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

“Cripes, I smell money,” laughed Jimmie.

“Go on with the boy,” Ned replied. “If you want to talk with me you may do so later.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Turn you over to the Zone government.”

The captive would have argued until his friends came out and sized up the situation, and Ned knew it, so he motioned Jimmie to march the fellow away and set about the work he had in hand. He took out the bomb he had brought with him and estimated the length of time the fuse would burn. It was, as has been said, a very long fuse, and the boy was satisfied that he could escape from the danger zone after firing it.

Then, seeing that Jimmie was out of view with his prisoner, he brought out his gun and fired two shots into the air. The result showed that he had planned with judgment, for the men working below came bounding out of the doorway behind the vines and vanished in the jungle, going in a direction opposite to that taken by Jimmie.

The rapidity with which the workers in the bomb-room disappeared astonished Ned until he reflected that he might unconsciously have given a signal agreed upon between the men and the guard. At any rate, he finally concluded, the men were not there to fight in defense of the place if spied upon, but to seek cover at once, as is the habit of those caught in the commission of crime.

He had expected to drive them away by firing from the jungle, but had not anticipated a victory as easily won as this. When the workers had disappeared Ned made his way to the underground room. There he found torches burning, and a fire in the forge. The place was littered with gas-pipe cut into small lengths, and the covers had been removed from the tins of explosives.

It was clear that the bomb-makers had been at work there, and the boy wondered at their nerve. He could account for their returning to their employment there so soon after the place had been visited by hostile interests only on the ground that they believed the secret service men and the boys were being held at bay by others of the conspirators.

Wondering whether the boys who had gone on toward Gatun were safe, he lighted the fuse of the bomb and hastened up the stairs and out into the jungle. A few yards from the broken wall of the temple he met Jimmie, red of face and laboring under great excitement. He turned the boy back with a significant gesture toward the temple, and the two worked their way through the thickets for some moments without finding time or breath for explanations.

When at last they stopped for breath they found themselves about at the point where they had parted from their chums. As they came into the cleared space a flash lighted up the sky, flames went flickering, seemingly, from horizon to horizon, and lifted to the zenith. Then came the awful thunder of the explosion. The ground shook so that Jimmie went tumbling on his face. After the first mighty explosion others came in quick succession.

“That’s the little ones,” Jimmie cried, rolling over in the knee-deep grass to clutch at Ned’s knee. “Talk about your fourth of July.”

As he spoke a slab of stone weighing at least twenty pounds came through the air with a vicious whizz and struck a tree close to where the boy lay.

“If we don’t get out of here we’ll get our blocks knocked off,” Jimmie said.

“The shower is over,” Ned replied. “What were you running back for? If you had not met me, if I had gone out another way, you might have been right there when the explosion took place.”

“Then I’d ’a’ been sailin’ around the moon by now,” the boy grinned.

“Where is the captive?” demanded Ned.

“He went up in the air,” replied Jimmie. “I had me eagle eyes on him one second, and the next second he was gone. He didn’t shout, or shoot, or run, or do a consarned thing. He just leaked out. Where do you think he went?”

“I think,” Ned replied, “that you were looking back to see the explosion and he dodged into a thicket.”

“Well,” admitted Jimmie, “I did look back.”

Ned, rather disgusted at the carelessness of the boy, walked on in silence until the two came to the smooth slopes which led up to Gatun. There they found the boys, waiting for them, eager for the story of the explosion, and wondering at their long delay.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE WATCHER IN THE THICKET

Between Tabernilla and Gamboa, a distance of about fifteen miles, the restless Chagres river, in its old days of freedom, crossed the canal line no less than fifteen times. At Gamboa the river finds a break in the rough hills and winds off to the northeast, past Las Cruces and off into more hills and jungles.

Where the river turns the canal enters the nine-mile cut through the Cordilleras, which form the backbone of the continent. Here at the Culebra cut, the greatest amount of excavation for the waterway is being done. This cut ends at Pedro Miguel locks, which will ease the ships down into the Pacific ocean.

Where the river turns to the northeast, at Gamboa, a wild and hilly country forms both banks. The hillsides as well as the plateaux are overgrown with dense vegetation. As in all tropical lands, the fight for survival is fierce and merciless. Trees are destroyed by great creepers, great creepers are destroyed by smaller growths, and every form of life, vegetable as well as animal, has its enemy. Every living thing springs up from the dead body of another.

Sheltered and half concealed from view in this wild country between Gamboa and Las Cruces, on the day the Boy Scouts set out in their search for Jimmie and Peter, there stood a house of stone which seemed as old as the volcanic formation upon which it stood. It was said that the structure had been there, even then looking old and dismantled, when the French began their operations on the Isthmus.

This house faced the valley of the Chagres river, having its back against a hill, which was one of the steps leading up to the top of the Cordilleras. There was a great front entrance way, and many windows, but the latter seemed closed. Few signs of life were seen about the place at five o’clock that afternoon.

From a front room in the second story the sounds of voices came, and now and then a door opened and closed and a footstep was heard on the stairway. However, those who walked about the place seemed either going or coming, for the house gained no added population because of the men who climbed the slope at the front and, ignoring the main entrance, passed on to the second floor by a secret staircase in the wall, entrance to which seemed easy for them to find.

At the hour named three acquaintances of the reader occupied the front room on the second floor of the stone house. They were Col. Van Ellis, the military man Frank Shaw had talked with in the old house near the Culebra cut, Harvey Chester, the father of the boy Jimmie and Peter had encountered in the jungle, and Gostel, the man who had approached the two boys the night before on the lip of the great excavation.

In a rear apartment, a sort of lumber-room, devoted now to wornout and broken furniture and odds and ends of house furnishing goods, was still another acquaintance – Ned Nestor. The patrol leader had met the two lost boys at Culebra, in the company of Harvey Chester and his son, Tony, and had spent enough time with the party to learn that Pedro, the ex-servant of the Shaw home, had been seen at the Chester camp, and that he had fled at the approach of Jimmie and his chum.

The story of Gostel’s watching the cut at night, probably assisted by Pedro, and Harvey Chester standing guard, or seeming to do so, by day, had interested Ned greatly. The presence on the Isthmus of Pedro gave an extra kink to the problem. The attempt to capture the two boys, as previously told by Gastong, on the previous night, and the unmistakable anxiety of Chester to remain in their company, had led Ned to believe that at last he was getting to some of the people “high up” in the conspiracy against the canal. Surely a man of the education and evident wealth of Harvey Chester was not loitering along the Culebra cut just for the excitement there was in it. It was plain that he was there for a purpose, and the arrival of a man Jimmie declared to be Gostel had convinced Ned that the heads of the plot were not far away.

Gostel had greeted the boys heartily, expressing relief at the knowledge that they had escaped in safety from the jungle, and Chester had urged them all to accept of his continued hospitality. Nothing had been said of Gostel’s pursuit of the two boys, and Ned had reached the conclusion that Gostel did not know that his movements had been observed.

Anxious to see what Gostel really was up to, Ned had instructed the boys to remain at a hotel at Culebra or visit the Chester camp, just as they saw fit, and had followed Gostel back to Gamboa and out to the stone house, where he had managed to hide himself in the room above described without his presence on the premises being suspected. One thing, however, Ned did not know, and that was that Jimmie McGraw, full of life and curious to know what was going on, had trained on after him and was now watching the house from a thicket on the hillside.

Ned had heard a good deal of talk since hiding himself in the rear room, much of which was of no account. Men who had delivered notes and messages had come and gone. Col. Van Ellis seemed to be doing a general business there. Some of the men who came appeared to be canal workmen, and these left what seemed to be reports of some kind.

From a break in the wall Ned could hear all that was said and see a great deal of what went on in the front room. At five o’clock a tall, dark, slender man whose black hair was turning gray in places entered the front room by way of the secret stairway in the side wall. He handed some papers to Col. Van Ellis and seated himself without being asked to do so.

“What, as a whole, are the indications?” Van Ellis asked.

“Excellent,” was the short reply.

“And the latest prospect?” asked Chester.

“In the valley, near Bohio.”

“What have you found there?”

“Clay-slate, hornblende, emeralds.”

“In large quantities?” asked Chester, anxiously.

“There is a fortune underground there,” was the reply. “Green argillaceous rock means something.”

There was silence for some moments, during which Van Ellis pored over some drawings on his desk, Chester walked the floor excitedly, Gostel regarded the others with a sinister smile on his face, and Itto, the recent arrival, sat watching all the others as a cat watches a mouse.

“And this territory will be under the Lake of Gatun?” Chester asked, presently.

“Yes, very deep under the Lake of Gatun,” was Itto’s reply.

Again Van Ellis bent over the drawings, tracing on one with the point of a pencil.

“There are millions here,” he said. “We have only to stretch forth our hands and take them.”

“The wealth of a world,” Itto observed.