Elliott was awakened from violent dreams by some one shaking him. He opened his eyes to find daylight on the sea, though the sun had not yet risen.
“Get up,” said Hawke. “We’ve got to make a long day of it.”
Elliott sprang up, broad awake instantly. The rest of the party were already astir, and in a few minutes the cook brought them coffee, canned salmon, corned beef, and biscuits.
“The first thing is to try to locate the cases that are sunk,” said Henninger, as they breakfasted hastily. “While we’re at it, we must see if we can’t find a way to get the dhow into the lagoon. If we can’t do that, we can’t fish up the chests bodily. We’d have to break them and bring up the bricks one by one, and I’d rather take almost any chances than that.”
“But there must be plenty of water inside the reef,” Hawke remarked. “The wreck’s sunk almost out of sight, and the dhow only draws four or five feet, doesn’t she?”
“That’s so,” said Henninger, gulping down his coffee. “We’ll try it. And, above all things, don’t any of you say the word ‘gold’ above your breaths. That’s a word that’s understood in all languages.”
The meal did not last five minutes, and Henninger, Bennett, and Elliott descended into the boat and pulled toward the line of reefs in search of a gap into the lagoon. They rowed nearly half a mile, and rounded the island to the west, in fact, before they found any opening in the barrier. Here, however, they came upon a gap quite wide enough to permit the passage of the dhow, and in the lagoon there was, as Hawke had estimated, a depth of from one to three and in one spot of five fathoms.
They rowed eastward again toward the wreck. The sunken part of the Clara McClay lay in about twenty feet of water, and had been swept round till it rested almost at right angles to the other half. It had, like the stern, toppled abeam, so that the decks lay almost perpendicular, and about three feet of the side rose above the water. The funnel was broken off, as well as the masts, and on looking down through the clear water it appeared that the engines had burst loose and smashed through the side of the steamer. A medley of wheels, rods, and cranks were visible, and the bottom was scattered thick with coal. Otherwise, probably owing to the protection afforded by the water, this portion of the steamer did not appear to have suffered so severely as the after half.
They rowed all around the sunken mass of iron that revealed nothing of what it might contain.
“There’s the hatch where I went down,” said Bennett. The hatch was still closed, and was some eight feet under water.