ABOARD THE LIGHTSHIP.

“Waal, I want to know!” exclaimed the captain.

Nat had just explained to him his eagerness about the wireless equipment of the Lightship. The explanation had followed Nat’s story of how he came to be adrift in the Harleys’ boat, which story had frequently been compelled to halt while the captain interjected such remarks as “Great whales and little fishes!” “Land o’ Goshen!” and “Shiverin’ top-sails!” When Nat had related the villainy of the Harleys and Minory, the old man had thumped the table savagely with his fist.

“I’d like to have had ’em in the foc’sle of my old ship, the Sarah Jane Braithwaite!” he had exploded. “I’d have shown ’em. Keel-hauling would have been too good for such a bunch of sojers.”

At the conclusion of his story, Nat had asked to be allowed to utilize the Lightship’s wireless in trying to raise his friends.

“Waal, I want to know!” was the skipper’s exclamation, already recorded above. “Anything you want on this ship is yours, young feller, even down to my wooden leg, although I wouldn’t wish that on yer. Come ahead, I’ll show you whar the contraption is. Lord! Lord! these are wonderful days, when lads who can use wireless and fix busted gas engines come drifting along, a-bumping into just the folks that needs ’em.”

The wireless room was on deck, enclosed in a small cabin at the foot of the forward mast of the Lightship. Nat saw that it contained a set of the latest and best instruments, and he soon was sending out broadcast an appeal to locate the Nomad. Following this, he tried on a chance to raise Goat Island. He had not much idea that there would be anybody there, but he thought it was worth an effort anyway.

To his amazement when he switched to the receiving apparatus and adjusted the telephones to his ears, out of space came a reply that almost made him fall off his chair. It was sent in a hesitating, unskillful way, very unlike Ding-dong’s expert key-handling, or even Joe’s.

“Who wants Goat Island?”

“I do, Nat Trevor!” he rejoined. “Who is this?”

“Nemo,” came back out of the ether.

“Nemo! Why, that’s the Latin for ‘nobody’” exclaimed Nat, in an amazed tone.

“Are you Goat Island?” flashed back Nat. “Answer at once!”

“This is Goat Island,” trickled into Nat’s ears in the same awkward, hesitating fashion; and then came silence. Try as he would, Nat couldn’t raise it again.

“Well, this is a wireless mystery for fair,” he muttered to himself, for the captain had left the wireless room to get some hot coffee and food; “that wasn’t Ding-dong and it wasn’t Joe; now who on earth was it? Some beginner, that’s plain, for he couldn’t send worth a cent. But then to cap the climax, telling me it’s ‘Nemo’! It must be spooks, that’s the only way I can account for it—wireless spooks.”

A minute later there came another message.

“Somebody trying to raise the Lightship,” exclaimed Nat, listening with all his might. “Maybe this is news of the Nomad.”

“Nomad put in at Santa Barbara last night,” was the message coming from the wireless man at the Santa Barbara station, which handled commercial messages. “Have found out that all on board are at Arlington Hotel. Shall I send message?”

“Yes. Tell them, please, that this is Nat Trevor, well and able. Am aboard the Lightship at Pancake Shoals. Tell them to come for me as soon as possible.”

Nat informed the man that the messages would be paid for at the land end and bade him good-night. With a light heart, troubled only by the mystery of the message from Goat Island, he joined the captain below and told him his good news.

“Waal, I’m glad you found your friends,” said Captain Sim, “but I’ll be sorry to lose you, my lad. You’re a boy after my own heart. I don’t know what I should have done without you.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Nat easily. “It just needed a little monkey-wrench sense, that’s all, and I happened to have given a lot of attention to that branch of science.”

The captain had prepared an appetizing meal, to which they both did ample justice.

“Now, lad,” said he, when it was completed, “you just turn in and take a good sleep and I’ll stand watch.”

As Nat was feeling drowsy again, doubtless owing to the far-reaching influence of Israel Harley’s opiate, he was nothing loath to accept this proposition, and turned in and was speedily in the land of dreams. When the captain awakened him he felt that the last traces of the drug had vanished, and his senses were as clear as a bell. The sun was high and the sea smooth and sparkling. Nat had some coffee and rolls and then joined the captain on deck. He gazed anxiously toward Santa Barbara, eager to catch the first glimpse of the Nomad.

Near by the Lightship several triangular fins were cruising about.

“Sharks!” cried Nat, and recalled with a shudder his terrible experience with these tigers of the sea when he was cast adrift in a sinking boat in mid-Pacific.

“So they be. Thar’s lots of them hereabouts,” said the captain, “but Lor’ bless yer, they’re only little fellows. Very different to the fellers that attacked me when the Sarah Jane Braithwaite was down among the Andaman Islands. Like to hear the yarn?”

“Why, yes,” said Nat, and added with a smile, “I’ve got a yarn of my own about them, too.”

“Waal,” began the skipper, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke as he withdrew his blackened old briar pipe from his mouth, “it was a good many years ago but I had a wooden pin even at that time, for d’ye see my port main brace was taken off when a spar fell on me during a typhoon in the Yaller Sea.

“But, to get to ther particlar day I’m talking of. We was becalmed among the Andamans. A dead flat calm with the pitch boiling in the seams, and there we lay under the broiling sun as ‘idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’, as the poet says. My first mate proposed to me that we should take a swim. Now, although I’m minus one of my spars, I’m a right smart swimmer, and I agreed.

“We had a fine time sporting round thar in the cool water, but suddenly somebody on deck hollers, ‘Sharks!’

“Now that’s a hail you want to act quick on, and you take my alfired-davy on it that we made good time getting back to the ship’s side. But just as we reached it, what d’ye suppose?”

“A shark got you?” demanded Nat.

“No, he didn’t get me, but he got my wooden leg. Yes, sir, bit it right off where it was strapped on. Took it off whole and entire. Waal, they hoisted me on deck and the carpenter rigged up a jury spar for me and I made out all right, although not so comfortable as I was with my old one.

“The next day it was still flat calm, and I was leaning over the rail whistling for a wind, when what should I see but the most caterwampus disturbance in the water a short distance away. The thing that was making it, whatever it was, was coming toward the ship, and it didn’t take me long to make out that it was a shark.

“But I never saw a shark act like that before or since. First it would jump out of the water like a trout and then come sploshing down again with a thump that sent the spray scattering for yards in all directions. Then it would roll over and over and snort and plunge and wrastle about like all possessed.

“I calls my mate over and points it out to him, and by this time all the men was leaning over the bulwarks watching the critter. It came nearer and nearer and I thought I cotched it looking at me with a sort of reproachful look, if you can imagine a fish looking that way.

“‘Bill,’ says I to the mate, ‘get a shark line,’ we carried them in those latitudes, ‘bait it up with a bit of fat pork and we’ll find out what ails that critter.’

“‘Acts to me like it’s got a tummy ache,’ says Bill, as he goes below to get the tackle, ‘maybe it’s been a-eatin’ of green sea apples.’

“Waal, we chucks the line over, an’ afore long the shark bolts the pork whole and the hook gets embedded in his jaw and we haul him on board. Waal, sir,” and here the weather-beaten old seaman looked very hard at his young listener, “would you believe me when I tells you that what had been making that shark act so scandolus was my wooden leg?”

“Your wooden leg?” asked Nat seriously.

“Yes, sir, my wooden leg. You see, that shark was the same as bit off my port spar, and the blooming thing had wedged itself right across its gullet. It’s a wonder it hadn’t choked to death. It couldn’t swallow nothing and that was why it was cutting up such didos.”

“It couldn’t swallow anything, captain?” asked Nat solemnly.

“No, sir; not a solitary morsel,” rejoined the captain, wagging his head.

“Then how did it take the bait?” asked Nat, fairly bursting into laughter. But the captain never smiled.

“I reckon that was one of the inscrutable ways of Providence to help me get my leg back,” he said. “See here,” he held up the wooden leg for inspection, “see those marks? Those were made by shark’s teeth—yes, siree, it was sure a terrible experience.”

“Well,” chuckled Nat, “I don’t want to doubt your word, captain, but I guess that yarn is about what the Andaman shark found your leg,—hard to swallow!”

The captain looked as if he meant to defend his story, but Nat cut him short with a joyful cry:

“Here comes the Nomad! Hooray!”

And the Nomad it was, and a few minutes later there was a reunion of the Motor Rangers that made the old captain chuckle and stamp his shark-marked leg and yell:

“Bully for you, boys! You sure ought to be glad to see yer messmate again. He’s a boy to be proud of.”

Not long after, the Nomad with her crew of three, for Dr. Chalmers, Mr. Anderson and Nate, and Prof. Jenkins had been left ashore—the latter in a hospital,—headed for Santa Barbara. For some days thereafter, during which the professor rapidly regained health, they awaited anxiously for news of Minory, but none came.

A visit to the cave by the authorities, guided by Nat, resulted in their finding that “the birds had flown,” doubtless immediately after Nat’s escape was discovered. They also found a door in the floor which had been hidden by boxes when Nat was in the cave. This door led to a flight of steps, which in turn led to a passage, which, on being followed, was found to open in a rift in the cliffs. To any active person it would have been an easy matter to gain the top, and this doubtless was the way Minory escaped. But, although for the present all trace of both the Harleys and Minory appeared to be lost the boys were destined to hear from them again and that at no very distant time.