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                   THE BOY AVIATORS ON SECRET SERVICE

                                   OR

                         WORKING WITH WIRELESS

                                   BY

                         CAPTAIN WILBUR LAWTON

               AUTHOR OF "THE BOY AVIATORS IN NICARAGUA"

                                NEW YORK
                            HURST & COMPANY
                               PUBLISHERS

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                          Boy Aviators' Series

                        By CAPTAIN WILBUR LAWTON
                  Author of "Dreadnought Boys Series"

                   Six Titles. Cloth Bound. Price 50c
                        UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

  1 The Boy Aviators in Nicaragua; or, In League with the Insurgents.
  2 The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; or, Working with Wireless.
  3 The Boy Aviators in Africa; or, An Aerial Ivory Trail.
  4 The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest; or, The Golden Galleon.
  5 The Boy Aviators in Record Flight; or, The Rival Aeroplane.
  6 The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash; or, Facing Death in the Antarctic.
  7 The Boy Aviators' Flight for a Fortune.

                            Sold Everywhere.

                            HURST & COMPANY
                               PUBLISHERS
                                NEW YORK

                   _Copyright_, 1910, by HURST & CO.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               CONTENTS.

                 I. An Important Commission
                II. The Boys Meet an Old Friend,--and an Enemy
               III. A Tramp with Field-Glasses
                IV. A Plot Discovered
                 V. Two Rascals get a Shock
                VI. The Start for the 'Glades
               VII. A Night Attack
              VIII. The Men of the Island
                IX. A Message from the Unknown
                 X. The Captive's Warning
                XI. The Black Squall
               XII. Pork Chops Proves His Metal
              XIII. The Front Door of the 'Glades
               XIV. Close Quarters with 'Gators
                XV. An Island Mystery
               XVI. The Boys Make an Acquisition
              XVII. The Everglades in an Aeroplane
             XVIII. A Night Alarm
               XIX. On the Mound-Builders' Island
                XX. Captain Bellman's Island
               XXI. A Bold Dash
              XXII. Ben Stubbs Disappears
             XXIII. The Boy Aviators Trapped
              XXIV. A Startling Meeting
               XXV. Quatty as a Scout
              XXVI. Lathrop as an Air Pilot
             XXVII. Hemmed in by Flames
            XXVIII. The Black Aeroplane
              XXIX. The Last of Bellman's Crew

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                  THE BOY AVIATORS ON SECRET SERVICE;
                                  OR,
                         WORKING WITH WIRELESS.




                               CHAPTER I.

                        AN IMPORTANT COMMISSION.


"Come in!"

The gray-haired man who uttered these words gazed sharply up at the door
of the private office of the Secretary of the Navy's Bureau, at
Washington, D. C., as he spoke. He was evidently anticipating callers of
more than usual importance judging from his expectant look. The old
<DW64> who had knocked opened the door and respectfully stood waiting.

"Well, Pinckney?"

"Dey have come, sah."

"Ah; good,--show them in at once."

The old <DW64> bowed respectfully and withdrew. A few seconds later he
reappeared and ushered in two bright looking youths of sixteen and
fourteen with the announcement in a pompous tone of voice:

"Messrs. Frank and Harry Chester."

Frank, the elder of the two brothers, was a well set up youngster with
crisp, wavy brown hair and steady gray eyes. Harry, his junior by two
years, had the same cool eyes but with a merrier expression in them. He,
like Frank, was a well-knit, broad-shouldered youth. Both boys were
tanned to an almost mahogany tinge for they had only returned a few days
before from Nicaragua, where they had passed through a series of strange
adventures and perils in their air-ship, the _Golden Eagle_, perhaps,
before her destruction in an electric storm, the best known craft of her
kind in the world and one which they had built themselves from top plane
to landing wheels.

The Secretary of the Navy, for such was the office held by the
gray-haired man, looked at the two youths in front of him with some
perplexity for a moment.

"You are the Boy Aviators we have all heard so much of?" he inquired at
length with a note of frank incredulity in his voice.

"We are, sir," rejoined Frank, with just the ghost of a smile playing
about his lips at the great man's evident astonishment--and its equally
evident cause.

"I beg your pardon," hastily spoke up the Secretary of the Navy, who had
observed Frank's amusement; "but you seem----"

"I know what you were thinking, sir," interrupted Frank, "that we are
very young to undertake such exacting service as Admiral Kimball
outlined to us in Nicaragua."

"You have guessed just right, my boy," rejoined the other, with a hearty
laugh at Frank's taking his thoughts and putting them into such exact
words, "but your youth has evidently not interfered with your progress
if all the reports I have heard of you are true. Sit down," he went on,
"and we will talk over the proposal the Department has to make to you."

The boys set down their straw hats and seated themselves in two chairs
facing the grizzled official. Both listened attentively as he began.

"When Admiral Kimball wrote to me about you, telling me that he had
found in the two sons of Planter Chester of Nicaragua the very agents we
wanted for a particularly dangerous and difficult mission," he said, "I
at once sent for you to come here from New York to see for myself if his
judgment was correct. I have not been disappointed--"

The boys  with pleasure.

"My brief observation of you has confirmed to my mind his report and I
am going to entrust to you the responsibility of this undertaking. Now,"
he went on impressively, "the government has been experimenting for some
time in secret with Chapinite, a new explosive of terrific power, the
invention--as its name makes apparent--of Lieut. Bob Chapin of the
United States Navy. I say 'has been experimenting' advisedly. It is so
no more.

"The formula of the explosive has disappeared from the archives of the
department and, what is still more serious, Lieutenant Chapin himself is
missing."

"The agents of the Secret Service force have worked in vain on the case
without discovering much more than the one very important fact that the
government of a far Eastern power has recently been experimenting with
an explosive whose effects and manifestations make it almost undoubted
that the stuff is Chapinite. By a tedious process of observation and
deduction the men have traced the shipments as far as the west Florida
coast but there all clues have ended. Weeks of work have left us as much
in the dark as ever as to the location of the source of supply of the
far Eastern power. But that somewhere within the untracked wildernesses
of the Everglades a plant has been set up in which Chapinite is being
manufactured in large quantities is a practical certainty to my mind.

"It is useless for the secret service men to attempt to explore what is
still an unmapped labyrinth of swamp and jungle and above all it would
occupy time. What we have to do is to act quickly. I racked my brain for
days until I happened to come across a paragraph in a newspaper calling
attention to your wonderful flights in the _Golden Eagle_, and then
followed Admiral Kimball's dispatch. It struck me at once that here
indeed was a way of locating these men that might prove feasible--I say
'might' because if you boys accept the commission I do not want to
absolutely impose the condition of success upon you. All that we shall
expect of you is that you will do your best.

"Will you accept the assignment?"

The blunt question almost took the boys off their feet so to speak. They
exchanged glances and then Frank said:

"As you perhaps know, sir, our first aeroplane, the _Golden Eagle_----"

"In which you rescued William Barnes, a newspaper correspondent, from a
camp in which he was held prisoner," remarked the Secretary--"you see I
have followed your doings closely."

"Exactly," went on Frank; "that first _Golden Eagle_ is at the bottom of
the sea. She went down when we were driven off the land in a tropical
electric storm and it was only the fact that she was equipped with
wireless, with which we signaled a passing steamer, that saved us from
sharing her fate.

"We might, however, construct a second one. In fact I have the designs
partially drawn up. She would be a more powerful craft than the first
and capable of even longer sustained flights."

"The very thing!" exclaimed his listener enthusiastically, "then you
will accept the commission?"

"I have not yet said that we would," rejoined Frank, calmly. "As you
have described the situation it looks rather like a wild-goose chase;
however, I think that if my brother agrees that we might consent to try
to do our best."

"Of course I agree, Frank," cried Harry enthusiastically. The very
mention of anything that promised exciting adventures was sufficient to
enlist Harry's ar