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CHAPTER V
THE WIRELESS BOY’S FIRST POSITION
The power of eight thousand horses was driving the big tanker Ajax through the Lower Bay, out past Sandy Hook, and on to the North Atlantic.
As the big black steel craft felt the lift and heave of the ocean swells, she wallowed clumsily and threw the spray high above her blunt bow. Very different looked this “workman” of the seas from the spick and span liner they passed, just after they had dropped the pilot.
Grim, business-like, and built for “the job,” the Ajax looked like a square-jawed bulldog beside the yacht-like grayhound of the ocean, whose whistled salute she returned with a toot of her own siren.
Like all craft of her type, the Ajax had hardly any freeboard. In the bow was a tall superstructure where the crew and the minor officers lived. Here, too, was the wheel-house and the navigating bridge. In the extreme stern was another superstructure, square in shape, whereas the bow-house was like a big cylinder pierced with port-holes.
From the stern upper-works projected the big black funnel with the red top, distinctive of the Titan liners, and in this stern structure, too, dwelt the captain, the superior officers and the first and second engineers.
From the stern superstructure and the chart-house to the crew’s quarters in the bow, there stretched a narrow bridge running the entire length of the craft. This was to enable the crews of the great floating tank to move about on her, for on board a tank steamship there are no decks when there is any kind of a sea running. The steel plates that form the top of the tank are submerged, and nothing of the hull is visible but the two towering structures at the bow and stern, the bridge connecting them, and the funnel and masts.
But for all her homely outlines the Ajax was a workman-like craft and fast for her build. In favorable weather she could make twelve knots and better, and her skipper, Captain Braceworth, and his crew were proud of the ship.
On the day of which we are speaking, however, there was one member of the ship’s company to whom the big tanker was as fine a craft as sailed the Seven Seas. This was a young lad dressed in a neat uniform of blue serge, who sat in a small, steel-walled cabin in the after superstructure. The lad was Jack Ready, sailing his first trip as an ocean wireless boy. As he listened to and caught signals out of the maze of messages with which the air was filled, his cheeks glowed and his eyes shone. He had attained the first step of his ambition. Some day, perhaps, he would be an operator on such a fine craft as the liner they had just passed and with which he had exchanged wireless greetings.
Jack had secured the berth of wireless man on the Ajax with even less difficulty than he had thought he would encounter. Mr. Jukes, although a busy, brusque man, was really glad to be able to do something for the lad who had done so much for him, and as soon as Jack had proved his ability to handle a key he got the job.
It had come about so quickly, that as he sat there before the newly installed instruments, – it will be recalled that the Ajax was making her first trip as a wireless ship, – the boy had to kick himself slyly under the operating table to make sure he was awake!
“I’m the luckiest boy in the world,” said the young operator to himself, as gazing from the open door of the cabin, he watched the coast slip by and the rollers begin to take on the true Atlantic swell.
His reverie was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Harvey, the first officer.
“Message from the captain to the owners,” he said briefly; “hustle it along.”
It was only a routine message, but Jack thrilled to the finger tips as he sent out the call for the station at Sea Gate, from whence the message would be transmitted to New York. It was the first bit of regular business he had handled in his chosen calling.
The air appeared to be filled with a perfect storm of messages coming and going. Newspapers were sending despatches of world-wide importance. Ships were reporting. Here and there an amateur, – Jack was out of this class now, and held them in proper contempt, – was “butting in” with some inquiry or message. And friends and relatives of persons outward or homeward bound across the ocean track added their burden to the mighty symphony of “wireless” that filled the ether.
But at last Jack raised the Sea Gate station, and in a second his first message from shipboard was crackling and spitting from the aerial. He sent crisply, and in a business-like way. The operator at Sea Gate could hardly have guessed that the message was coming from a lad who had but that day taken his place at an ocean wireless station.
When this message had been sent, Jack sat in for an answer. Before long, out of the maze of other calls, he picked his summons and crackled out his reply, adding O.K. G. – “Go ahead.” When he had finished taking the message, merely a formal acknowledgment of the captain’s farewell despatch, Jack grounded his instruments and went forward with the reply in search of the skipper.
He found the Ajax wallowing through a somewhat heavy sea. Looking down from the narrow bridge, he could see the decks with their covered winches, steam-pipes and man-holes only at times through a smother of green water and white foam that swept over them.
Jack clawed his way forward and found the captain with his first officer on the bridge. The wheel was in the hands of a rugged, grizzled quartermaster, who stood like a figure of stone, his eyes glued to the swinging compass card. Occasionally, however, he gave an almost imperceptible move to the spokes of the brass-inlaid wheel he grasped, and a mighty rumbling of machinery followed. For the Ajax, like practically every vessel of to-day, steered by steam-power, and a twist of the wrist was sufficient to move the mighty rudder that was distant almost a tenth of a mile from the wheel-house.
But the boy did not give much observation to all this. He was intent on his duty. Touching his cap, he held out the neatly written message, – of which he had kept a carbon copy on his file.
“Despatch, sir!” he said respectfully.
The captain took the message and read it, and then eyed the boy attentively.
Captain Braceworth was a big figure of a man, bronzed, bearded and Viking-like. He was also known as a strict disciplinarian. Jack had not spoken to him till that moment. He decided that he liked the skipper’s looks, in spite of an air of cold authority that dwelt in his steady eyes.
“So you’re our wireless man, eh?” asked the skipper.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Jukes – ”
“Humph! I know all about that. I understand this is your first voyage. Well, you have lots to learn. Do your duty and you’ll have no trouble with me. If not, you will find it very uncomfortable.”
He turned away and began talking to his first officer. Jack made his way back to his cabin with mingled feelings. The captain had spoken to him sharply, almost gruffly. He began to revise his opinion of the man.
“He is a martinet and no mistake,” thought the boy; “a bully too, I’ll bet. But pshaw, Jack Ready, what’s the use of kicking? You’ve got what you wanted; now go through with it. After all, if I do my duty, he can’t hurt me.”
But as he took his seat at his instruments again, Jack, somehow, didn’t feel quite so chipper as he had half an hour before. In his own estimation he had rated himself pretty highly as the wireless man of the Ajax.
“But I reckon I don’t count much more than one of the crew,” he muttered to himself as the memory of the captain’s brusque, authoritative manner rankled in his mind.
CHAPTER VI
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.
CHAPTER VII
IN THE TEETH OF THE STORM
An old German bos’un came by as Jack was picking himself up.
“Hullo! Almost man overboard, – vat?” he chuckled. “Don’d go overboard in dis vedder, Mister Vireless, aber vee nefer see you no more.”
“Did you ever see a storm as bad as this?” sputtered the dripping Jack.
“Dis not amount to much,” was the reply. “Vait till you cross in midt-vinter, den you see storms vos is storms.”
He hurried off on his work, while Jack, having recopied his messages, started forward again. This time he met with no mishaps.
On the reeling bridge he found Captain Braceworth. The captain was clinging to the railing, a shining, uncouth figure in dripping oil-skins. The clamor of wind and sea made speech almost impossible, but Jack touched the captain on the elbow to attract his attention.
In spite of his feeling, almost of aversion to the grim, strict captain, Jack felt a sensation of admiration for this stalwart, silent figure, guiding his wallowing ship through the storm as calmly as if he had been seated at a dinner table. One thing was certain, Captain Braceworth was no fair-weather sailor. Martinet though he might be, he was a man to meet a crisis calmly and with cool determination.
The captain took the messages silently and once more retired to the wheel-house to scan them. At the other end of the bridge the chief officer stood, an equally silent figure, looking out over the tempest-torn ocean. The captain was soon back on the bridge. He went over to the chief officer and Jack could see the two talking, or rather shouting.
He stood waiting respectfully for orders, crouching in the lee of the weather-cloth for protection against the screaming gale.
As soon as he saw that the captain had finished his conference with the officer, Jack came from the shelter and clawed his way to the skipper’s side.
Captain Braceworth placed his hands funnel-wise to his mouth and shouted into Jack’s ear:
“Try to get Cape Race or Siasconset, and tell the office in New York that we are in a bad gale and running under reduced speed. From the look of the glass it may last two days and delay our arrival at Antwerp.”
Jack saluted and was off like a flash, while the captain resumed his silent scrutiny of the racing billows. Five minutes later, the young wireless boy sat at his post, sending his message through the shouting, howling turmoil of wind and wave.
Experienced as he was at the key, it was, nevertheless, a novel sensation to be sitting, snug and warm in his cabin, flashing into storm-racked space, the calls for Siasconset or “the Cape.” Occasionally he groped with his key for another vessel, through which his message to the New York office might be “relayed.”
He knew that some of the big liners had a more powerful apparatus than he possessed, and if he did not succeed in raising a shore station, his message could be transmitted to one of the steamers and thence to the land.
The spark whined and crackled and flashed for fifteen minutes or more before there came, pattering on his ears through the “watch-case” receivers, a welcome reply.
It was from Cape Race. Jack delivered his message and had a short conversation with the operator. He had hardly finished, before, into his wireless sphere, other voices came calling through the storm. Back and forth through the witches’ dance of the winds, the questions, answers and bits of stray chat and deep sea gossip came flitting and crackling.
But Jack had scant time to listen to the voice-filled air. He soon shut off his key and prepared to go forward again, with the news that the message had been sent. In less than an hour some official at the office of the line in New York would be reading it, seated at his desk, while miles out on the Atlantic the ship that had sent it was tossing in the grip of the storm.
Jack thought of these things as he buttoned himself into his oil-skins, secured the flaps of his sou’wester under his chin and once more fought his way forward along that dancing, swaying bridge, below which the water swirled and swayed like myriads of storm-racked rapids.
The captain, grim as ever, was still on the bridge, but now Jack saw that both he and the officer who shared his vigil were eying the seas through the glasses. They appeared to be scanning the tumbling ranges of water-mountains in search of some object. What, Jack did not know. But their attention appeared to be fully engrossed as they handed the glasses from one to another, holding on to the rail with their free hands to keep their balance.
Presently the chief officer shook his head and shrugged his shoulders as if he had negatived some proposition of the captain’s.
The latter replaced the glasses in their box by the engine room telegraph, and Jack, deeming this a favorable opportunity, came forward with his report.
He had almost to scream it into the captain’s ear. But the great man heard and nodded gravely. Then he turned away and drew out the glasses once more and went back to scanning the heaving seas.
Jack, from the shelter of the wheel-house, within which an imperturbable quartermaster gripped the spokes of the wheel, followed the direction of the skipper’s gaze.
All at once, as the Ajax rose on the summit of a huge comber, he made out something that made his heart give a big jump.
It was a black patch that suddenly projected itself into view for an instant, and then rushed from sight as if it would never come up again.
CHAPTER VIII
SIGHTING THE WRECK
The captain wheeled suddenly. His eyes focused on Jack.
“Operator!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Have you had any calls from a ship in distress?”
“No, sir. I should have reported any message to you at once.”
“Of course. I’m not used to this wireless business, although it seems to be useful.”
“There – there’s a ship in distress yonder, sir?” Jack ventured to ask.
“Yes, they’re badly off.”
The captain tugged at his brown beard which glistened with spray.
“Call the third officer. He is in his cabin.”
Jack hastened aft and soon returned with Mr. Brown, the third officer of the Ajax, an alert, active little man. Jack ventured to linger on the bridge while they talked. His heart was filled with pity for whoever might be on board the storm-tossed derelict. He wanted to know what the captain proposed to do.
Fragments of speech were blown to the young operator’s ears as the three officers talked.
“Hopeless – Boat wouldn’t live a minute in this sea – she’ll go before eight bells – Yes, bound for Davy Jones’ locker, poor devils.”
Jack’s pulses beat fast as he heard. Could it be that the Ajax was to make no effort to rescue the crew of the wreck? His heart throbbed as if it would choke him. He felt suddenly angry, furiously angry with the three men on the bridge, who stood so calmly talking over the situation while, less than a mile away, there was a wrecked ship wallowing in the mighty seas without a chance for her life.
Had he dared, he would have stepped forward and volunteered to form part of a boat’s crew, no matter what the risk. His father’s seafaring blood ran in his veins, and he could recall hearing both Captain Amos Ready and his Uncle Toby recounting to each other, over their pipes, tales of sea-rescues.
“Uncle Toby is right,” thought the boy, with a white-hot flush of indignation; “seamanship is dead nowadays. The men who go to sea in these steel tanks are without hearts.”
They rose on the top of another mountainous wave and Jack had his first good view of the forlorn wreck. She was evidently a sailing vessel, although of what rig could not be made out, for her masts were gone. A more hopeless, melancholy sight than this storm-riven, sea-racked derelict could not be imagined. Her bowsprit still remained, and as she rose upward on a wave with the star pointed to the scurrying gray clouds, Jack’s excited fancy saw in it a mute appeal for aid.
And still the three officers stood talking, as the Ajax ploughed on. No attempt had been made to veer from her course.
“They’re going to leave her without trying to help her,” choked Jack, clenching his hands. “Oh! the cowards! the cowards!”
The boy made an impulsive step forward. In his excitement he was reckless of what he did. But, luckily, he came to his senses in time. Checking himself, he gloweringly watched the captain step to the wheel-house. As he did so, the commanding officer beckoned to Jack.
“I suppose he’s going to haul me over the coals for standing about here,” muttered the boy to himself; and then, impulsively, “but I don’t care. I’ll tell him what I think of him if he does!”
With defiance in his heart, Jack, nevertheless, hastened forward to obey Captain Braceworth’s motioned order.
Within the wheel-house the hub-bub of the storm was shut out. It was possible to speak without shouting. The captain’s face bore a puzzled frown as if he were thinking over some difficult problem. As Jack entered the wheel-house, he swung round on the boy:
“Oh, Ready! Stand by there a moment. I may have an order to give you.”
He stepped over to the speaking tube and hailed the engine-room.
“He’s going to give some order about saving that ship,” said the boy to himself.
But no. Captain Braceworth’s orders appeared to have nothing to do with any such plan. Jack felt his indignation surging up again as the commander, in a steady, measured voice, gave a lot of orders which, so far as Jack could hear, had to deal with pipes, pumps and something about the cargo. At all events, the boy caught the word “oil.”
“Well, if that isn’t the limit for hard-heartedness!” thought the lad to himself as he heard the calm, even tones. “What have a lot of monkey-wrench sailors like those fellows in the engineers’ department to do with saving lives, I’d like to know! If this was my dad’s ship, I’ll bet that he’d have a boat on the way to that wreck now.”
He gazed out of a port-hole. The wreck was still visible as the Ajax rode the high seas. From one of the stumps of the broken masts fluttered some sort of a signal. Jack fancied it might be the ensign reversed, a universal sign of distress on the high seas. But what ensign it was, he could not, of course, make out.
It seemed to him, too, that he could distinguish some figures on the decks, but of this he could not be certain.
“They may all be dead while this cowardly skipper is chatting with the engine-room,” he thought angrily.
“Ready!”
“Yes, sir.” It was with difficulty that Jack spoke even respectfully. He felt desperate, disgusted with all on board the “tanker.”
“I want you to stand by your wireless. Try to pick up some other steamer. Tell them there is a ship in distress out there. Wait a minute, – here’s the latitude and longitude. Send that, if you chance to pick anybody up.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fairly bursting with anger, Jack hurried off. He did not dare to let the captain see his face. He was naturally a frank, honest youth and his emotions showed plainly on his countenance when his feelings were strong.
So, after all, this miserable skipper was going to run off and desert that poor battered wreck! He was going to leave the work for somebody else, for some other ship, for some captain braver than himself to undertake.
As he was entering his wireless room, he encountered Raynor.
“What’s up? You look as black as a thunderstorm,” said the young engineer.
“No wonder,” burst out Jack, his indignation overflowing; “we’re deserting a wreck off yonder. The old man’s lost his nerve, that’s what. I’d volunteer in a moment. He ought to have launched a boat an hour ago.”
“Hold on, hold on,” said Raynor, laying a hand on the excited lad’s shoulder; “we couldn’t do anything in this sea, anyhow. The old man’s all right. – Ah! Look! What did I tell you!”
From the signal halliards above the bridge deck, a signal had just been broken out. The bits of bunting flared out brightly against the leaden sky.
“We will stand by you,” was the message young Raynor, who knew something of the International Code, spelled out.
