The young wireless operator sat vigilantly at his key. The night was a bad one for wireless communication, although a storm does not, of necessity, interfere with the “waves.”
At last, about ten o’clock, he succeeded in obtaining communication with the Kaiser, one of the big German liners, some one thousand miles to the eastward.
Back and forth through the storm the two operators talked. The Kaiser’s man reported heavy weather, rain-squalls and big seas.
“But it is not bothering us,” he added; “we’re hitting up an eighteen knot clip.”
“Can’t say the same here,” flashed back Jack; “we have been slowed down for an hour or more. This is a bad storm, all right.”
“You must be a ‘greeny’; this is nothing,” came back the answer from the Kaiser man.
“It is my first voyage as a wireless man,” crackled out Jack’s key.
“Bully for you! You send like a veteran,” came back the rejoinder; and then, before Jack could send his appreciation of the compliment, something happened to the communication and the conversation was cut off.
When he opened the door to go forward with his message for the skipper, the puff of wind that met the boy almost threw him from his feet. But he braced himself against the screaming gale and worked his way along the bridge. He wished he had put on oil-skins before he started, for the spray was breaking in cataracts over the narrow bridge along which he had to claw his way like a cat.
“Well, whatever else a ‘Tanker’ may be, she is surely not a dry ship in a gale of wind,” muttered the boy to himself, as he reached the end of his journey.