apparatus and slowly turned it. Then he turned a second condenser very carefully.

“We are on the ordinary six-hundred-metre wave-length now,” the Captain explained, “and shall remain so until we get our seven dots. I am bound to keep the machine so or I should miss other messages I ought to hear. But we will change as soon as we get your signal.”

Presently they came, sharp and clear, dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot. Immediately Captain Le Couteur made some swift adjustments.

“Now listen,” he said, “we are on a three-hundred-and-fifty-metre wave-length.”

A moment later came three M’s—three pairs of dashes.

“That’s Code Five,” said Captain Le Couteur. “Now we shall get the real message.”

It came in what to Dick was a gibberish of letters and figures, but Captain le Couteur wrote it down and then, decoding it, read it off with the skill of the expert. It ran:

CONTENTS

“M M M begins Have located the machine stop Apparently entirely new type stop Tell Manton to be ready stop M M M ends.”

“That’s our newest code,” the Captain explained, “and this is the first time it has been used. Jules learnt it only just before he left. It is very unlikely that the message has been picked up by anyone else, as the wave-length is quite low, but even if it was, no one could decipher the code from such a short message. They would want one very much longer, and even then it would probably take at least a week or ten days of very hard work by a lot of experts.”

And he paused.

“I think it would be well now for one of us to be constantly here,” he went on. “Perhaps, too, you would like to overhaul your machine so as to have it absolutely ready to get away at a moment’s notice. My fellows will give you any help you want and they are all absolutely to be depended upon not to talk.”

Dick soon had the Mohawk ready; indeed there was not much to do after such a short trip as the flight to Verdun. The rest of the day he spent chatting with Captain Le Couteur, finding him a delightful companion and full of enthusiasm on the subject of wireless, of which his knowledge seemed boundless. Dick felt he could never tire of admiring the wonderfully ingenious devices which the other had invented and put into operation in his underground fortress.

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