THE BAY OF WHALES
Magdalena Bay, that great expanse of protected water between Punta
Entrado and Santa Margarita Island, was once a great haunt of the
sulphur bottom whales. Then came the shark fishers and then came the
American Pacific Fleet and made a gun practice ground of it, just as
they have made a speed testing ground of the Santa Barbara Channel
between the Channel Islands and the coast. Maybe that drove the sulphur
bottoms to go south all in a body and the more pessimistical ones to
commit suicide in a bunch, and all on the same day in the bay once
known as the Bay of Jaures and now as the Bay of Whales. For the bones
seem all of the same date, ghost-white, calcined by sun and worn by the
moving sands that cover them and uncover them and the winds that drive
the sands.
Another thing, you find them almost to the foot of the low cliffs that
ring the bay. How has this happened? The wind. The wind that can lift
as well as drift, the wind that is always redisposing the sands.
The bay stretches for a distance of four miles between horn and horn;
the water is strewn with reefs visible at low tide. Emerald shallows
and sapphire depths and foam lines and snow of gulls all show more
beautiful than any picture; and beyond lie the sands and the cliffs and
the country desolate as when Jaures first sighted it. Near the centre
of the beach, at the sea edge, stands a great rock shaped like a pulpit.
“That’s the bay,” said Candon, pointing ahead.
It was noon and the _Wear Jack_, with all plain sail set, was driving
straight for a great blue break in the reefs, Hank at the helm and
Candon giving directions. The Chinks were all on deck, gathered
forward, their faces turned shoreward, gazing at the land almost with
interest.
“Where are the whales?” asked Tommie suddenly. “You said it was all
covered with the skeletons of whales.”
“You’ll see them quick enough,” said Candon. “Port, steady so.”
The rip of the outgoing tide was making a lather round the reef spurs.
Ahead the diamond-bright dead blue water showed up to a line where it
suddenly turned to emerald.
“It’s twenty fathoms up to there,” said Candon, “and then the sands
take hold. I’m anchoring somewhere about here. It’s a good bottom. Make
ready with the anchor there!”
He held on for another minute or so, then the wind spilled from the
sails and the anchor fell in fifteen fathom water and nearly half a
mile from the shore.
The boat was got over, with two Chinks to do the rowing, and they
started, Candon steering.
“Where’s the whales?” asked Tommie.
They were almost on to the beach now and there lay the sands singing to
the sun and wind. Miles and miles of sand, with ponds of mirage to the
south, and gulls strutting on the uncovered beach; a vast desolation,
with, far overhead, just a dot in the blue, an eagle from the hills of
Sinaloa. An eagle so high as to be all but invisible, whose eyes could
yet number the shells on the beach and the movement of the smallest
crab. But where were the whales?
T. C. had once seen a whale’s skeleton in a museum, set up and
articulated. Her vivid imagination had pictured a beach covered with
whale skeletons just like that, and, instead of thanking providence for
the absence of such a bone-yard, her mind grumbled. She was wearing one
of Bud’s superfluous panamas and she took it off and put it on again.
As they landed close to the pulpit rock Hank said nothing, George said
nothing, Candon, visibly disturbed, looked north and south. Here but
a short time ago had been ribs lying about like great bent staves,
skulls, vertebræ. Here to-day there was nothing but sand.
He did not know that a fortnight ago a south wind had “moved the
beach,” bringing up hundreds of thousands of tons of sand not only
from the south end but from the bay beyond; that in a month more,
maybe, a north wind would move the beach, sending the sand back home;
that only between the winds the bones were laid fully bare. No storm
was required to do the work, just a steady driving wind sifting,
sifting, sifting for days and days.
The fact that the beach seemed higher just here suddenly brought the
truth to Candon.
“Boys,” said he, “it’s the sand.”
No one spoke for a moment under the frost that had fallen on them. Then
Hank said, “Sure you’ve struck the right bay?”
Like Tommie, he had pictured entire skeletons, not bones and skulls
lying flat and easily sanded over.
“Sure. It’s the sand has lifted over them.”
Scarcely had he spoken when a thunderbolt fell into the shallows a
cable length away from the shore. It was the eagle. In a moment it
rose, a fish in its talons, and went climbing the air to seaward, and
then up a vast spiral stairs in the blue, and then, like an arrow, away
to the far-off hills.
It was like an underscore to the desolation of this place, where man
was disregarded if not unknown.
“Well,” said George, coming back to things, “the bones aren’t any use
anyway. Let’s start for the boodle. Strike out for the cache, B. C.”
They turned, following their leader, and made diagonally for the cliffs
to the north. Candon walked heavily, a vague suspicion filling his
mind that Hank and George held something more in reservation than mere
disappointment over absent skeletons. The odious thought that they
might suspect him of being a fraud came to him as he walked, but he had
little time for self communing. Something worse was in store, and he
saw it now, and wondered at his stupidity in not having seen it before.
Amongst the implements of the expedition two spades had been brought.
The Chinks carried these spades. They brought up the rear of the
procession, silent, imperturbable, apparently incurious. They would not
do the digging when the moment came. Candon and Hank, or George would
be easily able to negotiate the few feet of hard sand that covered the
treasure. The Chinks just carried the spades. Candon stopped dead all
of a sudden. Then he went on, quickening his pace almost to a run. The
booty had been buried at a place easily recognisable, on the southern
side of a little out-jut of the cliff and about ten feet from an issue
of water that came clear and cold and bright through a crack in the
cliff face.
The issue was still there, but it was far lower than before; the sand
had risen. The wind had done its work and five feet or more of new sand
lay upon the cache. It ran up the cliff face like a snow drift. Five or
six feet of pliable sand that seemed an almost impassable barrier. The
big man folded his arms and stood for a moment dumb. Then he laughed.
“Boys,” said he, “I’m a fraud.”
No answer came but the wash of the little waves on the beach and far
gull voices from the south. He turned about fiercely.
“I’ve led you wrong. I’ve fooled you, but it’s not me. It’s my pardner.
It’s the sand. Sand. That’s me and all my work. All I’ve ever stood on,
sand. Sand. Six foot deep.”
“For the land’s sake, B. C.,” cried Hank, “get a clutch on yourself.
What’s wrong with you anyhow?”
“He means the sand has covered the cache,” said the steady voice of
Tommie.
Candon did not look at her. It seemed to him just then, in that moment
of disappointment, that Fate was carefully explaining to him the
futility of his works and his life, and in an immeasurably short space
of time all sorts of little details, from his Alaskan experiences
to his absurd rescue of Tommie, all sorts of weaknesses, from his
enjoyment of robbery to his inaction in letting that freighter pass,
rose before him. He struggled to find more words.
“It’s just me,” said he, and fell dumb and brooding.
“Well,” said George, “it’s a long way to come—to be fooled like
this—but there’s an end of it. How many men would it take to move that
stuff?”
“Six foot of sand and square yards of surface; it would take a steam
dredger,” said Hank, in a hard voice.
Tommie’s eyes were fixed on Candon. She knew little of the whole thing,
but she knew suffering when she saw it. From what he had said and
from his attitude, she could almost read Candon’s thoughts. The movie
business is a teacher of dumb expression.
“D’you mean to say you’re going to turn this down?” asked Tommie.
“What’s the good?” said George. He was feeling just as Hank felt. The
absence of whales’ bones, the flatness of landing on an ordinary beach
where they had expected to see strange sights, had deflated them both.
They did not doubt the bona fides of B. C., but as a medicine man he
was at a discount.
They saw before them hopeless digging. The thing was not hopeless, but
in that moment of defection and disappointment it seemed impossible.
“Well,” said Tommie, “next time I start on a show of this kind, I’ll
take girls along—that’s all I’ve got to say.”
In the dead silence following this bomb-shell, Candon looked up and
found himself looking straight into the eyes of the redoubtable T. C.
“Talk of sands,” she went on, talking to him and seeming to disregard
the others, “and all your life has been sands and that nonsense, why
it’s the sand in a man that makes him. Anyhow, I’ve not come all this
distance to go back without having a try. Aren’t you going to dig?”
The scorn in her tone had no equivalent in her mind, no more than the
spur on a rider’s heel has to do with his mentality. She was out to
save B. C. from himself. Also, although she did not care a button for
the hidden “boodle,” her whole soul resented turning back when on the
spot.
Candon, standing before her like a chidden child, seemed to flush under
his tan, then his eyes turned to Hank.
“Lord! let’s dig,” suddenly said Hank. “Let’s have a try anyhow, if
it takes a month.” He stopped and stared at the hopeless looking task
before him. “We’ll get the whole of the Chinks to help—”
“Chinks!” said Candon, suddenly coming back to his old self in a snap.
“This is white men’s work—I brought you here and I’ll do it myself if I
have to dig with my hands. It’s there, and we’ve got to get it.”
“I’ll help,” said Tommie.
“Well, I reckon we’ll all help,” said George, unenthusiastically.
It was a strange fact that, of the three men, Tommie had least power
over George du Cane. Less attraction for him maybe, even though the
very clothes on her back were his.