CHAPTER I.
THE UNITED STATES AGAINST THE WORLD.
"War is declared!"
"Impossible!"
"It is true. The news has just come by telephone from the cabinet chamber at Washington."
"And against whom?"
"Against the world!"
"Are you joking, Andy?"
"Oscar, I was never more serious in my life. The War Department has just sent the news to the office. The three new warships we are building must be completed without delay. The firm is offered a bonus of fifty thousand dollars if we can float them complete by the first of July."
"That is just six weeks off."
"Exactly, and it means that four months' work must be accomplished in that time. We can't do it," and Andy Greggs shook his head doubtfully.
He was a tall, well-built fellow of eighteen, with blue eyes and curly brown hair. He was a machinist, employed in the great Standard Shipyard of Bridgeport.
"We can do it and we will," answered Oscar Pelham decidedly. "We can work nights."
"It won't be enough."
"Then the firm will have to double the force."
"Where are you going to get the men?"
"Advertise for them—hunt for them—take them from other shipyards if necessary. If Uncle Sam wants those ships he is going to have them. But a war against the world! It's enough to stagger a fellow, Andy."
"So it is, Oscar, but it was bound to come, sooner or later. Foreign nations have been watching the United States with great envy since we whipped the Spaniards and gathered in Porto Rico and the Philippines, and when Cuba became a new state and Canada broke loose from England, I reckon they thought we were getting too big for our boots."
"No, the real trouble started in China," was the answer from Oscar Pelham. "England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan wanted to carve up poor China to suit themselves during the Yellow War of 1925 and Uncle Sam wouldn't allow it. Then South Africa tried for liberty again, and that put England's nose out of joint worse than ever when we helped the Boers to freedom. Then came the old quarrel about that money Turkey is owing us, and when we turned the Turkish kingdom inside out in 1928 that set all the rest of Europe in a rage."
"Well, we were justified in going for the Turks. They are the worst heathens on the face of the globe, outside of the Chinese."
"The Chinese ought to be our friends in this war, for we did so much for them when the other nations were after them. But England, Russia and the Japanese have bought her, body and soul, and now she is against us with all the rest."
"But we'll win out—we must win out!"
"Right you are! The Stars and Stripes forever!"
The conversation recorded above took place one spring morning of the year 1936.
For two years the United States—that vast territory which now embraces all of North America, from the Isthmus of Panama to Hudson Bay, and takes in all of the West Indies, Hawaii, the Philippines, and half a dozen other islands of the sea, as well as a corner of China and another corner of Japan—had been at peace with the world. We say peace. What we mean is, there was no war, but war talk was on every tongue.
In the past twenty-five years the country had prospered immensely. We now numbered over a hundred million of inhabitants, and nearly all of these were well-to-do and had money in the bank.
Jefferson McKinley Adams was President, and had been for six years, and under him were a standing army of five hundred thousand men, and a navy of five hundred of the best warships which human ingenuity could devise.
Many of the best of the warships had been turned out at the Standard Ship Yard at Bridgeport, which, up to a year before, had been under the personal supervision of Commodore David Pelham, the father of Oscar Pelham, just introduced. David Pelham had been a retired veteran of the Civil and the Spanish-American wars, and had followed his beloved wife to her grave, leaving Oscar alone in the world.
Oscar Pelham was a young man of nearly twenty, well-built and strong, with piercing black eyes and curly black hair.
At first he thought to follow his father into the navy, but he had a strong taste for electricity and mechanics generally, and he ended by entering the services of the ship building company, after spending three years at Edison's Electrical University at Llewellyn Park.
Oscar was a smart young man, and already many of his electric and other devices were beginning to attract attention. When the improved submarine torpedo-boat destroyer, Holland X., was building at Elizabethport he had gone to see her, and had come away much impressed by the novel construction of the craft.
"I'll build such a boat myself some day," he said to his boy friends, "only I'll make her better than anything afloat."
Some of his friends laughed at this, but others only smiled faintly. "Perhaps the boy is right," said one old machinist. "He had a smart father and a smart grandfather. Blood ought to tell."
And blood did tell, for, although only twenty years old, Oscar now had the whole run of the extensive shipyard and hardly any plan went through but what somebody came to him for his opinion on it.
Once Oscar disapproved of the plan of a new submarine boat, invented by an old war captain from Vermont.
"That boat will sink fast enough," he said. "But she won't come up."
The experts laughed at him and said he was mistaken. Then the boat was built. She sank on her first trial and blew up in her effort to raise herself.
After that Oscar Pelham's opinion counted for a good deal in all matters under consideration, so far as ship structure and the use of electricity went.
"Can't git around him," said George Dross, the oldest engineer in the yard. "He's got it all down on his finger tips. Him as tries ter corner him will git bit sure!"
The visit to the Holland X. had never left Oscar's mind. He remembered exactly how the submarine destroyer had been built and just how she was worked.
Once, when some of the naval vessels were at Newport, the Holland X. took a midnight trip among them, and Oscar was allowed on board.
The destroyer sank almost out of sight, and unknown to those on the big warships, passed completely around and under, first one vessel and then another.
"We could have blown every warship sky high!" said the inventor, but of this Oscar was doubtful. Yet he realized that the Holland X. was a grand boat and one calculated to do some terrific damage in a naval contest.
"But I'll build a better—wait and see," he said, over and over again, and when he was nineteen years of age he began to perfect the plans which had rested so long in his brain.
His boat was to be built of aluminum and steel—aluminum on account of its lightness and steel because of its strength. The craft was to be one hundred and fifteen feet long, sixteen feet wide, and eight to eleven feet six inches high. She was to be shaped like a stubby cigar and have three windows of glass on each side and one in front, and another in the stern. She was to have two small but exceedingly powerful screws, operated by an electric engine. She was to carry both natural and manufactured air, and had ample space for provisions and water, as well as ammunition, the latter to consist principally of torpedo tubes and dynamite bombs. She was to attain, under favorable circumstances, a speed of twenty-three knots an hour, and must work absolutely without noise, both while under water and while sailing over the surface.
Luckily for Oscar Pelham, his father had been rich, and upon the commodore's death, all the wealth went to the young inventor, to do with exactly as the young man saw fit. Several thousands of dollars were immediately spent upon a model of the Holland XI., as Oscar christened his craft, and this model was, one dark night, taken out on Long Island Sound for a trial.
No one was in the secret but Oscar and his particular friend, Andy Greggs, and it must be confessed that Andy was almost as anxious for success as the young inventor himself.
"If she runs all right, she'll be the biggest thing on the water," he declared.
"You ought to say, under the water," said Oscar.
The trial took the best part of the night and when it proved a perfect success Oscar Pelham could hardly contain himself.
"She'll be the submarine terror," he observed. "No warship, no matter how big she is, will be able to stand up against her secret attacks."