Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 93: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Minerva’s them out of their boats, so as not to get their feet damp. Imagine—after being in the water all day. In the end I cleaned up and got away to Paris with a belt full of beauties, as well as my pay. “Vou see now, Dockery, that you needn’t hold anything back from me. But now we're getting to the point. I finally worked back into the game in the South Pacific while I still had a little capital left. I was pretty blue; it was hard luck to be broke, or nearly broke, after so much work. I’d tried to get smart in a city that’s wise to all the tricks, and they simply laughed up their sleeves and took it away from me. “Don’t you whine about the Lottery, John, because you don’t know the first principles of ‘losing money. Sometimes when I was four or five fathoms under I used to wish a big gray fellow would mosey along and settle me, but none did. Prob- ably because I wanted them to. “Anyway, I worked at it for a while and managed to add a little to my capital for two miserable years—and then I ran across Cleaver, Captain Cassius Cleaver. . He’s dead now; he died an unnatural death; which is one very good reason why I’m French and named Minot. The captain was a great old fellow, and he had the most beautiful scheme ever thought of or discovered in this world, but he tried to double-cross me, and when you hear about it you'll say I was justified. “It was one evening in Apia Harbor in the off season that I heard the captain’s story. We were sitting in the cabin of his packet with a bottle of forty-rod between us. Ln passant, let me mention that the same packet is now tied up down by the Elite. You might say he left it to me. Anyway, the captain had had a son, not so long before our conversation. He also had this extraordinarily valuable information, which he could not cash in on without a son, or without a perfectly trustworthy helper. The captain was too old to dive. “Now, you see, we’re getting to it. The son died. It seems he had wandered off with some vahine who belonged by law to another white man, and the other white man hadn’t liked it. So the son died. At any rate, that was the captain’s story, and it was the one he always told. Well, as I said, he wanted another son, or @ son, . and he wanted to adopt me. Dockery, did you ever hear of the Minerva Reefs?” Treasure 87 Dockery, lolling back in his chair, shook his head. “Few have, so you needn’t be ashamed of it. The Minerva Reefs are some five thousand miles from where you sit and are shown on a chart as completely sub- merged, though some parts of them jut out alittle. They lie southwest of the Friendly _ Islands, and the nearest island is Pylstaart, and the nearest big one is Tongatabu. Even Pylstaart is over a hundred miles away. In other words, the Minerva Reefs are the jumping-off place. Go there to die. “But, Captain Cleaver was the only white man living who knew that a certain part of the Minerva Reefs is the wonder spot of the world for pearl. fishing. These banks haven’t been touched within the memory of » any one alive today. Long ago the natives of the Tongans used to go out in nothing but their outriggers and fish this bank for their chiefs—and they brought back some of the finest pearl specimens the South Pacific has ever yielded.” Dockery was sitting on the edge of his chair. “How the captain learned this I will never know, but, Dockery, it’s true, because I went there with him and for two months we worked it with astonishing success, and without even beginning to deplete it. When we finally got back to Apia to pro- vision, the crash came. I was slugged one night and robbed of all I had with me, which was nearly all my share. Lucky I had a few. But I got a glimpse of my attacker. “T later saw him talking to the captain, and inquiry brought out the surprizing knowledge that he was the captain’s son, and that he couldn’t dive for the life of him. That was nice and thoughtful of the captain wasn’t it, to fix it all up for his boy like that? “But we won’t get into gruesome details. They aren’t here any more, either father or son, but the Minerva Reefs are. And so is a vast fortune in pearls of the first water. Remember, I said Useless Inlet showed sometimes one good one in five hundred? At Minerva we often opened a day’s work to find one in one hundred. That’s right, go ahead and look surprized. They are beauties too.” Minot opened a leather wallet and poured out three large gems into the palm of his hand. €O books: co -~