“Silver!” he hissed. “Can all of them be such? Is there no gold?”
He kept at his work. It soon became apparent to him that this was a terrible fact. He sank in a chair, with distorted features and bursting veins.
For a moment he was apoplectic. Then great curses rolled from his lips. He struck the table with his clenched hand.
“They have beaten me!” he hissed; “they have taken the gold and left me the silver! Curse them! they have beaten me, but the end is not yet!”
He was too unreasonable to consider the situation logically. He could accept but one conclusion, and this was that the submarine voyagers had taken the gold and outwitted him.
“Why did I allow them to escape me?” he gritted. “I should have killed them all! They were in my power! Fool! Fool!”
He raved like a maniac in his impotent wrath, frothed at the mouth, and might have really yielded to apoplexy or some other fit had not an interruption come.
The distant boom of a gun was heard. Poole turned a ghastly pallor.
He knew what that meant.
“They are overhauling us!” he gritted. “We are to lose even this pittance of silver! But I will have the gold if I have to follow Frank Reade, Jr., to the end of the earth!”