CHAPTER XIII—THE SUPER-SUBMERSIBLE
The boys from Seacove and George Belding—but especially the last and Phil Morgan—had a second topic of daily conversation quite as interesting, if not as exciting, as that of the German raider, in chase of which the Colodia was now driving at top-speed into the southwest.
This topic was the fruitful one of the Redbird and her cruise to Bahia. If the big sailing ship had left New York on the date promised, then the Belding family and Phil’s sisters would now be off Hatteras—perhaps even farther south.
“For you can believe me, Belding,” Al Torrance declared earnestly, and speaking with all the sea-wisdom acquired during his naval experience, “that Captain Lawdor would not sail right out across the Gulf Stream and make the Azores or the Canaries a landfall, as he might have done before Hun submarines got to littering up the Atlantic as they do now.”
“We cannot be altogether sure of his course,” murmured George Belding.
“Sailing vessels hate to head into the current of the Gulf Stream,” added Whistler, likewise in doubt.
“You chaps are determined to expect the very worst that can happen, aren’t you? Like a fellow going to have a tooth extracted,” said Al, with disgust. “Now, listen here! It stands to reason that news of this new raider, the Sea Pigeon, or whatever it is they call her, was transmitted to the other side of the periscope pond. George’s father and the captain of the Redbird would be warned before they sailed from New York of this new danger—if not afterward, by wireless. Of course the ship has a radio plant, hasn’t she?”
“Of course,” agreed the shipowner’s son.
“Nuff said! They never in this world, then, would take the usual course of sailing ships for South America. They would not cross the Gulf Stream. It will take the Redbird a little longer to buck the northerly set of the current; but that is what Captain Lawdor will do, take it from me! I figure they are now about off Hatteras, following the usual course of the coasting vessels.”
“Not much leeway for a big sailing ship,” muttered George.
“Better hugging the shore, even stormy old Hatteras, which we know something about, eh, fellows?” added Al, “than dodging subs and raiders out in the broad Atlantic.”
He had an old chart and was marking off the possible course of the Redbird with a lead pencil.
“Good work, Torry,” said Frenchy Donahue. “It’s navigation officer you’ll be next.”
They were all five deeply interested, and each day they worked out the probable course of the sailing ship, as well as figuring the distance she probably had sailed during the elapsed twenty-four hours.
“I only hope,” George Belding said, “that we overtake this Sea Pigeon and finish her before her commander takes it into his head to steam across the ocean to the western lanes of travel. If the raider should intercept father’s ship——”
“Ah, say!” cried Frenchy, “that ‘if’ is the biggest word in the language, if it has only two letters. Don’t worry, Belding.”
That advice was easy to give. George and Whistler remained very anxious, however; indeed, they could not help being. Nor did the activities aboard the destroyer during the next few days much take their thought off the Redbird and her company and cargo.
They talked but little—even to their closest boy friends—about the possibility of there being a great store of coined gold aboard the Redbird. Just the same, this fact they knew would cause the ship to be an object of keen attraction to any sea-raider who might hear of it.
The spy from the Zeppelin had secured George Belding’s letters in which the gold treasure was mentioned and Mr. Belding’s voyage in the Redbird explained. More than a month had elapsed between the spy-chase behind the little English port and the sailing of the square-rigged ship from New York for Bahia, Brazil.
“And you know,” George once said, “a whole lot can happen in a month. Those Germans have an ‘underground telegraph’ that beats anything the negroes and their Northern sympathizers had during, and previous to, our Civil War.”
“Aw, don’t bring up ancient history,” growled Al, who tried to be cheerful, but who found it hard work when the older boys seemed determined to see the dark side of the shield. “I’ve forgotten ’most all I ever knew about every war before this one we’re into with both feet—and then some!”
“Sure, Torry,” put in Frenchy Donahue, “don’t you remember the war of that showman who antedated Barnum—the one they say got a herd of elephants over the Alps to fight for him?”
“Oi, oi! Hannibal!” cried Ikey.
“Say! it would take a friend of yours to do that, Frenchy,” said Al in disgust. “I’ve always had my doubts about that fellow, Hannibal.”
“Besides,” went on Ikey, going back to Belding’s statement, “it’s nothing to do with ‘underground’ or any other telegraph. The Germans use wireless. If that spy got news across the pond——”
“Right-o!” broke in George, with increased good-nature and an answering smile. “But let’s ‘supposing.’ That spy has had ample time to transmit to friends on the other side of the ocean information about the gold my father is carrying to South America.”
“Why,” said Whistler, slowly unpuckering his lips, “he might even have crossed to New York himself by this time—if the British didn’t catch him.”
“If they had caught him wouldn’t we have been told?” asked Belding quickly.
“How? By whom?” demanded Whistler.
“Say!” declared Al vigorously, “the British War Office makes a clam look like it had a tongue hung in the middle and running at both ends!”
“Now you’ve said something!” muttered Frenchy.
“That’s right! The world doesn’t even know how many submarines have been sunk and captured, already yet,” declared Ikey excitedly. “And we won’t know, it’s likely, till the end of the war.”
“What’s the odds?” growled Al.
“You got to hand it to them,” sighed Whistler. “The British have great powers of self-restraint.”
“You said it!” again put in Frenchy.
“Well,” Ikey said, more moderately, “if that chap that came near sending Belding here west, was that schmardie’s brother——”
“Cousin!” interposed Whistler.
“Well—anyhow and anyway—Emil Eberhardt—I say!” cried Ikey, “he might have got free and gone over to New York by submarine, or someway, like Whistler says.”
“What do you suppose he’d do if he wanted to get that money off the Redbird?” asked Frenchy, big-eyed.
“Ask us an easier one,” begged Al Torrance.
“You kids are letting your imaginations run away with you,” put in Phil Morgan.
But in secret the two older boys—Belding and Whistler—did not consider the idea of the spy reaching New York before the Redbird sailed at all impossible.
“That chap with the broken arm we took off the wrecked Zep,” Belding remarked once to Morgan, “told you his cousin, the ‘super-spy,’ was bound for America, didn’t he?”
“He dropped such a hint,” admitted the Seacove lad. “But pshaw! we don’t even know that Franz Eberhardt referred to the fellow we had our adventure with.”
“I know! I know!” muttered George Belding. “But I do wish Willum Johnson, the strong man, had got his hands on that spy.”
“‘If wishes were horses——’”
“Sure! And perhaps it is all right. At any rate, father must have got my letter before he sailed, in which I told him all about losing the papers and warning him about German plotters. Of course he must have got that letter.”
But this thought would have afforded them little comfort had the two friends known that the ship which bore George Belding’s letter of warning had been sunk off the Irish coast by a German U-boat, and that that particular freight or mail for the United States would probably not be recovered until after the war.
The Colodia touched at St. Michael and then at Fayal, receiving in both ports information of the escapades of the new raider. Lastly she had been heard of far to the west.
Perhaps she was going across the ocean to prey on the American coastwise trade! This was a suggestion that put the Seacove boys and Belding on edge.
There was, however, something rather uncertain about the stories regarding the Sea Pigeon. Some of the merchant crews that had already met her, declared her to be a huge new submarine—a submersible that looked like a steam freighter when she was afloat, and that she was all of three hundred feet long.
“Some boat, that!” observed Mr. MacMasters. “We’ve seen ’em with false upperworks, boys. But you know, even the Deutschland was no such submarine as this one they tell about.”
Whistler put forth the idea that there were two ships working in these waters; but not many accepted this until, the day after they left Fayal, and the destroyer was traveling west, Sparks suddenly picked up an S O S from the south. The Argentine steamship Que Vida was sending out frantic calls for help. She was being shelled by a monster submarine two hundred miles off the port of Funchal of the Madeiras.
“This is the real thing—Sea Pigeon or not!” the radio operator confided to George Belding. “She’s the super-sub we’ve been hearing about. The operator on this Buenos Aires’ ship says she came right up out of the sea at dawn and opened fire with guns fore and aft. Has used a torpedo, and has upperworks like a regular honest-to-goodness steam freighter.
“There! He’s off again!” he exclaimed, as the radio began to spark, and he turned back to the machine.
So was the Colodia off again, and at full speed, dashing away in quest of the Que Vida and the great submersible that had attacked her.