“Hey, look!” Ken said, around a mouthful. “Photos by Allen—two of them! And on the front page.”
With an unconvincing air of boredom Sandy bent over to see the pictures. One was a highly foreshortened view of Barrack, Grace, and Cal seated around the paper-littered table in the back room of the Tobacco Mart. The other was a dramatic shot—also made from above—of the stone-laden barge, her port gunwale already under water, slipping sideways beneath the waves.
“Not bad,” Sandy muttered. “That camera sure is great. Sorry there wasn’t better light for the table shot, though.”
Ken grunted. “And I suppose you wish the helicopter had taken a nose dive into the sea, so you could have caught a better angle on the barge.” He shook his head. “Nobody but you would even have thought of a camera two seconds after being rescued from a briny grave.”
“Listen to who’s talking!” Sandy said indignantly. “We weren’t in that windmill a minute before Ken was telling you to radio to New York to have the T-men close in on the Tobacco Mart.” He broke off, grinning. “Now there’s a nice by-line. ‘By Richard and Ken Holt.’”
“Oh. I hadn’t even noticed it.” Ken glanced rapidly at the story and then looked up at his father. “You shouldn’t have let them put my name on it, Dad. You wrote it, and put in all that stuff about the foreign angle. I didn’t contribute anything but a couple of guesses.”
“And the trail that led the Treasury men to a mighty slick counterfeiting ring,” his father pointed out. “Besides, your guesses were all pretty accurate. You were right about everything. The plates were sold to Grace and his gang by a European outfit for whom things were getting a little too hot—the same outfit I was talking about that day in the Advance office. They were palmed off on me, in the iron box, so they’d be brought through customs by a trustworthy character.”
Richard Holt grinned. “And then,” he went on, “a carefully prepared duplicate was substituted for the box I’d brought. Grace has admitted he finally managed the exchange—after two false tries, here and in Brentwood—at Sam Morris’s store. Despite the fact,” he added, “that his little arson trick was almost a fiasco.”
Ken’s father watched the boys eating for a moment. “You were also right,” he went on, “about the Tobacco Mart being the distribution center, under Grace’s direction. Barrack supplied paper and ink, through his printing connections. And Cal was the printer, working on the barge, just as you suspected. In fact, it was a well-planned operation—until you two happened along.”
Ken took one more glance at the by-line over the front-page story headlined: TREASURY AGENTS NAB COUNTERFEITERS. It gave him a good feeling to see his own name and the name of his famous father written together that way.