Lew, hopeless of solving the puzzle of the spies' disappearance, was thinking of how the scouts should equip themselves if they should be called upon for a land pursuit; for at following trails and taking care of himself in the open he had no superior in the wireless patrol. Roy, keen minded as a Sherlock Holmes, was turning over in his mind the problem of the spies' escape, trying to reason out what their line of action would be in the immediate future. Willie was examining a mental landscape to decide the same question. With that wonderful facility of memory he had acquired by hours of practice at Camp Brady, he now called up the maps of the neighboring waters he had been studying; and in his mind's eye he could see every point and indentation of the shore-lines, every arm of water, every inequality of the land as pictured on the contour map, and the principal roads of the region. And he was asking himself what a party of fugitives in a small boat would naturally do.
Henry, eager as always to learn more about the wireless, had ingratiated himself with the Patrol's wireless man and was eagerly examining his instruments and plying him with questions. At first the operator answered with good-natured tolerance as one replies to the queries of a child. But when he saw how much Henry actually knew, and found that though he was only a boy he had already acted as operator at a government wireless station, he fell into an earnest discussion about the possibilities of wireless in police work—for in New York the police wireless was still in an experimental stage. Then he permitted Henry to clamp on the receivers and listen in.
Henry welcomed the opportunity, for in all the weeks they had been watching the Germans, the wireless patrol had hardly had an opportunity to listen to the myriad voices in the air. They had had to shut out all other sounds and tune down to the low lengths used by the Germans—and by nobody else. They had been like spectators at the opera with their ears plugged to shut out the music.
Now, as Henry eagerly listened in, he caught a sharp, whining note that vibrated powerfully in his ear. "There's the Navy Yard calling," he said, and a deep frown passed over his face, for it made him think of submarines and the failure of the wireless patrol. For a moment he tuned to a short length and listened for a spy message, as he had done so many times before.
"That's the Waldorf-Astoria talking," said Henry a moment later, and he copied down the message and shoved it over to the police operator.
Then followed press despatches—stories of land and sea, of fires and battles, of shipwrecks and the arrest of a spy. And again Henry scowled and slid his tuning-coil and briefly listened in at lower range.
Down the river ploughed the little steamer, repassing, one by one, the landmarks it had passed on its trip northward. As it steamed along and the meaning of their failure became more apparent to the young scouts, they became gloomier and gloomier. But Henry, exulting at the opportunity to handle such an outfit, almost forgot their failure, and drank in eagerly the gossip of the night. So engrossed was he, that he was startled when he heard the order to slacken speed, and heard his captain say, "Well, here we are, boys."
Reluctantly he removed the receivers. Then, as an after-thought struck him, he clamped them again to his ears, tuned his coil to a low length, and strained his ears in one last search for a forbidden voice in the dark. For a moment he sat listening vainly. Then, with unwilling fingers, he began to take the clamps from his head. But suddenly he jammed the receivers back on his ears and sat tense.
"Hurry up, Henry," called Captain Hardy. "We're waiting for you."
"Hush!" said Henry, lifting a warning hand. Then he sat rigid, bending eagerly forward. In his ear a call was sounding. It was the old familiar call of the motor station. He seized a pencil and began to write. A moment later he jumped to his feet and went rushing after his captain.