Scarcely had she gone over these reassuring words when something startled her, anew. A dark shadow appeared suddenly at her right. She took one look, then laughed. “It’s only a fish,” she thought.
Brushing away two tiny fish that had managed to get themselves stuck to her canvas, she began giving her work its final touches.
For ten full minutes she worked feverishly. “My time is almost up,” she was thinking. “They will be giving me the signal. Then up I’ll go. But I do so want—”
Her thoughts were suddenly arrested. What was that? She had felt the motion of water against her body. “As if something passed—fast!” she thought with a little shudder. Turning slowly about, she peered through the window of her brass helmet.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “Nothing but three long, gray fish, over there. But what of that? I—I’ll give my signal rope a pull,” she told herself. “Just a minute more and I’ll do it.”
The minute stretched to two, three, four. And then it happened. One of the long, gray fish flashed like a streak of doom, straight for the hand that held the paint brush. Missing by inches, it collided with the easel, knocked it to the sea floor and shot away in sudden flight.
The fish could not have been more frightened than the girl. Suddenly she recalled wild tales told by the natives about the vicious barracuda—“Tiger of the Sea.” ... A woman had dabbled a finger in the water—and one of these fish snapped it off.... Swimmers had lost toes.... She felt paralyzed with fear.
Then, like an act in some strange drama, a pair of dangling legs appeared between her and the gray terrors. The legs were followed swiftly by a body, a brass helmeted head and two hands, holding a sharp-pointed spear.
The spear shot out!
The gray terrors, like arrows from a bow, flashed out of sight. It seemed to Doris that no creatures ever had moved so rapidly beneath the surface of the sea.