Silently, as some craft propelled by spirits, they glided along between the high walls of saw-grass that grew up on each side of the stream they were navigating. Quatty stood in the stern manipulating the pole with the skill of a very Seminole, and sending the light craft through the water at a surprising rate of speed. His elevated position gave him a chance to peer over the tops of the lower clumps of saw-grass and judge—by their glitter under the starlight—which leads were the best to follow.
It was pitchy dark, with the exception of the dim starlight, and to the boys it seemed that they were passing through an endless tunnel. They threaded in and out of creeks till it seemed that they must be progressing in a circle. But Quatty, whatever his other faults might be, knew the Everglades as a city dweller knows his own streets, and by the darker landmarks of various hammocks and islets he steered the craft as unerringly as a cab-driver who wishes to drive in a certain direction.
Occasionally as they brushed against a sunken log, or shoal of rank-smelling mud, there would be a heavy flop in the water or a rustling sound in the dry grass.
“Whatever is that, Quatty?” asked Harry after the sound had been several times repeated.
“Moccasins. Dey bite you, you die plenty quick,” responded Quatty.
Harry, who had been trailing his hand in the water, quickly drew it in, not without a shudder. He had seen cotton-mouth moccasins before and had a lively recollection of the fat, dirty colored reptiles and their deadly fangs.
Once, as they were crossing quite a broad sheet of water that suddenly opened out about them, something bumped up under the boat with such violence that Quatty was almost upset from his position astern.
“Good gracious, was that an earthquake?” exclaimed Harry much alarmed.
“’Gator,” grunted Quatty, “ah’d jes like to stop an’ git his ugly hide fo’ dat.”
“There’ll be no shooting to-night, let’s hope,” was Frank’s reply.
They poled along in silence after this. The boys were completely bewildered and had no more idea of where they were going than if they had been blindfolded. But Quatty never stopped poling and fell to his work with such an air of certainty that the boys were compelled to conclude that he knew what he was about.
Suddenly the negro uttered a sharp grunt.
“What is it?” asked Frank instantly.
“Look ober dere, massa, an’ tell me wad you see,” said Quatty, pointing dead ahead.
At the risk of upsetting the boat and himself Frank stood up and saw reflected on the sky, not more than a mile ahead, a deep-red glow.
“Fire,” he exclaimed.
“Yes, an’ it’s de furnaces dem debbils has built dere fo’ make dere blow up stuff, drat ’em,” was Quatty’s response.
They were then at last within sighting distance of the mysterious forces that had succeeded in filching the formula of the United States’ most deadly explosive and kidnapping one of the bravest and most popular young officers in the Navy.
“Pole ahead, till I tell you to stop,” commanded Frank, resuming his seat.
“W-w-w-what,” stuttered Quatty, “yo’ goin’ on, Marse Frank?”
“Certainly,” was the quiet reply.
“B-b-b-but we may git shot or blowed up wid de debbil powder,” protested the frightened black.
“You will certainly get shot if you don’t obey commands,” was Frank’s stern rejoinder, “pole ahead!”
Something in the young leader’s voice, decided Quatty that it was best to obey and with chattering teeth he started the canoe moving nearer and nearer to the red glow. As they approached its source, the light it cast grew brighter and the boys were enabled to see each other’s faces.
“Stop,” commanded Frank suddenly.
Quatty breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps now they were going to go back. But no. After a few seconds’ reconnoitering, Frank gave the order to go ahead and the trembling Quatty, with his eyes on the boys gleaming revolver, obeyed. Frank stood up in the boat when he took his brief survey without much fear of being seen by the men on the island, as in the bright light shed by the furnaces with which they were manufacturing the explosive they would hardly be able to penetrate the surrounding blackness.
What he had seen was this: A large barn-like building erected against the side of a hill surrounded by smaller huts and out in the open, removed at some distance from the other buildings, a large, retort-shaped blast furnace, from the mouth of which was pouring a column of copper-colored flame and a great efflorescence of sparks. It was this furnace doubtless that had caused the column of smoke they had seen during the day.
In the bright light cast by the flaming mouth of the retort he could see dark figures scurrying around, some of them with wheelbarrows which they pushed up an inclined plane leading to the side of the retort. From their barrows they constantly dumped something into the furnace. What it could be of course Frank had no means of knowing, but he guessed that it was some substance used in the manufacture of Chapinite. The whole scene reminded Frank of one of the foundries in the iron district, seen from a car window at night.
With the aid of the night-glasses he could make out details more plainly. The workmen were being urged to even greater activity by a tall man who was evidently in authority. From time to time this man raised a whip he held in his hand and brought its lash down viciously on the back of some unfortunate worker with a crack that was audible even at the distance the boys were.
“Oh Lawd, dat look like Hades for sho’!” groaned Quatty as his eyes almost popped out of his head at the weird scene. “Dem not men, Massa Frank, dems all debbils.”
“Pole her along a bit!” ordered Frank, not paying any attention to this outburst. He was bent on getting near enough to ascertain, if possible, if the unfortunate Lieutenant Chapin was one of the crew of laborers.
With frequent orders to stop from Frank which were obeyed by Quatty with alacrity and commands to proceed once more, which did not meet with the same eager response, the boat drew nearer and nearer to the blazing retort and the frenzied workers. As they were still in between high banks of saw-grass the boys had no fear of being seen unless of course some canoe from the island happened to come down the stream they were threading. As it was a narrow twisting, little runnel, however, with barely a foot of water under their keel, this did not seem likely.
All at once, however, they emerged without warning into a broad smooth-flowing channel worthy of the name of a river. The boys saw at once that this was indeed a main-traveled water-course and most probably the one used by the men on the island in getting to and from the coast.
“Get back where we were as quick as you can,” sharply ordered Frank as they glided out onto its broad current.
With a dexterous twist Quatty—quite as much alarmed as the boys at the prospect of discovery by the workers on the island—shot the boat back into the narrow grass-walled creek they had been traversing. It was well they had done so, for hardly had they gained the welcome shelter of the tall saw-grass when they heard the rapid “dip-dip” of paddles coming toward them down the main channel.
“Keep perfectly quiet,” ordered Frank, and scarcely breathing the boys listened with straining ears to catch the conversation the men in the approaching craft were carrying on.
“Hurry there, you miserable Indian, or I’ll fill you full of lead,” were the first words they heard in a harsh, rough voice. The command was evidently addressed to the Indian paddler for they heard the reply:
“All right. Me hurry all I can,” and a quicker dip of the paddle.
“You’re a rough fellow, my dear Scudder,” another voice commented, “are you never in a softer mood?”
“Not me, Foyashi;” came the reply, “and if you’d been working for Captain Mortimer Bellman as long as I have you wouldn’t be either. He learned his lesson in your government I suppose.”
“Captain Bellman is a remarkable man.” went on the other speaker, whose accent was distinctly foreign and mincing.
“Remarkable? You may lay your head on that,” replied the other; “nobody but a remarkable man would have got Chapin to visit him in his hotel and there drug him and get from him the keys of the safe where the formula was kept.”
“How did he induce him to visit him?” asked Foyashi.
“Why, they were classmates at Annapolis before Bellman was kicked out of the navy for conduct unbecoming an officer. Chapin’s a good-hearted chap and when Bellman turned up in Washington one day and sent him a message that he was ill and in trouble Chapin came to the hotel like a bird dog when you whistle it to heel. But you deserve a lot of credit for your part of the business, Foyashi,” he went on. “How did you get the lieutenant under your control. He swore he’d die before he told us the method of making Chapinite when we first got him aboard the Mist.”
“Ha, ha!” laughed the man, addressed as Foyashi, “to the Jiu Jitsu expert many nerves are common knowledge that you foolish Americans do not know anything about. A little pressure on the nerve I had selected while the lieutenant slept; and I had dulled his brain till he did as we directed.”
“Wonderful,” exclaimed Scudder admiringly, “I wish I knew the trick.”
“I hope I may never find it necessary to practice on you,” was the reply of the other, uttered in a tone of voice that made Harry feel, as he said afterward, as if he had touched the back of a moccasin.
“What are your plans?” continued Scudder, who was evidently an inferior in command to Foyashi and the man spoken of as Captain Bellman, “here you start me off in the dark in a canoe with enough Chapinite to blow half the Everglades sky high and you don’t even tell me where we are taking it.”
“You know as well as I do,” replied the other, “that we are bound for the coast and that we are going to put the last consignment aboard the submarine to-night at the mouth of the Jew-Fish river. What follows to-morrow will be simply the tapping of the furnace taken to-night and we will work that up into Chapinite in the government’s yards at home.”
“Then we are through here,” commented Scudder.
“Practically, yes. We shall meet the cruiser in the South Atlantic next week and then sail for home.”
“The cruiser!” exclaimed Scudder, “ain’t you afraid of the United States government being suspicious?”
“My dear friend,” replied the other, “the wisdom of the Oriental has been left out of your composition. The cruiser, as I call her, has been converted into the likeness of a peaceful passenger ship.”
“Where do you coal her?” demanded Scudder, a certain admiration in his tones.
The boys were unable to catch the reply. Indeed they could not have heard as much of the conversation as they did had not the small creek fortunately run parallel with the larger water-course for some distance. By dint of shoving along the banks with their hands the boys had managed to keep a short distance in the rear of the other canoe. Her speed, however, prohibited their keeping up with her and they were compelled to satisfy themselves with what they had already heard, which, however, was of sufficient importance to cause them to order Quatty to pole back at top speed to the mound-builders’ island.
It was evident from the conversation they had been lucky enough to overhear that the stealers of the formula, headed by Captain Mortimer Bellman, were to leave the ’glades the next day. That the plotters had a submarine and that it lay at the mouth of the Jew-Fish river. Furthermore a cruiser, belonging to the power whose agents the men were, was waiting to pick them up and carry them back to their own country and that Lieutenant Chapin had been subjected to a cruel operation in order to force him to submit to a betrayal of his country.
It was a time to act quickly. There was in fact not a moment to spare.
They arrived at the camp on the mound-builders’ island shortly before dawn. A hasty survey with a lantern indicated, to their great satisfaction, that nothing had been disturbed and that everything was as they had left it. From the height of the summit nothing was visible now of the red glow of the blast furnace, which indicated to the boys that the plotters had concluded their work and that the blast had been extinguished forever. Satisfactory as their night’s work had been in one respect, however, it had been a dire failure in another and so the boys could not help admitting to each other.
They had learned a pretty good outline of the plans of Captain Bellman and Foyashi, but they had not gained a single bit of information about Lieutenant Chapin that would aid them in any way in rescuing him from what was likely to prove imminent death.