Adventure Magazine Cover — page 106: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

96 “T read doubt in the skipper’s mind when he saw the message. He checked my trans- lation with his own code-book. But I had made no mistake. “The message was official. It was an order. Moreover, it was a hurry-up com- mand. Yet it.might have been a direction to sail for the North Pole and land one keg of nails for all the sense it conveyed to us. “Hoonak Harbor, you see, is one of the world’s jumping-off places. It’s an unin- habited spot a short distance west of where the great sea-arm of Cook Inlet be- gins to grope its way inland about the bases of fir-matted: Alaskan mountains. We had put in there once to escape a nasty blow and we found it a wonderful haven; landlocked and not too deep for good anchorage. “At the upper end an alluvial plain, through which runs a small river, makes a site for the town that will undoubtedly be ' there some day. For, back in the hills a few miles, easily accessible with a narrow- gage railway, are millions of tons of good steaming coal; great veins that stand out in black streaks on the sides of cliffs. “In those hills, too, are iron, copper, nickel and antimony, to say nothing of gold and silver. It’s a natural northern naval base, and some day they’ll be building war- ships there from the materials right in those hills. “All this was not new to us, yet why the order to ‘hold at all costs?? Who would dare attempt to seize it? I knew the skipper was asking himself these questions while we were getting up anchor. _ “At last the hook was being catted, when a power-boat chugged swiftly up to the port gangway, which was still down, and two men piled out and hurried up to the deck. I say hurried, because that is what the first man did. It was Atoonyak. And behind him, lugging a heavy box about three feet square, fitted with rope handles, came the interpreter. The motor-boat immediately shoved off. “ “Who in —— told you to come aboard?’ demanded a master-at-arms, but Atoonyak brushed him aside and headed straight for the deck officer who was approaching. The old fellow was all gesticulations and gut- turals. “The interpreter carefully deposited the box on deck and stepped forward. “Him say we go home now,’ naively Adventure explained the native, as if that settled the matter. s “The officer gazed after the vanishing motor-boat and swore. We were now under way. To have stopped and lowered a boat to put them ashore would have meant delay when our orders were to hurry., The en- sign was puzzled> “ “Come up to the bridge and tell it to the captain,’ he finally ordered. “The upshot was that they stayed. “Uneventful days followed, while we churned steadily northward, with never another word from Washington, although I stood almost constant watch, fearing I would miss a call. And it was not until the rocky entrance to Honak Harbor began to show itself one evening just before dusk that I ‘heard the high-pitched whine of a navy shore-station spark, querulously sound- ing the Reindeer’s call. Captain Millete was in the wireless-room with me when I told the shore station to ‘go ahead.’ “Again it was a code message, much longer than the previous one. I had to ‘break’ the ‘sending’ operator several times because of the atmospheric interference of a coarse, rasping spark of some strange ship not twenty miles distant and which opened suddenly. I made but one copy of the message and the skipper took it from me and hurried away to his own code-book before I could make a translation. “No sooner had the shore station stopped than the stranger’s spark openedagain. It paused, and from somewhere far out in the ether void came a reply in an unknown code. The timbre of the second spark was identi- cal with that of the first. It stopped, and once more my mysterious neighbor spoke. Then silence. “Then came my call again, in the familiar high-frequency pitch of an American Navy ship. I knew that spark, though I hadn’t heard it for months. It was the super- dreadnought Luzon, flagship of the Pacific Fleet, which I had supposed was off Lower California. He had a message. This time I decoded it. “*Two hundred miles south and making twenty knots,’ it read. ‘We have first division, including Hawati and Colon. Hold at all costs for few hours and we will rein- force.’ 7 “‘Again the ‘hold at all costs!’ “T just naturally tore off my telephone receivers and dashed for the door, message = GOmichboo KS (E@)