The Wireless Operator—With the U. S. Coast Guard/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
The Mystery Grows Deeper
THE three men in the stateroom were astir early the next morning. Roy had to get back to the Lycoming, but before he went, he sought and obtained an interview with Captain Hardwick. The commander liked his looks, and felt drawn toward him, as indeed every one was, for Roy was a prime favorite with all who knew him.
“Captain Hardwick,” he said, after Henry had introduced him and withdrawn from the cabin, “I want first of all to thank you for your courtesy in allowing me to come to Henry and stay with him overnight. He feels this matter very keenly, and it is certainly hard to think he should start out so unfortunately. I suppose the chief electrician has told you that the difficulty with the wireless was in a coil that had grounded in the field. He will try to learn why it grounded. But no matter what he finds, I want to say that you can have absolute confidence in Henry. I’ve known him a good many years, and he would be the last person in the world to do anything dishonorable.”
“We will go into this matter thoroughly,” said the captain, without committing himself,“ and I have no doubt we shall get to the bottom of it. You may be sure that I shall do whatever is right.”
Roy thanked the captain, was set ashore by the launch, and made his way back to his own ship.
Life aboard the Iroquois went on as it ordinarily did. Now that the ship lay in harbor, with fewer duties for the seamen, the captain put the crew to work drilling. Some of these drills Henry had seen the first day or so he was on board the ship. During the extraordinary events that had occurred on that trip, drills had been suspended. Now the captain put his men through their paces with renewed vigor, as though to make up for lost time.
Naturally the thing that attracted Henry most was the practice with the big guns. There were two four-inch guns mounted on the forward deck. The crews of these guns were assembled in their proper places. Then the captain, standing on the bridge, gave an order, the gun-breeches were thrown open, the big shells inserted and the breeches locked, the guns sighted, and, at a word of command, crack they went. But the crack was only a click, for the shells were imaginary, and all the rest of the drill was also largely a matter of the imagination. How Henry did wish he could see the guns really fired at something! What a noise they would make! And how far their shells would go tearing across the water!
He was especially interested when the captain showed him the range-finder. Never had he seen anything like this before. It was a small horizontal tube, containing prisms and reflecting mirrors. There were eyepieces in the middle of the sides of the tube. When one looked through this range-finder at a distant ship, or target, that target seemed to be divided into two parts, half above and half below a common line. By twirling a screw, and so moving the reflectors within the tube, the parts of the ship moved into place until at last there stood forth a perfect image of a ship. Above this image was a scale, which indicated the range. To find the range, all the commander had to do was to look through this tube at his target, twirl the screw until the image of the target became perfect, and then read the figures that stood just above the image.
The collision drill was also interesting. In imagination, the Iroquois had run into another ship, and a great gaping hole had been torn in her hull. At the captain’s word of command the crew sprang to their places, and a collision mattress was quickly produced and unrolled. This was then lowered over the side, so as to cover the hole in the hull. In practice, of course, the collision mattress was not actually lowered into the water, but it was brought to the side of the ship and balanced on the rail, ready to be dropped over. It required little vision to see how useful such an article would be after an actual collision. Unless the hole in the ship were too large, the mattress would be caught in it as it was drawn inward by the suction of the inrushing water, much as a cork might be drawn fast by suction down the neck of a bottle. The mattress, of course, was meant to act like a cork and keep the sea out.
The abandon-ship drill would have had more fascination for Henry had he not by this time been so familiar with the process of lowering a small boat. Nevertheless it was interesting to see the men prepare themselves, just as they would if they were really going to abandon the ship, with compasses and rifles, and provisions, and then line up opposite the boats while the roll was called and each man mustered. Of course the men did not actually get in the boats, though these were lowered even with the rail. Likewise this drill gave Henry a chance to examine the small boats better. Though these were new, they were much like those the Iroquois had lost. The quartermaster called his attention to the water-beakers and the boat-boxes that contained certain kinds of food, fishing-lines, etc. They were so snugly stowed away that Henry had hardly noticed them. A crew adrift in one of these boats would have food and water for some time.
The fire drill had little novelty for Henry. Too often he had seen the firemen in his native town couple their hose to a fire-plug and squirt water, to be much excited about a similar display now, though it was rather interesting to see eight streams going at one time.
The infantry drill had more attraction for him. It was not exactly a novelty, either, but it gave him a new idea of the Coast Guard men. He had not previously thought of them as soldiers. But when the quartermaster told him that in time of war the Coast Guard becomes part of the navy, he saw that marines on a battleship were no more necessary than they were on a Coast Guard cutter.
Probably Henry would have enjoyed all these exhibitions more, had he not been under the shadow of suspicion. No formal charges had been made against him, and he was not exactly a prisoner. Neither was he free to leave the boat. He hoped that the captain would soon get to the bottom of the mystery. Henry did not feel free to say anything to the chief electrician about the matter, lest the latter think that he was seeking to influence him. So he stayed away from the radio shack. He was no longer a part of the wireless force, for the return of the chief electrician had taken his job from him.
But while Henry was disconsolately considering the matter, things were moving briskly in the wireless shack. Though he was now really sick, the chief electrician continued on duty. Alone on his watch, he was working patiently to uncover the difficulty with his grounded coil. Once more he had examined this coil thoroughly, yet he could see no external indications of impairment.
Slowly he now unwound the covering cords that formed the outer casing for the wrapped wires within. There was still nothing visibly wrong. But when he had cleared the cords away, and had gotten to the coil itself, his sharp eye detected a shining little dot, hardly bigger than a large pinhead, among the wire wrappings. With the point of his knife-blade he picked at this shining point and found it was hard, like metal. He believed he had found the difficulty.
Getting a large wooden spool, he began to unwind the copper wire from the coil, rolling it up on the empty spool as he unrolled it from the coil. Swiftly he transferred the wire from one cylinder to the other. As his coil grew thinner he saw that he had found the difficulty. The bright dot was the head of a long, thin finishing nail. Presently it was sticking up a half inch above the winding of the coil. The chief electrician started to pull it out, then thought better of it and desisted. But even his first slight tug at the nail showed him it was pretty tight. He went on unwinding. But now he examined the wire carefully as it unrolled. In piercing the coil, the nail had cut the insulation of practically every wire it had touched. In one or two places it had even severed the wire wrapping itself. When at last the chief electrician unwrapped the last winding of the coil, the nail dropped to his desk. Its end was bent over at an angle, and the metal core was scratched where the nail had been bent sidewise. The whole thing was as plain as day now. Some one had driven the nail through the coil, finishing the job with one or two hard blows that had bent the point against the core of the coil, sinking the head far below the corded cover. The question was, who had done it.
As soon as he had made this discovery, Mr. Sharp carefully removed all traces of his work, locked the parts of the damaged coil in his private drawer, bundled himself up, and sought the captain. The nail he had in his pocket.
“I have found the trouble, Captain Hardwick,” the chief electrician reported, when he was alone with the captain in the cabin. “There it is,” and he laid the bent nail before his commander.
“You look half sick, Sparks,” said the latter, looking at him keenly. “Be careful of yourself.”
“It’s that wretched cold I got from my ducking at Cape Cod,” laughed the chief electrician. “I’ll be all right soon.”
The captain picked up the nail and examined it curiously. “ Well?” he said inquiringly.
“That was in the grounded coil,” said the chief electrician. “That is what grounded it. Some one drove that nail into the coil.”
The captain stared at the nail long and fixedly. “It beats me,” he said at last. “You think that it was done maliciously, don’t you? Is there a possibility that it might have been done in an experimental way? Now, young Harper is very ambitious and desirous of learning. Might he have been experimenting, trying to learn some- thing, by fooling with the outfit?”
“In my opinion, Captain, whoever did this did it with perfect knowledge of what would happen. I cannot think it was done for any purpose except to put the wireless out of commission.”
The captain frowned. “I fear you are right, Sparks. But who would want to put the wireless out of commission? I can think of only two reasons why any one should do that. Some one might have it in for me or for the operator. If it weren’t that young Black was asleep when this was done, I’d think he did it. You know he and Harper had some words.”
“That would explain everything,” said the chief radio man, “but the facts won’t fit the case.”
“So far as we know, not a soul was on deck except the men on watch. If some one entered the radio room while Henry was up in the chartroom with me, he would have had to be both sly and slick. He would have had to watch young Harper’s every movement, and be all prepared to run in and drive this nail home. It was a terrible risk to run, for it was certain that the wireless man wouldn’t be away from his key for more than a minute or two. Discovery was almost certain. The more I consider it, the more it seems to me that young Harper must have been experimenting. Did you find anything else out of its usual order?”
“Now that you speak of it, I did find some loose screws, as though some of the other instruments had been tampered with.”
“I hate to think of it,” replied the captain, “but it looks very much as though young Harper took advantage of his position to tinker with the instruments.”
“That might be true about the other instruments, Captain, but he would certainly know what would result from driving a nail into a field coil.”
“Maybe so, maybe so, but he may not know half as much about wireless as you think. All I can do is to go according to the facts. They point to young Harper. But we shall have to have more evidence on the matter before I decide what to do. Furthermore, the situation is so very unusual that I am puzzled as to what should be done, even if I knew Harper to be the culprit. In a sense he was a regular operator. I made him one temporarily. But he is under age, and we did not have the consent of his mother to his enlistment. And finally, I should have to take into consideration the very real service he rendered us during the storm. Strictly, I suppose, he was only a volunteer that I put in charge for a time.”
“I can’t help feeling that the lad is innocent,” urged the chief radio man. “He undoubtedly knows a lot about wireless, and no one who knows anything about it would have done what he did unless he intended to cripple the service.”
“We must go by the facts, young man, not by theories,” said the captain a little testily. “But let’s get all the facts. Say nothing. Let no one know you have discovered the cause of the trouble. If the culprit thinks he is undiscovered, he may give himself away.”