“What do you suppose it is?” queried Joe Hartley, his red, good-natured face aglow.
“Don’t go up in the air, Joe,” cautioned Nat, “it’s probably nothing more thrilling than a weather report from one of the chain of coast stations to another.”
“Get busy, Ding-dong, and find out,” urged Joe Hartley; “let’s see what sort of a message you can corral out of the air.”
But young Bell was already plodding across the sand toward a small timber structure about fifty yards distant from the Motor Rangers’ camp. Above the shack stretched, between two lofty poles, the antennæ of the wireless station. Against these the electric waves from out of space were beating and sounding the wireless “alarm-clock,” an invention of Ding-dong’s of which he was not a little proud.
Ding-dong had become inoculated with the wireless fever as a result of the trip east which the Motor Rangers had taken following their stirring adventures in the Bolivian Andes in Professor Grigg’s air-ship—which experiences were related in the fourth volume of this series, The Motor Rangers’ Cloud Cruiser. On their return to California—where all three boys lived, in the coast resort of Santa Barbara—nothing would suit Ding-dong but that they take a vacation on Goat Island and set up a wireless plant for experimental purposes.
“I want to try it and away from home where a bunch of fellows won’t be hanging about and joking me if I make a fizzle,” he explained.
As the lads while in the east had done a lot of business, some of it connected with Nat’s gold mine in Lower California and some with interests of Professor Griggs, they decided that they were entitled to at least a short period of inactivity, and Ding-dong’s idea was hailed as a good one. Goat Island, a rugged, isolated spot of land shaped like a splash of gravy on a plate, was selected as an ideal camping place. The wireless appliances, shipped from San Francisco, were conveyed to the island on board the Rangers’ sturdy cabin cruiser _Nomad_, and three busy, happy weeks had been devoted to putting it in working order. Since the day that it had been declared “O. K.” by Ding-dong, the lads had been crazy for the “wireless alarm” to ring in, and when it failed to do so Ding-dong came in for a lot of good-natured joshing.