Adventure Magazine Cover — page 169: what you’re looking at

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

The Fox’s Earth and they could hear his heavy breathing as he crept along beside them in the darkness, and the constantly repeated mutterings of his twisted lips. What an endless journey that bare mile seemed to them as they crept slowly, silently along, groping their way as best they could with but the faint rays of a horn lantern to light them; with water dropping at intervals with startling, icy unexpectedness upon them; with rats racing and scurrying and swarming beneath them as they trod, with fingers that clutched at slime and dank and filth-grown walls, and felt strange creatures crawl and squirm and dart from beneath their groping palms! A journey which was as a lifetime to them all, a time of horror and imagination and torture. ‘Till quite sud- denly a dull, far-off roar sounded in their straining ears and a fresh, wet breath of new air filled their nostrils and acted like an elixir to their quivering nerves. “The sea!” cried Algy, gasping his relief. “The sea, Jacobs! ‘The sea, Hafner! And at the sea the cove and Ostermann! We must be nearly there. Have your revolver ready, Jacobs, in case of surprise, and, Haf- ner, stay close beside me and keep quiet! Ah!” They had come to a great wall that was not rock, a great dividing wall, and, directly facing them, a little door in it, left ajar. VI Cig IN SPITE of Brett’s restraining a hand Hafner stepped through it, and e instantly his arm beckoned them after him. One after the other they stepped in his wake through the tiny door and realized that Ostermann’s great secret lay bare under their gazing eyes, the message of it plain for all to read who viewed. The great secret! The secret Ostermann had boasted of! The secret he had sold for two millions, and which was to be used in vengeance against England within a week! The great secret, the great mystery was stored in a mighty arena—the huge work- shop of Ostermann’s inventions, where his genius held pitiless sway and fashioned things of evil and death and destruction and ted murder out of the depths of his tre- mendous brain. The vast subterranean workshop was quite empty and unguarded, and Brett and 925 Hafner and the old man stood stock-still by the door, looking like pygmies in the colos- sal bigness—three parasites clinging to one another for some promise of protection and strength, awed to the soul by the enormity of the thing revealed to them and the un- veiling of a superman’s inventions. A flood of light poured down from numer- ous floats of electric bulbs run across the natural roof of the rock, and under its vivid brilliance everything stood out with start- ling distinctness and assumed even a greater magnitude than it in reality possessed. A monster—long, gray, sinuous and sinis- ter—lay in the center of the vast place, reaching from end to end of it, and bulging out like a giant at rest after a surfeit of SUCCESS. It was Gray Ghost. Gray Ghost! Algy shivered and reeled as he recognized her and remembered his ordeal of not twelve hours ago. Gray Ghost, still armed to the teeth, ready and cleared for action, should action be signaled; ready for war at a moment’s notice, ready for more feats of stupendous magnitude the instant the master’s fingers pressed the levers which would send her rearing and soaring into the limitless heavens! But that was not all. On all sides, in every stage of construc- tion, some scarce commenced, some ready to fly out into the night equipped with full complements of machine-guns and bulks of ammunition; some abandoned in the mak- ing, some broken in their trials, and others scarred and patched and weather-beaten and bearing all the marks of victorious, strenuous battle with the elements, were numberless airships, duplicates of Gray Ghost! Children of a wonderful parent, a fleet of them, sixty or seventy at least, each and all armed with the appliances of war, and each a messenger of death! It was like a nightmare. A perfected fleet of aerial ships of war secreted in the bowels of the earth in England—in Eng- land, and yet the fleet of another country! In England, and not a soul dreamed of it or would believe it when they heard of it! Only that brave man, Sir Dean Densham, had ever admitted the possibility of such a thing, and even he had not anticipated such a colossal discovery as this. Surely it was beyond a man’s conception! It was un- believable, a monster hallucination, and yet the truth—and Algy was face to face with COmiclbook (©