A BOLT FROM THE BLUE
All the way back to the ship the girl sat silent, with bowed head buried
in her slender white hands. Jarrold, tied and harmless, on the floor of
the boat, raved and swore incoherently. Not till she stood once more on
the deck of the _Tropic Queen_, however, did the girl give way. Then as
she saw her uncle, sullen and defiant now, led to the captain’s cabin
where he was to be questioned, she reeled and would have fallen had not
De Garros, who happened to be close at hand, caught her.
The sudden stopping of the ship had awakened most of the passengers and
they had come on deck to see what was the matter.
“Here, take her below,” said De Garros to a stewardess, as the
passengers crowded curiously around.
The ship was once more got under way, the boat lashed home and the
voyage resumed, while in the captain’s cabin, facing Colonel Minturn,
the wretched Jarrold told his story. But he expressed no sorrow, except
for the failure of his mission. Captain McDonald ordered him confined in
a cabin, to be turned over to the U. S. authorities when the ship
reached Panama.
The sentence had hardly been executed, when a shuddering, jarring crash
shook the ship.
Her way was checked abruptly and every plate and rivet in her steel
fabric groaned.
Jack was thrown from his chair in the wireless room and hurled against a
steel brace. He struck his head and fell unconscious to the floor.
For an instant following the shock, all was absolute silence. Then
bedlam broke loose. Hoarse voices could be heard shouting orders, and
the answering yells of the crew came roaring back. Women were screaming
somewhere below, and men passengers were trying in vain to quiet them.
Sam was hurled out of his bunk, and, rudely awakened, found Jack lying
stunned on the floor. He dashed some water over him and then ran to the
bridge. Captain McDonald, firm and inflexible, stood there giving orders
as calmly as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
“Shall I send out an S. O. S., sir?” asked Sam, striving to keep as cool
as the ship’s commander.
“Not yet. I have not a full report of the extent of the injury to the
ship,” was the reply. “First reports indicate that we have struck a
submerged derelict.”
But as Sam went back to the wireless room, he saw the boats’ crews all
standing by and every preparation being made for abandoning the ship. In
an instinctive way, he felt that she had been mortally injured. She was
still moving, but slowly, like a wounded thing dragging itself along.
The first officer came hurrying along the deck and shoved his head into
the door.
“You had better try to raise any ship within our zone as fast as you
can,” he said.
“You are going to send the passengers off?” asked Sam.
“Yes, as a measure of precaution. The derelict we struck has torn a big
hole in the engine room. It is impossible to say how long we can keep
afloat.”
He hurried off. Sam heard a groan and saw Jack rising on an elbow.
“What is it? What’s up?” he asked bewilderedly, and then: “Oh, I
remember now. Any orders for an S. O. S., Sam?”
“Not yet. But we’re to raise any ship we can. They are sending the
passengers off in the boats.”
“Wow! That was a crack I got when she struck,” said Jack, getting on his
feet. “What did we hit, did you hear?”
“A submerged derelict. It has torn a big hole in the engine room.”
Jack took the key from Sam and began pounding it. But an exclamation of
dismay spread over his face as he did so.
“No juice!” he exclaimed. “Or not enough to amount to anything. Here’s a
fine fix.”
Below them, as they stood facing each other, thunderstruck at this
disaster, every light on the ship went out.
“Dynamos out of business,” gasped Jack. He struck a match and lighted a
lamp that hung in “gimbals” on the bulkhead.
They could hear the sharp staccato commands of the ship’s officers as
they quelled the incipient panic that had followed the extinguishing of
the lights. The boats were being filled and sent away with quiet and
orderly precision, a boatswain or a quartermaster in each one. The
higher officers could not leave the ship till later, by the law of the
sea.
Everything moved quietly, almost silently. It was like watching a dream
picture, Jack thought afterward. Luckily, the moon was bright and gave
ample light for the disembarking of the passengers. It was just this,
the bright moonlight, the cloudless sky and the smooth, summery sea that
made it all seem so unreal. It seemed impossible that a death blow had
been dealt to a mighty liner and that her passengers were in peril, on a
sea like a millpond and under an unruffled sky.
Jack hastened forward to report the failure of the current, without
which not a message of appeal could be flung abroad. The captain
received the news without the flicker of an eyelid.
“At any rate, the passengers are all safe,” he said, “the boats are all
off. Each has plenty of provisions and water and is in charge of a
competent man. We are in for a long spell of fine weather and the coast
is not far off. At the worst it will be a sea adventure for them with
few discomforts.”
“Are you going to abandon the ship, sir?” asked Jack respectfully.
“No. My duty is to stay by her as long as I think there is a chance of
saving her. The report from the engine room is that she can be run
several miles yet before the water reaches the boilers. All the pumps
are at work, full force, and that is the reason there is no power left
for the dynamos.”
“Do you mean you are going to try to beach her, sir?” inquired Jack.
“If I can possibly do so,” was the reply. “There is an island not far to
the south of here called Castle Island. If I can reach it in time and
beach her, there may be one chance in a thousand of salving her, after
all.”
Jack had asked all the questions he dared. Had it not been a time of
such stress, he would not have ventured to ask so many.
He hurried back to the wireless room. Sam was busy at the key, but he
shook his head in reply to Jack’s inquiring glance.
“Nothing doing,” he said. “Any news forward?”
“Yes. All the passengers are off and there are now on board only the
officers and crew. The skipper means to run for an island called Castle
Island and beach her there. He thinks that later there may be a chance
of getting her hull off, if he can make it.”
“Then she is leaking fast?”
“Yes, they’ve got all the pumps going to keep the water from getting to
the fires. That’s the reason we’ve got no juice.”
“Let’s look up Castle Island,” said Jack, partly to relieve the
tenseness of their position as the wounded ship crawled strickenly
southward and partly to keep Sam, who was making a plucky effort to
fight back his fears, from thinking too much of their situation.
They soon found it—a small island shaped like a splash of gravy on a
plate. It was marked with a red dot. Under this red dot, in italics, was
written, “_Volcano. Probably extinct._”
“Well, any old port in a storm,” remarked Jack, as he closed up the
atlas.