It was slow work getting started, though the weather favored us. Howard was timid about the diving suit first, but finally grew confident, and the fourth day without an interruption we had all the drowned crew in the forward hold, and about everything else loose of any value in the captain's, officers' and crew's quarters, which, as I explained, were separated by a water-tight bulkhead from the cargo-hold forward.
It was a very unpleasant, gruesome job. There were twenty-four, instead of a crew of ten or twelve, of the sunken cargo sub, the name of which must remain covered until the Government sees fit to divulge it. All had to be moved from a boat in sixty feet of open roadstead water, searched and photographed individually and in group, in both cases showing as much of the faces as their condition would permit. Arduous, nauseating work and we were glad that it was over. I thought it would get on Howard's nerves, but they seemed of iron again.
Don had gone with the Titian to get mail and telegrams for me, and possibly hear from little Jim. We had eaten in the evening and were smoking forward. Scotty patrolled as lookout as though serving on a dreadnaught. Howard was quiet and thoughtful. I thought it was because he was tired and depressed after ransacking a wreck for dead Huns and having to fight swarms of sharks. I was congratulating myself on getting a lot of supplementary proof of much importance, especially the records of the ship and the loading and sailing orders of the captain.
"Wood," he began quietly. "How much is that vessel worth; that is, what would it cost built now?"
"I don't know, Howard; what would you guess her dead-weight tonnage?"
"The last time I was down I went all around her. She is over three hundred feet long and twenty-five or thirty-foot beam, amidships, tapering a little toward each end."
"Perhaps five thousand tons?"
"I would guess her that big anyway."
"A submarine that size cannot be built at the present time for less than a million dollars; two hundred dollars a dead-weight ton, I think, is the ruling price now."
"The Government wants submarines now, don't it?"