A STARTLING MEETING.
The legion of little brown men at once fell in round the two boys, whose
clean cut young figures towered above their squat forms, and after they
had surrendered their weapons--not without a momentary qualm of regret
on Frank's part--the march to the camp began.
Bellman said little as they made their way along the trail, but strode
along with his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep thought.
He was a huge man, with a singularly brutal face bronzed by the suns of
a dozen countries over which he had been a wanderer, and a heavy
drooping mustache which hid a cruel mouth. His eyes were steely gray and
as keen as a hawk's. Such was the man into whose power the Boy Aviators
had fallen and even they did not realize the extent to which such a man
will go to gain an end--and that he had an end in view his action in
sparing their lives fully convinced them.
At last they emerged--after passing once more over the luckless wire--on
the settlement under the hill that Frank had noted the night before from
the boat. There was every evidence of abandonment about it, however,
even now, although it had been so recently the scene of activity.
"If you had come to-morrow I should not have had the pleasure of
receiving you," said Bellman, with a sardonic grin, waving his hand to
indicate the preparations for the abandonment of the settlement.
The blast furnace had been almost completely demolished and a gang of
men, compatriots of the small brown men who formed the boys' escort,
were busily engaged in completing the work of destruction with crowbars
and picks. Several of the small houses which Frank had seen from the
boat had also vanished and the rest were portable contrivances. They
were being rapidly taken to pieces and carried up the hill into the
woods, where doubtless they were to be destroyed, for the smoke of a big
fire was beginning to rise from there.
In the side of the hill back of the blast furnace, a great ragged hole
had been torn like a small quarry, and a runway from this to the
shattered blast-furnace indicated that some earth found in the hillside
was reduced in the crucible to a condition in which it formed an
ingredient of Chapinite. The large building was evidently a sort of
bunk-house for the workmen and packing-house for the product that
Captain Bellman and his men had been making there, for from its wide
door a perpetual stream of dwarfed brown men were carrying packing cases
carefully wrapped in straw to a small fleet of canoes that lay moored
alongside a primitive wharf.
All these things the boys' eyes took in as they were led across the bare
earth to the barrack-like building; but of the man to search for whom
they had come to the Everglades they could see no sign.
Bellman's first care was for his wounded dogs, after which he ordered
his men to bring the boys into a long, low ceiled room, apparently from
its heat right under the roof of the bunk-house. Straw mats laid all
along the walls also indicated that it was used as a sleeping attic by
the Orientals employed on the island.
There was a small table in the room with a rickety chair by it, and
Bellman took up a seat at it.
"We need not occupy much time," were his first words, as the boys stood
facing him, surrounded by their impassive-faced guards. "I and my men
are leaving the Everglades forever to-night. We wish to be secure
against anybody following us. Where is this air-ship of yours and where
are the canoes in which you brought it here?"
"Why do you wish to know?" demanded Frank.
"I naturally wish to make myself secure from pursuit by destroying
them," was the cool reply, "if you don't wish to tell me I shall find
them."
Frank knew that this last was an empty boast as to search the Everglades
for their canoes or for their air-ship either would be a work occupying
much more time than Bellman could afford to spare.
"Under no circumstances will I give you any such information," said
Frank.
"I admire your pluck but deplore your lack of common sense," rejoined
Bellman with a sneer.
"We don't care any more for your admiration than we do for your
sympathy," replied Frank, proudly.
Bellman's dark face flushed angrily.
"This is the way you treat my intended kindness," he thundered, striking
the table with his clenched fist till its crazy legs wobbled under it.
"Well, I shall try another method. If you had answered me I would have
sent some Seminoles here to pick you up, once I was safe at sea, but as
it is now I shall leave you here to rot."
Little as Frank believed Bellman's tentative promise that he would send
relief to them if they afforded him the opportunity to raid their camp
and destroy their canoes and the _Golden Eagle II_, yet both boys
realized not without dismay that there was a good deal of deadly earnest
in the last words he had spoken.
"Leave them there to rot."
Involuntarily both boys shuddered.
Bellman's malevolent eye saw this and interpreted it at once as a sign
of weakening.
"Ah," he said viciously, "I touched you there, eh?"
"I don't know what you mean by that," said Frank, "but if you intend to
convey that we are afraid of you, we are not."
"Or of any cad that has been kicked out of the United States' Navy, and
has turned against his country," added Harry.
"You young whelp," shouted Bellman, beside himself at the sneer, "you
have tried to checkmate me at every turn, but you'll find out I am more
than your match."
"You come here to find Lieutenant Chapin, the dog who was instrumental
in my disgrace. Well, I'll introduce you to him."
He gave a sharp order in the same tongue his followers used and the next
minute the boys were seized. With a good, left-hand punch to the jaw
Frank knocked one of the amazed little brown men half across the room
and the next minute Harry had served another the same way. But it was no
good. The opposing force was too many for them and ignominiously
handcuffed they were at length led down several steep flights of stairs
into what they knew, by its musty smell, must be an underground chamber.
The darkness of the place was made visible, so to speak, by a smoky
oil-torch, like those used in the stoke-hold of a steamer, that hung in
one corner. It was miserably damp and several subterranean streams fed
by the mountain above trickled across the floor. In one corner the boys
noticed, as their eyes grew accustomed to the light, was a curious
contrivance formed of two long bars of heavy wood with holes pierced in
them at regular intervals.
Two heavy posts stood at each end of this contrivance, to which were
attached heavy padlocks and hasps. With a quick thrill of horror the
boys realized that they faced that instrument of confinement of blue-law
days--the stocks.
After another sharp order from Bellman their captors carried them to the
appliance and raising the heavy upper block of wood thrust the boys'
legs into the semicircular openings cut in the lower section for that
purpose. Similar holes were cut in the upper bar and when it was lowered
and padlocked down the unfortunate person confined there could in no way
release himself till somebody unlocked the padlocks.
"Now," said Bellman, when this work was completed to his satisfaction,
and the boys were securely fastened in their prison, "I am going to
introduce you to the man you have been looking for. Serang," he ordered,
turning to the little brown man with the red stripe on his arm, "Sahib
Chapin bring."
The man nodded obediently and left the fetid chamber. The boys wondered
that he did not take any companion with him, but when he returned,
leading a stumbling, helpless figure, they understood that even a small
man of his caliber was able now to handle the once strapping Lieutenant
Chapin. For that in the figure before them, for all his unshaven cheeks
and blinking eyes, like those of a bat, they had the man they had come
all the way in search of, his uniform, now bagging in unsightly fashion
about his shrunken form left them no room to doubt. The miserable
scarecrow figure that gazed apologetically about it, was the inventor of
Chapinite, and once the most popular man in the United States Navy.
The boys' cheeks burned with indignation at the sight, and if they might
have had any weak inclination to save their lives by yielding to
Bellman's demand that they reveal the whereabouts of the _Golden Eagle
II_, the sight of the miserable wreck before them would at once have
decided them. They would stick by the unfortunate officer come what
might and if possible, avenge the indignities he had suffered.
"Put him in alongside them, serang," ordered Bellman, as Chapin gazed
about in a dazed manner, evidently realizing little of what was
transpiring and in a few minutes Lieutenant Chapin, Frank Chester and
his brother Harry, were trussed up in a row absolutely helpless. It was
a bitter thought that here they were within hand's reach of the man they
had come so far and endured so much to succor, and now they were as
helpless to aid him as he seemed to be to care for himself.
"I wish you a pleasant afternoon," said Bellman, as, signing to the
serang, he and his myrmidons left the subterranean chamber.
As soon as their footsteps had died out Frank determined to make an
effort to arouse the dormant faculties of Lieutenant Chapin.
"Lieutenant," he said, "we are your friends. Can you understand us?"
To his amazement a light of brighter intelligence shone in the captive
officer's face and he answered with what was absolute briskness compared
to his former listless manner:
"Of course I can; but who are you?"
Rapidly Frank sketched out to him the events that had brought them there
and all they had hoped to accomplish. Then in a saddened voice he had
related the failure of their hopes and aspirations.
The lieutenant thanked them warmly for their loyalty, but urged them to
save their lives if possible by acceding to Bellman's demands. For
himself, he said, he expected no better fate than to be left there to
die.
"My life has been a living death at any rate," he said, "since I came to
this terrible place. Yours are the first kindly faces I have seen. I
have lived as if in a dream." He pressed his hand to his forehead. "It
seems that I must do what they told me. I have even, as you know, aided
in the betrayal of my government by aiding these men in preparing my
invention. For the last two days, though, my mind has been getting
clearer. I have realized what is going on about me. I can judge things
in their true proportions."
"But--pardon me for the question--" said Frank, "but when you----"
"I know," interrupted the lieutenant, "you are going to say that when I
came in here, I seemed stupefied. I was acting a part. I did not want
Bellman to think that I had recovered my senses. I cannot understand it
myself. Until yesterday everything was like a dream, now I can think
once more like a rational man."
Frank detailed to him the conversation that they had overheard in the
boat the night before and the boast that Foyashi had made that he had
placed the captive under his control.
"Ah, that is it," exclaimed the lieutenant eagerly, "since Foyashi has
gone I have felt this new life of my brain, but hark--there's somebody
coming."
His ears, sharpened by his long captivity, were keener than the boys'
for it was not till the serang with the red band on his arm entered the
place that they heard any indication of the arrival of the newcomer. He
came straight up to the boys and informed them that it was the order of
his master that he should search them. His manner was not insolent or
rough, it was simply the manner of the lay figure who does as he is told
and asked no questions. Indignant but helpless Harry submitted to the
search. He begged the man to let him keep his mother's picture which he
carried in a case in his inside pocket, but the man refused with a
mechanical shake of the head.
"No, my orders. Tuan he say take everything," he muttered.
Then came Frank's turn. As with Harry one by one his most treasured
possessions were stripped from him by the immobile faced, yellow man.
But suddenly something happened that had been entirely unlooked for.
Frank had entirely forgotten the squatting Buddha, which he had placed
in his pocket the day the moonshiner had sold it to him, and had not
given it a thought since.
Now, however, the serang's searching hand found it in the boy's pocket
and the effect on him was electrical.
He fell on his knees reverentially before the absurd looking piece of
jade and beat his head on the damp floor and then gazed at Frank in awe.
"How came you by this, master?" he asked.
Frank saw that the possession of the thing had made a strong effect on
the man and that to deceive him as to the fact in the case, might have a
beneficial bearing on their position, so he simply shook his head and as
Harry would have said, "looked wise."
"Him great Buddha of Lhasa," moaned the serang, bobbing up and down
before it. "You great man. Me worship you if you give him me for keep."
"Why don't you steal it from us; we can't prevent you?" Harry could not
help saying.
"No can steal. If steal heap curse all time. Plenty soon die," was the
response, "but if give then great blessing--plenty blessing all time."
A sudden idea struck Frank.
"You are leaving here to-night in canoes for the coast?" he asked.
"Yes," was the reply, "we leave here never no more to come back."
"If I give you that Buddha will you unlock these stocks and these
handcuffs before you go?" he asked.
The man thought a minute.
"If you don't I will make the Buddha curse you," pursued Frank. This
seemed to decide the yellow man.
"All litee," he said, "before I go I lettee you out but no let Bellman
know; he kill me."
"We won't let him know," said Frank with emphasis, "but how do we know
that you will keep your word?"
"If I don't then Buddha curse me and I die," said the man simply as he
left the dungeon. The boys felt that they had secured a pledge of
freedom by the merest chance that was better than all the promises that
could be made from now till Doomsday.