“Ain't it getting pretty stuffy in here?” asked the master, putting words to Mayo's thoughts.
“I have been feeling like a bug under a thimble for some little time,” stated Otie, whacking his chisel sturdily.
“Her bottom can't be awash with all this lumber in her. If we can only get a little speck of a hole through the outside planking right now, we'd better do it,” suggested Candage.
“That's just what I have been doing,” declared Mr. Speed. “I'm right after the job, gents, when I get started on a thing. Helpful and enterprising, that's my motto!”
The next moment, before Mayo, his thoughts busy with his new danger of suffocation, could voice warning or had grasped the full import of the dialogue, the chisel's edge plugged through the planking. Instantly there was a hiss like escaping steam. Mayo yelled an oath and set his hands against the mate, pushing him violently away. The industrious Mr. Speed had been devoting his attention to the planking instead of to the sawed beam.
Wan light filtered through the crevice made by the chisel and Mayo planted his palm against the crack. The pressure held his hand as if it were clamped against the planks, and the hissing ceased.
The schooner, as she lay, upside down in the sea, was practically a diving-bell; with that hole in her shell their safety was in jeopardy. The girl seemed to understand the situation before the duller minds of her father and his mates had begun to work. She frenziedly sought for Mayo's disengaged hand and thrust some kind of fabric into it.
“It's from my petticoat,” she gasped. “Can you calk with it?”
“Hand me the chisel,” he entreated.
As soon as she had given the tool to him he worked his hand free from the crack and instantly drove the fabric into the crevice, crowding it fold by fold with the edge of the chisel.