A HAZARDOUS VENTURE
“And now,” said Benton, after the excitement had somewhat subsided,
glancing at his watch, “I’ve kept you fellows up till the wee sma’
hours, and I guess we’ve had enough for one night. We’ll sleep over it
and get together to-morrow and see how things look in the cold grey dawn
of the morning after.
“Mind,” he continued, as he gathered up his papers and made ready to
depart, “I don’t want to sweep you fellows off your feet. There are a
whole lot of things to be considered, and while I’m tickled to death by
the way you feel about it, I don’t hold you to the decision that you’ve
made tonight. I take that just as the statement of your personal
attitude toward the matter. If on thinking it over more carefully you
should change your minds, I’d be horribly disappointed, but I wouldn’t
feel a bit sore. In other words, I want the decision to be not a matter
of momentary enthusiasm but of cool judgment, after you’ve considered
all the pros and cons.”
“It’s bully of you to feel that way about it,” responded Phil warmly,
“but we’ve got used to making rather quick decisions, and so far we’ve
won out. Besides our decision wasn’t made at the minute you asked for
it. It had been forming in our minds all the time we were going through
those papers. Of course we’ll have to talk with our folks about it, but
we’ve persuaded them before to let us have our way in these matters, and
I guess we can again. At any rate if we don’t, it won’t be for lack of
trying.”
“One other thing,” broke in Dick. “There’s a pal of ours named Steve
Elwood. Just at present he’s in New York. He’s no end of a good fellow,
and I’m sure he’d like to go along with us. Would you have any
objection?”
“Not if he’s like the rest of you and you will vouch for him,” replied
Benton with a smile. “We’re rather shorthanded as it is, and five won’t
be too many.”
“We’ll vouch for him, all right,” said Phil, and the others seconded him
enthusiastically. “He was with us in Florida and Mexico, and he just
eats up danger.”
“That’s the kind we want,” replied Benton. “Go to it then and get in
touch with him as soon as you can. So long, fellows. See you tomorrow,
and we’ll get busy on the question of ways and means.”
There was very little sleep for any of the Radio Boys that night. They
had been too stirred up by the vista opened up by their interview with
Benton. And when toward morning they dropped off into a troubled
slumber, their dreams were a jumble of pirate ships and lonely islands
and tumbling waters and coins that gleamed and shimmered in tropical
sunlight.
But the morning saw no slackening in their resolution of the night
before. A strong appeal had been made to their imagination and their
love of adventure, and that appeal persisted.
Naturally, the appeal was much less strong to the members of their
families, when with considerable mental misgivings the boys opened up
the subject to them, after having enjoined them to strict secrecy as far
as outsiders were concerned.
There was a chorus of expostulations and objections, to all of which the
boys made answer as best they could. But the strongest arguments lay in
the way they had come through the perilous adventures they had
previously undergone. Their folks had to admit that in these they had
shown qualities of coolness and good judgment, in addition to courage,
that had extricated them from all their difficulties. Why was it not
reasonable to believe that the same qualities would stand them in good
stead in their present venture?
In the end, Phil and Dick prevailed, as they had felt sure that they
would, although the consent was a grudging one. Tom had a harder task,
as his father was in Chicago, and their talk had to be over the radio,
concerning which the elder Hadley was as ardent a “fan” as the son
himself. They had a code of their own, but naturally even with that the
talk had to be a guarded one, and dealt with the matter in a much more
general way than would have been the case in a personal talk, where Tom
could have brought his big guns to bear. The result was that Tom got a
qualified consent, which was not to be regarded as final however, until
the elder Hadley had received full details in a letter which Tom was to
write to him at once.
“So far, so good,” remarked Tom, at the end of the struggle, as he wiped
the perspiration from his brow. “Now I’ll have to give my natural
eloquence a chance and spread it all over my letter. Just wait till you
see that letter. It’s going to be a cuckoo. But I haven’t any doubt as
to how it will turn out. Dad’s a good sport, and he’s taken chances
himself all his life. I’ll bet he’d like to be in on this himself.”
Phil in the meantime had been writing to Steve, laying the matter before
him, and enjoining him by all that was good to let him have an answer in
twenty-four hours.
“Humph!” sniffed Dick, as he glanced over Phil’s shoulder. “Twenty-four
hours! He’ll telegraph an answer in five minutes after he reads the
letter. I know Steve.”
“I guess you’re about right,” smiled Phil. “You’ve got the old boy
pretty well sized up.”
There was so much to do that day that the time passed as though on
wings, and in the evening, in accordance with arrangements made over the
telephone, Benton came up again to get their final word on the matter.
“No need to ask though,” he remarked, when the first greetings were
over. “I can see that there are no cold feet in this crowd.”
“Warm as toast,” laughed Phil. “There was considerable chilliness about
the pedal extremities of our folks though. We had to talk until we were
hoarse. We carried our point though, and as far as Dick and I are
concerned the matter’s a go. Tom’s been talking over the radio and the
thing’s still in the air, but Tom considers it as good as settled. I’ve
written to Steve too, and we expect to get an answer tomorrow by
telegraph.”
“Some speed boys,” smiled Benton, “but that’s the way to go at it.
Either it’s worth nothing at all, or it’s worth every ounce of speed and
energy we can put in it. What were some of the objections that your
folks put up.”
“Well, there were a good many of them,” replied Phil. “First of course
was the danger. They conjured up all sorts of horrible things, sudden
tropical storms, drowning, sharks and things like that. Then too, they
thought that it was in the nature of a wild goose chase. If the ship had
been sunken recently, they’d have thought we had more of a chance. But
two centuries ago seems a long while. They thought the ship might have
broken up, sunk in the sand, wholly disappeared.”
“There’s something of course in that,” Benton admitted. “And yet
treasure has been brought up from the ships of the Spanish Armada that
sank over three hundred years ago. What has happened once may happen
again. As for the danger, of course there is some. But nothing venture
nothing have, and if we are successful the rewards will be great enough
to compensate for the risk.”
“Just what we argued,” replied Phil. “And then who can tell where danger
lies? A man may sail the seas for forty years without a scratch, and
then come home to be drowned in a cistern. After all, life itself is
just taking a chance.”
“Right you are,” put in Dick. “If this venture goes through, we’ll have
pulled off a big thing. But even suppose it doesn’t go through. We’ll
have seen a new part of the world, will have had lots of fun and
adventure and the game will have been worth the candle.”
“And just think what it means if we put it over,” added Tom. “Just think
of pulling up those ducats and doubloons and louis d’or and all the rest
of them from the bottom of the sea. It seems a shame to have all that
money doing no one any good, when it might be put into circulation.”
“Old ocean sure is greedy,” replied Benton. “Think of the hundreds of
millions, probably billions, that have been engulfed at some time or
other. Probably ten millions went down on the _Lusitania_, the _Titanic_
and the _Arabic_. Then there’s the _Laurentic_ that went down in 1917
with from ten to fifteen millions on board. They’ve already brought up
about three millions of that though. Then there was the fleet of Spanish
ships that sank in the harbor of Vigo, Spain, in 1702 carrying down
$37,000,000. There’s the _San Pedro de Alcantara_ that sank in Margarita
Channel near Caracas in 1812 with $32,000,000 in gold doubloons on
board. You’ve read perhaps of the American ship _Phantom_ that was
wrecked in 1862 with $10,000,000 in California gold. The _George Sand_
sank in the China Sea in 1863 carrying down $13,000,000 in bullion. And
those are only a few of the hundreds of ships that have carried down
hundreds of thousands or millions. There’s probably enough gold under
the waves to make a solid golden pathway a good many feet wide over the
whole of the ocean bed.”
“Well, here’s hoping that there’ll be less of it under water when we get
through,” laughed Tom.
“Let’s hope so,” smiled Benton, “but now let’s shift for a little while
to another metal and get right down to brass tacks.”