“I say fight back! It may be their money—somebody’s money—but what good did it do them or anybody else until you came here with your strength and your courage and your brains and got it up from the bottom of the ocean? I don’t know what the law is about such things—I don’t care. I’ve heard you and father talk, but I only know that often in this life law is one thing and justice is another.”
“There are the laws of salvage,” I told her. “We could turn this money over and wait for the courts to decide. But I’m afraid of what may happen if we do that. There’s that renegade Keedy with his lies; there are the customs men of Mexico, and all that mess of international law to complicate things. Keedy can claim partnership; the shippers can claim shares, I suppose; this one and that one can dip in their fingers; and lawyers can tie the matter up; and God only knows when it will all be untied so that we can get what we have honestly earned. We may have to fight for our liberty, for men are crazy enough to try to make us out thieves, providing they can get hold of much money by lies and injustice. I have been pounding it all out in my poor head, and I can’t seem to believe that the law is going to give us what we ought to have. For, you see, this thing isn’t like anything else that has ever happened.”
“I say fight!” she insisted, her eyes alight, her cheeks flaming under the tan. “You have fought the ocean for their sakes as well as your own—and you have won. Keep on fighting! Plan something, do something—get into some position where they will have to come to you and beg for what’s theirs. You have earned the right to make them beg. And you know you have!”
Yes, I did know it; and on that belief I had based my idea which had served for my encouragement. Her advice and her woman’s spirit in the matter heartened me. She had acted like the lady of the castle of whom I had read. She brought to me my helmet and shield, and was sending me out to battle as a brave woman should. I started to tell her more about my idea—but we were interrupted.
There was a queer noise in the direction of the ladder which led to the lower deck. It was such a prodigious puffing and wheezing and grunting that anybody might suppose that we were going to receive a visit from a hippopotamus. The Snohomish Glutton, the cook of the Zizania, appeared to us. I had not laid eyes on that individual for weeks. He stuck in his pantry like a hermit in a cell, reveling in the steam of food, stuffing himself even while he was cooking for others. He rolled rather than walked across the deck, and stood before us, propping up the rolls of fat which shuttered his little eyes.
“I don’t know how much there is or where you’re keeping it,” he blurted, without preface, in his tin-whistle voice. “I don’t ask questions—I stay in my pantry and mind my business. But I serve the niggers in the port alley and the whites in the starboard alley, and I hear both sides. But there’s only one side now. They said that the monkey’s tail started the row. But they’ve forgotten the row. Gold will make men forget ’most anything. They’ve got together at last. They are going to grab for it. They thought I haven’t been hearing because my eyes were shut and I seemed to be asleep.”
“What do you mean, my man?” I demanded.
“I mean that you can play checkers on that checkerboard crew now, sir. It has settled into a solid board—white and black mixed. The Russian Finn is captain. He killed my cat. I have said I would get even with him. He is captain, and they are going to drop on to that gold and run away.”
“They have planned a mutiny?”
“Mutiny and all the side dishes that go with it. I have heard. I wasn’t asleep when they thought I was. I’ve got to go back. I have duff in the pot.”