Where Your Treasure Is. Holman Day
spite of all that the first sensations nigh paralyzed me. I reached bottom and wallowed around without the least thought or remembrance regarding what I had been told to do. A freight-train seemed to be roaring around inside my helmet and I was gasping like a dying skate-fish.
Then in scuffing around in a sort of panic, taking no care of what I was about, I hooked my shoe onto something and began to yank and thresh around in a perfect frenzy. The result was that I pulled the shoe off and my lightened foot was snapped above my head in a finer spread-eagle than any acrobatic dancer ever pulled off. To drag that foot down was beyond my powers, and I tripped and went onto my back. Being up-ended is a diver’s chief peril, because the air bellies up into the legs of the dress and leaves scant supply in the helmet.
In that crisis there was one idea which stuck to me: I must get that lost shoe!
And I did get it. I groped and rolled and struggled and pulled until I did get it. A half-dozen times in my efforts I felt them trying to haul me up. I suppose I must have given signals telling them to quit that. I fought them as best I could, anyway, until I had recovered the shoe; then I yanked for a lift and went up.
Captain Vose was standing in front of me with the helmet in his hands when I had recovered my wits enough to notice anybody.
“Been dancing a jig?” he inquired, caustically.
I shook my head, for I was not able to utter words.
“Which did you lose first down there, your nerve or that shoe?”
When I hesitated, he snapped, “Give me the truth, now, or we sha’n’t get along after this!”
“My nerve!” I told him.
“So I knew—for I lashed on that shoe with my own hands. Very well! What good are you as a diver without your wits or your nerve?”
“No good, sir.”
“You can buy an eighteen-pound shoe at any equipment loft. But how about buying nerve?”
“I reckon it can’t be bought, sir,” I confessed.
“Still, you were almighty particular,” he sneered, “to bring back that shoe with you even if you didn’t bring your nerve. Left your nerve on the bottom, eh?”
He was mighty nasty in his tone and his manner, and the men standing around were grinning. Perhaps even all that would not have put grit back into me, for I was dizzy and scared and was owning up to myself that I was better fitted for dry ground than a wet sea-bottom. But just then Anson C. Doughty bellowed from the wharf:
“Say, look here, Vose, let that coward go back upcountry to his steers! We have no time to fool away on greenhorns.”
“If I did leave my nerve on the bottom I’m going back after it, and I’m going right now!” I told the diver. I was holding the shoe and I dropped it on deck and shoved my foot into it. Captain Vose kneeled and began to lash it.
“What are you doing, there?” demanded the manager.
“Making a diver,” stated my teacher, calmly.
“I’m paying you fifty dollars a day to do what I tell you to do, Vose.”
“That’s right, sir!” The captain kept right on with the lashings. “There’s a contract between you and this young man which tells me to teach him how to be a diver, if he shows the capacity.”
“He hasn’t shown it.”
“He is going to in about five minutes, sir.”
He picked up the helmet and bent over me.
“I had a reason for twitting you about that shoe,” he said, in my ear. “You showed what was in you by bringing it back If you hadn’t brought it back I would have stripped this suit off you and sent you hipering! You’ve got it in you! You’re all right! Now go down, son, and set that chain where I told you to set it. The first scare is the vaccination for this kind of work. You’re in a way to be immune from now on!”
The last sound I heard was the snarl of Anson C. Doughty. That sound helped me to go to my job that day. I went down and did what was required of me, and, as I worked below there and became convinced that there was nothing to harm me if I kept my head, I found my nerve, I reckon, for good and all, in the diving business.
And now that this story seems to be settled into a rut of adventure in my chosen line of work, hold breath with me and prepare for a couple of most “jeeroosly jounces,” as old Wagner Bangs used to term his occasional falls from his state of natural grace.
First, I leap as nimbly as I can over three years and a half of hard work, the story of which would hold as little interest as the biography of a mud-clam. I slipped and slid and dug in slime, I shagged granite blocks and dragged chains, I pried into wrecks and had my whack at fumbling in the watery shadows for the drowned—pitiful bundles floating as if they were attempting posthumous gymnastics, head down and fingers trying to touch toes.
I did “deep work” on ticklish jobs.
So I came into the fifty-dollar-a-day class of workers, to the grim content of my mentor.
I have just remarked that the snarl of Anson C. Doughty sent me in earnest to my first job. Also, just as suddenly, that snarl pried me loose from my job.
I wish I did not have to confess what I have to say now. I come to jounce number two!
I have spoken a ways back of mile-stones in my life and suggested that Anson C. Doughty was connected with one.
I wish I could give a real, compelling, manly reason why I tossed my hopes and my prospects so wildly into the air all of a sudden. I have spoken of my ready temper—but that’s no reason.
In fifteen seconds I shifted the life I was living as completely as a derailing-switch shoots a runaway engine off the main line.
The borers of that mysterious hatred for Anson C. Doughty must have been burrowing in me all the time, even as those little teredinoid bivalves we call ship-worms gnaw into submerged piles with the edges of their shells. I was full of burrows and went to pieces all of a sudden.
For I came up one day out of thirty fathoms—and that’s man’s work—and Doughty was giving me green help out of his general meanness—and my head was far from steady; in addition he gave me his snarl for the last time, instead of snarling at his infernal dubs who were risking my life.
I stepped on his foot with a shoe that was loaded with twenty pounds of lead—and that’s some anchor!—I walloped him into insensibility with the end of a rubber hose. Then I resigned informally, while he lay on the deck of the lighter, grunting back to life again.
Nobody stopped me when I said I was going and announced that it would be dangerous to get in my way.
They stood back while I shifted my clothes—and I got away with my diving equipment, even! It was the newest thing out for those days and the going styles of gear, and I had paid good money for it.
I say again, I wish I had a more cogent reason to give for throwing up my work. But I’m giving the truth of the matter. I left just that way. I knew that Anson C. Doughty would have me put in jail if he could catch me. I knew that I couldn’t do any more diving, for divers are marked men and are easily located. It was up to me to go and hide; so I went and hid.
VII—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A PLUG-HAT|
I HAD been about a bit during three years and a half. I own up frankly that I had found out that I had more or less of a cheap streak in me. I’m not disguising it wholly by the name of curiosity; though, of course, a country fellow has a keen hankering to look in on some of the sights of