“Let him come!” cried Terry. “I’m not afraid of Bud Hyslop. He’s a big braggart, but it’s all a bluff. He’s just a coward!”
“I’d like to get Bud down in this cave and keep him here,” said Prim angrily. “I’d like to keep him here forever.”
“I can’t see how that would help any,” answered Terry. “What we want to do is to get away from the island and down to Peru with this paper. And we’ll not get away by making a prisoner of Bud. That won’t help in the least.”
Pedro was shaking his head. He frowned and his face looked fierce and cruel. The girls felt shudders go through their bodies and realized that the tribe might be really savage if roused to anger.
Suddenly Pedro spoke, and in his halting, broken sentences he expressed his ideas. Bud was on the way to the new village, and when he came, if he made trouble, it would be good to put him down in the cave. Besides they might make him talk so that they would know what Joe Arnold was planning to do.
“And where will we stay?” asked Terry.
“My house!” replied the chief with a wave of his hand toward the hut. “Pedro’s house, your house!” And Rosa led the girls inside the hut.
Pedro covered the opening to the cave with straw mats and giving orders for his followers to guard the girls well, he left to go back to the beach.
But Terry and Prim were far less comfortable here than they had been in the cave. Here there was not a breath of wind, for Pedro’s wife seated herself in the opening and kept out what little air there was.
Finally Terry could stand it no longer. She jumped up and shoved Rosa aside. The big black woman laughed as she watched Terry and Prim mopping the perspiration from their faces.