What was the secret of that unpretentious little house below us?  We peered out in the gathering blackness eagerly in the direction where we knew it must be, nestled among the trees.  Whoever it sheltered was still there, and we could locate the place by a single gleam that came from an upper window.  Whether there were lights below, we could not tell.  If there were they must have been effectively concealed by blinds and shades.

“We’ll stop here,” announced Garrick at last when we had reached a point on the road a few hundred yards from the house.

He ran the car carefully off the road and into a little clearing in a clump of dark trees.  We got out and pushed stealthily forward through the underbrush to the edge of the woods.  There, on the slope, just a little way below us, stood the house of mystery.

Garrick and Dillon were busily conferring in an undertone, as I helped them bring the packages one after another from the car to the edge of the woods.  Garrick had slipped the little telephone mouthpiece into his pocket, and was carrying the huge reflector carefully, so that it might not be injured in the darkness.  I had the heavy coats of the peculiar texture over my arm, while Dillon and his man struggled along over the uncertain pathway, carrying between them the heavy, long, cylindrical package, which must have weighed some sixty pounds or so.

Garrick had selected as the site of our operations a corner of the grove where a very large tree raised itself as a landmark, silhouetted in black against a dark sky.  We deposited the stuff there as he directed.

“Now, Jim,” ordered Dillon, walking back to the car with his man, “I want you to take the car and go back along this road until you reach the top of the hill.”

I could not hear the rest of the order, but it seemed that he was to meet someone who had preceded us on foot from the railway station and who must be about due to arrive.  I did not know who or what it might be, but even the thought of someone else made me feel safer, for in so ticklish a piece of business as this, in dealing with at least a pair of desperate men such as we knew them to be in the ominously quiet little house, a second and even a third line of re-enforcements was not, I felt, amiss.

Garrick in the meantime had set to work putting into position the huge reflector.  At first I thought it might be some method of throwing a powerful light on the house.  But on closer examination I saw that it could not be a light.  The reflector seemed to have been constructed so that in the focus was a peculiar coil of something, and to the ends of this coil, Garrick attached two wires which he fastened to an instrument, cylindrical, with a broadened end, like a telephone receiver.

Dillon, who had returned by this time, after sending his chauffeur back on his errand, appeared very much interested in what Garrick was doing.

“Now, Tom,” said Garrick, “while I am fixing this thing, I wish you would help me by undoing that large package carefully.”