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Updated: June 2, 2025
For full five minutes Maxwell stayed under water without a fresh supply of air then he signalled for it, and the anxious pumpers sent it down with a will. While the divers were engaged with these experiments, Chok-foo was sent on shore in the small boat for a supply of fresh water from a spring near the top of the island.
At a given signal the pumpers ceased to work, and the adventurous man was thus cut off from all further communication with the outward air. At first the onlookers were amused; then they became interested, and as the minutes flew by, a little anxious, but Maxwell's grave countenance, as seen through the bull's-eye, gave no cause for alarm.
Joking apart, they have been found sixty-eight feet below the surface of the prairie, and often in especially dry seasons cattle would perish were not these faithful little well-diggers and pumpers constantly at work for them. In the river valleys of Arizona although the air is dry the subsoil water is near the surface of the ground.
The "Engine Company" ran the force-pump out to the end of one of the lower wharves; two lines of pipe were attached; two rows of men mounted the planks for the pumpers, and, at the word of command, began the up-and-down of the hand-machine with admirable vim. Nothing happened; the water did not come; something appeared to be wrong with the mechanism.
In a little while the fire was about out, and Bert ordered the boys to use only one line of hose, which made it easier on the pumpers and bucket lads. Then, with a final hiss and splutter, the fire died away. "It's a terrible loss!" declared the butcher, as he contemplated the ruins of his shop. "I'll lose over a thousand dollars." "Haven't you any insurance?" asked Mr. Appelby.
The small pump the job had been making shift with was obliged to acknowledge itself beaten, and to make way for one with two handles, each with room for two pumpers; and this in turn was discarded in favour of a noisy affair with a donkey-engine, which brought up the yellow stream as fast as ever a gutter of nine-inch plank, nailed up to a =V=, would carry it away.
The rich, who before saluted him with their hats and compliments, now spurned him out of their way; the gamesters overlooked him, thinking he was no fish for their net; the chairmen, instead of Please your honour, d -d him; and the pumpers, who attentively marked his nod before, now denied him a glass of water.
The nearest German trench caught the clank-clink, and by a simple process of deduction and elimination arrived at its meaning and its location. The pump and the pumpers led a troubled life after that. Snipers kept an unsteady but never silent series of bullets smacking into the stones of the ruin, whistling over the communication trench, and 'whupp'-ing into the mud around both.
It was so hot that the boys at the nozzles had to be relieved every few minutes, and Bert was kept busy making shifts from the bucket corps or from among the pumpers. The men's bucket brigade could only throw water on from the rear, where the fire was less hot, but the boys pluckily stuck to the front, and directed their three streams into the midst of the flames.
As soon as she heard the hiss of the air in the helmet, she screwed on the bull's-eye, and our diver was as much shut off from surrounding atmosphere as if he had been twenty fathoms under the sea. Then she went to where the pumpers were at work, and taking the air-pipe in one hand and the life-line in the other, awaited signals. These were soon sent from the verandah.
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