"Better wait till Joe comes," he told himself. "The more people there are to hear it, the more chances there are of its getting back to sh.o.r.e."

Joe blew back into the cabin a few moments later.

"Everything all right?" Curlie shouted.

At the sound of his voice, the girl started, looked up, then smiled; Joe nodded his head.

"Say, Joe, I'm hungry," shouted Curlie. "There's bread in the forward cabin and some milk in a thermos bottle. Couldn't manage coffee, but toast and milk'd be fine."

The girl sprang to her feet as if to go for the required articles, but Joe pushed her back into her chair.

"Not for you," he shouted. "It's gettin' dangerous."

"Joe," said Curlie, "there's a small electric toaster there in the cabin. Disconnect it and bring it in here. We'll connect it up and make the toast right here."

When the toaster had been connected, the girl, happy in the knowledge that she was able to be of service, toasted the bread to a brown quite as delicate as that to be found on a landlubber's table.

"Now," said Curlie as they sat enjoying this meager repast, "I've got something to tell you, something that I want someone else beside me to know. It's going to be an ugly storm and the _Kittlewake_ is no trans-Atlantic liner. We may all get back to sh.o.r.e. We may not. If one of you do and I don't, I want you to tell this. It--it will sort of justify my apparent rashness in dragging you off on this wild trip."

He moved his chair close to the stationary seat of the girl and, gripping one of the arms of the seat, motioned Joe to move up beside them. It was only thus that he might be heard unless he were to shout at the top of his voice.

"You know," he said, a strange smile playing over his thin lips, "you folks probably have thought it strange that I should go rushing off on a trip like this without any positive knowledge that those two boys had started for that mysterious island shown on the map and spoken of in the writing on the back of the map, but you see I had more information than you thought. This I know for an almost positive fact," he leaned forward impressively: "The mysterious island of the chart does not exist."

"Oh!" the girl started back.

"It's a fact," said Curlie, "and I'll give you my proof."

He paused for a second. The girl leaned forward eagerly. Joe was all attention.

"When I went into that big library," he continued, "I was determined to find all the truth regarding that map that was to be had there. While you were looking at those ancient maps," he turned to Gladys, "I went into a back room and there the lady in charge gave me some bound reproductions of ancient maps to look at and some things to read, among them a volume of the 'Scottish Geographic Magazine.' I read them through carefully and--"

Suddenly he started violently, then clasped the receivers close to his ears.

"Just a moment. Getting something," he muttered.

A second later he seized a pencil and marked down upon a pad a series of dots and dashes.

Then, wheeling about, he put his fingers on a key to flash back an answer.

"It's the boys," he shouted. "Got their location. Joe, decode what I wrote there, then go ask the skipper how much we're off it."

He turned once more to click off his message, a repet.i.tion of the first one; then he shouted a second message into his transmitter.

Joe Marion studied the pad for a moment, then rushed out of the cabin.

All alert, Curlie sat listening for any further message which might reach him. Presently Joe returned. There was a puzzled look upon his face.

"Skipper says," he shouted, "that the point you gave me is the exact location of the island shown on that ancient map and that we must be about ten knots to the north of it. When I told him that the boys were in a seaplane at that point, he suddenly became convinced that there must be an island out there somewhere and refused to change his course.

"'For,' he says, 'if they've been sending messages from a plane in a gale like this they must be on the ground to do it and if on the ground, where but on an island? And if there's an island, how are we going to get up to her in the storm that's about to hit us. We'll be piled on the rocks and smashed in pieces.' That's what he said; said we'd be much safer in the open sea."

Curlie stared at the floor. His mind was in a whirl. Here he had been about to furnish proof that the mysterious island did not exist and just at that instant there came floating in from the air proof of the island's actual existence, proof so strong that even a seasoned old salt believed it and refused to change his course. What was he to say to that!

Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was to be given time enough to think about it, for at that moment, with an unbelievable violence the storm broke.

As they felt the impact of it, it was as if the staunch little craft had run head on into one of those steel nets used during the war for trapping submarines. She struck it and from the very force of the blow, recoiled. The thing she had struck, however, was not a steel net but a mountain of waters flanked by such a volume of wind as is seldom seen on the Atlantic.

"It's the end of the _Kittlewake_," thought Curlie. "You take care of her," he shouted in Joe's ear, at the same time jerking his thumb at Gladys. The next second he disappeared into the storm.

CHAPTER XX

A SEA ABOVE A SEA

When Alfred Brightwood had tilted the nose of the _Stormy Petrel_ upward and away from the threatening bank of clouds she rose rapidly. A thousand, two thousand, three, four, five thousand feet she mounted to dizzy heights above the sea.

As they mounted, the stars, swinging about in the sky, like incandescent bulbs strung on a wire, made their appearance here and there. They came out rapidly, by twos and threes, by scores and hundreds. In cl.u.s.ters and fantastic figures they swam about in the purple night.

Almost instantly the sea disappeared from beneath them and in its place came a new sea; a sea of dark rushing clouds. Rising two thousand feet above the level of the ocean, this ma.s.s of moisture hanging there in the sky took on the appearance of a second sea. As Vincent looked down upon it he found it easy to believe that were they to drop slowly down upon it, they would be seized upon and torn this way, then that by the violence of the storm that was even now raging beneath them, and that their plane would be cast at last, a shapeless ma.s.s, upon the real sea which was roaring and raging beneath it.

"How wonderful nature is!" he breathed. "It would be magnificent were it not so terrible."

He was thinking of the gasoline in their tank and he shuddered. Would it last until the storm had pa.s.sed, or would they be obliged to volplane down into that seething tempest?

He put his lips to the tube. "You better use just enough gas to keep us afloat," he suggested.

Alfred muttered something like, "Think I'm a fool?" Then for a long time, with the black sea of clouds rising and falling, billowing up like the walls of a mammoth tent, then sagging down to rise again, they circled and circled. They were not circling now in search of adventure, to find some island which might bring them great wealth, but to preserve life. How long that circling could last, neither could tell.

When Curlie Carson left the wireless cabin of the _Kittlewake_, he grasped a rail which ran along the cabin, just in time to prevent himself from being washed overboard by a giant wave. As it was, the water lifted his feet from the deck and, having lifted him as the wind lifts a flag, it waved him up and down three times, at last to send him crashing, knees down, on the deck. The wind was half knocked out of him, but he was still game. He did not attempt to regain the wireless cabin but fought his way along the side of that cabin toward his own stateroom door.

Now a vivid flash of light revealed the water-washed deck. A coil of rope, all uncoiled by the waves, was wriggling like a serpent in the black sea.

"No use to try to save it," he mumbled. "No good here, anyhow."

A yellow light, hanging above his stateroom door, dancing dizzily, appeared at one moment to take a plunge into the sea and at the next to dash away into the ink-black sky.

Curlie was drenched to the skin. He was benumbed with the cold and shocked into half insensibility at the tremendous proportions of the storm. He wondered vaguely about the engineer below. Was the water getting at the engines? He still felt the throb of them beneath his feet. Well, that much was good anyway. And the skipper? Was he still at the wheel? Must be, for the yacht continued to take the waves head-on.

Short and light as she was, the craft appeared to leap from wave-crest to wave-crest. Now she missed the leap by a foot and the water drenched her deck anew. And now she overstepped and came down with a solid impact that set her shuddering from stern to keel.

"Good old _Kittlewake_," he murmured, "you sure were built for rough service!"

But now he had reached his stateroom door. With a lurch he threw open the door, with a second he fell through, a third slammed it shut.