e might make a rush, so I
caught up a hammer I was working with--it was my only weapon--and struck
it against the steamer's iron side as hard as I could. You know a blow
like that sounds louder under water than it does in the air, and it
frightened the shark so he went off like a flash."

"Perhaps he wasn't hungry," laughed one of the crew.

"Not hungry? I'll tell you how hungry those sharks were. They'd swallow
big chunks of pork, sir, nailed and wired to barrel heads, as fast as we
could chuck 'em overboard; swallow nails, wire, barrel heads, and all,
and then we'd haul 'em in by ropes, that did for fish-lines, only it
took twenty or thirty men to do the hauling. And there were plenty of
sharks 'round, only they never seemed to tackle a man in the suit."

"Some say it's the fire-light of the valve bubbles that scares sharks
off," commented Atkinson. "I don't know what it is, but I know the
bubbles shine something wonderful as you watch 'em boiling up out of
your helmet."

"Phosphorescence," I suggested, and then went back into the talk for
some broken threads.

"How about that steamer you were telling about," I asked; "the one that
was wrecked on the bar? Did you save her?"

"I should say we did," replied Timmans, "and I guess the company wished
we hadn't; it cost them more money than the job was worth. Why, if I
should start telling how we saved that steamer I don't know when I'd get
through. It took us eight solid months. Yes, sir, and that meant sixty
men to feed and pay wages to--forty in the wrecking-crew and twenty on
the tug. Oh, but we did have trouble--trouble all the time, but we had
fun, too, especially when some o' these gay Bowery lads we'd picked up
got loose on the mainland. Talk about scraps!"

Timmans paused as if for invitations to spin the whole yarn, and these
he immediately received.

"Tell about painting the alligator," urged Hansen.

"Oh, that was a bit of foolishness me an' another fellow done. He was a
Dutchman, and got me to help him catch an alligator one day. He said he
could bring him up North and get a big price for him. Well, we noosed
one after a whole lot of chasing in a lagoon, and kept him four or five
weeks, but he wouldn't eat, and the boys all gave us the laugh. So the
Dutchman got up a scheme to paint him white and put him back in the
lagoon. His idea was that this white alligator would scare out all the
other alligators, and then we'd capture mebbe twenty or thirty on