Meanwhile Dave Fearless sat posed like a statue. His gaze was fixed beyond the little inlet where the Swallow was moored, straight across the unbroken ocean stretch. His thoughts just then, however, were not fixed on the west, but rather on the east. A vivid panorama of his stirring adventures of the past few months seemed spread out to his mental eye. They went back to the start of what the present moment seemed to be the finish.
Dave's home was at Quanatack, along the coast of Long Island Sound. There for many years his father had been an expert master diver, and Dave himself, reared beside the sea and loving it, had done service as a lighthouse assistant.
In the first volume of the present series, entitled "The Rival Ocean Divers," it was told how they one day learned that they were direct heirs of the Washington family, who twenty years previous had acquired a fortune of nearly a million dollars in China. This, all in gold coin, had been shipped in the Happy Hour for San Francisco. A storm overtook the vessel, which sunk in two miles of water in mid-ocean with the treasure aboard.
Amos Fearless secured a chart showing the exact location of the wreck. Unfortunately two distant relatives, a miserly trickster named Lem Hankers and his worthless son, Bart, learned of the sunken treasure, too. They proceeded to San Francisco and were joined by a rascally partner named Pete Rackley. The trio chartered from a wrecking company the Raven, Captain Nesik in command, and engaged a professional diver named Cal Vixen.
The Fearlesses, learning of this, hastened their plans. An old friend of the diver, Captain Broadbeam, was just then starting out with the Swallow, to convey a well-known scientist from Washington to mid-ocean. The Swallow was equipped with the finest diving bells and apparatus for capturing and preserving rare monsters of the deep. Broadbeam agreed to incidentally assist Amos Fearless in the search for the sunken treasure.
The rival divers located this at about the same time. Thrilling experiences followed, terrific battles with submarine monsters, hair-breadth perils on the ocean bed. The Hankers and their diver after several efforts gave up the quest. Dave and his father stuck at it until one day they located the hull of the Happy Hour. Bag after bag of gold they stored in their Costell diving bell, until all the treasure was conveyed safely to the hold of the Swallow. Then they set sail for home.
Pete Rackley had managed to secrete himself aboard. He disabled the machinery of the Swallow. This was the starting-point of a new series of adventures as related in our second volume, "The Cruise of the Treasure Ship."
It now became plot and warfare on the part of the disgruntled Hankers and their friends. The result was that one dark and foggy night the schemers succeeded in stealing aboard of the Swallow. Captain Broadbeam, Bob Vilett, Doctor Barrell, and the Fearlesses were put ashore on a lonely island, and the Raven steamed away with the captured convoy.
A sixth person was also marooned. This was one Pat Stoodles, a whimsical Irishman, who had been previously rescued by the Swallow from this same island, where for several years he had been the king of its savage inhabitants.
"The Cruise of the Treasure Ship" has told graphically of the many adventures of the marooned. Stoodles reassumed his kingship temporarily and helped his friends out of many a sore dilemma. A cyclone and an earthquake drove all hands to a neighboring island. Finally Dave and Bob discovered the Swallow, somewhat dismantled, lying off the coast of the island. They boarded her to find Mr. Drake, the boatswain, Mike Conners, the cook, and Ben Adams, the engineer, handcuffed in the cabin. These men had refused to navigate the Swallow for Captain Nesik. They told how the cyclone had parted the two vessels and the Swallow had been driven to her present isolated moorings. They told also of the four boxes into which they had seen the Hankers place the sunken treasure.