Peter the Brazen Part 4

Sensitizing the detector, he slid up the tuning handle for high waves.

Static, far removed, trickled in. Then a faint, musical wailing like a violin's E-string pierced this. The violin was the government station at Arlington, Virginia, transmitting a storm warning to s.h.i.+ps in the South Atlantic. For five minutes the wailing persisted. Sliding the tuning handle downward, Peter listened for commercial wave-lengths.

A harsh grinding, unmusical as emery upon hollow bronze, rasped stutteringly in the head phones. Laboriously, falteringly, the grating was cleaved into clumsy dots and dashes of the Continental Code, under the quaking fingers of some obviously frightened and inexperienced operator. Were these the sounds which had unnerved Dale? For a time the raspings spelled nothing intelligible. The unknown sender evidently was repeating the same word again and again. It held four letters. Once they formed, H-I-J-X. Another time, S-E-L-J. And another, L-P-H-E.

The painstaking intent, as the operator's acute ears recognized, was identical in each instance. Frequently the word was incoherent altogether, the signals meaning nothing.

Suddenly Peter jerked up his head. Out of the jumble stood the word, as an unseen s.h.i.+p will often stand out nakedly in a fog rift. Over and over, badly s.p.a.ced, the infernal rasp was spelling, _H-E-L-P_.

He waited for the signature of this frantic operator. But none occurred. Following a final letter "p" the signals ceased.

For a minute or two, while Peter nervously pondered, the air was silent. Then another station called him. A loud droning purr filled the receivers. Peter gave the "k" signal. The brisk voice of the transport _Rover_ droned:

"I can't raise KPH. Will you handle an M-S-G for me?"

"Sure!" roared the _Vandalia's_ spark. "But wait a minute. Have you heard a broken down auxiliary asking for help? He's been jamming me for fifteen minutes. Seems to be very close, K."

"Nix," replied the _Rover_ breezily. "Can't be at all close or I would hear him, too. I can see your lights from my window. You're off our port quarter. Here's the M-S-G."

Peter accepted the message, retransmitting it to the KPH operator, then called the wheelhouse on the telephone. Quine, first officer, answered sleepily.

"Has the lookout reported any s.h.i.+p in the past hour excepting the _Rover_?"

"Is that the _Rover_ on our port quarter?" Quine's voice was gruffly amazed. Like most mariners of the old school, he considered the wireless machine a nuisance. Yet its intelligence occasionally caught him off guard.

"Only thing in sight, Sparks."

Peter made an entry in the log-book, folded his hands and shut his eyes. The Leyden jars rattled in their mahogany sockets as the _Vandalia_ climbed a wave, faltered, and sped into the hollow. Far removed from her pivot of gravity, the wireless house behaved after the manner of an express elevator. But the wireless house chair was bolted to the floor.

Wrinkles of perplexity creased his forehead. Had this stuttering static anything in kind with those other formless events? If not, what terrified creature was invoking his aid in this blundering fas.h.i.+on?

A simple test would prove if the signals were of local origin--from a miniature apparatus aboard the s.h.i.+p. He hoped anxiously for the opportunity. And in less than a half hour the opportunity was given him.

A tarred line sc.r.a.ped the white belly of the life-boat which swelled up from the deck outside the door, giving forth a dull, crunching sound with each convulsion of the engines. The square area above it danced with reeling stars, moiled by a purple-black heaven.

Peter, who had been studying the tarred rope, swung about in the chair and dropped an agitated finger to the silvered wire which rested against the glittering detector crystal. A tiny, blue-red flame snapped from his finger to the crystal chip! The frantic operator was aboard the _Vandalia_!

The broken stridulations took on the coherence of intelligible dots and dashes. The former blundering was absent, as if the tremulous hand of the sender was steadied by the grip of a dominant necessity; the signals clarified by the pressure of terror.

"_Do not try to find me_," it stammered and halted.

Some maddened pulse seemed to leap to life in Peter's throat. His fingers, working at the base of the tiny instrument, were cold and damp.

"_You must wait_," rasped the unknown sender, faltering. "_You must help me_! _You are watched._"

For a breath there was no sound in the receivers other than the beating of his heart.

_Click_! _Snap_! _Sputter_! Then: "_Wait for the lights of China_!"

The receivers rattled to the red blotter, and Peter rushed out on deck.

Slamming the door, he stared at the spurting streams of white in the racing water. Indescribably feminine was the fumbling touch of that unknown sender!

A grating--hollow, metallic--occurred in the lee of the wireless cabin.

A footfall sounded, coincident with the heavy collision into his side of an unwieldy figure whose hands, greasy and hot, groped over his.

Both grunted.

"'Sthat you, Sparks?" They were the German gutturals of Luffberg, one of the oilers on the twelve-to-six watch. "Been fixin' the ventilator.

Chief wondered if you were up. Wants to know why you ain't been down to say h.e.l.lo."

Peter decided to lay a portion of his difficulties before Minion.

CHAPTER VI

The first operator had developed for himself at an early stage of his occupancy of the _Vandalia's_ wireless house the warm friends.h.i.+p of the chief engineer. A wireless man is far more dependent for his peace of mind upon the engine-room crew than upon the forward crew. The latter has only one interest in him: that he stick to his instruments; while the engine-room crew strictly is the source from which his blessings flow, his blessings taking the invisible, vital form of electric current.

Wireless machines are gourmands of electricity. They are wastrels.

Not one-tenth of the energy sucked from the s.h.i.+p's power wires finds its way through the maze of coils and jars to the antennae between the mastheads.

The _Vandalia's_ engine-room equipment was installed long before wireless telegraphy was a maritime need and a government requirement.

Hence, her dynamos protested vigorously against the strain imposed upon them by the radio machine. Any electric engine is unlike any steam engine. Steam engines will do so much work--no more. Dynamos or motors will do so much work--and then more. They can be overloaded, unsparingly. But the strain tells. Stout, dependable parts become hot, wear away, crumble, snap.

In the typical case of the _Vandalia_, the question of whether or not the wireless men should be provided with all of the current they required, was narrowed down to individuals.

If Minion had disliked Peter Moore he could have slowed down the dynamos at the critical times when the operator needed the high voltage; but Peter had had encounters with chief engineers before. He had at first courted Minion's good graces with fair cigars, radio gossip and unflagging courtesy. And on discovering that the chief was a sentimentalist at heart and a poet by nature, he had presented him with an inexpensively bound volume of his favorite author. Daring, but a master-stroke! He had not since wanted for voltage, and plenty of it.

He pondered the advisability of taking Minion entirely into his confidence as he followed the sweated, unders.h.i.+rted shoulders to the engine-room galley, and thence across the oily grill of s.h.i.+ning steel bars which comprised one of the numerous and hazardous superfloors which surrounded the cylinders.

Minion was nursing a stubbornly warm bearing in the port shaft alley.

The fat cylinder revolved with a pleasant ringing noise, the blurring knuckles of the frequent joints vanis.h.i.+ng down the yellow, vaulted alley to a point of perspective, where the shaft projected through the hull. The floundering of the great propellers seemed alternately to compress and expand the damp atmosphere.

The sad, white face of Minion arose from the dripping flanks of the journal as he caught sight of Peter in the arched entrance. A pale smile flickered at his lips.

The chief did not in any wise reflect his monstrously heaving, oil-dripping surroundings. He was a small, deliberate man, with oceans of repressed energies. His skin had the waxy whiteness of a pond lily.

An exquisitely trimmed black moustache adorned his mouth. The deep brown eyes of a visionary rested beneath the gentle, scythe-like curves of thin and pointed eyebrows.

"You look worried," vouchsafed Minion as their hands met. His quiet voice had a clarity which projected it nicely through the bedlam of engine-room noises. "Why you up so early--or so late? Anything wrong?"

Peter took out a cigarette and nervously lighted it at the sputtering flame Minion held for him. "Mr. Minion, something's in the wind," he complained, and hesitated. He was at the verge of telling what he had seen on the promenade deck, of the confusion on the pierhead, of the unaccountable behavior of the woman in the window above Ah Sih King's, of the suspicious att.i.tude of Blanchard, of the recent plea for help.

Again something checked him.

"Mr. Minion, what is Len Yang? And where is it?"

The scythe-like brows contracted. Minion's lucid, brown eyes rested on his lips, seeming to await an elaboration of the query. His features suddenly had stiffened. His whole att.i.tude appeared on the moment to have undergone a change, from one of friendly interest to a keen defensiveness.

"Len Yang is a city in China. Why?"