“I see her!” Johnson executed a kind of dance on the rocking raft. “Lookee,” he pointed into the exasperatingly dense water, “see her there—like a shadow—her bow is shoved up four—five feet above her stern. Got her?”
Bruce nodded, then they looked at each other joyfully, and Bruce remembered afterward that they had giggled hysterically like two boys.
“The water’ll drop a foot yet,” Bruce said excitedly. “Can you dive?”
“First cousin to a musk-rat,” the Swede declared.
“We’ll build a raft like a hollow square, use a tripod and bring up the chain blocks. What we can’t raise with a grappling-hook, we’ll go after. John, we’re going to get it—every piece!”
“Bet yer life we’ll get her!” John cried responsively, “if I has to git drunk to do it and stand to my neck in water for a week.”
XXI
Toy
Bruce paused in the blithesome task of packing six by eights to look at the machinery which lay like a pile of junk on the river bank. Each time he passed he looked at it and always he felt the same hot impatience and burning sense of irritation.