His one-time partner, the fair and fleet-footed "Dorphy," had deserted him for good and sufficient cause, and his hard old heart rebelled against priggish Christians and their superior ways. Some of the tardiness of age has come upon him. Though he had "worked" the oysters with all the resourcefulness of the lone hand, the marketable results were less in bulk than formerly. "Dorphy" had been wont to re-sort and classify Hamed's gleanings, for Hamed's eyes are misty; also his desire to emulate "Dorphy's" quickness was so ingenuous that in lieu of oysters he would frequently stow away flat stones and pieces of coral. Such things may be abomination in the eyes of the conscientious oyster-getter, but with Hamed they helped to fill the "beg." Vain old Arab! He deceived no one--in the end not even himself, for none of his fakes passed the final inspection of clear-sighted "Dorphy," with whom the moralities of the firm rested, but who in Hamed's eyes was a finicking precisian.
For weeks after his partner's withdrawal from the business Hamed was perplexed. The swing of the seasons set the tides adversely. Hence his complaint--"Water no much dry. Carn dry long. No good one man work himself. Subpose have mate he give hand along nother man. One man messin' abeaut. One small beg oyster one day. My word, 'Dorphy' smart boy--good-for-working boy!"
As a lone hand--his honour thrown upon himself--Hamed was so precise and methodic that by the time the second "beg," had been painfully chipped off semi-submerged rocks, the first was past its prime. When the third was full, the first was good merely in parts. On the completion of the fourth "beg" one passed the neighbourhood of the first on the other side with a precautionary sniff. It contained self-assertive relics.
But Hamed took all four "begs" with him in his little cutter, and "Billy," the toothless black boy, who lisped not in affectation but in broad and conscious profusion, for a blow from a nulla-nulla years ago deprived him for ever of the grace of distinct articulation, sailed with him. No sensation of sorrow fretted me when on that lovely Monday morn I saw the sail of the odoriferous cutter a mere fleck of saintly white on the sky-line among the islands to the north. Can so lovely a thing be burdened with so ponderous a smell? Will it not--if two more days of windless weather prevail--ascend to the seventh heaven and tarnish the glitter of the Pleiades? I mused as I strolled on the tide-smoothed beach of my own scented isle.