“It felt mighty good to us when we couldn’t find the bottom of the sea with our feet.”
Billy’s happy disposition was again working.
It was Jimmy’s hour, this business of being inside of a submarine. Our Aviator Boys might be princes of the air, but down here Jimmy Stetson was the ace, and all the other cards. He could not give Henri any points that would puzzle about the gasoline engine that furnished the power when the craft was running on the surface, and, perhaps, not a great deal that was new about the electric motor that propelled the boat when under the water, but to all of the visiting boys, except Jimmy, there was much of mystery about the way the vessel was raised and lowered.
How, when the ballast tanks are full, they sink the hull of the submarine until only the periscope and top of the conning tower are visible, and, when empty, the whole of the conning tower, superstructure, and a portion of the hull ride above the water.
How hydroplanes—short, broad fins—tilt the nose of the vessel so that the propeller can drive the craft down fifty or sixty feet.
Jimmy knew all about it, and the sailors let him have all the pleasure of telling it to his wondering companions.
The guarded screw propeller aft and outside, the vertical steering rudders behind it, the air flasks which supply the crew with air when the vessel is submerged, the torpedo equipment—all the details thereof were reeled off by the Dover boy with great gusto.
Ned Belton, with whom Jimmy had trained for submarine service in London, laughingly nominated his friend, there and then, for head talker on a sight-seeing ’bus.
With roving commission, the submarine was lazily drifting, half submerged, within sight of the lighthouse with the famous hexagonal tower, near Nieuport-Bains, a little seaside resort in Belgium.
The boys had realized that it was considerable of a cramp for the submarine to carry passengers in the limited space allotted to the crew, and barring this extreme emergency, it would not have done at all for this fighting machine to serve any other than the purpose intended.