At that the doctor exploded. “Humph!” he snorted. “Duty! Yes, on a white cot! You’ll be lucky if you see the radio room again in a fortnight.”
Henry saw his chance. “Let me take your turns at the key, Mr. Sharp,” he begged. “I promise you nothing more shall happen to the instruments when I am on watch. I’ll never leave the room for a second, after this.”
When the chief electrician seemed to hesitate, Henry continued his pleading. “Mr. Sharp, you don’t believe that I had anything to do with damaging that coil, do you?”
“No, I do not,” said the chief electrician decisively. “And I’m perfectly willing to have you go back on duty, but I don’t know what the skipper will think about it.”
“Will you ask him if I may go back on duty?” begged Henry.
“Yes,” murmured Mr. Sharp weakly.
Henry fairly raced for the captain’s cabin and told the commander that Mr. Sharp was sick and would like to speak to him. Captain Hardwick at once went forward. Henry stepped outside the stateroom and the captain conferred with the chief electrician. The result of that talk was that Mr. Sharp, who was now suffering from pneumonia, went to the sick bay and Henry again went on duty in the wireless house.
The very first message he caught was an order from headquarters for the Iroquois to proceed to sea at once and take the oil tanker Rayolite in tow. Henry was going to have his desire fulfilled. The cutter was to go out and once more wrestle with the ocean. The Rayolite, an unfinished tanker, was being towed from Nova Scotia to New York. In the storm the towing tug had deserted her, and the ship was somewhere out on the ocean, driving helplessly before the wind. Her position was given in the despatch as approximately forty-one north, seventy-one west. There were some maps in the wireless shack, so after he had sent the message to the imperiled tanker Henry looked up her position. It seemed to be almost due east of the eastern end of Long Island. The wind was east of north, so that the helpless tanker would be blown along almost parallel with the coast line. Henry was glad of that. He did not want to see any more ships piled up on the shore.
Within a very few minutes after the receipt of this message, the Iroquois was once more heading out to sea. Clad in thick woolen garments and oilskins, the captain stood on the bridge, conning the cutter through the channel. He was needed there. The passage, so fair and easy on a clear day, now called for the utmost caution. Lowering clouds of fog were driving in from the sea, increasing in density with every minute. Snow had begun to fall, at first coming in gusty squalls. Then it fell steadily, the dancing flakes driven in swirling clouds before the sweeping winds. At times the snow changed to rain, and was flung in blinding sheets against the little cutter.
Cautiously the Iroquois nosed her way down the channel, the water becoming rougher and rougher as she approached the open sea. Looking into the swirling, blinding curtain of fog and snow, Henry did not see how the captain could possibly find his way. But with chart and compass to direct him, and his wonderful seaman’s sense of direction to aid him, he took the cutter from buoy to buoy, along the channel, straight out again to the Ambrose Lightship.