hy flor you want blook? 'Ow much you
got? Dolla flive---all light, you take. Me go bed.'

"From which discourse, I gathered that Kim Chee had been rudely
interrupted in the midst of a sweet dream; that he could not fathom my
sudden distaste for whisky; that a long time ago a whaleship had come
into port with a sick man aboard, whom they had picked up in an open
boat, up north; that they had brought the sick man to Kim, and departed
without paying over any money; that Kim Chee had cared for the sick
man, until the latter died; that the sick man had been out of his head,
had talked constantly of 'grease,' had been crazy; that Kim had removed
the diary from the man's body, after death; that he would let me have
it gladly for a dollar and five cents; that he was going back to bed
and didn't want to be disturbed again by the unaccountable vagaries of
a dipsomaniacal white man.

"I didn't bother Kim again. Indeed, I clasped my cheaply purchased
treasure close, hied myself with speed to the docks, and had myself
pulled off to the brig. My spree was ended, and I felt that I held in
my hand the best piece of fortune that had befallen the happy family in
many a day.

"I reasoned, you see, that the treasure of ambergris was still in its
hiding-place on Fire Mountain--and subsequent events have not shaken
that belief. I reasoned that Winters had been picked up some time
after he had made his last entry in the log, that he was out of his
head when rescued, and that he never regained sanity.

"His rescuers apparently did not bother to search him, or else, with
the cunning of the crazed, Winters concealed from them his journal. If
they had happened upon it, they would surely have appropriated it.
Their dumping him off on Kim Chee was not so heartless as it
sounds--the sick man was undoubtedly better off ashore in Hawaii than
aboard a cruising whaler, and Kim Chee is famed for his charity from
one end of the Pacific to the other.

"At breakfast that morning, I acquainted Ruth with the discovery, and
read to her the passages I read to you. It was an exciting breakfast.

"We were waited upon by Ichi, the little Jap we shipped as cook in
Hakodate. Polite, stupid, unfamiliar with the English language, we did
not think it necessary to guard our speech against him. Indeed, we
never gave him a thought, and we discussed my find pro and con very
freely. We dwelt upon the value of the treasure, verified the _Good
Luck's_ repo