Herrick only shook his head.

"O Lord, it's rich!" laughed Huish. "It would really be a scrumptious
lark if it 'ad 'appened to somebody else! And what are we to do next? O,
my eye! with this bloomin' schooner, too?"

"That's the trouble," said Davis. "There's only one thing certain: it's
no use carting this old glass and ballast to Peru. No, _sir_, we're in a
hole."

"O my, and the merchant!" cried Huish; "the man that made this shipment!
He'll get the news by the mail brigantine; and he'll think of course
we're making straight for Sydney."

"Yes, he'll be a sick merchant," said the captain. "One thing: this
explains the Kanaka crew. If you're going to lose a ship, I would ask no
better myself than a Kanaka crew. But there's one thing it don't
explain; it don't explain why she came down Tahitiways."

"W'y, to lose her, you byby!" said Huish.

"A lot you know," said the captain. "Nobody wants to lose a schooner;
they want to lose her _on her course_, you skeericks! You seem to think
underwriters haven't got enough sense to come in out of the rain."

"Well," said Herrick, "I can tell you (I am afraid) why she came so far
to the eastward. I had it of Uncle Ned. It seems these two unhappy
devils, Wiseman and Wishart, were drunk on the champagne from the
beginning--and died drunk at the end."

The captain looked on the table.

"They lay in their two bunks, or sat here in this damned house," he
pursued, with rising agitation, "filling their skins with the accursed
stuff, till sickness took them. As they sickened and the fever rose,
they drank the more. They lay here howling and groaning, drunk and
dying, all in one. They didn't know where they were; they didn't care.
They didn't even take the sun, it seems."

"Not take the sun?" cried the captain, looking up. "Sacred Billy! what a
crowd!"

"Well, it don't matter to Joe!" said Huish. "Wot are Wiseman and t'other
buffer to us?"

"A good deal, too," said the captain. "We're their heirs, I guess."

"It is a great inheritance," said Herrick.

"Well, I don't know about that," returned Davis. "Appears to me as if it
might be worse. 'Tain't worth what the cargo would have been, of course,
at least not money down. But I'll tell you what it appears to figure up
to. Appears to me as if it amounted to about the bottom dollar of the
man in 'Frisco."

"'Old on," said Huish. "Give a fellow time; 'ow's this, umpire?"

"Well, my sons," pursued the captain, who seemed t