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"To say nothing of the mortgage on my house and on the nicest little best paying flat building in San Francisco since the earthquake." "But who's still putting up? all of you, I ask you." The wheat-farmer leaned forward, resting the heels of his hands on his knees so that the fingers hung down his long shins, in Daughtry's appraisal, half-way to his feet.
"And I saw it go under the sand, a fathom under the sand, on cross-bearings unnamable, where the mangroves fade away, and the coconuts grow, and the rise of land lifts from the beach to the Lion's Head." "Hold your horses," the wheat-farmer said, with a flare of irritation, directed, not at the Ancient Mariner, but at the captain and the Jew. "Who's putting up for this expedition?
But I give you fair warning, sir, before I sign on: if the beer dries up, I'm goin' to get interested in what you're after. Fair play is my motto." "Do you expect us to pay for your beer in addition?" Simon Nishikanta demanded. To Daughtry it was too good to be true. Here, with the Jew healing the breach with the wheat-farmer whose agents still cabled money, was the time to take advantage.
Why did you sail with only one chronometer?" "But I was willing for two," the Jew would defend. "You know that, Grimshaw?" The wheat-farmer would nod reluctantly and Captain would snap: "But not for three chronometers." "But if two was no better than one, as you said so yourself and as Grimshaw will bear witness, then three was no better than two except for an expense."
"He shall not share," spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-boned, middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands as the California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward. "Plenty for all," the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by cackling shrilly. "Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand." "Share what, sir?"
"My word," quoth Daughtry, "the old gentleman'd give one the jumps. There'll sure have to be plenty of beer." "Sea stewards put on some style, I must say," commented the wheat-farmer, oblivious to the Ancient Mariner, who still declaimed of the heat of the longboat.
But just the same we can dispense with the undesirables." "If you will have your will," the wheat-farmer conceded sardonically, although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if throttling a throat. "Besides, if we should run short of food you will prove desirable for the quantity of you, I mean, and not otherwise. Now just who would you consider undesirable? the black nigger?
"Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven," the Ancient Mariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help but notice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked their ears to listen and glanced each to the other with scant eyes. "It was in '52, in 1852, on such a day as this, all drinking and singing along the decks, we cleared from Sydney in the Wide Awake.
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