or neither
of the others made a move until he gave the order:

"Throw that line ashore!"

Goeltz seized it and made fast to a ring-bolt, and then only at another
command did the two stand up. We seized their hands and pulled them up
on the wall. They were as rugged as lions in the open, burned as brown
as Moros, their hair and beards long and ragged, and their powerful,
lean bodies showing through their rags.

"What ship are you from?" I inquired eagerly.

The steersman regarded me narrowly, his eyes squinting, and then said
taciturnly, "Schooner El Dorado." He said it almost angrily, as if
he were forced to confess a crime. Then I saw the name on the boat,
"El Dorado S. F."

"Didn't I tell you so?" asked Lying Bill, who was in the crowd now
gathered. "George, didn't I say the El Dorado would turn up?"

He glared at Goeltz for a sign of assent, but the retired salt sought
kudos for himself.

"I saw her first," he replied. "I was having a Doctor Funk when I
looked toward the pass, and saw at once that it was a queer one."

The shipwrecked trio shook themselves like dogs out of the water. They
were stiff in the legs. The two rowers smiled, and when I handed each
of them a cigar, they grinned, but one said:

"After we've e't. Our holds are empty. We've come thirty-six hundred
miles in that dinghy."

"I'm captain N.P. Benson of the schooner El Dorado." vouchsafed the
third. "Where's the American Counsul?"

I led them a few hundred feet to the office of Dentist Williams,
who was acting as consul for the United States. He had a keen love of
adventure, and twenty years in the tropics had not dimmed his interest
in the marvelous sea. He left his patient and closeted himself with
the trio, while I returned to their boat to inspect it more closely.

All the workers and loafers of the waterfront were about it, but
Goeltz would let none enter it, he believing it might be needed
untouched as evidence of some sort. There are no wharf thieves and
no fences in Tahiti, so there was no danger of loss, and, really,
there was nothing worth stealing but the boat itself.

Captain Benson and his companions hastened from the dentist's to
Lovaina's, where they were given a table on the veranda alone. They
remained an hour secluded after Iromea and Atupu had piled their
table with dishes. They drank quarts of coffee, and ate a beefsteak
each, dozens of eggs, and many slices of fried ham, with scores of
hot biscuits. They never s