Bell had been listening impatiently, when a sudden whining, whistling noise broke into the program of very elevated music, played utterly without rest. The sound came from the speaker, of course.
He frowned thoughtfully. The whistling changed in timbre and became flutelike, then changed again, nearly to its original pitch and tone.
Paula was not listening. Her mind seemed very far away, and on subjects the reverse of pleasurable.
"Listen!" said Bell suddenly. "You hear that whistle? It came on all at once!"
Paula waited. The whistling noise went on. It was vaguely discordant, and it was monotonous, and it was more than a little irritating. Again it changed timbre, going up to the shrillest of squealings, and back nearly to its original sound an instant later.
Bell began to paw over maps. The plane had been intended for flight over the vast distances of Brazil, and there was a small supply of condensed food and a sporting rifle and shells included in its equipment. Emergency landing fields are not exactly common in the back country of South America.
"Here," said Bell sharply. "Here is where we are. It must be where we are! No towns of any size nearby. No railroad. No boat route. Nothing! Nothing but jungle shown here!"
"Someone near," said Bell briefly. "That's another radio receiver, an old fashioned regenerative set, sensitive enough and reliable enough, but a nuisance to everyone but its owner--except when it's a godsend, as it is to us."
The music ended, and a voice announced in laboriously classic Portuguese, with only a trace of the guttural tonation of the _carioca_, that the most important news items of the day would be given.
Paula paled a little, but listened without stirring. The voice read--the rustling of sheets of paper was abnormally loud--a bit of foreign news, and a bit of local news, and then....
She was deathly pale when the announcement of her father's death was finished, and she had heard the official view of the police reported--exactly what Ribiera had told her it would be. When the voice added that a friend of the late Minister of War, the Senhor Ribiera, had offered twenty contos for the capture of the fugitive pair, who had escaped in an airplane stolen from him, she bit her lip until it almost bled.