Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone: or, The Plot Against Uncle Sam

“Do you think he is one of the men we came here to look up?” asked Jimmie. “I’ve been thinking he looks like a Jap. Perhaps he’s one of the men at the bottom of that bomb business. Well, we don’t have to go with him.”

“I’d like to see where he would take us,” Peter whispered.

“Not for your uncle,” Jimmie replied. “It is me for the jungle. This thing is gettin’ worse ’n’ a Bowery drama. The villain comes on in every scene here. Say! Suppose we take a run into the woods before he gets back?”

“I’m not in love with the jungle at night,” Peter said. “Besides, I’d like to know what this Jap has in mind.”

The chug-chug of the stranger’s motor was now heard, and, without waiting for further discussion, the boys ducked away into the jungle, which crowded close on the cut at this point.

They heard the car stop at the point where they had been standing, and heard a low exclamation of impatience, indicative of disappointment, from the lips of the driver, and then crept farther into the tangle of vines.

Finally Peter stopped and faced toward Gatun.

“We’d better be working toward home,” he said. “This thicket is no place for a civilized human being at night.”

Although there was a moon, and the sky showed great constellations with which the boys were unfamiliar, the jungle was dark and creepy. Keeping the lights from the workings on their left, the boys pushed their way through the undergrowth for some distance without resting, and then paused in a little glade and listened.

“Gee,” cried Jimmie, after standing at attention for a moment, “there’s some one following us. We’d better dig in a little deeper.”

“It may be a wild animal,” said Peter, who, while ready to face whatsoever peril might come in the company of the man they were running away from, was in mortal terror of the jungle.

“There are no man-eaters here,” Jimmie replied, unwinding a snake-like creeper from his neck and pushing on.

“I can feel snakes crawling up my legs now,” complained Peter, with a shiver.

The noise in the rear came on about as fast as they could move, and at last Jimmie sat down on a fallen tree.

“He can hear us,” he said. “We might as well be hiding with a brass band.”

“Then we’ll keep quiet until he passes,” Peter trembled out. “I’m afraid to go plunging through here in the dark, anyway.”

Making as little noise as possible, the boys crept into a particularly dense thicket and crouched down. Almost as soon as they were at rest the noise behind ceased. In five minutes it began again, but the sounds grew fainter and fainter and finally died out.

“He was followin’ us all right,” Jimmie said. “Now we’ll dig in a little deeper, so as not to come out anywhere near him, and then go back to camp.”

They walked, or crept, rather, until they were tired out and then looked about.

There were giant ceiba trees, with trunks as smooth as if they had been polished by human hands, tremendous cotton-trees, their branches bowed down with air plants, palms, to which clung clusters of wild nuts, thick, bulbous trees, taller trees with buttressed roots, as if Nature knew the strain that was to be placed upon them and braced them up accordingly, trees with bark like mirrors, and trees with six-inch spike growing from the bark.

And through this thicket of trees ran creepers resembling pythons, smaller vines which tore at the boughs of the trees, and a mass of running things on the ground which caught the foot and seemed to crawl up toward the throat. By daylight it would have been weird and beautiful. At night it was uncanny and fearsome.

“We ought to be in sight of the lights by this time,” Peter said, after they had crept on and rested again and again.

“Yes,” said Jimmie, “but we ain’t. We’re lost in the jungle, if you want to know.”

CHAPTER XIII.

BOY SCOUTS TO THE RESCUE

Ned Nestor and Frank Shaw sat on the porch, that night, for a long time after the other boys were asleep. It had been decided that Frank should stand guard until midnight, but Ned was far too anxious to attempt to sleep. The absence of Jimmie and Peter worried him, and he sat waiting for some sign of their approach until very late.

“Frank,” he said, after a long silence, “there has been some talk in this case about your father having an interest in an emerald mine down here. Have you any idea where that mine is?”

“Not the slightest,” was the reply. “All I know about it is that it is a paying proposition, and that foreigners are in the game with him.”

“You do not even know whether the mine is situated in the Province of Panama?”

“I rather think it is.”

“I have heard talk,” Ned went on, “about mines on the line of the canal. It may be that this one is.”

“I think it is not far from Colon,” was the reply.

“Do you know who these foreigners are?”

“Japanese, I think.”

Ned was silent for a time, as if studying some proposition over in his mind. The boys in the cottage were stirring in their sleep, and a shrill-voiced bird in the jungle was calling to its mate.

“What are you trying to get at?” Frank asked.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” Ned replied, “that your father acted rather strangely on the night he was attacked in his house – the night your emerald necklace was stolen and the office building searched?”

“I have never thought of his attitude as remarkable,” replied Frank, “but, come to think the matter over from this distance, it does seem that he did act queerly when asked to reveal the nature of the information he had received. Lieutenant Gordon was angry with him.”

“Yes; the lieutenant believed that the papers would help him a lot if he could get hold of them. He still thinks so.”

“I understand that he still, in his mind, accuses father of disloyalty to his country,” said Frank.

“It seems to me,” Ned continued, “that one of two propositions is true. Either the papers would be useless in revealing the plot, or they deal with a situation which your father believes himself capable of handling alone.”

“I wonder what he will think when he gets the cable Lieutenant Gordon took up to Panama for me?” asked Frank.

“What did you say in the message?”

“I told him to keep an army of men in the basement of the newspaper building – to look out for bombs all over the structure.”

“I am glad you were able to warn him,” Ned said, “but I can’t help believing that he knew something of the peril he was in before we left New York. He was altogether too quiet that night when his house and his office were searched. He appeared to me to be planning a revenge both effective and secret.”

“And he never made a row about Pedro leaving him,” Frank said. “Why, he used to think Pedro was the whole works.”

“You say the fellow’s name is not Pedro at all, but Pedrarias?” asked Ned.

“Yes, that is what father says. I gave him the name of Pedro for short. He is an offshoot of the Spanish family that ruled the Isthmus after Balboa was shot. He claims pure Castilian blood, and all that. How he ever consented to become a servant is more than I can make out.”

“Has it never occurred to you,” asked Ned, “that he might have had an object, besides that of salary, in acting the part of a menial?”

“I have thought, since the night of the robbery, that he might have scented the necklace from afar off and come there to get it.”