"Some say it's the fire-light of the valve bubbles that scares sharks off," commented Atkinson. "I don't know what it is, but I know the bubbles shine something wonderful as you watch 'em boiling up out of your helmet."
"Phosphorescence," I suggested, and then went back into the talk for some broken threads.
"How about that steamer you were telling about," I asked; "the one that was wrecked on the bar? Did you save her?"
"I should say we did," replied Timmans, "and I guess the company wished we hadn't; it cost them more money than the job was worth. Why, if I should start telling how we saved that steamer I don't know when I'd get through. It took us eight solid months. Yes, sir, and that meant sixty men to feed and pay wages to—forty in the wrecking-crew and twenty on the tug. Oh, but we did have trouble—trouble all the time, but we had fun, too, especially when some o' these gay Bowery lads we'd picked up got loose on the mainland. Talk about scraps!"
Timmans paused as if for invitations to spin the whole yarn, and these he immediately received.
"Tell about painting the alligator," urged Hansen.
"Oh, that was a bit of foolishness me an' another fellow done. He was a Dutchman, and got me to help him catch an alligator one day. He said he could bring him up North and get a big price for him. Well, we noosed one after a whole lot of chasing in a lagoon, and kept him four or five weeks, but he wouldn't eat, and the boys all gave us the laugh. So the Dutchman got up a scheme to paint him white and put him back in the lagoon. His idea was that this white alligator would scare out all the other alligators, and then we'd capture mebbe twenty or thirty on the banks, and make our fortune."
He paused a moment with a twinkling eye, and Hansen snickered.
"Well, we done it. We painted that alligator white, and put him back in the lagoon, and you can shoot me if those other alligators didn't eat him. Yes, sir; they chewed him clean up before we'd hardly got the ropes off him."
"What did the Dutchman say?" asked Hansen, shaking with mirth.