ming down with
you."

"But you know nothing about diving, and you might have an accident, and
I should be responsible."

"Oh, I'll risk that! You must nursery-maid me a bit."

Tazzuchi lowered his voice. "To tell the truth, I'm going to pay a
surprise visit. I want to make sure those chaps below are doing the
square thing. If they aren't, and I catch them, there'll be a row, and
they'll use their knives."

"H'm!" said Kettle, "I've got no use for your local weapon as a general
thing. I find a gun handiest. But at a pinch like this I'll borrow a
knife of you, and if it comes to any one cutting my air-tube you'll find
I can use it pretty mischievously."

"I wish you wouldn't insist upon this," said Tazzuchi persuasively.

"I'm going to, anyway."

"I'm going down merely because it's my duty."

"That's the very same reason that's taking me, Captain. I must ask you
not to make any more objections. I'm a man that never changes his mind,
once it's made up."

Whereupon Tazzuchi shrugged his shoulders, and gave way.

"Now," thought Kettle to himself, "that man's made up his mind to kill
me if he gets the glimmer of a chance, and, as I'm not going to get
wiped out this journey, he'll do with a lot of watching."

It has been the present writer's business at one time and another to
point out that Captain Owen Kettle is a man of iron nerve; but I cannot
call to mind any instance where his indomitable courage was more
severely tried than in this voluntary descent in the diving dress. The
world beneath the waters was strange and dangerous to him; his companion
was a man against whom he held the blackest suspicion; the men at the
pump (whose language he did not understand) might any moment cut off his
supply, and leave him to drown like a puppy under a bucket. The
circumstances combined were enough to daunt a Bayard.

But Kettle felt that the men in the boat, who helped to adjust his
stiff rubber dress, were regarding him with more than ordinary
curiosity, and, for his own pride's sake, he preserved an unruffled
face. He even tried a rude jest in their own tongue before they made
fast the helmet on his head, and the cackle of their laughter was the
last sound he heard before the metal dome closed the audible world
away from him.

They hung the weights over his chest and back, and Tazzuchi signed to
him to descend. Kettle hitched round the sheath-knife to the front of
his belt, and signed with politeness, "After you."