While Henry and his host were eating their luncheon, the noises suddenly ceased. There were a few shouted orders, indistinguishable in the roar of the storm, then some banging noises as hatches were closed and battened down, and other openings made fast. Soon all was quiet. When the luncheon was ended, Henry went up the companionway and peeped out. Things had been made tight. Awnings had been removed. Everything was lashed fast. The decks were bare. The Iroquois was stripped for action.
Henry could hardly believe that Captain Hardwick would leave port in such a storm. He knew that storm warnings must be showing all along the New England coast, and perhaps the entire Atlantic seaboard, but before he could return to the cabin and ask the captain if he intended to put to sea, he saw the chief electrician running aft along the slippery deck. Henry threw open the door for him, and the radio man dodged in out of the blinding rain. He had a message for the captain.
Henry descended to the cabin with the electrician. Captain Hardwick took the telegraph blank from Mr. Sharp and studied it a moment.
“No orders?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said the electrician.
The captain sat down at his desk, drew a red-bordered telegraph blank from a pigeonhole, and wrote. “Send that,” he directed.
The radio man struggled out into the storm. The captain rose and touched his call-bell.
“Rollin,” he said, when his attendant appeared, “ask Mr. Farley to come to me at once.”
The commander picked up the telegram and handed it to Henry. “You’ll have a chance to see something today, Henry,” he said.
Henry looked at the message in his hands. It was a cry of distress, an SOS message the radio man had picked out of the air: