Project Gutenberg's The Ocean Wireless Boys on the Atlantic, by Wilbur Lawton

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Title: The Ocean Wireless Boys on the Atlantic

Author: Wilbur Lawton

Illustrator: Charles Wrenn

Release Date: May 14, 2015 [EBook #48955]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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Then, shoving the men aside, he dived from the edge of the dock.—Page 8.

Jack Ready was making his way home. He was a tall, well-set-up lad of sixteen, and when in a good mood was a wholesome, cheerful-looking youngster.

But now, as he trudged along the rough, deeply rutted road that skirted the crowded wharves and slips of the Erie Basin, his attitude toward life was anything but amiable.

“It just seems as if I get turned down everywhere,” he muttered to himself as he turned aside to avoid a big automobile truck that was rumbling away from a squat, ugly-looking tank steamer lying at a dock not far off. “Too young, they all say. If only I could get a chance at a wireless key, I’d show them, but—Oh! what’s the use! It’s me for a shore berth till I’m old enough to try again, I guess. Hullo, what’s the matter over there?”

His attention had been caught by a sudden stir on the dock alongside the home-looking “tank.” She was a type of oil carrier familiar to the boy, as many vessels of a similar sort docked in the Erie Basin, New York’s biggest laying-up place for freight ships. This particular craft was black and powerful looking, with two pole masts bristling with derricks, and a tall funnel right astern painted black, with a red top.

But it was not the appearance of the steamer that interested the boy. It was a sudden rush and stir on the wharf alongside that had arrested his steps.

He could see the men, who had been engaged in various tasks about the vessel, running about and shouting and pointing down at the water between the ship’s side and the pier.

Evidently something very out of the ordinary was occurring. Glad of any opportunity to divert his thoughts from his fruitless search for employment as a wireless operator, Jack ran toward the scene of the excitement.

As he came closer he could distinguish some of the shouts.

“Throw her a rope, somebody!”

“She’s still down there!”

“No, she isn’t!”

These and a dozen other agitated cries and contradictions were flying about from mouth to mouth, and on the faces of the speakers there were looks of the greatest agitation.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” demanded Jack, running to the edge of the dock where the crowd of ’longshoremen and deck hands and sailors were clustered.

“It’s Mrs. Jukes’ little girl. She—she’s fallen overboard!” cried a man.

“She’s down there in the water,” explained another one. “She was clinging to a pile a minute ago. We’re trying to get a rope to her.”

“What! There’s a child down there and nobody’s gone after her?” cried Jack indignantly.

As he spoke he stripped off his coat and removed his boots almost with one operation. Then, shoving the men aside, he dived from the edge of the dock into the strip of dark, dirty water that lay between the ship and the wharf.

Clinging frantically to one of the piles supporting the dock was a little girl with a wealth of fair hair and a pretty, flower-like face. Too terrified even to scream, she was holding to the rough woodwork with all her little strength, but the expression of her face showed plainly that the struggle could not last much longer. In fact, as Jack, with a few strong, swift strokes, reached her side her grip relaxed altogether, and she slipped back into the oil-streaked water just in time for his strong arms to seize and hold her.

It was all over so quickly that hardly a moment seemed to have elapsed from the instant that the lad sprang from the stringpiece of the dock to the time when the cheering crowd above beheld him clinging to the rough surface of the pile with one hand, while with the other he supported the child, who had fainted and lay white-faced and weak in his grasp.

“Throw me a rope, some of you,” cried the boy, and in a jiffy a stout rope, with a loop in it, came shaking down to him.

He gently placed the loop under the child’s arm-pits, and when this was done, and it was not accomplished without difficulty, he signaled to the onlookers above to hoist up the unconscious little form. They hauled with a will, and in almost as brief a time as it takes to tell it Marjorie Jukes, daughter of the owner of the Titan Line of tank steamers, was on the dock once more with a doctor, hastily summoned from another vessel, attending to her.

Jack’s turn at the rope came then, and by dint of scrambling on his part and stout pulling from a dozen brawny arms above he, too, was presently once more in safety. Just as he reached the dock, dripping wet from his immersion, he heard the doctor asking how the child had come to go overboard.

“Her dad, he’s Jacob Jukes, the big ship-owner, was ashore there in the warehouses with the captain, fixing up an invoice,” Jack heard one of the sailors explaining. “Little Miss here was playing on the dock, waiting till her dad came back.

“All at once, afore any of us knowed a thing, there she was overboard. We all lost our heads, I guess. Anyhow, if it hadn’t been for a lad that suddenly bobbed up from no place in particular she might have drown-ded.”

“Here’s her dad coming now!” cried another.

Someone had found the ship-owner, and, hatless and white-faced, he was racing down to the dock from the gloomy red brick pile of warehouses ashore.

“She’s all right, sir!” shouted one of the sailors. “See, she’s openin’ her eyes, sir!”

“Thank God!” breathed her father reverently. “I should never have left her. Get my automobile, somebody. I must rush her home at once.”

In a few minutes a big limousine came purring down the dock from the rear yard of the storehouses. In the meantime Mr. Jukes, a handsome, florid-faced man of about fifty years of age, with a somewhat overbearing manner, as perhaps became his importance and wealth, had been informed of Jack’s brave rescue while he stood with his little daughter bundled up tenderly in his arms, the water from her wet clothing streaming, unregarded by him, down his broadcloth coat.

“Where is he? Where is that boy?” he demanded. “I want to see him. I must reward him handsomely.”

But Jack had vanished.

“He must be found. Does nobody know his name?” asked Mr. Jukes as if he were issuing an order. “I want to see him at once. Who is he? Does he live hereabouts?”

But nobody appeared to know. As for Jack, being satisfied that the child was out of all danger, and having no desire to pose as a hero, he had slipped off home at the earliest opportunity, shivering slightly in his wet clothing, for it was late fall and a chilly wind swept about the crowded docks and ship-filled slips.

It was an odd home for which Jack was bound. Tucked away in a quiet corner of the bustling Basin was a sort of ocean graveyard. Here old ships that had outlived their usefulness lay in peace until they were sold to be broken up or to be converted into barges or to meet some such end. Tall-sparred clippers that had once proudly swept the seven seas, rusty old tramp steamers, looking like the wrecks of marine hoboes that they were, and venerable ferryboats, all rubbed sides in this salt water cemetery.

In the farthest part of this quiet corner of the Basin lay a derelict two-masted schooner of an entirely different type from the other craft. To begin with, she was much smaller, and then again, instead of displaying rusty iron sides, or gaping, bleached wooden ones, she was gayly painted, with red and green hull and bulwarks. Her deck-house astern was a veritable marine garden, and bright-colored blossoms of all kinds, even though the season was late, bloomed from numerous boxes placed on the roof and about the taffrail.

A plank connected this queer-looking craft with the shore, and a column of smoke ascending from a pipe stuck through the cabin roof, as well as the curtained windows and general look of neatness, showed that someone made a home on this retired wanderer of the seas. It bore the name “Venus” on either side of a dilapidated figurehead, doubtless intended to represent the goddess of love. The effigy’s one remaining eye sadly surveyed the deep-sea vagabonds about her.

If the above evidences that the old schooner was used as a habitation had been lacking, there still would have remained proof that Captain Toby Ready made his home there, for, nailed to one side of the flowering cabin-house, was a large sign. On it in sprawling characters of white on a black background was the following inscription:

Here it was that Jack had made his home since the death of his father, Captain Amos Ready, at sea some years before. His Uncle Toby was thus left his sole surviving relative, for his mother had died soon after Jack’s birth. So Jack had lived with his eccentric relative on the old schooner, bought by Captain Toby many years before as a Snug Harbor.

The boy had helped his uncle compound his liniments and medicines, which had a ready sale among the old-time ship captains. They had more faith in Uncle Toby’s remedies than in a whole shipload of doctors. Captain Toby had, in his day, commanded fast clippers and other sailing vessels. On long voyages he had amused himself by studying pharmacy till he believed himself the equal of the entire college of surgeons. At any rate, if his medicines did no good, at least they never did any harm, and Jack was kept busy delivering orders for Captain Toby’s compounds to various vessels.

With such a line of sea-going ancestry, it was natural that the boy should have a hankering for the sea. But, together with his love of a seafaring life, Jack had developed another passion, and this was for wireless telegraphy.

Slung between the two bare masts of the old schooner was the antennæ of a wireless apparatus, and down below, in his own sanctum in the schooner’s cabin, Jack had a set of instruments. It was a crude enough station, which is hardly to be wondered at, considering that the boy had constructed most of the apparatus himself.

But Jack had a natural leaning for this sort of work, and his home-made station gave satisfactory results, although he could not catch messages for more than fifty miles or so. This, however, had not prevented him from becoming an adept at the key, and his one great ambition was to get a berth on one of the liners as a wireless operator.

So far, however, he had met with nothing but rebuffs. Wireless men appeared to be as common as blackberries.

“Come back when you’re older. We can’t use kids,” the head of a big wireless concern had told him. And that was the substance of most of the replies to his applications for a job at the work he loved.

That day he had tramped on foot to Manhattan and made his weary round once more, with the same result. Footsore and thoroughly discouraged, he had trudged back over Brooklyn Bridge and across town to the region of the Basin, where the air bristled with masts and derricks, and queer, foreign, spicy smells issued from the doors of warehouses. He walked, for the excellent reason that he was young and strong, and every nickel saved meant a better chance to improve the equipment of his station on the old Venus.

He cheered up a bit as he came in sight of his floating home. He had grown to like his odd way of life, and he had a sincere affection for his eccentric old uncle. Determined not to let the old man see his disappointment, he struck up “Nancy Lee,” whistling it bravely as he crossed the rickety gangplank, walked over the scrupulously scrubbed deck and dived down the companionway into one of the strangest homes that any boy in all New York ever inhabited.

As Jack entered the cabin he was greeted by a succession of shrill shrieks and whoops.

“Ahoy, my hearty! Never say die! Don’t give up the ship! Kra-a-a-a!”

“That is good advice, Methusaleh,” laughed the boy, addressing himself to a disreputable-looking parrot that stood balancing itself on a perch in a cage that hung in one corner of this queer abode.

The ports which the cabin had originally boasted had been enlarged and formed into windows, through which the light streamed cheerfully. Red cotton curtains hung at these casements and gave a dash of color to the dark wooden walls of the place. In the center was a swinging table and some rickety chairs; at one end was a sea-stove, a relic of the schooner’s sea-going days, and at the opposite end of the cabin, at the stern portion of it, was a bulkhead and a door.

From beyond this door came the clinking of glasses and the sound of pounding. It was Captain Toby hard at work in his sanctum compounding his medicines. Jack turned into another door alongside the stove, on the other side of which there was a similar portal.

These doors led into the cabins respectively of Jack and his uncle. Jack’s cabin was a neat little combination workshop and sleeping place.

On a shelf opposite his bunk was his wireless set, with the wires leading down to it from the aerials above. Another shelf held his stock of books, mostly of a scientific character, dealing with his favorite pursuit. The rest of the space in the not very large cabin was occupied by a work bench, cluttered with tools and stray bits of apparatus.

Jack had no wish to worry his uncle with an account of the happenings of the afternoon, so, before seeking him, he slipped out of his wet clothes and donned the overalls in which he usually worked. There was another reason for this, too, for the suit in which he had dived to the rescue of little Marjorie Jukes was the only one he boasted.

Having hung up his garments carefully, so that they would dry as free from wrinkles as possible, Jack left the cabin and made for his uncle’s sanctum in the stern.

“Well, Jack, my hearty, what luck?” inquired the old man as the boy entered.

Jack shook his head.

“The same old story, Uncle Toby. What are you busy at?”

“An order for the ‘Golden Embrocation and Universal Remedy for Man and Beast’ for Cap’n Styles of the Sea Witch,” rejoined his uncle in his deep voice, hoarse from many years of shouting orders above gales and storms. “If you really want to go to sea, Jack, I’ll get you a berth with Cap’n Styles. The Sea Witch is a fine old Yankee ship; not one of your smoke-eating tea-kettles.”

“But she has no wireless?” questioned Jack, gazing about him at the compartment, which was stocked with the tools of the captain’s trade: herbs in bundles, bottles, pestles and mortars and so forth. A strong aromatic odor filled the air, and the captain hummed cheerily as he poured a yellow, evil-smelling liquid from a big retort into half a dozen bottles, destined to cure the ills of Captain Styles.

“Wireless! Of course not, my hearty. What does a fine sailing ship want with a wireless? Take my word for it, Jack, wireless is only a newfangled idee, and it won’t last. Give a sailor sea-room and a good ship and all that fol-de-rol is only in his way.”

“And yet I saw the news of another rescue at sea by means of the wireless when I was looking at a newspaper bulletin-board to-day,” rejoined the lad. “The crew of a burning tramp steamer was rescued by a liner that had been summoned to their aid by the apparatus. If it hadn’t been for wireless, that ship might have burned up with all hands, and no one ever have known her fate.”

His uncle grunted in the manner of one unconvinced.

“Well, I ain’t saying that wireless mayn’t be all right for one of them floating wash-boilers, but for Yankee sailors, good rigging and canvas and a stout, sweet hull is good enough to go to sea with.”

As he went on with his work, he began rumbling in a gruff, throaty bass:

“That’s the music, Jack,” said he. “I wish you’d go inter sails instead of steam, and follow the examples of your dad and your uncle, yes, and of your granddaddy, Noah Ready, afore ’em.”

Jack made no rejoinder, but set about straightening up the litter in the place. The contention between them was an old one, and always ended in the same way. His uncle knew many seafaring men of the old school who would gladly have given Jack a berth on their craft. But they were all in command of “wind-jammers,” and the boy’s heart was set on the wireless room of a liner, or at any rate a job on some wireless-equipped vessel.

Meantime the captain went on compounding and mixing and pouring, rumbling away at his old sea songs. He was an odd-looking character, as odd in his way as his chosen place of residence.

Years of service on the salt-water had tanned his wrinkled skin almost to a mahogany color. Under his chin was a fringe of white whiskers, and his round head—covered with a bristly white thatch—was set low between a pair of gigantic shoulders. He was dressed in a fantastic miscellany of water-side slops which flapped where they should have been tight, and wrinkled where they should have been loose. Add to this an expression of whimsical kindness, a wooden leg and a wide, rough scar,—the memento of a battle with savages in the South Seas,—and you have a portrait of Captain Toby Ready.

Presently the captain drew out a huge silver watch.

“Two bells. Time to stand by for supper, lad,” he said. “That stuff’ll have to go to Cap’n Styles to-morrow. There’s plenty of time; he don’t sail for goin’ on a week yet. Slip your cable, like a good lad, and set a course for the bakery. We’re short of bread.”

“And I’m short of the money to get it,” said Jack.

The captain thrust a hairy paw into his pocket and drew out an immense purse. He extracted a coin from it and handed it to the boy.

“An’ how much, lad, is a penny saved?” he inquired, peering at Jack from under his bushy white brows.

“A penny earned,” laughed Jack.

“Co’-rect,” chuckled the captain, grinning at Jack’s quick reply to the almost invariable formula, “an’ if Captain Toby Ready had thought o’ that when he was young, he wouldn’t be here on the craft Wenus making medicines fer sea-cap’ns with a tummy ache.

“I’ve got an apple pie in the oven, Jack,” said he, as the boy left the “drug-store,” as he and his uncle called it, “so cut along and hurry back.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” cried the boy, bounding up the cabin stairs with alacrity.

Apple pies were not common on board the Venus, nor was Jack too old to appreciate his uncle’s announcement.

When Jack returned, he was surprised to hear voices in the cabin. His uncle had a habit of talking to himself, but there was another voice mingling with the old sailor’s deep, rumbling tones.

Wondering greatly who the visitor could be, for somehow the voice sounded different from the bellowings of the old sea cronies who visited the Venus either on business or socially, Jack descended the cabin stairs.

The swinging lamp was lighted and shone down on his uncle and another man, seated on opposite sides of the table.

“By the great main boom, the lad never told me a word of it!” his uncle was saying. “Dived overboard an’ saved your little gal, eh? Well, sir, Jack’s a chip of the old block!”

The man who sat opposite the captain was a portly gentleman with a bald brow, gold-rimmed glasses and close-cropped gray mustache. He spoke with curt, sharp emphasis, as if his minutes were dollars.

“Lucky that a watchman saw and recognized the boy as he sneaked away,” this individual replied. “If it had not been for that, I might never have found him. But I must see him. Where is he?”

“Here he is, sir, to answer for himself,” said the captain, as he heard Jack’s step on the stair.

As the boy entered the cabin the ship-owner jumped to his feet. He crossed the place with a quick, rapid stride and grasped Jack’s free hand.

“I’m proud to shake hands with a youngster like you,” he said in his swift, incisive way, “yes, sir, proud. If it had not been for you, my daughter might have drowned with those dolts all standing round doing nothing. Jove——”

He mopped his forehead in an agitated way at the very thought of what might have happened.

“That’s all right, sir,” said Jack, “I’m glad I was there when I happened to be. When I knew the little girl was all right, I came away.”

The boy had recognized the shipping magnate from pictures of him that he had seen in the papers. Had he not come around another way from the bakery, he would have been prepared for this august visitor by the sight of his limousine, lying at the head of the dock.

“’Sarn it all, why didn’t you spin me the yarn?” sputtered the captain in an aggrieved tone.

“Oh! there really wasn’t much to tell,” said Jack. “The little girl was clinging to a pile and I went down and got her up. That’s all there was to it. If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would.”

“That is just the point,” roared Mr. Jukes, “somebody else wouldn’t.”

He drew out a check-book and signed his name to a check. He shoved this across the table to Jack, who was standing by his uncle.

“Fill that in for any amount you like, lad,” he said in his dictatorial way. “Make it a good, round sum. Jacob Jukes’ account can stand it.”

Jack colored and hesitated.

“Well, what’s the matter, boy?” sputtered the ship-owner, noting the boy’s hesitation. “That check won’t bite you. I know a whole lot of lads who’d have grabbed at it before it was out of my hand.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” rejoined Jack, “you’re very generous and—and all that. Maybe you’ll think me ungrateful, but I can’t take that check.”

“Wha—what! Can’t take my check! What’s the matter with the boy?”

“Hev you slipped the cable of your senses, Jack?” hoarsely exclaimed his uncle, in what was meant to be a whisper.

“I don’t want money for just doing a little thing like that,” said the boy stubbornly.

“You don’t mean it. Come, take that check at once. Don’t be a fool!” urged Mr. Jukes with a very red face. “Why can’t you do as I tell you!”

The magnate’s tone was almost angry. He was not used to having his commands disobeyed, and he was commanding Jack to take the check. But the boy resolutely shook his head.

“Why, confound it all, I can’t understand it. Make him take the check at once, captain.”

“Don’t see how I can, if he’s so sot and stubborn about it,” rejoined the captain. Then, turning to Jack, he made another appeal. “Why won’t you take it, Jack?” he growled. “Shiver my timbers, what ails you?”

“Nothing; but I can’t accept money from Mr. Jukes or anybody else, for doing what I did,” said the boy quietly.

Mr. Jukes, with a crimson face, gave up the battle. He reached across the table, took the check and slowly tore it into fragments.

“It is the first time in my experience that I ever encountered such a singular lad as this. Hang me if I don’t think there’s a screw loose somewhere. But after what you did for me this afternoon, never hesitate to call on me if you need anything at any time. Here’s my card.”

He rose, and with a comical mixture of astonishment and indignation on his face, regarded Jack somewhat as he might have looked at some strange freak in nature.

“Thank you, sir,” said the boy, taking the bit of pasteboard, “I didn’t mean to offend you; but—but, well, I couldn’t take that check, that’s all.”

“Well, well, we’ll say no more about it,” said the great man testily. “But remember, I’ll always stand your friend if I can.”

He started to leave the cabin, when he suddenly brought up “all standing,” as the captain would have said, with a sharp exclamation of pain.

“What is it, sir?” demanded that veteran with some concern. “Your figurehead looks like you had some sort of a pain.”

“It is nothing. Just a sharp twinge of my old trouble, rheumatism,” explained the great man. “The damp air of the Basin may have brought it on.”

“Anchor right where you are!” exclaimed the captain, and before Mr. Jukes could say another word, he had darted into the “drug-store” and was back with a bottle full of a villainous-looking black liquid.

“My rheumatiz’ and gout remedy,” he explained.

“Yes, but I am under medical treatment. I——”

“Keel-haul all your doctors. Throw their medicine overboard,” burst out the captain. “Try a few applications of Cap’n Ready’s Rheumatiz and Gout Specific. Cap’n Joe Trotter of the Flying Scud cured himself with two bottles. Take it! Try it! Rub it in twice a day, night and morning, and in a week you’ll be as spry as a boy, as taut and sound as a cable.”

“Well, well, I’ll try it,” said the magnate good-naturedly in reply to Captain Toby’s outburst of eloquence; “how much is it?”

“One dollar, guaranteed to work if used as directed, or your money back,” rattled on the captain, pocketing a bill which Mr. Jukes peeled off a roll that made Captain Toby open his eyes.

And so, burdened with a bottle of the “Rheumatiz and Gout Specific,” and with the memory of the first person he had ever met who was not willing to accept his bounty, the shipping magnate stepped ashore from the Venus.

“He’ll be dancing a hornpipe in a week,” prophesied Captain Toby; “the Specific has never failed.”

But if he could have seen Mr. Jukes carefully drop the bottle overboard as soon as he reached the shore end of the dock, his opinion of him would have fallen considerably. As it was, the old seaman was loud in his praise.

“Think of him, the skipper of a big corporation and all that, wisiting us on the Wenus!” he exclaimed. “Why, Jack, that’ll be something to tell about. The great Mr. Jukes! Maybe this’ll all lead to something! If the Specific works like it did on Cap’n Joe Trotter, he may make me his physician in ordinary.”

“Let’s hope it won’t work the same way on him that it did on Captain Zeb Holliday,” said Jack with a smile.

“Huh! That deck-swabbing lubber!” cried the captain, with intense scorn. “He drank it instead of rubbing it in, although the directions was wrote on the bottle plain as print. But, Jack, lad, why didn’t you take that check? Consarn it all——”

“It’s no good talking about it, uncle,” said the boy, cutting him short; “I couldn’t take it; that’s all there is to that.”

“Confound you for a young jackass! Douse my topsails, but I’m proud of you, lad!” roared the captain, bringing down a mighty hand on Jack’s shoulders. “And now let’s pipe all hands to supper.”

Two days later, Jack happened to pass the dock where the Titan liner lay. She was taking aboard her cargo from a pipe-line—crude, black oil destined for Antwerp. Because of the adventure in which he had participated alongside her, Jack felt an interest in the ugly, powerful tanker. As he was looking at her, he noticed some men busy at the tops of her squat steel masts.

All at once they began to haul something aloft. What it was, Jack recognized the next moment. It was the antennæ of a wireless plant. They were installing a station on the ship, which bore the name “Ajax” on her round, whaleback stern.

Jack’s heart gave a sudden leap. A great idea had come to him. Mr. Jukes owned the Titan Line. The ship-owner had said to him only two nights before: “Remember, I’ll always stand your friend if I can. Never hesitate to call on me if you need anything at any time.”

And right then Jack needed something mighty badly. He needed the job of wireless operator on board the Ajax.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Good for him!” cried Jack, surprised into what was almost a cheer. “But,” he added grudgingly, “he took long enough about it.”

“Suppose you go ahead and attend to your end of the job and let the skipper manage his,” rejoined Raynor, in a quiet voice; and Jack, with a very red pair of ears, set himself down to the key.

The young third engineer was off watch, so he took a seat on the edge of Jack’s bunk and watched the lad manipulating the key with deft, certain fingers.

Crack-ger-ack-ack-ack! Crack-ger-ack-ack-ack! whined the spark as the boy alternately depressed and released the sending key. Then he switched over to “listen in.”

But no answering sounds beat against his ears. The signal had, apparently, fallen still-born on the wings of the storm. This went on for some fifteen minutes and then Jack gave up for a time.

“Nothing in our field or else my waves are too weak,” he explained to young Raynor, who listened with interest.

“I don’t understand what your wireless gibberish means,” he laughed, “but if you’ll teach me, I’ll learn some day.”

“Sure you will,” said Jack cheerfully; “it’s as easy as rolling off a log.”

“Yes, when you know how,” rejoined Raynor.

They sat silently for a time, while Jack again tried to raise some other ship, but without success.

“Looks as if the ocean must be empty just about here,” he commented.

“Would you be bound to get in touch with another ship if there was one within range of your instrument?” asked young Raynor presently.

“Not necessarily. There might be a dozen things that would interfere.”

“The storm, for instance?”

“Not that cause any more than another. There’s a lot that is mysterious about the wireless waves. Even to-day, nobody knows all about them. Sometimes, for no apparent cause, they will work better than at other times.”

“On a fine day I suppose they work best.”

Jack shook his head.

“On the contrary, at night and on foggy days, the Hertzian waves are sometimes most powerful. All things being equal, though, they work better over the sea than the land.”

“What is the longest distance a message has ever been sent by wireless?” was young Raynor’s next question.

“The last one I heard of was seven thousand miles. At that distance a ship off the coast of Brazil heard a call from Caltano, Italy. Think of that! That message had traveled across Italy, over the Mediterranean, slap across the northwestern part of Africa, and then went whanging across the Atlantic to a spot south of the Equator!”

“Going some,” was young Raynor’s comment.

“But that isn’t the most wonderful part of it. If that message went seven thousand miles in one direction, it must have gone an equal distance in an opposite one. That would make it encircle almost half the world.”

“Curves and all?” asked Raynor.

“Curves and all,” smiled Jack.

“And how fast does this stuff—the electric waves, I mean—travel?” asked the young engineer.

“Well,” said Jack, “it is estimated that a message from this side of the Atlantic would reach the Irish coast in about one-nineteenth of a second.”

“Oh, get out! I’m not going to swallow that.”

“It is true, just the same,” said Jack. “I know it is hard to believe; lots of things about wireless are.”

“Well, I mean to learn all about it I can.”

“You’ll find it well worth your while.”

“I believe that it is the most fascinating thing I’ve ever tackled.”

“In the meantime, I wish I could raise a ship,” grumbled Jack, again sending out his call.

“If we were sinking or in urgent difficulties right now, would you stick on the job till we raised some rescue ship?”

“I hope so. I’d try to,” said Jack modestly. “The history of wireless shows that every operator who has been called upon to face the music has done so without a whimper.”

While he worked at the key and the spark sent out its crepitant bark, young Raynor peered out at the tumbling sea through the port of the wireless cabin.

“Hullo!” he exclaimed presently, “we’re swinging round.”

“I can feel it,” said Jack, as the Ajax, instead of breasting the seas, began to roll about in the trough of them.

The heavy steel hull rolled until it seemed that the funnel and the masts must be torn out by the roots. Both boys hung on for dear life. After a while the motion became easier.

“Good thing I’m not inclined to be sea-sick,” said Jack, “or this would finish me.”

He gave up his key for a while and groped his way to Raynor’s side. The Ajax was creeping along and was now not more than half a mile from the wreck. But the meaning of her maneuvers was not very apparent. Jack could not understand what Captain Braceworth meant to do. Even the inexperienced eye of the young operator told him that it would be suicide to launch a boat in those mountainous seas.

The two boys opened the door and went to the rail. The Ajax had beaten her way up to windward of the doomed wreck. Suddenly Jack gave a shout.

“Hurray! Bully for Captain Braceworth! I see his plan now!”

At intervals along the bridge we have mentioned as running between bow and stern superstructures, were tall standpipes connected with pumps in the engine-room. These were used in discharging the cargo at Antwerp.

The valves of these pipes had been opened while the boys were in the wireless room, and now, as the pumps were started, jets of thick, dark-colored oil spouted from them.

As the oil spread on the sea, the wind drove it down in a great band of filmy smoothness toward the tossing wreck. As the oil spread, the big combers ceased to break dangerously, and a shimmering, smooth skin of oil spread over them till they merely rolled beneath it.

It was like magic to see the way in which the oil calmed the troubled sea.

“Well, I’ve heard my father tell of skinning a sea with oil-bags,” said Jack, “but I never expected to see it done.”

“You’ll see stranger things than that if you stay long enough in this business,” said Raynor sententiously.

The Ajax slowly cruised around the floundering wreck under reduced speed, with oil spouting constantly from the standpipes. At last all about the hulk there was spread a sort of magic circle of smooth, oily water.

Jack looked on in an agony of impatience.

“Surely he’ll send a boat now,” he said to Raynor.

But the young engineer shook his head.

“Braceworth isn’t a skipper who holds with doing things in a hurry,” he said; “wait a while.”

“Surely it is smooth enough to launch a boat now,” pursued Jack.

“If the skipper thought so, he’d do it,” rejoined Raynor.

The call to dinner came without Jack having secured communication with any other ship. He could only account for this by the supposition that the atmospheric conditions were bad. The wireless was evidently suffering from an attack of “atmospherics,” as the professional operators call it.

Before going down to his meal, Jack went forward to report to the captain. He found the burly commander with a sandwich in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. He was having a snack on the bridge in the shelter of the weather-cloth.

Jack, despite himself, felt a quick flash of admiration for a man who could face such discomforts so dauntlessly for the sake of his duty.

The boy would have liked to ask some questions, but he did not have the courage. So he stood in silence while the skipper pondered a full minute.

“Don’t bother about it any more,” he said at length. “I think we will be able to do without help.”

Jack could contain himself no longer.

“Oh, sir, do you think we’ll be able to get those poor fellows off?”

The captain looked at him sharply.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Don’t pester me with foolish questions. It is eight bells. Be off to your dinner.”

Jack, abashed, red-faced and angry at what he felt was an undeserved snub, obeyed. At dinner he told Raynor all about it.

“Well, if you had been on the bridge all night, maybe you would feel none too amiable, either,” said his companion.

“On the bridge all night!” exclaimed Jack, who had no idea that while he was snug in his bunk the captain had been facing the storm.

“Of course. Captain Braceworth never leaves the bridge in bad weather, even if this is only a freighter and not a dandy passenger boat with pretty ladies and big swells on board,” retorted Raynor.

“I—I didn’t know that,” said Jack, rather shamefacedly. “If I had, I wouldn’t have spoken as I did.”

“I know that, youngster,” said Raynor. “And now let’s hurry through grub and get up on deck again and see what’s doing. I’ve a notion we’ll see something interesting before very long.”

When the lads returned on deck, they found that the Ajax had made another complete circle of the wreck, this time covering the first film of oil with a thicker one. They were much closer to the wreck now. Jack could count two figures in the bow and three astern.

But even as they looked, both boys gave a cry of horror. A huge wave had swept clear over the floundering hulk, and when it vanished one of the men in the stern had vanished, too.

“Oh! That’s terrible!” exclaimed Jack. “Why don’t we launch a boat?”

“No use sacrificing more lives,” said Raynor, with forced calmness, although he was white about the lips. “Braceworth knows what he’s doing, I reckon.”

“Yes, but to watch those poor fellows—it’s—it’s awful!”

Jack put his hands over his eyes to shut out, for an instant, the frantically waving arms of the men on the wreck. They were making desperate appeals. Plainly they could not understand why the liner kept circling them.

“Brace up, youngster,” said Raynor kindly. “I guess the skipper feels as bad about it as you do, but he won’t act till he can do so safely.”

The afternoon began to close in. The stormy twilight deepened into dusk and found the nerve-wracking waiting still going on. On the great gray seas the black steamer, with a wind-blown plume of smoke pouring from her salt-encrusted funnel, still solemnly circled the foundering hulk, while the storm clouds raced past overheard.

But the wind had dropped slightly and the coat of oil that now covered the waves prevented their breaking. The Ajax, already crawling up on the weather side of the wreck, appeared to reduce speed.

“There’s going to be something doing now,” prophesied Raynor.

On the bridge the captain had summoned Mr. Brown, the third officer.

“Brown,” he said, “I’m going to make a try to get those fellows off. That craft won’t last till daylight and we could never tackle the job in the dark.”

“Just what I think, sir,” rejoined the third mate.

“Very well; take one of the stern boats. Be very careful. If you hit the side, she’ll smash like an egg-shell and we could never pick you up in this. I’ll come in as close as I dare, to give you the lee water. Now be off with you and—good-luck.”

Mr. Brown hurried aft. He collected his boat crew as he went. The boat he selected was the one hung on patent davits above the wireless room. Young Raynor had been summoned to the engine-room and Jack stood there alone watching the preparations. The blood of his seafaring ancestors stirred in his veins. Mustering his courage he stepped forward.

“Mr. Brown, can I go, sir? I can row. Let me go, won’t you?”

The mate, angry at being disturbed, spun on his heel and glowered at the young wireless boy.

“What do you know about a boat?” he demanded. “You’re only a sea-going telegraph operator——”

At that instant the doughty little mate’s eye fell on a hulking big seaman who was hanging back. Plainly enough the man was afraid. He was muttering to himself as if he did not like the prospect of breasting those giant seas in the small boat.

The man was a Norwegian seaman, and Mr. Brown, who was an American, made a quick, angry spring for him as if to grip him bodily and compel him to go. Then he suddenly recollected Jack.

“Well, lad, since that hulking coward is afraid, I’ll give you a chance. Get in and look slippy. We’ve no time to lose.”

Jack shoved the big sailor aside while the fellow scowled and swore.

“Get forward, you!” roared little Mr. Brown. “I’ll attend to you when we get back. Now, youngster.”

But Jack was already in the boat. There was a shouted order and the falls began to creak in the quadrant davits. For an instant they hung between wind and water. Mr. Brown watched with the eye of a cat the proper moment to let go.

Suddenly the Ajax gave a roll far out to leeward. The boat dropped like a stone. The patent tackle set her free.

“Give way, men!” shouted the officer; and in the nick of time to avoid being shattered against the steel side of the tank by a big sea, the boat put forth on its errand of mercy.

Had the seas been breaking, the boat could not have lived a minute. The moment that she struck the water would have been her last.

But, thanks to Captain Braceworth’s up-to-date seamanship, the oil-skimmed swells, although high, were smooth, without dangerous spray and breakers.

The five seamen and the young wireless man who had volunteered at the last instant, tugged frantically at the big sweeps. Jack had been guilty of no exaggeration when he had said he could row. It had been his favorite amusement about the bay, and he was as strong as a young colt, anyhow.

In the stern at the steering oar stood Mr. Brown. His eyes were riveted on the wreck ahead.

As a monstrous green swell rushed under the boat he gave a shout:

“Lay into it, bullies! Pull for the girls, boys! That’s the stuff! Break your backs! All together now! We’ll pay Paddy Doyle for his boots!”

Mr. Brown, in his youth, had been before the mast on a whaler, and in moments of excitement he went back to the language of whalemen when out in the boats.

“H-e-a-v-e a-l-l!” he bellowed, with a strength of lung that appeared wonderful in such a diminutive man.

As the tanker’s boat was pulled by its stalwarts across the heaving seas, the men at the oars, by turning their heads, could see in what desperate straits were the handful of survivors.

“There’s a woman on board!” yelled Mr. Brown suddenly. “Pull for all you’re worth, my lads! It’s a little girl, by the Polar Star!”

As if this information had given them new strength, the men gave way with renewed energy. Jack, by twisting his head, could see, as the boat topped a wave, the sight that had excited Mr. Brown. Astern, lashed to the stump of the mizzen-mast, was the figure of a tall, spare, gray-haired man. His arms were clasped tightly around a young girl, whose hair was whipped out wildly by the wind.

Near by, another form was lashed to the wheel, while forward were two figures, apparently those of sailors. They also were tied, in this case to the windlass. This fact alone betrayed the desperate conditions through which the unfortunate craft had fought her way.

“She’s a down-easter, from Nova Scotia or Maine. Lumber, I guess,” opined Mr. Brown. “Good thing for them they had a lumber cargo, or she’d have been keeping company with Davy Jones by this time. Give way, men!”

But all Mr. Brown’s urgings to “hit it up” were unneeded. The crew of the boat were all Americans, and anyone who knows the merchant navy of to-day, knows that it is by a rare chance that such a thing happens. American ships are largely manned by foreigners; but aboard the Ajax,—Captain Braceworth was particular in this respect,—the majority of the crew were American. Consequently, they needed no driving to do their duty when lives were at stake.

Jack, tugging at his oar, felt the strength of ten men. His whole being thrilled to the glory of the adventure. This was real seaman’s work. This was no job for a monkey-wrench sailor, but a man’s task, requiring strength, grit and nerve.

But as they drew alongside the wreck, it was apparent that any attempt to get close enough to take off the crew must infallibly end in disaster.

Mr. Brown turned to his crew.

“Men, which of you can swim? I’m like a lame duck in the water or I’d do it myself.” (And nobody doubted that he would.) “We’ve got to get a line to that craft.”

Jack’s face flushed with excitement. He would prove worthy of his line of sea-going forbears.

“I can swim like a fish, sir! Let me try it!”

At the same time that he spoke, four other voices expressed their willingness to try. Mr. Brown looked at Jack.

“This is no job for a wireless kid to tackle,” he said grimly. “Dobson, you spoke next. I’ll send you. Get ready and make fast a line around your waist.”

But Dobson was already knotting a line about his middle. He stripped to his underwear, and, while Jack looked on with bitter disappointment in his face, the man tossed one end of the line to Mr. Brown and then, without a word, plunged overboard.

Jack watched him with a thrill of admiration, as with strong, confident strokes he cleft the sea. Then he looked in another direction. Off to the leeward was the Ajax, tossing on the seas for an instant and then vanishing till only the tops of her masts and a smudge of smoke were visible.

It was growing dusk. A wan, gray light filled the air. The next time the steamer rose on a swell, Jack saw that at her mast-head the riding lights had been switched on. They glowed like jewels in the monotonous sea-scape of lead and dull green.

Dobson reached the wreck. With clever generalship he had waited for a big sea, and then, as it rose high, he had ridden on it straight for the vessel. When the sea swept by, they saw him clinging to the main chains and after an instant begin clambering on board with the line trailing from his waist.

Those in the boat broke into a wild cheer. Jack’s voice rang out above the rest.

“There’s a real seaman,” he thought; “one of the kind my father and Uncle Toby were.”

As the hoarse shouts of the men in the boat rang over the waters, they saw the form of Dobson creeping aft along the wreckage. They watched through the thickening light as the shadowy figure toiled along. He gained the side of the old man and the little girl.

Taking the line from his waist, he made it fast to the latter’s body.

“Give way, men,” ordered Mr. Brown, and the boat was warily maneuvered under the stern of the wreck. It was dangerous, risky work, but while the small craft tossed almost under the derelict’s counter, the forms of the old man and the child were lowered into her. Although both were badly exhausted, there were stimulants in the boat, and Mr. Brown pronounced both to be safe and sound and not in any danger.

But the seaman who had made the rescues was, himself, in no condition after his long, hard swim to do any more. When the girl and the old man were safe in the boat, he, too, made a wild leap and boarded it. Immediately it was sheered off.

Jack’s heart gave a wild leap. There were still two men in the bow. What about them?

There was a second line in the boat and the young wireless man had already made it fast around his middle.

“It’s my turn now, Mr. Brown,” he urged. “Let me go now, won’t you, and get those two poor fellows in the bow?”

“Shut your mouth and sit still,” came hotly from Mr. Brown; and then a sudden exclamation, “Great guns! He’s as brave a young idiot as I ever saw!”

For Jack had taken the law into his own hands, leaped overboard into the boiling sea and was now swimming with bold, confident strokes toward the dim outlines of the derelict’s bow.

Jack leaped overboard into the boiling sea.—Page 94

Outlined dimly in the distant gloom was the hulk of the steamer. Her whistle was shrieking hoarsely, now sounding, as the mate guessed, a recall to the rescue boat before darkness closed in.

Jack was a strong, able swimmer, but never had he received such a breath-taking buffeting as fell to his lot in that wild commotion of waters. But with grim determination he fought his way to the ship’s side. Those in the boat saw him gain a foothold on the anchor chains and scramble upward; but they could not guess what a supreme effort of nerve and muscle those last few moments cost him.

As he gained the deck he was compelled, perforce, to cast himself gasping on his face, and so he lay for a space. Then, from the gloom, came a feeble call for help. It nerved him with fresh vim. Among the tangled wreckage he scrambled till he reached the place where the two men were lashed to the bitts.

Thanks to the oil-spread waters, the seas were no longer breaking over the wreck, but the two men who had lashed themselves there to avoid being swept over the side, were too feeble to sever their ties. Jack cut them loose and signaled to the boat. It was brought as close alongside as Mr. Brown dared, and one after the other the two seamen were hauled on board. Last of all came Jack. He secured the rope to his waist as it came snaking toward him from the boat like a lasso, and then jumped outward. As he sprang, he felt the hulk drop from under his feet in a wild yaw.

At the same instant the boy felt himself being drawn under water as if in the grasp of a giant hand that he was powerless to resist. Then his senses left him in a rocketing blaze of light and a roar like that of a hundred water-falls.

When he came to, he was lying on the bottom boards of the boat. From a bottle some stimulant was being administered to him. He sat up and stared about him wildly for a moment, and then saw that they were almost alongside the heaving hull of the tanker.

But of the wreck there was no sign.

“Went to Davy Jones like a plummet,” said Mr. Brown cheerfully, “and almost took you along with her, my lad. We had a fine job hauling you aboard, I can tell you.”

Now came the dangerous task of hauling up the boat of rescuers and survivors. But it was accomplished at last by dint of cool-headed work and seamanship. The two sailors were sent forward to get dry clothing and hot coffee, while the elderly man, who was Captain Ralph Dennis of the wrecked vessel, and his daughter Helen, were cared for in the officers’ quarters aft.

Feeling rather shaky and dripping like a water-rat, Jack hastened to make a change of clothing. By the time this was accomplished, the Ajax was once more on her course. Hardly had he drawn on dry socks before the old bos’n was at the door.

“The skipper wants to see you forward. I rather suspect there’s a storm brewing for you, younker,” was his greeting.

“I’ll be there right away,” said Jack, and having pulled on his boots, he hastened forward. As he went, his heart beat a little faster than usual. What fault had he committed now, he wondered. Jack was a modest youth, but he had suspected praise rather than censure for the part he had taken in the rescue.

The skipper was in the chart-house giving a few directions before he turned in, after an almost continuous twenty-four hours of duty.

He greeted Jack with a frown.

“Ready, who gave you orders to go away in that boat?” he demanded sternly.

“No one, sir, but I thought——”

“You had no business to think. This is not a man-of-war or a passenger boat, but if everyone on board did as they thought best, where would discipline be?”

Jack stood dumbly miserable. He had performed what he thought a meritorious act and this was his reward!

“I did the best I could to help when one of the men hung back, sir,” he said.

The captain’s face softened a bit, but his voice was still stern as he said:

“Mr. Brown was in charge of the boat. He should not have let you go. I blame him more than you. But remember another time that you must do nothing without orders so long as you sail under me. That is all,—and Ready.”

“Sir?”

“I understand you conducted yourself according to the best traditions of American seamanship. I was glad to hear that. Now get along with you and try to relay a message to our owners, telling them of the rescue. If there is another vessel within our range, inform me, as I wish to transfer the shipwrecked men if possible. The craft was bound from Portland, Maine, to the West Indies with lumber, and there is no sense in taking the rescued company all the way across the Atlantic.”

Jack saluted and hastened off on his task. He felt considerably lighter of heart when he left the chart-room than when he had entered it. There had been a gleam of real human sympathy in the captain’s eye. That man of iron actually had a heart after all, and Jack had read, under his gruff manner, a kindly interest in his welfare and esteem for his act in saving the two seamen.

“I’m glad I did disobey orders, anyway,” he said to himself; “if it did nothing else, it has shown the skipper to me in another light than that of a cruel task-master and slave-driver.”

That night Jack succeeded in relaying, through the Arizonian, of the Red B Line, a message to the ship’s owners, telling of what had been done. He also discovered that by noon of the next day they would pass on the Atlantic track,—which is as definitely marked as a well-beaten road,—the Trojan, of the Atlas Line of freighters. He made arrangements with the captain of that craft to transfer the castaways of the Ajax. This done, he informed the second officer, for the tired captain was taking a well-deserved rest, and then turned in himself.

Next morning the gale had blown itself out and the Ajax was pushing ahead at top speed to make up for lost time. Black smoke crowding out of her funnel showed that coal was not being spared in the furnace room. Everyone appeared to be in good spirits, and the late autumn sun shone down on a sparkling, dancing sea. It seemed impossible to believe that only twelve hours before that same ocean had claimed its toll of human lives and property.

Not long before eight bells, the look-out forward reported smoke on the horizon. Jack, who had been in communication with the craft all the morning, knew that the vapor must herald the approach of the Trojan. He sent word forward to the captain by a passing steward, and the castaways were told to prepare for a transfer to the other ship. Before the two crafts came alongside, Captain Dennis had made his way to Jack’s wireless room.

He looked forlorn and miserable, as well he might, for he had lost a fine ship in which he owned an interest.

“How is your daughter coming along?” asked Jack, deeming it best not to dwell on the stricken mariner’s misfortunes.

“Fairly well. We were two days in that gale. It’s a wonder any of us lived. But I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart. That was a fine bit of work, and I can’t begin to express my gratitude.”

“We were glad to have happened along in time,” said Jack; but at this moment the conversation was interrupted by the appearance of the captain’s daughter. Jack saw with surprise that the bedraggled, white-faced maiden of the day before had, by some magic peculiar to womankind, transformed herself into a remarkably pretty girl of about his own age. She thanked him in a gentle way for his part in the work of rescue, and Jack found himself stammering and blushing like a school-boy.

“The Trojan is almost up to us now,” he said, “and it will be time for us to say good-bye. But I—I wish I could hear some time how you get along after you get ashore.”

“We live in New York,” said the captain, coming out of a sad reverie, “or we did. We’ll have to find new quarters now. But this address will always find me.”

“And here is mine,” said Jack, writing hastily on a bit of message paper. The captain glanced at it and then started.

“Are you any relative of Captain Amos Ready?” he demanded eagerly.

“I’m his son,” said Jack. “I live with my Uncle Toby and——”

But Captain Dennis was wringing his hand as if he would shake it off.

“This is a great day for me, boy, even if my poor old ship does lie at the bottom of the Atlantic and Helen and I will have to start life all over again. Why, Captain Ready and I sailed together many a year, but I lost track of him and he of me. Where is he now?”

Jack sadly told him of his father’s death. Then there was only time for quick farewells and hand-shakings, for an officer came hurrying up to say that the boat was ready to transport the castaways to the Trojan. The two big freighters lay idly on the ocean, bowing and nodding at each other, while the transfer was made. Then the boat returned and was hauled up and the vessels began to move off in opposite directions.

Jack stood at the rail gazing after the Trojan. He waved frantically as the freighter got under way, and thought he caught a glimpse of a white handkerchief being wafted in return. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Raynor. There was an amused smile on the young engineer’s face.

“Pretty girl that, eh, Ready? Pity she couldn’t have made the trip with us.”

“Oh, you shut up!” exclaimed Jack, crimsoning and aiming a blow at his friend’s head.

Through varying winds and seas, the Ajax plowed steadily on her way, and in due course arrived at Antwerp and discharged her cargo. Of course, while in port, Jack was at liberty, and he spent his time roaming about the quaint old harbor and city.

Raynor joined him sometimes on these expeditions, but the young engineer was kept busy making minor repairs on the engines and directing the machinists. Since he was the junior member of the engine-room crew, this work fell to his lot.

On the voyage across, and in port, too, whenever it was possible, he had been steadily perfecting himself in the wireless craft till he was quite proficient at it for a beginner. Jack proved an apt teacher and the young engineer, himself unusually quick and intelligent, was a willing scholar.

So the days passed pleasantly among the foreign scenes of the town and harbor. All this time Jack had been noticing surprising vigilance concerning the firemen and the crew of the big tanker.

One evening while they were roaming about the town, making purchases of post-cards and other small articles, Jack asked Raynor about this.

“They’re on the look-out for the tobacco smuggling gang,” explained his friend.

“The tobacco smuggling gang? What is that?” asked Jack.

“Do you mean to say that you have never heard of them or of their activities?” asked Raynor.

Jack shook his head.

“Not till this minute, anyway,” he said.

“Well, then, you must know that most of the Sumatra tobacco used for cigars and so on comes to this port, and it can be bought here very cheaply. In New York there is a well-organized gang, as is known to every seaman, that makes a practice of buying all that can be smuggled into the country by the crews and firemen of ships trading out of this port. Their activities have been reported in the papers many times, and all sorts of means have been employed to check them, but somehow the trade still seems to go on. So now you know why we keep such a careful look-out while in this port.”

Jack was satisfied with the explanation and thought no more of the matter, but a time was to come, and that before very long, when it was to be brought vividly before him again.

Jack liked Antwerp, with its fine buildings and picture galleries. But he found that along the docks were all manner of tough resorts where the worst class of sailors spent their time while in port.

He was passing one of these places one day when a man, whom he recognized as one of the engineers of the Ajax, approached him.

“Hullo, youngster,” he said, “come inside and have something. I want to talk to you.”

Jack shook his head.

“I don’t go into places of that sort and I don’t smoke or drink.”

The man looked at him and then burst into a roar of laughter. “You’ll not get very far at sea then,” he said.

“That’s just where I differ with you,” said Jack, and was passing on when the man seized his arm.

“Well, forget it,” he said. “See here, you’re a pretty smart sort of lad and I can put you in the way of making some money.”

“What sort of money?” asked Jack.

“Well, about the hardest part of your job will be to keep your mouth shut.”

“You mean that there is something dishonest involved?” inquired the boy.

“That all depends on what you call dishonest. Some folks are pretty finicky. This something doesn’t come within the law exactly, but there’s good money in it.”

“I don’t want any of it,” said Jack, and moved off.

The man called after him.

“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it, but just forget anything I said.”

Jack did not reply, but hurried on. He was bound for the Boulevard des Arts, one of the most beautiful thoroughfares in Europe. As he walked along, he wondered what the man who had intercepted him could have been driving at. He finally gave it up as too tough a problem. But later on he was to recollect the conversation vividly.

Jack’s pay was not very large, nor was that of his chum, Raynor, but the two planned a trip one day on one of the canals. They boarded an odd-looking boat and for a very small sum they voyaged across the frontier into Holland with its quaintly dressed peasants, low, flat fields and general air of neatness.

It was drowsy work gliding along the canal at a rate of not more than six knots an hour. Jack declared that he would have gone to sleep for the voyage, had it not been for the captain of the canal craft, who was a most willing performer with his whistle, and tooted at everything and everybody he saw.

From time to time they slowed up at a dock and the passenger, if a man, jumped off without the boat stopping. When a woman traveler wished to alight, the boat was brought to a standstill.

“Look over there!” called Raynor suddenly, as they passed a pretty cottage on the canal banks.

There, on the roof, was a stork family, father, mother and two young ones.

“Well, we sure are abroad,” declared Jack, gazing with pleasure at the pretty picture.

“Low bridge,” or its equivalent in Dutch, was frequently called, and then all hands ducked their heads till the bridge was passed. Clouds began to gather, and one of the sudden rain storms which sweep over Holland descended in a pelting downpour. The passengers were driven to the cabin, which they shared with a cargo of cheese, traveling in state. But the storm soon passed over and the sun shone out brightly once more.

Windmills were in sight everywhere, their great sails turning slowly. In some places the roofs of the farm houses were on a level with the banks of the canal.

Occasionally a broad-beamed canal craft, with a patched brown sail, drifted lazily by, with a leisurely Dutchman standing at the stern placidly smoking a big China-bowled pipe, his family, perhaps, or at least a dog, voyaging with him.

“Nobody seems to be in a hurry over here,” said Raynor.

“No, it’s like that country where it is always afternoon, that we used to read about in school,” said Jack.

“Hullo,” he added suddenly, “what’s coming off now?”

The little vessel was making for a sort of garden with tables set about in it.

“Going to stop for dinner, I guess,” suggested Raynor.

This proved to be the case. A true Hollander cannot go long without eating, and the amount of food the voyagers consumed astonished the boys.

“They’ll sink the ship when they get back on board,” prophesied Jack, looking about him with apprehension.

The boys did not see Antwerp again till late, as the returning boat was delayed. They found everything closed up, although it was only eleven, and the streets deserted. Antwerp believes in going to bed early, and the hotels are all locked by midnight. But that didn’t trouble the boys, for they had their floating hotel in which to stay and which they reached without incident.

The boys found Antwerp a straggly town full of fine buildings and galleries, but almost like a maze without a plan. Jutting right off even the finest thoroughfares were slums, and they were advised to follow the tram lines and keep off the more squalid of the streets.

Jack, who was quite a student, struck up a friendship with a bookish old man whom the boys met while exploring the great Cathedral. From this mentor, who, fortunately, could speak English,—French being the tongue most heard in the capital of Belgium,—the boys learned much of the history of the town.

Of course, as they already knew, he told them that Antwerp was the sea-port of the Schelde estuary, and one of the youngest of the Belgian great cities.

The name originally meant “At the Wharf,” their old friend told them, and even in antiquity there was a small sea-port here, of which no traces, however, remain. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as Europe quieted down, the city began to rise in importance. The large, deep, open port floated the keels of vessels from all over Europe. Under Charles the Fifth, Antwerp was probably even more prosperous and wealthy than Venice, Queen of medieval sea-ports. The center of traffic was shifting from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. In 1568 more than a hundred craft arrived at, and sailed from, Antwerp daily.

It is to this period, so the old gentleman told the boys, that Antwerp owes the cathedrals and other fine buildings, containing pictures and objects of art, which still adorn it.

But the Cathedral itself is a mixture of different periods. Begun in the middle of the fourteenth century, various parts were added till the seventeenth.

The finest examples of the art of the two great painters, Quentin Matsys and Rubens, are to be found in Antwerp. The works of many other painters of minor importance, too, adorn the galleries and churches of the city in great numbers.

The decline of Antwerp, if it can be so called, began in 1576, during the attempt of the southern provinces of Flanders to throw off the yoke of Spain. In that year a thousand fine buildings were burned, the town hall razed and eight thousand persons massacred by fire and sword. In 1585 the famous Duke of Parma completed the destruction, and Antwerp seemed to be completely crushed.

Then came the unhappy separation between Holland and Belgium. The Dutch erected forts on their own territory at the mouth of the Schelde and refused to allow ships to proceed up the estuary. Finally, in 1648, it was agreed by a treaty that all ships should unload their goods for Antwerp at a Dutch port, the freight being then transshipped to the Belgian city by small river craft.

Naturally, this action proved a severe blow to Antwerp. Rotterdam and Amsterdam took her place as commercial cities. In 1794, however, the French, then in occupation, reopened navigation on the Schelde and destroyed the commerce-killing forts at the mouth of the river.

The great Napoleon caused new quays and a harbor to be constructed, and it began to look as though Antwerp were once more to enjoy some of her pristine importance. But after Napoleon’s overthrow, the city underwent another change in her fortunes. She was made over to Holland and thus became, by a twist of fate, a Dutch sea-port.

Even when Antwerp became independent again in 1830, the Dutch still maintained their heavy tolls on shipping. This was a constant drain on the city which had already suffered much during the War of Independence when it was subjected to a heavy siege.

In 1863, however, a large money payment bought off the Dutch extortioners and Antwerp’s prosperity began to rise. As the boys’ friend pointed out, the city was the natural outlet of the Schelde, and to some extent of all the German Empire.

Since that time, so far as history is concerned, the rise of Antwerp to her old place as one of the world’s great commercial centers has been rapid. It was on this account, as the old man explained, that Antwerp was such a strange jumble of the ancient and modern, for, until the shipping embargo was lifted, she practically stood still in her development.

The old man appeared to be very proud that Antwerp, unlike Brussels, had retained her old Flemish ideas in spite of the march of her trade. He told the boys that it would require at least four days to get a clear idea of Antwerp, and after another day of exploration they began to believe him.

But they made up their minds that they were going to be able to give the folks at home a good account of the city, so they stuck to the task even though Raynor did yawn over pictures of the Old Masters in dull colors and frames. The young engineer was extremely practical, and loudly declared in one of the galleries:—

“Well, that picture may be all right, but give me something with a little ginger and color in it.”

“My, but you’re a vandal!” laughed Jack, consulting a catalogue. “That’s one of the most famous pictures in Europe. It is by Rubens.”

“Guess I’m too much of a Rube-n to appreciate it, then,” was Raynor’s comment.

But he was a methodical lad, as are most persons who have a mechanical bent. He purchased and loyally used a small red note book, in which he jotted down everything they saw, good, bad or indifferent. He soon had one book full, when he promptly began on another, noting down whatever was supposed to be of interest, whether he understood it or not.

The boys enjoyed sitting under the shady trees in the Place Verte, surveying the scene. It is one of the few places in Antwerp from which a clear view of the Cathedral can be obtained, mean-looking houses shouldering up to the great structure and spoiling it from other points of vision.

“Say, Jack,” exclaimed Raynor one evening as they walked rapidly shipward, “I’m getting tired of moldy old cathedrals and rusty old galleries full of Rubes,—beg pardon, I mean Rubens; can’t we do something more lively?”

“What would you suggest?” asked Jack.

“Oh, let’s take a few trips around. Another canal boat ride, for instance, or something like that.”

“That would be fine but for one consideration,” said Jack.

“And what is that?”

“Funds, old boy, dollars and cents. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty well down to my limit.”

“Same here. Say, you’ve got to be rich to enjoy these places, Jack.”

“I begin to think so, too,” declared his chum.

The boys were walking briskly down a tree-bordered, rather badly lighted street in the residential quarter as this conversation took place. They had been to the home of a friend of Captain Bracebridge with a confidential note. The man to whom they had taken the message had been absent at the theater. As they had a verbal message to deliver, too, and supposed that it, like the note, was confidential, they had not wished to confide it to a servant but had decided to wait. It was, therefore, late when, their errand completed, they started back on a lonely walk through the residential section to the ship.

The good folk of Antwerp go to bed early. No one else was on the street as the boys hurried along. Tree shadows lay across the road in black patches, where there were lights brilliant enough to effect such results.

“Well, I suppose we ought to be glad to have the chance to get abroad at all,” muttered Raynor, continuing the conversation whose record began in the last chapter.

“Yes, indeed, we’re lucky fellows,” said Jack cheerfully.

“Yes, it’s a fine old city and all that,” admitted Raynor rather grudgingly, “and I’ve certainly enjoyed my stay here; but I’d have liked to look about a little more. I wonder if there isn’t some place where they have machinery to show?”

“Gracious! I must say you’re a barbarian. Can’t you see all the machinery you wish in that greasy, fire-spitting old engine room of yours, without wanting a sight of more?”

“Well,” retorted Raynor, “would you trade one of those ‘old masters,’ as they call them, for a dandy set of modern instruments to put in your wireless room at home?”

Jack was fairly stumped. He broke into a laugh.

“That’s not a fair way of putting it,” he said after a minute. “I like monkeying with wireless as much as you do with machinery, but I can enjoy other things.”

“So can I. An ice-cream soda, for instance.”

“I’m with you there,” agreed Jack, “but we’ll have to wait for that.”

“Yes, till we get back to the U.S.A. The stuff they sell you for soda here wouldn’t be offered you by a bankrupt druggist in Skeedunk with bats in his belfry.”

Jack broke into a laugh, which suddenly changed into a quick exclamation of astonishment.

“Hark!” he cried.

“What’s the matter?” breathlessly from Raynor. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“You didn’t? You must be—there it is again.”

This time it was Raynor’s turn to start.

“I heard it all right then,” he exclaimed. “It was——”

“A woman screaming.”

“That’s what. Gracious, what’s the matter?”

“It’s off down that street there,” decided Jack, pointing a little distance ahead where a small street branched off the main thoroughfare and skirted a small, unlighted park. “Come on,” he shouted to Raynor, and was off.

“What are you going to do?” called Raynor.

“Find out what’s the trouble. There’s something serious the matter.”

Suddenly the cries stopped as abruptly as if a hand had been clapped over the mouth of the person uttering them.

“There’s no time to lose,” panted Jack, sprinting.

“I’m with you,” gasped Raynor, running at his companion’s side.

The two lads dashed around the corner. Before them lay a narrow, gloomy street, edged by the dark trees of the little park, which, at that time of night, was, of course, deserted.

At first glance, nothing out of the ordinary appeared. Then they suddenly saw the headlights of an automobile. As suddenly, the lights vanished. They had been switched off by somebody.

“There’s where the trouble is,” cried Jack, and was conscious of a wish that he had some sort of weapon with him. They were rushing into they knew not what danger; but Jack was no quitter. Some woman was in trouble, and that was enough for him.

The same was the case with Raynor. Both lads, typical Americans, lithe-limbed, stout of heart and muscle, and with grit to spare, didn’t give a thought to the danger they might be incurring by their daring dash to the rescue. The mere idea that they were needed urgently was enough.

“Some ruffians are attacking the auto!” came from Jack as they drew closer.

“Yes. Look! There’s a woman in the car. Two of them,” added Raynor.

“They’ve been held up.”

“Looks that way.”

As the two boys neared the car, the whole scene became clear to them. It was a limousine and three men, two on one side and one on the other, were poking revolvers into the windows of the enclosed part. As the boys came up, the chauffeur, who till then had been paralyzed by fear, leaped from his seat and dashed off, taking the low stone wall, surrounding the park, at one bound.

“The great coward! He might have been a big help to us, too,” exclaimed Jack with indignation as he saw this.

“Yes, it’s three to two, and they are armed,” cried Raynor.

The next moment, with a startling yell they attacked two of the men simultaneously. One of them went down with a crash under Jack’s powerful right swing before he could do anything to defend himself, for none of them had noticed the approach of the two American lads.

The fellow’s revolver went spinning over the wall and fell with a ring of metal out of his reach. In the meantime, Raynor was not having such an easy time with the man he had tackled. This fellow was a heavily-built specimen of dock lounger, or worse, with a Belgian cap on his head and a handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face.

As Raynor rushed him, he seized the young engineer in an iron grip and pressed a weapon to his side.

“Fool, to interfere! This is your last moment on earth!” he snarled.

From the interior of the limousine, two women, one elderly and the other young, looked out, paralyzed with alarm. Too frightened to scream, they sat stock still as they saw what was about to happen.

Jack saved the day.

With muscles of steel, tensed like tightly coiled springs, he leaped on the back of the fellow whose revolver was pressing against Raynor’s side, and threw his arms about his neck. Choked and dazed, the man toppled over backward and fell with a crash to the concrete walk.

“Quick, old fellow, get his revolver before he can get up,” choked out Jack.

Raynor, recovering from his struggle, bent over and picked up the weapon and stood with it ready for action. Just as he did so, the third man, who up to now had been deprived of action from surprise at the quickness of the whole thing, came to himself and made a rush for Jack.

Before Jack could turn, the fellow had seized him and knocked him over. At the same instant, in the distance, they heard the shrill screaming of whistles.

“Les gendarmes!” shouted the man who had knocked Jack over.

The two recumbent men, aroused from their stupor by their fright at the approach of the police, gathered themselves up, and the three sped away, running at top speed across the little park where all was dark and shadowy.

In the meantime, the cowardly chauffeur, who had been watching from behind a tree, saw that the day was saved, and began to consider what he should do to save himself and his reputation. He had plainly deserted his employer’s wife and daughter, frightened out of his wits when the three ruffians demanded the women’s diamonds as they were on their way home from the opera. But now he leaped the wall again and shouted to the women that he had merely gone to summon the police, seeing that the boys had the case well in hand. Then he jumped to the seat, and, not wishing to face a police examination himself or involve his employer in one, he turned on full power and sped away.

Hardly was he out of sight, than there appeared a detachment of Antwerp policemen, led by an officer running at full speed toward the boys. Some timid householder had heard the screams and shouts, but, too timorous to venture out himself, had telephoned the nearest station; and the sudden appearance of the officers was the result.

“Bother it all,” exclaimed Jack, “here come the police. Although they’d have been welcome a while back, we don’t want them now.”

“Why not?” asked Raynor, not unnaturally.

“Well, we have a very important letter to the captain with us. If the police get hold of us, they’ll want to do a whole lot of questioning, and goodness knows what time we’ll get back.”

“What shall we do?”

“Take to our heels, I guess. It doesn’t look very honest, but we must get that letter to the captain to-night.”

“That’s so; he said he’d sit up and wait for us,” responded Raynor.

“That is why I’m so anxious not to be detained. Come on.”

The two boys set off, running at top speed.

“Keep in the shadow of the wall,” said Jack; “we don’t want them to see us.”

But that is just what the police did do. Their leader happened to be keen of eye and almost instantly he detected the two fleeing forms. He shouted something in French.

The boys kept right on. They ran like greyhounds. But the police were fleet of foot, too.

Then the boys heard behind them a series of sharp, yapping barks.

“What in the world are those dogs for?” asked Raynor pantingly.

They had passed the park now and were running through a street bordered with dark houses. Jack’s reply was startling.

“They’re police dogs!”

“Police dogs?”

“That’s right. They have them in New York, too, and I remember reading in the paper that they were imported from Belgium.”

Shouts came from behind them.

They were in French, but the boys readily guessed their import. As if to emphasize their cries, the police, who believed not unnaturally that they were in pursuit of the miscreants who had disturbed the midnight peace, drew their revolvers.

Bullets spattered at the heels of the boys.

“We’ve got to stop,” panted Raynor.

“If we do, we may get shot,” gasped Jack. “Quick, in here.”

He seized Raynor’s arm and pulled him inside an iron gate in a high wall that surrounded a garden, in which stood a pretty, old-fashioned house. It appeared to be unoccupied.

“We’re in a fine pickle now,” muttered Raynor.

“Yes, I’m sorry we ran. If they catch us now, we’ll have an awful time explaining.”

Raynor shuddered.

“You don’t mean they’ll send us to jail?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot about these foreign police. They’re likely to do anything.”

“And we can’t speak their language,” added Raynor. “That makes it worse.”

“I’m afraid that it does,” agreed Jack. “But hush! here they come.”

Headed by the nosing, sniffing, rough-coated police dogs, held in leashes, the police came running down the street. The boys had outrun them and hoped that by crouching in the shelter of the wall within the iron gate, they could throw them off the track.

But in this, they had calculated without the dogs!

As the dogs came level with the gate, they stopped and sniffed suspiciously. The police behind them began to talk excitedly, waving their arms and talking with their hands as well as their tongues.

“It’s all off now,” whispered Jack.

“Couldn’t we run up that gravel walk and get back of the house?” breathed Raynor.

Jack shook his head. He didn’t dare to talk.

Suddenly the leader of the police squad pointed to the iron gate.

“Open it and search the house and grounds thoroughly,” he said in French. “These are desperate criminals, it is clear. Great credit will come to us, mon braves, can we catch them.”

The iron gate was pushed open.

The next moment the two American boys with beating hearts stepped forward and faced this body of men, who, it was plain, believed Jack and his chum to be miscreants of the blackest sort.

It was the most unpleasant predicament of his life in which Jack now found himself. Naturally, his chum felt the same way about it. The irony of the situation was irritating.

Having chased away, at the risk of their own lives, some desperate crooks, the lads who had done all this found themselves accused of being nefarious characters.

“They are Anglise,” exclaimed one of the men as he turned a bull’s-eye lantern on them.

“No, sir, we are not. We are Americans,” exclaimed Jack proudly.

The leader of the gendarmes laughed in an amused way.

“Your country should be proud of you,” he said in good English with a provoking sarcasm.

In fact, neither Jack nor Raynor looked at his best just then. Their caps were gone, lost in the struggle with the would-be robbers, their hair was tousled, perspiration streamed down their faces and their garments were torn and dusty.

Jack felt all this, and the knowledge of it did not tend to cheer him. Had he been a policeman and known no more of the facts than did the gendarmes, he felt that he would have been justified in acting in the same way. But he determined to try to explain the case.

“We are off the American tank steamer Ajax,” he said. “To-night we had an important errand in this section of the city. On our way back to the ship we heard screams, and investigated. We found three men trying to rob an old lady and a younger one who were seated in the closed part of a blue limousine.

“After a struggle we disarmed them and put them to flight. Just as you people came up, the chauffeur, who ran away during the fight, reappeared, jumped into his seat and drove off. We were in a hurry to get back to our ship and so, foolishly, as I can see now, we ran off, thinking that if we stayed we might be detained and questioned.”

“Is that all?” asked the officer calmly.

“That is all,” responded Jack.

“It is enough.”

“Enough for what?” The man’s tone nettled Jack in spite of himself.

“Enough to secure you both a lodging in the prison of the city to-night.”

The boys looked aghast.

“What! Do you mean to make us prisoners and lock us up?” asked Jack, who had hoped that at the worst nothing more would be done than to question them and, having ascertained the truth of their stories, set them free.

The officer nodded and then gave a brisk command. At his words, a policeman took hold of both boys by the right and left arms, twisting them back so that if they made any great struggle to escape, their arms would be broken.

It was not till then that the full seriousness of their positions broke over the boys. Raynor gave a wrench to free himself of the grip of the police, but an excruciating pain that followed made him quickly desist.

“Keep cool, old fellow,” advised Jack, “this will all be straightened out.”

Then he turned to the English-speaking policeman.

“Of course we can send a message to the ship, and then you can speedily ascertain that we are telling the truth and set us free,” he said bravely, but with a sinking heart.

To his dismay the reply was a decided negative.

“You will be allowed to tell your story to the examining magistrate in the morning,” he said coldly. “And in the meantime, allow me to inform you that if it isn’t any more probable than the one you told me,—well——”

He shrugged his shoulders and twisted his sharp-pointed, little black mustache.

“But, great heavens, man, it’s the truth!” burst out Jack.

“No doubt, no doubt. All our prisoners tell us that,” was the reply.

Suddenly the little officer’s eyes fell on Raynor’s coat. It bulged conspicuously in one of the pockets. He stepped quickly to the American lad’s side and, with a cry of triumph, drew out a revolver.

It was the one Raynor had taken from the foot-pad; but its discovery made things look black for the boys. The officer’s eyes narrowed. He looked at them with a sneer.

“So,” he said, holding up the pistol, “you two honest, law-abiding lads carry pistols abroad at night! This discovery alone, messieurs, proves that your story is a concoction from beginning to end. If you really come off a ship, you are samples of the sort of sailors we don’t want here.”

Jack tried in vain to be heard, but a wave of the hand enjoining silence and a crisp command to the subordinate police silenced him.

The next moment, held as if they had been desperate characters, the two boys found themselves, under armed guard, being marched through the sleeping city of Antwerp to prison cells.

Here was a fine end to their evening of adventure. But protests, they knew, would be worse than silence, and so they submitted to being ignominiously marched along without uttering a word. Beside them strutted the little officer, vastly proud of his “important captures,” word of which he took care reached the newspapers that night.

The boys passed a sleepless night in a none too clean cell. A sentry paced up and down in front of the bars, as if they stood committed for some heinous offense. To keep their spirits up, they tried to make light of the affair. But in that dreary place, with the stone-flagged floor and the steel grating, it was pretty hard to be lively.

“Never mind; it won’t last long, and think what a laugh we’ll have on these fool police once we are out,” said Jack with a dismal attempt at a chuckle.

“Yes; but in the meantime, they have the laugh on us,” objected Raynor with grim humor. “Anyhow, I’m not sorry. Those ruffians would certainly have robbed those two women if we hadn’t done something,” he added.

“We made our mistake in not standing our ground and facing the police,” decided Jack.

“I guess they’d have gathered us in on general principles, we being the only people in sight. Their motto seems to be, ‘We’ve got to collar someone and it might as well be you.’”

“That’s the way it appears to be,” agreed Jack with a sigh.

It seemed as if that night would never pass. But, like everything else, it came to an end at last. With a great clanking and parade of police, the boys were marched forth and ordered into a covered wagon. Then they were jolted off over the cobbled streets and finally ordered to alight in front of a building that looked as if the old burgomasters of the place might have transacted business there.

It was, in fact, one of the ancient guild-houses of the city, and bore a coat of arms on its ornate, time-stained front. Inside, it was cool and dark, with scrupulously clean floors and furnishings. Had the boys been in any more pleasant situation, they would have admired the quaint old carved beams and the stone-work enriched by clever, bygone masons’ tools. But just then they had no eye for architecture.

They were ushered into a large room whose groined ceiling and dark oak panels made it appear that only twilight ever filtered through the stained-glass windows, set in frames of carved stone. At one end, behind a high desk of dark, shiny wood, which looked as if it were as old as the building, sat a dried-up dignitary with a skin like parchment, peering through a great pair of heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles.

In front of him was a huge pewter ink-stand with pens sticking up in it like quills upon a porcupine. Before this personage, whom they guessed to be the officiating magistrate, the boys were marched with much pomp and ceremony. Then the little mustached official who had played the leading part in their arrest stepped forward.

With a bow and a flourish he explained the case. To the boys’ astonishment, too, they saw their caps handed up. Evidently the police had found them and taken them up as evidence. This was a hopeful sign, for in each cap the owner’s name was inscribed.

“They’ll know that we told the truth about our names, anyway,” said Jack, nudging Raynor.

At this juncture there was a sudden disturbance in the back of the court room, and in broke a burly, sun-bronzed man. It was Captain Bracebridge, the last man in the world the boys wanted to have see them in such a position. They crimsoned with mortification and felt ready to sink through the floor.

The captain burst through a line of small Antwerp police, who tried to restrain him, like a runaway horse through a crowded street. He came straight up to the boys and gasped out breathlessly:

“Read about it in the papers and rushed straight here. What’s the truth of it all?”

“Then you don’t believe that police story?” asked Jack gratefully.

“Of course not. Tell me all about it.” He turned to a short, sallow man, carrying a big bag, who had followed him in, like the dust in the trail of the whirlwind. “This is a lawyer. He’ll straighten this thing out in a brace of shakes.”

The lawyer made a long harangue to the court, of which none of the Americans understood a word; but apparently he had asked leave to take his clients into a consulting room, for presently they were ushered into a chamber which might have been, and probably was, used for the purpose in medieval times. They were in the midst of their story, when another disturbance occurred outside. A handsome automobile had driven up, out of which stepped a portly personage with dignified, white whiskers, gold-rimmed eye-glasses, top-hat and frock-coat.

“Monsieur La Farge, the head of the government railways,” whispered the loungers in the court room as he hastened down the aisle and whispered to the magistrate, who received him with great deference.

The next moment he, too, was escorted into the consulting room. To the boys’ amazement, he rushed up to them and, with continental demonstrativeness, began wringing their hands up and down and uttering a tirade against the police, the methods they employed and the force in general.

“You are interested in this case, sir?” inquired Captain Bracebridge.

“Interested!” M. La Farge appeared to be about to explode. “The police! Bah! Dunderheads! Idiots! Assassins! These boys saved my wife and daughter from ruffians who would rob them, and——”

“Your wife and daughter?” exclaimed the boys in one breath. Their case was certainly taking a startling turn, for already their attorney had whispered who the newcomer was and his high rank.

“Yes, they told me about it on their arrival home last night, and also about the cowardly, foolish actions of Alphonse, the chauffeur, whom I have discharged. When I read in the papers of the arrest of two American lads and the story that they told, despite which the police had arrested them, I was angry, furious. I knew then that the deliverers of my dear ones had been arrested like felons,” exploded M. La Farge. “I hastened here at once to make what reparation I could for such an act of the idiots, the police! Bah!”

“Perhaps the police were not altogether to blame,” said Jack as the peppery M. La Farge concluded his angry harangue. “We should not have run away, and then perhaps we should not have been arrested.”

“It was all the fault of that foolish chauffeur in driving away as he did,” exclaimed M. La Farge. “But in one sense I am glad all this has happened, although I am deeply mortified at the same time. Had it not been for this occurrence, I should never have known whom to thank for the brave act you performed. I could not have rewarded you——”

He drew out a check book. But both boys held up expostulating hands.

“None of that, if you please, sir,” said Jack.

“He speaks for me, too,” said Raynor. “We’d do the same thing over again, if it had to be done.”

“Police and all?” smiled Captain Bracebridge.

“I beg your pardon,” said M. La Farge, re-pocketing the check book. “I should have known better than to offer money for such a service; no money could repay it. But I must think of some other way. However, the first thing to be done is to extricate you from this unpleasant position and obtain the apologies of the police.”

For a man of M. La Farge’s influence, this was easy to do; and the boys certainly felt that the humble apology that the little mustached officer tendered them almost on his knees was due them.

That evening they were the rather embarrassed guests of M. La Farge at dinner at his home. In order not to make them feel uneasy, there were no guests outside the immediate family; but both boys had to endure what was for them quite an ordeal when the pretty Miss La Farge and her handsome, gray-haired mother thanked them again and again, and almost wept in apologizing for the action of the police. Then, seeing that the boys were really troubled by their thanks, they tactfully turned the subject, and the boys, whose bashfulness soon wore off, enjoyed a jolly evening. After dinner Miss La Farge, who was an accomplished musician, played and sang for them, including in her program a medley of American airs.

As they were leaving, receiving many cordial and pressing invitations to come again, their host presented each of them with a small flat package.

“A slight remembrance,” he said. “It is inadequate to express the gratitude of my wife, my daughter and myself, but perhaps it will help you in recollecting that you always have three warm friends in Belgium. Do not open them till you reach the ship.”

The boys stammered their thanks and then, after more warm good-nights, they parted from their kind and grateful hosts. That they walked briskly to the ship may be imagined. They were on fire with eagerness to see what the packages contained. They hastened to Jack’s cabin and opened them, and then gasped with delight. Inside each was a gold watch and chain; but, more wonderful than this, was the inscription under each lad’s name, “In grateful and unfading remembrance of the night of —— from their steadfast friends, the family of M. La Farge.”

“Phew!” exclaimed Jack, mopping his forehead, not altogether on account of the warmth of the night, “what do you know about that?”

“Nothing,” exclaimed Raynor, “nothing at all! Aren’t they bully! But let’s see what is in these two flat pocket-books.” In the excitement of finding the watches, they had not paid much attention to two flat cases of dark leather enclosed in each package. The books were opened and found to contain, under isinglass, like a commuter’s ticket in America, two passes on the government railways, signed by M. La Farge and good all over the Netherlands.

The boys’ cup of happiness was pressed down and running over.

“Just to think that only a few minutes before we ran into our big adventure, we were kicking because we had no money to travel,” cried Jack, as he eyed his engraved pass lovingly. “Now for a few trips!”

The Ajax was to remain two days or so longer in Antwerp, and the boys readily obtained permission from the captain to make all the use they could of their passes. They had already exhausted what they wished to see of Antwerp, including the famous fort on the Tête de Flandre on the opposite bank of the river, the great cathedral, the home of Rubens’ parents, and the magnificent picture gallery.

Now they could enlarge their opportunities, and they decided to take a trip to Brussels and from there to the field of Waterloo. Accordingly, they started in high spirits on their tour as soon as they could get a train. Their passes were marked “first-class,” so they soon ensconced themselves in a leather-lined compartment, while their less fortunate fellow passengers had to be content with “second” and “third.”

“I wonder how this arrangement would go in America?” asked Jack as they sank back in the soft-padded cushions.

“I guess everybody would go first-class,” laughed Raynor. “We haven’t anyone at home willing to brand himself ‘second’ or ‘third’ in the race.”

“Now who on earth is this?” wondered Jack presently, as a brightly uniformed official entered the compartment which they had to themselves.

“Conductor, I guess,” hazarded Raynor.

The official removed his cap and bowed low.

“Bonjours, messieurs,” said he; “les billets, si vous plait.”

“I guess he wants our tickets,” said Jack, fishing for his. This surmise proved to be correct.

The politeness of the official was more marked, if it could be possible, when he saw, from the signature on the passes, that the boys were traveling under “royal auspices.” He raised his cap and bowed again. Not to be outdone, the boys bowed back with equal suavity.

“Merci bien,” he said.

“Merci bien,” responded Jack, who had acquired some French at high school.

“Mercy beans, too,” sputtered young Raynor, thinking that Jack was giving an order for a Boston lunch. The conductor bowed again and vanished, a bell rang and they were off. The ride lay through a farming region and the road was cool, clean and smooth.

On their arrival in Brussels, they found accommodation at a hotel overlooking the public square. The windows, although the maître de hotel had assured them that it was one of the best rooms in the house, were only four feet high.

“Gee, we have to lie down to look out!” exclaimed Raynor.

“On the square?” asked Jack with a grin.

“No; on the level; that’s the way I lie,” chuckled Raynor. Both lads were in high spirits. Their unexpected stroke of luck had surely proved a windfall.

In the center of the Place Royale, the first place the boys explored, stands an equestrian figure of Godfrey of Bouillon.

“It was on that spot that he first assembled his crusaders who won back Jerusalem to the Christians,” said Jack, wise with guide-book knowledge.

“And to think that up to now I always thought Bouillon was a soup,” remarked Raynor dryly.

Before the train left for Waterloo, they had time to visit the Royal Museum, walking down the Rue de La Régence. The Royal Museum was filled with fine pictures and statuary, but, to tell the truth, the boys had become a little bit cloyed with art at Antwerp. It takes some experience and training to be interested in, and gauge properly, such things, although both felt that what they had seen had done them permanent good.

Several times during their walk to the railroad station where they were to take a train for Waterloo, the boys were much amused and interested by the working dogs hitched to small carts. Sometimes the working dogs got into a fight with the leisure-class canines, and then there was a fine racket among the owners and the dogs, till things were straightened out and humans and canines, both growling, went on their way.

“Almost all the shops say they cater to the King or the Court of Flanders,” commented Raynor as they strolled along.

“I guess they get most of their real money from Americans, at that,” was Jack’s comment.

The Gare du Midi, or Central Station, they found surrounded by a crowd of shouting, noisy, officious guides, and also several individuals who looked none too honest. They buttonholed every arrival, volunteering all sorts of information in bad English. This, despite the fact that there were plenty of signs in plain view.

It was half an hour’s ride to Braine-l’Alleud, for the most famous battle of modern history was fought several miles from the village whose name it bears. This is because Wellington sent his victorious despatches from Waterloo, which has ever since claimed the honor of naming the place of Napoleon’s downfall.

They took a small, rickety carriage at the station, and before long Raynor was pointing to a mound with an ugly, clumsy-looking lion on it.

“Zat is zee Lion of Belgium,” volunteered the driver. “Eet ees model from French cannon and mark zee spot where zee Prance of Orange was wounded.”

“Is that so?” muttered Raynor. “Well, it looks more like a Newfoundland dog than a lion to me.”

“Eet weigh twenty-eight ton,” volunteered the driver again, pointing with his whip to the lion, close access to which was gained by a steep flight of steps. There are two hundred and twenty-six of these steps, and the boys, on climbing them, were considerably out of breath when they reached the summit and saw the historic plain spread out under their feet.

“I’m disappointed,” confessed Jack frankly. “I thought it was much larger. Why, it doesn’t look like much more than a parade ground!”

“Well, it wasn’t much of a ‘parade’ at the time of the battle, with three hundred thousand men tearing at each other’s throats for five or six hours and leaving fifty thousand dead and wounded on the field,” commented Raynor, who was well up in history.

Then they drove over the road built by Napoleon fifteen years before the battle.

“Might have been a good cavalry road, but it sure is a bone-shaker in this rig,” remarked Jack, and his companion agreed with him. They were much interested in the farm house of Hougomont, or rather its shell-battered ruins. This was the hottest point of the battle. The French assaulted it for hours, but did not succeed in taking it.

The family, who own the house, make a good living selling souvenirs to visitors.

“I’ve been told,” said Jack, with a smile, “that every fall they plant little bullets and souvenirs. The winter snow and spring rains make the crop ready to be plowed up.”

“Profitable farming,” laughed Raynor. However, the boys bought a grape shot and what purported to be an insignia from an artilleryman’s cap.

“It must have been a great battle,” said Raynor as they paid off their hack bill, the size of which made them raise their eyebrows.

“Yes, and the Belgians are still able to charge,” remarked Jack dryly.

In the railroad carriage on the way back a self-assertive Englishman was holding forth on what a great victory Wellington had achieved. “Which,” he added, turning to the boys, “was all the more creditable because he fought with raw recruits. Most of our seasoned soldiers were in your country at the time.”

“And most of them are planted there yet,” remarked Raynor.

The Englishman glared at him; but Jack smoothed things over and everything was amiable till Raynor again disrupted international peace.

“Deuced funny clothes those beggars wear,” remarked the son of Britain, gazing out at a wooden-shoed, baggy-breeched peasant.

“Oh, I don’t know. Not so much funnier than an Englishman’s,” said the American lad; after which there ensued a silence lasting till the train rolled into Brussels.

The boys thought they had never seen so many vari-colored uniforms as were on parade in Brussels. They passed a fresh one every minute.

“I guess every soldier designs his own,” said Raynor.

“Well, some of them certainly look it,” agreed Jack as a dapper little man with a bottle green uniform with yellow stripes and facings and a cap without a peak swung by.

They went to the Church of St. Gudule, an old Gothic structure on the top of a hill, which Jack wished to see. Raynor came along for company.

“I’ve seen enough ruins,” he declared.

“Well, this will be the last one,” promised Jack.

In the church they found many people at prayer, especially in front of an altar on which were hung models of arms, legs and every portion of the human anatomy, as a reminder to the saint of what part of the body needs help.

“There’s Adam and Eve,” exclaimed Raynor in low tones, motioning to the figures of the father and mother of the race carved under a fine pulpit. Some American tourists were admiring these figures at the same time as the boys.

“Oh, look!” cried one of the lady tourists. “Wasn’t that sculptor a mean thing?”

“Why?” asked her companion innocently.

“Just look! He’s put all the lions and tigers around Adam and given poor Eve nothing but peacocks, monkeys and parrots. It’s a shame!”

The boys had dinner at a side-walk café. They found it very amusing to watch the various types of Belgians who went strolling by, enjoying the evening air. More uniforms than ever seemed to be out. To their surprise the bill for their meal was moderate, although the café declared that it “Catered to the King.”

“Well, if this is all he pays for his meals I wonder what he does with the rest of his money,” was Raynor’s comment.

After dinner the boys went out to the “Kirmess,” which lasts six weeks each summer.

“Like a cheap Coney Island,” was their verdict as, not much impressed, they sought a theater. Here they found that they might as well have saved their money—almost their last—for nearly every act they saw was American.

Early the next day they had to return to Antwerp, tired out but happy from sight-seeing and conscious of exceedingly light pockets.

“Anyhow, we’ve had our money’s worth,” declared Jack.

“Yes; both in adventure and sight-seeing,” added Raynor, as they returned to the ship.

They found a warm invitation from the La Farge family awaiting them; but had to decline it, with sincere regrets, for there were minor repairs to be made on the wireless and, besides, Raynor was on duty in the fire room.

The next day the Ajax was ready for sea. She was to sail “in ballast,” that is, without cargo. Jack thought her uglier than ever as she lay at the dock with steam up, as a white plume from her scape pipe testified, and with big patches of rust on her black sides; for the work of repairing these ugly patches would not be done till a few days before she arrived in New York.

Now that she was so high out of the water, the “tanker” looked like a big black cigar with a miniature turret on either end.

“She’ll roll like a bottle going over,” the crew prophesied; a prophesy, by the way, which was to be fulfilled.

But Jack forgot all this when at last the orders to sail came from the agent’s office and, with a roaring of the whistle, the “tanker” started on the voyage home.

Raynor came up to Jack as he stood gazing down at the puffing tugs which were helping the marine monster clear.

“Glad to be going home, Jack?” he asked.

“What a question! Glad? I should say so! Of course I love my work and all that, but after all there’s no place like home, you know.”

“That’s so,” assented Raynor, “although I haven’t much of a home. Both my parents died when I was a kid, and except for a sister who lives way up New York state, I haven’t a relative in the world that I know of.”

“I am almost as badly off,” confessed Jack, and he went on to tell Raynor about his home life.

“What a jolly way to live,” cried the young engineer, “on a flower-garden schooner! That’s the greatest ever!”

“I didn’t think so all the time, I can assure you,” said Jack with a laugh, “but I guess the wireless I rigged up there made me think of this way of life.”

The ship was in the stream by this time and it was Raynor’s turn on watch. As he dived below, he took occasion to turn and grin at Jack.

“We ought to make a good run home,” said he.

“How is that?” asked Jack innocently.

“Oh, maybe a certain young lady has hold of the tow rope,” and, before Jack could reply, he had dived below.

The Ajax made the run through the Channel and out on to the broad Atlantic without incident. Coming through the Channel, they encountered fog and some bad weather, but on the whole the skipper was pleased with the conditions and the ship’s behavior.

They had been two days on the ocean and a fairly high sea was running one night, when Jack, who was seated in the wireless room, where he had been exchanging information and wireless small-talk with half a dozen other operators, noticed a sudden bustle on the deck outside.

A grimy fireman had run forward from the fire-room companionway and then the captain had hastened aft. He went to the door and looked out. He was just in time to see several men carrying up a limp form from the engine-room and taking it into the captain’s cabin.

“An accident!” exclaimed the boy. “Somebody hurt! I wonder who it can be?”

He hailed a passing fireman who was coming off watch and going forward.

“What has happened below?” he asked.

“An accident. Someone hurt.”

“Do you know who it is?”

The fireman shook his head.

“I was just coming off watch and didn’t stop to inquire.”

He made off and then Jack saw the captain hasten past and come hurrying back with his surgical case. Jack would have asked him, if he had dared. As it was, he buttonholed another grimy stoker on his way to the forecastle and put his question again.

“Sure I know,” was the reply, “one of the engineers hurt.”

“Badly?”

“I dunno.”

“Who was it?”

“The third. Name’s Raynor, I guess.” And the man hurried on, leaving Jack standing there aghast.

While he still stood there, the captain emerged from his cabin and, to Jack’s surprise, came up to him.

“Know anything about surgery, Ready?” he asked.

“Why, no, sir. I heard there had been an accident. My friend Raynor. Is he badly injured, sir?”

The question was put with painful eagerness.

“Not necessarily, my lad. His arm was crushed in a shaft while he was oiling it. The deuce of it is, we’ve no doctor on board and I don’t know how to care for it. I may have to amputate it. I did that once on a sailing ship; and in that case, I’ll need assistants. That is why I asked you if you knew anything of surgery.”

“You’ll have to amputate it? Oh, sir! Poor Raynor!”

“I don’t want to do it if I can help it, but I don’t want to run the risk of blood poisoning. If only we had a doctor! It would go to my heart to deprive the boy of an arm, but what am I to do?”

Never had the captain seemed so human, so sympathetic to the young wireless man. He looked genuinely distressed.

“They ought to compel every ship to carry a doctor,” he said. “Accidents are always happening, and—strike my topsails! What’s the matter with the boy?”

For Jack’s eyes had suddenly begun to dance. He gave a sudden caper and snapped his fingers.

“I’ve got it, sir! I’ve got it!” he cried.

“What, in the name of Neptune? St. Vitus’s dance?”

“No, sir. A doctor. I can get you a doctor, sir.”

“Have you suddenly gone mad?” demanded the captain. “We’re a thousand miles out at sea.”

“I can get one by wireless, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“All the big liners carry doctors, sir. I was in communication with one only a few minutes ago. The Parisian of the Ocean Line.”

“Where is she?”

“About three hundred miles to the west of us on the Atlantic track, sir.”

“Three hundred miles away! Then how can we get a doctor from her?”

“Very simply, sir, I think, as you say it may not be necessary to amputate. Have Raynor brought in here and laid on my cot. I’ll raise the Parisian and get her doctor on the wire. Then I can flash a full description of the case and the doctor can flash back to us, through the Parisian’s operator, full directions how to proceed!”

“Jove, boy! You have got a head on your shoulders, after all. It sounds extraordinary, but why shouldn’t it be done?”

“It is worth trying, anyhow, sir,” said Jack, his face radiant at the idea that he might be the means of saving his poor chum’s arm. The captain hastened off to give the necessary orders, while Jack raised the Parisian once more.

In crisp, flashing sentences he sent, volleying through the air, an explanation of the case. By the time poor Raynor, white and unconscious, was carried to the bunk and laid out there, while the open-eyed sailors looked on, the Parisian’s doctor was standing by the side of the liner’s operator listening gravely to the symptoms of the case as they came pulsing through space.

The captain, with bandages, instruments, antiseptics and so forth, sat by Raynor’s side, anxiously awaiting Jack’s first bulletin.

“Anything coming yet?” he asked more than once as Jack sat alert, waiting for the first word from the doctor who was to treat a surgical case across three hundred miles of ocean.

The silence was tense and taut, and broken only by the heavy breathing of the injured engineer.

“What is the man doing?” said the captain impatiently at length.

“It takes even shore doctors time to give a correct diagnosis in some cases, sir,” ventured Jack gravely. “I suppose he is considering the conditions.”

“Absent treatment at three hundred miles,” muttered the captain. “Ready, I begin to believe that this is a crack-brained bit of business, after all.”

“Wait a minute,” warned Jack, holding up his hand to command attention, “here is something coming now!”

His pencil flew over the pad and then stopped while he flashed back:

“Thanks, that’s all for now. I’ll cut in again when we are ready for the next step.”

He turned to the captain and read slowly from his pad the doctor’s directions for treating the injury.

“He says that, from your description, there are no bones broken. The arm is merely crushed,” said the boy; and then, bit by bit, he read off the far-distant surgeon’s directions for treating the injured member. As he read, the captain and his assistant amateur surgeons plied dressings and antiseptics with diligent care.

At last the doctor of the Parisian said that he had no more advice to give that night, but flashed a prescription for a soothing draught to be compounded from the ship’s medicine chest.

By midnight the patient was sleeping peacefully without any symptoms of fever, and Jack cut off communication with the distant liner after promising to “call up the doctor in the morning.”

It was two days later. Young Raynor, his injured arm in a sling, sat on the edge of Jack’s bunk. They had passed out of range of the Parisian, but, thanks to Jack’s quick wit, the crushed arm was getting along well, and the “wireless doctor” had left instructions for the treatment of the case as it progressed.

“Jack, old fellow, you saved this flipper for me, all right, with those Hertzian waves of yours,” said Raynor, “and you know just how I feel about it. But how in the world did you ever come to think of such a stunt?”

“I can’t claim that it was very original,” was Jack’s rejoinder; “in fact, it has been done two or three times before on freight ships that carry no doctors.”

“Tell us about it,” urged the invalid.

“Well,” was the answer, “one case I heard about occurred on board the S. S. Parismina, while she was crossing the Gulf of Mexico. A sudden call came to her from a small island out of the path of regular ships called Suma. A small colony lived there like so many Robinson Crusoes, mining phosphates.

“A tramp steamer happened along once in a while, and they could sail to the mainland, but those were their only links with civilization. To carry the phosphates from the mines to the coast, they had a narrow gauge railway. One day this railway cut up didoes; a train ran away and crushed a workman’s foot.

“Luckily, the island had a wireless station with a powerful equipment. There was no doctor and the man was so badly injured that it was feared he would die before they could get one. Well, what did the bright young wireless man do but get busy and start sending out calls broadcast for a doctor.

“At last the Parismina picked up his message, and Dr. C. S. Carter of the ship volunteered his services. The Parismina was then just two hundred miles away from the island. The doctor transferred his office to the liner’s wireless room and took the patient’s pulse and temperature, via the air line. Then he told them just how to prepare a strong antiseptic and how to fix up the broken ligaments.

“The wireless treatment was kept up till the Parismina was four hundred and twenty miles away, when the doctor was able to dismiss the case.”

“Some class to that,” said Raynor admiringly. “Do you know any more like that?”

“Yes, there is one other I can recall, so you see that I can’t claim the credit for any originality in the idea.”

“Tell us about that other one,” urged Raynor.

Jack paused a moment to adjust his instruments and send a message to another ship, giving their position and the weather. Then he shut off the connection and turned to his chum.

“This other one, as you call it, occurred on the freighter Herman Frasch, while she was well out at sea. Captain McGray of the ship was seized with a bad attack of ptomaine poisoning. He grew worse, although they did all they could for him with the help of the ship’s medicine chest and the book of directions that goes with it.

“The ship was out in the Atlantic off the Florida coast. The captain suddenly thought of a plan by which his case might be treated intelligently. He knew there was a government station at Dry Tortugas, Florida, one hundred miles off. He ordered a despatch sent there.

“As it so chanced, the despatch was not picked up by the government station, but by the operator of the Ward Liner Merida, which was just leaving Progresso, Yucatan.

“‘Doc!’ he exclaimed, rushing into the cabin of the Merida’s doctor, ‘there’s a man awful sick with ptomaine poisoning.’

“The doctor lost no time in grabbing up his medicine case.

“‘Where is he, my man? What stateroom?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to lose any time on such a case.’

“‘Well, he’s about eight hundred miles to the west of us, Doc,’ said the operator dryly, ‘but here is the diagnosis,’ and he handed the doctor a long aerogram.

“The doctor whistled.

“‘Pretty bad,’ said he, ‘temperature 104, nausea, rash on face and neck.’ Then he added quickly, ‘Give me an aerogram blank quickly.’

“He wrote out a prescription and a few minutes later it was being flashed across the sea to the Frasch. The medicine was prepared, and not long after the wireless reported that the captain was ‘Resting easily.’

“The following morning the captain’s temperature was sent and he was reported ‘a little better.’ The prescription was changed and the captain improved rapidly. By this time a number of other ships had picked up the messages, and the stricken skipper might have had a consultation of physicians if his case had demanded it.

“So you see I did nothing very wonderful,” concluded Jack with a smile, turning once more to his key.

“You saved my arm,” insisted Raynor stoutly, and then he left Jack to his work and hastened off to the chief engineer’s cabin to ascertain how soon he could be taken off the sick list.

In due time the voyage ended at the port of New York. The Ajax would not be ready for sea again for two weeks to come, and in the meantime her crew was paid off, Jack among them.

Raynor, after promising to call on the young wireless man on board the Venus as soon as he returned from a flying visit to his sister, shook hands warmly with his young chum. He proffered his left hand, though, for his injured arm was not entirely mended even then.

Uncle Toby received his young nephew with characteristic demonstrations of delight. He inquired if he had had occasion to use anything from the voluminous chest of medicines that the drug-compounding uncle had given to the boy. Jack had not the heart to tell the anxious old man that the contents of most of the bottles had gone overboard, although he had given some of them to a stout old quartermaster, who was as fond of dosing himself as are most sailors. The patient had drunk off the embrocations and rubbed in the internal remedies and declared himself much benefited; so that Jack could, without stretching the truth, tell his uncle that his remedies had accomplished a lot of good on the Ajax.

“I knew it! I knew it!” declared the old man, rubbing his hands delightedly. “They were never known to fail. I’ll give you another boxful when you are ready for sea again.”

“I’ve plenty left of the old lot, uncle,” declared Jack.

“Nothing like being well provided, though, my hearty,” said his uncle. “I’d hate to think of you being sick, away out at sea, without some of the ‘Universal Tonic and Pain Eradicator’ handy.”

The night after his return Jack bethought himself of some bits of apparatus he had left in his cabin on the Ajax. He decided to go over to her dock and get them. It would not take long and he was anxious to conduct some experiments with a view to the betterment of his “wireless alarm,” which had not worked quite satisfactorily.

The Ajax was not berthed in the Erie Basin, there being temporarily no room for her there, but lay at one of the Titan Line’s wharves in New York City.

The dock was on West Street, and it was not a long trip across the Brooklyn Bridge to where she lay.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” he told his uncle as he left.

“All right, my hearty,” said the old salt, engrossed in the composition of an invaluable malarial remedy for a captain bound for the South American coast.

When Jack reached the ship the evening had turned from a cloudy, dull twilight into a damp, disagreeable drizzle. A heavy Scotch mist filled the air and the big electric lights on the pier shone through the haze like blobs of pale yellow.

At the head of the gangplank was an old ship’s watchman who readily passed him on board on his explaining his business. Jack was surprised to see that there were several vague figures flitting about the elevated after-structure of the “tanker.”

“I thought all hands were ashore,” he said.

“No; there’s the fireman and an engineer left on board,” said the watchman. “They mean to keep up steam till it’s time to berth her over in the Basin, I guess.”

Jack’s mission took him longer than he had thought it would. He decided not to go home to supper, but to take it at any nearby restaurant and then come back to search for what he wanted later.

He found a quiet, respectable place and ate a hearty meal. When he had paid his check he returned to the ship and to his cabin. Some little time longer was spent in getting together the odd effects he wanted.

Suddenly his attention was arrested by a sound of shouting and yelling and brawling somewhere, as near as he could make out at the river end of the dock.

“Wonder what’s up?” thought the boy; and then the next minute, “Sounds to me like a lot of firemen cutting up in a riot.”

There was a lull and then the clamor burst out afresh. Loud, angry voices rose, and fierce shouts, as if the men on the dock were in deadly strife.

Jack ran out of his cabin.

As he did so the old watchman came pattering along the steel decks and clambered up the ladder to the superstructure, where Jack was standing.

“What is the matter?” demanded the boy.

“The firemen!” panted the watchman, pointing to the dock.

“Well, what’s the reason of all this racket? Are they fighting?”

“Fighting! They are trying to kill each other!” puffed the old watchman in a scared voice.

The lad knew that the firemen of big steamers are about as hard a crowd as can be found anywhere; but it was unusual for them to be making such a racket so close to the ship. He surmised correctly that some of the men had been ashore on a carouse while the others kept up steam.

“You’d better run for the police,” he told the scared watchman, and while the old fellow pattered off on his errand Jack’s ears were suddenly assailed by another sound.

Splash!

Something had struck the water right alongside the ship. Jack was just about to shout, “Man overboard!” when he peered over and saw in the fog-wreathed space between the ship and the dock a dark object drop from some port in the fire-room below him and strike the water with a second splash.

For a flash he thought it might be some fireman taking French leave of the ship. But a second’s thought convinced him that what had dropped was no human being but a big bundle of some sort.

“Now what in the world is going on?” he thought undecidedly.

On the dock the din of the fighting firemen still kept up. But right then Jack was more concerned with the mysterious happenings on board the ship itself. Something very out of the ordinary was going forward, that was plain enough. But what could it be? What was being thrown out of the fire-room port?

He was still struggling with the mystery when there came another sudden sound.

Jack recognized it instantly as the noise of an oar moving in a rowlock.

A boat was moving about in the dark obscurity between the ship and the dock. Peering over, Jack could see the dim outlines of the little craft moving slowly about far below where he stood.

Then of a sudden another of those mysterious bundles dropped from the fire-room.

He saw the boat impelled toward it as it lay floating, and then it was hoisted on board.

“What black work is going on here?” thought the young wireless man as he watched.

Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the true meaning of the scene going on below him dawned on the lad.

The tobacco smugglers! The men who worked with the gang of customs cheaters, with their headquarters across the dark river in New Jersey!

Yes; that was undoubtedly the explanation of it. What was he to do? Go below and alarm the engineer in charge of the fire-room crowd? No; the man was only an apprentice engineer, as young Ready knew, and more than probably he was in with the gang himself.

Back and forth moved the boat, dodging in and out of the black shadows cast by the dock. It was an ideal night for such work. The fog lay thick, like a blanket laid over river and city.

Through the curtain of mist boomed the hoarse voices of tugs and ferryboats as they played a marine game of blind man’s buff in the fog. Jack felt terribly alone. He might have summoned help from the dock, but the rising and falling noise of the riot, which was evidently still in progress, told him that the men in charge of the wharf already had their hands full.

All at once the boy had one of those swift flashes of inspiration that come sometimes like a bolt from the blue in moments of great emergency.

He would summon the police by wireless!

The police boats, as he knew, lay at Pier A, the Battery, with steam constantly up, so as to be able to dart off on the instant after wharf thieves and smugglers. They all carried wireless and he would be certain to catch an operator on duty. At any rate, there was a wireless attached to the marine police station itself, which was situated in a big building adjacent to the Aquarium.

With Jack to think was to act. He was swift, to spring to his key and begin sending out a call. He looked the code word up in his book and almost instantly the heavy spark began crackling and snapping out a summons:

Cracking like the lash of a giant whip, writhing like a tortured serpent of flame, the lithe, green spark leaped between its points. Never had Jack’s fingers worked so fast. Before he could summon the guardians of the harbor it might be too late. The boat might have gathered up its cargo of contraband and sneaked off like a thief in the night into the impenetrable fog.

At last, after an interminable wait, came an answer from out of space.

“This is H. P. What is it?”

“This is the tank steamer Ajax, lying at Pier 29, North River.”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

The answer came mapping back from amid a mystifying maze of other flying dots and dashes.

“There is a gang of tobacco smugglers at work here!”

“The dickens, you say! Hold on a minute.”

“All right. But you must hurry men up here if you want to nail them.”

“Who are you?”

“The wireless man of the Ajax. I was here late and saw the work going on.”

“Bully for you! We’ll rush Launch B up there on the jump.”

“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” chattered back Jack’s key; and then silence fell once more.

Jack jumped up from his sending table.

“At any rate, I’ve done my duty,” he thought.

He went to the door. He wanted to look down into the black fog-filled pit overside once more and see what was going on. Glancing cautiously over, he almost gave a gasp of delight.

A second boat was at work!

“My gracious, if they get here in time they’ll make a fine haul of doubtful fish!” he said to himself in a low voice.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He was spun round like a top and found himself in the clasp of a giant fireman. The hairy-chested fellow was naked from the waist up, and his coal-smeared face and blood-shot eyes did not add to the beauty of his appearance.

Suddenly the man’s grip transferred itself to Jack’s neck. The fingers, hard as iron, closed on his windpipe. He felt his breath shut off and his eyes starting out of his head. The man threw him roughly to the deck, and as he did so Jack recognized in him the sailor who had hung back when the boat was to be launched to the rescue of the derelict, and whose place he had taken. The fellow had been transferred to the fire-room force as a punishment.

The boy could feel the giant’s hot breath fanning his face as the man knelt over him, one knee crushingly on his chest.

“So, my young gamecock, you bane play the spy, hey?” he snarled. “You bane forgat everything you seen, or overboard you go with your figurehead stove in!”

The blood sang loudly in Jack’s ears. He fought for breath against the remorseless pressure on his throat. But the two great, gnarled hands of the fireman held him as if in a steel vise.

“You bane forgat what you see! You bane forgat it!”

The Norwegian emphasized what he said with a bump of Jack’s head against the deck at every word.

Twisting in what he felt was his death struggle, Jack managed to loosen the man’s hold ever so little. It was no time to consider fair tactics.

Seizing the advantage he had gained, the boy sank his teeth deep into the man’s arm.

With a yell of pain, the fellow relaxed his grip, and in a flash Jack was on his feet, while the Norwegian, disconcerted at this sudden attack, lay sprawling on the deck. As he arose, staggeringly, Jack dealt him a smashing blow in the face, but it only staggered the fellow for an instant. It could have been little more than a mosquito prick to his bull hide.

Roaring with rage, the fellow tore at Jack, who, feeling that his life was at stake, tried to make a dart for the door of the wireless cabin. But the man was too quick for him. He caught the boy in the embrace of a maddened wild beast.

“I bane keel you for that, you young demon!” he cried, and bore Jack toward the rail.

“Don’t! Don’t!” implored the boy, who felt that his last moment had come. But the brute showed no mercy. Deliberately he raised the boy, who was no more than a featherweight, in his arms, and was about to cast him into the water when suddenly something unexpected occurred.

A bulky form rushed upon the scene, and the next instant the sailor went staggering back under a crashing blow. Simultaneously a revolver flashed and a harsh, stern voice exclaimed:

“Don’t move a step or I’ll shoot you down like the mongrel cur you are!”

“Captain Braceworth!” gasped out Jack, who could hardly keep his feet.

“That’s who it is, youngster, and just in time to save your life, I imagine. I happened to be not far off and they summoned me to the dock to quell that riot. When that was done I came on board, and I’m glad I did. Don’t move, you despicable dog!” This to the fireman, who was trying to sneak off.

At almost the same instant there came from below the sound of a pistol shot.

“What in Neptune’s name does that mean?” demanded the captain. “What’s happening to this ship?”

“I think I can explain, sir,” said Jack, while the captain still kept the cowering fireman covered.

“Then do so by all means, and then I’ll trouble you to get me a pair of handcuffs from my cabin for this fellow.”

“It’s this way, sir. To-night I came on board to get some bits of apparatus and a book or two that I had left in my cabin. I happened to see a big bundle dropped into the water and then I saw a boat cruising about. I summoned the harbor police by wireless.”

“Jove! You’re not called ‘Ready’ for nothing!” exclaimed the captain, eyeing the boy with unconcealed admiration.

“And then, sir, this man saw what I had been up to and threatened to kill me if I told.”

“A threat, I believe, he is perfectly capable of carrying out. Don’t move there, you,” to the fireman. “I see it all now. That struggle on the dock was a blind to keep the watchman’s attention attracted while the smugglers got that stuff out of the bunkers. Ready, you’ve foiled a clever plot.”

More shots came from below.

“It’s the police, sir!” exclaimed Jack, “and I guess they’ve come in time.”

Just then a police sergeant appeared on the upper deck. He had come on board from the dock, having been summoned with a file of men by the old watchman. He looked astonished, as well he might, at the picture before him: a white-faced, shaking boy, a sullen, whipped cur of a fireman and a stalwart seaman covering the man with a revolver. From below, where the police were rounding up the smugglers, who put up a desperate resistance, also came sounds of conflict.

“Sergeant, if you’ll handcuff this man, I’ll explain all this in a brace of shakes,” said the captain. He speedily did so to the officer’s satisfaction, and the malefactor was led off, after Jack had promised to appear against him in the morning when the case came up in court.

As for the gang in the boats, they, too, were rounded up after several shots had been exchanged without bloodshed. Jack was warmly congratulated by the police, and it was late before he was able to slip off home to the schooner.

He found his uncle anxiously waiting up for him, and Jack told his story with as little melodrama in it as he could. But his throat was rapidly turning black and blue where his assailant had grasped him, and his uncle would not hear of the lad’s turning in till it had been anointed with Captain Ready’s “Bruise Balm and Sore Soother.”

The next day in court the fireman, whose name, by the way, was Lars Anderson, and all the other smugglers were held for the higher tribunals of the federal government, under whose jurisdiction their cases, with the exception of Anderson’s, came.

Heavy sentences were prophesied for all of them. Many were the black glances cast at Jack by the gang as they were led away. But these malicious looks did not come alone from the malefactors. Out in the courtroom was gathered a hard-looking crowd.

Coal passers and firemen of the Ajax against whom nothing could be proved, although it was morally certain that they were connected with the gang, had gathered there to see how it fared with their companions. When Jack was giving his testimony he saw many malevolent glances fixed on him, and one man went so far as to shake his fist covertly at the lad.

But Jack did not falter, and gave his story in a manly, straightforward fashion that won him the approval of the court and the respect of the attorneys. He left the courtroom with Mr. Brown, the captain having gone uptown with some friends.

As they passed out of the door the firemen who had witnessed the scene within were gathered about the doorway. They eyed Jack scowlingly and more than one muttered threat was heard.

As soon as they had passed out of earshot, Mr. Brown spoke seriously to Jack.

“I’d be very careful how I went about New York at night after this, if I were you,” he said.

“Why?” asked Jack innocently.

“Simply because those fellows have it in for you.”

“But this is New York City. Surely they wouldn’t dare——”

“They’d dare anything fast enough if they could get you up a dark street,” said the mate sententiously.

“But they’ll be sailing with us again, anyhow,” said Jack.

“They will not!” said Mr. Brown with emphasis. “But recollect that some of them are desperate characters. Firemen, some of them at least, are as bad as they make ’em. You’ve sent their pals to jail. Very well then, their code of justice requires them to avenge themselves on you. So look out for squalls!”

“Oh, I’ll be careful,” laughed Jack as they shook hands and parted.

At the Brooklyn Bridge he paused to buy a paper. The first thing that caught his eye made him flush and then laugh.

There at the top of the page and spread out over two columns was a portrait of himself, drawn by an artist possessed of a vivid imagination, inasmuch as he had never seen Jack.

Then there was a half-tone of the Ajax, labeled “Scene of the Thrilling Battle for Life.”

Underneath came headlines:

“Well, that’s going some, as Raynor would say,” laughed Jack, hardly knowing whether to be amused or indignant.

“There’s one satisfaction,” he thought as he rode over the bridge on a surface car and digested the long interview with himself that he had never given, “nobody would ever recognize me from that picture.”

A few days later Jack received a letter from the company. It enclosed a handsome check “for valuable and appreciated services.” This time Jack did not return the check.

“Still,” he mused, “if it had not been for Captain Braceworth, there might have been a different story to tell.”

The letter, however, delighted him more than he showed. It demonstrated for one thing that the company appreciated what he had done, and that, if all continued to go well, he was in the line of promotion. He dreamed night and day of his next step upward, and longed for a berth on one of the Titan Steamship Company’s coasting vessels that ran to Galveston and Central American and West Indian ports. They carried passengers, and they paid their operators much more than the Ajax class of wireless men received.

“If I can only get some more opportunities to show what I can do,” thought the boy, “I’m bound to get on. ‘Keep plugging,’ my dad used to say, and that is just what I am going to do, no matter how many discouragements or hardships I meet. And then, perhaps, some day——”

Jack went off into a day dream, and it was an odd thing that his reverie led him into a sudden determination to seek out Captain Dennis at the address that had been given him, and to call on the captain. Perhaps there was another member of the captain’s household that Jack was anxious to see, too!

He found Captain Dennis installed in a pleasant, though small, flat in that section of New York known as Greenwich Village. It is a queer old quarter, full of once fashionable houses with dormer windows and white doorsteps, and some of them with shutters. Captain Dennis had been unable to find another ship, and was working for a ship chandler. But he bore up bravely under his misfortunes, and as for his daughter Jack thought that she was the most charming, enslaving bit of budding womanhood he had ever seen.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that the young wireless man did not need to be pressed to stay to supper. How the time flew! Captain Dennis dozed and only took part at times in the lively chatter of young Ready and his “little gal,” but Jack did not find anything to object to about this, you may be sure.

When at last he left with the promise to come soon again and his head full of plans for a “regular party” on the old Venus, he found a raw, foggy night outside, and at that late hour the streets of the old-fashioned quarter almost deserted.

Now the streets of Greenwich Village twist and turn, as somebody has said, “like a giant pretzel.” Tenth Street crosses Eleventh Street, and Eighth Street runs through both of them in this topsy-turvy old quarter.

Jack’s course lay for the elevated station at Eighth Street, but, what with the fog and his unfamiliarity with the section, he found himself utterly lost after a short time, wandering about with no idea where he was.

But to his nostrils came a whiff of the sea, and he suddenly bethought himself of the fact that, although there were no late passers-by or policemen to be seen in “the village,” he might be able to find somebody on the waterfront who would direct him.

“I’m a fine sailor to lose my bearings like this,” he scolded himself as he bent his steps in that direction.

If the village had been deserted, there was plenty of life—and life of a very doubtful sort—on the waterfront. Saloons blazed with light, and from within came discordant sounds of disorderly choruses and songs. These places were the haunt of ’longshoremen, stevedores and the lower class of sailors from the big liners, whose docks ranged northward in a majestic line.

Jack had no desire to go into one of these resorts, but he looked about in vain for some more respectable place in which to inquire. As is not uncommon in New York, not a policeman was in sight, and the few passers-by were too ruffianly-looking to make the boy feel inclined to accost them.

At last he found himself opposite a small eating place—the Welcome Home—that appeared to be fairly respectable. A full-rigged ship painted in red and blue on its front window and the legends displayed in the same place told him it was an eating house for sailors.

And so he decided to go in. In the front of the place was a glass showcase filled with cheap cigars. Behind it were gaudily colored posters of steamship lines.

There was no one behind the counter, and Jack started toward the rear, where three men sat at a table talking rather boisterously.

One of them, a big, hulking fellow with the build of a bull, brought his fist down on the table with a crash that made the plates and glasses jump, just as Jack came in.

“The kid’s on the Ajax,” the lad heard him say in a rough voice, “and if ever I catch him, I——”

He stopped short as he heard Jack’s footfall behind him. The next instant he turned a bloated, brutal countenance, suffused with blood, upon the boy.

Up to that instant, Jack had not connected himself with the subject of conversation. But he did now. With a quick heart-leap he had recognized the hulking brute at the table as one of the cronies of Anderson the fireman.

The recognition was mutual. With a roar like that of a stricken bull the man leaped to his feet.

“Mates!” he bellowed, “it’s the kid himself! After him! Keep the door there, someone!”

A bottle came whizzing through the air at Jack’s head. He dodged it and it burst in a crimson spatter of ketchup against the wall, spattering the boy with its contents.

Like an arrow he darted out of the door. The proprietor, who was just coming into the place from an errand next door, spread his arms to stop him. Down went Jack’s head, and like a battering ram he butted the fat landlord, gasping, out of his path.

After him came a shower of plates, glasses and bottles and loud, excited shouts.

Jack ran as he had never run in his life before. Behind him came the heavy beat of the firemen’s feet. How much mercy he could expect from them if they laid hands on him, he knew.

Nobody was in sight. Jack’s safety lay in his own heels, a fact he recognized with a quick gasp of dismay.

As he doubled the nearest corner, like a hare with the hounds close upon it, Jack uttered a wild shout for help. He hoped that somebody might hear it.

But there was no result from his appeal for aid. Were there no policemen in New York?

The street he had blindly doubled into was lined on each side by tall, dark, silent warehouses. The blank walls echoed back the sound of his flying feet and the heavy footfalls of those in pursuit.

Jack realized, with a thrill of dismay, that they were gaining on him. He heard the heavy exhalation and intake of the runners’ breaths.

Suddenly one of his pursuers whipped out a revolver and fired.

The audacity of the deed sent Jack’s heart racing faster than before. A man who would dare to fire a revolver on a New York street, dark and deserted though it was, would hardly stick at any act of violence.

“If I can’t throw them off, it’s all up with me,” thought the boy.

Bang!

Another report echoed back from the shadowy walls on either side. This time the bullet came close, but it was only a random shot, for at the pace they were running nobody could take careful aim.

The effect of the closely singing bullet was to make Jack lose his nerve utterly. Blindly he plunged forward, not hearing the distant screaming of police whistles and the thunder of nightsticks as they were rapped on the pavements.

The sound of the revolver shots had aroused the police at last. From every direction they came running; but Jack, in a perfect frenzy of fear, knew nothing of all this. He did see, though, that he was coming into a better lighted quarter. A few stores and residences blossomed with lights, and help lay ahead if he could only make it in time.

Behind him he could hear only one set of footfalls now. Two of his pursuers had dropped out of the chase. The boy put forth a supreme effort, but in the very act he met with disaster. He had been running with his head down, and suddenly, just as he gave a last desperate sprint to gain the lighted quarter, he collided, crashingly, with an iron lamp-post. The boy went down as if he had been struck with a club. Fire blazed before his eyes; his senses swam, and then all became black.

It was just at this moment that a big black auto came whirling through the street. In the tonneau sat a stout, prosperous-looking man who, as he saw the sudden accident, started up and ordered his chauffeur to stop. Master and man got out and went over to the recumbent figure, and, as they did so, a hulking form glided off in the shadowy region toward the waterfront.

“The kid’s broke his head without botherin’ me to do it for him,” the man muttered as he slunk off.

“Now then, Marshall,” said the prosperous-looking man, “give me a hand to pick this boy up. Lucky for him that we were coming this way home from Staten Island or he might have lain here all night.”

They stooped over the lad and picked him up. As they did so, the light of a street lamp fell on the pale face. The owner of the car gave a sudden sharp exclamation:

“Gracious goodness! It’s young Ready! How in the world did he come here?”

“He’s got a precious bad crack on his head, sir, and by the looks of him won’t be able to answer that question for some time to come. My advice, Mr. Jukes, is to take him to the hospital.”

“You are right, Marshall. I’m afraid the poor lad has a bad injury. Help me put him in the tonneau and then make a quick run for the nearest hospital.”

By a strange fate it was Mr. Jukes’ car that had approached Jack as he fell senseless to the street. The shipping magnate was returning home, as he had said, from a dinner party on Staten Island. Finding the streets by the South Ferry torn up, he had ordered his chauffeur to proceed along West Street and then cut through the village to Fifth Avenue. Thus it came about that his employer it was who had picked up poor Jack.

Straight to the Greenwich Hospital drove the chauffeur, and in less than half an hour Jack lay tucked in a private bed, with orders that he was to be given every care; and Mr. Jukes was speeding uptown, wondering greatly how the young wireless operator happened to be in that part of the city at that hour of the night.

The next morning Jack awakened in his bed at the hospital with the impression that a boiler shop had taken up a temporary abode in his head. For a few minutes he thought he was in his bunk on the Ajax, then he shifted to the Venus and at last, as he blinkingly regarded the ceiling, memory came rushing back in a full flood.

The dark, deserted streets, the rough, brutal men, the mad run for life, and then a sudden crash and darkness. What had happened? Had they struck him down? Jack put his hand to his throbbing head. It was bandaged. So they had struck him. But he was uninjured otherwise seemingly, so something must have happened to stop the savage fury of the firemen before they had time to wreck their full vengeance on his defenseless body.

He turned his head and saw a young woman smilingly regarding him. She wore a blue dress and a neat white apron and cap.

“A nurse,” thought Jack, and then aloud, “is this the hospital?”

“Yes,” was the reply, “but you must not talk till the doctor has seen you.”

“But what has happened? How did I come here?” persisted Jack.

“If you will promise not to ask any more questions till after the doctor has been here, I will tell you.”

“Very well. I’ll promise.”

“You were brought here in Mr. Jukes’ automobile.”

Jack tried to sit up in bed. What sort of a wild dream was this? His last recollection was of a dark street, revolver shots and a stunning blow, and now, suddenly, Mr. Jukes, his employer, was brought into the matter.

“Mr. Jukes!” he exclaimed. “Why, how——”

“Hush! Remember your promise.”

Jack, perforce, lay back to wait, with what patience he could, the visit of the doctor, after which he hoped he might be allowed to talk. It was all too perplexing. Then, too, he recollected, with a pang of dismay, that the Ajax sailed the next day. What if she sailed without him? He would lose his berth. The lad fairly ground his teeth.

“Just one question, ma’am,” he begged; “when can I get out of here?”

“Not for two or three days, at any rate,” was the reply.

Poor Jack groaned aloud and buried his face in his hands.

The doctor had come and gone, confirming the verdict that Jack had dreaded to hear. In the meantime, by the kind offices of the hospital authorities, a message had been despatched to his uncle informing him of the lad’s plight.

The nurse had told the boy all she knew of the matter and added an admiring eulogy on Mr. Jukes, who, she said, had promised to call that day and had ordered that no expense was to be spared in caring for Jack in the meantime.

But all this fell on ears that were deaf. The one bitter fact that the boy’s brain drummed over and over to the exclusion of all else was that his ship would sail without him and his accident might cost him his berth.

“Isn’t there any way I can be patched up so as to get out to-morrow?” he begged.

The nurse shook her head.

“The doctor wouldn’t hear of it. You must lie here two days, at least.”

“You might as well make it a year,” moaned Jack.

After a while he dozed off, but was awakened by the nurse, who, in tones of suppressed excitement, informed him that Mr. Jukes had arrived to see him. Jack, who had been expecting his uncle, felt disappointed, but still, he reasoned, Mr. Jukes might be able to throw some light on the dark hours through which Jack had passed.

With Mr. Jukes, when he entered, was a tall, delicate-looking lad of about Jack’s age. He shrank rather shyly behind his father as he gazed at the sunbrowned, bandaged lad on the bed.

“Well, my lad, how do you feel this morning?” asked Mr. Jukes in his brisk, close-lipped way as he took the chair offered him by the nurse.

“Much better, sir, thank you,” rejoined Jack. “I—I want to rejoin the ship, sir.”

“Impossible. They tell me you cannot get out for two days, at least,” was the decisive reply. “But I must say you are a hard lad to kill. When you struck that lamp-post——”

“That lamp-post!” exclaimed Jack.

“Yes, down in Greenwich Village. You were running along like one possessed. All of a sudden I saw you strike the post like a runaway locomotive, and then down you came. Now, my boy, it’s up to you to explain what you were doing in that part of town at that time of night.”

Mr. Jukes compressed his lips and looked rather severe, but as Jack launched into his story, the magnate’s brow grew black.

“The rascals! The infernal rascals! I’ll offer a big reward this very day for their apprehension.”

“I’m afraid there’s not much chance of getting them, sir,” said Jack. “But it was fortunate indeed for me that you arrived on the scene, although I cannot understand how it happened.”

This was soon explained, and then Mr. Jukes, turning to the frail-looking youth, said:

“This is my son, Tom. Tom, this, as you know, is the lad who saved your sister from drowning.”

“How d’ye do!” said Jack, gripping the other’s slim white fingers in a grasp that made the lad wince, for, sick as he was, Jack’s grip had lost none of its strength.

“Tom’s not very strong, but he’s crazy about wireless and the sea. Now I’ve got to be off. Big meeting downtown. Tom, I’ll be back and get you for lunch. In the meantime, stay here and get young Ready to tell you all he knows about wireless.”

“That won’t take very long,” laughed Jack, which remark brought from Mr. Jukes a repetition of the observation that it would be “hard to kill” the young wireless man.

Mr. Jukes rushed out of the room as if there was not an instant to be lost.

“That’s his way,” laughed Tom Jukes, as his father vanished, “always in a rush. But he’s got the best heart in the world. Tell me all about your trouble with those firemen and your life on the Ajax. I wish dad would let me follow the sea. I’d soon get strong again.”

Jack, in the interest of having someone to talk to, forgot about his damaged head. He gave a lively, sketchy account of life on the big tanker, not forgetting the surgical operation performed by wireless, and wound up with the story of the night raid on the tobacco smugglers and his encounter of the night before with the revengeful firemen.

When he finished, Tom Jukes sighed.

“Gracious! That’s interesting, though! I wish I had adventures like that. But they are doing their best to make a regular molly-coddle out of me. The yacht and Bar Harbor in the summer, Florida in the winter and a private tutor and a man-servant! It makes me sick!”

The lad shot out these last words with surprising vehemence. “I know a lot of fellows who’d change with you,” said Jack.

“You do! They must be sap-heads,” said the rich man’s son; and then suddenly, “How would you like to try the life for a time?”

“Me? Oh, I’ve never thought about it,” said Jack.

“Because if you would—but I forgot. I’m not to say anything about that. That’s dad’s plan, and he’ll have to talk to you about it.”

Jack was much mystified, but Tom adroitly dodged further questioning by turning the subject. He told the young wireless man of his trips to Florida and California in search of health, and all about his father’s fine yacht, the Halcyon, on which he had made many trips.

“But it’s all rot,” he concluded. “If they’d let me live the life any ordinary kid does, I’ll bet I’d be as sound—as sound as you are before very long.”

About noon Mr. Jukes came back. He burst into the room with his customary bustle and hurry, and it was plain that he had something on his mind to deliver in his usual blunt way.

Without any preliminaries he broke out:

“Ready, I’ve decided that you will make an excellent companion for Tom. He needs the companionship of an active, cheery lad of his own age.

“I like you and I know he will. It’s a great chance for you. Stay here till you feel all right, and then I’ll send you and Tom on a cruise to Florida on the yacht. Life at sea is a dog’s life at the best. I’ll pick out a different career for you and give you a desk in my office when Tom is on his feet again. Come now, what do you say?”

While the magnate had been volleying out these rapid-fire orders,—for that is what they amounted to,—Jack’s tired brain had been performing an eccentric whirl. At first he had hardly understood, but now the full meaning of it burst upon him.

Mr. Jukes wanted him to leave the sea, to drop his beloved wireless work and take a desk in his office! He was also to act, it seemed, as a sort of companion for Tom. It was a life of ease and offered a future which few boys would have had the courage to decline.

Jack knew that every round of the ladder he had elected to climb could only be won by stern fighting and keeping the faith like a man. On the other hand, if he chose to give in to Mr. Jukes’ wishes or commands, he was on the road to a life of ease and luxury and one that was as far from the hardships and adventures of the sea as could be imagined.

Mr. Jukes eyed the boy as he hesitated with rising impatience. He was not at all used to having his wishes disobeyed. Men jumped to carry out his commands; and yet it appeared that this stubborn young sailor lad of the ocean wireless wavered.

“What are you hesitating about, Ready?” he asked impatiently.

“I’m not hesitating, sir,” was the astonishing reply, “I’m trying to find the best way to tell you that I can’t accept your offer.”

Mr. Jukes was as astonished as on the night when Jack had refused his check. He flushed red and his cheeks swelled.

“Don’t talk like an idiot, lad,” he exclaimed, choking down his wrathful amazement. “Of course you can do as I wish. It will be the making of Tom and of you.”

“I’d like to do it if I could, Mr. Jukes,” said Jack, wondering why he seemed to be doomed always to run afoul of this man who appeared bent on doing him a kindness. “It’s a great offer. Please don’t think I do not appreciate it.”

“Then why in the name of heaven don’t you accept it?” thundered Mr. Jukes with rising wrath.

“Because I cannot, sir,” rejoined Jack bravely; while he thought to himself, “This means I’ll have to look for another job.”

“Cannot! Why, of all the crass idiocy! What ails you, boy! Cannot, indeed! Why?”

“Because I have chosen my own way of life, sir, and I must follow it out,” replied Jack, as firmly as he could in spite of the bitter feeling that filled him that he was killing his own chances with the Titan Line.

Tom Jukes tried to interpose, but his father angrily choked him off.

“Not a word!” he exclaimed. And then, to Jack, with an air of finality:

“I’ve no more time to dally words with an ungrateful boy. Is it yes or no?”

“It must be no, sir,” said Jack, setting his teeth, “but, if you would let me explain, I——”

“Say no more! say no more!” exclaimed Mr. Jukes, jamming on his hat. “Come, Tom. As for you, Ready, I wash my hands of you. I’ve no desire to interfere with your prospects on the line. You retain your job, but expect no favors from me. You must work out your own salvation.”

“That is just what I want to do, sir,” was Jack’s quiet rejoinder, as Mr. Jukes bounced out of the room, dragging Tom, who looked wistfully back.

“The boy is mad! Stark, staring mad, by Jove!” exclaimed the angry magnate as he stamped his way out of the hospital.

“I suppose anyone would think me a fool for what I’ve done,” thought Jack, as he lay back on the pillows after the frantic Mr. Jukes’ departure, “but I couldn’t help it. I’m not going to be a rich man’s pawn if I know it. What was it he said? Work out my own salvation? Well, I’ll do it, and maybe I’ll astonish some folks before long. Too bad, though I’m not such a chump as not to know what powerful friends and influence can do in the world, and now, through no fault of my own, I’ve had to chuck away both. But if grit and determination will help any, I’ll get up the ladder yet.”

Not long after that Uncle Toby arrived with cheering news. The Ajax was docked in the Erie Basin and would not sail for three days more, owing to a defective boiler which would have to be repaired.

“So I can join her, after all,” thought Jack, cheered vastly by the news. “Well, that’s a streak of fat to put alongside the lean!”

Jack made his second eastward trip on the Ajax under smiling skies and seas almost as smooth as glass. Nothing out of the routine happened, and in due course the Ajax, once more in ballast, cleared from Antwerp for the home run. Jack had heard nothing more from Mr. Jukes and deemed that the magnate had utterly cast him off.

Before he left the hospital, he had had visits from Captain Dennis and his daughter and from Tom Jukes, who came secretly and brought the information that, although his father was furious with the young wireless man for rejecting what he deemed a magnificent offer, he would yet pay Jack’s hospital bill.

“He’ll do nothing of the sort,” Jack had flared up, and when he left the institution, it was the lad himself who footed the bill.

It ate quite a hole in the check that was his reward for his share in the detection of the tobacco smugglers, but it would have choked him to think of accepting Mr. Jukes’ charity after the scene at his bedside the morning after he had received his injury.

But the disfavor with which he was regarded by Mr. Jukes was the only cloud on Jack’s horizon. Since that night in New York, Captain Braceworth’s manner toward the young wireless boy had changed. He was still austere and silent, but now and then, as he swung past the wireless room on his way forward or to his cabin, he would exchange a word or two with the lad. Perhaps he never guessed how much this encouraged the boy who, on his first voyage, had set down the skipper of the Ajax as a cruel, harsh despot.

Knot after knot the steadily revolving engines of the Ajax brought her closer to home. The weather continued fine until one day, when Jack was half wishing something would happen, the curtain began to draw up on what was to prove a drama of the deep, destined to test every man on board the big tanker.

A fog, dense, swirling and moist as a wet sponge, shut down all about the Ajax that morning soon after breakfast. The captain donned his oil-skins and took up his position on the bridge, to stay there, as was his custom, till the fog should lift and everything be secure again.

The chief engineer was sent for and instructed to keep his force in the grimy regions below, keyed up for instant obedience to orders from the bridge, for the Ajax was on the Atlantic lane, a well-traveled, crowded ocean track.

Like a blind man, the big tanker felt her way along, now starting forward and now almost stopping with an air of fright, as some fancied obstruction loomed in her path.

Through the weary day and the long night that followed, the Ajax groped her way through the fog blanket that hung like a dense mist-shroud over the sullenly heaving sea. It was a marine game of touch and go, with possibly death and disaster for the stakes.

The engine-room telegraph spun in a weary succession of “Come ahead”—“Slow”—“Ahead”—“Slow”—“Stop her”—and “Come ahead, slow” again.

When daylight came, it shone on the fog walls that bound the Ajax prisoner. The wan light showed Jack the figures of the captain and his first officer on the bridge. He knew that through the long night they had kept their weary vigil. But so dense was the fog that it was not always possible to see the bridge from the after superstructure.

Only when light and vagrant breezes sent the fog-wreaths fluttering and writhing, like ghosts, could a blurred view of the forward part of the ship be obtained.

Jack, too, had been on duty all night and he felt dull and wretched. Through the fog had come calls from other ships, and vague whisperings and chatterings, all fraught with fear and caution.

So far as those on the Ajax knew, there was no ship closer to them than the Plutonia of the Smithson Lines. Jack had been busy through the night, running back and forth with messages. Now, as he came to the door of his cabin for a breath of the fog-laden air, he was musing to himself on the anxious look on the captain’s furrowed face.

It was not the fog. Jack had seen the captain guide his ship through even denser smothers than the present one. He had always been his calm, collected, even cold, self.

But now the very air appeared to be vibrant with some vague apprehension which the boy could not name or even guess at. But it was something that lay outside the fog. Some overshadowing peril of more than ordinary imminence.

As the steamer crawled forward, the mournful hooting of her siren sounding like the very spirit of the mist, Jack revolved all these things in his mind. He felt vaguely troubled.

It was no small thing that could worry the stalwart skipper of the Ajax, as he palpably was worried. Fog was dangerous, yes, but what with the wireless and the extraordinary caution observed, the peril was reduced to a minimum.

The watches forward had been doubled and in the crow’s nest two men had been stationed. But that was customary in a fog. Suddenly, as Jack stood there, his wireless alarm,—he had perfected the device and had made application for a patent on the same,—began to clamor loudly.

Jack hurried to his post. It was the Westerland, a hundred and fifty miles east and considerably to the south, calling.

“Dense fog clearing here,” so the message ran, “but many large icebergs in vicinity. If in fog, use great caution. Please repeat warning.

Jack’s heart gave a bound.

“Icebergs!”

So it was fear of the white terrors of the north that kept the captain chained to the bridge with that anxious look on his weather-beaten face.

When he reached the bridge with this all-important despatch, Jack found the captain in consultation with his officers. Tests of the temperature of the water were being made, and the skipper was listening attentively to the roaring of the siren.

If there was ice in the vicinity, the echo of the great whistle would be flung back and serve as a warning.

“Well, boy?” the captain turned impatiently on Jack.

“A message, sir. I think it’s important,” said the boy deferentially.

The captain glanced through it and whistled.

“Important! I should think it is. Just what I thought. Confound this ocean!”

He hastened over to his officers and showed them the despatch. A lively consultation followed, which Jack wished he could have overheard. He would have liked to know what further steps could be taken to avert the dangers amid which they were crawling forward.

As a matter of fact, all that could be done had been done. Humanly speaking, the Ajax was as safe as she could be rendered in the midst of the invisible dangers that, like white specters, might be swarming about her even now.

Jack was ordered back to the wireless room and told to stand by for any further information. The captain evidently placed great reliance on getting further word of the location of the ice-fields and bergs.

But, although Jack worked ceaselessly, sending out his crackling, sparkling calls, no reply came back out of the blinding fog. Clearly the ship that had sent the wireless that was so all-important had passed out of his zone, or else the “atmospherics” were arrayed against communication.

It was a thrilling and not altogether a comfortable thought to consider that at any moment there might loom above them, out of the choking mist, a mountainous white form that might well spell annihilation for the sturdy tanker.

Raynor, whose hand was now quite well, poked his head in at the door. He was grimy and soot-covered but cheerful, and was going off watch.

“Hello, Jack,” he cried, “what do you think of this? Burning soft coal in heaven, I guess! Isn’t it a smother, for fair?”

“It sure is,” rejoined Jack, “but the fog isn’t the worst of it.”

Raynor looked surprised.

“What are you driving at? They’ve had us on double watches since it started, stopping and starting up the engines till they must think they’re being run by a gang of crazy engineers.”

“It’s icebergs, old fellow,” said Jack in an awed tone.

“Icebergs! At this time of year, that’s unusual,” said Raynor.

“I don’t know about that, but I got a message from the Westerland telling about them.”

“The dickens, you say! No wonder the old man is worried out of his socks. Say, Jack,” went on the young engineer.

“Well?”

“What a fine chance we’d stand down below there, if we ever hit anything, eh?”

And young Raynor, whistling cheerily, passed on to his room to wash up and change.

Jack gave a shudder. “If they hit anything.” Well did he know what a small chance the men in the grimy, sooty regions of the fire-room and engine-space would stand in such a contingency. It would be their duty to keep up the fires till the rising water put them out, and then—every man for himself!

Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo! boomed the siren.

“Ugh! You sound as cheerful as a funeral,” shuddered Jack; and, to divert his mind into a more cheerful channel, he fell to running the wireless scale, in the hope that he might find himself in tune with some other ship with fresh news of the white monsters of the northern polar cap.

But the white silences were broken by no winged messages; and so the afternoon waned to twilight, and night descended once more about the fog-bound ship.

The strain of it all began to tell on the young wireless man. He made hourly reports to the shrouded figures on the bridge that looked like exaggerated ghosts in the smother of fog. The lights on the ship shone through the obscurity like big, dim eyes, and the constant booming and shrieking of the siren grew nerve-racking.

Vigilance was the order of the night. Bridge, deck and engine-room were all alike keyed up to the highest pitch of watchfulness. At any moment a message of terror might come clanging from the bridge to the engineers’ region.

The suspense made Jack, strong-nerved as he was, feel like crying out. If only something would happen, he felt that he would not care so much, but this silent creeping through the ghostly fog was telling on him.

Half dozing at times, Jack sat nodding at his key. All at once, without the slightest warning what all hands had been waiting for with keyed-up nerves happened.

From somewhere dead ahead the shriek of the siren was hurled back through the fog in a volley of echoes.

It was Captain Braceworth himself who jumped to the engine-room telegraph and signaled:

“Full speed astern!”

At the same instant a voice boomed out from the fore-peak:

“Something dead ahead, sir!”

And then the next moment a heart-chilling hail from the crow’s nest:

“Ice ahead! A big berg right under our bow!”

Jack leaped from his instruments, a nameless dread clutching at his heart. There had been no impact as yet, but he did not know at what instant there might come a crashing blow that would tear the stout steel plates of the tanker open as if they had been so much cardboard.

For a moment wild panic had him in its cold grasp. Then, heartily ashamed of the cold sweat that had broken out on him and the wild impulse he had had to cry out, he clenched his hands and regained control of himself.

The whole fabric of the ship quivered as the mighty engines flew round in the opposite direction to that in which they had been rotating. At the instant Captain Braceworth’s order had been given it had been obeyed.

For a breath there was killing suspense; and then suddenly there came the shock of an impact. It was not a violent one, but just a grating, jarring shock.

“Great Scott! We’ve struck!” exclaimed Jack, as the next instant there came a second and more violent contact.

He was thrown bodily from his feet. Forward there came a babel of cries.

The ship listed heavily to port and then slowly, like a wounded creature, she righted. Then came a sound of thunder as the masses of ice, dislodged from the berg by the collision, toppled and slid from her fore-decks.

Jack knew that what the skipper had dreaded had come to pass. In spite of ceaseless, sleepless vigilance and the exercise of every caution a man could use, the Ajax had rammed an iceberg.

Above the yells and shouts of the seamen came the captain’s calm, authoritative voice.

His orders rang out like pistol shots. Accustomed to obey, the seamen stopped their panic and fell to their work. The mates were down among them, silencing the more obstreperous in no very gentle manner.

A squad of men came running aft to the boats. For an instant Jack thought that, in their panic, they were about to lower away and make off. But he speedily saw, to his immense relief, that they were in charge of cool-headed little Mr. Brown; they had been sent aft merely to stand by the boats and tackle in case it became necessary to abandon the ship.

Jack jumped to his key. If the ship was sinking, he would show them that he could live up to best wireless traditions.

Out into the black, fog-bound night went thundering and volleying the stricken ship’s appeal for aid. But the boy did not send out the S.O.S.; that could only be done by the captain’s orders. His intent was to inform any ship within his zone of their plight, so that they might stand by to render assistance if it should be necessary.

But no answer came to the wireless appeal that the boy flung broadcast through space. Time and again he tried to summon help, but none answered his call.

The captain himself came aft, leaving things forward to the first officer. The second officer and the carpenters were sounding the ship to discover if her wound were mortal or if she could make port somehow.

Somewhere off in the fog Jack could hear the swells breaking as if on a rocky coast. He knew they were beating against the iceberg that the ship had crashed against!

Jack looked up as the captain entered the wireless room. Never had he admired the man as he did in that instant. Pale, but stern and resolute, Captain Braceworth looked the man of the minute, a fit person to cope with the dire emergency that had befallen them.

“Any ships in our zone, Ready?” he asked calmly.

“No, sir, I’ve been trying to raise some and——”

“Very well. Keep on. If you get into communication, report to me at once.”

“Yes, sir. Are—are we badly hurt, sir?”

“It is impossible to say. We are trying to find out now. I need not tell you it is your duty to stay at that key till the last boat leaves the ship.”

“You need not tell me that, sir,” said Jack, flushing proudly. “I’d go down with her if it would do any good.”

The captain looked oddly at the boy a moment and then slapped him hard upon the back.

“You’ve the right stuff in you, Ready,” he said and hurried off again.

The ship was still slowly backing. Presently Jack heard the mate’s big voice booming out from forward.

“She’s flooded to the bow bulkhead, sir, but so far as I can see, there’s no immediate danger. When daylight comes, we may be able to patch her up.”

This was hopeful news, and a cheer arose from the men as they heard it. But mingled with the cheer came another sound—a muffled roar like that of wild animals or of an enraged mob.

What it meant flashed across Jack in a jiffy.

The firemen, The Black Squad, as they were called! They had mutinied against being penned in the fire-room on a sinking ship and were rushing to the deck.

Without knowing just what he was doing, the boy took his revolver out of the drawer where he kept it and rushed outside. The first thing he saw under the glow of the lights was the figure of Raynor.

The young engineer’s head was bleeding from a cut and in his hand he had a big spanner. Pressing upward behind him as he backed out of the fire-room companionway were the Black Squad, wild with panic. In their hands they carried slice-bars, shovels, any weapon that came handy.

“Stand back, I tell you,” commanded Raynor, as Jack approached him.

“Stand back nothing,” bellowed a giant of a stoker. “Think we’re going to the bottom on this rotten hooker? Stand back, yourself. Come on, boys! The boats! We’ll get away while there’s time.”

“You’ll stay plumb where you are or be drilled as full of holes as porous plasters!”

It was little Mr. Brown who spoke. Almost before he knew it, Jack was at the doughty little officer’s side and stood with Raynor and Mr. Brown facing that howling mob from the black regions below.

“So you will have it, eh?”

The leader of the Black Squad, a huge hulk of a fellow, stripped to the waist and smeared hideously with coal-dust, sprang forward. Above his head he brandished a heavy slice-bar.

He came straight for Jack and was raising his formidable weapon to strike the boy down when something happened.

Crack!

There was the report of a pistol and the fellow fell headlong. But it was not Jack’s pistol that had exploded. The boy could not have brought himself even in that moment to fire on a fellow being.

It was Mr. Brown’s weapon that had spoken.

He came straight for Jack ... when something happened.—Page 258

“Any one else want the same medicine?” demanded the fearless little man, indicating the form of the wounded fireman.

The men murmured sullenly. Their leader was gone, and without him they wavered and hesitated. The captain came running aft.

“What in the mischief is going on here?” he shouted.

“Fire-room crew. Mutiny, sir!” said Raynor. “We held ’em as long as we could, but the scoundrels overpowered us. The first is lying below wounded, sir. That fellow Mr. Brown shot felled him with a slice-bar.”

The captain’s brow grew black as night.

“Back to your posts, you mutinous dogs!” he roared. “Back, I tell you, or some of you will feel cold lead!”

He advanced toward them, driving them before him by sheer force of character as if they had been a flock of sheep.

“You cowards!” he went on. “There is no danger, but at the first shock of a small collision you leave your posts like the curs you are! Down to the fire-room with you!”

Completely demoralized, the men shuffled below again. Certain men were told off to attend to the wounded chief engineer, whose injuries were found to be slight. As for the man Mr. Brown had shot, he turned out not to have been injured at all. The chicken-hearted giant of a fellow had simply dropped at the report of the pistol and lain there till the trouble blew over. He was placed in irons and confined in the forecastle to await trial in port on charges of mutiny.

And thus, by prompt action, the mutiny was quelled almost in its inception. The thoroughly cowed firemen took up their work and nothing more was heard of refusal to do duty. It had been a good object lesson to Jack who, in ranging himself by the side of Mr. Brown and the young engineer, had acted more on instinct than anything else.

Secretly he was glad it had ended as it had, without bloodshed, for, as he knew, discipline on a ship must be upheld at any cost. He realized that neither the captain nor Mr. Brown would have hesitated for an instant to hold the men back with firearms, had they persisted in their bull-headed rush.

“Well, we are all right for the time being,” said the captain to Mr. Brown. “No need to keep these men by the boats.”

“Then we are not hurt as badly as you thought, sir?”

“No, the report is that the bow bulkhead is holding, although our forward plates are stove in. Thank goodness, we didn’t hit harder!”

“Yes, indeed, sir.”

“When daylight comes we’ll start to patch up. I hope this witches’ broth of a fog will have held up by then.”

“I’m glad that it was no worse, sir.”

“And so, indeed, am I, although, if it comes on to blow, there may yet be a different yarn to spin.”

The captain and the officer went forward, and Jack was left alone.

He took the opportunity to snatch a nap, adjusting the “wireless alarm” so that any ship that came within the zone would awaken him instantly.

Twice during the long night he tried to raise some other craft, but each time failed.

“I guess they’ve called in all the ships on the ocean,” said the boy to himself as, after the second attempt, he desisted from his efforts for the time being.

When daylight came, the big tanker presented a forlorn picture. Of the berg that had almost sent her to the bottom, there was no sign, although the fog had lifted quite a little.

The stout steel bow was twisted and crumpled like a bit of tin-foil. There was a yawning cavity in it, too, through which the water washed and gurgled with an ominous sound. When Jack came on deck, huge canvas screens were being rigged over it to keep out the water as much as possible. The steamer was proceeding slowly ahead through the fog wreaths, but, compared with her usual speed, she appeared hardly to have momentum.

Besides the protection of the crumpled bow by the canvas screens, another portion of the crew was sent below to strengthen the bulkhead from within by heavy timbers. There was a space between the front end of the tanks and the bulkhead, and in this they labored, bracing the steel partition as firmly as possible.

But Jack, when he made his report, heard Mr. Brown, who had the watch, remarking cheerfully to the second officer that the barometer had risen and that the prospects were for good weather.

“Well, we deserve a little luck,” was the response.

About noon the captain reappeared on the bridge. He was as much refreshed by his brief rest as most men would have been by a night’s sleep.

He had not been there ten minutes, when Jack, his face full of excitement, came hurrying up with a message.

“Important, sir!” he said.

The captain glanced the message over and then burst into an angry exclamation.

“They are asking for assistance, you say?”

“Yes, sir. But all I could catch is on that message there.”

“Great guns! Mr. Brown, sir, disasters always appear to come in bunches.”

“What’s the matter, sir?” asked the sympathetic officer.

“Why, young Ready, here, has just caught a message from the air. A ship is in distress somewhere.”

“Any details, sir?”

The captain shook his head.

“None. This is all the wireless caught. ‘S.O.E.,’ and then a few seconds later, ‘No hope of controlling it.’”

“Sounds like fire to me, sir,” said Mr. Brown.

“So it does to me. Hustle to your key, Ready, and get what more you can. If we can help them, we will, though Lord knows we’re in bad enough shape ourselves!”

Jack’s fingers shook with excitement and suspense as he took his seat again at the instrument and began searching the air for a clue to the mysterious sender of the frantic summons.

Every fiber of the adventurous strain in his being responded to this call for succor from the unknown. Impatiently he waited for more to come beating at the drums of his receivers. But for a long time he heard nothing.

Then, faintly and hesitatingly, there volleyed through the air some figures. Latitude and longitude, Jack guessed them to be, but they were so feebly sent and so jumbled, that in themselves they argued eloquently the stress of the sender.

Then came a frantic appeal that set Jack’s pulses to throbbing:

“Help! S.O.S.!”

Then silence shut down again. The captain appeared in the doorway.

“Well?” he said interrogatively. “Anything more?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack, handing him the figures he had jotted down; “he’s been trying to send us his latitude and longitude, I think. Can you make this out?”

The commander scanned the figures and then gave an impatient snort.

“Confound that wireless lunatic!”

“What is it, sir? Are the figures no good?”

“Good! I should think not. This latitude and longitude would put that ship somewhere up near Albany!”

The captain was irritated. His long vigil on the bridge had told upon him.

“Confound it all,” he broke out testily, “if that fellow wants us to come after him, why the dickens can’t he send some plain facts?”

“His current is very weak, sir. I can hardly hear the messages,” volunteered Jack.

“Well, stand by, my boy, and report to me the instant you get anything more,” said the captain. “It’s just like the luck. Here we are stove in like an old egg-shell, and there’s not another ship they can pick on for help but us.”

Under the circumstances the captain’s irritation was perhaps natural. The Ajax had already been delayed by the fog, and she was owned by a corporation that expected its ships to run on time. Furthermore, her injuries would cause her to limp along at a snail’s pace; and now, on the top of all this, had come an appeal for help that could not be disregarded, but which gave no facts or figures whatever!

“Who are you?—Who are—you?—Who are you?”

This was the message that went crashing out from the sender of the Ajax.

The aerials took up the question and spread it abroad to all the winds of heaven, but not the faintest whisper came back from the ether to tell that the words had been caught.

Then, with the suddenness of lightning, came another startling appeal.

“Fire is spreading. Ship being abandoned. Help!”

It was maddening to sit there and listen to these futile prayers for succor without being able to do a thing to reply to them.

“Why, oh why, won’t he send his position?” sighed Jack; and again he sent a frantic query volleying along the air waves.

But the receiver remained as silent as the void itself. Not the faintest scratching of an invalid fly’s footsteps came to reward Jack’s vigilance.

Before he could report his failure to the captain that dignitary was back again. He was fairly bubbling with impatience.

“It’s enough to drive a man mad,” he growled. “They must be a crew of lunatics on that ship. I never heard of anything like it. Oh, I’d like to drum some sense into their fool heads!”

“Hullo! Wait a jiffy!” cried Jack, startled out of his customary deference. “By the great horn spoon, here comes something now!”

The captain’s burly form bent over the slim body of the young operator as Jack’s nimble fingers flew over the receiving pad. He was excited and made no effort to hide it, although his long years at sea had taught him that nothing was too wildly improbable to occur on the great deep.

But that he should have collided with an iceberg and another ship within his wireless zone should be simultaneously on fire appeared to be almost without the pale of possibilities.

“Ah! Figures at last!” he said, as Jack jotted down a lot of numerals.

“Great Scott!” he shouted a moment later, “those figures put her within forty miles of us to the southwest!”

“Hold on, sir, here’s some more!” warned Jack.

The diaphragms crackled and tapped as a hail of dots and dashes beat against them like surf from the electric ocean. The sending was stronger now from the doomed vessel, wherever and whatever she was.

“This is the yacht Halcyon, New York for the Azores. Owner and son on board. For Heaven’s sake, send help! This may be good-bye.”

“Thunder and lightning!” roared the captain, more excited than Jack had ever seen him. “This is news! Why, the Halcyon is Mr. Jukes’ yacht!”

The pencil dropped from Jack’s nerveless fingers and he sat back, gasping at this extraordinary intelligence.

“Mr. Jukes’ yacht!” repeated the young wireless lad. “And his son is on board, too!”

“What, you know him?”

“Yes, I met him when I was in the hospital after those firemen, or rather the lamp-post, gave me that crack on the head.”

“Great Scott! It’s a case of have to go now whether we want to or not,” exclaimed the captain. “Of course,” he added, “we would have gone anyhow, but still, under the present conditions, if another steamer had been handy, I’d have left the job to them. But Mr. Jukes’ yacht, that’s another pair of shoes!”

“Clang-g-g-g-g-g-g!”

The wireless alarm “rang in” with its sharp, insistent note. Jack bent again to his instruments. In a trice he had turned into a business-like young operator of the wireless waves.

“Maybe that’s some more from them,” exclaimed the captain, as Jack picked up his pencil.

“Hurry!” was what Jack wrote. “Owner states he will give a million to anyone who will come to his help. Good-bye. I’ve got to make a getaway.”

“Well, at any rate, that wireless chap on the Halcyon is a cheerful sort of cuss,” observed the captain. “I guess that will be all from him now. I’ll go forward and see about proceeding to their aid.”

But the captain’s plans were destined to be changed. For a time they moved steadily but slowly toward the location of the doomed yacht. By noon the sun was out and the sea dancing a vivid blue under a bright sun. There was a smart breeze, too, and, after considering all the conditions, Captain Braceworth summoned Mr. Brown.

“Mr. Brown,” said he, “take a boat and go about twenty miles to the sou’west. If that yacht’s boats are scattered about there, you should sight some of them. You should be back not long after eight bells of the dog-watch. I’ll have flares and rockets sent up so that you can find the ship easily.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Mr. Brown, with sailor-like directness, and hurried off to complete his preparations.

In the meantime, Jack and young Raynor had been having a consultation. The latter was by this time quite an efficient wireless man, and this just fitted in with Jack’s plan; for he was dying to go in that boat which was about to set out after the castaways!

“How would you like to take the wireless this afternoon?” he inquired of his chum.

“I can’t think of anything that would suit me better. Why?” was the rejoinder.

“Because I am going to apply for a chance to go in that boat, if you will do relief duty for me. You are not on watch this afternoon, and it will be great experience for you.”

“Aren’t you the little wheedler, though?” laughed Raynor. “All right, Jack, I’ll do it for you. Cut along, now, and see the skipper. You haven’t any time to waste.”

In five minutes Jack was back and radiant.

“He says he doesn’t know why I should go hunting for trouble,” he reported, “but he says I can go.”

“Well, that’s the main thing,” said Raynor cheerily, “and you’d better see Mr. Brown right away. There goes the boat.”

The craft was, in fact, being slung out on the davits when Jack approached the mate and told him that he was to form one of the party.

“Always digging up work for yourself,” grinned the mate.

“That’s what the captain said,” rejoined Jack demurely.

He took his place in the boat, and a few moments later the small craft was being rowed away from the big tanker’s side by six pairs of stout arms.

“Cheerily, men!” admonished Mr. Brown. “Remember it’s the owner we’re going after. It may mean a dollar or two in every man’s pocket if we hurry.”

This hint had the desired effect.

The men bent to the oars till the stout ash curved and the boat hissed through the water. They had not gone more than a mile before a lively breeze caused Mr. Brown to order the sail hoisted.

Naturally enough, nobody was averse to this, and soon, under the canvas, they were speeding over the dancing sea. In his pleasure at this agreeable break in the monotony of sea-life, Jack almost forgot the seriousness of the errand on which they were bent.

But Mr. Brown reminded him of it by observing, “I’m hoping we are not too late.”

This idea had not entered Jack’s head before. Too late!

What if they were too late, after all! That last message had broken off with suspicious abruptness, although Mr. Jukes must have been then aboard, because his offer of a million dollars to the unknown ship—Jack had not sent the name of the Ajax—was characteristic of him.

The bright afternoon seemed to cloud over as he thought of this. Stern and capricious as the magnate was, still, Jack, in his inner soul, admired his forcefulness and driving power; and as for Tom Jukes, he had formed a genuine liking for the frail lad.

He looked out over the sparkling sea. It was hard to believe that it might have witnessed a marine tragedy within the last few hours.

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!”

“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.”

“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.

“Ahoy, there!” shouted Mr. Brown cheerfully, “Don’t worry; we’ll soon get you!”—Page 293

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.

“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.

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.”

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Transcriber's Notes

Hyphenated words have been retained as they appear in the original text, except as noted in the full list of changes below.

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