back contents forward {{frabfp037.png}} || eagles of the sky || which they were enabled to communicate along professional lines at least. If it seemed necessary to Perk to ask questions not down on the brief list thus worked out, all he had to do was to adjust Jack's harness and then his own little outfit, enabling him to chatter away to his heart's content--and often to the annoyance of his less talkative chum. But first of all he proceeded to make good use of the binoculars upon which so much depended. From side to side he would swing the glasses and search for anything that looked like a suspicious light on land or water then turn to what lay dead ahead. In this region of the Ten Thousand Islands--all fashioned from the queer spreading mangrove that drops its long seeds so that they stick upright in the mud, and, quickly developing roots, spring up to add to the dimension of the original "island" there were never at any time many settlers so that the coast has been reckoned as the "loneliest ever," on which account Perk realized that if he should happen to glimpse a ocr> light, whether _^{r_}'and or gulf, the chances were fix> light, whether onland or gulf, the chances were ocr> fifty to one it c have some connection with the fix> fifty to one it might have some connection with the operations of the smuggler league. Perk remembered how that Curtiss-Robin ship had finally disappeared in the haze lying to the north and from this he sucked more or less [[37]] back contents forward