Part 1 (1/2)
The Secret Wireless.
by Lewis E. Theiss.
CHAPTER I
WHAT CAME OF HENRY'S IDEA
Henry Harper was sitting in the doorway of the workshop in his father's back yard, where the Camp Brady Wireless Club made their headquarters.
He was reading the morning newspaper. Suddenly he sprang to his feet.
His face grew black. His free hand clenched.
”That's terrible!” he exclaimed. ”Terrible!”
He walked across the shop, spread the newspaper on the bench and began to read aloud the big head-lines that had so aroused him.
LEAK IN NAVY DEPARTMENT
_Germans Knew of Departure of Transport Fleet_ _First Contingent of Pers.h.i.+ng's Men Attacked, by Waiting Submarines_
”It's terrible, terrible!” repeated Henry. ”Their spies are everywhere. They stop at nothing. Who could have been villain enough to give them the information? It is terrible!”
In his agitation Henry began to pace up and down the floor of the shop.
His face grew blacker and blacker as he brooded over the story of treachery. Though Henry was not yet eighteen, he was affected far more deeply by the story than most boys of his age would have been. For when the Camp Brady Wireless Club, of which Henry was president, had been practising the previous summer, Henry had been called upon to replace one of Uncle Sam's radio men who was suddenly stricken with appendicitis, and Henry had taken the operator's oath of fidelity to his government. So to him treachery appeared doubly black.
For some moments he paced up and down the shop. Suddenly he stopped short. A new idea had come to him.
”How did they get the news to Germany?” he asked aloud. ”Both the cables and the mails are censored--and besides the mails would be too slow. It must have been the wireless. Can there be traitors in the wireless service, too?”
Henry was silent a moment, his brow wrinkled in thought. ”Never!” he cried suddenly. ”Uncle Sam's radio men are true blue. It's a secret wireless! A secret wireless! The Germans have got a hidden station somewhere.”
The black look left his face. The scowl was replaced by a gleam of joy. ”That means a job for us!” he cried. ”The wireless patrol can help find that station, just as we found the German dynamiters at Elk City.”
For when the wireless patrol had been at Camp Brady only a few weeks previously, acting as official operators for the commander of the troops guarding that section of the country, Roy Mercer had picked an innocent-looking message out of the air one night and by accident had found a code message in it revealing a German plot to dynamite a great dam and destroy a munition city; and later the wireless patrol had run down the dynamiters themselves in the very nick of time, after the state police had failed to find them, and had saved the city.
With Henry, to think was to act. ”I'll write Captain Hardy at once,”
he said to himself.
Captain Hardy was a young physician who had been leader of the club of boys that had camped on his father's farm near old Fort Brady, and that had subsequently become the Camp Brady Wireless Club. But Captain Hardy was no longer leader of the club. He had offered his services to his country, and was now Captain Hardy of the Medical Officers' Reserve Corps. It was his standing and his friends.h.i.+p with the Chief of the Radio Service that had made it possible to secure permission for the Camp Brady boys to act as radio men for the state troops the preceding summer, although the government had forbidden amateurs to send wireless messages. And Henry, believing that his idolized leader could accomplish anything, now cleared a s.p.a.ce at his desk in a corner of the shop, and wrote him a long letter, setting forth all that was in his heart.
The promptness with which the answer came should have warned Henry that the reply was not the one he hoped for. But his faith in his leader was so great that he never doubted for a moment that if Captain Hardy favored the proposal, he could effect its accomplishment. With a shout of joy, Henry seized the letter from the hand of the postman and ran to his favorite haunt, the workshop, to read it. As he did so, the smile faded from his face and a look of utter despair succeeded it, for this was what he read:
”MY DEAR HENRY:
”It was a very great pleasure to receive your letter, with the little items of information about the members of the club, and your plan to be helpful in the present emergency. I know exactly how you feel. Every true American is filled with similar loathing for the treacherous enemies that infest our land, and with the same ardent desire to hunt them down and bring them to justice. You may be very sure that our secret service men are hard on the trail of many of them. Yet the very story of treachery that has so stirred your indignation shows that the secret service men cannot cope with them. But the fault is not with the secret service. It lies with Congress, which has persistently refused to appropriate sufficient money to make the service adequate.
As far as it goes, it is the peer of any secret service. Of course help is needed, but I very much fear it is not the sort of a.s.sistance that the Camp Brady boys are prepared to give.