“‘Well,’ said Buck, ‘here we are and here we stick. We’ve anchored on top of a fortune and if it takes ten years we’ll hive it.’ That was all very well saying, but we’d got the question of grub to consider, but we soon found we needn’t worry about that; there was fish and turtle and _béche de mer_ and cocoanuts, bread-fruit on the south side and taro, to say nothing of oysters. Having fixed that matter, we set to work. Those Kanakas hadn’t signed on for diving after oysters, but stick a Kanaka in the water and it’s all he wants; besides, we gave them extra pay in the way of stick tobacco, axing open a lot of old Pat’s tobacco cases, sure of being able to pay him out of the pearl money; then we worked like grigs in vinegar, and at the end of the first week’s work we hadn’t found one pearl. The way we did was to put each day’s takings out on the beach in the sun; the sun opened them better than an oyster knife.
“‘Well, this is bright,’ says Buck one day as we were going over the heap. ‘Luck’s clean against us,’ he says, and no sooner had he spoke the words, a whopper of a pearl ’s big as a pistol bullet jumped into his fist out of an oyster he was handling. It wasn’t a big oyster neither. My, that pearl was a beauty; it turned the scale at forty grains I reckon, and it wasn’t the last.
“We were six to seven months on that job, and I never want to strike another pearl lagoon. Me and Slane had at last to do most of the diving, for the Kanakas got sick of it. We looked like Guy Fawkes. When we sailed into that lagoon we were spry young chaps clean-shaved and decently dressed; when it had done with us we were bearded men, men black with the sun and salt water and ragged as Billy be Dam. I tell you we were spectacles. Satan never fixed up such a factory as a pearl lagoon when you have to work it short-handed and on the secret. You can’t stop, not if you only get a pearl in a thousand oysters, you can’t stop. It’s always the one pearl more that does you. It’s like the gambling rooms. Till one day I says to Buck: ‘I’m done.’
“‘I was only waiting for you to say it,’ said Buck. ‘I’ve been done this last week only I wouldn’t give in.’
“We’d got together two hundred and thirty-two pearls and some seeds—the king of the lot was a roseleaf pink pearl; there were two golden pearls that were a perfect match pair, half a dozen blacks, a few yellow that weren’t no use, and the balance white. We’d been looking up prices before we started and got some tips from a man who was in the know, and we reckoned our haul was thirty or forty thousand dollars. You see it was virgin ground, and the things had time to grow to size without being disturbed.