I intimated my sense of his condescension.



"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.



"I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer.

Gummy! how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll

remember anything of the Ocean Pioneer?"



The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had

read it. The Ocean Pioneer? "Something about gold dust," I said

vaguely, "but the precise--"



"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no

business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh

on that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all

the rocks was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair

have to follow the rocks about to see where they're going next.

Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist,

with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said,

in one form or another."



"Survivors?"



"Three."



"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"



But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so

extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more

ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me,"

he said, "but--salvage!"



He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make

myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--



"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some

time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.

At last he took up his tale again.



"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs,

and Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set

the whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the

jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence.

He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty

thousand pounds,' he said, 'on that ship, and it's for me to say

just where she went down.' It didn't need much brains to tumble

to that. And he was the leader from the first to the last. He got

hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and

the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought the diving-dress--

a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.



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