THE next morning Captain Holstrom ordered the checker-board crew assembled on the main deck, forward. He appeared on the bridge and leaned over the rail like a candidate ready to make a stump speech. But, unlike a candidate, he had two revolvers strapped to his waist and in plain sight.
“I have a few words to say to you critters down there,” he began. “I know all about what you have been planning to do. I have watched you peeking and spying around this morning for them boxes. Well, you won’t find them. Them boxes are a good way off.” He pointed a stubby finger down at the Russian Finn. “You come up here!” he commanded. The Finn turned pale and shook his head.
“You come up here and I’ll promise that you won’t be hurt. I want you to take back a report to that gang of yours. If you don’t obey a master’s orders and come up here,” continued the captain, pulling a gun, “it will be mutiny—and I know how to deal with mutiny. I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
After a little hesitation the Finn climbed the ladder. The captain led him into the wheel-house, into all the state-rooms, and took him on a genera! tour of inspection of the upper deck.
“Now you can see with your own eyes that there isn’t any gold up here to mutiny about. You go back and tell that gang what you have seen—or, rather, what you didn’t see.” He pushed the Finn to the ladder.
“I give you all liberty to hunt over the lower part of the steamer from forepeak to rudder,” declared the captain over the rail. “You can help yourselves to all the gold you find. But I can tell you that there ain’t an ounce aboard here. That gold is stored where you can’t get it.” He swept his hand in a gesture which embraced the horizon. “If you act like men from now on until this cruise is over, you’ll be paid like lords. If you hanker for mutiny, start in and mutiny. Them who live through it will never get a cent; them who are killed can’t use gold where they will fetch up; it will be too hot to handle!” The men fell to muttering among themselves, but I could see that they had been cowed. The report of the leader made them still more melancholy. They divided at last—the blacks from the whites—and went about their tasks.
“I want to say, Sidney, that you showed good judgment,” said the captain, as he went to his state-room. “But I don’t feel like giving three cheers—not while that gold is back on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.”
Well, there was gold to the value of about a million yonder on the bottom in that wreck of the Golden Gate, but I had no appetite for more gold just then. I knew that I had reached the limit of my strength and courage. I had won more than two millions from the greed of that miserly ocean, and had given it back again in order to make another fight against the greed of men.
I sat on deck and endured the pains of my tortured body, and waited for the inevitable when it should come down over the horizon from the north. Half a dozen anxious days dragged past—and then it came!
A trail of blacksmoke signaled it—they were using lots of coal and were in a hurry, as that banner of black indicated. Framed in Captain Holstrom’s long telescope, it took form as a big ocean tug. She seemed to leap angrily across the sea as the surges rolled under her, and the bows churned up white yeast.