The Motor Rangers' Wireless Station
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“We want to send a message,” was the gruff rejoinder, “and dern quick, too.”
“We don’t handle any commercial business,” replied Joe; “this is a private plant.”
“Oh, we know all about that. That’s just the reason we took the trouble to get a boat and come here,” was the reply.
“Yes, our business is private and confidential, and we don’t want no nosy operator at a public station ashore to know nothing about it,” supplemented the ferret-eyed man.
“Where do you want to send the message?” asked Joe, who by no means liked the situation. The men spoke in a dictatorial, bullying sort of way and appeared prepared to enforce their wishes by violence if no other way offered. Joe had no weapon on him, and the only revolver on the island was in Nat’s trunk.
In reply to Joe’s question, the red-faced individual pointed seaward.
“You mean you want to send a message to a ship?”
“Yes, a message in cipher.”
Joe shook his head.
“If it had been some really urgent matter I might have helped you out, but as it is, I’m afraid I can’t do anything. You’d better try one of the stations ashore.”
The red-faced man scowled; but an instant later he assumed what was meant to be an ingratiating manner. He drew out a wallet and tapped it meaningly.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” he said.
“Sorry, but I can’t do it,” was Joe’s rejoinder.
“I’ll make it right with you, kid,” urged the other.
“Nothing doing,” said Joe firmly. “Sorry you’ve had this trip out here for nothing, but you’ll have to go back again if you want to send a cipher message to any ship.”
The ferret-eyed man came close to his companion.
“Bill, you do it yourself,” he whispered, but not so low that Joe didn’t hear him.
“Oh, I’m too rusty. Haven’t tapped a key since I was fired for selling information on that Wall Street pool.”
“Oh, you can do it all right enough,” insisted the other.
“Well, if the kid won’t do it, I guess I’ll have to try,” was the reply, and the two men started out of the shanty and walked toward the wireless hut.
“Hold on there!” cried Joe, springing forward and laying a detaining hand on one man’s arm. “I can’t allow any interference with the apparatus yonder.”
The red-faced man whipped round like a shot.
“Can’t, eh?” he sneered. “I’d like to see you stop me. Ed, grab him!”
The ferret-eyed man seized Joe and pinioned his arms before the boy had a chance to resist.
“There, that’ll be about all from you, my rooster,” grinned the red-faced man. “Bring him along, Ed, we may need him.”
Struggling in the man’s grasp, Joe was dragged to the wireless hut. In one corner of the structure was a closet with a stout oak door in which some of the valuable parts of the plant were locked up when the island was left for any considerable period. The door had a strong padlock and, having thrust Joe inside, the men banged the door and snapped the padlock. The door had a small slit in it, which was lucky, or Joe might have suffocated in the stuffy place. Through this slit he wrathfully watched the men as they went up to the table on which the apparatus was adjusted.
The red-faced man inspected it a bit dubiously.
“I’m all right pounding brass on the regular key and I know a bit of wireless, although I hadn’t learned very much when I was canned for that deal you know about.”
“Oh, you can work it all right,” his companion assured him.
He drew out a paper and handed it to the ex-operator.
“Here’s the cipher code and the message. Now get busy and tap it out and then we can vamoose.”
Joe was entirely powerless to aid himself. The door was thick and strong and there was no possibility of his being able to open it; and, even had he been able to, it wouldn’t have done any good. His captors were burly, strong men and looked vicious to a degree, and had he managed to get out they would assuredly have given him rough treatment. No; there was nothing for it but to remain quiet and be keenly alert to what was going forward in the room outside.
The red-faced man sat down to the key and at first fiddled clumsily with it. But he soon acquired confidence and then began to flash out his message. By listening Joe readily learned that he was trying to raise the steamer Vesta from San Diego for Vancouver, Canada. After a long interval Joe saw a grin of satisfaction come over the man’s face.
“He’s raised her,” thought Joe, and he was correct in his conjecture. Flash-crackle-bang! went the spark, and Joe by close listening heard the man instruct the operator on the Vesta to deliver a message to a man named Albert Carter. Then followed a jumble of code words utterly meaningless to Joe.
The sender repeated his message and then rose from the table.
“Well, I’ve done the best I can,” he said, “and I guess it’s all right.”
“Sure it is. Anyhow, he can’t kick. You’ve done what you could to help out a pal.”
“Let’s be getting along, then. I’ve no fancy for sticking around here.”
“What about him?”
The ferret-eyed man nodded his head in the direction of the closet where Joe was confined.
“Leave him where he is. We want a start, don’t we? Some one will be along and let him out, I guess.”
“Well, so long, sonny,” cried the ferret-eyed man with a chuckling laugh that made Joe’s blood boil, “much obliged for the accommodation.”
“You’ll get in trouble over this,” roared out Joe furiously, “you see if you don’t.”
“Oh, I guess not,” said the man who had sent the message, with a coarse laugh. “Well, shake a day-day, kid. You might have made some money and have saved me the bother of showing you that I could work your wireless without your aid.”
Joe knew it would be useless to reply, so he bottled up the vials of his wrath and remained silent. The men left the hut and no doubt made their way back to their boat in which they had come from the mainland.
“Well, of all the nerve,” sputtered Joe in his prison. “If that isn’t the limit! There’s something mighty crooked about all this,” he went on to himself. “They got word to some one on board that ship bound for Canada, and the trouble they took to do it shows that there is something mighty suspicious about the whole affair.”
He went on thinking – there was nothing else to do, – and racked his brain to recollect what he could of the message. But this wasn’t much, for of course the code words were as meaningless as Greek to him.
“I do wish I could figure out what it was,” he said to himself, “if only I could and get word to that ship about the manner in which the message was sent, I might be the means of preventing some grave wrong being done to somebody; for I am sure those men are no good. You could tell that by their faces, let alone their actions. Hello!”
Joe stared through the slit in the door at the entrance to the wireless hut. It had been suddenly darkened by the figure of a man.
“Anybody around here?” came a voice.
“Yes, I’m here,” cried Joe eagerly, for he knew by the voice that it was neither of the men who had treated him so roughly.
“Where the dickens are you?” came the natural inquiry.
“Here in the closet.”
“Well, what in Sam Hill! – ”
The figure came forward and Joe almost dropped with surprise right there and then. He had good reason.
The newcomer was Hank Harley, old Israel’s nephew. It certainly was an afternoon of surprises for Joe.
CHAPTER XIX.
AND ALSO GETS A SURPRISE
“Let me out of here,” cried Joe, rattling the door.
He felt that his liberty came first and that the time for questioning Hank would come later.
“Sure, I’ll let you out,” responded Hank, “but how under the sun did you get in there?”
“I was shoved in here and then the door was locked.”
“Who by?”
“Let me out first. I’ll tell you that later.”
“All right. The key is in the padlock. I’ll have you out in a jiffy.”
Hank’s behavior puzzled Joe. He did not appear to be belligerent or threatening. On the contrary, he seemed to be only too anxious to do a good turn to another youth in distress.
“Well, this beats rooster fighting!” exclaimed Hank, as Joe stepped out into the room. “You surely couldn’t have locked yourself in there. How did you happen to get in such a fix?”
“I’ll tell you all about that later,” said Joe hurriedly; “but I want to thank you, Hank Harley, for what you’ve done for me. It’s a big favor and I’m grateful for it.”
“That’s all right,” murmured Hank rather shamefacedly, “I reckon it was up to me to do something for you fellows after the other day’s work.”
Joe looked at him in surprise. What did this new attitude mean? True, Hank had taken no active part in the kidnapping of Nat, but he had made no move to prevent it; and yet here he was, apparently seeking their friendship. But the boy had no time to devote to speculation or questioning right then.
His sharp eyes had spied two pieces of paper lying on the floor near the wireless instruments. He eagerly picked them up and then gave an exclamation of delight.
“Why, those fellows have dropped the cipher and the key to it,” he exclaimed as he scanned the two sheets, “and here’s the message written out, too. Well, if this isn’t real luck!”
Knitting his forehead in thought, Joe went painstakingly over the message. It contained words he recollected having heard the intruding operator use. Then he took a pencil and with the help of the key managed to turn the meaningless message into plain English. This is what he wrote down:
“Leave Vesta before arrival at Vancouver. San Diego police have wired to arrest you there.”
“Phew!” whistled Joe, “so that was the game, eh? No wonder those fellows didn’t want to send their despatch from a land office! They were warning a friend, apparently a confederate of theirs in crime. Well, the rascals! I’ll fix it so that their warning will fall flat.”
He began sending out calls broadcast for the Vesta. It was some time before he raised her a hundred miles or more to the north of Goat Island. When he finally got in connection with the steamer, he requested the operator to transmit a private and confidential message to the captain. Then he sent word that the man to whom the two confederates had wirelessed was in all probability a criminal, and that it would be wise to keep him under surveillance and hand him over to the police at the first opportunity. When he had done this and received warm thanks for it, Joe began to try to raise the authorities ashore. He succeeded in getting a message into Santa Barbara police headquarters, which replied that they would be on the lookout for the two men who had visited the island. The information concerning the passenger on the Vesta was transmitted by the local authorities up the coast as far as Vancouver.
“Well, that’s a good job done,” sighed the lad contentedly, as he shoved his chair back and grounded his instruments. “Now then, if only they can nail those two fellows ashore, the wireless on Goat Island will have justified its existence for this day at any rate.”
All this time Hank Harley, a tall, raw-boned youth with big awkward hands and feet, had been looking on at Joe’s activities with much the same expression as a small boy gazing at a magician. It was plain that to Hank the whole thing savored of mystery. He stared at Joe with such wonderment and admiration that the boy could not help smiling.
“Were you talking to some one with that thing?” he asked incredulously.
“I certainly was. I was giving some information to a ship more than a hundred miles off.”
“Sho! Go on, now. Was you, honest?”
“Just as true as I’m sitting here,” replied Joe, but he saw that Hank’s face bore an expression of disbelief, and doubted if he would be able to explain to the unsophisticated youth the rather intricate theory of the wireless. He contented himself, therefore, by replying:
“I felt just the same way as you do about it, Hank, till I found out for myself just what wonderful things the wireless could accomplish.”
Hank, with a look of keen curiosity on his rough features stepped close to the instruments. He cautiously stretched out his gnarled fingers and touched the detector. The next instant he gave a howl of pain and bounded up till his head almost touched the roof of the shanty.
“Wow! Ow! Ouch!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
“What on earth is the matter?” demanded Joe, who had not seen Hank’s movement.
“Ouch! She bit!”
“She? Who?”
“Them things thar,” and Hank pointed to the instruments.
Joe couldn’t help laughing at Hank’s woebegone and alarmed expression as the young fisherman rubbed his arm.
“That wasn’t a bite, Hank, that was an electric shock. I wouldn’t advise you to tamper with the instruments again. Come here and I’ll show you how to work the key.”
“What, me? No, siree bob,” and Hank shook his head with deep conviction. “Let sleeping dawgs lie, says I. I wouldn’t touch that thar thing ag’in fer a new fishing boat. Wow, but the sparks flew!”
“It was lucky for you that we are not operating a high power station,” declared Joe. “Had we been doing so you might have been knocked out.”
“Sho! Killed dead?”
“Maybe. At the big stations the electric forces in the atmosphere are so strong that visitors cannot bring their watches into the operating room, unless they want to run the risk of seriously disarranging the mechanism.”
Hank looked prepared to believe anything by this time.
“Say, Joe,” he said, “now that we’ve buried the hatchet, s’pose you tell me something about how this contraption works.”
“It’s rather hard to explain in simple language, Hank, and I guess there are heaps of fellows just like you who’d like to understand the first principles of wireless without tackling a lot of dry text books, so here goes.”
“Let her go,” said Hank, knitting his brows and preparing to assimilate knowledge with a determined look on his rugged features.
“Of course you know about the waves of the sea,” began Joe. “Well, the air, or more properly the ether, is full of just such waves. But they are not set in motion till a disturbing element answering to a storm or a wind at sea is set loose among them. For instance, when I depress this key, I set loose an electric shock that agitates the ether and sends out waves. These waves may be long or short as I desire, according to the power of the shock sent out.
“In 1888 a Professor Hertz began the first attempts to utilize these waves to send messages through the air. In a crude way he succeeded, and paved the way for his followers along these lines. Hertz found that heat and light are all electric waves. The waves that he set in motion from his apparatus bear his name, Hertzian waves.”
“Then all the air is full of waves?” asked Hank, looking about him in a rather scared sort of way, as if he rather expected to be engulfed in some atmospheric disturbance at any time and was preparing to swim for his life.
“That’s it, Hank, you’re catching on fine. But understand, the waves require some force to agitate them. It’s like a mill pond, the air is, quite smooth till you chuck a stone into it, and then waves begin spreading out in all directions.”
Hank nodded as if he quite understood this homely illustration.
“Heave ahead,” he said, settling back in his seat.
“All right,” smiled Joe. “Now you see my detector here, – quite an elaborate bit of mechanism, isn’t it?”
“Yep, that’s what bit me,” muttered Hank, rubbing his arm once more at the recollection.
“Well, Hertz had to make his detector just out of a circle of wire with a gap in it. A screw adjustment lengthened or shortened the distance between the ends of the wire, making the gap larger or smaller. The waves, as they came in, were registered on this detector in the form of minute sparks. Is this all clear to you?”
“Oh, as clear as mud,” was the non-committal reply, with a wave of the hand.
“In 1895, Sir Oliver Lodge detected waves from an oscillator over a distance of forty yards, using a filings tube coherer, a galvanometer and a cell.”
“Hey, hey, hard aport there!” cried Hank. “You’re out of soundings, mate.”
“Well, that is a little technical, I’ll admit,” smiled Joe. “I’ll try and get down to plainer language.”
“Yep, my head ain’t tough enough to take in all that. It’s swimming now as if you’d chucked a dictionary at it,” growled Hank. “Tell me the names of them biting jiggers on the table thar, and what they’re supposed to do.”
“Very well. This,” touching it, “is the coil or transformer. That produces the spark that slips up into the aerials, those wires over our heads, and sends it shooting off into space just like that stone you might chuck in the pond.”
“Um-hum, that’s all clear enough. Heave ahead.”
“Now you see this little appliance? That is the vibrator. By that I can regulate the length and ‘fatness’ of my spark. Now when I press down the key like this – ”
S-s-scrack!
Hank almost jumped from his seat as the green spark whined and leaped between the terminals.
“ – well, that is a dot. If I make the contact longer, it forms a dash. Of course you know the Morse alphabet is made up of dots and dashes. For instance the letter A is. – .”
To illustrate Joe made the dot-dash sign, at which Hank blinked his eyes, but resolutely suppressed other symptoms of nervousness.
“And so on through the alphabet. Each letter has its own combination of dots and dashes. The only instruments needed in a simple set are the coil, spark-gap, wireless key and batteries; that is, for a sending set. Now we come to the receiving part of it.
“Suppose another operator miles away has been sending out into space the dot-dash just as I have been doing. If I had my receivers on, that is, those telephone-like things that I put on my head and over my ears, why then I’d have heard it, providing my apparatus was tuned to his wave lengths.”
“Hold hard! Hold hard! I don’t quite get that.”
“Simple enough. As I told you, various shocks of current produce various wave lengths. Well, suppose my receiving apparatus is only adjusted to receive a wave length of one thousand feet, and he is sending a wave of one thousand two hundred feet, then my apparatus will not be ‘in tune’ with his. That is, I shouldn’t be able to hear him.”
“Wa’al, how d’ye fix that – by touching off them biting things?” asked Hank. “Look a’out!” he added, as he saw Joe’s hand move toward the receiving tuning coil, “you ought’er have them things muzzled. If they bit you in the dog-days you’d git hydrophoby, sure as cock-fightin’.”
“Now then, Hank, a receiving tuning coil is used to adjust the wave lengths of the receiving circuits. This tuning, as it is called, is very simple. See, I move these sliding contacts along a bar, at the same time listening in. As soon as I am ‘in tune,’ I hear the dots and dashes from the other chap begin beating into my ears. Easy, isn’t it?”
“Humph, ’bout as easy as walkin’ a tight rope or running an air-ship! Joe, I couldn’t larn nothun’ ’bout such didoes in a billion, trillion of years.”
“In order to get the waves from the aerials into the receivers at my ears, they have to filter through the detector – ”
“That’s the thing that bit me, that d’tector.”
“ – through the detector, which consists of two mineral points in very delicate contact.”
“But is the blamed thing of any real use?” Hank wanted to be informed.
CHAPTER XX.
HANK EXPLAINS
Joe laughed at Hank’s last question.
“Of use? Why, man alive, since wireless has been introduced, it has averted some great sea disasters and been the means of saving thousands of lives, not to mention its commercial value.”
“Do tell! It’s saved a lot of ships, hey?”
Hank looked really interested now.
“It certainly has. Some time ago the Prinz Joachim, of the Atlas Line, from New York to the West Indies, grounded on a remote island of the Bahama group more than a thousand miles south of New York. In the old days she’d have stuck there, while the passengers took to the boats or played Robinson Crusoe on the island. But nowadays what happened? Why, Henry Muller, her wireless man, was sent for by the captain, and he at once began pumping out the call for the home office of the line in a Broadway skyscraper.
“Almost by the time the last of the passengers, aroused by the shock, had come on deck to learn the cause of it, the captain was able to assure them that New York had the news and that the home office had flung out a call for rescue ships along the whole length of the Atlantic Coast. At the same time, of course, the vessel’s own wireless was on the job, too.
“Well, several ships were quickly located in the vicinity, and before long a small fleet was rushing to the Joachim’s aid. There was no fear on board. In fact, William Jennings Bryan, who was a passenger, could not resist the opportunity to make a speech. He suggested that they form a republic on the island, and that, as he could not be elected president of the United States, they make him chief executive of the island realm.
“Then take the case of the steamer Momus, carrying one hundred and twelve passengers, that caught fire off Cape Hatteras. Every effort was made to fight the blaze, which started among cotton bales in the forward hold; but to no avail. In this emergency, wireless signals were flashed in all directions.
“Before long they were answered. The Comus, a sister ship, heard them and informed the Momus that she was seventy-eight miles away and would come at top speed to the rescue. The two ships, by constant interchanging of their positions through the night, came together at two o’clock in the morning. Naturally, every passenger was up and about, but on the other hand there was no panic. The fact that wireless was on board gave a feeling of security to all, which they certainly would not have had otherwise.
“All the passengers were taken off in safety, and the relief ship stood by till the Momus was beached in shallow water and the fires drowned out. Twelve hours afterward the water was pumped out. The passengers re-embarked and the ship resumed her voyage. Incidentally, the ship and her cargo, valued at three million dollars, were saved. Not the least remarkable feature of this rescue was that throughout the whole affair the general manager of the line at his desk in New York was kept in constant touch with the situation and directed the operations.
“But I’m preaching a regular sermon,” broke off Joe.
“No, no; heave on, Joe. I like to hear about it,” declared Hank, who, to tell the truth, was anxious to stave off the inevitable time of explanation of his presence on the island, which he felt was close at hand.
“To switch to the naval uses of the wireless, then. The torpedo boat Beale was overtaken by a heavy storm off the Virginia capes. The waves were mountain high and it soon became clear that unless assistance came, and that speedily, the long, lean craft would be unable to ride out the gale. The S. O. S. signal, which means ‘in dire distress,’ was sent out, and was read by the wireless station at Norfolk. It was quickly passed on to Washington and received by the assistant secretary of the navy, who at once got into communication with the Beale. He asked for further details so that he could despatch relief intelligently. The Beale responded, and all this within a few minutes, that she was awash and making bad weather of it. This reply was in the secretary’s hands in time to enable him to send relief ships out from Norfolk, and the Beale and her crew were saved.
“There is one other field in which the wireless plays an important part. That is in the capture of criminals. A runaway now stands a much greater chance of being caught at sea than he does ashore. In former years the exact reverse was true. A man who tries to flee from America to Europe to avoid the consequences of a crime is, so to speak, like a runner caught between bases. The wireless spreads a net about him from which he cannot escape.
“One notable case occurred in 1911. A crime had been committed in London, and the search for the man who did it was carried on by an immense corps of police and detectives all over Europe working in harmony. London, Paris, Berlin were all searched, but without results. The runaway had vanished utterly.