“Oh, we are honest men--not thieves,” he called back. “We do not deal
with thieves. We came here to stop you from stealing. But you do not
stop. Now we shall see. We have kept our knives in our belts. But you
have set us an example. You have tried to kill a man who did not offer
to hurt you.” He leaped up on the rail, and aimed a long finger at me.
“We can fight the way you do. If we catch you there on bottom again
you’ll be pulled up with six of these sticking in you.” He patted the
knife in his belt.
There are men who can threaten and who cannot impress others. It is
easily docketed as bluster. There is another kind of a man who gives you
a look and a word, and you know that he means what he says. I went away
from that sloop feeling that if I were desperate enough just then to
commit suicide, an easy way had been opened for me.
I went and tumbled into my berth, and viewed the ruins of that idea
which I had been building so prayerfully. It looked to me then, in
my despondency, as if Keedy was holding mighty good cards. If he had
decided to turn informer, he could demand and would undoubtedly receive
a noble rake-off. It was probable that he _would_ inform--for that would
be his natural, lazy method of making his money out of the thing. The
posting of the pearl divers in behalf of the underwriters would be an
additional feather in his cap; on the other hand, if he proposed to come
with a backer and new equipment--having discovered my system--he had
good reasons for leaving men behind him who would hold us in check.
If Keedy returned with steam-pumps he could rip the bottom out of the
Pacific. Our makeshift equipment would not be two-spot high.
And how soon could he return, whether he came piloting the underwriters
or came on his own hook as a rival “thief”? I talked with Captain
Holstrom on that matter the next day. He rubbed his nose and scruffed
his hair, and could not guess.
I asked the captain for his estimate of the amount of treasure in our
chest. He told me that we had rising three-quarters of a million.
“Captain, it has become a matter of touch and go--live or die--with us.
With less than a third of that gold in our hands, we’re in no position
to do business when the pinch comes. I’m going after the rest of it!”
“But you said you knew them greaser pickerel would poke their knives
into you. God knows I’m hungry for the rest of the treasure, Sidney, but
I’m no Marcena Keedy.”
“I’m going down at night, Captain Holstrom.”
“It can’t be done.”
“It _can_ be done. After I get my stream started I’m in the dark even
when the sun is brightest. I know the way from the lighter to that
wreck, all right. I’ve dragged my way there times enough with a trail of
blood behind me,” I told him, sourly. “It can never be any worse than it
has been. We’ll take extra chances, moor the lighter nearer the wreck,
get rid of the surf-boat and crew, and leave those greasers guessing.”
I want to say, to the credit of the captain, that he opposed this
undertaking of mine. His daughter--But I will not dwell on that point.
It harrows my soul now to remember the manner in which I opposed my
obstinate and reckless will to her honest grief and her almost frantic
protests.
I went down that night. I gave ’em three boxes before midnight. I ate
a lunch, and gave ’em one box more before I quit.
I have no ambition to make this story a rival of Fox’s Book of Martyrs.
I have already given some idea of the physical state I was in. I think
I became numb to pain, accustomed to agonies. I cannot explain otherwise
how I ever kept on, night after night. I haven’t the courage to write
down what I suffered.
But out from under those grinning greasers--grinning their sneers at
us daytimes--I dragged one and one-half million dollars’ worth of gold
ingots inside of two weeks--and they never suspected that I was under
water.
During the last of that nightmare, I felt as if I were working with
my chin over my shoulder. I was looking for trouble. I was expecting
disaster. I was scared to the marrow. I am not referring to any feelings
I had on account of the pearl divers. Their bug eyes had never detected
me in what I was about. I knew that darkness protected me more surely
from any attack by them than iron walls would have done.
But I worked nights with the constant feeling that the red and green
eyes of a steamer were coming up over the horizon. When I was awake
daytimes I peered into the northern sky hour after hour, expecting and
dreading to see the trail of smoke which would announce the coming of
Marcena Keedy and those whom he had notified.
My conferences with Captain Holstrom had been scant and rather brusque.
There were some points in that idea of mine that I had not thought out
to my own satisfaction, and I had not found the captain to be especially
helpful in attacking problems. He was wholly taken up in helping to pull
that gold in over the rail, in storing it, in guarding it.
His daughter knew why I stared at the northern horizon, and why
desperate worry added to the other woes I was suffering in that tophet
of toil. She had resigned herself to the situation when I had persisted
in keeping on. She became, as before, my wistful nurse. She talked to me
as she would have soothed a madman whom she hoped to win back to sanity.
Well, I was a lunatic in those days--there’s not much doubt of it. It
was madness made up of fear, desperation, agony of physical pain,
lust for gold--all forcing me to do work which no sane man could have
accomplished in my condition of body.
She dared to break her usual silence on the matter of the treasure when
we were on deck one afternoon after my sleep. She had been gazing at me
sorrowfully while I stared into the north.
“Oh, what use is it--this dreadful work and worry? You have told me that
you feel like a thief in it all. You sit and stare into the north as
though you were a wicked man, instead of being so brave and successful
in the most wonderful work a man ever did. You are getting their gold
for them. But you feel that they are coming to take it all away--and
call you a thief. You cannot deceive me as to your thoughts.”
I had to acknowledge to myself that her woman’s intuition was in fine
working order. I understood what men were, naturally, in affairs where
big sums of money were involved. These men, provided Keedy had done as I
supposed he had, would have Keedy’s lies about us to inflame them still
further in addition to their natural greed.
But she was no quitter on one point. She clenched her little fists and
kept on:
“I say fight back! It may be their money--somebody’s money--but what
good did it do them or anybody else until you came here with your
strength and your courage and your brains and got it up from the bottom
of the ocean? I don’t know what the law is about such things--I don’t
care. I’ve heard you and father talk, but I only know that often in this
life law is one thing and justice is another.”
“There are the laws of salvage,” I told her. “We could turn this money
over and wait for the courts to decide. But I’m afraid of what may
happen if we do that. There’s that renegade Keedy with his lies; there
are the customs men of Mexico, and all that mess of international law to
complicate things. Keedy can claim partnership; the shippers can claim
shares, I suppose; this one and that one can dip in their fingers; and
lawyers can tie the matter up; and God only knows when it will all be
untied so that we can get what we have honestly earned. We may have to
fight for our liberty, for men are crazy enough to try to make us
out thieves, providing they can get hold of much money by lies and
injustice. I have been pounding it all out in my poor head, and I can’t
seem to believe that the law is going to give us what we ought to
have. For, you see, this thing isn’t like anything else that has ever
happened.”
“I say fight!” she insisted, her eyes alight, her cheeks flaming under
the tan. “You have fought the ocean for their sakes as well as
your own--and you have won. Keep on fighting! Plan something, do
something--get into some position where they will have to come to you
and beg for what’s theirs. You have earned the right to make them beg.
And you know you have!”
Yes, I did know it; and on that belief I had based my idea which had
served for my encouragement. Her advice and her woman’s spirit in the
matter heartened me. She had acted like the lady of the castle of whom I
had read. She brought to me my helmet and shield, and was sending me out
to battle as a brave woman should. I started to tell her more about my
idea--but we were interrupted.
There was a queer noise in the direction of the ladder which led to the
lower deck. It was such a prodigious puffing and wheezing and grunting
that anybody might suppose that we were going to receive a visit from a
hippopotamus. The Snohomish Glutton, the cook of the _Zizania_, appeared
to us. I had not laid eyes on that individual for weeks. He stuck in his
pantry like a hermit in a cell, reveling in the steam of food, stuffing
himself even while he was cooking for others. He rolled rather than
walked across the deck, and stood before us, propping up the rolls of
fat which shuttered his little eyes.
“I don’t know how much there is or where you’re keeping it,” he blurted,
without preface, in his tin-whistle voice. “I don’t ask questions--I
stay in my pantry and mind my business. But I serve the niggers in the
port alley and the whites in the starboard alley, and I hear both sides.
But there’s only one side now. They said that the monkey’s tail started
the row. But they’ve forgotten the row. Gold will make men forget
’most anything. They’ve got together at last. They are going to grab
for it. They thought I haven’t been hearing because my eyes were shut
and I seemed to be asleep.”
“What do you mean, my man?” I demanded.
“I mean that you can play checkers on that checkerboard crew now, sir.
It has settled into a solid board--white and black mixed. The Russian
Finn is captain. He killed my cat. I have said I would get even with
him. He is captain, and they are going to drop on to that gold and run
away.”
“They have planned a mutiny?”
“Mutiny and all the side dishes that go with it. I have heard. I wasn’t
asleep when they thought I was. I’ve got to go back. I have duff in the
pot.”
He backed to the ladder and let himself down, rung by rung, grunting
more terrifically than before.
The girl leaped to her feet. She held her clenched fists above her head.
Her white teeth showed beneath the crimson of her parted lips. She drove
her hands down at her sides.
“Oh!” she had gasped, when her hands were above her head. When she drove
them down her woman’s soul spoke its anger and horror. “Damn the name
of gold!” she cried; and I would not have indorsed a milder phrase even
from her.
For weeks my head had been full of seething particles of schemes
relating to my central idea. I reckon it needed a shock--needed the
desperate occasion of instant action--to make those particles cohere
into resolve. For a moment I was stunned by the prospect of this
new danger; and then a course of action came to me in a flash of
inspiration--it was the result of all the thinking I had been doing,
without making up my mind to act.
I hobbled to find Captain Holstrom in his state-room. I had to push
him back when he had heard a dozen words of what I had reported. He
had grabbed his pistols and was rushing to kill off a few prospective
mutineers as an example to the others.
“You have got to do what I advise in this matter, Captain. I’ve been
making plans. We’ve got not only this crew to consider, but Keedy and
those he is bringing down here. He is coming. We may as well make up our
minds to that. I want you to go down on the main deck as quickly as
you can and order the crew to get out planks and start in making strong
boxes. Privately, you and I will overhaul the junk for scrap iron, for
chains and cable. Get after the men. Hustle them. Make it a hurry-up
job. Busy men won’t have time to talk mutiny. And say to one of the
mates, when you are giving off orders, that you are going to pack the
treasure into boxes suitable for handling. Say that loud enough so that
all the men will hear.”
“I’ll be joheifered if I don’t believe I’ve got to handle a lunatic as
well as a mutiny,” flamed Captain Holstrom. “Are you advising me to pack
up that gold so that it will be easy lugging for the crew?”
“As soon as they believe that it is going to be packed so as to be easy
lugging there’ll be no mutiny until those boxes have been made. You’ve
got to do as I say. You ought to have had your lesson by this time that
I know what I’m talking about.”
He shuttled his eyes when I looked at him. He was remembering those past
matters in which he had made a fool of himself in resisting me. I was
willing to explain my plan to him, for I was not trying to humiliate
Captain Holstrom. But just then I had a feeling that every moment
counted. One instant more and I knew what the pricking of my mental
thumbs had meant. Mate Number-two Jones came clattering along the deck
from below. He shoved a red and greatly troubled face in at the door.
“Get your guns, Cap’n Holstrom,” he panted. “They’re grumbling and
mumbling. It means mutiny.”
“Take your guns with you, if you like,” I told the captain. “But go down
there as cool as you can. Give off your orders as if you didn’t notice
anything. And be sure to throw out that hint about why you want the
boxes made. This is no time to bull this game of ours.”
Captain Holstrom was no fool, and he knew when a man was in dead
earnest. I pushed him and he went. I’ll have to confess that he
qualified as a good actor when he arrived on the main deck.
I was looking down from the bridge, and I saw the men of the crew
exchange winks and grins behind the captain’s back.
The model crew of the crack ship in all the world could not have shown
such willing obedience. They went to their work on the rush. Saws rasped
and hammers banged. There was clattering of iron and hum of industry.
Captain Holstrom left the work in charge of his mates, and came back to
his state-room to resume his watch over the treasure. I closeted myself
with him.
“Now, we’ll get down to the bed-rock of the proposition, Captain
Holstrom. We have agreed--you and I--that Keedy is about due here.
We don’t know who will come with him. But we can be mighty sure that
they’ll be no friends of ours. We’d be playing the parts of idiots to
keep that gold on board the _Zizania_. But there isn’t a harbor nearer
than Acapulco where we can land it; we can’t lug it ashore on the open
coast through the breakers; we can’t dodge all around the Pacific Ocean
with it. Right now, there’s another complication besides Keedy and his
crowd. We have still more desperate thieves right here with us. The
mates and Shank are safe. To-night the five of us will get busy, pack
that gold in the strong boxes, and drop it overboard.”
“Great guns!” groaned the captain. “I said you was crazy, and now I’m
sure of it. Dig it all up, and then throw it away again! No, let’s not
put it in the boxes. Let’s hoot and holler and cavort around the deck
and heave it overboard, one ingot at a time, so as to see who can make
the biggest splash. Come on--let’s have fun!” he raved.
“I am far from being crazy, Captain Holstrom,” I informed him, giving
him the hard eye so steadily that he blinked. “To each box we’ll hitch
chain long enough to reach to the surface. That chain will have rope
cable--say ten feet of it--hitched to the end, and the rope will be
buoyed to a small spar. The box and all the chain will lie on bottom.
The small spar with its rope cable will swim well under the surface of
the water. In case we want to raise the box we can catch the rope and
spar with a rake, or else drag for it with a chain between two boats.”
“I hate to see that gold go under water again,” mourned Captain
Holstrom.
“It’s that or stand by and see mutineers lug it off or lawyers divide
it.”
He writhed like a speared fish when he pondered on the alternatives.
I went out on deck and left him to think, confident that his slow mind
would finally swing to my way of making the best of a bad matter.
The checker-board crew was at work in a real frenzy of effort. I have no
doubt that each man secretly told himself that he was building his own
box--and he was putting his best work into his treasure-carrier.
The summer evening was long and the crew labored on after their supper.
According to my best judgment, when darkness shut down on their labors
there were boxes enough for our purpose. The men went to their rest
on the berth-deck in the forepeak of the steamer. Captain Holstrom had
remarked, casually, in their hearing, that he would wait till next day
before packing the ingots. From my post on the bridge, though the dusk
had deepened, I caught a cheerful wink or two between man and man, and
they went below looking like cats who had been promised a full meal of
canaries.
In order to encourage general peace and confidence, the mates allowed
the usual deck watch to go below and sleep, and the lazy sailors were
only too glad to do so.
When they were snoring in satisfactory chorus, Captain Holstrom slid
their hatch over and barred it so as to guard against a surprise by
peepers. Before two bells after midnight the last box of our gold had
gone gurgling down over the taffrail. The last spar winked out of sight
under the surge.
“It’s gone!” groaned Captain Holstrom.
“Thank God, it has!” said I, and felt the girl’s little hand snuggle
comfortingly into my unsightly fist.