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At first they succeeded very well, but the captain knew that the wind was swiftly increasing in force, and that he could not long continue to hold his place. It was a terrible emergency, but he proved himself equal to it. "We must float the cable," he shouted to his first assistant. "Over with the big buoy." This buoy of levium had been prepared for other possible emergencies.
Why didn't you send him the message in regular code? He would then have decoded it right in the consulate, or at best he could have gone to the cable office and borrowed a code book from them." "I sent it in our secret cipher," Mr. Skinner faltered.
Our anchor began to drag with the weight of both tide and wind, and that was the uttermost of our dread. Slowly it tore through its holding, and as it were step by step at first, and once we thought it stopped when we had paid out all the cable. But wind and sea were too strong, and presently again we saw the shore marks shifting, and we knew that there was no hope.
Serpent forms present themselves: now and then the huge boa and the macaurel, twining the trees. The great tiger-snake is seen with its head raised half a yard from the surface; the cascabel, too, coiled like a cable; and the coral-snake with his red and ringed body stretched at full length along the ground.
To one who has never witnessed the difficulties of propelling a rowboat through the heavy breakers of some of these Philippine coast towns, it would be hard to appreciate the struggles of the Signal Corps to land shore ends at the different cable stations.
Once landed on the beach, the shore end was laid in the trench dug for it, one end of the cable entering the cable hut through a small hole in its flooring, where after some adjustment and much shifting of plugs and coaxing of galvanometers, the ship way out in the bay was in communication with the land, through that tiny place, scarce larger than a sentry-box, in which a man has barely room enough to turn around.
Inch by inch the cruiser dragged her keel along the sand, each minute floating a little freer and each minute putting her deck more level as the stern found the deep water. And, perhaps a half-hour from the time they had started, they had the boat riding clear and slowly going astern to take up the cable.
That it could have happened by accident was out of the question. The acid could have gotten on the wire rope in one way only. Some one must have climbed up the rope ladder to the platform and applied the stuff. "But who did it?" asked Jim Tracy, when Joe had told him of the discovery of the acid-eaten cable. "Some enemy.
The rest of that day was spent in planting two stout posts, one on each side of the river, close to the old bridge abutments, and in stretching across the river, from one post to the other, a wire cable that Mr. Elmer had bought for this purpose.
The retardation which resulted from the intense current generated by two hundred cells will be also proportionately reduced in the comparatively small battery of forty cells. Thus we perceive, that, while the length of the cable is, electrically and practically, reduced to one-fifth of its former length, the retardation of the current is also decreased in the same proportion.
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