Adventure Magazine Cover — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

t "578 the sound came at intervals; that night he ‘saw search-lights flashing across the sky like a northern aurora; and early in the morning there was a long streak of smoke in the south which the fleet left as it steamed down toward Auckland. This interruption of his quiet strangely disturbed Coulson, but an odd chance turned it to his advantage. On the following day he went out in his canoe to fish, going far- ther out to sea than usual. He espied a great reddish object floating awash with the waves. It looked very like a sea-serpent, and he paddled toward it. On a nearer inspection he recognized it at once. It was a Whitehead torpedo, undoubtedly lost from a battle-ship during torpedo-practise, and drifting dead and derelict with its propelling gear run down. Being without its ‘war head,” it was temporarily as harmless as a log, and Coulson took a hitch of a line a around it and towed it to the island. The discovery of this torpedo raised in him a multitude of excited imaginings. From that day he had a deadly weapon at hand, and the Man suggested to him many plans for its use. He might sail far out to sea, signal some passing steamer with a flare by night, and contrive to attach the torpedo to her side. Or he might wait for the very unlikely event of a ship approaching the island. But in the end it seemed best to commence his operations by waiting for the supply-ship and sending her to the bottom of the lagoon with celerity and precision. In the absence of the percussion appa- ratus there would be some difficulty about exploding the torpedo, but Coulson with much labor drilled a hole into the powder chamber and attached a fuse enclosed in a rubber tube to protect it from wet. Then there was nothing to do but wait. It was nearly a month before the gunboat was due, and there had been no ships in sight since the departure of the ironclads, when late one afternoon a trail of smoke appeared on the sky in the east. It grew and approached, though slowly, and in time ~ the hull rose above the water. An hour later Coulson made her out distinctly with his glass. She was one of those jerry-built ocean tramps, constructed by the mile and cut off in suitable lengths, and by her pain- fully slow movements she was having trou- ble in her engine-room. She passed the island within a mile, and had begun to increase the distance a little Adventure when she suddenly stopped, a cloud of steam escaping from her waste-pipe. Coulson had watched her with intense interest from the moment she came into view. And the Man was at his shoulder. When she stopped, Coulson put down his glass calmly; he knew that his enemy had been delivered into his hands. The equatorial darkness shut down like a sudden curtain, and the steamer’s lights twinkled like smoky stars across the water. An hour after sunset they went down to the beach where the canoe lay, attached the torpedo to a towline, and the Man got into the little craft and paddled out of the lagoon with the great red cigar in his wake. Coul- son remained ashore; he understood that his companion was the right person to carry the business through. But though he stood on the beach, he seemed to follow the progress of the canoe as if he had been aboard her. He could even feel the shock of the waves and the succes- sive impulses of the paddle-strokes as the Man, grim and silent in the stern, forced the craft forward. He could see the steam- er’s lights growing brighter; he heard pres- ently the sound of voices and the clinking of hammers, and then he saw the tall black sides just ahead, towering up through the blue gloom. Slowly the canoe approached the ship’s overhanging stern. She was high in the water, so that a great part of her rudder showed above the surface, and the Man drew in the torpedo and made it fast. Coul- son watched him with agonized suspense as he fumbled for matches to light the fuse and at that moment there was a sharp jin- gle of bells from the vessel’s interior. A tremor shook her, and the water boiled suddenly underneath. The canoe collapsed, and Coulson found himself unexpectedly, incomprehensibly precipitated into cool water, struggling to grasp the canoe in the midst of foam and a horrible suction that was drawing him irresistibly down- ward. A moment later there was nothing to be seen above the water but a dozen crimson threads drifting up through the froth, and there was an irregular note in the pulsation of the propeller. The mate, leaning over the stern, signaled to the bridge. “Stop her! he called. ““Something has fouled the screw.” COMICLOOCKKS. EGO S|