taken his place at an ocean wireless station.
When this message had been sent, Jack sat in for an answer. Before long, out of the maze of other calls, he picked his summons and crackled out his reply, adding O.K. G. – “Go ahead.” When he had finished taking the message, merely a formal acknowledgment of the captain’s farewell despatch, Jack grounded his instruments and went forward with the reply in search of the skipper.
He found the Ajax wallowing through a somewhat heavy sea. Looking down from the narrow bridge, he could see the decks with their covered winches, steam-pipes and man-holes only at times through a smother of green water and white foam that swept over them.
Jack clawed his way forward and found the captain with his first officer on the bridge. The wheel was in the hands of a rugged, grizzled quartermaster, who stood like a figure of stone, his eyes glued to the swinging compass card. Occasionally, however, he gave an almost imperceptible move to the spokes of the brass-inlaid wheel he grasped, and a mighty rumbling of machinery followed. For the Ajax, like practically every vessel of to-day, steered by steam-power, and a twist of the wrist was sufficient to move the mighty rudder that was distant almost a tenth of a mile from the wheel-house.
But the boy did not give much observation to all this. He was intent on his duty. Touching his cap, he held out the neatly written message, – of which he had kept a carbon copy on his file.
“Despatch, sir!” he said respectfully.
The captain took the message and read it, and then eyed the boy attentively.
Captain Braceworth was a big figure of a man, bronzed, bearded and Viking-like. He was also known as a strict disciplinarian. Jack had not spoken to him till that moment. He decided that he liked the skipper’s looks, in spite of an air of cold authority that dwelt in his steady eyes.
“So you’re our wireless man, eh?” asked the skipper.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Jukes – ”
“Humph! I know all about that. I understand this is your first voyage. Well, you have lots to learn. Do your duty and you’ll have no trouble with me. If not, you will find it very uncomfortable.”
He turned away and began talking to his first officer. Jack made his way back to his cabin with mingled feelings. The captain had spoken to him sharply, almost gruffly. He began to revise his opinion of the man.
“He is a martinet and no mistake,” thought the boy; “a bully too, I’ll bet. But pshaw, Jack Ready, what’s the use of kicking? You’ve got what you wanted; now go through with it. After all, if I do my duty, he can’t hurt me.”
But as he took his seat at his instruments again, Jack, somehow, didn’t feel quite so chipper as he had half an hour before. In his own estimation he had rated himself pretty highly as the wireless man of the Ajax.
“But I reckon I don’t count much more than one of the crew,” he muttered to himself as the memory of the captain’s brusque, authoritative manner rankled in his mind.
CHAPTER VI
Having sent his “T.R.” – as the first message from an outward bound ship is, for some mysterious reason known, – Jack occupied himself by occasionally chatting with some other operator and exchanging positions.
As the Ajax forged on, the boy began feeling ahead with his key for the wireless stations at Sagaponack or Siasconset. Messages to and from Nantucket he had already caught, and had sent in a report of the Ajax and her position.
Supper time came and Jack ate his meal in company with the second and third engineers. The captain and the other officers were far too important to sit down with a wireless man on his first voyage. The second engineer was a lively youth with a crop of hair as red as the open door of one of his own furnaces. His junior was not more than two years older than Jack, a stalwart lad, with a bright, intelligent face, named Billy Raynor.
Young Raynor and Jack struck up quite a friendship at supper, and after the red-headed second, whose name was Bicket, had left the table, they fell to discussing the ship and its officers.
“I happened to be on the bridge, – message from the chief, – this afternoon when you were talking to the old man,” said Raynor. “From the look on your face, I fancy you thought him a bit overbearing.”
Jack flushed. He did not know that he had let his mortification be visible.
“Well, I had expected rather a different reception, I must say; but I’m not such a baby as to kick about anything like that, or even a good deal worse.”
“That’s the way to talk,” approved Raynor. “The old man’s bark is worse than his bite, although I don’t come much in contact with him. Mr. Herrick, the chief, is my boss.”
He rose to go below to his duties.
“Some time when I’m off watch, I’d like to come up to your coop and have a chat with you about wireless,” he said.
“I wish you would,” said Jack, heartily glad to find, – for he was beginning to feel lonely, – that there was at least one congenial soul on the big steel monster, of which he formed a part of the crew.
Jack’s day ended at eight o’clock, but before his time to go off duty, there came a peremptory message from the captain. The weather had been steadily growing worse, the sea was mounting and the wind increasing. Jack was to stay at his post and try to catch messages from vessels farther out at sea, concerning conditions on the course.
As the night wore on, the gale increased in violence. The tanker wallowed through giant seas, the spray sweeping over even the elevated bridge linking her bow and stern. Her hull, with its cargo of oil and coal and the mighty boilers and engines that drove her forward, was as submerged as a submarine.
The young wireless operator sat vigilantly at his key. The night was a bad one for wireless communication, although a storm does not, of necessity, interfere with the “waves.”
At last, about ten o’clock, he succeeded in obtaining communication with the Kaiser, one of the big German liners, some one thousand miles to the eastward.
Back and forth through the storm the two operators talked. The Kaiser’s man reported heavy weather, rain-squalls and big seas.
“But it is not bothering us,” he added; “we’re hitting up an eighteen knot clip.”
“Can’t say the same here,” flashed back Jack; “we have been slowed down for an hour or more. This is a bad storm, all right.”
“You must be a ‘greeny’; this is nothing,” came back the answer from the Kaiser man.
“It is my first voyage as a wireless man,” crackled out Jack’s key.
“Bully for you! You send like a veteran,” came back the rejoinder; and then, before Jack could send his appreciation of the compliment, something happened to the communication and the conversation was cut off.
When he opened the door to go forward with his message for the skipper, the puff of wind that met the boy almost threw him from his feet. But he braced himself against the screaming gale and worked his way along the bridge. He wished he had put on oil-skins before he started, for the spray was breaking in cataracts over the narrow bridge along which he had to claw his way like a cat.
“Well, whatever else a ‘Tanker’ may be, she is surely not a dry ship in a gale of wind,” muttered the boy to himself, as he reached the end of his journey.
On the bridge, weather-cloths were up, and the second officer was crouched at the starboard end of the narrow, swaying pathway. But pretty soon Jack made out the captain’s stalwart figure. The skipper elected to read the message in the chart-house. He made no comment, but informed Jack that in an hour’s time he might turn in.
Nothing more of importance came that night, and at the hour the captain had named, the young wireless boy, thoroughly tired after his first day at the key of an ocean wireless, sought his bunk. This was in the same room as the apparatus, and as he undressed,