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Wherever there’s a carcass there’s sharks to eat it, though you may have sailed a week and not seen a fin; and human sharks have the longest scent of any, especially when they have the law on their side and courts of justice behind them. I wanted to keep the money in the family, so to speak, and I was not only unwilling to harm Old Dibs myself, but I didn’t want no others to harm him neither.

I talked it over with Tom next morning, till the eyes nearly bulged out of his head. Tom was less of a pirate even than me, but he had to have his fling in fancy, being, as I said, one of them natural-born yarners, and he never got back to earth till we had poisoned Old Dibs (wavering between Rough on Rats and powdered glass), covered up all traces of the crime, divided the money equal, and sailed away West in his five-ton cutter, to bring up at last in one of the Line islands. After arranging it all to the last dot, even to the name of our ninety-ton schooner, and the very bank in Sydney where we’d lay the stuff in our joint names, he said there was only one thing to do, and that was to warn Old Dibs, and arrange some kind of a scheme to protect him.

“They are bound to run him down,” said Tom. “A man that skips out with nothing, and a man that skips out with a quarter of a million, are in two different classes; and it wouldn’t surprise me the least bit if there was six ships aiming for Manihiki simultaneous.”

By the time I started back to find Old Dibs I was worked up to quite a fever, and I’d keep looking over my shoulder expecting every minute to see one of them six ships in the pass. He had finished breakfast and had gone, and so I followed him over to the weather side, where, as usual, he was sitting under his tarpaulin in the graveyard, tootling for all he was worth. He looked up, a little surprised to see me, and I guess ships were running through his head also, for that was his first question.

I sat down on a near-by grave.

“The fack is, Mr. Smith,” I said, very meaningly, “you paid me a little visit last night and I paid you one.”

“Oh, my God!” he said, turning whiter than paper, and the voice coming out of him like an old man’s.

“There’s no ‘my God’ about it,” I said. “But me and Tom Riley’s been talking it over, and we’d like to bear a hand to help you.”

“It’s mine,” he said, very defiant, and trembling. “It’s mine, every penny of it, and honest come by.”

“No doubt,” I said, “but would I be guessing wrong if there were others who didn’t think so?”

“There are others,” he said at last, seeing, I suppose, that my face looked friendly, and realizing that me and Tom would hardly take this tack if we meant to massacre him in his sleep.

“Mr. Smith,” I said, “you never had two better friends than Bill Hargus or Tom Riley.”

He laid down his flute.

“I’d never feel in any danger with that good wife of yours about,” he said. It didn’t seem quite the right remark under the circumstance, but there was a power of truth back of it. That girl of mine was regularly struck on Old Dibs, and, being a Tongan, was full of the Old Nick, and would have bit my ear off if I had lifted my hand to him. The two of them had patched up an adoption arrangement, him being her father, and she used to play suipi with him, and taught him to repeat Psalms in native. It’s only another proof how women are the same everywhere, and how far it goes with them to be treated with a little respeck and consideration.