“If I would care to come?” gasped Billy, “Jimminy crickets! If I’d care to come! Say, just wait a minute while I go to ’phone my resignation.”
“What an impetuous chap you are,” laughed Frank, “we don’t start for three weeks yet and here you are in a hurry to throw up your job to-day.”
“Well,” replied Billy somewhat abashed, “I was a bit previous. But it’s so white of you chaps to take me along that I hardly know what I’m doing. How I’m to wait three weeks I don’t know.”
“How would you like to help us build the Golden Eagle II?” asked Frank suddenly.
“Say, Frank,” burst out Billy earnestly, “you are a trump. That was just the very thing I longed to do but I didn’t have the nerve to ask you after you were so decent about taking me with you to Florida. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“It won’t be all a picnic,” laughed Frank. “We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of us and we’ll all have to pitch in and take a hand, share and share alike.”
“You can count on me,” exclaimed the reporter eagerly.
“I know we can,” replied Frank, “or we would not have asked you to accompany us.”
“What are your plans?” asked Billy eagerly.
“At present so far as I have thought them out,” replied Frank, “we shall sail from New York for Miami about the middle of June. I think it will be best to go by steamer as we can keep a better watch on any suspicious fellow passengers in that way than if we went by train. The key on which the Mist was wrecked is on the opposite coast from there, I understand, and the men who kidnapped Chapin and stole the plans must have entered the Everglades by one of the numerous small rivers that lead back from the coast at the Ten Thousand Island Archipelago.