“No,” the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in reply to a query.  “It wasn’t the wounds that made me faint.  It was the exertion I made in the struggle.  I was too weak.  No; so little moisture was there in my system that I didn’t bleed much.  And the amazing thing, under the circumstances, was the quickness with which I healed.  The second officer sewed me up next day with a needle he’d made out of an ivory toothpick and with twine he twisted out of the threads from a frayed tarpaulin.”

“Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on the fingers that were cut off?” Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta ask.

“Yes, and one beauty.  I found it afterward in the boat bottom and presented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me.  It was a large diamond.  I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an English sailor in the Barbadoes.  He’d stolen it, and of course it was worth more.  It was a beautiful gem.  The sandalwood man did not merely save my life for it.  In addition, he spent fully a hundred pounds in outfitting me and buying me a passage from Thursday Island to Shanghai.”

* * * * *

“There’s no getting away from them rings he wears,” Daughtry overheard Simon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the dark on the weather poop.  “You don’t see that kind nowadays.  They’re old, real old.  They’re not men’s rings so much as what you’d call, in the old-fashioned days, gentlemen’s rings.  Real gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen, wore rings like them.  I wish collateral like them came into my loan offices these days.  They’re worth big money.”

* * * * *

“I just want to tell you, Killeny Boy, that maybe I’ll be wishin’ before the voyage is over that I’d gone on a lay of the treasure instead of straight wages,” Dag Daughtry confided to Michael that night at turning-in time as Kwaque removed his shoes and as he paused midway in the draining of his sixth bottle.  “Take it from me, Killeny, that old gentleman knows what he’s talkin’ about, an’ has been some hummer in his days.  Men don’t lose the fingers off their hands and get their faces chopped open just for nothing—­nor sport rings that makes a Jew pawnbroker’s mouth water.”

CHAPTER XI

Before the voyage of the Mary Turner came to an end, Dag Daughtry, sitting down between the rows of water-casks in the main-hold, with a great laugh rechristened the schooner “the Ship of Fools.”  But that was some weeks after.  In the meantime he so fulfilled his duties that not even Captain Doane could conjure a shadow of complaint.

Especially did the steward attend upon the Ancient Mariner, for whom he had come to conceive a strong admiration, if not affection.  The old fellow was different from his cabin-mates.  They were money-lovers; everything in them had narrowed down to the pursuit of dollars.  Daughtry, himself moulded on generously careless lines, could not but appreciate the spaciousness of the Ancient Mariner, who had evidently lived spaciously and who was ever for sharing the treasure they sought.