Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone: or, The Plot Against Uncle Sam

“I reckon you could help him, all right,” Gastong replied, confidently, but still with a look of anxiety on his face. “He has a heap of confidence in you, Mr. Nestor, but he thought best to take every precaution for your welfare. That is the reason why he surrounded you, as far as possible, with secret service people.”

Ned was more than amused at the statement, for all the discoveries that had been made had resulted from the activities of the boys and himself. In fact, the only help Gordon’s chain of secret service men had given his party was the thwarting of the plans of Van Ellis at the old house.

This had been important, in a sense, as the boys would otherwise have been held prisoners there and so would not have been able to come to the rescue of Ned and Jimmie at the old temple. Still, Jack Bosworth had been in that incident, and it was a question in the mind of the patrol leader if the result would have been the same without him. However, he gave the lieutenant full credit for his cautious way of going at the matter.

“The Japs, as you call them,” he said to Gastong and Tommy, “have gone on toward Colon. I’m going on after them, but it may be well for you to remain here on the chance of meeting the lieutenant. He may have plans of his own for to-night.”

“I am sure he has,” said Tommy. “He has been active all day, with half a dozen men going and coming under his orders. He missed you this afternoon.”

“I had a date to view the scenery up the Chagres river,” laughed Ned.

The patrol leader went back to the room where he had left Frank, George, Glen, and Peter. Tony had left for his father’s camp and George Tolford had gone with him.

“I would give considerable to know what Chester and the Japs, as they are called, quarreled about to-night,” he said, but of course the boys could give him no information on the subject.

As a matter of fact, Ned thought he knew, but the thing was so incomprehensible to him that he doubted, for a time, his own reasoning. It was now nine o’clock, and it seemed to him that the time for action had come. Whether he was right in his deductions or not, he could not afford to ignore the plans he had made for the night. He did not like the idea of accepting responsibility for the important move he was determined to make, but Lieutenant Gordon was not to be found, and there was nothing for him to do but to go ahead.

“Now, boys,” he said to his chums, “we are going into a game to-night that may lead to bloodshed. Again, it may prove a farce. I have only my own judgment to go on, but the matter is so serious that I’m going to take a risk. I should prefer to have Lieutenant Gordon with us, but that seems to be impossible. Get your guns ready, and I’ll arrange for a railroad motor car to take us to Gatun.”

“I just believe Lieutenant Gordon is in trouble,” Peter said. “He was in the hotel this afternoon, just before they carried the sick man out, but has not been seen since.”

Ned sprang to his feet, all excitement.

“When did they carry a sick man out?” he asked.

“Oh, it must have been about five o’clock,” was the reply. “He was plumb sick, too, for they carried him out in a wheel-chair, with a sheet over his face.”

“Who carried him out?”

“Why, the men from the hospital who were sent for.”

“What floor?” demanded Ned, a thought he did not care to put into words coming to his mind.

“Third floor,” replied Peter. “I stood out there, looking around, when the chair was brought down on the freight elevator.”

Greatly to the amazement of the boys Ned darted away. In a minute he stood before the clerk’s desk.

“Will you have a boy show me to Lieutenant Gordon’s room?” he asked.

“Certainly,” was the reply, “but you won’t find him in. There have been repeated inquiries, for him this afternoon.”

“Has any one been to his room?” asked Ned.

“Yes, but it is locked and the key is not here. I was up on that floor about five o’clock, when the hospital people took a man out of the room next to his, and his door was locked then.”

Ned stood for a moment in deep thought, hesitating, wondering if the clerk was a man to be trusted in a great emergency.

“You look to me like a dependable man,” he finally said to the clerk, “anyway, I’ve got to take you into my confidence. Will you take duplicate keys to the lieutenant’s room and the room next to it and come with me?”

“Of course, if it is anything important,” replied the clerk, “but you’ll have to give some good reason before I can admit you to either room.”

“Step in here,” Ned said, motioning toward a little check room at the end of the counter. “You saw the sick man carried out?” he asked, as the clerk wonderingly stepped into the designated room.

“Yes, I saw him taken out. He was a stranger – took the room about noon through a friend. I did not see him at all, that is, until he was carried out, and then I did not see his face.”

“You are sure it was not Lieutenant Gordon who was carried out?” asked Ned.

“Why, why, he wasn’t sick. He said nothing to me of being ill.”

“But he has enemies on the Isthmus,” Ned went on, “and is now at work on a very delicate and dangerous job for the government. Suppose – ”

The clerk waited to hear no more. He seized the keys asked for and bounded toward the elevator, taking Ned with him. When they entered the lieutenant’s room they found it in great disorder. There were many signs of a desperate struggle. On the floor was a three-cornered slip of paper which had evidently, judging from the quality and thickness, been torn from a drawing roll. The scrap showed only two irregular lines, but Ned recognized them.

Lieutenant Gordon had taken into his possession the crude map of the Gatun dam which Ned had discovered in the old temple bomb-room. The next room, the one from which the alleged sick man had been taken, was also in disorder, and the door which connected the two apartments had been forced open. There was a strong odor of chloroform in both rooms.

The clerk did not need to be told what had taken place. His face turned white as chalk and his voice trembled as he asked:

“What is to be done? Think of the lieutenant being carried off from this hotel in the daytime. It will ruin us.”

“First,” Ned replied, “you must make up your mind to keep what has been done a profound secret. You may tell the proprietor if you see fit to do so, but no one else must know.”

“But the secret service men must be told.”

“Not now,” Ned replied. “I have an idea that I can restore the lieutenant to his friends without any row being made over the matter.”

“But how? I don’t understand.”

“At least,” Ned urged, “wait until two o’clock to-morrow morning. I am going out now on an expedition which may reveal many things, if I succeed. If I fail, why, then you must notify the secret service men and look for me in some of the pools about Gatun.”

The clerk finally consented to this arrangement, and in ten minutes Ned and his chums were speeding toward Gatun on a railroad motor car.

CHAPTER XX.

THE SPOIL OF THE LOCKS

At eleven o’clock that night the workmen employed at the locks, the spillway, and the barrier of the Gatun dam found that their lights were not working satisfactorily and sent word back to the electric department that something was amiss.

The electric department sent word back to the men in the excavations that the lights were all right so far as they were concerned, that they were doing their full duty efficiently, and that the men with the shovels, the dynamite and the dump cars might go chase themselves.

This expression of fact and permission did not make it any lighter at the workings, but the men kept on, in the intermittent showers of illumination, and grumbled while they excavated and piled in the concrete. At last, just before midnight, the incandescence did not come back to the globes, and the men gathered in groups to discuss the matter and express heated opinions of the efficiency of the men in charge of the lighting plant.

The workmen moved about here and there in the shadows and clambered like ants over the great bulk of the dam. No one looked to see that the men assembled in the workings all belonged there. At midnight four men who did not belong there entered the excavation which leads from the bottom of the lower lock to the sea-level channel into Limon Bay, which is a child of the Caribbean Sea.

These four men moved about as if accustomed to the situation, only now and then they halted and whispered together. Other men, workmen, were doing that, however, and so these four passed on up to the foot of the spillway without attracting attention.

Here they separated, one to the west, one to the east, where the locks are, and one to a position half way between the spillway and the west side of the locks. The fourth man remained near the foot of the spillway.

Due primarily to its size, Gatun dam has received, perhaps, more attention in the United States than is its due. There is nothing especially difficult or complicated about this dam, and many dams have been successfully built in this country to withstand much larger pressures and greater heads of water than the Gatun dam without being given one-quarter of the attention.