“Well, that rather knocks out my plans, too,” declared Rawlins. “I’d counted on the boys going to work the radio end of it—seems kind of hard on them to let some one else do it after they invented the thing and were responsible for getting the men and the sub. If it hadn’t been for them I’d never have got ’em, as it was their hearing Tom yell for help that made ’em surrender, and you’d never have thought of that block and the garage if they hadn’t located those messages with their radio compasses. I don’t think there’s any danger, Mr. Pauling.”
“I don’t agree with you,” declared Mr. Pauling
in positive tones. “If you go after that man there’s every danger. You can’t tell what force he may use or how an attempt to capture him might turn out.”
“But I had no idea of attempting to get him alone,” replied Rawlins in surprise. “My plan was to have a trim little destroyer right handy and then, when we’d located Mr. Big Bug, we’d report to the jackies and let them do the dirty work. The boys wouldn’t have to be where there was any scrapping going on and that old ex-German sub is never going to be my coffin if I can help it, I’ll tell the world. No, sir, my idea was just to do the scouting, so to speak—secret service under the sea—and let the boys be in on the preliminary intelligence work running the secret service of the air as you might say.”
“Well, I suppose in that case there would be little risk,” admitted Mr. Pauling, “and as you say, they are really the ones who should be allowed to have charge of their own apparatus as they have earned the right to it. I’ll have to give a little more consideration to the matter before I decide, however. Possibly I may wish to go along also—or
I may be asked to, when I put this matter before my superiors. Now here are those figures given by the dying man and the notes made by the boys.”
Unlocking a drawer, Mr. Pauling took out a packet of papers and spread them before Rawlins, while the two boys, now that events had taken a more hopeful and promising turn, laughed and talked excitedly to each other, wildly enthusiastic at the bare possibility of going on the unique search.
For a few minutes Rawlins studied the various sheets intently and silently, comparing the figures which the boys had heard spoken and the ones given by the dying Irishman, and at last he glanced up.
“These numbers of the boys’ will need a lot of study,” he declared, “but these the chap in the hospital gave are dead easy. One of ’em is nineteen and as there’s no longitude nineteen in the West Indies, or within two thousand miles of the islands, it must be latitude, so there we have a clue right out of the box—nineteen north latitude. Now if we take a map and follow along nineteen we’ll
know it must be within a few miles of it that we’ll locate old Beelzebub. It can’t be over sixty miles north of that meridian or the man would have said twenty instead of nineteen, and it can’t be south of it or he’d have said eighteen and something. So we can be dead sure the old duck hits the hay somewhere in a sixty-mile belt bounded by meridians nineteen and twenty. Now here are the other two numbers—sixty and seventy-five. You say he sort of lost consciousness between these and you thought he said southwest by south. Well, sixty might be longitude—the sixtieth meridian is in the West Indies—but he might have meant sixty anything and so, if it is longitude he was getting at, it brings us down to a space six hundred miles east and west and sixty miles north and south—quite a considerable bit of land and water to search—about 36,000 square miles—but only a little of it’s land, so it don’t cut such a figure. That’ll take in—let’s see—some of the Virgins, I think, and a lot of little cays and quite a bit of Santo Domingo, but shucks, that’s not such a heap. But I’ll admit this seventy-five gets my nanny. It’s not minutes—’cause there are only sixty minutes to