“I hope not,” responded the shipbuilder, solemnly.

Having said his say, Hal subsided.  He was likely not to speak again for an hour.  As a class, engineers, having to listen much to noisy machinery, are themselves silent.

It was well along in the afternoon, a little past the middle of October.  For our three young friends, Jack, Hal and Eph, things were dull just at the present moment.  They were drawing their salaries from the Pollard company, yet of late there had been little for them to do.

Yet the three submarine boys knew that big things were in the air.  David Pollard was away, presumably on important business.  Jacob Farnum was not much given to speaking of plans until he had put them through to the finish.  Some big deal was at present “on” with the Government.  That much the submarine boys knew by intuition.  They felt, therefore, that, at any moment, they were likely to be called into action—­to be called upon for big things.

As Jack and Hal sat in the office, silent, while Jacob Farnum turned to his desk to scan one of the papers lying there, the door opened.  A boy burst in, waving a yellow envelope.

“Operator said to hustle this wire to you,” shouted the boy, panting a bit.  “Said it might be big news for Farnum.  So I ran all the way.”

Jacob Farnum took the yellow envelope, opening it and glancing hastily through the contents.

“It is pretty good news,” assented the shipbuilder, a smile wreathing his face.  “This is for you, messenger.”

“This” proved to be a folded dollar bill.  The messenger took the money eagerly, then demanded, more respectfully: 

“Any answer, sir?”

“Not at this moment, thank you,” replied Mr. Farnum.  “That is all; you may go, boy.”

Plainly the boy who had brought the telegram was disappointed over not getting some inkling of the secret.  All Dunhaven, in fact, was wildly agog over any news that affected the Farnum yard.  For, though the torpedo boat building industry was now known under the Pollard name, after the inventor of these boats, the yard itself still went under the Farnum name that young Farnum had inherited from his father.

While Jacob Farnum is reading the despatch carefully, for a better understanding, let us speak for a moment of Captain Jack Benson and his youthful comrades and chums.

Readers of the first volume in this series, “The Submarine Boys on Duty,” remember how Jack Benson and Hal Hastings strayed into the little seaport town of Dunhaven one hot summer day, and how they learned that it was here that the then unknown but much-talked about Pollard submarine was being built.  Both Jack and Hal had been well trained in machine shops; they had spent much time aboard salt water power craft, and so felt a wild desire to work at the Farnum yard, and to make a study of submarine craft in general.

How they succeeded in getting their start in the Farnum yard, every reader of the preceding volumes knows; how, too, Eph Somers, a native of Dunhaven, managed to “cheek” his way aboard the craft after she had been launched, and how he had always since managed to remain there.