“We might be able to save time,” put in Bob, “if my friend went with your servant and took the doctor directly to the submarine.”
“Fine!” exclaimed the consul, and Dick and the negro hurried away.
“Sit down, my boy,” said the consul, waving his hand toward a chair, “and we’ll chat a little. I reckon I ought not to say much to you until I talk with Captain Nemo, junior, and make sure everything is right and proper. Still——”
“Here are my credentials,” said Bob, and handed over the letter which he had recently read aloud in the periscope room of the Grampus.
The consul glanced over the letter.
“I’ll take you on that showing, Bob Steele,” said he heartily, as he handed the letter back. “If anything is done for my friend Coleman, it’s got to be done with a rush. The little states all around us are able to have a revolution whenever some one happens to think of it. There’s one on now, and Captain James Sixty was to help on the fighting by landing a cargo of guns and ammunition. Sixty’s work, as you may know, was nipped in the bud, and the revolutionists are having a hard time of it. But they’re still active, and about two weeks ago, when Sixty failed to arrive with the war material and they were afraid he had been captured by the United States authorities, the hotheaded greasers planned reprisal. That reprisal was about the most foolish thing you ever heard of. They spirited away my friend Coleman; then they sent me a letter saying that Coleman would be released whenever the United States government gave up Sixty—and, at that time, Sixty wasn’t in the hands of the authorities at all. He had just simply failed to show up with the contraband of war, and the revolutionists imagined he had been bagged. I communicated with Washington at once, and it was that, I reckon, that gave the state department a line on Sixty.”
“Is Mr. Coleman in any danger?” asked Bob.
“You never can tell what a lot of firebrands will do. They’re bound to hear of Sixty’s capture, and of the confiscation of his lawless cargo. The news will get to them soon, and when that happens Coleman is likely to have trouble. If possible, he must be rescued from the revolutionists ahead of the receipt of this information about Sixty and the lost guns. It’s a tremendously hard piece of work, and only a submarine boat with an intrepid crew, to my notion, will stand any show of success. If a small boat from a United States warship was to try to go to the rescue, the revolutionists would learn she was coming and would immediately take to the jungles of the interior with their captive. See what I mean?”
“Mr. Coleman’s captors are somewhere on the sea-coast?”
“Not exactly. They have a rendezvous on the River Izaral, which runs into the Gulf of Amatique, to the south of here. The revolutionists have tried to make people think that they have Coleman somewhere on the Rio Dolce, but that would put the whole unlawful game in British territory, and wherever the British flag flies you’ll find lawbreakers mighty careful.”