throughout the entire day. It was out of the question to keep them off
the schooner, and Wilbur and Moran were too wise to try. They swarmed
the forward deck and rigging like a plague of unclean monkeys, climbing
with an agility and nimbleness that made Wilbur sick to his stomach.
They were unlike any Chinamen he had ever seen--hideous to a degree that
he had imagined impossible in a human being. On two occasions a fight
developed, and in an instant the little hatchets were flashing like the
flash of a snake's fangs. Toward the end of the day one of them returned
to the junk, screaming like a stuck pig, a bit of his chin bitten off.

Moran and Wilbur kept to the quarter-deck, always within reach of the
huge cutting-in spades, but the Chinese beach-combers were too elated
over their prize to pay them much attention.

And indeed the dead monster proved a veritable treasure-trove. By the
end of the day he had been triced up to the foremast, and all hands
straining at the windlass had raised the mighty head out of the water.
The Chinamen descended upon the smooth, black body, their bare feet
sliding and slipping at every step. They held on by jabbing their knives
into the hide as glacier-climbers do their ice-picks. The head yielded
barrel after barrel of oil and a fair quantity of bone. The blubber was
taken aboard the junk, minced up with hatchets, and run into casks.

Last of all, a Chinaman cut a hole through the "case," and, actually
descending into the inside of the head, stripped away the spermaceti
(clear as crystal), and packed it into buckets, which were hauled up on
the junk's deck. The work occupied some two or three days. During this
time the "Bertha Millner" was keeled over to nearly twenty degrees by
the weight of the dead monster. However, neither Wilbur nor Moran
made protest. The Chinamen would do as they pleased; that was said and
signed. And they did not release the schooner until the whale had been
emptied of oil and blubber, spermaceti and bone.

At length, on the afternoon of the third day, the captain of the junk,
whose name was Hoang, presented himself upon the quarter-deck. He was
naked to the waist, and his bare brown torso was gleaming with oil and
sweat. His queue was coiled like a snake around his neck, his hatchet
thrust into his belt.

"Well?" said Moran, coming up.

Wilbur caught his breath as the two stood there facing each other,
so sharp was the contrast. The man, the Mongolian, sma