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

“If you want to say the word I’ll go back,” he concluded rather lamely but with a longing look in his face that told of his eager desire to be allowed to join the expedition.

“Well, you certainly have an impetuous way of doing things,” commented Frank. “Did you come on this train?”

“Yes,” replied the boy. “I’ve just been up to the hotel and engaged rooms and tidied up a bit and then hurried right down here.”

Frank and Harry exchanged glances of amusement, the cause of which Lathrop was at a loss to fathom.

“Well,” began Frank, after a brief whispered conversation with his brother, “you are here now and I suppose you’ll have to stay. We can find some work I dare say for you to do and there are a lot of ways you can be useful.”

“I’ll start right in at anything you tell me,” began the boy eagerly. “It’s mighty good of you – ”

“Not much you won’t. Not in that fancy rig,” burst out Harry, “if you are coming with us you’d better go up to the village store and get an outfit as much like ours as possible and forget you ever patronized a tailor.”

Lathrop gladly agreed and hurried off to get himself a working outfit. As he hastened down the tracks, Frank turned to Harry with a grin.

“Well, we have gone and done it now,” he said. “But we really have use for another hand, and I think that we can make something out of Lathrop, besides we owe him a debt of gratitude for helping us out at White Plains. If it hadn’t been for him we might have lost the Golden Eagle II and all our work.”

“That’s so,” assented Harry. “I guess he will work out all right. But those fancy duds he had on – ”

And the boy burst out laughing at the recollection.

By sundown most of the “duffle” in the car had been transferred to trucks and carted down to the wharf, where the boys, with considerable pride, exhibited to Ben Stubbs, Billy, and the newly overalled Lathrop, the light draught thirty-foot sloop, with an auxiliary five-horse engine, the four canoes and the light draught “sneak-box,” they had secured for their transportation round the Cape and into the Thousand Island Archipelago. The canoes were of the “Ontario” type, fitted with narrow decks round the edges and canvas covered. The sneak-box was of the spoon-bowed variety familiar to duckers in Barnegat Bay. It drew only a few inches of water and afforded a lot of space in its sixteen feet of length for the stowage of the heavier baggage. It rejoiced in the name of Squeegee .

Ben Stubbs was delighted with the “fleet” as he called it, and declared that the sloop was a “witch.” After a dinner at the quiet boarding house at which the boys had been stopping the adventurers that night finished the stowage of their impedimenta aboard the sloop and piled the canoes on the top of the canvas enclosed “summer cabin.” The “sneak-box” was towed astern.

The owner of the sloop, a coal-black negro called Pork Chops – the boys could never discover that he had any other name – was to take them round the cape as far as the Thousand Island Archipelago where they were to be left. From there on their course would lie up the Shark River into the heart of the little known Everglades.

Of course the wharf loungers were full of curiosity as the work of transferring the boys’ belongings and outfit to the sloop proceeded, but Frank and Harry had allowed it to become widely circulated that they were a hunting party bound for some of the keys to the east of Cape Sable, and “Pork Chops” also was of this belief, so that the boys were pretty sure that none but the members of their own immediate party knew of the real goal of their journey.

By midnight everything was in readiness and the tide served for start. With her big mainsail flapping lazily in the breath of wind that was stirring Pork Chops’ sloop, which held the poetic name of Carrier Dove dropped down Biscayne Bay with her “kicker” going and dawn found her well on her journey south with a spanking breeze out of the northeast to fill her canvas. As she skimmed along over the sparkling blue of the tropical waters in whose crystalline depths hosts of fish of all kinds could be easily seen and on the surface of which floated great masses of yellow gulf weed, the boys rejoiced that their momentous expedition had started so auspiciously. As for Lathrop he acted like a boy out of his head with joy at his unexpected good fortune. Ben Stubbs and the inky Pork Chops relieved each other at the wheel, and Frank and Harry, at the table in the stuffy little cabin, worked at plans and lists trying to devise ways of still further cutting down their outfit without impairing its usefulness. Billy Barnes, with a knowing air, scrutinized the sails and from time to time admonished Ben Stubbs to “keep her up a bit,” to which suggestion Ben with an air of ineffable contempt replied:

“I never knowed they taught navigation on a newspaper but it’s a good school for nerve.”

Most of that day they dropped leisurely down Hawk Channel and at night anchored off a small key covered with a luxuriant tropical growth and topped by the feathery crowns of a group of stately royal palms. It was early afternoon when they let go the anchor and the boys lost no time in getting into the Squeegee and rowing ashore. They carried with them the Carrier Dove’s water keg which held ten gallons and which had been discovered by them to be half empty the first time they went forward for a drink. What water there was in it was so stale as to be almost undrinkable. Pork Chops was summarily sent for and arraigned on the “quarter deck.”

“I done declar I clean forgit all about deh watah,” he gasped, as Frank read him a lecture on his carelessness. Indeed everything about the Carrier Dove bore witness to Pork Chops’ shiftless ways. Her rigging was spliced in innumerable places and her halyards badly frayed so that they wedged in the blocks sometimes. Her paint was peeled off her sides in large flakes and altogether she was quite as disreputable a proposition as her owner; but in her, Pork Chops had navigated the waters about Miami for many years and was accounted a skilful mariner.

The boys uttered a cry of delight as the Squeegee’s nose grated on a beach of white sand and they sprang out. The key was a veritable fairyland. Lime, lemon and guava trees grew almost down to the water’s edge and further back were several wild banana plants with their yellow fruit hanging temptingly for the boys to pluck. And pluck it they did and declared they had never known what real bananas were like before, – which is hardly surprising as the fruit is picked for the northern market long before it is ripe and shipped in a green state.

After they had fairly gorged themselves on fruit, they set out to look for a spring. They were not long in finding it and Billy Barnes, dipper in hand, started in to fill the keg. He had ladled out a few dipperfuls when he started back with a yell. The others, who had been roaming about in the vicinity, hurried back and found the reporter gazing petrified at a huge cotton mouth moccassin. Frank, who had one of the sixteen gauge guns with him, quickly despatched the creature, which was about three feet long.

“Ugh, what a monster,” exclaimed Lathrop, as he gazed at the ugly, dirty-brown colored body.

“He is a pretty sizeable reptile and that’s a fact,” remarked Frank, “But what would you say to a serpent twenty feet long?”

The others looked at him incredulously.

“Twenty feet long – Oh come, Frank,” laughed Billy. “That sounds like the fish that got away.”

“Lieutenant Willoughby, who explored the Everglades in 1897, reports that he heard from Indians and believed himself that in the southern portions of the Everglades there are snakes bigger than any known species,” replied Frank, “his guide killed a reptile marked with longitudinal stripes, – but otherwise like a rattlesnake, – which measured nine feet from tip to tip.”