The Secret Wireless or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Henry Harper was sitting in the doorway of the workshop in his father's back yard, where the Camp Brady Wireless Club made their headquarters. He was reading the morning newspaper. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. His face grew black. His free hand clenched.

"That's terrible!" he exclaimed. "Terrible!"

He walked across the shop, spread the newspaper on the bench and began to read aloud the big head-lines that had so aroused him.

LEAK IN NAVY DEPARTMENT

Germans Knew of Departure of Transport Fleet
First Contingent of Pershing's Men Attacked, by Waiting Submarines

"It's terrible, terrible!" repeated Henry. "Their spies are everywhere. They stop at nothing. Who could have been villain enough to give them the information? It is terrible!"

In his agitation Henry began to pace up and down the floor of the shop. His face grew blacker and blacker as he brooded over the story of treachery. Though Henry was not yet eighteen, he was affected far more deeply by the story than most boys of his age would have been. For when the Camp Brady Wireless Club, of which Henry was president, had been practising the previous summer, Henry had been called upon to replace one of Uncle Sam's radio men who was suddenly stricken with appendicitis, and Henry had taken the operator's oath of fidelity to his government. So to him treachery appeared doubly black.

For some moments he paced up and down the shop. Suddenly he stopped short. A new idea had come to him.

"How did they get the news to Germany?" he asked aloud. "Both the cables and the mails are censored—and besides the mails would be too slow. It must have been the wireless. Can there be traitors in the wireless service, too?"

Henry was silent a moment, his brow wrinkled in thought. "Never!" he cried suddenly. "Uncle Sam's radio men are true blue. It's a secret wireless! A secret wireless! The Germans have got a hidden station somewhere."

The black look left his face. The scowl was replaced by a gleam of joy. "That means a job for us!" he cried. "The wireless patrol can help find that station, just as we found the German dynamiters at Elk City."

For when the wireless patrol had been at Camp Brady only a few weeks previously, acting as official operators for the commander of the troops guarding that section of the country, Roy Mercer had picked an innocent-looking message out of the air one night and by accident had found a code message in it revealing a German plot to dynamite a great dam and destroy a munition city; and later the wireless patrol had run down the dynamiters themselves in the very nick of time, after the state police had failed to find them, and had saved the city.

With Henry, to think was to act. "I'll write Captain Hardy at once," he said to himself.

Captain Hardy was a young physician who had been leader of the club of boys that had camped on his father's farm near old Fort Brady, and that had subsequently become the Camp Brady Wireless Club. But Captain Hardy was no longer leader of the club....