"Then I must be a mark, also," grumbled the Captain.
"Exactly. How do you like it?"
"Oh, it isn't so bad!" smiled the other, won into better humor by the laughing face of the boy. "But why should the Secret Service department put you in such peril?"
"It is my notion," Ned hastened to say, in defense of his superior officers, "that they give me credit for sense enough to take care of myself. The same with regard to you."
"But why—"
"It seems to me," Ned interrupted, "that the department is up against a tough proposition. The matter is so delicate that no foreign government can be accused of mixing this conspiracy for Uncle Sam. What remains to do, then, is to spot the tools being used by the power that is most active."
"That's good sense."
"Well, we can't spot them in Washington, nor in Tientsin, nor yet in the American embassy at Peking. Where, then, but on the road—on the road where they are striving with all their might to block the progress of the agent who is trying to land them?"
Captain Martin mused a moment and then broke into a laugh.
"And so," he said, "you think we are spread out along this road for the conspirators to grab off?"