The Pirate Submarine

THAT'S done it! Scrap brass has fallen another thirty shillings a ton Pengelly. The slump has knocked the bottom out of the market. We're in the soup. Thus spoke Tom Trevorrick senior partner of the firm of Trevorrick Pengelly & Co. shipbreakers of Polkyll near Falmouth. He was a tall powerfully-built man standing six feet two and a half inches in his socks red-haired florid featured with a high though receding forehead and a heavy protruding jaw. His rich deep voice had a plausible ring about it—a compelling masterful yet persuasive tone that had largely influenced the shareholders of Trevorrick Pengelly & Co. to part with their money with the absolute certainty of a pre-war ten per cent. return. Paul Pengelly aged thirty-three or three years older than the senior partner was of different build and temperament. Trevorrick represented the Celtic strain of Cornishmen; Pengelly had dark curly hair and sallow features—legacies of an Iberian ancestor one of a handful of survivors from a vessel of the Spanish Armada that had been cast ashore on the rock-bound Lizard. History does not relate why the Cornish wreckers spared the lives of the olive-featured mariners but it does record that the shipwrecked Spaniards took wives of the Cornish maids and lived and died in the country of their adoption. Pengelly was slow of speech stolid in action save when roused to anger. Of an argumentative nature he acted as a foil to his partner's exuberance. If Trevorrick suggested a certain course Pengelly almost invariably went dead against it not that he disapproved of the scheme but simply as a matter of habit. He was secretive and cautious; but he never hesitated to do an underhand action if he felt reasonably secure from detection. He was a man of many parts—a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Given to building castles in the air he would soar to dizzy heights in planning fantastic schemes. Some of them might take definite shape; then almost without warning he would chuck his hand in and cast about for something else. Eighteen months previously Trevorrick and Pengelly had met for the first time. Trevorrick had just left the Royal Navy. He had been a lieutenant-commander attached to the Portsmouth submarine flotilla. He had not resigned under the favourable terms offered by My Lords to redundant officers; he had not been axed under the Geddes Scheme. He had been courtmartialled and dismissed from the Service under circumstances that could not be termed extenuating.