"Don't think they'd object, do you?" suggested Gibb.
"Of course not," Billy answered. "Let's walk right up the main road."
But they were forced by circumstances to abandon this straightforward, fair, and aboveboard way of doing things. They had hardly turned the bend in the road at the bottom of the hill when there, in front of them, stretched a heavy barbed-wire fence, with the strands so close together that no one could possibly get through it or under it. Even climbing looked risky, and on the top of a post was the following legend, in very black letters:
"Trespassing Forbidden. Beware! No one Allowed on this Property on any Pretence Whatever. No Admittance."
"That kind of stops us," observed Billy to Gibb. "Say! what do you suppose is going on in there, anyhow?"
"Counterfeiters!" exclaimed Gibb; "that's what they are. I've read about them hiring lonely houses."
"It may be," returned his cousin. "But I've got an idea."
Now Billy Schreiber was the smartest boy in the Northport, Eastport, Westport, and Centreport schools. He read all the newspapers that he could lay his hands on, and, moreover, had the good fortune, of course, to be the son of his father—who had asked so many questions in his life that he could not help having imbibed a vast store of knowledge—and Billy had inherited some of his father's traits.
"Yes, I've got an idea," he repeated. "They're fitting out a Cuban expedition."
Why they should be fitting out a Cuban expedition twenty miles from the coast it might be hard to tell, but it sounded nice and adventurous. It was full of possibilities, and the idea struck Gibb at once as being almost worthy of "Old Sleuth, the Guessing Detective," of whose wondrous discernment he had read in a dime novel.