to dig out ten million dollars with a second-
hand spade you call buy for sixty-eight cents."

Dag Daughtry could not fail to overhear some of these conversations,
which were altercations rather than councils. The invariable ending, for
Simon Nishikanta, would be what sailors name "the sea-grouch." For hours
afterward the sulky Jew would speak to no one nor acknowledge speech from
any one. Vainly striving to paint, he would suddenly burst into violent
rage, tear up his attempt, stamp it into the deck, then get out his large-
calibred automatic rifle, perch himself on the forecastle-head, and try
to shoot any stray porpoise, albacore, or dolphin. It seemed to give him
great relief to send a bullet home into the body of some surging,
gorgeous-hued fish, arrest its glorious flashing motion for ever, and
turn it on its side slowly to sink down into the death and depth of the
sea.

On occasion, when a school of blackfish disported by, each one of them a
whale of respectable size, Nishikanta would be beside himself in the
ecstasy of inflicting pain. Out of the school perhaps he would reach a
score of the leviathans, his bullets biting into them like whip-lashes,
so that each, like a colt surprised by the stock-whip, would leap in the
air, or with a flirt of tail dive under the surface, and then charge
madly across the ocean and away from sight in a foam-churn of speed.

The Ancient Mariner would shake his head sadly; and Daughtry, who
likewise was hurt by the infliction of hurt on unoffending animals, would
sympathize with him and fetch him unbidden another of the expensive three-
for-a-dollar cigars so that his feelings might be soothed. Grimshaw
would curl his lip in a sneer and mutter: "The cheap skate. The skunk.
No man with half the backbone of a man would take it out of the harmless
creatures. He's that kind that if he didn't like you, or if you
criticised his grammar or arithmetic, he'd kick your dog to get even . . .
or poison it. In the good old days up in Colusa we used to hang men
like him just to keep the air we breathed clean and wholesome."

But it was Captain Doane who protested outright.

"Look at here, Nishikanta," he would say, his face white and his lips
trembling with anger. "That's rough stuff, and all you can get back for
it is rough stuff. I know what I'm talking about. You've got no right
to risk our lives that way. Wasn't the pilot boat _Annie Mine_ sunk by a
whale right in the Golde