I had a raw temper which went with my raw surface in those terrible days. I left hose and box and went up with the caller, dragging my knife from my belt. I kept clashing the knife against the front bull’s-eye of his helmet, and after we had been dragged together for some distance from the edge of the hole, and the sea became clearer, he perceived what I was doing. He let go his clutch, and it was well he did, for I was in a state of maniacal fury. I would have ripped his dress from crotch to neck-band with my knife if he had not escaped from me just as he did. I went back and recovered my hose, and after a time got the box. Then I returned to the lighter, for I was too unnerved to work any longer that day.
As I lay on deck that afternoon, a shapeless, hideous thing of bruised and macerated flesh, I wondered whether I would be able to work any more.
When I was under the sea I was fairly beside myself with the excitement of the hunt. I could grind my teeth together and groan and fight my way through the sand, for there was gold at the bottom of the hole I was digging. And every time I went down through that fifteen feet of smother I knew that death raced me to the box of treasure and back. Under those circumstances, a man is desperate enough to forget his bloody cuts and raw skin. But I felt like a pretty weak and useless tool as I lay there on deck.
Kama Holstrom was with me. She had insisted on becoming my nurse. I craved her companionship, I’ll admit, but I wanted to hide myself from her eyes. Her father was in his state-room, busy at his job of adding more sheets of iron, more bands of steel, to the treasure-chest he had taken it upon himself to build. We could hear the bang of his hammer. Captain Holstrom worked days at that huge chest, slept on it nights with the key lashed into the palm of his right hand, and between whiles cuddled those ingots rapturously. In his way, he had become as insane over the matter as I was myself.
The girl and I were in the lee of the deck-house, to get out of the trades, and we did not see the boat when it came off Keedy’s schooner. Had I seen it coming, Keedy would never have been allowed to board us. But all at once he appeared before the girl and myself. I felt a fierce impulse to get up and beat his face off him, even though my hands were as sore as the exposed nerve of an aching tooth. He got that flash from my eyes, and looked meek for a moment, but then he saw the condition I was in and became insolent.
“Better listen to me,” he said. “I’m on. I know your system. But I should say you’re all in, Sidney. You need help. There’s enough there for all of us. I’ve got two good divers. I’m over here to propose that we call the row off, and I’ll send my men down to work with your contrivance and give you a rest.”
That proposition from Marcena Keedy, after what he had done to us in the matter of that twenty thousand dollars, and after what he had tried to do to us in the affair of the customs men! I felt the language begin to roil in me as the said roiled under the force of my stream from the nozzle.
“Miss Kama,” I pleaded, “won’t you please run away? I want to talk to this dirty dog. And send your father here with a club.”
She did not leave me. She came closer, and gave Keedy a look which would have wilted any other sort of man.
“You can’t afford to be foolish over what’s past and gone,” insisted my ex-partner. “I left because you wasn’t making good—wasn’t holding up our end of the partnership. You fell down. Now if you can deliver goods we’ll call off all trouble and start it over again.”