"Leggo! Leggo!" he screamed. "Let me go, you idiot! It always does that!
It"s working now."
He was right. The launch was churning up a peculiarly serpentine wake, and the motor was buzzing furiously.
Hawkins dived toward his machinery, tinkered it with nervous haste for a little, and finally managed to head the boat down-stream just as a collision with the Palisades seemed inevitable.
"Really, Griggs," he remarked, smoothing down his ruffled feathers, "you mustn"t interfere with me like that again. We might have hit something that time."
"We did come near uprooting that cliff," I admitted.
Hawkins thereupon ignored me for a period of three minutes. Then his temper returned and he began a discourse on the virtues of his motor.
It was long and involved and utterly unintelligible, I think, to any one save Hawkins. It lasted until we had pa.s.sed the Battery and were in the shadow of Governor"s Island.
Then it seemed time for me to remark:
"We"re going to turn back pretty soon, aren"t we, Hawkins?"
"Turn back? What for?"
"Well, if we"re going up the Hudson, we can"t run much farther in this direction."
"Hang the Hudson!" smiled the inventor. "We"ll go down around Sandy Hook, eat our lunch, and be back in the city at two, sharp. Why, Griggs, this is no scow. What speed do you suppose this motor can develop?"
"I give it up."
"One hundred knots an hour!"
"Indeed?"
"Confound it! You don"t believe it, do you?" snapped Hawkins, who must have read my thoughts. "Well, she can make it easy. I"ll just start her up to show you."
Argument with Hawkins is futile. I saved my breath on the chance of finding better use for it later on.
Hawkins unlocked his little door, fished around in the machinery, and fastened the door again with a calm smile.
Simultaneously, the launch seemed to leap from the water in its anxiety to get ahead. For a few seconds it quivered from end to end. Then it settled down at a gait that actually made me gasp.
I am not positive that we made one hundred knots to the hour, but I do know that I never traveled in an express train that hastened as did that poor launch when the Hawkins A. P. motor began to push it through the water.
An account of our trip down the Narrows and into the Lower Bay would be interesting, but extraneous. Hawkins sat erect beside his infernal machine, looking like a cavalryman in the charge. I squatted in the cabin and watched things flash past.
The main point is that we reached the open water without smashing anything or smashing into anything.
"Well, I think we may as well swing around," said Hawkins, glancing at his watch. "It"s wonderful, the control I have over the launch now.
Every bit of the steering-gear is located in that steel dome, along with the motor, Griggs. Nothing at all exposed but this little wheel.
"You observed, probably, that I set it a few moments ago, so that the wind wouldn"t blow us about, and haven"t touched it since. Now note how we shall turn back."
Hawkins grasped his little wheel, puffed up his chest, and gave a tremendous twist.
And the wheel snapped off in Hawkins" hands!
"Why--why--why----" he stuttered, in amazement.
"Yes, now you"ve done it!" I rapped out, savagely. "How the d.i.c.kens are we to get back?"
"There, Griggs, there," said Hawkins, "don"t be so childishly impatient.
I shall simply unlock this case again and control the steering-gear from the inside. Certainly even you must be able to understand that."
The calm superiority of his tone was maddening.
One or two of my sentiments defied restraint.
Heaven knows I didn"t suppose it would make Hawkins nervous to hear them, but it did. His hands shook as he fumbled with the key of his steel box, and at a particularly vicious remark of mine he stood erect.
"Well, Griggs, you"ve put us in a hole this time!" he groaned.
"How?"
"You made me so nervous that I snapped that key off short in the lock!"
"What!" I shrieked.
"Yes, sir. The motor"s locked up in there with fuel enough to keep her going for three months. I can"t stop her or move the rudder without getting into the case, and nothing but dynamite would dent that case!"
"Then, Hawkins," I said, a terrible calm coming over me, "we shall have to go straight ahead now until we hit something or are blown up. Am I right?"
"Quite right," muttered Hawkins, defiantly. "And it"s all your fault!"
I transfixed the inventor with a vindictive stare, until he abandoned the attempt at bravado and looked away.
"We--we may blow back, you know," he said, vaguely, addressing the breeze.
"The chances of that being particularly favorable by reason of your having set your miserable rudder to correspond with the present wind?" I asked. "Can"t we tear up the woodwork and contrive some sort of rudder?"
"We could," admitted Hawkins, "if it wasn"t all riveted down with my own patented rivets, which can"t be removed, once they"re set."
Hawkins" rivets are really what they claim to be. Only one consideration has delayed their universal adoption. They cost a trifle less than one dollar apiece to manufacture and set.
But they stay where they are put, and I knew that if the launch"s woodwork was held together by them, it wasn"t likely to come apart much before Judgment Day.
"Real nice mess, isn"t it, Hawkins?" I said.
"It--it might be worse."
"Far worse," I agreed. "We might be wallowing helplessly around in those heaving billows, or a gale might be tiring itself all out in the effort to swamp us. But, as it is, we are merely careering gaily over the sunlit waves at an unearthly speed. In a day or two, Hawkins, we shall sight the French coast, barring accidents, go ash.o.r.e, and----"
"By Jove, Griggs!" exclaimed the inventor, lighting up on the instant.