THE TASTE OF SALT SEA WATER
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.”