Page:Barbour--For the freedom from the seas.djvu/63

 queer survey, and then to the north. The others watched and waited in silence.

Suddenly they saw the ensign's roving gaze fix itself steadily on some point almost above his head. They craned their necks, but saw nothing. The ensign's head moved again and finally he walked away from them, step by step, still gazing upward. Nelson, for one, was fairly consumed by curiosity and would have remained so several moments longer had not his wandering gaze surprised Lanky Staples in the act of forming the word "wireless" with his lips. Then Nelson understood and peered eagerly into the topmost branches and, after an instant, saw what the officer had seen. Once detected the apparatus was startlingly evident. Twenty paces away from where Nelson stood, a twenty-foot sapling had been lashed to one of the taller trees. Some forty feet away another sapling, not quite so long, had been secured. Between them, invisible to a careless gaze, stretched two fine copper wires, perhaps two feet apart. From above they might have been detected, but from any point seaward they were invisible.

The ensign was stepping softly back toward the little group, a quiet smile on his lean face. "We've got them," he whispered. He bent a 41