I followed after that big man with a raging desire to kick him under the sleek tads of that coat—to pound my fists into his fat back. I might have given quite an account of myself, at that, for I was full grown at twenty and as hard as hickory.
“As I say,” I heard before he slammed the door behind him, “you better come along with me down to Trull wharf and talk to Vose himself. He can tell you—”
I gathered my wits and chased along behind. The two of them paid as little attention to me as they would to a prowling cat. But if they were on the way to talk to “Vose himself,” that surely was my opportunity.
It was some distance and by way of devious alleys, but we came at last to where a lighter was tied beside a wharf.
There was a derrick and the scow was loaded with blocks of granite. A man was slowly and ceaselessly turning the wheel of a queer-looking machine, another was carefully handling hose which passed over the side of the lighter and down into the water, and still another was tending ropes. It did not occur to me at first what this activity indicated.
But when the big man called out, “Is Vose about due to come up?” I understood at once and was mightily interested.
I looked down into the dock and saw water like liquid muck, filled with floating refuse, and a good deal of the glamour of a diver’s life departed from my imagination. Somehow I had thought that Jodrey Vose spent his days in blue depths of pure ocean water, looking around at strange fishes and exploring mysterious caves. That he was obliged to go down into any such mess as that and work on blocks of stones with his two hands was a depressing discovery.
After a time there was a bubbling of the turbid water close beside the lighter, and for the first time in my life I saw a diver’s helmet emerge; the goggling eye-plates, the grotesque excrescences, the sprouting antennæ of the hose lines, the venomous hissing of the air from the vents—it all seemed uncanny, and made me shiver.
Men reached down to help him up the ladder, and when he was on deck in full view, scuffing his huge, weighted shoes, a balloon-like creature, as shapeless as the doughnut men my mother used to cut for me when she was in good humor on frying-day, I was sure I had never seen so curious a sight.
After he sat down they twisted off the helmet, and the fat man, whom I reckoned must be Manager Anson C. Doughty, escorted the other man aboard the lighter and the three started a conversation which I could not hear.