"I'll telephone Admiral Buck for you, Doctor, but I don't dare telephone any such message to Bolton; he'd take my head off. He has been running the whole service ragged lately, and this is my first afternoon off duty in a fortnight." "What's the trouble, a flood of new counterfeits?" "No, the counterfeit division is getting along all right. In point of fact, they have lent us a dozen men. The trouble is a sudden big increase in Communist activity throughout the country, with the Young Labor party behind it. Bolton has been pretty jumpy since that Stokowski affair last August and he is afraid of another attempt of some sort on the President." "The Young Labor party? I thought that gang was bankrupt and out of business, since the Coast Guard broke up their alien smuggling scheme." "They were down and out for a while, but they are in funds again--and how! They must have three or four millions at least." "Where did they get it?" "That's what we have been trying to find out. The leaders have presented bars of gold to a dozen banks throughout the country and demanded specie. The banks shipped the gold to the mint and it was good gold, nine hundred and twenty-five fine. What we are trying to find out is how that gold got into the United States." "A shipment of that size should be easy to trace." "It would seem so, but it hasn't been. We have accounted for every pound of every shipment that has come in through a port of entry, and we have checked almost that close on the output of every mine in the United States. If the gold came from Russia, it would have had to cross Europe, and we can't get any trace of it from abroad. It looks as though they were _making_ it." * * * * * Dr. Bird rubbed his head thoughtfully. "Possible, but hardly probable," he said. "How much did you say they had?" "Over three millions in thirty-pound bars. Each bar shows signs of having a mint mark chiselled off, but that don't help much for they have done too good a job. It has us pretty well bluffed." Again Dr. Bird rubbed his head. "Telephone Admiral Buck, and then phone Bolton and tell him exactly what I told you to: that you will be away indefinitely. When he gets through exploding, tell him that you are going with me and that possibly, just barely possibly, we might be on the trail of that gold shipment." "On the trail of the gold!" gasped Carnes. "Surely, Doctor, you don't think--"