[CHAPTER I.]
OFF THE CHILIAN COAST.
"Great spark plugs!"
"Strike me lucky!"
"Py shiminy Grismus!"
There were three surprised and excited boys on the rounded deck of the submarine boat Grampus. It was a calm, cloudless night, and the sea was as smooth as a mill pond; but, for all that, the night was cloudless, a dank, clinging fog had rolled down from the Andes and out upon the ocean, blotting out moon and star and rendering their surroundings as black as Erebus.
The Grampus was proceeding slowly northward along the Chilian coast. Motor Matt, Dick Ferral, and Carl Pretzel were on the deck forward, keeping a sharp lookout. The electric projector from the conning tower bored a gleaming hole into the darkness ahead, giving the lads a limited view in that direction. Speake was half in and half out of the conning tower, steering from that position.
The waters gurgled and lapped at the rounded sides of the boat, then floated rearward in long lines of phosphorescence, spreading out in the wake like two sticks of an open fan. At the stern of the submarine the propeller churned up a glittering froth.
What the boys saw, however, that had aroused their startled exclamations was a cluster as of glowing lights a foot or two under the surface of the water. This mysterious glow was moving, at a moderate rate of speed, in a course that crossed that of the Grampus.