The girl followed this trail for more than an hour. Then she sat down on a fallen mahogany tree to think. She was far from all her friends. Should she go farther? She, too, recalled the last message of the green arrow of light—about “striking”!
“Perhaps I can stop them,” she whispered stoutly, as she rose to her feet. “At least I can try!”
Though her knees trembled, she did not falter, but marched straight on. For was she not the granddaughter of old Kennedy—hero of a hundred battles?
All went well with Johnny on his undersea photographing trip until he had reached the fifteen-hundred-foot level. Then he called in his loud-speaker to Doris, who was directing the controls:
“Sorry, Doris. On that last, ten-foot shot, I made a double exposure. Hike me up a bit, will you, please?”
“O.K. Johnny,” was the answer. To the men at the hoist she said: “Up ten feet.”
“Up ten feet,” the men repeated.
Johnny waited for the rise. His floodlight was on. Some strange creatures with amazing teeth, were passing, and he snapped his camera.
“Interesting place, down here,” he thought. “Hate to stay down here all night, though.” His leg felt cramped. He tried to shift to a new position, but at last gave it up. “No sort of place for an active person,” he sighed. “Wonder why I don’t go up a bit—I’d like to get this over!”
“Hey, up there!” he called into the phone. “What’s wrong?”
“Sorry, Johnny,” Doris drawled. “Something’s wrong with the hoist. It won’t work. But they’ll get it fixed pretty soon, I guess!”
Something wrong with the hoist! Johnny experienced a cold chill. Suppose someone had been tampering with that hoist—had done something really serious? What then? You couldn’t take hold of a fifteen-hundred-foot steel cable with a two-ton ball at the end of it, and haul it by hand like a fishline. Johnny realized all too keenly that his life depended on that hoist.
“It could have been tampered with,” he told himself. This was all too true. While the boat had been in the harbor it had not been any too carefully guarded—and Johnny had been off duty one whole night! “Might cost me dearly—that night!” he thought.
To ease his mind he began watching the passing show—fire-glowing shrimps—flying snails, and a host of other strange creatures. He snapped his camera again and again.
“I say, up there,” he exclaimed impatiently, “what’s keeping us?”
“Sorry, Johnny. It’s the hoist. We—”
Doris stopped suddenly. Johnny felt a shock—as if his cable had been struck by something hard and heavy. At the same instant the ball began drifting away from the submerged wall of rock.
“Hey, there!” he called, in genuine alarm, “what’s up now?”
There came no answer. He called again, and yet again. No answer. His heart began pounding madly.
“This won’t do,” he told himself, savagely. “Probably nothing—just nothing at all! It—”
Then came a second, jolting shock, and—ceasing to move in a circle—the ball began drifting quite rapidly away from the rock and out to sea.
Johnny knew at once what had happened. One of the anchor cables holding the boat in place had been struck and broken.
“By that submarine!” he burst out savagely. Then as if it were right out there in the water in front of him, he seemed to see the green arrow of light, and to read:
“We will strike—at the earliest possible moment!”
“They have struck!” he thought. “The second cable has been broken by the added strain—and we are drifting out to sea!”
He tried to think what this meant. The hoist was broken, so he could not be pulled up. Out to sea some three or four miles were coral reefs and beneath these, no doubt, a rocky wall. Moving at its present rate and striking that wall, the steel ball might crack!
Only one cheery thought came to him at this moment. If the boat’s small motor was strong enough to counteract the force of wind and current, he could be held in one position until the hoist was repaired.
Even as he thought this, Doris came back on the air: “Awfully sorry, Johnny, but something has severed an anchor cable—and then the other one broke! The hoist won’t work. We’d have the motor going, but that, too, seems to have gone wrong. Keep your chin up, Johnny. We’ll get you up out of there before it’s—too late.” Her voice faltered at the end.
Johnny found it impossible to utter a single word in reply.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime, Mildred still was following the signs of the green arrow trail.
As she advanced, the trail grew steeper and rougher. She followed it between dark pines, where the shadows were like night, along a narrow ledge to an abrupt descent into a low ravine.
More than once, as if contemplating retreat, she turned and looked back. But always, she went on.
At last, weary from climbing, she dropped down on a flat rock in the shade and dabbed at her damp cheeks with a white, red-bordered handkerchief.
As she rested she turned her head quite suddenly to listen. All the usual sounds of the tropical wilderness—the call of monkeys, the shrill squawks of parrots, the piercing screams of jungle birds—these all were familiar to her. But did she hear some strange sound—perhaps a human call? Listening intently for a moment longer, she rose and journeyed on.
Some ten minutes later she paused once more. She had come to a spot where the trail led round a towering cliff. In an involuntary gesture of dismay her hand unclasped and she dropped her handkerchief. It fell unnoticed among some large leaves—a bit of red and white amid the eternal gray and green of the jungle.
Summoning all her courage, Mildred proceeded along the rocky trail. Like a soldier she tramped straight on until, with a startled cry, she stopped abruptly, on rounding a sharp turn in the path.
There, directly ahead, was the ancient castle that might once have been a fortress or a prison. Standing before its door and staring intently at her, was a man with a rifle. Turning to flee, in complete panic—she found herself facing another man, similarly armed.
A man in front of her, and one in back—a towering cliff above—a precipice below. She was trapped.
* * * * * * * *
Darkness came to the Kennedy cottage, but no Mildred returned to join its worried owner at his evening meal.
He ate alone and in silence. In silence he smoked his pipe on the veranda until midnight. Then he went to the house of Pean, his head native.
“Pean,” he said, “she has not returned. At three o’clock, unless I come again, tell Camean to makewangawith the drums.”
“Makewangaat three. Can do,” said Pean.
Johnny, meanwhile, was having a very bad hour all by himself. Still drifting a thousand feet beneath the surface of the sea, he awaited his deliverance—a deliverance he knew might never come.
Knowing little about the rate at which the powerless boat might be drifting, he made a guess; it should be about two miles per hour. “That gives me less than two hours,” he told himself, grimly.
After noting the time, he decided to take a few more pictures—just in case.
Never before, he imagined, had such opportunity for taking undersea shots been given any living being. Moving at fairly steady speed, he passed through countless schools of deep-sea creatures, and never before had Johnny looked upon such fantastic sights.
“Like things in a nightmare,” he told himself. “All heads—practically no bodies at all—some long and slim as a leadpencil, with noses half the length of their bodies. If ever I get out of this I probably shall be famous. But—”
What was this? His eyes stared at the compass. It appeared to have gone wrong, or else—
“Hey!” he called into the loud speaker, “what’s up? Are we going north by east—”
“North by east is right. Oh, Johnny!” Doris apologized, “I didn’t let you know, but they have the sails up, and we’re traveling in a circle. We think that will keep you off the rocks. The chart is not very clear, but we can cruise around for hours if—if it is necessary.”
“Hours!” Johnny groaned.
“Well, anyway—” Doris stopped, abruptly. Then:
“Johnny! You’re saved! The mate just told me the hoist will be working again any minute now!”
“Hooray!” Johnny shouted. “Hooray! We live again! Boy-oh-boy!”
“Yes, Johnny,”—the girl’s voice went husky, “it will be good to see you!”
Ten minutes later, Johnny was going up. Slowly, surely, the dense darkness passed. The blue black of early dawn was changing places with glorious hues, and then came the light of a rapidly passing day.
As he tumbled from the steel ball Johnny placed a box of plates carefully on the deck.
“There you are!” he exclaimed. “Pictures I’ll really live to see!”
The pictures were superb—all the professor could have dreamed of, and more. “These, alone, will add greatly to the world’s riches,” he said, placing a trembling hand on Johnny’s shoulder.
“And when you show them,” Johnny grinned, “tell your audience they were taken by a ship’s watch, will you?”
“I take it,” said the professor with a laugh, “that you think you’d like to keep your feet on the ground, for a while!”
“Absolutely,” Johnny agreed. “And in more ways than one!”
Johnny went back to his old task of walking the deck that night. There would be no more tampering with hoists and motors if he knew anything about it—and he surely would know if it happened in the night.
For some unknown reason, this night was not like others that had passed. There seemed to be a spirit of unrest in the air.
Doris, too, felt it. Enveloped in a midnight-blue gown, she wandered out on deck.
“It’s ridiculous,” she exclaimed. “A grand night to sleep, but my eyes just will not stay closed!”
“There are ghosts in the air,” said Johnny. “I have felt them and almost heard their wings—or do ghosts have wings? There goes one now!”
Doris jumped as some swift, darting thing shot past her head.
“Oh, no!” Johnny laughed. “Only a bat. You’d think—”
He stopped suddenly to stare at the distant hills. The next instant, with binoculars held to his eyes with one hand and a pencil in the other, he was recording a message.
“The green arrow speaks again,” he murmured softly. “Oh—Oh—now it’s gone! Snapped right off as if a fuse had blown.
“Oh, well—perhaps it will flash again, later.” He stuffed his notebook into his pocket.
“We’ll be leaving here soon,” Doris said quietly. “In two or three days, I think. Grandfather received a wireless today. And how I’m going to hate it.” She sighed. “This,” she spread her arms wide, “this has been grand! Moonlight on gorgeous waters! Strange tropical shores. Adventure!”
“And bats!” said Johnny, as one shot past his ear.
“But even they are different,” she insisted, smiling.
“Yes, I know,” Johnny agreed. “To go to strange places, to see new things, to find excitement, thrills, mystery and adventure—that’s life!”
“Is it for most people?” she whispered.
“Perhaps not,” he replied thoughtfully. “Most people like to be safe and comfortable, to go to the same places, to see the same people, do the same things. That’s their privilege, of course.”
“That’s right, Johnny. And now—goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” he replied, softly.
Halfway between midnight and morning, when even the bats were less active, and the whole tropical world seemed asleep, Johnny was amazed to hear the sudden roll of a native drum, from the island. The very sound of it at that eerie hour, set his blood racing and his skin prickling.
“Drums!” he ejaculated. “What can that mean?”
For a time the weird beats were a steady roll. Then they began breaking up; two beats, a pause—one beat—pause, three beats—pause....
“Like a message,” he whispered. Then with a start, he recalled the message of the green arrow—undeciphered in his pocket!
Dragging it out, he began decoding it, growing more and more wildly excited every minute.
“H—E—” he worked it out “L—P!HELP!”
“Someone is in trouble,” he whispered. “But there are only three letters left. Rapidly he studied these out.
“Help Mil—”
A cold sweat broke out on his brow. He recalled Mildred’s determination to follow that green arrow trail. Had she followed it too far? Had the spies captured her? Was she a prisoner? And had she attempted to get off a message on the green arrow, only to be interrupted? Or perhaps even—
“I might be wrong,” he told himself. But he dared not hope.
Again there were the drums. This time a drum close at hand, on shore, thundered out. Then, from far away in the jungle came an answer, another, and yet another. It was ghostly, romantic, thrilling. Johnny’s hair fairly stood on end. But what did it mean?
He caught the sound of soft footfalls. Instantly he was on his feet, all attention.
“Oh!” he exclaimed softly. “It is you, Samatan.”
“Yes. The drums! They speak!” murmured Samatan. “Something—it is very bad.” His voice was low-pitched, tense.
“What do they say?” Johnny asked in a whisper.
“That something very wrong. This what drums say!” The old man’s voice was vibrant with emotion.
“They say Kennedy has hadbaddone him! Natives must come. All who love Kennedy must come. And all natives love Kennedy! All night they must come. In morning they march—perhaps they fight! Much fight for Kennedy! Maybe much die!” His voice trailed off.
“Yes,” Johnny choked. “Something terrible has happened. We must go, Samatan!”
“Just when it little light, in my dugout, we go, Johnny,” said Samatan, quietly.
Settling back in a steamer chair the old man closed his eyes and appeared to sleep. While from the shore came again and again the vibrant rumble of the drums—tum—tum—tum—tum—on and on into the night that was marching toward the dawn of another day.
Tense with forebodings of what might be in store, Johnny waited—impatient and grimly expectant.
Old Samatan was not asleep. He was only thinking. After a time he opened his eyes wide, to stare at the dark shore where drums still beat out their message.
“Makewanga,” he said to Johnny. “Always when trouble, my people makewanga—make prayer to Voodoo gods. Gods help good natives win victories.”
“Great!” exclaimed Johnny. “Then we shall win!”
“Yes. Win,” the old man said, softly.
Then Johnny told Samatan of the green arrow trail that Mildred had said she would follow. He told of the suddenly broken message he had picked up from the green arrow.
Thinking deeply, Samatan declared they should go very soon—at least a full hour before dawn.
“Shall Dave go, too?” Johnny asked.
“Plenty men on shore,” the old man waved an arm. “We go—tell Kennedy. That all. Dave? Better Dave stay.”
Half an hour later, Johnny wakened Dave to tell him what was going on. At first Dave was determined to go with them and have a hand in the affair. But after sober thought he decided it best to stay with the ship.
“The ship may be needed before this thing is over,” he said.
“Yes, it may,” Johnny agreed.
So, guided by native fires on the beach, Johnny and Samatan headed for shore.
Johnny was steeped in gloom as he pictured the golden-haired little beach-comber, the prisoner of unscrupulous spies.
“Nothing could be worse,” he groaned. “I should have warned her never to go, alone!”
But the moment their boat touched shore, Johnny’s mood changed quickly for the better. Seldom had he witnessed a more inspiring sight. In two short hours, more than a hundred, dark-faced, half-clad, natives had gathered at the call of their beloved Kennedy.
They were squatting around the fires, roasting small fish or strips of peccary meat and gulping cups of bitter, black coffee.
“They will go for a whole day on this,” Kennedy told him, “and still be with us when the day is done.”
When Johnny told of the green arrow’s message and the trail Mildred had sworn to follow, the old man’s brow wrinkled.
“I suspected something of the sort,” he rumbled, “but this is worse than I figured. There may be a number of those spies—all well armed. And we—” he went on, with a touch of sadness, “these people here are not warlike. We have two heavy rifles of ancient make, half a dozen light, hunting rifles, two or three shotguns, and a hundred machetes. But these natives—” There was a rumble of admiration in his voice. “You should see what these men can do with those two-foot blades of theirs! There are two grindstones out behind the house—and they haven’t stopped turning for hours!”
Johnny felt a tingle course through his veins as the old man finished. It was, he thought, like the days of old, like something he had read in a book. They were to storm an ancient castle to rescue a fair lady!
There were men among that loyal throng who knew every trail leading to the old castle.
“The men say it will take about three hours to reach the place,” said Kennedy, when just after dawn, they prepared to break camp. “We shall have to march in silence, as sound travels far. I only hope,” his brow wrinkled, “that these spies did not guess the meaning of those drums. I hated that. But there was no other way to get the men together, nor,” he added in an undertone, “to put the real, fighting spirit into them. For more than a hundred years, the beating of these drums has meant battle!”
“And how they respond to it!” Johnny enthused.
“Yes, Johnny,” the old man rumbled. “These are faithful, loyal people. Think what it would mean to have these islands taken over by a foreign power—cannon and bombing planes everywhere. If war came, think how these beautiful islands would be torn to bits by bursting bombs! Just think Johnny! Try to imagine it!”
For a moment after that, there was silence. Kennedy’s voice was husky when he spoke again. “Johnny, my boy—I’ve come to like you a heap. Promise me, Johnny, that if anything should happen to me this day, you’ll see the girl safely back to her own land where she rightly belongs.”
“Nothing can happen to you,” Johnny declared, stoutly. “You could handle four of those cowards, single-handed.”
“Promise me,” the old man insisted.
“I promise.” Johnny put out a hand that was at once caught in a grip of steel.
And so they marched away into the golden, tropical dawn.
* * * * * * * *
Those on theSea Nymphwere on deck early that morning. Coffee and muffins were served in the forward cabin. After Dave told what was happening on land, a silence fell over the party. Active, happy, always friendly, Mildred had found her way into all their hearts.
“Dave,” said the professor at last, breaking the silence, “since that fine old man Kennedy is in a good way to lose his granddaughter—”
“Oh, but he won’t!” Doris broke in. “Not with Johnny Thompson on the trail of those spies. I had a letter last week from an old friend, Marjory Morrison. She’s known our Johnny a long time, and she says he’s a marvel!”
“No doubt,” said the professor. “But spies, my dear!”
“Spies are cowards,” Doris exclaimed. “Just the same—I’d like doing something for those Kennedys!”
“Just what I was about to suggest,” the professor beamed. “Manifestly, we can’t sail this ship up that mountain but we can go in search of their sunken schooner!”
“Oh, yes!” Doris sprang up. “Let’s do that! Anything to help!”
“I know the spot, within a mile,” said Dave. “Kennedy showed me on the map. It’s not over three miles from here.”
“Good! We shall weigh anchor at once,” exclaimed the professor. “In the steel ball, Dave, you should be able to locate the schooner in a very short time.”
“And then?” asked Dave.
“One problem at a time,” smiled the professor, who during his long life had solved many a problem.
Fifteen minutes more and they were away.
“Do you think we shall be able to find their sunken schooner?” Doris asked, as she and Dave stood in the prow, looking at the hills. “That depends,” said Dave. “Just now, another problem interests me more.”
“And that?”
“Whether that girl, who seems the very spirit of the island, ever will sail that schooner again.”
“Never doubt it,” said Doris. But in spite of her high hopes, she herself was in grave doubt.
* * * * * * * *
Johnny was never to forget that silent march up the tropical island trail. Before him glided a native guide. Behind him, taking each steep ascent with the quiet, steady breathing of a boy, came the giant Kennedy.
After these marched a silent throng. Their faces and machetes shining in the morning sun, they were a band of simple, honest natives, in whose midst Kennedy long had stood out as king.
A monkey chattered from a tree, but no rifle was aimed at him. A parrot screamed, and over in a narrow ravine, a drove of wild pigs scampered unmolested over the dry moss of the jungle.
“We’re seeking bigger game, today,” the boy thought, grimly.
Finally they arrived at a point not far distant from the turn, beyond which lay the castle. Kennedy held up a hand, and the men gathered silently about him. In low tones he gave them final instructions.
There were, he said, three trails to the ancient castle. They would divide into three groups. John Puleet, a stalwart native, with his followers, would circle the hill to the right. Teratella, another burly leader of the islanders, would go to the left with his men. Time would be given them to take their positions. When this had been done, a “wild parrot” would scream from the right, another from the left—and they would all move forward.
“We’ll take the trail straight ahead, with old Samatan,” he said to Johnny. “It’s the toughest of them all, if we are attacked.”
“O.K.” Johnny murmured, gripping his light hunting rifle.
Silently, one by one, a hundred men crept into the brush. After that, save for the chirp of some small bird and the faint sound of a dashing stream, all was silent. It was, Johnny thought, the dead silence that comes before a storm.
Stooping suddenly, he picked something from among the leaves by the trail. It was Mildred’s lost handkerchief. He held it out for Kennedy to see, but neither said a word.
Meanwhile, Dave and Doris were warming to the search for the small trading boat that had meant so much to Kennedy and Mildred.
Having found the approximate location where the little supply schooner sank, Dave climbed into the steel ball and was lowered into the deep. For an hour after that, with the steel ball always close to the bottom, they sailed about in ever widening circles. From time to time Doris called on the radio:
“See anything?”
“Yes, a whole flotilla of jellyfish,” would come Dave’s laughing answer. Or—“there’s an ancient wreck off to the right—goes back to pirate days, I’m sure. But I don’t catch the faintest gleam of a white schooner.”
When at last he returned to the surface and was released from his spherical prison, he complained of eye-strain.
“Let me go down with you,” Doris pleaded. “I’ll be eyes for you. Together we can’t fail to find the schooner. We just must get it located!”
“What do you say, professor?” Dave turned to his superior.
“What’s the bottom like?”
“All sand.”
“No rocks?”
“Not a one.”
“O.K., my girl—in you go.” The professor waved a hand, and in they went.
To the imaginative Doris, this fairyland of waving seaweed, darting fish, and drifting jellyfish was most entertaining, but she never forgot their real mission. “Dave!” she exclaimed more than once. “I see something!” A moment of excitement, and then—“No—it’s nothing but a bit of coral, after all.”
Then, of a sudden, a whisper reached her ear:
“One eighty—eighty-two and a half—eighty four—”
“Dave! He’s back! The whisperer is back!” Doris spoke before she thought.
“Why! Hello there, mermaid!” came in words startlingly distinct.
Doris and Dave remained silent. Who could this be? Where was he? On land, or in the sea? Or on it?
For a time they heard that whispering of numbers. Then it faded, as abruptly as it had come.
As they drifted, they quietly discussed the strange whispering, but came to no logical conclusions. Neither did they sight any white schooner, resting on the bottom.
* * * * * * * *
For a long time, there on the side of the hill beneath the tropical sun, Kennedy’s fighting band watched and waited.
“The signal will come,” Johnny thought with a thrill. “The signal to move! And then—
“There! There it is now!” he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper.
There had come the distant scream of a wild parrot. One more scream.
“Now!” said Kennedy. “Let’s go!”
“We go,” old Samatan said, simply.
Johnny would have taken the lead, but the old man pushed him back. Cautiously they moved straight ahead.
Johnny sighed in relief as they reached the end of a narrow pass. That, he thought, would have been a bad place to be caught. His sense of relief was short-lived, however, for out from the wide door of the ancient castle, burst a man with a rifle. Instantly Johnny recognized him as the man whom he had saved from the grip of the octopus.
“Come on!” he exclaimed, as the man leveled his rifle. A shot cracked out, and a bullet burned Johnny’s cheek. Next instant the man dodged and the rifle clattered from his nerveless hands. There had been a flash of steel, as Samatan had thrown his machete. Its point was buried in the door, just back of the spot where the man’s head had been.
Dropping his rifle, Johnny executed a flying tackle, bringing the man to the ground, with a thud. Instantly two powerful natives pinned him to the earth.
“Come on!” Kennedy shouted, as the door stood open a crack. “We’re going in!” His powerful shoulder forced the door so suddenly that a man on the other side of it was instantly floored. A second man—huge, fat, beast-like—lurched at Kennedy with a knife. He was felled with one blow of the old man’s bare fist.
“Now!” Kennedy roared, towering over the prostrate pair. “Tell me where my granddaughter is or I’ll tear you limb from limb!”
“Girl?” the fat man stammered in broken English. “Gone—gone.”
“Where to?” Kennedy touched the man none too gently with his foot. But the halting reply could not be understood.
“Please, sir,” came in a youthful voice from the corner, “if I may, I will tell you.
“But first I must tell you,” said the youth who, until now, had not been noticed, “that I am not one of these!” He nodded at the men on the floor. “I was coming to America to join my father, and they compelled me to accompany them here.”
“Is that true?” Kennedy demanded of the stout man on the floor. The man nodded.
“All right. Tell us.” Kennedy’s voice softened a little as he spoke to the youth. “Where is my granddaughter?”
“They took her to the submarine,” said the boy.
“The submarine?” Kennedy stared.
“Yes. There is a submarine,” said the boy. “They are making a survey of the sea-bottom around these islands! Don’t you see,” the boy seemed anxious to please, “in time of war, they shall place depth bombs and steel nets—and establish submarine bases!”
“I see,” Kennedy replied in a low tone that was not good to hear. “Very nice, I should say. We seem to have stumbled into the situation at about the right time!
“But my granddaughter.” His voice rose. “She is on this submarine?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then,” roared Kennedy, “we shall find the submarine! And if we do not—or if my granddaughter has been harmed—!” He laid his machete, sheath and all, across the stout man’s throat. And the stout man turned a sickish, yellow-green. And not without reason.
“Get up!” commanded Kennedy. The two men stood up. “I’ll guard them,” he said to Johnny. “You and the natives search this place. Gather up every scrap of paper to be found. There should be ample evidence of this espionage. And—there is not a moment to be lost!”
“Not a second,” said Johnny.
A few hours later, with three other prisoners taken by the second band of natives attempting to flee from the rear of the castle, they were back at the Kennedy cottage. At once Johnny and Samatan prepared to leave for theSea Nymph.
“We’ll do all in our power to find that submarine,” Johnny assured Kennedy, as he and Samatan pushed off....
But Johnny could not have known, of course that the submarine had been found....
* * * * * * * *
For a long time Doris had watched the sea bottom as the steel ball moved about in a circle that ever grew wider. So absorbed had she become that her ear-phones were forgotten. When suddenly a voice broke in on her thoughts, she jumped involuntarily.
“Hey, there! I say, there! Are you there?” came in a hoarse, anxious voice. “Listen! It’s important! Listen! Are you there?”
Doris adjusted her microphone, then answered, as her heart missed a beat. “Yes, we are here. Why?”
“Listen!” came in gutteral tones. “We are on the bottom, and we can’t get up!”
“Try the Australian crawl,” Doris laughed into her speaker. These people were good at kidding, whoever they were.
“Listen!” came in a man’s voice, hoarse and insistent—even pleading. “We are in a small submarine. We are on bottom and our pumps have failed!”
“Submarine!” Doris whispered, as she and Dave gaped at each other.
“We are about two hundred feet down,” the voice went on, desperately. “Something’s gone wrong with our pumps, and we can’t blow out the water in our compartments. You gotta help us. We have a friend of yours here and she’ll tell you I’m speaking the truth!”
Doris and Dave were startled beyond description when they heard Mildred Kennedy’s voice coming over the air.
“Listen, Doris,” the girl’s voice was tense with emotion. “I’m down here in this submarine. I blundered onto that ancient castle up on the ridge, and there were spies there. They wouldn’t let me go because they—they said I’d tell what I saw. And that—that’s true. I would!
“But these boys on the submarine—they—” her voice broke a little, “they’re not really spies! They’re just boys in the navy of their country, doing what they’re ordered to do. They’ve been decent to me, and they’d have put me back on land if they’d dared. So—so you can’t let them die like this. You just can’t, Doris! Besides, I—” she choked, and could not finish.
“We won’t let them die and most of all—we won’t letyoudie!” declared Dave, who had been absorbing every word. “Just you keep cool and stand by. We—we’ll have our whole navy here in no time. Just you see!”
“Th—thanks, Dave ... Mil—Mildred, signing off,” came in a wee small voice.
“Gee, she’s a game kid,” whispered Dave to Doris. Then into his microphone:
“Put that man on again,” he said.
“Here, here I am,” came the hoarse voice from the submarine.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Dave said, shortly.
“We have a fairly powerful wireless on our ship. We’ll get in touch with the United States Naval Station at Port au Prince at once, and report the situation. They will send assistance—even though you’re over here to help your spies! Now—give me your location—in code.”
“O.K.” the foreigner answered, humbly, “Here it is. 2 - 4 - 7, 9 - 3 - 6, 1 - 6 - 3 - 9, 3 - 7 - 9.—That is all. Will you please repeat?”
Dave read the numbers he had written, and the sub commander checked them again.
“Don’t be nervous or frightened about the girl, here,” he said. “We have oxygen enough for thirty-six hours, at least.”
“I hate to think what would happen to you if any harm comes to her,” Dave answered, grimly. “We’re signing off and going up.”
To get the Port au Prince naval station was only a matter of moments, after the steel ball was back on board.
“There’s a submarine and a coastguard cutter at Santiago de Cuba,” was the answer. “We will get in touch with them at once, and you can be sure of fast action!”
After a short wait came the encouraging news: “Submarine and cutter proceeding to the rescue under forced draft!”
Fifteen minutes later theSea Nymphwas in motion. Dave, having obtained the grounded submarine’s location, would sail to the spot and stand by to aid, if possible.
“Perhaps we’ll go down in the steel ball and reach them before that sub arrives,” he said.
“But Dave!” Doris exclaimed. “What can one submarine do for another on the bottom? Surely they can’t raise it!”
“No—o, they couldn’t. Nor could we. But then,” Dave sighed, “there must be some way. We’ll have to leave that to the navy, I guess.”
Two hours later the steel ball rested on the sandy bottom some two hundred feet down, and within twenty feet of the submarine’s dark bulk. As Dave and Doris stared out of their window, they saw a face in a port of the submarine. It was Mildred, and she was waving at them.
“Only twenty feet,” Doris murmured, “and yet for the moment there’s nothing we can do! How strange—and how—how terrible!”
Night was falling on the waters of the blue Caribbean when Johnny and Samatan finally reached theSea Nymph, and were told of the sub’s predicament. For a full hour after darkness fell, Doris and Johnny sat on the after deck. But they spoke hardly a word. They were thinking of a brave, American girl, two hundred feet below surface, in a foreign submarine.
“Johnny!” Doris gripped the boy’s arm suddenly. “Is that a light—or is it a star?” She pointed out to sea.
“A light! No, it’s a star. No! No! Itisa light! See! It blinks!”
“Dave!” Doris called. “The navy is coming!”
And so it was. As they stood there waiting, the light grew brighter and brighter. Then a long, sleek form, dark as the night, slid alongside theSea Nymph.
“Ahoy there!” a voice called.
“Ahoy!” Dave echoed. “We’ll send our small boat for you at once”
Ten minutes later, the young commander of the American submarine was on board.
“What’s the situation?” he demanded, briskly.
“They’re down here, about two hundred feet,” said Dave. “Their pumps won’t work and they can’t get up!”
“That’s it, eh? It sounds bad.” The young officer’s voice was somber. “I suppose you assumed we had a diver on board, and—until three days ago—we did have. But now he’s in the hospital with a raging fever!”
“Might I inquire,” the professor asked, slowly, “what a diver would do?”