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The Ocean Wireless Boys of the Iceberg Patrol
But Jack's gloomy mood did not last long. As usual, the stimulus of work soon caused the clouds to dissolve, and by the time he had the detector adjusted, he was humming cheerfully. As he looked up from his completed job, a ruddy-faced, cheery-looking lad about two years older than Jack, who was eighteen, stuck his head in at the door of the wireless-room which, besides the apparatus, contained Jack's bunk, a picture of the boy's dead mother hanging at its head, and the desk at which he made out his reports.
"Hello there," hailed Jack, as Billy Raynor appeared, "going off watch?"
"Well, don't I look it, with this fine old coat of grime on my hide?" laughed Jack's chum, now promoted to the post of second engineer on the new freighter.
"Thought when you got to be second you were just going to loll around with your hands in your pockets and give orders," commented Jack.
"Um, so did I," rejoined Raynor with a rather wry grin, "but, as you see, it didn't just work out that way. By-the-way, I thought you were going to be the dandy, brass-buttoned wireless hero on a passenger packet this trip."
"Old Jukes was mighty nice about it though," he explained. "I'm getting the same pay as I would on a liner and then, too, that check for that South American business came in mighty handy, so that, financially, I'm not kicking. But I do want to get ahead in my work."
"Say, shut up, will you!" sputtered Jack, turning red. "I don't want any favoritism for anything I may or may not have done. That isn't it. I just want to get right ahead in the wireless game."
"And so you are, so far as I can see," replied Raynor. "Incidentally, how's the portable set coming along?"
He referred to Jack's pet hobby, an invention over which he had worked during all his spare time, afloat and ashore, for months. It was a portable wireless set in which weight and complexity had been cut to the bone. Jack had managed to reduce the weight by degrees till at last he had produced what he believed would prove a practicable device for use in the field, which weighed a trifle under fifty pounds, and could be carried over the operator's shoulder in a satchel.
In reply to young Raynor's question, Jack opened a closet and produced a set of instruments of exquisite finish. Attached to them was a neat coil of copper wire and, strapped to the base that supported the whole, was a flat package of cloth and bamboo sticks.
"What's that jigger underneath?" asked Raynor, referring to the latter bit of apparatus.
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