A STARTLING MESSAGE
The next morning, all was stir and bustle on board the steamer. The
great cranes groaned, as they hoisted aboard the last of the freight,
and lowered it into the hold, that gaped like a huge monster, whose
appetite could never be satiated. Men were running here and there, in
obedience to the hoarse commands of the mates, and bringing order out of
the apparent confusion. The pier and decks were thronged with friends
and relatives of the passengers, come to say good-by to those who seemed
to become doubly dear, as the hour of parting drew near. The cabins were
piled with flowers that, under the inexorable rules of sea-going ships,
would have to be thrown overboard, as soon as the vessel had cleared the
harbor. Everywhere there were tears and smiles and hand grasps, as
friends looked into each other's eyes, with the unspoken thought that
the parting "might be for years, or it might be forever."
The boys had risen early, and, after a hearty breakfast, had come on
deck, where they watched with keenest zest the preparations for the
start. It was a glorious day and one that justified all they had heard
of the wonderful California climate. The sun was bright, but not
oppressive, and a delightful breeze blew up from the bay. The tang of
the sea was in their nostrils, and, as they gazed over the splendid
panorama spread out before them, their spirits rose and their hearts
swelled with the mere joy of living. The slight melancholy of the night
before had vanished utterly, and something of the old Viking spirit
stirred within them, as they sniffed the salt breeze and looked toward
the far horizon where the sky and waves came together. They, too, were
Argonauts, and who knew what Golden Fleece of delight and adventure
awaited 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 invigorating
air, and watching the animated scenes about them, Ralph came up to them,
accompanied by an alert, keen-eyed man, whom he introduced as his
father.
He shook hands cordially with the boys, but when he learned that Dick
and Tom, as well as Bert, were all students in the college from which
he had himself graduated, his cordiality became enthusiasm. He was one
of the men who, despite the passing of the years and the growth of
business cares, remain young in heart, and he was soon laughing and
chatting as gaily as the boys themselves. There was nothing of the snob
about him, despite his wealth and prominence, and, in this respect Ralph
was "a chip of the old block."
"So you are the Wilson whose fadeaway ball won the pennant, are you?" as
he turned to Bert. "By George, I'd like to have seen that last game. The
afternoon that game was played, I had the returns sent in over a special
wire in my office. And when you forged ahead and then held down their
heavy 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 force
thought I was going crazy. But you turned the trick, all right, and
saved my tottering reason," he added, jovially.
The boys laughed. "It's lucky I didn't know all that," grinned Bert, "or
I might have got so nervous that they would have knocked me out of the
box. But since you are so interested, let me show you a memento of the
game." And running below, he was back in a minute with the souvenir
presented to him by the college enthusiasts.
It was a splendid gift. The identical ball with which he had struck
out the opposing team's most dangerous slugger in the ninth had been
encased in a larger ball of solid gold on which Bert's name had been
engraved, together with the date and score of the famous game. Now it
was passed from hand to hand amid loud expressions of admiration.
"It's certainly a beauty," commented Mr. Quinby, "and my only regret is
that I wasn't called upon to contribute toward getting it. I suppose it
will be rather hard on you fellows," he went on, "to have to go without
any baseball this summer. If I know you rightly, you'd rather play than
eat."
"Oh, well," broke in Ralph, "they may be able to take a fling at it once
in 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 it
the 'international' game. In Japan, especially, there are some corking
good teams, and they play the game for all it is worth. Take the nine of
Waseda University, and they'd give Yale or Princeton all they wanted to
do to beat them. Last year, they hired a big league star to come all the
way from America, to act as coach. They don't have enough 'beef,' as a
rule, to make them heavy sluggers, but they are all there in bunting and
place hitting, and they are like cats on the bases."
"Yes," said Dick, "and, even leaving foreigners out of the question, the
crews from Uncle Sam's warships have what you might call a Battleship
League among themselves, and every vessel has its nine. Feeling runs high
when they are in port, and the games are as hotly contested as though a
World's Series were in question. I'm told that, at the time of the Boxer
rebellion, there were some dandy games played by our boys right under the
walls of Peking."
Just here the captain approached, and, with a hearty handshake and best
wishes for the journey, Mr. Quinby went forward with him to discuss
business 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 freight
had been lowered into the hold and the hatches battened down. There was
the usual rush of eleventh hour travelers, as the taxis and cabs rattled
down to the piers and discharged their occupants. All the passengers
were on the shore side of the vessel, calling to their friends on the
dock, the women waving their handkerchiefs, at one moment, and, the
next, putting them to their eyes. The last bell rang, the huge gangplank
swung inward, there was a tinkling signal in the engine room and the
propellers 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 the
telephone receiver held close to his ears by a band passing over his
head, he exchanged messages with the land they were so rapidly leaving
behind them, with every revolution of the screws. Amid the crashing of
the sounder and the spitting blue flames, he felt perfectly in his
element. Here was work, here was usefulness, here was power, here was
life. Between this stately vessel, with its costly cargo and still more
precious freight of human lives, and the American continent, he was the
sole connecting link. Through him alone, father talked with son, husband
with wife, captain with owner, friend with friend. Without him, the
vessel was a hermit, shut out from the world at large; with him, it
still held its place in the universal life.
But this undercurrent of reflection and exultation did not, for a
moment, distract him from his work. The messages came in rapidly. He
knew they would. The first day at sea is always the busiest one. There
were so many last injunctions, so many things forgotten in the haste of
farewell, that he was taxed to the utmost to keep his work well in hand.
Fortunately he was ambidextrous, could use his left hand almost as
readily as his right, and this helped him immensely. From an early age,
more from fun than anything else, he had cultivated writing with either
hand, without any idea that the day would come when this would prove a
valuable practical accomplishment. Now with one finger on the key, he
rapidly wrote down the messages with the other, and thus was able to
double the rapidity and effectiveness of his work.
Before long there was a lull in the flood of messages, and when time
came for dinner, he signaled the San Francisco office to hold up any
further communications for an hour or so, threw off his receiver, and
joined his friends at the table.
"Well, Bert, how does she go?" asked Dick, who sat at his right, while
Tom 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 on
you."
"Oh, Bert just says that, so that when he gets seasick, he'll have a
good excuse for not coming to meals," chaffed Ralph.
"Well, watch me, fellows, if you think my appetite is off," retorted
Bert, as he attacked his food with the avidity of a wolf.
"By the way," asked Dick, "what arrangements have you made for any
message that may come, while you are toying with your dinner in this
languid fashion?"
"I've told the San Francisco man to hold things up for a while," replied
Bert. "That's the only station we're likely to hear from just now, and
the worst of the rush is over. After we get out of range of the land
stations, all that we'll get will be from passing ships, and that will
only be once in a while."
"Of course," he went on, "theoretically, there ought to be someone there
every minute of the twenty-four hours. You might be there twenty-three
hours and fifty-nine minutes, and nothing happen. But, in the last
minute of the twenty-fourth hour, there might be something of vital
importance. You know when that awful wreck occurred last year, the
operator was just about to take the receiver from his head, when he
caught the call. One minute later, and he wouldn't have heard it and
over eight hundred people would have been lost."
"I suppose," said Ralph, "that, as a matter of fact, there ought to be
two or three shifts, so that someone could be on hand all the time. I
know that the Company is considering something of the kind, but 'large
bodies move slowly,' and they haven't got to it yet."
"For my part," chimed in Tom, "I should think that with all the brains
that are working on the subject, there would have been some way devised
to make a record of every call, and warn the operator at any minute of
the day or night."
"They're trying hard to get something practical," said Bert. "Marconi
himself is testing out a plan that he thinks will work all right. His
idea is to get a call that will be really one long dash, so that it
won't be confounded with any letter of the alphabet. He figures on
making this so strong that it will pass through a very sensitive
instrument with sufficient force to ring a bell, that will be at the
bedside of the operator."
"Rather rough on a fellow, don't you think?" joined in the ship's
doctor. "If he were at all nervous, he might lie there awake, waiting
for the bell to ring. It reminds me of a friend of mine, who once put up
at a country hotel. He was told that the man who slept in the next room
was very irritable and a mere bundle of nerves. He couldn't bear the
least noise, and my friend promised to keep it in mind. He was out
rather late that night, and when he started to retire he dropped one of
his shoes heavily on the floor. Just then he remembered his nervous
neighbor. He went on undressing quietly, walked about on tiptoe, put out
the light, and crept into bed. Just as he was going off to sleep, a
voice came from the other room: 'Say, when in thunder are you going to
drop that other shoe?'"
"In the meantime," went on Bert, when the laugh had subsided, "they've
got an ingenious device on some of the British ships. It seems rather
cruel, because they have to use a frog. You know how sensitive frogs are
to electricity. Well, they attach a frog to the receiving end, and under
him 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 the
black away, and leaves white dots and dashes. So that you can pick up
the paper and read the message just like any other, except that the
letters are white instead of black."
"Poor old frogs," said Ralph. "If they knew enough, they'd curse the
very 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 ignoring
Tom's awful pun, "and the humane societies are taking it up. The
probability is that it will be abolished. It certainly does seem
cruel."
"I don't know," said the doctor. "Like many other questions, there are
two sides to it. We all agree that no pain should be inflicted upon poor
dumb animals, unless there is some great good to be gained by it. But it
is a law of life that the lesser must give way to the greater. We use
the cow to get vaccine for small-pox, the horse to supply the anti-toxin
for diphtheria. Rabbits and mice and guinea-pigs and monkeys we
inoculate with the germs of cancer and consumption, in order to study
the causes of these various diseases, and, perhaps, find a remedy for
them. All this seems barbarous and cruel; but the common sense of
mankind agrees that it would be far more cruel to let human beings
suffer 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, we
would have to overlook the frog's natural reluctance to write the
message. I hope, though," he concluded, as he pushed back his chair,
"that they'll soon find something else that will do just as well, and
leave 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 bowling
along in capital style. Her engines were working powerfully and
rhythmically, and everything betokened a rapid run to Hawaii, which the
captain figured on reaching in about eight days. The more seasoned
travelers were wrapped in rugs and stretched out in steamer chairs, but
many of the others had already sought the seclusion of their staterooms.
It was evident that there would be an abundance of empty seats at the
table 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 as
far as the land stations were concerned, and from that time on until
they reached Hawaii, the chief communications would be from passing
ships within the wireless range.
The boys were gathered in the wireless room that night, telling stories
and cracking jokes, when suddenly Bert's ear caught a click. He
straightened up and listened eagerly. Then his face went white and his
eyes gleamed with excitement. It was the S. O. S. signal, the call of
deadly 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 of
waters:
"Our ship is on fire. Latitude 37:12, longitude 126:17. For God's sake,
help."