“Now,” thought Kettle to himself, “that man’s made up his mind to kill me if he gets the glimmer of a chance, and, as I’m not going to get wiped out this journey, he’ll do with a lot of watching.”

It has been the present writer’s business at one time and another to point out that Captain Owen Kettle is a man of iron nerve; but I cannot call to mind any instance where his indomitable courage was more severely tried than in this voluntary descent in the diving dress.  The world beneath the waters was strange and dangerous to him; his companion was a man against whom he held the blackest suspicion; the men at the pump (whose language he did not understand) might any moment cut off his supply, and leave him to drown like a puppy under a bucket.  The circumstances combined were enough to daunt a Bayard.

But Kettle felt that the men in the boat, who helped to adjust his stiff rubber dress, were regarding him with more than ordinary curiosity, and, for his own pride’s sake, he preserved an unruffled face.  He even tried a rude jest in their own tongue before they made fast the helmet on his head, and the cackle of their laughter was the last sound he heard before the metal dome closed the audible world away from him.

They hung the weights over his chest and back, and Tazzuchi signed to him to descend.  Kettle hitched round the sheath-knife to the front of his belt, and signed with politeness, “After you.”

Tazzuchi did not argue the matter.  He lifted his clumsy lead-soled feet over the side of the boat, got on the ladder, and climbed down out of sight.  Kettle followed.  The chill of the water crept up and closed over his head; the steady throb-throb of the air-pump beat against his skull; and a little shiver took him in one small spot between the shoulder blades, because he knew that it was there that an Italian, if he can manage it, always plants a knife in his enemy.

He reached the end of the ladder and slid down a rope.  He felt curiously corky and insecure, but still when he reached the bottom he sank up to his knees in impalpable mud.  He could foggily see Tazzuchi a few paces away waiting for him, and he went up to him at once.  If the men in the boat, acting on orders, cut his air-tube, he wanted to be in a position to cut Captain Tazzuchi’s also with promptness.

However, everything went peacefully just then.  The Italian set off down a track in the slime, and Kettle waded laboriously after him.  It was terrible work making a passage through that white glutinous ooze, but they came to the wreck directly, and, working round her rusty flank, stood beside a great shallow pit, where two weird-looking gray sea-monsters showed in dim outline through the dense fog of the water.

Sound does not carry down there in that quiet world, and the two new-comers stood for long enough before the two workers observed them.  But one chanced to look up and see them watching and jogged the other with his spade, and then both frantically beckoned the visitors to come down into the pit.  Tazzuchi led, and Kettle followed, wallowing down the slopes of slime, and there at the bottom, in the dim, milky light, one of the professional divers slipped a shovel into his hand and thrust it downward, till it jarred against something solid underfoot.