, Captain. Your face is not familiar.
You are new in the islands?"
"It's Captain Robinson of the _Roberta_," Grief said, introducing them.
In the meantime Mulhall had shaken hands with Peter Gee.
"I never fancied there were so many pearls in the world," Mulhall said.
"Nor have I ever seen so many together at one time," Peter Gee admitted.
"What ought they to be worth?"
"Fifty or sixty thousand pounds--and that's to us buyers. In Paris----" He shrugged his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows at the incommunicableness of the sum.
Mulhall wiped the sweat from his eyes. All were sweating profusely and breathing hard. There was no ice in the drink that was served, and whiskey and absinthe went down lukewarm.
"Yes, yes," Parlay was cackling. "Many dead men lie on the table there. I know those pearls, all of them. You see those three! Perfectly matched, aren't they? A diver from Easter Island got them for me inside a week. Next week a shark got him; took his arm off and blood poison did the business. And that big baroque there--nothing much--if I'm offered twenty francs for it to-morrow I'll be in luck; it came out of twenty-two fathoms of water. The man was from Raratonga. He broke all diving records. He got it out of twenty-two fathoms. I saw him. And he burst his lungs at the same time, or got the 'bends,' for he died in two hours. He died screaming. They could hear him for miles. He was the most powerful native I ever saw. Half a dozen of my divers have died of the bends. And more men will die, more men will die."
"Oh, hush your croaking, Parlay," chided one of the captains. "It ain't going to blow."
"If I was a strong man, I couldn't get up hook and get out fast enough,"
the old man retorted in the falsetto of age. "Not if I was a strong man with the taste for wine yet in my mouth. But not you. You'll all stay, I wouldn't advise you if I thought you'd go, You can't drive buzzards away from the carrion. Have another drink, my brave sailor-men. Well, well, what men will dare for a few little oyster drops! There they are, the beauties! Auction to-morrow, at ten sharp. Old Parlay's selling out, and the buzzards are gathering--old Parlay who was a stronger man in his day than any of them and who will see most of them dead yet."
"If he isn't a vile old beast!" the supercargo of the _Malahini_ whispered to Peter Gee.
"What if she does blow?" said the captain of the _Dolly_. "Hikihoho's never been swept."
"The more reason she will be, then," Captain Warfield answered back. "I wouldn't trust her."
"Who's croaking now?" Grief reproved.
"I'd hate to lose that new engine before it paid for itself," Captain Warfield replied gloomily.
Parlay skipped with astonishing nimbleness across the crowded room to the barometer on the wall.
"Take a look, my brave sailormen!" he cried exultantly.
The man nearest read the glass. The sobering effect showed plainly on his face.
"It's dropped ten," was all he said, yet every face went anxious, and there was a look as if every man desired immediately to start for the door.
"Listen!" Parlay commanded.