# Waylaid by Wireless/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI
UNDER THE WING OF THE WIRELESS
"Land's End!" the American pointed.
Far off to starboard the extreme point of Cornwall slid into the sea.
"We've lost the land now for six days!"
The Englishman smiled seriously, then indicated the long, vertical streaks strung from the masts overhead.
"Not for a few hundred miles yet!" he reminded. "The 'wireless'!" he almost exclaimed.
He watched the American carefully for a moment, as he turned sidewise to the ship's rail.
"For the 'wireless,' Mr. Preston," he continued warningly, "cannot only bring back to land and make available there evidence from a ship at sea, but it can also carry ​from the shore to the ship any matter which may come up against any one on board.
"Formerly a man—even a criminal—could count upon at least a week's security if he could get safely to sea. But for all the freedom or refuge one can find now, even upon a transatlantic 'liner'—as you Americans say—in mid-ocean, one might quite as well be upon our Strand or your Broadway. For now you cannot shake a thing off, or escape it even for a week, though upon the high sea. The 'wireless' will send whatever there is to pursue you hot after you, and overtake you with it even in mid-Atlantic!"
The American pretended to shiver at the foreboding warning in the Britons words, but he shook himself up again and smiled easily.
"Some of you English certainly have the most inveterately cheerful way of bringing out the gloom in things. You almost convinced me for a moment that I actually had come to sea to escape something which is now sure ​to pursue and catch me anyhow! But let's not recall anything like that!" He shrugged with a real, reminiscent shiver this time. "Let's think that we are at sea again, and four hundred miles nearer America each day!"
He looked away from his companion and glanced expectantly and hopefully down the broad, bright promenade-deck, alive with the breeze and gayety of the first forenoon at sea.
Ahead, the tiny little green Isles of Scilly, speckled and splashed with the white, dashing surf from the mighty ocean now clear and open to the American shore, began to slip past in scattered successions. But at last the steadying ship shook off even those last lingering recollections of the land and breasted full and fair the breadth of the glistening Atlantic.
And, as forgetful as young Preston himself of the warning of the "wireless" aerials humming softly in the wind overhead, the other passengers began to settle themselves comfortably for their last, long delightful week at sea, secure from disturbance or interruption.
​The American reviewed, with a share in their gay satisfaction, the fair serried Saxons and Angles—British and American—who passed and repassed him in their morning promenade.
He started forward!
"Miss Varris! Why—Miss Varris!" he cried in his delighted astonishment.
"Mr. Preston! Well—Prisoner!" The girl's familiar, teasing voice, after her first surprise, laughed at the young American behind the Englishman's back.
"Liberator!" young Preston found himself rejoining as naturally and easily, in the bantering tone of their old companionship into which the single amused, mocking word of the girl had at once re-admitted him. "Jove!" he cried joyfully, as he fully realized the meaning to him of her presence on board ship again in the easy spirit of their former friendship. "But it is impossibly good to believe that you are here! And really, Miss Varris, it is most alarming to me, and surely must be to Mr. ​Dunneston, to find you here on board this ship full five days before you intended to sail. What has happened to send you here to sea—are you escaping something, which is going to follow and catch you anyhow?"
"Oh, Mr. Dunneston!" the girl cried, as she recognized then the Englishman behind young Preston. "So you, too, are on board!"
"Certainly, Mr. Preston," she turned back to the American, "I am glad now that I am on board. For, from what you have just said, the foreboding English disposition which so readily forces you to connect yourself with every crime you chance upon, seems to charm you still—in spite of leaving England. Just exactly what, please, was Mr. Dunneston suggesting to you now?"
"Oh, he was merely warning me about the 'wireless,' that was all, Miss Varris," the American reassured. "He was cautioning me against too premature exhilaration at leaving England. The 'wireless' obviously can keep ​me in convenient touch with the Cornwall jails for a fully adequate time yet."
"I beg pardon," the Englishman corrected conservatively, not certain of how many of the younger people's words were meant seriously. "Mr. Preston was observing to me, with quite unjustifiable relief, surely, for one who left England in his extremely—ah—equivocal position, that we had quite entirely lost the land for the week. Whereas—"
"Yes, whereas the 'wireless,' Mr. Dunneston," the American interrupted impatiently, "as you very properly recalled, can bring a warrant for my arrest at any moment and keep the police very cosily in touch with me for a few hundred miles at least. And, as it has been decided over and over again in the courts that the deck of an English ship is English ground and, obviously, we still have the English with us, it still behooves me to be wary."
"It does indeed!" the girl nodded. "But, Mr. Dunneston—"
"I beg pardon." The Englishman checked ​her seriously. "I beg pardon, Miss Varris," he repeated, after pondering a moment. "And, I say, I would not ask it, you know, but Mr. Preston is in the cabin with me, you know. He bought the other half just by chance, and, I say, I'm glad to have him with me, of course. Jolly that, we two together, what? But I say, you know, when you came up a bit ago, Miss Varris, you addressed Mr. Preston as 'Prisoner.' I say, I hope he hasn't been jailed a bit anywhere, has he? You were not seriously in jail, I hope, Mr. Preston?" he turned with concern to the young American.
"Oh, not tried, condemned, and in stripes—I mean in the funny arrow-marked suits your convicts wear, Mr. Dunneston," the girl corrected. "He was just arrested at Polporru that morning and detained a short time under suspicion."
"At Polporru?" the Englishman repeated. "You mean he was arrested," he exclaimed incredulously, "between the time I left you at the station and—and when I saw him off ​myself two hours later when he was called away? I say, you know, the police were quite stuffy about their information received by the 'wireless' that morning; but you do not mean that Mr. Preston was arrested the forenoon upon that? Why, you didn't tell me so, Mr. Preston!" he rebuked.
"I ought to have told you, I know," the young American agreed guiltily, "particularly before being booked in the same cabin with you, and most particularly," he ran on recklessly, "as I would now be languishing in jail praying for adequate longevity to pay the English people the proper penalty for my twenty-six crimes, if we had not offered a false alibi."
"Mr. Preston!" the girl warned too late. "For—"
"False, Mr. Preston?" the Englishman was repeating in alarm. "I say, you weren't really arrested upon the information received by the 'wireless' and freed by a false alibi?"
"Yes, Mr. Dunneston." The American carried it out now that he had committed himself. ​"It was this way: Miss Varris and I, you remember, went down to the 'wireless' station directly after you started uptown. And, some time after we got there, the police got into communication with the Bahia. That Plymouth police chap, who had been dogging me, procured for us the place of honor inside. Well, then, when the Bahia answered, the chief inspector told the captain to rendezvous his mates and the purser into a marine court, which began taking depositions from Mr. Hareston and the steward, and the 'wireless' began bringing them ashore.
"And, when they had their system in perfect working order, they discovered that they desired a tall, tanned American in a dress suit, with dark hair and eyes and a wounded wrist. Now, as I was both tall and tanned enough to satisfy them, and had hurt my wrist only the same morning, as I told you on the train, they gathered me joyfully to them, and if Mrs. Varris, who is very well known in Polporru, had not been able to swear that I had not left ​the Tudor Hotel the night before till after twelve when the Bahia had sailed, I would now probably be the champion plaiter of neat rattan chair-bottoms in your crack penitentiary, Mr. Dunneston. Really," he concluded, "if the word had come at night and they had found me wearing my evening clothes, I don't think even the alibi could have cleared me."
"But the alibi, Mr. Preston," the Briton persisted, puzzled. "You said that the alibi was false, did you not?"
"Oh, that was the funny part of it, Mr. Dunneston," the girl put in for the other somewhat weakly. "Mr. Preston really left at eleven; but as mother didn't know that, she got him off easily without suspecting that she was perjuring herself."
"I see!" the Englishman acknowledged doubtfully after a moment. "But, obviously, you knew it, Miss Varris? And I say, Mr. Preston, then you were not only arrested upon the information received by the 'wireless,' and freed upon a false alibi, but actually, ​you know, you might have done it after all, what?"
Young Preston watched him solemnly.
"Why, of course, Mr. Dunneston," he agreed, "I might actually have done it, as you say."
"Very decidedly decent of him to have let me off with only might now, wasn't it, Miss Varris?" Preston appealed in appreciation to the girl, as the two moved down the deck together.
"But you should not have told! I tried to stop you," the girl rebuked him. "It wasn't entirely your fault, though," she corrected fairly. "I more than half told him before I saw him."
"I know I mustn't try to tell you how I—I feel about the wonderful—the incredible way you have accepted me through all this queer business"
​all this,—you warned him just the way Punch flags its readers when they are approaching a joke,—so he'll probably persevere till he has ferreted out the humorous side of it. But—Miss Varris, where is your mother?" he recollected suddenly. "Not under decks in this sea, surely?"
"No, in Cornwall still."
"She's well, I hope?"
"Very. It's this way: You remember, we were to come back together on the Northumbria next Wednesday, but I received a cable asking me to come back a week earlier for a wedding at which I am to be bridesmaid. At the same time mother decided to stay for a month with Mrs. Brookingdale, in Cornwall. So, as my aunt, who has been spending the last month at Brighton, was going back upon this boat and had a whole cabin to herself, I decided to cross back with her. She was to have come down from Brighton to meet me at Southampton."
"Was to have?"
​"Yes. I would not let mother come with me to Southampton, so I came on alone with Elsie, the maid, you remember? She left me, expecting to find my aunt in the cabin. But, just as the boat put off, this came," she spread out a telegram, "instead of my aunt to chaperon me across the Atlantic.
"Auntie was taken sick at the last moment, you see, and had telegraphed me to find a Mrs. Burrett on board who is a very good friend of hers and whom she also telegraphed to care for me. But I have just found that even Mrs. Burrett did not sail."
"Mrs. Burrett?" Preston repeated. "No, she didn't. I know," he explained, "because it is her cabin I have—or rather half of it. I wanted to get home as soon as possible after leaving you, Miss Varris," he skipped over that recollection quickly, "so I tried a day or two more at Plymouth and then cast about Southampton looking for some released reservation. And, as Mr. Dunneston has finally fixed up his property contest with his ungouted ​cousin, or some way come into his property all safe, he was there for a booking, too. He thought then that my position was no worse than 'equivocal' and let me in on half of Mrs. Burrett's cabin, which he had just picked up. She did not wire the final release to the agents till just an hour or two before sailing, so I had no time to send to Plymouth for my things. I had to buy a new steamer rug and cabin trunk and get aboard."
"I was afraid that was it," the girl said. "I mean, of course, I was afraid that Mrs. Burrett was not on board. And my aunt and mother will probably know by this time and be worrying. There seems to be no one on board whom I have even met before, except you and Mr. Dunneston, so I'll 'wireless' them that you are here, at any rate, and that I am all right."
"I hope," said Preston, "that your mother can consider Mr. Dunneston's presence, at least, reassuring. Then I may see you soon?"
Some hours later he again met Miss Varris ​upon the deck. "I have been back sounding my British 'bunkie,'" he said. "He is not going to change his cabin, but he is most decidedly troubled."
"About himself?"
"No, far from that. He's really so bored that I think he looks forward to having me rob him more hopefully than otherwise. But, as you know, apart from the opinion he is obliged to hold of me, he really likes me and certainly likes you, and he's rather used to worry about me, of course; but now he is worrying about you, too."
"About me?"
"Yes. For did you not consciously suborn perjury, or at least condone it, to get me off? I never thought of your being involved with me as an accomplice before, Miss Varris. But 'Really, Mr. Preston,' Mr. Dunneston warned me, 'quite—oh, quite entirely apart from the consideration of the possibility of your having done that little business at Plymouth, really you did wrong to condone perjury to free ​yourself. And, I say, really the young lady might have quite seriously involved herself, too. For, you know, the perjury just in itself is actionable—oh, entirely actionable. Besides, might you not have shown that it was possible for you to have been upon the streets at that hour and robbed no one at all?'"
"And what did you say?"
"Oh, I said that I might have found some magistrate who would have considered that just possible."
"But," the girl laughed delightfully, "now he is beginning to consider my qualifications as an accomplice?"
"Oh, not quite," Preston replied truthfully. "I think he has finally decided about me now, yet will welcome me into his cabin to relieve the monotony of the voyage. For he is one of the kind who have crossed no end of times and keep on crossing automatically from habit whenever they can, but are always bored.
"Yet in many ways he is the best possible sort to have on the ship; for, though he ​himself is bored, he does more than any one else to make the trip interesting. Last night, for instance, before the boat was out an hour he had started the pools in the smoking-room and had the Anglo-American entente going on the high-speed clutch."
"And you, of course, felt it your duty to accelerate an alliance by buying a number?"
"No; worse—or better. I bought high field. The pool has separate numbers for the miles between two hundred and two hundred and thirty for the run since Southampton to noon to-day. Below that, low field wins, and above that, I win. And it really looks fair for me, doesn't it, with this weather?"
"It does indeed! And it's almost—why, it is past time to post the run now!"
"You forget that we are west bound. You haven't changed your time. Subtract half—"
Suddenly the whistle startled up all the deck with a single long blast.
"There! It is noon! Come!"
"Two hundred and forty-three miles!" ​came back along the rail, as the two hurried forward together. "Two hundred and forty-three. High field wins!"
"Good luck! Congratulations!" the girl cried. "You have won!"
"Good luck, yes," Preston agreed. "Still I am glad that I won on 'field' rather than on just a single number—after hearing what my 'bunkie' already fears for me."
"Why?"
"Oh, he was telling me last night about a passage he made once when the pools were running very high—and they are running high enough upon this. Well, there was a fellow aboard who was a clairvoyant, and he won a total of thousands of dollars upon pool after pool by buying just a single number each night—that is, he did until the captain heard of it and called his officers together and told them that if he heard of any more such unerring clairvoyance, the ship would be shy some officers."
"When was that?"
​"Several voyages ago, I think, because Mr. Dunneston considerately explained to me that the captain meant the fellow had been fixing the run with some officer. So he has had time to catch it."