“Bill,” he exclaimed, “this little machine here may get us out of the brig before our term of confinement expires! They’ll cut the aerial as soon as they can after they hear the noise from the spark-gap. What’ll I say?” he asked thoughtfully. “It’s got to be short and yet tell ’em enough.”
Suddenly his hand moved quickly, rhythmically, and the white arc across the air-gap sizzled and rasped. Then the boatswain’s mate suddenly threw out the sending circuit and listened eagerly through the telephone head-piece for an answer. Marley observed a satisfied smile on his face as he again threw in the sending circuit, and for several minutes the spark leaped and played under its glass case like a thing alive. The noise of the arc drowned out completely the click of the key. Then the metallic sound of the key suddenly was heard, showing that the aerial wire had been severed on deck, and O’Neil threw off his head-gear and slapped Marley a resounding blow across the shoulders.
“Bill, every ship in the harbor knows that there’s a mutiny on the ‘Sylvia,’” he laughed. “I was afraid the ‘Alaska’ wasn’t listening, so I made the ‘general call.’ Now when the first boat comes alongside, you and I have got to make as much noise as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Far East, in one.”
The two sailors were not kept long in suspense. O’Neil from his point of vantage soon espied one of the “Alaska’s” steam cutters, full of armed men, standing down toward the yacht’s gangway, while he heard the excited and joyful voice of Marley from his station on the other side of the cabin.
“Here comes a Jap steam launch full of our little friends. I never was so glad to see any one not of my own race before.”
O’Neil and Marley, like two men at a race-meet encouraging their favorite horses, called out loudly, cheering the two boats on. The steam launch from the “Alaska” passed close to his air port.
“We’re the mutineers, sir,” O’Neil cried out loudly across the ten feet of intervening water. “They’re holding Marley and me prisoners here in the cabin.”
Within a few minutes the hatchway was undogged and lifted and the two sailors came up blinking into the sunlight. They saw Randall and his friend closely guarded by both the Japanese and American rescue party, and O’Neil could not suppress an amused smile as he read real terror on their faces.
“You’ll feel worse than that in a few minutes!” the boatswain’s mate exclaimed hotly to the discomfited Randall. Then he put his hand into his shirt and pulled out the letter which had been the cause of all the trouble.
“Mr. Winston,” O’Neil exclaimed, “here’s a letter I found in the yacht’s cabin. Bill Marley and I have been chasing these fellows to get it since last night. When they found we had it, they locked us in the cabin.” O’Neil’s face was serious as he told the story, which was quite near the real facts. Randall’s jaw dropped, and he would have denied the sailor’s words, but that he saw by the intimidating faces of the Japanese sailors that his denial would fall upon deaf ears.