The Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril/Chapter 1
The Boy Scouts of the Air
At Cape Peril
CHAPTER I
STARTING THE ADVENTURE
In the second car of an electric train racketing on its way to the seashore, sat three boys in scout costume. Two sat side by side, while the third, twisted around in the seat just in front, was facing them and talking with an animation that arrested the attention and excited the merriment of the non-scout passengers near him.
"I say, it's a shame to make a catfish travel on a motorcycle while you two landlubbers take the Seaboard Airline to Cape Peril."
The speaker's fascinatingly homely face was almost sliced in two by a capacious mouth, which, when open, revealed snaggly teeth with gaps between, the whole effect offering a ludicrous resemblance to the denizen of the deep he had just mentioned.
"Well, we matched for the airplane rides, didn't we?" retorted a round-eyed, smooth-cheeked youngster, whose slender figure, when erect, must have been at least six feet one. "Take your medicine like a scout and close up that Mammoth Cave of yours."
"That's right, Legs, hand it to him good and straight," approved the companion by his side, dark of hair, swarthy of complexion, stocky in build, and a good foot and a half shorter than the other. "Nothing's ever settled with Cat Miller. Might know his daddy was a politician. Button up your mouth, Cat, button up your mouth."
Regardless of this admonition, Cat grinned like a Billikin and then came back, "That's all right, Legs Hatton, you and Jimmy Todd, you better take a lesson from my dad and from me too. I got you fellows this trip, didn't I?"
"Doggone right you did," conceded Jimmy, speedily changing his tone to one of appreciation, "and, Cat, old boy, you're some getter! A fellow doesn't get a treat like this every day. Gee! It's great to go camping without having to take a thing along except one little knapsack full, and to be able to chase around all day with nothing on but trunks! We'll be regular Indians. Won't take us long to look as sweet as we did when we got home from school after scrapping through that Paradise Alley gang. Remember that bunch, Cat?" Jimmy grinned at his friend.
"Do I? Well, I should smile. Look here, see this little souvenir over my left eye one of those suckers handed me with a brickbat? I reckon I do remember 'em."
"Ye-ah, and I tried to stop the blood with a piece of brown paper while you were yelling like murder," returned Jimmy, glowing with these memories of his early youth, "and gee! When I got home, Mother wanted to know why in thunder I was so bloody, and I asked her how she expected a fellow to keep clean when he had to fight his way from school every day through a gang of hoboes. Gosh! those Paradise Alleycats were lulus. A white collar and a clean shirt set those guys wild, same as a red rag does a bull. Redhot times those were, you bet."
"Pretty lively times now," remarked Legs soberly. "Going up in an airplane ain't so slow. Say, Cat, pity about you!"
Cat winked one eye and then the other and grinned knowingly as if he were possessed of an important and highly amusing secret which he was inwardly enjoying.
"Look here, fellows," he said finally, "I'm not sore because you two drew the plane this time." And then he added in a low and mysterious tone, "Know sumpthin'? I've been up in one already."
"Yes, you have!" returned Jimmy sarcastically. "Over the left!"
"Yes, I have," affirmed Cat staunchly. "I cross my heart, and I can prove it just as soon as we get back to town."
Jimmy snorted derision.
"Come off, Cat," objected Legs. "You know you couldn't have kept that secret five minutes."
"Believe it or not, I don't give a hang," snapped Cat sourly, "but listen to this, will you?"
"Shoot!" directed Jimmy, who began to be interested despite his incredulity.
Legs cocked his head on one side and screwed up his eyes as if to hear a Munchausen fable.
"Know that guy that flew people over town for fifteen bucks a fly? Well, every afternoon I used to trot out to his field and hang around watching him. After a while, I got to talking planes and, when he found I wasn't any bonehead on flyers, he gave me a lot of new dope. I'd spent 'bout ten afternoons hanging around when he said day before yesterday, 'Look here, young fellow, how'd you like to take a little sky ride? Business seems to be slack, so I might as well make you happy.' My heart turned a somerset, but I looked kind of shy and said, 'Haven't got the price, but I'd give my head to go up.' 'How much have you in your jeans?' he asked me. Then I said, 'Two bits and a jit.' All right,' he said, 'I'll take that. Come along.' Course he was just fooling about the dough. Then he remembered and wanted to know if I could get permission from home right quick. Quick as lightning, I reached down in my pants and fished out a note from the old man saying I could go any old time I got a chance. He laughed like the mischief, and said I was some slick kid and wouldn't have to have anybody to lead me 'round the world. You see, fellows, I knew I was going to work it sooner or later, so, to save time, I got dad the first night to write me a note saying I could go. Gee! You ought to have seen him grin, and he said if I could get a fifteen dollar ride for a little scrap of paper, I sure would make a killing as a lawyer when I grew up. Well, I got my fly, and great day, man! Talk about fun!"
As Cat paused at this point for the applause of his audience, he gave Jimmy a chance to get in a word.
"Swear this is so?"
"If it's not, I hope I may be struck dead right this minute. What would I want to fool you for?"
"Gee, man!" was Legs's fervent exclamation.
"Well," declared Jimmy, "you sure did do us a dirty trick not telling us sooner. We fellows might have pulled off that stunt like you did."
"I don't see how that big mouthed buzzard managed to keep it in this long, that's what gets my goat," observed Legs.
Cat grinned. "You bet I'd 'a spread it all over this U. S. A. if he hadn't made me promise to keep it on the q. t. till he got away. Said he didn't want to be pestered, and he didn't expect to ride a single 'nother kid free. See? Well, he's pulling out to-day just about this time, so I can loosen up on it. See?"
"Golly, Cat!" exclaimed Jimmy, now fully convinced and looking at the new birdman with undisguised admiration. "Say, fellow, what did it feel like?"
To his intensely absorbed scout audience, not to mention certain grown individuals on the side lines, he recounted, in his most humorous style, his varied sensations and experiences during the flight.
"Is Mr. Hardy just as good a pilot as that one?" asked Legs eagerly, after Cat was apparently on the point of exhausting his narrative.
"Big sight better," he asserted.
"How did your father get in with him?" queried Jimmy.
"Listen! You know Father he's had airplanes on the brain ever since the Wright brothers pulled off their experiments on the North Carolina coast way back yonder before we were born. He's read every darn thing he could lay his hands on about flying. He's been up every time he could beg or buy an air ride, and, when the war came on, he was crazy as a Junebug to get in as a pilot, but of course he got turned down because he was too old and his eyes are bum. See? Well, while he was fooling and fussing around trying to buck into the service, he ran across Hardy and they've been buddies ever since, though my dad's about twenty years older. Now, my old man is some horse pulling wires. See? And when he heard about that N. C. Topographical Coast Survey, his pull landed the job for Hardy—I call him Tom behind his back."
"State Top—what? Whew!" whistled Jimmy. "Jimmy, that's a jawbreaker."
"You can listen, but don't try to handle," proclaimed Cat with mock solemnity. "Now, listen some more and I'll teach you something. You know surveyors used to trot all over the country with rods and a lot of junk and take about five years to survey one measly little county. Well, now an aviator and a photographer can go up and take views with the camera upside down, and in an hour or two the job's done. Get me? Well, that's the stunt Tom does on the Carolina coast, and a fellow named Turner, who is with him, does the camera work. They're bunking at Cape Peril till they finish around there and then they'll move on somewhere else. Father hooked that job for him and he thought it would tickle the old man to invite me down. He sent word for me to pick two good old scouts for company, so you two rummies are my pickings. See?"
"Pretty good pickings, too, eh, Legs?" observed Jimmy. "Sure your daddy's going to stop and bring us home in his yacht?"
"That's what he promised," said Legs. "He'll let us know by the wireless Cat says they've got at Cape Peril. This is the eighteenth, isn't it? He ought to be leaving Tampico right about this time, but he's going to stop by Cuba for a couple of days or so."
"Bet he's been having a swell time down there," affirmed Cat. "You're the slowest rummy I ever saw. Why in the name o' Heck didn't you make him take you with him? Bet your life, I'd gone if my dad had a clipper."
"Nothing doing!" returned Legs. "It's something secret—about oil. He couldn't take any of the family only his friends. Dad sure is good to his friends. He wants 'em to put a lot o' money in oil lands down there."
"Gee! I wish my daddy had a yacht," sighed Cat comically, "then I wouldn't have to go down on that blamed motorcycle with the coast guard. Wish Turner had brought the hydroplane up."
"Jiminy! have they got a hydro down there, too?" asked Jimmy excitedly.
"Sure they have. Didn't I tell you that? An airplane rigged up in a life preserver, that's what it looks like to me. They use it to survey the sounds and creeks around Cape Peril. Oh my, oh me, I see where I get a ride every day. You fellows, too, if you don't lose your nerve flying down to Seagulls' Nest."
"Bet your sweet life, here's one scout that won't," asserted Jimmy valiantly.
Legs, for the moment, was silent, thinking deeply.
"And fellows, you know they used to use seaplanes in the war to hunt for submarines," explained Cat.
"The mischief you say!" This from Jimmy.
"Sure! The subs, even when they were 'way down deep, made sort of rings on the top of the water, and the flyers could spy 'em out with the airplanes, and find out where to drop the depth bombs and blow the stuffings out of them."
"Golly!" exclaimed Jimmy.
"I bet you can't guess what they use them for now?" Cat persisted with his instruction of his friends.
"Search me!" returned Jimmy.
"Use 'em to look for shoals of fish that make pretty much the same sort of circles that submarines do. When the flyer sees 'em he signals to the fishermen where to net 'em. How's that?"
"Sounds fishy!" joked Jimmy.
"Oh, mush! Is that the best you can do?" came from the disgusted Cat. "I don't waste any more breath on mutts like you. You'd just as soon spring that rotten joke about the fishermen and the salmon. They eat all they can, and what they can't, they can.'
"Oh, no," denied Jimmy, "I canned that joke along with the other stale one about the lightship. Remember it! You tell a rube they raise all the vegetables they eat on that boat. Then the boob pops his eyes, and you explain they raise 'em from the row boat onto the deck."
"Bury all those chestnuts and bury 'em deep," directed Cat, with a pained expression. "But, say, that reminds me—"
"Just one more," interrupted Jimmy. "This is a bird for Legs. Say, Legs, know how long a fellow's legs ought to be? Don't know? Here's the answer. Just long enough to reach from his body to the ground. Hear that joke crack?"
Jimmy pounded Legs, delightedly.
"Put him out!" shouted Legs, at the same time giving his chum a shove that nearly landed him in the passageway. "You cribbed that joke from Adam. I heard that before you were born."
"Bury that, too," directed Cat, when Jimmy had righted himself and was trying, in revenge for the upset, to flatten Legs's head against the window frame.
"And listen here," he added, as if seized by a sudden inspiration. "Did you boys know that Blackboard used to scout around Cape Peril? Tell you what! Maybe we'll run across some buried treasure down there—doubloons and pieces-of-eight, shiver my timbers."
"Who in thunder is Blackbeard?" asked Jimmy, becoming interested at once.
"Gee! You never heard of Blackbeard? He was a fe-rocious pirate whose real name was Teach, from over in Accomac county on the Eastern Shore. He raised Cain with the merchant boats on the Virginia coast till the sea cops got on his tracks and he had to light out to Albemarle Sound. He operated down there for a while, till a ship from up this way jumped his boat and killed most of his men, and I bet you something pretty that those who got away hid their coin on the shore somewhere. Wouldn't it be funny if we ran across some of it?"
"You're right it would! Where did you see that, Cat, in he newspaper?" queried Jimmy.
"Golly Moses, Jimmy. You think you're funny. You know that was about two hundred years ago."
"No, I didn't," asserted Jimmy. "I didn't know I was pulling a bone, swear I didn't."
Visions of adventures began to float through the lads' fancies.
"Oh, ye-ah, I remember!" exclaimed Legs with sudden enthusiasm. "Teach? By Jebo, he's the very fellow Stevenson—you know, the guy who wrote Kidnapped and Treasure Island—tells about in The Master of . . . Oh, shucks!"
"Master of Oh Shucks!" jeered Cat.
"Of Ball—Ball—Ball," Legs stumbled, "Oh yes, I know, The Master of Ballantre. The guy supposed to be telling the yarn was captured by pirates who ran up the black flag and made the skipper and 'most all the crew of the captured ship walk the plank, all except two or three. Then Teach blacked up his face and curled his hair in rings and crammed his mouth full of glass and chewed it to make himself spit blood. Then he stuck his belt full of pistols and brandished a dirk and cussed a blue streak—pulled off a regular bughouse parade up and down the deck, swearing he was Satan and that his ship was called 'Hades.' He wasn't any chocolate sundae pirate, he wasn't. He was a genu-wine blood-and-thunder guy, he was.
At this violent explosion from the mild-eyed, velvet-cheeked Legs, the other two scouts broke into a roar.
"Oh, Legs, naughty boy, ain't you ashamed of yourself?" mocked Jimmy.
"Got it all wrong, too," added Cat. "The saphead didn't see the note that said it wasn't the same Blackbeard who scouted in these parts. Why don't you take a squint down in the cellar when you are reading? Then you find what they say upstairs ain't so."
"Ah, get out! Hanged if I saw it," declared the muddled Legs. "Don't believe it was there, either. Anyhow, I don't see why they want to stick in junk like that to spoil a dandy good story."
"Hello, Central!" called Cat into his fist, raised to his mouth to represent a telephone. "Give me Legs's top story. How's the weather up there, Legs? Foggy as usual? I thought so."
"Don't cry, Legs," laughed Jimmy. "You'll forget it before you're a hundred. See here, fellows, the pirate business is sort of on the blink now, but I certainly would like to spend about two years sailing around the world. That's a long sight better education than what you get in books. But blessed if I want to swab decks. You can't look at the scenery and study the customs of the natives while you are splicing ropes and splashing water around all day. Wonder if they'd take me on one of these pleasure yachts as an entertainer. I can play the guitar and do card tricks—"
"That's right, Jimmy," interrupted Legs, now recovering his usual good humor, "blow off to hear yourself talk. But tell you what's a fact. If you can speak 'steen languages, you can get a fat job on 'most any old ship. Easy berth, too. Father picked up a fellow in Newport News who can tie Spanish up in a bow knot, believe me, and, as Father can't talk anything much but American, he is giving him all sorts of money just to help him chin the Greasers down there in Mexico."
"That straight?" said Jimmy. "Gee! I sure will take that Spanish course in High School next session, and when I get up on it, I'll run down and open an airplane factory in Brazil."
"Come off, they don't speak Spanish in Brazil, nut," corrected Legs. "They talk Portuguese."
"All right, then. Can't phaze me. I'll go on to Bonus Airs."
"Huh! Reckon you do need some Spanish! Bonus Airs!" sneered Legs.
"What is it if that ain't right!" insisted Jimmy.
Legs scratched his head, but apparently without extracting any information therefrom.
"Tell you the truth, I've forgotten, but I'm dead certain you're a million miles off. I know that much."
"Huh-huh-huh-huh!" grunted Jimmy. "Better find out something yourself before you try to give me lessons."
"I know what it is," announced Cat, who had just been in consultation with a gentleman in the seat in front; "it's Bwanus I-res, and it's the capital of Argentine Republic."
"You fudged, Cat," detected Jimmy, almost sticking his accusing finger in Cat's eye. "I saw you get the dope. Can't put that over on us."
The informer smiled over his newspaper, while Cat twisted his mouth ludicrously. "Anyway, I did it," he protested.
"Give you a dime to do it again," Jimmy baited him.
"Don't you know Shakespeare never repeats," said Cat, with sham solemnity.
"But Shakespeare's cat does," retorted Jimmy. "Cat, you are some fraud. Know where you are going? "
"Anyway, I've got a return ticket. Say, boys," he suddenly shouted, "we're there!"
Instantly six eager eyes, which had been giving but fleeting attention to the familiar sand dunes along the seashore, were focused on two landmarks just ahead, indicating the end of the first leg of their journey. One was the century-and-a-half-old stone lighthouse, now in disuse; the other, its modern successor whose revolving light at night guides a host of seacraft through the great strait between Cape Charles and Cape Henry.
"Knapsacks up," yelled Jimmy. "Hurrah, all off for the Cape!"
In wild excitement, each lad grabbed up the slim roll of luggage lying at his feet, made for the door and bounded out upon the sand. To the right was the vast blue Atlantic; and to the left, over the sand hills, the shores of the Bay of Lynnhaven, ancient site of the Indian village of the Chesapeakes, where, in the year 1607, the doughty adventurers from the good ships Susan Constant, Goodhope, and Discovery, made their first landing before sailing on to what was to be the first permanent settlement of the English in the New World, the famous foundation on the island of Jamestown.