The Stolen War Secret/Chapter 12

HE situation called for instant action. Yet what was there we could do, to all intents and purposes marooned down the bay from the Seaville House and the cottage? How in all that vast extent of blackness were we to discover anything?

Sinclair looked in amazement at Kennedy, calm and collected. I think for the moment he believed it was the calmness of despair.

“Couldn’t we use the wireless in some way?” I asked desperately, without much idea of just how we might do it.

“Wireless—why they would be just as likely to pick it up and know everything instantly then,” he replied, hurrying from the library without explaining his remark, and making his way down to the dock where the Streamline lay.

We followed but were able only to look about hopelessly.

Kennedy, however, was busily engaged over the peculiar apparatus which he lifted out of the hold of the little runabout. As far as I could make it out, it seemed to consist of nothing more than the peculiar prism of glass which he had exhibited to us before we left the Yacht Club.

It was, as I have said, one of those black, inky nights with no moon—one of those nights when the myriad lights on the boats far down the harbor twinkled as mere points in the darkness, scarcely discernible at such a distance.

As we stood on the end of the dock Kennedy seemed to be engrossed in the study in black.

Here and there a moving light might be seen as a boat made its way up or down the bay, but there was no way of determining who or what they were, or whether or not their errands were legitimate. Hunting a needle in a haystack seemed to be mere child’s play to locating the power-boat of Alvarez and those who sought to avoid us.

SUDDENLY from the darkness a long finger of light swept out into the night, plainly enough marked near the source, but diffused and disclosing nothing in the distance as it reached us.

“The Yacht Club searchlight!” cried Sinclair.

I wondered what might be happening to Burke, whether he might not need us, or, if we tried to go to him, we might not overlook something of importance nearer where we now were.

“Yes,” rejoined Kennedy, “Burke has trained the light down the bay in our direction.”

By the time the beam reached us, though, it was so weak that it was lost.

Craig had leaped up on a railing and was capping and uncapping with the brass cover of the case the peculiar glass prism. I looked, uncomprehending, from him down at the wide path of light aimed at us, but apparently of no avail.

“What are you doing?” I asked hastily.

“Signaling with the triple mirror,” he called back, still busy with the prism. “I thought we might have to use some means of communicating and I had this apparatus sent up here for the purpose. I hope Burke hasn’t forgotten the code—it is simple enough.”

I looked out again in the darkness, half expecting to see a ray of light, I suppose, emanating from us in the direction of Burke. Of course there was nothing.

Rapidly but deliberately Kennedy kept at work, which to us looked as futile as if he had tried to shout something over the distance with a megaphone.

Sinclair was more frankly sceptical than I, although he said nothing. He took a few steps toward the Streamline as if that were something tangible in which he could put faith.

“I’ll be ready in a moment, Sinclair,” shouted Kennedy. “Just wait till I get Burke started.”

Sinclair waited impatiently.

“What would have been the matter with using wireless?” he remarked more to me than to Craig.

Craig overheard it.

“In this case the triple mirror is even better than wireless,” he hastened, still working with it. “Besides, wireless requires heavy and complicated apparatus. This is portable, heatless, almost weightless—a source of light depending for its power on another source at a great distance.”

I wondered how Burke could ever be expected to detect such a feeble ray as came from the triple morror [sic], but said nothing.

“Even from a rolling ship,” continued Kennedy, alternately capping and uncapping the mirror, “the beam of light which this prism reflects always goes back, unerring, to its source. It would do so, Sinclair, from an aeroplane so high in the air that it could not be located.”

Sinclair now for the first time seemed interested. He was scientist enough to appreciate that it was something new in the application of the laws of light that Kennedy was using.

“It must be tremendously accurate,” he remarked, his scepticism shaken.

“It is. The returning beam is invisible to any one not immediately in the path of the ray, and you can see what a slight chance there can be of some one being so situated. The ray always goes to the observer. It is simply a matter of pure mathematics, practically applied. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. You recall how no matter how you looked into the prism you saw your reflection accurately?”

“Yes, but when you are dealing in miles it must be a very different matter,” persisted Sinclair.

“There isn’t a variation of a foot in two miles,” asserted Kennedy confidently.

Sinclair subsided, convinced at last.

Craig had finished flashing his quick message along the invisible beam of the searchlight.

“What message did you send him?” I asked.

“I told him simply that they were trying to avoid us and asked him to watch the roads away from the hotel and cottage. I said that we could take care of the bay, if he would show the lights.”

“Lights—what lights?” I asked.

Kennedy was peering through a little telescope which was attached to the case beside the triple mirror.

“Burke is signaling back to us!” he cried. “Good—he gets me perfectly—is going over to Seaville House—we can meet him there unless there is something for us to do elsewhere.”

He was hastily packing up the apparatus which had served us so well in a tight pinch.

“Now, Sinclair,” he added briskly, “this is the time when you can show us what your boat can do. If it isn’t too late, we may be able to catch these people before they can slip out of our hands.”

“I’m afraid I can’t get the speed out of her at night that I got this afternoon,” replied Sinclair cautiously. “It’s risky enough trying to get up to a mile-a-minute speed in the daytime, but at night it’s suicidal. I don’t dare to let her out.”

WE CROWDED into the Streamline as quickly as we could, Sinclair taking his place at the wheel, and cast off.

“Start slowly then,” urged Craig. “It won’t hurt. We shall have to take in just how things are at first, anyhow. You can cut loose in a moment.”

Neither Sinclair nor I said anything, but I am sure both of us wondered how it was going to be safer to speed the boat up a few minutes later than now. Kennedy was eagerly looking up the harbor in the direction of the Yacht Club with an expectant air as if something might happen at any moment.

Cautiously at first Sinclair drove us along, gradually increasing the speed, but carefully devoting his entire attention to the running of the boat.

Suddenly there came a boom, as if from a gun, far away in the direction in which Kennedy was peering. Sinclair quickly shut off his motor and gazed about in surprise. Then came another from the same direction.

“What’s that?” we both asked, startled.

“There are the lights!” Kennedy exclaimed.

Another instant and from every quarter, up the bay toward which we were headed, showed what seemed to be huge balls of fire, literally rising from the sea, with a brilliantly luminous flame.

“Wh-what is it?” gasped Sinclair again.

Kennedy had risen in the boat and was looking about eagerly.

“A German invention,” he replied, “for use at night against attacks from torpedo boats and aeroplanes.”

“And they are using them against us?” I asked, forgetting in the excitement Kennedy’s remark a short time before about the lights.

“No, no,” he answered testily. “Don’t you remember the mortar I set up at the club. From it Burke has shot half a dozen of these bombs.”

Sinclair had recovered from his surprise and started his engine again.

“What are they made of?” he asked.

“Phosphid of calcium,” returned Kennedy briefly. “The mortar hurls them out far in every direction into the darkness. They are so constructed that they float after a short plunge into the water. The action of the salt water automatically ignites them merely by contact, and the chemical action of the phosphid and the water keeps them phosphorescing for several minutes.”

Sinclair was as ready to praise as he had been to criticize a few minutes before.

“My hat off to you, Kennedy,” he ejaculated. “You seem to have prepared for almost any emergency. It’s splendid—splendid!”

I could quite agree with him. The sight which the calcium bombs unfolded about us was indeed a beautiful pyrotechnic display. They lighted up the shores and the high-lying hills about the bay in an almost spectral manner. Cottages hidden among the trees, or in coves here and there along the sweep of shore-line, seemed to stand out as if in an unearthly flare.

What the people about the shore must have thought I could only guess. Here and there we could see them crowding out on the porches and pointing in consternation at what appeared to be impossible bonfires in the very water itself.

Every craft in the harbor was shown as distinctly as if the glare of the sun shone on it, and the excitement on the boats was even greater than on the shore, for the people on them were closer and more amazed at what they saw.

Together we scanned the bay carefully for any sign of a boat moving suspiciously.

“There it is,” cried Kennedy, bending forward nervously and pointing almost directly ahead of us.

We strained our eyes. Perhaps half a mile from the Seaville House we could distinguish a power-boat moving swiftly in and out among the craft at anchor, trying frantically to reach the open water.

“Cut them off!” ordered Kennedy.

Sinclair swung his helm just a trifle so as to cross their course as they came down toward us and crowded on all the speed his speedy hull could make. With the muffler cut out we awakened the echoes of the hills as if it had been an international race.

“That ought to throw a scare into them,” approved Kennedy. “Keep it up.”

THEN followed as wild a dash across the harbor as I would care to take, day or night. The spray from the Streamline rose in a cloud, and the wind taking it drenched us. But Sinclair did not care. He had fallen into the spirit of the chase and, as now and then a wild shout was wafted to us from the shore, he knew that all eyes were on him and that Westport wanted to know what the famous little craft could do.

Kennedy had not reckoned without a knowledge of psychology. It was only an instant that the people in the power-boat might have doubted that they were our object. They saw us and they saw at the same time that there could be only a question of seconds when the Streamline would be up with them.

The phosphid bombs were holding out splendidly and, as the power-boat came between one of them and us, we could just distinguish the people in it, though at the distance it was impossible to recognize them, of course.

“There are five of them besides the man managing the boat,” muttered Kennedy, “and one of them, at least, seems to be a woman.”

“They’re turning,” interrupted Sinclair with just a touch of pride and satisfaction at the compliment they paid his boat.

“Swing around—and beat them to it whatever they head for,” exhorted Craig.

The power-boat had turned as short as its pilot dared and was now retracing its course in the direction of the Seaville House. We had evidently caught them in the nick of time, for a few minutes longer and they would have been down the bay and perhaps out of reach of the phosphid glare that betrayed them.

Apparently their idea was to gain the pier of the hotel, where at least they would be on an equality with us, for their boat, whatever might be its cruising radius, was simply no match in speed for ours.

“Can Burke intercept them?” I asked anxiously as I reasoned out their plan.

“He has Sinclair’s car which we left at the club,” replied Kennedy. “He ought to.”

“Look over the shore-road,” put in Sinclair. “You ought to be able to see if there is a car there.”

Sure enough, where the road ran for some distance along the very edge of the bay, shaded by a few sparse locust trees, we could catch a glimpse of a car tearing along at a breakneck speed, its siren horn warning others at the curves in the road and adding one more feature to the excitement.

Would Burke be able to get there? Could he do the distance in time? The Seaville House was not far from the club, but at one point the road bent back, away from the bay, and we now no longer could distinguish Burke.

Sinclair was speeding the runabout to the limit, even here where the shipping was thick. On either side of us I could see the boats at anchor rocking wildly from the waves that we plowed up in huge furrows.

They had reached the dock of the hotel, and we could see them pile out and run up it. It was only a moment later when Sinclair shut off his power and with a daring flourish, regardless of the varnish of the Streamline, brought us to the opposite side of the float.

Kennedy sprang ashore ahead of us and sprinted up the dock, through an excited crowd that had gathered to witness an event that they did not understand yet could fully enjoy.

“Which way did they go?” we cried breathlessly.

The bystanders pointed up the hill beside the hotel, as if that were quicker than words.

Panting, puffing, perspiring, we followed the directions, Kennedy several yards ahead of us.

As we turned the corner of the roadway, we came upon the hotel garage, deserted by the employees in the excitement on the bay. One of them came running toward us.

“Six of them—they stole a car—I saw ’em from the hotel-porch—couldn’t get here quick enough!” he blurted out.

Another moment and the curious crowd had surrounded us, all talking at once, each one with a different plan.

None of us said a word.

They had escaped!