“I’m paying you fifty dollars a day to do what I tell you to do, Vose.”
“That’s right, sir!” The captain kept right on with the lashings. “There’s a contract between you and this young man which tells me to teach him how to be a diver, if he shows the capacity.”
“He hasn’t shown it.”
“He is going to in about five minutes, sir.”
He picked up the helmet and bent over me.
“I had a reason for twitting you about that shoe,” he said, in my ear. “You showed what was in you by bringing it back If you hadn’t brought it back I would have stripped this suit off you and sent you hipering! You’ve got it in you! You’re all right! Now go down, son, and set that chain where I told you to set it. The first scare is the vaccination for this kind of work. You’re in a way to be immune from now on!”
The last sound I heard was the snarl of Anson C. Doughty. That sound helped me to go to my job that day. I went down and did what was required of me, and, as I worked below there and became convinced that there was nothing to harm me if I kept my head, I found my nerve, I reckon, for good and all, in the diving business.
And now that this story seems to be settled into a rut of adventure in my chosen line of work, hold breath with me and prepare for a couple of most “jeeroosly jounces,” as old Wagner Bangs used to term his occasional falls from his state of natural grace.
First, I leap as nimbly as I can over three years and a half of hard work, the story of which would hold as little interest as the biography of a mud-clam. I slipped and slid and dug in slime, I shagged granite blocks and dragged chains, I pried into wrecks and had my whack at fumbling in the watery shadows for the drowned—pitiful bundles floating as if they were attempting posthumous gymnastics, head down and fingers trying to touch toes.
I did “deep work” on ticklish jobs.