The result of that hurried and exceedingly confidential interview was that, as the boys and Mr. Rawlins were crossing the Manhattan Bridge in Mr. Pauling’s car, they looked down and saw a lean, gray destroyer sweeping down the river with two others in her wake, black smoke pouring from their funnels, great mounds of foam about their bows and screeching an almost incessant warning from their sirens as they sped seawards bearing orders to overhaul and capture a Bahama schooner
that, under a cloud of canvas, was plunging southward on the farther edge of the Gulf Stream, her mulatto skipper driving his craft to her utmost, while aloft two monkeylike negro seamen were busily stretching a pair of slender wires between the straining lofty topmasts.
Two days later, a black-hulled liner steamed out from New York’s harbor and dropping her pilot also headed southward for the Bahamas. Upon her decks stood Tom and Frank with Mr. Pauling and Mr. Henderson by their sides, while in the Navy Yard, with a marine guard tramping ceaselessly back and forth about her, a submarine was being feverishly fitted for a long cruise.
After much discussion, Mr. Pauling had at last given consent to the boys joining in the search for the mysterious master mind whose plans had so far come to grief through their efforts, although he refused to consider letting them go south on the captured submarine. But the boys had no objections to this, for they did not look forward with any pleasure to an ocean voyage in the sub-sea boat and were filled with excitement at the thoughts of
the adventures in store for them when they joined Rawlins, and the submarine at a prearranged meeting place in the Bahamas.
As they watched the skyline of New York fade into the mists of the summer afternoon and the smooth gray-green sea stretched before them beyond the Narrows, they were thinking of the adventures which had so strangely fallen to their lot in the great city and Tom chuckled.
“Remember when we first called ourselves radio detectives?” he asked Frank, “Gosh! we never thought we’d even strike anything the way we did.”
“You bet I do!” rejoined Frank. “Say, wasn’t Henry sore because he couldn’t go and wasn’t he crazy to find out what we were going for? It’s great! And we’re real radio detectives now—working for Uncle Sam, too!”
“Rather, I should say, ‘radio secret service,’” said Mr. Henderson who stood beside them. “But don’t talk about it. Remember the first thing for a person in this service to learn is to hear everything, see everything and say nothing.”
“We will!” declared the boys in unison.