The Adventuress Page 18

  Shelby had retreated to the porch, where now he was pacing up and down, alone. As he came past the door his abstracted glance fell with a start on his sister. He drew himself together and spoke to her. Evidently he was debating whether she had seen anything, and, if so, how much and how she had interpreted it. At any rate, he was at pains to speak now, hoping that she might carry a message which he dared not send. What was going on in their minds I could not guess, but to outward appearance they were more like brother and sister than I had seen them ever before.

  They parted finally and Shelby continued his measured tread about the porch, as though trying to make up his mind on a course of action. For about a quarter of an hour he walked, then, his face set in determined lines, entered the Lodge and went deliberately over to a florist’s stand. There, oblivious to anything else, he selected the handsomest bunch of violets on the stand. He was about to drop his card into their fragrant and reconciling depths when he paused, replaced the card in his case, and directed the man to deliver them anonymously. There was no need for us to inquire where they were sent.

  Still oblivious to the gay life of the Lodge and Casino, he strode out into the night and down to the dock, paying no attention to Craig’s student as he passed. He stepped into the tender which was still waiting and we saw him head straight for the Sybarite. Ten minutes later the lights in the main saloon flashed up. Shelby was evidently at work over some problem, wrestling it out himself. Was it his relations with Winifred or his stock-market schemes—or both?

  ‘Well, I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?’ sounded Burke’s voice back of us, as Kennedy and I were silently looking out over the dark waters at the yacht.

  Without waiting for us to reply Burke hurried on. ‘You remember that operator, Steel, that was here from Seaville?’

  ‘Yes,’ encouraged Kennedy. ‘What of him?’

  ‘He went back to the station and has done his trick. He has just crossed over again with a message to me. That wireless power, whatever it is, is jamming the air again. I thought you’d like to know of it.’

  For just a second Kennedy looked at Burke in silence, then without further inquiry turned and almost ran down the length of the dock to the float at the end.

  There Watkins had already set up on the float a large affair which looked for all the world like a mortar. We watched as Craig fussed with it to make sure that everything was all right. Meanwhile the student continued adjusting something else that had been let down over the edge of the float into the water. It seemed to be a peculiar disc, heavy, and suspended by a stout wire which allowed it to be submerged eight or ten feet.

  ‘What’s this thing?’ inquired Burke, looking at the mortar over which Craig was bending. ‘Fireworks, or are you going to bombard somebody?’

  ‘It’s a light-weight rocket mortar,’ explained Kennedy, ramming something into it. ‘You’ll see in a moment. Stand back, all of you—off the float—on the dock.’

  Suddenly there came a deep detonation from the mortar and a rocket shot out and up in a long, low parabola. Kennedy rushed forward, and another detonation sent a second far out in a different angle.

  ‘What is it?’ gasped Burke, in amazement.

  ‘Look!’ called Kennedy, elated.

  Another instant, and from every quarter of the harbour there seemed to rise, as if from the waves, huge balls of fire, a brilliant and luminous series of flames literally from the water itself. It was a moonless night but these fires seemed literally to roll back the Cimmerian darkness.

  ‘A recent invention,’ explained Craig, ‘light-bombs, for use at night against torpedo-boat and aeroplane attacks.’

  ‘Light-bombs!’ Burke repeated.

  ‘Yes, made of phosphide of calcium. The mortar hurls them out, and they are so constructed that they float after a short plunge in the water. You see, the action of the salt water automatically ignites them merely by contact and the chemical action of the phosphide and the salt water keeps them phosphorescing for several minutes.’

  As he talked he shot off some more.

  ‘Kennedy, you’re a genius,’ gasped Burke. ‘You’re always ready for anything.’

  The sight before us was indeed a beautiful pyrotechnic display. The bombs lighted up the shores and the low-lying hills, making everything stand forth and cast long spectral shadows. Cottages hidden among trees or in coves along the wide sweep of the shore line stood out as if in an unearthly flare.

  What people on the shore thought we had no time even to wonder. They crowded out on the porches, in consternation. The music at the Casino stopped. No one had ever seen anything like it before. It was fire on water!

  As yet none of us had even an inkling of what it was that Kennedy expected to discover. But every craft in the harbour now stood out distinct—in the glare of a miniature sun. We could see that, naturally, excitement on the boats was greater than it was on shore, for they were closer to the flares and therefore it seemed more amazing.

  Craig was scanning the water carefully, seeking any sign of something suspicious.

  ‘There it is!’ he exclaimed, bending forward and pointing.

  We strained our eyes. A mile or two out I could distinguish a power-boat of good size, moving swiftly away, as though trying to round the shelter of a point of land, out of the light. With a glass someone made out a stubby wireless mast on her.

  Kennedy’s surmise when we had first studied the wireless interference had proved correct.

  Sure enough, in the blackness of the night, there was a fast express cruiser, of the new scout type, not large, almost possible for one man to control, the latest thing in small power-boats and a perfect demon for speed!

  Was that the source of the strange wireless impulses? Whose was it, and why was it there?

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE SUBMARINE EAR

  ALMOST before we knew it the speed demon had disappeared beyond the circle of the flares.

  ‘Suspiciously near the Sybarite,’ remarked Kennedy, under his breath, watching the scout cruiser to the last moment as she ran away.

  I wondered whether he meant that the swift little motor-boat might have some connection with Shelby Maddox and his new activities, but I said nothing, for Kennedy’s attention was riveted on the wake left by the boat. I looked, too, and could have sworn that there was something moving in the opposite direction to that taken by the boat. What could it be?

  On the end of the deck was an incandescent lamp. Craig unscrewed the bulb and inserted another connection in the bulb socket, an insulated cable that led down to the apparatus on the float over which his assistant was still working.

  By this time quite a crowd had collected on the dock, and on the float, watching us.

  ‘Burke,’ ordered Kennedy, ‘will you and Jameson make the people stand back? We can’t do anything with so many around.’

  As we pressed the newcomers back I saw that among them was Paquita. Though I looked, I could not discover Sanchez, but thought nothing of it, for there were so many about that it would have been hard to find any particular person.

  ‘If you will please stand back,’ I implored, trying to keep the curious from almost swamping the float ‘you will be able to see what is going on just as well and, besides, it will be a great deal safer—providing there is an explosion,’ I added as a happy afterthought, although I had almost as vague an idea what Kennedy was up to as any of them.

  The words had the effect I intended. The crowd gave way, not only willing, but almost in panic.

  As they pressed back, however, Paquita pressed forward until she was standing beside me.

  ‘Is—Mr Maddox—out there?’ she asked, pointing out at the Sybarite anxiously.

  ‘Why?’ I demanded, hoping in her anxiety to catch her off guard.

  She shot a quick glance at me. There was no denying that the woman was clever and quick of perception.

  ‘Oh, I just wondered,’ she murmured. ‘I wanted to see him, so much—that is all
. And it’s very urgent.’

  She glanced about, as though hoping to discover some means of communicating with the yacht, even of getting out to it. But there did not seem to be any offered.

  I determined to watch her, and for that reason did not insist that she get back as far as the rest of the crowd. All the time I saw that she was looking constantly out at the Sybarite. Did she know something about Shelby Maddox that we did not know? I wondered if, indeed, there might be some valid reason why she should get out there. What did she suspect?

  Again she came forward, inquiring whether there was not some way of communicating with the Sybarite, and again, when I tried to question her, she refused to give me any satisfaction. However, I could not help noticing that in spite of the cold manner in which Shelby had treated her, she seemed now to be actuated more by the most intense fear for him than by any malice against him.

  What it meant I had the greatest curiosity to know, especially when I noticed that Paquita was glancing nervously about as though in great fear that someone might be present and see her. Nor did she seem to be deterred from showing her feelings by the fact that she knew that I, Kennedy’s closest friend, was watching and would undoubtedly report to him. It was as though she had abandoned discretion and cast fear to the winds.

  As the minutes passed and nothing happened, Paquita became a trifle calmer and managed to take refuge in the crowd.

  I took the opportunity again to run my eye over them. Nowhere in the crowd could I discover Winifred, or, in fact, any of the Maddox family. They seemed to be studiously avoiding appearance in public just now, and I could not blame them, for in a summer colony like that at Westport facts never troubled gossipers.

  ‘What do you suppose Kennedy is afraid of?’ whispered Hastings in my ear nervously. ‘Your friend is positively uncanny, and I can almost feel that he fears something.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ I confessed, ‘but I’ve seen enough of him to be sure that no one is going to catch him napping. Here’s Riley. Perhaps he has some news.’

  The Secret Service operative had shouldered his way through the throng, looking for Burke, who was right behind me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ demanded his chief.

  ‘There’s another message, by telephone from the Seaville Station,’ Riley reported. ‘They say they are having the same trouble again—only more of it.’

  ‘That operator, Steel, came back again,’ considered Burke. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘As soon as I got the message, I hunted him up and took the liberty of sending him up to Mr Kennedy’s room to look at that arrangement there. I couldn’t make anything out of it myself, I knew, and I thought that he could.’

  ‘Did he?’ inquired Burke.

  ‘Yes. Of course he hadn’t seen it work before. But I told him as nearly as I could what you had told me, and it didn’t take him very long to catch on to the thing. After that he said that what was being recorded now must be just the same as it had been before when Mr Kennedy was there—not messages, but just impulses.’

  ‘Where is he—down here?’

  ‘No, I left him up there. I thought it might be best to have someone there. Did you want to speak to him? There’s a telephone down here in the boat-house up to the switchboard at the Lodge.’

  Riley jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at a little shelter built on the end of the dock.

  ‘N-no,’ considered Burke. ‘I wouldn’t know what to tell him.’

  ‘But I think you ought to tell Kennedy that,’ I interrupted. ‘He might know what to do.’

  Together Riley and I walked across the float to where Craig was at work, and briefly I told him what had happened.

  He looked grave, but did not pause in his adjustment of the machine, whatever it was.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he approved. ‘Yes, get the operator on the wire. Tell him to stay up there. And—yes—tell him to detach that phonograph recording device and go back to straight wireless. He might try to wake up the operator on the Sybarite, if he can. I guess he must know the call. Have him do that and then have that telephone girl keep the line clear and connected from the boat-house up to my room. I want to keep in touch with Steel.’

  Riley and I pushed through the crowd and finally managed to deliver Kennedy’s message, in spite of the excitement at the Lodge; which had extended by this time to the switchboard operator. I left Riley in the boat-house to hold the wire up to our room, and rejoined Burke and Hastings on the float.

  Kennedy had been working with redoubled energy, now that the light-bombs had gone out after serving their purpose. We stood apart now as he made a final inspection of the apparatus which he and his assistant had installed.

  Finally Craig pressed down a key which seemed to close a circuit including the connection in the electric-light socket and the arrangement that had been let over the edge of the float. Standing where we were we could feel a sort of dull metallic vibration under our feet, as it were.

  ‘What are you doing?’ inquired Hastings, looking curiously at a headgear which Kennedy had over his ears.

  ‘It works!’ exclaimed Craig, more to Watkins than to us.

  ‘What does?’ persisted Hastings.

  ‘This Fessenden oscillator,’ he cried, apparently for the first time recognising that Hastings had been addressing him.

  ‘What is it?’ we asked, crowding about. ‘What does it do?’

  ‘It’s a system for the employment of sound for submarine signals,’ he explained hurriedly. ‘I am using it to detect moving objects in the water—under the water, perhaps. It’s really a submarine ear.’

  In our excitement we could only watch him in wonder.

  ‘People don’t realise the great advance that has been made in the use of water instead of air as a medium for transmitting sounds,’ he continued, after a pause, during which he seemed to be listening, observing a stop watch, and figuring rapidly on a piece of paper all at once. ‘I can’t stop to explain this apparatus, but, roughly, it is composed of a ring magnet, a copper tube which lies in an air gap of a magnetic field, and a stationary central armature. The magnetic field is much stronger than that in an ordinary dynamo of this size.’

  Again he listened, as he pressed the key, and we felt the peculiar vibration, while he figured on the paper.

  ‘The copper tube,’ he resumed mechanically to us, though his real attention was on something else, ‘has an alternating current induced in it. It is attached to solid discs of steel, which in turn are attached to a steel diaphragm an inch thick. Surrounding the oscillator is a large water-tight drum.’

  ‘Then it makes use of sound-waves in the water?’ queried Hastings, almost incredulously.

  ‘Exactly,’ returned Craig. ‘I use the same instrument for sending and receiving—only I’m not doing any real sending. You see, like the ordinary electric motor, it is capable of acting as a generator, too, and a very efficient one. All I have to do is to throw a switch in one direction when I want to telegraph or telephone under water, and in the other direction when I want to listen.’

  ‘Talking through water!’ exclaimed Burke, awestruck by the very idea, as though it were scarcely believable.

  ‘That’s not exactly what I’m doing now,’ returned Kennedy indulgently, ‘although I could do it if there was anyone around this part of the country equipped to receive and reply. I rather suspect, though, that whoever it is is not only not equipped, but wouldn’t want to reply, anyhow.’

  ‘Then what are you doing?’ asked Burke, rather mystified.

  ‘Well, you see I can send out signals and listen for their reflection—really the echo under water. More than that, I can get the sounds direct from any source that is making them. If there was a big steamer out there I could hear her engines and propellers, even if I couldn’t see her around the point. Light travels in straight lines, but you can get sounds around a corner, as it were.’

  ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, ‘I think I see. Even if that little scout crui
ser did disappear around the point, you can still hear her through the water. Is that it?’

  ‘Partly,’ nodded Kennedy. ‘You know, sound travels through water at a velocity of about four thousand feet a second. For instance, I find I can get an echo from somewhere practically instantaneously. That’s the bottom of the bay—here. Another echo comes back to me in about a twentieth of a second. That, I take it, is reflected from the sea wall on the shore, back of us, at high tide. It must be roughly a hundred feet—you see, that corresponds. It is a matter of calculation.’

  ‘Is that all?’ I prompted, as he paused again.

  ‘No, I’ve located the echo from the Sybarite and some others. But,’ he added slowly, ‘there’s one I can’t account for. There’s a sound that is coming to me direct from somewhere. I can’t just place it, for there isn’t a moving craft visible and it doesn’t give the same note as that little cruiser. It’s sharper. Just now I tried to send out my own impulses in the hope of getting an echo from it, and I succeeded. The echo comes back to me in something more than five seconds. You see, that would make twenty thousand-odd feet. Half of that would be nearly two miles, and that roughly corresponds with the position where we saw the scout cruiser at first, before it fled. There’s something out there.’

  ‘Then I was right,’ I exclaimed excitedly. ‘I thought I saw something in the wake of the cruiser.’

  Kennedy shook his head gravely. ‘I’m afraid you were,’ he muttered. ‘There’s something there, all right. That wireless operator is up in our room and you have a wire from the boat-house to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I returned. ‘Riley’s holding it open.’

  Anxiously Kennedy listened again in silence, as though to verify some growing suspicion. What was it he heard?

  Quickly he pulled the headgear off and before I knew it had clapped it on my own head.

  ‘Tell me what it sounds like,’ he asked tensely.

  I listened eagerly, though I was no electrical or mechanical engineer, and such things were usually to me a sealed book. Still, I was able to describe a peculiar metallic throbbing.