CHAPTER XVII
SO there were three of us, Twisted Jimmy Martin, Mike Cochrane, and I, who sailed away from Maracaibo one day to buy another ship with which to go adventuring. She landed us in Havana, Cuba, where, without any delay whatever, we got a Ward liner for New York, and had the pleasant and strange experience of being seamen traveling as passengers, and free to criticize the handling of a ship by other men.
We landed without incident, and pursuant to the promise I had given Monsieur Périgord, I immediately wired him of our safe arrival. Knowing his eagerness for quick action I lost no time in beginning the round of ship-brokers' offices, and visiting the water-front. On the very first day I discovered that my task was going to be a slow one, and that the demand for ships was so great that they were commanding fabulous prices. It had got to a point where any old tub that could float, even if it was no bigger than a bathtub, was being put into service, and freight rates had risen to such a point that almost any ship was actually paying as much as she was worth on each successful voyage. What were they worth? The shipping market had gone insane, and any ship actually commanded ten times what it could have been purchased for in the year preceding the war. Before the week was out I began to be pestered with a daily cablegram from Monsieur Périgord, urging me to haste, and reiterating that I must not lose time by haggling over prices. Evidently he had no more idea of the market conditions than a child, and believed that all I had to do was to put money enough in my pocket, go out and buy a ship, in just about the same fashion as one would walk into a department store to buy a pair of socks.
Nor was I alone in my attempt to purchase, for we had not been in New York a week before Cochrane had got in touch with all the members of the old Esperanza's crew, and the entire crowd waited upon me with the flat assertion that not only would they not sail on any other ship than one which I commanded, but that also they would assist me in my quest. Then began a period when, if all the rumors these men brought me could have been verified and realized, I should have been able to purchase more ships than had ever sailed the Atlantic Ocean. I chased down these rumors one by one, until I was led to take a trip up to Fall River, Massachusetts, to learn that the "fine ship, sir," that was secretly for sale, was a mud-dredger, and then decided that while my men might be most excellent at sea, as shipping scouts they were about as useless as a dummy funnel aboard a sailing yacht.
Twisted Jimmy was the only one who made no effort to assist me; because no sooner had he reached New York than he fell into his old, mysterious ways, and frankly asserted that, inasmuch as he believed it would be a long time before we could buy a boat, he proposed to build another model of his invention, or at least gather together the material that would be necessary for him to take aboard our next ship when we sailed; for he seemed to take it for granted that another laboratory would be provided for him, and had hopes that it would be even more commodious than the one destroyed with the Esperanza.
I had about concluded that the Germans had indeed lost track of him, when the contrary was proven in a most disturbing manner. Jimmy had taken lodgings in Greenwich, quite close to the Italian section, as being the safest place for his researches, and after a day of disappointment, I went, one evening, to visit him. His house, one of the old and somewhat decrepit buildings that had originally been a private residence facing a triangular square, was situated where the trees in the little park screened the electric lights, and threw dark shadows over its front. It was not too well lighted at the best, and at any time after ten o'clock in the evening that neighborhood was practically deserted, save in the extreme heat of the summer time, when the park became the panting place for the poor. Jimmy's rooms were at the front of the third story. Adjoining his house was one which had been turned into a factory of some sort, probably for shirt-waists or incandescent burners, and always, after six o'clock in the evening, this was black and unoccupied. I had read a book one time on historic old Greenwich, and on this night, as I came into the little park, tired and depressed, I threw myself down on a bench for a few minutes in which to contemplate the decay and metamorphosis into which this quaint place had fallen. Being in a dreamy mood, and in no hurry to disturb Jimmy, I probably stayed there longer than I had intended. I looked out from under the boughs of the trees at his rooms, where the curtains were drawn but exposed cracks of light on each side where the shades had been stretched, until here and there they gaped. It is said among oculists that there are two types of men whose eyes, through the training of their calling, become inordinately acute and far-sighted, and strange it is that these two types of men are so widely separate, being sailors inured to long night watches at sea, and men of the far Western desert whose eyes are attuned to enormous spaces. Perhaps being a member of one of these classes accounts for my surprised discernment of a mere shadow that was moving along the ledge adjoining Jimmy's house and the dark, deserted factory. Startled by my discovery, I dodged from bush to bush until I reached the park railings, where I stopped and stared. There was no doubt of it. An intrepid and skilled balancer was sliding along that narrow ledge high above the pavement, toward Jimmy's window. At first I was inclined to rush from the park, and shout, lest the intruder be intent upon doing Jimmy violence; but on consideration I determined to wait until the last moment before taking such a course. The shadow continued to advance until it actually reached the broad, deep ledge of Jimmy's window, on which, it carefully seated itself, and then I discovered it had become motionless. I removed my shoes, climbed the park railings, and sought another point of vantage from which I could see that the man had gained a position from which he could stare through the opening at the side of the shade into the interior of Jimmy's room. He could not have been there more than five minutes at the utmost; yet to me it seemed at least ten times that long, and then, as if satisfied by his spying with what was going on in Jimmy's room, he moved back with the same caution and skill, and I watched him reach the ledge, raise himself erect upon it, seemingly with his back to the wall, and then progress perilously back to the window of the factory. Coming still closer, I could discern that it was open, and when, noiseless as a ghost, the man reached it, he doubled up and disappeared inside. Immediately thereafter there was a cautious, sliding sound plainly audible in the stillness, after which all was black and lifeless. I stood for some time by the side of the door of the blackened buildings, waiting for the spy to emerge, until the futility of waiting dawned upon me; for it was quite certain that a man bent on such a mission would have other means of egress at the rear from which to make his regular escape. I therefore turned toward the door of Jimmy's hallway, found it unbolted, and boldly climbed the stairs, with which I was familiar.
In obedience to my tap Jimmy himself opened the door and invited me in. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and with a pair of ragged carpet slippers on his feet, slouched across the room to a little table on which rested a broad drawing-board, and an uncompleted plan, on which he had evidently been engaged.
"You are late, Tom," he said, with that familiarity which we adopted when alone together.
"So are you," I retorted; "I suppose you are working on plans for your invention, aren't you?"
"Yes," he said. "I am nearly halfway through. It is a great invention! Revolutionary, I tell you! You saw what it could do. Now, when I have got these working scales completed—"
"It will be time for them to steal them from you again," I asserted dryly.
"There is no danger of that," he declared. "Why, I am as safe now as if I were in Timbuctoo."
"You are, eh?" I said, somewhat sarcastically. "Nobody watching you at all, is there? Not a soul on earth has an idea you are here, or, if they know you are, who the devil you may be. Oh, no, not at all! Suppose I were to tell you that for the last hour I have been out here watching a man who actually sat on your window ledge until he satisfied himself that the time was not yet ripe for him to burglarize your room and steal your precious plans."
He was so astonished and incredulous that for a moment his mouth hung down almost idiotically, and then he jumped to his feet, scowling savagely, and whispered hoarsely, as if fearing that the interloper were still on the window ledge: "Good Lord! You don't mean that, do you?"
"Of course I do," I replied. "I tell you I sat over in the park and saw a man come from the adjoining building, plant himself on your window ledge, and sit there for quite a while, watching you at work. After that he turned and went back the same way as he came, and I saw him shut the window behind him. I watched in the hope of getting him, until it struck me I was a blithering ass for not finding out where the back door of that mansion is, and catching him as he came out through it. They are waiting for you to finish those plans, and, believe me! the job will be pulled off this time if they have to murder you to do it."
Twisted Jimmy ran with absurd haste to the window, threw the blind and sash up, and poked his head out into the night air, while I sat watching him with much intolerance. After he had again closed the window he came back, pulled out the drawing-pins, rolled his half-finished plans into a wad, and locked them in a battered old trunk that would have been as useful a protection as a tin biscuit box in the hands of a burglar with a can-opener.
"If you will take my advice," I suggested, "you will give me every one of those plans, and all the memorandas you have, when I leave here to-night, and you will do no more work of this kind until you are in some safe place I tell you, Jimmy, they, will get you yet if you don't look out. What you need is a guardian."
"I believe I do, and I'll get out of here to-morrow," he declared wrathfully.
"You will do nothing of the kind," I said. "You can beat that to death by simply staying here and pretending to draw—useless things, of course, to throw them off the track, in case they get in."
About an hour later when I left I took the plans with me, and on the following day made it my business to rent a safety deposit box wherein I locked them.
Troubles never come singly, for at dinner I discovered in the evening's paper, in big head-lines, a flash story, embroidered to the limit, asserting that the ship Esperanza, when she was sunk in the Caribbean Sea, had six million dollars' worth of gold on board. The news had leaked, after all, from Monsieur Périgord's private bankers, and was now being flung broadcast as a story of romance. I sent out and bought other papers. Being a dull news day each one had worked remarkable talent for reading matter.
One journal drew comparisons between this and other losses, and another gave a list of gold ships resting on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea that dated back to the time of Pizarro and the Spanish conquest. Then I blundered upon a short article on salvage, in which the statement was made, "on good authority," that a certain person—name unmentioned—was even then building a new appliance for recovering wrecks and treasure from deep-sea depths, and that doubtless the gold of the Esperanza would be circulating again within a short time.
I was interrupted by Jimmy, who had come to pass the evening with me, and handed him the newspaper. He read it, and suddenly began to mumble to himself as if vastly disappointed at such news. He leaned across the table toward me, made sure no one was within hearing, and then declared in an undertone: "You thought I was working on the drawing for that new light, didn't you? Well, I wasn't! Those plans you carried away were not only for the light, but were rough drawings for a complementary invention as well, which is to accompany the light you saw. I was going to surprise you by telling you that you and I together could salvage ships at depths which have never before been attempted in all the history of wrecks in this world."
It took me a full minute to realize that he was thoroughly in earnest, and had I not been so confident of his genius as an inventor, I should have laughed at him; yet knowing what I did of his accomplishments I began to think of the possibilities involved. Could he prove his belief and put his invention into actual practice there was wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I blurted out something stupid, like, "You don't mean it, do you?"
"Of course I do," he asserted, in that same mumbling undertone, and then, as if exasperated by what he had read, added: "Just my luck! Somebody beats me to it, every time. We have got to have time and money to put my scheme into operation, and here, according to this paper, somebody else is already preparing, and will be there before we get a chance,"
He had laid before me a rich and tempting avenue of thought, and I could but slowly work out the different branches thereof and what it might lead to as my quickened imagination thought of such possibilities. And yet there was the war still being fought with frightful earnestness and daring over every navigable ocean on earth. Ships torpedoed without warning, though they might be nothing more than tramp freighters; ships whose values did not warrant the discharge of an expensive projectile, being overhauled and sunk by shell-fire; mere trawlers, dredgers, and rafts being sent to the bottom with carefully placed bombs.
"That's all right," I assented stoutly, "but just the same the war works for us. You and I both know that there are submarines in the Caribbean Sea. If these unknown inventors had their apparatus completed at this moment, they would not be immune from attack down there while doing that bit of salvage. They would be fools to attempt it. As long as this war lasts, there will be no security for anything that floats anywhere on the seas. We shall have ample time to try out our own schemes before anybody dares go down there and try to pick up what we have lost. We have the advantage of knowing where it is. No one else, save those aboard the submarine that sunk us, can have such definite knowledge. The thing for us to do is to begin to lay plans for operations after the war; certainly not while it is in progress. If you can do what you think you can—"
"I can do it!" he shouted, banging his fist on the table until the dishes rattled. "I tell you I'm too wise in experience not to know when I am able to accomplish certain things."
He got no further. We were interrupted by a prodigious noise in the streets. The sounds floated up to our windows. It was the shouting of newsboys and the murmuring roar of a multitude. The United States was threatening war over another piece of German insolence, this time unbearable.