# The Wireless Operator—With the U. S. Coast Guard/Chapter 18

CHAPTER XVIII
A Clue to the Culprit
With the call of the Rayolite sounding in his ears, Henry had to leave the nails for later consideration. He swept all the mass of stuff back into his pocket and turned to his key. When he had taken the message, he sent it up to the captain by a sailor. That done, he stripped off the coat and searched it thoroughly. But nothing else of interest was to be found. The coat was one of those dark blue sailor jackets. There were dozens exactly like it on the Iroquois. No name or identifying initials could be found in it. Henry was not really sure whose coat it was. Both Black and Belford had been wearing heavy sweaters. The coat might belong to either. It might even be Mr. Sharp’s coat. Henry had grabbed it out of the wardrobe when his own had got wet, with little thought as to who owned it.
Presently Belford came on duty. “I’m much obliged for the loan of your coat,” said Henry. “I grabbed it and pulled it on yesterday after I got wet, without stopping to ask your permission.”
Belford looked at the coat a moment, then ​looked inside. “It’s not my coat,” he observed. “I have my initials sewed in mine. But you’d be welcome to it if it were mine.”
Henry drew a deep sigh of relief. “So it’s not yours, eh? Then whose is it?”
“That's Black’s, I’m sure.”
“I think I'll get a breath of fresh air,” said Henry.
“That won't be difficult. It’s blowing a streak, but nothing like it did yesterday.”
Henry left the radio shack and made his way to the bridge. ‘ Captain Hardwick,” he said, “when you find it convenient, I’d like to talk to you privately.”
The captain looked at Henry sharply. “Come to my cabin at noon,” he said.
All the morning long the commander remained at his post on the bridge. The storm was easing up, but the high seas made the towing of the Rayolite difficult. Too much strain on the towing hawser would cause it to part. With too little tension, the Rayolite was harder to handle. The captain, with his long experience, knew that he dare not relax his vigilance for a moment, but when mess gear was piped, he turned the control of the cutter over to Lieutenant Hill with a few words of caution, and made his way to his cabin.
Impatiently Henry had been waiting for this move, and hardly had Captain Hardwick reached ​his quarters before the lad was knocking at his door.
“Well, Henry,” smiled the commander as the young wireless operator entered the cabin, “what can I do for you?”
“Do you see this jacket?” asked Henry, with feverish eagerness, pulling off the garment in question. “When I got wet yesterday while that small boat was being cut loose, I ran into the stateroom and grabbed this coat out of the wardrobe. I put it on in place of my own wet one. This morning I got to feeling around in the pocket in search of a pencil and this is what I found.”
From the pocket Henry drew out the entire mass of rubbish and dumped it on the captain’s table. Then he sorted out the two finishing nails and handed them to the captain. “They looked to me exactly like the nail Mr. Sharp found in the damaged field coil,” explained Henry.
The commander examined the nails with interest. Unlocking a drawer in his desk, he drew out the nail Mr. Sharp had given him and laid it beside the others. ‘The three were identical, though of course the one was bent.
“Whose coat is that?” demanded Captain Hardwick.
“I can’t say for sure, sir, but I think it’s Black’s. Belford says it is,”
​“I thought I gave orders not to say anything about this matter,” said the captain severely, an angry frown wrinkling his forehead.
“I haven’t been talking about it. I merely asked Mr. Belford if the coat was his. I didn’t tell him about the nails.”
“Who was with you when you found the nails?”
“Nobody, sir.”
“Nobody! Then how do I know that you really found them in the coat? What was to prevent you from putting them in the coat yourself and then bringing it to me, to throw suspicion on Black?”
Poor Henry! For a moment he looked heart-broken. Then he became indignant. “Captain Hardwick,” he cried, “do you think I would do a trick like that?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” replied the commander. “The fact that you found two finishing nails in Black’s coat doesn’t prove anything. There may be a dozen other coats on this ship with similar nails in them. Don’t you see that it is one thing to assert something and quite another to prove it? This is likely Black’s coat, though you haven’t proved even that. But it doesn’t follow that Black put the nails in his coat. Somebody else may have done it, even if you didn’t.”
​“Captain Hardwick,” protested Henry, “don’t you trust me at all?”
The captain smiled. “It isn’t a matter of trust, Henry. You come to me with something you regard as evidence against Black. I’m glad to have any evidence in the matter that is evidence, but we must be sure that it is, before we use it. Don’t you understand what I am driving at?”
“I see,” said Henry, drawing a breath of relief. “The finding of these nails isn’t proof of anything. I grasp that all right. But it’s—suggestive.’
“Now you are on exactly the right tack. It’s very suggestive. You think that I’ve been a little hard on you, Henry. I want to be fair. Now I’ll say that I think it much more likely that Black would have had nails in his coat than that you would have had them about you. Boys dressed to go visiting don’t ordinarily carry nails with them.”
Henry’s face evidently showed the relief he felt. The captain smiled again. “It was quite right for you to bring me this coat,” he continued. “I shall follow up this suggestion. Meantime I want you to go on about your work and say nothing about the matter.”
Henry thanked the commander and withdrew from the cabin. Hardly had he left before the ​captain punched his call-bell and sent Rollin to summon the quartermaster. The latter was the captain’s prime favorite and right-hand man among the non-commissioned officers.
“Quartermaster,” said the commander when his helper appeared, “immediately after I go back to the bridge, I want you to slip into the wireless stateroom without being observed, and search the place. Keep your eyes open, especially for nails like this,” and the commander held out the two nails Henry had given him. “Look in all the nooks and corners, the bunks, and elsewhere, and notice anything out of the ordinary that you find. Above all, as you value your job, don’t say a word about this to any one.”
When Captain Hardwick passed to the bridge, he poked his head into the radio shack. “Belford,” he said, “I want you in the chart-room. And I want you, Black, to stick close to your instruments. Don’t leave them for a second. The Rayolite may be signaling us at any time, and it’s important to catch her message instantly. The hawser is likely to part at any moment if we aren’t careful. Harper is to stand watch with you.”
Belford followed his commander up to the chart-room, where he was put to work erasing lines from some old charts. The quartermaster promptly seized his opportunity to slip into the ​stateroom, where he locked the door, hung a cloth over the window, and got to work. For more than an hour he searched everywhere and found nothing out of the way. But when he got to work in the bunks, he found, tucked securely away under the top mattress, a peculiar little hammer. He put the room to rights again, uncovered the window-pane, picked up the hammer, and, concealing it in the palm of his hand, stepped out on deck.
He found himself face to face with the ship’s carpenter. A sudden lurch of the ship threw them together. Laughing, each grasped the other. As well as he could the quartermaster kept his fingers closed over the hammer-head, but the quick eyes of the carpenter saw the protruding ends of it.
“So you’re the fellow who borrowed that, are you?” he said. “I’ve been hunting all over for that hammer. Why didn’t you tell me you had borrowed it?”
For a moment the quartermaster was at a loss. He knew not what to say. Then he asked the carpenter to come with him to the captain.
“Captain,” said the quartermaster, when they had mounted to the bridge, “I have some things I would like to tell you. The carpenter here can help explain them.”
The captain stepped to the chart-room and dis-​missed Belford, who at once departed. Then the captain, the quartermaster, and the carpenter stepped into the chart-room and closed the doors.
“I found this hammer under the mattress of the top bunk in the wireless men’s room,” explained the quartermaster. “Black sleeps in that bunk. As I came out on deck I bumped into the carpenter, here. I thought that I had the hammer concealed, but he caught sight of it in my closed fist. It seems he has been looking for this very hammer for some days. It belongs in his tool kit.”
“When and how did you lose your hammer?” asked the commander.
“I was using it last Thursday. When evening mess gear was piped, I had not quite finished the job I was doing, and I left it lying with my work while I ate my supper. When I went back to finish the job, the hammer was missing.”
“Where were you at work?”
“Close to the stairway where the men come down from deck, sir. I pushed my work to one side, where it would not be in the way, and stepped to the table. I wasn’t away from it half an hour.”
“The hammer was where any one could get it easily, was it?”
“Yes, sir. It was just beside the stairway. Any one going up or down the stairs could have ​seen it, and it was necessary to take only a step to one side of the stairway to reach it. Any one going up the steps from supper could have picked it up easily without being noticed.”
“What were you doing with the hammer?”
“I was making a case for the executive officer, sir. He wanted a case with pigeonholes to hold some of his account books.”
“Then you were using small nails to fasten in the partitions with, I take it.”
“Yes, sir, some long, thin, finishing nails. They were like these, sir.” And the carpenter thrust his hand into his pocket, drew forth an assortment of nails, and fished out a finishing nail that was the duplicate of those Henry had so recently found.
“Give it to me,” directed the captain.
“It looks to me,” continued the commander, after the carpenter had handed him the nail, “as though some one coming up to the deck after eating must have picked up your hammer and perhaps some nails with it.”
“I can’t say about the nails,—they were. scattered about on the case,—but there is no doubt some one got the hammer.”
“It looks as though young Black got it,” said the quartermaster.
The captain dismissed the two men. “I don’t want a word said about this,” he warned them. ​“Be very careful that you do not mention it to any one.”
The moment he was alone the captain turned to a calendar. “Last Thursday,” he muttered to himself, “was the day we got back to New York from Boston. Henry was on duty in the wireless house every minute that evening. I don’t know that he even got any supper. I must find out what Black was doing at that hour. I guess the best way to do it is through the quarter-master.”
Again the quartermaster was called and instructed to find out from the third-class wireless man, without arousing the latter’s suspicions, at what time he ate his supper on the preceding Thursday evening. That was not a difficult thing to do. Later in the day the quartermaster engaged young Black in conversation and turned the talk to the events of their run from Boston.
“You missed your supper the night we got in, didn’t you?” asked the quartermaster.
“Not on your life,” said Black. “You don’t catch me missing anything like that. I was one of the first fellows at the table.”
“I’ll bet I’ll be one of the first there this noon,” said the quartermaster. “I’m hungry enough to eat a bear.”
He said good-bye to Black and reported to Captain Hardwick. When the commander was ​alone, he said to himself: “The trail grows warm. Black went to supper at the first pipe of the whistle. He likely finished before the others, and went out. Nails and hammer lay invitingly beside the stairway. Unobserved, he snatched up the hammer and some nails, and thrust them into his coat. A little later a nail of that same kind got into the wireless outfit. Later still, nails and hammer are found in Black’s possession, or, what amounts to the same thing.”
The captain frowned. “But Black was asleep when that nail got into the wireless,” he commented. He pondered a moment. “By George! I wonder if he was asleep,” he exclaimed. “Everything hinges on that. How am I going to find out?”