The sky, too, had dulled.  Little lumpy clouds showed near the horizon line, and, sailing above these, hung a dirt spot of vapor, while aloft glowed some prismatic sundogs, shimmering like opals.  Etched against the distance, with a tether line fastened to the spar buoy, lay the Susie Ann.  She had that moment arrived and had made fast.  Her sails were furled, her boom swinging loose and ready, the smoke from her hoister curling from the end of her smoke pipe thrust up out of the forward hatch.

Then I looked closer in.

Below me, on the concrete platform, rested our big air pump, and beside it stood Captain Joe.  He had slipped into his diving dress and was at the moment adjusting the breastplates of lead, weighing twenty-five pounds each, to his chest and back.  His leaden shoes were already on his feet.  With the exception of his copper helmet, the signal line around his wrist, and the life line about his waist, he was ready to go under water.

Pretty soon he would don his helmet, and, with a last word to Jimmy, his tender, would tuck his chin whisker inside the round opening, wait until the face plate was screwed on, and then, with a cheerful nod behind the glass, denoting that his air was coming all right, would step down his rude ladder into the sea,—­ down,—­down,—­down to his place among the crabs and the seaweed.

Suddenly my ears became conscious of a conversation carried on in a low tone around the corner of the shanty.

“Old Moon-face’ll have to git up and git in a minute,” said a derrick man to a shoveller,—­born sailors, these,—­“there’ll be a red-hot time ’round here ’fore night.”

“Well, there ain’t no wind.”

“Ain’t no wind,—­ain’t there?  See that bobble waltzin’ in?”

I looked seaward, and my eyes rested on a ragged line of silver edging the horizon toward Montauk.

“Does look soapy, don’t it?” answered the shoveller.  “Wonder if Cap’n Joe sees it.”

Cap’n Joe had seen it—­fifteen minutes ahead of anybody else,—­had been watching it to the exclusion of any other object.  He knew the sea,—­knew every move of the merciless, cunning beast; had watched it many a time, lying in wait for its chance to tear and strangle.  More than once had he held on to the rigging when, with a lash of its tail, it had swept a deck clean, or had stuck to the pumps for days while it sucked through opening seams the life-blood of his helpless craft.  The game here would be to lift its victim on the back of a smooth under-roller and with mighty effort hurl it like a battering ram against the shore rocks, shattering its timbers into drift wood.

“Billy,” said Captain Joe to the shoveller, “go down to the edge of the stone pile and holler to the sloop to cast off and make for home.  Hurry, now!  And, Jimmy,”—­this to his pump tender,—­“unhook this breastplate,—­there won’t be no divin’, today.  I’ve been mistrustin’ the wind would haul ever since I got up this mornin’.”