Gustave Aimard
The Treasure of Pearls: A Romance of Adventures in California

CHAPTER XIII.
INTERVENTION

The Burlonilla proved herself commendably swift. Had she been even a faster sailer, captain Gladsden would have never dreamt of going out to sea with a view of eluding anyone curious about the movements of the eccentric young Englishman, after the disappearance of Ignacio being reported to him. Search high and low, not a trace of the rogue. Spite of the sharks at Guaymas, capitán don Jorge was so convinced that the lieutenant of bandoleros was inevitably fated to adorn the gallows, that he believed the rogue had reached land, or, as the vice-consul could have given him a pointer, been taken into the scow of his famous colleagues.

Without being aware that the steamer was at the command of those who could be accounted his enemies, and would be sent in pursuit, or, rather better to say, since Ignacio was the pilot, would strive to anticipate him, the captain made all haste for the spot indicated on Pepillo's plans.

Since Ignacio had but a vague surmise to go upon, the Burlonilla passed Point St. Miguel without anything hostile arising, and soon cast anchor at the second of the islets, in a chain which were named after the knots in the rope girdle of St. Francis. But the seafarers, men supremely practical, who do not fetch their similes from afar, had also preferred to take the protuberances for a likeness to the knots in a logline, call them, Las Señales de la Cordonera de San Francisco. The good mission priests might protest, but the laws of the Medes and Persians are easily effaceable as compared with a name down on a sea chart.

Between the mainland, where a dreary haze hinted of the smoke of sleeping volcanoes in the rocky ridge of the peninsula of old California, and the string of isles, the brigantine was made secure by stem and stern.

The mainland was rugged, and apparently admirably abundant with vegetation.

There were giant palmettos tossing their feathery tops to every cat's-paw, in isolated clumps, among a verdant screen of varied trees.

Alas, for the trickiness of Dame Nature. That luxuriance was superficial, the verdancy that of worthless shrubs, cactus, and prickly pear, briar, vine and beach, plum, thorn apple and Dead Sea fruit. Behind that illusive foliage, sand, lava, stones, dust, formed the melancholy waste in which the scanty, wild creatures live in perpetual madness, induced by chronic thirst. Without irrigation, Lower California is an Arabia Petrae.

But as Gladsden had no intention to settle, he was content with the alluring, if deceptive, face of the country.

The first real annoyance was to find a small colony of Indian mongrels, painfully carrying on the re-raking up of the shells of the abandoned pearl fishery grounds. Their huts were picturesquely perched on rocks, the leafy roofs ornamented with gallinasos, fowls, more than half wild, which indolently hunted for food in the natural thatch of palm and brush. These born pearl fishers had been there so long, that they had laid out little gardens for ground and bush, fruit and vegetables, defended by live cactus. Above patches of sugarcane glowed the golden globes of orange and citron, amid deep green leaves.

As don Jorge Federico de Gladsden had come, not to scrape oyster shells, but to haul up a mass of pearls in a submerged box without desiring prying eyes to witness the operation, he allowed Benito to get the observers out of the way by simply hiring the whole settlement to go fishing at another point of the broken reef. From the brigantine they could be seen, without their being able to watch the peculiar fishing in which her crew were about to engage.

Fishing for pearls is a much more dangerous and difficult operation than is generally supposed.

Each of the several piraguas, or pirogues, or dugout canoes, as you please, had two men, stripped for diving, save an apology for bathing drawers, girded on by a rope. This retains to the left side a leather sheath for a heavy knife, not less than eighteen inches long and three fingers wide, sharp as a razor, intended to battle with the sharks and stripe backs, pez manta, a kind of galvanic ray of which the mere contact paralyses the victim.

The worst kind of shark, the tintorera, that is to say, "the dyer," promenades the Pacific where human beings congregate, and comes up the Gulf. One of the headlands on the east coast is named after this terror of the pearl divers. The tintorera owes its cognomen to a singular peculiarity, which reveals his presence providentially to afar off. Pores around his muzzle exude a luminous, gluey matter, which spreads over the entire body and gives him a glowworm like effulgence. Over and above this, the animal is next to blind, and consequently cannot go by sight alone to any point desirable. While, too, other sharks, to seize their prey, simply turn over on their sides, señor el Tintorera has to roll belly up completely.

When there are any such squaloid around the fishing place, no day passes without there being "knots to untie," between the divers and the tintoreras, as well as the pez mantas, and, almost always, the men only cut clear after horrible struggles.

When the diver takes his "header," his fellow paddles the skiff forward so as to accompany the plunger's diagonal immersion, whilst his rise is, on the contrary, vertical. This is done to pick up the swimmer at the very identical instant of his reaching the surface, his left arm laden with oysters and his lungs eager to catch air. Then he climbs in, takes the paddle, and manages similarly whilst his mate does the diving.

Good divers go very deep, the most famous can touch bottom at twelve and even fifteen fathoms, and can stay under for seven or nine minutes, but these are rare, the majority not surpassing four and five minutes, which is very pretty. The mated divers keep on by turns until they have brought up the requisite quantity of oysters. Their gains are miserable, and those whom captain Gladsden engaged were delighted to get a dollar a dozen. Many a shell has to be opened before any pearls are found; ten or twelve per cent is a good proportion for the enriched ones, and then again, many pearls are far from valuable. The basis of the estimation is the orient, as much as to say the lustre of the concentric layers, the "water," the roundness, and the size. Those worth a couple of thousand dollars are found on the South American coast, and still more seldom in "the Sea of Cortes," where we now are.

Whilst the hired Indians were engaged at this submarine toil, Benito and the two red men, old acquaintances of his, who would not have engaged themselves to another master, were searching the water at the side of the brigantine first, and latter, farther and farther away, accompanied by the yawl, two men pulling so that the two red men could rest calmly till they relieved the Mexican at the watery work.

For a time there was a growing belief that Ignacio's brother had lied, or that the chest had been burst by the waters churned up by the temporal, as is named the terrible wind, the West Coast counterpart for "the Norther" of Texas, or, at the best, moved it away into deep water. But Benito and his copper acolytes were expert in judging the aquatic "signs," and soon pronounced that the bluish tint that denoted a pearl oyster bed, showed a bright bar from a break in its continuity. The chest had dragged, but was not lost. Within an hour, all three divers being down at once, the old Indian came up and uttered a joyous shout on expelling his breath. He had a fragment of tarry rope. Next, Benito struck the trail, and came up crying, as soon as he could speak, that he had discovered the chest, the buoys had been eaten away by marine creatures on the tooth of time, and the treasure coffer had sunk, crushing into an oyster bed. The wounded oysters had exuded their pearly fluid and coated the strange object beautifully, and the shellfish had settled on it, but there it was in its lustrous and lovely mantle.

The yawl returned to the brigantine with this good news. It was coming on dark, so that nothing could be done till morning, but make ready a drag and hauling and lifting tackle, the hooks of which the chief diver and his aides undertook to attach, as confidently as others would work on dry land in open air.

Doña Dolores, whom, as a young bride, her husband had allowed to indulge in all her caprices – and heaven knows a Mexican girl, liberated by wedlock, so to say, paradoxically, has an infinity of tastes to gratify – had indulged in too much sweetmeat to have been a good sailor. As a consequence she was glad of the suggestion of Gladsden that, during the anchorage, she should remain on shore in the best hut of the little settlement. With the things landed from the Burlonilla the haquel (little hut) was made tolerable lodgings – a relief to the confinement of the brigantine's cabin.

The night was lovely, after a glorious sunset, when the reflections of the sublime play of orange and vermilion suggested why the early navigators were led to call those upper waters of the Gulf the Red Sea (Mar Rojo), rather than because the united streams of the Gila and Colorado pours, dyed with iron and copper, into the clearer blue.

In the deep, deep sky the stars glittered like diamonds of more than mortal polish. There was a mingling of air off the peninsula fragrant with wild flowers, of air off the Gulf, of tempered briny billows bumping the rocks of Cape St. Lucas, and of hot, dry breath from the mainland, rich with a honey like sweetness that cloyed. All was still, all was lonely, and the sole cry, at long intervals, was that of the lean coyote, stealing over the sands and mingling his starlight shadow with those of the giant cacti, shaped like colossal men brandishing maces and clubs, as he curiously regarded the brigantine. If a slight breeze ran along the shore it almost musically clattered the oysters clustered on rushes and mangroves, standing part submerged. Behind them the mesquite and acacia, and back of all the sparse woods on the rising slope: beyond that peaks well apart.

Once in the night watch the lookout reported a red fire gleam southwards like a fallen star quenching itself in the Gulf, and twice smoke was espied in the same quarter.

They knew it not, but it was Matasiete, after a search of San Luis Gonzales Bay by daytime, pushing the steamer into the shoals around the Islands of San Luis and Cantador. The double incentives of revenge and greed made the amphibious rascal excessively daring.

In the morning, therefore, Gladsden coming on deck early to have a tub in the brackish water drawn for his ultra-English custom, himself beheld the chaste Susana, full steam on, steering for the knots of the log line of St. Francis, and, logically, for himself.

It would have been hard to lose the prize just when he had verified its existence, as well as one may believe in a pig – we mean a pearl in a poke.

The Burlonilla floated two guns and a swivel, and no deficiency of small arms. The steamer had four ports, and canvas covered objects, one at bow and one at stern, were no doubt the complement of her armament. She came down to within two cables' length of the anchorage of the goleta, blowing off steam noisily, not to say threateningly, and there let her both bower chains run out. A kedge and hawser, let from the stern, enabled her numerous crew to moor her so that her broadside overawed the little brigantine. Before this manoeuvre, Gladsden was fain to believe it was only one of the smugglers which often run up the Gulf and await the result of the negotiation of the consignees and the port officers before returning to Guaymas or elsewhere, and discharging a cargo on which, thus, the Exchequer of Mexico is neatly defrauded and the public deficit is kept from lessening.

With his glass captain Gladsden had recognised as the officer on the steamer deck none other than the double traitor Ignacio. It needed nothing more to understand that the newcomer would stick at nothing on this desolate coast where the ship duel would have no seconds or interferers.

He was ordering Mr. Holdfast, after having pointed out the Mexican to him, to hurry all hands over breakfast with a little intimation that some of them would dine in paradise if they did not beat off the unwelcome visitor.

Suddenly the old Indian tutor and friend of Benito pointed shoreward. The canoe of the pearl diver was putting off with him and doña Dolores. Instantly, being a little nearer, and seeing the same sight, there was a bustle on the quarterdeck of the Susana, and there appeared in gorgeous array, even eclipsing that of the Chilian representative in which he had last been admired, the celebrated don Aníbal Cristobal de Luna.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE HAUL OF MILLIONS

Soon a cutter was lowered, in which the Mexican got, with the radiant Ignacio as his coxswain, and four oarsmen, while the moment it started in pursuit, or as matters stood then, for the encounter of Benito's little piragua, doña Maria Josefa de Miranda hoisted herself up the stairs and lumbered to the side of the steamer to gloat over the proceeding.

Gladsden saw that, though he had a boat got ready, the canoe must be met before he could intervene, to say nothing of the probability of a volley from the bow of the Casta Susana checking his attempt in mid career. If, besides, the pearl diver ran himself ashore, encumbered with the young lady, he was almost sure to fall among the mesquite brush under the pistols of the salteador and his lieutenant.

It was no question till the young Mexican and his wife were out of peril, of attacking the formidable steamer.

Benito's red ally, who had whispered to his grandson and drawn a nod of comprehension from the latter, had stripped himself, as did the youth, for diving. All other eves were on the chase. They slipped over the low board unnoticed, opposite the Casta Susana, and as silently took to the water and swam away. It looked as if they deemed the impending combat hopeless, and, like the rat, quitted the surely defeated ship.

In the meantime, poor Benito, recognising with whom he had to deal, was plying the paddle manfully, whilst Dolores, falling on her knees in the canoe, set ardently to praying, her hands clasped, and her eyes on the profound sky. All at once, without giving a warning to the girl, so that she was shaken in her devotions, Benito turned the pirogue somewhat, evaded the Susamalis boat, and went straight to a little rocky islet of some height, well covered with rushes and other vegetation. It would mask him from the Casta Susana's crew, though leaving that vessel between him and his friends. Possibly, he had no other aim than to deposit Dolores thereon, and stand in defence of her against all comers.

The Mexicans began to cheer their captain, whose boat, clumsily turned, resumed the hunt.

Very little could be seen now of the chase from the low-lying goleta, and though Gladsden recklessly climbed up the rigging to get a view over the thronged deck of the steamer, soon the piragua and the cutter were veiled by the islet from all the spectators, friends and foes.

"Every man to the boats!" cried the Englishman. "Arm to the teeth, and, cook, all the matches and tar; we'll board that beast of a smoky tub," appealing to the seamen's hatred of a steamer to fire their energy, "take her or leave her a prey to the flames! Every man, active and idlers, away!"

There was, indeed, a very fair prospect of the Casta Susana being taken by surprise, so enwrapt was the attention of all the people of the Mexican, taking the cue of doña Maria Josefa, with interest and anxiety.

But the coup de main never came off. Halfway to the target, Gladsden was startled to see her, previously riding, doubly secured, so stiffly, nod, and begin to rock, then cant at such an incline whilst settling down slowly, as to cause the Mexicans to catch hold of every near object.

A great outcry arose.

It was repeated with anguish, as the careering continued as if a giant hand was rolling her over. Then the black faces of the stokers and engineer were seen as they came climbing up on deck to add themselves to the no less terrified crew. The steamer's deck was at a slope of forty-five, everybody clinging to the uppermost gunwale, save the unlucky ones who had rolled to the down scuppers, in among the rubbish which a Mexican captain allows to encumber his upper planks. The swaying cannon above threatened to break loose and crush these struggling wretches to marmalade, whilst their vis-à-vis, bursting the port lids, ran out to the carriages and kissed the agitated water. Poor Maria Josefa, grasping a sailor round the body whilst he hung on the taut guy of the reeling smoke pipe, hovered over the knot of writhing, fighting men trying to get a footing on a surface every moment changing its centre of gravity.

At that direful instant the boat of Gladsden was slightly pulled down on the opposite side to the steamer, and two dark heads succeeded two pair of red arms, abruptly seizing the gunwale by chin and hands. In the mouths of both were the formidable navajas, "gapped" by recent rough usage and pointless.

"You, Diego? And young Diego?" cried the captain, assisting them on board.

"Yes; you see um steamer go down, and you see um pirates go up pretty soon dam quick! Old Diego and young Diego play swordfish – we scuttle the steamer, see?"

In fact an ominous hissing seemed to indicate that the water rising within the steamer, well on her side now, was menacing a blow up of the boilers. The engineer and his mate fully foresaw this, and were scrambling into a boat, jammed of its fall in the blocks.

"Heaven guard us!" was the shout on the ill-fated steamer. Some forty men were seen preparing to launch the boats, or even leap into the water, when a louder scream, though from one pair of lungs, was audible over the clamour. Doña Maria Josefa, with the sailor on whom she would not relax her grasp, had rolled like a ball across the perpendicular decks, bounded over the bulwarks, now washed by the water, and splashed out of sight.

As if her plunge had been arranged for the eliciting of a salute, pistol shots from the rock islet announced that the pirates and Benito were at firing range.

There was chaos.

The hissing steam, the splitting vessel, the straining yards and masts, the knocking about of everything loose within the half-flooded hull, the exclamations of the men in the water, some of whom mounted on the drift, shouted out "shark!" no pen can do justice to, and to the critical situation which doña Maria was the most prominent object, the centre, the feminine hub of a wheel of frantic men.

The Englishman took the only course, however risky, towards desperadoes who might not appreciate humanity. He rowed to the spot, reached the centre, and after nearly capsizing the boat, dragged the woman safe to the stern sheets. The heavy mass lay there, inert as a stranded porpoise.

Shrieks, and the disappearance of men in the water, of whom no further traces were yielded up but the ruddy bubbles which marked a shark's wake, incited the Burlonilla's crew to greater speed in their rescue. But they would have been swamped by the concourse of frightened men, whom not even the presentation of a cutlass or loaded pistol kept off; luckily the steamer had finished her going down, having attained the level which was her altered draught, while the compressed air buoyed her. The Mexicans, seeing her deck become almost level, climbed upon her in dread of the tintorera. Gladsden left these to count their missing, whilst he conveyed his cargo, as prisoners, to his vessel, where they were secured. He had the swivel trained for precaution on the unfortunate Casta Susana, smokeless, fireless, waterlogged, and retraced his course with a circuit to avoid the disabled foes, so as to bear the too long delayed succour to his young friends.

Benito had run the canoe up a little cleft in the rocks, shoaled her on a stretch of sand, taken out Dolores and placed her in a grotto. Before her he rolled a stone, as a breakwater, gave her his revolver, and stood on guard only with the pearl diver's knife, which, however, he well knew how to swing and thrust, as well as cast – a siring enabling this latter trick to be executed without the knife being lost.

Urged madly on by Matasiete, the noise on the other side of the islet on his ship puzzling him, and giving him an earnest desire to wipe out the present vexation and return to his post, the boat stove itself on the rock. The water was not deep, the men could leap from stone to stone or wade. The waders, two in number, trod on a stingray or an electric fish, for they were heard to groan and seen to fall palsied in their tracks.

The rest confronted Benito. He drew their fire, expressly to prevent a shot being directed at his wife, and then met their charge in a mass. As the mob enveloped him, Dolores fired the revolver twice, more at random than with careful aim. One shot told, for a seaman left the struggle to go on of itself, whilst he reeled aloof, and tumbled off the rock into the water. Two more Benito gave a quantum of steel to Ignacio and his commander were left alone to quell the dangerous young Mexican. So far they had not been able to use their firearms without the hazard of injuring their own. They drew off to fire with deliberation, when the young wife, whose head had cleared after her first shot, and who was made a heroine by seeing that the life of her beloved perhaps rested on the true flight of the little globes of lead in the revolver, let fly at Ignacio, whose backbone was broken by the two shots. As he fell in a heap, the salteador chief, aghast at being so quickly placed solitary before his foeman, wheeled round and fired at the smoke oozing out of the young woman's cave. She screamed, for a fragment of stone, cut off by the bullet, had fallen on her neck, and she believed she was killed, supporting the delusion by swooning away. Receiving no reply, therefore, to his heartrending call, Benito flew at the murderer with so awful a countenance and so menacing a flourish of the blood-smeared knife, that Matasiete did not pause to try to raise his name to Mata-ocho, "the slayer of eight." He backed, and then plunged into the bush.

"¡Hola, cobarde!" cried Benito, but the other made no reply.

There was a crashing of the bush wood, a splash, and all was silence. The young Mexican heard his name behind him in a faint voice, and renouncing vengeance at the appeal of love, went quickly to his wife. Dame Dolores required nothing but his presence as a proof of his safety to be recovered of her fright.

After making certain that the assailants were incapable of mischief, the two who had been stunned by the fish surrendering with as much alacrity as their confused senses permitted, the couple had the satisfaction of being hailed from the boat of Gladsden.

It is regrettable to say that the latter, in his concentration of thoughts upon the rescue of his friends, was deaf to his oarsmen beguiling the time as they shot by the wreck, by supplying the words to the notes of the key bugle in the hands of their shipkeeper. He was playing a song popular at the period of the outbreak of the Gold Fever in California, of which the chorus runs someway thus – applicably, the singers fancied, to the situation:

"Oh, oh, Susannah! don't you cry for me. I'm going to Califomy with my washbowl on my knee."

The young couple were gaily taken off the islet, though the two Mexicans were left there to regain their clearness of wits, whilst a prolonged search was made all around it for the lost leader. The islet did not contain him, there was little likelihood that he had gained the mainland, though a sanguinary streak gave reason to the supposition that he had at least essayed to do so. No doubt of it, he had been devoured by a tintorera, unscrupulous about entombing the pretended scion of three of the great conquerors of Spanish America. It must be confessed that this tragic end caused no chagrin to the crew and extra force of Guaymas riffraff who acted as marines on board the Casta Susana. They blamed him for the whole of the disaster, and it was a good thing for his consort in the expedition, doña Maria Josefa de Miranda, that she was remote from the crew, exceedingly spiteful since they had escaped a watery or a shagreen bound grave.

That lady had been completely changed in character by her bath in the Gulf, a magic wrought by Pacific water which may recommend it in the future to the lovers of peaceful married life vexed by an irritating aunt. She showed herself quite kind towards the pair, and blamed the late don Aníbal for all her persecution.

Ignacio and his master having kept to themselves and carried away with them the secret lure which had decoyed the Casta Susana to lay her ribs on the knots of the logline reef, the Mexicans displayed no desire to linger. They filled their boats with provisions, loaded a raft to be towed with other articles, and, the weather being fine, started off to Whale Channel, intending to cross and coast along till picked up. The peninsula was too sterile to afford so large a party any hope of successful land marches to reach inhabitants. To have done with them: they had to cut the raft adrift off Tiburón, and, parting company, the three boats separately reached the port whence they sailed – having had to live on tortoise and even cayman —en route.

Long before their arrival, Gladsden's vessel had transported Dolores, her husband, and their aunt, fully reconciled, to Guaymas, where – as their marriage had been so informally and unceremoniously performed by a friendly priest – Father Serafino – they received the grand nuptial benediction in the presence of a numerous assembly of the best society, among whom Captain Gladsden had the honour of signing his name as witness. It is needless to say that don Stefano Garcia, in considerable trepidation – walking like a cat on hot cinders, as the proverb goes – did not attend the ceremony.

Before the wrecked men of the Casta Susana came to port the treasure of pearls had been divided. There were other valuable stones, notably emeralds, but the pearls were worthy all of Pepillo's eulogy; there were perfect ones for shape and other qualities – the pears, the globes, the flatcrown (tympani, or kettledrum shaped, as the ancient said), in short, the choicest specimens imaginable of "the Pinnic stone."

Don Benito agreed to maintain the family of Pepillo and a sweetheart of Ignacio out of his half share, amounting, as valued by Mr. Lyons (who had his racial genius for estimating precious stones), to £150,000, well overrunning Pepillo's rough casting up. Both he and Gladsden placed a large sum in the bishop's hands for almsgiving; they contributed towards the breakwater and so on, and then separated, each in his own way to enjoy the filibuster's hoard, originally accumulated to revolutionise Lower California as a preliminary to annexing it to the United States.

Captain Gladsden sailed to San Francisco, where he disposed of the Little Joker, and of some of the pearls, and travelled overland to take steamship for England.

Don Benito accompanied his wife back to her paternal estate, which was to be their happy home.