“You have guessed just right, my boy,” rejoined the other, with a hearty laugh at Frank’s taking his thoughts and putting them into such exact words, “but your youth has evidently not interfered with your progress if all the reports I have heard of you are true. Sit down,” he went on, “and we will talk over the proposal the Department has to make to you.”
The boys set down their straw hats and seated themselves in two chairs facing the grizzled official. Both listened attentively as he began.
“When Admiral Kimball wrote to me about you, telling me that he had found in the two sons of Planter Chester of Nicaragua the very agents we wanted for a particularly dangerous and difficult mission,” he said, “I at once sent for you to come here from New York to see for myself if his judgment was correct. I have not been disappointed—”
The boys colored with pleasure.
“My brief observation of you has confirmed to my mind his report and I am going to entrust to you the responsibility of this undertaking. Now,” he went on impressively, “the government has been experimenting for some time in secret with Chapinite, a new explosive of terrific power, the invention—as its name makes apparent—of Lieut. Bob Chapin of the United States Navy. I say ‘has been experimenting’ advisedly. It is so no more.
“The formula of the explosive has disappeared from the archives of the department and, what is still more serious, Lieutenant Chapin himself is missing.”
“The agents of the Secret Service force have worked in vain on the case without discovering much more than the one very important fact that the government of a far Eastern power has recently been experimenting with an explosive whose effects and manifestations make it almost undoubted that the stuff is Chapinite. By a tedious process of observation and deduction the men have traced the shipments as far as the west Florida coast but there all clues have ended. Weeks of work have left us as much in the dark as ever as to the location of the source of supply of the far Eastern power. But that somewhere within the untracked wildernesses of the Everglades a plant has been set up in which Chapinite is being manufactured in large quantities is a practical certainty to my mind.
“It is useless for the secret service men to attempt to explore what is still an unmapped labyrinth of swamp and jungle and above all it would occupy time. What we have to do is to act quickly. I racked my brain for days until I happened to come across a paragraph in a newspaper calling attention to your wonderful flights in the Golden Eagle, and then followed Admiral Kimball’s dispatch. It struck me at once that here indeed was a way of locating these men that might prove feasible—I say ‘might’ because if you boys accept the commission I do not want to absolutely impose the condition of success upon you. All that we shall expect of you is that you will do your best.
“Will you accept the assignment?”
The blunt question almost took the boys off their feet so to speak. They exchanged glances and then Frank said: