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Then I looked closer in.

Below me, on the concrete platform, rested our big air pump, and beside it stood Captain Joe. He had slipped into his diving dress and was at the moment adjusting the breastplates of lead, weighing twenty-five pounds each, to his chest and back. His leaden shoes were already on his feet. With the exception of his copper helmet, the signal line around his wrist, and the life line about his waist, he was ready to go under water.

Pretty soon he would don his helmet, and, with a last word to Jimmy, his tender, would tuck his chin whisker inside the round opening, wait until the face plate was screwed on, and then, with a cheerful nod behind the glass, denoting that his air was coming all right, would step down his rude ladder into the sea,–down,–down,–down to his place among the crabs and the seaweed.

Suddenly my ears became conscious of a conversation carried on in a low tone around the corner of the shanty.

“Old Moon-face’ll have to git up and git in a minute,” said a derrick man to a shoveller,–born sailors, these,–“there’ll be a red-hot time ’round here ‘fore night.”

“Well, there ain’t no wind.”

“Ain’t no wind,–ain’t there? See that bobble waltzin’ in?”

I looked seaward, and my eyes rested on a ragged line of silver edging the horizon toward Montauk.

“Does look soapy, don’t it?” answered the shoveller. “Wonder if Cap’n Joe sees it.”

Cap’n Joe had seen it–fifteen minutes ahead of anybody else,–had been watching it to the exclusion of any other object. He knew the sea,–knew every move of the merciless, cunning beast; had watched it many a time, lying in wait for its chance to tear and strangle. More than once had he held on to the rigging when, with a lash of its tail, it had swept a deck clean, or had stuck to the pumps for days while it sucked through opening seams the life-blood of his helpless craft. The game here would be to lift its victim on the back of a smooth under-roller and with mighty effort hurl it like a battering ram against the shore rocks, shattering its timbers into drift wood.

“Billy,” said Captain Joe to the shoveller, “go down to the edge of the stone pile and holler to the sloop to cast off and make for home. Hurry, now! And, Jimmy,”–this to his pump tender,–“unhook this breastplate,–there won’t be no divin’, today. I’ve been mistrustin’ the wind would haul ever since I got up this mornin’.”

The shoveller sprang from the platform and began clambering over the slippery, slimy rocks like a crab, his red shirt marked with the white “X” of his suspenders in relief against the blue water. When he reached the outermost edge of the stone pile, where the ten-ton blocks lay, he made a megaphone of his fingers and repeated the captain’s orders to the Susie Ann.

Baxter listened with his hands cupped to his ears.

“Who says so?” came back the reply.

“Cap’n Joe.”

“What fur?”

“Goin’ to blow,–don’t ye see it?”

Baxter stepped gingerly along the sloop’s rail. Obeying the order meant twenty-four hour’s delay in making sure of his wages,–perhaps a week, spring weather being uncertain. He didn’t “see no blow.” Besides, if there was one coming, it wasn’t his sloop or his stone. When he reached the foot of the bowsprit Moon-face sent this answer over the water:

“Let her blow and be d–! This sloop’s chartered to deliver this stone. We’ve got steam up and the stuff’s goin’ over outside. Get your divers ready. I ain’t shovin’ no baby carriage and don’t you forgit it. I’m comin’ on! Cast off that buoy line, you,”–this to one of his men.

Captain Joe continued stripping off his leaden breastplate. He had heard his order repeated and knew that it had been given correctly,–Baxter’s subsequent proceedings did not interest him. If he had anything to say in answer it was of no moment to him. His word was law on the Ledge; first, because the men daily trusted their lives to his guidance, and, second, because they all loved him with a love hard for a landsman to understand, especially today, when the boss and the gang never, by any possibility, pull together.