me, they WILL come to pass!'"
14 And all there looked at the weary man who slept among them. "Truly,"
remarked one of the men, "this day we have witnessed the fulfilling of
Prophecy, and honored am I to be here in the midst of it!" The other
men nodded in agreement.
15 Now, the army again encouraged Gray Boar to accept deferment, but he
refused. "As you say," he said, "I do not wish to serve merely to gain
honor. I am not a vain man, that I need my people's praise, but I am a
man of duty. I will fulfill my duty."
16 So they gave him command of a small post near Lito, safe from the
enemy. They forgot, though, that in the winter from their desert bases,
the enemy's bombers could reach Lito. In one midnight raid, Gray Boar's
camp was almost totally destroyed. But strangely, not one man was
injured, or were any in the nearby village hurt, though the bombs
destroyed everything.
17 "If we had some way of detecting bombers at night," he said, "before
they could reach our territory and send out our fighters to stop them,
many lives could be saved."
18 Within two weeks a village workshop was preparing a listening device
to his specifications. The next time the bombers came his way, they
were heard in time to man the guns and send up the fighters. Soon,
hundreds of the devices stretched along the desert, no matter how high
the enemy flew, no matter how low. The sound of their engines could be
heard; their direction plotted, and fighters sent to meet them.
19 "It is too bad," remarked Gray Boar, "that there are not wireless
telegraphs, so we could talk to pilots in the air and they did not have
to depend on clumsy ground signaling stations to get the enemy's course
and speed."
20 For many seasons he would search for the answer