SEAWEED.

Auckland Star, 2 September 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

SEAWEED.

(Winning entry By Ruth Park, 129, Symonds Street, Auckland; age 15.) Whitney stared fascinatedly at the spot where he had last seen Lattimer. He was lying face downwards on the utmost point of the rocks, his sunburnt hands tightly clenching the sharp, jagged edge before him. Around him the restless waves broke into smoking ruin on submerged rocks and chuckled in water-worn cracks and crevices. Seagulls -wheeled above him, echoing the mournful cries of their fellows out on the heaving deep, and all the while Whitney stared unseeingly at the water below him. He had taken his chance and he had succeeded. Lattimer had gone to the bottom of the tide-trap among the rocks, and he, Whitney, was alone on the island with the pearls. Lattimer, the rough, domineering sailor from the wrecked Dominic, upon which Whitney had been a passenger! It had been a strange, whimsical fate ■which cast these two incongruous companions on the same island, for Whitney was essentially all inland man, with twenty years of monotonous clerkship behind him. They had lived amicably enough for three months, until Lattimer had found the first pearl. It was then that avarice and greed came uppermost in both their souls, for they had laid dormant in Whitney's character for nearly forty years, and had never been subdued in Lattimer's. So, during six months of ceaseless search they had reaped the harvest which now reposed in its rough sack within Whitney's shirt< Fifteen beauties, oval, round, and tearshaped, fourteen priceless globules of glistening white, and one of pure black; the cause of Lattimer's death and of the covetousness of Whitney.

They had been fishing that morning on the black rocks that stretched in two broad piers from the shore. Lattimer had preceded Whitney by ten minutes or more, and had already baited and thrown out his lines when Whitney began to pick his way carefully among the scattered heaps of dying seaweed and sand-filled shells' that had been thrown up by a recent storm, for between the two stretches of rock the -water was deep and darkly green, with conflicting undertows swirling giddy whirlpools on its surface. He stepped softly along the flat rock, upon whose end Lattimer sat, facing seawards, and quite unaware of hiscoming. Whitney stopped. What was it Lattimer had in his hand, and into which he was peering? The bag of pearls which they had agreed to divide equally! Whitney tiptoed towards the unsuspecting Lattimer. "Mine!" lie heard him mutter. "All mine—every one of the fifteen! Whitney and his 'halving equally'! You're mine, mine!" Rage welled up with Whitney. The double-crossing scoundrel! It did not matter that he also had planned to have the entire fifteen of the pearls, for he forgot everything in his blind anger. Quick as a seagull snatching a fish from the waves, his hand darted over Lattinier's shoulder and seized the little sack. The next instant Lattimer was falling swiftly towards the tumbling green be-low. He vanished with--a strangled cry into the waters, which boiled up from unknown depths. Whitney, who scarcely realised what he had done, thrust the eack inside his shirt and flung himself down on the rock, peering over the edge. Lattimer had come up once, with head and face covered in streaming seaweed, then sank into the eeething depths of the undertow. Whitney rose, touched the pearls jealously, and walked slowly shorewards, his mind in a turmoil. Lattimer was dead, drowned, and Whitney had fifteen pearls. One man against fifteen pearls! The scales had been hopelessly outweighed for Lattimer. Unconsciously he. picked his way among the seaweed, for long brown strands and dripping, bedraggled green heaps of it lay everywhere on the rocks. It was salt-smelling rubbery grass from the sea-floor, from the mud where Lattimer now lay.' That night he counted and played

Salty, like Hie seaweed which now lay like'a shroud over Lattimer. He returned them ono by one to their sack and put them back within his ehirt. Whitney fell asleep that night with the thunder of the surf making music in his earn. A week passed. Every day he climbed the tall tree nearby to scan the horizon for a passing ship, but never a speck marred the heaving blue of the ocean. Along tho fund of the beach luy dying seaweed. Hβ looked at it, a strange foreboding in his soul; for the sea wits calm, had been so for a week, and yet every tide brought up more seaweed. He was beginning to hate the sight of it, for ho already hated the smell of it lying .steaming in the sun. He could not" forget that Lattim.or was lying among the eeaweed at the bottom of the seat That day, Whitney went out on the rocks—why, he did not know. Ho found Lattimer's' fishing lilies, etill tied to a sharp jagged edge, eo he laid an experimental hand on one. It was heavy and seemed to tug, so he hauled it slowly in. A long, waving, dark thing, tangled firmly round the hook came to the surface, and Whitney flung ddwn the line in disgu«?t. Seaweed! A strange desire impelled him to take out the pearls, to see their highlight* in the sunshine. So into a tiny cuplike hollow in the rock, he. poured them, one by one —beautiful, glistening, they spelt fortune and power, murder and theft. "Yes, I won, Lattimer, and you lost," ho said aloud and rose. He walked across the rock so that he might behold the grave of the dead sailor. In bis path lay a twenty-foot length of deep-sea kelp, the colour of new leather; he kicked at it viciously, his foot caught under a broad leaf, and he pitched headlong; he had just time to utter a strangled cry before there closed over Ma head the waters, from which there was 110 escape. One by one, the pearls slowly rolled out of the hollow and down the cracked rock. They disappeared under a wet pile of pale green eeaweed.