Kitabı oku: «The Ocean Wireless Boys on the Atlantic», sayfa 10
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE MATE’S YARN
Mr. Brown was soliloquizing.
“Nothing so bad as fire at sea,” said he. “Take any typical case. The old man thinks he can fight it down and so do most of his crew. And so they let it run on till it’s too late, and then it’s all off.
“I was on a coal ship once, Frisco to Hong-kong. Fire started in the bunkers in mid-Pacific. We passed two or three ships while it was still smoldering and you could smell the coal gas a mile away.
“Think the old man would call for help? Not much. If he did, his owners would have jumped him for costing them salvage money! That’s another reason so many ships sink and are burned,” he added in parenthesis.
“Well, sir, that old fire went from bad to worse. The crew had to berth aft and the decks, – she was a steel ship, – began to get so hot that you had to walk pussy-footed on ’em. But still the old man wouldn’t quit.
“‘If we only get a wind,’ he says, ‘I’ll bring her into port even if she busts up when we tie to the dock.’
“‘If you get a wind,’ says I, ‘you won’t have to wait fer that. She’ll go skyrocketing without any by your leave or thank you.’
“‘Pshaw, Brown, you’re nervous!’ says he.
“‘Of course I am,’ says I; ‘who wouldn’t be, going to sea with a bloomin’ stove full of red-hot coals under their boots, instead of a good wholesome ship? Keel-haul me if ever I sail again with coal,’ says I.
“Things goes along this way for about two weeks, and then comes the grand bust-up. We couldn’t eat, we couldn’t sleep, we could hardly breathe.
“‘Get out the boats,’ says the old man at last, as if he’d made up his mind that it was really time to get away.
“Well, sir, to see the way those bullies jumped for the boats you’d have thought there was pocket money in every one of ’em, or a prize put up by the old man to see who’d be overboard first.
“We got away, all right, the skipper last, of course. But he had to go below to save his pet parrot. He’d just about reached the deck, when – confusion! – up she goes.
“The whole blows up sky high and the skipper with it. One of the men said he had stopped to light his pipe, and the flame of the match touched off all that gas. But I dunno just how that might be. Anyhow, for quite a while we could see that old skipper sailing up to heaven, – ’twas the only way he’d ever get there, I heard one of the men say. Then down he comes, kerplunk!
“It was a hard job for us in the boat to reckernize him. You see, he’d had a fine, full beard when he went up, but he come down clean shaved! And the parrot, – well, sir, that parrot looked like a ship without a rudder. Its gum-gasted tail had followed the skipper’s whiskers into oblivion, – as Shakespeare says. Well, we got him into the boat, and two days after we were picked up, but neither the skipper nor the parrot were ever the same man or the same bird again.”
At the conclusion of this touching narrative, Jack saw fit to put a question.
“By the way, what was the name of that ship, Mr. Brown?” he asked mischievously.
“The name?” asked Mr. Brown, with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Yes, I’d like to look that craft up.”
“Well, sir, I’ll not deceive you,” said Mr. Brown. “Her name was the Whatawhopper. It’s an Injun name, they tell me, but gracious, I don’t know anything about those matters! We had on board, besides the coal, a cargo of beans, – took ’em on at Boston, – but they got wet and swelled and we thought – ”
But this was too much even for Jack.
“Mr. Brown, you’ve missed your vocation,” he said.
“How’s that?” inquired the mate with a serious face.
“You should have been a novelist,” laughed Jack. “With your imagination, you’d have made a fortune.”
“Well, I’ll never make one at sea, that’s one sure thing,” said Mr. Brown, with a conviction born of experience.
The crew managed the boat silently. They were cheered by Mr. Brown’s extensive vocabulary and picturesque speech, and stuck to their duties like real seamen.
As time passed, however, and there was not a sign of boats on the sea, and the sparkling water danced emptily under the burning sun, some of the crew become restive.
“Aw, you cawn’t moike me believe there’s a bloomin’ thing in this bally wireless,” muttered a British sailor. “It’s awl a bloomin’ bit of spoof, that’s what it is, moites. We moight as well go a choising the ghost of Admiral Nelson as be chivvying arter this old crawft.”
His attitude toward wireless was typical of that of most sailors, and it may be added – some landsmen!
Their intelligence appears to balk at grasping the idea of an electric wave being volleyed through space, although they accept hearing and eyesight, – dependent, both of them, on sound and sight waves, – as an everyday fact.
Jack felt like giving a little lecture on wireless right then and there. It nettled him to think that the wonderful invention which has done so much to render sea-travel safe, accounts of which appear in the columns of the newspapers every day, should be belittled by the very men who owed so much to it.
“But what’s the use,” thought he. “It would only be wasted breath. But if everyone could know it as I do, the world would be full of wireless enthusiasts; and then what a job we’d have picking up messages!”
But as they sailed on and no sign of any boats appeared, even Jack’s faith began to waver.
Could the message have been a hoax?
Such things, incredible as they may seem, have been known. The sailors began to look at him derisively.
“I guess that kid dreamed that stuff about the bird cage aloft,” muttered one. “It stands to reason there ain’t no way of sending messages without wires. You might as well try to eat food without a thing on yer plate!”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
IN SIGHT OF SMOKE
“I suppose I ought to take that view of the situation, too,” said Mr. Brown to Jack, “but somehow I don’t want to give this thing up yet.”
“But surely we should have seen some trace of the ship by this time,” objected Jack, who was beginning to get a little skeptical himself.
The blue line of the horizon was without a speck to mar its empty spaciousness.
Mr. Brown had recourse to the glasses, which he had used frequently since they had set out. But the powerful binoculars failed to disclose any object the naked eye might not have discovered.
“If there really has been a fire on that yacht and the boats are drifting about, it may prove an even more serious matter than we imagine,” said the officer at length.
“You mean they may be lost?” asked Jack.
“Just that,” was the reply. “If the boats should drift beyond the regular established routes and steamer lanes, it might be weeks and even months before they are found.”
“Then the ocean beyond the regular routes is empty of life?” asked Jack.
“I wouldn’t say that exactly, but the Atlantic is covered with regular sailing routes just as a country is mapped out with railroads. The master of a ship usually makes no deviation from those routes; although, of course, in the case of some ships, they are sometimes compelled to.”
They sailed on for some little time further and the officer was on the point of giving up the search, when he once more resorted to the binoculars.
He stood up and swept the sky line earnestly for some sign of what they sought.
“There’s nothing visible,” he was beginning, when suddenly he broke off and uttered a sharp exclamation:
“Jove! There’s something on the horizon. Looks like a tiny smudge on a white wall, but it may be a steamer’s smoke!”
“If it is, it may be some other ship that has come to their rescue,” suggested Jack.
Mr. Brown gave orders to the men to give way with increased power. The breeze had dropped and the use of the oars was once more necessary.
“Should it be a steamer’s smoke, she may have rescued them,” observed the officer; “if not, it may be the burning craft still floating.”
“Lay into it, bullies,” he added a moment later. “Let her have it! That’s the stuff!”
Jack’s excitement ran high. Putting aside the adventurous nature of their errand, the owner of the Titan Line from whom he had parted under such unpleasant circumstances in the Greenwich Hospital, was aboard, and his friend, – for so he called him, despite their brief acquaintance, – Tom Jukes, might be there, too.
“My! Won’t they open their eyes when they see who it is has come to their rescue!” he thought to himself. “Come to think of it, I must have been as rattled as the operator of the Halcyon or I’d have given the name of the ship.”
The smudge of smoke grew as they rowed and sailed toward it, till, from a mere discoloration of the blue horizon, it grew to be a flaring pillar of smoke.
“No ship ever burned coal at that rate,” decided Mr. Brown. “Yonder’s the blaze, men, and the old hooker is still on top, although it surprises me that she hasn’t gone down long ago.”
While they all gazed, suspending their rowing for a moment in the fascination of the spectacle, Jack uttered a shout:
“Look!” he cried, “look!”
Something appeared to heave upward from the surface of the sea. The smoke spread out as if it had suddenly been converted into an immense fan of vapor, and the air was filled with black fragments.
Then the smoke slowly drifted away and the ocean was empty once more.
“Well, that’s good-night for her,” said Mr. Brown. “Ready, that operator certainly had a right to have a case of rattles.”
Jack did not answer. He was thinking of the wonder of the wireless, and how by its agency the news of the disaster that had overtaken the Halcyon had been flashed to the rescue party.
“She just blew up with one big puff and melted away,” he said presently.
“Yes, I’ll bet there isn’t a stick or timber of her left,” said Mr. Brown.
“Was she a fine boat?”
“A beauty.”
“Ever see her?”
“Yes, once in New York harbor. The old man was coming back from a cruise to the Azores. That’s a favorite stamping ground of his, by the way. There’s nothing cheap about J. J. when he comes to gratifying his own whimsies, and the Halcyon was one of them. Mahogany, velvet, mirrors, and I don’t know what all, – but never mind that now. We ought to be sighting some of the boats.”
The men rowed like furies now. Even the most skeptical had become convinced that, after all, there was something in wireless.
It was almost sunset when Mr. Brown tapped Jack’s shoulder after he had taken a long look through the binoculars.
“There’s something in sight off there,” said he; “take a look, if you like.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
ADRIFT ON A LIFE RAFT
“I can’t quite make it out,” said Jack, as he returned the glasses. “Is it a boat?”
“Looks like it. I’m sure I saw men on board it.”
“Let’s take another look.”
Jack picked up the binoculars once more and gazed through them long and earnestly.
“It looks like a white dot,” he said, “and – yes, there are men on it! They’ve seen us! They’re waving!”
“Give me the glasses, boy,” said Mr. Brown, trying hard to repress his excitement.
The little officer stood up and focused the powerful binoculars on the object that had aroused their attention.
“It’s not a boat,” he pronounced at length.
“Not a boat? Then what is it?” asked Jack, puzzled.
“It’s a life raft, one of those patent affairs. I can see men paddling it with bits of wood. S’pose they had no time to get oars.”
The crew bent to their work with renewed fervor. They knew that not far off from them there must be suffering and misery in its keenest form.
Mr. Brown did not need to urge them now, although he kept hopping about and shouting his favorite:
“Give it to her, my bullies!”
As they approached the raft, they could see that it was crowded almost to the water line with a wretched, forlorn-looking assemblage of humanity.
It was clear that the yacht must have been left in the most desperate haste.
The clothes of the castaways were burned and their faces blistered and smudged. They must have fought the fire desperately till the last moment, when they found further effort useless.
“Ahoy, there!” shouted Mr. Brown cheerfully. “Don’t worry; we’ll soon get you!”
“We can wait a while longer,” came back a cheery voice.
It proceeded from a stout, good-natured looking man whose clothes were perhaps a trifle more disreputable than any of the others.
“I’m Wireless Willie,” he cheerfully explained, as he climbed on board. “This is a fine note, isn’t it? I’ve lost everything and came pretty near losing my mind. Do you blame me? She caught fire forward, and – Pouf! – up she went like kindling wood.”
The others clambered on board, one after another, and last came two seamen, who dragged a ragged, limp, smoke-blackened form from the raft and handed it to the mate in the boat.
For a moment Jack had a shock. He thought the man was dead. But a groan convinced him otherwise. At last all were on board.
“Now, bullies,” said Mr. Brown, addressing his crew, “it’s a long, hard pull back to the ship, but think of what you’re going to get when J. J. comes to!”
“Is Mr. Jukes on board?” asked Jack. “I thought maybe he was in another boat and cast adrift.”
“What, you didn’t know him?” demanded the mate, in genuine astonishment.
“No, I – ”
“Well, that’s J. J., right there.”
He indicated the unconscious form to which some of the sailors were trying to administer nourishment.
“Yes, this is the owner, all of a heap,” volunteered one of them. “His heart’s gone back on him, I reckon.”
“Looks that way,” assented Mr. Brown, glancing at the recumbent form.
“But where is Tom?” cried Jack, the thought of the son of the magnate coming suddenly to him.
“Hush,” said one of the sailors from the Halcyon, “don’t talk too loud. He might hear you.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jack, staring at the man.
“The boy went off in one of the boats. We lost them in the fog. The good Lord only knows where they are now.”
“Drive the old man crazy when he hears of it, I reckon,” put in another man, the mate of the yacht. “He thought the world and all of Tom, he did.”
“As if I didn’t know that,” thought Jack; and then aloud to Mr. Brown:
“There’s another boat adrift, sir. Aren’t we going to look for it?”
Mr. Brown shook his head and pointed to the western horizon. The sun, like a big copper ball, was sinking.
“It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “But cheer up, they’ll be picked up somehow. You can depend on that.”
“I only hope so,” said Jack sadly.
He looked around at the empty sea. It made him shiver to think that somewhere on that desolate expanse was a boat full of castaways looking in vain for succor.
CHAPTER XL
THE RESCUE OF MR. JUKES
“How did the fire happen?” asked Mr. Brown of the wireless man of the Halcyon as they rowed back to the ship, for the wind had now entirely dropped.
“Well, it all came about so blessed quickly that I doubt if anyone knows just what the start of it was,” came the reply. “The skipper thought he could fight it (Here Mr. Brown nodded knowingly to Jack as if to say, “I told you so”), and we battled with it for a long time. The fire affected my dynamos, I guess, for my current was miserably weak.”
“I noticed that, all right,” said Jack.
“But you caught it though. Lucky for us you did. Well, to continue. The old man, – Mr. Jukes, I mean, was furious. He wouldn’t hear of abandoning the ship.
“He wanted to fight the fire to the last moment. But he sent his son off in a boat. The fog had lifted a bit, and we thought it would be no job at all to pick them up. But then the smother shut down again, and when it lifted and we were forced to leave the ship, there wasn’t a sign of that boat high or low.”
The prostrate figure of Mr. Jukes, who had been sedulously attended by the sailors, stirred lightly and he gave a moan. Suddenly he sat bolt upright.
The sight of him gave Jack a shock. Was this bedraggled, pallid, soot-smeared scarecrow the once pompous and lordly head of the Titan Steamship Company’s activities?
Yes, it was Mr. Jukes, sure enough. He sat up and asked in a hoarse, husky voice:
“Where’s Tom?”
“He’s in the other boat, Mr. Jukes,” said one of the sailors soothingly. “He’s all right.”
“Yes, but where is the other boat? What boat is this?”
“By a strange coincidence, Mr. Jukes,” said Jack, “it is one of the boats from your tanker, the Ajax. Don’t you know me, Jack Ready? I picked up your wireless call for aid.”
“Oh yes, yes, I know you now,” said the magnate dully. “But my boy Tom, where is he? I want him.”
Some of the men were whispering.
“What’s that I hear?” said Mr. Jukes, turning quickly on them. “Tom adrift? Adrift in that boat? Look for him. Find him, I tell you. Oh, Tom, my boy! my boy! I didn’t mean to desert you!”
Jack patted him on the shoulder as he might have a companion in misfortune. Gone now was the lordly, magnificent air of the head of the steamship combine. Mr. Jukes was simply a sorrowing parent, crushed by his misfortunes.
But in a minute his old domineering manner came back.
“You are in my employ, every one of you!” he shouted. “Find my boy!”
Mr. Brown shook his head.
“It’s almost dark, sir, and you yourself are badly in need of attention.”
“What, you will abandon him?” shouted the magnate.
The unfortunate mate looked sorely puzzled.
“It would be useless to look for him now, sir,” he said. “To-morrow, perhaps, by daylight.”
“To-morrow,” groaned Mr. Jukes.
“Don’t worry, sir. He’ll turn up all right,” said Mr. Brown consolingly.
“Oh, if I could only think so!” burst out the man of millions. “But to think of my boy, my Tom, out on this desolate sea! Lost in an open boat! How shall I ever face his mother?”
“He’ll be all right, sir,” was all that the mate could repeat.
“If we don’t pick them up, some other ship will,” added Jack.
It was a hard lesson that Mr. Jukes was learning. He was finding out that money cannot buy everything. All his millions were as dross to him at that moment.
“How can I face my friends?” he muttered presently. “I am saved and Tom is gone! How can I explain to his mother? Oh, if it had only been me in his place!”
Then suddenly his rage turned on Jack.
“You boy! You, whom I tried to help! Why are you here and my boy gone? How is it you are safe and sound, and my son is lost?”
“I’m as sorry as I can be, Mr. Jukes,” said Jack. “If there was anything I could do, I’d do it gladly, and you know it.”
“Bah-h-h-h-h!” was the contemptuous reply.
But Jack kept his temper.
“I’d stay out here a week, sir,” he said, “if that would do any good.”
But the half-crazed man only snarled at him and sat silent, till the welcome sight of the Ajax’s rockets and flares showed them that they were nearing the ship.
CHAPTER XLI
A JOYOUS REUNION
The Ajax was almost ready to proceed when the boat joined her. The repairs had been made with even more success than the captain had dared to hope.
When, therefore, Mr. Jukes informed him tremulously that he was not to leave the vicinity till they found some trace of Tom Jukes, he did not receive the orders with the best grace in the world. But, of course, there was nothing for it but to obey.
Perhaps, too, the captain, who was a father himself, felt a sort of sympathy for Mr. Jukes, although he did not believe for an instant that Tom was in any danger.
Mr. Jukes passed a sorry night, and the next morning, haggard and gray, he was up and about early. He came up to where Jack was leaning against the rail.
“So it’s you, is it?” he said, in a softened tone. “I’m sorry I spoke as I did last night, but I was almost beside myself with grief. You cannot understand how this thing is preying on me.”
“I do understand, Mr. Jukes,” said Jack earnestly; “and as for being sorry about the way you spoke of me, I don’t blame you one bit.”
The strangely softened magnate sighed and his tired eyes swept the sea.
“We must not leave here till we get some news of Tom,” he said.
Then he fell to pacing the deck, while Jack went back to his wireless.
Suddenly he picked up a message.
“Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!” buzzed the instrument.
Jack sent a replying message and then came this:
“This is the Caronia. We were in communication with you yesterday. We’ve picked up a shipwrecked crew and – ”
“What!” volleyed back Jack’s key.
“What’s the matter, are you crazy? Don’t butt in when I’m giving you the news. Where are your manners?”
“Oh, stop that and get on!” sputtered Jack’s key.
“Well, you must have got out of bed the wrong side this morning!” came the reply. “I said that we had picked up a shipwrecked crew. They want to go aboard some vessel for New York, so I called you up. We’ll pass you pretty soon now.”
“Was there a boy among them?” asked Jack.
“Yes. Name, Tom Jukes, son of the old millionaire. Why?”
“Because his father is on this ship!”
“For the love of Mike!”
“Yes; have you got a clear wire?”
“All clear now.”
“Then send for Tom. Let him speak to his father. The old man is almost unbalanced over his loss.”
“Nothing easier than that.”
And so it came about that, ten minutes later, Tom’s greetings came to Jack through the air, while Mr. Jukes, with tear-filled eyes and a heart full of thankfulness, stood in the wireless room of the Ajax and dictated his answering messages.
He was a changed man from that instant, but he could hardly keep his patience till the Caronia came up and the transfer of the castaways was made. The drifting boat of the Halcyon had been picked up early that morning by the liner, after her crew had become hopelessly lost and bewildered.
What a meeting that was! And when the father and son had finished wringing each others’ hands, it was Jack’s turn. Tom Jukes declared that if it had not been for the wireless, he might at that very moment have been on the Caronia bound for Liverpool, and it might have been weeks before he and his father were reunited.
“I suppose we can go ahead now, sir?” said Captain Braceworth, poking his head into the wireless room where the joyous reunion had taken place.
“Yes, captain. And, by the way, I want the names of those men you sent to the rescue. There’s something handsome coming to them. As for this lad,” smiling at Jack, “he’s too proud to accept a gift.”
“I know one he wouldn’t mind,” said Tom roguishly.
“And what’s that?” asked his father, patting the lad’s hand.
“A better job on a bigger ship.”
Jack’s eyes danced. Mr. Jukes smiled.
“Well, we shall see what we shall see,” he said; “but, if I do anything like that, it will be on condition that you go along with him. He wouldn’t have anything to do with you on land. Perhaps he will on the ocean.”
“And I can learn wireless?” asked Tom.
“If Ready, here, will teach you. I’m convinced now that it is one of the seven modern wonders of the world. Look at what it has done for us! And I’m going to see that the lad who worked it isn’t neglected.”
Mr. Jukes was as good as his word. When the injured Ajax came into port ten days later, Jack’s reward came.
But what it was and how he carried out the additional responsibilities imposed upon him by his new work must be saved for the telling in the next volume of this series, which will be called: “The Ocean Wireless Boys and the Lost Liner.”
