For six nights the same ceaseless vigil was kept, but without anything abnormal transpiring. The man Marx had not again visited the mysterious house in Albany Road, yet the fact that the obscured light showed nightly in the window of Chandler’s Farm, made it apparent that some midnight visitor was expected. For that reason alone Ronnie did not relinquish his vigilance.
One night he was creeping with Beryl towards the spot where they spent so many silent hours, and had taken a shorter cut across the corner of a big grass-field when, of a sudden, his well-beloved stumbled and almost fell. Afterwards, on groping about, he discovered an insulated electric wire lying along the ground.
“That’s curious,” he whispered. “Is this a telephone, I wonder?”
Fearing to switch on his torch, he felt by the touch that it was a twin wire twisted very much like a telephone-lead.
At the same moment, as they stood together in the corner of the field, Beryl sniffed, exclaiming:
“What a very strong smell of petrol!”
Her lover held his nose in the air, and declared that he, too, could detect it, the two discoveries puzzling them considerably. Indeed, in the succeeding hours as they watched together in silence, both tried to account for the existence of that secret twisted wire. Whence did it come, and whither did it lead?
“I’ll investigate it as soon as it gets light,” Ronnie declared.
Just before two o’clock the silence was broken by the distant hum of an aeroplane. Both detected it at the same instant.
“Hullo! One of our boys doing a night stunt?” remarked Ronnie, straining his eyes into the darkness, but failing to see the oncoming machine. Away across the hills a long, white beam began to search the sky and, having found the machine and revealed the rings upon it, at once shut off again.