SURGERY BY WIRELESS.

While he still stood there, the captain emerged from his cabin and, to Jack’s surprise, came up to him.

“Know anything about surgery, Ready?” he asked.

“Why, no, sir. I heard there had been an accident. My friend Raynor. Is he badly injured, sir?”

The question was put with painful eagerness.

“Not necessarily, my lad. His arm was crushed in a shaft while he was oiling it. The deuce of it is, we’ve no doctor on board and I don’t know how to care for it. I may have to amputate it. I did that once on a sailing ship; and in that case, I’ll need assistants. That is why I asked you if you knew anything of surgery.”

“You’ll have to amputate it? Oh, sir! Poor Raynor!”

“I don’t want to do it if I can help it, but I don’t want to run the risk of blood poisoning. If only we had a doctor! It would go to my heart to deprive the boy of an arm, but what am I to do?”

Never had the captain seemed so human, so sympathetic to the young wireless man. He looked genuinely distressed.

“They ought to compel every ship to carry a doctor,” he said. “Accidents are always happening, and—strike my topsails! What’s the matter with the boy?”

For Jack’s eyes had suddenly begun to dance. He gave a sudden caper and snapped his fingers.

“I’ve got it, sir! I’ve got it!” he cried.

“What, in the name of Neptune? St. Vitus’s dance?”

“No, sir. A doctor. I can get you a doctor, sir.”

“Have you suddenly gone mad?” demanded the captain. “We’re a thousand miles out at sea.”

“I can get one by wireless, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“All the big liners carry doctors, sir. I was in communication with one only a few minutes ago. The Parisian of the Ocean Line.”

“Where is she?”

“About three hundred miles to the west of us on the Atlantic track, sir.”

“Three hundred miles away! Then how can we get a doctor from her?”

“Very simply, sir, I think, as you say it may not be necessary to amputate. Have Raynor brought in here and laid on my cot. I’ll raise the Parisian and get her doctor on the wire. Then I can flash a full description of the case and the doctor can flash back to us, through the Parisian’s operator, full directions how to proceed!”

“Jove, boy! You have got a head on your shoulders, after all. It sounds extraordinary, but why shouldn’t it be done?”

“It is worth trying, anyhow, sir,” said Jack, his face radiant at the idea that he might be the means of saving his poor chum’s arm. The captain hastened off to give the necessary orders, while Jack raised the Parisian once more.

In crisp, flashing sentences he sent, volleying through the air, an explanation of the case. By the time poor Raynor, white and unconscious, was carried to the bunk and laid out there, while the open-eyed sailors looked on, the Parisian’s doctor was standing by the side of the liner’s operator listening gravely to the symptoms of the case as they came pulsing through space.

The captain, with bandages, instruments, antiseptics and so forth, sat by Raynor’s side, anxiously awaiting Jack’s first bulletin.

“Anything coming yet?” he asked more than once as Jack sat alert, waiting for the first word from the doctor who was to treat a surgical case across three hundred miles of ocean.

The silence was tense and taut, and broken only by the heavy breathing of the injured engineer.

“What is the man doing?” said the captain impatiently at length.

“It takes even shore doctors time to give a correct diagnosis in some cases, sir,” ventured Jack gravely. “I suppose he is considering the conditions.”

“Absent treatment at three hundred miles,” muttered the captain. “Ready, I begin to believe that this is a crack-brained bit of business, after all.”

“Wait a minute,” warned Jack, holding up his hand to command attention, “here is something coming now!”

His pencil flew over the pad and then stopped while he flashed back:

“Thanks, that’s all for now. I’ll cut in again when we are ready for the next step.”

He turned to the captain and read slowly from his pad the doctor’s directions for treating the injury.

“He says that, from your description, there are no bones broken. The arm is merely crushed,” said the boy; and then, bit by bit, he read off the far-distant surgeon’s directions for treating the injured member. As he read, the captain and his assistant amateur surgeons plied dressings and antiseptics with diligent care.

At last the doctor of the Parisian said that he had no more advice to give that night, but flashed a prescription for a soothing draught to be compounded from the ship’s medicine chest.

By midnight the patient was sleeping peacefully without any symptoms of fever, and Jack cut off communication with the distant liner after promising to “call up the doctor in the morning.”