A NEW arrival off San Apusa Bar had interested us for a couple of days. It was a husky sloop with a leg-of-mutton mainsail—a broad-bellied craft on which a dozen men showed themselves when it sailed past us to take up a position near the ribs of the wreck. This sloop seemed to be of a build to ride the surges easily, and ventured much closer inshore than we had dared to anchor our lighter. The men did not visit us, and displayed no desire to meddle with the secrets of the equipment on the walled-up scow. We wondered who they were, why they were there, and left them alone.

I went down and crawfished my way over the sand windrows, but I could make only slow work of it, for I was stiffened by my days of inaction. But that new idea of mine went along with me for my encouragement.

I had hardly put myself in position, ready to call for my stream of water, when I got a rousing surprise. Down through the sea came rushing a naked man. The depths were fairly clear, for I had not begun to stir the roil with my nozzle. His eyes were wide open and staring, and I reckon that I peered at him through my bull’s-eye with eyes just as wide open. When he arrived close to me he dropped a rock from each hand, his diving weights, and grabbed me, hanging to my belt. I sat right there on the sand and gaped at him. His mouth was shut tight—he was holding his breath.

In a short time another naked man came down like the stick of a sky-rocket. He dropped his rocks and grabbed me, and the first man let go and went swimming up to the surface. Then came a third man and replaced the second.

I began to feel like a candidate for office in the receiving line. I wanted to ask some questions about what this function meant. But for good and obvious reasons I could not carry on a conversation, and I did not know the deaf-and-dumb alphabet.

Along came the fourth man. I noticed that each man wore a narrow belt with a huge knife fastened in it. And that’s all the man did wear. The sight of the knife made me rather nervous. A man under water, straining to hold his breath, his eyes bulging with his efforts, is a savage-looking object at best. These men were plainly Mexicans, and they looked particularly savage. I felt pretty sure that they were not diving down there to cheer me in my loneliness or to ask me to run for mayor.

Then it came to me all at once who these men were. As a submarine worker, I was interested, of course, in all sorts of jobs under the sea, and I had read various accounts of the Mexican pearl divers. I knew that they could descend long distances and could remain under water, many of them, for ninety seconds. One man succeeded another, diving in rotation. I remained there without moving, staring at them until I began to recognize faces. They were making me return visits. I realized that they did not propose to carve me—the first man could have done that on his first call. Therefore I got my nerve back and decided to go to work. I signaled for water.

It occurred to me that my new friends might find that the “fogo” I stirred with that hose would be a little too much for them. I resisted an impulse to bat them away from me with that nozzle, a considerable effort in selfcontrol, for my temper was pretty short in those dreadful days.

They stuck to me bravely at first when the sand began to swirl. There was an itching under my ribs when the sand made a pall and darkness settled on me. I was afraid that one of my callers might become peevish and ram his knife into me as a hint not to muddy that water.

It was not easy to hold my position and work with a man anchored to me. But I was not bothered for long.

The tug at my belt ceased suddenly, and I knew that they had given up. They could not find me in that smother.

They resumed operations again when I got up my first box. In working my way out of the hole I decreased the flow from the hose, and when I reached the top of the sand the swirling particles were settling and were being washed farther inshore by the surges. In a clearer sea down came those devils once more, and fastened to me, one by one, like leeches. They tried to clutch the box, but it was too heavy for them. It was hoisted past them up to the surf-boat, and once more I drove the nozzle into the sand and forced them off me with a whirlpool of mush.

They were more bothersome the next time I allowed the sea to clear. Two dove at a time, and grabbed me, and almost lifted me up with them. I was furious, but I did not try to beat them off. I kept on about my own affairs as best I could, and allowed them to hang on to me. There were a dozen of them above, with knives, and I had no hankering to tackle the pack. I was not sure as to their motives, anyway. One rip of a knife would have put me out of business. But they did not offer to use knives.

I did a short day’s work and went back to the lighter. Captain Holstrom had watched their diving operations and was full of eager questions.

That night we doubled the guards on the Zizania. But no boat came near us.

My friends were ready for me next day, and resumed the same tactics. I carried a bigger knife, and kept my eye out as best I could. But before I got the stream started they were coming at me three at a time. They kept lifting me off bottom, and I wasted a lot of valuable time and much of my little stock of strength before I got down on the sand and began to bore. They were ready for me again as soon as I got up with a box and the sea had cleared a bit. One of them brought a rope, and tried to get it around a box I was handling, but I had my tongs well set, and my men hoisted the treasure away from them. Then they began to interfere with me so savagely that I quit in disgust and signaled to be pulled up.

I was half crazy with rage, and frantic because this sort of business was putting me where I could not realize on that idea which I was nursing.

After listening to me, Captain Holstrom set his cap well down over his ears, jutting his chin, set his teeth, and called for his boat. He was rowed over to the side of the little sloop. He came back very soon and he was not looking pleased.

“I couldn’t get anything out of that bunch except a few grunts and a lot of jabber,” he reported. “They make believe they can’t understand the English language. They want graft, I suppose. They’d understand, all right, if I was to carry over a slug of gold and dump it over the rail. But I’m about tired of feeding gold to everybody who comes along here.”

“This isn’t our gold to give away to all comers,” I told him. He blinked at me, and did not seem to understand. I did not go into that side of the question any further, for I was not ready for much argument at that time. “I’ll not stand for any more ‘hot rocks,’” I told him.

“Nor I, either,” he agreed. “Begin to feed gold to those chaps, and they’ll think we are scared of ’em and they’ll want the whole mess.”

To show them that I was not scared, I went down the next day, and I had a wire edge on my temper. I balked at starting a knife duel, however, and after a struggle got my hole started.

I struck something new that day in the ruck at the bottom of the hole. I found ingots loose in the hodgepodge of pantry wreckage. A wooden box had been smashed. I had a slit and a sort of deep pocket in the canvas overalls affair which protected my India-rubber suit. As my toes located loose ingots, I sifted the mush of sand with the fingers of one hand, captured the gold, and stuffed it down into the deep pocket. I came up with a box, and my breeches were bagging with gold.

Then came the climax of my strained relations with those greaser divers. I’ve heard of pickpockets operating everywhere, almost, but I reckon that I’m the first and only man who ever had his pockets picked at the bottom of the sea. The first devil who got to me as the sand settled, in groping for a handhold on my dress, felt the loose ingots. He got one, but he did not get away with it. Trouble or no trouble, knives or no knives, I had got to the limit of my temper. I gave him a jab with the end of my sheet-iron nozzle, and as near as I could judge I took a hunk of meat out of him as neatly as a woman could operate on dough with a doughnut cutter. The edges of that nozzle had been whetted on sand until they were as sharp as a razor blade. The fellow drooped that ingot and darted upward, blood streaming behind him. Another diver was coming down to take his place, but when I jabbed at him with the nozzle he whirled like a fish and went up, giving me an awful kick when he started.

I reckoned I had thrown down the gage of battle, and I was not minded to stay there and meet the pack, for I was weak after my extra struggle down in the hole. It had been a tedious job gathering that loose gold. I saw the box started on the way to the surf-boat, gave the emergency signal, and was yanked back to the lighter at a lively clip.

Later that day, being in a proper and ugly frame of mind, I tucked a rifle under my arm and had myself rowed to the neighboring sloop. I found the spokesman of the crew ready to talk English that day, all right. But when our conversation was ended I had received a surprise. No demand was made on me for a “hot rock.” I found that I was dealing with men who had deeper motives. It took me some time to understand that they were not holding out for a big offer. The man at the rail wrinkled his nose and sneered when I angrily told him that was what they were after.

“It’s what I’d expect a gringo to tell me,” he said. “But we are not here to do business with thieves. You have no right to be here. You may pick and steal, but it will not amount to that!” He snapped his finger above his head. “We shall do our business with those who will have the gold in the end, with those who can pay and will pay. And we have a man who will see that we are paid.”

My wits had been sharpened while I had toiled at San Apusa Bar. I was able to see farther into the ways of guile than before I had met a man like Marcena Keedy. I had a flash of suspicion that was almost instinct.

“So you think you have made a better trade with that renegade, Keedy, do you?” I flung at him.

I was sure I had guessed right; the man’s face betrayed him.

“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.