The Outlaws of the Air | Page 7

another year or two you must carry on the work without me, or stop
it altogether, as seems best to you; and meanwhile you, Hartog, shall
get your thirty-five knot sea-devil afloat and to business till you've
levied ocean tolls enough to give us funds to build an aerial fleet on the
model of the ship that I'll bring you, and then we'll have no more
hole-and-corner assassinations and no more pettifogging
bomb-throwing. We'll declare war - war to the knife - on the world that
we hate, and that hates and fears us, and then-"
"Here's your glass, my Lord of the Air that is to be," said Lea, rising
and handing him a full tumbler of champagne with a gesture of
deference that was not altogether assumed. "And so let us have your
toast."
"You shall have it, short and sweet," said Max, taking the glass and
lifting it above his head. "Here's life to those we love, and death to
those we hate - Vive L'Anarchie and the Outlaws of the Air!"
"Mein Gott, but dat is a great scheme! He vill set de vorld on fire if he
only comes properly to bass," said Franz Hartog, as he drained his glass
at a gulp, and then stood gazing at Max Renault with a look that was
almost one of worship in his little twinkling eyes.
CHAPTER I.
UTOPIA IN THE SOUTH.
ON the 21st of November 1898, the Calypso, a team yacht, rigged as a
three-masted schooner, and measuring between four and five hundred
tons, met with a rather serious accident to her engines in one of those
brief but deadly hurricanes which are known to navigators of the South

Seas as " southerly busters."
They are the white squalls of the South, and woe betide the unhappy
ship that they strike unawares. Over the smooth, sunlit waters there
drifts with paralysing rapidity a mass of hissing, seething billows,
churned into foam and then beaten down again by the terrific force of
the wind that is roaring above then. Often there is not a breath or a puff
of air felt by the ship until the squall strikes her, and then the blow falls
like the united stroke of a hundred battering-rams.
If the ship is stripped and ready for the blow, she heels over till the
water spurts in through the lee scupper holes and half the deck is awash.
If there is a rag of sail on stay or yard, there is a bang like the report of
a duck-gun, and, if yon have quick eyes, you may see it flying away to
leeward like a bit of tissue paper before the gale, and if it has not
yielded with sufficient readiness to the shock of the storm, a sprung
topmast or a snapped yard will pay the penalty of resistance.
Meanwhile, what was a few minutes ago a smoothly-shining sea,
scarcely ruffled by a ripple, is now a white, boiling mass of swiftly
rising billows, amidst which the straining, struggling vessel fights for
her life like some stricken animal.
It had been thus with the Calypso. A stout new forestaysail that had
been hoisted in the hope of getting her head before the squall had been
struck square, and had resisted just a moment too long, at the cost of a
sprung foretopmast. Then, an effort to bring her round with the screw
had resulted in the disaster that practically crippled her.
A big sea came rolling up astern, her nose went down and her stern
went up, her propeller whirling in the air, and, before the engine could
be stopped, there came a grinding, thrashing noise in the engine-room,
and, a moment later, the yacht was drifting helplessly away before the
storm with a broken crankshaft.
When this happened, the Calypso was on a voyage from New Zealand
to the Marquesas Islands, between four and five hundred miles to the
north-east of Auckland. The screw had been hoisted out of the water

and a spare foretopmast fitted; but only five days after this had been
done she was caught in a heavy gale from the south-westward, and got
so badly knocked about that when every spare spar on board had been
used in refitting her, she could only carry sail enough to take her at four
or five knots an hour before a good topsail breeze.
The result of this double misfortune was, that a month later she was
still on the southern verge of the tropics, beating about in light, baffling
winds, unable to make her way into the region of the south-east trades.
The Calypso was owned and sailed by Sir Harry Milton, Of Seaton
Abbey, Northumberland, landowner and ironmaster, who rather less
than three years before had come of age and