Kitabı oku: «Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound; A Red Cross Worker's Ocean Perils», sayfa 7

CHAPTER XVI – ON THE EDGE OF TRAGEDY

They went up to the open deck to meet the blackest night Ruth Fielding ever remembered to have seen. The impenetrable clouds seemed to hover just above the masts of the abandoned steamship.

The night air aided Mr. Dowd to recover his poise. It was plain that the narcotic influence of the drink the doctor had given him still affected his brain more than did the blow he had suffered in falling. Soon his mind was quite clear and his manner the same as usual.

“I am afraid, as you say, Miss Fielding, that we are alone on the ship. I do not hear a sound,” he said.

“But you do not think the ship is sinking, do you, Mr. Dowd?” Ruth asked.

“She does not roll as though she was waterlogged in any degree. Nor can I see that she has any pitch, either to bow or stern. If the explosion was amidships – and you say it was in the fireroom – I doubt if a hole torn in the outside of the ship would sink her.

“You see, the engine room and boilers are shut off from the rest of the ship, both fore and aft, by water-tight bulkheads. If these were closed when the accident occurred, or soon after, that middle compartment might fill – up to a certain point – and that would be all. She could not take in enough water to sink her by such means.”

“But one would think Captain Hastings – or the engineer – or somebody – would have discovered the truth,” Ruth said, in doubt.

“You’d think so,” admitted Mr. Dowd. “But there was a great deal of excitement, without doubt. If the water rushed in and put out the fires, and the place filled with steam, until that steam cleared the situation must have looked much worse than it really was.

“You see the ship was abandoned so quickly, that I doubt if the engineers could have learned just how serious the danger was. They must all have been panic-stricken.”

“Your Captain Hastings as well,” said Ruth scornfully.

“I am afraid so,” admitted the chief officer. “But the captain must have been misled by the under officers. I do not believe he showed the white feather. He had the responsibility of the passengers – especially of those wounded – on his mind. We must give him credit for making a clean get-away,” and in the lantern-light Ruth saw that he smiled.

“I hope they are all safe,” she responded reflectively. “The poor things! To have to drift about in open boats all night!”

“We are not far from land, of course,” said Mr. Dowd. “And it is a wonder that one of the patrol boats has not crossed our track. Hold on!”

“Yes?” said the startled young woman.

“What about the radio? Didn’t they send a wireless? Couldn’t they have called for help?”

“Oh, I never thought of the wireless at all,” Ruth confessed. “And I am sure it was not used at first – not while I was on deck.”

“Strange! With two operators – Rollife and an assistant – how could they neglect such a chance?”

“I heard nothing about it,” repeated Ruth.

“Come on. Let’s look and see,” said the chief officer of the steamship. “Something is dead wrong here. Sparks surely would not have left his post unless the radio had completely broken down. Why, if we could manipulate the radio we’d call for help now – you and I, Miss Fielding.”

He led the way swiftly along the deck. The radio station had been built into the forward house, for the Admiral Pekhard was an old steamship, her keel having been laid long before Marconi made his dream come true.

The staff from which the antennae were strung shot up into the darkness farther than they could well see. There was a single small window far up on either side of the house for circulation of air only. There seemed to be no life about the radio room.

Mr. Dowd tried the door. It did not yield. He shook it – or tried to – crying:

“Sparks! Sparks! Hey! Where are you?”

He was answered by a voice from inside the radio room. It was not a pleasant voice, and the words it first uttered were not polite, to say the least. The man inside ended by demanding:

“What in the name of Mike was meant by locking me into this room?”

“Great Land!” gasped Dowd. “It’s Rollife himself.”

“And you know darned well it’s Rollife,” pursued the radio man. “Let me come out!” and he went on to roll out threats that certainly were not meant for Ruth’s ears.

But to let the man out of his prison was not easy. Dowd found that two long spikes had been driven through the door and frame above and below the doorknob. He was some time in getting Rollife to listen to this explanation.

“Who is it? Dowd?” demanded the angry radio man at last.

“Yes,” replied the first officer. “Who did this?”

Whoever it was who pinned the man into the room was threatened with a good many unpleasant happenings during the next few moments. Finally Dowd’s voice penetrated to the operator’s ears again.

“Hold your horses! There’s a lady here. How shall I get you out, Sparks?”

“I don’t give a hang how you do it,” snarled the other. “But I want you to do it mighty quick – and then lead me to the man who nailed me up.”

“Wait,” said Dowd. “I’ll get a screwdriver and take off the hinges of the door. Then you can push outwards.”

“What the deuce has happened, anyway?” demanded Rollife, as the first officer of the Admiral Pekhard started away.

Ruth thought she would better answer before the imprisoned radio man broke out afresh. She told him simply what had happened, and why it had happened, as she presumed.

“It was Dykman nailed me up – the cur!” growled the radio man. “Then he monkeyed with the wires outside there. He put the radio out of commission, all right. That was before the explosion. My door was nailed almost on the very minute the old ship was hit. But why doesn’t she sink?”

“I do not believe she is going to sink, Mr. Rollife,” said Ruth. “Oh, if you could only repair your aerial wires, you might call for help!”

“Let me out of here,” growled the radio operator, “and I’ll find some way of sending an S O S – don’t fear!”

Mr. Dowd came back from the engine room where he had secured a screwdriver. He set to work removing the screws from the hinges of the radio room door.

“I do not believe that the explosion caused any serious damage to the ship itself,” said he. “The fireroom is full of water; but it looks to me as though a seacock had been opened. I think the explosion was on the inside – a bomb thrown into one of the fires, perhaps.”

“What’s that you say?” demanded Rollife, from inside the room. “No likelihood of the old tub sinking?”

“Not at all! Not at all!”

“Well, I certainly am relieved,” said the radio man. “I’ve been conjuring up all kinds of horrors in here.”

“Huh!” exploded Dowd. “You were asleep till I pounded on the door.”

“Oh, well, maybe I lost myself for a moment,” confessed Rollife. “Anyhow, I made up my mind I was done for when I could make nobody listen to me after my door was nailed. They certainly had it in for me.”

“Where was your assistant?” Dowd asked.

“That fellow is a squarehead,” growled the radio man. “I suspected him from the start. Why, he couldn’t talk American without saying ‘already yet.’ A Hun, sure as shooting.”

That Rollife himself came from the United States there could be no doubt. His speech fully betrayed his nationality.

“He never came near me,” he went on, speaking of his assistant. “He was some ‘ham,’ anyway! Graduate of one of these correspondence schools of telegraphy, I guess. His Morse was enough to drive one mad. Let me out, Dowd. I’ll fix up those aerials and call somebody to our help in short order.”

The first officer had accomplished his purpose. The screws were out of the hinges. Rollife was a big, strong fellow, and he drove his shoulder against the door with sufficient force the first time to push it outward at the back.

Then Mr. Dowd took hold of the edge of the door, and together they worked out the long nails and threw the useless door on the deck. Rollife came out into the light of the lantern which Ruth held at one side. He was a big, fresh-faced man with a square jaw and a direct glance.

Ruth was glad to see him. He was such another man as the first officer of the steamship. If she had to be aboard an abandoned craft in such an emergency as this, she was glad that her companions were just such men as these two. She felt that they were resourceful and trustworthy.

Her mind, however, was by no means at ease. Mr. Dowd and Mr. Rollife were much more cheerful than Ruth. And it was not because they were any more courageous than the girl of the Red Mill. But Ruth thought of something that did not seem to have made any impression on the men’s minds.

What had been the intention of the conspirators in abandoning the ship with the innocent members of her company? What would naturally be their expectation regarding the Admiral Pekhard, if she had not been put in condition to sink? If it was a German plot, surely the plotters did not intend to leave the steamship to drift, unharmed, until some patrol boat picked her up.

And the plotters knew the three castaways were on the vessel. What of the chief officer, the radio man, and Ruth herself? They had all been left for some purpose, that was sure. What was it?

Mr. Dowd and she had been allowed their freedom. Only Rollife had been locked up. And the plotters must have known that in time Ruth or Dowd would have found means of releasing the radio man. Once released, it was more than probable Rollife would be able to discover what had been done to the aerials and repair them. It was quite sure that, before morning, those abandoned on the Admiral Pekhard would be able to send into the air an S O S for help.

There was something that she could not understand – something back of, and deeper, than the surface-work of the plotters. Perhaps that explosion in the fireroom had not been meant to injure the ship seriously. It was merely meant (as it did) to create panic.

It caused a situation serious enough to alarm the captain and all aboard. It seemed that all they could do was to flee from a ship that threatened to sink.

This situation might have been just what the plotters intended to create; because they would not wish to remain on the steamship when actual destruction was coming upon her!

They had escaped with the other members of the ship’s company. Yet the steamship drifted in apparent safety. Was there something much more tragic threatening the Admiral Pekhard?

CHAPTER XVII – BOARDED

Rollife was busy with his repairs on the aerials. Dowd was down in the engine room, or so Ruth supposed, and neither seemed suspicious of any further happening that would injure them. Rather, they considered themselves in full charge of a steamship that was in no actual or present danger.

Ruth Fielding’s mental vision saw more clearly. There was something else coming – something far more tragic than anything that had thus far occurred.

There might be, hidden somewhere in the cargo-holds, time-bombs set to explode at a given moment. Her imagination was by no means running away with her when she visioned such a possibility.

Surely there was something still to happen to the Admiral Pekhard. If not, why then all the scurry to get away from the ship, the conspirators themselves included in the stampede?

Or had the ship’s position been made known to a German submarine and would the U-boat soon appear to torpedo the British craft? This was not so far-fetched an idea. Only, the young woman was pretty sure that the explosion aboard the Admiral Pekhard had been advanced in time because of her own suspicions and the attempt she had made to get Mr. Dowd to investigate matters which the conspirators did not wish revealed.

Rollife had taken the lantern and Dowd had gone in search of another, Ruth presumed. By and by she began to wonder what was engaging the first officer’s attention for so long, and she went to the engine-room hatch. Her small electric torch showed her the way.

To her amazement – and not a little to her fear at first – Ruth found the first officer lying upon the engine-room ladder. He was wet from head to foot, his turban of bandages had come off, displaying a bleeding scalp wound, and he was panting for breath.

“What has happened to you, Mr. Dowd?” she cried. “Did you fall into the water?”

“I dived into it,” explained Dowd, grinning faintly. “That water in the fireroom didn’t look right to me. I found the seacocks below, there. Two were open, as I suspected.”

“Oh!”

“It was a deliberate attempt to scare us – and it succeeded. I shut off the cocks. This compartment could be pumped out if we had the men. Of course, the steam pumps can’t be used. We have no donkey engine on deck. All the machinery is down there, half under water.

“There must have been more than Dykman and that man you saw talking to Miss Lentz, in the plot. Another man in the stoker-crew, perhaps. He flung a bomb into one of the furnaces after opening the seacocks. It was a well laid plot, Miss Fielding.”

“Yes, I know,” she said hastily. “But to what end?”

“How’s that?”

“What was the final consideration? Why was this done? They must have known the ship would not sink. Then, what did they do all this for?”

“Why – by Jove!” gasped Dowd, “I had not thought of that, Miss Fielding.”

He crept up the ladder and stood upon the deck, the water running from the garments that clung closely to his limbs and body.

“Doesn’t it seem reasonable,” she asked, “that the conspirators, whoever they were, should have some object rather than the simple desertion of a vessel that was not likely to sink?”

“It would seem so,” he admitted, and his tone betrayed as much anxiety as she felt herself.

At the moment a shout from Rollife, the radio man, aroused them.

“I’ve found it!” he cried.

They went toward the radio room. He was busy in the light of the lantern on the roof of the house. He had tools and a small plumber’s stove that he had found. He turned on the blast of the stove and began to weld certain wires.

“Can you fix it?” Dowd asked quietly.

“You bet I can, Mr. Dowd!” declared Rollife. “In half an hour I’ll have the sparks shooting from those points up there. You watch.”

Ruth looked at Mr. Dowd. Her unspoken question was: “Shall we take him into our confidence? Shall we tell him our fears?”

Before the first officer could answer her unspoken inquiry Ruth’s sharp eyes glimpsed a light over his shoulder. It was an intermittent sparkle, and it was low down on the water. She remembered then the light she had seen for a moment when she had first come on deck after learning that the ship was abandoned.

“What is that?” she whispered, pointing.

Dowd wheeled to look. Instantly she saw by the light of her torch that he stiffened and his head came up. He gazed off across the water for quite two minutes. Then he said:

“It is a light in a small boat I believe. At first I thought it might be a submarine. But I do not believe a submarine would show anything less than a searchlight in traveling on the surface at night.”

“Oh! Who can it be?” murmured Ruth.

“You put a hard question, Miss Fielding. Surely it cannot be our friends coming back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a boat sent by Captain Hastings to make sure that nobody was left on the steamship.”

“Do you consider that likely?” she asked.

“Well – no, I do not,” he admitted.

“Then you think it may be people who have not our interest at heart?” was her quick demand.

“I am afraid I can give you no encouragement. I cannot imagine Captain Hastings abandoning the ship without believing she would sink. In the darkness he must have got so far away that he would think she had gone down. He would be anxious, you understand, to get his crew and passengers to land.”

“Of course. I give him credit for being fairly sane,” she said.

“On the other hand, who would have any suspicion that the ship would not sink save those who had brought about the panic?”

“The Germans!” exclaimed the girl.

“Exactly. I believe,” said Dowd quietly, “that here come the men who caused the explosion in the fire room and opened the seacocks. They purpose to take charge of the Admiral Pekhard, of course. If they get aboard we shall be at their mercy.”

“Oh, can we stop them? Can we hold them off?” murmured Ruth.

“I do not know. I am not sure that it would be wise to offer fight. You see, we shall finally be at their mercy.”

“If we can’t beat them off!” Ruth exclaimed. “Haven’t you arms aboard?”

“My dear young lady – ”

“Oh, don’t think of me!” Ruth cried. “Do just what you would do if I were not here. Wouldn’t you and the radio man fight them?”

“I think we could put up a pretty good fight,” admitted Dowd thoughtfully. “There are automatic pistols.”

“Bring one for me,” commanded Ruth. “I can shoot a pistol. Three of us might hold off a small boarding party, I should think.”

“If they mean us harm,” added Dowd.

“Make them lie off there and wait till morning so that we can see what they look like,” begged Ruth.

“That might be attempted.”

His lack of certainty rankled in the girl’s quick mind. She ejaculated:

“Surely we can try, Mr. Dowd! There is another thing: the deck guns! Had you thought of them?”

“My goodness, no!” admitted the first officer.

“If we could slue around one of those guns, a single shot might sink the boat off there. If they are enemies, I mean.”

“Now you have suggested something, Miss Fielding! Wait! Let me have your torch. I will take a look at the guns.”

He ran along the deck to the forward gun. After a minute there he ran back to the stern, but kept to the runway on the opposite side of the deck as he passed the girl of the Red Mill. She waited in great impatience for his return.

And when he came she saw that something was decidedly wrong. He wagged his head despairingly.

“No use,” he said. “Those fellows were sharper than one would think. The breech-block of each gun is missing.”

“That light is drawing close, Mr. Dowd!” Ruth exclaimed. “Get the pistols you spoke of – do!”

But first Dowd called to the radio man up above them: “Hi, Sparks, see that boat coming?”

“What boat?” demanded the other, stopping his work for the moment. Then he saw the light. “Holy heavens! what’s that?”

“One of the boats coming back – and not with friends,” said Dowd.

“Let me get these wires welded and I’ll show ’em!” rejoined Rollife. “I’ll send a call – ”

At the moment the sudden explosion of a motor engine exhaust startled them. It was no rowboat advancing toward the Admiral Pekhard. Probably its crew had been rowing quietly so as not to startle those left aboard the ship.

“The pistols, Mr. Dowd!” begged Ruth again.

The first officer departed on a run. Rollife kept at his work with a running commentary of his opinion of the scoundrels who were approaching. Suddenly a rifle rang out from the coming launch.

“Ahoy! Ahoy the steamer!” shouted a voice. “We see your light, and we’ll shoot at it if you don’t douse it. Quick, now!”

Another rifle bullet whistled over the head of the radio man. Ruth removed her thumb from the electric torch switch instantly. But Rollife refused at first to be driven.

The next moment, however, a bullet crashed into the lantern on the roof of the radio house. The flame was snuffed out and the radio man was feign to slide down from his exposed position.

Dowd came running from the cabin with the pistols. He gave one to Ruth and another to Rollife. The latter stepped out from the shelter of the house and drew bead on the lamp in the approaching launch. Ruth heard the chatter of the weapon’s hammer – but not a shot was fired!

“Great guns, Dowd!” shouted the radio man, exasperated. “This gat isn’t loaded.”

“Neither is mine!” exclaimed Ruth, who had made a quick examination in the darkness.

“Oh, my soul!” groaned the first officer. “I got the wrong weapons!”

“And no more clips of cartridges? Well, you – ”

There was no use finishing his opinion of Dowd’s uselessness. The motor boat shot alongside under increased speed. There was a slanting bump, a grappling iron flew over the rail and caught, and the next moment a man swarmed up the rope, threw his leg over the rail, and then his head and face appeared.

Ruth in her excitement pressed the switch of her electric torch. The ray of light shot almost directly into the eyes of the first boarder. He was the flaxen-haired man – the man she believed she had seen hiding in the small motor boat before the explosion in the steamer’s fire room.