cheat. He used to have prayers on board and try to teach the niggers to join in the hymns, and he was in deadly earnest about it, though he wasn't particularly tactful, because he'd as soon biff a Kanaka on the head with a marline spike as not if he wasn't taking his doses of religion regularly. There wasn't a cent's worth of cant in his composition. He believed in hell fire after death for the wicked, and a punch on the jaw for the living if they scoffed at things religious they didn't understand. Oh, you may smile, Trent, but you find 'em like that sometimes. They have to let off steam somehow, and if it's a choice between rum and religion give me the religious skipper every time. I've shipped with both, and I know.
"Well, Ellis had tried all sorts of games to make a living, and he was having a pretty thin time as a trader, when he took a flier at pearling off Teipui. He hit on the thing more or less by accident, but it was the luckiest accident that ever happened to him. He got two hundred and twenty-three pearls inside six weeks, and then sailed off to Sydney to turn 'em into ready. They realized enough to keep him in comfort for the rest of his days, and when an Australian who knew him offered to give him a thousand pounds for the secret of where he'd been fishing, Ellis snapped at it. He took the Australian out to Teipui, and after the man had seen some more pearls of the same kind found under
