CHAPTER XIV An Unexpected Find
CLOSING the aquascope of the Nautilus with a quick turn of the air control, Superintendent Brown stepped lightly across the diving compartment of the new salvage ship to the side of the fleet captain.
"What's up, Cap?" he inquired casually.
Austin was peering intently straight ahead through the water. The Nautilus was moving slowly to and fro with the rise and fall of the tide, but her progress forward through the water had been checked by a signal to the engine room of the mother ship, the Jules Verne.
"Looks like we had accidentally run upon a wreck our first day out." Captain Austin had his gaze firmly directed upon the outlines of some object near at hand, the character of which he was not at all able to make out as yet. Perhaps it was just a shifting sand formation; or possibly an apparition in the water due to the passage of the sun behind clouds, or a school of fish in the bay.
Superintendent Brown took up his station at another port just to the left of the captain. His eyes by now, directed by Brown, rested on the identical object that had first claimed the attention of the captain.
"Blamed if I don't think you are right, Austin," remarked the superintendent after a bit.
He suggested that the Nautilus be moved forward slightly in order that the two might get a more comprehensive view of the "phantom ship" that had loomed out of the mist like some specter of the deep that Jules Verne himself had conjured in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."
Cap Austin fell in with the idea, and at once took down the telephone connecting with the Jules Verne.