The ferret-eyed man nodded his head in the direction of the closet where Joe was confined.
“Leave him where he is. We want a start, don’t we? Some one will be along and let him out, I guess.”
“Well, so long, sonny,” cried the ferret-eyed man with a chuckling laugh that made Joe’s blood boil, “much obliged for the accommodation.”
“You’ll get in trouble over this,” roared out Joe furiously, “you see if you don’t.”
“Oh, I guess not,” said the man who had sent the message, with a coarse laugh. “Well, shake a day-day, kid. You might have made some money and have saved me the bother of showing you that I could work your wireless without your aid.”
Joe knew it would be useless to reply, so he bottled up the vials of his wrath and remained silent. The men left the hut and no doubt made their way back to their boat in which they had come from the mainland.
“Well, of all the nerve,” sputtered Joe in his prison. “If that isn’t the limit! There’s something mighty crooked about all this,” he went on to himself. “They got word to some one on board that ship bound for Canada, and the trouble they took to do it shows that there is something mighty suspicious about the whole affair.”
He went on thinking—there was nothing else to do,—and racked his brain to recollect what he could of the message. But this wasn’t much, for of course the code words were as meaningless as Greek to him.
“I do wish I could figure out what it was,” he said to himself, “if only I could and get word to that ship about the manner in which the message was sent, I might be the means of preventing some grave wrong being done to somebody; for I am sure those men are no good. You could tell that by their faces, let alone their actions. Hello!”
Joe stared through the slit in the door at the entrance to the wireless hut. It had been suddenly darkened by the figure of a man.