I do not mean to be profane, but I must state that when I got that new stream to operating it was hell for me down below—and no other phrase seems to express the case.
I have already mentioned the refuse of that wrecked pantry and bar; from out of the holes I bored rushed up bits of broken bottles and crockery, slashing at my bare feet and hands. I could not protect them.
The stream from the nozzle—a three-inch stream—stirred such a mush of sand that I worked in pitch darkness. I had to have bare feet and hands in order to feel my way.
After a time, my feet were swollen to twice their natural size. Finger-nails and toe-nails had been worn off by the grinding of the sand, and the skin had been eaten off. The sand even penetrated my dress, and my knees and shoulders were chafed raw. My back, under the dragging weights I was forced to wear, was about like a piece of pounded steak. I was suffering the limit of human agony, but I was mad for success—I was crazed by the gold lust. I was bringing out a small fortune every day; one day I recovered six boxes—one hundred and twenty thousand dollars! But I was still just as hungry for the gold that remained at the bottom. I set my teeth, gasped back my groans, and kept at work.
All the tender ministrations of Kama Holstrom could not mend my hurts, and I would not listen to her appeals to me. She begged me to give up the fight. She urged that we had enough. But I was as crazy as the wildest man who ever hunted gold, and the pain I was in made me more of a lunatic. On several occasions I was pulled back to the lighter in a dead faint, and fought with Number-two Jones because he would not send me down again that day.
I cannot go into the details of those days of nightmare. I can only say that I kept on.
We soon had plain hints that Keedy was getting suspicious and uneasy. One night a crew from the schooner made a desperate attempt to board the lighter. On other nights they made other tries, and shots were exchanged before they were driven off.
One day when I was at the bottom of the hole I had bored and had just succeeded in fastening my hooks to a box, I got a shock that made me believe the end of the world had come. Something hit me on the top of the helmet with a thud that knocked me senseless for a moment. I reached out quickly with one hand, reserving the other for my hose, and felt the breastplate of a diver. I realized what had happened then. One of Keedy’s men, sent to spy, had stumbled through the sand swirling from my pit, and had fallen in on me, not dreaming that I had been able to dig a fifteen-foot hole.
In the tangle that followed, it was a wonder that either of us escaped.
By the way the man struggled I knew that he was terrified out of his senses. He clung to me desperately, as a drowning man might ding to a rescuer. Then he gave his emergency pull, and yanked me with him when he went up.