"What's that for?" asked Conkling.
"That's to help get my body out, if the life-line breaks," said the diver.
"Go on and do your work," replied Conkling, who had little use for sentiment.
It happened exactly as the diver feared. He was drawn into the suction of the hole, and when they tried to pull him up both hose and life-line parted, and the man was drowned, but they managed to rescue his body with the heavy line, just as he had planned.
Then Conkling called for another diver, but not a man responded. They said they weren't that kind of fools.
"All right," said the captain, in his businesslike way; "then I'll go down myself and stop that hole." And he called the men to dress him.
At this time Captain Conkling was seventy-five years old, and had retired long since from active diving. But he was as strong as a horse still, and no man had ever questioned his courage.
In vain they tried to dissuade him. "I'll stop that hole," said he, "and I don't want any extra rope, either."
He kept his word. He went down, and he stopped the hole, but it was with his dead body, and to-day somewhere in the Holyoke Dam lie the bones of brave old Captain Conkling, incased in full diving-dress, helmet and hose and life-line, buried in that mass of masonry. No man ever dared go down after his body.
IV
WHEREIN WE MEET SHARKS, ALLIGATORS, AND A VERY TOUGH PROBLEM IN WRECKING
TIMMANS, whom I used to call the student diver, because of his keen observation and capacity for wonder, leaned against the step-ladder that reached down from hatch to cabin on the Dunderberg, and remarked, while the others listened: "I did a queer job of diving once down into the hold of a steamship, a National liner, that lay in her dock, blazing with electric lights, and dry as a bone. Just the same, I needed my suit when I got down into her – in fact, I wouldn't have lasted there very long without air from the pump."
"Some queer cargo?" suggested Atkinson.
"That's it. She was loaded with caustic soda, or whatever they make bleaching-powder of – barrels and barrels of it, with the heads broke in after a storm, and it wasn't good stuff to breathe, I can tell you. First they set men shoveling it out, with sponges in their mouths, against the dust and gases, but one man coughed so hard he tore something in his lungs or head and died. Then they sent for a diver – that was me – and I worked hours down there hoisting and shoveling, like I was at the bottom of the bay, only there was no water to carry the weight. Say, but wasn't that suit heavy, and when I looked out through my helmet-glasses it seemed as if I was digging through a snow-field, with such a terrible dazzle it made my eyes ache to look at it."
"I suppose you don't usually see much under water?" said I.
"Depends on what water it is," answered Timmans.
"All rivers around New York are black as ink twenty feet down," remarked Atkinson.
"I know they are," said Timmans, "but I've seen different rivers. When I was diving off the Kennebec's mouth, five miles southeast of the Seguin light (we were getting up the wreck of the Mary Lee), then, gentlemen, I looked through as beautiful clear water as you could find in a drug-store filter. Why, it reminded me of the West Indies. I could see plainly for, well, certainly seventy-five feet over swaying kelp-weed, eight feet high, with blood-red leaves as big as a barrel, all dotted over with black spots. There were acres and acres of it, swarming with rock-crabs and lobsters and all kinds of fish."
"Any sharks?" said I.
Hansen and Atkinson smiled, for this is a question always put to divers, who usually have to admit that they never even saw a shark. Not so Timmans.
"I had an experience with a shark," he answered gravely, "but it wasn't up in Maine. It was while we were trying to save a three-thousand-ton steamer of the Hamburg-American Packet Company, wrecked on a bar in the Magdalena River, United States of Colombia. I'd been working for days patching her keel, hung on a swinging shelf we'd lowered along her side, and every time I went down I saw swarms of red snappers and butterfish under my shelf, darting after the refuse I'd scrape off her plates; and there were big jewfish, too, and I used to harpoon 'em for the men to eat. In-fact, I about kept our crew supplied with fresh fish that way. Well, on one particular day I noticed a sudden shadow against the light, and there was a shark sure enough; not such an enormous one, but twelve feet long anyhow – big enough to make me uneasy. He swam slowly around me, and then kept perfectly still, looking straight at me with his little wicked eyes. I didn't know what minute he might make a rush, so I caught up a hammer I was working with – it was my only weapon – and struck it against the steamer's iron side as hard as I could. You know a blow like that sounds louder under water than it does in the air, and it frightened the shark so he went off like a flash."
"Perhaps he wasn't hungry," laughed one of the crew.
"Not hungry? I'll tell you how hungry those sharks were. They'd swallow big chunks of pork, sir, nailed and wired to barrel heads, as fast as we could chuck 'em overboard; swallow nails, wire, barrel heads, and all, and then we'd haul 'em in by ropes, that did for fish-lines, only it took twenty or thirty men to do the hauling. And there were plenty of sharks 'round, only they never seemed to tackle a man in the suit."
"Some say it's the fire-light of the valve bubbles that scares sharks off," commented Atkinson. "I don't know what it is, but I know the bubbles shine something wonderful as you watch 'em boiling up out of your helmet."
"Phosphorescence," I suggested, and then went back into the talk for some broken threads.
"How about that steamer you were telling about," I asked; "the one that was wrecked on the bar? Did you save her?"
"I should say we did," replied Timmans, "and I guess the company wished we hadn't; it cost them more money than the job was worth. Why, if I should start telling how we saved that steamer I don't know when I'd get through. It took us eight solid months. Yes, sir, and that meant sixty men to feed and pay wages to – forty in the wrecking-crew and twenty on the tug. Oh, but we did have trouble – trouble all the time, but we had fun, too, especially when some o' these gay Bowery lads we'd picked up got loose on the mainland. Talk about scraps!"
Timmans paused as if for invitations to spin the whole yarn, and these he immediately received.
"Tell about painting the alligator," urged Hansen.
"Oh, that was a bit of foolishness me an' another fellow done. He was a Dutchman, and got me to help him catch an alligator one day. He said he could bring him up North and get a big price for him. Well, we noosed one after a whole lot of chasing in a lagoon, and kept him four or five weeks, but he wouldn't eat, and the boys all gave us the laugh. So the Dutchman got up a scheme to paint him white and put him back in the lagoon. His idea was that this white alligator would scare out all the other alligators, and then we'd capture mebbe twenty or thirty on the banks, and make our fortune."
He paused a moment with a twinkling eye, and Hansen snickered.
"Well, we done it. We painted that alligator white, and put him back in the lagoon, and you can shoot me if those other alligators didn't eat him. Yes, sir; they chewed him clean up before we'd hardly got the ropes off him."
"What did the Dutchman say?" asked Hansen, shaking with mirth.
"He stuck to it his idea was all right, but it was the blamed alligator's fault for being too weak with fasting to fight the ones as weren't painted, and he wanted somebody to help him catch another, but nobody would."
Then Timmans came back to the saving of the wreck, and it really was an amazing story of patience and ingenuity against endless obstacles. I doubt if men from anywhere but America would have carried such a hopeless undertaking through to success. First they rigged up a wire railway from wreck to shore, and slid off a valuable cargo of alpaca, silks, and beer bit by bit along the wire to land (where they conscientiously drank the beer). Then they hitched a hawser to the steamer, and by clever engineering managed to drag her off the bar against the river current; but presently this current, sweeping down from the mountains, grew too swift for the wrecking-tug, and