THERE was nothing especially interesting about that prolonged grunt of the old Zizania down the California coast. She rolled and thrashed, and the brisk trades spattered spray over her bows, and she certainly took her own time in moving along.

We all settled down to endure the trip as best we could, but it was a rather surly party. Forward, the blacks and whites nursed their scars and their grudge; aft, Keedy and I scowled at each other so much that nobody could be happy around where we were. Miss Kama walked the deck alone, or read, or embroidered in her state-room; once in a while I got a glimpse of her through the door while she was at work. She continued to sit beside me at table, but she was very cool and distant. I don’t know as I tried to have her anything else. I would have liked to lean over the rail and talk with her, though I never presumed to speak to her on deck. Take a fellow when he is young, penned aboard a slow packet, a pretty girl near him all the time, and you bet he cannot confine all his thought to the scenery and his job.

She truly was a pretty girl! I can see her now as she strode to and fro on the upper deck, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her white sweater, and drawing it forward so that it set off her plumpness. There was a sort of indescribable tousle to her hair, if I may put it that way. I don’t know what the color was—there’s no name for those shades of copper and brown and all that.

I know I liked mighty well to see the sun shine through that hair.

I loafed below and forward considerably. I found a lot to interest me, particularly a job that the Russian Finn was on in his spare time. He was making a new tail for his monkey. He explained to me half tearfully that the monkey would never be safe or happy otherwise. I had pretty hard work to understand the man’s broken lingo, but I gathered that this especial kind of monkey needed to spend a portion of his time hanging head downward from his tail in order to be well and contented. Once or twice since the tail had been amputated the monkey had run up the foremast or the derrick, and had confidently tried to throw an imaginary tail over a rope, and had tumbled to the deck, where he had squatted and moaned and examined the stump with confused and pitiful attempt to understand the phenomenon. I could sympathize with the Finn’s fears when he said that “some day he fall over the board or break him damn neck.” The cook’s random blow had left some inches of the stump, and to this with marline and glue the Finn deftly fastened by an “end-seizing” a wire covered with furred skin. I wondered where he secured this skin. He owned up to me. He had captured and killed one of the cook’s pet cats, and the cook had never opened his eyes wide enough to detect the crime, or to behold where the skin of the defunct was performing vicarious atonement.

This catskin-covered wire was hooked at the end. Edison, I reckon, never watched the testing of an invention with greater raptness than the Finn displayed as the monkey, after a thorough inspection of the new appendage, clambered aloft to where a rope swayed invitingly. I confess that I shared in that interest. It proved a surprising success. The monkey swung from the hook, chattered, and grinned, and came down and sat for long minutes scrutinizing the thing, running busy little fingers along the furred wire.

“I may need an inventor with brains when I get at my job down below here,” I told the Finn. “I will remember what you have done to your monkey.”

But when the time did come, it was the monkey instead of the master who served.

As day followed day, and we finally raised the loom of the southern California mountains in the blue distance on our port, Ingot Ike came out of the lethargy in which limitless supplies of soft gingerbread seemed to involve him. He talked to me with the brown crumbs sticking in the comers of his mouth, and his spirits rose higher each day. He was like a thermometer which was being brought nearer and nearer to heat. His talk became more eager, his demeanor more alert, joy more intense.

“After all I’ve talked about it, and told ’em about it, and argued, it’s coming true at last,” he kept repeating to me. He had fastened himself to me with especial insistence during the voyage. “You’re the one who is going to get it, who is going off this boat right down to where it is, where you can lay your hands right on it, sir. Won’t it be a grand feeling when you lay your hands on the first box?”

“Yes,” I admitted, “it will—when I lay my hands on it.”

I did not say that with any great enthusiasm. If Ingot Ike had not been so full of gingerbread and glee he would have seen that I was pretty much down. That San Francisco cocktail had got well worked out of me. I’d had plenty of time to think the whole thing over during that wallow down the coast. A man could be hopeful, in on shore, with Mr. Keedy rolling the word “gold” over his tongue like a luscious morsel. I had been hopeful—and desperate. But after days at sea in that rickety old tub, with her rotten equipment, her bargain-sale fittings, her makeshift crew, with her whole grouchy, suspicious, and reckless atmosphere, I decided that I was a fool and would have been better off if I had gone out and hunted for a legitimate job. I had ahead of me the fact, according to old Ike, that other good men had tried and failed. I had behind me just then the sure feeling that Mr. Keedy proposed to do me up as soon as I made good, provided I did so by some lucky chance.

The last stage of the voyage south was made with old Ike posted in the crow’s-nest, his beak thrust out, and his mat of hair fluttering in the wind. He was so excited that he forgot to wallop gingerbread between his toothless jaws.

Number-two Jones, who wasn’t a bad sort, gave me some information about the coast which was in sight of us since we had crossed the mouth of the Gulf of California. He had sailed those waters before. He had a somewhat misty remembrance of where the steamer Golden Gate had gone ashore, but he had never been in the vicinity of the spot, for the sand-bars obliged craft to keep well offshore.

According to his recollection, the wreck had occurred along the Guerrero coast, somewhere between Orilla and Acapulco. The doomed steamer, after she had caught fire, was headed for the harbor of Acapulco, almost the only haven on the coast, but an outlying sand-bar tripped her many miles north of her destination and she went to her grave. Mr. Jones confessed that he did not know just where; he would be obliged to hunt fifty miles of coast for her if it were up to him.

But Ingot Ike had the memory of a monomaniac on the subject of the Golden Gate. He peered under his palm at the hazy sky-line; he threw back his head and snuffed into the east like a dog treeing game.

Captain Holstrom started the lead going as soon as Ike had asked to have the Zizania hug the coast more closely. He knew the reputation of those hummocks and submarine plateaus of sand, and the howl of the leadsman rather astonished me when he reported, for on the Atlantic coast, to which I had been accustomed, we would be in deep water with a coast-line so far away in the hazy blue of the east. At a distance which I judged to be at least two miles offshore we were getting a report of only fifteen or twenty fathoms.

At last Ike began to swish his thin arm. “Ye’d better down killick, Captain!” he screamed from the crow’s-nest. “We’re laying off of her. This is the place.” He scrambled down and ran to the wheel-house. “If you put her in closer than this she’ll roll her blamed old smokestack out.”

Captain Holstrom accepted that advice promptly, though the shore-line was at least a mile away.

He yelled shrilly, and splash! went the port anchor. When she had swung wide he sent down the starboard mud-hook, and she headed the rolling Pacific, riding easily to the heave of the giant sweepers.

A little thrill tingled in me as she came to a halt. We were on the ground at last.

It was now up to me!

There were plenty of other men on that boat, but there was only one man who could reach out and put his hand on that treasure, and that was myself. The thought did not help to cheer my despondency.

Captain Holstrom was immediately busy with a huge telescope which he lifted from its rack and leveled across the sill of the wheel-house window. Old Ike was excitedly counseling him, jabbing a digit toward the shore.

“Follow down from that second nick in that hossback mount’in,” the guide suggested. “Them is my bearings. You ought to see them ribs fairly plain against the white where that surf is breaking inshore.”

There was silence after that while the captain squinted through the glass, twisting a section now and then to sharpen the focus. His daughter was in the wheel-house at his side, her face tense. She had never intimated to me, of course, what her ideas were in regard to this treasure quest. She may have held the whole project in the same contempt in which she seemed to hold Keedy, its chief instigator, or old Ike, its prophet. But I stole a look at her, and decided that she was interested now.

Well, anything with intellect above that of a steer would have had to be interested at that moment.

We were hoping that yonder under those rollers lay three or four million dollars’ worth of gold—gold enough to buy everything that man or woman could desire.

Even the blockheads of the checker-board crew, who could hope for no more than their wages from the quest, were staring over the rail from the main deck forward, their mouths open. Marcena Keedy was eating a cigar instead of smoking it.

“Them ribs ought to be there, Captain,” insisted the old man, wistfully. “The rest has been buried, but them ribs have stood all the swash for years. They ought to be there.”

There was another long silence.

Then Captain Holstrom straightened up. “They’re there!” said he. He beckoned to me. I was at the rail. “Come in here,” he directed. “It’s your next peek—for yonder is laid out your job.”

I had good eyes and I spotted the objects right off. There were three curved ribs of a ship outlined against the white of the breaking rollers beyond. The telescope gave the view relief and perspective, and I saw that the ribs were well outshore. Many yards of tossing water, so I judged, were between them and land.

“Well, what do you think?” he inquired, when I passed the glass back.

“I’ll tell you after I’ve been down, sir. A diver can’t afford to waste guesswork on the top side of water.”

The girl shook her head when her father offered her the telescope, and Keedy came in and took his look.

“Away in there, is it? Well, what are we waiting for out here?”

Captain Holstrom looked his partner up and down.

This sudden exhibition of a lack of a practical knowledge took his breath away for a moment.

“We’re waiting out here because we have got to stay here, Marcena. This is as far as it’s safe to go.”

“We might as well sit on the Cliff House piazza and boss the job as be out here,” grumbled the gambler.

“I don’t know what sort of an idea you had about getting this treasure,” retorted the captain. “But if you had paid attention to Ike when, he was telling about the lay of the land you ought to have realized that we wasn’t going to tie up to that wreck and have Sidney hook bags of gold on to a fish-line for you to pull up.”

“I’m down here to have a general oversight in this business,” said Keedy, “and I propose to be near enough to the job to oversee it.”

Captain Holstrom looked a bit disgusted. “We might rig a bos’n’s chair for you on one of them ribs, and cut a hole in the water for you to look down through. But see here, Marcena, don’t get foolish about this thing. All you’ve been thinking about, so I judge, is of them boxes of gold, and you haven’t stopped to figure on the way of getting ’em. I have figured. I’ve talked a lot with old Ike when you wasn’t listening, but was dreaming about them ingots. Now you listen to me. Let’s start in without a row and a general misunderstanding.” He began to dot off his points with a stubby forefinger.

“We can’t anchor the Zizania any nearer. There isn’t holding-ground on that sand, and we’ve got to have plenty of water under this steamer in case of a blow. See those lighters forward? I bought ’em after I got a general understanding of the lay of the land here from Ike.”

“You bought a lot of things without consulting me,” said Keedy, showing his grouch. “What am I in this thing—a passenger or a partner? Seeing that my money is in it, I propose to have my brains in, too.”

The man acted and talked in a way to indicate that he was starting out hunting for trouble. It began to look to me as if there were worse shoals ahead for our partnership than the shoals of San Apusa Bar. Mr. Jones had given me that as the name of the place where the wreck lay.

Capt. Rask Holstrom did not have the steadiest temper in the world. His eyes narrowed.

“Every man for his own line, Keedy. I’m not presuming to tell you how to deal from the box, nor how to size the buried card in stud poker. Nor I don’t need any advice from you when it comes to handling a job of work in tidewater. I’ve waited till I got here to tell you my plans. When I can talk and you can see the layout at the same time, I’ll not be wasting so much breath; even those faro-game brains of yours can take in what I’m getting at. Now, hold right on! This is going to be a square deal, and you can sit close to the jack-pot. Those four lighters are going overboard, and we’ll moor them in a chain between here and the shore. We can splice the cables so as to allow a hundred fathoms between each one. That will make each lighter a sort of a bridle anchor for the others, and we ought to get the inshore lighter mighty nigh the wreck. You can stay on that lighter and have your meals brought if you hanker to.”

He snapped out that last remark while he was backing down the ladder from the bridge to the main deck. The sneer that went with it did not improve the state of Keedy’s feelings.

“I’ll show this aggregation whether I can boss a job or not,” he growled.

I decided right then that if Keedy tried to boss me from that inshore lighter the partnership of Holstrom, Keedy & Sidney would get a fracture in the second joint much wider than the one which was already widening there. I looked after him when he strolled away, and I reckon if he had turned around and given me one of those nasty looks of his just then I would have run after him and hoisted him a good one under the coat-tail—gladly taking the consequences. I had never hated Anson C. Doughty any worse. Keedy had grafted himself on to the project with stolen money—and now he was insulting the rest of us by placing us in the rogue class with himself and in need of watching.

I suppose I looked very blue and ugly and disgusted as I stood there at the rail, scowling first at Keedy and then at the streaming white of the surf which played beyond the ribs of the wreck.

The girl spoke to me. She leaned from the window of the wheel-house, and there was a note in her voice I had never heard before. All her brusqueness was gone. She was sort of confidential and wistful.

“You don’t think much of this scheme, do you, Mr. Sidney?”

I was in the mood to agree with her. “There must be an almighty good reason why those other fellows did not recover the treasure, Miss Holstrom, providing old Ike is right in what he says and that they didn’t get it. I can tell better after I have been down.”

“I have never seen a diver at work. It is very dangerous, isn’t it?”

“That depends on the job. I have been as deep as one hundred and seventy feet, Miss Holstrom, and I felt perfectly safe, though the pressure made my nose bleed. Another time I was down in only four fathoms in the wash of a lee shore, and they couldn’t keep my lines and my air-hose dear, and they pulled me up near dead. That’s a lee shore yonder, and I’m afraid I’m going to find some very good reasons why the other divers didn’t succeed. Sometimes I am tempted to believe that they did get the gold and that old Ike’s talk is simply a dream.”

“I think the whole affair is a nightmare—I mean this trip,” she declared. “I don’t believe the good Lord is going to allow a man like Marcena Keedy to succeed in any decent enterprise.”

I rubbed my ear and looked at her for a few minutes. I had been turning over a thought about this expedition in my mind for some days. I did not know whether to say anything to her about it or not. It would be giving Captain Holstrom a pretty hard dig. But I blurted it, for she knew I had something on my mind and bluntly demanded to know what I was thinking about.

“Perhaps this is the kind of a scheme where the devil will help his own, Miss Holstrom—and therefore Keedy belongs in the thick of it as chief manager. He’ll win on that basis. I don’t know much about admiralty law or maritime justice. But it may be that this treasure has not been officially abandoned. Perhaps taking it is stealing it. I know that the Zizania got away from port with papers as a trawl fisher. I know I have no business talking like this about your father’s affair. But if it’s to be real stealing, perhaps we’ll succeed with Keedy in the game,” I said—and it was a pretty clumsy joke. It fell flat.

“I hope my father will wake up,” she said, curtly, looking down on him where he was giving off orders about clearing the big derrick. “Sometimes I almost believe in evil spirits and in control of a man’s mind by another man—in a wicked way, I mean. But I thank God there’s one of the Holstrom family who can’t be hypnotized by Marcena Keedy. That is why I have come on this voyage—my father needs a guardian.”

She came down the steps from the wheel-house, and went into her state-room. I walked aft, for the Zizania had swung with the surges, and was tailing toward shore, and I wanted to look at the place where my work had been cut out for me.

Keedy met me amidship. He came out from behind a lashed life-boat, and it struck me at once that he had been in ambush, spying on me. That was before he had opened his mouth. He did not leave me in any doubt when he began to talk.

“Let’s get to an understanding about Miss Holstrom, Sidney,” he rasped, leveling his finger at me. “You let her alone. No more buzzing her behind my back or her father’s.”

“Keedy, you have started running after trouble to-day. In my case, you’ll catch up with it mighty soon.”

“Then let’s make believe I have caught up. I’m going to marry that young lady. And no cheap Yankee masher is going to stand around and make sheep’s eyes at her. That’s business and you keep your hands down. You slap me again, Sidney, and I’ll drop you in your tracks—even if the gold stays there till we can get another diver.” He had his hand on his hip, and his eyes were fairly green.

I started to tell him what I thought of him and his chances with that girl, proposing to throw in a few remarks about what I should do if I wanted to. But I shut my mouth suddenly. I had no right to stand out there and insult a girl by quarreling about her with a fellow of that stripe.

Vastly different were the circumstances and the relations of the persons concerned—but I felt the same rankling of resentment which hurt my pride and my feelings when Jeff Dawlin growled his warning in my ear. I hated to leave any false impressions with Keedy. I did not propose to have him think I envied him anything he possessed or thought he possessed. Pride and the spirit of brag—that was it—prompted my answer.

“Look here,” I shot out at him, “I have a girl East who is worth more than all the gold you expect to find in that wreck over there. What do you think I’m out in this God-forsaken country for? What do you think I’m gambling along with you for? It’s so I can grab off enough money to make a showing when I carry it back home and pour it into her lap! Don’t you worry, Keedy. I don’t want any of your girls. There’s one who is waiting for me back East!” How a man will lie when he gets to talking about girls! I snapped my fingers under Keedy’s nose and walked on aft. I felt considerably relieved because I figured I had taken some of the conceit out of him. I had a lot taken out of myself when I returned.

Miss Kama Holstrom met me. She gave me one of those up-and-down glances which seem to sting like the flick of a long lash.

“I have no objection to your discussing your love affairs with Mr. Keedy, my dear sir—though I question your good taste. But I must ask you not to discuss me with him.”

“I assure you I did not!”

“I stepped into my state-room only to get my cap. I was walking on the other side of the life-boat when you were talking.”

“But I—”

“I’m sure you understand my request, sir.” She walked on.

A fine partnership—that of Holstrom, Keedy, and Sidney, treasure-seekers! And there was a silent partner whose silence just then, along with her disgust, sent a crimson flame into my cheeks.