Buch lesen: «The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; Or, Working with Wireless»

CHAPTER I
AN IMPORTANT COMMISSION

“Come in!”

The gray-haired man who uttered these words gazed sharply up at the door of the private office of the Secretary of the Navy’s Bureau, at Washington, D. C., as he spoke. He was evidently anticipating callers of more than usual importance judging from his expectant look. The old negro who had knocked opened the door and respectfully stood waiting.

“Well, Pinckney?”

“Dey have come, sah.”

“Ah; good, – show them in at once.”

The old negro bowed respectfully and withdrew. A few seconds later he reappeared and ushered in two bright looking youths of sixteen and fourteen with the announcement in a pompous tone of voice:

“Messrs. Frank and Harry Chester.”

Frank, the elder of the two brothers, was a well set up youngster with crisp, wavy brown hair and steady gray eyes. Harry, his junior by two years, had the same cool eyes but with a merrier expression in them. He, like Frank, was a well-knit, broad-shouldered youth. Both boys were tanned to an almost mahogany tinge for they had only returned a few days before from Nicaragua, where they had passed through a series of strange adventures and perils in their air-ship, the Golden Eagle, perhaps, before her destruction in an electric storm, the best known craft of her kind in the world and one which they had built themselves from top plane to landing wheels.

The Secretary of the Navy, for such was the office held by the gray-haired man, looked at the two youths in front of him with some perplexity for a moment.

“You are the Boy Aviators we have all heard so much of?” he inquired at length with a note of frank incredulity in his voice.

“We are, sir,” rejoined Frank, with just the ghost of a smile playing about his lips at the great man’s evident astonishment – and its equally evident cause.

“I beg your pardon,” hastily spoke up the Secretary of the Navy, who had observed Frank’s amusement; “but you seem – ”

“I know what you were thinking, sir,” interrupted Frank, “that we are very young to undertake such exacting service as Admiral Kimball outlined to us in Nicaragua.”

“You have guessed just right, my boy,” rejoined the other, with a hearty laugh at Frank’s taking his thoughts and putting them into such exact words, “but your youth has evidently not interfered with your progress if all the reports I have heard of you are true. Sit down,” he went on, “and we will talk over the proposal the Department has to make to you.”

The boys set down their straw hats and seated themselves in two chairs facing the grizzled official. Both listened attentively as he began.

“When Admiral Kimball wrote to me about you, telling me that he had found in the two sons of Planter Chester of Nicaragua the very agents we wanted for a particularly dangerous and difficult mission,” he said, “I at once sent for you to come here from New York to see for myself if his judgment was correct. I have not been disappointed – ”

The boys colored with pleasure.

“My brief observation of you has confirmed to my mind his report and I am going to entrust to you the responsibility of this undertaking. Now,” he went on impressively, “the government has been experimenting for some time in secret with Chapinite, a new explosive of terrific power, the invention – as its name makes apparent – of Lieut. Bob Chapin of the United States Navy. I say ‘has been experimenting’ advisedly. It is so no more.

“The formula of the explosive has disappeared from the archives of the department and, what is still more serious, Lieutenant Chapin himself is missing.”

“The agents of the Secret Service force have worked in vain on the case without discovering much more than the one very important fact that the government of a far Eastern power has recently been experimenting with an explosive whose effects and manifestations make it almost undoubted that the stuff is Chapinite. By a tedious process of observation and deduction the men have traced the shipments as far as the west Florida coast but there all clues have ended. Weeks of work have left us as much in the dark as ever as to the location of the source of supply of the far Eastern power. But that somewhere within the untracked wildernesses of the Everglades a plant has been set up in which Chapinite is being manufactured in large quantities is a practical certainty to my mind.

“It is useless for the secret service men to attempt to explore what is still an unmapped labyrinth of swamp and jungle and above all it would occupy time. What we have to do is to act quickly. I racked my brain for days until I happened to come across a paragraph in a newspaper calling attention to your wonderful flights in the Golden Eagle, and then followed Admiral Kimball’s dispatch. It struck me at once that here indeed was a way of locating these men that might prove feasible – I say ‘might’ because if you boys accept the commission I do not want to absolutely impose the condition of success upon you. All that we shall expect of you is that you will do your best.

“Will you accept the assignment?”

The blunt question almost took the boys off their feet so to speak. They exchanged glances and then Frank said:

“As you perhaps know, sir, our first aeroplane, the Golden Eagle– ”

“In which you rescued William Barnes, a newspaper correspondent, from a camp in which he was held prisoner,” remarked the Secretary – “you see I have followed your doings closely.”

“Exactly,” went on Frank; “that first Golden Eagle is at the bottom of the sea. She went down when we were driven off the land in a tropical electric storm and it was only the fact that she was equipped with wireless, with which we signaled a passing steamer, that saved us from sharing her fate.

“We might, however, construct a second one. In fact I have the designs partially drawn up. She would be a more powerful craft than the first and capable of even longer sustained flights.”

“The very thing!” exclaimed his listener enthusiastically, “then you will accept the commission?”

“I have not yet said that we would,” rejoined Frank, calmly. “As you have described the situation it looks rather like a wild-goose chase; however, I think that if my brother agrees that we might consent to try to do our best.”

“Of course I agree, Frank,” cried Harry enthusiastically. The very mention of anything that promised exciting adventures was sufficient to enlist Harry’s ardent interest.

“Then it is as good as settled,” concluded the Secretary. “The thing is now, how long will it take you to build this craft?”

“We shall require at least three weeks,” replied Frank.

The Secretary almost groaned.

“It is a long time – or at least it seems so,” he corrected, “when there is so much at stake.”

“It would be quite impossible to construct a suitable aeroplane in a lesser period;” rejoined Frank, with finality in his tones.

“Then I suppose we shall have to exercise patience,” remarked the secretary. “You will of course need funds. How much shall you require do you suppose?”

“We cannot build a second Golden Eagle for less than ten thousand dollars to start with,” was the quiet reply.

“Ten thousand dollars?” repeated the secretary, in tones of amazement.

“It does sound like a good deal of money,” replied Frank, “but if you were more familiar with aeroplane construction you would see that it is not exorbitant. Everything that enters into the construction of an air craft must be of the very best and strongest material. The engine alone is a heavy item of expense and besides must be of specially prepared metals and hand machined.”

“I see,” replied the secretary. “You know best. I will see that arrangements are made to provide you with everything you require. Where do you intend to build the ship?”

“There is a place at White Plains, some miles out from the town and back in the hills,” replied Frank, “that is in every way suited for our purpose. It is off any main road and we can work there in quiet. We built the first Golden Eagle there and I don’t think that outside of ourselves and our workmen half a dozen people knew about it.”

“The very thing,” replied the secretary. “Of course I need not impress upon you the importance of absolute secrecy in this matter. We have almost positive proof that our every movement is watched by agents of those who have stolen the plans, and who now have Lieutenant Chapin a prisoner – that is, if they have not made away with him, poor fellow. My own idea is, however, that he has been kidnapped and forced to take charge of the work, as without his direction it would be impossible, even with the aid of the formula, to manufacture the explosive. What I fear is, that after they have made a sufficient quantity to stock up the arsenals of the far Eastern power they will destroy their plant and end Lieutenant Chapin’s life. You see the explosive is so powerful that even a small quantity would make the nation possessing it extremely formidable, therefore it is not likely that wherever they have set up their plant they are figuring on a permanent location.”

“What is the last trace you have of the plotters?” asked Frank.

For answer the secretary pressed a bell that stood on his table at his elbow. When in response the bowing old negro appeared he said sharply:

“Send Flynn here.”

Flynn turned out to be a thick-set, red-faced man with the neck of a bull and powerful physique. He was one of the most trusted men in the Secret Service Bureau.

“Flynn,” said the secretary when the detective had introduced his huge bulk, “these young men are Frank and Harry Chester, the Boy Aviators, they are going to take up your work where you left it off.”

“Only because we were up against a dead wall,” protested the agent.

“Quite so – quite so; I meant no offence. I know that you did all it was humanly possible to accomplish. What I want you to do now is to outline to these young men the discoveries you made following the morning on which we found the safe opened and the plans gone, – to be followed a few hours later by the discovery that Lieutenant Chapin had also vanished.”

“Well,” said Flynn, “cutting out the minor details we discovered that the very same day a big white yacht had cleared from New York without papers and had headed toward the south. We traced her up and found that she had been bought by a Mr. Brownjohn of Beaver Street. We looked him up and found he was a ship broker who had bought the craft on telegraphed instructions from Washington. We trailed up the telegram and found that it had been sent from the Hotel Willard by a Captain Mortimer Bellman, who, from what we can find out about him, was considerable of an adventurer and had at one time lived a good deal in the far East. In fact he had only recently come from there. At the Marine Basin at Ulmer Park, near Coney Island, we discovered that a nondescript sort of a crew had been hustled on board and that the yacht had sailed at night without papers a few hours after her purchase was completed.

“Ten days later the newspapers reported that a large yacht had gone ashore on one of the Ten Thousand Islands on the west coast of the Everglades, and the men we sent down there to investigate discovered that the derelict was the Mist, – the same yacht that Bellman had bought. What was most remarkable, however, was that the boat seemed to have been deliberately wrecked, for everything had been taken off her except her coal and ballast and all the boats were gone. There was no indication that she had been abandoned in a hurry and the reef on which she lay was such an obvious one that even at high water it was clearly visible. Now that the Mist’s boats went into the Everglades we are reasonably sure. If they had gone anywhere else we should have got some trace of them by this time, but from that day to this we have not had a word or sign concerning them.”

“We have heard, however, that the navy of the power we suspect has been conducting experiments with a new explosive and we have also learned that this same explosive is undoubtedly Chapinite. We have looked up Bellman’s record and find that while he was stopping at the Willard he received several letters from the government in question and that he paid twenty thousand dollars for the Mist. Now a man isn’t going to pay that much out for a boat and wreck her unless he does it purposely. Bellman didn’t have that much money anyhow. There is only one conclusion, Bellman was simply the agent for some one else and that some one has got a lot of money to spend to secure the most powerful explosive ever discovered.”

“There you have the case in a nutshell,” remarked the secretary as Flynn concluded.

“There is only one thing that is not clear to me,” objected Frank. “Why should they make the stuff in the Everglades. Why not manufacture it out and out in the country you have mentioned?”

“Such a course would have been too full of risks,” replied the secretary, “we are at peace with that power and if the stolen formula had been discovered there it would have led to a serious international breach and possibly war. By manufacturing it here and shipping it secretly in small quantities the plotters secure safety from war to their own country.”

“I see,” nodded Frank. He pulled out his watch. It was twelve o’clock. “There is a train to New York at one o’clock,” he said.

“Won’t you stop and have lunch with me?” asked the secretary.

“No, thank you,” was the boys’ reply; “you see we have a lot of work before us. Building an aeroplane in three weeks calls for some tall hustling.”

CHAPTER II
THE BOYS MEET AN OLD FRIEND, – AND AN ENEMY

As the boys hurried from the office of the Secretary of the Navy they almost collided with a plump faced, spectacled young man in an aggressively loud suit of light summer clothes who was just rushing in.

“I say, look out where you are coming, can’t you?” he was beginning when he broke off with a cry of delight.

The next minute the boys were wringing the hand of Billy Barnes the youthful newspaper reporter who had been with them in Nicaragua and whose life they had saved when he was a captive among the Nicaraguans. Boy fashion the three slapped each other on the back and went through a continuous pump-handle performance at this unexpected meeting.

“What on earth are you doing here?” asked Harry when the first enthusiasm of the greetings had worn off.

“Working,” replied Billy briefly. “I’m on the Washington Post.”

“But I thought you were going to take a holiday after you had realized your money on the sale of your share of the rubies we found in the Toltec cave;” said Frank wonderingly.

“Well,” rejoined Billy, “of course the money I got for my two rubies looked good and it feels pretty nifty to have a check-book in your inside pocket; but I guess I can’t be happy unless I’m working. I bought my mother up the state a pretty little place in Brooklyn and tried to settle down to be a young gentleman of leisure but it wouldn’t do. I wasn’t happy. Every time I saw the fire-engines go by or read a good thrilling story in the paper I wanted to be back on the job, so I just got out and hustled about for one and here I am.”

“But what are you doing at the office of the Secretary of the Navy,” demanded the boys.

“Ah, that’s just it,” rejoined Billy mysteriously, “I’m on the track of the biggest story of my career and I think it’s a scoop. Can you fellows keep a secret?”

“We can do better than that,” laughed Frank, “we can tell you one. What would you say if we could tell you your errand here?”

“That you are pretty good mind-readers,” retorted Billy promptly. “I can guess yours though. You are here to try to sell the government an air-ship.”

“Wrong,” shouted Frank triumphantly. “But you – William Barnes – ” he went on, making a mysterious pass at the other boy’s head, “you are here to find out about Lieutenant Chapin.”

“How on earth did you know that?” gasped Billy, “you are right though. Do you know anything about it?” he inquired anxiously.

“Everything,” replied Frank.

“Oh, come off, Frank,” retorted Billy, “that’s too much. How on earth can you – ?”

“That matters not, my young reporter – we do,” struck in Harry.

“Give me the story then, will you?” begged Billy.

“No, we can’t do that,” replied Frank in a graver tone.

“Oh, of course I wasn’t trying to worm it out of you,” said Billy abashed somewhat.

“We know that, Billy,” said Harry kindly. The reporter looked at him gratefully.

“I just thought you might have something to give out,” went on Billy. “I see that you are in the confidence of the naval department.”

“No, Billy,” continued Frank, “we can’t give you anything for publication. But we can do better than that, we can tell you we are about to start on what may prove the most exciting trip we have ever undertaken.”

“What do you mean?” questioned Billy seeing clearly by Frank’s manner that something very unusual was in the wind.

“That we are going to try to find Lieutenant Chapin and the men who kidnapped him,” replied Frank; “but come along, Billy, we’ve just an hour before train time and if you feel like having a bite of lunch come with us and we can talk it over as we go along.”

The young reporter gladly assented and, linked arm in arm, the three boys passed out onto the sunny avenue which was glowing in the bright light of a late May day.

Frank rapidly detailed to Billy the gist of their conversation with the Secretary of the Navy, having first called up that official on the telephone and secured his permission to enlist Billy as a member of the expedition. For Frank had made up his mind that the reporter was to come along almost as soon as the boys encountered him.

The young journalist could hardly keep from giving a “whoop,” which would have sadly startled the sedate lunchers at the Willard, as Frank talked. He resisted the temptation, however, and simply asked eagerly:

“When do you start?”

The boys told him. They could see the eager question framing itself on Billy’s lips.

“Say, Frank, couldn’t you take me along?”

Frank feigned an elaborate indifference.

“Well, I don’t know,” he replied, winking at Harry as Billy’s face fell at this apparent refusal, “we might, of course, but really I think we shall have to go ‘without a chronicler.’”

The boys might have kept the jest up but Billy’s face grew so lugubrious that they had not the heart to keep him in suspense any longer.

“If you would care to come we were sort of thinking of taking you,” laughed Harry.

“If I would care to come?” gasped Billy, “Jimminy crickets! If I’d care to come! Say, just wait a minute while I go to ’phone my resignation.”

“What an impetuous chap you are,” laughed Frank, “we don’t start for three weeks yet and here you are in a hurry to throw up your job to-day.”

“Well,” replied Billy somewhat abashed, “I was a bit previous. But it’s so white of you chaps to take me along that I hardly know what I’m doing. How I’m to wait three weeks I don’t know.”

“How would you like to help us build the Golden Eagle II?” asked Frank suddenly.

“Say, Frank,” burst out Billy earnestly, “you are a trump. That was just the very thing I longed to do but I didn’t have the nerve to ask you after you were so decent about taking me with you to Florida. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“It won’t be all a picnic,” laughed Frank. “We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of us and we’ll all have to pitch in and take a hand, share and share alike.”

“You can count on me,” exclaimed the reporter eagerly.

“I know we can,” replied Frank, “or we would not have asked you to accompany us.”

“What are your plans?” asked Billy eagerly.

“At present so far as I have thought them out,” replied Frank, “we shall sail from New York for Miami about the middle of June. I think it will be best to go by steamer as we can keep a better watch on any suspicious fellow passengers in that way than if we went by train. The key on which the Mist was wrecked is on the opposite coast from there, I understand, and the men who kidnapped Chapin and stole the plans must have entered the Everglades by one of the numerous small rivers that lead back from the coast at the Ten Thousand Island Archipelago.

“My idea, then, is to establish a permanent camp from which we can work, the location of course to depend entirely on circumstances, that may arise after we reach our destination. We are going into this thing practically blindfold you see, and so we shall have to leave the arrangement of a host of minor details till we arrive there.”

“You mean to strike right back into the wilderness?” asked Billy.

“As soon as possible after our arrival at Miami,” was the businesslike rejoinder. “Every minute of our time will be precious. Oh, there’s heaps to be done,” broke off Frank.

All the boys had to laugh heartily at the wave of the hands with which Frank accompanied his last words. But their merriment was cut short by a sharp exclamation from Billy.

“I say, Frank,” whispered the young reporter, “have you noticed that fellow at the next table?” He indicated a short dark sallow-faced man sitting at a table a few feet from them and to whom most of their conversation must have been audible.

“He’s not a beauty,” remarked Harry in the same low tone; “what about him, Billy?”

“Well,” said the reporter seriously, “I may be wrong and I may not – and I rather think I’m not, – but if he hasn’t been listening with all his ears to what we’ve been saying I’m very much mistaken.”

Frank bit his lip with vexation. In their enthusiasm the youthful adventurers had been foolishly discussing their plans in tones which any one sitting near could have overheard without much difficulty. The boys realized this and also that if the man really turned out to have been an eavesdropper that they had involuntarily furnished him with much important information about their plans.

The object of their suspicion apparently saw that they had observed him, for as they resumed their talk in lowered tones he called for his bill and having paid it with a hand that flashed with diamonds, he left the dining-room.

“Have you seen him before?” asked Frank of Billy.

“I was trying to think,” replied the reporter. “It seems to me that I have. I am almost certain of it in fact. But I can’t think where.”

“Try to think,” said Frank, “it may be very important.”

Billy cudgeled his brains for a few minutes and then snapped his fingers in triumph.

“I’ve got it,” he exclaimed joyously. “I’ve seen him hanging around the Far Eastern embassy. I was up there the other day to report a reception and this fellow was wandering around as if he hadn’t got a friend in the world.”

“He might have had an object in that,” said Frank gravely. “There is no doubt that he was listening to what we were talking about.”

“And not much question that he heard every word of it,” put in Harry.

“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Frank in an annoyed tone, “we shall have to be more cautious in the future. I see that the secretary was right, this place is swarming with spies.”

“I should say it is,” replied Billy, “Washington is more full of eavesdroppers and secret-service men of various kinds than any other city in the world.”

If the boys had seen the bediamonded man hasten from the hotel direct to a Western Union telegraph office where he filed a long telegram, they would have been even more worried than they were. If in addition they had seen the contents of the message they would have been tempted, it is likely, to have abandoned the expedition or at least their present plans, for the message, which was addressed to “Mr. Job Scudder, Miami, To Be Called For,” and signed Nego, gave about as complete an account of what they intended to do as even Billy Barnes with his trained ear for catching and marshaling facts could have framed. There was a very amiable smile on Mr. Nego’s face as he left the telegraph office and drew on a pair of light chamois gloves that gave a finishing touch of fashion to his light gray spring clothes, whose every line bore evidence to the fact that they had come from one of the best tailors in Washington. He had done a good morning’s work.

The boys of course had no means of knowing that, even as they hurried to their train, the wires were rushing to Florida the news of their coming three weeks before they planned to start and even if they had been aware of it they could not then have stopped it. With Billy Barnes they dashed up to the Pennsylvania depot in a taxi-cab just as the big locomotive of the Congressional Limited was being backed up to the long train of vestibuled coaches. They had their return tickets so that there was no delay at the ticket window and they passed directly into the depot, and having found their chair car deposited themselves and their hand-baggage in it. Billy stayed chatting with them till the conductor cried “all aboard.” As the reporter rose to leave he gave a very perceptible start. He had just time to cry to Frank:

“Look behind you,” when the wheels began to revolve and Billy only avoided being carried off by making a dash for the door almost upsetting the colored porter in his haste.

As the train gathered speed Frank glanced round as if in search of somebody. He almost started, as had Billy, as his eyes encountered the direct gaze of the very black orbs of the man whom they were certain had overheard their conversation at lunch and who had signed the telegram “Nego.”