that point, had turned back to the station on top of the Santa Ynez mountain range behind Santa Barbara. For two days he had been listening vainly in the attempt to catch code messages which might be interpreted as coming from the secret radio station of the smugglers.
Success had come that morning, just after the storm. The heavy fog at sea had not reached to the mountains. It had been sunshiny and bright, and he had taken his listening post at an early hour.
Then, as he tuned his sound detector to varying wave lengths, had come a message in code—a code unlike any of the commercial codes registered with the government and of which he had obtained copies at San Francisco through the offices of Inspector Burton.
He listened. A conversation was being carried on between a ship at sea and a fixed land station. The ship, he now realized must have been the trawler; the station, the secret radio of the smugglers.
It seemed to him the sound detector located the fixed land station south-southeast of Santa Barbara, which would place it somewhere in the group of Channel Islands. This coincided with a bearing communicated from the San Francisco station, which
also had picked up the code messages, and had radioed him at once the line along which they had come. Ventura had not, for some freakish reason, been able to pick up the messages at all.
It was then he had radioed Inspector Burton aboard the Bear, and caused the latter to return.
Later, however, and very recently, in fact, he had gotten information more definite. For, since Inspector Burton had telephoned him to descend from the mountains and confer at the hotel, he had picked up another message in code in which, moreover, occurred the words “Santa Cruz” several times.
“So there you are, Inspector,” he said. “That’s what the Bender sound detector discovered. Human ingenuity could do no more.”
“You certainly have done wonders, Mr. Bender. It is your opinion, then, that the smugglers’ radio plant is on Santa Cruz Island?”