Sanders and Hamilton both took a hand at fixing the Wiggle's wireless. The only thing they were all quite certain about was that there ought to be a wire somewhere. So they stretched the aerial from the funnel to the flagstaff at the stern of the boat, and then addressed themselves to the less simple solution of "making it work."
They tried it for a week, and gave it up in despair.
"They've had you, Bones," said Hamilton. "It doesn't 'went.' Poor old Bones!"
"Your pity, dear old officer, is offensive," said Bones stiffly, "an' I don't mind tellin' you that I've a queer feelin'—I can't explain what it is, except that I'm a dooce of a psychic—that that machine is goin' to be jolly useful."
But though Bones worked day and night, read the book of instructions from cover to cover, and took the whole apparatus to pieces, examining each part under a strong magnifying glass, he never succeeded either in transmitting or receiving a message, and the machine was repacked and stored in the spare cabin, and was never by any chance referred to, except by Hamilton in his most unpleasant moments.
Bones took an especial delight in the Wiggle; it was his very own ship, and he gave her his best personal attention.
It was Bones who ordered from London especially engraved notepaper headed "H. M. S. Komfuru"—the native name sounded more dignified than Wiggle, and more important than "Launch 36." It was Bones who installed the little dynamo which—when it worked—lit the cabins and even supplied power for a miniature searchlight. It was Bones who had her painted Service grey, and would have added another funnel if Hamilton had not detected the attempted aggrandizement. Bones claimed that she was dustproof, waterproof, and torpedo-proof, and Hamilton had voiced his regret that she was not also fool-proof.
At five o'clock the next morning, when the world was all big hot stars and shadows, and there was no sound but the whisper of the running river and the "ha-a-a-a—ha-a-a-a" of breakers, Bones came from his hut, crossed the parade-ground, and, making his way by the light of a lantern along the concrete quay—it was the width of an average table—dropped on to the deck and kicked the custodian of the Wiggle to wakefulness.
Bones's satellite was one Ali Abid, who was variously described as Moor, Egyptian, Tripolitan, and Bedouin, but was by all ethnological indications a half-breed Kano, who had spent the greater part of his life in the service of a professor of bacteriology. This professor was something of a purist, and the association with Ali Abid, plus a grounding in the elementary subjects which are taught at St. Joseph's Mission School, Cape Coast Castle, had given Ali a gravity of demeanour and a splendour of vocabulary which many better favoured than he might have envied.
"Arise," quoth Bones, in the cracked bass which he employed whenever he felt called upon to deliver his inaccurate versions of Oriental poets—