An hour passed, and found me still alone. There had been no response to my message, no further agitation of the receiver whose message baffled me. Faithful to my wish, neither Larry nor McShanus had interrupted me. I could hear as a distant sound the murmur of gentle seas beating upon our bows. The purr of our engines was as that of a living, sentient entity, awake to the intervals of action. My fingers had grown weary of repeating those idle words. I sat back in my chair in a bitterness of spirit foreign to me, and reflected upon the fatuity of impulse and the mockery of all human deduction. If there were a password to the deck of the Diamond Ship, I lacked it. My hasty conclusions had met with their just fate. The men aboard the distant vessel had taken alarm and signalled to me no more. What would it profit them to continue this vain employment? Answer, that obstinacy prompted me. Doggedly, persistently, reason would repeat that I was right. The words were the only words. I could imagine no others. In mockery almost I changed my key, and to prove myself right, a hundred times I tapped out the word “Fordibras” upon the ready instrument. Once, twice, thrice—thus it went speeding into the aerial wastes, losing itself under the blue heavens, a delusion upon a delusion, the mocking jest of a man who had no resource but jest. And how are wonder and the sport of chance to be expressed when I say that the word was answered, immediately, clearly, beyond all question—in a message from the Diamond Ship and from those who commanded her. I sat as one transfixed, my hands trembling with excitement, my ears intent as though open to the story of a miracle. Plain as the talk of a friend at my side came that memorable answer, “How is old Five A’s doing?” Leaping to the lad Harry’s story, I answered them in the Romany tongue—the first, perhaps, that any student of crime should begin to learn. And now it became no longer a question of the word. Their anxiety mastered them. They were telling me their secrets across the waste—those secrets I would have paid half my fortune to learn. “We lie at 90° 15′ by 35° 15′ 15″. Where are you?” I flashed back a false reply, two degrees northward of our true situation. Quick as the instrument would transmit the words, I added this intelligence: “Every port watched. Fabos in Paris; white ensign off St. Michael’s; station safe; wait coming.” Their reply was the impatient question: “Are you Ross or Sycamore?” I took it to mean that there were two ships for which they waited, and that the captains thereof were named respectively Ross and Sycamore. At a hazard, I chose the first name, and waited for them to go on. Never in all this world did the flashing voice of electricity mean so much to mortal man. “We are short of coal and water,” the tidings went. “Hurry, for God’s sake, or we are driven into Rio.” To this, my hands hot with the fever of discovery, I rejoined: “Rio known—keep the seas; we reach you to-morrow.”