All at once as he was digging away the crowbar struck something hard. With a firm impact it brought up against a solid substance. The diver's own buoyancy and the swing of the rolling sea kept him from digging with much force, but pecking away with determination Jay soon accomplished his purpose, and that was to make a considerable excavation over the hard metallic substance that his crowbar had encountered. "How do you do, Mr. Submarine," he laughed. For what he had encountered with his crowbar was nothing more or less than the top of the U-boat's conning tower! Setting the anchor in the hole, he lashed the crowbar to his body again and gave the signal to be hoisted. "See you in the morning," he called to the sunken submarine. CHAPTER X CAUGHT WITH THE GOODS It was morning. Captain Austin, won over by the arguments of Jay Thacker, one of his crack divers, had decided to postpone the return trip to Bridgeford twenty-four hours in order to give the Brighton lad a chance to work out a plan he had hatched while exploring the wreck of the submerged U-boat. "You say you want us to anchor directly over the submarine and play you out a hundred feet of hydraulic hose?" asked the captain of the _Nemo_ as he greeted Jay and Dick on deck after morning mess. "Right you are," chirped Jay, "and I want the hose attached to the air pump just the same as you hitch up my own air lines--only I want all the pressure of air you can put behind this new hose line." "You shall have it, my boy," replied the captain, and gave orders to various members of his crew to rig out the apparatus for which Jay had called. "What's all this hose line?" chortled Larry Seymour as he watched Jay preparing again to go over the side of the _Nemo_. "Looks as though you are going down to spray the mermaids with a little hot air." "Nothing doing, kiddo; it's a vacuum cleaner to scrub up Father Neptune's parlor," remarked Dick, who had been let in on Jay's plans. Weddigen sauntered up like a pouter pigeon. "Nothing new about this," said he to members of the crew standing beside him. "This bird Thacker knows his onion; he's simply taking down a line of hose and proposes to bore his way into the stranded submarine with a line of compressed air. All you got to do is turn on the air, point the nozzle of the hose into the sand, and away she goes." Jay, getting ready to adjust his helmet, overheard the remark. How did Weddigen know it was a U-boat? "You have it O. K., Weddigen; that's just exactly what I'm going to try and do," he replied pleasantly. At the same time he was asking himself: "Has Weddigen overheard about the plans in the U-boat?"