“Huh! looks like a fine sight for sore eyes,” Perk declared with glee, “to see our boat standin’ there safe an’ sound tho’ I’m sure sorry Mister Fitzgibbons—I mean Gibbons, had to lose his crate—no fault o’ ourn I’ll tell the world, Jack.”
“To be sure we could hardly be blamed for what happened,” returned the other with a deep meaning in his voice and manner that caused Perk to start and then blurt out:
“By jinks! partner, does it look to you like some crazy snooper set fire to the hangar under the belief that our ship was locked in there?”
“Between you and me and the lamp-post, buddy, that just struck me as possible, though I’ve no proof to back me up in saying it.”
“Another o’ them slick hunches o’ yourn, eh partner?” Perk hastened to say and then, scratching his chin in a way he had when seriously considering some debatable proposition that puzzled him very much, he added: “can’t for the love o’ mike guess how anybody could learn jest who an’ what we might be but it’s a risky line we’re engaged in, buddy, an’ some o’ these here smart crooks have accomplices they say even in the service o’ Uncle Sam. It’s possible a whisper leaked out an’ havin’ some fish to fry, word was sent to some o’ the big gang out here at Salt Lake City to do for us, or wipe our ship off the face o’ the earth instanter. Gee whiz! but that sure does make things look mixed-up for us, ol’ hoss.”
“For one thing,” said Jack, firmly, “after this I never mean to leave our boat in a strange hangar without hiring a guard to watch over it every hour of every night, no matter what the cost to Uncle Sam. I reckon they keep some insurance on these crates, but it would be what time and instruments and charts we lost that would knock us the hardest.”
“But how could anybody know what sorter job we’re goin’ to wrestle with next, even ’fore we got a glimmer o’ it ourselves?” querulously demanded the bewildered Perk, up in the air again apparently for there seemed to be a vast number of things of which he was densely ignorant.
Jack laughed and shook his head.
“Some fine day perhaps we’ll get on the inside track of these strange doings, brother but right now I’m just as much in the dark as you. All I know is that for some little time rumors have been going around at and close to Headquarters but so far as I understand the matter up to lately, the mysterious party responsible for such give-aways hasn’t been located. So it’s within the bounds of reason for me to suspect we’ve fallen under the ban and have had some sort of secret enemy set on our track.”
“Huh!” snorted Perk indignantly, “kinder like that Oswald Kearns employed one o’ his critters to do us a bad turn—you know, that big rum-runner we nailed down in Florida not so very long back an’ whose trial hasn’t come along so far, we’ve heard.”