“Yes, only a few days before I was to leave, I took one portable radio to a place twenty miles away and talked to C. K. back there in his shop. We could hear each other plainly. That was a great day for C. K.”
“And for you.”
“Yes, but a greater one came when he took me into his shop that day before I left and said: ‘Sally, I want you to take these two black boxes with you.’”
“‘But, C. K.,’ I said, ‘those are your two secret, secret radios, your choicest possessions!’
“‘I can make more of them.’ That’s what he said. Then he went on, ‘Once I tried to give one of my inventions to our country. I failed and later someone stole it from me. Now, Sally, it’s your turn—’”
“How strange!” Nancy whispered. “What did he mean?”
“That’s what I asked him,” Sally whispered excitedly. “He said I was to take these radios with me, that I was to get someone who could be trusted to help me and, as I found time, to test the radios, listen in for any other radios that might be using those wave-lengths, do all I could to see what could be accomplished with them to aid our country.”
“That,” Nancy said, “is the strangest thing I ever heard.”
“Not so strange after all,” Sally said soberly. “He knew I was going first to a school close to the sea where I might listen for messages. Then, too, I am to be a WAVE. Perhaps I shall travel in a convoy across the sea. What a chance that will be to try out the radios!”
“Yes, what a chance!”