Martin Crusoe E-Book

T.C. Bridges

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A few minutes passed, and Martin, lazily tapping his pencil on paper, seemed to have little interest in sounds. Then suddenly his attitude changed, his back straightened, and a look of passionate interest illuminated his sharp gray eyes. The door of the large room opened, and a boy came in quickly, a boy about the same age as Martin, but as dark and thin as Martin, tall and bright.

Leseprobe

Contents

I. THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGES

II. THE GREAT ADVENTURE BEGINS

III. THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

IV. THE PAINTED HALL

V. THE GOLDEN GIANTS

VI. IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY

VII. THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHTS

VIII. BATTLE ROYAL

IX. BREAD AND SALT

X. THE LAKE OF FIRE

XI. AKON'S DECISION

XII. THE PRIEST'S PLAN

XIII. THE CHANCE PASSES

XIV. ORDEAL BY FIRE

XV. THE POWDER PLOT

XVI. MARTIN PLAYS A LONE HAND

XVII. THE PLACE OF DEATH

XVIII. THE WISDOM OF THE EAST

XIX. THE SECOND BOMB

XX. MARTIN PLAYS THE GAME

XXI. A FORCED LANDING

XXII. A BATTLE OF GIANTS

XXIII. – THE WAVE

XXIV. A DESPERATE VENTURE

XXV. A NIGHT OF TERROR

XXVI. THE ESCAPE FROM THE CAVE

XXVII. IN THE NICK OF TIME

XXVIII. MOBBED

XXIX. THE RESCUE

XXX. IN THE HEART OF THE GLADES

XXXI. THE CONFESSION

I. THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGES

WITH the telephones of his wireless fixed over his ears, a pencil in his hand, and a writing-pad before him, Martin Vaile sat listening to the signals that came through.

Some minutes passed, and Martin, tapping idly on the paper with his pencil, seemed little interested in the sounds. Then suddenly his attitude changed, his back straightened, and a look of eager interest lit his keen gray eyes.

His pencil began to work, and he rapidly jotted down a series of figures and letters on the paper.

Then he stopped writing and sat waiting, but nothing more came, and, glancing at his watch, he noted the time, slipped off the receiver, and ran his fingers through his close, curly hair.

The door of the big room opened, and a boy came quickly in, a boy about Martin’s age, but as dark and slight as Martin was tall and fair.

“That you, Basil?” said Martin quickly. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

Basil Loring gave the other a quick glance.

“What’s the matter, old man?” he asked lightly. “Why this frown on your marble brow? What horrible news have you been absorbing out of space?”

“Nothing horrible, Basil, but something most unthinkably baffling. I’ve just had the sixth message from the unknown sender.”

“The sixth message?” repeated Basil, looking puzzled. “What in the name of sense are you talking about?”

“Oh, I forgot. You’ve not been here for a week, and don’t know anything about it. Well, every night for six nights past I have had a message from this unknown station. It gives the latitude and longitude, and says ‘Help! Come to me!’„

“Sounds like an S.O.S., Martin. Is it a ship in trouble?”

“Bless you, no. Nothing of the sort. This is from a much more powerful installation than any ship has. Besides, it isn’t a ship. The tuning is different.”

“That’s Greek to me,” said Basil. “Explain.”

“Well, you know we use different length waves for wireless work, and ships use comparatively short waves. By adjusting my apparatus, I can cut those out completely, so that all I catch is from the giant land stations such as the Eiffel Tower or Washington. Their wavelengths are much greater, and cannot be heard with the ordinary adjustment. The other night, as an experiment, I tried an even wider adjustment, and then came this mysterious message, or, rather, the duplicate of it; and each night since, just at the same hour, it has come again. As I told you, this is the sixth.”

Basil stared. “I understand about the waves,” he said. “But surely, Martin, if this is a big station that you are hearing from, it’s easy enough to find where it is! All the big stations are known, aren’t they?”

“This one isn’t,” Martin answered. “I can tell you this much: if the sender states his position correctly, it’s right in the middle of the sea.”

This time Basil was startled.

“If that’s the case, it must be from a ship. And yet you say that it’s from a big installation.”

Suddenly his face cleared. “Tell you what, Martin, it’s someone having a joke with you–some fellow in one of the other big stations playing a game.”

Martin shook his head decidedly.

“It’s not that, Basil. The message does come from the spot it is supposed to come from, or from that neighborhood. You see, nowadays, we are able to tell pretty accurately the direction of wireless signals. I have made experiments during the past week, and, as far as I can gather, the station is exactly where the sender says it is.”

“Then there must be an island there,” said Basil.

“If there is, it is not on my map, and, mind you, I have looked up the best government charts.”

Basil shook his head helplessly.

“It’s beyond me, Martin,” he said. “Show me the spot on the map.”

Martin took a chart out of a drawer and unrolled it. It represented that vast tract of the North Atlantic Ocean between the Canary Islands and the Bermudas, between twenty and thirty degrees north. Near the center of this, but a little to the west, Martin had made a tiny cross in pencil.

“There’s the spot,” he said.

Basil looked at it for some moments. “Why,” he said slowly, “that’s in the Sargasso Sea.”

Martin nodded.

“Exactly. It is right in the center of that tremendous plain of weed which is drifted by circling currents into that dead water, and covers more than a million square miles. That is where the mysterious island must be, and that is the spot from which these queerly-tuned messages must be reaching me.”

Basil stared first at the map and then at Martin.

“If the island is not charted, the only reason can be that the weed has prevented ships from getting to it,” he said. “And if ships can’t get to it, how in the name of sense has this fellow got there? And if he has got there, how did he ever get his wireless there, or put it up?”

“Just the questions I have been asking myself, Basil, and just the questions I mean to solve before I am very much older. I hope to be on that island within a month.”

“You’re going there?” cried Basil. “But how? Of course, you have the yacht, but she can’t travel through the weed any more than any other ship.”

“True, my boy. But if one can’t travel through the weed the other way is to travel over it.”

Basil’s eyes shone.

“A ‘plane!” he said breathlessly.

“I shall take the Bat, Basil. She will do the trick if anything will. A flying boat ought to be the very thing for the Sargasso.”

Basil drew a long breath.

“Bully!” he said. “Oh, Martin, I wish I could come with you!”

“I wish you could, Basil,” replied Martin gravely; “but I’m afraid it’s out of the question. You’ve got to go back for your last term at ‘prep.’ school. In any case, your father would not hear of it.”

“What about yours?” questioned Basil, quickly.

“I am wiring him tomorrow,” Martin answered.

Twenty-four hours later Martin stood on the wide-stretching lawn. The stately house lay behind him; in front the Atlantic sparkled under the spring sun, and in the cove below lay the Flying Fox, a magnificent ocean-going craft of twelve hundred tons, in which Martin and his father had traveled thousands of miles across the seas of all the world. Martin’s father was a very rich man, whose business interests lay in many countries.

The boy’s eyes were on the drive. He was expecting the telegraph boy, with the answer to the message he had sent the previous day to his father, who was in Florida attending to one of the great land settlement projects he and his partner, Morton Willard, had started there.

A boy on a bicycle came up the distant drive, and Martin walked quickly down the slope to meet him.

“Telegram for you, sir,” said the lad.

“Thanks,” answered Martin with a smile.

“Dad is prompt,” he said. “I hardly hoped to hear today.”

He tore the envelope open, unfolded the flimsy sheet, and read the message.

The color faded from his face; his eyes went blank; he staggered and fell on the grassy bank. The slip fell from his shaking fingers.

Then, with a big effort, he pulled himself together, and, picking up the telegram, forced himself to read it again. This was the message:

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU YOUR FATHER DIED SUDDENLY TODAY RESULT OF HEART FAILURE. AM MAKING ALL ARRANGEMENTS FOR FUNERAL AND WRITING BY THIS MAIL. WILLARD, SEMINOLE HOTEL, LACOOCHEE, FLORIDA.

“Dead! My father dead!” groaned poor Martin.

The shock was terrible, for Martin’s mother had died when he was only a baby, and he and his father had been the greatest chums imaginable.

And now his father had died, hundreds of miles from home, without a last word!

For many minutes Martin sat there, staring blankly in front of him, but with his mind’s eyes fixed on his father’s face as he had last seen him, barely a month before. When at last he rose and went to the house he looked five years older than when he had left it.

How the next days passed Martin hardly knew. Everyone was as kind as could be, but he was in a dazed state and hardly knew what was happening around him.

What roused him at last was a visit from the family lawyer, Mr. Vincent Meldrum. He arrived with a bag full of papers and a very grave face. They met in the library, an oak-paneled room full of Mr. Harrington Vaile’s books.

“Martin,” began Mr. Meldrum, “I am going to tell you at once that I have bad news for you.”

“It can’t be any worse than I have had already,” said poor Martin. “You needn’t be afraid to tell me.”

The lawyer looked at Martin and sighed.

“Martin,” he said, “I have known you from a child, and I believe you have plenty of pluck. You will need it all, I fear. Having said that, I will not keep you in suspense. The big land scheme at Cleansand Bay has come to utter smash and the papers are saying it was a swindle from the beginning.”

Martin leaped to his feet.

“A swindle! Who accuses my father of having anything to do with a swindle?”

“Steady, Martin–steady!” begged the lawyer. “You and I know better, but others do not. I fear there is no doubt about the swindle; but your father did not know this. He took Mr. Willard’s word that the scheme was sound. Willard ran the whole thing, and, as you will remember, kept your father away from Florida on one excuse or another until quite lately.”

Again Martin sprang to his feet.

“Then he murdered my father!” he cried fiercely.

Mr. Meldrum raised his hand.

“You must not make rash accusations, Martin,” he said gravely. “There is no suspicion, let alone proof, that Mr. Willard did anything of the kind: in any case your father’s heart was said to be weak.”

“Then it was the shock that killed him,” declared Martin; “the shock of finding that he was mixed up in a swindle.”

“That is possible,” replied the lawyer. “Now listen, Martin. This is a bad business. The loss to the investors runs into an enormous sum. I fear that all your father’s property will be seized to pay the debt. There is this much comfort. The courts cannot touch the money you have under your mother’s will, so you will have a small but sufficient income to–”

Martin broke in with a quick question.

“Is my father’s money enough to satisfy the creditors?”

“I doubt it, Martin.”

“Then you will take every penny, Mr. Meldrum–every penny, do you hear? Sell the house, the yacht–everything. Do you think I would let anyone say that my dad had swindled them?”

II. THE GREAT ADVENTURE BEGINS

“YOU’RE going to the island, Martin?”

“I’m going, Basil.”

“But–but what does old Meldrum say?”

“He doesn’t know, Basil. He thinks I am going to Florida. So I am, for the matter of that, but I mean to visit the island first. You see, it all fits in perfectly. The people who have bought the Flying Fox want her delivered at Havana. So I may just as well go in her as not. And the Bat is my own. I paid for her out of my own allowance, and I feel justified in keeping her. I have told Captain Anson, of the Flying Fox, just what I want to do, and he has agreed. You are the only other person who knows about it.”

Basil looked worried.

“I almost wish you hadn’t told me. Suppose you come to grief?”

“If I do there’s no one to miss me except you, old friend,” said Martin, gently. “But don’t be upset. There’s no reason why I should come to harm. The island is not more than two hundred and fifty miles from the edge of the weed, and the Bat will cover that distance in two hours.”

“Yes; but suppose you get there and can’t get away again?”

“I don’t see how that can be, unless I smash up the Bat, and if I do there’s always the wireless with which I can call for help.”

“I’d forgotten the wireless,” said Basil. “Yes, you can do that.”

He paused.

“But I say, Martin,” he went on, rather doubtfully. “I thought your idea was to get square with Willard!”

Martin’s face hardened.

“That is exactly what I do mean to do,” he said sternly. “I shall never rest until he is punished–until all those poor people who have lost their money through him have been repaid to the last penny. But don’t you see that this delay may help? At present Willard is on his guard. He will be looking out for me, and is sure to know that I am starting for Florida. If I disappear on the way he will think the danger is over. He won’t worry. Then, when he has forgotten, I shall swoop down on him.”

Martin’s eyes were shining. Basil stared at him in wonder.

“You’ll get him all right, I feel sure of that,” he declared. “Besides, I daresay you’ll make a fortune on the island. A man who has a great wireless like that must be awfully rich.”

“I had thought of that,” said Martin. “And I shall want money to tackle this swindler Willard. The messages make it quite plain that someone is wanted there, on the island, and if whoever is there will pay for my help, why, I sha’n’t refuse the money. And now, good-by, Basil. Keep a still tongue, and I will promise you shall hear from me as soon as possible.”

“Good-by, Martin!” said Basil, in a voice not very steady. “And just remember, if you are in a hole, I’ll do anything on earth that I can!”

“I know you will,” Martin answered, as he wrung his friend’s hand. “Good-by again. I go aboard to-night, and we sail first thing in the morning.”

Basil left, and Martin finished his packing. Two hours later he went aboard the yacht. At five next morning he was on deck. He stood alone in the stern, taking his last look at the beautiful old house with its wide, smooth lawns, and the tall trees behind with the rooks cawing in the branches.

The yacht swung southward around a tall headland, cutting off the view.

The Flying Fox traveling at a steady seventeen knots ran rapidly into the tropics and a week later lay rolling idly on the silken swells of mid-Atlantic. It was a heavenly day, the warm air soaked with sun.

To the north the sea lay open to the farthest horizon, but the view to the south was bounded by a dark line which at first sight resembled a low-lying shoal, but which was actually the edge of the monstrous mass of weed covering the Sargasso Sea.

Alongside the yacht, attached to a long spar which projected well beyond her side, lay Martin Vaile’s big flying boat, the Bat, and on the deck of the ship Martin himself, in the thick overalls of a pilot, stood exchanging a last few words with bluff old Captain Anson.

“This is for Mr. Meldrum, captain,” said Martin, handing him a letter. “But mind, I don’t want him to have it until you get home again. Long before then you will have heard from me.”

“I hope so, I’m sure, Martin,” replied the captain, who was frowning uncomfortably.

“Oh, you’ll hear all right,” declared Martin with a smile. “I have told you there is wireless on the island.”

“Ay, if there is an island at all,” grumbled the skipper.

“There must be an island, or there wouldn’t be wireless,” insisted Martin.

“And suppose there is an island?” burst out the captain. “And suppose you reach it, what are you going to do when you get there? How do you know this fellow that has sent the message will let you get away again? Suppose you tumble into trouble, how are we going to help you? Just remember this is as close as any ship can get to this unknown land. Let me tell you, Martin, if your good father was still alive he’d never have let you go off on a wild-goose chase like this.”

“But he is not alive,” said Martin, sadly. “And even if he were I don’t think he would forbid me, captain. Remember this, my only objects in life are to clear his memory and to punish this man Willard. As I have told you already, I must have money for both these purposes. I firmly believe that what I am going to do will be my quickest and best way to make the necessary money. And, quite apart from all that, the man on the island wants help, and I feel that it’s up to me to bring it. Now, don’t try to discourage me,” he went on quietly. “My mind is made up. Let me feel that I have your good wishes, captain. I’m sure I shall need them.”

“Certainly you have them, my lad,” said the captain warmly, “and the good wishes of all aboard. Well, I’ll say no more, except to wish you the best of luck. I hope you’ll come out of it safely, with all the cash you want, and I for one will be uncommon glad to see you safe back again.”

The two shook hands, then Martin went over the side and took his seat in the slim hull of the flying boat. The men above cast off, Martin pressed the button of the self-starter, the engines roared, and the Bat shot away from the side of the yacht. Sweeping up the side of one of the long, slow swells, she reached the smooth top, and, taking off like a sea-bird, rose bodily into the air.

Martin kept driving up and up, and as the needle of his barograph sank so did the mercury in the tube of the thermometer beside it. Above the instruments was his chart with the mark showing the exact position of the unknown island. He steered by compass, and kept the bows of his machine pointed almost precisely south.

Martin was a skilled pilot. He had been mad on aircraft even before he first went to school; and his father, realizing this, had started his training when he was only ten years old. His wealth had made it easy for him to give the boy the best teachers, and at seventeen. Martin was not only a first-class pilot and a certificated wireless operator, but he had a wider knowledge of general science, of electricity and of chemistry, than most men of double his age.

Having made sure that all was running right, Martin settled himself comfortably in his seat. Once in the air, a ‘plane is far easier to handle than a motor-car. He was able to take it easy and to look about him.

Glancing downwards, he saw that he was already far from the open sea. Beneath him spread the brown mat of weed, stretching mile after mile in tangled masses.

Yet it was not all weed, for it was broken by lagoons of blue water. And, even at the height at which he sailed, he could see that these lagoons were full of life; the tropic sea seemed clear as blue glass, and he could see, far down in the depths, strange forms gliding at great speed. Once he noticed a huge whale, looking as if carved out of black rubber, in the act of broaching. In another pool he caught a glimpse of a monstrous tangle of twisted antennae, which he realized, with a shudder, must be one of the tremendous cuttles which are known to infest the tideless depths of the Sargasso.

Then he saw a ship. A sailing ship of large size she must have been, but her masts had gone overboard, leaving only the stumps; the cordage had rotted away, and she lay mouldering, lifeless, waiting until slow decay should cause her to sink into the hidden depths under the tangle which surrounded her.

He looked back. Very far to the north lay the blue line of open sea, and a tiny trail of smoke told where the Flying Fox steamed onwards to her destination. Martin shivered. After all, he was only seventeen, and he felt terribly alone.

This feeling soon passed. The interest of the scene enthralled him. For now he saw more ships, and he noticed that, the farther he got into the heart of the ocean jungle, the more ancient the type of vessel that lay within its festering tangles. Here was a galleon with a high poop-castle and quaintly curved bow, and a mile away a strange-looking ship which was like a picture he had seen of the Great Harry, a famous war vessel of the sixteenth century. It seemed clear that either the weed area had been steadily increasing during the centuries or that some hidden current sucked the trapped ships deeper and deeper into the heart of the weed sea.

An hour had passed. It had seemed like five minutes. But he did not yet begin to strain his eyes for sight of the island, for he knew that he had still fully two hundred miles to go. And even the towering peak of Teneriffe is not visible more than a hundred miles out to sea.

Now he passed across a wide belt of open water which fairly teemed with marine life. Here was a school of cachalots, led by an old bull that must, Martin thought, be over a hundred feet in length. It came to him that this was where the whales had sought refuge from man’s age-long persecution.

Another hour. Still the breeze held, still the sky was unsullied by a single cloud, and still his engines thundered in perfect rhythm.

Martin began to glance ahead. His heart was beating rapidly. At any minute he might sight the goal of his adventurous journey.

What was that? Was it a white cloud, or was it the gleam of a snow-capped peak hung high against the southern sky? Five minutes more, and Martin, half choked with excitement, knew that it was indeed a mountain. The island was no dream.

III. THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

FIFTY minutes later, and the Bat was shooting like a meteor towards a vast dark mass of land surrounded by a wide belt of shining sea. Martin was near enough to see plainly the enormous cliffs and frowning precipices which bounded it.

The island was about twenty miles long and nearly as wide. In the centre rose a mountain with twin peaks white with snow, and from one of which a thin coil of smoke drifting lazily across the blue proclaimed it to be a volcano not yet extinct.

Here and there were patches of vivid green, but whether forest or bush, or merely grassland he was not yet near enough to see. To the west, so far away as to be merely a blur on the horizon, was what appeared to be another island.

As Martin drew nearer he was more and more impressed by the savage grandeur of the scenery. This was no coral island, but a great volcanic mass, clearly a survival of some continent long since whelmed in the depths of the sea.

He stared hard, but could see no sign of life upon the land. The only smoke was the faint curl from the tall peak. There was no sign of house or building nor, as far as he could see, of any cultivated land.

The next thing that struck him–and struck him very unpleasantly–was that there did not seem to be any place to make a landing. There was the sea, of course, but if he alighted on the sea he was faced with those enormous cliffs, up which there appeared to be no way of climbing. There was not a yard of beach anywhere. Even the deepest inlets seemed to be mere fiords faced with grim precipices.

Rising again, he circled higher, the roar of his engine coming back in rattling echoes from the wilderness of crags below. The higher he rose the less he liked the look of things. It seemed certain that he must either land upon the sea, or else turn and fly back to where he had come from.

Martin was one of those lucky people whose brains always work most quickly in an emergency, and like a flash it came to him that, even if he could not see the nameless inhabitant of this mysterious island, it was probable that the other was aware of his approach. He remembered his wireless.

While it is still rare for any ‘plane to carry a wireless sending installation, all the larger types of aircraft are fitted with receiving apparatus. It was the work of a moment to clap the telephones to ears and release the wire.

Instantly came the whistling notes in sequence, and presently he was reading out a message repeated time and time again:

“Pass twin peak to north. Land on lake beyond!”

Instantly obeying the order, he opened his throttle to its widest and went rushing round the shoulder of the northern peak. He gave it a wide berth. As it was, the hot air from below, mingling with the cold breath from the snow-capped heights, made wild eddies which swung his big ‘plane giddily. But the giant power of his engines carried him safely through this peril and, sure enough, beyond and beneath lay the lake that the message had told of.

It was a mountain tarn, perhaps three miles long and a mile wide, and rimmed with precipices looking every bit as savage and inaccessible as the sea-cliffs themselves.

Yet Martin did not hesitate. He had every confidence in the mysterious guidance which had brought him so far, and, besides, he had no choice in the matter. Cutting out his engines, he glided down in a long, silent volplane, to land, light as a homing sea-bird, upon the dark surface of the lonely lake.

He had now been flying for more than four hours, and it was a relief to his tired nerves to release the controls and lie back a moment and look around him. The lake, as he had observed already, was long and narrow. It was evidently of enormous depth, and, from the black basalt cliffs which bordered it, he gathered that its bed must be the crater of an old fissure eruption.

Martin was not left long to consider his surroundings. All of a sudden the quick beat of a motor engine reached his ears, and, looking behind him, he saw a small launch shooting towards him at great speed. Where it came from he had not the slightest idea, for so far he had seen no possible landing-place. Yet there it was, and in the stern sat a man who steered his smart craft straight towards the flying boat.

Martin’s heart throbbed with excitement. Here was the stranger who had called to him across all those thousands of miles of ocean.

Soon the launch was near enough for Martin to see the face and figure of the solitary steersman. The first thing of which Martin was conscious was that the stranger was a man of great height and magnificent physique, the second that he was old beyond belief.

His hair, still thick, was white as the ice-cap of the peak above, and so were his beard and mustache. The skin of his face was brown as parchment and seamed with a million wrinkles, and his cheekbones stood out prominent like those of a mummy. Yet his eyes were dark and piercing and there was still an air of power and strength about him, which was intensely impressive. Martin stared at him as though fascinated. He felt himself in the presence of an unusual personality.

The launch came alongside, and Martin found himself waiting breathlessly for the other to speak.

He had not long to wait. The white-haired giant raised his soft hat courteously.

“Welcome to Lost Island,” he said in a deep voice. “My name is Julius Distin, and I wish to assure you that I am very grateful to you for coming to my help.”

“I am Martin Vaile,” Martin answered simply. “I consider myself very lucky to have been the one to pick up your message.”

Julius Distin looked at Martin thoughtfully.