As he mounted the steep ladder leading to the “Wireless Hutch,” he could feel the ship leaping and rolling under his feet like a live thing. Every now and then a mighty sea would crash against the bow and shake the stout steel fabric of the Tropic Queen from stem to stern.
The wind, too, was shrieking and screaming through the rigging and up among the aërials. Jack involuntarily glanced upward, although it was too dark to see the antennæ swaying far aloft between the masts.
“I hope to goodness they hold,” he caught himself thinking, and then recalled that, in the hurry of departure from New York, he had not had a chance to go aloft and examine the insulation or the security of their fastenings himself.
In the wireless room he found Sam with the “helmet” on his head. The boy was plainly making a struggle to stick it out bravely, but his face was pale.
“Anything come in?” asked Jack.
“Not a thing.”
“Caught anything at all from any other ship?”
Sam’s answer was to tug the helmet hastily from his head. He hurriedly handed it to Jack, and then bolted out of the place without a word.
“Poor old Sam,” grinned Jack, as he sat down at the instruments and adjusted the helmet that Sam had just discarded; “he’s got his, all right, and he’ll get it worse before morning.”
Sam came back after a while. He was deathly pale and threw himself down on his bunk in the inner room with a groan. He refused to let Jack send for a steward.