otty exclaimed.

Rick looked, and let out a yell. "Steve! Steve Ames!" In the next moment
he could have bitten his tongue out, because it was entirely possible
that Steve wasn't traveling under his own identity.

Ames was an athletic-looking young man in a white suit and Panama hat.
He stopped at Rick's hail, turned, and waited for the boys to catch up.
His face split in a pleased grin.

Rick breathed his relief. Evidently Steve didn't mind being called by
name.

The boys knew Steve as Spindrift's contact with JANIG, the Joint
Army-Navy Intelligence Group for which Spindrift had worked in the past,
once to solve _The Whispering Box Mystery_, and again to track down the
secret of _The Caves of Fear_.

"Wonder what he's doing here?" Scotty muttered.

"We'll soon find out," Rick said.

Steve greeted them cordially. "What brings you two wanderers to these
shores?"

"We were about to ask the same of you," Rick returned.

Steve grinned at the obvious curiosity in the boys' faces. "Nothing very
exciting. I'm here on a little vacation. Swimming."

"What kind of swimming?" Scotty wanted to know.

"Oh, skin diving, mostly."

"Gosh, that's wonderful!" Rick exclaimed. "Scuba or snorkel?"

There was the barest of hesitations before Steve replied. "Snorkel.
There's nothing that's more fun than snorkeling around the reefs. That's
the only way to swim in waters like these. You can get right down among
the fish."

Rick saw Scotty's mouth open to point out Steve's error, but he stepped
on his friend's foot and said quickly, "We're here for the swimming,
too. Maybe we can join forces."

He knew the answer would be no. Steve wasn't vacationing; he was on a
case. A vacationing skin diver would know that a snorkel is nothing but
a tube that allows a swimmer to float face down on the surface of the
water while looking for something to dive after. Once the dive starts,
the snorkel has no purpose, since its short length only allows it to
project a few inches above the surface while a diver is floating face
down. On the other hand, the Scuba--Self-Contained Underwater Breathing
Apparatus, like the boys' aqualungs, really does allow the diver to get
down among the fish.

"Thanks for the invitation," Steve said. He smiled. "I don't usually try
a cover story unless I have it down cold. Just for my future guidance,
where did I slip? Your faces were quite a study."

Rick told him. Steve nodded. "Thanks. I just got here on the mo