Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 87: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE STRANGER “But they had failed in one point of their calculations. There was so much iron in the binding of the chest that instead of floating it dropped, at once, to the bottom of the sea. ‘“‘ This story was hardly ended when the narrator died. And the natives of the coast, including Lajpat Rani, went out in boats as soon as the storm was ended, to search the beach. But though they continued their labors for a month, unremittingly, they never were able to locate the great chest and the great pearl which it contained. ‘“‘Lajpat Rani, however, fished for the pearl more with his brains than with his boat. He discovered that, a hundred yards from shore, there was a deep current which swept along the bottom of the sea when the wind blew from a certain quarter in a storm. It was one of those shallow water currents which storms will on rare occasions set up. And when the ship went down, the storm had been coming from that identical quar- ter of the horizon. ‘“Lajpat Rani then went out in his boat and examined the point of land which jutted out from the coast just beyond the scene of the wreck of the sloop. He found that there was a solid wall of rocks rising. And he reached the conclusion that the reason the search along the shore where the sloop went down had been unsuccessful was be- cause the storm-raised current had tumbled the chest to the side and against the rocks. “But the roots of those rocks lay too deep to be reached by ordinary divers. It would be necessary that a diver with a full modern equipment be sent with an electric torch to probe the depths. But there was no one in his village with sufficient means to undertake the task. Besides, Lajpat Rani knew that a.prophet is always with- out honor in his own country. “So he went to Calcutta and laid his scheme before such of the well-to-do Hin- doos as he could reach. One and all, they had shrugged their shoulders, and so he had come to decide that the white men must hear his idea. “Tt was mere chance that brought him to me as the first white man who was to hear the story. I heard it. I believed that there might be something in it. At that AT THE GATE. 877 time it happened that my credit was fairly good, but my property was almost nothing and I was in desperate need of a sudden turn of fortune. So I decided to take the gambling chance. “T outfitted a diver, chartered a boat, and dropped down to the Ceylon coast, taking Lajpat Rani along with me. We found the point of land easily enough. And there was a long black nose of rocks running out into the water like a great sea beast about to dive for the bottom. “Around the roots of those rocks we searched for three days—no, it was on the fourth day that the diver put a hook into a great sea-rotted chest and came to the sur- face in triumph. “T shall never forget how the boat heeled over as the windlass tightened and short- ened the line. There was a devilish wind just beginning to blow up, and coming in puff on puff, each puff ten miles an hour stiffer than the puff which went before. But we paid no attention to the rise of the wind. We were too much interested in what was drifting up toward the surface on the end of that line. ‘Finally a corner tipped out of the water. It was a corner covered with red iron rust and soppy with seaweed. We yelled at the tops of our lungs. We lay down on our bellies and reached for the box and helped the windlass bring it over the side. ‘““T yelled at the rest of ’em, then, and drove them back—there were seven souls of us aboard that boat—and I smashed at the box with the ax. The head of the ax sank into the wood with a thick thudding, as though it were flesh. But finally I pounded the spongy stuff away and we were at the insides of her. And, sure enough, the little box was there. “T tried to work the lock, but it was rusted into a solid mass with the wood. The six others crowded about and kept yelling advice at me. I remembered how their voices came screaming and whistling in that wild wind. Finally I dropped the box to the deck and smashed at it again and again. Finally the axhead struck. The box crum- pled up, and out of the wreckage I picked the Sheik. “Tt was—” Ccomicboook CO