“You damned spies!” came a voice from behind us.
Kennedy dropped the receiver, turning quickly, his automatic gleaming in his hand.
There was just a glimpse of a man with glittering bright blue eyes that had an almost fiendish, baleful glare. An instant later the door which had so unexpectedly opened banged shut, we heard a key turn in the lock—and the man dropped to the floor before even Kennedy’s automatic could test its ability to penetrate wood on a chance at hitting something the other side of it.
We were prisoners!
My mind worked automatically. At this very moment, perhaps, Baron Kreiger might be negotiating for the electro-magnetic gun. We had found out where he was, in all probability, but we were powerless to help him. I thought of Miss Lowe, and picked up the receiver which Kennedy had dropped.
She did not answer. The wire had been cut. We were isolated!
Kennedy had jumped to the window. I followed to restrain him, fearing that he had some mad scheme for climbing out. Instead, quickly he placed a peculiar arrangement, from the little package he had brought, holding it to his eye as if sighting it, his right hand grasping a handle as one holds a stereoscope. A moment later, as I examined it more closely, I saw that instead of looking at anything he had before him a small parabolic mirror turned away from him.
His finger pressed alternately on a button on the handle and I could see that there flashed in the little mirror a minute incandescent lamp which seemed to have a special filament arrangement.
The glaring sun was streaming in at the window and I wondered what could possibly be accomplished by the little light in competition with the sun itself.
“Signaling by electric light in the daytime may sound to you ridiculous,” explained Craig, still industriously flashing the light, “but this arrangement with Professor Donath’s signal mirror makes it possible, all right.