[CHAPTER XXIV—AN APPEAL FOR HELP]
[CHAPTER XXV—“IT’S DEATH TO REMAIN HERE!”]
[CHAPTER XXVI—AN ASTOUNDING DISCOVERY]
The Boy Inventor’s Wireless Triumph
CHAPTER I—THE WIRELESS AT LONE ISLAND
The book Jack Chadwick had been reading,—a volume dealing with some rather dry experimental work,—slipped from his fingers and fell with a crash on the floor of the veranda. At the sudden interruption to the sleepy, breathless calm of Lone Island on a July noon, his cousin Tom Jesson, sixteen, and more than a year Jack’s junior, looked up from the steamer chair in which he, too, was extended, with one of his quiet smiles.
Suspending his task of wrapping some new condenser plates with glittering tin-foil, he gazed about him. In front of the bungalow was a strip of dazzling white sand,—the beach. Beyond shimmered the cobalt-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. At a small wharf lay a capable-looking motor cruiser, painted white and about forty-five feet in length. She had been moored thus for the past seven days—ever since Jack and his cousin and their colored attendant, Jupe, had landed on the island after an uneventful passage from Galveston.
“Dozed off,” chuckled Tom, regarding Jack as the latter’s eyelids closed drowsily; “well, I don’t know that I blame him. Waiting on Lone Island with nothing to do but read, eat and sleep, does get monotonous after a week of it.”
Suddenly a gong, affixed to the freshly painted wall above their heads, broke forth in a wild, insistent clamor.