d it down, and drawing his dressing gown closer around him,
took another go at filling up the trunks again with the paper packing.

This seemed a good time for me to skip, which I did more cautious than
ever, my heart beating that loud I wonder he didn't hear me. I felt for
my pipe in the dark, and went out under the stars to the edge of the
lagoon, to think it all over. You might wonder what I had to do with it
unless it was to make away with him and scoop the pool for me and Tom;
but, as I said before, I wasn't that kind of a man, and millions
wouldn't have made no difference. But I was in a sort of tremble for the
old fellow himself, for what was he doing alone with it in the far
Pacific, unless there were others after him, hotfoot?

Wherever there's a carcass there's sharks to eat it, though you may have
sailed a week and not seen a fin; and human sharks have the longest
scent of any, especially when they have the law on their side and courts
of justice behind them. I wanted to keep the money in the family, so to
speak, and I was not only unwilling to harm Old Dibs myself, but I
didn't want no others to harm him neither.

I talked it over with Tom next morning, till the eyes nearly bulged out
of his head. Tom was less of a pirate even than me, but he had to have
his fling in fancy, being, as I said, one of them natural-born yarners,
and he never got back to earth till we had poisoned Old Dibs (wavering
between Rough on Rats and powdered glass), covered up all traces of the
crime, divided the money equal, and sailed away West in his five-ton
cutter, to bring up at last in one of the Line islands. After arranging
it all to the last dot, even to the name of our ninety-ton schooner, and
the very bank in Sydney where we'd lay the stuff in our joint names, he
said there was only one thing to do, and that was to warn Old Dibs, and
arrange some kind of a scheme to protect him.

"They are bound to run him down," said Tom. "A man that skips out with
nothing, and a man that skips out with a quarter of a million, are in
two different classes; and it wouldn't surprise me the least bit if
there was six ships aiming for Manihiki simultaneous."

By the time I started back to find Old Dibs I was worked up to quite a
fever, and I'd keep looking over my shoulder expecting every minute to
see one of them six ships in the pass. He had finished breakfast and had
gone, and so I followed him over to the weather side, where, as usual,
h