“Ain’t you afraid of them bombovitches?” demanded the man.
“Me! Not in Noo York, I ain’t. In Russia, I ain’t saying.”
A delighted grin came over Wilkins’s face. “Say!” he exclaimed. “You’re all rightski. They tried to scare me with them fellows, and I let ’em think they had, but, Lord sakes, they ain’t troubling me none. If they come to Colorado after me, the Czar’ll have one less to put in his dungeonoffski.”
“Then”—the girl held out her hand—“it’s understood. We’ll stand together. If we get a chance to skiddoo with the gold, we’ll do it. An’ I’ll marry you the day we get it to Noo York.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BLACK and high, the islands of the Aland Archipelago rise out of the Baltic. All winter long they lie bound about with ice. With the spring, the ice, borne southward by the waking streams of the north, grinds past them, scraping and tearing, rending all that lies in its path. The short summer follows, when the great bowl of the Baltic rocks to the horizon like molten gold; when the black rocks take on a coat of living green; and the sea birds scream as they flash through the surf that breaks against them or tears through the narrow channels between.
On the eastern edge of the archipelago rise two islands, Burndo and Ivono, Siamese twins whose tie has not been wholly severed. The channel between them lies almost east and west and not north and south, and so has been spared the full scour of the annual ice-flood. Cut deep at each seaward end, in the middle it is interrupted by a dike of harder rock that as yet persists against the inevitable and at low tide changes it into two inlets that nearly touch each other.
Into the western inlet, driven by her slowing engines, and urged by waves and tide, the Orkney had sped two years before; had impaled herself upon a sunken rock; and, shuddering backward, had sunk with her crew and her passengers and her million pounds sterling of gold.
No eye had seen her sink. The little fishing village of Burndo, scattered along the western inlet, close to the central neck, had slept soundly, lulled by the roar of the wind. The watchman at the beacon tower on the heights of Ivono Island had dozed, not watching. If cries arose from the sinking ship; if men battled for life in the surf; if the waves hammered and the wind tore, it passed unnoticed. When morning dawned the Orkney lay ten fathoms deep, and the wreckage and bodies belonging to her, caught in the tide, had been swept away toward Copenhagen and the vast Atlantic. Two succeeding winters had torn her masts away and ravished her upper decks of all their superstructure. But the hull lay intact, buried far beneath the green water.
For five days the Sea Spume had lain moored close to the head of the channel, within sight of the village, while the divers searched the bottom hour after hour until the last ray of daylight vanished. One of them was really a scientific assistant, and to him was allotted the task of making such observations and collecting such specimens as would naturally have been desired by Professor Shishkin, had the object of the expedition actually been that which it purported to be. Indeed, so far as the Professor was concerned, the work was conducted in good faith, the researches planned really being in exact line with his long-cherished ambitions.