agious sentiment of success, they gave three
cheers that scared the sea-birds; and the next they had crowded round
the captain, and were jostling together and groping with emulous hands
in the new-opened mat. Box after box rewarded them, six in all; wrapped,
as I have said, in a paper envelope, and the paper printed on in Chinese
characters.

Nares turned to me and shook my hand. "I began to think we should never
see this day," said he. "I congratulate you, Mr. Dodd, on having pulled
it through."

The captain's tones affected me profoundly; and when Johnson and the men
pressed round me in turn with congratulations, the tears came in my
eyes.

"These are five-tael boxes, more than two pounds," said Nares, weighing
one in his hand. "Say two hundred and fifty dollars to the mat. Lay into
it, boys! We'll make Mr. Dodd a millionaire before dark."

It was strange to see with what a fury we fell to. The men had now
nothing to expect; the mere idea of great sums inspired them with
disinterested ardour. Mats were slashed and disembowelled, the rice
flowed to our knees in the ship's waist, the sweat ran in our eyes and
blinded us, our arms ached to agony; and yet our fire abated not. Dinner
came; we were too weary to eat, too hoarse for conversation; and yet
dinner was scarce done, before we were afoot again and delving in the
rice. Before nightfall not a mat was unexplored, and we were face to
face with the astonishing result.

For of all the inexplicable things in the story of the _Flying Scud_,
here was the most inexplicable. Out of the six thousand mats, only
twenty were found to have been sugared; in each we found the same
amount, about twelve pounds of drug; making a grand total of two hundred
and forty pounds. By the last San Francisco quotation, opium was selling
for a fraction over twenty dollars a pound; but it had been known not
long before to bring as much as forty in Honolulu, where it was
contraband.

Taking, then, this high Honolulu figure, the value of the opium on board
the _Flying Scud_ fell considerably short of ten thousand dollars, while
at the San Francisco rate it lacked a trifle of five thousand. And fifty
thousand was the price that Jim and I had paid for it. And Bellairs had
been eager to go higher! There is no language to express the stupor with
which I contemplated this result.

It may be argued we were not yet sure: there might be yet another
_cache_; and you may be certain in that hour of my