The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; Or, Working with Wireless

“A general alarm?” repeated Lathrop, puzzled.

“Yes, that’s reporter’s slang for advertising for a missing man. Well, we can’t advertise here unless the herons and mocassins get out a gazette, but we can take the canoes to-morrow and make a thorough circuit of the island.”

Greatly comforted by Billy’s assumed light-heartedness, Lathrop tramped back to camp by his side in a more cheerful frame of mind. As a matter of fact, Billy was feeling what he himself would have described as “pretty blue,” but he was sensible enough to know that the best way to face the emergencies of life is to look at them from the best possible aspect and not give up hope till every way out of difficulty has been tried.

In the meantime what had happened was this, and it was sufficiently alarming. Ben, after he parted from Billy, had followed a fascinating “Ke-ouk ke-ouk” through the brush till he found himself near the margin of the creek that flowed round the island. He had reached the brink and was looking inquiringly about him to ascertain what might have become of the big gobbler when he felt a rope thrown over his head from behind, and the next minute the big ex-sailor, great as was his strength, was struggling in the arms of a dozen men. Who his captors were he was unable to see, for as the rope had tightened, his great arms were pinioned close to his side, forcing at the same time his gun from his grip, and a thick blanket had been thrown over his head. Blinded and half suffocated, Ben felt himself picked up and hustled through the wood. He tried to shout but the blanket effectually muffled his voice.

After a few minutes of this rapid traveling Ben felt himself thrown into what he instinctively realized was a canoe and then being paddled rapidly over the water. In what direction they were proceeding he had of course no means of knowing, but from the few words his captors had exchanged he knew he was in the hands of the Seminoles. Of the object of his abduction he could not even hazard a guess.

After about an hour of traveling Ben, through his smothering blanket, heard the loud barking of dogs and crying of children, and knew that they must be near a settlement of some kind. He was not left in doubt. The canoe’s keel grated on the beach the next minute and he was dragged out and propelled toward the center of the sound. He felt dogs come sniffing about his legs and kicked out viciously. He grinned under his blanket as he heard one limp away with ear-piercing howls.

“There’s one trouble disposed of,” thought Ben to himself, “what’s coming now. I wonder?”

He was not kept long in suspense. He was suddenly halted and the cloth jerked off his head. His wrists, however, were not unbound. It was now dark, and in the sudden glare of firelight that confronted him, Ben’s eyes refused their duty for a minute or so. As he grew accustomed to the light, however, and looked about him he saw that he stood in the center of a ring of palmetto-thatched huts which were crowded with women and children, all heavily laden with beads – in fact these were about all the clothing the children wore – while all about him were grouped grave-faced men with bright-colored turbans on their heads, one of whom he at once recognized as the chief who had visited them with Quatty the previous afternoon and promised them freedom from annoyance while they were in the limits of the ’glades.

“This is a dern fine way you keep your promises,” roared the captive Ben indignantly, while the women snickered and the men regarded him with stolid curiosity, “you cigar-store Injuns you, if I had my hands free I’d hammer you into lobscouse. I’d show you the kind of a buck sailorman I am. I thought you promised us you wouldn’t disturb us and here you clap my head in a mainsail and furl me in it till I can’t use my deadlights to see day from night. Keelhaul you, if I had you aboard a ship I’d masthead the lot of you till you fell overboard.”

There was not a word in reply and the chief stood with folded arms, as immobile as if Ben had not spoken a word.

“Oh, you’re all going to play deaf, are you,” bellowed the enraged ex-sailorman, “well, it won’t go down with me, my hearties. I know you can hear, – oh, if only I had my hands free I’d put some life into you – you – you row of tenpins.”

Here Ben stopped, because he was completely out of breath with his volcanic outburst. While he was getting ready for a fresh eruption, to his surprise one of the younger men stepped forward from the solemn circle and in excellent English, considering the place and by whom it was spoken, said:

“You all through big talk, white man?”

“All through,” sputtered the amazed Ben, “yes, I’m through, that is for the present. And now, as you seem to be the only one of this collection of dummies that has any glimmering of sense, will you please tell me why I am fetched here like a ship’s cat going aboard a strange craft, all tied up in a bag?”

“No savee – ship’s cat,” replied the Seminole quietly; “plentee – savee, white man tell heap lie – all time.”

“Calling me a liar, now are you, you mahogany-colored lobster,” yelled Ben, “I’d like to get one good punch at you, my matey.”

“All white men liars,” blandly went on the Indian, “steal our land – all time break word to us – um no good.”

“Well?” demanded Ben.

“Well,” went on the spokesman of the tribe, “you stay here lilly while – we no hurt you. When you fren’s go then you go, too. They no hurt us we no hurt you.”

“Oh, is that so?” replied Ben, “werry good of you, I’m sure.”

“You eat plenty sofkee – plenty fowl – plenty tobac. Good time plenty, how?”

Now Ben had been in tight places in his adventurous career and he was by no means disposed to offend the Seminoles by seeming over anxious to get away, at least for the present, for he knew that if he did so any chance that his wrist gyves would be removed would be lost, so he acquiesced gracefully to all the Indian had said.

“All right, old odds-and-ends,” he said, “I’ll act as hostage as long as you feed me well and give me plenty to smoke. Now, take off these.”

As soon as his reply had been translated to the chief, and that dignitary had agreed, the ropes that bound Ben’s wrists were cut and he was at comparative liberty.

“Sofkee?” questioned the young Indian who had conducted the negotiations, indicating a huge pot simmering on the fire. And then for the first time Ben tasted that delectable standby dish of the Seminoles, which is composed of birds, rabbits, turtles, fish, corn, potatoes, sweet and white, peppers, beans and anything else that comes to hand. There is a big kettle of it kept handy in every Seminole village and anyone who happens along is at liberty to help himself. There is only one drawback to the dish from fastidious folks’ point of view, and that is that every one helps him or herself from the same big wooden spoon. But Ben was not fastidious and he made a hearty meal of the savory compound, and then after a pipe or two of tobacco, appeared to compose himself to sleep on a pile of skins laid on the floor of the palmetto-thatched hut assigned to him.

He simulated slumber till midnight when, as no one appeared to be watching, he rose and tiptoed out of the camp and down to the water’s edge where the canoes were moored. He was about to launch one when a tall figure stepped out of the gloom of the trees and pointed a rifle straight at him.

“Huh – white man go back – or Injun shoot,” said the figure.

Ben, as has been said, was a wise man – he went back.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BOY AVIATORS TRAPPED

The trail on which Frank and Harry found themselves wound irregularly through dense groves of wild fig, orange, custard apple and palmetto trees, through which from time to time they could catch glimpses of the dark, monotonous brown sea of the Everglades stretching away into the remote distance. They plodded along it not speaking a word, through undergrowth that at times brushed their arms, crackling in an annoying fashion to anyone who wanted his advance to be unheralded. The growth was as dry as tinder and Frank could not help thinking to himself that a fire once started among it would rage through the forest as if it had been soaked with kerosene.

Suddenly, and without a moment’s warning, Frank tripped and fell flat on his face, his rifle shooting out of his hands and falling with a loud crash on the hard-baked ground. This was bad enough in itself but there was a worse shock in store for the boys.

A moment’s glance sufficed to show them that a wire had been stretched across the trail at this point and that, as Frank’s foot struck it and he tripped, a loud, clanging alarm-bell began to sound and by the loudness of its uproarious clangor, it could not be more than a few paces from where they then were.

“Quick, Harry! Run for your life!” said Frank, in a low, tense voice, scrambling to his feet.

“We have struck an alarm wire and in a minute we shall have a dozen men on our track.”

Stumbling along the rough path the boys began to make the best speed they could over its uneven surface. But the tough journey they had made through the muddy trail among the saw-grass, and the fact that they had not eaten for some hours and were feeling somewhat faint, made a fast speed impossible.

They had not gone more than a few hundred yards when Harry gave a gasp and pressed his hand to his side.

“What is it, Harry?” asked Frank, through his parched lips.

“Keep on, Frank,” gasped the younger boy, “you can make it if you hurry. I’m tuckered out.”

“Come, make an effort, you’ve got to,” said Frank sternly, realizing that now was no time to sympathize with his younger brother, although he hated to use the sharp tone he thought it expedient to assume.

The younger boy rose to his feet. Pluckily he staggered on a few steps but sank to the ground again, overcome with the pain of the sharp “stitch” in his side.

“Go on, Frank,” he whispered in a faint voice, “you go on. I’ll get through somehow,” he added bravely, with a pitiful effort at a confident smile.

“As if I’d leave you,” said Frank, indignantly, “can’t you run another foot, old boy?”

“No, I really can’t, Frank,” gasped Harry, “I couldn’t move if I was to be killed the next minute.”

“Then I’ll have to carry you,” decided Frank, “I’ve done it when you were a little fellow, and I guess I can manage it now. Put your arms round my neck – so. Now then.”

With his added burden Frank struggled gamely on, though every step was telling heavily on him.

If they could only reach the little glade of cabbage palms, there was a pile of rocks there, he recollected, behind which they could hide. Speed meant everything, and pressing his lips together determinedly, Frank swore to himself that he would make the rocks or die.

And somehow by a supreme effort of will, he made them. Though how he managed that last sickening effort of half dragging and half carrying his inanimate burden across the little grove he never recollected.

But he made it and, having scrambled up the rough crevices in the pile of stone in which he hoped to find a safe asylum, he dragged his half-fainting brother into position beside him.

And now he could hear far back in the brush loud shouts and orders coming thick and fast. What a fool he had been not to realize that men engaged on such a hazardous enterprise as were the bogus manufacturers of Chapinite would have more cunning than to leave their retreat unguarded by alarm appliances. If only he had watched the trail more carefully.

But it was too late for vain regrets now; they would have to trust to luck to avoid detection for, judging by the noise and the number of different voices, the search for the invaders was to be a hot one. The young leader tried grittily to choke back the great, panting gasps in which his breath came after his exertions. But he might as well have attempted to stop a cataract, as to check his sobbing respiration. To him his deep breaths sounded as loud as the reports of minute guns.

And now a fresh peril made itself manifest. A deep baying sound arose far up the trail, which Frank recognized, with a violent throb of the heart, as the sound of bloodhounds, giving tongue on the scent. Their discovery was inevitable.

“Can you handle your revolver, Harry?” he asked of his younger brother, who was now somewhat recovered, thanks to the shade and the rest he had had.

“Yes, Frank,” whispered Harry, hoarsely, and then the next minute, noticing Frank’s troubled face, as the baying grew louder and nearer, “you needn’t tell me, old fellow, what that means – it’s bloodhounds.”

Frank nodded gravely.

“I’m afraid our chances of seeing the Golden Eagle II and our comrades are about nil,” he said.

The other boy did not reply. He was listening to the sounds of the dogs baying and the savage human shouts that grew momentarily nearer.

“Don’t use the revolvers unless you have to,” whispered Frank, whose wind was now returning, – “but the first dog that comes over the top of the rock – knife him.”

Harry nodded and drew his heavy hunting-knife from its case. Frank did the same.

“Now we are ready for all comers,” said Harry, with a wan smile, gripping the horn handle of his blade with a determined grip.

They had not long to wait. From their nest in the rocks they saw the first dog, a huge, bristly-haired Cuban bloodhound, with heavy hackles and blood-shot eyes, come bounding into the clearing, sniffing the ground and from time to time throwing his head into the air with a loud ringing bay that chilled the blood.

The animal was followed by half a dozen others of his own breed. Without a moment’s hesitation they made straight across the glade and for the rocks. The first one scrambled up with difficulty, and as his dripping fangs showed over the top of the rampart of rock, Frank’s arm shot out and he fell back with a choking growl – dead.

The next of the savage beasts fell before Harry’s knife, a great gaping wound in its throat; but after that the boys were no match for the four huge beasts that fell on them at once. Frank felt the teeth of one brute grip him through his stout khaki clothes while he had his hands on the throat of another, choking its life out. Harry had plunged his knife into another and was turning desperately on its mate when there was a sudden interruption of the impending tragedy.

A sharp, clear whistle rang through the clearing and the survivors of the brutes that had attacked the boys limped dispiritedly away from them and shuffled in the direction from which the summons had proceeded. From their eyrie in the rocks the boys saw two dozen or more small yellow men, in white duck jackets and trousers, with yellow straw slippers on their feet, rush into the glen followed by a tall man in a sort of undress naval uniform. He it was who had given the whistle. He gave an evil laugh as he saw the wounded, exhausted animals come shuffling toward him, their tails between their legs.

“They are in the rocks yonder, boys. Surround them!” he ordered in a sharp, harsh voice. “They shall pay dearly for each of my beauties they have killed.”

One of the little brown men, who wore a red band about his arm and seemed to be a leader among them, shouted some sharp orders to his fellow countrymen and they spread about the rocks in a circle. The first impulse of the boys had been to run for it but they realized, even as the thought entered their minds, that it would be useless in their exhausted condition to try to make their escape. Each of their opponents was armed and while they also carried weapons, still they could only have stood off an attack for a few minutes.

With a shout the little brown men rushed at the Boy Aviators as they stood side by side, but they hesitated and fell back as Frank and his brother aimed their revolvers.

“I do not want to take human life,” cried Frank, “but the first one of you that lays a hand on us I’ll shoot him.”

“Very fine talk,” sneered the big white man, striding up, “but there are twelve of us here.”

“Yes,” replied Frank, undaunted, and tapping the magazine of his revolver, “and there are twice twelve here and they all come out at once.”

The big man paused a minute and bit his lip. For a minute he seemed about to give orders to his followers to fire on the boys and shoot them down where they stood. He evidently thought better of his intention later, however, for he said, with a change of voice from his original harsh, rasping tone.

“There are several things I want to talk to you about, Frank Chester – you see I know you and your brother Harry – will you give up your weapons and agree to accompany me to my camp if on my part I give my word not to harm you?”

Frank realized in that instant that the man who faced him was Captain Mortimer Bellman, the renegade American officer, and he also weighed and recognized the value of a pledge from such a man; but they were in position where there was nothing to be gained by fighting and in which much benefit might accrue to them from temporizing – so:

“Yes,” he said, “we will go with you.”

CHAPTER XXIV

A STARTLING MEETING

The legion of little brown men at once fell in round the two boys, whose clean cut young figures towered above their squat forms, and after they had surrendered their weapons – not without a momentary qualm of regret on Frank’s part – the march to the camp began.

Bellman said little as they made their way along the trail, but strode along with his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep thought. He was a huge man, with a singularly brutal face bronzed by the suns of a dozen countries over which he had been a wanderer, and a heavy drooping mustache which hid a cruel mouth. His eyes were steely gray and as keen as a hawk’s. Such was the man into whose power the Boy Aviators had fallen and even they did not realize the extent to which such a man will go to gain an end – and that he had an end in view his action in sparing their lives fully convinced them.

At last they emerged – after passing once more over the luckless wire – on the settlement under the hill that Frank had noted the night before from the boat. There was every evidence of abandonment about it, however, even now, although it had been so recently the scene of activity.

“If you had come to-morrow I should not have had the pleasure of receiving you,” said Bellman, with a sardonic grin, waving his hand to indicate the preparations for the abandonment of the settlement.

The blast furnace had been almost completely demolished and a gang of men, compatriots of the small brown men who formed the boys’ escort, were busily engaged in completing the work of destruction with crowbars and picks. Several of the small houses which Frank had seen from the boat had also vanished and the rest were portable contrivances. They were being rapidly taken to pieces and carried up the hill into the woods, where doubtless they were to be destroyed, for the smoke of a big fire was beginning to rise from there.

In the side of the hill back of the blast furnace, a great ragged hole had been torn like a small quarry, and a runway from this to the shattered blast-furnace indicated that some earth found in the hillside was reduced in the crucible to a condition in which it formed an ingredient of Chapinite. The large building was evidently a sort of bunk-house for the workmen and packing-house for the product that Captain Bellman and his men had been making there, for from its wide door a perpetual stream of dwarfed brown men were carrying packing cases carefully wrapped in straw to a small fleet of canoes that lay moored alongside a primitive wharf.

All these things the boys’ eyes took in as they were led across the bare earth to the barrack-like building; but of the man to search for whom they had come to the Everglades they could see no sign.

Bellman’s first care was for his wounded dogs, after which he ordered his men to bring the boys into a long, low ceiled room, apparently from its heat right under the roof of the bunk-house. Straw mats laid all along the walls also indicated that it was used as a sleeping attic by the Orientals employed on the island.

There was a small table in the room with a rickety chair by it, and Bellman took up a seat at it.

“We need not occupy much time,” were his first words, as the boys stood facing him, surrounded by their impassive-faced guards. “I and my men are leaving the Everglades forever to-night. We wish to be secure against anybody following us. Where is this air-ship of yours and where are the canoes in which you brought it here?”

“Why do you wish to know?” demanded Frank.

“I naturally wish to make myself secure from pursuit by destroying them,” was the cool reply, “if you don’t wish to tell me I shall find them.”

Frank knew that this last was an empty boast as to search the Everglades for their canoes or for their air-ship either would be a work occupying much more time than Bellman could afford to spare.

“Under no circumstances will I give you any such information,” said Frank.

“I admire your pluck but deplore your lack of common sense,” rejoined Bellman with a sneer.

“We don’t care any more for your admiration than we do for your sympathy,” replied Frank, proudly.

Bellman’s dark face flushed angrily.

“This is the way you treat my intended kindness,” he thundered, striking the table with his clenched fist till its crazy legs wobbled under it.

“Well, I shall try another method. If you had answered me I would have sent some Seminoles here to pick you up, once I was safe at sea, but as it is now I shall leave you here to rot.”

Little as Frank believed Bellman’s tentative promise that he would send relief to them if they afforded him the opportunity to raid their camp and destroy their canoes and the Golden Eagle II, yet both boys realized not without dismay that there was a good deal of deadly earnest in the last words he had spoken.

“Leave them there to rot.”

Involuntarily both boys shuddered.

Bellman’s malevolent eye saw this and interpreted it at once as a sign of weakening.

“Ah,” he said viciously, “I touched you there, eh?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Frank, “but if you intend to convey that we are afraid of you, we are not.”

“Or of any cad that has been kicked out of the United States’ Navy, and has turned against his country,” added Harry.

“You young whelp,” shouted Bellman, beside himself at the sneer, “you have tried to checkmate me at every turn, but you’ll find out I am more than your match.”

“You come here to find Lieutenant Chapin, the dog who was instrumental in my disgrace. Well, I’ll introduce you to him.”

He gave a sharp order in the same tongue his followers used and the next minute the boys were seized. With a good, left-hand punch to the jaw Frank knocked one of the amazed little brown men half across the room and the next minute Harry had served another the same way. But it was no good. The opposing force was too many for them and ignominiously handcuffed they were at length led down several steep flights of stairs into what they knew, by its musty smell, must be an underground chamber.

The darkness of the place was made visible, so to speak, by a smoky oil-torch, like those used in the stoke-hold of a steamer, that hung in one corner. It was miserably damp and several subterranean streams fed by the mountain above trickled across the floor. In one corner the boys noticed, as their eyes grew accustomed to the light, was a curious contrivance formed of two long bars of heavy wood with holes pierced in them at regular intervals.

Two heavy posts stood at each end of this contrivance, to which were attached heavy padlocks and hasps. With a quick thrill of horror the boys realized that they faced that instrument of confinement of blue-law days – the stocks.

After another sharp order from Bellman their captors carried them to the appliance and raising the heavy upper block of wood thrust the boys’ legs into the semicircular openings cut in the lower section for that purpose. Similar holes were cut in the upper bar and when it was lowered and padlocked down the unfortunate person confined there could in no way release himself till somebody unlocked the padlocks.

“Now,” said Bellman, when this work was completed to his satisfaction, and the boys were securely fastened in their prison, “I am going to introduce you to the man you have been looking for. Serang,” he ordered, turning to the little brown man with the red stripe on his arm, “Sahib Chapin bring.”