Lemly, but I'm beginning
to suspect that one, or both, of those fellows carried messages,
somewhere and of some nature. In that case, we're letting our
curiosity hold us up here while the enemy are accomplishing something
at some other point."

"Confound 'em!" growled Joe, prodding the bulwarks with his toe.
"They're clever rascals!"

"Meanwhile," whispered Tom, "I've just been thinking of something else
that we ought to be doing."

"What?"

"There may be another steamship for Rio Janeiro passing somewhere in
these waters at any time. We ought to send out a call on the wireless
at least once an hour. There's something else in the wind, old fellow,
and we _do_ want to know when the first steam vessel for Rio passes
through these waters."

"Then I'll go below and get at work at the sending key," proposed
Dawson. "Send out the wireless call once an hour, you say?"

"Yes; yet we don't want to forget that we're being watched all the
time from that old drab pirate yonder. Don't let the enemy see you
going to the cabin."

"I'll drop down into the motor room and use the passageway through."

Dawson was gone ten minutes. When he returned he shook his head, then
stood looking out over the sea. Excepting the "Restless" and the drab
seventy-footer there was no craft in sight. Not so much as a
lighthouse shed its beams over the ocean at this point of the coast.

"Say, it's weird, isn't it?" muttered Joe Dawson. "We can't see a
thing but ourselves, yet down in the cabin I've just been chatting
with the Savannah boat, the New Orleans boat, two Boston fruit
steamers, the southbound Havana liner and a British warship. Look out
there. Where are they? Yet all are within reach of my electric wave!"

"There are no longer any pathless roads of the sea--not since the
wireless came in," declared Tom Halstead. "If there were enough
vessels to relay us we could talk direct with London now. The next
thing will be a telephone in every stateroom, with a wireless central
on the saloon deck or the spar deck. But gracious! We've been
forgetting all about our poor prisoner in the starboard stateroom. He
must have a royal case of hunger by now. Tell Hank to take him in some
food and to feed the poor fellow, since he can't use his own hands."

Later time began to drag by. There were few signs of life aboard the
seventy-footer. Sending Joe and Hepton down to the motor room berths
as watch below, Tom kept Hank on deck with him. Bye-and-bye Jo