Grantline

“ Such was the outer aspect of the Grantline Treasure Camp near the beginning of this Lunar night, when, unknown to Grantline and his men, the Planetara with its brigands was approaching. The night was perhaps a sixth advanced. Full night. No breath of cloud to mar the brilliant starry heavens. The quadrant Earth hung poised like a giant mellow moon over Grantline's crater. A bright Earth, yet no air was here on this Lunar surface to spread its light. Only a glow, mingling with the spots of blue tube light on the poles along the cliff, and the radiance from the lighted buildings. ”

“ The light sprang through the banks of rotating prisms, intensified up the scale until, with a vague, almost invisible beam, it left the last swaying mirror and leaped through our overhead dome into space.
"Commander!" The duty-man's voice carried an appeal. These bulging walls! If they cracked, or even sprung a serious leak, the camp would be uninhabitable....
"Enough," said Grantline. "Switch it off. We'll let it go at that for now."
It seemed that every man in the room had been holding his breath in the darkness. The lights came on again: the Erentz motors accelerated to normal. ”

“ But the Grantline beam spelled another message:
"The brigand ship is coming! It will be here before we can get out to you! No lights! We will try and hide our location."
And the signal-beam brought a last appeal to me:
"Miko and his men will divulge where we are. Unless you can stop them—"
The beam vanished. The lights of the Grantline camp made a faint glow that showed above the crater-edge. The glow died, as the camp now was plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER XXVII Anita's Plan
e crouched in the shadows, the Earthlight filtering down to us. ”

“ As I stood at the window watching the oncoming ship, Grantline's voice sounded:
"Call in those men! Ring the call-lights, Franck!"
The siren buzzed over the camp's interior; the warning call-lights on the roof brought in the outer guards. They came running to the admission portes, which had been repaired after Miko disabled them.
he guards came in. We dimmed our lights further. The treasure sheds were black against the cliff behind us. No need for guards there—the bulk of the ore was such that we reasoned the brigands would not attempt to move it until our buildings were captured. ”

“ We could see the ship plainly above us now, a gray-black shape among the stars up beyond the shaggy, towering crater rim. The vessel came upon a level keel, hull down. Slowly circling, looking for Miko's signal, no doubt, or for possible lights from Grantline's camp. They might also be picking a landing place.
We saw it soon as a cylindrical, cigarlike shape, rather smaller than the Planetara, but similar of design. It bore lights now. The ports of its hull were tiny rows of illumination, and the glow of light under its rounding upper dome was faintly visible. ”

“ It's obvious. I'm skilled at trajectory-firing. If Grantline appears down there now, I'll help you—"
"Is it connected?" Anita demanded boldly.
"Yes," he said. "You have on your Erentz suits: are you going to the dome-roof? Then go."
But that was what we did not want to do. Anita's glance seemed to tell me to let her handle this. I turned toward one of the cubby windows; she said sweetly:
"Are you in charge of this room? Show me how that projector is operated; it will be invincible against the Grantline camp." ”

“ The news had spread that we knew the location of the treasure. The brigands were jubilant. In a few hours the ship's armament would be ready, and it would advance.
I saw many glances cast out the dome side windows toward the distant plains of the Mare Imbrium. The brigands believed that the Grantline camp lay in that direction.
Anita whispered, "Which is their giant electronic projector, Gregg?"
I could see it amidships of the deck. It was already in place. Potan was there now, superintending the men who were connecting it. The most powerful weapon on the ship. ”

“ Like poison in a man's veins, reaching his heart, the free alien electrons had disturbed the motors. They accelerated, then retarded. Pulsed unevenly, and drew added power from the reserve tanks. But they had normalized at once when the shot was past. The duty-man's voice sounded from the grid in answer to Grantline's question:
"Five degrees colder in your building. Can't you feel it?"
The disturbed, weakened Erentz circulation had allowed the outer cold to radiate through a trifle. The walls had had a trifle extra explosive pressure from the room-air. ”

“ It stabbed up from the shadows across the valley at the foot of the opposite crater-wall, a beam of vaguely fluorescent light. Simultaneously the search-light vanished.
The stream of electrons caught the front face of our main building in a six-foot circle. It held a few seconds, vanished; then stabbed again, and still again. Three bolts. A total, I suppose, of nine or ten seconds.
I was standing with Grantline at a front window. We had rigged an oblong of insulated fabric like a curtain: we stood peering, holding the curtain cautiously aside. The ray struck some twenty feet away from us. ”

“ Our Henry Grantly, our major, knew himself to be his mother's favourite child,—knew himself to have become so since something of coolness had grown up between her and her august daughter. The augustness of the daughter had done much to reproduce the old freshness of which I have spoken in the mother's heart, and had specially endeared to her the son who, of all her children, was the least subject to the family failing. The clergyman, Charles Grantly,—he who had married the Lady Anne,—was his father's darling in these days. ”

“ If only Grantham lost his grip on the waverers! The thronged chamber was simmering with thrilling rumors and wild anticipations. Few members could recollect a crisis like this.
Grantham lay back in his seat, hands clasped negligently, eyes half-closed—his wonted attitude when listening. He looked as if he felt nothing. His nickname of “Cold Steel” still stuck. One of his younger lieutenants was speaking, and now and then Grantham nodded, almost imperceptibly, a chilly approval. Yet his heart was hot. ”

“ For a long time Grant stood drinking in the scene; the fertile valley lying with its square farms like a checker-board of the gods, with its round little lakes beating back the white sunshine like coins from the currency of the Creator; the ruddy copper-colored patches of ripe wheat, and drowsy herds motionless upon the receding hills; the blue-green ribbon of river with its yellow fringes of cottonwood and bluffs of forbidding spruce, and behind and over all the silent, majestic mountains. It was a sight to make the soul of man rise up and say, “I know I stand on the heights of the Eternal!” ”

“ Major Grantly had done that which made him think it imperative upon him to do something further, and to do that something at once.
Therefore he started off on the Monday morning after breakfast and walked to Silverbridge, and as he walked he built various castles in the air. Why should he not marry Grace,—if she would have him,—and take her away beyond the reach of her father's calamity? Why should he not throw over his own people altogether, money, position, society, and all, and give himself up to love? ”

“ Nattie and Mori, the Blacks, and all the foreign population of Japan knew that only Grant could win the prize. His business tact, his personal friendship with the powers at the head of the government, and his well-known reputation for honesty were the virtues forming the magnet that would attract the golden plum.
The outrageous assault of Ralph on board the junk had shown Grant how desperate his enemies were. It hinted strongly at nothing short of murder. No man, no matter how brave, can walk in the shadow of a threatened death without inwardly wishing himself free from danger. ”

“ Major Grantly had been a successful man in life,—with the one exception of having lost the mother of his child within a twelvemonth of his marriage and within a few hours of that child's birth. He had served in India as a very young man, and had been decorated with the Victoria Cross. Then he had married a lady with some money, and had left the active service of the army, with the concurring advice of his own family and that of his wife. He had taken a small place in his father's county, but the wife for whose comfort he had taken it had died before she was permitted to see it. ”

“ Grant is a genuine son of New England, therefore to be looked on as a vigorous offshoot of the old Puritan stock. His father removed from Coventry, first to Pennsylvania, afterwards to Ohio, and finally to Illinois, where the Ulysses of these many wanderings received his classic name. He appears to be a man of no ordinary class for shrewdness and good sense. Gen. Grant's mother is one of those sedate, sensible, serious women, whose households are fit nurseries for heroes. Industry, economy, patience, temperance and religion, were the lessons of his early days. ”

“ We have already heard what was said on the subject at the house of Archdeacon Grantly. As the days passed by, and as other tidings came in, confirmatory of those which had before reached him, the archdeacon felt himself unable not to believe in the man's guilt. And the fear which he entertained as to his son's intended marriage with Grace Crawley, tended to increase the strength of his belief. Dr. Grantly had been a very successful man in the world, and on all ordinary occasions had been able to show that bold front with which success endows a man. ”

“ Looking all about you, you begin to learn that you can not describe your whereabouts. I do not marvel at that. No one finds himself planted at last in so terribly foul a morass as he would fain stand still forever on dry ground.
Dr. Grantly was disgusted; and, although he was himself too true and thorough in all his feelings to be able to say aloud that any Giant was wrong, still he had a sad feeling within his heart that the world was sinking from under him. ”

“ Grantley's pride was eager to raise its crest again. It caught at the result of the struggle and claimed it as a victory, crying out that there was to be no pointing of scornful fingers, no chuckles and winks, no shame open and before the world. The woman who walked by his horse was a pledge to that. He was not to stand a plain fool and dupe in the eyes of men. If that thought were not enough, look at the figure young Walter Blake had cut! Who had played the man in the fight? Not the lover, but the husband. ”

“ To his immediate family, however, he was always known as Ulysses, which his playmates soon twisted into the nickname "Useless," more or less good-naturedly applied.
Grant's father moved to Georgetown, Ohio, soon after his son's birth, and there his boyhood days were passed. The place was not at that time much more than a frontier village and its inhabitants were mostly pioneers—not the adventurous, exploring pioneers who discover new countries, but the hardy advance-guard of civilization, who clear the forests and transform the wilderness into farming land. ”

“ Well, are you willing to give any of your own life, any of your way of thinking, any of what you call your nature, or your temperament, or what not? Not a bit of it! You can love Frank when there's no danger of Grantley's thinking it may mean that you could forgive him! As soon as there's any danger of that, you draw back. You use the unhappy child as a shield between Grantley and yourself, as a weapon against Grantley. Yes you do, Sibylla. Whenever you're inclined to relent towards Grantley, you go and sit by that child's cot and use your love for him to fan your hatred against Grantley. ”

“ Grant hastened to obey his father’s directions, and in the space of a few minutes the team was ready, with O’Brien, the stable-man, and Mr. Mackerly as its occupants; and soon they were out of sight in the darkness, speeding for the train.
“There’s something up, that’s dead sure!” soliloquized Grant, as he stood in the doorway. “Father’s never in all that hurry for nothing. I wonder what the racket is? I’ll go a fiver that it has something to do with that Heathcote matter. He’s a perfect nuisance, and I hope father will squelch him this time, once and for all, the booby!” ”

“ Grant regretted this terrible wastage of animals as much in a personal as in a military way; for, like nearly all great men, his sympathies were broad enough to make him compassionate toward every kind of sentient life. No Arab ever loved his horse better than Grant loved his splendid charger Cincinnati, the worthy counterpart of Traveler, Lee's magnificent gray.
Summoned to Washington in March, Grant, after one scrutinizing look at the political world, then and there made up his steadfast mind that no commander-in-chief could ever carry out his own plans from any distant point ”

“ But if Grant had suffered such losses in 1861 or 1862, he would have been dropped by Washington as unfitted for a military campaign.
History will rank Grant as the foremost soldier of the Republic. His story is full of romance. He was of Scotch Covenanter stock that settled in New England, and made its way to Ohio and Illinois. Like all the most successful generals on both sides in our Civil War, he was a graduate of West Point, showed talent in mathematics and engineering, and made an honourable name in the Mexican War. ”