When at last his feet touched solid dry land again, his feeling that the man had certainly been drowned left him. Such experiences are not uncommon. One’s feeling toward all of life during a time of peril is always different from that which he experiences in a place of comparative safety.
Strange to say, however, Johnny was, at the moment he stepped on that made land, in greater peril than he had been at any time while crossing the slippery breakwater. Being quite unconscious of this, he struck boldly down the length of that narrow stretch of land.
It was a curious sort of island on which he stood. A city that had built skyscrapers to its very water front, becoming dissatisfied with the waterscape that lay out before it, had decided that a few islands off its shores would add to the decorative effect of its view. So, with the fearless, Titan-like soul that possesses American cities, it had decided to build islands here and there along its shores. This narrow stretch of land, a few hundred yards wide and a mile long, was their first attempt at altering the face of nature.
At the present time, like the world in its beginning, it was “without form and void.” Upon the great mounds of dripping sand raised up from the bottom by dredges, had been hauled all manner of refuse from the land. Loads of clay, great heaps of tin cans, dump loads of broken brick and mortar, caused this man made island to look like the side of a volcano after an eruption.
Johnny found it a very difficult place to walk. One moment he was climbing a mound of clay, the next he was wading knee-deep in soft sand, and after that rattling through a whole desert of tin cans.
For all that, there was a certain thrill to be had from walking there. He was upon an island. As far as he knew the island was without an inhabitant. Certainly two years before it was entirely unknown to the civilized world.
He chuckled at the thoughts he had thus conjured up. “And yet,” he laughed, “the island is within gunshot of one of the largest cities of our land.”
If he had concluded that the place was entirely deserted, he was destined to a rude and shocking disillusionment. Suddenly, out from behind a tall heap of rubbish, a large figure launched itself at him with such sure effect that it sent him crashing to the ground.
Now Johnny, as you will know well enough if you have read our other book “Triple Spies,” was not the sort of a fellow to take the count on the first down. It would have been a nimble tongued referee who could have counted three before Johnny was getting to his feet.
Thoroughly aroused and angered by this sudden, cowardly assault, he was now quite ready for trouble.