“Bet-ty! I have seen him before--seen him do that--with his fingers! But where--where? I must remember! I feel--now--that I ought to remember! Oh! God, help me to--remember!” Sara Davenport bowed her paling girlish face against a purple cushion of wild pea, raised it again in half a moment, and crept cautiously around the screening mounds.
“He’ll bear watching!... I’m going to watch him,” she gasped. “I’m going to see what he’s up to! Oh!” winking fiery tears back, “oh! if I could--only--get the spark now--the spark from my memory, instead of just smoke--I wouldn’t care if I never--never--got it, the fire, from wood again, in all my born life!”
CHAPTER XVI
WIGWAG
“He has something in his hand--something that shimmers in his hand! See! See, Betty! It--it’s like the radio-powder in that little bottle--Olive’s secret that shines in the dark--only you can see it farther off--much farther off--where we are!”
“Like--like the radio-dials facing the aviator in his tiny cock-pit!” corroborated Betty, in low response to the flaming whisper which scorched her ear, as Sara’s lips hissed into it amid the rustling beach-grass.
“Mer-cy! He’s whirling it--doing something with it--spinning it round in a circle. It is--it is a radio-dial! A big one! Bet-ty----”
“Don’t pinch so har-rd!” sobbed Betty, groveling amid the purple pea-blossoms.
“He’s signaling with it! Oh! my living soul! he is--is--signaling now, with his right arm! Wigwagging! See-ee! Putting his hand d-down, with the dial in it, snapping it back up to his shoulder; that answers to a dot! More slowly now--that’s for a dash, by code! Standing up there in the launch--in that little creek--showing the dial out to sea! Short! Long! Short! Oh-h! I understand Wigwag. But I can’t read that--get the words--message!... I can just barely make out his arm going--catch the shimmer sideways. Heaven and earth! It’s cipher, I suppose.... He’s sending a message out to--sea--by cipher! Betty, he’s a--spy-y!”
The murmuring beach-grass whispered about the two girls. The crushed pea-blossoms lining their sand-nook with velvet cushions--dark velvet--sent the ghost of a wild fragrance up into their nostrils--wild as the situation in which they found themselves on the ragged coast-line of their normal life--wild, abnormal, as War itself.