Artistically, he had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired sapience of the painter’s training.  If he could have existed in a universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest citizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world.  He was absolutely incapable of judging people.  His tendency was to underestimate men and to overestimate women.  His life bore all the scars inevitable to such an instinct.  Women, in particular, had played ducks and drakes with his career.  Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, he lacked the faculty of learning by experience — especially where the other sex were concerned.  “Predestined to be stung!” was, his first wife’s laconic comment on her ex-husband.  She, for instance, was undoubtedly the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had managed to extract a ruinous alimony from him.  Twice married and twice divorced, he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck raking articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last unhappy matrimonial venture.

Physically, Pete was the black type of Celt.  The wild thatch of his scrubbing-brush hair shone purple in the light.  Scrape his face as he would, the purple shadow of his beard seemed ingrained in his white white skin.  Black-browed and black-lashed, he had the luminous blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen.  There was a curious untamable quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the aloofness of the Celt and the aloofness of the genius.

Three weeks passed.  The clear, warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept up.  The ocean flattened, gradually.  Twice every twenty-four hours the tide brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day.  Occasionally came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster.  But calloused as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with hasty ceremony and forgot.

By this time an incongruous collection stretched in parallel lines above the high-water mark.  “Something, anything, everything — and then some,” remarked Honey Smith.  Wood wreckage of all descriptions, acres of furniture, broken, split, blistered, discolored, swollen; piles of carpets, rugs, towels, bed-linen, stained, faded, shrunken, torn; files of swollen mattresses, pillows, cushions, life-preservers; heaps of table-silver and kitchen-ware tarnished and rusty; mounds of china and glass; mountains of tinned goods, barrels boxes, books, suit-cases, leather bags; trunks and trunks and more trunks and still more trunks; for, mainly, the trunks had saved themselves.

Part of the time, in between tides, they tried to separate the grain of this huge collection of lumber from the chaff; part of the time they made exploring trips into the interior.  At night they sat about their huge fire and talked.