I DID not go down next day, and I watched the descent of Keedy’s divers
with indifference that was pretty nigh serene. Captain Holstrom stamped
around restlessly, for he couldn’t seem to get it into his mind that
the Pacific Ocean was on guard. But he did not venture to make any
suggestions to me, and I decided that I had trained him in pretty fair
shape.
I had good reason for delaying my next descent. It would not do to take
chances with my diving-dress, which was showing signs of being frayed
by the swirling sand, and I put in a busy day with the two Joneses,
stitching an extra canvas suit to wear over the rubber dress. I improved
on the ice-tongs by having a set of steel spring hooks made so that by
means of long handles I could push them over a box without stooping and
fumbling. Also I had a long rod of steel turned out for me, and with
this I could probe the sand for boxes.
I had no way of knowing whether Keedy or his divers suspected that I
had secured any treasure. I knew that after a night of action of the
sea there would be few traces left where I had disturbed the sand. But
I also knew that Keedy would certainly be wondering why we had built
the wall around the lighter, and therefore we doubled the guards who had
spent the night there since we had installed the pump, and gave the men
orders to shoot any man who tried to climb on board.
We started work on a bigger and more elaborate pump, having tested out
the principle of the thing by means of the first one. I needed more
stream. While Shank was building this I went to work again, using the
old equipment.
I waited each day until the other divers had been down and had climbed
back into the sunlight, empty-handed. Then I slid overboard from our
lighter as secretly as possible, and did my day’s work. I averaged three
boxes a. trip by working myself to the limit of my endurance. It was
reported to me that Keedy climbed into the rigging of the schooner
whenever the surf-boat was eased back toward the wreck, and that he
remained there on watch. How much he saw we did not know, but the men in
the boat crowded together whenever a box was raised. From what I learned
afterward, I found that Keedy thought we were operating some kind of a
dredge, and that his divers reported to him that we were not making any
impression on the sand. So he sat calmly in the rigging, spying on what
he could see, and reckoning that we were wasting our time the same as
his crew.
Before the end of a week the new pump was finished and I had almost five
hundred gallons a minute at my command.
I do not mean to be profane, but I must state that when I got that new
stream to operating it was hell for me down below--and no other phrase
seems to express the case.
I have already mentioned the refuse of that wrecked pantry and bar; from
out of the holes I bored rushed up bits of broken bottles and crockery,
slashing at my bare feet and hands. I could not protect them.
The stream from the nozzle--a three-inch stream--stirred such a mush of
sand that I worked in pitch darkness. I had to have bare feet and hands
in order to feel my way.
After a time, my feet were swollen to twice their natural size.
Finger-nails and toe-nails had been worn off by the grinding of the
sand, and the skin had been eaten off. The sand even penetrated my
dress, and my knees and shoulders were chafed raw. My back, under the
dragging weights I was forced to wear, was about like a piece of pounded
steak. I was suffering the limit of human agony, but I was mad for
success--I was crazed by the gold lust. I was bringing out a small
fortune every day; one day I recovered six boxes--one hundred and twenty
thousand dollars! But I was still just as hungry for the gold that
remained at the bottom. I set my teeth, gasped back my groans, and kept
at work.
All the tender ministrations of Kama Holstrom could not mend my hurts,
and I would not listen to her appeals to me. She begged me to give
up the fight. She urged that we had enough. But I was as crazy as the
wildest man who ever hunted gold, and the pain I was in made me more of
a lunatic. On several occasions I was pulled back to the lighter in a
dead faint, and fought with Number-two Jones because he would not send
me down again that day.
I cannot go into the details of those days of nightmare. I can only say
that I kept on.
We soon had plain hints that Keedy was getting suspicious and uneasy.
One night a crew from the schooner made a desperate attempt to board the
lighter. On other nights they made other tries, and shots were exchanged
before they were driven off.
One day when I was at the bottom of the hole I had bored and had just
succeeded in fastening my hooks to a box, I got a shock that made me
believe the end of the world had come. Something hit me on the top of
the helmet with a thud that knocked me senseless for a moment. I reached
out quickly with one hand, reserving the other for my hose, and felt
the breastplate of a diver. I realized what had happened then. One of
Keedy’s men, sent to spy, had stumbled through the sand swirling from my
pit, and had fallen in on me, not dreaming that I had been able to dig a
fifteen-foot hole.
In the tangle that followed, it was a wonder that either of us escaped.
By the way the man struggled I knew that he was terrified out of his
senses. He clung to me desperately, as a drowning man might ding to a
rescuer. Then he gave his emergency pull, and yanked me with him when he
went up.
I had a raw temper which went with my raw surface in those terrible
days. I left hose and box and went up with the caller, dragging my knife
from my belt. I kept clashing the knife against the front bull’s-eye
of his helmet, and after we had been dragged together for some distance
from the edge of the hole, and the sea became clearer, he perceived what
I was doing. He let go his clutch, and it was well he did, for I was in
a state of maniacal fury. I would have ripped his dress from crotch to
neck-band with my knife if he had not escaped from me just as he did.
I went back and recovered my hose, and after a time got the box. Then I
returned to the lighter, for I was too unnerved to work any longer that
day.
As I lay on deck that afternoon, a shapeless, hideous thing of bruised
and macerated flesh, I wondered whether I would be able to work any
more.
When I was under the sea I was fairly beside myself with the excitement
of the hunt. I could grind my teeth together and groan and fight my way
through the sand, for there was gold at the bottom of the hole I was
digging. And every time I went down through that fifteen feet of smother
I knew that death raced me to the box of treasure and back. Under those
circumstances, a man is desperate enough to forget his bloody cuts and
raw skin. But I felt like a pretty weak and useless tool as I lay there
on deck.
Kama Holstrom was with me. She had insisted on becoming my nurse. I
craved her companionship, I’ll admit, but I wanted to hide myself from
her eyes. Her father was in his state-room, busy at his job of adding
more sheets of iron, more bands of steel, to the treasure-chest he had
taken it upon himself to build. We could hear the bang of his hammer.
Captain Holstrom worked days at that huge chest, slept on it nights
with the key lashed into the palm of his right hand, and between whiles
cuddled those ingots rapturously. In his way, he had become as insane
over the matter as I was myself.
The girl and I were in the lee of the deck-house, to get out of the
trades, and we did not see the boat when it came off Keedy’s schooner.
Had I seen it coming, Keedy would never have been allowed to board us.
But all at once he appeared before the girl and myself. I felt a fierce
impulse to get up and beat his face off him, even though my hands were
as sore as the exposed nerve of an aching tooth. He got that flash from
my eyes, and looked meek for a moment, but then he saw the condition I
was in and became insolent.
“Better listen to me,” he said. “I’m on. I know your system. But I
should say you’re all in, Sidney. You need help. There’s enough there
for all of us. I’ve got two good divers. I’m over here to propose
that we call the row off, and I’ll send my men down to work with your
contrivance and give you a rest.”
That proposition from Marcena Keedy, after what he had done to us in the
matter of that twenty thousand dollars, and after what he had tried to
do to us in the affair of the customs men! I felt the language begin
to roil in me as the said roiled under the force of my stream from the
nozzle.
“Miss Kama,” I pleaded, “won’t you please run away? I want to talk to
this dirty dog. And send your father here with a club.”
She did not leave me. She came closer, and gave Keedy a look which would
have wilted any other sort of man.
“You can’t afford to be foolish over what’s past and gone,” insisted my
ex-partner. “I left because you wasn’t making good--wasn’t holding up
our end of the partnership. You fell down. Now if you can deliver goods
we’ll call off all trouble and start it over again.”
“Captain Holstrom,” I yelled, “come here quick! Bring your hammer!
Hurry! Knock that devil overboard!” I shouted when the captain tore
around the corner on the gallop. His eyes were bulged out, and he had
his hammer over his head, for I guess he thought from the tone of my
voice that pirates had boarded us. His expression did not soften any
when he laid eyes on Keedy.
The gambler put up a lean forefinger. “You’d better hark to what I say,
friend Rask.” He went over the same talk he had had with me.
“Not by a continental tin damsite!” howled the captain. “And how you
have got the gall even to look the way of the _Zizania_, much more come
aboard of her, is what gives me a callous over the collar-button. Get
off’m here!”
“You don’t dare to drive me, Holstrom, after I’ve come to you with a
fair and open proposition--ready to take the first step and let bygones
rest. You can’t afford any big talk! Why, you’re only stealing this
gold, whatever of it you are getting! This is pirate business--the whole
of it. Now you be careful how you try to raise me out of the game.”
That taunt about our rights there at San Apusa came from a rascal and
a gambler, but the taunt made me think--and it stung, too. To tell the
truth, I had done a little thinking about our rights in the matter of
that treasure.
“You’re infernal thieves, and you can’t make yourselves out anything
else!” Keedy insisted. “And you can’t afford to throw down another thief
who is willing to come in and help.”
Captain Holstrom shot out a swift kick and missed Keedy. He made a crack
at him with the hammer, and missed again.
The Keedy person had had experience with the captain, probably, in past
times. He ran for the ladder and escaped into his boat.
“You are fools, besides being thieves,” he informed us, standing up
when he was a safe distance away, and shaking his fists. “Don’t
you understand what I can do to you?” Captain Holstrom returned the
fist-shaking with too much alacrity to be misunderstood.
“All right,” bellowed Keedy; “have it your own way, you fools! I’ll do
you so good that you’ll never know you were ever in the game.” He was
so mad that he let out a little more than he intended to, so I reckoned.
“There are men who will pay me more for what I can tell ’em than any
rake-off you can give me, anyway.” He was rowed away to his schooner.
“That means?” I suggested, swapping looks with the captain.
“I suppose it means that he is going to blow this thing to the
underwriters.”
“Then we are stealing this gold, are we?”
Captain Holstrom fingered his red knob of a nose, and looked away from
me.
“I don’t know much about law,” I went on. “I supposed you knew something
about our rights in this thing--if we have any. I tell you, it’s going
to be pretty tough, Captain, if I’ve been through all this hell only to
have all our great hopes grabbed away from us.”
“Men have to take a chance in this world, Sidney. Damn the law in a case
like this! The gold was there, and nobody was trying to get it. We had a
right to try for it.”
“But wasn’t there any legal way?”
“Oh, a drunken lawyer in San Francisco told me something about power
by attorney, but it meant chasing around and getting hold of claims by
shippers, or something of the kind--and that meant blowing our plans
and letting a lot of grafters in on us. I simply cleared from the
custom-house as a trawler and came away, minding my own business.”
“And now somebody else will take the job of minding it,” I complained. I
did not have much philosophy or courage about me just then. My hands and
feet and shoulders were aching too miserably; and had all my suffering
and daring been thrown away?
“Let’s go home, father,” pleaded the girl.
“Go home!” he yelped. “Sail in past the Golden Gate with this gold? Lug
it back where coyote lawyers can get their whack at it until they’ve
trimmed us for every ounce? Well, I guess--not!”
I wondered if he proposed to sail around in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, cuddling those ingots for amusement, the rest of his life; but
I had neither strength nor taste for any more complaint or argument
at that time. It was a mighty dismal outlook, according to my way of
thinking. I saw that I was tied up with a man whose sole notion was to
get the gold without bothering his head about how he was going to keep
it. Later, Keedy’s schooner frothed out past us, standing to sea, and
headed north.
I did not go down again for almost a week. Courage is always a man’s
best asset, but courage in the job I had undertaken was pretty near my
whole capital. And courage had left me--I had to admit it. I had been
doing honest work with all a man’s grit and strength and will. I had
wrecked my body and wrenched my soul in effort. Yes, the work part of it
was honest, but how about the honesty of our undertaking? I had got some
plain words from Keedy--and I got no consolation from Captain Holstrom.
I was daredevil enough and plenty in those days, but I was not the sort
of a daredevil who would make a successful pirate.
I sat on deck day after day, and bore with my agonies of body and
wrestled with my soul. An idea had come to me as I had struggled with
that problem of our rights. It was a rather vague idea. Of only one
point of it was I sure--its success depended on getting as much of that
gold as I could tear out of the sand.
Thinking upon it, hoping that good would come from it, brought my
courage back to me. I was again ready to undergo tortures and to face
death.