Amazement held Dennis spellbound, incredulous. There had been but two diving-suits aboard the Pelican; of this he was quite certain. Yet here upon the sea floor stood three divers!
Dumont—for the second figure was manifestly that of the cook—stood staring at Dennis as though inviting any hostile movement. But the third figure suddenly rose in the water with a great leap—rose and threw itself forward, and went caroming down upon Frenchy, Then the answer came to Dennis—a diver from the Jap boat! Under shelter of the fog, knowing themselves unseen, the little brown men had gone to work!
And as he realized this, Dennis saw the figures of the two other divers, plunging together upon the bottom, abruptly obscured from his sight by a red mist uprising through the water. With horrified comprehension, Dennis realized that the murderer, Dumont, had been taken unawares, had been caught in his own trap—had cut the lines of one man only to have an unseen enemy spring upon him and stab him to death!
Dennis turned, and with a wild leap left the red-smeared scene behind.
The whole affair, from the moment he had heard his helmet valve click, had not taken twenty seconds, Already there had sprung into Dennis's brain the comprehension that he had but one bare slim hope of salvation—almost subconsciously he was aware of it, and almost upon intuition he leaped upward through the water. He leaped not toward the Pelican, where he knew well that no help awaited him, but away from her; he leaped toward the shattered and sundered afterpart of the John Simpson.
Speed now meant life. He could not reach the shore in time, already—was it fact or imagination?—he fancied that his breathing was getting more difficult, the air in his lungs hot and vitiated. There came to him the horrible thought of a diver leaping about the bottom of the sea, leaping in huge bounds of twenty feet upward, leaping like a mad crazed animal until the air in his suit gave out and he dropped head-foremost in the ooze. It was a frantic thought. Upon the heels of it something tugged at the trailing lifeline and jerked Dennis down head first.
Knife in hand, he recovered his balance, thinking that the Jap diver had pursued him. But the trailing end of his line had caught in some obstruction—nothing more. With a sobbing breath of relief, Dennis slashed away the line and bore onward with a high leap.
That bound gained the crushed decking of the John Simpson. The afterpart of the wreck lay upon a sharply inclined plane, its broken forward end upon the bottom, the stern high in its nest of rocks. Up that sharp steep slope crawled Tom Dennis.
To maintain his balance and to keep any foothold upon the slimy decking was difficult. He clung to the rail with his left hand, slowly working himself upward. He dared try no leaping here, lest like a rubber ball he fly over the rail with the seaward current and drop; and if a diver drops thirty feet he is apt to be crushed all at once into his helmet by the pressure—and it would not be nice.
"Can't take chances!" thought Dennis, then laughed inwardly at the notion. Take chances! Why, he was basing his entire hope of salvation upon chances of which he was totally uncertain! It had swiftly come to him that by gaining the after end of the wreck, by crawling up her sloping deck to the stern, he would be out of the water. But would he? How far had the tide ebbed? He did not know. He could not remember what time the tide had turned—whether the wreck would be now uncovered or not.