"And might I add," said Grace Krowl, "that he is also the mysterious Whisperer of the air!" "That," said the Captain, "calls for a lot of explaining. Suppose we retire to the parlor?" "There's really nothing very mysterious about that whisper business," said Newton Mills when they were all gathered about the fire. "I became interested in something they call narrow-casting. It's one of the uses of the electric eye. You really talk down a beam of light." "Talk down a beam of light!" someone exclaimed. "Surely." He smiled. "It's really very simple. You talk into a microphone. An instrument takes up the sound impulses of your voice and changes them to light impulses. These impulses may be sent down a beam of light a mile, ten, twenty, thirty miles. How far? No one knows. "A very special reflector catches those light impulses. A mechanism containing an electric eye changes those light impulses back into sound impulses. And then you hear my voice thirty miles away. "The wonderful part is, Captain--" He leaned forward eagerly. "Only a person with the proper mechanism in the line of that ray of light can hear them! Think of being able to sit in my high tower and send secret messages to a score of my fellow detectives, and never a crook listening in! I tell you it is going to be a great thing for crime hunters in the future!" "Do you know," Johnny asked, "that you in your high tower came near being the end of this young giant?" He nodded toward Spider. Newton Mills stared in surprise. Then he said, dryly, "A caller should send in his card." "But how was it you could see me as well as speak to me?" Grace Krowl asked. "Television." Newton Mills smiled afresh. "I'd had a set installed in that room. It's a rather crude set. But you can see a person well enough to recognize him even now." "And that must have been why I could see Iggy the Snake and the stolen bonds back there in the 'House of Magic,'" Johnny put in. "Probably was," Newton Mills agreed. "Speaking of those bonds," said Captain Burns, "last night I recovered all but a few of them. Great luck! Fine Christmas present for that closed bank!" "And for the depositors," Drew Lane added. "And now," said Madame LeClare, appearing in the doorway, "soup's on!" "On with the feast!" cried the Captain. A moment later they were all seated about a broad table that groaned under its weight of good things to eat. Bowing their heads, they sang their grace before meat. "Peace on earth, good will toward men!" the Captain rumbled. "If only the men of this earth had good will toward one another, we could throw away our sticks and guns and come to a peaceful spot like this to live all our days." It was a very merry time they had in the Captain's boyhood home that Christmas day and a joyous journey they made back to the city. And why not? Had they not been sentenced to death by their enemies and the enemies of all honest men, and had they not escaped and triumphed?