“It’s the infinite variety that appeals to me,” he said. “The sea is full of wonders.”
“And tragedies,” supplemented the other.
He settled back in his chair and lighted a fresh cigar. As he struck the match, Bert noticed that his right hand was horribly scarred and disfigured. It looked as though it had been drawn through a harrow whose teeth had bitten deep. Great livid weals crossed each other on the back, and two of the fingers were gone. And Bert noted that, although his face and frame indicated that he was not more than thirty years old, his hair was snowy white.
“Of course, that’s true,” said Bert, reverting to the stranger’s last remark; “storms and shipwrecks and typhoons and tidal waves are things that have to be reckoned with.”
“Yes,” was the reply, “but I wasn’t thinking especially of these. They’re common enough and terrible enough. What I had in mind was the individual tragedies that are happening all the time, and of which not one in a hundred ever hears.”
“Do you see this hair of mine?” he asked, removing his hat. “One day at noon it was as dark as yours. At three o’clock on that same day it was like this.”
He paused a moment, as though battling with some fearful recollection.
“I don’t know how familiar you may be with the Pacific,” he resumed, “but on this coast there is every variety of monster that you can find in any other ocean, and usually of a fiercer and larger type. Nowhere do you find such man-eating sharks or such malignant devil-fish. The sharks don’t come near enough to the shore to bother us much. But it’s safe to say that within half a mile from here, there are gigantic squids, with tentacles from twelve to twenty feet long. More than one luckless swimmer, venturing out too far, has been dragged down by them, and there are instances where they have picked a man out of a fishing boat. If those tentacles ever get you in their murderous grip, it’s all over with you.
“Then, too, we have what is called the ‘smotherer,’ something like a monstrous ray, that spreads itself out over its prey and forces it down in the mud at the bottom, until it is smothered to death. It’s a terror to divers, and they fear it more than they do the shark.
“But these perils are well known and can be guarded against. If I’d got into any trouble with them, it would probably have been largely my own fault. But it is the ‘unexpected that happens,’ and the thing that marked me for life was something not much bigger than my fist.