Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1919 — Page 2

THE DEEP SEA PERIL

THE VILLAIN MAC BEARD, POSSESSED OF THE DEAD MASTERMAN’S SECRET, GOES TO FIND THE ABODE OF THE WEIRD THINGS NEAR SHETLAND ISLANDS—HAS DEADLY PURPOSE.

Naval Lieutenant Donald Paget, just given command of a submarine, meets at Washington an old friend and distinguished though somewhat eccentric scientist. Captain Mastennan. Ma’sterman Jias just returned from an exploring expedition, bringing with him a meipber of the strange race, the existence of whose species, he asserts, menaces the human family. At the elub, the “March Hares,” Masterman explains his theory to Paget. The recital is interrupted by the arrival of a lifelong enemy of Masterman, Ira Macßeard, and the former is seized with a fptal paralytic stroke. From Masterman s body I aget secures documents bearing upon the discovery and proceeds to the home of the scientist. Paget proceeds to sea on his submarine, the F 55 and encounters a German cruiser. He sinks the enemy, which had destroyed the Beotia, on which Ida Kennedy, his fiancee, was a passenger The girl escapes in a small boat* He rescues her, but ns himself unable to take the skiff to the submarine because of invisible forces. Paget, Ida, Midshipman Davies land Seaman Sam Clouts barely escape death. Clouts plays the mouthorgan.

CHAPTER Vl—Continued. Donald heard him leap into the torpedo room below. A moment later his voice came up the funnel. “I’m ready for the lady, sir!” he called. Donald raised Ida in his arms and lowered her through the tube. “After you, sir,” said Davies. “I have assumed command, Davies,” Donald replied. “Very well, sir,” said the middy quietly, and descended. Donald followed him. As he jumped for the floor of the torpedo room, he heard the scraping sound of flippers on the floor above. But the creaking of the conning tower door had ceased. “We’re saved!” cried Donald. “Davies, they can’t force the conning tower. Of course not. That sound is one or two of the beasts who have come down the hatches. You closed them?"' • “No, sir. There wasn’t time.” “Then they tried to get through the conning tower, and hadn t reason enough to know that they could get through the hatches!” cried Donald joyfully. “Their reason won’t get them down the tube, sir, unless they’ve got bodies as slim as ours,” said Clouts. “And they feel like—like barrels, sir,” he added. Overhead, the scraping continued, sometimes approaching the tube and then receding. Presently there came the sound of a commotion. Donald inferred that the sea devils had found the one that he had injured, and that they were satiating their horrible cannibalistic instincts. He heard a body dragged this way and that, and a dreadful rending. After a while the swishing began again, and a faint tapping of flippers against the walls, as if the creatures were endeavoring to explore the interior of the ship. Occasionally a faint, phosphorescent luminosity was visible at the top of the tube. But the monsters made no attempt to descend into the torpedo room. An idea came to Donald. “Davies! Listen to me!” he said. “They don’t know we’re here.” "No, sir. I was thinking —” “That they have no sense of smell.” “Yes, sir.” “And little hearing. At least, that they distinguish sounds only as vibrations.” “Yes, sir. And of course their sense of sight must be extremely limited. And so, roughly, that leaves them only the use of taste and touch, but probably developed far above dur own.” “We’ll beat them, Davies?’ “If that’s true as they can’t hear much, I if I might, sir. I’ll play a bit on my mouth organ,” said Clouts. “Just a lbw, humming, sir.” “Right, Clouts,” answered Donald, j But simultaneously with the first notes there came from above a singular sound. It seemed to be very far away; it was a single, mellow note, the G of a violin, and exquisitely true. It might have been a distant warning buoy anchored amid .the tides. “What’s that, Davies?” Donald. “I don’t know, sir. The lighthouse stopped operating when the war broke out, and the buoys were taken up.” Once more the sound was heard. And suddenly Donald knew that he had heard it before, the same note, though infinitely less., powerful. It was the sound of thfe finger on the bowl of water with!n the house in Baltimore. The scraping in the passage ended In a scurry and did not recur., All through the night they crouched in the torpedo room, watching and sleeping by . turns, and the silence was broken only by a passing word and the occasional tunefulness of Clouts’ mouth organ as he played “Sally in Our Alley.”',/ CHAPTER V|L Ira Macßean|. Ira Macßeard was one of those rare men who' are recognized by their contemporaries as master minde. To the

By VICTOR ROUSSEAU

public he was unknown, but among the learned he was mentioned in the same breath with Faraday, Sir Isaac New’ton and Lavoisier. Halfleld of the March Hares’ club had once honoredhim by publicly comparing him with James I. He had discovered the secret of cold light, and had received a fortune from one of the largest e’ectrical companies for destroying his papers. This enabled him to free himself from the poverty in which he had lived. He had bisected an ion—upon a blackboard; a thing considered theoretically impossible. He had solved the problem of utilizing solar energy, although he had not succeeded in making his process valuable commercially. Unfortunately, like many men of genius, Macßeard had one disastrous failing. He had trained himself intellectually at the expense of his moral o faculties. He had never learned to control his primal gutter-urchin propensities. He was a thief. He did not steal big things, but little ones, and everyone knows that this is more damning socially. They called it kleptomania, and let him resign. But it was not kleptomania ; it was theft, Macßeard’s career was finished. The only club that would admit him to membership was the Inventors’ —and that only because the furious bickerings of its members had compelled the passage of a rule that there should be no blackballing. Anyope could join the Inventors’ club, but only inventors wanted to. Macßeard, embittered, brooded over his wrongs. They assumed monstrous proportions in his mind. He was already approaching fifty; tie believed that at death the soul perishes with the body, and the thought of his gigantic brain being obliterated filled him with frenzy. He wanted to make a lasting mark upon the world. His first idea was to use his solarenergy plant to produce simultaneous eruptions of the volcanoes in Italy and Iceland, Japan and California upon an unprecedented scale. A lava desert should cover all the tilled fields and cities, burying man a thousand feet under its surface snd obliterating civilization.

The science and art of nineteentwentieths of the world would disappear. Macßeard not only hated the world, which had made him an outcast, but he despised it intellectualily as beyond redemption. He wanted to bestride its ruins as a superman, a god. However, his scheme had several drawbacks. It was utterly beyond his financial means. He could not foresee exactly the results of it. There were disturbing possibilities, and he was not the man to act without mathematical exactitude. . , __ His vengeance must take other forms. He wanted a less academic plan, one which reeked less of the midnight lamp. He wanted a more concrete, personal triumph. He w’anted to lead an army to victory, not to sit back and watch the working out of blind forces that he had set in motion. Besides, destruction must be followed by //construction, to satisfy his scientific Trnind. His second thought was to produce a race of men, somewhere in the icebound wastes of Greenland, that should grow to maturity in a few years; a race organized for war, a primal Tflend of man and tiger. It ha,d been done with the plants. But be was too old. He would be Seventy before this plan could be carried to perfection, And then it was improbable that the details would work out as he anticipated. His final idea came through Masterman. Masterman was one of the many men whom he had broken in his days of power. But Masterman was of a different caliber from the rest. Masterman had tried to come back, and had, almost succeeded. Macßeard, at first contemptuous of the old dreamer, came, at last to watch Masterman uneasily. He knew that

(Copyright by W. G. Chapman)

THE EVENING REPUBLICAN, RENSSELAER’, IND.

the old captain was crazed upon the subject of deep-sea life; but he knew, too,«the facts that underlay his letters to the newspapers. He had sent a paper embodying this subject to the magazine of the Inventors’ club. Unfortunately, Halfleld had won the ballot for the editorship that month. Masterman's scholarly contribution had been consigned to the waste basket, and the articles in the magazine had been as follows: “A King in Masquerade,” “King James I as Universal Man,” “Shakespeare and the JIM cipher,” “Bacon and the MIJ Cipher,” “What Civilization Owes to James I.” When Masterman’s proxy ballot won the editorship during his absence, the printers, instead of inserting his latest paper, as he had requested, used a quantity of his old, unpublished material. Secretly Macßeard had known that the carapace which Masterman had brought back from the North was not that of a stegosaurus. His attack upon Masterman had been inspired by envy and hatred. He had examined the relic, and admitted to himself that it was that of an unknown deep-water animal. His respect for Masterman’s abilities increased tenfold. He had begun spying upon the captain. He broke into his house while he was away and read his papers, without, however, learning anything* of use to him. Incidentally, he stole a gold presentation watch, a Chinese' vase of the Ming dynasty, and a pair of lapislazuli earrings which had belonged to Masterman’s wife. When Macßeard heard the first rumors to the effect that Masterman’s ship had been wrecked, and that all on board had perished, he planned to fit out a secret expedition to go to the scene of the disaster and see What was to be discovered. Then he iiad seen the captain in the dining room of the club.

He had been thrown off his guard by Masterman's unexpected return, had followed him and Donald to the door of the card room, and had heard the greater part of the story. He had been unable to restrain his eagerness, and had been detected spying. Balked in his scheme to get possession of Masterman’s letter, he had followed Donald to the house in Baltimore. There he had assaulted him and taken the papers from him. He had had no intention of killing Donald, whom he despised heartily. Once the secret, in which he now firmly believed, was in his possession, there would come no reckoning for the assaijlt. He saw his way to immediate rulership over the world. To do Macßeard justice, he had been scared away, not by fear of the monster, but by the realization that Masterman’s terrific story was true. After Donald had left the house Macßeard crept back. He discovered the monster upon the floor, where it had precipitated .itself in its death agony. It had been disrupted by the Internal pressure, under a normal atmosphere. He made a quick examination of it sat down in the kitchep, and spent the remainder of the night poring over Masterman’s papers. In these he learned much that was essential to his-' success.

He read that the creature in the tank was a young one, which had not yet acquired the power of resistance to an ordinary atmosphere. Nature was still in process of modifying her creation, and, as is always the case, < the young retained the atavistic disabilities, just as the young of flatfish swim like other fishes and have one eye on either side of the head. The modifications in the physiological structure come with maturity. The adult monsters, Macßeard learned, had already acquired the ability to exist for an indefinite period upon the surface of the sea. While the young had gills, these became modified into a species of lung, capable of breathing both above and under water. This was a new adaptation of nature. Macßeard hurried back to the dead monster, and found the lung already partly formed. That satisfied him that Masterman was an accurate observer.

The submarine sinks. Paget’s party take to the water in diving suits. They make s6me amazing discoveries.

(.TO BE CONTINUED.) —

Practice Economy.

The sane standard, “Eat .enough food and no more.” rigidly followed, would reduce greatly food ’ bills in many homes and at the same' time tend to improve the physical condition of all members of the household.

Soy Beans as Food.

Soy beans, introduced into the United States more than qne hundred years ago primarily for us& as a forage crop, are in reality one of the most nutritious of the bean family when used as human food, according to specialists of the department of agriculture.

TWELVE SEASONS NEEDED TOBUILD UP CHAMPIONSHIP BASEBALL ORGANIZATION

Grover Cleveland Alexander and Bill Killifer.

“It takes 12 years to build up a championship ball club. That’s the way Charley Comiskey figures it out, and Comiskey ought to know, as he has built up several of them. It takes about ten minutes to break up a winning organization, if the man who owns it can make a deal that quickly. William F. Baker pulled the foundation from under his block house with the stroke of a pen. Baker had a near championship ball club In the Phillies, a pennant winner In 1915 end a runnerup in 1916 and 1917. Lost Two Stars. The Chief reason Baker had a pennant winner and contender was Grover Cleveland Alexander, the greatest pitcher in baseball, and Bill Killifer, one of tlfe-greatest catchers. When he lost them he lost more than Alexander’s ability to win more than 30 games a season and Killifer s ability to catch more games than any other receiver in the National league; he lost the winning confidence of the rest

STORY OF CLASSIC BLOOMER

Shortstop Wortman for Whom Chicago Cubs Paid $20,000 Is Back With American Association. Shortstop Wortman has drifted back to the American association. He will be with Columbus this year. Behind this news is the story of a classic bloomer of baseball. Several years ago Charley Weeghman, who had just broken Into the National league from the Feds? by purchasing the Chicago Cubs, started to build up his club. Since the passing of Joe. Tinker the crying need of the team has been a capable shortstop. Wortman was playing with the Kansas City club of - the American

Shortstop Wortman.

association. He was playing great ball, and several major league teams were after him. Weeghman set out to get the player at any ,price. He’ finally., did secure him for something like $20,000. Wortman joined the Cubs late in the season three years ago. He fielded well in the fall, but hit little or nothing. But Weeghman waited another year before passing judgment. ‘ ’ The< next season Wortman showed clearly that he was not of major league caliber, so The Cubs had to go out and dig up Charley'Hollocher. Wortman was carried all last year. But he figured in few games. Now be is back in the American association. .

MAJOR VON KOLNITZ QUITS

Former White Sox Infielder Is Through With Professional Baseball—. Goes Into Business. While the Brooklyn Dodgers were ashore at Charleston recently they ran Into Maj. Von Kolnltz, whose home is in that southern town. Von Kolnltz, who leaves the service as a brevet lieutenant colonel, will not report to the White Sox. He is through with professional baseball and will go Into business with his father tn Easton. Pa. “Von” gave the boys a royal time in Charleston.

of the ball players on his team. There’s a lot of psychology in basebait; —Imagine, if you will, the confidence of a ball club going into the field with Alexander, in top form. In the box and Killifer behind the bat. Figures do not He and they show that Alexander wins three games out of four he pitches. These ball players know that they have only one chance in four of losing with him and play up to the confidence that knowledge breeds. Took Away Confidence. So aside from losing a pitcher who would add in the neighborhood of 30 victories to the club’s season totals, Baker took" away a confidence that would bring other victories. This fact is one of baseball’s first axioms. In 1914 Connie Mack stripped his American league champions of half a dozen stars. Since then the Athletics have finished a poor last. The great Cub machine was broken into a pitiful selling plater after winning a pennant.

BAS EBALL STORIES

Pitchers have two kinds of control. Good and government * • • Earl Smith is catching extremely well. His throwing to bases has pleased McGraw very much. • * • The St. Louis Cardinals have released Pitcher Elmer Knight to Little Rock of the Southern league. ♦ ♦ • They never quit. For instance, there is Josh Devore playing the outleld for the Kansas City Blues. -' * —* * - —— ■' Billy Meyer, second baseman, last year with Waco in the Texas league, has been signed by the Mobile club. First Baseman Wally Pipp of the Yankees is said to be about twenty pounds heavier than he was last year. ♦ * * Percy Haughton,'ex-president of the Boston National league club, has announced his retirement as football coach. • • • Pitcher Bill Fincher, formerly of the St. Louis Browns and turned over to Little Rock, is-back from overseas as sergeant. ,• f ♦ • • The Washington Americans are trying out Shortstop Davis, who was with the Wichita club of the Western league before the war. • • • Lee Fohl is much taken with the work of Harry Lupte on third base and says the Indians are safe on that corner, Gardner or no Gardner. <5 « « « * Frank Dehaney, young soldier catcher glgned by Manager Charley Frank of Atlanta, has been traded to Memphis for Outfielder Pete Allison. • • • Promoters of the New England league further advanced their organization by electing John D. Donnelly of Lowell, president for a two-year term. -• The trip of the Cubs to California this year has been something of a novelty—not, one of the stockholders went along to tell how a training camp should be conducted. Rube Schauer, having become properly repentant and restored to good standing by the national commission, has been released by Connie Mack to the Minneapolis Millers. Manager Barrow gives his men all sorts of talks. Many of them are not exactly along baseball lines, but Billy Sunday would applaud freely if he could sit tn and listen. The Baltimore club announces the sale of First Baseman Pug Griffin to Memphis of the Southern league. Joe Slattery held out for more pay on Memphis and thia is his answer.

MUST HAVE HIS GAME

You cannot cheat an American soldier out of his baseball even if he has to make his own supplies. - , A company of soldiers now on German soil suddenly discovered that their supply of baseballs had run out For a while it appeared as if there would ' be no baseball until a new supply. arrived. However, one ingenious soldier got a cork from a wine bottle, unwound the worsted from one of his socks, twisted the worsted around the cork and then cut a cover from an officer's old glove. The harness maker completed the job by sewing the cover on. A number of games were played before the home-made ball became physically unfit for further service. ~ ... .

SAYS HAL CHASE IS INVALUABLE PLAYER

One of Greatest Hit and Run Men in Game, Says Rowland. McGraw's Group of .300 Sluggers Will Make Life Miserable, for Twirlers in National League During 1919 Season. Z , --.—l T i ill -IIIn acquiring Hal Chase, McGraw obtained one of the best hit-and-run players, and one who is able to hit back of a runner at all times. Chase will fit in with the Giant machine like a cog in a well made Swiss watch. He is McGraw’s style of player. It is predicted by Clarence Jtowland that Chase will play the»game of his

Hal Chase.

caret? for McGraw, because he believes the latter, a good judge of human nature, will handle the temperamental star properly. And the shifty first baseman dotes on putting on the hit-and-run sign with a runner or runners on the sacks. “Chase is one of the greatest hit and run men tn the game,” said Rowland' recently. “He can hit back of a runner any time. That is where he will be invaluable to McGraw. “That is McGraw’s style of baseball and Chase, because of his almost uncanny talent in whacking the ball when a runner is going, will make it possible for the Giants to score many runs. “I have not had much of a chance to study McGraw’s method of playing the game, but I have heard enough from other smart baseball men to know what he does and also got a pretty good idea of his ways in the 1117 world’s series. / “I know what Chase can do. Therefore I predict they will hitch well and the pitchers of the National league are going to be kept busy watching Hal when runners are on the bases. “Then take Burns. Kauff. Young, Zimmerman. Doyle, and McCarty, and you have a group of .300 hitters that will make life miserable for the twlrlers in the league. The Giants are the players the Cubs will have to beat for the pennant. “I do not think Chase .will run amuck under McGraw, as he has done on other clubs. His recent experience has, 1 think, taught him a lesson. I believe McGraw will have no difficulty in getting him to play the brand of ball of which he is capable. “Chase is the type of player who has to be petted a little. He must be made to think be is a brainy player, that he knows yvhen to do the right thing, and has to be permitted to use his own judgment considerably. McGraw may allow him to do that. If he does Chase will play as smart a game as he ever did In his life.”

TERRY TURNER NEAR RECORD

■Signs Sixteenth Consecutive Contract to Play With Cleveland Amenlean League. T. L. Turner has signed his sixteenth consecutive contract with the Cleveland Americans. Next to the record made by J. H. Wagner with the Pittsburgh Nationals, this is said to be the best record for any one major league I club.