Читать книгу The Radio Boys with the Iceberg Patrol; Or, Making safe the ocean lanes - Chapman Allen - Страница 3

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“Say, fellows, whom do you think I got a letter from?” cried Bob Layton, as he ran out of his front gate to meet a group of boys who were coming down the street.

“From the President of the United States, judging from the way you’re all worked up about it,” replied Joe Atwood, with a grin.

“My guess would be the King of England,” chimed in Jimmy Plummer.

“Quit your kidding!” exclaimed Bob. “They don’t know that I’m alive, and don’t care whether I am or not. The letter came from Paul Bentley.”

That Paul Bentley’s name was one to conjure with was evident from the keen interest that leaped into every face.

“Paul Bentley!” cried Joe. “What does he have to say? How are things going with the old scout?”

“Is he coming to Clintonia?” asked Herb Fennington, eagerly.

“No such luck,” Bob replied to the last question. “Say, maybe he wouldn’t get a welcome if he did! No, he’s still up in the Spruce Mountain district, fighting fires. Says they had a big one a couple of weeks ago, almost as bad as the one in which we fellows came so near to losing our lives.”

“It must have been a lallapaloozer then,” affirmed Jimmy. “I never believed anything could be nearly as bad as that. Gee, I feel hot flashes whenever I think of it. And I think of it pretty often, too. Sometimes I wake up in the night and begin sniffing around for smoke.”

“Same here,” chimed in Joe. “Whenever there was a fire in town I used to like to run to it. But not any more! I’ve had enough of fires to last me a lifetime.”

“We did have a pretty tough fight for life,” assented Bob. “What with the fire on one hand and the bears on the other, we had a mighty sight more of excitement than we bargained for.”

“Yet that’s what we went to Spruce Mountain to get,” observed Joe Atwood.

“We got it all right,” remarked Jimmy. “And yet, since we got out of it safely, I’m mighty glad we had the experience. And leaving the fire out of the account, what a whale of a good time we had! Good air, good eats, good company. Everything was good.”

“Everything?” queried Herb, with a tinge of skepticism.

“Sure!” declared Jimmy, stoutly. “Point out anything that wasn’t.”

“How about Buck Looker and Carl Lutz?” asked Herb, with a grin.

“They were good too,” asserted Jimmy. “Good for nothing. But, after all, they didn’t do us any real harm, though they tried hard enough. And I guess the scare they got in the fire took some of the meanness out of them.”

“I don’t know about that,” remarked Joe dubiously. “Buck was frightened ’most to death, and he was ready to promise almost anything. But probably that didn’t change his real nature. If he should get a chance to do us a bad turn, he’d probably do it, just as he always has. You’ve heard that old saying that the leopard can’t change its spots, haven’t you? Buck sure had a lot of spots.”

“Talk about angels, and they appear!” exclaimed Herb. “Here they come now.”

The four boys looked in the direction that Herb Fennington indicated, and saw two boys of about their own age coming down the street. The larger of the two was a heavily built, hulking fellow, with eyes set too close together and a look of the bully standing out all over him. The other was not so large in bulk, but quite as tall. His complexion was pasty and there was a furtive look about him that was anything but prepossessing.

“Fallen angels,” muttered Joe, in reply to Herb’s last remark. “I’ll bet at this moment they’re cooking up some low-down trick or other. They wouldn’t be happy if they weren’t. That’s their conception of having a good time.”

The two newcomers were coming along facing each other and tossing a baseball between them. The slenderer one, Carl Lutz, had his back toward the four friends, while the heavier one, Buck Looker, was facing them.

Just as they got about twenty feet from Bob Layton and his friends, Buck threw the ball well to one side of Lutz. Even at that, the latter could easily have stopped it, if he had wanted to. He made only a half-hearted offer at it, however, and the ball went swiftly past him and struck Jimmy Plummer full in the pit of the stomach.

The ball was hard thrown, and it doubled Jimmy up promptly. With a cry of pain, he fell to the sidewalk.

Bob sprang toward him to pick him up, while Joe glared wrathfully at Buck.

“That was a nice thing to do, wasn’t it?” he demanded.

“Aw, how could I help it!” growled Looker, not exhibiting the slightest compunction nor offering to go to Jimmy’s assistance. “He ought to have kept his eyes open and gotten out of the way.”

“I believe you did it on purpose,” broke in Herb.

“You can believe what you like,” snarled Buck. “How could I help it if Carl didn’t stop the ball?”

“It’s mighty funny that the first wild throw should come just as we were passing by,” observed Joe.

“And that it should be such a swift one,” added Herb. “You were just tossing the ball until you got near us. Then you let out with all your might. And Lutz didn’t even try to stop it.”

“I did make a try for it,” growled Lutz, though the look in his eyes did not bear out his statement.

They attempted to pass by, but Bob Layton barred the way.

“Just wait a minute,” he said. “Are you badly hurt, Jimmy?” he added, addressing his companion, whom he had helped to his feet.

“It—it knocked the breath out of me, and it hurt like the mischief,” gasped Jimmy, whose face was white and who spoke with difficulty. “But I guess I’ll be all right in a little while.”

“Now, look here, Buck Looker,” said Bob, with a steely look in his eyes, before which both Buck and Lutz drew back. “I had hoped that we had got through with this kind of thing from you and your gang. Do you remember what you promised when we saved your life in the forest fire? You told us on your knees that you’d cut out all the dirty tricks that you had been trying to put over on us for the last year or two. Yet here you are, right after you’ve got back, doing the same old thing.”

“I tell you I didn’t do this on purpose,” muttered Buck, with a scowl.

“Look me straight in the eye and say that again,” demanded Bob.

Buck tried to, but before Bob’s steady gaze his eyes wavered and fell, and his words fell away into an inarticulate growl.

“Aw, what right have you to put me through the third degree?” he snarled. “I’ve told you once that I didn’t mean to, and that settles it.”

“No, it doesn’t settle it,” cried Joe, whose temper was of the hair-trigger variety. “I’m going to give you a thrashing right here and now.”

He made a move to throw off his coat, but Bob laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“Not this time, Joe,” he counseled. “Every dog, you know, is entitled to one bite. We’ll let this go for Buck’s first bite since he got back. It isn’t a dead certainty that he did it on purpose, though I believe he did. But I tell you this straight, Buck Looker, and you paste it in your hat. If anything like this happens again, you won’t get the benefit of the doubt, and I’ll give you the worst licking that you ever got in your life. I’ve thrashed you before, and you know that I can do it again. Now skip along before I change my mind and trim you right on the spot.”

Buck looked at first as though he were going to resent Bob’s words and tone, but a look at the latter’s fists that had involuntarily clenched themselves, made him think better of it, and, picking up the ball which, obeying his will, had caused the mischief, he and his crony slunk away, favoring the group with a malignant stare that told he was only biding his time to attempt some further rascality.

“A precious pair of rascals,” remarked Herb, disgustedly, as they watched the retreating figures.

“Oh, my prophetic soul!” exclaimed Joe. “What did I tell you when I saw them coming? Didn’t I say they were cooking up something as they came along? I tell you they’re hopeless.”

“I’m afraid they are,” agreed Bob, regretfully. “I really thought that after we’d saved Buck’s life and after all his tears and promises, he might reform. But you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Buck’s yellow through and through.”

“We ought to have let the bears get him when they were clawing at the raft,” declared Herb. “What hasn’t that fellow and his gang tried to do to us? Tried to smash our radio sets and a dozen other things!”

“Feeling better, Jimmy?” inquired Bob, as the four chums resumed their interrupted walk.

“A little bit sore at the pit of my stomach, but the pain’s going away,” replied Jimmy. “It certainly knocked me out for a minute. Thought I’d never be able to breathe again.”

“We’ll just mark that up as another tally in our score against Buck Looker,” said Bob. “And now let’s try to forget that beauty and talk of something pleasanter. Did you fellows read about that radio test by the airplane mail pilot? It was in this morning’s paper.”

None of the others had noticed the item, but as they were all radio fans of the thirty-third degree, they were interested at once.

“Tell us about it,” urged Joe, echoed by the others.

“You see,” explained Bob to his eager auditors, “the post-office department has been having a lot of trouble communicating from the ground to the mail planes and from the mail planes to the ground. In order to have the planes carry as little weight as possible, the radio apparatus they’ve carried has been of reduced size and the antenna facilities have had to be limited, too, so that the range of the aerial set hasn’t been great enough to bring about the best results.

“Then, too, it’s been hard to reach the speeding plane from the ground. This has been due to the noise of the engine and the local interference picked up by the receiver from the ignition and other electrical circuits of the motor.

“But now they’ve established at the Omaha field a one-thousand-watt transmitter, especially designed for the postal authorities, that has a range of from three hundred to five hundred miles in the day time and up to one thousand miles at night. And as none of the flying fields is more than five hundred miles from another, the field superintendents are able to keep in touch with the planes at almost any moment they are in flight.”

“Sounds good,” commented Joe. “But has it actually worked?”

“To the queen’s taste,” affirmed Bob. “One of the pilots tried it out yesterday between Omaha and North Platte. While traveling at the rate of one hundred and twenty miles an hour on a three-hour trip, the pilot kept up a conversation with the superintendents of two stations, and they could hear each other as plainly as if they had been in the next room. What do you think of that?”

“Dandy,” replied Herb. “Just think what that will mean to the pilot, especially in fog or storm. It won’t be necessary for him to see the light from the air-mail fields so as to be able to land. The superintendent can give him his location to a dot, and he can come down with his eyes shut.”

“Another triumph for radio!” exclaimed Joe. “I tell you, fellows, there’s no limit to the possibilities of that wonderful science. One thing follows so closely on the heels of another that a fellow gets dizzy trying to keep up with it.”

“It’s as though one were living in fairyland,” agreed Jimmy. “I have to pinch myself sometimes to see if I’m dreaming.”

“We surely are living in an age of miracles,” declared Bob. “I’ve given up thinking anything was impossible. I don’t give the merry ha-ha to anything, no matter how unlikely it sounds. Nothing can happen more wonderful than what’s taking place every day in radio. You can tell me that some day we’ll be talking to the men on Mars—if there are any men there—and I won’t be the one to say we can’t.”

“In other words, you’re ready to fall for anything,” laughed Jimmy, who had by this time recovered from the effect of the blow and was his own jolly self again. “But now, to get down to earth again, suppose you tell us where we’re going. We’re a long way from home.”

“It’s that appetite of Jimmy’s that’s beginning to talk now,” gibed Herb. “He knows it’s getting near supper time, and he doesn’t need any watch to tell him so. That stomach of his is a regular chronometer.”

“It came near having the works knocked out of it this afternoon,” chaffed Joe. “But I see that it’s still ticking. After all, it is getting rather late. Suppose we turn around and beat it for home.”

“You’ve come so far, you might as well come a little farther,” urged Bob. “I’ve an errand to do for my father at Mr. Baker’s house. It’s only about half a mile farther on.”

“Now I know why Bob spun us that yarn about the air-mail pilot,” laughed Herb. “He wanted company, and he tried to keep us so interested that we wouldn’t notice how far we were going.”

“Dead wrong,” declared Bob, in denial. “It wouldn’t be worth going to all that trouble to beguile you innocent boobs. But come along now and we’ll be there in a jiffy.”

They swung around a turn in the road, and Bob, who was slightly in advance, gave a startled exclamation.

“Look! Look!” he cried.

The others looked, and turned white in consternation.

What they saw was a large automobile that had crashed through a fence alongside the road and was rolling down into a deep gully, while from it rose loud yells for help.