Bob fumbled with the familiar apparatus on the table, his face troubled.
“If he’s out of his head with fever, he must be pretty sick,” he muttered, as though talking to himself. “And that means that he won’t be able to attend to radio for a good long time to come.”
“And with telegraph and telephone wires all down, that’s pretty much of a calamity,” added Joe, his eyes meeting Bob’s with a look of understanding.
“Say!” cried Herb, suddenly seeing what they were driving at, “that knocks out Mr. Salper’s last chance of getting even with those crooks.”
“Yes,” said Bob, soberly, “I guess the game’s up, as far as he’s concerned.”
“Let’s go over to the hotel and inquire for the sick man,” Joe suggested, adding hopefully, “maybe he isn’t as sick as they make out.”
The operator had a room at the hotel, and the boys had been there once or twice to talk over points on radio with him and so they knew exactly where to go.
However, if they had treasured any hope that Bert Thompson’s sickness had been exaggerated, they were promptly undeceived. No one was allowed to speak to him, the nurse at the hotel told them, adding, in her briskly professional manner, that it would be no use to speak to him anyway, since he was delirious and recognized nobody.
But before they went, softened by their real concern, she said, quite kindly, that as soon as the patient was able to receive visitors at all she would let them know.
They thanked her and went out into the freezing air again. The snow had stopped and the wind had died down completely but in the atmosphere was a deadly chill, a biting cold that seemed to penetrate to their very marrow.