LEARNING THE ROPES.
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, Jack figured on installing,
at the first opportunity, a bell connecting with the apparatus by means
of which he might be summoned from sleep if a message came during the
night. He had made several experiments along these lines at his station
on the old _Venus_, which now seemed so far away, and had met with fair
success. He believed that with the improved conditions he was dealing
with on the _Ajax_, he could make such a device practicable.
When he went on deck at daylight, he found that the storm, far from
abating, had increased in violence. The speed of the _Ajax_ had been cut
down till she could not have been making more than eight knots against
the teeth of the wind.
The white-crested combers towered like mountains all about her. Nothing
of the hull but the superstructures were visible, and the latter looked
as if they had gone adrift,—with no hull under them,—in a smother of
spume and green water. It was almost startling to look down from the
rail outside his cabin and see nothing but water all about, as if the
superstructure had been an island.
He went back to his instruments and picked up a few messages concerning
the weather. Two were from liners, and one from a small cargo steamer.
All reported heavy weather with mountainous seas.
“Not much news in that,” thought the boy, as he filed the messages and
prepared to go forward with his copies.
As he opened the cabin door, the man at the wheel must have let the ship
fall off her course. A mighty wave came rushing up astern and broke in a
torrent of green water over the gallery on which Jack stood. He was
picked up like a straw and thrown against a stanchion, with all the
breath knocked out of him.
Here he clung, bruised and strangling, till the wave passed.
“Seems to me that the life of an ocean wireless man is a good bit more
strenuous than I thought,” muttered the boy, picking himself up and
discovering that he must make fresh copies of the messages he had been
taking forward.
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