and you can get it cheap. Have you any tobacco?"

Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree Raoul headed.
He was his mother's supercargo, and his business was to comb all the
Paumotus for the wealth of copra, shell, and pearls that they yielded
up.

He was a young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity,
and he suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in
pricing pearls. But when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he
managed to suppress the startle it gave him, and to maintain a
careless, commercial expression on his face. For the pearl had struck
him a blow. It was large as a pigeon egg, a perfect sphere, of a
whiteness that reflected opalescent lights from all colors about it.
It was alive. Never had he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped
it into his hand he was surprised by the weight of it. That showed
that it was a good pearl. He examined it closely, through a pocket
magnifying glass. It was without flaw or blemish. The purity of it
seemed almost to melt into the atmosphere out of his hand. In the
shade it was softly luminous, gleaming like a tender moon. So
translucently white was it, that when he dropped it into a glass of
water he had difficulty in finding it. So straight and swiftly had it
sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight was excellent.

"Well, what do you want for it?" he asked, with a fine assumption of
nonchalance.

"I want--" Mapuhi began, and behind him, framing his own dark face,
the dark faces of two women and a girl nodded concurrence in what he
wanted. Their heads were bent forward, they were animated by a