A few moments later, with Mr. Ironsides at the wheel, the submarine nosed out of Brownhaven Harbor. She moved through the water rapidly and with little vibration.
"Hurray! We're off!" exclaimed Tom, who, with the professor and Jeff, was seated on the whaleback deck.
"Yes, off into the unknown," quoth the professor, who was at times given to what he himself would have called "hyperbole," and Tom, "high faluting" language.
CHAPTER XV.
"WE'VE STRUCK A SUBMERGED WRECK!"
It was one of the most fascinating experiences that had ever befallen Tom Dacre—this of sitting at his ease on the metal back of a submarine monster, rushing through the water at a speed which Mr. Ironsides declared was almost twenty-five miles an hour. The spray flew back in the faces of the party on deck, whipping the keen blood into their cheeks. The roar of the water, as the submarine parted it in two mighty foam-crested waves, was like that of a waterfall.
"Better come inside now," said Mr. Ironsides, after a while, "I'm going to try a burst of speed, and you might get drenched."
When they were all assembled in the conning tower, and pretty closely packed, too, they were, in that narrow metal structure, Mr. Ironsides pressed a button. Far off somewhere within the submarine, a faint tinkle responded. It was a bell calling on old Sam in the engine room to "let her out." Like a race horse when the barrier flies up, the Huron gave a sudden leap forward as her three propellers bit into the water. A wave, like a tidal inundation, rose high on each side of her bow. From the conning tower she appeared to be plowing her way through a canyon whose walls were of water.
So suddenly had the burst of speed followed the signal to increase her rate of progression, that the party were thrown one against the other. Tom almost lost his feet, fetching up against the professor with a bump that caused the man of science to ejaculate a most undignified "Ouch!"
"Well, what do you think of it?" inquired Mr. Ironsides, who had stood calmly at his steering lever with his lips compressed into a line, and his hawk-like eyes peering keenly ahead during all the confusion.