But the _Penguin_ passed from one mark buoy to the other without a show of the real thing; and then she turned and steamed back on an equally fruitless course.
She was making ready for a third grapple when the bell went for dinner, and Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain turned aft and went below to the saloon.
The Wolff gang were in a bad temper, and the meal had scarcely begun when a discussion broke out.
“It’s a funny thing,” said Shiner, “that we have not hit the thing yet.”
“We have been twice over the ground,” said Wolff.
“Sure you haven’t made a mistake in the spot, Captain?” said Shiner.
The Captain put down the glass of mineral water he was raising to his lips.
“Why can’t you say what you mean?” said he. “Why can’t you ask me right out if I haven’t muddled the navigation and missed the job? Well, I haven’t. Is that plain? Some men may doubt their own work, and there are some men who would be put off by suspicions flung at them and would say, ‘Maybe I _am_ wrong,’ and pick up his buoys and move off to another ground and make fools of themselves. I’m not that sort. Can’t you see that a cable may be passed over by a grapnel half a dozen times without the grapnel catching? It may be glued down with coral.”
“Just so, just so!” said Shiner, anxious to pacify. “We never doubted your capacity, Captain.”
The Captain, somewhat mollified, went on with his meal, and he was raising the glass of mineral water for the second time to his lips when the dead, slow tramp of the engines ceased.
Immediately on their cessation, through the open skylight came the clanking sound of the picking-up gear, and right on that came Harman’s voice, roaring down the saloon companionway: “Below, there! We’ve got the cable!”
In a minute or less, Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain were in the bows; the Captain on the bow balks, Shiner and Wolff on the deck.
The great drum, rotating slowly, was hauling in the grapnel rope, dripping and taut; the dynamometer registered a strain of seven tons, and the strain was slowly increasing.
Nothing else could give this result but cable.
“Are you sure we have got it, Captain?” asked Wolff.
“If that rope was to break under this strain,” said he, “it would mushroom out like an open umbrella and cut you to pieces. Better get up on the bridge. You’re safe there. Yes, I’m sure we’ve got cable, unless we’ve grappled a dead whale.”
