“Well,” thought Kettle, “these are pretty cool hands for Dagos, anyway.  I’m going to have a fine tough time of it when my part of the scuffle comes.”

That night he had a still further taste of their quality.  So soon as darkness fell, the dhows closed in again and recommenced their sniping.  They kept under weigh, and so it did little enough good to aim back at the flashes.  But Tazzuchi, with half a dozen keen spirits, got down into one of the boats with their rifles and knives, and a drum of paraffin, and pulled away silently into the blackness.

There was silence for quite half an hour, and the suspense on the anchored steamer was vivid enough to have shaken trained men.  Yet these Italian artificers and merchant seamen seemed to take it as coolly as though such sorties were an everyday occurrence.  But at the end of that time there was a splutter of shots, a few faint squeals, and then a bonfire lighted up away in the darkness.

The blaze grew rapidly, and showed in its heart the outline of a dhow with human figures on it.  With promptness every man on the steamer emptied his rifle at the mark, and continued the fusillade till the dhow was deserted.  They had all done their spell of military service, and they chose to decide that these snipers were Abyssinians, and did their best toward squaring the national accounts.

Tazzuchi and his friends returned in the boat, safe and jubilant, and for the rest of that night the little salvage steamer was left in quietude.  With the next daybreak the divers and their attendants once more applied themselves to labor.  Kettle, as he watched, was amazed to see the energy they put into it.  Certainly they seemed keen enough to get the specie weighed, and on board.  Whatever piratical plans they had got made up were evidently for afterward.

But when day after day passed, and still none of the treasure was brought to the surface, he began to modify this original opinion.  Tazzuchi—­translating the divers’ reports—­said that the cause of the delay was the softness of the sea-floor.  The heavy chests had sunk deep into the ooze, and directly a spadeful of the horrible slime was dug away, more slid in to fill the gap.  Of course this might be true; but there was only Tazzuchi’s word for it.  The sea was too consistently opaque to give one a chance of seeing down from above the surface.

Now as suspicion had got so deep a hold on Captain Kettle’s mind, he began to cudgel his brain for some new method by which the Italians could serve their purpose.  He put himself supposititiously in Tazzuchi’s place, and made piratical theories by the score.  Most of them he had to dismiss after examination as impracticable, others he eliminated by natural selection; and finally one stood out as practicable beyond all the rest.