[Illustration: Each clasped the gas-gun ready for instant use.]
The Boy Inventor’s Wireless Triumph
By
RICHARD BONNER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
CHARLES L. WRENN
M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
CHICAGO NEW YORK
Copyright 1929
by
M. A. Donohue & Company
Made in the U. S. A.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I—THE WIRELESS AT LONE ISLAND
CHAPTER II—THE MYSTERIOUS X. Y. Z.
CHAPTER III—THE CIPHER CODE
CHAPTER IV—A MARINE GAME OF BLIND-MAN’S BUFF
CHAPTER V—A SHOT IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER VI—NED BANGS’ STORY
CHAPTER VII—THE THREE COLORED GEMS
CHAPTER VIII—ON BOARD “THE TARANTULA”
CHAPTER IX—THE CHADWICK GAS GUNS
CHAPTER X—DRAWING A RASCAL’S FANGS
CHAPTER XI—THE “FLYING ROAD RACER”
CHAPTER XII—HERRERA IS NOT CAUGHT NAPPING
CHAPTER XIII—A DARING PLAN
CHAPTER XIV—A MESSAGE FROM THE AIR
CHAPTER XV—A DASH ALOFT
CHAPTER XVI—INTO THE ENEMY’S CAMP
CHAPTER XVII—“DAD!—IT’S JACK!”
CHAPTER XVIII—HEMMED IN BY FLAMES
CHAPTER XIX—“STAND BY FOR A ROPE!”
CHAPTER XX—A RESCUE BY AIRSHIP
CHAPTER XXI—ALOFT IN THE STORM
CHAPTER XXII—A VOYAGE OF TERROR
CHAPTER XXIII—THE BOY INVENTORS SOLVE A PROBLEM
CHAPTER XXIV—AN APPEAL FOR HELP
CHAPTER XXV—“IT’S DEATH TO REMAIN HERE!”
CHAPTER XXVI—AN ASTOUNDING DISCOVERY
The Boy Inventor’s Wireless Triumph
CHAPTER I—THE WIRELESS AT LONE ISLAND
The book Jack Chadwick had been reading,—a volume dealing with some
rather dry experimental work,—slipped from his fingers and fell with a
crash on the floor of the veranda. At the sudden interruption to the
sleepy, breathless calm of Lone Island on a July noon, his cousin Tom
Jesson, sixteen, and more than a year Jack’s junior, looked up from the
steamer chair in which he, too, was extended, with one of his quiet
smiles.
Suspending his task of wrapping some new condenser plates with
glittering tin-foil, he gazed about him. In front of the bungalow was a
strip of dazzling white sand,—the beach. Beyond shimmered the
cobalt-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. At a small wharf lay a
capable-looking motor cruiser, painted white and about forty-five feet
in length. She had been moored thus for the past seven days—ever since
Jack and his cousin and their colored attendant, Jupe, had landed on the
island after an uneventful passage from Galveston.
“Dozed off,” chuckled Tom, regarding Jack as the latter’s eyelids closed
drowsily; “well, I don’t know that I blame him. Waiting on Lone Island
with nothing to do but read, eat and sleep, does get monotonous after a
week of it.”
Suddenly a gong, affixed to the freshly painted wall above their heads,
broke forth in a wild, insistent clamor.
“Clang! C-l-a-n-g! Clang! Clang!—Clang! Clang!”
The effect on Tom was electrical.
“L-I in the Continental Code!” he exclaimed springing to his feet.
“Hurray, Jack, old boy! Wake up! It’s our call at last!”
Jack Chadwick galvanized from his nap into vibrant action with hardly
less suddenness than had marked Tom’s arousing. Three times the gong,
connected by an ingenious arrangement of Jack’s with his detector, beat
out brazenly the call of Lone Island. Then came the signature:
“S-K.”
“Whoop! It really is the _Sea King_ at last!” exclaimed Jack, his blue
eyes dancing. The lees of sleep had cleared from them as if by magic.
“Race you to the wireless station, Tom!” he shot out, jumping from the
veranda without bothering about the steps.
“You’re on!” was the instant response. Like a flash Tom was at his side.
The few dozen yards between the bungalow and the shed of raw,
resinous-smelling pine lumber that housed the wireless was covered in
less time than it takes to tell it. Panting from their dash through the
heavy sand the two lads flung themselves, shoulder to shoulder, at the
door.
“Dead heat!” laughingly proclaimed Jack, as he opened the portal and
hastened to the array of shining instruments which occupied most of the
space within.
All this time, behind them, the bell had kept up its insistent tocsin.
With a quick movement Jack “threw” a “knife-blade” switch. Instantly the
resonant drone of a dynamo filled the small sun-heated shack. Bending
forward. Jack depressed the sending key.
Flash! C-r-a-s-h!
A wriggling snake of blue flame leaped, like a live thing, between the
polished sparking points.
Alternately pressing and releasing his key. Jack sent an answer to the
message. With nimble fingers he directed the powerful electric impulses,
which were winging into space from the lofty aerials stretched between
their masts above the shed.
While he did this with one hand, with the other he deftly adjusted the
bright metal head band with its twin receivers that fitted over each
ear. This accomplished, he drew toward him a pencil and a pad of paper.
“L-I! L-I! L-I!”
Crackling and squealing the powerful spark volleyed across the gap, and
rushing into the aerials went flashing hundreds of miles through the
ether.
Then came a pause. Tom, his hand on Jack’s shoulder, leaned eagerly
forward and over him, watching for the first words of the message from
space to be written on the pad.
All at once Jack began to write. His fingers flew fast in response to
the flood of dots and dashes that came beating against his ear drums,
transmitted by the sensitive diaphragms of the receivers.
To an untrained ear the soft tappings would have sounded as vague and
undefined as the footsteps of a fly on a sheet of sensitive matter. But
to Jack, the whisperings winging their way in three hundred meter waves
through space were as clear as a story read aloud.
As he wrote, shoving his pencil over the sheets as fast as he could, Tom
began to gasp.
“Great ginger-snaps!” he choked out, and then, “Well, we were sighing
for action, and it looks as if we’ll get it in big, juicy chunks before
we’re much older.”
While the message, destined to have such an important effect on their
immediate future, is still pulsing through the air, we will take the
opportunity to place the reader in closer touch, so to speak, with our
two lads. Jack Chadwick, then, was the only son of Professor Chester
Chadwick, an inventor, whose various discoveries in many mechanical
fields had resulted in gaining him a handsome fortune. Jack’s mother had
died when he was a tiny lad, and, as he was an only son, he had been
brought up in constant association with his father. Almost as soon as he
had mastered his earliest lessons Jack was familiar with his parent’s
laboratory and workshop, and Mr. Chadwick, delighted at the interest the
boy displayed in science, had made him a close companion.
When Jack was twelve years old a new interest entered his life. His
cousin, Tom Jesson, came to live with them at Mr. Chadwick’s handsome
home on the outskirts of Boston. Tom was the son of Jasper Jesson, the
noted traveler, and, like Jack, he was motherless. Mr. Jesson had, some
time before, accepted a commission from a scientific institute to travel
and collect antiquities in the then little-known territory of Yucatan.
From this expedition he did not return within the year allotted him to
complete his researches.
Time went on and no word came from him, and at length he was given up
for lost even by the most hopeful of his friends. And thus it was that
his son Tom, then ten years old, came to High Towers, Mr. Chadwick’s
estate, even then known as the home of a famous inventor.
And so Jack and Tom had practically grown up together in close
association and with kindred interests.
To two lads of inventive mind, no more delightful field for their
experiments could have been imagined than High Towers. A park of some
fifty or sixty acres surrounded the house, which, among other features
of a country estate, possessed a small lake. On this sheet of water Jack
and Tom tried out models of a dozen different kinds of craft before they
were fourteen. Professor Chadwick gave them practically “the run” of his
workshops and experimental sheds, besides instructing them in scientific
investigations.
Among other things, the lads had constructed a complete miniature
railroad on the grounds, and had also built gliders of various types.
But their most recent “craze” had been wireless telegraphy. With a dozen
lads of their own age they had formed a “Wireless Club,” which met at
High Towers every month. But, with the summer vacation, the members of
the body had scattered, leaving only Jack and Tom to carry on the work.
As Professor Chadwick stinted his son in nothing pertaining to his
chosen pursuits, the two lads had assembled as complete an amateur
station as could be found in the country.
In addition to the latest instruments and appliances, their natural
ingenuity had enabled them to invent several additional features, some
of them patentable,—as, for instance, the call-bell which tapped out the
mysterious summons to the island station.
Which brings us back to Lone Island and to an explanation of how the two
lads and Jupe, their faithful colored attendant, happened to be
quartered on this low-lying, sandy, rather desolate patch of land off
the coast of Texas, not far from the mouth of the Rio Grande. The islet
belonged to Professor Chadwick, being part of an estate which had been
owned by his wife, the daughter of a Texas cattle man. The lads had
already camped there a winter, and knew the vicinity well.
About two months before this story opens, Professor Chadwick had left
home, bound, so he informed the lads, on a biological investigation
cruise among the Florida Keys and the West Indies. The lads had heard
nothing more of him, or of his steam yacht, the _Sea King_, with the
exception of a letter from Key West, and another from the island of
Jamaica, stating that all was going well.
Imagine their bewildered astonishment and excitement therefore, when,
two weeks before, a brief letter came to High Towers telling them to
proceed, with Jupe, to Galveston, where the motor cruiser _Vagrant_
would be awaiting them. Their instructions continued to inform them that
they were to equip the _Vagrant_ with wireless, and also purchase a
portable bungalow and shed, with which to establish a wireless station
on Lone Island. The letter, signed by Professor Chadwick, closed in his
customary abrupt manner, without vouchsafing any explanation of his
orders.
But Jack and Tom hardly needed any. The letter opened up before them a
delightful vista of fun and adventure.
“Just fancy, a wireless island all to ourselves!” Jack had exclaimed as
the boys joined hands in a wild war dance of delight. They had pleasant
recollections of former jolly days in camp on the Gulf.
The letter enclosed a liberal draft on Professor Chadwick’s bank, and
within forty-eight hours after receiving the missive which was to mean
so much to them, the two cousins and chums, with the faithful Jupe
attending them like a black shadow, were off for Galveston. On arrival
there they went to the boatyard mentioned in the Professor’s letter,
where they found the _Vagrant_,—the smart craft already mentioned as
lying at the Lone Island wharf,—already equipped for sea, awaiting them.
To install a wireless plant on board did not take long. The most
difficult part of their task lay in finding a suitable mast for the
support of the aerials. Jack solved this problem by constructing a
telescopic staff of steel tubing which, when not in use, could be
lowered to a height of twelve feet. In use it could be raised to an
altitude of sixty feet, giving a very fair radius of scope.
The materials for the wireless on the island, like those for the
floating plant, had been brought from Boston. But the portable shack and
bungalow were purchased in Galveston.
The Professor’s letter had instructed the lads to wait on the island for
a message by wireless. Now it had come; come, too, with a startling
suddenness that might be likened to a jolt. Tom, watching Jack’s fingers
with burning eyes, finally saw this message inscribed on the receiving
pad:
“Lone Island Station.—Proceed with all speed to Long. 96° W. by Lat. 27°
N. Urgent. We are in dire peril.—Bangs, operator _Sea King_.”
The patter of the electric waves against the receivers ceased. No
further word came, and Jack, after a brief interval, took off the
headpiece and laid it down beside him on the table. For an instant the
message, so utterly, wildly different from any they had expected, almost
deprived him of speech.
Now his faculties rushed back, but he did not speak. Instead, he
grounded the aerials by throwing the switch, and leaped to his feet with
such impulsiveness that the stool on which he had been sitting went
careering to the floor.
“Come on, Tom,” he cried, darting for the door.
As he ran he stuffed the message into the pocket of his linen jacket.
Tom shot out of the shack after him.
“You’d better lock——” he began.
“Send Jupe to do it,” was the backward flung rejoinder, as Jack sprinted
for the bungalow, “we’ve got to get grub on board and fill the water
tanks within fifteen minutes.”
“And then what?”
“To sea—at top speed! The best the _Vagrant_ can do will be none too
quick! They need us out there,” he flung his arm seaward in an embracing
gesture, “need us mighty bad, and it’s up to us to make a record run to
the rescue.”