Then he turned and looked, with surprise, toward Nicky.

“Can it be,” muttered Sam, “that Ma’am Sib’s voodoo has worked, after all?”

Nicky was turning somersaults and rolling about like a boy who has gone mad!

CHAPTER III
A “MYSTERY BOYS” MEETING

Watching Nicky’s contortions, Ma’am Sib began to see pictures in her mind of herself in jail and she became more afraid than she had made the boys.

She knew that the open practice of voodoo was against all laws and she had not really meant to do any more than frighten the boys off. But Nicky’s actions caused her to dread the consequences to herself. But Tom and Cliff, understanding their comrade, had different thoughts. When Tom looked at Cliff he saw the latter calmly but determinedly scratching his left ear. Tom instantly folded his arms!

Tom hastened to Nicky and grabbed his chum between two somersaults.

“Cliff’s calling for a council,” he whispered. Nicky became at once a very sober and quietly normal young fellow.

The three chums were the sole members of a secret order which they named from the fact that each of them had a mystery in his life; so their secret order was called “The Mystery Boys.”

Nicky, to begin with, had in his family the supposed message from the former pirate, William Kidd. Tom’s mystery had to do with the fact that his sister had never been located after an attack on a Mexican mine by bandits; after which no trace of the girl, living there with her father, the mine superintendent, had ever been found. Cliff had solved his mystery the summer before; his father, studying Inca civilization, had been held prisoner by Incas of the old Peruvian race, in a city hidden among the Andes; a letter had reached Cliff, and he, with Tom and Nicky and a history instructor from Amadale, and with “Quipu Bill” whom they had met in Peru, had discovered and rescued the old scholar and had secured some Inca gold at the same time.The purpose of the secret order was to be able to exchange ideas in the presence of other people who were not members of the clique, without the outsiders knowing about it. The Mystery Boys had made up their order for the purpose of helping one another in every way, but in secret. Their motto was “Seeing All, I see nothing; Knowing All, I know 

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