There followed much talk of the nature of this treasure, whether it was to be sought or conveyed, bought, stolen, or ravished in fair fight.  No further soothsaying could they elicit from the Nigger.  They followed their own ideas, which led them nowhere.  Someone lit the forecastle lamp.  They settled themselves.  Pulz read aloud.

This was the programme every day during the dog watch.  Sometimes the watch on deck was absent, leaving only Handy Solomon, the Nigger and Pulz, but the order of the day was not on that account varied.  They talked, they lit the lamp, they read.  Always the talk was of the treasure.

As to the reading, it was of the sort usual to seamen, cowboys, lumbermen, and miners.  Thrackles had a number of volumes of very cheap love stories.  Pulz had brought some extraordinary garish detective stories.  The others contributed sensational literature with paper covers adorned lithographically.  By the usual incongruity a fragment of The Marble Faun was included in the collection.  The Nigger has his copy of Duvall on Alchemy.  I haven’t the slightest idea where he could have got it.

While Pulz read, Handy Solomon worked on the alteration of his claw.  He could never get it to hold, and I remember as an undertone to Pulz’s reading, the rumble of strange, exasperated oaths.  Whatever the evening’s lecture, it always ended with the book on alchemy.  These men had no perspective by which to judge such things.  They accepted its speculations and theories at their face value.  Extremely laughable were the discussions that followed.  I often wished the shade of old Duvall could be permitted to see these, his last disciples, spelling out dimly his teachings, mispronouncing his grave utterances, but believing utterly.

Dr. Schermerhorn appeared on deck seldom.  When he did, often his fingers held a pen which he had forgotten to lay aside.  I imagined him preoccupied by some calculation of his own, but the forecastle, more picturesquely, saw him as guarding constantly the heavy casket he had himself carried aboard.  He breathed the air, walked briskly, turned with the German military precision at the end of his score of strides, and re-entered his cabin at the lapse of the half hour.  After he had gone, remained Percy Darrow leaning indolently against the taffrail, his graceful figure swaying with the ship’s motion, smoking always the corn-husk Mexican cigarettes which he rolled with one hand.  He seemed from that farthest point aft to hold in review the appliances, the fabric, the actions, yes, even the very thoughts, of the entire ship.  From them he selected that on which he should comment or with which he should play, always with a sardonic, half-serious, quite wearied and indifferent manner.  His inner knowledge, viewed by the light of this manner or mannerism, was sometimes uncanny, though perhaps the sources of his information were commonplace enough, after all.  Certainly he always viewed with amusement his victim’s wonder.