Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 06.djvu/40

an even louder blast, he blew it a third time. And between the blasts he quietly observed.

"Two hundred cents!"

A shudder ran through the hall.

The Major seemed overwhelmed, and fell back against Todrin. At this price per square mile, the Arctic regions would cost 814,000 dollars. The Canadian limit had evidently been passed.

"Two hundred cents!" said Gilmour. "Once! Twice! Any advance?" he continued.

The Major looked at the Professor, and the Colonel, and the Dutchman, and the Dane; and the Professor, and the Colonel, and the Dutchman, and the Dane looked at the Major.

"Going! Going!" said the auctioneer.

Everyone looked at the codfish man.

"Gone!"

And down went Gilmour's hammer.

The North Polar Practical Association, represented by William S. Forster, had become the proprietors of the North Pole and its promising neighborhood. And when William S. Forster had to name the real purchasers, he placidly drawled, "Barbicane & Co!"

Barbicane & Co! The president of the Gun Club! What was the Gun Club going to do with the North Pole? We shall see.

Is it necessary formally to introduce Impey Barbicane, the president of the Gun Club, and Captain Nicholl, and J. T. Maston, and Tom Hunter with the wooden legs, and the brisk Bilsby, and Colonel Bloomsberry and their colleagues? No! Although twenty years had elapsed since the attention of the world was concentrated on these remarkable personages, they had remained much as they were, just as incomplete corporeally, and just as obstreperous, just as daring, just as wrapped up in themselves as when they had embarked in their extraordinary adventure. Time had made no impression on the Gun Club; it respected them as people respect the obsolete cannon that are found in the museums of old arsenals.

If the Gun Club comprised 1833 members at its foundation—that is persons and not limbs, for a number of these were missing—if 30,575 correspondents were proud of their connection with the club, the number had in no way decreased. On the contrary, thanks to the unprecedented attempt they had made to open communication with the Moon, as related in the Moon Voyage^[1] its celebrity had increased enormously.

It will be remembered that a few years after the War of Secession certain members of the Gun Club tired of doing nothing, had proposed to send a projectile to the Moon by means of a monster Columbiad. A gun nine hundred feet long had been solemnly cast at Tampa Town, in the Floridan peninsula, and loaded with 400,000 lbs. of fulminating cotton. Shot out by this gun, a cylindroconical shell of aluminium had been sent flying among the stars of the night under a pressure of six million millions of litres of gas. Owing to a deviation of the trajectory, the projectile had gone around the Moon and fallen back to the earth, dropping into the Pacific Ocean in lat. 27° 7' N., long. 141° 37' west; when the frigate Susquehanna' had secured it, to the great satisfaction of its passengers.

Of its passengers, two members of the Gun Club, the president, Impey Barbicane, and Captain Nicholl, with a hair-brained Frenchman, had taken passage in the projectile and had all returned from the voyage safe and sound. But if the two Americans were then present ready to risk their lives in some new adventure, it was not so with Michael Ardan. He had returned to Europe, and made a fortune, and was now planting cabbages in his retirement, if the best-informed reporters were to be believed.

Barbicane and Nicholl had also retired, comparatively speaking, but they had retired only to dream of some new enterprise of a similar character. They were in no want of money. From their last undertaking there remained nearly two hundred thousand dollars out of the five millions and a half yielded by the public subscriptions of the old and new worlds; and by exhibiting themselves in their aluminium projectile throughout the United States they had realized enough wealth and glory to satisfy the most exacting of human ambitions. They would have been content if idleness had not been wearisome to them; and it was probably in order to find something to do that they had now bought the Arctic regions.

But it should not be forgotten that if they had paid for their purchase eight hundred thousand dollars and more, it was because Evangelina Scorbitt had advanced the balance they required.

Although Barbicane and Nicholl enjoyed incomparable celebrity, there was one who shared it with them. This was J. T. Maston, the impetuous secretary of the Gun Club. Was it not this able mathematician who had made the calculations which had enabled the great experiment to be made? If he had not accompanied his two colleagues on their extraordinary voyage, it was not from fear; certainly not! But the worthy gunner wanted a right arm, and had a guttta-percha cranium, owing to one of those accidents so common in warfare; and if he had shown himself to the Selenites it might have given them an erroneous idea of the inhabitants of the Earth, of which the Moon after all is but the humble satellite.

To his profound regret J. T. Maston had had to resign himself to staying at home. But he was not idle. After the construction of the immense telescope on the summit of Long's Peak, one of the highest of the Rocky Mountains, he had transported himself there, and from the moment he found the projectile describing its majestic trajectory in the sky he never left his post of observation. At the eye-piece of the huge instrument he devoted himself to the task of following his friends as they journeyed in their strange carriage through space.

It might be thought that the bold voyagers were forever lost to earth. The projectile, drawn into a new orbit by the Moon, might gravitate eternally