It was a sultry night. Not a breath was stirring. Storm clouds hung dark in the west with heat-lightning playing intermittently across their face. An occasional October asteroid flitted fireflylike through the sky. The weather was too oppressive to think of going to bed, so we sat up and waited for Myles Cabot. It got very late. But still he did not come.
Finally, along toward morning, the storm broke. I was for going up to Cow Hill to see how Myles was getting along, but Mrs. Farley restrained me.
“He has oilskins in the laboratory, if he wishes to come down,” she said. “In the meantime, leave him alone. He is phoning to his sweetheart, and ought not to be disturbed. When you were courting me, you never used to phone to me in public.”
“Nor in a thunderstorm either,” was my reply.
The rain fell in torrents, and the lightning was very vivid, though I suppose that the storm was a mere trifle compared with those which Cabot describes as occurring on Poros. Finally the weather began to clear; but not without a Parthian shot, which fell so close that the lightning and the thunder-clap seemed simultaneous. When the next flash came, the momentary light revealed the fact that only one of the two towers remained standing on Cow Hill.
Myles might be in trouble! Seizing my sou’wester and a lantern, I hurried out into the night. The rain had now stopped. The sky had begun to clear. As I neared the wireless station, I could see that the stricken tower had fallen across one end of the laboratory, caving it in. This was the end which held most of the apparatus, so I quickened my pace and flung open the door.
But Myles Cabot was not there. One glance satisfied me on that score. Probably he had passed me, without my noticing him, my gaze having been fixed intently on the hill.
Next I explored the room to ascertain the extent of the damage. The matter-transmitting apparatus was hopelessly wrecked; the radio set partially so. The head phones were lying on his desk, and by their side a pencil and pad. The pad was all scribbled over with letters, as though Myles had been trying to take down a message.
These letters made no sense at all, until the end of the sheet, where suddenly they stood forth with unexpected vividness and distinctness “S.O.S. Lilla.”
Only that, and nothing more.