way
thence to the tangled mangrove which hid the creek, in order to tout
amongst the pearlers newly come to port. They gave me scant
encouragement. Tough chaps and rough they were, the Broome pearlers of
those days—driftwood, dregs and spume. They distrusted me. In their
jaundiced eyes this plausible fellow had only come to cheat them of
their hard-earned prize. Yet every man jack amongst them with a pearl
of price in his pocket was completely at sea as to its real worth. He
neither knew what to ask for it nor when to close with an offer.
But this ignorance seemed to offer me a fair loophole. One morning I came amongst them armed with kindly malice.
"You
mugs who know it all," I said. "You sweat and dive and fish and risk
your lives every day in the week. And then when your fish is caught you
don't even know its market value!" And then I added a high-falutin
jargon of "explanation" to puzzle them and fix their attention.
"What are you gettin' at, you bloody fool?" said a hefty Irishman through discolored teeth.
"Simply
this. And you can't deny it. Not a chap among you knows the value of a
given piece of pearl. That's how I can help you. I'll undertake to
value without fee for any of you chaps, and my valuation stands as an
offer too. If none of the big bosses will give you more, then bring the
stuff back to me and I'll pay the price all right. If you have any
sense, and any guts, you'll know what to do!"
Well,
there they stood, thinking hard and looking for the snag in my offer.
But there was no snag, and at long last they realized it. That was a
great day, when I put my first crimp into the men who had tried to run
me out of town.
It
was Syd Lang who really started the run. He was the chap whom Mac the
steward had introduced to my notice as the man who stuffed his pocket
with poetry books. Though to the eye he was a very plain fellow, the
veriest prose in shabby binding, yet the nearness of the poets to his
skin must somehow have given him compassion. He was always ready to
help the underdog, if it did not cost him anything. Anyway, he was
