Bert Wilson, Wireless Operator

by Marion Ames Taggart

  CHAPTER III

  A STARTLING MESSAGE

  The next morning, all was stir and bustle on board the steamer. Thegreat cranes groaned, as they hoisted aboard the last of the freight,and lowered it into the hold, that gaped like a huge monster, whoseappetite could never be satiated. Men were running here and there, inobedience to the hoarse commands of the mates, and bringing order out ofthe apparent confusion. The pier and decks were thronged with friendsand relatives of the passengers, come to say good-by to those who seemedto become doubly dear, as the hour of parting drew near. The cabins werepiled with flowers that, under the inexorable rules of sea-going ships,would have to be thrown overboard, as soon as the vessel had cleared theharbor. Everywhere there were tears and smiles and hand grasps, asfriends looked into each other's eyes, with the unspoken thought thatthe parting "might be for years, or it might be forever."

  The boys had risen early, and, after a hearty breakfast, had come ondeck, where they watched with keenest zest the preparations for thestart. It was a glorious day and one that justified all they had heardof the wonderful California climate. The sun was bright, but notoppressive, and a delightful breeze blew up from the bay. The tang ofthe sea was in their nostrils, and, as they gazed over the splendidpanorama spread out before them, their spirits rose and their heartsswelled with the mere joy of living. The slight melancholy of the nightbefore had vanished utterly, and something of the old Viking spiritstirred within them, as they sniffed the salt breeze and looked towardthe far horizon where the sky and waves came together. They, too, wereArgonauts, and who knew what Golden Fleece of delight and adventureawaited their coming, in the enchanting empires of the East, or in the

  "Summer isles of Eden, lying In dark purple spheres of sea."

  As they stood at the rail, filling their lungs with the invigoratingair, and watching the animated scenes about them, Ralph came up to them,accompanied by an alert, keen-eyed man, whom he introduced as hisfather.

  He shook hands cordially with the boys, but when he learned that Dickand Tom, as well as Bert, were all students in the college from whichhe had himself graduated, his cordiality became enthusiasm. He was oneof the men who, despite the passing of the years and the growth ofbusiness cares, remain young in heart, and he was soon laughing andchatting as gaily as the boys themselves. There was nothing of the snobabout him, despite his wealth and prominence, and, in this respect Ralphwas "a chip of the old block."

  "So you are the Wilson whose fadeaway ball won the pennant, are you?" ashe turned to Bert. "By George, I'd like to have seen that last game. Theafternoon that game was played, I had the returns sent in over a specialwire in my office. And when you forged ahead and then held down theirheavy hitters in the ninth, I was so excited that I couldn't keep still,but just got up and paced the floor, until I guess my office forcethought I was going crazy. But you turned the trick, all right, andsaved my tottering reason," he added, jovially.

  The boys laughed. "It's lucky I didn't know all that," grinned Bert, "orI might have got so nervous that they would have knocked me out of thebox. But since you are so interested, let me show you a memento of thegame." And running below, he was back in a minute with the souvenirpresented to him by the college enthusiasts.

  It was a splendid gift. The identical ball with which he had struckout the opposing team's most dangerous slugger in the ninth had beenencased in a larger ball of solid gold on which Bert's name had beenengraved, together with the date and score of the famous game. Now itwas passed from hand to hand amid loud expressions of admiration.

  "It's certainly a beauty," commented Mr. Quinby, "and my only regret isthat I wasn't called upon to contribute toward getting it. I suppose itwill be rather hard on you fellows," he went on, "to have to go withoutany baseball this summer. If I know you rightly, you'd rather play thaneat."

  "Oh, well," broke in Ralph, "they may be able to take a fling at it oncein a while, even if they are abroad. It used to be the 'national' game,but it is getting so popular everywhere that we'll soon have to call itthe 'international' game. In Japan, especially, there are some corkinggood teams, and they play the game for all it is worth. Take the nine ofWaseda University, and they'd give Yale or Princeton all they wanted todo to beat them. Last year, they hired a big league star to come all theway from America, to act as coach. They don't have enough 'beef,' as arule, to make them heavy sluggers, but they are all there in bunting andplace hitting, and they are like cats on the bases."

  "Yes," said Dick, "and, even leaving foreigners out of the question, thecrews from Uncle Sam's warships have what you might call a BattleshipLeague among themselves, and every vessel has its nine. Feeling runs highwhen they are in port, and the games are as hotly contested as though aWorld's Series were in question. I'm told that, at the time of the Boxerrebellion, there were some dandy games played by our boys right under thewalls of Peking."

  Just here the captain approached, and, with a hearty handshake and bestwishes for the journey, Mr. Quinby went forward with him to discussbusiness details connected with the trip.

  Ten o'clock, the hour set for starting, was at hand. The first bell,warning all visitors ashore, had already rung. The last bale of freighthad been lowered into the hold and the hatches battened down. There wasthe usual rush of eleventh hour travelers, as the taxis and cabs rattleddown to the piers and discharged their occupants. All the passengerswere on the shore side of the vessel, calling to their friends on thedock, the women waving their handkerchiefs, at one moment, and, thenext, putting them to their eyes. The last bell rang, the huge gangplankswung inward, there was a tinkling signal in the engine room and thepropellers began slowly to revolve. The steamer turned down the bay,passed the Golden Gate where the sea lions sported around the rocks,and out into the mighty Pacific. The voyage of the _Fearless_ had begun.

  Down in the wireless room, Bert had buckled to his work. With thetelephone receiver held close to his ears by a band passing over hishead, he exchanged messages with the land they were so rapidly leavingbehind them, with every revolution of the screws. Amid the crashing ofthe sounder and the spitting blue flames, he felt perfectly in hiselement. Here was work, here was usefulness, here was power, here waslife. Between this stately vessel, with its costly cargo and still moreprecious freight of human lives, and the American continent, he was thesole connecting link. Through him alone, father talked with son, husbandwith wife, captain with owner, friend with friend. Without him, thevessel was a hermit, shut out from the world at large; with him, itstill held its place in the universal life.

  But this undercurrent of reflection and exultation did not, for amoment, distract him from his work. The messages came in rapidly. Heknew they would. The first day at sea is always the busiest one. Therewere so many last injunctions, so many things forgotten in the haste offarewell, that he was taxed to the utmost to keep his work well in hand.Fortunately he was ambidextrous, could use his left hand almost asreadily as his right, and this helped him immensely. From an early age,more from fun than anything else, he had cultivated writing with eitherhand, without any idea that the day would come when this would prove avaluable practical accomplishment. Now with one finger on the key, herapidly wrote down the messages with the other, and thus was able todouble the rapidity and effectiveness of his work.

  Before long there was a lull in the flood of messages, and when timecame for dinner, he signaled the San Francisco office to hold up anyfurther communications for an hour or so, threw off his receiver, andjoined his friends at the table.

  "Well, Bert, how does she go?" asked Dick, who sat at his right, whileTom and Ralph faced them across the table.

  "Fine," answered Bert, enthusiastically. "It isn't work; it's pleasure.I'm so interested in it that I almost grudge the time it takes to eat,and that's something new for me."

  "It must be getting serious, if it hits you as hard as that," said Tom,in mock concern. "I'll have to give the doctor a tip to keep his eye onyou."

  "Oh, Bert just says that, so that when
he gets seasick, he'll have agood excuse for not coming to meals," chaffed Ralph.

  "Well, watch me, fellows, if you think my appetite is off," retortedBert, as he attacked his food with the avidity of a wolf.

  "By the way," asked Dick, "what arrangements have you made for anymessage that may come, while you are toying with your dinner in thislanguid fashion?"

  "I've told the San Francisco man to hold things up for a while," repliedBert. "That's the only station we're likely to hear from just now, andthe worst of the rush is over. After we get out of range of the landstations, all that we'll get will be from passing ships, and that willonly be once in a while."

  "Of course," he went on, "theoretically, there ought to be someone thereevery minute of the twenty-four hours. You might be there twenty-threehours and fifty-nine minutes, and nothing happen. But, in the lastminute of the twenty-fourth hour, there might be something of vitalimportance. You know when that awful wreck occurred last year, theoperator was just about to take the receiver from his head, when hecaught the call. One minute later, and he wouldn't have heard it andover eight hundred people would have been lost."

  "I suppose," said Ralph, "that, as a matter of fact, there ought to betwo or three shifts, so that someone could be on hand all the time. Iknow that the Company is considering something of the kind, but 'largebodies move slowly,' and they haven't got to it yet."

  "For my part," chimed in Tom, "I should think that with all the brainsthat are working on the subject, there would have been some way devisedto make a record of every call, and warn the operator at any minute ofthe day or night."

  "They're trying hard to get something practical," said Bert. "Marconihimself is testing out a plan that he thinks will work all right. Hisidea is to get a call that will be really one long dash, so that itwon't be confounded with any letter of the alphabet. He figures onmaking this so strong that it will pass through a very sensitiveinstrument with sufficient force to ring a bell, that will be at thebedside of the operator."

  "Rather rough on a fellow, don't you think?" joined in the ship'sdoctor. "If he were at all nervous, he might lie there awake, waitingfor the bell to ring. It reminds me of a friend of mine, who once put upat a country hotel. He was told that the man who slept in the next roomwas very irritable and a mere bundle of nerves. He couldn't bear theleast noise, and my friend promised to keep it in mind. He was outrather late that night, and when he started to retire he dropped one ofhis shoes heavily on the floor. Just then he remembered his nervousneighbor. He went on undressing quietly, walked about on tiptoe, put outthe light, and crept into bed. Just as he was going off to sleep, avoice came from the other room: 'Say, when in thunder are you going todrop that other shoe?'"

  "In the meantime," went on Bert, when the laugh had subsided, "they'vegot an ingenious device on some of the British ships. It seems rathercruel, because they have to use a frog. You know how sensitive frogs areto electricity. Well, they attach a frog to the receiving end, and underhim they put a sheet of blackened paper. As the dots and dashes come in,the current jerks the frog's legs over the paper. The leg scrapes theblack away, and leaves white dots and dashes. So that you can pick upthe paper and read the message just like any other, except that theletters are white instead of black."

  "Poor old frogs," said Ralph. "If they knew enough, they'd curse thevery name of electricity. Galvani started with them in the early days,and they've still got to 'shake a leg' in the interest of science."

  "Yes," murmured Tom, "it's simply shocking."

  He ducked as Ralph made a playful pass at him.

  "There's been quite a stir caused by it," went on Bert, calmly ignoringTom's awful pun, "and the humane societies are taking it up. Theprobability is that it will be abolished. It certainly does seemcruel."

  "I don't know," said the doctor. "Like many other questions, there aretwo sides to it. We all agree that no pain should be inflicted upon poordumb animals, unless there is some great good to be gained by it. But itis a law of life that the lesser must give way to the greater. We usethe cow to get vaccine for small-pox, the horse to supply the anti-toxinfor diphtheria. Rabbits and mice and guinea-pigs and monkeys weinoculate with the germs of cancer and consumption, in order to studythe causes of these various diseases, and, perhaps, find a remedy forthem. All this seems barbarous and cruel; but the common sense ofmankind agrees that it would be far more cruel to let human beingssuffer and die by the thousands, when these experiments may save them.If the twitching of a frog's leg should save a vessel from shipwreck, wewould have to overlook the frog's natural reluctance to write themessage. I hope, though," he concluded, as he pushed back his chair,"that they'll soon find something else that will do just as well, andleave the frog in his native puddle."

  When they reached the deck, they found that the breeze had freshened,and, with the wind on her starboard quarter, the _Fearless_ was bowlingalong in capital style. Her engines were working powerfully andrhythmically, and everything betokened a rapid run to Hawaii, which thecaptain figured on reaching in about eight days. The more seasonedtravelers were wrapped in rugs and stretched out in steamer chairs, butmany of the others had already sought the seclusion of their staterooms.It was evident that there would be an abundance of empty seats at thetable that evening.

  Throughout the rest of the day the messages were few and far between.Before that time next day, they would probably have ceased altogether asfar as the land stations were concerned, and from that time on untilthey reached Hawaii, the chief communications would be from passingships within the wireless range.

  The boys were gathered in the wireless room that night, telling storiesand cracking jokes, when suddenly Bert's ear caught a click. Hestraightened up and listened eagerly. Then his face went white and hiseyes gleamed with excitement. It was the S. O. S. signal, the call ofdeadly need and peril. A moment more and he leaped to his feet.

  "Call the captain, one of you fellows, quick," he cried.

  For this was the message that had winged its way over the dark waste ofwaters:

  "Our ship is on fire. Latitude 37:12, longitude 126:17. For God's sake,help."