The door opened and a young man entered.
“Oh, Watkins,” Craig directed, as I recognized one of the students who had attended his courses, “there’s a lot of apparatus I would like you to take out to Westport for me.”
They talked briefly in a wireless jargon which I did not understand, and the student agreed to carry the stuff out on a late train, meeting us at the Harbor House. At the last moment Kennedy was off for the railroad station. It was making close connections, but we succeeded.
The ride out was nerve-racking to us under the circumstances. We had taken the bait so temptingly displayed by Paquita and had gone to New York. Now we could not get back fast enough. We had not been in the city long, it is true. But had it been too long? What had happened out in the town we were anxious to learn. I felt sure that in our absence some of the Maddoxes might well have attempted something which our presence would have restrained.
Burke met us at the station with a car, so sure was he that Kennedy would return immediately on receipt of his second message, and it was evident that he felt a great sense of relief at regaining Kennedy’s help.
As we spun along down from the station Kennedy hastened to tell Burke what had happened, first about Paquita as Riley had reported, then his deciphering of the cipher message, our failure to discover anything in the scantily furnished office at the other end of the detectaphone wire, Shelby’s visit, and the whole peculiar train of circumstances.
Instead of going directly to the Harbor House Burke drove us around by the hotel dock, where we saw that there was a stranger in a power boat apparently waiting for him.
Kennedy was just finishing his recital of our unsatisfactory experience as we approached.
“Perhaps it all has something to do with what I wired you about,” returned Burke, thoughtfully. “This new affair is something that I know you’ll be interested in. You see, among my other jobs for the Government I’m what you might call a radio-detective, I guess. You know that there are laws aimed against these amateur wireless operators, I suppose?”
Kennedy nodded, and Burke went on, “Well, whenever regular operators find anything illegal going on in the air, they notify the Government, and so the thing is passed along for me to take up. Heaven knows I don’t know much about wireless. But that doesn’t matter. They don’t want a wireless man so much as they do a detective to ferret out from the operator’s evidence who can be violating the law of the air, and where. So that is how I happened to get hold of this evidence which, I think, may prove valuable to us.”