This reckoning stretched over three days, and in the end Moseh was reduced to bringing in a sack of dried beans and making piles of them on the table, shoving them from place to place to demonstrate to Jack where the money had gone. A great many beans ended up on the floor, representing what they’d simply lost . But when Moseh was finished, an impressive pile of beans still remained on the table, and when Moseh told him that each bean amounted to a hundred pieces of eight, Jack had to admit that the Plan Moseh had proposed to him long ago in Algiers had been a pretty good one after all.