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.”