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, small,
weazened, leather-colored, secretive--a strange, complex creature,
steeped in all the obscure mystery of the East, nervous, ill at
ease; and the girl, the Anglo-Saxon, daughter of the Northmen,
huge, blond, big-boned, frank, outspoken, simple of composition,
open as the day, bareheaded, her great ropes of sandy hair falling
over her breast and almost to the top of her knee-boots. As he
looked at the two, Wilbur asked himself where else but in
California could such abrupt contrasts occur.

"All light," announced Hoang; "catchum all oil, catchum all bone,
catchum all same plenty many. You help catchum, now you catchum
pay. Sabe?"

The three principals came to a settlement with unprecedented