ing by starlight, and
the corner where an old chap from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we
had aboard. A comfortable couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now
you couldn't have got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.

"I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I daresay I spent the
best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went below to find
where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work hunting, feeling it
was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing blue gleams down the
companion. And there were things moving about, a dab at my glass once, and
once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect. I kicked a lot of loose stuff
that puzzled me, and stooped and picked up something all knobs and spikes.
What do you think? Backbone! But I never had any particular feeling for
bones. We had talked the affair over pretty thoroughly, and Always knew
just where the stuff was stowed. I found it that trip. I lifted a box one
end an inch or more."

He broke off in his story. "I've lifted it," he said, "as near as that!
Forty thousand pounds' worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted inside my
helmet as a kind of cheer, and hurt my ears. I was getting confounded
stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down twenty-five minutes
or more--and I thought this was good enough. I went up the companion
again, and as my eyes came up flush with the deck, a thundering great crab
gave a kind of hysterical jump and went scuttling off sideways. Quite a
start it gave me. I stood up clear on deck and shut the valve behind the
helmet to let the air accumulate to carry me up again--I noticed a kind of
whacking from above, as though they were hitting the water with an oar,
but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling me to come up.

"And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood a-quiver
in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd seen young Sanders
handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was still calling him this kind
of fool and that---for it might have hurt me serious--when I began to lift
and drive up towards the daylight. Just about the level of the top spars
of the _Ocean Pioneer_, whack! I came against something sinking down,
and a boot knocked in front of my helmet. Then something else, struggling
frightful. It was a big weight atop of me, whatever it was, and moving and
twisting about. I'd have thought it a big octopus, or some such thing, if
it hadn't been for the boot