Terry broke the silence: "Where is Lindsey?"
Cochran answered quickly to head off the more explicit Casey: "Oh, he's busy—busy with Sears."
Terry understood. Cochran sparred for an opening in the silence his friendship for Sears made embarrassing.
"Lieutenant, you are likely to have work for your soldiers pretty soon. There's a rough outfit gathering down here in the Gulf—though I imagine Bronner told you all about it."
"He told me something of it, but I would like to hear more."
"Well, I don't know much about it, excepting that a score or more of tough characters have come down in the past two months. They settled on a mangy plantation up the coast, north of Davao, but they aren't working: just loafing around all day. They seem to be waiting for something—or somebody. The natives are scared, and the whites don't feel any too good about it either! You know we are scattered all over the Gulf—everybody a mile or more away from his neighbors—and that means a mile of jungle."
Casey flared up: "We ought to run 'em out—they're no good, probably carabao thieves or worse—"
"How worse?" grinned Cochran. "Horse thieves—or pig thieves?"
Casey did not mind being ragged by his friends. He persisted: "Lieutenant, you ought to run 'em out as undesirables or under the vagabond law! They're no good—they won't work—and they're the toughest lookin' lot I ever did see! Sure and if I had my way I'd toss the lot into Sears' crocodile hole—the dirty, low-lived, shiftless lot of 'em!"
Terry was interested: "Sears' crocodile hole?" he asked.