Behind them the coast line lay like a dim gray scarf stretched along the blue horizon. The keen, ozone-laden wind struck their faces with an invigorating tang. It was great, glorious, exciting to be out here on the broad bosom of the gulf, guiding a speedy motor craft toward unknown adventures. The zest of achievement, the glory of grappling with obstacles as yet unseen and hardly guessed at, ran hot in both boys’ veins. Fast as the Vagrant was, she seemed to them to crawl, and yet, thanks to Tom’s skill as an engineer, she was reeling off her thirteen knots with the regularity of a sleeping infant’s breathing.
“Jupe!” called Jack presently, “come aft and spell me at the wheel for a while. I’m going to send a few questions into the air,” he added to Tom.
“Good. We’ve got plenty of ‘juice.’ Shall I go below and send up the mast?”
“Yes. Better run it up to its full height. It won’t hurt in this light breeze, and I want all the radius I can get.”
“Right you are.”
Tom descended once more. The base of the telescoping aerial mast was in the forepart of the engine-room. A hand winch operated it much in the same manner that a fire department’s extension ladders are sent aloft. It did not take Tom long to extend the slender, yet pliant and strong steel spar heavenward to its fullest length.
At its truck, or summit, was a pulley, through which halyards attached to the aerials had been rove. Jack had gotten these out while Tom had been busy below, and in a remarkably short time the slender antenna, or aerials, were strung from mast tip to deck. There were four separate wires of stranded phosphor bronze attached to wooden spreads, and properly insulated. From them a wire led back to the instruments attached to a table in the forepart of the cabin.
The aerials being up Jack, after satisfying himself that everything was shipshape, made for the cabin. Seating himself at the wireless table he sent a signal crashing out into space.
“S-K! S-K! S-K!”
Then, after a pause:—