“Sick!” I yelled. “Dead!”
“Dead!” cried the Marquis and the captain together.
“Why!” the captain declared, “that Gertrude, she up sailed and off with her before they was well on board.”
So she had; there was no vestige of her to be seen. It appeared afterward that Good Joe Gilbert had completely lost his head at the sight of his two divers, one obviously murdered, the other dead and mutilated, and had started off as hard as he could for the magistrate and the police on Samarai. This job was too much for him to handle, he said, and he didn’t want to get his head into no murdering rows and have the Government jumping on a harmless man that only wanted to do well by every one.
It was to his panic haste that I owed my freedom to carry out my own plans, there at the bottom of the sea. Had the Marquis or the captain realized that Gilbert’s divers were dead they would have pulled me up at once. But divers’ paralysis had been common in the fleet, and they took the disturbance on the Gertrude to mean nothing worse, as her flag, in the confusion, had not been half-masted.
The Marquis and I discussed afterward whether the Greek could have known or not that Mo’s brother had a diamond on his ugly little person. I inclined to think that he did not. In a pearling fleet the minds of men run exclusively on pearls, and nobody, so far as I knew, had said anything about diamonds at any time. The acute little Greek had somehow sensed the existence of a small and precious valuable in which we were interested; he had shadowed the Papuan to try and find out what he could, and, being baffled, had taken service on the Gertrude for the sole purpose (or so I judged) of following Mo’s brother beneath the water and robbing him, there where no man was likely to see or interfere.
I do not think it ever entered his head that a stranger, not a diver by profession, would risk the descent in twelve fathoms of dangerous water merely on the chance of seeing what he was up to. But then, he did not know the stake.
Or so I thought. The Marquis had his own opinion.
He had his own opinion about the diamond, too. That night we ventured, very cautiously, to take it out and examine it in a quiet corner. He handled its beauty—our own at last—with a touch that was almost reluctant.
“Flint, now that it is to us, I do not feel as I have felt about it before,” he said. “I hope these misfortunes are at an end.”