Show g P adventurers club teti ten tons of chain chaiet by FLOYD GIBBONS famous headline hunter HERES ERES a detective yarn for you a smuggling story with all the good points of an old time thriller plus the additional good point that every word of it is true maybe some of you boys and girls have wondered what really goes on behind the scenes with the customs men well heres one of them to give us the lowdown low down and spin us the yarn of an actual happening he is john lynch of new york city a distinguished adventurer and a heck of a swell yarn spinner john barjes right into his yarn without any preliminaries well 11 he says it was back in 1914 1 I was discharged from the fifteenth united states infantry at china and got a job with the chinese maritime customs in that port my duties were to search all ships coming and going for smuggled goods and its not as pleasant a job as you might think because it entails crawling into all sorts of odd corners and out of f the way places during the course of your search customs officers ordered to search the king sing there youve got the whole picture in a nutshell the picture that is of the average working day but theres always liable to be a day a little different from the average and its just such one that john lynch is gl going to tell us about now it was in 1916 two years after he be had entered the customs service john came to io work orie one morning and took his instructions from the bulletin board officers mitchell galvin and lynch read a notice on that board will search S S king sing before departure it was all in the days work and there was nothing in that order that promised any excitement mitchell and galvin arrived a few moments later and the three of them began getting together their overalls and lamps the king sing was due to leave in half an hour so they had to work fast they went out to the ship and john began searching the and crews quarters while mitchell and galvin worked amidships and aft john goes sleuthing into anchor chain locker john prowled and poked around the crews quarters but he find anything then he began looking for other hiding places in the fore part N ag L A N john picked up one of the boxes to open it of the ship he spotted a manhole that led down to the anchor chain locker and that struck him as a likely place to hide contraband so he lifted the cover and crawled down inside the lanchor was down and with it the fathoms of heavy an aishor hor chain so the locker was empty but john noticed something that looked suspicious footprints quite a bunch of them on the ficor of he locker now the anchor chain locker sucha popular place aboard a ship its dark and stuffy and little frequented except by the anchor chain theres ing doing down here john said to himself and he began poking around in the darkness to see what he could find shanghaied Shanghai ed in the bottom of the ship then he found it in the floor was another manhole leading to the bottom of the sl ship dp he opened that and went down in the compartment below veri several small wooden boxes john picked one up and started to break it open when suddenly he heard the rattle of chain above him the crew were pulling in the anchor and the chain was pouring into the locker overhead john picked up his bis lamp and started up the ladder it was no use already a ton or more of heavy chain was lying on top of the opening he yelled for help until his throat was hoarse but the noisy rattle of chain deadened au all other sound the ship got under way and there was john in that stuffy hole racing a journey of five days and nights to shanghai with no food no water and doggone little air at first he nearly went crazy then as the hours and days dragged on he got so he care the foul air drugged him into a sort of a stupor hunger pains gnawed him inside but he knew that the greatest of his worries the big problem was water john would have given all his savings for just one big long drink of it in those dark hours five days in an opium smuggling cache after a while hunger and thirst roused him from his stupor and he began to look around the compartment he was in he hoped he might fine find some way of getting out but he was disappointed then idly he turned kurnec his attention A u the boxes on the floor he broke one open and it was full ful of opium his hunch about those footprints had been right there WAS smuggling going on fhe che opium in those boxes was worth a fortune five days clays and five nights then they reached shanghai overhead he could hear the anchor chain snaking out of the locker barely able to navigate john climbed the ladder when he came to the second ladder he almost fainted from weakness and thirst he was all in when he tumbled out on deck the first mate mat found him lying there and took him to his room whet the customs launch came john told his story of the opium cache and then he was sent ashore ashor to a hospital for a much needed going over and I 1 been in a chain locker alone since then he says its not so bad when you have company f 0 service |