“Nothing,” he declared. “What should I mean? I hardly know your friend, Mr. Glover. Your mother, no doubt, knows him well.”
“Yes—and all about him,” the girl replied. “He’s awfully kind to us. He took us to Brighton in his big car last Sunday week, and gave us a topping time there. He claims to be a American but I don’t know if he is.”
Geoffrey reflected. That strange series of secret signals held him mystified. So he determined to wait and watch.
Next day, when in the experimental laboratory at Chelmsford, he took his friend, Frank Boyd, into his confidence regarding the signal they had tuned in, and also told him of the message sent by Glover late one night from mid-Atlantic.
Boyd, who stood with the head-’phones in his hand, for he had been making a test upon a new direction-finding device, listened with great interest.
“I agree, Falconer, there’s something wrong somewhere,” he remarked. “But who can have a transmitting-set which sends out messages upon a wave-length that we can’t get?”
“It may be by the new beam method,” Falconer suggested, “the method with which we are just now experimenting. Once or twice I’ve thought it might be a military continuous-wave set.”
“If so—then they are in front of us. That, however, I very much doubt,” declared Boyd. “The Germans thought themselves top-dogs in wireless before the war, but we beat them every time on their own ground—didn’t we?”
“We certainly did. Here, in these works, the inventions were made and developed for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It’s up to us—to you and me personally—to solve this mystery.”
“Yes, Falconer—and we’ll do it,” said the other. “I don’t like the idea of signals being sent out that we can’t read from our big aerial here.”