“Well, most of our interest in this wonderful trip doesn’t lie in the chance of finding the stores of gold and silver lying in the old hulks of vessels that were sunk, some of them a hundred or two years ago. We’ve got our own plans to carry out, and could call the venture a glorious success even if we didn’t run across a single Spanish doubloon.”
“Yes, providing the scheme works, as Jack believes it will, and his judgment is worth a whole lot on anything that is connected with motion picture photography. We hope to secure films that are bound to startle the world of screen lovers, showing as they will the up to now unknown secrets lying deep down under the surface of the sea.”
“It’s a great risk we’re taking, but we’ve put over two big jobs so far and why not a third? Those circus films are still going the rounds, and pronounced gilt-edged wherever they are shown.”[1]
“Yes, and our series of pictures depicting wild animal life in the African jungles have met with great favor too.[2] We’ve been overwhelmed ever since we got back, with all sorts of wildcat offers to undertake new schemes, all of which so far we’ve had to turn down. And yet here we are about to start off on the most hazardous adventure that any one could possibly think of.”
“But this is different, you know, Ballyhoo; and besides it came to us through that old uncle of your mother’s, who has a third interest in the venture, though he was knocked out of accompanying the boat by that bad attack of rheumatism.”
“Well, I wish Jack would hurry up, because I think our Captain acts as if he might be anxious to cast off, and steam down Chesapeake Bay.”
The speakers were a couple of hardy looking well grown boys. They lounged on the little upper deck, if such it could be called, of a very odd-looking craft lying snugly hidden in a certain secluded basin connected with a Baltimore shipyard.
In fact the low, squatty craft was nothing more nor less than a submarine built somewhat after the style of those steel whaleback barges used for carrying huge cargoes of grain on the Northern Lakes.
Money had not been spared in the building and equipping of this craft, which was really owned and controlled by the “Argonaut Submarine Diving-boat Company,” and constructed for a purpose which has been partly disclosed by the brief conversation between the two boys.
Oscar Farrar and his two chums lived in the town of Melancton in an Eastern State. The boy whom he had been calling by that quaint nickname of “Ballyhoo” was really Jonathan Edwards Jones. For some years he had taken such delight in mimicking the animals usually seen in a menagerie, as well as the “barkers” who tried to coax the gaping public to patronize their side shows, where all manner of freaks were on exhibition, that naturally enough he soon found himself given the name of “Ballyhoo,” which term is often used to designate loud-tongued orators.