A beneficent nature has considered the white visitor in this concern, for he can go upon the reef to look for its treasures at low tide, at sun-up or sun-fall, when it is cool.

We fell to talking about missing ships, and Goeltz insisted on Lying Bill telling of his own masterful exploit in bringing back a schooner from South America after the captain had run away with it and a woman.  Pincher was mate of the schooner, which traded from Tahiti, and the skipper was a handsome fellow who thought his job well lost for love.  He became enamored of the wife of another captain.  One night when by desperate scheming he had gotten her aboard, he suddenly gave orders to up anchor and away.  The schooner was full of cargo, copra and pearl-shell and pearls, and was due to return to Papeete to discharge.  But this amative mariner filled his jibs on another tack, and before his crew knew whither they were bound was well on his long traverse to Peru.

Lying Bill was the only other white man aboard, and he took orders, as he had to by law and by the might of the swashbuckler captain.  The lady lived in the only cabin—­a tiny corner of the cuddy walled off—­and ate her meals with her lover while Pincher commanded on deck.  At a port in Peru the pirate sold the cargo, and taking his mistress ashore, he disappeared for good and all from the ken of the mate and of the South Seas.

“Now,” said Captain George Goeltz, “Bill here could ‘a’ followed suit and sold the vessel.  Of course they had no papers except for the French group, but in South America twenty-five years ago a piaster was a piaster.  Bill was square then, as he is now, and he borrows enough money to buy grub, and he steers right back to Papeete.  Gott im Himmel!  Were the owners glad to see that schooner again?  They had given her up as gone for good when the husband told them his wife had run away with the captain.  That’s how Bill got his certificate to command vessels in this archipelago, which only Frenchmen can have.”

Goeltz picked up the “Daily Commercial News” of San Francisco, and idly read out the list of missing ships.  There was only one in the Pacific of recent date whose fate was utterly unknown.  She was the schooner El Dorado, which had left Oregon months before for Chile, and had not been sighted in all that time.  The shipping paper said: 

What has become of the El Dorado, it is, of course, impossible to say with any degree of accuracy, but one thing is almost certain, and that is that the likelihood of her ever being heard of again is now practically without the range of possibility.  Nevertheless she may still be afloat though in a waterlogged condition and drifting about in the trackless wastes of the South Pacific.  Then again she may have struck one of the countless reefs that infest that portion of the globe, some entirely invisible and others just about awash.  She is now one hundred and eighty-nine days out, and the voyage has rarely taken one hundred days.  She was reported in lat. 35:40 N., long. 126:30 W., 174 days ago.