As a commissioned officer in the United States navy he had been intrusted with important dispatches. If he did not recover the dispatches, and then proceed with the rest of the duty marked out for him, a black mark would be set against his name that would interfere with his promotion.
Glennie was worried as he had never been before in his life. His one desire was to serve Uncle Sam with a clean and gallant record. His father, the Boston nabob, expected great things of him, and Glennie, being puffed up—as already stated—with rather high ideas regarding his family, expected them of himself. Therefore the loss of that packet of official papers caught him like a slap in the face. It made him squirm, and he was squirming as he sat by that table on the grating, felt the Borneo reach the end of her scope of cable and come to a stop with her mud hook hard and fast.
The water was too shoal for a large boat to get very far inshore, and Glennie was among the first to tumble into the launch that soon hove alongside. When he had scrambled off the launch at the landing, he hailed a queer-looking cab and ordered the dusky driver to carry him, as rapidly as possible, to the Ciudad Bolivar.
The ensign did not pay much attention to the scenery as he was jostled along—his mind was too full of other things for that—and presently he went into the wood and stone building that faced the plaza and proceeded to make frantic inquiries regarding a waiter by the name of Tolo.
To all of these eager questions the Venezuelan proprietor of the hotel gave a negative shake of the head.
“There must be some mistake—the Señor Americano has surely been wrongly informed. There has never been such a person as the Japanese employed in the hotel. The waiters were all Venezuelans, and no Japs were ever employed. Perhaps this Tolo had worked in the old hotel that had been burned during the great fire?”
Glennie’s trail, faint enough at best, had run into thin air. He was at the end of it, and it had led him nowhere. Going off into one corner of the wine-room, the ensign dropped down at a table in an obscure corner, rested his chin in his hands, and wondered dejectedly what he should do next.
He was not very well acquainted with Orientals, or the brand of guile they used. He had heard of Japs insinuating themselves into fortifications flying the United States flag and making drawings and jotting down memoranda of the guns, stores, and number of men. He had laughed contemptuously at such yarns, although heartily agreeing with the expediency that had suggested such a move on the part of the men from Nippon. Like all others in the sea and land service of the great republic, Ensign Glennie knew that it was not so much the forts, or the guns, or the ammunition, as it is the unconquerable spirit of the men behind the guns that count.
But where was the tactical advantage to be gained by a Jap in stealing an envelope addressed to a consular agent tucked away in a Brazilian town at the mouth of the Amazon? The only advantage which Glennie could think of was that of pecuniary gain. Tolo had stolen the packet in order to demand money for its return. Glennie had plenty of money, and he began to think he had fallen into a grievous error by running away from La Guayra without giving Tolo a chance to communicate with him.
And yet there was the information developed by the La Guayra police, to the effect that Tolo had sailed for Port of Spain. However, this might be as unreliable as that other supposed discovery, namely, that Tolo had worked at the Ciudad Bolivar.