Part 25

“You nev--You don’t--You ain’t ever--” Ike took another drag at the gingerbread, and swallowed hard. “Why, the Snohomish Glutton is known--the Snohomish Glutton, he has eat at one setting--Oh, shucks, if you ain’t ever heard, what’s the use!” He started on, but whirled and came back and shook the hunk of gingerbread under my nose. “I suppose if it had been writ and printed in a book you Eastern perfessers would know all about it. Thank God, in the West we know a lot of things that ain’t printed in a book!” Then he stumped away.

Well, I concluded I would stroll along to the galley and take a look at the cook, and be able thereafter to say that at least I had seen this notable of the Pacific.

There was a spacious galley on the old _Zizania_. I looked in through an open window which commanded the port alley. A fat man was chopping kindlings. He was a thing of rolls and folds of fat--a gob of a man. There were narrow slits near his nose marking his eyes, but his eyes seemed to be shut by fat. A little, round, pursed-up mouth was in the middle of his face, and from this came wheezy grunts as he chopped.

While I was watching him, an object bounded into the galley door and leapfrogged him, darting past me through the window. Before I could turn my head the thing, whatever it was, had disappeared around the corner of the alley.

The cook straightened up, and by an effort opened his eyes enough to stare at me. I expected a deep, gruff voice, But he had a real tin-whistle pipe.

“What did you throw at me?”

“I didn’t throw anything. Something rushed through the galley--I didn’t see what.”

“Things don’t hit a man unless they are thrown,” he insisted. “I may look funny, but I ain’t funny. I don’t relish having things thrown at me.”

He gave up trying to hold his eyes open, and went on chopping.

I was getting my breath ready to protest when the thing came through once more. It was a monkey. But it missed the cook’s back, for the broad shoulders heaved as the ax came up. The monkey slipped, slid across the chopping-block, and down came the ax. The animal squealed horribly, flung itself past me through the open window, and fled. It went like a shot, but I got the fleeting impression that its tail was gone.

“What did you do then?” asked the cook, squinting at me suspiciously.

“I tell you I haven’t done anything at all. That was a monkey. He came from somewhere. He ran through here. I think you have cut off his tail.” He peered about. “There ain’t no tail here,” he whined. “There couldn’t have been any monkey here. This ain’t any place for a monkey to be. There may be monkey business here--and you’re getting it up. You go away from here!”

I’m afraid the Snohomish Glutton and I would have had trouble then and there, but just then a man came rushing into the door of the galley. He had the monkey under his arm, upside down, and he was pointing quivering finger at a bleeding stump of a tail. I couldn’t understand what he was bawling. I found out afterward that he was a Russian Finn and could command only a few English words even when he was perfectly calm. He was not calm now. I never heard a man rave so. The monkey joined him with hideous screams.

The cook listened for a time, puckering his fat forehead. When he found that the man was talking a foreign language he upraised his ax and swished it around in circles near the Finn’s head. A cook in his galley is lord supreme in his domain, and the sailor probably knew as much. The ax was menacing; it was coming very close, and the Finn already had one exhibit of that cook’s ferocity under his arm. He allowed himself to be backed out, and the cook slammed and barred the door.

“What did he say?” he asked me, in his piping tones.

“I don’t know what he said.”

“I reckoned it was some kind of Dago swearing, and I don’t allow a man to swear at me. Most likely it was swearing.”

“You cut off that monkey’s tail,” I insisted. “I thought so when he squealed. Now I’m sure of it.”

He went to peering around again, whining to himself like a fat porcupine who is being badgered.

“There ain’t no tail here. I didn’t cut off his tail. I didn’t see him so that I could cut off his tail.” He started toward the window with a look as if he proposed to resent my suggestion that he had been cutting off monkeys’ tails. I passed on. I figured that I might as well try to argue with a Sussex shote as with that shapeless mass of fat. I would have saved a nasty bit of trouble for myself, perhaps, if I had remained and argued. And my trouble later that day--and that monkey with the missing tail--was the seed from which--But that’s getting ahead of the story.

There were really three messes aboard the _Zizania_. There was the captain’s mess aft, with special dishes, which was entirely distinct from the crew’s food. On the port side was set out the food for the black half of the checker-board crew, and on the starboard side the white half received their provender.

We were at dinner in the captain’s mess. It was our first meal at sea--our first meeting at table.

When Miss Kama came in we were just sitting down. The captain was with us, having left one of the Joneses at the wheel. Keedy lifted his paint-streak mustache against his nose in a smile, and pulled out a chair beside his own.

“Sit here, my dear,” he said to the girl.

She walked past the chair, came around to my side of the table, and sat down. She did not toss her chin or sniff, as some girls would have done, to show dislike of Keedy. She was a cool proposition, that girl was.

That left the chair beside Keedy the only vacant one at the table. A plump little man had been standing off at one side, waiting for the last choice of seats. He looked rather bashful, and his round face was shining with soap, and his hair was plastered down at the sides and combed up in front in a fancy cowlick. You could see that he realized that he did not exactly belong at that table. Therefore he had scrubbed himself up for the occasion.

Captain Rask Holstrom did not trouble himself with any of the finer graces of society. He gruffly introduced the little man as Romeo Shank, chief engineer, and told Shank to slide into the chair beside Keedy. “We ain’t drawing any fine lines between ship’s officers on this trip,” stated the captain, bluntly, for the benefit of all concerned. “Get to table while the grub is hot, and get it into you--that’s the motto. Business before style is the idea aboard this boat.”

He began to shovel food industriously with his knife.

Keedy hitched away from his table-mate a few inches, and looked across at me, and deepened the wrinkle between his eyes. But he could not spoil my appetite. Something else which happened the next moment pretty nigh did it, though.

A black man leaped into the saloon through the forward door by which the waiter came and went. Two other black men were at his back. They stopped just inside the door and dragged off their knitted caps. They had the appearance of being a delegation, and an excited delegation at that. It was plain to be seen that they had come rushing aft without stopping to figure on consequences. The leader carried something in front of him, and it was looped over the blade of a wicked-looking-knife. He held the object at arm’s length toward Captain Holstrom, pointed at it with the vibrating finger of his left hand, and yelped shrilly like a dog. He was too excited and too furious to put his complaint into words.

“What have ye got there--a snake?” yelped the captain, gulping down a mouthful, and wrinkling his nose like one who had suddenly come upon something disgusting.

“We find him in our kittle--we find him dere. Yassuh! We eat ’most to de bottom, and den we find him,” raved the negro.

Captain Holstrom snapped up from the table and strode over and squinted at the object which dangled from the knife blade.

“Dey cook for us in our kittle a monkey tail--dem white men cook dat for us, and laugh,” squealed the negro.

“And you think that some of those cheap white jokers put it in, eh?”

“Dey laugh all de time since when we pull him out. Yassuh, it’s a lot of fun for dem men.”

Captain Holstrom rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and stared down on the thing which had savored the black men’s dinner.

A happy thought seemed to strike him. He turned his head and winked at me.

“Take that thing out and whack it across the face of the white man you find laughing the hardest,” he commanded. “When he gets up to hit you pitch in.” He came lurching back to the table. “I didn’t intend to have the row till to-morrow,” he informed us, in an undertone. “But this is too good a chance to miss. We’ll get that checker-board crew on a war basis where they’ll stay put.”

The black men were lingering at the door, trying to get the captain’s meaning through their wool.

“Excuse me, Captain Holstrom,” I said, “but I think I know how this thing happened--and I feel it’s too bad to have innocent men beaten up.” I started to tell what I had seen, but he swore and broke in on me.

“Don’t butt into something that’s none of your business!” he snapped. He roared at the men: “Go do what I told you to do. Go punch the jokes out of that white gang or you’ll have no peace the rest of the voyage. Get out of here before I kick you out!”

It sounded like a very pretty row, judging it from where we were sitting in the saloon. It began in a very few minutes.

“Mr. Number-two Jones,” directed the captain, “go out there and oversee, and let me know when it’s time to break the clinch.” He loaded up his plate once more and kept on eating.

In about five minutes the mate returned. “I reckon it’s about time to knock ’em apart, Captain Holstrom,” he advised, shoving his head in at the door. “No great harm done, but they’re chewing each other bad, and that means expense for plaster and salve.”

If I hadn’t already lost my appetite for dinner, that grisly statement from Mr. Number-two Jones would have fixed me. I pushed back from the table.

“Come along, Sidney,” commanded the captain, kicking his chair out from under him. “Come settle your dinner. I’ll find a club for you.”

“I’ll obey the orders you gave me first, sir,” I called after him; “I won’t butt into something that’s none of my business.”

“Do you mean to say--” He had stopped and whirled on me.

I was sore because he had snapped me up so short before them all. I thought my explanation should have been considered.

“I mean to say that this fight was needless. You started it; now you can stop it.”

Mr. Keedy had been lighting a cigar, and it was plain that he did not intend to venture out into the mêlée.

“Look here--I tell you to come along,” yelled the captain. “It’s your duty.”

“Not on your life. I’m no ship’s officer! I’m along as a diver, not as a prize-fighter.”

Captain Holstrom looked ugly enough just then to tackle me as a preface to his job forward, but after cursing a moment he followed the mate. The riot was increasing, and it was plain that he was needed in the field.

Keedy leaned back and scowled at me through his cigar smoke.

“I didn’t know I had picked a quitter,” he sneered. “We’re tackling a job that needs sand. You ain’t a tin horn, are you?”

I didn’t answer and the back of my neck began to itch; I suppose if I had had hair there like a dog’s, the hair would have bristled. That itching in the neck when you’re mad is a survival of the old days when men had lots of hair on ’em.

I started to walk out of the saloon. Miss Kama was sitting there, looking at us, and her presence rather complicated matters for a man who was getting madder all the time, as I was. The other officers had chased along on the trail of Captain Holstrom.

“A second-hand diving-suit doesn’t stack up very high against what we’re putting into this thing--Captain Holstrom and myself,” he insisted. “There was something going in from your side in addition to the divingsuit, as I understand it. But a coward can’t invest grit.”

I stopped at the door and walked back toward him.

“A what?” I inquired.

“I said ‘a coward.’”

I slapped him--not hard.

“Now come up on deck with me, Mr. Keedy. You’ve got to come after that. There’s a lady here.”

“I’m going, gentlemen,” said the girl. “Don’t mind me.” She looked at Keedy and set her lips.

But Keedy jumped up and pulled a gun instead of putting up his fists.

“I don’t fight that way, Mr. Keedy,” I told him. “I have no gun. You’d better put yours up. You can’t afford to kill me--not yet!”

“No--and that’s the devil of it,” he blurted, after waiting a moment. “You have taken advantage of--of--”

“Of your hankering to get money into your paws,” I snapped back at him. “If you won’t come up and fight man fashion, I can’t make you, but if you ever call me a coward again on this trip I’ll put in a little evidence to the contrary with these.” I showed him my fists.

He rammed his revolver into his hip pocket and stamped out of the saloon.

I found the girl looking at me, wrinkling her forehead.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Holstrom,” I apologized. “But an itching to strike that man has been in my fingers for some time.”

“You ought to have waited until you had an excuse to strike harder than that, Mr. Sidney. I have known Marcena Keedy for a long time. A man like you with a big job ahead ought to be able to keep his eyes to the front all the time. Now you will have to keep looking behind you. I say--I have known Mr. Keedy for a long time.”

She went out.

I followed a few minutes afterward, and I went with my head down, and I was pretty thoughtful. Captain Holstrom and I bumped together in the doorway. He shoved past me and threw a club into a corner.

“I hope you can dive better’n you can fight,” he snorted.

Then he bawled to the waiter and demanded his piece of pie.

XXIX--THE TELLTALE RIBS

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.”