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.