The gold-seekers gazed eagerly, and, as regards Elliott at least, with strange emotions of excitement, at the ruins of the vessel they had come so far to see, whose name had been familiar so long, but which none but Bennett had ever seen. But it was not all of the treasure-ship that lay staked upon the reef. She had evidently broken in two, and the forward and larger portion had been swept into the lagoon-like space beyond the rocks, where it could just be made out as a shapeless bulge of iron scarce showing above the surface. In reply to a question from Henninger, Bennett stated that the gold-chests had been in the forehold, and must be, consequently, submerged. Even if they had been in the after portion they must surely have been shaken out of the wretched tangle of plates and rods that formed the relics of that half of the vessel.
The dhow was brought up cautiously, with the lead constantly going, and in eight fathoms the reis gave the order to anchor by Henninger’s direction.
“We’ll find a better anchorage on the lee side of the island,” remarked the chief, “but it’ll be dark in an hour and we’d better lie here for the present”
“Why, aren’t you going to look over the wreck right away?” demanded Hawke, in surprise.
“What’s the use? We can’t do anything to-night.”
“Then I’ll row over there alone. Hanged if I can stay here all night with maybe a fortune within a couple of hundred yards and not go to see if it’s there,” said Hawke.
This speech found an answer in the hearts of all, and Henninger, outvoted, ordered the dhow’s small boat over the side. Margaret’s desire to visit the wreck was overruled, and Sullivan preferred also to remain behind, but the rest of the adventurers rowed themselves toward the reef.
The tide was rising and they were able to bring the boat alongside the wreck, by careful steering. The fragment of the steamer was lying almost upon her beam-ends, so that it was possible to grasp her rail by standing up in the boat. The deck was too sharply inclined to stand on it, however, and was besides deeply covered with the droppings of sea-birds. The deck-houses were quite gone, great cracks yawned in the deck-plates, the hatches and companionways were vast gaping holes, while on the other side the deck seemed to have broken entirely clear from the side plates.
“No use in going aboard,” said Bennett, but Hawke scrambled on hands and knees to the companionway hole, and the rest followed him through the filth. The stairs were gone, but they slid easily to the deck below, where, in the low light that entered freely through a score of yawning gaps in her side, they viewed a scene of ruin even more depressing than that upon the deck. Not a trace of man’s occupancy was left. Everything wooden or movable had been swept out by the wind and sea that had raged through and over the wreck, and they could hear the water washing hollowly in the hold below.
There was nothing to tell whether the ship had been visited before them, and there seemed little possibility of settling this great question that night “We might as well go back,” said Elliott, after they had stared at the desolation for a few minutes.
“No, I’m going to have a look into the hold before I sleep,” Hawke insisted, and he began to clamber down the cavernous gulf that led to the interior of the ship.
Henninger, Elliott, and Bennett meanwhile went back to the deck and perched precariously upon the broken rail while they waited for their comrade’s return. Hawke was gone for a long time, however, and at last a sudden outburst of wild shrieks arose from the bowels of the ship.
“He must have got caught somewhere and can’t get back,” exclaimed Elliott, and they returned below hurriedly. They had scarcely reached the lower deck, however, when Hawke reappeared, dripping wet, with his face distorted with some emotion.
“It’s there! It’s there—tons of it!” he cried, and his voice broke on the words. “Come along! I’ll show you!”
They tumbled after him at the risk of breaking their necks, for the iron plates hung in torn flaps, and the ladders were broken or gone. But at last they peered down the hatch. The light was faint, coming principally through the great fissures, but they could dimly make out a heap of miscellaneous freight, cases and hogsheads and crated machinery that had tumbled against the ship’s side when she heeled, and now lay in several feet of water. Some of it had actually fallen through the holes in the bottom that had enlarged with pounding on the rocks, but the upper articles of the mass showed above water. Hawke sprang recklessly down upon the pile, and splashed in to his knees.
“Be careful. You’ll break a leg if you slip on those crates,” Henninger warned him.
But Hawke paid no attention. “This is it!” he shouted, his voice resounding hollowly in the hold. He struck his hand upon a wooden box about three feet in diameter. “It’s stencilled with that corned beef mark, and it’s heavy as lead. You can’t stir it. See!” He strained at the case, which refused to move.
“Bennett, please row back to the dhow and bring an axe and a lantern,” Henninger ordered, coolly. “We’ll see what’s in that box. And don’t say anything to them aboard. We don’t want to raise their expectations.”
Bennett must have rowed at racing speed, though the fifteen minutes of his absence seemed an hour to those who awaited him. All four men then descended upon the pile of unsteady freight, where the lantern light showed that the case in question was indeed marked with a stencil that Bennett remembered. But this time the box might really contain corned beef.
The steel would show, and Hawke attacked the case with the axe. It was strongly made and bound with iron, while its water-soaked condition made it the more difficult to cut, but he presently succeeded in wrenching off a couple of boards. The interior was stuffed with hay.
Hawke thrust his arm into the wet packing, and burrowed furiously about. Presently he withdrew it—and hesitated before he exposed his discovery to the light of the lantern. He held an oblong block of yellow metal.
“God!” said Bennett.
They all stared as if hypnotized by the small shining brick that shone dully in the unsteady light. Then Bennett flung himself upon the case and began to rip out the hay in armfuls, swearing savagely when it resisted.
“Here, stop that! Stop it, I say!” cried Henninger. “We don’t want that case gutted—not now.”
He put a powerful hand on Bennett’s shoulder, and dragged him back. Bennett wheeled with a furious glare, that slowly cooled as it met Henninger’s steady gaze. Elliott was reminded of the end of the roulette game at Nashville.
“We must leave it packed,” the chief continued. “We don’t want to go back to the dhow with a lot of loose gold bricks for all the crew to see. We’ll have to trans-ship the cases whole. Is this the only corned beef box?”
They found another heavy case bearing the same stencil and half-buried among the freight under a foot of water. There were no more in sight, though others might have been invisible among the débris. Apparently only a small portion of the treasure had been shipped in the after-hold, but the discovery of any of it proved conclusively that no man had visited the wreck before them. As they rowed back to the dhow they were strangely silent, and Elliott, feeling slightly dazed and drunken, understood their taciturnity.
“Congratulations, Miss Laurie,” said Henninger, as he climbed over the rail. “You’ll be an heiress to-morrow.”
“Was it there?” faltered Margaret; and Henninger handed her the golden brick, after a cautious glance around the deck. She came near dropping it when she took it in her hands.
“How heavy it is!” she exclaimed. “How much is it worth?”
“Two or three thousand dollars,” replied Henninger.
Margaret gave a little gasp. “Here, take it.” She thrust it back to Henninger. “I’m almost afraid of it. I never had so much money in my life at once. I can’t imagine that it’s really true. I hoped, but—please don’t look. I believe I’m going to cry!”
She turned aside and did cry quietly for a couple of minutes, with her head on the rail, while the men preserved an embarrassed silence.
“I’m better now,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m ashamed to be so silly, but it was the excitement, and the waiting, and the success, and—everything. What are we going to do now?”
“We can’t do anything more to-night,” returned Henninger. “We must have light to locate the rest of the stuff, for it’s mostly in the lagoon, you know. At least, we suppose so, for we only found two cases on the wreck. Bennett says he counted twenty-three cases in the forehold, and that will all have to be got by diving. We might get out our diving apparatus to-night and rig the derrick.”
There was not much sleep on the Omeyyah that night. The diving armour was brought up from the hold, cleaned and oiled, and the air-tubes tested. They mounted the air-pump between decks with its big driving-wheels, adjusted the manometer, coiled the life-line, and made everything ready for the descent. The impromptu derrick was also set up, consisting of a strong spar forty feet long hinged in an iron socket at the foot of the mizzen-mast, with a block and tackle at the extremity and a geared crank at the base. As it was not likely that the cases of hay and gold would weigh over two or three hundred pounds, this rude apparatus would be sufficient to hoist them aboard. Henninger meanwhile cleared out the room that had been prepared below for the reception of the treasure. This was a corner of the after-cabin, partitioned off by three-inch planks, totally dark, and entered only by a low and narrow door fastened with four heavy iron bars, each locked into its socket with a Yale lock. The after part of the dhow had been bulkheaded off from the forward portion with heavy planks, so that no man could gain access to the cabin except by the cabin ladder on the quarter-deck.
These preparations were finished by two o’clock in the morning, however, and there was nothing then to do but wait for daylight. A cool air breathed on the sea, though scarce a breeze stirred; the stars were white fire in the velvet sky, with the hill on the island rising dark against them. The adventurers lounged about the deck, talking in low tones, with their eyes ever fixed upon the indistinct shape of the wreck that lay amid the wash on the surf. But weariness brought sleep after all, and silence gradually fell upon the deck.
Elliott was awakened from violent dreams by some one shaking him. He opened his eyes to find daylight on the sea, though the sun had not yet risen.
“Get up,” said Hawke. “We’ve got to make a long day of it.”
Elliott sprang up, broad awake instantly. The rest of the party were already astir, and in a few minutes the cook brought them coffee, canned salmon, corned beef, and biscuits.
“The first thing is to try to locate the cases that are sunk,” said Henninger, as they breakfasted hastily. “While we’re at it, we must see if we can’t find a way to get the dhow into the lagoon. If we can’t do that, we can’t fish up the chests bodily. We’d have to break them and bring up the bricks one by one, and I’d rather take almost any chances than that.”
“But there must be plenty of water inside the reef,” Hawke remarked. “The wreck’s sunk almost out of sight, and the dhow only draws four or five feet, doesn’t she?”
“That’s so,” said Henninger, gulping down his coffee. “We’ll try it. And, above all things, don’t any of you say the word ‘gold’ above your breaths. That’s a word that’s understood in all languages.”
The meal did not last five minutes, and Henninger, Bennett, and Elliott descended into the boat and pulled toward the line of reefs in search of a gap into the lagoon. They rowed nearly half a mile, and rounded the island to the west, in fact, before they found any opening in the barrier. Here, however, they came upon a gap quite wide enough to permit the passage of the dhow, and in the lagoon there was, as Hawke had estimated, a depth of from one to three and in one spot of five fathoms.
They rowed eastward again toward the wreck. The sunken part of the Clara McClay lay in about twenty feet of water, and had been swept round till it rested almost at right angles to the other half. It had, like the stern, toppled abeam, so that the decks lay almost perpendicular, and about three feet of the side rose above the water. The funnel was broken off, as well as the masts, and on looking down through the clear water it appeared that the engines had burst loose and smashed through the side of the steamer. A medley of wheels, rods, and cranks were visible, and the bottom was scattered thick with coal. Otherwise, probably owing to the protection afforded by the water, this portion of the steamer did not appear to have suffered so severely as the after half.
They rowed all around the sunken mass of iron that revealed nothing of what it might contain.
“There’s the hatch where I went down,” said Bennett. The hatch was still closed, and was some eight feet under water.
“Diving will be the only way to go down there again,” Elliott remarked.
“Yes,” said Henninger. “No use looking at it from here. Let’s get the dhow up alongside.”
They regained the dhow as the sun rose, and the reis got the Omeyyah under sail. There was just wind enough to move her, and the boat led the way and conned her in, through the gap in the reef and across the lagoon till alongside the rusty bones of the wreck. Here the anchor dropped with a short cable to keep her from drifting, and as a further precaution the boat carried a second cable with a kedge anchor, and fixed it among the rocks of the reef.
“Now,” said Henninger, when they had returned aboard, “where’s the diving-suit? I’m going down.”
“I thought you said you had an Arab expert for the diving,” said Elliott, in surprise.
“So we have, but I’m afraid to send him down till I’ve had a look first. The gold cases may have burst, and you don’t know what sights he’d see. I don’t trust this crew, so I’m going below myself this time.”
“By thunder, I wouldn’t crawl into that wreck in a rubber jacket, not for a ship-load of gold,” said Bennett, earnestly. “We don’t know whether the diving-machine works right. Better try it on the dog.”
Henninger appeared struck by this consideration, but after a little hesitation he persisted in his purpose. Hawke brought the suit on deck, the rubber and canvas jacket, the weighted shoes and the copper helmet, and Henninger accoutred himself under the directions of the Berber expert. Before the helmet was screwed on, the air-pumps were tested again, and appeared to be efficient. A couple of Arabs were stationed in the waist to turn the big wheels that drove the pumps, and Henninger’s head disappeared inside the helmet with its great goggle eyes.
He puffed out remarkably as the air was pumped into the suit, and Elliott and Hawke assisted him to stagger along the deck, and over the dhow’s rail. Thence he stepped down upon the uncovered part of the steamer, and slid down the sloping deck till he was entirely submerged. A string of bubbles began to arise.
Every one on board, except the men at the pumps, lined the rail and watched him eagerly. He checked himself at the hatch, looked up and waved his hand. Then he attacked the hatch with a small axe, and after a few minutes’ chopping and levering it gave way, and he wrenched the cover off. It sunk slowly, being water-logged. There was a square, black hole, and after peering into it for a few seconds Henninger slipped inside and vanished.
The life-line and the air-tube slowly paid out, and the bubbles sparkled up intermittently from the hatch. Henninger remained in the hold for about ten minutes, when his grotesque form emerged like a strange sea-monster, and he crawled up the slanted deck again, and came above the water. Sitting on the broken rail of the steamer, he shouted to them, but his voice came inarticulately through the helmet, and, seeing his failure, he gesticulated at the derrick.
“He wants us to lower the grapples,” exclaimed Elliott. He ran to the crank and touched it, looking at Henninger, and the helmet nodded affirmatively.
With the assistance of a couple of the crew, the beam was swung round over the wreck, and the grappling-hooks lowered. Henninger caught them as soon as they were within reach, and he descended once more into the hold, carrying the irons with him. He was out of sight for a longer period this time, but he reappeared at last, and clambered with difficulty aboard the dhow.
“Hoist away,” he said, as soon as the helmet was unscrewed. “I’ve got one hooked.” His face was much flushed, and he rubbed his eyes dizzily.
“What did you find?” queried Hawke, with excitement.
“All the freight is piled in a heap, higgledy-piggledy, and it’s pretty dark down there. I made out the cases we want, though, or at least some of them. I had forgotten that it’s so easy to lift weights under water. I heaved those crates and hogsheads around like a dime museum strong man. The irons are hooked on one of them. Let’s get it up.”
At the word the Arabs at the crank began to revolve the handles. The long spar rose, and an iron-bound, wooden packing-case, about three feet in diameter, appeared at the hatch, and swung dripping out of the water. The dhow heeled slightly at its weight.
“Inboard,” commanded Henninger, and the reis translated the order. The beam was swung around till the case hung directly over the after hatchway of the dhow, and, being lowered, it descended accurately out of sight.
Every one rushed down the ladder to look at it as it lay in the centre of a widening pool on the planking, with the grapples still fast. But there was nothing to see; the markings on the box had been almost obliterated by water, though the false stencil could still be made out. On the other side letters had been painted with a black brush, presumably the forwarding directions, but nothing could be made of them. Hawke went out and returned with an axe, but Henninger checked him.
“Why, aren’t you going to open it?” said Hawke, staring.
“Better not. We know well enough what’s in it. We’ve got to hurry, work day and night, and get away from here as quick as ever we can.”
“Oh, confound it! We’ll have to open one of them, anyway. We may have made a mistake. Aren’t we going to see any of the plunder?” exclaimed Elliott and Hawke, and Margaret added her entreaty.
“All right, go ahead,” Henninger gave in. “Open it carefully, though, for we’ll want to close the box again. Sullivan, please keep an eye on the hatch to see that nobody looks down.”
Hawke released the grapples, and they dragged the case into the cabin, where, with some difficulty, one of the boards of the cover was pried off. A mass of wet, foul-smelling hay appeared below, and Hawke began to drag this out upon the floor, where it made a great pool of sea-water.
The hay was packed very tightly, but in a few seconds Hawke encountered something solid, and brought it to light. It was a dead yellow brick of gold, exactly similar to the one already acquired.
Hawke continued the disembowelling of the case until the floor was swimming with water and heaped with sodden hay, and the pile of yellow blocks grew upon the floor. At last the box was empty.
“Twenty-five,” remarked Henninger, who had been counting them as they came out. “We might as well weigh them. There are small scales in the storeroom,”—which Elliott at once fetched.
The scales, which were not strictly accurate, indicated the weight of the first brick at a trifle under eight pounds, and the others all gave the same result. Evidently they had been run in the same mould.
“The latest quotation for pure gold, as I suppose this is, was twenty-five dollars an ounce, or thereabouts. At that rate, how much is each of these bricks worth? Remember, these scales weigh sixteen ounces to the pound.”
“Three thousand, two hundred dollars,” replied Hawke, after making the calculation. “The whole case will total up—let me see—eighty thousand dollars!”
“I counted twenty-three cases in the forehold, and there are two at least in the after-hold,” said Bennett.
“Two millions,” said Hawke.
“Two millions!” whispered Margaret, and at her awed tone Hawke burst into a high-pitched roar of laughter. Bennett caught the contagion, and then Elliott, and they laughed and laughed, a shrill nervous peal, till they could not leave off.
“Stop it!” shouted Henninger.
“We’ll never have a chance to laugh like this again,” Hawke managed to ejaculate, and there was a renewed outburst.
“Brace up. You’re all hysterical!” said Henninger, sharply, and they gradually regained self-control. “Come,” he continued, “we’ve got to get the rest of that stuff aboard. Hawke, you and Miss Laurie will repack that box again just as it was before. Make a memorandum of the number of bricks in it, and, Miss Laurie, you will keep a tally of the boxes as they come down.”
This time, Elliott volunteered to go below, and he donned the diving-dress, and lumbered over the side. It was easy enough to slide down the steep slope of the steamer’s deck; in fact, he scarcely knew when he became submerged, but it required a summoning of all his courage to jump into the black gulf of the hold.
He floated down through the water as lightly as a falling leaf, however, and landed without a jar upon a miscellaneous mass of tumbled freight. There was a faint green-gold light in the place, and at first it was hard to distinguish anything, but as his eyes grew more accustomed to the strange gloom he made out the articles of cargo distinctly. There were boxes and cases of every size and shape, with barrels and bales and shapeless things in crates—very much the same heterogeneous mixture, in fact, as he had seen in the after-hold.
The air began to buzz in his ears, and according to directions he knocked his head against the valve in the back of the helmet and released the pressure. The coolness penetrated through his armour; and, but for the rubbery taste of the air he breathed, he found the situation decidedly pleasant, for the depth was too slight to cause any feeling of oppression.
He examined the cases, bending his helmet close over them, for it was not easy to make out their almost erased markings. He found that he had been standing on one of the gold chests, and he hitched the tackles to it, astonished to find that he could move its heavy weight with considerable ease. He signalled through the life-line, and the case was hoisted up, and disappeared out of his sight.
By the time the grappling-hooks returned empty upon him he had found another of the treasure-cases, which he at once sent aloft. He secured four cases in this way, and sent them up in about twenty minutes; and then, beginning to feel a slight nausea from the hot, rubber-flavoured air, he climbed out and made his way aboard the dhow.
Henninger took his place, and sent up two more cases, making seven that were stored in the dhow’s cabin. The first one had already been repacked, and Hawke and Bennett were busy stacking the chests in the strong-room, lashing each one strongly to ring-bolts to prevent shifting when the dhow rolled. They opened two more just enough to see that there was certainly gold in each, and closed them again. The heavy weight of the cases was evidence of the amount.
All day long the work went on, under the full blaze of an equatorial sun. The dhow’s decks ran with water from the dripping chests, and down below the cabin was flooded, for the boxes were like sponges. With the exception of Margaret, the adventurers were drenched to the skin, and the work grew increasingly difficult when it became necessary to shift the cargo about in the steamer to find the gold cases. When at last it seemed that all had been taken out, the tally showed only fifteen in the strong-room, while Bennett had counted twenty-three in the hold. The missing ones would have to be discovered, and Henninger went down again to search for them.
“I wonder what the crew are thinking of all this,” Margaret remarked to Elliott. He had paused at the entrance to the strong-room where she was keeping tally in a note-book as the precious cases came aboard.
“I don’t know what they think. I know what the reis told them,” returned Elliott. “He told them that we’re wrecking the steamer and taking out a lot of cases of cartridges for the sake of the brass and lead. He knows all about it, of course, but the crew would never dream of so much gold being in her.”
Margaret shivered a little. “Things have gone almost too smoothly since we sailed. I felt certain that we would get here in time, and I was right. But now I feel, I hardly know how, as if something was going wrong. I wish we could leave the rest of the gold and go away. We have more than we need now.”
“Oh, no,” Elliott expostulated. “And there are two more cases in the after-hold, which won’t be easy to get out.”
“I have been nearly happy,” she broke out, after a silence, “happier than I ever expected to be again in my life. I feel almost ashamed of it, after all that I suffered such a little while ago. I see now that it was a dreadful thing for me to come on this expedition; I am surprised that you let me do it. But everybody has been so nice to me. If I had been the sister of all these men they couldn’t have treated me with more respect and real kindness. Aren’t you almost glad I came, after all?”
“Yes,” said Elliott. He hesitated. “Do you know why I wanted all this money?” he went on, bending toward her. “It wasn’t for myself.”
“What, then?” said Margaret, faintly. “No, don’t tell me,” she exclaimed, “not yet. Let’s be comrades the same as ever, and we haven’t got the gold yet, anyway.”
“Then I’ll tell you when we do get it,” Elliott answered; and at that moment another case came down the hatch, and Bennett followed it, breaking off the conversation. But the girl’s “not yet” left a glow of excitement and exultation in Elliott’s heart for the rest of the day.
Two more of the missing chests were located at last and sent up. A fourth had been burst; it might have been the very one which Bennett had opened while imprisoned in the hold, and the contents were scattered. After some consultation, Elliott went down again and sent the bricks up in a canvas sack, three at a time, packed in hay to disguise the weight. By the time this was accomplished, it was near sunset, and already growing too dark to see in the hold. Henninger fumed impatiently, but without electric lights it was impossible to work under water after sunset. Besides, the boxes in the after-hold could not by any possibility be reached that night.
Elliott struggled that night between sleepy exhaustion and excited wakefulness, and the rest of the party were in a similar state. All night long he could hear frequent movements; a dozen times he started up anxiously at some sound, only to find that it was the armed guard over the hatchway, but toward morning he slept heavily for a couple of hours.
Work was resumed as soon as a diver could see in the steamer’s hold. After looking through all the mass of freight, and turning over much of it with a lever, the missing cases were at last discovered, and one by one hoisted aboard.
“Now for the other half of the ship,” said Henninger, turning his eyes toward the wreck on the reef. “I rather fancy we’ll have to dynamite a hole in her side—good God!”
They followed his pointing finger and stood stupefied. Off the eastward end of the island a small steamer was lying, a faint haze of smoke drifting from her funnel, and the red British ensign flying at her peak.