"Here," said Bell sharply. "Here is where we are. It must be where we are! No towns of any size nearby. No railroad. No boat route. Nothing! Nothing but jungle shown here!" * * * * * He frowned absorbedly over the problem. "What is it?" asked Paula. "Someone near," said Bell briefly. "That's another radio receiver, an old fashioned regenerative set, sensitive enough and reliable enough, but a nuisance to everyone but its owner--except when it's a godsend, as it is to us." The music ended, and a voice announced in laboriously classic Portuguese, with only a trace of the guttural tonation of the _carioca_, that the most important news items of the day would be given. Paula paled a little, but listened without stirring. The voice read--the rustling of sheets of paper was abnormally loud--a bit of foreign news, and a bit of local news, and then.... She was deathly pale when the announcement of her father's death was finished, and she had heard the official view of the police reported--exactly what Ribiera had told her it would be. When the voice added that a friend of the late Minister of War, the Senhor Ribiera, had offered twenty contos for the capture of the fugitive pair, who had escaped in an airplane stolen from him, she bit her lip until it almost bled. * * * * * "I know," he said abstractedly. "It's as you said. But listen to that whistle." The news announcement ceased. Music began again. The whistling abruptly died away. "I just found some coils," said Bell feverishly, "that plug in to take the place of the longer-wave ones. I'm going to try them. It's a hunch, and it's crazy, but...." There were sharp clickings. The radio receiver was one of those extraordinarily light and portable ones that are made for aircraft. In seconds it was transformed into a short-wave receiver. Bell began to manipulate the dials feverishly. Two minutes. Three. Four. The speaker suddenly began to whine softly and monotonously. "Regeneration," said Bell feverishly, "on a carrier-wave. It can't be far off, that receiving set." Suddenly a voice spoke. It was blurred and guttural. Infinitely delicate adjustments cleared it up. And then.... Bell listened eagerly, at first in triumph, then in amazement, and at last in a grim satisfaction. Reports from Rio on a short-wave band of radio frequencies were passing from Ribiera to some other place apparently inland. It was Ribiera's own voice, which quivered with rage as he reported Bell's escape. "_I do not think_," he snapped in Portuguese, "_that full details should be spoken even on beam wireless. I shall come to the_ fazenda _to-morrow and communicate with The Master direct. In the meantime I have warned all sub-deputies in Brazil. I urge that all deputies be informed and instructed as The Master may direct._" * * * * *