"Dead?" I whispered.
He looked up at me from the circular hole in the helmet, and seemed to think me mad.
"Dead? Of course, he's dead—a ton or two of iron on top of him, and no air—sure he's dead. We'll have to put the line to the winch to haul him out from under it."
We buried Mitchell as we had Haswell, hauling him from under the wreckage by a line to our steam winch, and afterward carrying him well out to sea, where he was weighted and sunk. It was bitter work, and all the time that hot sun shone down upon us until the seams of the decks warped and the tar ran out of the lanyards.
Williams was shaken. The next day he refused to go down, and pleaded a rest necessary. His men were silent and awed. I could say nothing to urge them on, as I felt that they had endured enough for a few days, at least.
Then Williams was taken with the African fever, and there was no one left who would go below for any amount of money offered. The horror of the thing had shaken the nerves of the entire outfit. There might be millions below there, but no man of that crew would touch them just at present, and we were lying there in that oily sea, eating up the company's money and cursing at the strange chance that had made our expedition so fatal.
At the end of a week Williams was so bad that I gave him up as a factor to help us. At times he was delirious, and raved horribly. His men were for abandoning the work, and putting into Lagos, and from there clearing for home.
I refused to hear of such a thing, although I was a bit worked up at the outcome of what had at first appeared to be an easy job. To send North for more divers was to delay the work months. To await the coming of the next coast steamer meant delay of at least three weeks—and even then there was no certainty of help from her. She didn't carry divers, and, although she would naturally give me any aid in her power, belonging to our company as she did, I felt that I would rather not ask anything from her skipper until the last act.
A man named Rokeby of the tug's working crew offered to tend line for me if I chose to go down. He assured me that the pressure at fifty or even sixty feet would not injure me. I might suffer some from the splitting headache natural to the pressure, but that was all. I could blow open the safe or get chains fast to it, or cut it adrift somehow.