The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

      After all that Blanche and he had hoped and planned on, from this job, just one day’s work. What the blazes, indeed?

      He thought of Blanche, mother of the boy now doomed to death. Then his mind nickered round to this drowned boy’s mother and father.

      “They’ll suffer, if this kid don’t come up. Sure they’ll suffer like the flames o’ hell, if I don’t bring him up. Yeah, but what about us?”

      Over him surged the words of the loose-lipped truckman:

      “If you make a good job of it, why, mebbe that five grand might be stretched a bit, too.”

      Five grand, and then some! Five thousand dollars and more, plus his wages for a few days’ work—all of six thousand or better! And for what? Why, for just doing nothing at all. For just seeing nothing, down there where nobody could check up on him. For just finding nothing, bringing up nothing.

      Had ever a man in all this world been left so starkly alone with his own conscience? In all of life, could any possibility exist, for Tim Spurling, of so much money being won by so little effort? Money, money that now meant life itself to his boy, life to little family!

      *****

      Tim felt strangely dizzy and sick. Heart pounding and air pump throbbing hammered his brain with maddening tempo, as he stood there in that green gloom and peered down at the corpse, and tried to think.

      Just a dead body, the body of a very rich man’s son. That was all—cold flesh and bones. And what on earth good, in bringing that up? Oh, yes, of course, it would give back to a father and a mother the thing they longed for; a lifeless thing, but still passionately desired. Without it, of course they’d agonize.

      “But how ’bout us, if our kid dies? How ’bout us, watchin’ our Bill die? How many dead boys is one live boy worth?”

      Tim Spurling seemed to hear words, echoes of his own speech hardly an hour ago:

      “Nix on that stunt. I couldn’t do it. Thanks, a heck of a lot, but nothin’ doin’!”

      And then the truckman:

      “The hell you say! Why not?”

      “Well, it ain’t the way us divers does business, that’s all. What we’re hired to risk our lives for, we allus does the best we can. It ain’t a gyp game, for any diver as is a diver. So thanks, mister, but forget it!”

      Already he was stooping to pick up the body. It would weigh almost nothing. A signal on the cord, and with the millionaire’s son in his arms, Tim Spurling could in less than no time be back up there at the diving float. Already he was reaching for the body.

      But there before him, suddenly he beheld—plain as if reality—the pinched, hollow, and suffering face of his own boy. The terror-stricken and hopeless eyes of his wife. Eyes now all too often red with secret weeping.

      “What a fool I am!” growled the diver, his brain clearing. “This here kid don’t go up, now nor never! I don’t locate him, and no other diver don’t, neither. And that is that!”

      Still stooping, what he picked up was not the body, but a weed-grown rock. Then another, and still another, and many more. Presently the body had vanished under layers of stones which so perfectly masked it that never could any diver locate it, no matter what his skill might be.

      “Six thousand bucks!” thought Tim Spurling, as he straightened up from this macabre task. “I’ll put in at least three days, and collect both ways. Make a good job of it, while I’m at it. And any man as wouldn’t do the same, to save his own boy’s life, he’d be a quitter an’ a coward, on top o’ bein’ a poor damn fool!”

      All of a sudden very weak and trembling, he wanted to regain the upper air. Then after a while he could go down again, could continue the fictitious search. But for now, he must quit a spell.

      Tim twitched the signal rope, felt an upward pull, saw the lake bottom slide down and away. Down, away, with that pile of stones under which lay a secret that only he knew. Only he, in all this world! Light strengthened, pressure steadily diminished. And then quite suddenly he saw the weighted bottom of the ladder. He grappled it, climbed up, emerged monstrous and dripping, his helmet goggling over the edge of the float.

      McTaggart and a couple of others gripped and hoisted him. Up and out he came, while cameras were busy and eager eyes watched from boats and from the float. Sitting down on the edge of the float, he motioned for McTaggart to unscrew his helmet and take it off.

      “Whew!” he breathed, deep-lunged and glad of air not pumped through a rubber hose. “Gimme a drag!”

      “Find anythin’?” Mac eagerly queried.

      “Not yet.”

      Another voice cut in—a trembling voice, a woman’s:

      “But you will? You will?”

      Astonished, Spurling turned his head. He blinked in the sunshine that cut his eyes after the vague obscurity of the depths. Beside the float he saw a motor launch, all brass and varnish, with a uniformed mech­anician at its gleaming engine. In wicker chairs, aft, a man and a woman were sitting—Eccles and his wife.

      “Look a here, mister!” Spurling reproved the millionaire. He felt aggrieved, to have these two hanging round while he was at work. “See here, now. You hadn’t oughta be here. This here ain’t no place for you two!” His clumsy, rubber-gloved hand sketched a crude gesture. “No place, ’tall!”

      “I know it,” the magnate assented, while listeners stretched their ears. Eccles, for all the heat of that July day, was shivering. His body shook as with a palsy. “I know it, but—”

      “I had to come. I had to!” put in his wife. “I couldn’t stay away and wait—”

      Spurling’s lip tightened with acid disapproval. An extraordinary and grotesque figure—with his head, seemingly far too small, projecting up out of that vast suit—he looked at the dead boy’s mother. And what he saw was human agony, raw and bleeding.

      The diver understood. The woman’s sunken eyes and pale lips, her deep-lined face, told the whole story. This story was underscored by her quivering fingers that tightly clutched the arms of the wicker chair.

      “If you only knew,” the mother half-whispered. “If you could only understand what it means to lose an only son!”

      “Reckon I do ma’am,” answered the diver. “Or reckon I will, pretty soon.”

      “Why—how—”

      “Well, I got a kid o’ my own, see? ’Bout the same age as yours was, and he’s dyin’. Arizona’s all that’ll save him. But Arizona ain’t for us. Huh! Fat chance we got o’ that!”

      “Oh!” breathed Mrs. Eccles comprehendingly, while the re­porters pounced on a wonderful human-interest story. “You mean you’ve got a—”

      “Tell me,” the millionaire brusquely cut in. “You haven’t found anything, yet? No sign, no indication?”

      “Nothin’, so fur. Not yet.”

      “But you will? You’re going down again, right away?”

      “Yeah, pretty soon. Quick as I rest up, a little, and get this cold out o’ my bones.”

      “And you’ll find my son?” asked the mother. “You will, won’t you?”

      “Well, gee, I’ll try.”

      “No, no! Promise you’ll find him. Oh, don’t you see, you’ve got to?”

      Tim Spurling began to feel very queer and sick again. Something seemed to have hold of his guts and to be twisting them. He blinked as he looked that woman fair in the eyes. Between the float and the motor launch extended a distance of not more than four feet. Between Tim Spurling, workman, and those two millionaires, stretched infinity. But