“My name is Sidney. I’m the diver you are expecting.”
“You’re a liar,” he returned, promptly.
“I tell you you were down to the ferry to meet me. I pulled you off that
turn-table!”
“Who are you?”
“I am Ross Sidney, I say! You’re expecting me. I’m a diver.”
But he did not show the least evidence of understanding what I was
talking about. It’s a familiar phase of drunkenness in many men--that
dogged determination to hang on to one notion and admit no others.
He shook his head and waggled the feather under the girl’s nose.
“This is a private party,” he growled.
“But your daughter is waiting for you--she is very much worried about
you and the money.”
“Say, who does this money and this daughter and this room here belong
to, anyway? Who do I belong to? Who am I? Ain’t I Rask Holstrom,
fifty-six years old, and fully able to take care of myself anywhere
between Point Lobo and India Basin?” He squinted at me along the
peacock’s plume. “Who are _you?_ You say my girl is at the ferry, hey?
How do you know she is there?” He leaned back in his chair, dropped
the feather, and yanked a canvas bag from the right-hand pocket of his
trousers. It was a plump bag, and a heavy bag, and it plainly contained
hard money. He banged it down on the table with such a thump that the
girl hopped and squealed, and it barely missed her toes. He pulled
another canvas bag from the left-hand pocket, and crashed that down.
This time he connected with the girl’s toes. She screamed in pain,
leaped down from the table, and began to hop around the room, kicking
her foot out behind her. She stumbled into a corner, braced herself
there, and began to swear volubly, clutching the tip of her faded
red-velvet slipper in both hands.
I had not broken in on his monologue. I could not match him in roaring.
Then for the first time he seemed to note that the girl was not in an
amiable state of mind.
“You’ve insulted my lady friend. I’ll have your life for that!” He
plunged out of his chair and drove against the wall in his unsteadiness.
The girl was profanely advising me--no, entreating me--to kill the
“drunken fool.” I didn’t blame her for her fire, and I could excuse her
language. To shift from a tickling under the chin to a mally-hackling of
toes was a little too strong for a woman’s nature even if the toes had
been cracked with money.
That was no time for fine figuring as to ways, means, or chances. Before
Captain Holstrom recovered his balance I grabbed his sacks and stuffed
them into my pockets. I started for the door. I had a sort of muddled
memory of a maxim, or proverb, or something of the kind which says that
“where a man’s treasure is there will his heart be also.” It occurred
to me that Captain Holstrom’s body would go with his heart if I made off
with that money, and I preferred to have the body chase me on two legs
rather than be lugged on my shoulders. If he would chase me back to the
ferry the situation would be simplified. Of course, mine was a crazy
expedient, considering the place where I was, but it was a crazy
evening, anyway.
“I’m not stealing it,” I yelled at him as I opened the door. “I’m going
to give it to your girl, and if you run hard enough you’ll see me give
it to her.”
I had plenty of help in opening that door. There were men outside who
helped me so promptly and unanimously that it was evident they had been
lying in wait.
Two of them grabbed me by the neck as they would have clutched a bat
stick in choosing sides in a game of three old cat. They rammed me back
into the room. There were three other men who came in, and one of them
was that rat of a Beason.
They were all talking at one another, and Beason was spitting words the
fastest. But Captain Holstrom drowned out all other sounds by a bellow
of delight. He knew these men, all right. He seemed especially tickled
to behold the two men who held me. He slapped them on their backs,
cuffed their faces with drunken affection, and adjured them to hold me
tighter.
“He took my money! He stole it! He insulted a lady friend of mine. He’s
been chasing me and picking a row with me for three days,” he lied, or
else the rum he had been drinking had elongated his notions of time.
“You see, I get your twenty, Mr. Keedy,” insisted Beason. “I told you
straight. I called the turn on this fly guy. He’s what I told you he
was. You just heard what the captain said.”
I was mighty busy just then with the two men who were holding me, and
Captain Holstrom was giving me some slaps which were drunkenly heavy,
but not affectionate. However, I heard what Beason said, and I saw the
man whom he called Keedy pass over a twenty-dollar gold piece. Beason
grinned at me and scuttled out of the room. The Keedy person pushed the
scolding girl out after him and slammed the door.
I did not like the looks of the Keedy person--no, not at all. I may have
instinct in such matters; I don’t know. A diver is obliged to do most of
his work in pitch darkness and by the sense of touch, and such work may
develop instinct in general. I won’t stop to discuss the question.
But that yellow face with a black mustache smacked across it like
a smear of paint, and arrows of eyebrows shooting up northeast and
northwest from a regular gouge of a wrinkle between the man’s eyes
wasn’t the kind of physog worn by the deacon who takes up the collection
in a Sunday-school. He stood with back against the door.
“Go through him, gents,” he directed. “And hand me the gun when you come
to it.”
There wasn’t any gun, but they got the two sacks of gold, and my little
stock of paper money as well. Then they gave me a shove into a corner,
and all of them stood off and looked at me. The excitement had brought
old Ingot Ike on to his feet and he joined the ring of spectators.
“You are in bad,” stated Mr. Keedy.
Silence gives consent; so I kept still.
“Who is backing you in this job? Where’s the rest of your gang? You’re
in here without a gun. Now, where’s the main party?”
“The main party,” said I, mad enough now to do a little talking,
“is down at the ferry, foot of Market Street. She is that old fool’s
daughter, and she was crying when I left her. I’m just in from the
East, and when I came out on to the street from the ferry this evening,
setting foot in San Francisco for the first time--”
“You’re a liar!” yelped Captain Holstrom. “You’ve been on my trail for
seven days, and you have just knocked me down when I was entertaining
a lady friend and wasn’t looking. You robbed me. The money was found on
you. But Rask Holstrom has got friends who won’t see him done. Here they
are. And into the dock you go, blast ye!”
“You’re in bad,” reiterated the Keedy person, narrowing the crease
between his eyes.
“If you’re a friend of Captain Holstrom, see if you can’t pound it into
his head that I’m the diver he is expecting.”
“You’re the what? Is your name Sidney?”
“That is my name.”
“Rask,” snapped Keedy at last, “were you down at the ferry turn-table as
this man says? You’ve been pretty drunk. This thing here is taking a new
tack. I’d like to believe this chap here if I can.”
“Might have been there,” owned up the captain.
“_Was_ there,” stated that old fool of an Ike, who had been standing by
without a word in my behalf. Now he was ready and willing to leap with
the popular side. “I was there with him.”
“Was your daughter there with you? Did you leave her there?”
Captain Holstrom looked a little ashamed, and hesitated.
“She was there,” stated Ike. “She was following us and trying to get my
noble cap’n to go along with her, but it wasn’t right to bother my noble
cap’n when he was happy over a lucky trade.”
“The two of you must have been good and fine,” growled Mr. Keedy. “Look
here, Cap, I believe this gent is telling a lot of the truth about you.
No matter now about his high jinks with the coin. I want to believe
what he says. As your partner, Captain Holstrom, my advice to you is to
hustle out, get a cab, and get to that ferry station in quick time. If
that diving-suit is there bring it back here.”
The captain rolled out of the room, growling, but subdued.
Mr. Keedy gave me what was for him an affable smile, a hitching up
nearer to his nose of that paint-streak mustache.
“We may as well start in an acquaintance,” he said. He passed my
pocket-book back. “My name is Marcena Keedy, partner of Cap’n Holstrom.
Step up here, gents,” he commanded the two men who had squatted my
windpipe. “This is Number-one Jones; this is Number-two Jones.” They
ducked salute. They had paint-brush chin beards and cock eyes, and were
evidently twins. “First and second mates, new hired for the _Zizania_.”
He did not bother to introduce Ingot Ike.
He pushed a button on the wall.
“We’ll take something to gum the edges of sociability, gents. There’s
nothing like gents starting in sociable when they can, and staying
sociable as long as they can, providing any gent proves himself all
right, as he says he is.”
He gave me a significant and mighty sharp look, sat down, and jigged one
leg over the other, trying hard to keep up his affable smile.
We kept on being sociable for half an hour or more.
At last back came Capt. Rask Holstrom. He was tugging my duffle-bag,
and on his heels was his daughter. She had my little valise. She did
not show any especial symptoms of embarrassment at being in such a joint
alone with men. She walked straight to me and gave me the valise. What
was better, she gave me a smile.
“I misunderstood you, sir, on short acquaintance,” she said. “I hope you
will excuse me.”
She looked me straight in the eyes without coquetry, a gaze as level and
candid as that of man to man.
I gulped some reply--I don’t know what. I wasn’t half as cool as she
was.
Keedy right now put that yellow face between us. The affable smile
wasn’t there. I got a quick and sharp impression that he didn’t relish
the way the girl and I were getting chummy. She was putting out her
hand to me, for I had made a motion as though to shake on our general
understanding. He took her hand and whirled her around and pointed to a
chair.
“You’d better sit down, Kama dear. We’re going to talk a little
business, and you can listen, for you are too much father’s girl to be
kept out of any deal of ours.”
She pulled her hand out of his, but she went and sat down without
shaking my hand.
“Father’s girl sees more clearly every day that he needs a guardian,”
she said, with a rather hard laugh. “Thank you, Mr. Keedy, but I do not
need your invitation to stay.”
Captain Holstrom looked very sheepish. It was plain that he had been
listening to some plain and frank opinions on his way back from the
ferry station.
He tried to act unconcerned, and spying the drink I had not touched,
started to lift it to his lips. His daughter snatched it away and
sprayed the liquor on the wall. He sat down, coughing behind his hand.
I had seen men like Capt. Rask Holstrom before--a bully and a braggart
among men, but half a fool where women were concerned--pliable in the
hands of the loose female, and mortally afraid of his own womenkind.
The men in the room were silent for some time. Keedy was looking at
Holstrom; then his eyes fell on my canvas sack at Holstrom’s feet. He
spoke to me in almost the same fawning tone he had used with the girl.
It was that almost indescribable air--that cheap assumption of gentility
that a professional gambler uses when he is prosecuting his business,
and it rather jars on an honest man.
“I’m sure it would be almighty interesting to me and to these other
gents and the lady to see an Eastern divingsuit. I reckon you’re pretty
much up to date back there.” Liar and knave himself, he wasn’t exactly
sure I had been telling the truth. He wanted to see the goods. But I did
not mind much. I knelt on the floor, and opened the sack and dug out
the equipment. This yam of mine goes back before the days of the
compressed-air chamber which the modern diver carries on his back just
as an automobile carries fuel. But I had a mighty good suit, almost a
new one. There wasn’t a dent in the helmet or a patch oh the rubber or
canvas.
“We have had a long talk, this gent and I,” said Keedy, after he had
squatted like a frog and had peered at all I had to show him. “I’m
naturally a man to get to cases quick. I’m open and free with them I
take a liking to.” He went to the door and peeked into the corridor.
“Number-two Jones, you stand here and keep an eye and ear out,” he
directed. “Now, Brother Sidney, you Eastern chaps are apt to be pretty
cold-blooded, and you need first-hand evidence. I’m going to open up to
you one of the biggest prospects you ever heard of--reckoning that, as
a human being, you simply can’t resist coming into it. If you don’t see
fit to come in after it has been opened up to you--well--” He scowled at
me like a demon, snapped his fingers above his head, and turned on old
Ike.
“Get up and take the floor,” he directed.
“First-hand evidence is what counts,” went on Mr. Keedy. “Now, here’s
a man who has told his story over a lot of times on the water-front. He
has told it so many times it has grown to be a joke. They’ve given him
the nickname of ‘Ingot Ike.’ Lots of big things in this world have been
buried under a joke.”
He leaned back in his chair and twisted up the ends of his mustache.
“Court is open for first-hand evidence, gents. Ike is the first witness.
I’m going to ask him questions and make him answer snappy, for if he
ever gets to rambling on this story of his he’ll make it longer than a
dime novel. Look-a-here, Ike, what was the steamer _Golden Gate?_”
“Passengers, bullion in ingots, and general cargo ’tween here and
Panama.”
It was rather comical to see that old bean-pole straighten up and try to
imitate the snappy style of Mr. Keedy.
“What was your job aboard of her?”
“Quartermaster.”
“What happened to her?”
“Caught fire off coast of Mexico when she was bound for Panama, beached
well north of Acapulco, rolled over and over in surf, what was left
of her, and bones still there. Three ribs show at low tide if you know
where to look for ’em.”
“What was she carrying for treasure?”
“Over three million dollars’ worth of gold in ingots in her strong-room
abaft second bulkhead, between pantry and boiler-room.”
“Was the treasure ever recovered?”
“Wreck was abandoned to underwriters, and after underwriters had worked
for a long time, keeping very mysterious, they reported that they had
got the ingots all out of her. Then they came away. Everybody believed
that the underwriters had cleaned out the wreck, just as they reported
they had. But I was in that wrecking crew. I kept my eye out. It was
a bluff about getting that treasure.” The old man began to show
excitement. “Their divers couldn’t get at it. They didn’t have nerve,
and they didn’t have the right outfits in those days. The underwriters
didn’t want it shown that they hadn’t pulled up the stuff. They knew
that every Tom, Dick, and Harry would go down there, peeking and poking
around that wreck, and that some fellow might think up a way to call the
turn.
“So they bribed the divers, and the divers brought up fake boxes of
gold, and the report was made that all the treasure had been taken from
the _Golden Gate_ wreck. But it’s all there, gents. The underwriters
haven’t been able yet to think of a sensible way of getting at it. They
don’t want to make another splurge and attract attention till they’re
sure of what they’re doing. Them’s facts what I’m telling. I know. I
haven’t done much of anything but keep tabs. I don’t care if they do
call me Ingot Ike. I know what I’m talking about. The trouble down there
has been that the old Pacific has rolled on and rolled in and piled
up sand over that treasure, and they didn’t know how to handle the
proposition in those days.”
“The idea is, Brother Sidney,” broke in Keedy, “firsthand evidence
informs us that three or four millions are cached in a place we know of.
Now, because man has failed once, years ago, when man wasn’t as bright
as he is now, is that any sign that man shall give up? Captain Holstrom
and I say, ‘No.’ We’re partners. We have been talking over this
proposition for a long time. Now, up to date, are you in any way
interested?”