Before either of the others could say another word they all became conscious of a perceptible shock that made the little submarine tremble all over as though stricken by a monster fist.
“Wow! was that my whale butting into us?” gasped Ballyhoo, who had only managed to keep himself from falling by clutching a convenient cleat on the wall.
“We’ve run up against something that was hidden among the waving, giant water ferns, that’s sure!” ejaculated Oscar anxiously.
They listened. Men could be heard calling out excitedly. The engines had stopped working, and the boys immediately felt a dreadful fear grip their hearts—had the motive power been disabled, and would they be unable to rise again to the surface when the compressed air chambers no longer contained the elements necessary to keep the imprisoned voyagers alive?
They may have remembered how the crew of an ill-fated U. S. submarine out at Hawaii had some accident occur that caused the boat to sink to the bottom of the sea in a deep hole; and that delay in rescuing her imprisoned crew resulted in the death of every one in the doomed boat.
Strange how things like this, common incidents under normal conditions, and simply glanced at in curiosity among other news items, arise to stagger one when suddenly placed in similar distressing conditions.
“Could it be possible for a hole to be punched in the outside shell of our bully little boat?” Ballyhoo wanted to know, and his voice quivered as he asked it.
“Hardly a likely thing,” Oscar told him. “But what I’m really afraid of is that our engines may be knocked galley-west and hurt so badly that the engineer can’t possibly repair the same.”
“As a last resort,” Jack added, seriously enough, “there’s a way of getting out of here through a chamber that can be emptied of water again and again. And once on the surface a fellow could swim to the island all right enough. So you see it hasn’t got to the desperate stage.”
“One of us ought to try and find out what happened, don’t you think?” asked Jack.