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.”