The Wailing Octopus

by John Blaine

  It was quiet, except for the regular chuckle of their exhausts, and the light was subdued and even. It was a world without shadows. Still, Rick thought, there was plenty of light for photography. Next time he would bring his camera.

  The watch showed him that over half their allotted time was gone, and he hooted once to Scotty, then reversed course, heading back toward their floats.

  They approached the patch where they had seen the ray and Rick paused suddenly.

  There was an odd shape on the sand near the patch. He flippered over to it and examined it. Scotty joined him. It looked like an oversized mushroom protruding from the sand at an angle.

  Rick unsheathed his knife and poked at it. The sharp tip penetrated for a fraction, of an inch, then stopped. It was either rock or metal, and judging from the shape, it was unlikely that it was rock. He put his knife under it and pried, and the thing moved in the sand.

  Both boys went to work on it, scooping the sand from around it. In a moment they had it clear. It was something like a dumbbell, covered with marine growth where it had been above the sand, but fairly smooth under it.

  Rick took his belt slate and scribbled, “Metal.”

  Scotty nodded. Then both, of them turned to look at the patch of marine life.

  A distant throb, as though of a boat, caught their attention. They looked up, but the surface was invisible.

  It was Tony and Zircon, Rick decided. They probably had returned to the cottage and found the diving equipment missing. They could spot the location where the boys were diving easily enough, first by the floats, then by the bubbles of their exhausts.

  Scotty hooted suddenly, four times. Rick turned quickly in time to see a six-foot shark

  speed past. The tips of the pectoral fins and the second dorsal were darker than the rest of the fish, and Rick identified it as a black-tipped shark. Obviously, the shark was on business of its own, not particularly interested in them. Still, it was curious. The shark was rushing almost straight up.

  Scotty” gripped his arm and pointed. More sharks,Another black tip. And a ten-foot leopard shark!All rushing upward.

  The boys watched tensely, and then out of the dimness above something sped down at them, followed by the sharks. It landed in the clear sand just beyond the marine growth.

  Rick saw a black tip go for it,then the black tip was struck from the side by the big leopard. In. spite of his sudden apprehension, Rick couldn’t help wishing for his camera.

  The sharks rushed again, and the falling object was lifted from the sand by the disturbed water. This time, Rick recognized it. A chicken! It was tied to a length of string from which dangled a lead sinker. The bird was dead, but apparently freshly so. He knew that it was the chicken blood that had brought the sharks-and a giant barracuda! The great fish, a full six feet in length, slashed past the sharks and tore a chunk out of the bird.

  The leopard shark made a fast pass at the barracuda, then turned and snapped at a black tip. Rick gulped. A hole suddenly appeared in the black’s side, as smooth as though scooped out of ice cream. And then the other sharks hit the wounded black tip.

  There were many sharks now, worrying the chicken and the wounded black tip like fierce dogs over scraps of meat. Rick thought, “We’d better get

  Rick turned in time to see a six-foot shark speed past out of here!” He hooted twice at Scotty, the signal to ascend. Scotty motioned to him to retreat. Rick picked up the dumbbell-shaped object. It was heavy, but not too heavy to handle, and he started a slow retreat along the sand.

  The sharks were paying no attention to the boys, but Rick wasn’t at all sure that they wouldn’t, once the supply of chicken and wounded shark were exhausted. His mind raced. Where had the chicken come from? Whoever had tossed it into the water would have known that the blood would bring sharks. It wasn’t a casual toss, either. Not when the chicken had been weighted with a fishing sinker big enough to carry it to the bottom.

  Tony and Zircon would never do such a thing. Besides, they had no chickens.

  Rick and Scotty backed far enough away so that the sharks could no longer be seen.

  Then, heading toward the reef, they started for the surface. Scotty was slightly in the lead, and Rick kept glancing back in case one of the big fish decided to follow. But they reached the surface without incident and broke water about two hundred feet from their

  floats. There was no boat in sight.

  Replacing aqualung tubes with snorkels, they swam on the surface, faces down, alert for sharks. When they reached the floats, Scotty kept watch from the surface while Rick dove to untie the lines.

  As they climbed on the floats and lifted masks,

  Scotty and Rick pointed and yelled “Hey!” simultaneously.

  But they had seen different things. Rick had seen the Water Witch pass through the reef and head for them. Scotty had seen another boat, a big cabin cruiser, tied up at the pier in front of the house occupied by the fancy frogmen!

  Rick turned and looked at the cruiser, then at the house. He was in time to see the front door close. There would have been plenty of time for someone to drop the chicken from the cruiser and then cross the reef and tie up at the dock.

  “I’ll bet that’s where the chicken came from,” Rick said harshly.

  “That’s a bet I won’t take,” Scotty returned. “But you can bet we’ll find out!”

  CHAPTER IX

  Wreck of the “Maiden Hand”

  Tony Briotti examined the metallic object they had brought from the bottom, then took his knife and scraped at it. Under the covering of marine growth, red rust appeared. He looked at Hobart Zircon. “Recognize this,Hobart ?”

  “There’s only one thing I can think of that fits the shape, Tony. Bar shot.”

  “My conclusion exactly.”Tony weighed the thing in his hand. He grinned at the boys.“Adventure-prone, and lucky. Describe the place where you found it.”

  Rick did so, concluding, “The patch didn’t look anything like a ship, though. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “After two centuries, the ship would no longer look like a ship. But this is unquestionably a bar shotfor an ancient cannon. It was used to cut ship’s rigging, and to

  knock down masts, and create other damage of that sort. It’s likely that the pirates, or the Maiden Hand, would have carried bar shot.”

  “I think you have found the ship,” Zircon told them, “and the question about earthquakes was a good one. There was a heavy quake in this region about a year ago. I had occasion to recall it a half hour ago when we found a slight fault at the southern tip of the island that had uncovered an Indian midden.”

  “And a fine one,” Tony added. “You boys can dive for treasure if you want to. I’ve some work of my own to do.”

  “Incidentally,” Scotty reminded Rick, “in the confusion below we forgot to send up a buoy. Hope we can find the place again.”

  “We can.”

  “What confusion?” Zircon asked.

  Rick told him. “A freshly killed chicken was dropped near us. And it must have been bleeding when it hit the water, because we suddenly had a shark convention around us.”

  He pointed to the boat tied at the pier, now far behind them because the Water Witch had been moving. “And we think that was the boat that dropped it.”

  “It was weighted,” Scotty added.

  The scientists looked at each other. Tony grunted. “It makes no sense,Hobart . Why would anyone weight a freshly killed chicken and throw it over the side?”

  “No reason at all,” the big scientist said, “unless he wanted to create mischief below.”

  “But just the act of dropping a chicken wouldn’t ensure harm to divers below,” Tony objected.

  “That’s why I said mischief. Inexperienced divers might panic under such

  circumstances and attract the sharks tothemselves .”

  Rick hazarded a guess. “What if they just wanted to keep people from diving in the area?”

 
; “That might be one way of doing it.” Zircon said thoughtfully. “Are you suggesting that there are others after the Maiden Hand treasure?”

  Scotty spoke up. “How could anyone else find out about the treasure?”

  “It’s possible that there are other references besides the logbook we found,” Tony replied. “But it would be too farfetched to speculate that other treasure hunters had found the location and were diving right at this time.”

  “This might be related to what happened onSt. Thomas ,” Rick ventured.

  Zircon shook his massive head.“Extremely unlikely. Consider.” He ticked off the points on his fingers. “Who knew we were coming to Clipper Cay?Ernst, Steve, and his Navy friend. We did not mention it to the people from whom we bought supplies, nor did we discuss it in the presence of others. We were not followed here. No, Rick, I think that we cannotbkme this incident on the ones inSt. Thomas .”

  “Then it was a dangerous practical joke,” Tony concluded. “Unless there was some legitimate reason for throwing the chicken over that we don’t know about.”

  Zircon steered the Water Witch through the reef entrance, and the Spindrifters tied up at the dock. Rick and Scotty inspected the compressor and then measured the amount of air in the tanks. They hooked the tanks up, refilled the gas tank of the compressor engine, and left the tanks to fill while they went to the cottage.

  Rick and Zircon prepared dinner while Tony and Scotty refilled the gasoline lanterns that provided light, and generally straightened up the cottage.

  Rick called, “Tony, tell us more about this Indian stuff you found.”

  Scotty added, “And what’s a midden, anyway?”

  Tony leaned on his broom. “A midden is a polite name for a refuse heap. Before the days of rubbish collection, people used to dump their trash in the yard. The Indians did, and thereby provided archaeologists with an important source of information.

  Apparently a tribe lived on this island, close to the southern tip. It’s likely that they simply dumped their rubbish into the water. Well, the earthquakeHobart spoke of shifted the old coral formations at the southern tip slightly and lifted a few square yards out of the water.”

  He went to the front porch and brought back a curved piece of material, encrusted with coral. “This used to be a pottery bowl, probablyTaino in origin. I’ll probably find many like it.”

  It didn’t look like much of a find to Rick, but he knew that Tony’s trained eyes could

  see many things that he couldn’t. “You’ll dive with us, though, won’t you?” he asked.

  “Of course.But you and Scotty are the real enthusiasts, and the diving I do will use up air that you properly should be using. I’ll go down with you in the morning, because I want a look at the wreck. But after that I think Hobart and I can amuse ourselves on the midden while you and Scotty hunt treasure. Of course we’ll be ready to help if you need us.”

  A few minutes before six, Rick turned on his portable all-wave radio to the channel Steve had given him, but the air was silent. He waited for ten minutes,then snapped it off again. Apparently Steve had no message for them.

  Dinner consisted of fresh snapper and barracuda steaks served with coconut sauce for which Zircon had learned the recipe during his tours of the Pacific. It was delicious, and Rick wondered about the fussiness of people who refuse to eat barracuda simply because the fish is a noted predator. However, he knew that people are served barracuda every day under less offensive names.

  After dinner they sat over coffee on the porch and watched the sun sink beyond the reef.

  It was like a Pacific sunset-colorful and somehow soothing.

  The boys walked to the pier, checked their tanks, and found them fully charged. Then, at Scotty’s suggestion, they locked tanks and compressor in the cabin of the Water Witch.

  Fresh-water rinses for the remainder of their equipment followed, and they carried the equipment into the house.

  Zircon was already engrossed in a book, while Tony was engaged in scraping the pottery shard he had found. The boys watched him for a few minutes,then Scotty suggested, “How about a walk?”

  “Okay.” There was an idea stirring in the back of Rick’s head. As they walked down to the beach he said, “We ought to take a look at the folks who own that boat.”

  And Scotty said in the same breath, “Let’s visit the fancy frogmen.”

  They grinned at each other, amused at how much alike their thought processes were.

  “We’d better approach from the back,” Scotty suggested.

  Rick agreed. “Suppose we cross to the eastern shore,then walk up until we’re in sight of the house. It’s close to the northern tip, anyway.”

  It was almost fully dark now, and no lights appeared in the houses south of them. As they watched, lights showed far up the beach where the fancy frogmen lived. But there were no other lights anywhere on the island.

  “Just two houses occupied,” Rick said.

  “We’ll probably have more neighbors during the week end,” Scotty answered. “The people in the house south of us must have left, but they may be back. Come on.”

  They made their way through the palm grove, watching fruit bats whirl against the darkening sky. There was a slight breeze, just enough to make the palms whisper. It reminded Rick of Hawaii.

  The eastern shore was rough. The reef was much closer here, and long swells that had come all the way across theAtlantic sounded like subdued thunder as they broke. It was dark now, and only the white of the breaking water could be seen.

  They walked up the eastern shore until the lights of the frogmen’s house were directly opposite, then turned toward it, moving with caution.

  “Take it easy,” Rick whispered. “They may be outside.”

  As they drew closer they could see that the lights were in the front rooms of the house.

  The back was dark, except for light that came through open inner doors.

  “Wait.” Scotty whispered. “I’ll see if they’re out front.”

  Rick sat down to wait as Scotty vanished. Few could equal his pal when it came to moving silently and invisibly.

  In a surprisingly short time Scotty reappeared. “No one out front,” he reported.

  “They’re all in the living room.”

  Rick rose, and together they walked swiftly and silently to the rear of the house. The door of the room in which the diving gear was stowed opened into the living room.

  Perhaps they could see in there.

  A card game was in progress by the light of a kerosene lamp. Rick studied the face of a heavy-set, dark-haired man who sat facing him. The man wore a T shirt that displayed the heavy muscles of arms and chest. His face was square-jawed and powerful, the eyes set deep under bushy eyebrows. His hair was short and curly, sprinkled with gray. He looked like one used to command. Rick’s quick imagination pictured him on the

  quarterdeck of a slaver, ruling his cutthroat crew with iron fists.

  The others were not visible through the door. The boys moved silently to the side of the house and drew back so they could look through the living-room window. The second man was visible now. He was young, perhaps in his twenties, and he had an unruly shock of blond hair. Once he might have been good-looking, but a scar crossed a nose that had been badly broken.

  The third man sat with his back to them. Rick touched Scotty’s sleeve and they went around the house via the back. The view was blocked by an open door.

  Scotty put his lips close to Rick’s ear.“The front.”

  Rick led the way, moving carefully because light spilled out of the front windows and the open front door. They reached a vantage point and looked in. The third man was clearly visible. The boys reached for each other at the same moment. The third man was Steve’s shadow!

  Morning found the Water Witch anchored on the reef close to the place where the boys had found the bar shot. There was no sign of activity at the fancy frogmen’s house, and the boat was tied up as it had been the previous e
vening. Apparently they were late sleepers.

  The Spindrifters tossed coins to see who would make the first dive, and the lot fell to Rick and Tony. They donned their equipment,then Rick picked up a spear gun while Tony selected a wrecking bar from his equipment.

  It took ten minutes of their precious fifteen to find the wreck again. This time, Rick took the precaution of tying a float to a projection and unwinding line while the float rose to the surface.

  Tony started at one end of the mass of marine growth and inserted his wrecking bar.

  Rick joined him in heaving, and a cloud of dust and fish eggs rose to envelop them. It took a moment or two for the water to clear enough so they could see, then Tony hooted his triumph. The pull had exposed rotted timbers. This had to be a ship! But was it the Maiden Hand?

  Rick wondered if they would ever be sure. Yet, he felt that it was, even though he realized that the feeling grew as much out of optimism and hope as anything else. Still, it was unlikely that another ship would be wrecked at this same depth.

  Tony wrote on his slate, “Morundrsandthn can see, likely.”

  Rick nodded. The shifting sands had undoubtedly covered, exposed, and re-covered the wreck dozens of times in the years it had lain here. He looked at his watch,then reluctantly gave Tony the signal to surface. Their time was up.

  On the Water Witch, Tony said, “It’s a ship all right. And sinceits on the western reef at twenty fathoms, I’d say that it’s very likely the one we want.”

  “Wonder how Captain Campion pegged the depth so accurately?” Scotty inquired.

  Zircon had a possible answer. “Let’s assume the pirates knew he was carrying the golden statue. It would have been logical for them to sound, just to see if there was any possibility of recovering the treasure from the wreck. Since they kept Campion for ransom, he would have heard the depth mentioned.”

  It seemed reasonable, and it was as good an answer as any, since there was no hope of knowing whether it was right or wrong.