Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1919 — THE DEEP SEA PERIL [ARTICLE]

THE DEEP SEA PERIL

By VICTOR ROUSSEAU

(Copyright by W. G. Chapman)

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

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

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.) —