Till about half-past nine they waited at the hotel, when they drove out to Tregoney, and, leaving the car at the little inn, they both walked along to the village post-office, where, even though so late, they saw the postmaster and explained that they were awaiting an urgent telephone message from the wireless station at Poldhu. Hamilton having made himself known, the postmaster at once agreed to send along to the inn—only a few yards distant—and call them when they were wanted.
Then the pair returned to the inn and ordered supper. Scarcely were they halfway through it when the postmaster himself hurried in and announced that Poldhu was on the line.
Hamilton rose instantly and dashed out. Five minutes later he returned.
“All right!” he said breathlessly. “It’s just what you expected, Falconer. Henway, the chief constable of Truro, and four of his men are awaiting us just down the road.”
Together the pair went out into the darkness, and at the end of the village the chief constable came out from the shadows to join them. After a few words from Hamilton, the police official whistled softly, and from nowhere, apparently, four of his assistants appeared.
Then whispering softly all went along to Miss Trethowen’s house, and slipping one after the other into the garden, they surrounded it. This effected, Henway rang boldly at the door, but received no answer. There was no sign of the clicking of the Morse instrument. All was quiet. Thrice he rang, when at last the bolts were drawn, and the thin man, whom Falconer had seen in the Red Lion in Truro, cautiously opened the door.
Next second the police rushed in. Henway and Falconer were first inside, and turning into a room on the left of the hall, which was Miss Trethowen’s dining-room, they saw upon the table a most up-to-date Morse telegraph instrument with wires attached to it trailing along the red Turkey carpet and out of the window.
The commotion caused by the entry of the police was great. All four occupants of the house were utterly staggered when Henway ordered their arrest on a charge of tapping telegraph wires, the property of the Postmaster-General, and with the interference of the secrecy of messages.
The man Martin instantly showed fight, firing three revolver shots point-blank at Falconer, none of which, very fortunately, took effect. The fellow was, however, quickly overpowered, and all four were later on conveyed to Truro police-station and placed in the cells.
To cut short this narrative of the romance of wireless, it is sufficient to explain that, as was afterwards discovered, the man who called himself Martin was an expert French bank thief, who had committed many great swindles both in Europe and America. In this particular case he had succeeded in obtaining, under threats of blackmail from a hard-up bank-clerk in Madrid, a copy of the secret code used by the London office of the Estremadura Bank—a great Spanish banking corporation—when ordering telegraphic payments to be made from the head office in Madrid.