It took them a fortnight to get the main posts up and the planking started.

Joe proved himself an invaluable worker, with initiative enough to oversee the others, so that both Schumer and Floyd could leave him and give their attention to the fishery and the pearl getting. Sru, despite his looks and his scars, was shaping well also as an overseer, and the pearls were showing in a satisfactory manner. The pearls taken hitherto by Schumer and Floyd working alone were all free pearls contained in the substance of the oyster or lying loose under the mantle; now began to come in pearls attached to the shell and shells presenting blisters.

It was well that Schumer had some practical knowledge of pearling, or these blistered shells might have been cast with the others.

Now a blister on a pearl shell looks exactly like the bleb raised by a blister on the human skin. It is caused by some foreign body getting into the oyster, causing irritation, and a consequent extra secretion of nacre which covers the foreign body over. But it must never be forgotten also that a pearl lying in the shell may cause sufficient irritation to stimulate this extra secretion of nacre, and that, as a result, a blister when opened may be found to contain a pearl.

[Pg 119]At the end of a month, when the house was nearly finished, they had on their hands two dozen of these blistered shells and a hundred and four pearls as the result of the month's fishing, besides eighteen shells to which pearls were adhering.

On paper that would seem to make a good show, but the practical results were not so rosy, though fair enough in all conscience, considering the cheap price of labor.

To arrive at a true estimate of the take one must disregard Schumer's rough statement as to values for something more precise.

The most valuable of all pearls are those that are perfectly round.

A perfect pearl must have this shape, and it must have four other qualities. It must be either pure white or pink; it must be partly transparent; it must be free from all specks or blemishes, and it must have the true pearl luster.

Next to the perfect comes the Bouton pearl, flat on one side and convex on the other; lastly comes the drop or pear-shaped pearl.

All these belong to the first class, and if they conform to the four cardinal rules as to transparency, et cetera, they are valuable, the value of each depending upon the weight in grains.

Then come the second class, consisting of imperfectly shaped pearls of good luster and quality and perfectly shaped pearls of imperfect luster and quality.

Lastly we have the baroque pearls.

These are sometimes of very large size, but of extraordinary and irregular shape. They are really masses of nacre that have been formed around large,[Pg 120] rough foreign bodies that have got into the oyster. They are sometimes hollow, and then they are known to jewelers under the French name coq de perle.

Now of the hundred and four free pearls taken in the month's fishing only six were absolutely perfect and only two of these of large size. Yet these two alone well repaid the labor of getting them. Of the other ninety-eight there were twenty baroques of small value, and of the remaining seventy-eight, twenty were estimated by Schumer to be worthless, the last fifty-eight varying in value from half a sovereign to four pounds.

Taken altogether, the catch was good, especially when the blistered shells were split, for in two of the twenty-four blisters a pearl was found of fair quality. The cavities of the remaining "blisters" revealed nothing but some discolored water that smelled horribly.

Beside the pearls taken the value of the shell had also to be reckoned. The shell was that known to commerce as golden-edged, and its value might have been anything from fifty to a hundred pounds a ton.

When I spoke of twenty of the pearls being worthless I referred less to the pearls than the remains of pearls; every healthy pearl is of some value, even down to the tiny seed pearl, but the pearl, no matter how large, that loses its beauty by disease is worthless.

It is the grief of pearl fishing to come across things that a year ago may have been worth anything from a couple of hundred to a thousand pounds and that to-day are worthless. Things as ugly as dead cod's eyes that, a year ago, were fit to be the symbols of beauty, and it is impossible to say exactly what causes this decay. There may be several causes, diseases that attack[Pg 121] the pearl as well as the oyster; but the result is there as a proof of the vandalism of nature.

Among the trade of the Tonga had been some parcels of surgeons' cotton wool. Schumer rooted a parcel of this out, and, turning the gold and papers from the cash box, lined it with a sheet of the wool. He placed the baroque and lesser-valued pearls on this sheet and covered them with a single layer of wool; on this layer he placed the pearls of the second order. All those of the first class he kept apart in a small wooden box, each pearl packed separately in its own nest of wool.

The few shells with pearls attached to them he placed in a cocoa box, each shell in a jacket of wool.

"We can't cut the pearls off those shells," said he. "It's jeweler's work, and we are only carpenters at the business. They'll keep till we get them to Europe."

A fortnight later the roof was on the house, a roof thatched with palm leaves bound down with coconut sennit, and the pearls and all their other valuables were placed in the smaller of the two rooms.

The indefatigable Schumer, immediately the main door was in its place, set his men to work making a table. The two deck chairs were brought from the Southern Cross, also a spare saloon lamp and some drums of paraffin oil. Otherwise the schooner was left intact.

"Those Hakluyts would be sure to make a disturbance if we touched any of the saloon furniture," said Schumer. "They'd swear, maybe, we had looted the ship, and it's my ambition to bring her into Sydney harbor with everything standing and without a scratch on her that a Jew could swear to."

[Pg 122]"Schumer," said Floyd, "I've been thinking of that. When do you intend that we should take her to Sydney?"

"Well," said the other, "now we have things fixed the sooner we make a move the better. At first glance one might say keep her here till we have finished with the lagoon and then shin off in her with all the pearls we can get. That's what a fool would say, and that's what a fool would do. Where lies the folly? This way.

"To keep her like that would mean to steal her, and, as I said before, you can't steal a ship these days without being caught. Suppose, even, we were to give all the ports in the wor............