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Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics.
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
[Illustration: HE CAUGHT THE ASTONISHED TAR BY THE SCRUFF OF THE NECK
AND THE SLACK OF HIS TROUSERS. --Page 26.]
THE DREADNOUGHT BOYS ON A SUBMARINE
BY CAPTAIN WILBUR LAWTON
AUTHOR OF “THE BOY AVIATORS SERIES,” “THE DREADNOUGHT BOYS ON BATTLE
PRACTICE,” “THE DREADNOUGHT BOYS ABOARD A DESTROYER,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
* * * * *
Copyright, 1911, BY HURST & COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. UNCLE SAM GETS FIRST CALL 5
II. THE DREADNOUGHT BOYS ON DECK 17
III. THE WORK OF A DASTARD 31
IV. ANDERSON DINES ON MUD 49
V. LIKE THIEVES IN THE NIGHT 66
VI. THERE’S MANY A SLIP 78
VII. “I NAME YOU ‘LOCKYER’” 89
VIII. TO THE UTTERMOST PARTS OF THE SEA 105
IX. SCHOONER, AHOY! 121
X. FIGHTING SOUND PIRATES 134
XI. CHANNING LOCKYER FILES A MESSAGE 143
XII. TECHNICALLY TORPEDOED! 152
XIII. A MESSENGER FROM THE DEEP 163
XIV. A “BIG LEAGUE” REPORTED 175
XV. SOME RASCALS AT WORK 192
XVI. INTO THE THICK OF IT 201
XVII. A SURPRISE PARTY WITH A VENGEANCE 213
XVIII. “SAFE AS IN A STEEL-LINED VAULT” 224
XIX. NED IS ASTONISHED 236
XX. TOM’S VERY THICK FOG 248
XXI. THE SHIPWRECKED MEN--AND A BOX 258
XXII. AN INFERNAL MACHINE 275
XXIII. THE GRIM VISAGE OF DANGER 288
XXIV. MUTINY ON THE HIGH SEAS 303
XXV. MR. LOCKYER CAPTURES A PRIZE 311
* * * * *
The Dreadnought Boys On a Submarine.
CHAPTER I. UNCLE SAM GETS FIRST CALL.
“So your final answer is no?”
“Yes. And with a big N, Mr. Ferriss. I have put my best work of head
and hand into the Lockyer submarine, and Uncle Sam gets first call on
her services.”
“You remind me of a copy book with your sentimental morality,” sneered
Jasper Ferriss, with the bitter inflection of a man who has fought a
losing fight and knows it.
“Why,” he went on persuasively, “you know as well as I do that the
government is notoriously slow pay. By the time the red tape is
unwound at Washington you’ll be penniless, and the boat a rust-eaten
wreck. Our concern, on the other hand, offers you a fat figure, down on
the nail. Come, say the word and I’ll write you a check now.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Mr. Ferriss,” smiled Channing Lockyer, as
the other’s be-diamonded hand sought his breast pocket to produce his
check book--the magic volume which could have told many tales of its
adventures with Jasper Ferriss.
“My answer to you and your concern regarding your proposition is
_No_,--first, last and all the time,” he went on.
“Why?”
Jasper Ferriss was angered. Despite his experience and skill in putting
through all manner of “deals” requiring the exercise of the nicest
diplomacy, he could not help showing his chagrin. He showed it in the
way his black brows contracted till they met in one thick band across
his puffy, florid countenance. Showed it, too, in the quick way in
which he rubbed his blue, clean-shaven chin, with its triple folds of
fat, and in the sharp, impatient beat of his patent leather boot on
the floor of the dusty shipyard office in which they sat talking by
Channing Lockyer’s battered old desk, with its litter of blueprints and
plans.
“Why?”
The question was shot out as if it had been a projectile.
“Why?” echoed Channing Lockyer. “Because your firm proposes to build
submarines of my type for a foreign power--a power that may some day be
at war with us. I believe--it may be an inventor’s conceited folly--but
I believe that with a fleet of Lockyer submarines the power controlling
them will be absolute mistress of the seas. Naturally, as a descendant
of Jefferson Lockyer, I don’t want to see any country but my own with
such powerful engines of war at its disposal.”
The confidence of inventors in their works was not new to Jasper
Ferriss. But somehow the enthusiasm of this tall, pale young man, with
the workman’s clothes and the long, nervous fingers, infected him. But
it made him burn with an ardent desire to secure possession of the
secret of the Lockyer submarine for his own company. However, while
Channing Lockyer had been talking the other had managed to control his
irritation, and now could speak with his accustomed smoothness.
“I understand and honor your feelings, Mr. Lockyer,” he said suavely,
“but a man’s first duty is really to himself, especially to a man in
your position. But when is the government going to test your craft?”
It was an old trick of Jasper Ferriss’s to abruptly change the subject
when things weren’t going his way.
“I am expecting the officer who will be in charge of the experiments,
and his picked crew, within a few days,” was the reply. “A short time
will be spent in making them familiar with the construction, and then,
after she is launched, we shall go ahead with the real tests.”
“And the launching will be?”
“As soon as possible. But there will be no public ceremony. Only the
workmen, who are pledged to secrecy, will know if she is a success or a
failure. Naturally we wish to keep it all as quiet as possible.”
“The men are still working on her?”
The question seemed hardly necessary. Through the open windows there
floated the busy sounds of activity from the fenced-in yard. From a
tall, narrow shed built against the seaward side of the high fence came
the loudest demonstration of activity.
A rattling volley of riveters’ hammers, accompanied by the snorting
snarl of the whirring pneumatic drills eating through steel plates, was
punctuated by shouted orders and the clamor of metal on metal.
“We are putting on the finishing touches,” explained Lockyer. He sighed
as he spoke. The “finishing touches” he referred to might mean the
last strokes of his own career as well as the end of the preliminary
stages of the submarine’s construction. Ferriss’s eyes followed the
tall, slender young form as the youthful inventor strode up and down
the tiny office, with its tumble-down, dust-covered desks, their
pigeon-holes crammed full of blueprints and working drawings. No gilt
and gingerbread about Channing Lockyer’s office. It was business-like
as a steam hammer.
“Looks soft as rubber,” mused Ferriss, “but he’s tough as Harveyized
steel; and a blessed sight less workable.
“Well, Mr. Lockyer,” he went on, rising, “I must be going. But I am
stopping in the village, recollect, so that if you change your mind, or
Uncle Sam doesn’t appreciate the boat, we stand ready to negotiate for
her.”
“I won’t forget,” laughed the inventor, “but really, Mr. Ferriss, you
are wasting your time. Either the United States gets her, or, if she
isn’t good enough for Uncle Sam, I’ll sink her to the bottom of Long
Island Sound.”
“Fine talk! Fine talk!” chuckled the amiable Mr. Ferriss, as he stepped
into the noisy, bustling yard, so effectually cut off from outside
observation by its high fence with the spikes on top. “But our
figures will look mighty comfortable to you when you are on the brink
of ruin. And you will be if the Lockyer doesn’t come up to government
requirements.”
“Time enough to talk about that when the crash comes,” laughed the
young inventor gaily enough. But as Ferriss’s portly, expensively
dressed form vanished through the door he sank into a chair, and sat
staring at the opposite wall, deep in thought. Things were coming to a
crisis at the Lockyer boatyard.
Channing Lockyer was in his twenty-fifth year. Just twelve months
before this story opens he had been left a considerable fortune by his
father, who during his lifetime had done all he could to discourage
his son’s “fantastic mechanical dreams,” as he called them. With the
money in his possession, however, young Lockyer, with the true fire of
the inventor, had started out to realize his fondest hope, namely to
build a practicable submarine boat capable of making extended cruises
without the drawback of the accompanying “parent boat.”
Compressed air had solved the problem of running his engines, but the
use of the new driving force had necessitated the invention of an
entirely novel type of motor. But young Lockyer--a graduate of the
Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, by the way--had perseveringly
overcome all difficulties, and now, in the long, narrow shed over in
one corner of the enclosed yard, stood the realization of his dreams.
Through some friends of his late father’s the young man had succeeded
in “pulling the wires” at Washington. As a consequence, after many
wearisome delays, Lieutenant Archer Parry and a picked crew were to be
sent to Grayport to make an extended series of tests with the new craft.
But in “pulling his wires” Lockyer had necessarily to allow a part
of his secret to leak out. Now, at Washington “walls have ears,” and
it was not long after he received the glad news that at last the
Navy Department had decided to look into his type of boat, that
Jasper Ferriss, promoter and partner in the Atlas Submarine Company,
had come to young Lockyer with a proposal to sell his plant, stock,
and experimental boat outright, for a sum that fairly staggered the
inventor, who had, as Ferriss had hinted, run through almost his entire
fortune in making his experiments.
Now, Lockyer was not ignorant that the Atlas people, having failed to
sell their own gasolene and electric-driven boats to the government,
were making diving torpedo boats for a certain Far Eastern power. He
came of old Revolutionary stock, and the idea of selling his boat, the
offspring of his brain and inventive power, for possible use against
his own country was absolutely repugnant to him; wherefore Lockyer, as
we have seen, had informed the Atlas concern in no uncertain terms that
he would have nothing to do with their offers, flattering though they
might seem. Jasper Ferriss had, however, perseveringly hung on, hoping
against hope that something might happen to make the inventor change
his mind. The news he had just received that a naval experimental
force had actually been ordered to start for Grayport came as a rude
shock to him.
In fact, after leaving Channing Lockyer, Mr. Ferriss took the first
train to New York. In the Broadway offices of his firm a stormy scene
followed his narrative of his failure to close a deal with Lockyer.
Camberly--Watson Camberly, the other partner of the firm--a middle-aged
man of the same aggressive type to which Ferriss himself belonged, took
him sharply to task.
“Looks to me as if you’ve bungled this thing badly, Ferriss,” he
growled. “You say that if the government decides not to take the boat
that there is a chance Lockyer will accept our offer?”
“He’ll have to, or be ruined,” was the prompt rejoinder.
“Then we’ve got him!” cried the other, bringing down a ponderous fist
on the shiny mahogany directors’ table of the Atlas Submarine Company.
“I don’t think so,” rejoined Ferriss quietly; “from what I can
gather, the boat is bound to be an unqualified triumph. The
government--although of course I didn’t tell Lockyer so--will jump at
her.”
“That is if she is a success?” asked Camberly, a peculiar light
creeping into his eyes.
“Exactly. But, as I said, there is no doubt of that.”
“Unless----”
“Well, unless what? You don’t mean to cripple her, as we did the
Grampus Concern when they began to be serious rivals?”
“That’s what I do,” growled Camberly. “It’s this way, Ferriss. We’ve
got to have money. Our Far Eastern friends stand ready to pay us, you
know how much, for the compressed-air boat. Thinking that Lockyer would
be easy, we practically promised to close a deal with them. We’ve got
to have it.”
“In other words, Lockyer’s boat has got to fail in her government
tests?”
“You catch my meaning exactly,” said Camberly, a slow smile spreading
over his heavy, coarse features. “I think we had better send for
Gradbarr at once.”
Ferriss shrugged his shoulders.
“Too bad,” he sighed, an almost regretful expression coming over his
face. “Lockyer is a decent young fellow, but impracticable--quite too
fanatic in his ideas. I really wish we didn’t have to resort to such
measures, Camberly.”
“Rot!” rejoined the other impatiently. “Isn’t it for his own good?
We’ll pay him a bigger price than the government would; but business is
business, and if Lockyer won’t come into camp willingly, we’ll have to
drive him.”
He tapped a small bell on his desk, and to the obsequious office boy
who glided in he gave a sharp order:
“Send to the yard for Tom Gradbarr. Tell him to report to me here as
soon as possible.”