“It will be a sorry joke if our Government gets after the sender. The law is mighty strict about private wireless plants, you know,” said Phil Morgan.
“There is one sure thing,” declared Belding. “If anybody is trying to call this ship, they don’t know much about the regulation codes and sendings. They don’t know the destroyer’s number, and the way they handle Morse is a caution to cats!”
“Stick to it,” advised Whistler.
But George did not really need to be urged in this direction. The next afternoon watch he was back at the radio room begging to “listen in” again. Because of the interest the radio men had begun to feel in the “ghost talk” in the air at this time of day, both Sparks and one of his assistants were on hand.
The regular radio men were listening for the peculiar voice in the wireless, at all hours; but it seemed to be confined now to an hour or two in mid-afternoon. One after the other the Colodia’s radio force slipped on the receiving harness and listened to the mystery. Belding got his chance, in spite of the fact that Sparks laughed at him.
This time Belding kept the instrument tuned down to the commercial waves on which it seemed the “ghost talk” was the more easily transmitted. Now and then he got the spelling of a letter clearly. But not a word in its entirety did he hear on this day—not even “help.”
“I get ‘r’, ‘d’, and ‘b’ a lot,” he signed, turning the receiver over to Sparks again. “They are in rotation—‘r’, ‘d’, ‘b’—and sometimes there follows another ‘d’. There are letters missing between them, excepting between the ‘b’ and the first ‘d’.”
“No ‘help’ stuff, eh?” queried Sparks.
“Nor any ‘Colodia’,” snorted Belding.
But he sat and watched the radio chief give his full attention to the mystery, and after a minute or two saw that the man was spelling something out carefully on the pad of scratch-paper under his hand. Belding peered over his shoulder and saw Sparks set down these letters as he heard them in the sound waves: