“This is Goat Island,” trickled into Nat’s ears in the same awkward, hesitating fashion; and then came silence. Try as he would, Nat couldn’t raise it again.
“Well, this is a wireless mystery for fair,” he muttered to himself, for the captain had left the wireless room to get some hot coffee and food; “that wasn’t Ding-dong and it wasn’t Joe; now who on earth was it? Some beginner, that’s plain, for he couldn’t send worth a cent. But then to cap the climax, telling me it’s ‘Nemo’! It must be spooks, that’s the only way I can account for it—wireless spooks.”
A minute later there came another message.
“Somebody trying to raise the Lightship,” exclaimed Nat, listening with all his might. “Maybe this is news of the Nomad.”
“Nomad put in at Santa Barbara last night,” was the message coming from the wireless man at the Santa Barbara station, which handled commercial messages. “Have found out that all on board are at Arlington Hotel. Shall I send message?”
“Yes. Tell them, please, that this is Nat Trevor, well and able. Am aboard the Lightship at Pancake Shoals. Tell them to come for me as soon as possible.”
Nat informed the man that the messages would be paid for at the land end and bade him good-night. With a light heart, troubled only by the mystery of the message from Goat Island, he joined the captain below and told him his good news.
“Waal, I’m glad you found your friends,” said Captain Sim, “but I’ll be sorry to lose you, my lad. You’re a boy after my own heart. I don’t know what I should have done without you.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Nat easily. “It just needed a little monkey-wrench sense, that’s all, and I happened to have given a lot of attention to that branch of science.”
The captain had prepared an appetizing meal, to which they both did ample justice.