hot biscuits. They never spoke during the meal. A customs-officer
had accompanied them to the Tiare Hotel, for the French Government
wisely made itself certain that they might not be an unknown kind of
smugglers, pirates, or runaways. Their boat had been taken in charge
by the customs bureau, and the men were free to do what they would.

When they came from their gorging to the garden, they picked flowers,
smelled the many kinds of blossoms, and then the sailors lighted their
cigars. This pair were Steve Drinkwater, a Dutchman; and Alex Simoneau,
a French-Canadian of Attleboro, Massachusetts.

"Where's the El Dorado?" I asked of the captain.

Again he looked at me, suspiciously.

"She went down in thirty-one degrees: two minutes, south and one
hundred twenty-one: thirty-seven west," he said curtly, and turned
away. There was pride and sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a
reticence not quite explicable. The three, as they stood a moment
before they walked off, made a striking group. Their sturdy figures, in
their worn and torn clothes, their hairy chests, their faces framed in
bushes of hair, their bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters
who had won a battle in which it was pitch and toss if they would
survive, made me proud of the race of seamen the world over. They
are to-day almost the only followers of a primeval calling, tainted
little by the dirt of profit-seeking. They risk their lives daily
in the hazards of the ocean, the victims of cold-blooded insurance
gamblers and of niggardly owners, and rewarded with only a seat in
the poorhouse or a niche in Davy Jones's Locker. I was once of their
trade, and I longed to know the happenings of their fated voyage.