The Boy Scounts on a Submarine | Page 9

we got to do this job all alone. I don't like his looks neither. Awful smooth' but' murderin'. Are you game, Porky, to land him ourselves?"
"Sure!" said Porky. "Ain't I alwus? What comes first?"
"Le's think," said Beany.

CHAPTER IV
REVELATIONS AT THE FLOWER-HOUSE
You would not have thought they were thinking at all as they sat on the broad brick steps, holding their chins in their right hands, left hands twisting their puttee lacers. They talked occasionally but not of the yellow-eyed man who was even then laughing and talking to the Colonel.
They came out a few minutes later, and "Captain DuChassis," as the Colonel called him, ran lightly down and drove off toward the clubhouse. The Colonel stood looking after him, and the two boys stood at attention beside him. He looked down and saw them presently.
"Boys, did you ever have a hunch?" he said.
"Yes, Sir!" they said together.
"Silly things--hunches; very silly! Never let a hunch spoil what seems to be a very good friendship, or change your opinion of a man."
Porky looked quickly up.
"I got the same hunch, Colonel," he said.
"Same man," added Beany.
"Eh, what's this?" demanded the Colonel.
The boys were silent; and while the officer continued his puzzled study of the two faces, the long racer swept again to the steps, and Captain DuChassis stepped out and handed down a lovely girl. She was in a riding habit, and she ran lightly up to the Colonel and kissed his tanned cheek. "Well, daddy," she cried, "we are going to take a ride together, Captain and I!"
She looked at the young man beside her and smiled. He was resplendent in riding clothes and returned her smile tenderly. They stood talking with the Colonel while they waited for their horses.
"How does everything go, daddy? Have you heard anything from Elinor Pomeroy?" She turned, "Elinor is a school friend of mine," she explained. "She is in dreadful trouble. Her brother invented a gas that will absolutely whip Germany, and he was attacked the very night that the gas was tried out, and frightfully hurt, and the formula taken away from him. Of course, it wouldn't matter if he could tell some one, but he never will. I heard to-day that he is conscious now, but the past is a perfect blank. Isn't that too dreadful? I wish I knew where that paper is, I'd like to be the one to get it."
"Would you, Miss Carol?" asked Captain DuChassis. He smiled and tapped his swagger stick lightly on his boot top. "Perhaps you are near it now.
"No such luck! she sighed.
"There will be luck for some one in it perhaps," said the Colonel. "Mr. Leffingwell has just offered a splendid prize to any Boy Scout who finds the formula. He offers an education to the lucky lad. Two years of prep school, and four years of college."
"He is a what you call it safety-first man, is he not?" laughed the Captain. "Is he pro-German? It looks it, setting such a task for children." He turned to the young lady. "Shall we mount? Here are the horses."
After the Colonel had watched them canter away, he turned once more to speak to the boys. They were gone. Sadly they had faded away around the corner, and drifted over to the cow stables, where they sat miserably down on a bale of hay.
"What we goin' to do?" asked Beany miserably. "That's the limit!" agreed Porky. "Here we got it all planned. We got to find that formula, nobody else has the chance we have, and now we've spotted one of our men. We will find that formula when we pull in the bunch that tried to shoot Colonel Handler. They are all mixed up somehow, you'll find. All right, we find that formula, because we got to do it for our country; and what do they do to us? What does Mr. Leffingwell do to us?" Porky's voice rose to a wail. "What does he do?" he asked again. "He goes and sticks an education on us! A college education!"
"Is Mr. Leffingwell going to pick our college?" asked Beany.
"You bet he won't pick mine!" said Porky, loftily. "Cause there ain't goin' to be no such animal!"
"Well, I dunno," mused the other twin. "We got to find that formula. See, the more people we tell, the more it gums the works. It sounds cheeky, but we work better alone: me and you. Le's go look around while we think. I can think better when I'm lookin I at things.
"Me too," said Porky.
They drifted over to the bandstand where the crowd was thickest and the noise loudest and, wriggling through the press, approached an ice cream stand. To reach the counter, Porky stooped and jammed his thin figure between two men.
They paid no attention to him.
"Where is the Wolf?"