_Chill II_ tore her way through the darkness, steered by the tow-headed youth who knew every foot of the river and who guided his course by the loom of the banks in the dim starlight. A smart breeze, kicking up spiteful wavelets on the wider reaches, splashed them with sheeted water as well as fine-flung spray. And, in the face of the warmth of the tropic night, the wind, added to the speed of the boat, chilled them through their wet clothes.
"Now I know why she was named the _Chill_," Habert observed betwixt chattering teeth.
But conversation languished during the nearly three hours of drive through the darkness. Once, by the exhaust, they knew that they pa.s.sed an unlighted launch bound down stream. And once, a glare of light, near the south bank, as they pa.s.sed through the Toreno field, aroused brief debate as to whether it was the Toreno wells, or the bungalow on Merrick"s banana plantation that flared so fiercely.
At the end of an hour, Peter slowed down and ran in to the bank.
"I got a cache of gasoline here--ten gallons," he explained, "and it"s just as well to know it"s here for the back trip." Without leaving the boat, fishing arm-deep into the brush, he announced, "All hunky-dory."
He proceeded to oil the engine. "Huh!" he soliloquized for their benefit. "I was just readin" a magazine yarn last night. "Whose Business Is to Die," was its t.i.tle. An" all I got to say is, "The h.e.l.l it is." A man"s business is to live. Maybe you thought it was our business to die when the _Topila_ was pepper-in" us. But you was wrong. We"re alive, ain"t we? We beat her to it. That"s the game. n.o.body"s got any business to die. I ain"t never goin" to die, if I"ve got any say about it."
He turned over the crank, and the roar and rush of the _Chill_ put an end to speech.
There was no need for Wemple or Davies to speak further in the affair closest to their hearts. Their truce to love-making had been made as binding as it was brief, and each rival honored the other with a firm belief that he would commit no infraction of the truce. Afterward was another matter. In the meantime they were one in the effort to get Beth Drexel back to the safety of riotous Tampico or of a war vessel.
It was four o"clock when they pa.s.sed by Panuco Town. Shouts and songs told them that the federal detachment holding the place was celebrating its indignation at the landing of American bluejackets in Vera Cruz.
Sentinels challenged the _Chill_ from the sh.o.r.e and shot at random at the noise of her in the darkness.
A mile beyond, where a lighted river steamer with steam up lay at the north bank, they ran in at the Apshodel wells. The steamer was small, and the nearly two hundred Americans--men, women, and children--crowded her capacity. Blasphemous greetings of pure joy and geniality were exchanged between the men, and Habert learned that the steamboat was waiting for his Billy Boy, who, astride a horse, was rounding up isolated drilling gangs who had not yet learned that the United States had seized Vera Cruz and that all Mexico was boiling.
Habert climbed out to wait and to go down on the steamer, while the three that remained on the _Chill_, having learned that Miss Drexel was not with the refugees, headed for the Dutch Company on the south sh.o.r.e. This was the big gusher, pinched down from one hundred and eighty-five thousand daily barrels to the quant.i.ty the company was able to handle. Mexico had no quarrel with Holland, so that the superintendent, while up, with night guards out to prevent drunken soldiers from firing his vast lakes of oil, was quite unemotional. Yes, the last he had heard was that Miss Drexel and her brother were back at the hunting lodge. No; he had not sent any warnings, and he doubted that anybody else had. Not till ten o"clock the previous evening had he learned of the landing at Vera Cruz. The Mexicans had turned nasty as soon as they heard of it, and they had killed Miles Forman at the Empire Wells, run off his labor, and looted the camp. Horses? No; he didn"t have horse or mule on the place. The federals had commandeered the last animal weeks back. It was his belief, however, that there were a couple of plugs at the lodge, too worthless even for the Mexicans to take.
"It"s a hike," Davies said cheerfully.
"Six miles of it," Wemple agreed, equally cheerfully. "Let"s beat it."
A shot from the river, where they had left Peter in the boat, started them on the run for the bank. A scattering of shots, as from two rifles, followed. And while the Dutch superintendent, in execrable Spanish, shouted affirmations of Dutch neutrality into the menacing dark, across the gunwale of _Chill II_ they found the body of the tow-headed youth whose business it had been not to die.
For the first hour, talking little, Davies and Wemple stumbled along the apology for a road that led through the jungle to the lodge. They did discuss the glares of several fires to the east along the south bank of Panuco River, and hoped fervently that they were dwellings and not wells.
"Two billion dollars worth of oil right here in the Ebano field alone,"
Davies grumbled.
"And a drunken Mexican, whose whole carca.s.s and immortal soul aren"t worth ten pesos including hair, hide, and tallow, can start the bonfire with a lighted wad of cotton waste," was Wemple"s contribution. "And if ever she starts, she"ll gut the field of its last barrel."
Dawn, at five, enabled them to accelerate their pace; and six o"clock found them routing out the occupants of the lodge.
"Dress for rough travel, and don"t stop for any frills," Wemple called around the corner of Miss Drexel"s screened sleeping porch.
"Not a wash, nothing," Davies supplemented grimly, as he shook hands with Charley Drexel, who yawned and slippered up to them in pajamas.
"Where are those horses, Charley? Still alive?"
Wemple finished giving orders to the sleepy peons to remain and care for the place, occupying their spare time with hiding the more valuable things, and was calling around the corner to Miss Drexel the news of the capture of Vera Cruz, when Davies returned with the information that the horses consisted of a pair of moth-eaten skates that could be depended upon to lie down and die in the first half mile.
Beth Drexel emerged, first protesting that under no circ.u.mstances would she be guilty of riding the creatures, and, next, her brunette skin and dark eyes still flushed warm with sleep, greeting the two rescuers.
"It would be just as well if you washed your face, Stanton," she told Davies; and, to Wemple: "You"re just as bad, Jim. You are a pair of dirty boys."
"And so will you be," Wemple a.s.sured her, "before you get back to Tampico. Are you ready?"
"As soon as Juanita packs my hand bag."
"Heavens, Beth, don"t waste time!" exclaimed Wemple. "Jump in and grab up what you want."
"Make a start--make a start," chanted Davies. "Hustle! Hustle!--Charley, get the rifle you like best and take it along. Get a couple for us."
"Is it as serious as that?" Miss Drexel queried.
Both men nodded.
"The Mexicans are tearing loose," Davies explained. "How they missed this place I don"t know." A movement in the adjoining room startled him.
"Who"s that?" he cried.
"Why, Mrs. Morgan," Miss Drexel answered.
"Good heavens, Wemple, I"d forgotten _her_," groaned Davies. "How will we ever get her anywhere?"
"Let Beth walk, and relay the lady on the nags."
"She weighs a hundred and eighty," Miss Drexel laughed. "Oh, hurry, Martha! We"re waiting on you to start!"
m.u.f.fled speech came through the part.i.tion, and then emerged a very short, stout, much-fl.u.s.tered woman of middle age.
"I simply can"t walk, and you boys needn"t demand it of me," was her plaint. "It"s no use. I couldn"t walk half a mile to save my life, and it"s six of the worst miles to the river."
They regarded her in despair.
"Then you"ll ride," said Davies. "Come on, Charley. We"ll get a saddle on each of the nags."
Along the road through the tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan"s burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a mile of Mrs.
Morgan.
Miss Drexel laughed and joked and encouraged; and Wemple, in brutal fashion, compelled Mrs. Morgan to walk every third quarter of a mile.
At the end of an hour the sorrel refused positively to get up, and, so, was abandoned. Thereafter, Mrs. Morgan rode the roan alternate quarters of miles, and between times walked--if _walk_ may describe her stumbling progress on two preposterously tiny feet with a man supporting her on either side.
A mile from the river, the road became more civilized, running along the side of a thousand acres of banana plantation.
"Parslow"s," young Drexel said. "He"ll lose a year"s crop now on account of this mix-up."
"Oh, look what I"ve found!" Miss Drexel called from the lead.
"First machine that ever tackled this road," was young Drexel"s judgment, as they halted to stare at the tire-tracks.
"But look at the tracks," his sister urged. "The machine must have come right out of the bananas and climbed the bank."
"Some machine to climb a bank like that," was Davies" comment. "What it did do was to go down the bank--take a scout after it, Charley, while Wemple and I get Mrs. Morgan off her fractious mount. No machine ever built could travel far through those bananas."
The flea-bitten roan, on its four legs upstanding, continued bravely to stand until the lady was removed, whereupon, with a long sigh, it sank down on the ground. Mrs. Morgan likewise sighed, sat down, and regarded her tiny feet mournfully.