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."

[Illustration: A DIVER AT WORK ON A STEAMBOAT'S PROPELLER.]

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 she in turn
was dragged down stream against all the strength of her engines, and saw
herself threatened with destruction on the bar. Then the captain of the
tug, in his peril, ordered the hawser cut, and thirty-nine men of the
wrecking-crew were left to their fate on the abandoned wreck. Their
adventures alone would make a thrilling chapter, but they were rescued
finally from the half-sinking steamer, after she had somehow crossed the
bar and wrecked herself anew in the breakers some miles down the coast.

Then weeks passed while the wrecking-crew worked at patching the
steamer's holes so that she would float, and every day Timmans went down
in his suit and did blacksmith work and carpenter work on her torn
plates and beams, in constant danger of being crushed in the deep sand
trough she rocked and slid in. Sometimes the whole iron hull, beaten
against by the ocean, would go grinding along, breaking down a wall of
sand ten feet high, almost as fast as Timmans could walk. And to be
caught between her side and that wall would have ended his days
forthwith. Diving-suit and man would have been crushed