“What?”
“Why, I tell you, George; twice to-night I have almost caught something that seemed to be a message in one of our codes and tuned to this length of spark. But I can’t really make head nor tail of it.”
“That wasn’t what you just sent aft to the Old Man?”
“Shucks! No! I’ll give you a tip on that, young fellow,” and the radio man smiled. “We’ve been zigzagging across the steamship routes, but now you will notice that we have an objective. That message was from Teneriffe in the Canaries. That big sub has been seen down that way.”
“Bully!” exclaimed Whistler, who had come to look into the room over his friend’s shoulder.
“Oh, that you, Whistler? Well, there is nothing secret about it. But this confounded ‘ghost talk’——”
“Sounds interesting,” Whistler said.
“I’m puzzled. I hope I’ll catch it again. It is just as though somebody—a slow operator, regular ham—was trying to put something over and couldn’t quite do it. Funny things we hear in the air, anyway, at times.”
He went back to his machine, grumbling, and the boys came away after a bit. The news that the super-submersible had been heard of again was something to talk about, at least, and served to keep them awake through the rest of the watch.
In the morning the news that the German submarine was again active in a certain part of the ocean to the southward became generally known. It was likely that the strange and threatening craft, which plainly could make longer cruises than most submarines, had been sent forth to prey upon food ships from South America.