“Survivors?”

“Three.”

“I remember the case now,” I said.  “There was something about salvage——­”

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast.  He came down to more ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly.  “Excuse me,” he said, “but—­salvage!”

He leant over towards me.  “I was in that job,” he said.  “Tried to make myself a rich man, and got made a god instead.  I’ve got my feelings——­

“It ain’t all jam being a god,” said the sunburnt man, and for some time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.  At last he took up his tale again.

“There was me,” said the sunburnt man, “and a seaman named Jacobs, and Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer.  And him it was that set the whole thing going.  I remember him now, when we was in the jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence.  He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things.  ‘There was forty thousand pounds,’ he said, ’on that ship, and it’s for me to say just where she went down.’  It didn’t need much brains to tumble to that.  And he was the leader from the first to the last.  He got hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought the diving dress—­a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.  He’d have done the diving too, if it hadn’t made him sick going down.  And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he’d cooked up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles away.

“I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink and bright hopes all the time.  It all seemed so neat and clean and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a ‘cert.’  And we used to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who’d started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly ached.  We all messed together in the Sanderses’ cabin—­it was a curious crew, all officers and no men—­and there stood the diving-dress waiting its turn.  Young Sanders was a humorous sort of chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded thing’s great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too.  ‘Jimmy Goggles,’ he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian.  Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was, and all the little Goggleses.  Fit to make you split.  And every blessed day all of us used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum.  It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you—­little suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.