I signalled to him to come up at once, but he
replied with a vigorous negative, and the next moment he was hard at
work again.

A minute or two later the man aloft hailed: "I guess Mr Cunningham have
give that there shark his gruel; for there he is, away out there on the
starboard quarter, in his dyin' flurry!" And, sure enough, there the
brute was, on the surface, about a hundred and fifty yards away,
twisting and splashing in the midst of a boil of pink foam; and a few
minutes later the struggles ceased altogether, and the monster floated
quiescent and awash, dead, one of its great pectoral fins and a narrow
strip of its white belly just showing above the surface. I was terribly
afraid that the smell of blood, and of the dead carcass, would attract
other sharks to the neighbourhood, and so further imperil Cunningham's
safety--for sharks are reputed to possess an extraordinarily keen scent;
but nothing of the kind happened. The dead shark slowly drifted away
and was finally lost sight of, and we finished our day's work without
further interruption.

Thus matters went steadily on for a fortnight, by which time we had
accumulated some three hundred and eighty thousand oysters, and had laid
them out upon the island to undergo the process of decay in the
scorching rays of the sun. And that they were undergoing that process
at a very rapid rate our olfactory nerves soon informed us; for the
odour of them became perceptible as early as the fourth day, while by
the end of the fortnight it was so strong as to be scarcely endurable
even on the oyster bank itself, which was about a mile to leeward of the
island, although, by berthing the schooner every night right up in the
weather corner of the lagoon, we managed to avoid getting more than an
occasional whiff of it during the hours devoted to rest.

By the end of the fortnight, however, we discovered that even the
accumulation of wealth by scooping up pearl-oysters from the bottom of
the sea may become monotonous after a while, especially when the
accumulation is for somebody else's benefit; therefore, with one accord,
we petitioned "Old Man" Brown to give us a change of occupation by
allowing us to amuse ourselves searching for pearls among the rotting
fish, which now covered a considerable portion of the leeward half of
the island. And Brown gladly jumped at the proposal; for he was every
day growing more anxious lest the _Kingfisher_ and her crew of "toughs"
should h