“It Couldn’t Happen!”
WHEN the inert form of Stokey Watts was at last brought up to the deck of the ship, Hawk knelt beside him and with shaking fingers stripped the helmet and corselet from the nerveless head. Then, his face clouded with horror, his mouth twitching at the corners, Hawk stared. For Stokey Watts was dead, and his watery eyes were fixed and glassy as they looked up into the sky they would never again see, the damp hair curled down over his forehead.
Vick stifled a cry, her hand across her mouth.
Death was not new to Hawk, but Stokey had been his friend, and now— Hawk ripped away the remaining equipment and sought with shaking fingers for some clue on the dead body. He searched again and again, then looked up at the stricken face of Captain Gregory.
“It’s not suffocation, and there isn’t a scratch on him, Greg. He had plenty of air—” Hawk’s voice went on, toneless, uncomprehending. “There’s no reason! I say, there’s no reason for him to die like that, Greg!” He covered the face with a tarpaulin and then stood up. “That’s what the words said, Greg. ‘Death at Twenty Fathoms.’ And it was Stokey that got it. Stokey!”
It was not until then that a slip of paper in a rubber envelope attracted attention, although the note had been lashed to Stokey’s lifeline and must have passed through Hawk’s hands as he pulled in. The phone operator saw it, untied it from the line and handed it to Hawk.
Without knowing what he did, Hawk opened the envelope and took out the note. It was not until he had read a dozen words of the message that he realized what he read.
“Where did this thing come from?” he snapped.
“It was tied to his lifeline,” said the operator.
“Tied to his lifeline!” Hawk was incredulous. “But how could anything— Look, Greg! It says:
Nice, isn’t it? Want that to happen to you? He wasn’t touched. He didn’t know what was wrong. He just knew pain, and then death. You have one alternative, Hawk Ridley, and that is to follow instructions. Otherwise the Stingaree will share the fate of the Ciudad de Oro. We’d take vast pleasure in blowing you to kingdom come. Tie your charts to a buoy secured to the wreck, and then go back to New York. If anything happens to the charts, or if you make any further attempt to recover the gold, your number is up. Do you get it straight?
“Well, for heaven’s sake! The thing isn’t even signed!”
“Good lord!” exclaimed Gregory. “How in the name of the devil could anyone tie that to the middle of a lifeline? And what could happen to kill a diver that way? There’s something phony about this, Hawk. I said so from the first, and I still say so.”
Hawk thrust the letter into the breast pocket of his jeans and then turned to look down at the covered body of Stokey Watts.
“Have the men break out my diving equipment, Greg, and get me some tools. I’m going to bury Stokey in his element.”
“But you’re sick!” cried Vick. “You’re sick! You can’t do that!” Her eyes were distended with horror. “Supposing…supposing that thing that got him! Oh, Hawk, please don’t go down there!”
“He’d have done as much for me,” Hawk said dully. “I’ll dig his grave in the sand and mark it with a coral cross. It’s the least I can do.”
They replaced Stokey’s diving suit and silently fitted the helmet over the round, wind-beaten head for the last time, and when Hawk had dressed, they pulled up the platform and laid Stokey and a small pile of tools upon it.
Hawk’s helmet disappeared beneath the blue water, and from the deck, Vick saw that his eyes were dull and unseeing as they looked up toward the sky through the plate-glass window.
Tense minutes flicked by, while the phone operator, half afraid lest silence greet him at any moment, talked incessantly into the mouthpiece. Vick listened to the drone of the man’s voice and then walked slowly to his seat beside a switchboard.
“Give me that, please,” she said. And with no more than a startled glance in her direction, the man surrendered the instrument to her.
Occasionally she could hear the clink of metal striking rock twenty fathoms down, and she listened, white and drawn, fearful lest the sounds stop. Then she relaxed, and she heard softly spoken words against the background of gurgling water.
From a hundred and twenty feet under the sea, from the realm of white sand and trees dancing weirdly upon a white sand floor, came the ritual for the burial of the dead at sea.
“We therefore commit his body to the deep, looking for the general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in Him shall be changed, and made unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.”
There was a pause, a silence broken only by the rush of air through water and then, “So long, Stokey!”
Perhaps it was the simplicity of the service or the revelation that Hawk Ridley—he of the lean, reckless face and youthful swagger—was capable of such depth of feeling, but Vick Stanton cried, unashamed and openly, upon the deck of the Stingaree, while the telephone slipped unheeded to the steel plates, to be retrieved by the awed sailor who sat at the switchboard.
“It couldn’t have happened!” Vick cried. “It couldn’t have happened! Why, oh, why did they have to do it? All the gold on the floor of the sea couldn’t pay for the death of Stokey!”