In his excitement he gave his signal line a mighty jerk. Afterwards they told him he had signaled the emergency. And they had been awaiting the signal so long, thinking some mishap had come to Jay, that they yanked him up in jig time.
Jay was a sight when he came over the side of the Nemo again. For one thing he had stayed too long. His nose was bleeding profusely and his head was bruised and battered by the pummeling he had gotten down below in the embrace of that undertow. But when they got his helmet off and freshened him up with cold water and first aid restoratives he soon rallied again to his normal self.
And then he told them all about the U-boat in its sepulcher of sand with its periscope standing out like a gravestone.
"Guess you were right," admitted Commander Wilberforce as he turned to Captain Austin, recalling how the latter had suggested the previous night that the U-boat might have been covered over by drifted sand, set in motion by cross currents and undertows.
"And that being the case, I don't see that there is much that we can do here for the present," added the Bridgeford official. "It will be necessary for us to bring down our new salvage ship before we can do anything with that U-boat. Of course, we have facilities for digging into the bottom of the ocean just as land engineers employ the steam shovel to excavate a cut or a tunnel. What do you think?"
Commander Wilberforce heartily agreed and said he would go ashore at once to acquaint the department at Washington with the full facts and ask an authorization on behalf of the Bridgeford Company for the employment of their entire resources in exhuming the buried submarine. In the meanwhile the Nemo was to return to Bridgeford.
But if Commander Wilberforce and Captain Austin were through for the present, Diver Jay Thacker was not. He liked not at all the prospect of backing off at this stage of the game, leaving the U-boat possibly to be buried high over her periscope deeper and deeper until the new Jules Verne could get on the job from Bridgeford.
Jay was doing a tall lot of thinking. And he had formulated in his own mind a plan of action that he hoped to put into effect with the aid of Captain Austin. Not even taking his own chum into his confidence, Jay sought out the Nemo's chief executive and drew him below decks for a star-chamber session of his own making.
Patiently the captain heard Jay through, shaking his head negatively in disapproval of the lad's proposition.
"There's no use of your taking any such risks, and, besides, we'll come back here a little later with the Jules Verne and worm our way right into that U-boat."