[Illustration]
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THE BOY AVIATORS ON SECRET SERVICE
OR
WORKING WITH WIRELESS
BY
CAPTAIN WILBUR LAWTON
AUTHOR OF "THE BOY AVIATORS IN NICARAGUA"
NEW YORK
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Boy Aviators' Series
By CAPTAIN WILBUR LAWTON
Author of "Dreadnought Boys Series"
Six Titles. Cloth Bound. Price 50c
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
1 The Boy Aviators in Nicaragua; or, In League with the Insurgents.
2 The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; or, Working with Wireless.
3 The Boy Aviators in Africa; or, An Aerial Ivory Trail.
4 The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest; or, The Golden Galleon.
5 The Boy Aviators in Record Flight; or, The Rival Aeroplane.
6 The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash; or, Facing Death in the Antarctic.
7 The Boy Aviators' Flight for a Fortune.
Sold Everywhere.
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
_Copyright_, 1910, by HURST & CO.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
I. An Important Commission
II. The Boys Meet an Old Friend,--and an Enemy
III. A Tramp with Field-Glasses
IV. A Plot Discovered
V. Two Rascals get a Shock
VI. The Start for the 'Glades
VII. A Night Attack
VIII. The Men of the Island
IX. A Message from the Unknown
X. The Captive's Warning
XI. The Black Squall
XII. Pork Chops Proves His Metal
XIII. The Front Door of the 'Glades
XIV. Close Quarters with 'Gators
XV. An Island Mystery
XVI. The Boys Make an Acquisition
XVII. The Everglades in an Aeroplane
XVIII. A Night Alarm
XIX. On the Mound-Builders' Island
XX. Captain Bellman's Island
XXI. A Bold Dash
XXII. Ben Stubbs Disappears
XXIII. The Boy Aviators Trapped
XXIV. A Startling Meeting
XXV. Quatty as a Scout
XXVI. Lathrop as an Air Pilot
XXVII. Hemmed in by Flames
XXVIII. The Black Aeroplane
XXIX. The Last of Bellman's Crew
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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."