  When he had collected his scattered senses after the tremendous lift which the plane had been subjected to, Johnny Thompson knew that they must have been in the midst of a terrific electrical explosion which had occurred in mid-air; a current of electricity such as no mere man-made voltmeter would ever measure had leaped from cloud to cloud. For a fraction of a second the circuit had been broken. The explosion had followed. Pressing his lips to Pant’s tube, Johnny inquired curiously: “Any—damage?” “Can’t—tell—yet,” came back. “Hope—not.” For a moment there was no sound, save the screaming of the wind. Then, again, came the call of the stranger. “Hello!” exclaimed Johnny. “About—the—wreck. Ought—to—tell. May—not—come—out—of—this. You—may—come—out. Can—you—hear?” “Yes,—yes!” Johnny was impatient of delay. “Ought—to—tell. Mighty—important. Wreck—mighty—important. Lot—of—people—affected. Children—most. Ought—to—tell.” “Well, why doesn’t he tell?” was Johnny’s mental comment. “Has the storm driven him mad?” He wanted to know about that wreck. His life was imperiled for a cause, but what cause he did not know. His mission in life, he had found out long ago, was to help others live more happily and profitably. If the cause were a good enough cause, he might cheerfully die for it. “Children,” the man had said, “many children.” Well, that was best of all: to help many children. “Well,” Johnny grumbled through the tube, “why—don’t—you—tell?” “Going—to—tell,” came to Johnny through the tube. Then the Professor told his story. There was a pause between every pair of words; the wail of the storm, the thunder of the engines, the roar of the ocean, made it necessary. Even so, he was forced to repeat several sentences over and over before Johnny caught them. It was aggravating, doubly so since any word might be the man’s last; might be the last Johnny ever listened to, as well. There was one word the man repeated ten times or more, and, at that, Johnny did not catch it. It was an important word, too, the most important word, the very keyword, but Johnny gave it up at last. “Isn’t any use,” he muttered after the tenth time. “Some great treasure, but whether it’s gold or diamonds, or old ivory or frankincense, I’ll never be able to tell, if I ask him a thousand times.” The stranger, it seemed, was a professor in a medical college; his brother, a medical missionary in one of those border countries that lie between China and Russia. During the war something became very scarce, but just what something Johnny could not make out. He, the Professor, wrote his brother about it. The something came from Russia—only place it could be obtained. There was fighting still in those regions where it was found, between the bolsheviki and their enemies. Children in the United States, it seemed, tens of thousands of them, would benefit if it were brought out from Russia. Johnny could not see how that could be. “Perhaps the mine belongs to an orphanage,” he decided, half in humor, half in earnest. The Professor had written his missionary brother of the need. He had written that he thought that, for the sake of the children, the thing must be managed. It could be carried out, the treasure could. It would require a considerable investment, perhaps twenty thousand dollars. The Professor had sold his home, had raked and scraped, borrowed and begged. At last the money was sent to the brother. Months of anxious waiting followed. Finally there came a cable from an obscure Chinese port. The missionary brother had the precious stuff and was boarding the “Men-Cheng,” a tramp steamer, manned half by Chinamen and half by white men. She bore a Chinese name but carried an American flag. He had not trusted the officers and steward of her overmuch, so, instead of putting his treasure in their hands, he had chartered a two-berth stateroom and had carried it with him in four flat chests. Piling three of them on the lower berth, and sliding the other beneath, he had slept in the berth above. That cable was the last ever heard from him. The steamer had been caught in a gale and driven upon the shore of a coral island, as Johnny already knew. The missionary brother did not appear with the rescued members of passengers and crew. All these survivors had been questioned, but none knew anything about what became of him. It seemed probable that he had come on deck in the storm and had been washed overboard. And the treasure was there still. Beyond question, it was in that stateroom where he had stored it, since none but him knew of it. 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. Then the thunder of the engines ceased; Pant had foreseen the ultimate end of the struggle and had prepared himself for it. The plane swung around, square with the wind, then began a glide which increased in speed with each fraction of a second. Pant was dragged from his seat by the mere force of the air. With nostrils flattened, eyes closed, body bent like a western rider’s, as he is thrown in the air by a bucking bronco, he still clung to the wheel and guided the craft as best he could. Feeling himself constantly drawn to the right, he realized that they were not gliding straight downward, but were following a gigantic spiral—perhaps miles across. He shuddered. He had experienced something similar to this in his boyhood days—the spiral glide of the amusement park. Yet that was child’s play. This was grim reality, and at the end of the glide lay the remorseless, plunging sea. Johnny Thompson and the Professor sat in their cabin, too much overcome to move or speak. Through Johnny’s mind there ran many wild thoughts. Now the past, his home, his friends, his mother, were mirrored before his mind’s vision. The next he was contemplating freeing himself from his harness and opening the cabin door. To be trapped in that cabin, strapped to his seat, as they took the plunge into the sea, would be terrible. Better that he might have one fierce battle with the ocean. Yet there was still a chance—a ghost of a chance—some startling development that might save them. Then, if he were loose in the cabin, the cabin door open, he would be shaken out to his death while the plane flew on to safety. He ended by doing nothing at all, and the plane, holding true to her spiral glide, swung on toward the dark waters. The spiral seemed endless. One might almost have imagined that the storm had an upward twist and was shooting them toward the skies. A moment’s flash of lightning undeceived them. The sea lay close beneath them, perilously close; almost it appeared to be lifting up hands to grasp them. Johnny Thompson at last began to struggle with his harness. Pant licked his lips with his tongue and thereby received a revelation. The moisture on his lips was salt; they were in the midst of the salt spray of some titanic wave. The end was not far off. In desperation he kicked the engines into gear. There followed a moment of suspense. Thinking of it afterward, not one of the three could account for what followed. Perhaps the current of air created by some on-rushing wave had lifted them; perhaps the very force of the powerful engines had torn them from the grip of the remorseless spiral glide. Whatever it was, they suddenly found themselves booming along over the raging sea, and with each hundred yards covered there came a lessening of the wind’s violence. It seemed that they were truly on their way to safety. Johnny started as from a revery. The signal from the Professor’s speaking-tube was screaming insistently. “Hello!” he shouted hoarsely. “Those—chests,” came back through the tube. “Do—you—hear—me? Those—chests—they—are—marked—with—initials—L—B—on the bottom. Do—you—hear? L—like—lake. B—like—bird. Get it?” “Yes,” Johnny answered. “All—right.” Again, save for the thunder of the engines and the diminishing howl of the wind, there was silence. “Wish I had tried harder to get the name of those things in the four chests,” Johnny mused. “I’d like mighty well to know. Didn’t sound like anything I have ever heard of. Perhaps it’s some kind of Russian fur; new name for Russian sable, maybe. Guess there’s no use asking him about it now. Too much noise; couldn’t hear.” Then his mind turned to the steamer they had seen struggling in that raging sea. He wondered if it had escaped. “Hope so,” he murmured, “even if they are our rivals. We’ll beat them easily if we get out of this. Looks like we would, too.” Then, suddenly, his face went gray. He had thought of something—the dust in the fuel tank! There would have been enough to carry them to their destination, and a little to spare, had they not encountered the storm. They had battled the storm for what seemed hours. This had consumed much fuel. What awaited them once they were free from this storm? He put his mouth to Pant’s speaking-tube, but the message remained unspoken. “No use to cross a bridge till we come to it,” he muttered. “Not out of the storm yet.” |
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