To be given a pearl lagoon by luck and to work it as a hog works a wood for truffles would be to act like a hog.
The stuff was all there; this and the success of the first day's work was ample confirmation of the riches lying under that green water, and Schumer expatiated on the matter.
"You wouldn't believe it," said he, "but the value of a single pearl grows in proportion as you can match it with others exactly like it. It takes eighty or a hundred pearls to make a woman's necklace. Eighty or a hundred pearls like that one would each be worth two or three times what each pearl is worth alone. Even twenty pearls exactly alike would be worth much more than if they were different, for they would form the basis for a collection. You would never dream of the work that goes on in the world matching these things. There are men at it all the time in Paris and London and Amsterdam. A perfect necklace of pearls once formed is always held together; it becomes an individual, so to speak, and is known to the trade by a name. The women belonging to the royal families of Europe hold a number of these collections, but there are lots of private ones, and every great collection is known and tabulated. So you see it won't pay us to peddle our stuff out little by little--we must hold all the pearls we get and match them."
"Look here," said Floyd, "one thing we have never settled--our shares in this business. There's Isbel, too; she has done her bit."
"What's the use of money to a Kanaka?" said he. "We'll give her something, of course, but we need not take her seriously into our calculations. Our shares--well, don't you think it's a bit early to come to that? All this is a dream in the air at present; it may never go farther."
"Well, it's this way," said Floyd, "I always think it's well to start out knowing exactly where you are going to, and what you are to get. When you sign on in a ship you know your pay, and you know the latitudes you have got to work in, and you know the time you are to be on the job. I think it would be better here and now to settle up this business, and I think we ought to go half shares."
"Half shares?" said Schumer meditatively.
"I have been figuring it out in my head," said Floyd. "What have we each contributed to the business? I have brought my work and a boat; now, without a boat we'd have been done completely, because you can't reach here by the reef, and we couldn't have discovered the beds without a boat. Then there's my work. You have brought your knowledge of pearling, and, what is more, all that trade stuff and provisions from the wreck, your energy and enterprise and your work. When I said half shares I did not mean that all the trade and provisions of the _Tonga_ should not be taken into consideration. I would suggest that when we settle up I should pay you for all that out of my share. Then there is the money of the _Tonga_ and the _Cormorant_. While I hold that Coxon's money belongs by right to his next of kin, I think what I have suffered through his relative, Harrod, permits me to use that money to further our speculation, paying it back with interest to the next of kin when all is through. So I would be nearly equal to you in ready cash, and the question resolves itself into my boat and work against your work and knowledge of pearling."