The wrecking crew, more than likely, was a gang of ghouls, with no principle, and with no knowledge of such things, anyway. They would either dump the treasure into the sea or carry it away. In either case it would be a total loss, and the small fortune of the Professor would be gone forever. It seemed, however, that the Professor was more concerned about the children’s share than he was about his own.
“What sort of treasure could it be,” Johnny asked himself, “that even the roughest, most ignorant rascals would dump into the sea?”
“Bunch of nonsense,” he muttered. Yet there was something about the intense earnestness of the man that gripped him, convinced him that it was not nonsense, but that here was a truly great and worthy cause.
Suddenly it came to him that, were he to outlive the stranger and reach the wreck, he would have no means of identifying the chests. Again his lips were at the tube.
“The—chests!” he shouted, “the—chests!”
“Yes—yes,” came back.
“The—chests. How—can—you—identify—”
His sentence was broken halfway. There came such a thundering, grinding, screaming horror of noises as he had never heard, not even in this hurricane. The seaplane stood still. Her engines were going, but she did not move. It was as if the shaft had broken loose from the propeller and was running wild, yet Johnny knew this was not so. He knew that the violence of the storm had suddenly become so great that the plane could make no headway before it.
So there they stood, halted in mid-air. What must come next? Was this the end? These questions burned their way to the very depths of his throbbing brain.
He had not long to wait for action. The plane began to turn slowly about. It was as if it were set upon a perpendicular shaft, and a mighty hand was gripping and turning it against its motor’s power to resist.