greased lightning. You’ve got to think fast and be accurate at the same time. That’s tough. But it’s absolutely necessary, especially in your work. To read a message wrong, skip a dot here and miss a dash there, may sink a ship, or even a half dozen ships.”

“Oh!” Sally held her head. “That sounds serious!”

“It is. But see here, why do we waste a beautiful sunset hour on code? You’ll get that in your next school anyway.”

“Yes, I know, but I want it now. It,” she hesitated, “it’s not my secret alone so I can’t tell you too much.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he replied with a generous smile.

“But I want to. That night when I fell off the roof I was running a wire from my room to the aerial on the roof. I’ve been working for a long time with a dear old man who’s a real genius. He invented a special kind of radio and he gave me two of them to try out.”

“I see. That’s what you’re doing now. Did the outside aerial help?”

“Oh, yes, a whole lot. The ‘put-puts’ come in a whole lot more distinctly.”

“The what?” He stared.

“The ‘put-puts’. That’s what we call them. I suppose it’s some special form of code, but it’s not like any I’ve ever heard on the short wave section of our radio.”

“I wish you’d tried to write it down,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps they have a secret code. They may substitute numbers for letters. See, here are the numbers in Morse Code. Dot, dash, dash, dot are for one, for two you add two dots and drop a dash-dot, dot, dash, dot. Three is dot, dot; dot, dash, dot, and so on.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard,” interrupted Sally.

“It’s simple. Take this book home and learn the numbers. Then listen to your radio and try to write down the ‘put-puts’ in dots and dashes.”

“I will if they are there tonight. Sometimes they’re not there at all and sometimes there are a lot of them, five, six, or a dozen, all talking to one another like frogs in a pond.”

“Is that right!” He suddenly became excited. “Say, perhaps they are in a pond, the big pond. Perhaps they are wolves instead of frogs.”

“Wolves?”

“Sure, enemy subs, wolf-packs of them, you know. Wouldn’t 

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