The Mystery Boys and the Secret of the Golden Sun, by Van Powell: a Project Gutenberg eBook

THE MYSTERY BOYS AND THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN SUN

CHAPTER I
THE MAN WHO COULD SMELL MONEY

“That fellow is watching us again!” whispered Tom Carroll to his companions, Nicky and Cliff, as he adjusted a pack strap on the Mexican burro behind which he sheltered his face as he spoke.

“If he keeps on, I’m going over and ask him what’s next!” Nicky said, “I’ll find out what he means by it or know the reason why.”

Nicky was impulsive and quick: he preferred action to reasoning, and was usually more willing to meet trouble than to avoid it. Tom, who was generally as cool and as level headed as Cliff, the oldest of the trio, seemed inclined to agree with the youngest chum; but Cliff, cinching up his pony’s saddle, shook his head at Nicky.

“We came out here to try to learn something about Tom’s sister, not to court trouble,” he urged. “I guess that chap is simply curious about us and is watching to see that we saddle up properly.”

“Is it any of his business?” demanded Nicky. “He’s just one of the miners having his lunch. What business is it of his what we do or how we do it?”

Tom, having taken a moment to consider, as he generally did, came to a conclusion. “I’m not so sure that he is mean,” he told his two friends. “That scar across his face, and his bleary eyes, make him look pretty fierce; but he may be perfectly innocent of any wrong thoughts. As long as he only watches, he isn’t breaking any law or hurting us. Are you fellows ready?”

“Then, let’s not bother about a rough looking miner who has hardly taken his eyes off us since we came here this morning. Nicky, run over to the mine office building and tell Mr. Gray we’ve got everything ready to start back.”

Nicky dropped his own pony’s rein over its head, while Tom, with his lithe movements apparent in the ease with which he mounted his own animal, caught the bridle of an extra mount and Cliff took the burro’s leading rope. Nicky ambled across the flat ground toward a zinc sheathed shack at a little distance.

Cliff and Tom sat on their ponies, watching covertly as the man they had been discussing finished the remnants of his chili con carne, wiped his mouth on a ragged coat sleeve, rose and strolled with a seemingly aimless air toward the upper level on which stood the engine house, the mouth of the mine and other timbered and metal covered buildings.

Nicky, on his return, looked around, saw that the man was gone and voiced a proposal.

“Mr. Gray says he won’t be ready to go for more than an hour,” he informed his chums. “The mine superintendent is telling him about some old Aztec curios he owns, and you know how that will chain Cliff’s father in his chair. What do you say if we take a little gallop down the trail—a race, maybe?”

Tom vetoed the race: they had a good ride before them and he did not want to start on winded ponies: however, he agreed to a short ride on a trail that they had not explored and the trio rode off, tying their burro to await their return.

The extra pony, also left standing, may have wondered why his own rider, the older one, had not come; but he waited with the patience of a well trained animal.

As the boys rode along, the trail became rapidly steeper and the small plateau narrowed into a rough, rocky coulee.

“It certainly is too bad,” Nicky said, with a sidewise glance of rueful sympathy toward Tom. “After we came all the way to Mexico City and then rode out here to the old mine, it is too bad that we can’t get even a trace of your missing sister.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “You’d think the authorities would know something, after all these years, or that we could pick up some clues.”

“It would have been different in the United States,” said Nicky, with a sense of pride in his native land. “Our detectives don’t let the grass grow under their feet.”

“And yet,” broke in Cliff, “many girls, and men and women, too, disappear in America and never are found.”

“There were no eye-witnesses, except the ones they found dead, after the bandits made their raid—that’s why there were no clues,” Tom added.

“Well,” he finished, sadly, “I guess my own private mystery will never be solved.”

“You can’t tell,” Nicky said, with his usual optimism. “You know, it seemed as though Cliff’s father would never be heard from again, after he went to Peru—but we got a letter, or Cliff did, and we went down there with Mr. Whitley, our history instructor—and not only rescued Mr. Gray from the hidden Inca city, but we saw a lot of adventure and got some of the Inca treasure.”

“And your mystery seemed as though it would never be solved, Nicky,” Cliff reminded his friend. “With only half of a cipher message left to your family by Captain Kidd, it was possible for us to find the hidden treasure in the Florida keys and have a lot of excitement in the bargain.”

“And both adventures started out very tamely,” Nicky was trying hard to brighten up his comrade; but Tom only shook his head.

Nicky and Cliff referred to two exciting escapades in which all three had participated. Because each of them had had a mystery in his life the three had drawn very close in the bonds of friendship, and had formed themselves into a secret order which they called the Mystery Boys. They had secret gestures by which they could communicate with one another in the presence of others without divulging the fact that they did so: also, they had initiation rites and binding oaths and strict codes which held them together and bound them to help each other in every way to solve their individual mysteries.

Cliff’s mystery, as Nicky said, had been cleared up in the summer past: the following winter the trio, while in Jamaica, had run onto some information which had begun the adventure through which the hidden treasure mystery of Nicky’s family had been brought to a successful end.

While in Cliff’s case the reward had not been financially large, he had found his father. In Nicky’s adventure no life had been involved in danger, but a buried mass of gold bars had been recovered and distributed fairly so that each of the three was, in a modest way, provided for as far as riches went: they were not made millionaires, because the treasure had to be shared with others involved in Captain Kidd’s legacy, but they were “well fixed.”

But in Tom’s case, the mystery was of a different kind, and there was in it not only the element of tragedy, but, as well, the element of uncertainty.

Hardly more than five years ago Tom, confined to his bed by a bad attack of measles, had been thus prevented from going with his father and his sister, a year older than he, to Mexico. That saved his life, which is a curious thing to think about—that sickness saved him from a worse fate.

Mr. Carrol, an engineer and mining expert, sent to inspect some mining property, had left Tom under the care of an older cousin; but so eager had eleven-year-old Margery been to see the strange country that Mr. Carrol had taken her with him.

That farewell, looking out of a darkened room at the bright hair and half-smiling, half-tearful face, had been Tom’s last sight of his beloved sister; and that clasp of hands between father and son had been the last they could ever exchange.

For, shortly after the arrival of the engineer and his daughter at a remote mining property, bandits had descended from the mountains in a raid, seemingly because they knew that gold to a high value had been amassed and stored until time to load it on burros and with armed guards take it to the railway shipping point.

In the news, meagre and disjointed, which Tom had received, it was supposed that the bandits had come to the mine during the night, had been seen and attacked by the engineer and several other Americans who were in charge of the property. A fight must have ensued, but one disastrous to the defenders, because the gold was gone and the mine was deserted when the workmen came from their hovels far down the trail the next day. According to what Tom heard, they had found his father and the other Americans, all past any earthly aid.

With his heart torn by his bereavement and with terror gnawing at his mind day and night, even at the tender age of ten, Tom had begged his father’s cousin to use every effort to learn what had happened to his sister. All that could be done, had been done.

But the family had little money and although the Government made inquiries and State departments exchanged notes and the Mexican authorities declared that soldiers had scoured the neighborhood of the mine and the passes in the sierras—and some of the bandits had been caught and punished!—there was no trace of the little girl.

No wonder that Tom suffered anguish every time he thought of her. Was she wandering about in the mountains, alone, starved? Was she a captive among the bandits? Those who had been caught declared by everything they reverenced that they had not seen her at any time nor after the retreat had they seen her in their camp among the cordilleras. Even the gold was gone! A renegade white man—they had not known his nationality—had incited the attack, seeming to guess that there was money to be had. But he had disappeared during the fighting—and so, they averred, had the gold bags and the burros.

Was the little, sunny-haired Margery his prisoner also? Tom never had learned, for no trace of him—or of her—had ever been found.

Naturally, even after five years, the pain was deep and the scar still burned; that is why he had been so anxious to see the summer vacation arrive at Amadale Military Academy, where he and his chums were students. Cliff was glad in one way, also, because the end of the term saw his graduation. That meant that he could devote all of his time, for the summer and as long as might be necessary, to his father, Mr. Gray, a great scholar and student of old civilizations. Mr. Gray wrote books on the subject of ancient history, and went to many strange places to get his facts. Cliff looked forward to the experiences and the knowledge he would gain; but mostly he was glad to be able to help his father whose health was not of the best since his years of captivity among the hidden Inca survivors in the Peruvian cordilleras.

Nicky, in the same class with Tom, and with a year yet to be passed in study and training of an athletic and disciplinary sort, looked forward to the vacation, because he knew that Mr. Gray was going to Mexico to study the Aztec civilization of a time long past, and to collect Indian relics and other material for a Museum in New York—and Cliff would go with him to help him and to write for him when his eyes were tired, and to superintend digging and so on; and Tom had been invited to accompany them, because he could in that way see at first hand the district of Mexico which had bred tragedy in its wild mountains for him. That meant that the inseparables would feel that their ranks were incomplete without the third member of the Mystery Boys, and so, of course, Nicky was with the others.

They had hired ponies and a guide and had ridden out to the mine, with the results which the boys had just discussed during their ride.

“I’ll bet this is the very trail those bandits used,” Nicky was saying as Tom reined in his pony.

“Maybe,” he said listlessly, “but there won’t be any clues or signs on it after five years. We’d better go back.”

“Well—I wish you’d look!” gasped Nicky, turning his head and spying something down the trail. “There comes that fellow who was watching us like a hawk—and he’s—yes, he is!—he’s riding Mr. Gray’s pony.”

“We’ll wait and see what he is after,” suggested Cliff at once. “We’re three to one.”

“Yes,” cried Nicky hotly, “and if he ‘starts’ anything, I’ll start him toward that chasm over yonder!”

The man riding toward them was quite tall, and rangey of build. He did not show his full height for he rode, as he walked, stooped over. He seemed to be in the last stages of physical slovenliness, and—even ignoring the scar across his face from the base of his nose to his left jawbone—his features looked sinister. Actually it was moral laxity, too much drinking and careless living that had pulled down a frame which must at one time have been erect and powerful, and broke a once daring spirit till it looked out of bleary eyes with dull, apathetic boredom.

“Well, are you following us?” Nicky spoke up as soon as the man was close enough to hear.

The man rode up closer still, reined in his pony, dropped the leather onto the animal’s neck and smiled ingratiatingly.

“Yes,” he said, in a husky, whispering sort of way, “I’m follerin’ you. ’Cause why? That’s what you want to know. ’Cause why! Ain’t it so?”

“Certainly we want to know,” chimed in Cliff. “Why are you following us?”

“He-he-he-he!” It was a shrill, cracked sort of laugh. “’Cause Henry Morgan smells money—that’s why!”

“Henry Morgan!——” Nicky started. He read a great deal about pirates and piracy because he had been interested in the cipher which Captain Kidd had given to one of his ancestors, “Henry Morgan! Any relation to the old pirate?” None of them were afraid; they were simply curious, and a little bit annoyed.

“Henry Morgan—the pirate! He-he-he! Maybe. Who knows! Can pirates smell money?”

“Well, then, I must be related to ’em. ’Cause why? ’Cause Hen Morgan can smell money. And—’cause Hen Morgan is crazy for it. And——” he fixed them with a bleared eye and rubbed his hands—and the chums drew their ponies closer on the trail as he added:

“Oh, yes! Hen Morgan smells money—an’ he smells it on you, or around you—and he wants some of it!”

CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERY BOYS GET NEWS

“You talk one way and act the opposite!” Tom made his tones sarcastic to cover his inward trepidation. He was not exactly afraid for he did not think that the man had any weapon and they outnumbered him. But Tom wanted to communicate secretly and he did not see just how to do it.

The Mystery Boys had two secret sign manuals: one was for asking and answering questions, and the other was for suggesting a course of action. But neither had been planned for use while seated on ponies, and such signs as the folding of arms, or the tying of a shoelace, were out of the question. So Tom kept on talking while he thought busily.

“You say you can smell money,” he added, “and then you follow us out here to rob us. Why, I don’t think we could get enough money together to buy a bag of chili beans!”

He sidled his pony a little closer, put up a hand as if to drive away any suggestion of robbery, and spoke again in his husky voice.

“No, not that! Hen Morgan aren’t no robber. ’Cause why? ’Cause robbers takes chances. They takes some likely person and risks getting a lot of money—and sometimes they guess wrong. But not Henry Morgan. Oh, no! ’Cause why? ’Cause he don’t guess. He smells money.”

The chums looked at one another dubiously. Was this man off his head? He wasn’t there to rob them! He didn’t guess—he smelled money! What was his purpose? “You smelled wrong, for once!” Tom declared, after a moment.

“Oh, no!” cried the husky voice, “not Hen Morgan. He sees you three come a-ridin’ up to Dead Hope mine, with the old gent. He sees how the super’tendent calls some of us miners in and he asks ’em, later, what it’s all about. ’Cause why? ’Cause Hen Morgan knows something.”

“Light down off your ponies an’ I’ll tell you. ’Cause why? ’Cause it takes too much work keepin’ these critters standing still. Light!”

Tom looked at his companions. Cliff nodded and slid from his saddle. Nicky and Tom followed his example. There was no danger, that they could see, and on the ground they had more freedom of movement than while mounted on strange, and possibly unruly mustangs.

“Now,” said Henry Morgan, seating himself on a boulder and rolling a cigarette expertly with his right hand, while three mystified, rather eager youths stood watching him, “now—Hen Morgan said he smelled money on you or around you, and he was right. ’Cause why? Look at it! You didn’t ride out here to look for mining property; you come a-hunting for some news of a certain thing what happened a good while ago!”

“From the miners who was called to the office. But they didn’t know anything. Nobody did. Nobody does—but——”

Tom almost sprang forward, so eager was he as the import of Henry’s words flashed through his mind. “Do you? Do you know about—about my sister——”

With maddening deliberateness the man held up a hand for silence, searched for and found a crumpled card of matches, struck one and carefully ignited the end of his cigarette. Then, at last, he nodded.

“Hen Morgan is the only man who does know anything—but he don’t know much.”

“Well, if you know anything at all, when you found out that we were hunting for facts, why didn’t you come out in the open and tell?” Tom said it angrily, for the suspense was torture to him.

“Hen Morgan uses his head, that’s why!” He blew a cloud of smoke, coughed a little, and resumed his confidential, husky whispering. “You come here lookin’ for news. That means money behind you. ’Cause why? ’Cause no three young lads comes all this way without money. Now, reasons I, they’ll pay for news.”

“Oh!” cried Tom, “I see. You know something and you want to bargain with us and sell your information for all you can get.”

“Come on, then,” Cliff urged. “We’ll pay you all your information turns out to be worth. But we’ll go back and talk it over with my father, out in the open, not up here in the trail.”

“Easy, easy!” begged Henry Morgan. “We won’t go back, right yet. ’Cause why? ’Cause we’ll make our bargain here.”

Nicky impulsively caught his pony’s saddle horn, started to lift a foot for the stirrup.

Henry Morgan stood up. “The minute you rides down the trail, I rides off—up that way.” He waved his arm. “They didn’t ever find the head bandit, that time, did they? Nor the gold? ’Cause why? ’Cause there’s a way they got took to safety, and I know that way! If you don’t want my news, and won’t strike a bargain, well and good. But if you do——” he paused.

Tom was scratching his left ear quietly with his finger, and with one accord Nicky and Cliff folded their arms and the Mystery Boys’ council was in session without an outward evidence that anyone could notice or read.

Tom shifted the visor of his cap a tiny bit one way, then back: it was a silent appeal, “What shall we do?”

Cliff picked up a pebble and shied it aimlessly to one side: that was a code sign which meant that the last word of every sentence in his next speech would have a meaning. Then he spoke up, carelessly.

Mentally, as he spoke, Tom noted the pauses, and then, connecting the words that ended each short sentence, he discerned that Cliff’s advice was: “See—what—news—is!”

Tom moved the little finger of his right hand gently, knowing that Cliff watched for that sign of agreement: to use the left finger would mean denial or rejection of the advice; but Tom took it.

“You’ve got to let us know what you have to sell,” he addressed Henry Morgan. “I’m willing to pass my word and strike hands on it, if you have any knowledge that will help us to find my missing sister, I will pay you anything within reason.”

The three chums half expected Morgan to demur. If he told them what he knew it would be worthless to him; once they knew it they could use it. However, they got a slight surprise, for Morgan merely grinned and nodded.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “’Cause why? ’Cause I want help. If I tell you, you can see how good it is—what I know. And even when I tell you, I’m still sure of my reward. ’Cause why? ’Cause I’ll tell you everything but one man’s name—and without that, you can’t do a thing—at the same time Hen Morgan can show that he knows what you want to know.”

He told them, quietly. They thrilled, they shuddered; they drew closer. Each and all, the Mystery Boys forgot that they were out on a lonely trail, forgot that the man was bargaining, in a way, for a human life. His story chained them in spellbound attention.

“It sounds like a real help—your story does,” he said. “I’m not of age to handle my own money, but I know that Mr. Gray, who is acting as the custodian of my money, will agree to give you——” he hesitated, partly to see how much Henry Morgan would name, and partly to plan in his own mind what to do. That they must have the name of a certain important figure in the bandit raid, cost how it might, Tom knew.

“Let’s not make it a set figure,” said Morgan, again surprising the trio. “’Cause why? ’Cause Hen Morgan has got a bigger stake to gain than what you could give. But you could help him to get it. And he could help you to get what you want. And so, everybody would be satisfied.”

“Agree?” asked Tom’s eyes, and the bent first finger that touched his right thumb. Nicky and Cliff signaled a “yes.”

“Well, only, if I help you find that—certain fellow—and we do find him, and he tells me what I want to know too—you’ve got to sign a paper that you’ll help me to get to locate the Golden Sun——”

Henry nodded. “Yep,” he agreed, “The Golden Sun. It’s a mountain of gold, the way I understand about it. And I got as much right to it as this—other fellow. You’ll see why later on. But I’ve got to have your word—you, the one who wants to find his sister!—that you’ll help me—and maybe share with me in the mine, eh? ’Cause why? ’Cause Hen Morgan is generous, he is—and if you help him he’ll help you.”

“I pass my word,” said Tom, solemnly, and gripped hands with Morgan, just a little hesitantly at the contact with the soiled, rough paw.

“All right, I know you’ll not break your word—you don’t look like that kind. Mount and let’s ride and talk to the old gent.”

“Well!” exclaimed Nicky. “Off again for adventure—and success, I hope!”

CHAPTER III
HENRY MORGAN’S STORY

They rode back to the mine property quickly. It did not take long to locate Mr. Gray, Cliff’s elderly father: he listened in silence to the eager trio as they broke in upon one another, so excited were they, and so eager to get his opinion in regard to the feasibility of starting at once for the Central American coast.

Henry Morgan had exacted from them all a promise that they would not disclose what he had told them to the mine superintendent, a rather lazy and careless man who seemed to realize that since the mine was hardly paying for its expense, his work was only a means of making a living until the mine finally “petered out” and he went elsewhere. The chums had already discovered that there were many adventurous and roving white men, from Mexico down all the Central American coast and into South America, as well as among the Virgin Islands, who eked out a living wherever and however chance offered. Henry Morgan was of that type, but much drinking and loose living had made him a very poor specimen, indeed, of the adventure-loving, roving American.

“If Mr. Morgan knew so much, why did he not come to us at once?” was Mr. Gray’s natural first question.

“I think he explains it logically,” answered Tom, “and Nicky and Cliff agree with me.” They nodded. “He is afraid that he might get ‘mixed up’ with the Mexican authorities, and that would spoil everything,” Nicky explained. “Let him tell you what he told us, won’t you, Mr. Gray?”

The elderly scholar and writer nodded. Henry Morgan cleared his throat and, in his husky, rusty voice, related the tale again.

“I’ve been a rover all my life,” he began, “from kid days on. ’Cause why? ’Cause I liked to see new places and have excitement. Sometimes I got more nor I bargained for. Sometimes I near starved. But I always come through all right.”

He sketched briefly the years he had spent roving up and down the Caribbean coast of the Central American states, and the adjacent islands, and over to Cuba during an insurrection, and in Haiti, while a revolution was in progress, and gold-prospecting in Spanish Honduras.

“It was while I was in Spanish Honduras, in the Mosquito Indian’s country,” he went on, “I met the fellow I told these lads about. He was lookin’ for gold, and there was supposed to be a gold mountain inland, but the Indians in the interior was too dangerous for us to risk gettin’ in. Well, finally, we decided to give up hunting for any mine there—at least, I did. I was down on the coast, near the sand point at Brower’s Lagoon when a sailing sloop came in over the reef one day, and when I found out they needed a hand, I shipped on her and left—this other fellow—inland, still bound he would some time locate that mine or mountain of gold and claim it.”

He explained to the interested quartet that he went into so much detail because it all had something to do with the later part of his yarn. They nodded and did not interrupt him once.

“This—other fellow—had made great friends with an old Indian, up river—oh, quite a ways up the Rio Patuca. This old Indian must have lived for centuries. ’Cause why? ’Cause he knew legends and history that his own tribe had forgot: and he knew medicines and herbs, the same as the oldest of the other medicine men couldn’t even remember. And Be—this other fellow—had got real close in his confidence and said this old Toosa—that was his name—would show him a way to find the golden mountain, so I left him there.”

He skipped quickly over the following years until the time, about six years before, when he had found himself in Mexico and, hearing of some rich mines in the sierras, had eventually reached and found employment at the mine which, in its prosperity, was called the Great Hope, but which, since, had degenerated in value until it was jokingly styled the Dead Hope.

“But whenever I get in civilized places where there is drink,” Henry continued, “I can’t do nothin’ for myself. ’Cause why? ’Cause it gets me and holds me and drags me down.” He made a gesture of rueful resignation. Then, rolling a fresh cigarette, he began to bring his story into the matters which most intensely gripped the imaginations of the chums.

“I was made assistant to the super’,” he told them, “but it wasn’t long before I got so bad and so low that they kicked me out. Well, I was sore about it and made up my mind to get even. But I didn’t. ’Cause why? Well, I struck up with B—with this other fellow, again.”

Whoever this man with the name he so mysteriously withheld might be, he was evidently of the same general type as Henry. The latter met him, he said, in a “dive” in Mexico City, and in a ribald fit of liquor stupor the friend had gabbled and raved and ranted about finding “the Golden Sun!”

“That was what we had decided we’d name our mountain, when we found it,” Henry explained. “So I was all excited. But he was too far gone to tell me anything I could pin onto. Then I got mad at him and started a fight and——” he pointed to his scarred face, “this is my souvenir! It laid me up in a dinky hospital for weeks.”

When, without money, weak and rather sobered in mind as well as physically, he came out of the hospital, Henry Morgan decided to drift back to the mine, see if he could be reinstated, and live a better life, he told the chums.

Mr. Gray leaned back and studied the bleared eyes while Henry Morgan resumed his story and the chums almost held their breath.

“I had to tell all that. ’Cause why? ’Cause it counts in the finish—or will, if you see it the way I do,” declared the rover. “I won’t waste time sayin’ how I got back, what I went through. But get back to Dead Hope I did.

“That dark night I come a-stumblin’ up the path, yonder, weak and hungry and staggerin’—I hadn’t eat no food for a day. All of a sudden there was a yelling and a shouting and guns a-popping!”

“I stopped,” said Henry, matter-of-factly, “I stopped. There was flashes of guns and people running around and the men on horses shooting and riding after people in their night-clothes—the ones that was on the ground, I mean, not the bandits. They was dressed, of course! One o’ the men a-horseback rode right close to where I had dropped back behind the rock, and he saw me. ‘Here, grab this rein,’ he snapped at me—and you can believe it or not—it was B—it was my old pal I had last seen in Mexico City, drunk, and he had give me this slash with a broken bottle!”

“B—who’s Be—?” asked Tom quickly, trying a clever way to surprise the man into revealing the name they sought, without having to wait.

“Be—oh, he’s the man I’ve been talkin’ of,” said Henry, favoring Tom with a steady stare and then, suddenly, breaking into his high chuckle. Then he sobered down and went on.

“Little boys what asks questions finds out just what they wants to know—he-he-he!” he reproved Tom who apologized for interrupting.

“All right,” Henry said. “Well, I yelled after him, but he was runnin’ towards the excitement, hollering and shouting, and I was too busy with that horse of his to run after him. I was scared to let the critter loose for fear o’ what he’d do to me. I guessed he’d fell in with a rough gang and had decided to lead them or be with them on this raid. I judged there must be a lot of gold laid up in the mine house, waiting for burros and guards to carry it to the railroad. If I let the horse go, this fellow would maybe give me a dose of lead. So I hung on.”

“He was, and no mistake! He began to drag me and I hung on, yellin’ at him to quit, and him draggin’ and rearing up. First thing I knew, I was bein’ dragged over to that pass we rode in this afternoon. The bandits must o’ come out of it earlier and the horse wanted to get home, maybe. Anyhow, towards that he was draggin’ me. And then—I saw a couple of Mex. desperadoes, so they looked with their tall straw hats and dirty, raggedy clo’es, and they was drivin’ about six burros with heavy sacks tied over their backs, all they could carry!”

“Gold it most likely was. Anyhow, here come that friend of mine—he was my friend once, I mean, before—” he touched his scar. “He had a rifle and was runnin’. There was still shootin’ going on, and a horse was down one place and a bandit another, and men stretched out yonder and hither. This fellow he run to me and pushed me to one side and pushed a rifle in my hand, and he said, ‘Hold this pass for ten minutes with this rifle, and then retreat up it about fifty feet, and I’ll be in ambush and I’ll surprise the guys, and what you can’t stop—I will! Then we’ll divvy the gold!’ So I grabbed the rifle and took a place. At the same minute I hear a screech and yonder, out of the sleepin’ quarters, comes a little girl, a-runnin’ as tight as she could run, with a big ruffian a-chasin’ her!”

“Oh!” cried Tom, aghast and almost shaking in his excitement, “Oh—my sis—little Margery!”

“Little girl with bright hair!” agreed Henry. “Well, before I scarcely knowed what was what that—er, friend—had shot down the ‘greasers’ with the burros, stopped the fellow chasin’ the little girl, scooped her in his arms and set her onto the saddle of his horse and was up behind her.”

“They had been so busy finishin’ off the engineer and the other white men—and they made a good stand, let me say it!—they was occupied too much to notice the actions goin’ on up by the pass. But they saw what was what about then, and come a-yellin’. I took cover, and begun to use that rifle. There was a full clip in it and I had another one shoved into my hands, and while that wild pal of mine rode up the pass, drivin’ the burros, I stood off about four of the bandits that wasn’t wounded.”

Henry Morgan wiped his dry lips and cleared his roughened throat. Tom hurried him along.

“Nothing?” Mr. Gray exclaimed, adding to the chorus of the younger voices, for they had not heard the details before.

“Nothing!” Henry repeated. “Not a sign of help. That fellow was gone, slicker’n grease, with the little girl and the burros and the gold. I was caught, of course. The bandits tried to get out of me what I knew and I told them exact facts like you’ve just heard. I was mad at being made to help him ‘double-cross’ his gang and they saw I was telling the truth. Well——” he broke off.

“But he got a letter, a couple of months ago, he says,” Tom took up the recital. “Another adventurer Mr. Morgan knows, wrote him, and—what did you say he wrote?”

“He wrote me that he had run onto—this fellow we been talking about, down in Colon—Panama, you know! Said he was livin’ like a millionaire, and was talkin’ that he was gettin’ gold off of——” ‘from’ he meant, of course—“off of some Indians. I guess it’s out of the Golden Sun. So, now, gent, my proposal is this:

“I know how to get where that Toosa, the old Indian, is. He will know about—this fellow—if he’s located that Golden Sun. But I couldn’t pay the fare from here to the coast, let alone get to Spanish Honduras. That’s where you come in. You finance me, while I try to find—that man. Then we’ll all learn what we want—you, where he took the little girl, what happened to her. Me, where that mine is. I staked him plenty of times, I have right to a share in it.”

“Have to hire a boat to coast along to the outer reefs and the mouth o’ the Rio Patuca, then we’d have to get them Mosquito Indians to take us up the river in canoes. It’s rough country. What say if I go alone?”

The three young fellows shook their heads violently, thus indicating how much they trusted him.

“I will have to take time to think this over very seriously,” he said. “I am too old and weak to brave the dangers of such a trip. I can’t let you lads go alone, or with Mr. Morgan——”

Their mounts were unsaddled and they stayed on overnight because of the new development. But after an evening of eager discussion, with urgent pleas for action by the youths and hesitancy on the part of Mr. Gray, their course of action was still undecided. Leaving Morgan with a promise to “get in touch” the minute they made a plan, they rode slowly away down the trail the next day.

“He feels that there are a lot of holes in Henry’s story,” said Cliff. “We looked at the trail, and how any half dozen burros and their load of gold could get away in ten minutes is more than he can understand. And, if he was ‘fired’ from the mine, why is he there?”

“Those things are easy to explain, I think,” Tom stated. “About the burros—I asked him and he said he guessed his former friend must have unloaded them and dropped the gold sacks over the cliffs or into some hole and covered it up and turned the burros loose, or drove them into the chasm up the trail. He came to work at the mine again when the new superintendent was employed there, and that was natural because the new man did not know him or his record.”

“That makes it sound better, but there are still funny points,” Cliff replied.

“Well,” said Tom, suddenly squaring his shoulders, “Cliff, you know how anxious you were to leave no stone unturned when you were trying to learn about your father!”

“I don’t want to leave any stone unturned in this case, either,” agreed his chum, and Nicky nodded emphatically.

“Nor I,” said Tom. “And there is one stone I know about that I am going to turn as soon as we reach Mexico City again!”

CHAPTER IV
TOM BREAKS THE TRAIL

The next ten days were dull ones for the Mystery Boys. Mexico was in a state of excitement, due to the approach of the Presidential election; and, while the revolutionary times were gone and a more orderly election would take place, there were some excitable spirits in the city whose outbreaks made it unwise for the youths to go out on the streets too often.

Cliff was busy enough for he worked with his father: Mr. Gray was working on a theory that all of the Indian tribes from North America, through Mexico, Central America, Venezuela and down to Peru, were offshoots of the same original migration from some other continent, many centuries before the white people discovered the new continents. He was writing a book about that migration, and his work in Mexico dealt with studies of the old Toltecs, who preceded the establishing of the Aztec empire.

It surprised the youths to learn how closely the Toltecs, and the Aztecs later, were allied with the Incas of Peru in certain ways: both were agriculturists of a high order, as were the Texcucans, kindred with the Azteca. But there was a great contrast in the nature of the people; while the Incas had been a mild people, ruling kindly, punishing justly, fighting only for a necessary cause, the Aztecs had been a fierce, cruel, actually brutal people, even giving the name of their war god, Mexitli, to their land in the corrupted form, Mexico.

Mr. Gray was anxious to fill in many gaps in his history by studying the life and customs and legends of the host of Central American tribes, the Mayas, the Chocos, the Mosquito and Talamanca tribes, as well as the Goajiras, the San Blas, and others.

But he hesitated, although the adventure offered in Henry Morgan’s proposal would give him close contact with some of the natives of at least one section—Spanish Honduras. The tribes were all rough, rather fierce, very primitive; and he was aged, as well as having been weakened, during his stay among the Incas. Nevertheless, had he seen a way, he would have gone into the adventure.

Nicky, staying rather idly in their hotel with Tom, was glum. He craved excitement; not only was he active and impulsive, but he was adventure-loving, athletic and quick, and he liked to go into strange places and meet new situations. Also Nicky sympathized keenly with Tom over the loss of the latter’s sister, and the uncertainty of her fate.

Tom, for his part, most eager of all to go to the Mosquito country and learn what could be learned about Margery, did not seem nearly as despondent as Nicky, nor was he as busy as Cliff; yet he seemed able to wear a confident air which puzzled both of his comrades.

Nicky sat with Tom in their hotel room, chafing at his long inactivity. Tom was busy going over some books which Cliff’s father had found for him in the public library.

“Here’s a funny one,” he exclaimed, indicating a passage in the book he held. “One explorer was down in the Central Americas, and because it is so rainy at times he had a mackintosh. Do you know, Nicky, that mackintosh gave him more trouble than anything else, because when the Indians saw him wearing it, as he came toward their villages on the river in his canoe, they thought he was a priest, and because some priests had sometimes been harsh in trying to compel the Indians to adopt their creeds, the Indians all ran and hid and this explorer couldn’t get any pictures of them or any stories.”

Nicky smiled forlornly. Cliff, coming in, with his father, saw Tom with a grin on his face and his companion looking glum.

“I wish I knew what makes Tom so joyful,” Cliff said. “Tom, why don’t you be a good fellow and tell your chums what you know that makes you feel so good. Is it that telegram you got last Saturday?”

“Say, look here!” burst out Nicky, “you’re not acting fairly to the Mystery Boys’ order. You are keeping a secret.”

“No,” Tom answered, grinning still more, “I’m simply living up to our oath—with a vengeance. ‘Telling all, I tell nothing; Seeing All, I see nothing, Knowing All, I know nothing!’” he quoted their oath of allegiance.

“Father, do you know what it is that he knows?” Cliff appealed to Mr. Gray who smilingly shook his head.

“Well, I’m going to shake it out of him,” cried Cliff. “Come on, Nicky.” The two attacked Tom with gusto, letting off some of their pent-up “steam” in an old-fashioned tussle that boded ill for the hotel furniture. Mr. Gray, only watchful lest they harm any of his old records, let them have their fun. Panting and laughing, at last they gave up, still none the wiser. A knock on the door panels halted their fun.

“Tom,” said Mr. Gray, turning from a brief conversation at the door, “There is a gentleman in the office asking for you.”

“Have him come on up, please, sir,” begged Tom, and then turned his back deliberately on his companions while he stared out of the window; but Cliff, watching, saw his shoulders shaking.

Tom expected this arrival! Who could it be? The door opened. With a simultaneous shout three youths launched themselves toward the tall, thin, lank figure that appeared.

Bill Saunders had been prospecting in the Peruvian Andes at the time that Cliff had gone to try to discover if his father was still alive among a hidden Inca tribe in the cordilleras. Bill had taken active part in their adventures. After the successful end of the trip he had, with his share of money paid him by Mr. Gray, bought a Texas ranch. The youths heard from him often. Now, here he was.

“What are you doing here—how did you know——” Nicky began. Then he turned suddenly on Tom.

“So that’s why you ran off by yourself to telegraph when we got back to the city, and that’s why you wouldn’t tell us what was in the telegram you got!” he accused. “You sent for Bill.”

“I told you at the mine, I would leave no stone unturned to get news of Margery,” Tom admitted. “I said I knew one stone I’d turn.”

“And I guess I was it,” grinned Bill Saunders, depositing his long length in a chair. “Your telegram hit me just in time. I don’t know your mind and you don’t know mine, but if there’s any chance for a rolling stone to gather a little more moss, here’s the stone, all ready to roll. Cow-raisin’ is not very profitable, just now, and my bank book could stand a little more fattening. I never did—and I never will—forgive you fellows for leaving me out when you found the Captain Kidd treasure—and me a full-fledged member, paying dues and all, in the Mystery Boys.”

“We got ourselves into that adventure so fast that we didn’t have time to send word or even to think about you,” Tom admitted, with some regret, for Bill was a good companion on adventure trails, and he was, as he said, a regular member of their order since they had initiated him during their Inca experience.

To say that Bill was intrigued and eager would put it mildly. The ranch life had begun to grow tame to him: he loved adventure for its own sake, and for its thrills, as did Nicky. He began planning a trip without a delay.

Of course Mr. Gray’s last objection was removed. He had good reason to know and to trust Bill Sanders, and he did both to the full.

“I wasted no time,” Bill said. “I hopped my cayuse and galloped for the railroad, leaving my top hand in charge: but while I was laying over in a Texas town I got a long-distance telephone call in to a chum of mine in Galveston, asking if he had that cruising boat of his that he used to take me on hunting trips in. He did. We can charter it. It’s got an engine. Lots of cabin and storage room. It can go up pretty shallow rivers. It’s just what we need to go on an exploring trip.”

“You wasted no time,” said Mr. Gray. “You took it for granted that you and the boys would go.”

“That’s Bill!” praised Tom. “My telegram told him enough to get him started. I thought I’d better break a trail—we seemed to be stuck down here in this old hotel.”

His comrades praised his idea of summoning their former comrade. The very next day Bill and Tom returned to the mine, found Henry Morgan and had a talk. Bill asked some pretty sharp questions, but “Hen” gave satisfying replies and Bill arranged with him to return to Mexico City with them at once. This he did.

It seemed no time at all until the trim, staunch cruiser Porto Bello was in harbor, with the chums, Bill and Henry aboard, well supplied. with gasoline, both in her tanks and in five gallon reserve cans, and with plenty of tinned food, as well as some arms and ammunition aboard. They waited only for Mr. Gray who had determined to become a passenger. He could explore the coast, he said, and if any real information could be gleaned he was determined to secure it. He had as much enthusiasm for his historical records as the chums had for Tom’s quest, or Henry Morgan and Bill for news of the mine—the one Henry’s unnamed friend called “The Golden Sun.”

“Anchor a-weigh!” cried Nicky, when Mr. Gray came aboard with clearance papers from the port authorities. “Man the capstan, me bully boys!”

“Man it yourself,” laughed Cliff, working with his chum at the small winch forward which drew the cable: they had been off on a trial spin to see that the engine worked perfectly, and had dropped anchor a little away from the wharves. “To be nearer being somewhere else,” as Nicky put it.

“Full speed ahead, Andy,” called Bill, already elected Captain by unanimous consent. The engineer, who accompanied the cruiser to help and to represent his employer, the boat’s owner, eased his throttle forward, and engaged the clutch sending the propeller around in the proper direction. The bow parted the waters of the bay, and with caps waving, and hurrah after hurrah, Tom, Nicky and Cliff stood on the after deck and watched Mexico’s humid, sweltering coastline drop away aft.

CHAPTER V
STORM AND STRESS

Out into the sparkling waters of the Gulf of Mexico the sturdy cruiser, Porto Bello , ploughed her way. Laying her course in a quartering slant, partly South and partly East, Bill Sanders, who was agreed by all to be in command, shaped up a plan to round the nose of Yucatan, passing between it and the more Eastward island of Cuba.

There they turned South, and giving the reefy, island studded coast of Yucatan a wide berth because of the jagged rocky formation and the heavy surf close to shore, they forged steadily ahead. Their boat was not fast, but she was steady in heavy seas and had a good reserve of power in her heavy motor.

Henry Morgan knew the coast line very well, and Bill often consulted his judgment. They did not try to make landings or lie-to during the nights, preferring to hold on their course, well out in deep water, for every one on board was anxious to get to the coast of Honduras as quickly as possible. Tom and Nicky supplemented the work of Bill and of Henry as deckhands and sailors, watching and keeping everything clean and ship-shape. Cliff, who had a good deal of mechanical ability, soon made himself indispensable to Joe Anderson, the engineer, who was a quiet, rather moody Scotchman. The boys, without any intention of disrespect, promptly named him “Andy.” He accepted the new name without comment and, commandeering Cliff’s services in the engine room, soon had as clever an assistant as he could desire, although he gave few signs of his inward appreciation. Mr. Gray spent most of his time arranging the numerous glass beads and other tawdry, cheap ornaments and fancy trifles which would be very dear to the untutored Indians and would serve as trade items and presents to the chiefs of various tribes. The youths made a gay jaunt of their trip.

There was only one thing that clouded their delight: that was the misconduct of Henry Morgan.

“I don’t like the way Henry does, very much,” Tom confided to his two chums, as they rubbed up the brass work in the small wheelhouse, while Tom held the wheel, giving and taking a spoke or two as the little vessel felt the heavy surge of the Caribbean swells, rolling in great, lifting pulsations from the East, and heeled under the strong thrust of the trade wind. “Almost as soon as we left port I caught him with a bottle——”

“I know,” broke in Nicky. “He told me it was a ‘Mexican Tonic’ to keep him from being seasick.”

“Buccaneer, my hat!” said Tom, “Bill,” to their clean-living, high-principled friend as he sauntered to the doorway of the steering room, “Why don’t you throw Hen’s ‘Mexican Tonic’ overboard?”

“I can’t find it,” Bill said, “or I would, in a minute. We’re getting into Caribbean waters and it won’t be long before we are in among the tricky rocks. We have to steer down through the Gulf of Honduras and pick up the reefs outside the Rio Patuca, and that is no place to be ‘half-seas-over,’ let me tell you. Henry knows the course and he can navigate pretty well when he’s ‘straight’ but I don’t like him in his present condition——”

“He’s a rowdy in his actions, and, goodness knows! he’s dowdy enough in his clothes and habits,” said Tom. “Nicky, why did you ever let him look at that book about pirates? He thinks he’s one.”

“I thought he would be interested, having a name the same as one of the most notorious pirates,” Nicky replied. “It isn’t the book that’s to blame, it’s the ‘Tonic.’”

“I’m going down in the cabin and have another good look,” Tom said, letting Bill take over the wheel, and indicating the course as Henry had last given it to him. “Cliff’s father is very nervous about Henry but he says not to argue with him, but to make the best of it.”

He did not find anything: Henry, whatever his failings, was of a cunning nature when it came to his own desires and he seemed to know of places on the boat that the chums could never think of. As Tom searched, he felt the boat rising and falling more violently, and lurching in a half-roll, half-plunge that was not very pleasant. The cabin was stuffy and close, and he opened the portholes, wrinkling his nose at the unpleasant odor in the small space; but a dash of salt spray flung itself in his face and hastily he closed the small brass-bound port glasses and fastened them securely, then went on deck, clinging to the companion rail to avoid being thrown down.

“She’s blowing up for a storm,” said Henry, clinging to the port rail as Tom came into view, and lurching wildly. “We’re due for a storm, my hearty! Oh—I’m a buc—buc——”

“You’d better stop being a ‘buc’ and get up to the wheel house,” Tom said snappishly. “Maybe the course ought to be changed.”

“What do I care?” Henry cried with a hoarse, choking guffaw. “Many’s the pirate has piled up on the rocks. ’Cause—— ’Cause Why? I’m a rowdy-dowdy buc—ca——”

Just then a comber, its green crest froth-flecked, reared its great top on their starboard quarter. “Look out!” yelled Tom. “Grab something!” for Henry was starting in a lurching gait toward the enclosed cabin companionway.

Tom, himself, caught a stanchion and clung, holding his breath. The Porto Bello lurched and staggered under the impact of a huge wave, and there came a gurgling yell, cut short, the surge of powerfully dragging water rushing at Tom.

Before it struck, almost burying him, tugging at his arms, he saw Henry meet the wave, spinning around in a mad, fruitless effort to clutch at the cabin coaming.

Down went Henry, and along the deck he was washed by the wave. Tom, at the risk of being himself torn loose and washed away, released one hand. He made a swift, reaching grab. His fingers caught Henry’s coat, in the surging inferno of water that swung along the deck. It seemed as though his arm would be torn from its socket: his face was stung and flailed by spume and great gouts of hard-flung water.

He braced and clung as the washing water swung Henry along: the check of his clutch slowed Henry’s body and Tom’s arms ached with the pull. He dared not let go until the wave should pass. Henry, caught off his guard, and with his brain befuddled, was helpless.

Came the thud of the companion door as Mr. Gray slammed it shut in bare time to prevent the cabin from being inundated.

From the wheelhouse door, now beyond the higher wash of the receding water, Bill leaped, with Cliff at his heels, Nicky clinging madly to the spokes of the wheel and fighting to hold the cruiser on her way, nose to wind and wave.

Gripping every foot and hand hold, Bill and Cliff fought through the swirl of water, while Tom clung grimly. The water receded and Henry was dumped, inert and gasping, onto the deck just as the hold Tom had was broken by the strain. Swiftly Bill grasped Henry’s shoulder and began to drag him toward the cabin companionway, while Cliff caught Tom and steadied him.

Another huge wave was rearing its white curl to the quarter. In the wheelhouse Nicky, a little frightened at his responsibility, and yet manfully rising to the occasion, knew that the boat must not be allowed to pay off so that she would catch the waves on her side—she would be rolled over, and over. He bore with his whole weight on the spokes, holding the rudder hard over as the valiant craft struggled against the rush of waters and the roar of the swiftly rising wind.

With Cliff aiding him, while Bill dragged at the gasping Henry, Tom got to the cabin. His father opened the door, and all three grasped Henry and fairly flung him in through the door and down the several steps. Then in they plunged, and just in time to close the door before the tumult of water was over the decks again.

The brave little vessel shuddered and groaned under the water, and Nicky said a little prayer for strength to hold the wheel against his enemies of wave and rushing air. Tom sputtered and got rid of some water he had taken in, while Henry, sitting up, gulping and choking, began to thank him.

Totally unconscious that he was taking the command, or that his words rang with the authority of anger and just censure, Tom cried, “Never mind. Get yourself together and get to that wheel. Nicky’s alone there. Joe’s calling. Cliff, go help Joe. Bill, you drag this Henry up to that wheel and stand over him. Cliff’s father is battening down the ports. We’re all safe inside, but we don’t know what’s going to happen. Get going, you Henry!”

As if every one of them recognized the voice of command, Bill caught Henry’s collar and almost yanked him to his feet. Henry, sobered and now beginning to recover himself, and with the just rebuke and the evident menace of their position clearing his mind, obediently staggered along with Bill, while Cliff raced past them on the other side of the churning, coughing engine, to help Joe.

“What will you do, Tom?” asked Mr. Gray, thrusting home a heavy steel bar across the companion door, although, being aft, it was not subjected to the crushing force of the waves.

“I’ll find that Henry Morgan’s ‘tonic,’ if it’s my last act!” cried Tom and began flinging things out of the lazarette, or storage cubby in the floor, where their food was kept.

He had no success there, but he began on the bunks lining the sides of the long, low, narrow cabin, at whose forward end was the wheel, with the engines just a little aft of amidships.

Still the storm, sudden and furious, mounted in ferocity. The vessel plunged and reared, rolled and twisted; her timbers creaked and her decks echoed to the roar and thunder of waves. Cliff and “Andy” stuck, one on either side of the motor, oiling, wiping, Andy watching the gasoline pressure glass, and the oil flow, Cliff jumping, clinging to the bunks, to bring a rag, or to steady Andy while he made an adjustment of the carbureter to compensate for the slight and occasional “miss” in one cylinder.

Forward, Bill, Nicky and Henry clung to the wheel, all swinging together at Henry’s order, or releasing a spoke or two to pay off for more way between the great, onrushing combers.

“No,” said Henry, between his teeth. “I’m going to swing her around if I can get steerage way in some minute when it’s quieter—we’d better run before it—but I das’sent try now—’cause why? She’d roll like a barrel and maybe dive under!”

“Right!” cried Cliff, above the thud of water and the groan of the timbers and the thrashing pulsation of the propeller, racing as it was lifted from the surging water. “Ease her when she races, Andy,” but he knew that Andy did so before his young aide spoke.

“If we could get a chance to swing her around,” choked out Henry, a thoroughly sober and frightened man.

“I’ve found it!” exulted Tom, rising from an old airtight waste can, bolted down aft of the engine; it had been filled with oily waste and old wiping rags, and he had found, at the bottom, the bottles Henry had concealed there. “Mr. Gray—don’t say a word. I’ll put them back until this storm blows by and then I’ll break them on the rocks when we get in to shore.”

With the suddenness which characterizes tropical storms of certain sorts, less than hurricanes, the wind began to drop, and soon to fall to the steady trade wind velocity, while the clouds broke, the rain squalls ceased, blue sky appeared, and only the lifting heave of the turbulent Caribbean remained of the time of stress. They all breathed a sigh of relief; but the respite was brief.

“We’re closer in than I thought!” shouted Henry, at the wheel. “Quick, somebody, get forward with the lead. Half-speed, Andy! We may be close on a reef!”

Tom flung aside the brace of the after door, and with Nicky at his side, leaped on deck while Mr. Gray closed the door. Bill was already out of the side door to port, while Andy and Cliff stood by their engine.

“Reverse—back water!” cried Henry. “We’ve got to fight her off the shore and stand off and on until we can see what we’re doing.”

Before their bow, disclosed by an onrushing comber which had obscured them, great black fangs of rock held their bared teeth in readiness to crunch joyously, grimly, as the Porto Bello staggered and strove to claw around!

CHAPTER VI
STRANDED!

Gleaming and flashing like the huge tusks of a water wolf, waiting, submerged, to gnash upon the defenseless cruiser, Tom saw the rocks, great needles of terror, for only an instant. Then a great, great, green-blue wave lifted between his straining eyes and the danger.

The wave swept on, while under their keel, another equally huge mass of water bellied up and flung the boat aloft on its surface.

Slowly the bow swung. The next glimpse Tom caught of the menace, it was off to port—but did a range of submerged reefs extend far across their path? Tom pointed out the threat to Bill and Nicky. They gasped, so close was the nearer of the needles.

All along the coast of Central America these reefs and islands, huge barrier reefs, wide, low-lying circle reefs, atolls enclosing tiny islets—all are a menace to navigation, and it is a skillful pilot who will try to take a boat in among them.

Henry Morgan was not a skillful pilot, but he had been through the barriers about the Rio Patuca mouth many times and he felt sure of his ability, coupled with an abiding faith in his “luck.”

But just after a storm, and with the seas even more wild than was their usual turbulent state, the task of getting through the reefs was one to whiten his face and shake his very marrow. Bill, looking back, saw his face of terror and, with a word to the boys, scrambled to the cabin and snatched the wheel from fingers already nerveless with fear. But the boat had paid off, the signal for full speed ahead had been obeyed, the steerageway, aided by the surge and force of the waves, had enabled them to turn aside. They swept over the first barrier on a huge swinging crest, seeing, through the clear water, that the jaws of rock seemed to gnash in fury at the loss of their prey. Tom and Nicky, gripping the capstan with one hand each, clutched one another with the other, clinging in tense, breathless waiting.

But the boat did not strike. She missed the rocks by almost a miracle. Had Henry kept his senses earlier in the voyage he would hardly have exposed them to such peril. For it was not over; it had scarcely begun!

“Keep still,” Tom called back, squeezing Nicky’s arm reassuringly. “Watch to the fore and on your side.”

Nicky’s eyes were fixed on the swirl in the water just ahead, and on the triangular black fin to port than on his duty, and it was fortunate that no rock loomed near his post; the sharks were gathering with seemingly uncanny instinct, waiting—waiting—waiting!

Bill, once the menace of the outer reef was passed, swung the bow down the coast, and because the most powerful thrust of the waves had been subdued, although they still were big enough to roll the cruiser sickeningly, they were able to make headway, always fighting outward a few points to overcome the inswing of the water.

Along the coast Tom and Nicky could see low, sandy stretches of beach, under the broil of the sun, now full out and very hot; beyond the wide strips of sand there were dense, tangled masses of jungle, and even in the cleared air after the storm they could scent that queer, fetid odor of decaying vegetation and mold which is characteristic of the tropics. Far in the distance, landward, back of sand and jungle, bluish mountains loomed.

“Where are we heading for?” Nicky wondered, and Tom shook his head. “I hope Henry knows,” he replied. “I don’t see any opening.”

Nor, at the moment, did Henry, who, thoroughly subdued, but with a remnant of his former manhood forcing him to steel his nerves to save his own precious life, and theirs, came forward and stood, eyes roving the shore and the waters.

“Shifting sand banks,” Henry replied huskily. “They always change. If we once get aground there, the waves would pound the boat to a pulp! And—the—” He felt a kick from Tom, and, with a glance of surprise, saw Tom’s eyes warning him not to frighten Nicky.

Tom, himself no coward, had sometimes yielded to a nameless dread of things unseen, but any visible danger tightened his muscles to their athletic perfection, settled his nerves and steadied his whole body to its dominating mind’s demands. He knew Nicky was not a coward, but he also knew that for anybody’s mind to settle on fear and think about it and worry about it, made them helpless when the need for action came.

Cliff, with the tense moment at the engines over, came on deck and joined his chums for a breath of the heated, but fresher air.

“Those are shifting sandbanks,” Tom explained, pointing. “We are hunting for the channel.”

“There’s Brower’s Inlet, that place inshore,” Henry said. “Now, form a line to pass word quick to Bill how to steer, and you, Cliff, be by the engine room port to call directions—we’ll try for the shore—but I don’t guarantee—” Tom kicked his shins again and Henry, scowling, became still and intent.

Toward land the great rollers, muddy and moiled, rose into swirling lines of dirty foam, then drew off to the shore.

Seaward, greater combers reared their heads and growled their fury that they had not succeeded in flinging these daring people onto their fang-like reefs.

Then came a sort of sighing, from the waves, as the Porto Bello swung her nose among them. She rose up over a wave, then settled; there came a trembling and a dragging as the bottom grated on the sand. She wrenched and tore herself free, like a living thing striving to help her friends at wheel and engine.

A great wave came rolling, its speed seeming to threaten that it would roar down upon the boat, her own speed diminished by the friction of her keel.

“No we’re not! We’re off!” shrilled Tom as the wave caught up to them and the Porto Bello , with a staggering effort, let herself be swung up into the cradling arms of the mighty water.

She staggered on; she lost the supporting force of the water and sunk down on one side; once again—and ever again for what seemed an eternity, she was lifted, borne forward, slumped down to roar and grind along the sand, or to lie, like a stricken thing, on her bulging side, the sole thing that kept her from turning over.

Bill did noble work, with Cliff again at his side, at the wheel, while Nicky and Tom stood by at the bows, one with the lead held ready if they ever got through this moiling mud and spume.

Came a wave, the greatest yet, as the Porto Bello was dumped on the sand. Crash! while they all grabbed and clung to stanchions with all their strength a huge swirl of muddied water swept over them. They emerged, gasping and coughing—came another grinding, forward movement—and then, like a tired bird, safe at last in her nest, the cruiser slid over the last sand of the bar and into quiet water where, as her engine slowed, she rocked in a soft, gentle swell.

“Phew!” coughed Bill, poking out a porthole glass, and sticking his head out through the opening. “That was——”

“Stand by!” shouted Henry, wildly. “We’re in a current running back out to sea like a torrent—get her around—get her around—hard a-starboar—no, hard a——”

Simultaneously he broke off his calls and stared ahead as if chained to the spot, speechless. Tom and Nicky, staring too, stiffened.

Out from the sand protruded needles of rock, with swirling water and roiling sand partly concealing the black doom!

Henry had sunk down and covered his eyes from the vision of the black-finned monsters congregating in the muddy waters—sharks!

Bill had the tiller ropes roaring in their channel, for he had paid no heed to the conflicting orders but, with a little prayer of devout trust that he did not mention later, he stood, gripping the spokes.

The boat had lost way, and swung sideways across the rushing water. Tom saw what was coming. Instantly he snatched loose a life preserver! Not to leap and save his life. To save all of them!

He bent low, hanging over the bow, dropping the preserver so that it met the rock, was between it and the boat as she touched.

She shuddered, and there was a crunch, but no smash. Madly yelling for full speed astern, Bill pawed his wheel over; the boat hesitated, her back-lashed propeller striving against the stream; slowly she receded from the rocks. Tom released his clutch on the preserver rope; from aft came the grind and shiver of sickening contact; the engine grated to a stop with a jar and a cough. The boat shuddered, ran forward again in the current.

“The propeller hit!” shouted Cliff, from the after deck, staring overside at a wicked fang, seeming to lick its glistening lips at him.

“It’s probably bent beyond help!” called Andy, from the engine. “The gears in the shift box are stripped. When the propeller caught it tore the gear teeth off—lucky it didn’t crack the crankshaft!”

There was no use for it, had they possessed it. With the strong outsweep of the water, and with a low, sandy spit jutting before them, there was nothing to be done but wait.

Gently, almost at the inlet, the Porto Bello lifted her nose on a swell, and poked it experimentally into the sand.

She liked the soft bed, burrowed forward on the next low swell, and then settled down, like a baby in its cradle.

“Better here than—out there!” Tom waved his arm toward the roaring surf of the outer reef.

“Unless it’s quicksand, we’re all right,” Tom declared. “When it’s low tide we can examine the propeller.”

“Let’s take one thing at a time—and take it as it comes!” said Tom. And Mr. Gray, somewhat shaken, but very calm, as well as Bill, agreed with Tom.

CHAPTER VII
TURTLES AND TROUBLE

Notwithstanding the youthful efforts to be optimistic, the Porto Bello’s position was bad. She lay with her stern in deeper, swift water. Sharks and the rapid flow of the tide made it impossible to get under her stern to examine the propeller. They had spare parts, and would be able to repair the stripped gearing, or, at least, to render the clutch and shifts possible to use by substituting new gears. But the damage to the propeller must be estimated.

“My idea,” said Tom, with proper diffidence, when the entire party discussed the situation while they ate the dinner Bill prepared, “my idea would be to get a rope over to those snags of rock, put pulleys fore and aft on the top of the cabin, reave a rope through them, run it to the capstan, forward, then carry it out to the snags, fasten it, and then, steadily take up on it with the winch. The pull would work on the whole boat that way, and if we moved most of our stuff aft and lightened the bow, she might drag off.”

“How would we get a line to those snags—across that deep water?” objected Henry. “I, for one, won’t risk those sharks! They say they don’t trouble the Indians, or Negroes, but white men are different.”

This prediction proved true, but not until the next morning; then a canoe containing two stolid Mosquito Indians came out. They wore ragged trousers and shirts worn outside the trousers, hanging down, and their dark faces were almost as expressionless as those of the North American Indians.

They paddled down the water near the stern, and coming into a small bight of water where the current was less violent, they sat still for almost an hour, staring fixedly and without answering a number of hails sent them by various ones.

Finally, however, they did respond. They spoke little, but seemed to comprehend a little English and a trifle more of Spanish. Henry Morgan, who was morose and angry about something, bellowed orders at them. Tom, who knew what made Henry sour, since Tom had already dropped several fat bottles into a swift eddy astern, remonstrated at his angry commands.

“You be still!” snapped Henry. “I guess I know how to handle these Indians. You’ve got to bellow and roar at them to get them started. They’re lazy and they’re rough and they’d never move if you don’t get them waked up.”

Nevertheless, Tom’s way proved the better one, for when Bill held up a flashing bit of ornamental glass, like the crystal pendant from a glass chandelier, they spoke. In time they were induced to catch a rope and carry it out and, in the canoe, fix it fast to a projecting tooth of rock located in the proper direction to help pull the boat out of her sand bed, into which she was burrowing her nose more deeply with every roll.

“We’ll use the rocks that tried to injure us, and make them help us!” Cliff cried, and with a good will they took up slack on the rope until it was taut and throbbing with its tension.

After a long day of effort and patience they saw their craft float free, and, for another bribe, several more Indians were procured, in canoes, to tow them to a convenient beach where their rope was taken well inland to a coco-palm, secured there, and the boat was unloaded the next day, the stuff piled on the hot sand under an improvised shelter of canvas stretched over four upright pieces of timber found by the chums in a search of the beach.

Under another shelter, to which they brought heavy mosquito netting and with it made a tight enclosure, they spent the night. It was no pleasant slumber that came to them, for the Central American mosquitos are not only vicious and persistent, but they are large and their bite, on any but the toughest skin, produces red welts and a sort of itching that is as maddening as it is persistent and painful.

The next day, while Bill and Henry bargained with the Indians for canoes and guides to take them up the Rio Patuca to a tribe further inland where the old Indian, Toosa, lived, and while Cliff and Mr. Gray aided Andy in work of examining the gear and shafting, Nicky joined Tom on the beach.

“Some of the Indians are going turtle hunting,” he said. “Let’s us go along. They’ll take us. I let one young Indian play with my watch, and he promised to take us if I let him wear the watch during the trip.”

They accordingly joined the Indians. The method of hunting was interesting: they went along the beach and, watching until they saw a turtle sunning itself, or, possibly, laying its eggs, they managed to get between it and the water.

Sometimes they were not adroit enough. A turtle will instinctively try for its native element, and once in it, no expert can capture it. On land, however, once headed off, it may be turned on its back, and thus secured. After several wasted tries they managed to get a big fellow, weighing several hundred pounds, headed off and surrounded.

It was both a job and a tussle to get the huge and clumsy shell reversed; and then the boys were amazed at the cleverness of the Indians’ method of getting the creature back to their village, or near to it. To drag such a weight would be very hard. To make it “do its own driving” as Tom said, was the easier way. The Indians fastened ropes to each of its flippers, and then turned it over.

With slackened ropes, the creature instantly drove for the water. But once it plunged into its favorite retreat, the ropes were manipulated in such a way that the animal was actually made to swim and, in addition, was pulled, along the shore line, with comparatively little effort. Once opposite the camp, the turtle was dragged onto the beach and despatched, to be cut into choice portions. For their efforts during the hunt, Tom and Nicky were given some large chunks of the meat which made a wonderful addition to eggs they had discovered, and their regular fare.

Days passed with little happening. Outside of the tedious work of dismantling the gear assembly, and taking out the propeller shaft and bearings to be certain that all was sound, and hammering at the propeller to get its bent flanges back to proper pitch, there was only eating, fighting mosquitos and other annoying insects, and trying to be patient.

In spite of, or, maybe, because of Henry’s shouts and orders, the Indians made no move to take the party upstream.

It was only when the combined arguments of Mr. Gray, Bill, Tom and his chums made Henry desist, that finally, after about ten days, the Indians signified that on the morrow two canoes would start.

“Bill, and Henry will go, of course,” said Mr. Gray. “Tom, I feel, has a right to be with them because of his intense interest in any news concerning his sister.”

“But Nicky is all bitten up with—or by—mosquitos,” said Cliff, “and he can’t risk getting away from the ointment jars—and I must help with the readjustment of the engine and stay with Andy and Dad.”

It was arranged in that way. The next morning two canoes came to the beach and Bill and Tom climbed into the larger, while Henry took his place in the smaller one. With many farewell waves, and promises to get back as quickly as the information could be discovered, they were rowed—or paddled—away.

In turning the sand-spit into the inlet’s swift current, the canoe containing Henry, still morose and soured, went fairly near the jagged rock formation on which the propeller had been damaged. Through the clear water, as a swirl of mud settled, he caught sight of something, and with a sharp word, ordered the four Indians paddling to swing in closer. He got very close to the rock, leaned over the side, then jumped into the water up to his waist.

“Gosh!” whispered Tom, “I wish I’d broken the darn things. I did try to shy the bottles of his ‘tonic’ so they’d smash, but they missed.”

“So that’s where they went!” he cried furiously red, holding the fat bottles aloft and shaking them toward the other boat. “Which one of that boatful did that—threw my stuff away?”

Suddenly he turned on Tom, about twenty feet away, in the larger canoe. “I’ll bet you—” he snarled, “you was the one. ’Cause why? ’Cause you was hollerin’ about it!”

Tom’s face turned red. Henry saw it and, in his sudden rage, he drew back his arm and flung one of the flasks—or almost did!

With Henry’s arm at the point of coming forward, Bill, a marksman of no mean ability, caught up the rifle with which he had armed himself, and almost at the instant that it appeared above the gunwale, there came the spit of its bullet and the shivering of glass as the bottle broke in Henry’s hand. So close was the shot, so perfect the aim, that only the neck of the bottle remained.

Henry dropped it, staring in rage and disappointment at the roiling spot where his good “tonic” was blending swiftly with the Caribbean water.

Henry did so—but into the canoe; and, so furious and beyond reason was he that his hand groped for and brought out his own rifle.

“You drop that rifle,” snapped Bill. “You crazy coot! Don’t you know I mean business!”

The way he replaced the rifle and climbed into the tilting canoe, as well as the tone in which his husky words were spoken, indicated that this was only one time, that there would be more.

“No! Forget his crazy stunt!” urged Bill. “Any day that I can’t handle a loon like him, I’ll eat scorpions’ tails!”

“Getting angry is better for us—as long as we keep cool!” Bill grinned, his rifle lazily resting on the canoe’s edge. “A cool man can out-guess, out-plan, out-shoot a fellow in a temper, any day! As for that bottle—watch it splinter the first time it starts for his lips.”

Bill motioned to the Indians, who had hardly moved, and who had certainly not spoken or changed expression. “Go on!” he said. Tom thought that just a hint of admiration showed in the faces of the five paddling their own craft.

“And you saved his life on the boat, when that wave washed him down,” grunted Bill.

CHAPTER VIII
AN UNPLEASANT TRIP

That trip up the Rio Patuca was one of the worst experiences Tom had ever been through, and Bill agreed with him when he said so.

Starting through a narrow inlet, taking advantage of the inflow of the tide, the canoes came into a lagoon; the water was shallow but clear; the banks were lined with the most dense and varied vegetation imaginable; Tom could recognize at a distance, only the cocoanut palms, and the mangroves, with their huge, spreading roots.

The canoes proceeded up the lagoon to a native village, marked by a cluster of coco-palms which seemed to be floating in the water. The whole village turned out to watch the landing of the white men and their young companion and Tom saw that they were as curious about him as he was about them. The young men were clean-limbed and had very fine faces; the girls were almost beautiful, though the older women showed how labor and daily toil aged and furrowed their faces and bent their bodies.

After a stay overnight the canoes set out again, and day after day the routine of paddling, fighting mosquitos, landing for lunch, going forward, finding a place to camp, putting up mosquito bars and trying to prevent them from being filled by the pests before it was too late, was all there was to report.

“They certainly named this country well,” Tom told Bill as they dived under their mosquito netting on the second day of the trip.

The mosquitos were much larger than the Northern species, and were of such a tough, rubbery body that in order to destroy them it was necessary to strike ones-self with great force—“More punishment than relief!” Tom observed, ruefully, as he fought the pests.

“They have to be killed,” replied Bill, “and we’ll have to get our net up earlier at night, because they get worse as we go on, Henry says.”

“Yes,” Tom admitted. “He told me that if anybody stayed out from the protection of his net for an hour at night, he’d be bitten to death!” Bill agreed that it was quite probable.

As they went on, finally reaching and turning into the muddy mouth of the river itself through a narrow channel, Tom and Bill came to the conclusion that their trip had more difficulties in store than the pestilence of the country’s terrible mosquitos. Henry Morgan kept away from them, morose and sullen; when he caught Henry’s eyes bent on him, or on Bill, Tom saw that they were brooding and angry. Henry had long since disposed of his final bottle of “tonic,” and he seemed to be holding and feeding his grudge against Bill and Tom for destroying the other bottle.

He was very hard on his Indians. He yelled at them, drove them, said foul things to them and about them. Tom and Bill, on the contrary, were decent in their attitudes; and, although the Indians were stolid and silent, seldom speaking, almost never smiling, they showed, in little services, that were human and responsive under their stolid exteriors. They often put up Tom’s mosquito bar for him, gave him and his closer companion the best they had, but always without the least flicker of expression.

Henry had to demand help, had to drive and threaten to get anything done; Tom had only to wish for an adjustment of his sleeping couch, of boughs, in a rude camp—and it was done! Perhaps it was because, during the long, humid, tensely hot days, he took the trouble to see that the heavy bough with which he fought mosquitos was used to drive them away from the paddlers as well; also, because he and Bill shared their food when the Indians had little. There seemed to be no open appreciation, but gratitude was evident in many ways, although Henry, seeing them wave their branches to flick the mosquitos from the Indians’ backs, derided them and sneered, saying an Indian had no feelings.

Camping on mud banks, uncomfortable and mean, paddling through muddy waters, past vast jungles and wide, low savannas of lush grass, past wide cane-brakes, they pursued slow but steady, if tedious progress. Tom began to wish the trip were done. Rain, fog and wet, dreary days were far more frequent than dry ones; and this, added to the mud beneath their camps, the small food supply and the mean temper of Morgan, made things more than unpleasant.

In time they reached a small village; the huts were of palmetto stakes, driven into the ground close together, in the shape of an oblong enclosure with rounded ends and a space for a door; roofs were of a thatch of woven reeds or brush. The few Indians were silent, stolid people, but not unkind or cruel in their attitude. At this village, Bill and Henry were informed, they would be left until men came down the river to take them on.

“They know,” Morgan responded in surly, husky tones. “Indians know when people come.”

Tom made no comment on the rude behavior, but busied himself making friends with a small boy, evidently a child belonging to some one of importance. The youngster, about eight, liked the white boy, some years older, and when his shyness was overcome, he spent hours watching Tom as the white youth demonstrated how a small, bright red magnet he carried would draw and cling to several nails he also had.

The boy, Porfirio, in response, showed Tom many trails across the swamp savannas surrounding the village, and helped him to search for beautiful tropical birds’ eggs, curious stones, and other specimens. Always he begged to be shown the magnet and its power; it fascinated him and, the day that Tom let him, fearfully and timidly, take it and play with it for a while, he looked toward Tom as one might have looked at a master, and from then on, followed him like a dog.

By that time Tom had picked up enough of the village dialect to learn that Porfirio’s father had been slain by one of the jaguars—or, as the natives termed the ferocious cats, tigers, caught on a lonely trail without a weapon, and horribly mangled. Tom felt sorry for the desolate child and did his best to amuse him.

After several wasted weeks, a great canoe arrived from upriver, in which, besides the paddlers, was an old man, bent and wizened and terribly dwarfed; yet he was stronger than any other man—or any two men—among the Indians, and seemed to be greatly respected. He was Toosa, the man they had come so far to see!

Henry at once began to question him, but Toosa paid no heed to him at all. He had come, primarily, to take the child, Porfirio, a great-grandson, to his own village further up the turbid stream.

“We came all the way up here—you recognize me, don’t you?” Henry cried, and when the old man nodded, went on, “we came all the way to find out where——”

Toosa made a gesture, stopping Henry. He had just landed and his young great-grandson ran to greet him. Toosa merely touched his shoulder with a finger and turned back toward the boats after a brief word with one of the natives. But Henry caught his thin, though muscular and wiry arm. Tom, watching, saw a display of a curious power that the old man possessed. He did not move his body or shake Henry off; he simply turned his head and fixed his steady, bright eyes on the impatient white man. Henry, about to speak, seemed to be struck by some invisible message of power, for he closed his lips, holding the grip he had for a moment; then his hand loosened and dropped, and he stood still. Toosa, turning back toward the boats, resumed his way, the small boy trotting at his side.

“We don’t want to let him get away, though, at that,” demurred Tom, but Bill merely gave him a warning glance, and slowly strolled along behind the dwarfed, bent old figure. Henry, after a moment, took up the march, and Tom kept close to Bill, curious and uncertain what was to happen.

“He’s a powerful chief, even if he isn’t the magician that the Indians think he is,” Bill observed quietly to Tom. “He won’t talk to us until he has settled himself in his own village.”

He soon found out. As soon as he had settled himself in his great, roughly shaped canoe, made from the trunk of a huge tree, Toosa turned to the three whites on the bank, and beckoned.

“Did you expect us?” asked Tom, mystified at the Indian’s calm arrangements for them.

“I know!” answered the old man briefly, and said no more. As they took their designated positions the chief took a paddle several times heavier and broader than the rest, made a signal, and the canoe began to glide away from the Indians, watching on the bank.

That huge paddle served well during the trip up the river, and the amazing strength with which the wiry old man used it was a marvel to Tom. There were rapids, and dangerous ones they proved to be. The swift water almost carried the canoe back, but with a strong sweep of that great driver, the Indian caused it to tremble; with a second heave, while the other Indians strove with their smaller paddles, he sent the boat forward, and then guided and drove it between the rocks, over the rough waters, past dangerous whirlpools. Once, only a swift swing of his paddle turned them aside before they were dashed to death in a whirling smother of foaming waters. Again, by exertions that seemed akin to those of a giant, he took the craft forward when one of the lighter paddles broke and the crew was in confusion and terror.

And when, close to nightfall, they landed, he stepped from the canoe as serene and unwearied as if he had been one of the three white passengers. Tom heard from Bill that the oldest Indians in that country claimed that Toosa lived there and was just as they saw him today, when the Indians themselves had been children.

Quartered in a hut, fed and well cared for, at least two of the white travelers obeyed Toosa’s brief order, which Bill understood to be a command that they must not set foot outside the hut. The reason for it seemed plain. It was a precaution against danger. During Toosa’s absence many of the villagers had become demons through drinking the fermented cane-juice which was brewed in a huge trough in the village and from which much had been taken.

The Indians were not only noisy and, in some cases, quarrelsome; they were beyond control.

In spite of their remonstrances Henry Morgan elbowed his way past Tom and Bill, his rifle under his arm.

“He’s going out to mix with them and join in their orgies!” cried Bill. “I hope——”

“He knows them. He’s been here often, he says,” Tom reminded him, “he isn’t in any danger.” Bill shook his head. He was not convinced.

“It’s not him I’m worrying about, or what they’ll do to him,” he said moodily, “it’s what he may tell them about us—remember, he’s nursing a grudge against us, Tom.”

CHAPTER IX
MAGIC AND MADNESS

In the midst of a tropical paradise under the vivid moon, and with the looming grandeur of brooding mountains over it, Tom and Bill saw such an orgy of lust and degradation as made them shudder.

Around the rude receptacle which held the fermented cane-juice, the Indians gathered. The younger men and the older youths played a weird, tuneless melody on reed pipes while the others indulged their taste for the strong liquid. Henry Morgan joined these and seemed to be a member of long standing, by the greetings he got.

Out into the moonlit square of the village, a space where the earth was trodden by countless feet until it was almost as hard as stone, came a bent, but striking figure. Although age had almost drawn his nose and chin together, although his body was in no way erect or striking, Tom saw nothing grotesque in that stalking form; rather, it spoke of power and of virility.

He approached the trough and for a while, as though ashamed, or frightened, the men were very still.

“Can he stop them, do you suppose?” Tom whispered, to Bill, as the two crouched by the door of the large hut that had been assigned to them.

They watched, silent and amazed as Toosa stalked straight over to the group of Indians. The reeds ceased to whine and whistle. The younger men and the boys appeared to fade into the encircling brush.

Toosa simply stood there, his distorted body drawn as erect as was possible, arms folded, his face stern in the moonlight.

There was a long moment of absolute silence. Toosa looked at his tribesmen and they, shamed, looked down at the ground.

Only Henry Morgan, his ruddy face inflamed, his eyes more bleary than ever, stared boldly back at the dark-skinned nemesis. Toosa did not even glance toward the white man; his regard was fixed upon his own kind. Several of them shifted their positions nervously and one, sidling off with head averted, disappearing into the brush.

That seemed to be the signal. Still Toosa said nothing—he merely looked his anger and disgust. But the men began to move, restlessly and then hurriedly rising and starting in various directions, none going near Toosa except one careless individual. With a swift, unexpected sweep of his ape-like arm, Toosa touched that man—and he sprawled in a choking, gasping heap.

“Look! Look at Henry!” whispered Tom, gripping Bill’s shoulder hard in his excitement.

“Just what I was afraid of,” Bill whispered back. “I hope he doesn’t think about us—I can guess that he’s going to defy Toosa! If he can get the Indians back he may turn their attention on us—then——”

He did not say any more, but his hand tightened on the stock of his rifle and with the other he loosened one of his two pistols, worn in belt holsters, and glanced at Tom in the dim light. Tom was too intent on the scene in the square to observe Bill’s half intent to give him a weapon which, did need arise, Tom’s training during the trip would enable him to use effectively.

Henry, his muscles responding poorly to his befuddled will, staggered upright and, wavering a little, faced Toosa.

“Get out of here!” he roared. “What do you mean, you red dog, by interfering with a white man’s pleasure!”

“Something to the effect that the white man’s ‘pleasure’ was the Indians’ ruin!” Bill told him.

Henry was not with Toosa, but very much against him! He stood, shakily but with fury growing in his face, a white man of the lowest sort, in maudlin rage defying a red man of the higher type of intelligence. It passed through Tom’s mind that by comparison, the red man was the finer specimen, dwarf or not.

“I’ll teach—teach you—to—” gulped Henry, and he bent down for his rifle, lying on the ground.

Bill’s muscles tensed, and he was about to leap forward, his own weapon ready; but Tom held his arm, and whispered, “Wait!”

Toosa, standing without movement or change of expression, watched as Henry fumbled with his gun, and getting himself erect by an effort, tried to level the rifle at Toosa.

“Even in his condition, he might hit him!” urged Bill, trying to disengage his arm from Tom’s restraining clutch.

Bill stared at his young companion in amazement; then his eyes turned to observe the expected result. Henry, the rifle leveled, stood on his uncertain feet, trying to “draw a bead” with the wavering sights.

In the brush, Indians were watching intently. Would their magician and healer, their guide and guardian, falter? Could the white man with the devil-stick that spat fire and death—could he——?

“I’ll—I—give you—chance!” he sputtered. “I give—you chance! ‘C-’cause why? ‘C-’cause you got to tell me where is Mort Beecher an’—an’—the Golden Sun!”

Toosa did not move, nor did he open his lips. He simply stood, eyes coldly, glowingly fixed on the furious, maudlin white man.

“You tell, I not shoot—I call men and put you out of way till we finish,” Henry called in his husky voice. “Then we fix the two who come with me—eh, boys?” He swung, staggering a little, to try and get response from the brush. Not an Indian showed himself or moved.

“Why doesn’t Toosa run—Toosa! Toosa—run while he’s not watching!” shrilled Bill breaking from the hut.

Toosa made one gesture, a slight gesture. Bill saw it and stopped, while Tom advanced to Bill’s side, though both retired into the hut’s shadow as Henry, with a muttered word that was not good to hear, swung on his heel, caught his balance and glowered toward the hut. Then he pulled the trigger; there was a flash, but while Bill flung Tom back into the hut, neither was struck, nor did they hear where the bullet went.

“Come!” he shouted. “Tell me. Where is Mort Beecher! Where is that Golden Sun mine he told me about! You know! You can tell! Tell now, if you want—want see sun—sun rise in morning!”

“Oh, all right!” Henry growled, his voice shaking. He took another huge gulp from a calabash of liquid fire, choked, gasped and then re-sighted his rifle.

Toosa brushed some fiery sparks from the old coat he wore, and laughed, a horrible sound of triumph and rage.

Choking and sputtering in his fury Henry raised and reversed his rifle, clubbed it and rushed.

At the same instant Tom, like a streak of lightning, raced across the space; but he arrived too late; Toosa, with his long arms, caught the rifle and with a wrench tore it from Henry’s grip. He flung it aside but Henry, lost to all sense of decency or judgment, flung his weight against Toosa.

Toosa, braced as he was, gave back a step under the impact. Bill was almost beside Tom as the latter drew back, unable to interfere as Toosa’s foot caught on a projecting root at the side of the level space; down he went with a thud, and instantly Henry, on top, reached for his throat.

Toosa fought like a tiger, his own ape-like arms giving him the advantage of reach in the grapple for throatholds. But the fall had stunned Toosa a little and he did not grip with his customary strength.

Whether it was right or wrong to take part against a white man and to fight for an Indian would not at any time have bothered Tom. He knew that color did not matter; that it was the spirit and quality of a man that counted and not the skin he wore. So, unhesitatingly, he caught Henry’s legs and flung them, with all his strength, toward the side, thus unbalancing Henry, and causing him to roll, and to fling out an arm, instinctively, to catch himself.

In that instant Toosa recovered his power, scrambled up and stood watching Henry, sputtering and clamping his teeth in his rage. Toosa gave a sharp call. The Indians, no longer wondering if their leader was supreme, rushed forward and quickly secured Henry. He was bound and taken to another hut. Toosa turned to Tom, and with about the only smile Tom ever saw on his face, Toosa spoke:

“Now, we sleep,” he said. Not one of the Indians went near the rude trough again. They trooped away, all except two he appointed to guard Henry in his small hut. Toosa picked up the rifle and walked off.

“He surely is a great magician,” Bill commented, as he and Tom lay on their rudely made bedding of woven vines and soft branches. “Henry, bad as he was, couldn’t have missed him with all those shells!”

“Well,” said Tom, nestling into a comfortable spot, “I don’t want to take any credit away from Toosa’s magic—but I helped it along a bit.”

“How?” demanded Bill, lifting to one elbow and staring into the blackness of the hut.

“I thought he might get boisterous—that Henry!” ‘Tom answered. “So I took the chance, while you and he dozed in the hut after supper, and dug the bullets out of his magazine full of cartridges.”

“Tom,” said Bill, soberly, “I never thought of that. You’re a pardner. Shake!”

CHAPTER X
HENRY TURNS SAVAGE

Late that night a tropical storm whirled down on the village from the mountains. Lightning that seemed more vivid than daylight flashed continuously; thunder that deafened shook and roared; trees thudded to the whipping lash of the lightning. Rain in literal sheets made a wall of water when Tom peered out from the door of their hut.

When the dull dawn came the rain had not subsided; thunder still growled and boomed. The river, rising swiftly, was a very torrent, its water racing toward the rapids below, whose roar could be heard like a growling undertone to the thrum of falling water.

A white rubber-trader, with his canoe full of paddlers, was glad to be able to nose in and ground his craft on the sandy beach and drag it to safety before the river rose any more dangerously.

Henry was released from guard, but did not come near his companions; in fact, he stayed close to his hut, more safely guarded from violent action by the downpour than by any watchers.

About noon the rain slackened and the white trader, Buckley, a quiet and yet a pleasant man, bronzed and sturdy, came over and visited with the white pair. Tom found him eager to hear about the situation that had come about on the previous night.

“You needn’t have extracted those bullets, Toosa has told me,” he said with a smile. “Toosa is sure that he could have turned the bullets aside. He is very sure of his magic powers. But I like the old fellow and I am rather glad our young friend had so much foresight.”

He told them that, even without the rain, it would be unlikely that they could start down the river for some time. Yellow fever, that terror of the tropics, had broken out near the coast, and inland, and a “deadline” had been established near the costal villages by the Honduran government. That deadline was a real thing, not merely a place where officers stopped people and examined their health. When fever broke out, the trader explained, a line was drawn across the roads, and a patrol established on the rivers. If anyone passed through an infected area they would be turned back at the line, and if they tried to pass bullets would follow the act. The government meant its quarantine! And to get to the cruiser they must pass through the infected area!

He eagerly related the conditions of his sister’s disappearance. The white man listened gravely and then shook his head.

“Toosa will be here in a few minutes,” he stated. “He has asked me some curiously veiled questions. I wouldn’t be surprised if what I answered has something to do with the results he will get from his ‘magic’—but he is a fine old magician, and it helps his standing among the natives to let him keep them deceived—so I will let him reveal what his ‘magic calabash’ whispers to him.” He laughed as Toosa, grave and stately in spite of his deformed body, came in. Several other Indians were with him and quite a crowd assembled outside. These he dispersed, telling them something in their dialect which Bill guessed was to the effect that his magic was, this time, for the white ears alone.

Those who accompanied him hung heavy skins over the door, and took up positions outside, shooing away the straggling women who thirsted for every demonstration of their chief’s magical powers.

Toosa set on the trampled earth floor a calabash, and some other articles of his supposed craft; then he produced a skin bottle or flask and from it poured into the calabash a dark, rather evil smelling liquid, till the gourd container was level full.

Tom, watching closely, thought he detected a tiny wink pass between the solemn old fraud and his trade friend; however, Tom kept his own counsel and refrained from trying to catch Bill’s eye.

If they got the information he sought, it did not matter to him if Toosa liked to impart a touch of mystery to the telling!

He built up a small fire of tiny twigs and let it burn until the sticks fell together, flared and then died down to a small flicker.

Onto that he threw some leaves and bits of dust or herbs finely powdered, and instantly a dense, whitish, and very pungent smoke rose.

“Now how do you suppose an Indian in Central America knows a trick that the African blacks use in their magic?” Tom said, out of the corner of his mouth, to Bill.

“They tell us in books that people came here from some old continent, ages ago—wasn’t it Atlantic——”

“Atlantis!” corrected Tom. “Cliff’s father told us about it—it was a great continent and it sank under the ocean.”

“Well, before it went down, history says, some wise people knew it was going to happen, and they came away and settled in safer places,” Bill stated.

“Do you suppose Toosa is one of their descendants?” Tom whispered. “He surely does seem to know a lot. And maybe some of the Atlantis people went to Africa, and that’s how the same customs spread.”

“Maybe,” agreed Bill. “Look, he’s swallowing the smoke. Don’t see how he stands it—just a sniff makes me sort of chokey.”

Toosa was drawing in great, sighing lungsful of the heavy and pungently acrid smoke. Then he settled back on his haunches, and to the amazement of even the trader, he spoke—in English! [1]

“You—want—find—out—man called Mort Beech,” Toosa chanted in a halting, but deep, voice.

“Yes,” said Tom with a little shiver of inherited superstition, even though he knew there was more fuss than truth in the witchcraft part, even though the English was amazing. “Yes, sir!”

There was a commotion at the doorway. Henry Morgan had crept up to see what was so mysteriously transpiring in the hut, and as the two guards had no instructions concerning him and did not dare to interrupt their chief, Henry had listened, had caught the whole message.

While Bill leaped up and Tom caught his feet under him swiftly, Henry strode into the hut, kicking over the calabash, into which Toosa had been staring after he inhaled the smoke.

“Porto Bello!” he shouted. “Well, that’s where Henry Morgan will find him. As for you—” he swung on his white companions, “you can follow me if you dare—but if you do, I shoot!”

“I take this,” he snapped, “’cause why? Toosa has mine. Now I go in canoe. I’ll tell your friends the yellow-jack got you. They can’t pass the deadlines to find out. We’ll take the cruiser and go on. When we find Mort Beecher I’ll let them come back and hunt you up if they want to. I’ll have what I want.”

“You swine!” cried Bill, halted by the rifle in the menacing hands. “That’s how you repay——”

“That’s how I repay that kid for what he did to my—stuff!” growled Henry. Toosa made an effort to stop him as he backed toward the door, but the smoke had really taken some of Toosa’s strength, or at least he was not swift enough in his move, for Henry sidestepped and sent a cruel kick at the dark face. Toosa fell back in time to avoid it, but Henry, thrusting the peering Indians to each side, backed out and turned as Bill tugged at a revolver.

Still striving to loosen the weapon, which his excitement made more of a task than it should have been, he raced to the door, Tom at his heels. They saw Henry Morgan running, rifle under his arm, for the sandy beach, where a rushing torrent worried at the sand and bore it away in great, swirling streaks.

Bill raised a pistol. Toosa, with a quick grip, thrust back Bill’s arm, shaking his head violently and choking.

Running a light canoe out partly into the turbulent stream, Henry reached into the beached canoe of the trader, holding their menacing approach back by a threat with the rifle, and threw some of the trader’s goods into the small canoe.

“Give me the pistol if you’re afraid to fire!” cried Buckley, the trader; but again Toosa held his arm.

They watched the canoe skip away from the bank and whirl, end for end, in an eddy. Then Henry got his paddle to working and with a derisive shout, swung his blade and straightened away, flying down the stream.

“Why wouldn’t you let us stop him?” Tom cried, angry at Toosa. He saw their companions being urged to desert by a false story, saw themselves stranded in the Indian country.

“Toosa says, ‘Rapids get him,’” Buckley translated, for Toosa now spoke curtly in his own dialect, making swift gestures. “Toosa says if the rapids don’t drag him under, as is likely, the deadline will stop him. He’ll never get through. As for you fellows—if you can put up with privations and hard climbing, I can arrange with some of my Indians to escort you over the mountains—to the capital, and from there you can easily get down to the coast and your cruiser and your friends.”

“But if Henry should get through!” Tom objected. “We ought to try and catch him.”

“No!” the trader remonstrated. “Wait! He will either get out of control—he’s weakened from his heavy debauches—and go over the falls instead of down the side currents and rapids, or he will be caught by the Indians and the Honduran soldiers.”

“It’s too bad it had to happen right in the middle of the witchcraft,” mused Bill.

“Toosa failed to tell us about the Golden Sun,” Tom said, knowing what was in his comrade’s mind.

Mr. Buckley spoke swiftly to Toosa who responded with a shake of his head. Then he became very thoughtful. Suddenly he walked away into the hut and sat, staring into the calabash, with its remaining liquid, the rest having been spilled.

“There isn’t any Golden Sun mine, at all,” Mr. Buckley explained. “The gold in the Honduran mountains in this section would be commercially profitless if you tried to mine it and get it to the coast. Those days of prosperity for Honduras are far in the future.”

“But Henry told us that Mort Beecher kept talking about the Golden Sun,” Tom remonstrated. “There must be something behind it!”

With a long arm Toosa beckoned to them. They hurried into the hut and stood, respectful and curious. Toosa looked up. This is what Buckley repeated from his curious sing-song chant:

“There is a Golden Sun! The Golden Sun is not a mine! The Golden Sun is alive. Ask of the San Blas Indians—and say that Toosa of the Mosquito country sent you. You find!”

CHAPTER XI
A FALSE MESSAGE

With her propeller hammered out by slow, careful work, and with new gears in her speed changing device, the Porto Bello was once more ready for the sea.

Nicky was all set to start up the Rio Patuca. But Cliff agreed with his father and with Joe Anderson, “Andy,” that it was unwise. Although the large village of the Mosquito Indians just a short way up the lagoon was not yet infected, villages beyond it were suffering from yellow fever epidemics and the older heads judged that the boat could not pass the inevitable quarantine.

Cliff and Nicky were greatly worried about Tom; but they could do nothing but wait.

“No,” agreed Cliff. “This is going to be a slow time. We can’t get any news, either. But the Indian we saw yesterday says that he thinks the fever is not as far up the river as Tom went.”

They passed the tedious days fighting the wickedly biting sand flies. The evenings sent the flies away, and there were long, beautiful and peaceful hours after sunset, before the mosquitos came out as far as the cruiser, when they could sit on deck and watch the stars; the glowing, sparkling orbs seemed very close, very clear and most beautiful. But there were many evenings when dull skies hovered above, when there was nothing to do but read the few books they had, or sit and talk. Mr. Gray told them countless stories of the old civilizations, and about the Indian customs and legends.

His body was thin and starved looking, and his clothes were rags. He came in a canoe and there was great excitement when he was recognized. Questions volleyed at him from all sides, but he would not talk—in fact, he could hardly stand—until he had been given some stewed turtle, a sweet yam and some fruit and tea.

He had not eaten such food for days, he told the eager party. To their questions about Tom he made one statement, and of course the chums had no way of guessing that it was false.

“Tom and Bill,” he declared, “they got took with fever. Not bad, but some. Bill found a good Indian doctor and he’s pulling them along.”

He told of his experiences in running the rapids and it was very probable that his story was not over-false as he recounted the thrills and dangers of his fight with the surging waters and the perilous rocks.

He had managed to get through by good fortune, he declared. Then he had gone on down the river until he came near the quarantine, and had deserted his canoe and gone into the brush. He happened to know of an inland village and he had made his way to that.

There he had found a guide who, on the promise of all the money he had, took him through the jungle, around the quarantined post. From there he had followed the river again, borrowing a canoe and avoiding every human habitation because he was in the fever zone. Once more, at the lower point of the infected area, he had taken to the brush, and with many privations, eating what he could find in the woods, or what game he could shoot, he had finally won out.

He made the tale a strong appeal for sympathy and fed his own vanity on the admiration of the chums.

All unsuspecting of his villainous desertion, he was made a sort of hero. Only Nicky seemed to be quiet and thoughtful. Finally he interrupted the second recital, late in the evening. Henry recalled some additional details of his misery, and repeated the whole story to get them in their proper places.

“Why didn’t you stay with Tom and Bill?” Nicky said finally. It seemed strange to him that Henry should have deserted his comrades.

“I left them on purpose,” Henry said. “’Cause why? ’Cause they sent me. They told me to come. They wanted me to. ’Cause why? They sent you a message!”

“There was plenty of time,” responded Henry, his old manner somewhat restored by good food and some rest. “They can’t leave where they are till the fever quits them. We can’t go up and do them any good. So they sent a message——”

“That is it! You go on. I found out, from Toosa, that the fellow we want is at Porto Bello——”

“It’s the name of a town, too—a place where the old pirate, Henry Morgan, once had his rendezvous,” Nicky explained. His study of the old histories of pirate life gave him that information.

“That’s all he could tell. Go to Porto Bello was what he ordered. Then Tom and Bill said for us to go on and find this fellow——”

“Because,” spoke up “Andy,” “if they’re sick they can’t travel, and we couldn’t get this boat to them even if we could get past the deadlines. And, instead of waiting here, doing nothing, we could go and find that lad and learn what he can tell us and then come back here. By that time the worst of the fever scare may be over and we can get our comrades and save time by going right where we have to.”

“I don’t like this,” he told Cliff, as the two were sitting, far beyond midnight—they were too excited to sleep—watching the cold moonlight throw mosquitos into tiny, black silhouettes on the netting of the protecting cover under which they stayed.

“But,” Cliff objected, “if Tom and Bill are in the fever zone, the Honduras authorities won’t let them come out or let us go to them.”

“Do you want to go off and leave them, only knowing what Henry says about them?”

Cliff shook his head and answered soberly, “I don’t want to! But I can’t see what we could do in the capital.”

“Do you think Henry has told us the truth?” Nicky demanded, under his breath.

He did not finish his sentence, but Cliff shivered and grew very thoughtful. Finally he spoke.

CHAPTER XII
THE FACTS

Those Indians picked by the white trader, Mr. Buckley, to take Tom and Cliff across the mountain ways toward the capital, were by no means pleasant companions. Even in looks they were disconcerting.

Their faces were cruel and hard; their bodies were stalwart and powerful; they spoke very little, and then in their own peculiar up-river and mountain dialects. Toosa warned Bill quietly that they were noted for their avarice.

“Give no money,” Toosa warned. “Hide. Not show. They—” He made a meaning gesture, drawing his hand across his throat.

“Not very pleasant companions, buddy,” Bill told Tom, as they got into the canoe which would take them further up the river. “But Toosa says if we don’t show fear or weakness we will be all right—only, keep what money you have in your belt close to your skin and never let on that you have any!”

He called the great-grandson, Porfirio, to his forward seat in the canoe, and gave him, for his very own, the magnet with which the boy so often played. Toosa’s eyes lighted up when he saw the boy’s dazed, almost awed look; Toosa smiled—a real smile.

Suddenly coming close to the leader of the mountain Indians, three in number, he made some very firm declarations—to the effect that the white men were in his keeping and that he would watch over them and know if anything happened to them—and on the least sign of such danger he would release all the spirits of the mountain—evil ones!—to punish the offending Indians. They seemed to be strongly impressed.

“I guess we’ll be safe enough now,” Bill said. “That magnet is going to be a life-saver, Tom.”

“It’s a cheap price to pay for insurance,” Tom grinned, and they were sent out into the current by the lusty paddles of the four river natives who owned the canoe and who would take them on the first lap of their roundabout trip to the coast.

Their last sight of Toosa was one Tom would never forget; he had an arm around the shoulders of the child; behind his dwarfed figure clustered the Indian men, women and children. He lifted his long arm high in air, and made a sort of sign with his fingers.

“Great Gravy!” whispered Tom, to Bill. “Did you see that? How in the world did he come to make that sign?”

“What sign? With his fingers? Why, I suppose it’s a benediction or something.”

“He spread all his fingers wide; then he closed them tight, then spread them wide again,” gasped Tom.

“That,” said Tom, in some awe, “that is the sign of our Mystery Boys’ order, as you very well know—the sign of ‘Goodbye, good luck and God be with you,’ that we use at parting!”

“By golly!” said Bill, and stayed silent a long time. What a coincidence that the almost savage man who lived in the woods had made such a final message without knowing, perhaps, that he did so—unless the boys had stumbled upon some ancient sign of some old cult.

After several days on the river the canoe was beached and the trio of mountaineers bade a gruff farewell to their river brethren, and, with heavy packs, of which Tom and Bill had their full share, the five started on foot for one of the most difficult and trying tramps Tom had ever experienced.

Before nightfall a small village was reached, and there the party was to stay over night.

“From what I understand, it’s proper in these parts to give our firearms to our host as a mark of good faith, for over night,” Bill told Tom.

“It must be safe enough, if it’s a custom,” Tom said, glancing at the ring of rough, coarse, dark faces studying them curiously.

“He’s supposed to hand them right back, Toosa said,” Bill answered, and accordingly he gave his rifle and one pistol to the Indian in whose hut they were quartered, while Tom handed over the other, given him by Bill. But the host did not hand them back.

No harm came to them during the night, however, although Bill was uneasy without his weapons.

Day after day, from then on, they went forward by increasingly difficult stages, first following the river, winding upward among the lower mountains, past dangerous rapids, over steep knolls, through rough canyons and up almost precipitous inclines, where ropes had to be used to hold any one who slipped from plunging to destruction.

Hard as was the way, and tiresome as was the furious pace set by the hardened mountain Indians, Bill and Tom kept up well, for Tom was of an athletic frame and always kept his body in perfect trim by lots of exercise, sports and fresh air, while Bill was of the lean, rangy type and never seemed to tire.

The attitude of their companions was a continual worry to Bill, however. Tom felt it also. Often he caught one or another of the three fierce-looking men watching him covertly in the camps, with speculative eyes roaming over his weapon, his clothing, his pack.

The Indians said little, but in their manner there seemed to be some expectancy, as if they either felt or knew that something was going to happen.

As the way grew more steep and difficult, the men seemed to be watching even more carefully, and Tom asked Bill what it meant. Bill, who understood their degraded Spanish words, used occasionally, but who pretended not to, replied that they were making some plan but he could not guess what it was.

They had reached a deep ravine, away high among the crags, and could look from it across a wide chasm, when a sudden storm caused them to make a hasty camp under a sheltering overhang of rock.

The men drew off and huddled together while Tom and Bill stuck close together under the rubber poncho which Bill carried. Presently one of the men approached.

Bill hesitated, but Tom, with a sudden inspiration, threw aside the covering with a generous wave of his hand. The man seemed surprised but took the garment away and the trio of Indians used it.

“Maybe,” said Tom, “but we can stave them off at least until we get out of this ticklish place. If we get them mad, away up here, they could push us off the side, before we could wake up from sleep. We ought to keep them quiet till we get to a better place.”

“So do I,” Tom agreed. “But as long as we keep our pistols and your rifle, it will be all safe; we can take turns watching at night.”

They did, and Tom, on watch that night, noticed a creeping figure, coming close to their soggy mosquito protection, but made no sign. He told Bill, when the later awoke, and they redoubled their watchfulness.

The next day they went on and came into a high, and rough, but fairly level plateau where they camped. Bill managed to shoot a wild pig and it was roasted for dinner. With some biscuit made of flour, salt and water, and with cocoa, they made a regular feast.

“The men are planning something,” Tom whispered, after the meal. “See how they look at one another!”

Soon enough they had to be. The leader came over to them and in a very polite way, for him, made a suggestion.

“We afraid,” he said. “Bad mountain cat close by.” They had heard the cry of a jaguar or panther, or some other huge cat. “You have guns, you save. We not got. We be died!”

“One of us sits up and watches all night,” declared Bill, meaningly. “Don’t be afraid. We not let you be hurt!”

The man walked away doubtfully, and that night neither Tom nor Bill took much rest; however, nothing more happened.

The next morning they were surprised to discover that the Indians seemed very much more pleasant, and the leader brought the whites a special and tasteful piece of the roast pig which he had saved for them. “That’s the way to treat them,” Bill said. “Let them know we are on guard!”

They went on, and were wading along in a small torrent of water, the only way through a deep abyss, when suddenly Tom clutched Bill’s arm.

“Do you know what?” gasped Tom, as a great, sweeping spasm of pain flooded over him and he saw, as through a haze, Bill’s face whitening, even as Bill staggered.

CHAPTER XIII
TOOSA’S VENGEANCE

Cliff and Nicky faced Henry Morgan on the cruiser’s deck. “Well, you are a fine one,” Cliff sneered. “You wouldn’t dare say what you do if my father and Andy hadn’t gone to the Indian village to find out if the fever quarantine is lifted up the river.”

“Yes, I would,” Henry said huskily. “I’d say it just the same. ’Cause why? ’Cause it’s true. I mean it!”

“You actually mean you’re going to ship on that sloop, lying off the reef?” Nicky argued.

“Ship on that schooner and leave you—yes! ’Cause why? What have you done about finding Mort Beecher, or—or the Golden Sun? Not one thing! You all sit around——”

“We had to scrape the hull and straighten the propeller and fix the shaft while you were gone—” Cliff grew angry.

“Yes—but when I got there, all was fixed and the cruiser was back in commission. But she’s laid still in the tide-race, here, for three days, and no move to go to Porto Bello, the way the old Indian said I should. I told you what word was sent from your friends—but you just sit and fight sand-flies and mosquitos and sweat and chafe and eat bananas and fire cocoanuts at sharks’ fins. I’m tired of waitin’. So, when that cutter comes off from final trading with the Indians, it’s Henry Morgan for on board and off for Colon or wherever the sloop touches.”

Cliff and Nicky looked at one another dubiously. This was a predicament. Cliff’s father had gone ashore to pay the Indians in fancy articles for helping to beach the cruiser first and then to drive her back into the water. Cliff had caught Henry packing a “ditty bag” and the resulting declaration that he was “quitting them,” brought Nicky racing to Cliff’s hail. But they were puzzled to know how to summon the older men from the village.

Finally, with a shrug, touching his left ear gently, to indicate to his chum that he wanted the Mystery Boys’ signals to be noted and understood, Cliff pushed his hair over his right ear with an index finger, indicating to Nicky, “Come with me!” Nicky promptly swung on his heel, with a contemptuous glance at Henry, and went below.

“We can’t tie him, or anything!” Nicky objected when Cliff asked what they could do. “I can’t see what good it will do to stop him. We know all he knows—that Mort Beecher is at Porto Bello.”

“All right,” Cliff agreed. “We’ll let him go. I guess we can get along just as well without him.”

They took no action, therefore, when Henry climbed aboard the ship’s shore-boat and went out, across the sand bars, across the reefs, and, one would suppose, out of their lives.

However, the afternoon was well along before they stopped talking about him, about Tom and Bill, and about everything that had happened. By that time Mr. Gray and Andy had arrived.

“What do we care if that Morgan is gone?” demanded Joe Anderson. “He’s a poor comrade on a cruise. First he almost let us be broken up on the reefs because he liked ‘tonic’ better than watching; then he deserted our companions, and for all we know, did worse.”

“We can start up the river, anyhow,” Mr. Gray stated. “The river towns are no longer quarantined against the lower coast or the upper river. We can run as far up river as the boat will navigate and then several of us can go to Tom and Billy Sanders by canoe.”

Accordingly the anchor was raised the next morning and with a river Indian aboard as pilot, they ran smoothly and quickly up the lagoon. When they were about a day’s run up the Rio Patuca, Nicky, at the bow, watching the alligators slide off of the sand banks, seeing the strange, bright birds flying over the water, suddenly gave a cry.

“Tom!” shrilled Nicky, dancing about until the pilot, watching the shifting currents, had to catch his coat and prevent him from toppling off the sharp bow.

The story of their exploits was a thrilling one. They had been in the first throes of suffering from a violent poison administered in, or with their food by the Indians conducting them through the mountains.

“Tom recalled that I had a bottle of white vaseline in my pack,” Bill said, “and he crawled to it and got the stuff. It was not very easy to take, but we each got some down, and it melted and made a sort of oily coating, or else it acted as an emetic, for we were very sick, and almost wore ourselves out struggling—and we couldn’t get enough water!”

“It was lucky for us that we were right by the stream, almost in it,” Tom added. “The Indians didn’t move a hand to help. If we hadn’t kept sense enough to hold onto our pistols I guess they would have jumped on us. We found out later that they had picked some sort of mushroom—‘fruit of the earth’ it’s called, in the lower levels, and put some in folds of the pork meat when they gave it to us.”

“Toosa told us,” Tom explained. “He claims that he knew by his magic spells that we were in danger, and that he came to save us; and for that he expected Bill to give him Henry’s rifle when we left—which Bill was glad to do. But he and I privately think it was more chance than planning that brought him just in time to help us.”

“When you have lived as long as I,” said Mr. Gray quietly, “you will understand that there isn’t any such thing as ‘luck’ or ‘chance’ or ‘coincidence.’ It is all a part of a Great Purpose, that is deeper than most of us can see; but it is there, and we do not have to depend on ‘chance’ to get out of difficulties. If we believed in ourselves, and do our honest best for ourselves, help will come as we need it. Toosa, perhaps, was worried about you and so his intuition was keen and he felt that he should follow you.”

“I guess you are right,” Tom admitted. “Anyway, Toosa got there in time to stop the Indians from running away, after they divided our packs and while they were hoping we would die so they could get our gun and pistols and cartridges.”

“He threatened he would revenge himself if they hurt you, Bill has told us,” Nicky added.

“He had his vengeance, but in a curious way,” Tom said, glancing at Bill, as if for his backing-up of the story. Bill nodded encouragement and Tom continued:

“Toosa called the Indians back and they came, slinking and cowering, like whipped dogs. I don’t know yet what there was about him that scared them so, but he certainly ruled them by fear. He called them to him and then he made them stand there while he looked them steadily in the eye. Bill, the Indian he had with him was close to you, what did he tell you Toosa said in their own language?”

“Toosa said, ‘Which you like best, to eat rest of “fruit of earth” with roast wild pig, or have mountain spirits follow you and drive you into chasm?’” Bill related it with a reminiscent grin.

“They picked the wild pig and the poison mushrooms,” Nicky guessed. “I know that much about these Central American Indians.”

“We urged Toosa to be easy on them,” Tom said. “But he said it must be a lesson, and he made them go through with it.”

“He wouldn’t let us wait to see,” Bill replied. “He winked at me and told me to leave what there was in the vaseline bottle, and let them see how their own medicine man can save them with ‘white man’s butter.’ They weren’t even sick when we started back. The river was free of quarantine and so, of course, after we got back to it, we had no trouble at all.”

“I’ll never forget Toosa, waving to me with the very sign of the Mystery Boys, again, as we canoed away down stream,” Tom added.

“I hope it wasn’t too unpleasant for the hill Indians,” Andy said. “But if they were as sick as you that would be justice.”

“And in the long run, if you wait long enough,” said Bill. “Justice is always done, one way or another.”

“Then Henry Morgan still has some punishment due him,” said Nicky and the desertion and falsehood of the departed pilot was discussed.

“We sent no message,” said Bill, telling how Henry had turned savage and stolen his rifle and a canoe. “Wait till I catch him!”

“No,” said Tom. “At least, only for a brief stop to see if Mort is there and if he really knows anything. Toosa told us, after Henry made his mad dash, that if we want to find out about Golden Sun—it isn’t a mine, either, he says!—we are to ask the San Blas Indians.”

“And,” finished Tom, “if the Golden Sun isn’t a mine—my sister had golden hair—do you suppose?——” No one answered.

CHAPTER XIV
THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE

Out from the Mosquito country the cruiser fought her way again; her machinery did not fail, and information given by the Indians, coupled with a fairly quiet sea, enabled the adventurers to make a safe passage through the treacherous rocks and the surging rollers.

There was no excitement during the run down the coast. Into the well-traveled route to and from the Panama Canal the voyagers worked the boat, and, by agreement, a stop was made at Colon.

In an earlier adventure the three chums, Tom, Cliff and Nicky, had visited Panama, and the great achievement of the Canal was therefore not a novelty to them, although they never ceased to marvel at the engineering skill by which it had been planned and built, nor did the vastness of its locks, the precision of its machinery, ever fail to make them thrill as they thought—the United States—“our country”—accomplished that feat. To them it was the Spirit of American success in an undertaking that made the world better and communication easier.

They did not wait long in Colon; only until Bill and Mr. Gray made inquiries about Mort Beecher.

As they traced the story, they learned, through many contacts which Mr. Gray’s reputation as a great scholar opened to them, that Morton Beecher had come to Colon, a few years before, and had seemed to be a very rich person. He had spent money freely and had gotten into a group of Spanish and of American pleasure-seekers who spent lavishly on the more sordid delights of a tropical life. Not many months ago Mort, broken in health and with no more money, had been compelled, as far as was known, to seek his fortune elsewhere. No one would give him employment because he was not dependable, had no strength, and spent all of his time bemoaning the vanished past of his opulence. No one knew just what had happened to him.

However, through the story that Henry Morgan had told them, they guessed that Mort’s misfortunes had finally led him to Porto Bello, that decayed spot on the Panama coast of the Caribbean which had once been a stronghold of the notorious pirate, Henry Morgan the first, the man who had first raided the Central and South American shipping and the towns of the coast, robbing and pillaging, and then had become reformed to such an extent that he had ended by making war on piracy and had achieved the great fame of being the governor of Jamaica who had done more than any other to “clean out” that nest of piratical looters.

With the wind kicking up a rough sea, the cruiser, namesake of the place they were bound for, headed toward Porto Bello.

With a pilot, a negro who called himself Bob, taking the place in their party vacated by Henry’s defection, they made the run safely, if under rough conditions. The entrance into the harbor of the ancient Spanish port was attended with only the usual dangers of any of the reef-locked, rock-studded passages along the coast.

Tom, Nicky and Cliff saw, with amazement, the ruins of the once noted place. There were the demolished battlements of its old fortifications, visible as they dropped anchor in a quiet harbor.

They found the population composed of Spanish and Negro people, of the most advanced state of dejection. No trade came to Porto Bello, no ships bothered to run the menace of her reefs, except for a very rare sailing sloop which might put in rather than to face a storm.

It took only a short time to land, and the crowd which assembled at the decrepit old shacks near the beach, astonished the boys by its slovenliness and its apathy. The people watched but made no effort to be pleasant or to help them.

“Did you ever see so many sickly people?” Nicky asked, and with good cause: hookworm was prevalent, from a diet that never varied; and the unclad bodies of the younger children seemed a very breeding place for sores. The ragged adults were in a like state.

“Father says that’s what comes of this kind of a life,” Cliff declared. “These folks never see anybody but themselves. They don’t have anything to interest them. They just eat, and sleep and exist, waiting till they die.”

“I don’t think I’d stay here, even if I had to build a canoe and run the risk of the reefs and the ocean rollers,” Tom stated. “I’d rather meet my end fighting for life than sitting down and waiting for the other thing.”

“So would I,” Nicky agreed. “But these people are just too lazy and dejected to care, I guess.”

“They have lost their self-respect and their wills,” Bill said. “I suppose I ought to feel sorry for them, but I don’t, because I was always of the idea that it’s up to every man to make himself what he wants to be.”

“Maybe it isn’t easy,” Bill nodded, “but it can be done if we stick to it. I always wanted to have a ranch in Uncle Sam’s good old West. I was down in Peru. Had no money. Just got enough to live on; but I stuck to my ideas and kept saying to myself that if I wanted it long enough and hard enough, and worked for it, I’d get what I had a desire for.”

“And you did,” admitted Nicky, for he had been with Bill during the adventure among the Incas in which Bill had been able to save Cliff’s father and eventually realize his desire for a ranch. “But it was a good deal by good luck, Bill.”

“Why, Nicky!” chided Tom, while they waited for Mr. Gray to make some arrangement with the “alcalde,” or head man, a sort of governor of the town. “You always say ‘there is something that looks out for us!’ and I’m surprised to hear you talk about luck.”

“That’s so,” Nicky agreed. “I didn’t stop to think. It looked like luck, that Bill, in Peru, found the eaglet that had Cliff’s father’s note tied to its leg.”

“But if you are sure that there is something, besides just chance,” Bill argued, “you’d see that sort of something could bring the bird to where I’d find it, and all the rest would come around through the same sort of purpose, instead of by pure chance.”

They all agreed to that, and Mr. Gray brought the alcalde to meet them. He was an elderly man, very sober and impressed with his dignity, though what he had to be dignified about Tom and his chums failed to see. However, with all the show of authority that he could put into what was really laziness and vanity, he pretended that he could not give them the information they sought until he prepared for an “audience” in the shabby old shack which served as his home and office.

“He makes me think of the little frog in the puddle,” Tom commented, as they stood about the beach, trying to be patient while Bill and Mr. Gray argued and asked questions. “He’s so swelled up because he has a little authority that he forgets to be decent or helpful.”

However, if the alcalde chose to be slow in his help, they found what they wanted in another way. They had come to Porto Bello to get information about Mort Beecher. This they secured through rather strange channels.

“Look what’s coming!” whispered Tom, nodding his head toward a figure slowly hobbling along the beach from a decrepit old lean-to among the palms and the bush.

Bent with apparent age, halting in his steps, clad in rags so far beyond repair that they scarcely covered him respectably, even in that half-clothed community, came a white man.

His face was covered with a rank, bushy beard. His figure, when he came close, was seen to be not only bronzed and roughened as to skin by exposure, but was, as well, in a pitiful condition with the ravages of drink. His eyes were more bleary and unpleasant than had been those of Henry Morgan. His voice, high and shaky, whined and implored.

“A beach comber,” Bill told them. “That’s what a white man comes to when he gets stranded in one of these dead spots, if he lets himself go.”

“It’s a pity,” Tom said. “He looks as if he has lost his own self-respect, for he isn’t even clean; and he has no will power, I’ll bet, or he wouldn’t have stayed here.”

“Laziness, drink—they tell the story,” Bill responded. “They’d sap the vitality of one of the old Greek Gods!”

“No,” replied the bent figure, which looked seventy but which might have seen no more than fifty years of life—but such a life! “No, nobody ever does. Nor—a smoke—not even a little ’baccy for me pipe.”

Bill drew out a sack of tobacco and some thin papers and shook a little tobacco into one of the latter. He saw it spilled from the shaking fingers that tried to roll the paper, and made a cigarette.

“He is of no account,” he declared. “He cannot help you,” he continued in his slow Spanish, using the words as though he was trying to recall the proper ones; his usual conversation was in a degenerate dialect form that he seemed to feel was too undignified for the occasion of the visit of such dignitaries. “Come away!” he added. “Tomorrow I will receive you and talk to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

“Tomorrow!” he said. “That’s what you hear all through the Spanish tropics, ‘tomorrow!’” And he might have added that “tomorrow” may also bring its “tomorrow,” for the hot countries breed delays and indolence and the slow, dragging moments seem interminable to the Americans, with their purposeful, aggressive manner and their habit of doing things at once!

“Don’t say ‘can’t,’” admonished Tom. “Look at this man. He’s said ‘can’t’ or ‘don’t’ to everything we ask him. That’s what ‘can’t’ gets you to—it breaks down everything you try to accomplish. Say ‘we won’t!’”

“Mister,” Tom turned to the old man, sniffling and slumped down on the sand as though unable to sustain himself on his two legs, “you can tell us, I guess, what we want to know. Is there anybody in this place named Mort Beecher?”

“Yes,” the other responded, “I guess you wouldn’t give me another smoke, would you?” He looked toward Bill. “Or something to—” he made a suggestive movement as if tilting a glass. “No—I guess nobody would give nothing to me no more.”

“There was another white man here,” Nicky persisted. “Was his name Mort Beecher?”

“It must have been Mort Beecher,” Tom asserted confidently; then he turned to the derelict again. “Did he ever talk about being in Mexico?”

“Did he ever mention a—a Golden Sun?” Bill, rolling and retaining a fresh cigarette just out of reach of the eager fingers.

“It’s no use,” Bill said, quite gruffly, tossing the rolled paper contemptuously to the other who snatched it greedily. “We’ll have to wait for the old slow-poke alcalde. We’ll go back to the boat—I won’t spend a night in this sordid place!”

“Wait,” pleaded Tom, “I feel, some way, as if this man knows it, but he has got into such a state that he doesn’t make even an effort.”

“Look, mister,” said Cliff. “Try to think back. Did he stay here a long time? Did he talk to you?”

“I guess it was quite awhile, but I don’t know how long—I forget. He talked some, I guess.”

“I don’t know? It bothers me to think. I can’t think. If I had, maybe—a bit o’ drink—but I’m not sure, even then——”

“I see what Tom is after,” Nicky broke in. “When we give him some food and clean him up some, maybe we can quiz him.”

“Psy—? Oh, yes, Mr. Gray. Our instructor at Amadale told us about that. It’s studying people’s minds, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” nodded the scholar. “Scientists have watched people and studied them, just as we study animals, until they have learned that almost all people will act in much the same way under certain ways of stimulating them.”

“I know,” agreed Tom. “We all want to run when we are scared; we all do, if there is a fire and a panic.”

“Yes,” chimed in Cliff, “and when we think about something nice we smile, and if we think about a lemon, we act and feel almost as though we tasted it.”

“Quite correct,” smiled the scholar. “And we can go further than that, as I believe Tom guesses. If we say ‘I cannot’ often enough, and keep thinking and declaring that we are victims of fate, and have no chance to get away from some place, or to succeed, we get ourselves into almost as bad a condition as this poor chap.”

“That’s how Mr. Whitley put it, once,” Tom conceded. “That’s what I was thinking about. If we get this man where he is more like a civilized man and talk about ‘you can’ and get him to feeling that he can remember instead of that he can’t—maybe——”

“We can try it,” Mr. Gray agreed. “There have been many wonders worked by ‘Modern Magic’—psychology applied to daily life.”

“All right, Jack,” said Bill. “You throw back those shoulders and step out like a young fellow. You’re going back to civilization, for awhile.”

“It can’t be—I can’t hear you right, saying that! Nobody would bother with an old beach comber like me.”

“Well,” said Tom, “we think we’re somebody, and we are going to bother. It not only can be true, it is true!”

So the procession started through the indolent cluster of natives toward the cruiser’s tender.

“You can’t be going to take me out on that fine boat—and feed me, and treat me like a white man!” he demurred, unable to believe in his good angels.

“We certainly are;” asserted Bill. “And loan you decent clothes, and treat you like a king!”

He had hardly finished when Jack turned on his heel and started away; over his shoulder, in his whining tones, he called to them.

CHAPTER XV
MODERN MAGIC

While the party returned to the cruiser, Jack, the beach comber, betook himself to a land-locked lagoon where he proceeded to begin his return to self-respect by taking his first bath for a long time. The chums, excited and with much gusto, assembled a set of clothes to give him.

“Now, Cliff, Tom and Nicky,” said Mr. Gray, “you all know that you feel much better if you are dressed up when you go among people. It gives you self-respect. That is the way we will work with this man: we will build up his idea that there is something good in him yet, and then Bill will offer him a chance to go away from here and work his way back to decency. Bill says he can use him on his ranch.”

“That ought to be fine,” Tom agreed. “And I guess we will let Cliff’s father do most of the talking.”

“After we get him on board and feed him well, we will have a talk with him,” Mr. Gray conceded. “At that time, make only what I would call positive statements——”

“I know,” Cliff said. “‘I can,’ instead of ‘I can’t,’ and ‘We will’ instead of ‘We wish.’”

“Exactly that,” Mr. Gray nodded. “We will first substitute a picture in his mind that will make him feel like his old self. Then we will make him want something better than this terrible life he is living, not offering him a reward, but letting him see that he wants it enough to make a try for it. Then probably he will try to remember and tell us what we want to know—he will feel that in helping us he is helping himself.”

The trio rowed to the lagoon with the bundle of clothes and when Jack had them on he seemed to take on a different look; and, as if he felt already more like a man, he stood up straighter and his shoulders did not hunch down so much.

After a good meal and his first decent shave for, perhaps, years, he looked and acted like a different person—and declared that he felt that way.

“You want to get away from here, of course!” Bill said, when they were all on deck, Bob, the Colon pilot, and Andy, the engineer, watching in the background, much interested.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Mr. Gray stated quietly. “You might find somebody who would help you along. Certainly, in such a case, you want to——”

“Indeed, I do!” declared Jack—and the voluntary change from indecision to assertion showed that the experiment was succeeding.

“Then I’ll see that you get to my ranch, in Colorado,” Bill said, and they all showed some surprise at the sudden movement Jack made.

“Colorado!” he almost yelled. “I was there once—a long time—I can’t remember—it was before I got down and out——”

“You’ll remember it all when you see Colorado, with its ranges and its painted rocks and its wonderful, soft sunshine, and its fine people,” Mr. Gray broke in, quickly taking advantage of this recollection, and using it to stimulate memories. “When you get there you will remember some of your old friends and you will find a lot to enjoy!”

Jack nodded, and his face took on a reflective look. Bill, and the chums, watching Mr. Gray as well as Jack, saw a slight shake of the scholar’s head and decided not to interrupt the flow of old Jack’s thought. They wanted Jack to think of the past.

Finally he asked Bill several questions about old range locations and Bill answered as well as he could, about a rather strange, and to him unfamiliar, part of the state.

Then, gently, by suggesting ideas to Jack, Mr. Gray got him to tell some incidents of range life that he recollected, and then went on from that, letting Jack talk as much as he would, to get from him the story of the past. It seemed to become even more clear as he talked.

“That is natural,” Mr. Gray explained later. “We never forget anything. It’s all hidden somewhere in our minds. But we keep track of things that interest us most and ‘forget’ or bury, the others. But if we try hard enough, and practice and keep at it, we can recall anything we want to.”

Finally—and it took time!—they got Jack to talk about his life in Porto Bello, not insisting on knowing how he came there, for he had “gone to the dogs” at that time and his brain was so befuddled by lust and bad habits that he had simply fallen into a state of indolence and drifted there.

They worked hard to get him to recall when Mort Beecher arrived, and after a time, Tom, by a fortunate remark, opened the gates of memory.

“Now I recall,” Jack said, accepting a fresh smoke. “Yes, sir—my lad, I recall it plain. There was a great storm.”

Getting into the spirit of excitement as his story unfolded, he related the broad details of a great storm during which a boat had been, by the whim of tide and wind, swept over the barrier reefs and into calmer water. Of her occupants, three men, one alone swam to shore through the shark-ridden waters. It was Mort Beecher.

“He and me, we got chummy,” Mort’s acquaintance told them, while they listened with avidity. “But we took to using liquor too free, and I know he talked a heap to me, but only when he was ‘fired up’ with this native poison we have to use. I wasn’t in condition to listen and so I can’t tell you nothing. I don’t remember. But we stayed here, going from bad to worse, till a few days since—I don’t recall just what day, but another man come here from a sloop that lay-to off the reef, and he looked for a man named Mort Beecher—that’s how I recall his name, come to think, I heard him ask.

“We would, so forget that sort of talk!” commanded Bill. “Well, he only wanted Mort—for some private business, maybe?”

“It must be, but I don’t recall. I didn’t hear him. He gave Mort some money and Mort gave me a lot of—you know—” he lifted a hand as if it held a bottle, tilting back his hand, “and I went off and didn’t care, so long as I got what I come to crave for.”

“But they went away, back to the boat, I suppose,” Mr. Gray asserted. Jack nodded.

“Mort was my pal while he was here,” Jack said. “I don’t remember nothing, but if it’s account of the law, or anything, I won’t help you to track down a pal.”

“No decent man would, unless his pal had done wrong!” agreed Mr. Gray. “We aren’t after him. We don’t know of anything he has done that is wrong. But we think he can help us to locate the sister of our Tom, here—” he related briefly the circumstances of her disappearance. “As a decent, self-respecting man, you want to help us all you can, of course!”

“I do,” he agreed. “But I wasn’t in condition to pay ’tention and I can’t remember——”

“Mexico—Mexico—I can’t just seem to—maybe he did, but I don’t recollect what he said.”

“The—Golden—the Golden Sun—” Jack said, trying to screw up his forehead in his effort to rebuild the old story.

“Golden Sun—was it, maybe—I don’t just—let me think—I was too fuddled to notice when he used to brag and boast,” Jack said.

“I suppose he bragged how he had found some money that he had hidden,” Bill broke in, referring to his supposition that Mort had hidden the loot from the mine, gone back to get it, taken it to Colon and wasted it in riotous living.

“He did brag—I recall that well,” Jack acknowledged. “Seems to me——”

“Just let it come to you—it will! You may have been ‘under the weather’ but you heard it all—it made an impression on you. You do remember it. It will all come back!” Mr. Gray was making suggestions almost in the way a hypnotist does when he is putting someone to sleep, only he was using the principle rightly, to awaken a man’s memories.

“Oh—yes! There was a Golden Sun,” Jack declared. “It was a—wasn’t it a mine——”

“No!” cried Nicky incautiously. “Remember, Bill, Toosa said it wasn’t—” He stopped, feeling the glare of Tom’s and Cliff’s warning eyes. He subsided, crimson with disgust at his carelessness, for Jack turned with a blank face.

“Wasn’t it?” he asked. “You see; I don’t re—I can’t be sure——”

“Well, let’s not worry about it,” he said. “He must have told you it was the Golden Sun mine—and that might be true. Nicky referred to something an old Indian said—the Indian thought the Golden Sun might be a girl, a name applied to a girl.”

“A girl?” said Jack, a blank look on his face. “Was it a girl? I don’t recall—I’ve tried. I want to help you—”

“Of course you do,” declared Mr. Gray, “and you will. As soon as it comes to you clearly—and it will!—you can tell us. Now, go and lie down and have your afternoon siesta.”

“Siesta!” Jack said. “On cushions! In good clo’es! With my stomach full! And yesterday I laid under a palm tree and roasted and sweat and starved.”

“I want to remember!” said Jack, rather pitifully and huskily. “I don’t know what it may mean for you—but you’ve been decent and more than I deserve——”

“Oh, no,” Tom declared. “You’d do as much for us, if it was the other way ’round.”

“Maybe not,” said Tom. “You didn’t remember what Mr. Gray said about being positive—and you denied what he said and shook his confidence, but he’s trying, and he will succeed.”

“Everybody succeeds if they keep trying on a certain line,” Cliff stated, and then they waited—but not long. Suddenly Jack came on his shaky legs, almost babbling in his excitement.

CHAPTER XVI
PART OF THE SECRET

“Men in tropical places don’t ask each other questions about their business any more than the cowmen do on the range,” Jack began. “That fellow, Mort, was like all of us. He didn’t say much when he was himself; but when he got——”

“Well,” Jack grinned, “I wouldn’t call it that. Instead of being happy, he got to weeping, and wailing and crying on my shoulder. It was thinking about that and what he said that made me remember.”

“It was after two days and nights,” Jack went on, “Mort was weeping about having so much money and then not having any and getting so he had to work as a sailor, and get wrecked in this forsaken hole.”

“Yes, I do,” Jack nodded. “Mort told me, then, he had been in Mexico and I recall that now. He said, between crying and looking for sympathy, what a shame it was that he had only took—let me see, how did he put it?——”

They waited, as patiently, as they could, although it was all that Nicky could do to keep still.

“Oh, yes! He said, ‘Ain’t it a shame I was scared to go back and get the rest? I only took one little sack of gold dust—and there was mules loaded with it and it was all safe for me to get, but I was too scared to go and get it.’ That’s what he said.”

“We can help build up what he meant,” suggested Bill. “We were told about the looting of the Dead Hope Mine by bandits and how Mort drove the mules away.” He was about to continue but a warning look from Mr. Gray caused him to let Jack resume his own story.

“He said he’d had a good time on the money but when it ran out—but you know about that!”

“Let me see,” he said finally. “Yes, this is the way of it—Mort said if he could find a little girl——”

“He didn’t call her any name,” answered Jack. “But he said ‘if I could find a little girl that—that the—er—Indians took——”

Tom had his lips parted to prompt, and Nicky was fidgeting in his folding chair until it squeaked and almost folded up; but Cliff, with one finger at his ear, caressing it, made a sign that neither chum could ignore—the call of the Mystery Boys’ order for a council. They folded their arms in token of agreement and then Cliff communicated by a touch of one finger on his chin—“Keep quiet!” They nodded.

“How did the Indians get her—did he say?” asked Mr. Gray in a gentle, quiet tone.

“Yes, it seems as though he did—let me think! Yes. He said that he took her all through the mountains all right, and he thought he would get a reward for saving her when the bandits attacked the mine. I recollect that real plain. Then——”

He had to stop often to bring up the memories, but one thought led to the next and soon he was in the midst of his narrative.

“The bandits were hot on his trail, and that is why he didn’t have time to stop and claim a reward or to return the little girl. She had golden hair, and was right pretty, he said. But he had to take her to the coast, with what money he could bring in the sack of dust.”

“Maybe!” agreed Jack. “Anyway, he said he and the little girl went at last to the coast and wanted to get a ship to take them to America, but there wasn’t any sailing right then, and the bandit chief was in the town, in disguise, and Mort was so scared he’d be shot that he took the little girl and went on a coasting boat bound for different ports. He dyed the little girl’s hair and made himself look different and kept her in the stateroom of the little ship he said.”

In that way, as Mort had related and as Jack recollected, bit by bit, the two had gone slowly down the coast. Always he was oppressed by terror, first of being discovered with the little girl, second, of being caught by the bandits he had fooled.

“One day he told me, the steward come to him, said the little girl was crying and said she wasn’t his little girl and she wanted to go home. That scared Mort so much that when the ship hove-to right near the San Blas country, which is all islands where the San Blas Indians live, he got a sailor to lower a boat in the night and set him and the little girl onto shore.”

“Toosa told us to seek him among the San Blas Indians,” said Tom, under his breath. Nicky and Cliff nodded and bent forward even more eagerly.

“Seems, from what I recall, he said they were landed on a right small island where some families of the Indians lived, and for a time they was all right, because the little girl was real smart and had a lot of pity for the sickly Indians and told them what to do to be better and they did, even young as she was to tell them how to behave, and they got better from washing more and living decenter, and anyhow, she got to be real well-liked; but Mort hated the idle place and no fun or anything to spend money on—you know what I mean?”

“That was like Margery,” Tom said, referring to his lost sister. “She used to play nurse to her dolls and say she was going to grow up to be a nurse and cure people, and she was always asking questions about how doctors made people well, and how people ought to do to keep well. My sister was the smartest girl of ten I ever saw, and awfully grown up for her age.”

“Well,” Jack completed his story. “All I recall is that Mort said one morning he woke up to find the little girl was gone——”

“Made away with,” Jack nodded. “Mort didn’t know where. Seems maybe the other Indians heard about her curing folks and wanted to be doctored—or maybe they made her like a goddess or something!”

“The inland Indians must have heard of her and taken her,” Bill suggested. “I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Anyhow, as Mort said, between his weeping, it was hard on him, after he had took such good care of her and been so careful—because now he’d never be able to get hold of the Golden Sun mine—”

“The Golden Sun mine!” cried Tom. “Did she have papers or anything, did he say—was she the owner of the mine?—did my dad discover a mine and give her the papers?”

“About that I can’t tell. Mort said by losing the little girl he lost the Golden Sun mine and so he went from there to Colon and rioted on what he had—and that’s all I remember!”

“That makes everything very plain to me,” declared Mr. Gray. “Henry Morgan said that all Mort could talk to him about was the Golden Sun, but Henry thought it might be the little girl, or a mine, he didn’t know what, when we discussed it.”

“So Mort ran away with the child,” Bill contributed. “And from what Jack, here, has told us, I think that Henry Morgan knew, from what Mort may have told him back in Mexico, that Tom’s father had discovered some mine or knew of one and either gave his daughter the title to it or else told her, and no one else, where it was located.”

“That’s why Henry Morgan, when he found out we were trying to trace my sister,” Tom said, “was so anxious to be one of the party. He wants to get the information before we find out anything about it.”

“I think he wants to get it all for himself,” Nicky declared. “I don’t think he intended that we should ever find out anything.”

“I think this may be it,” Bill suggested. “You know, Toosa was a great medicine man and witch-doctor, and he knew a lot about Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher when they were in his country earlier.”

“I see,” Tom said. “He thought Toosa would know how to locate Mort better than anybody else.”

“And when he found out that Mort might be in Porto Bello, he deserted us,” stated Cliff. “The mean, contemptible——”

“Action is the word!” Bill conceded. “Henry Morgan got here while you folks on the cruiser came up-river to rescue us. Now he’s been here, probably convinced Mort that they could do more together than alone—and——”

“Went to the San Blas Indians!” cried Tom. “We’ve got to hurry and get there, too, before he can locate my sister.”

“Wait,” suggested Mr. Gray. “How do we know that he and Mort Beecher have not gone back to Mexico to secure the hidden money?”

“Even so, we’d not care about that; we must get to the San Blas islands,” Tom cried. “We must find out about Margery.”

To that they agreed, and with Jack as a passenger, the cruiser wasted no time in clearing the port and turning her nose toward the archipelago.

CHAPTER XVII
A COLD RECEPTION

The San Blas Indians live on islands of the archipelago which guards the coast close to the line between Columbia and Panama. Most of the islands are quite small and are occupied, in some cases, by no more than three families; in others by more, and on the largest of the islands there is a city, close-packed huts crowding each other with very little free space. On this island, really the capital, the Indians live in goodly numbers, getting their food and doing much of their work by going to the mainland shore in canoes.

Before they approached the San Blas island colonies, Tom spoke of a matter that had been worrying him a great deal.

“We ought to have a plan,” he suggested. “If we go and ask about a girl—my sister—they won’t tell us, especially if they have kept her a prisoner.”

“I think you’re right,” Cliff acknowledged. “We could say we are traders, couldn’t we?”

“That would not help us to get to the inland tribes, if she is not on the islands,” Bill objected.

Mr. Gray shook his head. They were all, except Andy at the engine and the colored pilot, Bob, at the wheel, seated in the little cabin eating dinner.

“No,” Mr. Gray said with his headshake. “The San Blas Indians are not much interested in gold. There is another tribe, the Chucunaque Indians, living on the mainland, and in the interior, who are really a part of the same original stock as the San Blas people, and they are very decidedly antagonistic to white people for the very reason that Nicky has suggested. These Indians think that white men are all trying to find gold, and the Indians say, according to the information I have, that gold is what has destroyed the Indians.”

“They argue somewhat to this effect: the white man wants gold. He comes among the Indians to look for it. He bribes them with his fiery liquors and he fights them and degrades them.”

“That’s so, too,” Cliff nodded. “Whenever you see Indians after white men have been in their country, you see a decayed race. Look at our own ‘Redskins’—they have lost their country and live on reservations and only since the Government saw what was happening and did something to protect them have they been able to protect themselves and try to get back some of their self-respect.”

“That is exactly what the Chucunaque Indians are afraid of,” Mr. Gray told them. “The Government of Columbia has tried to colonize their country but they have fought every effort and the Government had to give up because the Indians won’t let a white man get into their lands. They have drawn a sort of sacred ring around themselves and no one can get into the country without their permission, and once in, will never be heard of again unless the Indians let him go.”

“But if we had a plan, as you said,” Nicky said hopefully, “only—what kind of a plan would fit that sort of people?”

Jack, who kept his face shaved and clean and who took pride in his new respectability, had been listening without comment; he spoke up.

“One thing I do know, from Porto Bello and other places,” he said, “is that the Indians are all pretty sickly. Now, back in Colorado, I used to be a sort of ‘jack-leg’ doctor, a rough-and-ready kind of a doctor, I admit—but I knew something about medicine and so on. If we had some medicines, now, and any books——”

“The very thing!” cried Tom, exultantly. “We have a medicine kit on board, and it tells how to use things—first aid and all that!”

“And we have plenty of zinc ointment, and other remedies that are useful for skin diseases and so on,” Mr. Gray declared. “I know enough about tropical exploration to provide those things, and we have them.”

“Then, maybe I could pose as a great medicine man,” Jack suggested. “Not that I would be, you see, but I could do some things, maybe.”

“And we know first aid,” Nicky cried, eagerly. “The Scouts all know first aid and how to take care of hurts and stings and cuts.”

“But they would only let you go through the guarded circle,” he said. “And where would the rest of us get in?”

“He could take me as a sort of second-string medicine man,” Bill spoke up. “Two of us could do all that was necessary. If we found Tom’s sister at all, either two could help to get her free or it would be impossible.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Gray. “Numbers would not count; we couldn’t expect to fight against them in their own country. Those Indians still use the old, primitive bows and poisoned arrows.”

Nevertheless, it cast a damper on their usually gay spirits for in every previous adventure the chums had been inseparable, had participated in every exciting episode and had really brought every adventure to a happy termination.

When they talked it over, however, they decided to make the best of the situation as it then appeared, burying their personal desires for the good of their cause.

Toward sunset they came to one of the first small islands of the archipelago, and saw three huts nestling among the palms. From a distance, with glasses, they made out a number of people standing on the shore.

“They seem to be watching for us,” Nicky declared. “How do they know we are coming, do you suppose?”

“Maybe Henry Morgan has been here and told them we might come,” Cliff suggested.

“Look!” said Tom, excitedly pressing the glasses into Cliff’s hands. “They’re running away!”

“I see the canoes with my naked eye,” Tom agreed. “They are pushing off from shore—they’re paddling away as fast as they can go it!”

It was a fact, and when the cruiser came near enough to lay-to and hail, there was no response and when the chums, in the boat, rowed to the rough corral beach there was not a soul on the island!

At a half dozen other islands, the next day, the same thing happened. Small groups gathered to watch their approach, then, as though driven by some fear of them, scrambled into canoes and disappeared among the islands or toward the mainland.

“Do you suppose they are as afraid of white people as all that?” Cliff wondered.

“Let’s all keep out of sight when we come in sight of the next island, only have Bob, who is dark and might look at a distance like an Indian, on deck,” whispered Nicky. Cliff and Tom agreed, and when Mr. Gray, Bill and Jack, all three puzzled, heard the plan, they agreed.

The change in their plan seemed to make no difference. As they came within sight of the next islet, canoes filled and were driven hastily into hiding.

Finally they reached a fairly clear harbor at the largest of the islands. While they dropped anchor they watched anxiously, for there were many canoes, of different sizes, busily traversing the waterway between the island and the distant shore.

Except for giving the cruiser a wide berth, however, the canoes appeared not to know that it existed.

All the next day the company waited for the approach of a canoe. With the early sunrise a fleet of canoes, filled with women—who seemed to do all of the paddling and all other work—set out for the mainland, paying no attention whatever to the cruiser. At evening the fleet came back.

“We ought to do something,” Nicky urged, always anxious to act. “Let’s land and find out what’s what!”

“You cannot hurry an Indian,” Mr. Gray counseled. “We must wait to see what they will do.”

“More can be gained by patience than by forcing them to move,” Bill supplemented the older man’s counsel.

Then a canoe approached. It contained three of the older Indians, dark, steady, stolid men. They made gestures indicating that they desired the boat to go away.

Bill, standing at the bow, beckoned to them, and held out for them to see, some very flashy glass ornaments.

“Present—for Big Chief!” repeated Bill, and bent low over the coaming and rail to hand them several brightly polished silver belt-buckles, a glittering glass pendant, and some strings of gay beads. He handed them down into the canoe.

“Want visit chief—give more present—show Indians how get well. We bring big medicine.”

Taking the ornaments but hiding any show of appreciation, the men paddled swiftly toward shore.

“I hope it works!” Bill said, rather nervously, dragging an old cigar lighter from his pocket and snapping its steel wheel with his thumb to ignite its wick so he could light a cigarette.

“Darn these things!” he grumbled when it failed. “Always out of whack! And matches are so wet you get one to strike out of a whole packet!”

“Let me have it,” suggested Tom. “I can turn the flint and clip the wick. I used to do it for my—for my father.” Bill nodded, handed him the implement and struck match after match, finally getting a light.

Tom worked over the lighter until it operated three out of four times, filled it with gasoline from the drip of the slightly opened carbureter drain, and, carefully closing the drain again, slipped the lighter in his pocket as Andy called him to help get out the after anchor, because a huge, stormy cloud was rapidly coming over and the cruiser must be well secured. Tom forgot all about the lighter in the ensuing excitement, for a terrific tropical wind and rain came up and everyone had plenty to do to keep the cruiser from dragging onto reefs.

Early the next morning the canoe approached again; the storm was all over and the harbor was like glass as the roughly hewn craft slid gently up to the cruiser’s side.

One of the older trio in the canoe stood erect and surveyed the company with expressionless, stolid gaze. Finally he spoke.

The man nodded, beckoned to Jack. The latter climbed, in his neat, borrowed clothes, into the canoe.

Then the trio waited. “They want the presents,” Bill suggested and he and Tom hurried to secure more gifts with which, if possible, to win the good will of the chief.

When they returned, instead of taking the gifts, the men beckoned and gestured for them to descend into the canoe, and so it was that Tom, Bill and Jack were taken to the island while the others, with what patience they could, mastered their disappointment and waited.

Noon came, and no one returned. Afternoon wore on and still nothing happened, no canoe put off from shore.

Just before dusk the fleet of canoes carrying the women who did the washing, prepared the food and other things on the mainland, came home; still the trio did not return to the cruiser. Cliff and Nicky did not voice their worry for they saw the uneasiness in Mr. Gray’s expression and did not wish to add to his concern.

Just before dark the canoe returned. Tom had hardly gotten on deck with his two companions and the canoe disappeared in the dusk when Nicky and Cliff demanded an explanation.

“Well,” Tom started his explanation, “I don’t think it looks very good. They took us to shore, and the island is fairly packed with the huts they live in, and there is a big, sort of open, hut in the middle, and they took us there.”

Tom nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “He was in a hammock, lying there as though he were asleep, and he had a lot of his chief men sitting on low stools around his hammock. The rest of the place was simply packed with people, men and women.”

“It was. And they took us to stools in the center and let us sit down. There we sat and sat and sat!”

“Finally Bill got tired of it and stood up and made a ‘talk’ in his best Spanish, with signs and everything. He pointed to Jack, and said he was a doctor—of course we had given the chief our gifts at first and he didn’t bother to thank us. Bill made a good speech, if they understood it; they didn’t show whether they did or not!”

“Then we sat and sat and sat some more,” Tom went on. “It got to be noon and the place began to get pretty strong, with the heat and the sweating and packed people. But nothing happened.”

“It got so bad, finally,” Bill took up the story, “I felt like I had to have a smoke, and so did Jack. They hadn’t brought any sick people to be doctored, or made a move. And nobody talked. So I hauled out my stuff and rolled two cigarettes. And then—here’s where Tom comes in. Go ahead, Tom.”

“Bill didn’t have any matches—he’d used up all his packet the night before,” Tom explained. “So he felt around and looked blank and Jack had one match and he struck it and the head was wet so it didn’t go off.”

“That was bad,” Nicky declared. “They’d suspect you weren’t very good makers of magic.”

“It wasn’t anything I did,” Tom demurred. “It was just having forgotten that I fixed Bill’s cigar lighter—and when we needed it we had it. I pulled it out and flicked it and it lit!”

“And did it surprise them?” demanded Bill, knowing that he answered himself.

“They were as excited as babies with new pinwheels,” Tom said. “The chief beckoned to me and I had to go over and light the thing a half a hundred times, and then let him try—and of course he couldn’t!”

“But it did help us,” Tom became serious. “That is—it helped us to learn what we were wondering about—why everybody runs from us on the other islands. But it makes our problem that much harder, too, at the same time!”

“This way,” Tom explained, despondently. “The chief called a man who speaks some Spanish and had him tell us. Two white men have come here already, a few days ago. I think it was Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher. They said they were great doctors, and they did have some medicines and they put stuff on the Indians and told them they would be cured of their sores and so on in a week.”

“They came in a sailing sloop,” Bill added. “It landed them and went on down the coast toward South America, but it is coming back in a week or so.”

“But what makes that mean anything to us, beyond the fact that they got here first?” asked Mr. Gray.

“Henry and Mort—if that’s who it was—told the Indians they are the only true medicine men, and they said that men would come soon and pretend to be as great—but they would be evil and undo all the good. And this is the diabolical part of their story—” he paused and bent forward impressively, to add:

“They said that if their medicine did not cure—it is because the evil ones that are coming—us!—are working with devil-medicine!”

“It has terrified the Indians,” Bill agreed. “And it was only because Tom’s trick with the lighter caught the chief’s fancy and impressed him that he told us. He warned us to go away. He can’t trust us, of course.”

CHAPTER XVIII
THE JUNGLE OPENS ITS ARMS

“Waiting for something to happen is the hardest thing in the world,” Tom declared. He, and Nicky and Cliff sat in the shade of a small awning on the forward deck.

“I don’t think anything will happen unless we make it happen,” he added. “The Indians didn’t pay the least bit of attention to us all day yesterday.”

“Well,” Cliff argued. “The day before, when Tom won the chief’s interest with the cigar lighter, the big man told him that the Indians don’t want to have anything to do with us.”

“I suppose he thinks he has done all that he needs to,” Tom said, dejectedly. “They are just waiting for us to go away.”

“I hope Bill and Jack get some results,” Nicky said. The two he mentioned had carried gifts to shore early in the morning of this, the second day following the audience with the chief; they hoped to win him over, to get his confidence. But while they tried they felt, from the start, that it was a hopeless attempt.

“We could find out what all the women do after they paddle over,” Tom said. “If we report their customs, Mr. Gray ought to be willing to let us go.”

They asked, and pleaded when Mr. Gray hesitated. They promised to be careful; they urged their case, agreeing to report customs and everything they saw. The elderly scholar did not feel like accompanying them himself, for he hated the humidity and the sun’s terrific heat; he told them that if Andy would go along—Bob had taken the two white men in the boat, and had brought it back—they might row a ways up the river and they could see across the wide expanse of the inner lagoon.

“I can’t go,” Andy told them. “I’ve got to tinker with my motor—there’s one spark plug that misses, and I want to clean the whole set and adjust the timing of my motor.”

“Take the spare rifle and get Bob to row you over,” suggested the engineer; but they demurred among themselves. Bob, not because he was colored, but because he had a gruff, rather surly disposition, was not a pleasant companion on an exploring trip.

“I can’t see any harm in rowing up the river,” Andy said. “Don’t get out of the boat and you’ll be all right.”

They promised with the utmost sincerity and meant fully to obey the order. The pull across the hot lagoon taxed them, for the sun was hot and even though they took turns rowing the boat was slow and they were quite wearied when, early in the afternoon, they came to a place opposite the spot where the women had beached their canoes.

“We can just draw up on the sand and eat our lunch,” Nicky suggested. “It’s shady under those mangroves.”

Tom and Cliff conceded that no harm could come of that. As they watched the women they saw that the washing for the various families was being done. It was conducted in a way quite like that they had seen in Jamaica, and among other tribes: the women, standing knee deep in the river, beat and pounded the clothes in the water.

“The clothes they have aren’t in such good condition that they could stand any sort of scrubbing, anyhow,” Tom agreed. “It certainly is a primitive sight—but look! They’re running and hiding!”

As they approached the women, the latter dropped what they had, leaving the things to drift in the slow current, and raced across the beach and into the heavy jungle. The jungle came close to the water and was as thick and seemingly impenetrable as any tropical growth could be; yet the women disappeared into it.

“That’s a shame,” Cliff cried. “Their things will all be lost—row over faster, Nicky. We’ll save the clothes.”

They spent a busy half hour recovering the pieces of cloth from the water and piling them on shore. Though they called and tried to make the hidden watchers understand that they meant them no harm, the boys got no response. Rather disgusted with the Indians, they sat under a shady clump of brush, surrounded by vividly colored birds and butterflies and ate their lunch of sweet yams, a tin of meat and a thermos bottle of warm cocoa. Not a very appetizing lunch to one accustomed to refrigerators and well-stocked markets, but, to tropical appetites, after a long row, a meal which was eaten with gusto.

“Did you ever see butterflies like these?” asked Nicky, pointing to a bluish-silver beauty whose wings seemed iridescent in the sunlight.

“I know that father would love to have some of them,” Cliff said. “He hasn’t any of these great silvery ones, or the deep, blue-winged kind, in his collection.”

“Take the rifle along, if you go into the brush,” warned Tom. “We might meet a jaguar or a tapir or some old thing—or snakes!—watch out for snakes!”

Cliff put the rifle under his arm, and the trio, darting after the bright-winged insects, raced up the beach, and into the heavy fringe of brush.

They kept quite close together, at first, but when they had thrust a little way into the dense growth they saw that they came out into a fairy-land, and, forgetting all caution in the thrill of the beautiful sight, they paused for a moment and then pressed forward.

They saw none of the Indian women; indeed, they had forgotten all about them. The dense growth of brush, matted vines, tangled creepers, which fringed the river, gave place to great, lofty open glades of forest grandeur. Trees like great columns, reared their tall forms upward from every point, making vast aisles of gloom between their huge trunks. Overhead their leaves met and tangled, twined and held by giant creepers, so that only a dim, softly diffused light came down to light the magical scene.

There was, at first, a seeming silence, an awesomely deep silence; it made the boys stop talking, or converse in a whisper, feeling some inward tendency to be still. Gradually, however, the forest took up its solemn conversation; the hum of insects became noticeable, the faint crackle of twigs as some soft-footed denizen of the deep gloom made wary way along some hidden trail; the soft plash of a fish in the hidden, distant river; the twitter of several birds, and the soft, incessant flutter of bright—gaudily colored wings. Most of the tropical birds are vivid in color but have no song.

A flock of gaily plumed birds whirred by among the silences above their heads. Cliff half-automatically lifted the rifle and then let its barrel drop; they were too beautiful to be killed, to be dragged down, inert, lifeless, by a cruel and senseless use of lead. Cliff was a very humane youth and he destroyed animal life only for real needs at any time.

Came a glitter and glow before their eyes; a very battalion of gay butterflies flitted here and there. Forgetting the silence, with a whoop they were in pursuit. Cliff dropped the rifle.

Here and there, afar and then close, through the great boles of century-old trees, the pursuit led them.

Sometimes in eyeshot of one another, oftener not, they caught the gay little insects.

Finally, with whoop and call, the trio managed to locate one another and to gather to compare their catches.

“I have twelve of the blue ones, two silver ones, six yellow ones, and this burnished gold one.”

“If I had six of your blue ones I’d trade two of these golden sunshine ones,” Nicky completed the trio of voices.

“Good gravy!” he exclaimed. “The needle is stuck. See—it doesn’t turn!”

“Well, that’s no good, then,” Cliff said, hiding his own misgivings. “We mustn’t get frightened and lose all our good sense. Let’s sit down and think how to go about finding our way out.”

“But it’s getting dimmer,” Tom stated. “We won’t have too much time before night—let’s see if we can’t find where I dropped the rifle. Each one go in a different direction, and nick the trees with your knives so you can get back.”

They started off, and, after awhile, a hail from Tom showed that he had discovered the previous weapon. But then they all had to return to the common center and from there, after meeting, had to go back to the spot where the rifle lay.

“Isn’t there any woods’ sign in the tropics to show which is North, or some direction?” demanded Nicky. “Doesn’t moss grow mostly on one side of a tree?”

“In temperate climates I know some signs, but I don’t see any here,” Cliff acknowledged, spying about him carefully.

“Well,” Nicky declared, “we can shout, in turn, every half minute, and fire the rifle once in awhile.”

“We can’t waste shots,” objected Cliff. “We may need—” he broke off, not wishing them to picture the dangers he began to foresee.

But their minds were quick; however, each hid his growing uneasiness from his companions as well as he could.

“We’ve got a rifle with a full magazine,” Tom said stoutly. “That will protect us and give us food until we get out—and we’ve got the lighter of Bill’s to make a fire to cook it on. We’re not so badly off.”

“If we get excited and start planning and running around,” Cliff suggested, “we will wear ourselves out and get nowhere. Let’s sit here in this open glade and think. When anybody has an idea that is good sense, we can try it.”

“I see what looks like a trail yonder,” Tom had used his eyes and he pointed to the near end of the glade. “Let’s try it a ways—it ought to lead toward the river.”

“That’s so—it is at both sides,” conceded Tom. “Let’s try one way for an hour and see what we see!”

At the end of that time by Nicky’s wrist watch they retraced their way—and when darkness came on, they were still on the other trail, and weary and excited; but no sight of the river rewarded their eager gaze, no sound of a response came back to their loud hallos.

“That didn’t work,” said Cliff. “Maybe we’d better pick out trees and get ourselves off the ground while its light enough to see——”

“We’re as safe on the ground,” Tom urged. “We can gather wood and make a big bonfire and that will be better.”

In the rapidly waning light, gloomy at the best, they managed to gather broken, half-rotted twigs, branches, small strips of bark and dead vines and several logs, back in the glade.

They made a good pile of them, keeping together, Cliff with the rifle always at his elbow.

“It’s watch-and-watch,” he said when they sat down to stare at the leaping flare of their fire, keeping quite close to its cheering blaze, “Nicky watches until nine, then Tom, then I will watch—two hours for each, unless we all have to wake up.”

Thus, as the day’s quiet gave place to the growing bedlam of the darkness, with hoots and wails, the strident sounds made by night insects making an undertone to the occasional weird voice of a wild beast, the three adventurous youths made the best of a bad situation and sat, supperless, by the one bright spot of safety in that wild place.

CHAPTER XIX
WASTED EFFORT

When all attempts to persuade the chief to listen had resulted in a final, and rather angry order for them to go, Bill and Jack gave up.

“It’s no use,” Bill said. “We are stumped. Let’s go to the dock and meet Bob—he ought to be back with the boat pretty soon.”

They went to the ramshackle wharf made of old, rotting poles stuck into the water, with old boards, from some wreckage, loosely laid on them for a footpath. The dock was seldom used—only for the few occasions when government launches came to the island to transact business with the chief.

But after a long wait, when Bob failed to show up, Bill became uneasy and finally hailed the cruiser by firing his pistol three times.

The boat was too far away for voices to carry, and also signs could not be distinguished.

Bill and Jack impatient and worried, for they could not see the small boat anywhere about, commandeered a canoe and paddled to the anchored cruiser.

“The boys have not come back,” said Mr. Gray uneasily when they came alongside. He told how he had given them permission to go to the river. Andy, summoned, was crestfallen and alarmed. He related his suggestion to the youths and Bob said that he had not been asked to be one of the party.

“We will take the canoe and paddle over,” said Bill. “No time to waste. It won’t be over-long till dark.” Without further word he and Jack paddled toward the mainland. They worked swiftly, for both knew that time was of supreme importance if any harm had come to their younger comrades.

“Here they come, anyhow,” he stated, pointing with his paddle to the fleet appearing at the river mouth. “We’ll ask.”

The canoes seemed to be bent on avoiding them, but Bill drew out a soiled but fairly white handkerchief and waved it, then beckoned. A canoe containing several younger women veered closer and the paddles ceased to sweep the glassy water.

“They’re back there,” Bill told Jack. “They must be all right. But we’d better go on and make sure.”

They passed through the squadron of canoes and up the river. Long before they reached the small, sandy beach, they discerned the rowboat, drawn up on shore. The Indian women had left it untouched, after a curious examination of its scanty contents.

“They’re nowhere around,” Bill exclaimed when they came closer: with tight lips he ran the canoe into shallow water and vaulted into the shallows.

The echoes were silent. Jack added his high pitched call, and they shouted together; but the jungle held its secret. The boys, at that time, were two miles beyond hearing, on a trail that ran almost parallel to the course of the river.

“If they’re in the jungle, how will we locate them?” asked Jack. “I know something about these places—once you get in, you wander and get further away all the time.”

“We’ll fire our pistols,” cried Bill. “Push in, here, as far as we dare go without getting lost ourselves!”

There they shouted and, at intervals, fired their pistols. But only the silent glades and the sentinels towering high above heard the hails and quivered a little to the strange sound of exploding powder.

“There’s nothing we can do by waiting here,” Bill said, finally. “My idea is to go to the chief and offer him all we’ve got to put out parties who know the trails, give them torches, and try to get some trace of what has happened. The boys are lost. We would be lost in no time, looking; but the Indians might not. We’ll try it. It’s the only thing to do.”

Tired as they were, their paddles fairly flew as they made their way back toward the cruiser.

“If the sun is setting in the open, it must be night back in the jungle,” began Jack.

“Be still!” snapped Bill, refusing to think of harm and thus lose his hold on his plans. They delayed at the boat only long enough to give the details of their discovery to a perturbed Mr. Gray, a penitent engineer and an excited colored pilot. Then they paddled for the shore.

Without ceremony they burst in at the chief’s big hut, where he was partaking of his evening meal.

“Well,” said Bill finally, exasperated out of all patience, “we will pay well to have men and boys take torches and scour the jungle.”

“You say you much doctor-magic man!” he declared. “All right. You make magic. You find!”

CHAPTER XX
TRAILED BY A JAGUAR

“Look, Cliff,” whispered Nicky, directing his comrade’s attention toward a limb not far above their campfire. “See those two bright spots? Are they a jaguar’s eyes, do you think?”

“Don’t anybody move,” Tom whispered. “From where I am it looks too flat to be a cat. But it’s something.”

The tropical jungle was beginning to show its eyes: would it go further and show its teeth and claws? After three hours of darkness, with only the blazing fire for protection, the three chums were beginning to be a trifle nervous, and the eyes above them, discovered by Nicky, did not add to their ease.

“Listen!” Tom breathed, barely audibly. “Don’t shoot hastily, Cliff. Ease your rifle up till you can get a sight.”

“I will!” Cliff said; but his hands were trembling so much that he fumbled with the rifle and it clattered to the ground.

“I can’t—I—my muscles shake so!” Cliff said. “I’m not a coward, but the first shot is so important——”

“Tom,” Nicky breathed, “you’re closest. Can you reach the gun and steady yourself?”

Tom, rather shakily, answered. “Cliff can. Just wait, Cliff. He won’t jump straight down into the fire. He’ll wait till one of us goes off as far as the wood pile. There’s time to get steady. Wait a minute, Cliff, till you get set.”

“I don’t seem able to make my muscles stop quivering,” Cliff replied, as low as he could. “Here, Tom, you take the rifle.”

Tom extended a hand very slowly toward the weapon; Cliff pushed it slowly toward him. In spite of their inward fear they realized that the bright, tiny disks reflecting the firelight were noting every move; they forced themselves to be deliberate, lest a sudden move, startling that dusky figure above, might cause the animal—or whatever it was—to leap.

The rifle in his hand, Tom made a determined effort to hold his muscles steady. He did not think of his nerves as being unstrung, for he had been told often by Mr. Gray that nerves are only the messengers that take the messages from the mind to the muscles: when the mind sent the wrong messages or was unable to be steady, the muscles were shaken, but not the nerves.

He drew the rifle slowly to him, got his hand onto its stock, lifted it with a deliberate determination not to let the barrel waver.

Using every atom of his will-power to compel his mind to concentrate on what he was going to accomplish, instead of looking at his pictures of what might happen, he managed to gain control of himself.

Then he raised the barrel until its forward sight and its rear sight grew a fine line to the eyes so steadily glowing above, and a trifle to one side of their fire. Cliff, shaking with his disturbed mental condition, and Nicky, anxious and worried, fixed their eyes on those so high up above them and waited, tensely.

Cliff and Nicky threw themselves away from the fire, for there was a sliding, crackling, scraping sound above the fire, and down came a long, slender, weird looking form, to crash upon the ground just beside the fire.

“It’s what they call an iguana—a huge lizard,” Cliff said. They approached the long reptile, which was about three feet from nose to tail.

“I think I startled it—maybe I hit it,” Tom gasped. “Anyhow, the fall has stunned it, I think.” He made sure by using the butt of the rifle as a club and striking the backbone just back of the skull: the lizard quivered, flailed its tail several times and then relaxed.

“It’s much better than a jaguar, for these lizards are good to eat,” Tom responded. “Goodness knows we could all eat. How about cutting out some of the meat and roasting it on sticks?”

They did so, and as soon as they had cut away what seemed to be the most promising parts of the flesh, Tom had another idea.

“Just take what we can eat,” he suggested. “Then we’d better drag the rest out to the far edge of the glade and leave it. If any meat-eating animals are around we’d rather have them get it and go away than to invite them to risk a rush to grab it close to our fire—they might grab us on the way!”

Accordingly they took the carcass as far away as they dared, Cliff, now recovered from his attack of fear, watching with the rifle ready.

No beast approached while they worked, but they had hardly returned to put their choicer meat on spits made of twigs to roast it before the fierce blaze of their fire when they heard the unmistakable, blood-chilling wail of a jungle cat, not far away. From here, and then from there, first to the right, then to the left, but ever closer, the intermittent wail continued. Then, in the dull glow from their fire they saw fiery eyes at the edge of the glade. There was a rush, a swift retreat—and the remains of the iguana had disappeared.

“Jaguar, for sure!” Tom replied shakily. “Mr. Jaguar, take your supper and don’t bother us any more. And, fellows, let’s hurry up and finish our own eating so we won’t tempt any of his cousins and brothers to come any closer.”

They gave the meat only time to cook, and then wasted no moments in tasting: the flesh proved to be quite palatable and it was consumed with the hearty avidity of appetites denied since noon. What they had left they flung far into the darkness: sudden, rushing sounds, several shrill squeals and one yelp very much like that of a startled dog, gave them the assurance that the jungle denizens were on hand.

The chums changed their plans about watching, two remaining awake and alert while one slept. Not that much sleep came to any of them.

From time to time, sometimes close, sometimes afar, they heard the weird, child-like cry of a jungle cat; the “teesh-teesh” of some other animal, a peccary, perhaps, and, once, the slithering progress of a large snake, apprised them that the jungle life was close around them.

But the bright fire served to restrain jungle curiosity and to hold the more fierce animals at bay, although during the night they saw eyes that glinted green, with a demon-like anger smouldering in them, and knew that the meat-eaters were abroad and watching their chance.

“Golly, I’m glad daylight’s coming,” yawned Nicky when the dim green tracery overhead began to let in the light which showed that the sun was getting higher. “I’ve got an idea, fellows. If I could ‘shin up’ that branchy tree yonder, and get to the top, I could see which is East and which is West, and we could judge which way to head for the river.”

Warning him about snakes and ants and poisonous insects he might meet and must avoid during his climb, Cliff and Tom agreed to his plan.

When, after an arduous climb, during which he disappeared from their sight in the heavy foliage, Nicky’s legs appeared again and finally he slid carefully to the ground.

“I brought you some breakfast,” he said, “eggs! If we can roast them in the coals they ought to be good. I know they are birds’ eggs and not poisonous—I took them out of a big nest.”

“That saves us having to shoot for our breakfast,” Tom said. “Now which way is East?”

“Then the sea is in that direction,” Tom decided. “The river must be at our right hand when we face the East, and we can’t get lost if we are careful not to get turned around.”

“Well, suppose you were to stand with your arm extended toward the East—that trail and the big tree. Then I’d go just as far as I could and still see you plainly, and set myself exactly in the same position. Then Cliff would go on beyond me and get himself set, picking some marker to keep all three of us in a straight line. When Cliff gets set you, Nicky, can go on beyond him, then I go beyond you again, and so we’d be sure we still had our East direction right and were moving South, and so toward the river.”

“But it’s all swamp on the South side of this glade,” objected Nicky. “I looked, and we can’t get over it, and we daren’t wade it.”

“Well, we could go on East, down the trail, parallel with the river,” Tom suggested. “Only, when we tried, last night, it ended ‘blind’ and so I guess we would waste time going that way. Maybe we had better go West, that is, up the trail. There must be some place where it will take us to the river.”

“How did we ever get into this glade from the North, when we must have been South of it and of the swamp when we came into the jungle?”

They ate the eggs, hot: they were not as palatable as had been the iguana meat, but it helped to stay their hunger. They were thirsty, and began looking for water to drink as soon as they set out on the upper trail.

They found a spring, in a little clearing, and since birds were bathing in the water Tom decided that it was safe for them to drink from it. They slaked their thirst and went on with a much better confidence. The jungle had yielded its food and drink to their confidence in themselves.

“I don’t want you to think I’m a ’fraid-cat,” Nicky said presently. “Do you fellows notice little cracklings off in the brush?”

“I’ve heard them, several times,” Tom agreed. “I wondered if some Indian might have seen our fire and was watching, going along some other trail, to see where we are bound for!”

“But it’s first on one side, then on the other,” Nicky protested. “Once I heard something, sort of ‘whoosh!’ away up ahead, and now—listen!”

They drew closer together on the trail, and Cliff took a tighter clutch of the rifle he carried. They kept still, and presently, from a point quite close, there came the crackle of a twig.

But then, from far ahead, there came a queer noise as if something were breaking through brush. The sound close at hand became also more pronounced, like the passage of a body through lush grass.

Spellbound they watched the scene that developed with the swiftness of a moving picture.

Into the path quite close to them, but ahead of their position, a dark, almost naked Indian sprang: he carried a bow and a quiver of arrows; his ragged trousers were torn and scratched. He glanced toward the chums only for an instant. Then, backing toward them, he pointed up the trail, saying no word.

Out from the brush, with a light bound, there came a dark shape, lithe and crouched as it landed, then swiftly assuming a posture that made it look like a great, blackish cat, squatting on its haunches, its long tail lashing to and fro, switching the grass at either side.

Although few have seen the “black panther,” or “black jaguar” of the Central Americas, and some deny its existence, the chums, backed by the authority of many books they had read, recognized the true nature of the animal. It was a black panther, or a dark specimen of the jaguar species. Which it was did not matter. That it was there, on the path before them, did matter.

The animal remained quiet, except for its swishing tail. The Indian, eyes fixed on the beast, slowly, gradually crept backward to be closer to them. Evidently he knew nothing of the use of the rifle that Cliff held ready. He paid no heed to it, but carefully selected an arrow, and very deliberately fitted it to his huge bowstring. Slowly he sighted, drew the string taut, and loosed the missile.

With a snarling cry the huge cat leaped into the air, coming down on all-fours. Swiftly, almost anxiously, the Indian drew out another arrow—his first had only pierced the outer coat of the beast.

CHAPTER XXI
WHERE NO WHITE MEN GO

While the panther was still in midspring, the Indian flung his body sidewise to escape the leap. He struck against the rifle barrel, and the impact knocked the weapon out of Cliff’s hands.

Tom, quick as a cat himself, caught the rifle before it touched the ground: the panther’s leap had fallen short by several feet and with its eyes smouldering with hate, its red tongue playing about its snarling lips, teeth bared, it gathered swiftly for a second leap.

Nicky jumped to one side as the Indian threw himself away: but Tom, swiftly bringing the rifle to his shoulder, said to himself:

“Now be steady. This shot must save our lives.” And he said a quick, earnest little prayer in his mind.

Crouched with muscles like steel springs, the panther never launched his body into the air. The bullet struck his eye and thence penetrated his skull. He rolled over, threshing his great paws, snarling and biting at his own flesh in his impotent helplessness.

Swiftly the Indian recovered himself, and, selecting an arrow from his quiver he watched his chance and managed to get to a point where, in an instant of comparative quiet, he drove the arrow like a lance, burying its point deep in the animal’s throat. There was renewed turmoil in that jungle path, but it was short. The jaguar, or panther, according to the natural history you choose to believe about the black species of Central America, lay still.

The Indian turned from watching the beast and regarded the youths with stolid, but awakened interest. His manner was not hostile. He seemed to be wondering what course to take.

“I think he saw our fire last night and has been watching us ever since,” Nicky said, his first remark since the exciting adventure, for Nicky, without a weapon, felt just a trifle ashamed because he had thought of his own safety first and had leaped aside to let Tom try to recover the rifle.

“In a way we saved his life,” Cliff said. “Or—Tom did. He ought to be grateful. Let’s try him with what Spanish we know.”

He said no word but turning he beckoned to them to follow him—they sidled past the beast, giving it as wide a berth as possible in case it still retained life enough to thresh out with those claws, curved like scimitars, sharp as steel grapples. The Indian led them up the trail for a short distance and then turned off with the trio following.

After an hour on the narrower, almost impenetrable way, where sharp branches caught at them, and poisonous scorpions stood their ground and dared intrusion with their stings all ready to back up their dare, Tom and his comrades saw that they had been brought to a small jungle village.

Slatternly, stout, worn old women, and sickly looking younger girls, cleanly athletic young fellows and old men came out to stare and to listen to the very few words with which the Indian explained.

“They are as sickly looking as the ones at Porto Bello were,” Cliff confided to his companions. “They certainly need a doctor,” Tom admitted. “It seems as though all the Central American Indians we have seen are degraded and poor looking through carelessness.”

“Bad diet, too,” Tom declared. “They eat the same diet year in and year out, and they’re too lazy—or don’t know how—to exercise. I don’t know that we ought to pity them. Still, somehow I do.”

“Because they really belong to a race which had a civilization that seems to have been as fine as ours in many ways,” Tom said. “But the race didn’t keep up to its old standards and so these people have themselves, and their ancestors, to blame.”

They were not treated badly: their guide showed them a hut where several women brought them a sort of stew, taken from a big pot at one part of the small cleared square of the village. The stew was not as palatable as some might like; but it was food and seemed to be made in a reasonably clean way, considering the scanty provisions for cleanliness that these people possessed.

In that village Tom and his two comrades had to remain for three days. No restraint was put on their movements. The jungle was enough to keep them prisoners. From the village, once they had lost their sense of the direction whence they had come, there was no trace of the way out. Nevertheless people came and went, going into the jungle in the morning and returning with trapped game or birds shot with their finely polished, long, light arrows.

Nicky, who was rather good at archery, one day made friends with one of the younger boys who was watching a half dozen women polish and bind pointed thorns onto sticks.

“There’s a nice, true one,” said Nicky, knowing that his words were not understood, but intending to use the arrow to demonstrate his own skill and impress the other youth favorably; but the Indian, catching his hand, held him back from the tiny pile on which the arrow lay.

However the youth proposed to show why he had been so quick: he touched Nicky’s arm and the trio followed him to a spot not far away, at the edge of the jungle. Here were several large earthen urns or shallow pots. Each had a lid.

The boy called and a companion issued from the brush: there was a brief pantomimic exchange between them and the latest arrival turned back into the woods to come forth again with a cage-like enclosure made of braided heavy vine stems, stiff enough to retain its shape. Within it, hissing and striking, was a furious snake.

“And it’s angry, too—I hope he isn’t going to release it!” said Tom. Evidently the youth had another purpose.

He took a forked stick and taking the lid off one of the jars, he reached into its depths, which were very unpleasantly odorous, and brought out on the stick a piece of meat. It was in a very bad state of decay already; however the youth, lifting a small slat opening in the top of the withe cage, lowered the stick with the meat on it: then he did all in his power to infuriate the snake by prodding at it with the meat on the stick.

In a snake’s rage the rattler struck and struck repeatedly at the meat. Each time, as the boys could see, more of his poison was left in the meat. After a moment the boy took out the stick and returned the meat to the jar, covering it. The snake was killed, the Indians’ signs indicating that his usefulness was ended. But the white youths could see another cage in the brush.

“I see,” Nicky said. “They let the snake strike till the old meat is full of poison and then they leave it in these jars for awhile till the poison gets all through the meat and it gets pretty terrible. But then what?”

He saw very quickly. The youth brought some of the arrows and dipped the thorn points, repeatedly, then set them aside to dry.

“He didn’t want you to shoot with a poisoned arrow,” Tom explained. “The least nick in your skin with one of them might end in fearful agony.”

“You’re right,” said Nicky soberly, and nodded with a smile of real gratitude to his Indian friend. The youth nodded briefly and walked away. The tribe was pleasant and fed the youths plentifully with such food as they had, all cooked in the one big pot, and renewed by dropping in whatever the day’s hunting brought home. But friendliness was absent.

The guide who had brought them to the village came to their hut with another, a taller, very old and very stern looking fellow. He made signs to Tom, pointing to his pocket and then toward the small fire in a little ovenlike place in a corner.

“Know what he’s trying to tell you?” Cliff said. “He wants you to show that lighter of Bill’s. He must have seen us use it in the woods, when we lit the fire the first night.”

That, clearly, was what he wanted for when Tom drew out the lighter and made it work, the old Indian looked on with amazement. Tom made a half gesture to hand it to him but he drew back and Cliff whispered hurriedly:

“Don’t let them get your ‘magic’—that must be what they think it is. Keep it in your pocket and use it as seldom as you can. The gasoline may be dried out or the flint worn, and then it won’t work.”

“That’s so. I’ll save it all I can.” Tom agreed and put back the small mechanical apparatus with which man has improved on the old custom of making fire by use of flint and steel: now the steel is a wheel and by whisking it sharply against a prepared bit of flint, a spark is made to fall on a wick soaked with gasoline, which ignites.

Soon after the lighter was demonstrated, the Indians beckoned to the youths, and by signs bade them follow. Half a dozen young men had packs slung on their backs. Led by the aged Indian, and with the three white youths in the line, they started off into a different jungle trail that wound upward steadily, and got more difficult and hotter and more unpleasant every hour.

Tom caught up to their guide and in pantomime tried to make him see that they wanted to know where they were going. He pointed forward, then to himself, then to the trail, and then forward again. The man seemed to understand.

With a great sweep of his arm he described a circle in the air. Then the same circle was made but pointing toward the ground, part of the imaginary line being drawn across the trail.

“Do you remember what my father said about the charmed circle—the circle the Chucunaque Indians have established?” Cliff asked.

“More than that,” Nicky added. “According to the gestures of our brother, who ought to be initiated into the Mystery Boys order and taught some signs that can be understood—according to him, the way leads in but the way doesn’t lead out again!”

CHAPTER XXII
IN THE CLOSED CIRCLE

Three days were spent on that trail: at times the chums felt as though the humid, close air would overcome them, the exertion would overwhelm their endurance.

Nevertheless they kept on stubbornly. The Indians seemed not to mind any amount of exertion, and it was agreed by the white comrades that they would not show themselves weaker. Truly they were not trained to such a life, yet they were determined to stand up—and they did. Grit carried them along when weary muscles rebelled.

At last they came into a cleared spot in the foothills. In it was a sizeable village, the capital city, as one might say, of the tribe.

“I’ll be mighty grateful for a hut and a long rest,” Nicky panted, walking resolutely, with shoulders back, into the clearing.

They were led across the cleared space. Around it, without any particular order, huts were erected. They were built of an open fashion, with stakes at the corners, and at intervals, to support the roofs of thatch, woven together quite tightly and sloped to shed water.

“Do you see what I see?” whispered Cliff, his observant eyes taking in a squatted figure in the shade of a hut across the quadrangle.

His friends looked that way. “It’s a white man,” Nicky admitted. “But what makes you so excited about him?”

“Well,” said Cliff, “we know that Henry and that Mort Beecher got started ahead of us. I wouldn’t be surprised——”

At the instant that he paused the white man looked up. He turned his head and called to another figure resting in a hammock.

“Wake up, Henry!” he cried, in a fat, hoarse voice. “Wake up. Seems like we got visitors, seems like!”

He stood up and the chums saw a portly, very short body on two brief pillars of legs, with a round, bullet head, twinkling eyes and a smiling mouth, over which an extremely red nose spoke of the many nights he had spent with Jack in Porto Bello, for there was no doubt that the man was Mort Beecher.

While the chums paused, astonished to a degree, and hardly knowing what action to take, with this sudden discovery, Henry Morgan rolled out of the hammock and came to the side of the hut. He screened his sleepy eyes from the sun and then uttered a word under his breath.

“Henry Morgan, and no mistake!” Nicky exclaimed. In sudden anger, recalling the trick that had been played on them, he started forward; but Tom restrained him with a hand on his arm. Nicky stopped, and after an instant to collect himself he felt that Tom’s decision for silence was wise.

“As I live and breathe!” cried Henry Morgan. “Who’d ever expect to see you lads here? Hello!”

“Hello, yourself!” answered Tom, advancing. He met the outstretched hand. He grasped its perspiring breadth and gave it a good grip.

Tom saw at once that Henry Morgan, after his first surprise, had decided on some course of action: Tom proposed to hold himself alert, but not to show anger or aversion until he learned the other fellow’s plans.

“How in the world did you ever get here?” demanded Henry. “Here—meet the man I used to talk about so much—Mort Beecher. A finer pal never lived. Shake, Mort. Shake hands with Tom, and Nicky, and Cliff. Now, we’re all pals together! But how did you get here!”

“The Indians brought us, as you saw, just now,” Tom answered. “How did you get here so much ahead of us?”

He put a good deal of meaning into his look and Henry looked away for a moment: then he faced them again, grinning and speaking in the husky voice they remembered all too well.

“When I left you and Bill—but the other lads have told you how I came down the river from the village——”

“Yes,” Tom responded, “and they told us what you said—that we were sick and couldn’t get away and there was no use for them to try to follow us or to rescue us.”

“I did tell them that. Yes, I did,” Henry said, affably. Nicky thought, “what a villain he is!” but he kept still.

“I told them that. ’Cause why? ’Cause I was anxious to get them to help me find Mort Beecher and not to waste any time. That was good sense. ’Cause why? There wasn’t any time to be lost. If Toosa knew anything about the Golden Sun—and that was the little girl you was looking for!——”

“Mine nothing! Where did you get that fol-de-rol? No. ’Twas the little girl, and if what he said was right—that the man I wanted was in Porto Bello—the cruiser could go and find him and hurry down and rescue the girl without wasting time to wait. I knew Toosa would see that you got out all right. I had told him to. I had given him money to look out for you!”

“And then, when you boys wouldn’t come on, what was I to do? I knew there was no time to waste. ’Cause why? ’Cause Mort might be took out of Porto Bello and not ever be found again—or not for a good while. And there was a innocent little golden-haired girl and her life at stake amongst the Indians.”

His face was so earnest and his tones were so sincere that if they had not seen his duplicity already the chums might have believed him. But, with all he had done, they simply stood still and listened.

Henry, however—and Mort, too—seemed to think that the story was very convincing.

“And good it was that he didn’t waste a minute,” Mort broke in. “He has your interests at heart, has Henry. Seems like no fellow ever was as fine as Henry, seems like. You can kick me for a football if that ain’t so. He knew I was likely to be took from Porto Bello, so he hurried there with a sloop and got me and we hurried here.”

“’Cause why? ’Cause we knowed the little girl’s life was in danger. So we got it fixed up that we was doctors, so we could get into the country. That’s so that the Indians would trust us.”

He saw Tom touching his ear, in a Mystery Boys sign of warning, and he changed the statement. “You told the San Blas Indians the same thing!”

“I did.” Henry grinned at them. “And I told them more, as you may have heard. I told them that when our friends came along, to pass them right along and help them to follow us.”

Nicky could not contain his disgust any longer. All this was a tissue of falsehood and he hated such talk.

“You told them that they must forbid us to stay near them—said we were evil doctors and if we came we would do harm. And what’s more, you said that if the people you doctored didn’t get well, it was because we were working harm on them!——”

Nicky stopped for breath and Henry, after a little start, turned to Mort Beecher and held out his hands, palms up.

“Ain’t that Indians for you?” he pleaded for agreement. “Ain’t that Indians? They’ll twist and alter anything you say. ’Cause why? ’Cause they want to keep everybody out of this country. They don’t want the dear little golden-haired girl rescued. Not they. They want her to stay here and be a priestess and cure them and dance in their festivals and bring them good luck. And we——”

“And we want to save her—and here we are, risking life and limb and trying to help, and you go and get mad.” Mort Beecher drew his fat jowls into a somber, dejected appearance. “Seems like there ain’t any gratitude in the world, seems like.”

“Oh, all right—the Indians might have mixed up and twisted what you said,” Tom agreed. “Nicky isn’t really mad at you—he only felt that you ought to have brought us all along.”

“And for what?” demanded Mort Beecher. “For all of you to be killed? Wasn’t it bad enough for us to be done that to? Wasn’t two lives enough to risk—but where is the rest of your party?”

Then Cliff did demand silence. He fell back into an easy position with one leg made shorter than the other, as though he were “at ease,” and clasped both hands hanging loosely before him. That was the Mystery Boys’ signal, “Do not speak!” Nicky saw it and Tom nodded.

“Oh,” answered Cliff, with assumed lack of interest, “they’re where they can do more good than here——”

“I hope so. Seems like I never hoped anything so much, seems like,” Mort declared. “That’s so.”

“’Cause why?” Henry declaimed. “’Cause we’re in the sacred circle of the Chucunaque Indians—and who-so gets in may never get out. And yet we do all that for you. Now, tell us how you got here?”

“Well, that’s something. It’s more than we are able to do.” Henry turned to Mort for sanction and Mort nodded.

The Indian who was conducting them beckoned curtly. “Well, we haven’t gotten anywhere,” Mort said. “So, go ahead to your hut and rest. We can talk later.”

The Indian conducted the chums to another hut. At the time they wondered why the five white people were not put together. However, the reason was soon to be discovered.

They made the best of things. Their movements were not restricted any more than in the smaller village. The same sort of general food-pots were in evidence, into which everything that was to be cooked was dropped, the resulting stew being dished out with calabashes as it was required.

There were a number of Albinos, or light-faced, light-haired, pale-eyed people, among the Indians, and no one seemed to have much use for them. They kept a good deal to themselves.

Hammocks were provided for sleeping and rest, and several women brought food at intervals. For the balance of that day the chums were left alone. But when they tried to go over to talk further with Henry and later, when Mort came to see them, Indians firmly intervened and refused to let the two parties communicate.

That night, well after dark, great activity was to be observed in the village; mostly it centered about the chief’s large hut, a sort of place of assembly for the people. Heavy skins were hung around part of it and, from where their hut was situated, the chums could not see what was going on; but people were running about with torches, and some were carrying bundles of torch material into the enclosure.

Finally an Indian, carrying a torch, appeared and beckoned for the boys to follow.

“Now we’re in for something,” Nicky observed. “I’m glad of it. I get tired of waiting. Action for mine!”

Suddenly Tom stopped as though shot, and gripped Nicky’s arm with a pressure that made the other wince.

“Hurry up, then! I’ll be so glad to hear somebody talk English I won’t know what to do!”

CHAPTER XXIII
MAGIC AGAINST MAGIC

“Go slow!” Cliff urged, detaining Tom before the latter could make an impetuous rush toward the large hut. “If your sister is in there, be sure you won’t spoil everything by telling her—before you do tell her.”

Tom loitered. For once Nicky saw eye to eye with Cliff, and realized that hasty action might endanger them all. He added his plea to Cliff’s and Tom, finally, agreed.

“Yes,” he said, “we are in the Chucunaque circle. We don’t know what they may be planning to do to us. We don’t trust Henry or Mort and we can’t count on them. The main thing is to rescue Margery, for I am sure she is in that hut; but we can do more, maybe, by going slow.”

They took up their pace again, following the Indian. Just ahead of them Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher were being led in.

When the chums entered the hut they saw that an Indian somewhat more powerful and stalwart than the others, for the Chucunaque’s were not a large type, sat in a hammock in the center of the hut. Close to him, squatting on the ground, were a dozen men, elderly, solemn, dignified: the youths judged them to be councillors, as they were. Off at one side sat two other men, surrounded by the now familiar implements of the doctors, or medicine men, who both worked spells and tried, by their witcheries, to cure disease: their small success was attested by the prevalence of sickness and diseased skins among their tribesmen.

But the point to which the youths’ eyes focused, and on which every bit of their attention concentrated was that where a girl sat—the only female figure in the hut; she was fairly tall, a little less than five feet and five inches, they guessed as she sat. Her clothing was of the same sort as that of the Indian women outside; a ragged, but clean waist of European or American style was the only feature of difference, and that was so faded and worn that it hardly looked like anything. Beside that a short petticoat of dull colored cloth completed the visible clothing: her head was bare, and so were her brown, dusky limbs, and her feet.

But she was an American, not an Indian! And the crown of long, bright golden hair, glittering and glistening in the wavering torch-light was all the proof that the three comrades needed to identify her.

Tom could hardly repress a cry. He held his lips tight shut. Nicky, clutching his arm, felt the muscles stiffen, and gave his biceps a reassuring, excited squeeze. Cliff, noting everything, saw that Tom had regained his control and would be careful not to do anything that could endanger their plans.

Tom saw Henry and Mort draw closer together and whisper: they, too, realized who the girl was, in spite of her dark skin and her expressionless face. She had been long enough among the impassive Indians to acquire their facial stillness. When she spoke, her voice was high and excited, like that of a girl of ten, and she talked in the same way that a child would, using simple words, instead of using the manners and conversation of a miss of sixteen. When the Indians took her, Tom mused, she stopped growing up with no one to talk to in her native language.

Henry and Mort, still whispering, were led to a point to the right of the hammock, a little in front of the medicine men. Tom, Cliff and Nicky were stationed at the other side, before the councillors. It was easy to see that they were considered as separate and not friendly, for some reason.

The girl could hardly wait until the ceremony of placing the white people was finished: then she said, eagerly:

“Hello, white men—and you, too, boys. I didn’t know you were here. My! It’s good to see so many people. I’m tired of Indians. They brought me from another village. I have to listen to you and tell them what you say. Then I will tell you what they say. How did you come here? Will you take me away? Don’t tell them. Don’t let them know. But will you take me away?”

“You bet!” cried Tom, forgetting himself for an instant: then he became silent again. But the girl, without changing her expression, nodded.

“I like you,” she said. “I didn’t know boys could get in here—or men either.”

Evidently the chief was impatient, for he could not understand what was being said. He spoke gruffly, one word. The girl turned and made some gestures, also speaking several strange words. Then she turned back toward Tom, and from then on she seemed, for some odd reason, to ignore Henry and Mort, almost—her whole mind seemed to be centered on Tom, and she studied him and appeared to be wondering about him and he, in turn, could not take his eyes off her face.

“The chief doesn’t like us to talk,” she explained. “But I’m glad you came. Will you take me away? Honest—cross-your-heart?”

Tom made the gesture, Nicky and Cliff following suit. Henry and Mort bent glowering looks on them and shook their heads at them vigorously.

“Listen,” said the girl. “The chief thinks the older men are big doctors and he thinks you boys—young fellows!——” and she laughed at them and clapped her hands like a teasing child of ten, “are bad doctors. He is going to make you show him which is strongest—magic, you know. So if you b—young men can do big magic, don’t waste any time. These Indians are cruel. Don’t joke with them.”

Tom nodded, keeping from his face the qualms of unease that clutched at his heart. What would the test be? How could they meet it? When they were so close to recovering the sister he loved, must strange customs interfere? Nicky and Cliff were perturbed, too, but they kept their faces as impassive as they could. The Indians were not going to win! Cliff regretted that he had left the rifle in the hut across the clearing but he hoped they would not need it. However, he made a secret plan to get out and secure it if things began to look black.

One of the councillors stood up and spoke briefly: the girl listened and then turned to the white parties and translated.

“They say word has come to them that great doctors wished to come into their country to heal their people,” she began.

“How could word come—there isn’t any newspaper or telegraph or telephone,” cried Nicky, incredulously. The girl merely nodded toward the medicine men as though they had secured the message in some way, and continued her translation.

“They say they wish to see the great doctors heal their tribe and so they let them come.”

“They say that you bo—young men—may be evil doctors. They say the first doctors told the San Blas Indians evil doctors would follow——” Nicky glared at Henry and Henry looked uncomfortable.

Henry gave out a string of pleading to establish the fact that he and Mort were the good doctors but that if their medicines had no power it was because of some evil influence. He did not quite dare to denounce the boys. Margery, as Tom already called her in his thoughts, did her duty in translating, and then she turned toward Tom, and waited.

Tom glanced swiftly toward Nicky and Cliff. He wanted to be sure they had no message to guide him. They looked anxious and earnest, but they had not thought out any answer. Tom, bending his head on his hands, tried to think what reply would show that they were not evil doctors, for it would not help much to declare it and stop: the Indians would ask proof, and he could not think of any way to prove his claim. The chief, his councillors and the medicine men waited without movement. They were used to tedious conferences. The girl watched without expression.

“We are only three young fellows who got lost in the jungle,” he said, finally, a pleading look in his face as he confronted the sister he dared not name. “The Indians brought us here. We don’t know why!”

She translated by gestures and a few words. The chief looked at the councillors and they in turn consulted the medicine men. Finally one of the medicine men stood up and addressed the chief. After he had finished the chief spoke to the girl and she, in her turn, translated.

“The first man says the doctors told the San Blas Indians they healed by magic and the chief wishes to see some of their magic. But he says that the medicine men say the younger ones are magic doctors too and he had them brought here because one of them showed his magic in the woods.”

Henry stared toward the three chums and then, putting back his head, he laughed: Mort, in his puffy, chuckly voice, joined him.

“That’s a good one!” Henry said. “Tell the chief he can hit me for a punchin’ bag if they know any magic. They’re just kids.”

Margery frowned but as the chief questioned she had to translate. But it was easy to see that her sympathy was with the younger fellows.

“The chief says,” she told them all finally, “he will see which one has magic, and if you both have magic he will see whose magic is the most powerful.”

Suddenly Tom elevated his hand to caress his ear and Nicky and Cliff saw the sign and folded their arms. It was a call for the Mystery Boys’ council. Tom wanted to say something he did not wish to have the other two white men hear: he proposed to ask by their signs and they were ready.

CHAPTER XXIV
A TIGHT CORNER

In the silence that followed the final words of the girl, the Mystery Boys signified their readiness to enter a council. And as they folded their arms they saw the girl stare at them amazedly and then her face became intent, but she did not look at them. Instead, she looked up at the roof of the hut. Anyone would think she was trying to remember something.

But Tom was not paying any attention to her. He realized that he and his chums were in a tight corner. The Indians were cruel and callous: when they demanded magic, they expected magic. Failure to produce it meant certain doom, perhaps—and Tom shuddered!—with one of those terrible arrows he had seen the youth preparing.

And the chums knew nothing about magic! They had seen stage people produce rabbits from supposedly empty silk hats and make coins disappear. Of course, with the proper apparatus and lots of experience these things could be done. Out in the jungle, among hostile people, with no apparatus and no experience, there was no hope!

So Tom planned to communicate to his chums his idea of what they must do. There was little time to spare. As yet the Indians were not openly hostile. They were intent on seeing something marvelous and while that was in their minds—and until they were disappointed—they would be quiet.

Tom determined to help his sister and, if possible, to enable his chums to escape. To accomplish that without having Henry and Mort interfere and perhaps warn the Indians—they were capable of anything to secure Margery’s secret of the Golden Sun for themselves—Tom made up his mind to make one desperate effort to escape.

Tom concentrated every effort of his mind. He had convened the Mystery Boys but he must convey his message. He knew how he proposed to do it, and in such a way that Henry and Mort would not comprehend, while the chums would. But it took some hard thinking to make up the sentences.

As Cliff had done, back in Mexico, Tom proposed to use the special code in which he would say short sentences. The final word of each sentence would have a meaning. Taken all together the last words of all the sentences would make a sentence themselves.

He had done this when he called the chums to see what news Henry had. Now Tom must give them a plan and do it briefly and so clearly that they could not mistake his meaning.

Therefore he paid no attention to Margery for the moment, but held his eyes on the floor, making up and going over his plan.

While he did this the chief spoke and Margery turned from her study of the roof and said in English to Henry Morgan:

Then she studied the youths intently and appeared to be trying to recall something. Her eyes went to the roof again and as far as she was concerned, Henry and his magic did not exist.

“You see—tell him——” he cleared his husky throat, “—tell him we got to get our magic prepared. It takes time. Ask him to let us wait till tomorrow.”

The girl did not bother to translate. There was a wicked little gleam of malice in her eyes, and she simply said: “Do your magic now.”

Henry consulted with Mort, while the medicine men whispered together and one of them chuckled hoarsely. Henry sent Mort away, evidently to get some materials for his trick, whatever it might be.

First he picked up a small bit of loose dirt from the hut floor, and with a slinging, underhand motion he shied it to one side. That was the signal which meant, “I will say short sentences. The last word of each one will have a meaning and all together they will give a message.” If he had spoken his meaning could not have been plainer to his comrades.

Though they were too busy to notice, so did Margery. There was a growing eagerness, a sudden wondering expression, on her face.

Had they noted Margery’s face as did the Indians, they would have seen it light up suddenly with a great amazement. That tiny bit of earth, shied in that way, awakened the memories she had been trying to recall.

But she did not speak, nor did she cry out. The Indians, watching her with their steady, black eyes, saw the first show of surprise and then she settled back into her position, and her face became expressionless. She was a child in her use of English because she had no one to grow up with; but in her common sense she had all the wise patience of the Indians. She waited quietly. This was no time for a dramatic reunion!

“Did you fellows notice the sun set? Wasn’t it like fire? I saw it over the hut. It was a picture I’d like to take. Who is this girl? Out here in the jungle?”

He made a sign that he was finished, but then went on speaking in a mutter, although his friends no longer heeded him; it was done to throw aside suspicion. His message had to be recalled. What had he said.

Margery did not understand at all. She was disappointed. When Tom used to shy a pebble it meant that he wanted to fool his companions of the moment and she and he would talk rapidly in a fashion to confuse his schoolmates. They had made that up together when they played and went to school. And here he was out in this wild place, come to her. Did he recognize her? He had made one of their old signals. But then he went on talking in a different code. It did not seem right and she was puzzled. She knew it was Tom. Did he know her?

Nicky and Cliff had by that time discovered the endings of the sentences and knew Tom’s message.

In a more perfect form the message meant that Tom would set fire to the hut with the cigar lighter if he could and then they would all try to escape in the confusion and panic and take Margery into the jungle.

All three stared. They recalled that she was there and looked to see what caused her to stamp. To their amazement she was standing up, her arms folded.

He recalled that he and Margery had “made up” secrets and that some of their old signs and secrecies had been adopted by his chums when the trio formed themselves into their secret order.

“H. L. Listen! I know you, Tom. Keep still! No time for that. But think, Tom! H. L. Tell me. H. L.”

The signal of the pebble used to mean that they would have secrets and she would say, “H. L.” for Hog-Latin, the higgledy-piggledy, rapid way so many school boys and girls talk. She wanted him to tell her what he had told his chums, and in “Hog-Latin.”

They exchanged the passages of mixed words and funny endings with such swiftness that Cliff and Nicky, a little surprised and half forgetting their old “stunt,” had difficulty in following it; surely the other two men, not versed in that kind of youthful foolishness, would not understand any better than the Indians.

And so a childish custom that older people thought silly was being turned to good account.

“No-kitty good-ibiddy,” she clipped out. “Get-ibbidy lost-ibbidy in-akkity junge-y-gongle-y bangle-y do!”

Tom had told his sister he proposed to fire the hut and then to help her escape with them; she had said it would not do because they would be lost in the jungles.

At the time the attention swung from this strange scene, for the Indians saw Mort returning with some apparatus which he set down gingerly on the floor. Every eye was fixed on him. Forgotten was the scene which had been enacted. Only one, a medicine man, kept his shrewd eyes fixed on Margery as though he would try to see beneath her flesh and bone to the working of her brain and mind.

“Oh!” Suddenly Tom recollected the lighter. The woods Indian had probably brought news of it.

“Yes,” he said, and explained to his sister, very briefly, that he could make what Indians would consider a magic light.

CHAPTER XXV
WHERE WITS COUNT!

“There’s another reason, and a better one, why we daren’t try to fire the hut and escape with Margery,” said Nicky, jogging Tom’s arm. “Look beyond the torchlight. Shade your eyes.”

Waiting just outside the hut at one end were a dozen men armed with bows—and probably with the deadly poisoned arrows.

At another point was another cluster of men, whose arms were not in evidence; yet they seemed to preserve orderly positions and to be awaiting some signal.

“Yes,” said Tom. “But I think we will get out all right. Margery doesn’t seem to be worried.”

“Where in the world do you suppose Henry Morgan got hold of a suitcase type moving picture machine?” asked Cliff, nodding toward the apparatus that Henry and Mort were fussing over on the ground.

“On the sloop,” Henry answered, fumbling with the lamp, which was of the calcium carbide, and water, type. He did not seem to know much about it, although Mort, who knew less, was fussing and puffing on his fat knees and giving a multitude of instructions, none of which seemed to help. “We thought the Indians would be puzzled about it,” Henry added. “We borrowed it. Do you fellows know anything about it?”

“Work your own magic!” said Nicky, rather maliciously. He could not resist the impulse to dig back at Henry for all the meanness the latter had shown.

Margery looked on with much mystification, as did the Indians. When the chief questioned his medicine men, evidently asking what sort of magic this was to be, they seemed baffled.

Margery questioned Tom with her eyes but he smiled across at her and while wondering, in his mind, how he was going to make any showing against such a manifestation, he did not lose his courage or his trust in being led to know what to do and how to do it.

“You’ll need water for that carbide,” suggested Cliff. “We’ll tell you that much.”

“Oh, I know that—knew it all the time!” scoffed Mort. Turning to Margery he demanded. “Have water fetched!”

“I know that sort of thing a little,” Cliff said. “Back in high school we had an outfit of that kind. You see, it all packs in a suitcase to make it portable.”

“Yes,” Nicky agreed. “The film is what they call non-inflamable. It won’t burn.”

“That’s right,” Cliff agreed. “That’s why it can be used with an open flame light. You know, don’t you, that the lamp has to be filled with those crystals of calcium carbide—in the can, there. Then, water is put in the container and when it is all assembled and the screw is opened, water drips onto the crystals and they act to make gas.”

But Mort and Henry were not having such a good time setting the machine in position. They got the “head” or apparatus for jerking the bits of exposed film down, back end foremost, and had to turn it around. That made them fidget and sweat.

To a degree, even in face of the danger, the boys were amused at the “hot time,” as Nicky whispered, that the older men were having to get their magic in readiness.

Evidently the chief sensed something of the sort for he made several impatient exclamations and his councillors stirred restlessly. But he said nothing to Henry and Mort and, finally, they seemed to have everything in readiness.

Mort, with a few matches in a flat paper packet, struck the first and tried to light the lamp. The effort was fruitless. Nervously he struck match after match.

Tom, who sensed what was wrong, half opened his lips, but Cliff shook his head and Tom waited.

Mort turned to Henry and demanded more matches. Curtly and bruskly Henry made an exclamation and shoved Mort aside. Upset, the fat one lost his balance and tumbled in a heap. This brought a grunt of amusement from the watching Indians and Mort reddened with anger and dismay. Their plans were not working out so well.

Henry struck his few matches and when failure met his effort to ignite the lamp he sat back with a look of mingled chagrin and fear on his face.

“I guess we’re whipped,” he grunted to Mort. Mort mopped his wet brow and looked appealingly at the boys.

“He says ‘your magic seems to fail!’” Margery translated. “Does it?”

Tom had a plan. It was based on something that he knew and which Henry and Mort had failed to recall if they, also, knew of it.

When the crystals of carbide are first exposed to water, it takes a fair space of time for the gas to be liberated in a quantity sufficient to generate pressure enough to force it through the burner tip.

That amount of time had elapsed, but in their haste Henry and Mort had either failed to open the setting screw or had not tightened the base enough to hold the pressure. Tom proposed to take advantage of this guess and to turn the older men’s magic to his own account.

“Tell the chief,” he said to Margery, “the magic of the great doctors has not answered their call. Then ask them if they give up to us.”

“What else can we do?” Mort grunted. “Seems like we can’t work it, seems like!”

“Listen!” cried Henry, suddenly, with a malicious leer toward Tom. “First you tell the chief that our magic failed because them—them evil ones work against us!”

“Wait, though,” Tom continued, not at all frightened. “Now tell the chief that these men admit that our magic is stronger than theirs.”

The chief nodded, and his next frown was turned toward Henry, who looked a little desperate. Then he said, softly, to Mort. “But them busybody kids can’t do what we can’t. How can they light the lamp?”

“Tell the chief,” Tom added. “Tell him that our magic is good, and it is even stronger than the other. And to prove it we will make their own magic work.”

When Margery had done this the chief looked at the youths with some surprise and a little mystification. His medicine men also nodded and motioned toward the small, compact picture machine.

“Nicky,” said Tom, “unroll that piece of cloth they brought. And you and Cliff go to the side, about ten feet off, and hold it up, as taut as you can!”

While they were doing as he asked, Tom bent down and examined the picture projecting apparatus. It was not yet “threaded up” with film, and he took from the small case one of the three rolls of films, small, tightly rolled, in little tin containers.

Opening a “can” he unrolled a bit of the end, the blank “trailer” that is put between the rollers and toothed gears so that when the machine is started the picture begins properly. “It isn’t marked ‘non-flam’,” he called to Cliff. “It’s just marked with the regular kodak marking in the edge.”

“Then be careful,” Cliff said. “It will blaze up, then. Watch what you do and don’t hold it still while it’s in front of the flame!”

Margery ran lightly across to take Cliff’s end of the sheet. She and Nicky, tall enough to lift it four or five feet up, held the sheet.

“Now, we put the roll on this spindle,” Cliff said “Then we run the end over this guide roller, down through this ‘gate’ and aperture plate, so it lies flat, then over the lower guide, and fix the end onto the spindle in the ‘take-up’ magazine at the bottom. Now she’s all set.”

“She’s O.K.,” said Tom excitedly. “I can smell the gas and the base is tight now.”

In her clear, treble tones she informed the company. Outside the men pressed closer in. There was a tense expectancy in the air. All eyes focused on Tom.

“I only hope the gasoline hasn’t evaporated out of this lighter,” he muttered. “It’s a good, tight sort—well, here goes——”

Calmly, although his fingers trembled a little, he closed the small case again and waited until the wick had a chance to be covered for an instant to accumulate some gas. Also he wanted to control his own muscles.

Carefully he lowered the flame, while he opened the thumbscrew on the lantern burner. There came a slight puff of light, like a little explosion, a sizzling flare, and then the flame settled down to an even, vividly brilliant white glare.

Tom snapped shut the burner, shoved the lamp into place in the casing so it was behind the film.

And, to the marvelling gasp of the Indians and the little shriek of amazement from Margery, there appeared on the sheet of muslin a square of gleaming white light, covering at once by a moving picture showing a marching army!

“Oh, dear!” said Margery. “He says the men who have failed are to be sent to their fathers—that means——”

Cowering, shrilly screeching with fear, Henry and Mort tried to dash toward safety. But at a sign from the chief the archers were in the hut, and before the crawling pair of white men appeared the other group, armed with cudgels of knobbed, polished wood.

Fearlessly he dashed in front of Henry and Mort, and faced the men with the bows. In one hand he held the closed lighter; in the other he unrolled a piece of leader film torn from another roll.

“Margery,” he gasped, “tell that Indian that our magic is good magic and is stronger. But tell him that we want these men spared. Say that if he does not we will use our magic to pour fire on his village and we will burn it to the ground.”

Margery, white-faced under her bronze, and with tight lips, managed to gasp out enough to make the chief listen.

He dropped the piece of curling film before the chief’s toes and stooping swiftly he ignited the lighter and touched the edge of the film.

As he leaped back, covering his face from the glare, the leader took fire and its celluloid base, almost as combustible as dynamite, shot into a blaze of white fire while a great, pungent puff of smoke flung itself upward and began to belly out in the still air of the hut.

Instantly the chief dropped to the ground like one stunned, and the archers, the councillors, the medicine man and every other Indian seemed to run away and vanish like the disappearance of the film at the end of the magic show.

“Well,” gasped Tom, as Nicky and Cliff dashed to his side, “Margery—come here! I guess we’re safe for awhile.”

And again, as had been hinted when he first saved Henry Morgan’s life, Tom had performed that service for the second time.

CHAPTER XXVI
TWO MEN DISAPPEAR

“These people will be your slaves from now on,” Margery said. “I know them. They ran to hide because they are afraid of you. If you do what I tell you we can get away safely after awhile!”

He looked at Mort and Henry, crestfallen and a little surly, standing by the motion picture machine.

“We’re going off by ourselves,” he told them. “I’ve got you out of the trouble you made for yourself, Henry—twice now,” he was not boasting, but stating it as a fact. “I think the least you can do is to be honest with us from here on.”

Henry nodded, curtly, nudged Mort, and without a word of thanks, swung on his heel and slunk out.

“Let’s go to my hut,” Margery suggested. “It’s more comfortable to talk, and I’ve fixed up like a home in it.”

Unaware that the eyes of the man they had saved were still burning hotly with resentment at his own defeat, that he watched because he was still determined to get what he wanted, they walked across the dark square to a small hut where an Indian girl, about a year older than Margery, slept in a hammock. Margery stuck the torch she had brought into a makeshift holder against a supporting pillar of wood, and showed the three chums her makeshift home.

She had preserved some of her American taste of love and comfort, in spite of the hardships. There, with the other girl dismissed firmly, she and Tom took their first brother-and-sisterly embrace and the girl, now very shy, clasped hands with the two who had come with Tom to her rescue.

“Now,” said Tom, “Sis’, are you too tired to tell us some about yourself? It can wait——”

“No,” she said. “I’ll feel better if we know everything all together. I’ve had a dreadful time. But it will soon be over—thanks to you three fine friends. I love you all!”

Then she told them her story. After her parting with Tom, when he was prevented from going with her and his father to Mexico, she and their father had gone to the land of the chili bean and the tamale.

On the way their father had fallen into conversation with a man who was going back to Mexico “to work a mine.” He had tried to sell it but had failed; its samples of ore were not very convincing, although its owner had great faith that he was nearly ready to tap a fine vein of ore. But his health was poor and the Mexican climate, even among the hills, was detrimental to recovery; he wanted to dispose of his holdings.

Their father told her, Margery said, that he was going to look at the mine before they went on to the Dead Hope, and if he liked it he might take an option on it.

He did so, but the man, when he found that Mr. Carrol considered the property good, begged him to buy it outright so he could take the money and go to Nevada to grow better. Mr. Carrol had agreed to take a half-interest and the papers had been drawn up.

They had then gone on to the Dead Hope mine. He had, in Mexico City, left the man who sold him the half-interest in the mine.

“Sh-h-h!” she warned. “He went off with the money father paid him and I guess he spent it in wild parties. But let me tell you the rest.

“The first night we were at the Good Hope mine house we were waked up by horses galloping, guns firing, men yelling. Father looked out and said it was bandits making an attack.”

“Father got his gun and told me to stay quiet and not to leave the shack. He had to go to help the mine people. The mine was part of the property of the firm he was paid by, you see.”

“Only while he helped drive off the bandits. He thought they would be frightened away. But——” she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, for there were no handkerchiefs in that primitive place, “Father—didn’t—come—back—ever!”

“I guess we never will know,” she said. “But this is what is important now. Father gave me some folded papers out of his pocket and said I must keep them until—he came back. But the fighting got worse and I was frightened. People began falling down in the open place and I was awfully scared.”

“I saw a man coming across the open place and it was Mort Beecher, only I didn’t recognize him at first.”

“But Henry said you ran out while he held the horse, and Mort saved you,” Cliff said.

“That wasn’t so, at all,” she declared. “I did not run out! I was obeying father. But when I saw that man coming I thought I’d hide the papers, because father had said they were partnership agreements and a deed. So I—put them—under a board—it was loose—right under where the old stove stood.” The youths nodded.

“Then Mort Beecher came in and said he would save me, and he picked me up and carried me out to a mule.”

“I’ve thought, all along, that Mort was the real bandit,” Nicky said. “What you say all checks up. He sold part of the mine and then, when he found out there was gold dust to be taken he wanted to get the agreements back and have the money too!”

“But not for a long time. After all the excitement was over. Then I said I didn’t have any papers and he was disappointed.”

“How did he get you away—Henry said he defended the pass while you were taken off, and that it was only ten minutes—but the gold was gone and so were you and Mort.”

“Up the trail we stopped. Mort unloaded the sacks and dropped them over the edge. I thought it must be awfully deep, but when he hit the burros and sent them flying up the trail he got down over the edge of the cliff and told me to jump into his arms.”

“Yes. It was only down about six feet. Then he made me bend low and I saw the edge hung over a sort of shallow place under it. So we hid there while the bandits went past. After a long time he crawled up on the trail and pulled me up, and made me give him a sack of the gold dust first. Then we climbed an awful trail, up the side of the hill, and hid in a cave. After that night he went away and left me; I thought he wouldn’t come back, but he did—with food. Then we went on to where he had a mule—he must have caught it on the pass. We rode for ever so long, and finally we came to where a hut was. Old people lived there. He said we were lost and begged for food and they gave us some. After that we rode on again and he was always afraid the bandits would find us, and our mule got worn out and we had to leave him and walk. Then we got to where some more people lived and he bribed them with some gold dust and they gave him a mule and then we rode from there. Finally we came to a city; he disguised the sack with some old oilskins he found, and I think he sold the gold dust gradually to some banks, for we stayed there—it was a long time, I don’t remember how long.”

“The bandits must have traced him,” Nicky suggested. “For Henry said—no, it was Jack—we found Jack in Porto Bello, but never mind—he said Mort had told him, while they drank—they did that a lot——”

“You’re worse mixed up than a shaker full of soda water!” laughed Tom. “What he’s trying to say is that in tracing you we found a man who told us part of Mort’s story as Mort told it to him. It was that bandits followed Mort and he took you——”

“On a boat, and kept me in the cabin and disguised me and said I was his daughter——”

“And you cried and the stewardess got suspicious—” Cliff added. They were all trying to tell what they knew.

“And we were put ashore on a San Blas Indian island,” she smiled. “Tom, you remember how I loved to doctor my dolls and all? Well, I saw how the Indians lived and when I could make them understand and learned a few words I doctored them as well as I could—and all of a sudden, one night, some Indians from inland came—and they took me away. They thought I was a great spirit or something. But I didn’t have any medicines and I wasn’t very old and so I couldn’t help them.”

“Maybe they were afraid of being caught for what they had done,” Nicky suggested.

“That must be it,” Margery agreed. “They didn’t make me prisoner or anything and they always treat me nice; but they didn’t have any use for me if I couldn’t cure them and so I just stayed and stayed because I didn’t know how to get away.”

“But what about the deeds and the partnership papers?” demanded Tom. “What did you do with them? They’d be mighty valuable.”

“Golly!” cried Cliff, “that’s why Henry was so anxious to find Mort and to get you and learn about that.”

“Well, they owe us their lives now,” Nicky asserted. “We can share some of what’s rightfully ours, and especially the half-interest in the Golden Sun mine.”

But, outside in the dark, there was a pair of ears that heard and a brain that was bound that no one should share except Mort and Henry.

“Well,” said Tom, “we’d better let Margery get some sleep. When the Indians come around in the morning we can plan to leave as soon as possible.” That was agreed to.

They were awakened soon after dawn by a tumult and excitement in the square. Margery met them, her hair blowing in the morning breeze.

“Don’t let them!” Tom cried. “We saved them last night. Tell the chief it is Big Boy Tom’s will that they be allowed to go.”

“That returns good for evil,” Tom said to Cliff and Nicky. “They only want to escape. They don’t know what we know!”

CHAPTER XXVII
AGAINST ODDS

Out from the mainland came a canoe. In it were two white people. They paddled stolidly and steadily, although several other canoes were close behind them, and at their sides, their occupants screaming and demanding in their high, shrill women’s voice, the return of the commandeered canoe.

Bill, Andy, Jack, Mr. Gray and Bob, on the cruiser, at anchor not far from a dingy, white sloop, watched curiously, and a little anxiously. Who were the men? They were men, not boys! But they were too far away to be recognized, if they were known, even with glasses trained on them. All that was to be seen was the anger of the canoeists around them and the lifting of an oar, with which they drove back too venturesome canoes.

The cruiser’s party, having made every effort to locate the missing Tom, Cliff and Nicky, even at risk of getting lost in the jungles themselves, had finally been forced to give up the search. They were lying at anchor, simply waiting, hoping against hope that something would give them a clue to the youths.

Mort Beecher and Henry Morgan, in their commandeered—to use a polite word—canoe, gave the cruiser plenty of seaway, and passed her well on the far side. However, Bill, using the glasses, recognized Henry and set up a shout. It was decided to row over to the sloop, on which they were seen to embark; at once Bob got the boat up and he, Andy and Bill tumbled in; but before they were half-way over the lagoon to the outer water which had depth for the deep-keeled sloop, she had hoisted sail and was bearing away.

“That’s funny,” Bill commented, when, giving up, they returned to the Porto Bello . “They didn’t come near us, and how they did hurry that boat away from here.”

“They could not have seen or heard of our boys,” Mr. Gray said. “They would, in decency, have stopped to tell us, no matter how great their haste.”

“They were in a big hurry,” Bill reflected. “I wonder why! They had no one with them. Could they have found Tom’s sister? In that case they would have brought her out.”

“They got into this Chucunaque country and came out safe again,” suggested Andy. “Might the lads have got there too?”

They could come to no conclusion, and while they all agreed that there was something decidedly strange about the haste with which Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher sailed North, and their avoidance of the very men who had helped Henry, they dared not go in pursuit to compel the elusive Henry to reveal his ’Cause why!

Nearly a week later, after being treated with dignity accorded to people of real prestige, Tom Nicky, Cliff and Margery were permitted, well-escorted, to leave the Chucunaque’s village for the coast.

Probably the chief’s experience with the motion picture film helped to establish them as true wonder-workers. The chief had seen Tom’s startling demonstration of fire, when he used the strip of celluloid “leader” torn off the end of a film. He therefore feared Tom until one of his medicine men, a little jealous of the white lad’s superior prestige, whispered that there was no great trick or secret, that he, too, could produce the smoke and flame with a piece of the picture-ribbon.

Nicky, Tom, Cliff and Margery, walking from but to hut, visiting the hammock-bound sick people, who believed that if Tom touched them it. would help to heal them, saw the portable picture projector apparatus, abandoned by Henry, being examined by the chief. He gingerly touched it, but his medicine man, with a contemptuous grunt, drew a length of the coiling film out of the lower magazine and ripped off a short bit. This he handed to the chief with some directions. The chief, hesitating, walked gingerly to the fire over which the community cook-pot hung, and stood irresolute.

“Look, Tom,” Nicky whispered. “He’s trying to nerve himself to make your magic. If he does, we are beaten.”

“Don’t worry!” Cliff retorted. “I examined the film, this morning. I wondered why the film was so combustible when it was to be used on a ship and with an open light. I saw the reason. The ‘leader part’ isn’t supposed to be ‘threaded-up’ in the beam of heat from the light; it is to go down to the lower magazine and so it can be of ordinary celluloid base film. But the real picture is on what is called ‘non-flam’ which is a celluloid base especially treated and with chemical constituents that make it smoulder when it gets hot, but it won’t burst into flame or explode. The chief has a bit of the picture itself, so Tom’s laurels are safe.”

It proved that he was right, for when the film was cast into the fire it only curled up and smouldered into ash, whereas Tom, to “make good” his own standing, at Cliff’s behest secretly secured a bit of “leader” from a second roll of the film and then “put on a show” for the chief which impressed the monarch so much that he ordered his bowmen at once—and the jungle resounded to the crashing escape of a medicine man who had advised jealously but not too wisely.

In time the sick had been touched and Margery’s request that she be allowed to go with the chums was granted; she promised to send back, by the guards, all the medicines on the cruiser, and when, after the days in the jungle trails the quartet reached the head of a small stream, and thence were hurried to the coast in canoes, they set foot again on the smooth white deck, she kept her word. All the medicine was sent, with careful instructions for its use according to the diseases prevalent in the country; other gifts were heaped upon the messengers and they left with the first smiles that any white man had seen on their stolid faces for many years. In return they loaded Margery and the chums with their cloth into which was woven many designs which later proved to be a key to many links of the modern Indians with ancient civilization.

Margery was greeted with much delight by Bill and Jack. Both of them were old enough, as was Mr. Gray, to realize that what worried Tom, her childishness, her habits of the girl of eleven in a body of a miss of sixteen, would soon be outgrown in new surroundings.

There was great excitement and a regular banquet to celebrate the return, and over plates of tinned meats and broiled yams, turtle and freshly caught fish, the youths related their experiences to an eager audience; but they hardly finished when Bill slapped his knee, almost upsetting all their crockery as he shouted:

“So you let Henry Morgan and Beecher go? And you thought they’d quit? Where were you lads when you and Margery talked over her story?”

“In her hut!” cried Tom, starting as he recalled a former time when Toosa had declined certain facts and an eavesdropper had overheard.

“That would explain why they avoided us and why the sloop sailed North in such a hurry,” Jack declared. He was much more of a self-respecting man than he had been even when the youths saw him last. He had control of himself, and took pride in his appearance.

“Andy—Bob—” called Bill, “get up the anchors and make everything shipshape. We’ve got enough provisions for a run back to Mexico?”

“Yes,” agreed Tom. “If what Margery said was overheard and our enemies have a start of us, we’ll have to try hard to catch them before they get to Mexico—”

“Make her hum, Andy,” Cliff said, taking up his duties as oiler and engineer’s assistant.

CHAPTER XXVIII
GOLDEN BAIT

During the long race back to Mexico the cruiser’s party never caught up with the lost time. Henry and Mort were always ahead; at Colon a tramp steamer had them aboard; at Vera Cruz they debarked; at Mexico City they were still ahead.

So it was that when the party reached the Dead Hope mine they were quite prepared for what they found.

Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher had come there four days before; yes, the superintendent explained, they represented that they had bought a mine location adjoining the Dead Hope. Yes, they asked to let them sleep in the old shack at the edge of his Dead Hope property until they could level off a place on the shaggy hillside for their own mine shaft and shack. No, he told them, he did not know whether they had done any exploring in the old shack.

On a warm afternoon Tom, Nicky, Cliff, Bill and Margery stood in the old, rickety shack, its corrugated metal sides almost ready to drop apart.

“You can see for yourself,” said the superintendent. “It looks as if they’ve done some explorin’, at that.” He had been told a good many facts concerning the adventures the chums had been through, the cause for their trip, and some deductions concerning the solution of the mystery of the missing gold dust which Bill, Jack and the chums had figured out.

“They certainly have been hunting for those papers Margery hid,” Tom said. “I guess we are beaten. If they find the papers they will destroy the partnership agreement father got, and change the deeds in some way, and then, of course, neither Margery nor I can do anything.”

“Well, they’ve torn up the old floor boards under the stove,” said Cliff, and Nicky echoed his statement. Jack, who came in, stared out of the dusty, grimy window, with its bit of rag stuffed into a broken pane, and did not seem to care much what was going on. He appeared to be trying to get his newly awakened memory to reveal some further pictures of his past.

“Let’s see if there was anything under the floor—or a place for it,” Bill suggested, but Margery touched his arm.

“I’ve been trying to remember something,” she said, “and I have. Tom, Nicky, Cliff—Bill—” she beckoned them close and whispered. They stared at her.

“The paper may still be under there, then. They haven’t torn up those boards.” Tom started across the floor. He stopped. Nicky was scratching his left ear. At the same instant Margery touched Bill’s arm and they all became very quiet, except Margery who, in a whisper, gasped into Tom’s ear: “Now do just as Bill said to do if Mort or Henry appeared.”

Tom nodded. In the dimly lit room, bare except for a bed and a stove and a chair with one leg gone, he and Cliff and Nicky and his sister, with Bill and Jack, were as silent as statues. So that Henry Morgan strolling with his mind far away, got half-way through the door before he discovered them.

“Um—er—oh! Fine. Fine! ’Cause why? ’Cause we see you got this little lady safe away from the Indians. We knew you would. I said to Mort, ‘We’ve told the Indians to take good care of them till they want to leave and then take them safe to the shore.’ He said ‘Seems like deserting them, seems like,’ but we had to hurry, because—because——”

For once his ’Cause why was forgotten in his effort to hide his surprise. “——We had to keep an appointment with the captain of a sloop——”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Tom, playing a part which Bill, Jack and the chums, and even Mr. Gray, had decided was the surest way to lull suspicion of what they really meant to accomplish.

“I knew you’d see it. ’Cause why? ’Cause you’re a fine feller. Tom, we fixed it all up with the Indians about letting Miss Margery go and then we come on back here. ’Cause why? Mort had remembered about his Golden Sun. It was a mine and he was anxious we should be partners.”

“Yes?” he said, with his eyelids lifted and brows arched, playing his part in laying a trap. “So that’s why, in the old days, Mort didn’t tell you where the gold dust went——”

“Do you know? Do you know anything? I didn’t learn nothing ’cause Mort got chased by the bandits and hid and then went to Central America.”

“I don’t think you ought to count too much on him for a partner,” Tom added to his story as Bill had arranged that he should, if circumstances allowed him to do so. “Henry—what would you say if I showed you how the gold dust disappeared—and where?”

“Oh! I’d—I’d be grateful. Of course, it won’t do any good now, but it would be nice to know.”

“Come on, then,” Tom urged, and the whole party, with Bill nudging Nicky to prevent the youth from doubling up with glee, went up the old trail to a spot well remembered as the point where the youths first met Henry Morgan—the man who then boasted that he could “smell money.”

“You said, when we first saw you, that you could smell money,” said Tom. Henry nodded. “Your nose must have been out of joint,” he said. “Look here.” He approached the ledge, and pointed overside. Henry, cautiously, drew close and looked; then he gasped.

“Yes, there’s a narrow ledge about six feet down—of course the chasm is below, but you could get down to the narrow ledge—and, here’s a little secret—the ledge goes back in under the overhang of rock—if you get on your stomach and look over, you’ll see!”

“I do,” said Henry, after he had looked. “It’s like a narrow cave under this overhang I’m lying on.” He stared back again. “What’s that, like something black, down on the ledge?”

“Oh, that!” said Tom, pretending to be uninterested. “That is the last sack of the gold dust. Here’s where the mules were stopped and where Mort dropped the sacks of dust and then, later, he and Margery were down there, hiding, when the—bandits!—rode past.”

“Well, I’ll be swiggle-swiggered!” gasped Henry. “What’s going to be done with that sack of dust? And where’s the rest?”

“Oh, a man from the Dead Hope is coming back for it—he just took another one out. This is the last. We’re going to lock it up with the rest of the mine’s nuggets and dust, in that old shack, tonight. In the morning we’ll all escort it to the city. We can’t do anything more here.”

“Oh, just to look up some papers Margery says father gave her and she hid in the old shack.”

They all saw the cunning light in Henry’s eyes. “But you ain’t found no papers!”

Tom laughed. “No,” he said. “The stove has been moved since Margery hid our papers under the boards beneath it—she thinks it used to be in the far corner—by the window. We haven’t looked there, though. I don’t think she remembers after all these years.”

Henry made an excuse and hurried away. Tom looked at his sister and his chums and then, of a sudden, they all smiled.

CHAPTER XXIX
THE RATS COME

Tom took a firm grip of Cliff, on one side, and of Nick, on the other; to the latter he whispered: “Here they come! If you make a false move I’ll make mince-meat of you!”

Black night had descended over the Dead Hope mine and its new neighbor, the Golden Sun. The two new partners of that latest venture had hastily taken their few belongings from the Dead Hope shack when Henry learned from Tom that it would be needed for gold-dust storage that night.

To all appearances the shack, standing dark and still, and the hillside behind it, were wrapped in slumber.

Two dull figures, as quiet as ghosts, slipped along in the gloomiest parts of the shadow, close to brush, hugging the cliff, or slinking under the shack windows.

“Seems like nobody’s around, seems like,” Mort whispered. “Ain’t that sort of funny?”

“There was a guard,” Henry said in his hoarse, but subdued rumble. “He ain’t around—’Cause why? ’Cause Henry attends to everything. He was leaning out the window when I sneaked around the side of the shack first time, spying. Well—there’s his hat.” He kicked the sombrero lying on the ground under the window.

“Now the main thing is not to wake up the camp,” Henry said. “Last time we played bandits we come with guns and a gang at our backs. But this time it’s different. ’Cause we are workin’ alone and I mean to see that you don’t get the best of me this time.”

“Seems like you never will get over that idear, seems like,” Mort grunted. “I tell you and tell you—I had the little gal to watch out for and I tried to find you but the others was too close behind me——”

“Well, it’s all come back to us, anyhow, except what you wasted in Colon—one sack was all you took, wasn’t it?”

“Only one, Hen. Yes, it’s come back. Now we’d better get it and get the papers out from where the stove used to be——”

“And we was pulling up boards in the wrong place. That’s kids for you—she remembers where she hid stuff and her brother tells us as nice as pie and never plans to bother to look. Thinks his sister has forgot—like that silly old codger, Jack, we saw down to Porto Bello!”

“Yep! Well, Hen, let’s get in through the window—or will you let me hand you the sacks and you take ’em to where we got the burros tied?”

“We’ll work right together,” Henry declared. “Here, you get in there and I’ll be right behind you. Watch. Go easy. Don’t come down hard onto the guard—I hit him and he dropped inward—don’t step on ’im if you can help it!”

“Maybe he crawled off from under the window. Get in—let me get there after you. Hurry, you slow poke.”

“That’s strange,” he said. “I was sure the guard fell in the room when I poked the cudgel down onto his fat head! But, he must of come to life and crawled off. Don’t hear nothing so he hasn’t sounded any alarm!”

Henry unslung a small pocket lamp and switched on its beam. Throwing it over the room he gave an exclamation of delight.

They lost no time in dragging some of the buckskin pouches from the top of the pile and dropping them out of the window so they could get to the bulkier flour sacks and gunny sacks beneath them. When they had lifted until they were tired, they decided to transfer what they had dropped under the window to the backs of the mules.

“But wait!” admonished Mort. “Seems like we better get at the papers, seems like. Then, if we’re chased, we know we haven’t left that partnership agreement and deed for the kids to find.”

“Wise idea,” agreed Henry. “Take this flash, and put it so’s it can’t be noticed outside. Then I’ll pry up the boards—let’s see—a girl of nine or ten or so would never have tools—and she was excited when you come in, wasn’t she, Mort?”

“Now, the stove was about here—yep, here’s the spots where the heat warped the wooden floor. Now—Mort, where was the little gal standing that night when you come in?”

“Well as I recall—I come in the door, and she was—just about like you are now.”

“Well, that settles it. She had just straightened up, I bet. ’Cause why? Look at that board along the wall. Loose, I’ll bet. See! A kid could get her fingers almost under the edge—enough to lift it—and sure enough! Here they are!”

He wrenched savagely at the long, narrow board, and lifted it enough to get his arm through and fish out some mouldy looking paper.

“Only the outer wrappers,” Henry whispered, holding the papers close to the electric beam, already growing dim. “See—the inside papers are all right.”

“Well, hurry up and make sure what they are. We want the deed and we might as well take the others and tear ’em up where the pieces won’t get us in trouble. Hurry, though. The battery is going down on that flashlamp.”

“It’s the deed all right,” Mort took one paper and unfolded it partly. “I recall how this corner was tore off where it was signed, and I made a patch onto it—only with my name instead of—that other ’un.”

“And here is the partnership paper. I won’t tear it up yet—but what are these other things?”

“Maybe more of his deeds,” Mort said. “You know, the night you was chief of the bandits and I helped, you said we ought to find more deeds for mines because he was representin’ a company——”

Henry, with the flash bulb now merely a dim, yellowish filament, held a paper close to his eyes.

“‘I—Henry Morgan—do confess,’” he began, then flung aside the paper and opened the last one feverishly.

Meanwhile Mort strained his eyes at the first, but Henry, snatching the lamp and using it, snarled.

“It’s got all about you being a bandit and shooting the gringoes—“(Americans)—“and lots more, Henry.”

“Well, this confession is about you and how you stole from me and your pals and hid the gold dust and took the little girl.”

Whirling, dazzled by two vivid white beams cast on them from large flashlamps protruding through the window, the two, caught red-handed, blinked and stammered in amazement.

“We’re the Mexican police,” declared one of three men who promptly handcuffed the two dazed culprits.

Tom, Nicky, Cliff, Bill, Jack, Mr. Gray, the mine superintendent—and Margery—everybody was trooping into the doorway and the small room.

“We heard every word they said, we crept right under the window,” Nicky said. He turned to Tom, “and I didn’t make a false move, did I?”

“Not a one,” said Tom. “The only false move was the one these men made trying to get the best of three boys, as they thought.”

“And they can sign those confessions and save you a lot of trouble,” said one of the Mexican officials. Mort looked at Henry and his look was returned—there was nothing else to do so the confessions checking and verifying the duplicity of the two—and worse!—were duly signed.

“But what became of the guard I hit?” asked Henry, when he had been told how they were surrounded all the time they talked and worked, and Tom answered: “Oh, Nicky and I were inside here with a hat and wadded sacks around a broomstick, to seem like a man in sombrero and poncho, leaning out of the window. When you ‘socked’ at them we let the hat drop off and put the rest over in the corner—there they are!”

“You certainly outwitted us,” said Mort, grudging admiration, but compelled to admit defeat.

“And now—” it was Jack, the man who had no memory until he left Porto Bello—“Just wait a bit. Mort Beecher—you that was with me so long in Porto Bello, and I never guessed—listen to this! Who crept in my room in a Colorado camp bunk house and stole my deeds, that I was carrying from one ranch to another—and who, by doing that, ruined my reputation, caused me to leave the State, and made the wreck who ended up on the beach at Porto Bello?”

“You should know by this!” snapped Jack. “Oh, I got my memory back at last, and I can remember as well as anything how a piece was torn off the bottom of one deed, the one you tore taking it out of my bunk! It was my own deed, to my own mine, I had just bought, down in Mexico. You thought the corner of the paper was lost. It wasn’t! It was left in my bunk and I had it in my old wallet down in Porto Bello all the time; only, I had been there so long I didn’t recall anything. But I brought away the wallet and here is that piece of paper with my signature on it!”

Eagerly Tom grasped the deed to the Golden Sun, transferred, supposedly, to one Morton Beecher. From Jack’s worn, faded wallet he fitted to its patched corner a bit of paper, yellow and mildewed, but an exact fit!

“So Margery and I will have you for a half-partner instead of that—” Tom made a face toward Mort who was being led, with head bent, toward his imprisonment and trial, with Henry, for their many sins.

“Bill,” cried Jack. “Tell you what I’ll do. You always liked mining and you say you used to prospect in Peru for mines. How about trading my share in this Golden Sun for your ranch in Colorado?”

“And we’ll take Cliff and Nicky into partnership, too, won’t we?” Margery pleaded.

“As to that!” exclaimed Tom, with a grand air, and waving a hand like an orator, while he stuck the other arm into the bosom of his coat, “I believe we shall have to take that up with the board of directors—in the morning.”

CHAPTER XXX
SUNSET

“The reason I didn’t want to talk about shares, last night,” Tom told his sister, late the next afternoon, “was because we don’t actually own a dollar’s worth of that mine.”

They were sitting outside the mine shack. Henry and Mort had been lodged in a Mexican prison. They were merely waiting until Mr. Gray would be ready to leave the mines. Bill and Jack had attended to the necessary legal formalities. But Mr. Gray learned that the mine superintendent had discovered a regular hoard of old Aztec relics in the fastness of the hills and Mr. Gray proposed to go with him to inspect them the next day. He might decide to remain the rest of the late summer and collect and arrange the relics.

“Why, don’t she own a dollar of the mine?” Nicky demanded. “She hid the paper. Her father paid for half the mine.”

“But he paid Mort, and Mort can’t return the money, and he had no right to sell the mine. It was really Jack’s——”

“You certainly did,” declared Cliff. “Tom says he can’t touch the mine at all because it’s all yours and what his father paid——”

“Please—please!” gasped Mort’s former beach combing partner of Porto Bello. “Don’t make me weep. Don’t make me laugh.”

“Well,” said Jack, “let’s look at it this way. Your father paid in good earnest.”

“And because Mort was greedy and all, his greed and lust has turned against him and has brought me back to being a man through you folks. But that don’t pay for the mine, of course. And it’s a shame, too.” He looked over toward the mountains. The sun, declining, was taking on the rich, golden hue, and the sky was dyed, above a blood-red line just over the hills, with a vast, swimming, pulsating light, a vivid golden sea of beauty.

“It’s too bad,” Jack added. “Don’t you think so, Bill?” as Bill came up. “What with us finding that the Dead Hope vein has been struck again, and they’ve got their gold dust back and our own mine has a vein of ore as thick as your arm, about two feet under the rock—ain’t it too bad we can’t sell shares to our friends?”

“Well,” said Jack, “how about making me an offer. If you was to want the half-interest, say, I might consider taking that—let me see—yes! That cigar lighter that saved you in the Chucunaque country. You don’t smoke. It’s no good to you.”

“It’s a keepsake,” Tom said—and then started—“Golly! It isn’t even mine to keep. I took it from Bill.”

“I now and here make you a present of it!” said Bill magnanimously, “and you keep it, too. Jack may own that mine, but he’s traded half to me for my ranch, and he don’t know which half he’s traded, so I guess nobody owns the other half—so, why not claim it from him!”

“Little sister,” said Bill kindly, “for lads like Tom, and Cliff, and Nicky—and a girl like you!—anything a decent fellow can do is—right!”

As for Tom, with just a little lump in his throat for the fine chum Bill always was—Tom couldn’t think what to say.

FOOTNOTE

Transcriber’s Notes

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mystery Boys and the Secret of the Golden Sun

THE MYSTERY BOYS
AND THE
Secret of the Golden Sun

CONTENTS

THE MYSTERY BOYS AND THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN SUN

CHAPTER I
THE MAN WHO COULD SMELL MONEY

CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERY BOYS GET NEWS

CHAPTER III
HENRY MORGAN’S STORY

CHAPTER IV
TOM BREAKS THE TRAIL

CHAPTER V
STORM AND STRESS

CHAPTER VI
STRANDED!

CHAPTER VII
TURTLES AND TROUBLE

CHAPTER VIII
AN UNPLEASANT TRIP

CHAPTER IX
MAGIC AND MADNESS

CHAPTER X
HENRY TURNS SAVAGE

CHAPTER XI
A FALSE MESSAGE

CHAPTER XII
THE FACTS

CHAPTER XIII
TOOSA’S VENGEANCE

CHAPTER XIV
THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE

CHAPTER XV
MODERN MAGIC

CHAPTER XVI
PART OF THE SECRET

CHAPTER XVII
A COLD RECEPTION

CHAPTER XVIII
THE JUNGLE OPENS ITS ARMS

CHAPTER XIX
WASTED EFFORT

CHAPTER XX
TRAILED BY A JAGUAR

CHAPTER XXI
WHERE NO WHITE MEN GO

CHAPTER XXII
IN THE CLOSED CIRCLE

CHAPTER XXIII
MAGIC AGAINST MAGIC

CHAPTER XXIV
A TIGHT CORNER

CHAPTER XXV
WHERE WITS COUNT!

CHAPTER XXVI
TWO MEN DISAPPEAR

CHAPTER XXVII
AGAINST ODDS

CHAPTER XXVIII
GOLDEN BAIT

CHAPTER XXIX
THE RATS COME

CHAPTER XXX
SUNSET

FOOTNOTE

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mystery Boys and the Secret of the Golden Sun

THE MYSTERY BOYS AND THE Secret of the Golden Sun

CONTENTS

THE MYSTERY BOYS AND THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN SUN

CHAPTER I THE MAN WHO COULD SMELL MONEY

CHAPTER II THE MYSTERY BOYS GET NEWS

CHAPTER III HENRY MORGAN’S STORY

CHAPTER IV TOM BREAKS THE TRAIL

CHAPTER V STORM AND STRESS

CHAPTER VI STRANDED!

CHAPTER VII TURTLES AND TROUBLE

CHAPTER VIII AN UNPLEASANT TRIP

CHAPTER IX MAGIC AND MADNESS

CHAPTER X HENRY TURNS SAVAGE

CHAPTER XI A FALSE MESSAGE

CHAPTER XII THE FACTS

CHAPTER XIII TOOSA’S VENGEANCE

CHAPTER XIV THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE

CHAPTER XV MODERN MAGIC

CHAPTER XVI PART OF THE SECRET

CHAPTER XVII A COLD RECEPTION

CHAPTER XVIII THE JUNGLE OPENS ITS ARMS

CHAPTER XIX WASTED EFFORT

CHAPTER XX TRAILED BY A JAGUAR

CHAPTER XXI WHERE NO WHITE MEN GO

CHAPTER XXII IN THE CLOSED CIRCLE

CHAPTER XXIII MAGIC AGAINST MAGIC

CHAPTER XXIV A TIGHT CORNER

CHAPTER XXV WHERE WITS COUNT!

CHAPTER XXVI TWO MEN DISAPPEAR

CHAPTER XXVII AGAINST ODDS

CHAPTER XXVIII GOLDEN BAIT

CHAPTER XXIX THE RATS COME

CHAPTER XXX SUNSET

FOOTNOTE

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

THE MYSTERY BOYS
AND THE
Secret of the Golden Sun

CHAPTER I
THE MAN WHO COULD SMELL MONEY

CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERY BOYS GET NEWS

CHAPTER III
HENRY MORGAN’S STORY

CHAPTER IV
TOM BREAKS THE TRAIL

CHAPTER V
STORM AND STRESS

CHAPTER VI
STRANDED!

CHAPTER VII
TURTLES AND TROUBLE

CHAPTER VIII
AN UNPLEASANT TRIP

CHAPTER IX
MAGIC AND MADNESS

CHAPTER X
HENRY TURNS SAVAGE

CHAPTER XI
A FALSE MESSAGE

CHAPTER XII
THE FACTS

CHAPTER XIII
TOOSA’S VENGEANCE

CHAPTER XIV
THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE

CHAPTER XV
MODERN MAGIC

CHAPTER XVI
PART OF THE SECRET

CHAPTER XVII
A COLD RECEPTION

CHAPTER XVIII
THE JUNGLE OPENS ITS ARMS

CHAPTER XIX
WASTED EFFORT

CHAPTER XX
TRAILED BY A JAGUAR

CHAPTER XXI
WHERE NO WHITE MEN GO

CHAPTER XXII
IN THE CLOSED CIRCLE

CHAPTER XXIII
MAGIC AGAINST MAGIC

CHAPTER XXIV
A TIGHT CORNER

CHAPTER XXV
WHERE WITS COUNT!

CHAPTER XXVI
TWO MEN DISAPPEAR

CHAPTER XXVII
AGAINST ODDS

CHAPTER XXVIII
GOLDEN BAIT

CHAPTER XXIX
THE RATS COME

CHAPTER XXX
SUNSET