The Professor watched the turtles crawling around their pens, more disturbed by the events of the previous few days than he cared to admit. Granted, the monotony of their days on the island did call for diversions, such as the manufactured excitement of the turtle races. That was both perfectly normal and perfectly healthy. The wagering, however, had exposed a psychological anomaly that made him extremely uneasy.
He wasn't certain which he found more unsettling: that the Howells—and the Skipper—had simply assumed that Gilligan was a possession to be gambled and owned … or that Gilligan had, too.
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Mrs. Howell wound her yarn into a neat ball as her husband rambled on about… something; she wasn't paying attention. She was, however, paying attention to her houseboy, who had been dusting the windowsill for fifteen minutes now without making any appreciable progress. Presumably because he was busy watching the hut across the clearing, and the man puttering around it, with a wistful, trapped look in his eyes that went straight to her heart.
This was wrong. Good help was hard to find, true, but it was the employer who was supposed to be paying for it. Not the servant.
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Gilligan made one last trip to the Howells' hut to return the now-superfluous butler's outfit. Mr. Howell was outside on his lounge chair, sipping his usual cocktail and perusing his repaired newspaper. Gilligan smiled at him as he went by, a bit conspiratorial, a lot grateful. Mr. Howell only harrumphed a bit and turned a page, but even Old Granite Heart himself couldn't quite repress the twinkle in his eyes. Whoever said you couldn't cheat an honest man had never tangled with a Howell.
Both of them knew damned well that Gilligan hadn't so much as touched the Howells' laundry.
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His first mate was back where he belonged. The Skipper was beyond thankful, beyond ashamed. The entire ridiculous affair had shown him a side of himself he didn't much like; Howell just rasped on every nerve he had, and somehow the races had driven him past reason. So he'd lost everything he had, and compounded the problem by losing things he'd had no right to risk.
He looked down, and froze. His ring… so much a part of his hand that he'd forgotten it. He'd kept that, and sold a friend. Unforgivable… and worse, Gilligan would never even mention it.
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Author's Note: The term 'Shellback' has been used for more than a hundred years to denote a sailor who has crossed the equator. Hawaii being where it is, I suspect that both Skipper and Gilligan would have been Shellbacks, and depending on exactly where the island is, (it did seem to change from episode to episode) the others might well be, too.