"I'll tell you," said Curlie, as he rose to answer a tap on the door, "I believe that affair last night was some big thing; but what it was I can't even guess."
He opened the door to let in Coles Masters, his relief, then motioning to Joe he took his cap and left the room. Down the winding stairs which led to the elevator several stories lower down they made their way in silence, at last to enter a cage and be silently dropped to the ground hundreds of feet below.
CHAPTER II
SOMETHING BIG
"You see," Curlie began as he crossed his slim legs beside a small table in an all-night lunch room, buried somewhere in the deep recesses of this same skyscraper, "that fellow sent the message about the easterly breeze that blew west and I located the station at that hotel. This morning I went over to see how the place looked. It's a wonderful hotel, that one; palm garden in the middle of it, marble columns, fountain, painted sheet iron ceiling that'd make you dizzy to look at, and the finest dressed people you ever saw walking around everywhere.
"Well, I found my way to the sending room of the radiophone and right away the operator wanted to throw me out; said I was a fresh kid and all that. But when I showed him my papers, he calmed down a lot and showed me everything he had.
"I saw right away it wasn't his equipment that had sent that message—that'd be like sending a Big Bertha bomb into Paris with a twenty-two caliber rifle. He just naturally didn't have the power, that's all. So I didn't tell him anything about it; just walked out and went around back to where I could see the way his wires ran from the sending room to the antenna.
"I hadn't any more than got there and had one look-up when along strolls a man who wants to know what I'm looking at. I saw right away that he wasn't a hotel employee for he didn't wear either a bandmaster's uniform nor a cutaway coat, so I just smiled and said: