Jack made off and Tom followed. They did not go out of the front end of the shed, though big doors running on rollers opened to seaward. Instead they made for a small “accommodation” door in the rear of the shed. It was alongside this that the watcher had bored his observation hole. He had just time to slip around a corner and fling himself face downward in a patch of spiky sea-grass before the boys ran out.
“Lucky those kids didn’t see me,” he muttered. “I feel half ashamed of spying on them like this. But it’s all in the game, I suppose. If I don’t run down this assignment it means hunting another job, and I’ve worked on every paper in Boston but the one I’m on now; and I haven’t got the fare to go anywhere else job hunting.”
He watched the two boys run up to the summit of a big dune which commanded a broad view to seaward.
“By the horntoads of Herrington,” he exclaimed under his breath, “now’s my chance! I’ll get a few snaps while they’re out of the shed and then dig back. It’s taking a long chance and may be a rotten sort of thing to do, but I’ve simply got to make good.”
He rose from his place of hiding and, dexterously dodging among dunes and sand hummocks, made his way to the shed and darted inside by the small door from which the boys had just emerged. If he was surprised, he counted on managing to hide in some place of security till he got a chance to escape. Dick Donovan, cub reporter on the Boston Evening Eagle, was a young man of much resource, though at present hardly an example to be emulated. Still, as he owned to himself and as his editor had informed him that morning, it was a case of “making good” or getting what the editor termed the “G. B.”—which being interpreted, meant, as poor Dick knew only too well, the “Grand Bounce.”
As is the habit in newspaper offices, such a seemingly hopeless assignment as running down “The Mystery of the Skies” had been given to the cub reporter, the reason being that he might just as well waste his time on that apparently forlorn hope as on anything more promising. But Dick, who was by no means the “bone-head” his indignant editor mentally termed him, worked on the assignment like a beaver. He recalled hearing of the Boy Inventors and their various contrivances, and he formed a conviction that if he could run them down he would arrive at a point near to the solution of the mystery of the flying lights. It had been a matter of some difficulty to find out the present whereabouts of the boys, but the indomitable Dick had finally done it. His inquiries had led him to the lonely shed amidst the wind-driven dunes, and to the beginning of what he would have called “a galloping grasshopper of a yarn.”
As the boys gained the top of the dune they saw the yacht, standing out in white relief against the slaty background of cloud that rolled up from the east. She rose and fell slowly on the sullen sea, and they could see that a vagrant cloud of bluish smoke was rolling away from her. No doubt, then, that it was she that had fired the guns.
By some instinct Jack had snatched up a pair of glasses as they ran out of the shed. They were instruments used by the boys to scan anyone approaching their shed from a distance. He now turned these on the distant yacht. The next instant he uttered an exclamation:
“There’s trouble aboard out there as sure as you’re a foot high!”
“Can you make out what it is? They’re pretty close in, and those Baking Pan Shoals run out quite a way. Maybe they’re aground,” ventured Tom.