At the thought, Phil’s breath quickened and he searched rapidly about the cabin, feeling with his hands where the headlights did not pierce the gloom.
Then suddenly, it seemed as though something caught at his foot and he went down sprawling. For a moment the fall knocked the breath out of him and he lay there, the hair beginning to creep on his scalp, his blood frozen in his veins. What had clutched at him out of the dark?
Feeling the need for action, he slowly began to flounder to his feet, expecting every moment to feel again that ghastly touch upon him.
But nothing happened and he stood there for a moment, striving to regain his composure. The thing, whatever it was, had grasped him about the knees. It must, then, be somewhere near the floor.
He bent over, trying to throw the light from his lamps upon the spot where he felt the thing to be. Was it a devil fish perhaps, like the one which had attacked Dick so short a time before? No, because the devil fish would not have let go. He would still be in its grip——.
He bent closer and then an exclamation of horror broke from him. The Thing which he had stumbled over, which had seemed to reach out bony arms to grip him, was a skeleton, a horrible thing lying crumpled up on the floor of the cabin.
Phil did not wait to see any more. In his explorations of the cabin he had found the door and toward this he groped his way. Rotted with years under the sea it gave beneath his touch, the rotten wood parting from the rusted hinges.
Driven by something he didn’t name, Phil made his way forward toward where he supposed the hold of the vessel to be. He would enter no more cabins unless he failed to find the treasure anywhere else. He tried to keep from his mind the thought of that huddle of bones which had once been a man.
It was a difficult passage and a slow one through the bowels of the sunken ship. Often Phil encountered wreckage that he supposed had been made by the explosion of the dynamite. Once the debris was so thick that it took him several minutes to clear it away.
“No treasure yet,” he muttered to himself as he made his way forward. “At this rate I’ll have to have another hack at it. Ho—what have we here?”