THE BOY AVIATORS ON SECRET SERVICE

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?”