tormy
Petrol_, had been a national hero. Burke could reach him in ten hours,
but how could _he_ reach Burke? In the heart of the frozen wilderness of
Labrador he might as well be on another planet, as far as communication
with the civilized world was concerned.

A burst of sunlight shot through the window and formed an oval patch on
the floor at his feet. The weather was clearing. He went out upon the
platform. Patches of blue sky appeared overhead. As he gazed
disconsolately across the valley toward the tower, his eye caught the
glisten of something high in the air. From the top of the wreckage five
thin shining lines ran parallel across the sky and disappeared in a
small cloud which hung low over the face of the cliff.

"The antennae!" exclaimed Bennie. "A wireless to Burke." Burke would
come; he knew Burke. A thousand miles overland was nothing to him.
Hadn't he wagered five thousand dollars at the club that he would fly to
the pole and bring back Peary's flag--with no takers? Why, Burke would
take him home with as little trouble as a taxicab. And then, aghast, he
remembered the complete destruction in the valley. The wireless plant
had gone with the rest. He ran back into the chart room and called
Atterbury.

"Can we get off a message to Washington?" he demanded. "The wires are
still up, and we have the condenser."

"We might, sir, if it's not--a long one, though you've always said there
was danger in running the engine with the car bolted down. We did it the
time the big machine burnt out a coil. I can throw--a wire--over the
antennae with a rocket--and join up--with the turbine machine. It will
increase--our wave length, but they ought to pick us up."

"We'll try it, anyway," announced Bennie.

He inspected the chart and measured the distance in an airline from
Boston to the point where the red lines converged. It was a trifle less
than the distance between Boston and Chicago. Burke had done that in
nine hours on the trial trip of his trans-Atlantic monoplane. If the
machine was in order and Burke started in the morning he would be with
them by sunset, if he didn't get lost. But Bennie knew that Burke could
drive his machine by dead reckoning and strike within a few leagues of a
target a thousand miles away.

A muffled roar outside interrupted his musings, and running out on the
platform again he found Atterbury attaching the cord of the aluminum
ribbon, which the rocket had carried up and over the antenna