“If you obey our instructions,” said Wolff, “I will do as you say; and, to prove that I am playing fair with you, I will even now give you a detail of the commercial speculation that is behind all this business.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” said the Captain. “I’d much sooner remain innocent. I’m just an ordinary sailor signed on to do an ordinary job. I’ll work freer in mind if I know nothing about the inside of the affair; it’s black enough on the out.”
“Well, we will leave it at that,” said Wolff, “and we will now set to work, if you please.”
They came on to the bridge, and the Captain gave orders for the main engines to be stopped and the Kelvin sounder to be set to work. The donkey man had been allotted to this job, and presently the furious, sewing-machine whir of the sounder hauling up the lead came through the silence that had supervened on the stopping of the engines, and the result was shouted forward: “Eight hundred fathoms, coral rock.”
Blood, on this result being given to him, left the bridge and came down to the bow balks to superintend the lowering of the first buoy. He had not only to act as cable engineer, but he had also to instruct the hands in the details of this work absolutely new to them. A big, red-painted buoy was swung up against the burning blue of the sky, a rope with a mushroom anchor attached to it was fastened to the buoy; then the anchor was cast overboard, taking the rope with it, and the buoy, swung outboard, was dropped. It rode off, bobbing and ducking on the swell, and the Penguin steamed on to a point a mile ahead, where another buoy was dropped in a precisely similar manner.
The Captain had now his position and his marks laid down. Somewhere between those two buoys lay the cable, like a black snake on the floor of the sea, waiting to be grappled for.
The grapnel rope was now lowered over the clanking drum of the picking-up gear and the wheel in the bow. This business took half an hour, and then the Penguin, going dead slow, began to steam back to the first-mark buoy, dragging the grapnel after her across the floor of the sea.
Wolff and Shiner took a great deal of interest in this part of the business. They stood at the bow watching the pointer of the dynamometer, which gave the pull on the rope in hundredweights; every lump of coral, every tuft of weed travelled over by the grapnel made the pointer of the dynamometer jump and joggle; and at every jump the idea “Cable!” would leap into the minds of the speculators and show itself in their eyes.
But the Penguin passed from one mark buoy to the other without a show of the real thing; and then she turned and steamed back on an equally fruitless course.
She was making ready for a third grapple when the bell went for dinner, and Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain turned aft and went below to the saloon.