“Follow me!” cried the valiant sailor, and Tom and the others rushed after him. They could hear the wind howling more loudly than ever, and as they reached the deck the rain dashed into their faces with such violence that they could hardly see. But they were aware that something had occurred. By the light of several lanterns swaying in the terrific blast they saw that one of the auxiliary masts had broken off near the deck.
It had fallen against the chart house, smashing it, and a number of sailors were laboring to clear away the wreckage.
“Fortune favors us!” cried Captain Weston. “Come on! Make for the small boat. It’s near the side ladder. We’ll lower the boat and pull to the submarine.”
There came a flash of lightning, and in its glare Tom saw something that caused him to cry out.
“Look!” he shouted. “The submarine. She’s dragged her anchors!”
The Advance was much closer to the warship than she had been that afternoon. Captain Weston looked over the side.
“It’s the San Paulo that’s dragging her anchors, not the submarine!” he shouted. “We’re bearing down on her! We must act quickly. Come on, we’ll lower the boat!”
In the rush of wind and the dash of rain the prisoners crowded to the accommodation companion ladder, which was still over the side of the big ship. No one seemed to be noticing them, for Admiral Fanchetti was on the bridge, yelling orders for the clearing away of the wreckage. But Lieutenant Drascalo, coming up from below at that moment, caught sight of the fleeing ones. Drawing his sword, he rushed at them, shouting:
“The prisoners! The prisoners! They are escaping!”
Captain Weston leaped toward the lieutenant
“Look out for his sword!” cried Tom. But the doughty sailor did not fear the weapon. Catching up a coil of rope, he cast it at the lieutenant. It struck him in the chest, and he staggered back, lowering his sword.
Captain Weston leaped forward, and with a terrific blow sent Lieutenant Drascalo to the deck.
“There!” cried the sailor. “I guess you won’t yell ‘Silenceo!’ for a while now.”
There was a rush of Brazilians toward the group of prisoners. Tom caught one with a blow on the chin, and felled him, while Captain Weston disposed of two more, and Mr. Sharp and Mr. Damon one each. The savage fighting of the Americans was too much for the foreigners, and they drew back.
“Come on!” cried Captain Weston again. “The storm is getting worse. The warship will crash into the submarine in a few minutes. Her anchors aren’t holding. I didn’t think they would.”
He made a dash for the ladder, and a glance showed him that the small boat was in the water at the foot of it. The craft had not been hoisted on the davits.
“Luck’s with us at last!” cried Tom, Seeing it also. “Shall I help you, dad?”
“No; I think I’m all right. Go ahead.”
There came such a gust of wind that the San Paulo was heeled over, and the wreck of the mast, rolling about, crashed into the side of a deck house, splintering it. A crowd of sailors, led by Admiral Fanchetti, who were again rushing on the escaping prisoners, had to leap back out of the way of the rolling mast.
“Catch them! Don’t let them get away!” begged the commander, but the sailors evidently had no desire to close in with the Americans.
Through the rush of wind and rain Tom and his friends staggered down the ladder. It was hard work to maintain one’s footing, but they managed it. On account of the high side of the ship the water was comparatively calm under her lee, and, though the small boat was bobbing about, they got aboard. The oars were in place, and in another moment they had shoved off from the landing stage which formed the foot of the accommodation ladder.
“Now for the Advance!” murmured Captain Weston.
“Come back! Come back, dogs of Americans!” cried a voice at the rail over their heads, and looking up, Tom saw Lieutenant Drascalo. He had snatched a carbine from a marine, and was pointing it at the recent prisoners. He fired, the flash of the gun and a dazzling chain of lightning coming together. The thunder swallowed up the report of the carbine, but the bullet whistled uncomfortable close to Tom’s head. The blackness that followed the lightning shut out the view of everything for a few seconds, and when the next flash came the adventurers saw that they were close to their submarine.
A fusillade of shots sounded from the deck of the warship, but as the marines were poor marksmen at best, and as the swaying of the ship disconcerted them, our friends were in little danger.
There was quite a sea once they were beyond the protection of the side of the warship, but Captain Weston, who was rowing, knew how to manage a boat skillfully, and he soon had the craft alongside the bobbing submarine.
“Get aboard, now, quick!” he cried.
They leaped to the small deck, casting the rowboat adrift. It was the work of but a moment to open the conning tower. As they started to descend they were met by several Brazilians coming up.
“Overboard with ’em!” yelled the captain. “Let them swim ashore or to their ship!”
With almost superhuman strength he tossed one big sailor from the small deck. Another showed fight, but he went to join his companion in the swirling water. A man rushed at Tom, seeking the while to draw his sword, but the young inventor, with a neat left-hander, sent him to join the other two, and the remainder did not wait to try conclusions. They leaped for their lives, and soon all could be seen, in the frequent lightning flashes, swimming toward the warship which was now closer than ever to the submarine.
“Get inside and we’ll sink below the surface!” called Tom. “Then we don’t care what happens.”
They closed the steel door of the conning tower. As they did so they heard the patter of bullets from carbines fired from the San Paulo. Then came a violent tossing of the Advance; the waves were becoming higher as they caught the full force of the hurricane. It took but an instant to sever, from within, the cable attached to the anchor, which was one belonging to the warship. The Advance began drifting.
“Open the tanks, Mr. Sharp!” cried Tom. “Captain Weston and I will steer. Once below we’ll start the engines.”
Amid a crash of thunder and dazzling flashes of lightning, the submarine began to sink. Tom, in the conning tower had a sight of the San Paulo as it drifted nearer and nearer under the influence of the mighty wind. As one bright flash came he saw Admiral Fanchetti and Lieutenant Drascalo leaning over the rail and gazing at the Advance.
A moment later the view faded from sight as the submarine sank below the surface of the troubled sea. She was tossed about for some time until deep enough to escape the surface motion. Waiting until she was far enough down so that her lights would not offer a mark for the guns of the warship, the electrics were switched on.
“We’re safe now!” cried Tom, helping his father to his cabin. “They’ve got too much to attend to themselves to follow us now, even if they could. Shall we go ahead, Captain Weston?”
“I think so, yes, if I may be allowed to express my opinion,” was the mild reply, in strange contrast to the strenuous work in which the captain had just been engaged.
Tom signaled to Mr. Sharp in the engine-room, and in a few seconds the Advance was speeding away from the island and the hostile vessel. Nor, deep as she was now, was there any sign of the hurricane. In the peaceful depths she was once more speeding toward the sunken treasure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AT THE WRECK
“Well,” remarked Mr. Damon, as the submarine hurled herself forward through the ocean, “I guess that firing party will have something else to do tomorrow morning besides aiming those rifles at us.”
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Tom. “They’ll be lucky if they save their ship. My, how that wind did blow!”
“You’re right,” put in Captain Weston. “When they get a hurricane down in this region it’s no cat’s paw. But they were a mighty careless lot of sailors. The idea of leaving the ladder over the side, and the boat in the wat
er.”
“It was a good thing for us, though,” was Tom’s opinion.
“Indeed it was,” came from the captain. “But as long as we are safe now I think we’d better take a look about the craft to see if those chaps did any damage. They can’t have done much, though, or she wouldn’t be running so smoothly. Suppose you go take a look, Tom, and ask your father and Mr. Sharp what they think. I’ll steer for a while, until we get well away from the island.”
The young inventor found his father and the balloonist busy in the engine-room. Mr. Swift had already begun an inspection of the machinery, and so far found that it had not been injured. A further inspection showed that no damage had been done by the foreign guard that had been in temporary possession of the Advance, though the sailors had made free in the cabins, and had broken into the food lockers, helping themselves plentifully. But there was still enough for the gold-seekers.
“You’d never know there was a storm raging up above,” observed Tom as he rejoined Captain Weston in the lower pilot house, where he was managing the craft. “It’s as still and peaceful here as one could wish.”
“Yes, the extreme depths are seldom disturbed by a surface storm. But we are over a mile deep now. I sent her down a little while you were gone, as I think she rides a little more steadily.”
All that night they speeded forward, and the next day, rising to the surface to take an observation, they found no traces of the storm, which had blown itself out. They were several hundred miles away from the hostile warship, and there was not a vessel in sight on the broad expanse of blue ocean.
The air tanks were refilled, and after sailing along on the surface for an hour or two, the submarine was again sent below, as Captain Weston sighted through his telescope the smoke of a distant steamer.
“As long as it isn’t the Wonder, we’re all right,” said Tom. “Still, we don’t want to answer a lot of questions about ourselves and our object.”
“No. I fancy the Wonder will give up the search,” remarked the captain, as the Advance was sinking to the depths.
“We must be getting pretty near to the end of our search ourselves,” ventured the young inventor.
“We are within five hundred miles of the intersection of the forty-fifth parallel and the twenty-seventh meridian, east from Washington,” said the captain. “That’s as near as I could locate the wreck. Once we reach that point we will have to search about under water, for I don’t fancy the other divers left any buoys to mark the spot.”
It was two days later, after uneventful sailing, partly on the surface, and partly submerged, that Captain Weston, taking a noon observation, announced:
“Well, we’re here!”
“Do you mean at the wreck?” asked Mr. Swift eagerly.
“We’re at the place where she is supposed to lie, in about two miles of water,” replied the captain. “We are quite a distance off the coast of Uruguay, about opposite the harbor of Rio de La Plata. From now on we shall have to nose about under water, and trust to luck.”
With her air tanks filled to their capacity, and Tom having seen that the oxygen machine and other apparatus was in perfect working order, the submarine was sent below on her search. Though they were in the neighborhood of the wreck, the adventurers might still have to do considerable searching before locating it. Lower and lower they sank into the depths of the sea, down and down, until they were deeper than they had ever gone before. The pressure was tremendous, but the steel sides of the Advance withstood it
Then began a search that lasted nearly a week. Back and forth they cruised, around in great circles, with the powerful searchlight focused to disclose the sunken treasure ship. Once Tom, who was observing the path of light in the depths from the conning tower, thought he had seen the remains of the Boldero, for a misty shape loomed up in front of the submarine, and he signaled for a quick stop. It was a wreck, but it had been on the ocean bed for a score of years, and only a few timbers remained of what had been a great ship. Much disappointed, Tom rang for full speed ahead again, and the current was sent into the great electric plates that pulled and pushed the submarine forward.
For two days more nothing happened. They searched around under the green waters, on the alert for the first sign, but they saw nothing. Great fish swam about them, sometimes racing with the Advance. The adventurers beheld great ocean caverns, and skirted immense rocks, where dwelt monsters of the deep. Once a great octopus tried to do battle with the submarine and crush it in its snaky arms, but Tom saw the great white body, with saucer-shaped eyes, in the path of light and rammed him with the steel point. The creature died after a struggle.
They were beginning to despair when a full week had passed and they were seemingly as far from the wreck as ever. They went to the surface to enable Captain Weston to take another observation. It only confirmed the other, and showed that they were in the right vicinity. But it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, almost, to and the sunken ship in that depth of water.
“Well, we’ll try again,” said Mr. Swift, as they sank once more beneath the surface.
It was toward evening, on the second day after this, that Tom, who was on duty in the conning tower, saw a black shape looming up in front of the submarine, the searchlight revealing it to him far enough away so that he could steer to avoid it. He thought at first that it was a great rock, for they were moving along near the bottom, but the peculiar shape of it soon convinced him that this could not be. It came more plainly into view as the submarine approached it more slowly, then suddenly, out of the depths in the illumination from the searchlight, the young inventor saw the steel sides of a steamer. His heart gave a great thump, but he would not call out yet, fearing that it might be some other vessel than the one containing the treasure.
He steered the Advance so as to circle it. As he swept past the bows he saw in big letters near the sharp prow the word, Boldero.
“The wreck! The wreck!” he cried, his voice ringing through the craft from end to end. “We’ve found the wreck at last!”
“Are you sure?” cried his father, hurrying to his son, Captain Weston following.
“Positive,” answered the lad. The submarine was slowing up now, and Tom sent her around on the other side. They had a good view of the sunken ship. It seemed to be intact, no gaping holes in her sides, for only her plates had started, allowing her to sink gradually.
“At last,” murmured Mr. Swift. “Can it be possible we are about to get the treasure?”
“That’s the Boldero, all right,” affirmed Captain Weston. “I recognize her, even if the name wasn’t on her bow. Go right down on the bottom, Tom, and we’ll get out the diving suits and make an examination.”
The submarine settled to the ocean bed. Tom glanced at the depth gage. It showed over two miles and a half. Would they be able to venture out into water of such enormous pressure in the comparatively frail diving suits, and wrest the gold from the wreck? It was a serious question.
The Advance came to a stop. In front of her loomed the great bulk of the Boldero, vague and shadowy in the flickering gleam of the searchlight As the gold-seekers looked at her through the bull’s-eyes of the conning tower, several great forms emerged from beneath the wreck’s bows.
“Deep-water sharks!” exclaimed Captain Weston, “and monsters, too. But they can’t bother us. Now to get out the gold!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ATTACKED BY SHARKS
For a few minutes after reaching the wreck, which had so occupied their thoughts for the past weeks, the adventurers did nothing but gaze at it from the ports of the submarine. The appearance of the deep-water sharks gave them no concern, for they did not imagine the ugly creatures would attack them. The treasure-seekers were more engrossed with the problem of getting out the gold.
“How are we going to get at it?” asked Tom, as he looked at the high sides of the sunken ship, which towered well above the comparatively small Advance.
“Why, just go in and get it,�
�� suggested Mr. Damon. “Where is gold in a cargo usually kept, Captain Weston? You ought to know, I should think. Bless my pocketbook!”
“Well, I should say that in this case the bullion would be kept in a safe in the captain’s cabin,” replied the sailor. “Or, if not there, in some after part of the vessel, away from where the crew is quartered. But it is going to be quite a problem to get at it. We can’t climb the sides of the wreck, and it will be impossible to lower her ladder over the side. However, I think we had better get into the diving suits and take a closer look. We can walk around her.”
“That’s my idea,” put in Mr. Sharp. “But who will go, and who will stay with the ship?”
“I think Tom and Captain Weston had better go,” suggested Mr. Swift. “Then, in case anything happens, Mr. Sharp, you and I will be on board to manage matters.”
“You don’t think anything will happen, do you, dad?” asked his son with a laugh, but it was not an easy one, for the lad was thinking of the shadowy forms of the ugly sharks.
“Oh, no, but it’s best to be prepared,” answered his father.
The captain and the young inventor lost no time in donning the diving suits. They each took a heavy metal bar, pointed at one end, to use in assisting them to walk on the bed of the ocean, and as a protection in case the sharks might attack them. Entering the diving chamber, they were shut in, and then water was admitted until the pressure was seen, by gauges, to be the same as that outside the submarine. Then the sliding steel door was opened. At first Tom and the captain could barely move, so great was the pressure of water on their bodies. They would have been crushed but for the protection afforded by the strong diving suits.
In a few minutes they became used to it, and stepped out on the floor of the ocean. They could not, of course, speak to each other, but Tom looked through the glass eyes of his helmet at the captain, and the latter motioned for the lad to follow. The two divers could breathe perfectly, and by means of small, but powerful lights on the helmets, the way was lighted for them as they advanced.
The Tom Swift Megapack Page 50
