CHAPTER VIII
“TALK ABOUT LUCK!”
Although they had been passing through these fields of water ferns and tree-like forms for only half an hour or so, the boys were ready to declare that the reality far exceeded even their most sanguine expectations.
“Of course,” Jack admitted when they commenced talking about their work, and what a satisfaction it was not to be disappointed, “this thing will get a bit monotonous in due course, unless we keep on meeting up with new sights. But then down here in these depths there’s apt to be something novel happening any old time; just as that terrible fight between the two species of sharks turned out.”
“We had the same sort of luck out in Africa, remember,” Ballyhoo reminded the other two chums. “Whenever things got a little dull along would come something out of the ordinary to liven up the show. When we got through taking pictures of all the wild animals that could be met with in the jungle and the forest, why, what followed but that trip to the black king’s kraal, where we saw his army drill, and watched ’em do the Lion Dance to the tune of a horrid din.”
The crew had before this fallen away from the ports, and gone back to their customary work. They saw little that was attractive about those waving forests of singular submarine growths; though the prospect of another fight between some of the denizens of the depths would have brought them rushing forward again.
“Notice how the skipper keeps lunging from side to side as we move along?” observed Oscar. “He is scouring the ground as he goes forward. By the time we’ve made several revolutions around Coco Key we’ll know whether there was any truth in that old yarn about the sunken hulk, or not.”
“Well,” ventured Ballyhoo, with a shrug of his shoulders that was intended to express incredulity, “so far as I’m concerned I reckon it was only a fishy story that some newspaper man got up just to fill space. You never know how much to believe of anything you see in the newspapers nowadays, when the reporters are paid for space.”
“The proof of the pudding is the eating of the same,” laughed Oscar; “so we’ll not quite condemn that yarn until we’ve proved it to be a bad egg. You’d feel pretty cheap, Ballyhoo, if we really did uncover something in the shape of an old hulk, whether it held any treasure or not.”
“Oh! I surely hope they do, for the captain’s sake, yes, and for Uncle Abner’s, too; because he’s sunk a wheen of good hard cash in this venture, that he may never get back again. With us, now, it’s different, I claim, for we’re going about a legitimate business. Let us get our pictures, and it’s going to line our pockets with gold. That’s the way to do things, according to my notion.”
“Stop and think,” said Jack, “how would we ever have found such a glorious chance to accomplish what we’re aiming to do now if it hadn’t been for this same wildcat treasure hunting expedition you’re harping on? Sometimes it’s cruel to look a gift-horse in the mouth, Ballyhoo.”
“Kick me, Oscar,” said the other contritely, “for I certainly deserve it. And after this I’ll try and keep my thoughts to myself, especially when they run counter to the balance of you. Sure I hope the captain’ll strike it rich, and locate this Aladdin stuff—or was it King Midas who had everything he touched turned straightway into gold, even the coffee he drank at meals?”
Before either of the others could say another word they all became conscious of a perceptible shock that made the little submarine tremble all over as though stricken by a monster fist.
“Wow! was that my whale butting into us?” gasped Ballyhoo, who had only managed to keep himself from falling by clutching a convenient cleat on the wall.
“We’ve run up against something that was hidden among the waving, giant water ferns, that’s sure!” ejaculated Oscar anxiously.
They listened. Men could be heard calling out excitedly. The engines had stopped working, and the boys immediately felt a dreadful fear grip their hearts—had the motive power been disabled, and would they be unable to rise again to the surface when the compressed air chambers no longer contained the elements necessary to keep the imprisoned voyagers alive?
They may have remembered how the crew of an ill-fated U. S. submarine out at Hawaii had some accident occur that caused the boat to sink to the bottom of the sea in a deep hole; and that delay in rescuing her imprisoned crew resulted in the death of every one in the doomed boat.
Strange how things like this, common incidents under normal conditions, and simply glanced at in curiosity among other news items, arise to stagger one when suddenly placed in similar distressing conditions.
“Could it be possible for a hole to be punched in the outside shell of our bully little boat?” Ballyhoo wanted to know, and his voice quivered as he asked it.
“Hardly a likely thing,” Oscar told him. “But what I’m really afraid of is that our engines may be knocked galley-west and hurt so badly that the engineer can’t possibly repair the same.”
“As a last resort,” Jack added, seriously enough, “there’s a way of getting out of here through a chamber that can be emptied of water again and again. And once on the surface a fellow could swim to the island all right enough. So you see it hasn’t got to the desperate stage.”
“One of us ought to try and find out what happened, don’t you think?” asked Jack.
“Let Oscar do it,” suggested Ballyhoo; for somehow it seemed that when something really important had to be carried through the Jones boy felt considerable more confidence in Oscar’s ability than in his own.
“All right, I will,” promptly spoke up the one indicated. “Both of you stay here so as not to get in the way. This is a tight fit, you must remember, and any useless confusion would be next door to criminal. I’ll be back in a jiffy; the chances are nothing so terrible has happened.”
With that he left them. Jack and Ballyhoo waited impatiently for his return, and, of course, conjectured all sorts of miserable things. Still, their spirits began to brighten in some degree when they noticed that pretty much all the furore had by now died down.
“Guess we’re not taking in water very fast, anyhow,” said Ballyhoo bravely.
“I haven’t seen or felt any leak,” agreed Jack, just as if such a thing as flooding the little compartment where they had their bunks were possible without a panic among the crew.
Then came Oscar almost crawling back to them, because passing from one part of the boat to another necessitated considerable of this sort of thing.
“It’s good news he’s fetching us, I warrant you!” exclaimed the eager Ballyhoo, “because I can see his face all wrinkled up in a smile.”
Oscar sank down beside them.
“Well, it seems that we certainly butted into something or other that was quite hidden in among that extra big patch of submarine imitation trees,” he commenced. “The captain doesn’t know just yet whether any damage was done, but they haven’t discovered that we’re taking on any water, and that is a comfort.”
“Bully!” zipped Ballyhoo, drawing in a big breath of relief.
“And the engines, how about them?” demanded Jack.
“Oh! he said they were all right,” Oscar told him. “The engineer shut off power the very instant we rebounded.”
“Lucky we were going pretty slow at the time, too,” Jack added. “If we’d been racing along at top speed it would have been good-night for everybody by now.”
“What do you suppose it was we struck?” asked Ballyhoo.
“Oh! one of those queer ledges that we’ve had to climb over several times before this,” Jack went on to say. “The floor of the ocean isn’t always like a level plain, you know. Sometimes there are hills, and then deep valleys, just as we have them on the land.”
“Somehow or other,” continued Oscar, “Captain Shooks doesn’t quite believe it was hard rock we struck. He says it didn’t just feel like it. Still, down in this section there’s a heap of coquina rock, which you know is really made by myriads of insects building. It looks like a mass of tiny shells welded together with some sort of cement. The skipper says coquina rock is lots softer than ordinary stone. It may have been a bank of that we ran smack up against.”
“Let’s hope so, anyhow,” said Ballyhoo fervently, “because to have anything injure our boat at this early stage of the game would be terrible. Jack here has only begun to take his under-the-sea motion pictures; and then again nary a cent have the treasure hunters found up to now, to help pay the enormous expenses of the enterprise.”
“There, the engines are working again,” remarked Oscar. “I suppose the next move will be to draw back out of this mess of giant ferns and other plants ten or twenty feet high. They’re all around us, you notice, boys.”
The boat was moving slowly, and just as Oscar had supposed would be the case, in a backward direction. It also began to swing to one side so that quite a broad avenue was left behind, showing where they had smashed through the aquatic growth.
During this time the boys had their eyes glued to the observation bull’s-eyes as though more than curious to discover what had lain ahead of them. The powerful electric searchlights were turned on again as soon as the engines had started, and they were thus enabled to see with distinctness.
“I can just make out something ahead there, boys!” Ballyhoo was calling out.
“Ditto here,” echoed Jack, “and I guess it must be a bank of that coquina rock Oscar was telling us about. Still, there’s something queer about it to me.”
“You bet there is,” snapped Ballyhoo, as quick as a flash. “I can begin to make out a shadowy outline further on. It rises just so high, and that’s all. If that’s a rock all I want to say is—why, boys, it looks to me a whole lot like some sort of vessel lying there partly on its side!”
Oscar laughed aloud.
“This is a big joke!” he exclaimed gleefully.
“In what way?” demanded Ballyhoo, still groping for an answer.
“Why, to think that after we’ve dropped down here with the principal idea of searching the bottom of the sea around Coco Key for a sunken treasure-ship that was said to have foundered here ever so many years ago in one of those hurricanes, we should actually bump the nose of our boat into the same!”
Jack and Ballyhoo uttered exclamations of amazement.
“Talk about luck!” cried Ballyhoo.
“Do you really mean that you think we’ve found that wreck already?” asked Jack.
“It looks mighty like it,” came the steady and confident reply, “for that object we can glimpse there in the midst of the thick growth has all the earmarks of an old hulk that’s been lying at the bottom of the sea for scores and scores of years!”