ive-ton
sinker, until they were ready to drop into the eddy and there discharge
their stone.

Dinner over the men fell to work, each to his job. The derrick gang was
set to shifting a boom on to the larger derrick, the concrete mixers
picked up their shovels, and I went to work on the pay-roll of the
week. This I always figured up in the little dry-goods box of a room
opening out of the galley in the end of our board shanty, its window
looking toward Montauk.

As I leaned my arms on the sill for a glimpse of the wide expanse of
blue and silver, the cotton rag that served as a curtain flapped in my
face. I pushed it aside and craned my neck north and south. The curtain
had acted as a weather vane,--the wind had hauled to the east.

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?"