Soon the ketch was swinging to her anchor a couple of hundred feet off the coral, and Chester Trent's four divers were in the whale-boat, ready for business. A rough ladder had been swung at each side of the smaller craft, to facilitate climbing aboard from the sea. Even the divers seemed to be imbued with enthusiasm, which, however, may have been inspired partly by the promise of a bonus, which their employer had made. For each large pearl found, a reward of one plug of tobacco was to be paid. Exactly what was to constitute a "large" pearl was not determined, but Trent felt he could be magnanimously generous with plugs of tobacco if pearls worth a hundred dollars a-piece or more came rolling in. The divers, like savages the world over, were boisterously playful now that they were in a happy frame of mind. They laughed and indulged in horse-play, blissfully unconscious of the fact that a single pearl which they might fetch to the surface could be worth enough sheath-knives to sink the whale-boat, or indeed the whale-boat and the ketch together. As they tumbled over the side into the smaller craft one of them tripped a companion and, with the assistance of a brown hand placed in the small of the victim's back, sent him splashing into the green sea. But the men were nearly as much at home in the water as they were ashore. They swam like otters, dived as only a South Sea islander can dive, and but for the fact
