The men were bearded like the pard, and in tattered garments, their feet bare.  The one at the helm was evidently an officer, for neither of the others made a move until he gave the order: 

“Throw that line ashore!”

Goeltz seized it and made fast to a ring-bolt, and then only at another command did the two stand up.  We seized their hands and pulled them up on the wall.  They were as rugged as lions in the open, burned as brown as Moros, their hair and beards long and ragged, and their powerful, lean bodies showing through their rags.

“What ship are you from?” I inquired eagerly.

The steersman regarded me narrowly, his eyes squinting, and then said taciturnly, “Schooner El Dorado.”  He said it almost angrily, as if he were forced to confess a crime.  Then I saw the name on the boat, “El Dorado S. F.”

“Didn’t I tell you so?” asked Lying Bill, who was in the crowd now gathered.  “George, didn’t I say the El Dorado would turn up?”

He glared at Goeltz for a sign of assent, but the retired salt sought kudos for himself.

“I saw her first,” he replied.  “I was having a Doctor Funk when I looked toward the pass, and saw at once that it was a queer one.”

The shipwrecked trio shook themselves like dogs out of the water.  They were stiff in the legs.  The two rowers smiled, and when I handed each of them a cigar, they grinned, but one said: 

“After we’ve e’t.  Our holds are empty.  We’ve come thirty-six hundred miles in that dinghy.”

“I’m captain N.P.  Benson of the schooner El Dorado.” vouchsafed the third.  “Where’s the American Counsul?”

I led them a few hundred feet to the office of Dentist Williams, who was acting as consul for the United States.  He had a keen love of adventure, and twenty years in the tropics had not dimmed his interest in the marvelous sea.  He left his patient and closeted himself with the trio, while I returned to their boat to inspect it more closely.

All the workers and loafers of the waterfront were about it, but Goeltz would let none enter it, he believing it might be needed untouched as evidence of some sort.  There are no wharf thieves and no fences in Tahiti, so there was no danger of loss, and, really, there was nothing worth stealing but the boat itself.

Captain Benson and his companions hastened from the dentist’s to Lovaina’s, where they were given a table on the veranda alone.  They remained an hour secluded after Iromea and Atupu had piled their table with dishes.  They drank quarts of coffee, and ate a beefsteak each, dozens of eggs, and many slices of fried ham, with scores of hot biscuits.  They never spoke during the meal.  A customs-officer had accompanied them to the Tiare Hotel, for the French Government wisely made itself certain that they might not be an unknown kind of smugglers, pirates, or runaways.  Their boat had been taken in charge by the customs bureau, and the men were free to do what they would.