“How’s that?” he shouted.

A cry broke from all hands:  the next moment, forgetting their own disappointment, in that contagious sentiment of success, they gave three cheers that scared the sea-birds; and the next, they had crowded round the captain, and were jostling together and groping with emulous hands in the new-opened mat.  Box after box rewarded them, six in all; wrapped, as I have said, in a paper envelope, and the paper printed on, in Chinese characters.

Nares turned to me and shook my hand.  “I began to think we should never see this day,” said he.  “I congratulate you, Mr. Dodd, on having pulled it through.”

The captain’s tones affected me profoundly; and when Johnson and the men pressed round me in turn with congratulations, the tears came in my eyes.

“These are five-tael boxes, more than two pounds,” said Nares, weighing one in his hand.  “Say two hundred and fifty dollars to the mat.  Lay into it, boys!  We’ll make Mr. Dodd a millionnaire before dark.”

It was strange to see with what a fury we fell to.  The men had now nothing to expect; the mere idea of great sums inspired them with disinterested ardour.  Mats were slashed and disembowelled, the rice flowed to our knees in the ship’s waist, the sweat ran in our eyes and blinded us, our arms ached to agony; and yet our fire abated not.  Dinner came; we were too weary to eat, too hoarse for conversation; and yet dinner was scarce done, before we were afoot again and delving in the rice.  Before nightfall not a mat was unexplored, and we were face to face with the astonishing result.

For of all the inexplicable things in the story of the Flying Scud, here was the most inexplicable.  Out of the six thousand mats, only twenty were found to have been sugared; in each we found the same amount, about twelve pounds of drug; making a grand total of two hundred and forty pounds.  By the last San Francisco quotation, opium was selling for a fraction over twenty dollars a pound; but it had been known not long before to bring as much as forty in Honolulu, where it was contraband.

Taking, then, this high Honolulu figure, the value of the opium on board the Flying Scud fell considerably short of ten thousand dollars, while at the San Francisco rate it lacked a trifle of five thousand.  And fifty thousand was the price that Jim and I had paid for it.  And Bellairs had been eager to go higher!  There is no language to express the stupor with which I contemplated this result.

It may be argued we were not yet sure; there might be yet another cache; and you may be certain in that hour of my distress the argument was not forgotten.  There was never a ship more ardently perquested; no stone was left unturned, and no expedient untried; day after day of growing despair, we punched and dug in the brig’s vitals, exciting the men with promises and presents; evening after evening Nares and I sat face to face in the narrow cabin, racking