A PECULIAR COINCIDENCE
But the young wireless boy had no time right then to waste in
speculation over the man’s strange conduct. It was his duty to relieve
Sam, who would not come on watch again till midnight.
As he mounted the steep ladder leading to the “Wireless Hutch,” he could
feel the ship leaping and rolling under his feet like a live thing.
Every now and then a mighty sea would crash against the bow and shake
the stout steel fabric of the _Tropic Queen_ from stem to stern.
The wind, too, was shrieking and screaming through the rigging and up
among the aërials. Jack involuntarily glanced upward, although it was
too dark to see the antennæ swaying far aloft between the masts.
“I hope to goodness they hold,” he caught himself thinking, and then
recalled that, in the hurry of departure from New York, he had not had a
chance to go aloft and examine the insulation or the security of their
fastenings himself.
In the wireless room he found Sam with the “helmet” on his head. The boy
was plainly making a struggle to stick it out bravely, but his face was
pale.
“Anything come in?” asked Jack.
“Not a thing.”
“Caught anything at all from any other ship?”
Sam’s answer was to tug the helmet hastily from his head. He hurriedly
handed it to Jack, and then bolted out of the place without a word.
“Poor old Sam,” grinned Jack, as he sat down at the instruments and
adjusted the helmet that Sam had just discarded; “he’s got his, all
right, and he’ll get it worse before morning.”
Sam came back after a while. He was deathly pale and threw himself down
on his bunk in the inner room with a groan. He refused to let Jack send
for a steward.
“Just leave me alone,” he moaned. “Oh-h, I wish I’d stayed home in
Brooklyn! Do you think I’m going to die, Jack?”
“Not this trip, son,” laughed Jack. “Why, to-morrow you will feel like a
two-year-old.”
“Yes, I will—not,” sputtered the invalid. “Gracious, I wish the ship
would sink!”
After a while Sam sank into a sort of doze, and Jack, helmet on head and
book in hand, sat at the instruments, keeping his vigil through the long
night hours, while the storm shrieked and rioted about the ship.
The boy had been through too much rough weather on the _Ajax_ to pay
much attention to the storm. But as it increased in violence, it
attracted even his attention. Every now and then a big sea would hit the
ship with a thundering buffet that sent the spray flying as high as the
loftily perched wireless station.
The wind, too, was blowing as if it meant to blow the ship out of the
water. Every now and then there would come a lambent flash of lightning.
“It’s a Hatteras hummer for sure,” mused the boy.
The night wore on till the clock hands above the instruments pointed to
twelve.
Above the howling and raging of the storm Jack could hear the big ship’s
bell ring out the hour, and then, faint and indistinct, came the cry of
the bow watch, “All’s well.” It was echoed boomingly from the bridge in
the deep voice of the officer who had the watch.
“Well, nothing doing on that _Endymion_ yet,” pondered Jack.
He fell to musing on Jarrold’s strange conduct. Why had the man suddenly
vanished when Colonel Minturn appeared? What was his object in the
strange proposal he had made to the young wireless man? What manner of
craft was this _Endymion_, and how was it possible that she could live
in such a sea and storm?
These, and a hundred other questions came crowding into his dozing
brain. They performed a sort of mental pin-wheel, revolving over and
over again without the lad’s arriving at any conclusion.
That some link existed between Jarrold and the _Endymion_ was, of
course, plain. But just why he should have vanished so quickly when the
Panama official appeared, was not equally evident. Jack had a passenger
list in front of him, stuck in the frame designed for it.
He ran his eyes over it. Yes, there was the name:
Mr. James Jarrold, N. Y.—Stateroom 44.
Miss Jessica Jarrold, N. Y.—Stateroom 56.
Suddenly Jack’s roving glance caught the name of Colonel Minturn, U. S.
A., stateroom 46. So the colonel’s stateroom adjoined that of the man
who appeared to be so anxious to avoid him! Another thing that Jack
noted was that, although the ship was crowded and a stateroom for a
single passenger called for a substantial extra payment, both Mr.
Jarrold and the army man had exclusive quarters. In the case of Colonel
Minturn this was, of course, understandable, but Jarrold? Jack looked at
the latter’s name again, and now he noticed something else that had
escaped him before.
Stateroom 44, the room occupied by Jarrold and adjoining Colonel
Minturn’s, had evidently been changed at the last moment, for
originally, as a crossed-out entry showed, Jarrold had been given
stateroom 53. A pen line had been drawn through this entry by the purser
evidently, when Jarrold had changed his room.
Jack happened to know that Colonel Minturn had come on board at the last
moment, so, then, Jarrold had changed his stateroom only when he had
found out definitely that Colonel Minturn’s room was No. 46. There must
be something more than a mere coincidence in this, thought Jack, but,
puzzle as he would, he could not arrive at what it meant.
He was still trying to piece it all out when suddenly the door, which he
had closed to bar out the flying spray, was flung open.
A gust of wind and a flurry of spume entered, striking him in the face
like a cold plunge.
“Bother that catch,” exclaimed Jack, swinging round; “I’ll have to get
the carpenter to fix it to-morrow, I——”
But it was not a weakened catch that had given way. The door had been
opened by the hand of a man, who, enveloped in a raincoat and topped by
a golf cap, now stood in the doorway.
The man was James Jarrold.