“Is it a big job?” asked Herb, who as a rule was not on speaking terms with anything that looked like work.
“No,” answered Bob. “It’s easy enough to make. We’ll just get Jimmy here to make a frame for it down in his father’s carpenter shop——.”
“Jimmy!” repeated that individual, in an aggrieved tone. “We’ll just get Jimmy to make the horn. Sure! We’ll just get Jimmy to make a frame. Sure! I suppose if one of us was marked out to die, you’d say, ‘We’ll just let Jimmy do it.’ Just as easy as that.”
“Stop right there, Jimmy,” commanded Joe. “You’ll have me crying in a minute, and it’s an awful thing to see a strong man weep.”
“After Jimmy has made the frame,” continued Bob, not at all moved by the pathos of the situation, “all we’ll have to do will be to wind it about eight times with copper wire. That will give us a lot of receiving area and capacity. The frame ought to be about four feet square. It’ll have to be mounted on a pivot——”
“Let Jimmy make the pivot,” murmured Jimmy.
“So that it can be swung end on in the direction of the broadcasting station,” continued Bob, not deigning to notice the interruption. “It has to be pointed in that direction in order to get the message. If it were at right angles, for instance, we probably would hear only very little or perhaps nothing at all. You see, with that kind of aerial we don’t have to put up anything on the roof at all. We could have it inside the room. It could be fastened to a hook in the ceiling, so that when we weren’t using it we could hoist it up and get it out of the way. That kind is used a lot on ships and at ship stations on shore. They call it sometimes a ‘radio compass.’ You can see it must be pretty good or they wouldn’t use it so widely.”
“It is good,” broke in a bass voice behind them, and as they turned in surprise they were delighted to recognize in the owner of the voice Mr. Frank Brandon, the radio inspector, by whose aid they had been able to track down Dan Cassey, the rascal who had tried to defraud Nellie Berwick, an orphan girl, of her money.
There was an exclamation of pleasure from all of the boys, with whom Mr. Brandon was a great favorite.
“What good wind blew you down this way?” asked Bob, after the greetings and hand-shakings were over.