it.
We've just got to. We'll show those secret service men that boys are
some good after all."

But the word was easier than the deed. Puzzle their brains as they
might, search the dollar as they would, they still found no key to the
language it spoke.

"Tell me again what the message was," demanded Henry for the twentieth
time, and Lew once more passed to Henry the slip of paper on which he
had written the message, both in cipher and deciphered, the message he
had picked from the air. It read as follows: TRPSLOWAOSEDONBADATSTITY.

T R P S L O
W A O S E D
O N R A D A
T S T I T Y

Long Henry studied the piece of paper, softly reading the message to
himself. "Two transports sailed to-day. How did that automobile
driver get that message from this dollar?" he asked himself, and again
he picked up the coin and turned it in his hand. "If only we had that
disc," he sighed, "or a duplicate."

At the word "duplicate," Roy pricked up his ears. "Maybe we can make
one," he said.

"Likely!" scoffed Lew.

"You never know till you try," rejoined Roy. Then he turned to Willie
and demanded, "What was the disc like that you saw?"

"If I knew, I'd make one," said Willie.

"Well," said Roy in a tone of disgust, "you know whether it was a foot
across or not, and whether it was round or square."

"It was round, of course," said Willie, "and the same size as the
dollar. I told you that before."

"We can make a disc the size of a dollar, anyway, even if it doesn't
get us anywhere," said Roy, putting the coin on a sheet of paper and
outlining it with a pencil. Then with scissors he cut the disc out.

"You saw that disc, or one like it, Henry," continued Roy. "What did
it look like to you?"

"Just like a spider-web, as Willie says," replied Henry.

"All right, we'll make a spider-web," said Roy.

He seized his pencil, made a dot in the centre of the disc, and from
the dot drew straight lines that radiated in different directions.
Then he drew a number of concentric circles about his dot.

"I don't see how that helps any," he said, examining his drawing. "Yet
that's the kind of thing they used to mark that dollar."

From hand to hand the paper passed, and each boy compared it with the
dollar. But none was any the wiser when he had finished. Their
leader, meantime, sat with his head in his hands, studiously turning
the matter over and over in his mind. For a long time he could make
nothing of it.