Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/74

 CHAPTER IV

HAT did I do when I got back, did you say? Well, after the sinking of the Andalusian my folks thought I ought to be willing to give up the sea and confine my adventures to Montclair, the Lackawanna Railroad and New York, and they urged me to settle down and sell engines, or get into some other kind of business in the big town and commute like the rest of the suburbanites.

I tried it for a few months but the air is dead on land and it stifles me like poison-gas when I breathe it, and besides, I kept hearing the call of the sea oftener and oftener and louder and louder just as though a spook mermaid were holding a conch shell to my ear.

Well, sir, there were just no two ways about it. I was not cut out for a salesman but I could handle a key with the best of them. So one