I have no ambition to make this story a rival of Fox’s Book of Martyrs. I have already given some idea of the physical state I was in. I think I became numb to pain, accustomed to agonies. I cannot explain otherwise how I ever kept on, night after night. I haven’t the courage to write down what I suffered.
But out from under those grinning greasers—grinning their sneers at us daytimes—I dragged one and one-half million dollars’ worth of gold ingots inside of two weeks—and they never suspected that I was under water.
During the last of that nightmare, I felt as if I were working with my chin over my shoulder. I was looking for trouble. I was expecting disaster. I was scared to the marrow. I am not referring to any feelings I had on account of the pearl divers. Their bug eyes had never detected me in what I was about. I knew that darkness protected me more surely from any attack by them than iron walls would have done.
But I worked nights with the constant feeling that the red and green eyes of a steamer were coming up over the horizon. When I was awake daytimes I peered into the northern sky hour after hour, expecting and dreading to see the trail of smoke which would announce the coming of Marcena Keedy and those whom he had notified.
My conferences with Captain Holstrom had been scant and rather brusque. There were some points in that idea of mine that I had not thought out to my own satisfaction, and I had not found the captain to be especially helpful in attacking problems. He was wholly taken up in helping to pull that gold in over the rail, in storing it, in guarding it.
His daughter knew why I stared at the northern horizon, and why desperate worry added to the other woes I was suffering in that tophet of toil. She had resigned herself to the situation when I had persisted in keeping on. She became, as before, my wistful nurse. She talked to me as she would have soothed a madman whom she hoped to win back to sanity. Well, I was a lunatic in those days—there’s not much doubt of it. It was madness made up of fear, desperation, agony of physical pain, lust for gold—all forcing me to do work which no sane man could have accomplished in my condition of body.
She dared to break her usual silence on the matter of the treasure when we were on deck one afternoon after my sleep. She had been gazing at me sorrowfully while I stared into the north.
“Oh, what use is it—this dreadful work and worry? You have told me that you feel like a thief in it all. You sit and stare into the north as though you were a wicked man, instead of being so brave and successful in the most wonderful work a man ever did. You are getting their gold for them. But you feel that they are coming to take it all away—and call you a thief. You cannot deceive me as to your thoughts.”
I had to acknowledge to myself that her woman’s intuition was in fine working order. I understood what men were, naturally, in affairs where big sums of money were involved. These men, provided Keedy had done as I supposed he had, would have Keedy’s lies about us to inflame them still further in addition to their natural greed.
But she was no quitter on one point. She clenched her little fists and kept on: