"At this rate we will be able to speak the language a little in a week's time," Charley declared. "I'm—" but he never finished the sentence.
From around them rose cries that brought the lads springing to their feet.
The crew were all crowded against the rail staring as if fascinated over the side, while the diver holding one of the life-lines was hauling it in with feverish energy.
As the boys sprang to the rail, the diver's headpiece appeared above the surface One glance, and they understood the reason for the sudden commotion—from the metal helmet dangled a short piece of severed air hose.
The luckless man was quickly dragged aboard, the head-piece quickly removed, and his rubber clothing cut away, but his eyes were closed and his face purple—he was dead. A long, weird, prolonged wailing came from his shipmates which arose and fell strangely, like the strains of the mournful death march.
The two chums gazed at each other with pale, horror-stricken faces.
"Poor fellow," Walter murmured, "His life went out like a candle in a gale. Alive one minute, dead the next. What could have cut that hose?"
"Chafed against a sharp branch of coral or bitten in two by a shark," Charley replied, sadly. "Well, I guess it means the last of our sponging, the other divers will hardly want to go down after such an accident, and I don't blame them."
But, to his amazement, as soon as the wailing chant ceased, one of the remaining divers began coolly to prepare to take the dead man's place.
"My, but those fellows have got nerve," he declared, admiringly, but he stopped the man as he began to put on his diving suit and by signs ordered the crew to get up anchor and return to the schooner.