“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.”
“What about—did he talk of his past?”
“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——”
“Look here, Bill,” said Tom, “let’s take him out to the boat.”
“What for?” demanded Bill.
“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.”
Mr. Gray, who had been quietly listening, nodded.
“You are a psychologist,” he said, amused at Nicky.
“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——”
“It’s better than hanging around doing nothing,” Nicky urged.
“We can try it,” Mr. Gray agreed. “There have been many wonders worked by ‘Modern Magic’—psychology applied to daily life.”
“What’s your name?” he inquired of the shaking man.
“Why—I didn’t use it for so long—Jack—just call me Jack.”
“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.”
The look of surprise in the dim eyes became one of pleading.
“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!”
“I can’t believe——”
“Well, come and see!”
So the procession started through the indolent cluster of natives toward the cruiser’s tender.
They were going to try modern magic.
But Jack held back.
“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.
“Then wait—I got to bathe me first!”
The magic was already working!
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.”
“We’ll do it!” declared Nicky. “I know we will!”
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.
“Nobody——” began Jack.
“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.
“Did he get shipwrecked?” he suggested.
“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.
“But he wouldn’t have nothing to do with me—who would——?”
“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.
“Well, we want to find out where they went,” began Bill.
“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!”
Jack nodded sturdily. The appeal had its effect.
“I do,” he agreed. “But I wasn’t in condition to pay ’tention and I can’t remember——”
“You recall him talking about Mexico—” suggested Mr. Gray.
“Mexico—Mexico—I can’t just seem to—maybe he did, but I don’t recollect what he said.”
“Something about the Golden Sun—” suggested Bill.
“The—Golden—the Golden Sun—” Jack said, trying to screw up his forehead in his effort to rebuild the old story.
“Golden Sun—he used to talk about it a lot,” said Mr. Gray.
“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——”
Mr. Gray did not change his expression.
“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.”
Bill rose to show him where he could take his nap.
“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.”
“I hope so,” agreed Jack. “Anyhow, I’ll try to think——”
“Now I’ve done it!” said Nicky ruefully, when Jack was out of hearing.
“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.
“It’s just come to me!” he said eagerly. “Listen——”
And they soon saw that “it” had “come to him” in full.
“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——”
“Happy!” suggested Tom.
“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.”
They settled themselves, under the hot afternoon sun, to listen.
“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.”
“You remember it all clearly, at last!” commented Mr. Gray.
“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!”
They nodded and waited while he reflected.
“Let me see,” he said finally. “Yes, this is the way of it—Mort said if he could find a little girl——”
“What did he call her?” broke in Tom, unable to restrain his eagerness.
“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——”
He broke off and concentrated his mind on what he wanted to recall.
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.”
“Gold dust!” commented Bill. “And the rest is still there, maybe!”
“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?”
They nodded and he continued the little more he had to tell.
“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.”
“We’ll find her,” declared Nicky.
“Well,” Jack completed his story. “All I recall is that Mort said one morning he woke up to find the little girl was gone——”
“Gone!” chorused the chums.
“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?”
Jack shook his head.
“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.”
Tom and Nicky nodded vigorous agreement.
“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.”
“No,” Cliff said. “But why did he want us to go to Toosa first?”
“That’s so—if the little girl knew about the mine,” Nicky agreed.
“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——”
“Names won’t help,” Bill suggested. “What we want is——”
“Action!” cried Nicky, leaping to his feet, upsetting his camp chair.
“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.
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.
“We could pretend we are looking for gold,” Nicky contributed.
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.”
“I don’t see how,” Nicky declared.
“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.”
“That doesn’t look very promising,” Tom said despondently.
“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.”
Tom found an objection.
“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.”
The three chums looked at one another disconsolately.
“It looks as though we’ll be left out,” Nicky said.
“We’ll have to make the best of it, then,” Cliff stated.
“After all, the main thing is to locate my sister,” Tom added.
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!”
“To get ready for a welcome,” Nicky offered.
“No,” cried Cliff, “they’re tumbling into three canoes!”
“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!
“That’s funny!” Nicky declared.
“They don’t seem to like company!” Cliff added.
Tom made no comment as they rowed back.
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.
“I can’t understand it,” Cliff stated.
“Nor I,” Bill acknowledged, and Jack conceded the same thing.
Tom still remained mute, his face very sober.
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.
And so they let another day pass.
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.
“For Big Chief!” he called, in Spanish.
The canoe lay quiet; the men did not move.
A long half-hour passed.
Then the men nodded, paddled closer and waited.
“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.
The men considered them without expression. Then one looked up.
“What you want?” he asked.
“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 getoneto 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.
All of the party assembled on deck to see what would happen.
One of the older trio in the canoe stood erect and surveyed the company with expressionless, stolid gaze. Finally he spoke.
“Who doctor?” he asked. They pointed to Jack.
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.”
“The chief lived there, I guess,” Nicky broke in.
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 must have been a sight!” Cliff declared.
“It was. And they took us to stools in the center and let us sit down. There we sat and sat and sat!”
“I know,” Nicky agreed. “They keep you waiting for the chief.”
“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!”
“Wooden Indians was a good name for them,” Bill said, coming up.
“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.”
“But wait!” Bill urged, and motioned to Tom.
“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!”
“Magic!” chuckled Jack.
“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!”
“Tom’s stock went up about two million points!” grinned Jack.
“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!”