At about this time Jacob Farnum was prowling carefully about the spot that Mr. Emerson had named.  He waited there, in hiding, for a long time, ere Messrs. Melville and Emerson came along.  He let them pass, then followed slyly, in accordance with Broughton Emerson’s directions of that afternoon.

“Now, what on earth does this all mean?” wondered Jacob Farnum, unable, despite his curiosity, to regard this expedition without a feeling of considerable disgust with himself.  “Confound it, it’s unmanly, this spying on someone else!  It makes me feel like a rubber-soled detective, a thug or a labor picket trying to ‘warn’ a workman with a lead-stuffed club!  Yet Emerson is a gentleman, or I’ve been fooled.  It must be all right, I suppose.”

The night was dark, and the moon not yet quite due to rise.  When it did come up above the horizon it was certain to be more or less obscured by the clouds hanging there.

While Messrs. Melville and Emerson stepped off along the road, Jacob Farnum was forced to keep behind bushes and other natural objects of cover, which increased the boatbuilder’s uneasy feeling that he was, doing something well nigh dishonorable.

At last, however, the two capitalists stepped off the road, concealing themselves in a clump of bushes as though by previous understanding.

“It looks like a prearranged meeting of some sort,” reflected the boatbuilder, after having crept close enough to be able to see and to overhear.

Five minutes went by.  Then Don Melville, narrowly escaping running into Mr. Farnum, appeared suddenly before his father and Mr. Emerson.

“It’s almost the time, now,” laughed Don, speaking in a low voice, as he held his watch close to his eyes.  “I’ll slip right down into the road, in plain sight, where you can see what happens.”

Back of all the rest, in the bushes, Jacob Farnum muttered, disgustedly, to himself: 

“I like it little enough to find George Melville this.  I like it still less, now that I find Don having a finger in the pie of mystery.”

Smoke wafted back from a cigarette that Don was smoking.  A few minutes thus passed, when there came the sound of a low whistle.  Tossing away the stub of his cigarette, Don answered with another whistle.

Broughton Emerson straightened up instantly, being well enough hidden for that, and so did Jacob Farnum, whose presence, of course, was unsuspected by either of the Melvilles.

Then out from the cover of the woods stepped a boy of sixteen, in a uniform like that worn by the submarine boys.

“Have you got the plans?” asked Don, in a low voice that was yet distinct to all the listeners.

“Yes,” came in a hoarse whisper, from the one in uniform.

“Pass them over, then,” commanded Don.  “That’s right.  Here’s your money, in this envelope.”

Just then ray from the rising moon struggled through the filter of clouds, the light touching lightly upon the uniformed one.