With the desperation born of madness Jay battled to free himself. Caught like a fly in a great spider's web, he knew every moment was precious. Unless those air lines were freed or he got a signal to the surface he was doomed.
Seizing the life lines above his helmet he drew them tight in his hands and followed them along until he came to the first entanglement of iron piping. For a moment the impediment thwarted him, and then he tore it free of the hose lines. But still no relief.
By now his brain was reeling and he could feel the blood vessels standing out on his forehead. A sense of suffocation pressed his heart and lungs and he found his breath coming in short wheezy gasps.
"Can it be that I'm lost!" he cried half aloud, the sound of his voice flooding his own ears like the wail of a siren.
But this was a time for self-control if he was to escape at all the perilous plight into which he had fallen. By sheer force of will he calmed himself and set about again to free himself. Taking the air lines as before he followed them to another point of contact with the débris and slipped down to his knees as he tugged at another joint of the tubing.
Fate, however, was hard and cruel. Try as he did, battling with all his strength and praying fervently as he worked, he was unable to move the obstacle. His fingers felt numb and weak; they refused to respond to his will. Even his legs seemed paralyzed. And again that horrible clutching at the throat and lungs!
"I——guess——I——can't——"
His voice trailed off into a whisper and his brain swam until a panorama of mythical scenes and figures flitted before his fancy. Still clutching the lines of hose that refused him life he reeled and stretched himself helplessly on the floor of the ocean. Dreamily he thought of home, of Brighton, of the service he had lately left. Now he was with the fleet vainly tugging to fasten an obdurate mine in place with other jackies of Uncle Sam's mighty war fleet.
"Now we've got the haughty Germans," he screamed in his delirium. All the while he was gasping and gurgling as his shoulders heaved and his lungs were convulsed in the agony of suffocation. Life was slipping fast away, and life was sweet to this youth who had dared death for his country and come through unscathed in the two years' campaign in the North Sea. By the irony of fate he had lived through all the period of the war only to come home to an untimely death like this while searching for lost treasure!
Now he was floating free in the ocean, a great filmy light suffusing the whole of the green sea, a myriad of soft-clad figures dancing before his glazed eyes, the murmur of some cathedral orchestra intermingled with the song of the sea. Out, out, out through the vast unknown recesses of the sea he drifted, propelled along by some unseen force....