“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.”
“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.