Once again Tom McCarthy and Rosa climbed to the upper sky where the stars seemed to reach down for them and the air was bitter cold.

“Now,” Tom muttered hoarsely, as he shut off the motor and they started on a spiral glide, “listen!”

“Listening,” came in a hoarse whisper.

At first no sound reached their listening ears. Then they caught a low, indistinct roar, like the approach of an on-rushing storm.

“A terrible storm coming.” Rosa seemed a little frightened.

“That’s no storm,” Tom’s voice was husky. “It’s the roar of lots of planes.”

“Lots of planes,” Rosa repeated. “They come from an airplane carrier. They will fly to Portland, Boston, perhaps New York!”

“Who knows?” Tom’s eyes were on his instruments. They were still spiraling rapidly.

“Darn!” he murmured, scowling fiercely. Where was the sea? To strike it head-on meant death. At night sky and sea look alike. And yet he wanted to listen to get the direction of that on-rushing squadron. At that moment he saw himself at the controls with Rosa manning the machine gun, surrounded by ghost-like enemy fighters shooting by them in the night. It was a fantastic, but not impossible, scene.

Suddenly a single flash of light appeared beneath them. One instant it was there, the next it was gone.

“Rosa! Quick! The spotlight!” He pulled the plane up so short that blood rushed to Rosa’s head and it was with the greatest difficulty that she set the light playing on the water.

One frightened look down and she gasped. They were all but upon the water and going like the wind.

One more short pull and their ship leveled off. It was then that their spot of light, gliding swiftly across the water, revealed a secret. Their light crossed a long, low craft with a tower at its center.

“Sub,” Tom shouted. But already it was too late to drop a bomb. They were over it and gone.

Instantly he began to climb. Not very high this time, perhaps ten thousand feet, then again silence.

The roar of distant motors was louder now, but even louder and closer at hand sounded a single motor.

“That’s the enemy plane,” Tom muttered. After listening with all his senses, he changed the direction of his plane and they went shooting away at full speed. Tom was flying by sense of direction alone, a dangerous business in the night.

Ten long minutes he stuck to his course, then, after climbing once more, he shut off the motor and began to glide.

“Huh!” he grunted. “We had that plane’s course to a ‘T’, but they’re fast. They’ve gone straight out to sea.”

“Then we can’t catch up with them?” Rosa asked.

“Never!”

“They go back to Europe?”

“That’s impossible. Plane’s too small to carry enough gas.”

“Then the ocean will get them.”

“No chance,” Tom grumbled. “They’ll keep a secret meeting with that sub!”

Realizing that his supply of gas would not carry him much further and allow them to fly back, Tom put his motor in motion and very reluctantly turned back.

At that moment, hidden by the night and the shadow of a great rock, Patsy and her grandfather sat huddled in the cold at the foot of Bald Head, listening and straining their eyes for some sight or sound from the sea.

“That was Tom McCarthy in the seaplane,” the grandfather whispered.

“Yes, and that other plane, that was an enemy plane,” said Patsy. “I hope the good Gremlins will pack its wings with ice until it falls into the sea!”

“But for us,” said the grandfather, “the sub is more important!”

“Yes, they might land,” the child answered and crowded close.

“Let them come,” came in a low, even tone. “We’ll take care of that.” He patted the tommy-gun on his knee. “We—”

“Sh—” Patsy placed a finger on his lips. Her young ears were sharper than his. Had she caught the low murmur of voices? She could not be quite sure.

“People talking,” she whispered, after a moment of intent listening.

Another moment of breathless silence and then: “Sounds like water splashing.”

“Paddles.” The old man gripped his gun tight.

Old for her years, Patsy knew this meant a boat of one sort or another. Without saying a word, she glided down the slope of Bald Head until her face was a scant two yards from the water that gently lapped the shore. Then, dropping flat on her stomach, she looked straight out across the dark surface of the sea. If a boat was out there it would show against the dull gray of the night sky.

A full five minutes passed without a sound. Then she whispered back:

“Not a boat, but three men sitting on the sea.”

“A rubber boat!” Without a sound the grandfather slid down the dock to her side. Then, bidding her lie quite still, he put his gun across her slender body. She did not flinch.

He could see the men. There were three or four of them. They came slowly shoreward, pausing now and then to rest.

“Afraid?” the girl said.

“Yes, of a trap,” was the all but inaudible answer.

Grandfather was thinking slowly, carefully, weighing the wisdom of laying a volley across the spot in the sea.

“They could be friends,” he whispered. “We’ll wait. Perhaps they will speak. Then we’ll know.”

So they waited and while they waited the low roar of many planes began beating on their eardrums.

“Oh!” Patsy squirmed in fear. “If these are enemy planes from a carrier—”

“They’ll not bomb Black Knob,” was the cheering assurance. “They only drop bombs where there are many people.”

“Listen,” he ended. “See if you can get their direction.”

Once again, save for the occasional dip-dip of a paddle, silence hung over Black Knob.

Suddenly, after gripping the old man’s arm with intense eagerness, the girl whispered:

“Grandfather! Those planes are coming from the south!”

“From Rocky Point airfield! They should have started sooner. Something must have gone wrong. But now—”

“Now will there be a battle?” The child was trembling all over.

“I don’t know, child.”

“Shall you shoot out there?”

“We must wait and see,” was the calm reply, always in a slow whisper. “We cannot afford a horrible mistake.”

And so, with the roar beating ever louder in their ears, they lay there, not daring to move, the man and the child.

As for the shadowy figures “sitting on the water,” they too must have heard, for there came no longer the dip-dip of their paddles.

Tom and Rosa, too, were being cheered by the ever increasing roar.

“We’ll leave that sub to them,” Tom said through the speaker. “We can’t have much more than enough gas to take us in.”

At last they circled low, dropped to the surface inside the breakwater at Indian Point, then taxied in.

The instant the motor stopped and Tom had secured a tie line, he said in a low tone:

“This is our secret, Rosa. To anyone else, you just didn’t go with me.”

“Okay,” was the frank agreement.

“Grab that skiff and row as fast as you can to the dock!”

“But you will come, too?” the girl demurred.

“Not yet!” He lifted her into the skiff. “Don’t you see, you little goose? If you come back for me, then it will all be quite regular. You just happened along and gave me a lift.”

“I see.” The girl rowed swiftly away.

When, a quarter of an hour later, Rosa, still fairly shaking with cold, but managing a casual stride for all that, walked into the big living room, Norma exclaimed, “Rosa! Where have you been? They have looked for you everywhere!”

“I went out for a little fresh air, that’s all.”

Norma, studying Rosa’s face, whispered: “Little Rosa has one more secret.” And little Rosa had—just that!

Still the old man and the child lay in the darkness on the great rock, feeling the sound of motors growing louder, ever louder in their ears. Still the old man’s fingers trembled as they gripped the gun that might have spelled death to those shadowy forms on the black waters.

At last the girl whispered, “They’re paddling again! I can hear them, dip-dip-dip. Will they come ashore now? Will you shoot, Grandfather?”

“If they come ashore I will shoot.”

Still, quite breathless, the child lay quiet, tensing as she lost the sound of the paddles. The roar of motors drowned it out. As her eyes searched the waters, it seemed to her that the shadowy forms were fading.

Then she lost interest in the sea, for coming like the wind, were airplanes, good American planes.

“They’re coming to drive the horrible sub and all the bad Gremlins away!” she whispered.

She wanted to leap to her feet and scream, “Hurrah! Hurrah for our planes!” but she dared not.

The planes were not looking for the sub. They had been sent out to find an enemy plane. As if by magic a gray mist came sweeping in from the sea.

“It’s the bad Gremlins.” She spoke aloud at last. “They have hidden those men!”

“The men on the sub have made a fog to hide them,” was the grandfather’s reply. “Even the airplanes will not find the sub now.”

“Come,” he lifted her up, “we must go back to the cabin. You are freezing. We will listen there. You may talk with your hands.”

“Grandfather,” she said, as she trotted beside him, “will the sub come back?”

“Perhaps another day.”

“And then will you shoot at those shadows on the water?”

“Yes, if I know they are our enemies, I will!”

Little Patsy did not talk with her hands that night, for, after drinking a big cup of hot chocolate and being wrapped in two warm blankets, she curled up on the broad couch and fell fast asleep.

It was the grandfather who, with his hands, spelled out their story to Beth and Bess, the faithful watchers at the Granite Head spotter tower. And all the while the searching planes roared on in the night.