“From what little I have been able to find out, I reckon it is there,” I told him; “and it wouldn’t surprise me much if it stayed there for some time.” I was in no mood to encourage that polecat, who was plainly thinking more about that treasure than he was about any dangers I might have been through. He drew that streak-o’-paint mustache up against his nose and looked like a dog about to snap. I turned away from him so as to have something better to look at. There was the girl beside me. She sure was an antidote for the poison of Marcena Keedy’s evil eye. Her red lips were apart, and her little hands were clasped, finger interlaced with finger.
“Thank God you are back safe, Mr. Sidney!”
She wasn’t looking at me as though she were wondering in which pocket I had hidden an ingot of gold.
“It was not dangerous,” I told her. “It was disappointing, that’s all.”
I ignored Keedy. I looked past him to Captain Hol-strom, and related what had happened below. It was a mighty interested crowd that stood around me and listened.
“The idea is,” I wound up, “this is no ‘reach-down-and-pick-it-up’ proposition.”
“That’s what I call doing damn little in an hour’s work,” growled Keedy. “You ain’t down here to tell us how hard that job is. We have heard all about that from the other divers. You are down here to get that gold. You bragged around what a devil of a diver you have been, and now when we have to depend on you, all we get is some more conversation. Have you got us away down here and let us in on a dead one?”
“If that money was in a faro-bank instead of a sandbank,” I told him, “you would be just the man to get it out—you have had plenty of practice in that line. But this happens to be an honest job, and it needs something besides false cards.”
Then I kept on talking to the captain:
“After giving the thing a good looking-over I have begun to figure on a few plans. I’ll paw over and size up the stuff on the Zizania this afternoon and see what there is in stock to help me.” I told Mr. Jones to unstrap my shoes.