“Well, here we are at the hotel, anyway,” laughed Dick, “so you’ll soon have the chance to find out.”
After a little more conversation they parted and went to their rooms.
The last thing Bert heard as he dropped off to sleep was the strident cry of a newsboy. “Wuxtra! Wuxtra! All about Wilson winning the transcontinental race. Wuxtra! Wuxtra!”
[CHAPTER XVII]
The Wonderful City
“And now for the Exposition,” cried Bert, as after a solid sleep and an equally solid breakfast they reached their rooms and looked out over the city glittering in the morning sun.
“For your Exposition,” corrected Tom. “Yes,” he went on, as he noted Bert’s look of surprise, “that’s exactly what I mean. For if it hadn’t been for you, when you discovered the plot to blow up the Panama Canal, there would have been no Exposition at all, or, at any rate, a very different one from this. The bands would have been playing the ‘Dead March in Saul,’ instead of ‘Hail Columbia’ and the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’”
Nor was Tom far from the truth. Before the minds of the boys came up that night in Panama, when Bert, crouching low beneath the window of the Japanese conspirators, had overheard the plot to destroy the great Canal. They saw again the struggle in the library; the fight for life in the sinking boat in the Caribbean Sea; the rescue by the submarine and the cutting of the wires that led to the mined gate of the Gatun Locks. Had it not been for Bert’s quick wit and audacity, the carefully-planned plot of the Japanese Government to keep the larger part of the American fleet on the Atlantic side, while they themselves made a dash for the Pacific slope, might easily have succeeded, and, at the very moment the boys were speaking, the whole country west of the Rocky Mountains might have been fast in the grip of the Japanese armies. But the discovery of the plot had been its undoing. The matter had been hushed up for official reasons, and only a very few knew how nearly the two nations had been locked in a life and death struggle for the control of the Western ocean.