‘My dearest,’ said I, ‘I have not a word to say against her. My quarrel is with you.’ She stared at me. ‘I call you Laura! Again and again last night you let me tell you I loved you. By your own admission I am your sweetheart, and yet you call me Mr. Monson.’
‘Oh, I will call you Charles; I never thought of it!’ she exclaimed, blushing rosy. ‘What are the men doing?’ she exclaimed, peering as though engrossed by the movements of the seamen.
Cutbill was winding away at the shell-thickened side of the galleon with an auger; further aft stood Head similarly employed. On a line with my face as I looked down there was a finger-thick coil of water spouting out of the vessel’s side, smoking upon the rocks and streaming away in a rivulet into holes which it overflowed. I explained to Laura the fellows’ employment.
‘They have a notion,’ said I, ‘that there may be treasure contained in the hold of this old galleon, but before they can search they must empty her of the water she is full of. Below there!’ I called.
Finn looked up. ‘I see that you have bored through her,’ said I. ‘Is her side hard?’
‘As stone, sir,’ he answered. ‘The shells come away pretty easy, but her timber’s growed into regular iron.’
I asked him how many holes they were going to pierce. He answered three, that she might be draining handsomely through the night.
‘The sooner we can rig up a sail, Finn, to serve as a shelter, the better,’ I called down to him. ‘When the sun is gone there’ll be nothing to see by. The men will be wanting their supper too; then there’s that lump of a porpoise to be got out of the craft, for we don’t want to be poisoned as well as shipwrecked; and if daylight enough lives after all this,’ I continued, ‘we ought to beach high and dry as much as we can come at to-night that may be washing about out of the yacht down there, in case it should come on to blow. There’s no moving on this island for the holes in it when the darkness falls.’
‘Ay, ay, sir, we’ll be with ye in a jiffy,’ he answered.
‘What think you of this marine show?’ I said to Laura.