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Updated: June 3, 2025
An oil-soaked and greasy glove clapped his shoulder and as he turned, the same voice, suddenly altered, stammered: "Oh, I beg your pardon " "'Lo, Harry!" Jim turned to greet a tall, lean individual more tanned than himself, with little, fine, weather lines about his eyes and an abrupt quickness of gesture which denoted his hair-triggered nerves. "What are you doing in this man's town?"
Bending over her task she did not see, neither did she hear, an approaching person. It was Ben. "Busy, eh?" he said in his splendid, candid way. Cora was so glad it was only Ben. "Oh yes," she replied, "the boys never seem to know how to leave a boat. This is thoroughly oil-soaked." "They're careless that way," admitted Ben, stepping into the boat to see what the trouble was.
The spectators gaped and squirmed, vastly excited, but silent now. About one hundred feet away from the tree stump, Andy shouted out the quick word: "Ready." At once Alf Warren drew the match in his free hand across his coat sleeve. It lighted. He applied the ignited splinter to the edge of the hoop. The oil-soaked covering took fire instantly. The blaze ran round the circle.
Each craft bore at its bow a fire-basket filled with some spongy substance, which, oil-soaked, blazed smokily with that peculiar blue-green light so ghostly in its wavering reflections. Many of the folk sat in these boats, among their brown fiber nets and long, iron-tipped lances. All alike were pale and anemic-looking, though well-muscled and of vigorous build.
Leaning sidewise against the gale, the little lantern-guided procession trudged along the sea-wall and stumblingly ascended the slippery path to the beacon on Brimstone. Sheltering the oil-soaked kindlings with his body, Jim scratched a match; and in a twinkling long tongues of smoky flame were streaming wildly to leeward. "Ah! They see us!"
When they were within a hundred yards Martha muttered, "It is time," and Foy ran hither and thither with a candle firing the slow-matches; also to make sure he cast the candle among a few handfuls of oil-soaked shreds of canvas that lay ready at the bottom of the hatchway.
They dismounted in the shelter of a wood and removed the bags which they had carried on their saddles. Inside these bags were several snakes, the largest perhaps eight feet in length. To the tail of each the negroes fastened a leather thong, and then to each thong a length of telegraph-wire, the end of which had been bent into a loop to hold a bundle of oil-soaked waste.
Finally, when all else was ready, Millard took the lighted candle out of the candlestick. "This candle will burn for thirty minutes yet," guessed the wretch, noting its unburned length with the air of an expert "That will be time enough. Poor lad!" He set the lighted candle down on top of the papers, over the pile of oil-soaked shavings.
"And settle down in Okoochee! Never see anything! Stuck in this God-forsaken hole! This drab, dull, oil-soaked village! When there are wonderful people, wonderful places, colour, romance, beauty! Damascus! Mandalay! Singapore! Hongkong!... Hongkong! It sounds like a temple bell. It thrills me." "Over in Hongkong," said Arnold Hatch, "I expect some Chinese Maxine Pardee would say, Okoochee!
We'll just keep this here mate in the brig while we're disposing of our black coral, pearl, shell, and copra in Honolulu, an' then, when we've cleaned up, an' got our passages booked for San Francisco " "But who says we're goin' back to San Francisco?" cut in McGuffey. "Why, where else would men with money in their pockets head for, you oil-soaked piece of ignorance?
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