The Ocean Wireless Boys and the Lost Liner

It was a beautiful sight, but he had no time to stop and admire it. He must push on. He left the cavern and the singing waterfall behind him, and once more battled with the mighty wind that swept through the bore.

The walls began to grow damp now and it was almost as cold as if a heavy frost had fallen. Jack shuddered and drew his coat close around him. He tried to calculate how far he had come, but the bore had made so many twistings and windings that he found it impossible to estimate.

His limbs felt tired and his eyes ached, but he kept on stubbornly.

“I’ve started this thing and I’m going to see it through,” he said doggedly to himself.

And now the passage began to grow narrower. Jack felt the walls closing in on him as if with intent to crush out his life. The passage began to slope steeply and it was hard to keep a footing on the wet floor.

All at once the boy stumbled and slipped. He almost fell headlong, but recovered himself with an effort. In front of him he could hear a mighty roaring sound. The wind, too, was stronger and seemed damper than it had further back. It smelled as if impregnated with salt.

Jack gave another stumble on the uneven floor. This time he did not recover himself, but pitched headlong. And then —

He was in the water. It filled his ears, drowning all sounds. He rose to the surface battling desperately, all senses dormant but the frantic desire to live.

He dashed the water from his eyes. He spat it from his mouth. It was salt and must come from the sea. Wave after wave swept toward him and under each of them he dived.

He soon realized that his fight for life was well-nigh hopeless, but he struggled as men will when death stares them in the face, for life is never sweeter than when it seems to be slipping from our grasp.

Weaker and weaker he felt himself growing. A sort of lethargy crept over him. He didn’t care much longer. His limbs were numbed and chilled. The waves swept down on him, each gleefully following its predecessor, as if they were determined to end Jack’s life in this cavern of the seas.

At last he felt himself uplifted on the crest of a gigantic comber and carried helplessly into the maw of that black gullet.

“It’s the end,” he thought.

But still the instinct of life was strong in his battered body. His outflung hand caught a projecting scrap of rock in a drowning grip and clung there, despite the efforts of the wave to tear him loose. It was more blind instinct than human reason that sustained him as the wave swept on into the dark cavern, thundering against its sides like a train passing through a tunnel.

He found himself hanging to the side of a jagged crack that slanted across the rock high up on the side of the cavern. Into it he managed to jam himself, and then he hung there, too exhausted to move hand or foot, waiting for the next wave to tear him from his precarious hold.

How long he hung there he never knew. Wave after wave came racing by, reaching up watery fingers to tear him from his haven. But he had jammed himself too securely into the providential rift in the rock to be easily dislodged.

Hope began to dawn in his mind once more, despite his position. He mentally cast up what had occurred since that disastrous tumble in the passage. It was plain enough that the bore in the rock opened on this cavern where the salt seas swept and raved. The cave, then, must be connected with the sea. Jack’s reasoning was right. By an extraordinary chance, he was in the cave which Jarrold had told Cummings existed far under the ruins of the old Don’s castle.

The boy had lost his rope and his electric torch and he was soaked through and through. But the canteen of water still hung round his neck. Safe for the time being, he began to cast about for some means of extricating himself from his position, but his heart sank as he realized the full hopelessness of his predicament.

CHAPTER XXIX – FREEDOM ONCE MORE

The necessity for action became imperative. If he stayed cramped and wet in that position much longer, there was grave danger that he would lose the power of locomotion altogether. He could not tell how far up the crack ascended, and, of course, since he had lost his torch he had no means of lighting up the gloom, for his matches, like the bread and meat with which he had stuffed his pockets, were soaked through.

He began to climb, moving painfully forward perhaps an inch at a time. For about fifteen feet he crawled, clinging with fingers and toes. It was heart-breaking work and anyone with a less stout heart than Jack Ready would have given it up and lain down to die where they were.

But Jack was made of sterner stuff. He wormed his way forward, and found suddenly that the crack widened. Then he struck his head violently against the cavern roof.

The crack continued to widen, though, till it was possible for him to crawl into it. But the jagged edges of rock cut and tore his hands and face unmercifully.

Once within the crack, he lay still, panting. It hardly seemed worth while to go further, after all. Would it not be better to die there in the darkness without further effort? There was not the remotest probability that he was nearing a way out of the cavern, and to follow the crack further was labor lost.

Thus he meditated as he stretched himself out to rest. But when he had recovered his breath, love of life reasserted itself.

He would keep on. At any rate, one thing was certain: he could never get back now. Death lay behind him in all its grimness. Ahead, at least, there was the unknown with a fighting chance – one chance in a thousand – in his favor.

Desperately, then, he struggled on, writhing between the narrow walls. He felt as if the whole weight of a mountain was upon him, crushing his ribs, driving the breath out of his body. The darkness was so dense that it could be felt enveloping him like a velvety pall of blackness.

Again and again he thought himself stuck fast, doomed to an eternal grave in the secret bowels of the earth. But every time he managed to wiggle through the tight place and gain another that was not quite so constricted.

But it was heart-breaking work at best. Then all at once the crack widened very noticeably. Cautiously he drew himself to his feet. He judged that he was standing on a shoulder or ledge of rock, but of course, in the inky darkness, he had no means of knowing.

It was at least good to be able to stand up and feel no longer the crushing of the rock walls, like those of a living tomb.

After a little he began to move along, taking care, however, to keep close to the wall, for he did not know how wide the ledge, as he judged it, might be. For perhaps a hundred yards he progressed thus. Always before he took a step he reached out with one foot before him, fearing to encounter vacancy.

Suddenly he found he was on the edge of a void, and shrank back, clinging to the wall with the desperation of fear. It was some seconds before he dared to move again. He could feel the sweat rolling off him, the cold, pricking sweat of fright.

By a supreme effort he mastered himself. He found a loose bit of rock at his feet. Cautiously he cast it into the darkness in front of him. There was a long silence, and then, as if from miles away, came a tiny tinkle.

Jack shuddered.

He had narrowly escaped pitching head first into a bottomless abyss. He carefully retraced his way down the ledge. Suddenly his feeling fingers discovered another crack. This one ran vertically upward like a chimney, almost, at least so far as he could determine by the sense of touch.

A wild hope surged over him. This crack perhaps ran up to the surface of the earth! Recalling an old school-boy trick, he “spreadeagled” himself into the crack. He reached out his hands to either side of the “chimney” and lifted himself a little.

Then he wedged his toes in either side. Thus he painstakingly mounted, praying within himself that the walls of this natural shaft might not widen and make further progress impossible.

It was terribly slow work, though. Time and again he was on the point of giving up, but always the tough spirit of his indomitable old sea-faring ancestors kept him at his task.

Foot by foot he toiled upward, till he estimated he had climbed some thirty feet. And then suddenly: Light! The blessed light of day! High above it was, but unmistakably the light of the outside world was streaming into this hideous subterranean chamber. It gleamed down into the shaft he was painfully ascending, shining like a blessed beacon of hope. It appeared to filter through some sort of net-work of greenery.

Wild with hope, he climbed on till at last he burst his way through a canopy of creepers and vines that obscured the mouth of the natural shaft. He clambered out beneath the blessed sky. As he fell exhausted, prone on the rocks, he heard a cry.

It was his own name!

But for the life of him he could not answer. He could only lie there without thought or motion.

CHAPTER XXX – IN SEARCH FOR A CLEW

The statement of De Garros concerning his chum struck Sam like a blow between the eyes. Of course he did not place the slightest belief in the Frenchman’s words, but he was sorely puzzled and perplexed.

“Where was this place?” he demanded.

“If you will come with me, I will show you,” said De Garros, linking the boy’s arm in his own. “How sorry I am that I did not accompany him myself! But I thought, I sincerely thought, that he was in good hands.”

“Who was this fellow that was with him,” demanded Sam.

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice particularly. It was no one I had ever seen before.”

“What did he look like?”

“As I told you, I did not pay him the attention that I should had I known things were going to turn out like this. He wore a big sun helmet, if that will afford you any clew.”