CHAPTER XXII—THE WIRELESS CALL FOR HELP
Having delivered the survivors of the Susanne to the greater comforts of an Italian liner bound eastward, the Colodia’s own course was set for the south and west. Her commander and crew hoped to pick up news of the Sea Pigeon once again. At any rate, the German raider had been last seen making off toward the West Indies and the Caribbean.
The destroyer was below the Tropic of Cancer now, and the weather was exceedingly hot. A dress of dungaree trousers and sleeveless undershirt was the most popular uniform forward of the bridge, decided Donahue.
“The brass hats who have to fairly live in their uniforms are greatly to be pitied.”
Drills were not pushed, and many duties became merely a matter of form.
Yet there was a very serious train of thought in the minds of the Seacove boys and George Belding, as has been shown. There had been uncertainty enough regarding the voyage of the Redbird to Bahia; but since the beginning of what the radio men called the “ghost talk” out of the air, the five friends had all felt a greater measure of anxiety.
Of course, it was by no means certain that these letters in Morse that suggested the name Redbird had anything to do with Mr. Belding’s ship and her company. Yet, not having heard in any form from the party bound for Bahia since the ship left New York, it was not strange that George Belding and Phil Morgan, at least, should be especially troubled in their minds.
During the afternoon watch on this day in which George had gone to Mr. Sparks again, the young fellow got relief and approached the radio room. The chief was off duty and one of his assistants was at the instrument. But the older man was lolling in the doorway and welcomed Belding with a smile.
“Jim, here,” said Sparks, nodding to the student at the instrument, “was just telling me ‘ghost talk’ is coming over again. He says he gets ‘Colodia’ as clear as can be.”
“My goodness! Then somebody is trying to call us, Mr. Sparks!” murmured Belding.
“I don’t know. I’ve been keeping track, busy as we have been for a couple of days. I really think there is some attempt to put a message over; but whether it is for fun or serious, I would not dare state. Or whether it is meant for us or not. It isn’t the same message each time.”
“But you do believe that somebody is trying—or something?”
“‘Something’ is good,” growled Sparks. “I’ve made out ‘Colodia’ more than a few times myself. And I agree that the letters you caught the last time you were listening in, and which I heard myself, may spell ‘Redbird’. Then, you know, you said you heard ‘help.’”
“Well, I did!” snorted Belding.
The radio chief pushed a square bit of paper into his hand. On it were set down without spacing of any kind the following line of letters:
“c,o,l,o,d,i,a,h,e,l,p,r,e,d,b,i,r,d,l,b.”
“I will be honest with you, George,” he said, watching closely the flushing face of the youth. “I really got those letters not half an hour ago. They were repeated in just that order several times. What do you make out of them?”
Belding’s excitement was growing momentarily. He seized Sparks’ pencil and wrote under the row of letters swiftly and surely:
“Colodia—Help—Redbird—L.B.”
The chief nodded. “‘L. B.’ being your sister’s initials, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” cried George breathlessly. “Lilian Belding.”
“Get over there on the bench. Jim will give you the harness. Listen in and see what you can make of it now,” said Sparks, himself excited.
George slid on to the bench and Jim handed him the receivers and strap. The youth fitted the discs to his ears, settled himself on the seat, and opened the key. As usual the static sputtered in the receivers for a little. He tuned down to the short waves and the strange, grating sounds began.
It was very bad Morse—clumsy and irregular; but that it was Morse, Belding was confident. There was something wrong either with the sender or with the instrument sending.
Belding seized the pad of scratch paper and poised his pencil. For a few moments the “ghost talk” ceased. Was it all over for the time? He waited impatiently, growing hot and cold with nervousness.
There were plenty of other wave-sounds in the air, had he cared to listen to them. But he knew the monotonous and rasping letters—on a lower plane, even, than the commercial waves—were carried only at the level to which he had tuned the instrument.
Suddenly: “Colodia! Colodia! Colodia!”
The words were rapped out harshly but briskly—each letter plainly to be read. Then Belding began to set down the unevenly sent letters as he could make them out, with a dash where he failed to catch the letter intended:
“c,o,l,o,d,i,a,h,e,l,p,g,e,t,—,a,n,—,s,—,i,z,—,d,r,e,d,b,i,r,d,—,o,r,b,—,—,i,a,h,e,l,p,l,b,e,l,d,i,—,—.”
George could not stop then to see whether these letters made any sense or not. He believed the main trouble with the message was that the sender used no punctuation.
For a brief time the mystery ceased. Then again the sounds broke out—the same clumsy, uncertain Morse; so bad, indeed, that at first the listener could make out a letter only now and then:
“l,—,—,—,—,l,—,n,g,—,—,—,a,—,e,r,e,—,b,i,r,—,—,a,i,n,—,e,d,—,—,t,m,—,—,t,i,n,—,g,e,r,—,—,n,s,s,e,i,z,e,d,s,—,i,—h,e,l,p.”
There was silence again as far as the “ghost talk” was concerned. Belding waited with his pencil poised over the paper.
His eyes meanwhile scanned the first list of letters he had set down. At first glance he believed he made out the first three words in the message. They were, “Colodia,help,get.” After the break and several disconnected letters the word “redbird” fairly leaped at him from the page. Then, after a few misses and letters that made no sense, he got “help” again. Then he saw as clear as day: “L.Belding”—his sister’s signature!
“Colodia—help—get—Redbird—help—L.Belding.”
The young fellow shook all over as he sat there before the radio instrument. This was a message from his sister, Lilian. Nothing could thereafter shake his belief in this statement. And that she and the Redbird were in peril Belding was positive.
The second combination of letters offered fewer understandable words than the first, or so it seemed to Belding at that moment. The beginning of this second message was entirely indistinguishable, but toward the end he got two words complete—“seized” and “help.”
Altogether he was assured that he had guessed the main trouble with the sender of these strange messages. The words were all run together and the awkward and uneven sending made the unpunctuated words very hard to understand.
Sparks touched him on the shoulder. He had a paper in his hand that a messenger had just brought. It was a radio that must be sent at once.
“Let me at it for a minute, son,” the radio chief said. “Here’s a report for headquarters’ base. Did you get anything?”
“I—I don’t know,” murmured George, giving place to the man. He left the room, taking with him the paper on which he had penciled the broken messages.
Secretly he was confident that he had heard a call over the radio for help and that his sister Lilian, on the Redbird, was sending it.
He wanted to see Philip Morgan about it—to show the leader of the Seacove Navy Boys this paper with the two cryptograms he had picked out of the air. Like Al Torrance, Ikey Rosenmeyer, and Frenchy Donahue, George had come by this time to look upon Phil Morgan as a fellow of parts. Phil would be able to help him make these messages out, if anybody could!
But he could have no time with Whistler until second dog watch that evening. Then he got the Seacove youth aside and showed him what he had managed to set down in letters from the “ghost talk” he had listened in on that afternoon.
Whistler did not know a thing about Morse, or much about radio, but he had a sharp eye and a clear head. Belding had translated enough words of both messages to suggest the general trend of them.
“How do you know where the letters ‘break’ if you can’t hear all the dots and dashes?” Whistler first asked, scanning the paper seriously. “That appears curious to me.”
“Not in this case. If it is Lil sending—or whoever it is—the sender is so unfamiliar with the Morse American code that there is a hesitation between the letters. Why, I thought at first the message was in Continental code, which is, you know, entirely different from American.”
“It’s all news to me, old boy. Go on.”
“Why, there’s nothing more. If I could hear those words repeated several times I reckon I’d get most of the letters—and get them straight.”
“I see,” murmured his friend. “And as it is, you have got a good many of the words, only you haven’t noticed it.”
“What’s that?”
“Why, it is plain,” said Whistler, “that several of the same words are used in both messages.”
“Yes. ‘Help’, ‘Colodia’, ‘Redbird’.”
“More than those,” said Whistler. “See! You have ‘seized’ plain as the nose on your face in the second set of letters.”
“I see that.”
“And there it is in the first list,” and Whistler pointed as he spoke to a combination of letters and blanks almost immediately following “Colodia—Help—Get.” “There is ‘s-e-i-z-ed’, plain enough. And, yes, by Jove! There is ‘redbird’ in the second message. Look here, old man! Let me go through this.”
“That is what I want you to do,” responded Belding excitedly.
“In the beginning the message surely says: ‘Colodia! Help! Get!——No! That should not be ‘getmans’ that ‘seized Redbird’. No, no! There is the same combination in the lower message. It is ‘ger’ down there, not ‘get’,” muttered Whistler, vastly interested now.
With pencil and paper he set to work. In five minutes he offered Belding the following paragraph as a translation in full of the first message:
“Colodia! Help! Germans seized Redbird for Bahia. Help!—L. Belding.”
“Oh, Whistler, you’ve got it! And it is as we have feared. Those papers that Emil Eberhardt stole from me back in England have played the dickens with the Redbird and the folks. I am sure it is Lil trying to call me—the splendid kid that she is!”
“Hold on! Hold on!” Whistler said, but encouragingly. “Let’s get the other message, too.”
He set to work on that; but the first of it baffled him. He could only begin to make it out where the word “Redbird” occurred. From that place on, it was not so difficult: “Redbird painted out—mutiny—Germans seized ship—Help.” This second message was not signed with Lilian Belding’s name or her initials, but George knew the sending to have been the same as that of the first call for help.
“But, Phil!” gasped the New York youth, “we don’t know a living thing about where the Redbird is, or what is happening to our folks.”
“You’d think she would have tried to tell their situation in the message,” rejoined Whistler slowly.
“If she knew. She’s a girl, and wouldn’t be likely to interest herself much in navigation.”
“Tut, tut, my boy! Everybody at sea takes an interest in the course of the ship and her speed. Of course they do. Wait! Here is the abbreviation for longitude right here—‘long.’ Two blanks for the figures you did not catch, George, my boy!”
“Do you think so?” murmured his friend.
Whistler wrote it “Lat.—,—, long.—,—.” Then he had an inspiration and put in “name” before “Redbird.”
“There we have it in full—except for the figures of the Redbird’s position. Look out for them next time, George. They are important.”
“Next time, Morgan?” gasped George Belding, excitedly.
“Certainly. It stands to reason your sister is sending out messages for help whenever she gets a chance at the radio instrument on the Redbird. And take it from me, the most important thing she is trying to put over is the position of the ship from day to day. They take the sun at noon, and as soon afterward as she can, Lilian gets to the radio and sends that information into the air.
“Believe me, George, you have some smart sister, and no mistake!” said Whistler Morgan in much admiration.