“Anything else you kin see off thar?” he asked sardonically.
“Nothing but that they say the horses are all right, and that if we see their signals we are to send up a smoke column,” replied Jack calmly, his countenance all aglow.
“Look hyar, Jack Merrill, I promised your father ter take care of yer,” said Pete sternly, “an’ I don’t want ter take back a raving loonertick to him. What’s all this mean?”
“That Ralph is signalling with a bit of mirror,—heliographing, they call it in the army,” cried Jack, with a merry laugh, which rather discomfited Pete.
“Wall, that may be, too,” he admitted grudgingly, “thar sun would catch it and make it flash. But how under ther etarnal stars kin you tell what he’s saying?”
“Simple enough,” rejoined Jack; “he was making the flashes long and short,—using the Morse telegraph code, in fact. You know we had a cadet corps at Stonefell to which we both belonged. Field signalling and heliographing was part of our camping instruction, but I guess neither of us ever dreamed it would come in handy in such a way as this. That certainly was a bully idea of Ralph’s. He knew if we were any place around we would see the flashes and be able to read them, whereas we couldn’t have sighted them in the tall brush so easily and might have missed them altogether.”
“Wall, what air we goin’ ter do now?” asked Pete, rather apathetically.
“Do? Why, light a fire, of course. Then they’ll see the smoke column and come over to us with grub and the ponies.”
“Hum,” snorted Pete. “Got any matches?”
“Why, no. Haven’t you?”