Originally Published: 1911
Genres: Children's
Dime Novel Bibliography: https://dimenovels.org/Item/2054/Show
Gutenberg link: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58013
Chapters: 25
Warning: This may include outdated and derogatory language and attitudes.
CHAPTER I
UNCLE SAM GETS FIRST CALL
“So your final answer is no?”
“Yes. And with a big N, Mr. Ferriss. I have put my best work of head and hand into the Lockyer submarine, and Uncle Sam gets first call on her services.”
“You remind me of a copybook with your sentimental morality,” sneered Jasper Ferriss, with the bitter inflection of a man who has fought a losing fight and knows it.
“Why,” he went on persuasively, “you know as well as I do that the government is notoriously slow to pay. By the time the red tape is unwound at Washington you’ll be penniless, and the boat a rust-eaten wreck. Our concern, on the other hand, offers you a fat figure, down on the nail. Come, say the word and I’ll write you a check now.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Mr. Ferriss,” smiled Channing Lockyer, as the other’s be-diamonded hand sought his breast pocket to produce his checkbook—the magic volume which could have told many tales of its adventures with Jasper Ferriss.
“My answer to you and your concern regarding your proposition is No,—first, last and all the time,” he went on.
“Why?”
Jasper Ferriss was angered. Despite his experience and skill in putting through all manner of “deals” requiring the exercise of the nicest diplomacy, he could not help showing his chagrin. He showed it in the way his black brows contracted till they met in one thick band across his puffy, florid countenance. Showed it, too, in the quick way in which he rubbed his blue, clean-shaven chin, with its triple folds of fat, and in the sharp, impatient beat of his patent leather boot on the floor of the dusty shipyard office in which they sat talking by Channing Lockyer’s battered old desk, with its litter of blueprints and plans.
“Why?”
The question was shot out as if it had been a projectile.
“Why?” echoed Channing Lockyer. “Because your firm proposes to build submarines of my type for a foreign power—a power that may someday be at war with us. I believe—it may be an inventor’s conceited folly—but I believe that with a fleet of Lockyer submarines, the power controlling them will be absolute mistress of the seas. Naturally, as a descendant of Jefferson Lockyer, I don’t want to see any country but my own with such powerful engines of war at its disposal.”
The confidence of inventors in their works was not new to Jasper Ferriss. But somehow the enthusiasm of this tall, pale young man, with the workman’s clothes and the long, nervous fingers, infected him. But it made him burn with an ardent desire to secure possession of the secret of the Lockyer submarine for his own company. However, while Channing Lockyer had been talking the other had managed to control his irritation, and now could speak with his accustomed smoothness.
“I understand and honor your feelings, Mr. Lockyer,” he said suavely, “but a man’s first duty is really to himself, especially to a man in your position. But when is the government going to test your craft?”
It was an old trick of Jasper Ferriss’s to abruptly change the subject when things weren’t going his way.
“I am expecting the officer who will be in charge of the experiments, and his picked crew, within a few days,” was the reply. “A short time will be spent in making them familiar with the construction, and then, after she is launched, we shall go ahead with the real tests.”
“And the launching will be?”
“As soon as possible. But there will be no public ceremony. Only the workmen, who are pledged to secrecy, will know if she is a success or a failure. Naturally, we wish to keep it all as quiet as possible.”
“The men are still working on her?”
The question seemed hardly necessary. Through the open windows there floated the busy sounds of activity from the fenced-in yard. From a tall, narrow shed built against the seaward side of the high fence came the loudest demonstration of activity.
A rattling volley of riveters’ hammers, accompanied by the snorting snarl of the whirring pneumatic drills eating through steel plates, was punctuated by shouted orders and the clamor of metal on metal.
“We are putting on the finishing touches,” explained Lockyer. He sighed as he spoke. The “finishing touches” he referred to might mean the last strokes of his own career as well as the end of the preliminary stages of the submarine’s construction. Ferriss’s eyes followed the tall, slender young form as the youthful inventor strode up and down the tiny office, with its tumble-down, dust-covered desks, their pigeon-holes crammed full of blueprints and working drawings. No gilt and gingerbread about Channing Lockyer’s office. It was business-like as a steam hammer.
“Looks soft as rubber,” mused Ferriss, “but he’s tough as Harveyized steel; and a blessed sight less workable.
“Well, Mr. Lockyer,” he went on, rising, “I must be going. But I am stopping in the village, recollect, so that if you change your mind, or Uncle Sam doesn’t appreciate the boat, we stand ready to negotiate for her.”
“I won’t forget,” laughed the inventor, “but really, Mr. Ferriss, you are wasting your time. Either the United States gets her, or, if she isn’t good enough for Uncle Sam, I’ll sink her to the bottom of Long Island Sound.”
“Fine talk! Fine talk!” chuckled the amiable Mr. Ferriss, as he stepped into the noisy, bustling yard, so effectually cut off from outside observation by its high fence with the spikes on top. “But our figures will look mighty comfortable to you when you are on the brink of ruin. And you will be if the Lockyer doesn’t come up to government requirements.”
“Time enough to talk about that when the crash comes,” laughed the young inventor gaily enough. But as Ferriss’s portly, expensively dressed form vanished through the door he sank into a chair and sat staring at the opposite wall, deep in thought. Things were coming to a crisis at the Lockyer boatyard.
Channing Lockyer was in his twenty-fifth year. Just twelve months before this story opens he had been left a considerable fortune by his father, who during his lifetime had done all he could to discourage his son’s “fantastic mechanical dreams,” as he called them. With the money in his possession, however, young Lockyer, with the true fire of the inventor, had started out to realize his fondest hope, namely to build a practicable submarine boat capable of making extended cruises without the drawback of the accompanying “parent boat.”
Compressed air had solved the problem of running his engines, but the use of the new driving force had necessitated the invention of an entirely novel type of motor. But young Lockyer—a graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, by the way—had perseveringly overcome all difficulties, and now, in the long, narrow shed over in one corner of the enclosed yard stood the realization of his dreams. Through some friends of his late father’s the young man had succeeded in “pulling the wires” at Washington. As a consequence, after many wearisome delays, Lieutenant Archer Parry and a picked crew were to be sent to Grayport to make an extended series of tests with the new craft.
But in “pulling his wires” Lockyer had necessarily to allow a part of his secret to leak out. Now, at Washington “walls have ears,” and it was not long after he received the glad news that at last, the Navy Department had decided to look into his type of boat, that Jasper Ferriss, promoter and partner in the Atlas Submarine Company, had come to young Lockyer with a proposal to sell his plant, stock, and experimental boat outright, for a sum that fairly staggered the inventor, who had, as Ferriss had hinted, run through almost his entire fortune in making his experiments.
Now, Lockyer was not ignorant that the Atlas people, having failed to sell their own gasolene and electric-driven boats to the government, were making diving torpedo boats for a certain Far Eastern power. He came of old Revolutionary stock, and the idea of selling his boat, the offspring of his brain and inventive power, for possible use against his own country was absolutely repugnant to him; wherefore Lockyer, as we have seen, had informed the Atlas concern in no uncertain terms that he would have nothing to do with their offers, flattering though they might seem. Jasper Ferriss had, however, perseveringly hung on, hoping against hope that something might happen to make the inventor change his mind. The news he had just received that a naval experimental force had actually been ordered to start for Grayport came as a rude shock to him.
In fact, after leaving Channing Lockyer, Mr. Ferriss took the first train to New York. In the Broadway offices of his firm, a stormy scene followed his narrative of his failure to close a deal with Lockyer.
Camberly—Watson Camberly, the other partner of the firm—a middle-aged man of the same aggressive type to which Ferriss himself belonged, took him sharply to task.
“Looks to me as if you’ve bungled this thing badly, Ferriss,” he growled. “You say that if the government decides not to take the boat that there is a chance Lockyer will accept our offer?”
“He’ll have to, or be ruined,” was the prompt rejoinder.
“Then we’ve got him!” cried the other, bringing down a ponderous fist on the shiny mahogany directors’ table of the Atlas Submarine Company.
“I don’t think so,” rejoined Ferriss quietly; “from what I can gather, the boat is bound to be an unqualified triumph. The government—although of course I didn’t tell Lockyer so—will jump at her.”
“That is if she is a success?” asked Camberly, a peculiar light creeping into his eyes.
“Exactly. But, as I said, there is no doubt of that.”
“Unless—”
“Well, unless what? You don’t mean to cripple her, as we did the Grampus Concern when they began to be serious rivals?”
“That’s what I do,” growled Camberly. “It’s this way, Ferriss. We’ve got to have money. Our Far Eastern friends stand ready to pay us, you know how much, for the compressed-air boat. Thinking that Lockyer would be easy, we practically promised to close a deal with them. We’ve got to have it.”
“In other words, Lockyer’s boat has got to fail in her government tests?”
“You catch my meaning exactly,” said Camberly, a slow smile spreading over his heavy, coarse features. “I think we had better send for Gradbarr at once.”
Ferriss shrugged his shoulders.
“Too bad,” he sighed, an almost regretful expression coming over his face. “Lockyer is a decent young fellow, but impracticable—quite too fanatic in his ideas. I really wish we didn’t have to resort to such measures, Camberly.”
“Rot!” rejoined the other impatiently. “Isn’t it for his own good? We’ll pay him a bigger price than the government would, but business is business, and if Lockyer won’t come into camp willingly, we’ll have to drive him.”
He tapped a small bell on his desk, and to the obsequious office boy who glided in he gave a sharp order:
“Send to the yard for Tom Gradbarr. Tell him to report to me here as soon as possible.”
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