Ever since Dick Donovan had written for his paper, the Boston Evening Eagle, the wonderful story of the boys’ adventures on the trail of the giant sloth of Brazil, other Boston reporters had regarded him as worth watching.  In some way, young Masterson learned of Dick’s frequent visits to High Towers while the preparations for the Colorado trip were going forward.

“It’s my idea,” he told his father, “that those Boy Inventors are planning another big stunt and that Dick Donovan is to go along and write the story.  Do we want to get beaten again?”

“We do not,” said his father, a heavily-set, dictatorial man, perpetually at war with the Evening Eagle.  “That last beat of Donovan’s on the Brazil story jumped the Eagle’s circulation sky high.”

“Well, why not let me trail along after them and find out what I can?” said young Masterson.  “No use letting the Moon get soaked again, and besides, I want to get even on those young fellows, anyhow, for the mean trick they played in having me arrested, even if it didn’t come to anything, and the case was dropped.

“Jove!” he cried suddenly, as a new train of thought was suggested to him.  “I’ll bet I’ve got it.  This trip, or whatever it is, they are planning has something to do with that miner, Zeb Cummings, the chap I ran down.”

“Well, it’s worth keeping a weather eye on, anyway,” decided his father.  “I guess you’ll get the assignment.”

“And I’ll run it down, too,” declared young Masterson boastfully.  “I owe that red-headed, chesty Donovan a grudge anyhow.”

That evening young Masterson met by appointment the two youths who had been with him in the automobile the day that Zeb was run down.  They were both sons of wealthy men, and had more money than was good for them.  Masterson found that both Sam Higgins and Eph Compton were willing to do all they could to harm the boys who had been responsible for their arrests, and so it came about that Jupe, on his way to the village to post some letters, was enticed into talk one night, and while he was chatting and accepting the good cigars three amiable young men pressed upon him, the mail was abstracted from his pocket.

There were two letters, one from Dick to his city editor telling him of the progress made and informing him of the day for the start, and the other from Jack to his father, who was a guest of Dr. Mays.  Jack gave full details of their plans and other information concerning the trip, so that the three plotters, a few days before the expedition set out, knew as much about it as the boys themselves.

Armed with this information, Masterson, Higgins and Compton had no difficulty in getting money from their parents, all of whom would have described themselves as “keen business men.”  As for Jupe, he was too badly scared to say anything about the loss of the letters, and as Masterson, after steaming them open and abstracting what he wanted of their contents, posted them to their proper destinations, the boys started out on their long journey west without the slightest idea that anyone but themselves and one or two others knew of their plans.