"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh
on that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all
the rocks was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair
have to follow the rocks about to see where they're going next.
Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist,
with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said,
in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me,"
he said, "but--salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some
time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.
At last he took up his tale again.

"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs,
and Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set
the whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the