The Steel Dutchman

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 146, 22 June 1934, Page 15

The Steel Dutchman

By Vincent Cornier

(Author of "Paradise Orchid," "The Green Hat," etc.)

* GREAT STORY OF ADVENTURE ON LAND AND S■ Aj

CHAPTER XXXll.—(Continued). At four in the afternoon of that day, Cleono Bainbridge and Guy Merlincote returned in Sir Gerald Homer's official car to Sloughstowe. They found the Secret Service chief awaiting them with strange eagerness. "Another minute," he grinned, "and hanged if I wouldn't have gone without you." He pushed a telegraph form into llerlincotc'd hands. "Read that—they've got Van Klaus at last!" Ho held up a hand. "Listen." Coming from beyond the horizon was a roaring and dully growling sound. Interspersed in its diapason were thudding single explosions and curiously swooping screams. "That's the business!" Homer was exultant again. "They're'smashing him to bits—" Without comment Merlincote and Cleono wont on with Homer's force to Hunter End. It took them all of half ti 11 hour to gain this point, and still the roaring of the shell lire sounded. "It's taking 'em a devil of a time," growled Merlincote. "Half a lleet against one yacht ... a dickens of a time." Homer halted and curiously regarded the barrister. "D'you know," he coolly remarked, "1 think you've more than a sneaking admiration for that Dutch thug!" "I'l" Merlincote was furious. "Admiration for a—a scoundrel like that'/" He laughed. "Mot on your life, Sir Gerald." "Methinks," came a soft and glacial sounding from the Secret Service chief, "thou dost protest o'er much—" From Hunter End the party went into the bowels of Hartness Cliff. Again Cleono and Guy Merlincote traced their ways through those tunnels hewn in the living rock. Again they entered the huge smugglers' cave where the old-fashioned furniture was . . . and the body of 'Any 'Ardistry. The Sloughstowe men had battered him terribly. Perhaps they had left him for dcr.d. It certainly looked like it. Xcver had Merlincote dreamed a man could be treated so violently, yet live. "Poor, poor devil," he groaned as the police bore the broken creature away. "If—if he lives, I'll take damn good care he'll not want —" "I wouldn't make emotional statements, Mr. Merlincote," came the rasping and sardonical rejoinder of Sir Gerald. "They're a tough breed, these of Sloughstowe —he'll live all right." Merlincote ignored the interruption. Ho went over to Hardisty and saw that everything possible had been done —his mind was made up; henceforward 'Arry was his pensioner. They attained the second and larger cavern where the wind was blowing and the secret lake sent its wavelets to rustle along the curving shores of gleaming pebbles. "Ah!" Sir Gerald Homer spread his force out wide. "Hero we enter the holy of holies —eh?" He held up a hand for" silence. "Yes," he muttered, "that certainly sound* like a dynamo plant." They drifted by various ways along the lake shore toward the point whence this noise- was coming . . . and so they entered the last stronghold of Mynheer Ryjer van Klaus. It was yet another cavern —but one that had heen put to a strangely perfect use. It housed a horde of miraculous machinery—and four men. These were taken prisoners straight away, and then an examination of the great place was begun. As Cleone had envisaged it, this was a secret transmitting station. The dynamos and transformers and all the rest of the gear which had been suspected was here. Sir Gerald Homer was silent with fascination and gratification. He moved from point to point about the place like a softly pawing cat. Without comment, he indicated to Merlincote and Cleono the stupendous detailing of the hidden transmitting station. Merlincote was hard put to understand one half of what he saw. It was different with Cleone . . . she had served so long an apprenticeship to her father's scientific trade that she was well aware of the consummate delicacy and infinite craftsmanship before her. Her heart thrilled and beat as swiftly as if she Were witnessing a perfect play.

"Juice" was delivered from llio dynamos and tlie transformers through mighty cables that quivered with the awful loads they carried. Tliey delivered it to the rectifier eqniqynent —great glowing valves which changed the fifteen thousand volt supply from alternating current to direct pulsating force. Thea? valves were wound about by serpentine fitments of tubes, and "veils" of quartz were among these; water gurgled in the tubes and coursed in never-ceasing falls through the glinting veils. Water radiators and screaming fans showed in hollow ducts in tho rock wails. Those, Cleonn knew, supplied the "storm" that raved across the underground lake —incidentally they were the authorities of all the immense cooling system Van Klaus and bis engineers had so marvellously designed. And then the little party stopped in something like awe before the wizard brain of all this contriving—before the panels of the actual transmitter plant. A lons control desk spanned itself in parallel with a great' amplifier rack, another banking of big valves. These were the last potentials behind the power that even now Van Klaus was receiving on the Fliegende Scluuim, away on the churning waters where lie was' fighting his last fight with the armed forces sent out to encompass his destruction. Sir Gerald Homer opened one of the doors in this control panelling. They saw behind a mica glazing; in a nest, of thickest asbestos, a curiously sparkling lump of crystal. It looked for all the world like a large brother of those tiny galena stones that once were -used in crystal sets. "And here," he said in a hollowsounding voice, "we. have the kernel of the nut." He turned to Clcone Bainbridge and smiled. "Do you know what it is?" he asked. Clcone nodded her head. "An oscillating crystal—'* "Correct!" Sir Gerald left the door to swing on its chromium hinges and crossed the rock chamber to a master switch. "And I think it's high time its oscillations . . . are ended. . . " He pulled down the big bronze rod of the switch. Fans ceased to howl. Machinery stopoed like death. The lighting of the valves went out, and there was a chill and terrifying hush that was, somehow, as that of a grave. . . . • • * * Away on the North Sea, at that moment, Van Klaus' piratical vessel, the Fliegende Schanm, was shaking herself free from' the devastating onslaught of the first bombing attack. The droning machines swept pas I; Lor and turned to

take up another formation. She utilised the time to twist and whirl about in a hundred different ways, but all of them rendered sluggish and to a certain extent impotent by that fatal drag of canvas beneath her keel. . . . And, realising at last that the pirate was not answering her helm as she had done aforetime, the battleships made quick gunnery calculations, and their wireless crackled out insistent instructions to the bombing equadron to "keep off the grass." Answering to these, the sullen bodied 'planes swooped away for fully half a mile —and, with one horrible tongue, the quickly aligned guns of all ships, great and small, called doom to Fliegendc Schaum. Called doom with grisly certainty . . . for, in the middle of one of her bewildering flittlngs, the white pirate suddenly heeled and quivered and rolled—and stopped. Thiri was the second in which Sir Gerald Homer shut off the master switch in (he caverns of Hartness Cliff. His hand had also shut the piratical course of Mynheer Ryjer van Klaus— up—like a tale that is ended, a story fully told. Into the Fliegendc Schaum a rush of steel was poured as molten lava into a paper shape. She was seen once to lift in a blaze of yellow flame; seen, once, to split along as a lightning stricken tree—then there was naught but a vast thunder that went out to be lost for ever on the skirtings of the grim grey ocean . . . and a smoking ruin, of something that had been the proudest ship in all the world, went down to the grave of ships. And of Van Klaus and his pirate crew no more was known to any man. . . .

Some weeks after the Kinking of Plicgondc Sehaum, a party consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Merliucote, an old and very shaky man known to the 'world as Hector Bainbridge the scientist and inventor of the "Bainbridge Thermionic Controlling Systems," and a shambling and dark visaged fellow whom Mcrlineote occasionally addressed as "Hardisfcy," went from the arterial road, to the villnge of Sloughstowe. Instead of a gloomy collection of little cottages and a dull red mass called the Broken Falcon inn, they looked on gangs of busy workmen and an area white with lime and studded with girders and concrete mixers, steelwelding plants and overseers' huts. The Government had acted swiftly for once. They had taken over all the rights of the remote-control motors that Hector Bainbridge had invented . . . and, poetic justice, had seized on the devastated and empty village of the Spaniard people as being an ideal spot on which to erect the factory intended for the manufacture of the new device. For a long time Merliucote and his newly married wife gazed on the scene that was once so tragic in their knowledge. Then Guy looked at Cleone .. . and saw that her grave grey eyes were wet with tears. "Coino darling," he softly said. "We'll SO —I know it hurts . . . but it's all been for the best. Truly now, don't you think so?" ' And Cleone, recalling with gratitude the fact of her father's life having been spared, remembering the terrible toll Van Klaus had taken of the toilers of the seas-—remembering again that this new invention was to make for work, wealth, happiness and contentment, where previously it had spelled death and disaster—agreed that all had been for the best. So they turned away and left the place called Sloughstowe, to a newer day . . . and, faithfully following them, went the solo survivor of Sloughstowe's once arrogant population . . . 'Arry 'Ardisty, who had turned the last cards of the'game, to play into the hand of world-justice the ace that, trumped Mynheer Rjyer van Klaus, the Steel Dutchman's, last trick. THE END.