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.