There for a time he stood listening. His footsteps on the sand made no sound. If there were people in the shack they could not be aware of his approach.
Nerving himself for quick action and possible attack, he stepped round the corner to look quickly in at the window.
Then he laughed softly to himself. There had been no need for all this precaution. Inside the shack was but a single room. In that room there was one person, and that person lay stretched full length upon a couch with his face turned toward the wall. To all appearances he was sound asleep.
Seeing this, Johnny proceeded to make a calm survey of the room. In one corner stood a table and chair. On the table were dirty dishes, an empty can, and a loaf of bread.
In a back corner stood a rifle, and across from that some strange looking black cylinders. It was the cylinders that interested Johnny. But realizing that he could get a better look at them from the only other window of the place, he contented himself, for the moment, with a careful look at the man. The face could not be seen, but there was about the large, heavy frame and rounded shoulders something vaguely familiar. Still, after all was said and done, Johnny could not be sure that he had ever seen the fellow before, and certainly he did not feel disposed to waken him to find out.
He passed around to the other window and for a full five minutes studied those black cylinders. They were strange affairs, about four inches in diameter and two feet in length. They resembled huge firecrackers coated black. Instead of fuse, however, each one had on its end two small shiny screws such as are found at the top of a dry battery.
“Probably what they are,” was Johnny’s mental comment, “just big dry batteries.”
Yet he could not quite convince himself that this was true. In the end, however, he concluded that was the nearest he could come to it at a guess, and since a guess was all he was to get that day, he moved away from the cabin and was soon lost in the sand dunes.
“Never saw any batteries half that big,” he grumbled to himself as he trudged along, “and besides, what would he be doing with them out here?”
Again he trudged forward for a half mile in silence. Then, of a sudden he came to a dead stop, turned about, made as if to retrace his steps, then appearing to think better of it, stood there for a moment in deep meditation.