But Madge never left her chosen spot. Deeper and deeper she dug. What a swirl of mud arose and eddied about her, darkening the clear water in which she stood! The little captain’s hammer struck against something hard. Was it a rock embedded in the sand? Yet a distinct sound rang out, as of one metal striking against another!
Madge did not know how she summoned Captain Jules back to her side. She was wild with curiosity and excitement. Captain Jules was smiling behind his copper mask. The young girl diver had probably found a piece of old iron cast off from some ship. Still, she should unearth whatever she had discovered so near the dark kingdom of Pluto.
The captain worked with her. Whatever her find might be, it was larger and heavier than Captain Jules had expected. They could afford to spend no more time with it. It was time for Madge to leave the water.
It is difficult to make an imploring gesture in a diver’s suit. Yet, somehow, Madge must have managed to do so. For one moment longer the old pearl diver relented. The hole that they were digging in the bottom of the bay was widening before them. A chunk of what looked like solid iron was visible. Then a triangular end came into view. It was rusted until it shone like beautiful green enamel. The top was absolutely flat and of some depth, as it was so hard to excavate.
The time was growing short. Madge had been under the water as long as was safe for any amateur diver. The captain was a man to be obeyed, as she knew instinctively. She gave one more dig into the mud about her iron treasure. It now became plain, both to her and to Captain Jules, that she had found an old iron chest. The captain tugged at it with both his great, strong hands. It was strangely heavy. But he managed to lift it in his arms.
Straightway he gave the signal to ascend; three sharp tugs at his life line. Madge followed suit. But she cast one long backward glance at the watery world into which she might never again descend, as slowly, steadily, the boat tenders pulled up her long life line. Her feet dangled above the sandy bottom of the bay. Now she could see even farther off. About forty feet from the rapidly filling hole from which she and the captain had extracted the iron chest was a spar of a ship jutting above the sand. The little captain may have been wrong, but it looked like the very spar on which Tania’s dress had caught the day she was so nearly drowned. Madge could not tell how far she and Captain Jules had traveled on the bottom of the bay, but she knew they had made their descent at a place no very great distance from the spot where Roy Dennis’s yacht had run down their skiff, and Captain Jules had rescued Tania and herself.
Thought travels swifter than anything else in the created world. So Madge’s thoughts had reached the upper world before she followed them. She wondered if the girls would be very sadly disappointed when she returned bearing, instead of a costly pearl, nothing but a rusted iron box!
Would Phil have better luck when she descended to the depths of the bay? What had happened in the outside world since she had disappeared from it a long, long time ago?
A flare of blinding sunlight smote across the glass goggles in Madge’s copper helmet. She felt herself picked up and lifted bodily into a boat. Her helmet and corselet were unscrewed. She lay still, smiling faintly as the boat made for her friends who crowded, watching, on the pier. Captain Jules, bearing the small iron chest, landed a moment later. The little captain had been in a new world, into which few men and rarely any women have ever entered. She had been out of her human element, a creature of the water, not of the air, and it seemed to her that she must have lived a whole new lifetime as a deep-sea diver.
Tom Curtis stared anxiously at his watch and smiled into her white face. He breathed a sigh of relief and of wonder. Captain Jules Fontaine and Madge Morton had been down at the bottom of Delaware Bay exactly thirty minutes!