THE CONFESSION
The size of the task was apparent to all of them, but to none more
clearly than Candon.
First of all, reckoning to deal with hard stuff, he had brought spades,
not shovels. The bundle had been buried hurriedly; even under the best
conditions he would have had to turn over many square feet of stuff to
find it. Then this soft fickle sand was a terrible material to work on;
it was like trying to shovel away water, almost. But the most daunting
thing to him was the fact that fate had induced him to make the cache
on the south side of the out-jut of cliff instead of the north, for the
south wind, blowing up from the bay beyond, had added feet to the depth
to be dealt with, just as a wind drifts snow against any obstruction.
The sand level on the north of the jut was much lower, and it was not
drifted. Then there was the question of time. Given time enough the
McGinnis crowd would surely arrive, if he knew anything of them, and
there would be a fight. And there was the question of Tommie.
This last consideration only came to him now on top of her words, “I’ll
help.” He stood for a moment plunged back into thought. Then he turned
to the others.
“Boys, I reckon I’ve been talking through my hat. White man or yellow
man it’s all the same, we’ll all have to take our turn. Back with you,
you two, to the ship and get canvas enough for tents. We’ll want three.
Grub, too; we’ll want enough for a week. Leave two Chinks to look after
the schooner and try to get some boarding to make extra shovels, as
much as you can, for we’ll want some to shore up the sand. We’ve got to
camp here right on our work.”
“Sure,” said Hank. “Come along, Bud, we’ll fetch the truck.” They
turned towards the boat.
“I’ll go with you,” said Tommie, “I want to fetch my book.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Candon, “I want you to help me here.”
“Me!” said Tommie surprised.
“Yes—if you don’t mind.”
“All right,” said she. Then to Hank, “You’ll find the book in my bunk,
and fetch me my tooth brush, will you—and that hair brush and my
pyjamas, if we’ve got to camp.”
“Right,” said Hank, “you trust me.”
They shoved off, and to George, as he looked back, the huge figure of
Candon and the little figure of his companion seemed strange standing
side by side on that desolate beach. Stranger even than the whales’
skeletons that had vanished.
The wind had veered to the west and freshened, blowing in cool from the
sea.
“Well,” said Tommie after they had watched the boat half way to the
schooner, “what are you going to do now? What did you want me for?”
“I want to have a word with you,” said Candon. “S’pose we sit down.
It’s fresh and breezy here and I can think better sitting down than
standing up. I’m bothered at your being dragged into this business, and
that’s the truth, and I’ve things to tell you.” They sat down and the
big man took his pipe from his pocket and filled it in a leisurely and
far-away manner, absolutely automatically.
Tommie watched him, vastly interested all of a sudden.
“It’s this way,” said he, “I got rid of the other chaps so’s I could
get you alone, and I’m not going one peg further in this business till
you know all about me and the chances you’re running. Y’ remember one
day on deck I was talking to you about that chap Vanderdecken?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m Vanderdecken.”
“You’re which?”
“I’m Vanderdecken. The swab that pirated those yachts.”
“You!” said Tommie.
“Yes. I’m the swab.”
A long pause followed this definite statement. The gulls cried and the
waves broke. Tommie, leaning on her elbow and watching the breaking
waves, seemed trying to adjust her mind to this idea and failing
utterly. She was not considering the question of how Vanderdecken, who
was being chased by Hank and George, had managed to be in partners with
them; she was up against the great fact that Candon was a robber. It
seemed impossible to her, yet he said so.
“But what made you _do_ it?” she cried, suddenly sitting up and looking
straight at him.
“I didn’t start to do it,” said he, throwing the unlit pipe beside him
on the sand. “All the same I did it, and I’ll tell you how it was.” He
sat up and holding his knees started to talk, telling her the whole
business.
It sounded worse than when he told Hank and George, for he gave nothing
in extenuation, just the hard bricks. But hard bricks were good enough
for Tommie; she could build better with them and quicker than if he had
handed her out ornamental tiles to be inserted at given positions.
When he had done talking and when she had done building her edifice
from his words, she shook her head over it. It wasn’t straight. In
some ways it pleased her, as, for instance, the liquor business. She
had sympathy with that, but the larceny appealed to her not as an act
of piracy but theft. T. C. would have been smothered in a judge’s wig,
but she would have made an excellent judge for all that. Candon was
now clearly before her, the man and his actions; he had been frank as
day with her, he was a repentant sinner, and to cap all he had saved
her, at all events in intention, from Chinese slavers. His size and his
sailor simplicity appealed to her.
All the same, her sense of right refused to be stirred by the blue
eyes of Candon, by his size, his simplicity, his patent daring, by the
something or other that made her like him even better than Hank or
George, by the fact that he had carried her off on his shoulder against
her will and in the face of destruction—and absurdity.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” said Tommie. “I don’t want to rub it in,
but you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have got mixed up with that McGinnis
crowd. What made you?”
“You’ve put your finger on it,” said Candon. “I don’t know what made
me. Want of steering.”
“Well,” said Tommie, “you wish you hadn’t, don’t you?”
“You bet.”
“Well then, you’re half out of the hole. D’you ever say your prayers?”
“Me! no—” Candon laughed. “Lord, no—I’ve never been given that way.”
“Maybe if you had you wouldn’t have got into this hole—or maybe you
would. No telling,” said Tommie. “I’m no praying beetle myself, but I
regularly ask the Lord for protection. You want it in the movies. Dope
and a broken neck is what I’m afraid of. I don’t mind being killed, but
I don’t want to be killed suddenly or fall for cocaine or whisky, the
way some do. Well, I guess work is praying sometimes and I shouldn’t
wonder but you’ll have some praying to do with your fists, getting the
sand off that stuff. And when you’ve sent it back to its owners, you’ll
have prayed yourself clear—that’s my ’pinion.”
“I’ve got something else to tell you,” said Candon, “I reckon you don’t
know me yet, anyhow you’ve got to have the lot now I’ve begun.”
“Spit it out,” said the confessor, a bit uneasy in her mind at this new
development and the serious tone of the other.
“I told the boys there was a black streak in me. And there is. I let
you down.”
“Let me down?”
“Yep. D’you remember when you were tinkering at the engine that day the
calm took us?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a big freighter passed within hail and I let her go.”
“Well, what about it?”
“I should have stopped her so that you might have got back to ’Frisco.”
“But I didn’t want to go to ’Frisco.”
“Why, you said the day we first had you on board that you could get
back on some ship.”
“Oh, did I? I’d forgot—well, I wouldn’t have gone in the freighter, to
’Frisco of all places.”
“I didn’t know that. From what you said I should have stopped her.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well,” said he, “I didn’t want to lose you. Hank and me didn’t want
you to go off and leave us, you’d been such a good chum.”
“Well, forget it. I didn’t want to leave you, either. Not me! Why, this
trip is the best holiday I’ve had for years. If that’s all you have to
bother about, forget it.”
“There’s something else,” said he. “The McGinnis crowd is pretty sure
to blow along down after us and there’ll be a fight, sure. You see,
we’re held here by that sand; that will give them time to get on our
tracks.”
“If they come, we’ll have to fight them,” said Tommie. “But, if you ask
me, I don’t think there’s much fight in that lot, by what you say of
them.”
“They’re toughs, all the same. I’m telling you, and I want you to
choose right now—we can stay here and risk it, or push out and away
back and put you down at Santa Barbara, give us the word.”
Tommie considered deeply for a moment. Then she said: “I’m not afraid.
I reckon we can match them if it comes to scratching. No, we’ll stick.
You see, there’s two things—you can’t put me back in Santa Barbara
without the whole of this business coming out and Hank Fisher and Bud
du Cane being guyed to death. Your ship is known, Althusen and that
lot will give evidence—you can’t put me back out of the _Wear Jack_
anyhow.”
“Then how are you to get back?” asked Candon.
“I’ve been trying to think that long enough,” said Tommie. “You
remember the rat in the flower pot—something or another will turn up,
or I’ll have to do some more thinking.”
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” asked Candon. “I’m thinking there’s
not many would stick this out just to save a couple of men from being
guyed.”
“Maybe—I don’t know. Anyhow the other thing is I want to see the end of
this business and that stuff got out of the sand and handed back to its
owners. Lord, can’t you see? If we turned back now we’d be quitters,
and I don’t know what you’d do with yourself; but I tell you what I’d
do with myself, I’d take to making lace for a living—or go as mother’s
help—paugh!”
“God!” said Candon, “give me your fist.”
Tommie held out her fist and they shook.