When Keedy saw them peeling off my dress he had a few more remarks to offer about the kind of a “hot diver” a man was who called an hour a day’s work. If I had brought up an ingot in each hand from that first trip he wouldn’t have been grateful; he would have wanted to know why I did not bring up the whole box.
I had a dirty job of it that afternoon pawing over the old junk on board that steamer, but I managed to sort out some material that fitted into my scheme, and it was ferried to the lighter.
I went down again the next morning at sunrise, for the southwest trade-wind had quieted during the night, and the swell wasn’t quite as energetic as it had been under the push of the breeze the previous day.
I had the same spectators. Miss Kama, looking like a pretty boy in her knickerbockers, had plainly determined to keep in the front row, and I’ll own up that her presence put ginger into my efforts. I reckoned I’d show her the difference between a man who could do and dare and a sneering loafer of the caliber of Keedy. A handsome girl usually has an effect of that sort on a young man.
When I reached bottom under the lighter they lowered an old mushroom anchor to me. I unhooked it, and started to roll it along the “windrows” of sand toward the wreck. It took every ounce of strength in me to boost it up those slopes. I had lashed a crowbar to the anchor stock, and when I finally got the thing to the wreck and had rested I stuck to the job, though I had really done as much as was advisable at one descent.
I loosened up a sizable patch of sand with the crowbar, and settled the anchor in the hole, stock upright. There was no need for me to pack the sand back; the Pacific Ocean would attend to that part of the job. The Pacific was altogether too busy in packing sand, though. It did not discriminate between an anchor which I wanted made solid and treasure which I wanted set free.
I went down a second time that day. I carried small chains and a broad shovel. I lashed myself to the anchor’s stock, and with that support as a fulcrum for my body I dug into the sand with the crowbar, and fanned out the loose particles with the broad shovel.
But it was like the reverse of the story of the man who set out to carry water in a sieve. The sand kept running in. If I had been able to stay down there night and day, and have my meals brought to me, and could have worked without rest or sleep, I might have been able to dig a hole in that sand and to keep it dug out until I had come to that treasure. As it was, I toiled until my head seemed splitting, until blood ran from my nose, and I felt the first weakness of that peculiar paralysis of the limbs which divers experience when they pass the limit set for endurance under water. I lashed my tools to the anchor, and was pulled back to the lighter.
Human arms had given up—human strength and grit had failed. But I knew that through the hours of that afternoon, through the watches of the night, that old, miserly ocean would keep toiling on, rolling sand back into that hole, patting it down with unseen fingers, locking a door over the treasure that would serve the purpose better than doors of steel or bars of bronze. I should find all my labor undone when I came back to that anchor.
Therefore I did not lark and play when I was dragged over the rail of the old lighter. I stumbled to my seat, and sat and wiped blood from my face when the helmet had been twisted off the breastplate.