CHAPTER X THE TASTE OF SALT SEA WATER
When he had collected his scattered senses after the tremendous liftwhich the plane had been subjected to, Johnny Thompson knew that theymust have been in the midst of a terrific electrical explosion which hadoccurred in mid-air; a current of electricity such as no mere man-madevoltmeter would ever measure had leaped from cloud to cloud. For afraction of a second the circuit had been broken. The explosion hadfollowed.
Pressing his lips to Pant's tube, Johnny inquired curiously:
"Any--damage?"
"Can't--tell--yet," came back. "Hope--not."
For a moment there was no sound, save the screaming of the wind. Then,again, came the call of the stranger.
"Hello!" exclaimed Johnny.
"About--the--wreck. Ought--to--tell. May--not--come--out--of--this.You--may--come--out. Can--you--hear?"
"Yes,--yes!" Johnny was impatient of delay.
"Ought--to--tell. Mighty--important. Wreck--mighty--important.Lot--of--people--affected. Children--most. Ought--to--tell."
"Well, why doesn't he tell?" was Johnny's mental comment. "Has the stormdriven him mad?"
He wanted to know about that wreck. His life was imperiled for a cause,but what cause he did not know. His mission in life, he had found outlong ago, was to help others live more happily and profitably. If thecause were a good enough cause, he might cheerfully die for it."Children," the man had said, "many children." Well, that was best ofall: to help many children.
"Well," Johnny grumbled through the tube, "why--don't--you--tell?"
"Going--to--tell," came to Johnny through the tube. Then the Professortold his story. There was a pause between every pair of words; the wailof the storm, the thunder of the engines, the roar of the ocean, made itnecessary. Even so, he was forced to repeat several sentences over andover before Johnny caught them. It was aggravating, doubly so since anyword might be the man's last; might be the last Johnny ever listened to,as well. There was one word the man repeated ten times or more, and, atthat, Johnny did not catch it. It was an important word, too, the mostimportant word, the very keyword, but Johnny gave it up at last.
"Isn't any use," he muttered after the tenth time. "Some great treasure,but whether it's gold or diamonds, or old ivory or frankincense, I'llnever be able to tell, if I ask him a thousand times."
The stranger, it seemed, was a professor in a medical college; hisbrother, a medical missionary in one of those border countries that liebetween China and Russia. During the war something became very scarce,but just what something Johnny could not make out. He, the Professor,wrote his brother about it. The something came from Russia--only place itcould be obtained. There was fighting still in those regions where it wasfound, between the bolsheviki and their enemies. Children in the UnitedStates, it seemed, tens of thousands of them, would benefit if it werebrought out from Russia. Johnny could not see how that could be. "Perhapsthe mine belongs to an orphanage," he decided, half in humor, half inearnest.
The Professor had written his missionary brother of the need. He hadwritten that he thought that, for the sake of the children, the thingmust be managed. It could be carried out, the treasure could. It wouldrequire a considerable investment, perhaps twenty thousand dollars. TheProfessor had sold his home, had raked and scraped, borrowed and begged.At last the money was sent to the brother.
Months of anxious waiting followed. Finally there came a cable from anobscure Chinese port. The missionary brother had the precious stuff andwas boarding the "Men-Cheng," a tramp steamer, manned half by Chinamenand half by white men. She bore a Chinese name but carried an Americanflag.
He had not trusted the officers and steward of her overmuch, so, insteadof putting his treasure in their hands, he had chartered a two-berthstateroom and had carried it with him in four flat chests. Piling threeof them on the lower berth, and sliding the other beneath, he had sleptin the berth above.
That cable was the last ever heard from him. The steamer had been caughtin a gale and driven upon the shore of a coral island, as Johnny alreadyknew. The missionary brother did not appear with the rescued members ofpassengers and crew. All these survivors had been questioned, but noneknew anything about what became of him. It seemed probable that he hadcome on deck in the storm and had been washed overboard.
And the treasure was there still. Beyond question, it was in thatstateroom where he had stored it, since none but him knew of it.
The wrecking crew, more than likely, was a gang of ghouls, with noprinciple, and with no knowledge of such things, anyway. They wouldeither dump the treasure into the sea or carry it away. In either case itwould be a total loss, and the small fortune of the Professor would begone forever. It seemed, however, that the Professor was more concernedabout the children's share than he was about his own.
"What sort of treasure could it be," Johnny asked himself, "that even theroughest, most ignorant rascals would dump into the sea?"
"Bunch of nonsense," he muttered. Yet there was something about theintense earnestness of the man that gripped him, convinced him that itwas not nonsense, but that here was a truly great and worthy cause.
Suddenly it came to him that, were he to outlive the stranger and reachthe wreck, he would have no means of identifying the chests. Again hislips were at the tube.
"The--chests!" he shouted, "the--chests!"
"Yes--yes," came back.
"The--chests. How--can--you--identify--"
His sentence was broken halfway. There came such a thundering, grinding,screaming horror of noises as he had never heard, not even in thishurricane. The seaplane stood still. Her engines were going, but she didnot move. It was as if the shaft had broken loose from the propeller andwas running wild, yet Johnny knew this was not so. He knew that theviolence of the storm had suddenly become so great that the plane couldmake no headway before it.
So there they stood, halted in mid-air. What must come next? Was this theend? These questions burned their way to the very depths of his throbbingbrain.
He had not long to wait for action. The plane began to turn slowly about.It was as if it were set upon a perpendicular shaft, and a mighty handwas gripping and turning it against its motor's power to resist.
Then the thunder of the engines ceased; Pant had foreseen the ultimateend of the struggle and had prepared himself for it.
The plane swung around, square with the wind, then began a glide whichincreased in speed with each fraction of a second. Pant was dragged fromhis seat by the mere force of the air. With nostrils flattened, eyesclosed, body bent like a western rider's, as he is thrown in the air by abucking bronco, he still clung to the wheel and guided the craft as besthe could.
Feeling himself constantly drawn to the right, he realized that they werenot gliding straight downward, but were following a giganticspiral--perhaps miles across. He shuddered. He had experienced somethingsimilar to this in his boyhood days--the spiral glide of the amusementpark. Yet that was child's play. This was grim reality, and at the end ofthe glide lay the remorseless, plunging sea.
Johnny Thompson and the Professor sat in their cabin, too much overcometo move or speak. Through Johnny's mind there ran many wild thoughts. Nowthe past, his home, his friends, his mother, were mirrored before hismind's vision. The next he was contemplating freeing himself from hisharness and opening the cabin door. To be trapped in that cabin, strappedto his seat, as they took the plunge into the sea, would be terrible.Better that he might have one fierce battle with the ocean. Yet there wasstill a chance--a ghost of a chance--some startling development thatmight save them. Then, if he were loose in the cabin, the cabin dooropen, he would be shaken out to his death while the plane flew on tosafety.
He ended by doing nothing at all, and the plane, holding true to herspiral glide, swung on toward the dark waters. The spiral seemed endless.One might almost have imagined that the storm had an upward twist and wasshooting them toward the skies.
A moment's flas
h of lightning undeceived them. The sea lay close beneaththem, perilously close; almost it appeared to be lifting up hands tograsp them.
Johnny Thompson at last began to struggle with his harness. Pant lickedhis lips with his tongue and thereby received a revelation. The moistureon his lips was salt; they were in the midst of the salt spray of sometitanic wave. The end was not far off.
In desperation he kicked the engines into gear. There followed a momentof suspense. Thinking of it afterward, not one of the three could accountfor what followed. Perhaps the current of air created by some on-rushingwave had lifted them; perhaps the very force of the powerful engines hadtorn them from the grip of the remorseless spiral glide. Whatever it was,they suddenly found themselves booming along over the raging sea, andwith each hundred yards covered there came a lessening of the wind'sviolence. It seemed that they were truly on their way to safety.
Johnny started as from a revery. The signal from the Professor'sspeaking-tube was screaming insistently.
"Hello!" he shouted hoarsely.
"Those--chests," came back through the tube. "Do--you--hear--me?Those--chests--they--are--marked--with--initials--L--B--on the bottom.Do--you--hear? L--like--lake. B--like--bird. Get it?"
"Yes," Johnny answered.
"All--right."
Again, save for the thunder of the engines and the diminishing howl ofthe wind, there was silence.
"Wish I had tried harder to get the name of those things in the fourchests," Johnny mused. "I'd like mighty well to know. Didn't sound likeanything I have ever heard of. Perhaps it's some kind of Russian fur; newname for Russian sable, maybe. Guess there's no use asking him about itnow. Too much noise; couldn't hear."
Then his mind turned to the steamer they had seen struggling in thatraging sea. He wondered if it had escaped.
"Hope so," he murmured, "even if they are our rivals. We'll beat themeasily if we get out of this. Looks like we would, too."
Then, suddenly, his face went gray. He had thought of something--the dustin the fuel tank! There would have been enough to carry them to theirdestination, and a little to spare, had they not encountered the storm.They had battled the storm for what seemed hours. This had consumed muchfuel. What awaited them once they were free from this storm?
He put his mouth to Pant's speaking-tube, but the message remainedunspoken.
"No use to cross a bridge till we come to it," he muttered. "Not out ofthe storm yet."