From the road the barn had appeared quite close; but when they reached the top of the bank they found that, actually, it stood back quite a little distance beyond a strip of grass and weeds. The boys waded through these almost knee-deep, and finally reached the side of the old barn. They set down their buckets and brushes and unrolled some bills preparatory to pasting them up.
Suddenly Merritt raised a warning finger. Rob instantly divined that his chum enjoined silence.
“Hark!” was the word that Merritt’s lips framed rather than spoke.
Inside the barn some one was talking,—several persons seemingly. After a minute the boys could distinguish words above the low hum of the speakers’ voices. Suddenly they caught a name: “Mainwaring.”
“I guess maybe we might be interested in this,” whispered Rob.
By a common impulse the two Boy Scouts moved closer to the moldering wall of the old barn.
CHAPTER V.
A BIG SURPRISE.
Time and weather had warped the boards of the structure till fair-sized cracks gaped here and there. The boys made for one of these, with the object of peering into the place and getting a glance at its occupants. At first they had thought that these were nothing more than a gang of tramps, but the name of the engineer, spoken with a foreign accent, had aroused them to a sense that, whoever was in the old barn, a subject was being discussed that might be of interest to their new friends.
Applying their eyes to two cracks in the timbers, they saw that within the barn four persons were seated. One of these they recognized almost instantly as Jared Applegate. By his side sat a youth of about his own age, flashily dressed, with a general air of cheap smartness about him. The other two occupants of the place were of a different type. One was heavily built and dark in complexion, almost a light coffee color, in fact. His swarthy face was clean shaven and heavily jowled. Seated next to him on an old hay press was a man as dark as he, but more slender and dapper in appearance. Also he was younger, not more than thirty, while his companion was probably in the neighborhood of fifty, although as powerful and vigorous, so far as the boys could judge, as a man of half his years.
“You say that you have duplicates of Mainwaring’s plans, showing exactly the weakest points of the great dam?” the elder man was asking, just as the boys assumed positions of listening.