Dick was so busy watching the chase and so earnest in his sympathy with the frightened, fleeing whip-ray that he quite forgot his duties.  He was reminded of them when Pedro, who had been frantically signaling him, took his head from the bucket and made a speech in Spanish to Dick that must have used up all the bad adjectives in that language.  Dick’s conscience hampered him so much that he was quite unable to reply fittingly, and the battle of words was won by Pedro.  The dingy drifted so far during the discussion that they were unable to find the sheep’s wool sponge that Pedro had seen, and which he now described as the finest one ever found.

Each day the spongers in the dingies worked farther from the sloop and each day more time was lost when the sloop made its round to pick up the spongers for dinner.  There were too few sponges to please Captain Wilson, who sailed over the ground whenever the water was smooth, studying the bottom with practiced eye and throwing out little floats, with anchors attached, wherever a sponge was seen.

“I’m going to the ‘Lake,’” said the captain, one afternoon at the end of a day of little success.  “It’s a feast or a famine there.  You get rich or go broke.”

“What is there at the ’Lake’?” asked Dick.

“Sponge, all sponge, the bottom lined with sponge.  If the weather is just right we’ll pile the deck with sponges in a week till you can’t see over them.  If the weather isn’t exactly right we won’t get a sponge.  On one cruise there, the men on this sloop averaged twenty-five dollars a day apiece.  I’ve been there five times since without ever making enough to pay for our salt.”

A week later the captain said to the boy: 

“Dick, you are a mascot.  You’ve brought us big luck.  We never had such weather here but once and I don’t care now how soon it comes on to blow.  I reckon it’ll begin to-night from the looks and we’ll hike for Key West to-morrow.”

Dick was glad to go.  The week had been a hard one, the work incessant and each night he felt as if his back were broken.  He was used to the fresh, sweet air of his country home and the sloop he was in was arranged like most of the sponging craft, with quarters sufficient for half the crew it carried.  The deck of the sponger was piled with the result of the work of the week.  The sponge of commerce, the one you buy at the drug store, is the skeleton of the creature; the thing taken from the water is its corpse.  Not until this body has rotted away is it pleasant to live with.  Day by day the stench, like that of a charnel house, became more unbearable to Dick.  The crew seemed never to notice it, which caused the boy much wonderment that noses had ever been given them.  He was glad when a strong wind came and swept some of the smell away instead of leaving it to settle in chunks in every nook and cranny on the boat.

At Key West most of the crew went to their homes, but Dick was invited to live on the sloop till he found a boat for the coast he wanted to reach.