after we had started the people of the island went ahead and came back
with water and milk, which did us a world of good. At the house of the
governor we had a mess of brown beans, and then we all fell asleep
on the floor. God knows how long we slept, but when we waked up we
were like wolves again. We then had beans with fresh killed mutton,
and that made us all deathly sick because our stomachs were weak."

* * * * *

Underneath us, while the red-cheeked and golden-haired Steve uttered
his puzzling sentences in English, I heard from time to time the
heavy tread of Captain Benson. He was, doubtless, living over again
the hours of terror and resolution on the El Dorado and in the boat,
and seeking to find words to amplify his log by his memories. I
heard him sit down and get up more than once; while opposite me in an
easy-chair, with his glass of Schiedam schnapps beside him, was the
virile Dutchman, hammering in his breast-swelling story of danger and
courage, of starvation and storm. I sighed for a dictaphone in which
the original Dutch-English might be recorded for the delight of others.

Alex Simoneau came back after a night of the hospitality of M. Lontane,
and soon was joyous again, telling his wondrous epic of the main to
the beach-combers in the parc de Bougainville or in the Paris saloon,
where the brown and white toilers of land and sea make merry.

"A man that goes to sea is a fool," he said, with a bang of his fist
on the table that made the schnapps dance in its heavy bottle. "My
people in Massachusetts are all right, and like a crazy man I will
go to sea when I could work in a mill or on a farm. They must think
I'm dead by now."