Cocos Gold

by Ralph Hammond Innes

  The Rigger laughed. “Nothing doing, Taffy,” he said.

  And then in sudden violent anger that seemed to flatten them: “You God-damned greedy fool! There’s only the four of us and Shorty left. Plenty for all of us. And we don’t split up. We’d be too weak if we ran into the captain and Sir Brian.”

  “Well, I’m going direct to the landslide,” Mike said. “I got a hunch, see. And when I get a hunch, I follow it up.” He turned and waded into the charred grass stems, raising a suffocating cloud of ash. Taffy followed him. Gault hesitated. Then he, too, went after the others. The Rigger shrugged his shoulders. “Come on, Johnny,” he said, gripping hold of my arm. “You’d think that treasure had wings the way they rush after it.” He laughed without mirth. “They’ll learn differently when they start to carry it down to the boats.” He turned to the cook. “You better come, too,” he said, and the three of us followed the others.

  That mad rush after the treasure was the most ghastly journey I ever hope to make. I was exhausted before I started and but for The Rigger I should never have kept on my feet for more than an hour. It seemed to go on and on into eternity. My feet burned with heat. They were hot and bleeding and my boots gradually disintegrated. At first we were sliding and falling down a steep slope of blackened grass stems. The ash we kicked up was so thick that it clouded the moon. It was a fine, penetrating dust that choked nostrils and throat and made the eyes smart. My whole body was so dry that there was no moisture in me to ease the grit against my eyeballs, so that soon I was half-blinded. I fell repeatedly, tearing my feet and skinning my legs. Here and there we came across freak patches of grass untouched by the fire…

  At last we-reached the limit of the grass. This was as far as the fire had come, and after fighting our way through a blackened tangle of creeper, we were in green jungle again with the insects humming about us. But they didn’t bite us. I suppose the burnt smell of us put them off. The moon rose higher and higher, and then it was right above us and dropping slowly behind us. It played queer tricks with the shape of branches and boulders. Mike, who led the way, lost himself completely. Time and time again we were forced to climb back in order to skirt a cliff edge. Once some sixth sense stopped me on the brink of a huge hole loosely covered with creeper.

  The going became worse and worse. In places the jungle was quite impenetrable. In others, a tangle of creeper crawled over precipitous slopes of loose, round boulders, some of them so big that there were dark cavities in which a man could slip and lose himself entirely. In such places it took us nearly an hour to progress a hundred yards. We had no bush knives or axes with which to cut our way through. We had to wriggle through and where there were loose boulders underfoot the going was treacherous. How we managed without breaking our legs, I don’t know. Every now and then a startled pig would go crashing wildly through the jungle.

  The desire for water soon began to take hold of us all. I had long ceased to think about the treasure or the danger of my situation. The feverish, burning ache of my body and the stifling dryness of my throat and nose swamped all thought. I began to think crazily of lying in the shade by a cool stream and drinking—drinking water— great draughts of it. My mind took hold of this picture so that it became more vivid than the twisted, steaming shape of the jungle round me. I moved in a daze, unconscious of The Rigger’s constant grip on my arm, my lacerated feet slipping and slithering down without direction from my brain.

  Stops became more frequent, and at each stop there were interminable arguments in parched, croaking voices. The men’s hot eyes stared at me out of their smoke-blackened faces. They grumbled and blamed it all on me. “If it hadn’t been for that blasted kid.” The Irishman said that more than once. And as the moonlight paled in the sudden dawn and we threw ourselves down on a smooth outcrop of rock, Taffy turned on The Rigger. “If you’d done as we said, man, we wouldn’t be fighting our way through this jungle.” His voice was like a raven’s croak. “We should have taken the ship like we did the ML.”

  “Sure we should, Taffy,” Mike agreed. “We should have took the ship.”

  “Now there’s the captain and half the crew loose on the island—and knowing where the treasure is.”

  “For all we know,” the Irishman snarled, “they’ve found it already.”

  The Rigger sighed wearily. “If they have, much good it will do them without the ship. But I don’t think they’ll have been bothering their heads about the treasure. They’ll have been far more worried about the ship.”

  The sky above The Lookout suddenly flared red. I opened my eyes painfully. The cook was lying stretched out beside me, breathing raspily. The others sat round, blinking in the sudden light. They looked like four ruffians out of another world. Sweat and fire dust streaked their faces. Their shirts were almost burned off their backs. Their feet showed bleeding through their boots and the skin was all swollen and torn under the burnt surface of their faces.

  They stared at me slowly with red-rimmed, sunken eyes as I sat up. Mike leaned forward. “God help you,” he said, “if you double-crossed us with your talk of a landslide.” He suddenly stretched out his big, blackened hand and gripped my wrist. “Was it the truth? Was it?” He gave my arm a sharp twist that rolled me over on the rock. “Was it the truth?” he roared. “Tell me that now?”

  Old Walrus sat up with a jerk. “Take your hands off of the boy,” he grunted. One half of his moustache was burned clean away. It made his face grotesquely lopsided. “You got what you wanted out of him. Ain’t that enough?” For a moment I thought the Irishman was going to hit him. His great fist clenched. Then The Rigger said sharply, “Let him be.” His voice was tired, but it still had a ring of authority.

  Mike relaxed slowly. “If we done this trip for nothing—” he muttered sullenly.

  “The boy didn’t make up those directions,” The Rigger said quietly. “He was too scared to make it all up.”

  Mike suddenly grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, he was too scared. That’s right, ain’t it, Taffy? The kid was too scared to make it up.”

  “That’s right, man. He was too scared.”

  The sun came up over the top of The Lookout and a blaze of heat beat lip from the rock on which we sat. The jungle steamed and a bare stone slope that rose above us turned white in the bright light.

  “Do you reckon those two gold statues is still there, Nat?” asked Mike, his eyes gleaming in the sudden excitement of his thoughts.

  “If anything’s there, it’ll be the statues,” The Rigger replied with a grin. “Have you any idea what the weight of a single gold bar is?”

  The Irishman scratched his thick ear and shook his head. “No. Reckon I ain’t that familiar with gold bars.”

  “They do say it’s the heaviest of all metals,” Taffy put in.

  “You’ll find out how heavy it is when we start to shift it down to the boats.” The Rigger laughed mirthlessly. “It’ll just about kill you.”

  “Sure and I’m dying to be killed then.” Mike got to his feet, a feverish eagerness in his eyes. “Suppose we get going?” he said.

  “I could do with some water,” Gault whined. “My throat’s so dry I can’t hardly think of anything else.”

  “I got a thirst for the sight of that gold bigger than what my throat’s crying out for.” Mike suddenly rounded on the youth from the East End. “If you got a thirst for water, we ain’t stopping you.” And his wicked, red-rimmed little eyes glared at the other hotly. If anybody was going to get killed, I felt Gault would be the first.

  The Rigger stretched himself and climbed stiffly to his feet. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get going. Can’t be far now.”

  “There’s supposed to be a rock door,” Taffy said as he got shakily to his feet. “We should have brought dynamite.”

  “That’s right,” Mike said. “We should have brought dynamite.” He turned to The Rigger. “It all comes of that blasted kid there. We forgot everything, chasing him and Old Walrus.”

  “Shorty can
bring it in to us,” The Rigger answered. “If it proves to be the place, it’s only a short distance to Chatham Bay.”

  “That means waiting,” Mike snarled. “And I don’t want to hang around waiting for Shorty. I waited eight years for this moment.” He punched his fist into the palm of his other hand viciously. “By the Holy Mother I’ll get in if I have to tear the rock away with my bare hands. I ain’t waiting for the captain’s mob to creep up on us—if they’re still alive.”

  “No need,” said Taffy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sax had dynamite with him when we left him, remember?”

  “Sure. He had most all of what we brought ashore.” Then his brow furrowed. “But first we gotta find Sax.”

  “Sax won’t have crawled far with that injured leg,” Taffy answered. “Anyway, we don’t have to worry about him. If he’s gone, the dynamite will still be there. No man crawls around in this stinking jungle with a bag full of dynamite.”

  “That’s right.” Mike nodded. “Well now, what are we waiting for?”

  “Nothing. Except we don’t know the way.” The Rigger was staring up at the slope of scree above us. “I think we’d better work along the base of this slope.”

  “I tell you, man, it’s further down.”

  “Yeah. Further down. That’s right.”

  But they weren’t certain, and in the end through force of habit they accepted The Rigger’s suggestion. We worked along the foot of the scree and then we were in a tangle of undergrowth again. The jungle steamed with heat. It was incredible how quickly the sun raised the temperature. The insects were no longer shy of our burnt skin. They stung us all over, clinging to our sweating bodies, their bites more violent because of the tenderness of our skin. The heat on the top of my head seemed to blaze like a fire. My skull grew and grew till it was an enormous, throbbing thing. The last drop of moisture was wrung out of me in sweat. Old Walrus was beside me. He was mumbling to himself. He was half-crazed with exhaustion and heat.

  But the mutineers were moving more quickly now. It was not of their own volition. They were being driven forward by the thought of treasure. They didn’t talk any more. They struggled forward with grim determination. We fought our way through a dense tangle of roots and creeper and came out on a bare scree slope that fell away into nothing. The loose stones of the landslide blazed white in the sunlight.

  Suddenly I stopped. I knew where I was. This was where I had fallen the previous day. I could see the trailing line of creeper that had stopped me from going over the cliff. Beyond the cliff edge was the surf-whitened sweep of Chatham Bay, the “Sally McGrew” lying, squat and ugly, in the burnished mirror of the sea, wallowing gently to the long Pacific swell.

  As though he sensed that I knew the place, The Rigger turned. “What are you staring at, Johnny?” he asked.

  I hesitated. Then, because I wanted to get it over with, I said, “This is the place. Down below the cliff at the bottom of the scree here.”

  “How do you know?”

  I explained how I had fallen and seen them below on the lower half of the landslide. When I mentioned Sax, he said, “Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The others had stopped now and were staring up at me, listening hungrily to every word.

  “Did you think this might be the place?” And when I nodded, he said, “What about Sax? Did he know what you thought?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mike let out a bellow of rage. “He’ll have got to it before us,” he cried wildly. “By God, if he’s taken it I’ll break his neck—and yours,” he added. Then he turned and plunged down the slope. The Rigger shouted to him. But it was too late. The scree of the landslide shifted under his feet. He turned and began to thrust up toward us again. But every time his feet pressed into the treacherous slope it carried him further down toward the cliff edge. The whites of his eyes stared up at us fearfully. I could hear him panting. The slope began to move. It carried him down with it. He gave one frightful cry and then he was hidden in a cloud of dust.

  We heard the stones clattering down over the cliff. It was a hollow, mocking sound. Then all was still. The dust settled. The sea sparkled in Chatham Bay. The hum of the insect life filled the air. Then right on the lip of the cliff edge, Mike picked himself up and began cautiously working his way along the lip of creeper. The creeper had saved him, just as it had saved me the previous day. It seemed the only thing that prevented the whole hillside from thundering over the edge.

  We turned right and made our way along the top of the scree. The Rigger was leading. Suddenly he stopped. He was staring down the slope. On the lip of the cliff, Mike crouched motionless, staring down below him. Suddenly he turned. “There’s somebody down there,” he cried, and the anger and frustration in his voice was noticeable even at that distance.

  “Who is it?” the Rigger called.

  But Mike had turned and was scrambling along the creeper as quick as a monkey. We went on again then, moving faster. At the edge of the bare scree we clambered down, clinging to long trailers of creeper that looked like tentacles stretched out from the jungle, searching for a hold on the loose stones of the landslide. At the bottom we joined Mike, fighting his way through the fringe of the jungle that spilled down the loose hillside which buttressed the cliff face.

  The green canopy of the undergrowth closed over us, shadow-mottled with sunlight. Then we were in a little clearing halfway down and could see out across the open scar of the landslide. It was like looking down into a huge quarry. The naked rock blazed in the scorching sun. The air quivered with the heat thrown up by the stone. Directly below us was the debris of the lower half of the landslide. To our left was the smooth rock of the cliff face, and above it a great patch of broken hillside spilled down to the edge. Mike had stopped and was pointing, his hand shaking and his lips mouthing inarticulately. He was quivering with the violence of his thoughts. “Look!” he croaked. “Down there at the foot of the cliff.”

  The others crowded round him, staring down into the cauldron of shimmering heat. But for a moment I could not take my eyes off the big Irishman. His face was all twisted up, his cracked lips drawn back in a snarl that showed his ugly teeth and his eyes staring in his charred face. The primitive violence of the man held me in its grip, and I shuddered.

  “They’ve beaten us to it, man.” Taffy’s black eyes were murderous. He had his gun in his hand and his big miner’s chest panted in great gasps, the singed hair plastered to his breast like burnt sacking. “Is it Captain Legett, do you think, or Sax?”

  They glanced at The Rigger, the three of them. He was leaning forward, his fingerless hand gripping a trailing rope of liana. A shaft of sunlight shone on his sweat-streaked face. His blue eyes blazed. His lips were compressed into a thin line. His features seemed to have shrunk, so that they had a hungry, wolflike look. I suddenly realized just how violent and dangerous this big, smiling man was.

  I tore my eyes away from him and glanced at the cook. His eyes, too, were staring out toward the cliff face. His hands were clenched and his chest heaved. And I knew then why he had kept with us when he could so easily have slipped off into the jungle during the nightmare march through the night. He, too, was hungry for gold. The sudden realization of what the thought of treasure could do to a normal, friendly person like the cook shook me more than anything that had happened during the last few hours. Only Gault showed no excitement. His eyes were hooded and he kept glancing nervously at the others. I realized he was scared—scared that he’d never get further than the sight of the treasure. Desire for life was greater in him than the desire for gold.

  “Could the captain have got here before us?” The Welshman repeated his question.

  “No.” The Rigger’s voice was violent.

  “Then who is it, man?”

  “Yeah. Who is it?” Mike turned like an angry bull. “I’m gonna find out.”

  “Wait!” The Rigger’s voice stopped him like a
punch. “There’s no hurry, you fool! The cave won’t disappear. Watch!”

  Mike turned and stared. They all of them stared down to the base of the cliff face. And I, too, turned my head and looked down the stony slope into the shimmering heat of the quarry torn by nature out of the hillside. There was the smooth cliff face that I’d seen the previous day, a sheer wall of white rock. It was quite flat as though it had been cut by a knife. From its foot the lower half of the landslide fell away-in a long scree slope to the jungle below. Halfway along, right at the base of the cliff, loose stone had been dug out in a great pile. The shadow of the hole was black. And as we stared a man’s head appeared. He was pressed close to the cliff, his shoulders arched and his body braced. A piece of the cliff seemed flaking away. In the still air we could just hear his grunts above the low hum of the insect life around us.

  “It is the door to the cave,” Taffy breathed.

  “That’s right.” Mike’s voice was hoarse with the pent-up violence of his excitement.

  “Look, man, it’s opening.”

  “Yeah. It’s opening.”

  A crack had appeared. It widened. I could see it quite clearly now. A small black hole was opening in the base of the cliff. A section of rock was being thrust back.

  Mike swung round on The Rigger. “Jeeze! You ain’t gonna stand here an’ watch some guy get in before us, are you?” His great fist closed on the butt of his gun. “Whoever it is, there’s only one. An’ he ain’t gonna live to get more than a look at the treasure.” He turned with an animal sound that was like the grunt of a wild pig and plunged into the jungle.

  “Mike’s right,” Taffy cried, his voice pitched high. And he, too, turned and went stumbling and slipping down through the jungle.

  The Rigger laughed. It was a violent, crazy sound in the lazy heat. “Sure and you’d think one man could spirit the treasure away from them.” He turned and thrust his big bulk into the undergrowth. “Come on now!” he called harshly. We turned and followed him. Gault went first, then the cook and finally myself.