CHAPTER I.—ALL READY FOR THE AMAZON
The opening of a door cast an oblong shape of light over the forward deck of a motor boat, against which an April rain drummed fast or slow, as the uncertain wind came in swift gusts or died down to whispers. As the illumination traveled past the splashed deck, bringing out a pier and a warehouse, and a sluggish current pushing and fussing against the piles of a pier farther down, the tousled heads of two boys appeared outlined against the ruddy doorway. In a moment their voices cut through the wind and rain.
“Jule? Oh, Jule!” one of them shouted.
“Last call for dinner in the main cabin, young man!” added the other.
There was no reply, so the boys, after listening a moment to the pounding of the rain, the complaining of the river, the roar of the city which lay all around them, closed the door, producing the effect to one outside of obliterating the deck and the pier, the warehouse and the river, as if they had never existed at all.
“Jule will get soaking wet and take cold!” fretted a third voice as the door closed. “Besides, being on guard, he ought never to have left the boat!”
One of the boys who had stood in the doorway wiped the rain from his face as he listened and grinned at the other.
“No need to have a fit about it, even if Jule does get soaked,” he said. “But he won’t get wet,” he added, entirely for the benefit of the one who had grumbled, “he’ll be back here in a minute as dry as a pound of powder.”
“How’s he going to get through all that,” with a swing of the arm toward the door, “without getting wet? I suppose you think he’ll be able to dodge the drops!”
“Anyway, what’s the use of getting him wet and sick in our minds?” cut in another, good-naturedly. “That won’t help any. Most of the hard luck we’ve had lately never caught up with us—except in our minds!”
“Case”—Cornelius Witters where full names are insisted on—turned a dejected face to the others.
“He shouldn’t have gone out,” he grumbled.
“Speaking of hard luck that never caught up with us,” said Clay—he had inherited from his parents, his only inheritance, by the way, the name of Gayton Emmett—“do you remember the time we lost $50 by taking in a counterfeit bill?”
“Yes,” laughed Alex—Alexander Smithwick on state occasions—“we lost the $50 for one day and one night, until we could get to a bank. Then it wasn’t lost at all, for the note was genuine! You know the story how a man hired a professional worrier to take trouble off his mind? Suppose we hire one? I reckon he’d have enough to do.”
“Quit, boys!” Case broke in. “I know I’ve got a grouch a mile high to-night, but I’ll soon recover. Wait until I get busy with the supper we’re going to have, and you’ll see!”
Case seemed ashamed of his complaining, so the boys silently accepted his implied apology and busied themselves preparing the supper he had spoken of. In the eyes of the lads that was Case’s one fault. He was inclined to worry, and also to express his worries in the most depressing prophecies. But while they laughed at his premonition of trouble for the absent boy, they listened anxiously for the absent one’s return.
Directly Clay took a handful of silver from a pocket and laid it in a shining heap on the table.
“I guess we’d better cash up,” he said. “I got my last pay envelope from Slade & Co., to-day, and here’s the coin. We must have more than $200 by this time.”
The other boys drew banknotes and silver from their pockets, and heaped their contributions on the table.
“Now, we’ll put it with the other,” Clay said, after it had been counted over at least half a dozen times. “Just where is our bank to-night? I don’t seem to remember where we deposited last time.”
“It wasn’t in a bank,” Case broke in, forgetting his promise to get rid of his grouch, “though it should have been. The idea of leaving $200 lying loose in this old tub!”
“Now you’re losing our money—in your mind!” laughed Clay. “How many times before to-night have you lost it, Case?”
“Well, it isn’t safe, anyhow,” insisted Case, “even with Jule here to watch it; and he runs out and leaves the boat alone after dark!”
“When will this professional worrier begin work?” asked Alex with a sly grin at Clay. “He’s needed here right now. Case doesn’t seem to be able to acquire any peace of mind!”
Case blushed, as if ashamed of his outburst so soon after having resolved to mend his ways, and moved toward the back of the cabin.
“I don’t know just where Jule put the money last time we counted it,” he said, making a great show of looking for it, “but I presume it is here somewhere.”
In fumbling around next to the rear wall the boy came upon a roll of drawings, which he brought out and tossed on the table, his quest of the hidden money momentarily forgotten.
“Here’s the map of the Amazon, boys,” he said, unrolling the paper. “I brought it in to-night. As we leave to-morrow, we may as well run over it now. Here’s where we strike the Brazilian coast, at Para, and here’s where we camp on the Amazon, away up near the foothills of the Eastern Andes. I guess Jule will get well up there!”
“Of course he will!” Clay asserted. “Didn’t Dr. Holcomb say so? I guess he knows.”
“He’s a brick, that Dr. Holcomb!” Alex declared. “Only for him we wouldn’t be so near the roof of the world as we are now.”
“I don’t see any roof of any world!” observed Case, obstinately.
“You will if you stick with us,” Alex continued. “The mountains and tablelands of South America, along there by Peru, you know, are often called the roof of the world. When you get up to the top of some of the mountains, you can’t get any higher in this world, without going up in an aeroplane, and then you wouldn’t be in the world at all, but out of it and above it.”
“Well, we aren’t very near it yet,” Case replied.
“But we will be nearer it, physically, to-morrow night at this time,” Alex kept on. “Think of it! Through the drainage canal like an arrow in this good little motor boat, down the Mississippi with a rush, into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean sea and out again, and then along the coast to the mouth of the Amazon! Say, boys, do you know that the Amazon has a mouth a hundred and fifty miles wide?”
“What a campaign orator she would have made!” laughed Clay. “But, suppose we find the money before we look over the map.”
The motor boat Rambler lay in a secluded warehouse slip in the South Branch, as the southwestern arm of the Chicago river is called, and the three hungry boys referred to and one other, Julian Shafer, the lad the others were now anxious about, constituted her crew and passenger list, all in one. Clay, Alex and Case were busy with supper arrangements, as stated, and all were listening for the approach of Jule.
The cabin, which was seven feet by nine, did not seem quite like home without him. The rain, which had come on with the going down of the sun, drove in spiteful gusts from the southwest, so that the two foot-square windows on that side were closed, but from the open casements to the north the odor of sizzling sausage and bubbling coffee traveled out on the wet winds of the April evening.
Many who passed the head of the driveway which led down to the warehouse and the pier where the Rambler lay stopped to sniff the fragrant reminder of what the world owes to its stomach, and to look in wonder at the odd little residence on the brown river.
A patrolman, rustling along in a rubber coat which came down to his great heels, swinging his nightstick petulantly, as if in protest of the storm, drew up at the entrance to the private way and glanced down at the boat and stood for an instant imagining how a good cup of that coffee would taste!
It was while he stood there that the door was opened, and it was while the light from the interior lay over the pier and warehouse that the officer thought he saw a slim figure skulking in an angle of the building. When he reached the place where the figure had stood, the light was gone and the angle was empty, with the rain beating against it in a particularly determined manner. So the policeman went on about his business.
The Rambler had lain in the slip by the warehouse all through the winter, and the boys had called her cabin, which was so low that they could stand upright only in the center, their “furnished, steam-heated apartments,” being careful to speak of it in the plural. She was a trim little craft, twenty feet by seven over all, with the cabin extending over almost half of the interior of the shell, lengthwise.
The cabin was a strongly-built structure, with two foot-square windows on each side and one looking out at the stern, where a platform four feet by the width of the boat formed a floor for chairs, and also a covering for the gasoline tanks underneath. The front deck extended to the prow, the powerful motors and other machinery being mostly under it, near the middle of the craft, just in front of the cabin door. Under this deck, forward of the motors and apparatus for supplying electricity, were storage spaces for provisions and gasoline.
As has, perhaps, been gathered from the conversation engaged in by the occupants of the cabin on this night, the boys had arranged to take their winter “bachelor hall” out on a long journey during the summer. They were now ready to start on the trip they had long planned—no less an undertaking than a motor boat journey to the headwaters of the Amazon! In fact, the boat was already stocked with provisions, and the gasoline was to be taken on the next day.
The boys were all orphans, so far as they knew, having been in the first instance brought together by their homelessness. They had been reared in the streets of the city, selling newspapers and running errands and doing such odd jobs as boys can turn hand to. Often, when very young, they had slept together in hallways and in boxes in alleys. When arrived at the age of fourteen, they had secured employment in printing offices, and had of their own volition become regular attendants at night schools.
There are to-day thousands of boys in the large cities who are living just as these boys lived in their younger years, who sleep and eat where and when they can, and who are too often brought into crime by those who ought to teach them, from experience, that crime is never pleasant or profitable in the long run. Sometimes the law, in the guise of a fat-bellied, egotistical, greedy police officer, assists these wreckers of youth by arresting boys and seeing that they are sentenced to months of association with thieves.
These four boys, the three in the cabin and the one out somewhere in the rain, had fortunately been spared the attentions of police officers, and had grown to the age of seventeen with sturdy figures and fairly-well trained intellects—all save Julian Shafer, who had long been showing symptoms of tuberculosis.
It was the ill health of Jule that had at first suggested the trip to the Equator. The boy, ordinarily the merriest one of the lot, as full of pranks as a young kitten, had been informed by Dr. Holcomb that the climate of Chicago would bring his life to a close in two years’ time, so the boys had planned to take him away. Unselfishly they had set their hands to the task, and now the first step was near completion.
It was while they were cudgeling their brains for some way of accomplishing the desire of their hearts that Dr. Holcomb had come to them, first as a physician for the ailing boy, then as a sincere friend. After becoming well acquainted with the lads, and after making a few investigations as to their habits of thought, their loyalty to each other, the good doctor had said to them, one bright night in early fall when they were assembled in his office:
“I’ll tell you what, boys,” he had begun, “I have a motor boat down in the South Branch which is of little use to me. I used to enjoy trips in her, and she has seen service on many of the lakes and rivers of the Northwest, but I’m too busy now to take the time to flirt with her. If you care to look after her this winter, fix her up a little, and in the spring provision her for a journey to some tropical climate, you may have the use of her. What do you say?”
What did they say! What would any group of boys of seventeen say to such a proposition as that? They almost hugged the doctor, and the occupants of the other offices on that floor afterward complained that the doctor’s patients were too noisy to be good pay! As for Jule, when he understood that it was all being done for him, he said nothing at all, but there was a moisture in his bright eyes, a tightening of his handclasp that night, which his chums understood.
“But you must save up at least $200,” the doctor had stipulated, “for I don’t care to have the Rambler tied up in some foreign port for supply or repair bills. She will carry you anywhere, on ocean or river, if you learn how to handle her, and you needn’t be afraid of being caught by anything of her size in a chase. Be good to her and she’ll be good to you!”
So the boys had slept and cooked for themselves in the Rambler all that winter, to save more money, and had learned to run the boat, and had made many little repairs with their own hands. And now they had saved the sum required, had given up their positions, and were to sail away to the Amazon and the Andes on the morrow! It all seemed too good to be true!”
“The money,” Clay said, after looking over the map, “is, I remember now, in the round box, with the tinned food, in a square box with a red cover. Get it, Alex.”
Alex brought the box—and found it empty. The money was gone!