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"We don't get her for nothing," agreed Thrackles. "Double pay and duff on Wednesday generally means get your head broke." "No trade," said the Nigger gloomily. They turned to him with one accord. "Why not?" demanded Pulz, breaking his silence. "No trade," repeated the Nigger. "Ain't you got a reason, Doctor?" asked Handy Solomon. "No trade," insisted the Nigger. An uneasy silence fell.
Once he explained that the medium he worked in caused a kind of uncontrollable longing for water; something having none of the qualities of burning or thirst, but an irresistible temporary mania. It worried him a good deal; he didn't understand it. That, then, was what ailed Pulz. When he opened the chest there was, as I surmise, a trifling quantity of this stuff lying in the inner lid.
The men separated, intending fresh meat. The affair was ridiculous. These sheep had become as wild as deer. Our surrounding party with its silly bared knives could only look after them open-mouthed, as they skipped nimbly between its members. "Get a gun of the Old Man, Mr. Eagen," suggested Pulz, "and we'll have something besides salt horse and fish." I nodded. We continued.
"Seventeen months," pursued the logician after a few moments. He scratched with a stub of lead. "That makes over eleven thousand dollars since we've been out. How much do you suppose his outfit stands him?" he appealed to me. "I'm sure I can't tell you," I replied shortly. "Well, it's a pile of money, anyway." Nobody said anything for some time. "Wonder what they've done?" Pulz asked again.
You let that wood alone, or you'll pick it up again!" Perdosa sprang at him with a screech. Pulz was small but nimble, and understood rough and tumble fighting. He met Perdosa's rush with two swift blows a short arm jab and an upper-cut. Then they clinched, and in a moment were rolling over and over just beyond the wash of the surf. The row waked the Nigger from his sullen abstraction.
"I found de treasure!" he almost shouted. "I know where he kept!" They leaped at him Handy Solomon and Pulz and fairly shook out of him what he thought he knew. He babbled in the forgotten terms of alchemy, dressing modern facts in the garments of mediaeval thought until they were scarcely to be recognised.
"It ain't such a hell of a fortune," growled Pulz, his evil little white face thrust forward. "There's other things worth all the seal trimmin's of the islands." "Diamon's," gloomed the Nigger. "You've hit it, Doctor," cut in Solomon. There we were again, back to the old difficulty, only worse. Idleness descended on us again.
Always the talk was of the treasure. As to the reading, it was of the sort usual to seamen, cowboys, lumbermen, and miners. Thrackles had a number of volumes of very cheap love stories. Pulz had brought some extraordinary garish detective stories. The others contributed sensational literature with paper covers adorned lithographically.
We were to hunt seals, and fish, and pry bivalves from the rocks at low tide, and build fires, and talk, and alternate between suspicion and security, between the danger of sedition and the insanity of men without defined purpose, world without end forever. The inevitable happened. One noon Pulz looked up from his labour of pulling the whiskers from the evil-smelling masks.
At half-past five on the midsummer Sunday morning, the Austrian advance guard led by Colonel Pulz came up with Prince Humbert's division near Villafranca. The battle began dramatically, with a charge of the splendid Polish and Hungarian Hussars, who dashed their horses against the Italian squares, in one of which, opportunely formed for his shelter, was the gallant heir to the throne.
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