[Illustration: COURTESY OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BOY AVIATORS IN
NICARAGUA
OR
IN LEAGUE WITH THE INSURGENTS
BY
CAPTAIN WILBUR LAWTON
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.
---------------------
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BOYS START FOR THE TROPICS 5
II. THE STORM-CLOUDS GATHER 23
III. BILLY BARNES OF THE PLANET 38
IV. THE TWO-FINGERED MAN 50
V. ROGERO IS CHECKMATED 61
VI. FRANK TO THE RESCUE 70
VII. FEATHERING THE GOLDEN EAGLE 85
VIII. BILLY BARNES TAKES THE WARPATH 94
IX. THE MIDNIGHT BELL 106
X. THE ONE-EYED QUESAL 118
XI. BILLY BARNES IS TRAPPED 128
XII. THE AVIATOR BOYS’ BOLD DASH 139
XIII. FRANK TAKES A DESPERATE CHANCE 149
XIV. SAVED BY AN AEROPLANE 159
XV. THE BOYS DISCOVER THE TOLTEC’S “SESAME.” 171
XVI. THE FIGURE ON THE CLIFF 181
XVII. THE TOLTEC’S STAIRS 191
XVIII. THE RAVINE OF THE WHITE SNAKES 203
XIX. THE BOYS ARE TRAPPED 213
XX. THE LONE CASTAWAY 226
XXI. DYNAMITING TO FREEDOM 237
XXII. IN AN AEROPLANE IN AN ELECTRIC STORM 247
XXIII. SAVED BY WIRELESS 257
XXIV. UNLOADING AN ARMY 267
XXV. LEAGUED WITH INSURGENTS 278
XXVI. THE FLOWER OF FLAME 290
XXVII. PRISONERS OF WAR 303
XXVIII. FACING DEATH 314
XXIX. FRIENDS IN NEED 324
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BOY AVIATORS IN NICARAGUA.
--------------
CHAPTER I.
THE BOYS START FOR THE TROPICS.
It was a bitter evening in late December. Up and down the East River
tugs nosed their way through the winter twilight’s gloom, shouldering
aside as they snorted along big drifting cakes of ice.
At her pier, a short distance below the Brooklyn Bridge, the steamer
_Aztec_, of the _Central American Trading Company’s_ line had just blown
a long, ear-piercing blast—the signal that in half-an-hour she would
cast off her lines. In the shrill summons there was a note of
impatience; as if the ship was herself as eager as her fortunate
passengers to be off for the regions of sunshine and out of the misery
of the New York winter.
The _Aztec_ had been due to sail at noon that day, as the Blue Peter
floating at her mainmast head had signified. Here it was, however, a
good hour since the towering mass of skyscrapers on the opposite side of
the river had blossomed, as if by magic, into a jewel-spangled mountain
of light and her steam winches were still clanking and the ’longshore
men, under the direction of the screech of the boss stevedore’s whistle,
as hard at work as ever. No wonder her passengers fretted at the delay.
Not the least eager among them to see the ship’s restraining lines cast
off were Frank and Harry Chester, known to the public, through the
somewhat hysterical pæans of the Daily Press and the rather more
dignified, but not less enthusiastic articles of the technical and
scientific reviews, as the BOY AVIATORS. It was an hour since they had
bade their mother and an enthusiastic delegation of boy and girl friends
good-bye.
Side by side the youths paced the deck muffled in huge overcoats and
surveying anxiously, as from time to time they approached the forward
end of the promenade deck, a lofty pile of boxes that contained the
various sections of their aeroplane the _Golden Eagle_ which had made
the sensation of the year in aviation circles.
Ever since the _Golden Eagle_, a biplane of novel construction, had
carried off from all competitors the $10,000 prize for a sustained
flight offered by J. Henry Gage, the millionaire aeronaut at the White
Plains Aerodrome, the boys had become as well-known figures in New York
life as any of the air prize contestants during the Hudson-Fulton
Exhibition. Frank, the eldest, was sixteen. A well-grown,
clean-lived-looking boy with clear blue eyes and a fearless expression.
His brother, a year younger, was as wholesome appearing and almost as
tall, but he had a more rollicking cast in his face than his graver
brother Frank, whose equal he was, however, in skill, coolness and
daring in the trying environment of the treacherous currents of the
upper air.
With the exception of a brief interval for lunch the two boys had amused
themselves since noon by watching the, to them novel, scene of frantic
activity on the wharf. The ships of the _Central American Trading Co._
had a reputation for getting away on time and the delay had grated on
everybody’s nerves from the _Aztec’s_ captain’s to the old wharfinger’s;
in the case of the latter indeed, he had attempted to chastise, a short
time before, an adventurous newsboy who had ventured on the pier to sell
his afternoon papers. Frank had intervened for the ragged little
scarecrow and the boys had purchased several copies of his wares. They
had a startling interest for the boys which they had not suspected. In
huge type it was announced in all, that the long threatened revolution
in Nicaragua had at last broken out with a vengeance, and seemed likely
to run like wildfire from one end of the turbulent republic to the
other. Troops were in the field on both sides—so the despatch said—and
the insurgents were loudly boasting of their determination to march on
and capture Managua, the capital, and overthrow the government of
President Zelaya. Practically every town in the country had been well
posted with the manifesto of the reactionaries, and had taken the move
as being one in the right direction.
In the news that the revolution, the storm clouds of which had long been
ominously rumbling had actually broken out, the boys had an intense and
vital interest. Their father’s banana plantation, one of the largest and
best known in Central America, lay inland about twenty miles from
Greytown, a seacoast town, on the San Juan River. The boys were on their
way there after a long and trying season of flights and adulation to
rest up and continue, in the quiet they had hoped to find there, a
series of experiments in aviation which had already made them among the
most famous graduates the Agassiz High School on Washington Heights had
turned out in its years of existence. Already in their flights at White
Plains, and later during the Hudson-Fulton celebration, the boys had
earned, and earned well, laurels that many an older experimenter in
aviation might have worn with content, but they were intent on yet
further distinction. Already they had given several trials to a wireless
telegraph appliance for attachment to aeroplanes and the _Golden Eagle_
in some private flights had had this apparatus in use. The results had
been encouraging in the extreme. With the use of a greater lifting
surface the boys felt that they would be justified in adding to the
weight the aeroplane could lift and that this weight would be in form of
additional power batteries for the wireless outfit both had agreed. In
the boxes piled on the foredeck they had indeed a supply of balloon
silk, canvas, wire, spruce stretchers and aluminum frames which they
intended to put into use as soon as they should reach Nicaragua in the
furtherance of their experiments. The conquest of the air both in
aviation and communication was the lofty goal the boys had set
themselves.
“The revolution has really started at last, old boy—hurray!” shouted
Harry, throwing his arm in boyish enthusiasm about his staid brother
Frank, as both boys eagerly assimilated the news.
“I say, Frank,” he continued eagerly, “it’s always been our contention
that an aeroplane capable of invariable command by its operator would be
of immense value in warfare. What a chance to prove it! Three cheers for
the _Golden Eagle_.” In his excitement Harry pulled his soft cap from
his head and waved it enthusiastically.
Frank, however, seemed to view the situation more gravely than his
light-hearted brother. As has been said, Frank, while but little older
in point of years possessed a temperament diametrically opposed to the
mercurial nature of his younger brother. He weighed things, and indeed
in the construction of the _Golden Eagle_, while Harry had suggested all
the brilliant imaginative points, it had been the solid practical Frank
who had really figured out the abstruse details of the wonder-ship’s
structure.
Despite this difference of temperament—in fact Harry often said, “If
Frank wasn’t so clever and I wasn’t so optimistic we’d never have got
anywhere,”—in spite of this contrast between the two there was a deep
undercurrent of brotherly love and both possessed to the highest degree
the manly courage and grit which had tided them over many a discouraging
moment. Nor in the full tide of their success, when people turned on the
street to point them out, were either of the boys at all above
recognizing their old playfellows and schoolmates as has been known to
be the case, it is said, with other successful boys—and men.
“I don’t know, Harry,” replied Frank at length to his brother’s
enthusiastic reception of the news of the rebellion, “there are two
sides to every question.”
“Yes, but Frank, think,” protested Harry, “we shall have a chance to see
a real skirmish if only they keep at it long enough. Confound it
though,” he added with an expression of keen regret, “the paper says
it’s another ‘comic opera revolution.’”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Harry,” replied Frank, seriously. “When
father was north last he told us, if you recollect, that a Central
American revolution was not by any means a picnic. In the battle in
which the United States of Colombia drove the Venezuelans from their
territory, for instance, there were ten thousand dead left on the
field.”
Frank halted under one of the wire-screened lights screwed into the
bulkhead beside which they had been pacing to let the light of the
incandescent stream brighter upon his paper. He scanned the page with
rapid eye and suddenly looked up with an exclamation that made Harry
cry:
“What’s the trouble, Frank?”
“Well, it looks as if on the day we are sailing for Nicaragua that that
country is monopolizing the news to the exclusion of the important fact
that ‘The Boy Aviators’”—he broke off with a laugh.
“Hear! hear,” exclaimed Harry, striking a pose.
“—I say,” continued Frank, “that it seems as we haven’t a look in any
more. The country for which we are bound has the floor. Listen—”
Holding the paper high beneath the light, Frank read the following item
which under a great wood-type scare-head occupied most of the front page
space not given over to the announcement of the revolution.
NICARAGUAN MYSTERIOUSLY STRANGLED.
ROBBERY NOT MOTIVE; BUT
ROOM IN HOTEL IS RANSACKED BY
HIS SLAYERS.
--------------
DR. RAMON MONEAGUE, OF CITY OF RIVAS, IS DONE
TO DEATH IN M—— HOTEL ON WEST 14TH
STREET.
--------------
POLICE HAVE NO CLUES. BUT LOOK FOR
TWO-FINGERED MAN.
--------------
CORONER SAYS MAN OF GREAT STRENGTH DID
THE DEED.
“Almost as big a head as they gave us when we won the prize,” laughed
Harry. “Newspaper head I mean.”
“I wish you’d be serious, Harry,” said Frank, though he couldn’t help
smiling at his brother’s high flow of spirits. “This is really very
interesting. Listen:”
“The body of a man about forty-five or possibly fifty years old was
discovered this afternoon in an upper floor bedroom of the M—— Hotel on
West Fourteenth Street. A brief scrutiny established that the man, who
had registered at the hotel a few hours before as Dr. Ramon Moneague of
Rivas, Nicaragua, had been strangled to death with exceptional
brutality. He had been dead only about an hour when the body was
discovered by a chambermaid who found the door unlocked.
“Whatever may have been the object of the murder it was not robbery, as,
although the dead man’s trunk and suit-case had been ransacked and money
lay scattered about the room, his watch and valuable diamond pin and
rings had not been disturbed.
“Whoever strangled Dr. Moneague to death he was no weakling. Both
Coroners, Physician Schenck and the detectives who swarmed on the scene
are agreed upon this. The marks of the murderer’s fingers are clearly
impressed upon both sides of the dead man’s throat.
“Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the case, and one which may lead
to the slayer’s speedy detection, is the fact that his right hand had
only two fingers. The police and the coroner’s physician and the coroner
himself came to this conclusion after a brief examination of the marks
on the throat. On the left side of the larynx where the murderer’s right
hand must have pressed the breath out of the Nicaraguan there is a
hiatus between the mark made by the thumb and first finger of the right
hand, indicating clearly to the minds of the authorities that the man
who killed Dr. Moneague is minus the middle and index fingers of his
right hand.
“Every available detective at headquarters and from the different
precincts have been put upon the case and every employee of the hotel
connected with it even in the remotest way examined closely. No result
has developed to date however. The clerk of the hotel admits that he was
chatting with a friend most of the morning and after he had assigned Dr.
Moneague to a room, and it might have been possible for a stranger to
slip in and up the stairs without his noticing it.”
“There,” concluded Frank, throwing the paper into a scupper, “how’s that
for a ringtailed roarer of a sensation?”
“It seems queer——” began Harry, but the sudden deafening roar of the
_Aztec’s_ whistle cut him short. His words were drowned in the racket.
It was her farewell blast this time. As the sound died away, echoing in
a ringing note on the skyscrapers opposite, the boys felt a sudden
trembling beneath their feet.
Far down in the engine-room the force was tuning her up for her long run
which would begin in a few minutes now. Already a couple of tugs that
had been hanging alongside since noon had wakened up and now made fast
lines thrown from the _Aztec’s_ lofty counter to their towing bitts. It
was their job to pull her stern first out into the stream where the
current of the ebb-tide would swing her head to the south.
“All clear there for’ard?” it was the bearded muffled-up skipper
bellowing through a megaphone from the bridge, where the equally
swaddled pilot stood beside him.
“We’re off at last, Frank old boy,” said Harry jubilantly as what seemed
a silence compared to the racket of hoisting in the last of the cargo
fell over the wharf.
Anything Frank might have had to reply was cut short by a hoarse echo of
the skippers hail, it came from the bow.
“All go—o—ne for’ard, sir.”
The officer in charge of casting off the bow lines waved his hand and a
quartermaster at the stern wigwagged to the tugs to go as far as they
liked.
“All go—o—ne aft,” suddenly came another roar from that quarter as the
tug’s screws began to churn up the water. The hawsers tightened and the
_Aztec_ began to glide slowly backward into the stream.
At that moment from far down the wharf, there came a loud hail.
“Stop the ship—twenty dollars if I make the ship.”
A loud yell of derision was the reply from several steerage passengers
clustered in the bow of the _Aztec_.
“Hold on, there,” suddenly roared the same vigilant old wharfinger who
had earlier in the day shown such a respect for discipline that he had
shooed the newsboy off the wharf, “hold on there.”
The boys heard coming up the wharf the staccato rattle of a taxicab
running at top speed.
The two sailors in charge of the gangplank were at that moment casting
it loose and lowering it to the wharf. They hesitated as they heard the
frantic cries of the old wharfinger.
“Let go, there. Do you want to carry something away,” yelled the second
officer, as he saw the gangplank under the impetus of the ship being
crushed against the stanchions of the wharf.
The taxicab dashed up abreast of the landward end of the imperilled
gangway. Out of it shot a man whom the boys, in the blue-white glare of
the arc-lights on the pier, noticed wore a short, black beard cropped
Van Dyke fashion, and whose form was enveloped in a heavy fur overcoat
with a deep astrachan collar.
“Five dollars a piece to you fellows if I make the ship,” he shouted to
the men holding the gangplank in place. Already the wood was beginning
to crumple as the moving ship jammed it against the edge of the
stanchion.
The stranger made a wild leap as he spoke, was up the runway in two
bounds, it seemed, and clutched the lower rail of the main deck bulwarks
just as the two men holding the crackling gangway up, dropped it in fear
of the wrath of their superior officer. The man in the fur coat dived
down in his pocket and fished out a yellow-backed ten-dollar bill.
“Divide it,” he said in a slightly foreign accent. Suddenly he whirled
round on his heel. The old wharfinger was bellowing from the wharf that
the man in the fur coat would have to wireless his address and his
baggage would be forwarded. There were several pieces of it on the taxi.
A steamer trunk, two suit-cases and a big Saratoga. These, however,
seemed to give the new addition to the _Aztec_ ship’s company no
concern.
“My bag. My black bag,” he fairly shrieked, running forward along the
deck to a spot opposite where the wharfinger and the taxi-cabby stood.
“My black bag. Throw me my black bag,” he repeated.
With trembling fingers he managed to get out a bill from his wallet. He
wrapped it round a magazine he carried with a rubber-band which had
confined his bill roll.
“This is yours,” he shouted, holding the bill-wrapped magazine high, so
that the taxi-cabby could see it. “Throw me the black bag.”
The taxi-cabby, like most of his kind, was not averse to making a tip.
He dived swiftly into his cab and emerged with a small black grip, not
much bigger than a lady’s satchel, bound at the corners with silver. It
was a time for quick action. By this time the sharp cutwater of the
_Aztec’s_ bow was at the end of the wharf. In another moment she cleared
it. The tide caught her and majestically she swung round into midstream,
while the tugs lugged her stern inshore.
The chauffeur poised himself on the stringpiece at the extreme outer end
of the wharf.
“Chuck me the money first,” he shouted at the gesticulating figure on
the _Aztec_, “I might miss your blooming boat.”
The magazine whizzed through the air and landed almost at his feet,
carrying with it the bill. The taxi-cabby, satisfied that all was
ship-shape, bent his back for a second like a baseball pitcher.
“I used to twirl ’em,” he said to the wharfinger, as with a supreme
effort, he impelled the black bag from his hand. There was a good thirty
feet of water between the end of the wharf and the _Aztec_ by this time,
but the taxi-cabby’s old time training availed him. It was a square
throw. The stranger with a strange guttural cry of relief caught his
precious black bag and tucked it hurriedly into the voluminous inner
pocket of his fur coat.
“He must have diamonds in it at least,” exclaimed Harry, with a laugh.
Both boys, with the rest of the passengers, had been watching the scene
with interest, as well they might. As for the man in the fur coat his
interested scrutiny was directed with an almost fierce intensity to the
pile of blue oblong cases on the fore deck, all neatly labeled in big
white letters:
HANDLE WITH CARE.
AIRSHIP “_GOLDEN EAGLE_.”
F. and H. CHESTER, GREYTOWN, NICARAGUA.
The man in the fur coat seemed fascinated by the boxes and the lettering
on them. From his expression, as a great bunch light placed on the
foredeck for the convenience of the men readjusting the hastily laden
cargo, fell upon him, one would have said he was startled. Had anyone
been near enough or interested enough they might also have seen his lips
move.
“Well, he wants to know our bag of tricks again when he sees them,”
remarked Harry, as the boys with a keen appetite, and no dread of sea
sickness to come, turned to obey the dinner-gong.
With frequent hoarse blasts of her strong-lunged siren the belated
_Aztec_ passed down the bay through the narrows and into the Ambrose
Channel. A short time after the cabin passengers had concluded their
dinner the pilot took his leave. From his dancing cockleshell of a dory
alongside he hoarsely shouted up to the bridge far above him:
“Good-bye, good luck.”
Then he was rowed off into the darkness to toss about till the steam
pilot-boat _New York_ should happen along and pick him up with her
searchlight.
“Good-bye, old New York!” cried both boys, seized with a common instinct
and a most unmanly catch at their throats at the same instant. From the
chart house above them eight bells rang out. Already the _Aztec_ was
beginning to lift with the long Atlantic swell. The Boy Aviators’ voyage
toward the unknown had begun.