The captain looked at Alec with evident admiration. "Do you mean you made the set yourself?"
"Absolutely. I can install it here on the Bertha B and take messages for you, if you'll let me."
"It's a nice thing, wireless is," replied the captain, "but it wouldn't be any use on an oyster-boat. Besides, it would be in the way. You see how cramped we are for room. These boats was all right as long as they stuck to sails, but they filled up the hold with engines and winders and a lot of machinery when they turned 'em into power boats, and they ain't big enough any longer. We can ketch twice as many oysters with power boats as we used to with sails, and we don't have room to carry 'em when we get a big catch. Some day they'll build oyster-boats of a new sort. They'll make 'em bigger and higher and have room in the hold where we can put oysters. Then we can catch 'em all winter."
"Don't you catch them in winter now?" asked Alec in astonishment, for he distinctly recalled eating oysters all through the winter season.
"We have to carry 'em on deck," explained Captain Bagley, "and in cold weather they freeze. Then we have to stop dredging. Your winter oysters come from the Chesapeake, I reckon; at least in real cold weather. But tell me some more about this Wireless Patrol. What was it?"
"Oh! Just a bunch of us fellows who had wireless outfits. We used to talk to each other at night and listen in to all the news that's flying about; and we used to go camping, too. When the war came, we knew enough about wireless to be of some use. We caught the German dynamiters at Elk City, and four of our boys helped the Secret Service in New York run down the secret wireless of the Germans. One of our boys, Henry Harper, is a government wireless man now, and Roy Mercer is wireless man on the steamer Lycoming running between New York and Galveston. Charley Russell is a forest ranger back home in the state forest, and he got his job largely because of his ability with the wireless. They're going to install a wireless system in his section of the forest, it is so useful in fighting forest fires."
"You don't say!"
"Sure. You see, Charley started as a fire patrol and he saved a tract of the finest timber in Pennsylvania because he was able to call help promptly with his wireless. He'd have had to hike twenty-four miles over the mountains and back to get help if he hadn't had his wireless outfit with him, and the fire would have got such a start it would have burned up the whole tract before they could have stopped it. Oh! You can do most anything with wireless. I'm sorry I can't use my outfit aboard the Bertha B. I could string up my aerial between the masts, and I don't believe my wires would be one bit in your way."
The captain smiled indulgently. "Wireless is all right, I know," he said. "But we ain't got any use for it on an oyster-boat. Our business is to ketch oysters."