“I wonder whether we shall hit on some other wreck instead?” he surmised. “These seas must be strewn with them.”
Captain Horst shrugged his shoulders.
Lyngstrand looked up.
“If I were a German U-boat commander,” he said, with a quiet deliberation, his eyes straight on Captain Horst’s face, “I should not dare to sail over these seas again. I should see drowning faces sinking through every wave.”
His last sentence seemed to ring through the silence which followed it. Captain Horst sat impassive, but his brutal jaw looked hard and his cruel mouth thinned during the moment in which he returned Lyngstrand’s glance.
“Bah!” he said. “The dead don’t come back!” There was something of defiance in his harshly contemptuous tone. “They are finished with—for ever!”
The blood went out of Lyngstrand’s face as he bent down again to his plate.
There was no further conversation during the meal.
The afternoon was spent by the two young men, in company with the half-dozen divers under their orders, in overhauling the diving-dresses, air-pumps, etc., which might be required on the morrow.