CHAPTER VII
A HAZARDOUS VENTURE

“And now,” said Benton, after the excitement had somewhat subsided, glancing at his watch, “I’ve kept you fellows up till the wee sma’ hours, and I guess we’ve had enough for one night. We’ll sleep over it and get together to-morrow and see how things look in the cold grey dawn of the morning after.

“Mind,” he continued, as he gathered up his papers and made ready to depart, “I don’t want to sweep you fellows off your feet. There are a whole lot of things to be considered, and while I’m tickled to death by the way you feel about it, I don’t hold you to the decision that you’ve made tonight. I take that just as the statement of your personal attitude toward the matter. If on thinking it over more carefully you should change your minds, I’d be horribly disappointed, but I wouldn’t feel a bit sore. In other words, I want the decision to be not a matter of momentary enthusiasm but of cool judgment, after you’ve considered all the pros and cons.”

“It’s bully of you to feel that way about it,” responded Phil warmly, “but we’ve got used to making rather quick decisions, and so far we’ve won out. Besides our decision wasn’t made at the minute you asked for it. It had been forming in our minds all the time we were going through those papers. Of course we’ll have to talk with our folks about it, but we’ve persuaded them before to let us have our way in these matters, and I guess we can again. At any rate if we don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.”

“One other thing,” broke in Dick. “There’s a pal of ours named Steve Elwood. Just at present he’s in New York. He’s no end of a good fellow, and I’m sure he’d like to go along with us. Would you have any objection?”

“Not if he’s like the rest of you and you will vouch for him,” replied Benton with a smile. “We’re rather shorthanded as it is, and five won’t be too many.”

“We’ll vouch for him, all right,” said Phil, and the others seconded him enthusiastically. “He was with us in Florida and Mexico, and he just eats up danger.”

“That’s the kind we want,” replied Benton. “Go to it then and get in touch with him as soon as you can. So long, fellows. See you tomorrow, and we’ll get busy on the question of ways and means.”

There was very little sleep for any of the Radio Boys that night. They had been too stirred up by the vista opened up by their interview with Benton. And when toward morning they dropped off into a troubled slumber, their dreams were a jumble of pirate ships and lonely islands and tumbling waters and coins that gleamed and shimmered in tropical sunlight.

But the morning saw no slackening in their resolution of the night before. A strong appeal had been made to their imagination and their love of adventure, and that appeal persisted.

Naturally, the appeal was much less strong to the members of their families, when with considerable mental misgivings the boys opened up the subject to them, after having enjoined them to strict secrecy as far as outsiders were concerned.

There was a chorus of expostulations and objections, to all of which the boys made answer as best they could. But the strongest arguments lay in the way they had come through the perilous adventures they had previously undergone. Their folks had to admit that in these they had shown qualities of coolness and good judgment, in addition to courage, that had extricated them from all their difficulties. Why was it not reasonable to believe that the same qualities would stand them in good stead in their present venture?

In the end, Phil and Dick prevailed, as they had felt sure that they would, although the consent was a grudging one. Tom had a harder task, as his father was in Chicago, and their talk had to be over the radio, concerning which the elder Hadley was as ardent a “fan” as the son himself. They had a code of their own, but naturally even with that the talk had to be a guarded one, and dealt with the matter in a much more general way than would have been the case in a personal talk, where Tom could have brought his big guns to bear. The result was that Tom got a qualified consent, which was not to be regarded as final however, until the elder Hadley had received full details in a letter which Tom was to write to him at once.

“So far, so good,” remarked Tom, at the end of the struggle, as he wiped the perspiration from his brow. “Now I’ll have to give my natural eloquence a chance and spread it all over my letter. Just wait till you see that letter. It’s going to be a cuckoo. But I haven’t any doubt as to how it will turn out. Dad’s a good sport, and he’s taken chances himself all his life. I’ll bet he’d like to be in on this himself.”

Phil in the meantime had been writing to Steve, laying the matter before him, and enjoining him by all that was good to let him have an answer in twenty-four hours.

“Humph!” sniffed Dick, as he glanced over Phil’s shoulder. “Twenty-four hours! He’ll telegraph an answer in five minutes after he reads the letter. I know Steve.”

“I guess you’re about right,” smiled Phil. “You’ve got the old boy pretty well sized up.”

There was so much to do that day that the time passed as though on wings, and in the evening, in accordance with arrangements made over the telephone, Benton came up again to get their final word on the matter.

“No need to ask though,” he remarked, when the first greetings were over. “I can see that there are no cold feet in this crowd.”

“Warm as toast,” laughed Phil. “There was considerable chilliness about the pedal extremities of our folks though. We had to talk until we were hoarse. We carried our point though, and as far as Dick and I are concerned the matter’s a go. Tom’s been talking over the radio and the thing’s still in the air, but Tom considers it as good as settled. I’ve written to Steve too, and we expect to get an answer tomorrow by telegraph.”

“Some speed boys,” smiled Benton, “but that’s the way to go at it. Either it’s worth nothing at all, or it’s worth every ounce of speed and energy we can put in it. What were some of the objections that your folks put up.”

“Well, there were a good many of them,” replied Phil. “First of course was the danger. They conjured up all sorts of horrible things, sudden tropical storms, drowning, sharks and things like that. Then too, they thought that it was in the nature of a wild goose chase. If the ship had been sunken recently, they’d have thought we had more of a chance. But two centuries ago seems a long while. They thought the ship might have broken up, sunk in the sand, wholly disappeared.”

“There’s something of course in that,” Benton admitted. “And yet treasure has been brought up from the ships of the Spanish Armada that sank over three hundred years ago. What has happened once may happen again. As for the danger, of course there is some. But nothing venture nothing have, and if we are successful the rewards will be great enough to compensate for the risk.”

“Just what we argued,” replied Phil. “And then who can tell where danger lies? A man may sail the seas for forty years without a scratch, and then come home to be drowned in a cistern. After all, life itself is just taking a chance.”

“Right you are,” put in Dick. “If this venture goes through, we’ll have pulled off a big thing. But even suppose it doesn’t go through. We’ll have seen a new part of the world, will have had lots of fun and adventure and the game will have been worth the candle.”

“And just think what it means if we put it over,” added Tom. “Just think of pulling up those ducats and doubloons and louis d’or and all the rest of them from the bottom of the sea. It seems a shame to have all that money doing no one any good, when it might be put into circulation.”

“Old ocean sure is greedy,” replied Benton. “Think of the hundreds of millions, probably billions, that have been engulfed at some time or other. Probably ten millions went down on the Lusitania, the Titanic and the Arabic. Then there’s the Laurentic that went down in 1917 with from ten to fifteen millions on board. They’ve already brought up about three millions of that though. Then there was the fleet of Spanish ships that sank in the harbor of Vigo, Spain, in 1702 carrying down $37,000,000. There’s the San Pedro de Alcantara that sank in Margarita Channel near Caracas in 1812 with $32,000,000 in gold doubloons on board. You’ve read perhaps of the American ship Phantom that was wrecked in 1862 with $10,000,000 in California gold. The George Sand sank in the China Sea in 1863 carrying down $13,000,000 in bullion. And those are only a few of the hundreds of ships that have carried down hundreds of thousands or millions. There’s probably enough gold under the waves to make a solid golden pathway a good many feet wide over the whole of the ocean bed.”

“Well, here’s hoping that there’ll be less of it under water when we get through,” laughed Tom.

“Let’s hope so,” smiled Benton, “but now let’s shift for a little while to another metal and get right down to brass tacks.”

CHAPTER VIII
COUNTING THE COST

“The first thing to be done,” continued Benton, as they all gathered about the table, “is to figure on the cost of the expedition. In this, as in everything else, we need the ‘sinews of war.’ We’ve got to lay in supplies, purchase a diving suit, charter a sailing vessel after we reach San Domingo and lots of other things. It can’t be done under five thousand dollars and we’d better figure on ten. How about it?”

“That’s all right,” answered Phil promptly. “We’ve talked it over among ourselves and estimated that it would be somewhere between those two amounts. A year ago it might have stumped us a bit, but the reward we got from the bank for the capture of Muggs Murray and the generous way in which Uncle Sam treated us after we had helped to run down the counterfeiters has put us on Easy Street.”

“Good,” said Benton. “I have a little wad of my own stowed away, and we’ll go in on an even basis. There are five of us – that is, if your friend Elwood comes in with us – and that will make from one to two thousand each that we will have to put up. And of course it is understood that we share alike in all the profits of the expedition.”

“Seems to me that you ought to have a larger share than the rest of us,” objected Phil. “You’re the one that got the papers, without which there wouldn’t be any trip at all.”

“Not a bit of it,” protested Benton. “The papers wouldn’t do me any good unless I had fellows like you to help me realize on them. No, it’s got to be ‘hoss and hoss,’ share and share alike. That is,” he added, with his whimsical smile, “if there’s anything to be shared. We’re counting our chickens before they are hatched.”

“I suppose the first leg of our journey will be from here to some of the West India Islands,” said Dick.

“Yes,” answered Benton. “I figure that we’d better go from here to New York by rail, and then by one of the regular steamers to San Domingo. When we reach there, it will be up to us to charter a small fast sailing vessel in which we can cruise around in the Caribbean while we’re trying to locate the old pirate’s island. We’ll drop down to the neighborhood of latitude 14, longitude 81, keeping our eyes open for any island whose skyline looks like the teeth of a saw.”

“How about navigating the sloop?” asked Phil.

“Leave that to me,” responded Benton. “I thought one time before I joined the marines of going into the merchant service and studied for the position of mate. I got my papers too and can handle a ship with the best of them. But the marine service appealed to me more strongly because of the greater chances of adventure, and so I passed the other up. But I haven’t let myself get rusty, and I’ve had a lot of practical experience. I’m as much at home on a boat as I am in the barracks. But how about you young fellows? Know anything about sailing?”

“Not on the ocean,” replied Phil, “but we’ve done considerable cruising on the Great Lakes, which are the next thing to the sea itself. We know enough about ropes and sails to understand orders and to obey them promptly. If you’ll act as captain, we think we can qualify as crew, especially on as small a boat as we expect to handle.”

“That’s dandy,” replied Benton, “and when we get down to San Domingo we’ll do a lot of cruising just off shore so that you can get thoroughly familiar with your work before cutting loose for the big adventure. That removes a lot of worry from my mind, for I’d hate like thunder to have to ship a crew from the kind of material you find in a West Indian port. They’re smart enough sailors, but as a rule a bad lot to have on any trip, let alone an expedition that’s looking for treasure.

“Now as to supplies. We’ve got to take along guns, revolvers and plenty of ammunition. Then we’ll need dynamite and blasting powder – ”

“I don’t see exactly where that comes in,” remarked Tom.

“For use in getting to the treasure,” explained Benton. “Granted that we locate the ship, it’s altogether unlikely that we’d be able to get through the hatches. They’d in all likelihood be crusted with barnacles or covered with silt and sea growths that would make it impossible for the diver to get into the hold unaided. But he could plant a charge of dynamite, and then after he’d been drawn up the charge could be fired by means of an electric spark from a battery in the boat above. That would tear a big hole in the deck and give the diver a chance to get in.

“Speaking of the diver,” Benton went on, “brings us to one of the most important things of all, and that is the diving suit. We can’t afford to get any but the best, for the man that goes down in it literally takes his life in his hands. The work though is less dangerous than it used to be because of the improvements that have been made.

“For instance, in the old-fashioned suits the fresh air was served to the diver from the surface of the water through a tube and the pressure within the suit was increased to equal the pressure outside of it. But the more modern suit that I have in mind eliminates the necessity of the air tube. The diver carries his own oxygen with him in a tank that is fitted into a steel shell that is a part of the suit. Beside the oxygen tank is another tank containing caustic soda which absorbs the carbon dioxide given out by the expelled breath of the diver. A valve operates to deliver a certain amount every hour of oxygen properly mixed with nitrogen.