Via Wireless
Summary
A draftsman’s blueprint for a super-gun becomes the fuse that detonates a triangulated war of love, larceny and metallurgy inside the cavernous Durant Iron Works. Edward Pinkney, the velvet-gloved comptroller of graft, diverts Marsh’s future royalties into his own silk-lined pockets while simultaneously courting Maisie Durant with the ardor of a man who knows that possession of the heiress equals possession of the empire. Enter Lt. Somers, naval architect of a rival cannon whose success would vaporize Pinkney’s skim; Pinkney responds by sabotaging the casting, turning molten hope into brittle catastrophe. Exiled by rumor, Somers watches from the deck of a cruiser patrolling an uneasy Turkish strait while Maisie—engaged to Pinkney under duress—sails straight into a floating minefield. The yacht coughs open; seawater floods the wireless shack; Maisie’s fingertips, taught Morse by the very man she renounced, flicker against the key like a trapped sparrow. Across the water Somers hears her heartbeat rendered in dots and dashes, races through cordite haze, and snatches her from the jaws of a drowned engagement. What follows is a Rube Goldberg of reversals: forged signatures, overheard confessions, a second sabotage that backfires, and a final courtroom explosion where blueprints, love letters and gun smoke are submitted as evidence of character.
Synopsis
Marsh, a draughtsman in the gun factory of John Durant, is swindled by Edward Pinkney, Durant's general manager, out of the huge royalty to be paid should a gun of Marsh's invention prove a success. Pinkney loves Maisie, but is far outrivaled by Lieut. Somers, U.S.N. Somers also has invented a gun which he gives to be cast by the Durant Iron Works, and which, if successful, will do Pinkney out of his expected graft on the Marsh invention. Pinkney takes good care that the Somers gun is "killed" in the making. He then misrepresents Somers to Maisie and her father, and though Maisie loves the Lieutenant, she feels she must give him up. Accompanied by her mother and Pinkney, she goes in the Durant yacht for a cruise in Turkish waters, formally engaging herself to Pinkney. The Durant yacht hits a mine, and in the rush to leave her, Maisie is trapped in the wireless room. With the water surging up about her shoulders, and every means of escape barred she sends out the S.O.S. signal taught her by Lieut. Somers. The lieutenant, aboard a U.S. cruiser, protecting American interests in Turkey, gets the signal, and arrives at the side of the doomed ship just in time to make a sensational rescue. Here follow a mass of complications as the plot gradually resolves itself to its end.
