“Yes,” said Dick, “and, even leaving foreigners out of the question, the crews from Uncle Sam’s warships have what you might call a Battleship League among themselves, and every vessel has its nine. Feeling runs high when they are in port, and the games are as hotly contested as though a World’s Series were in question. I’m told that, at the time of the Boxer rebellion, there were some dandy games played by our boys right under the walls of Peking.”
Just here the captain approached, and, with a hearty handshake and best wishes for the journey, Mr. Quinby went forward with him to discuss business details connected with the trip.
Ten o’clock, the hour set for starting, was at hand. The first bell, warning all visitors ashore, had already rung. The last bale of freight had been lowered into the hold and the hatches battened down. There was the usual rush of eleventh hour travelers, as the taxis and cabs rattled down to the piers and discharged their occupants. All the passengers were on the shore side of the vessel, calling to their friends on the dock, the women waving their handkerchiefs, at one moment, and, the next, putting them to their eyes. The last bell rang, the huge gangplank swung inward, there was a tinkling signal in the engine room and the propellers began slowly to revolve. The steamer turned down the bay, passed the Golden Gate where the sea lions sported around the rocks, and out into the mighty Pacific. The voyage of the Fearless had begun.
Down in the wireless room, Bert had buckled to his work. With the telephone receiver held close to his ears by a band passing over his head, he exchanged messages with the land they were so rapidly leaving behind them, with every revolution of the screws. Amid the crashing of the sounder and the spitting blue flames, he felt perfectly in his element. Here was work, here was usefulness, here was power, here was life. Between this stately vessel, with its costly cargo and still more precious freight of human lives, and the American continent, he was the sole connecting link. Through him alone, father talked with son, husband with wife, captain with owner, friend with friend. Without him, the vessel was a hermit, shut out from the world at large; with him, it still held its place in the universal life.
But this undercurrent of reflection and exultation did not, for a moment, distract him from his work. The messages came in rapidly. He knew they would. The first day at sea is always the busiest one. There were so many last injunctions, so many things forgotten in the haste of farewell, that he was taxed to the utmost to keep his work well in hand. Fortunately he was ambidextrous, could use his left hand almost as readily as his right, and this helped him immensely. From an early age, more from fun than anything else, he had cultivated writing with either hand, without any idea that the day would come when this would prove a valuable practical accomplishment. Now with one finger on the key, he rapidly wrote down the messages with the other, and thus was able to double the rapidity and effectiveness of his work.
Before long there was a lull in the flood of messages, and when time came for dinner, he signaled the San Francisco office to hold up any further communications for an hour or so, threw off his receiver, and joined his friends at the table.
“Well, Bert, how does she go?” asked Dick, who sat at his right, while Tom and Ralph faced them across the table.
“Fine,” answered Bert, enthusiastically. “It isn’t work; it’s pleasure. I’m so interested in it that I almost grudge the time it takes to eat, and that’s something new for me.”
“It must be getting serious, if it hits you as hard as that,” said Tom, in mock concern. “I’ll have to give the doctor a tip to keep his eye on you.”
“Oh, Bert just says that, so that when he gets seasick, he’ll have a good excuse for not coming to meals,” chaffed Ralph.
“Well, watch me, fellows, if you think my appetite is off,” retorted Bert, as he attacked his food with the avidity of a wolf.
“By the way,” asked Dick, “what arrangements have you made for any message that may come, while you are toying with your dinner in this languid fashion?”
“I’ve told the San Francisco man to hold things up for a while,” replied Bert. “That’s the only station we’re likely to hear from just now, and the worst of the rush is over. After we get out of range of the land stations, all that we’ll get will be from passing ships, and that will only be once in a while.”
“Of course,” he went on, “theoretically, there ought to be someone there every minute of the twenty-four hours. You might be there twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes, and nothing happen. But, in the last minute of the twenty-fourth hour, there might be something of vital importance. You know when that awful wreck occurred last year, the operator was just about to take the receiver from his head, when he caught the call. One minute later, and he wouldn’t have heard it and over eight hundred people would have been lost.”
“I suppose,” said Ralph, “that, as a matter of fact, there ought to be two or three shifts, so that someone could be on hand all the time. I know that the Company is considering something of the kind, but ‘large bodies move slowly,’ and they haven’t got to it yet.”
“For my part,” chimed in Tom, “I should think that with all the brains that are working on the subject, there would have been some way devised to make a record of every call, and warn the operator at any minute of the day or night.”
“They’re trying hard to get something practical,” said Bert. “Marconi himself is testing out a plan that he thinks will work all right. His idea is to get a call that will be really one long dash, so that it won’t be confounded with any letter of the alphabet. He figures on making this so strong that it will pass through a very sensitive instrument with sufficient force to ring a bell, that will be at the bedside of the operator.”
“Rather rough on a fellow, don’t you think?” joined in the ship’s doctor. “If he were at all nervous, he might lie there awake, waiting for the bell to ring. It reminds me of a friend of mine, who once put up at a country hotel. He was told that the man who slept in the next room was very irritable and a mere bundle of nerves. He couldn’t bear the least noise, and my friend promised to keep it in mind. He was out rather late that night, and when he started to retire he dropped one of his shoes heavily on the floor. Just then he remembered his nervous neighbor. He went on undressing quietly, walked about on tiptoe, put out the light, and crept into bed. Just as he was going off to sleep, a voice came from the other room: ‘Say, when in thunder are you going to drop that other shoe?’”
“In the meantime,” went on Bert, when the laugh had subsided, “they’ve got an ingenious device on some of the British ships. It seems rather cruel, because they have to use a frog. You know how sensitive frogs are to electricity. Well, they attach a frog to the receiving end, and under him they put a sheet of blackened paper. As the dots and dashes come in, the current jerks the frog’s legs over the paper. The leg scrapes the black away, and leaves white dots and dashes. So that you can pick up the paper and read the message just like any other, except that the letters are white instead of black.”
“Poor old frogs,” said Ralph. “If they knew enough, they’d curse the very name of electricity. Galvani started with them in the early days, and they’ve still got to ‘shake a leg’ in the interest of science.”
“Yes,” murmured Tom, “it’s simply shocking.”
He ducked as Ralph made a playful pass at him.
“There’s been quite a stir caused by it,” went on Bert, calmly ignoring Tom’s awful pun, “and the humane societies are taking it up. The probability is that it will be abolished. It certainly does seem cruel.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor. “Like many other questions, there are two sides to it. We all agree that no pain should be inflicted upon poor dumb animals, unless there is some great good to be gained by it. But it is a law of life that the lesser must give way to the greater. We use the cow