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“Well, it’s cheap enough,” said Harman. “Wonder what the unions would say to us and them chaps that’s always spoutin’ about the wages of the workin’ classes—not that I’m against fair wages. I reckon if that guy Clayton had left us enough tobacco, I wouldn’t mind raisin’ the wage bill to eight dollars a week, but we haven’t got it—haven’t got enough to last a month as it’s runnin’ now.”

He spoke the truth. Less than a month left them cleared out, and the Kanakas struck to a man and ceased to dive, spending their time fishing, lazing in the sun and smoking—but their chief amusement was watching the white men at work.

There is no penitentiary equal to a pearl lagoon, once it seizes you, and no galley slaves under the whip ever worked harder than Harman and Bud Davis, stripped to the skin, brown as cobnuts with sun and water, long-haired, dishevelled, diving like otters, and bringing up not more than a hundred pair of shells a day.

The boat had to be anchored over a certain spot, and as the work went on the anchorage had to be shifted; at the end of the day the oysters had to be brought ashore and laid out on the coral to rot. Then, too tired, almost, to smoke, the Pearl Syndicate would stretch itself under the stars to dream of fortune and the various ways of spending money.