"But, good heavens—you're keeping our promise to him, aren't you?" I burst out.
"To the letter—exactly and precisely to the letter," was his calm reply. "You heard what the Frenchman asked, and what I agreed to. He made three conditions; we were to go back to our camp; he was to be permitted to land in peace; and Goff was to be given up. We have kept faith in all three particulars. But he isn't meaning to keep faith with us at all."
"You mean that he won't leave us the boat?" I gasped.
"Not on your life. Goff told me we couldn't put the slightest dependence in anything he might say; and if I had been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt over Goff's warning, his own boasting would have turned the scale against him. Did you remark what he said, just as he was leaving?—about Santa Cruz and the liberator?"
I don't know why the fat man's boast hadn't made the proper impression upon me when he shrilled it out at us, or why I had failed to recall the name he had given as that of a Nicaraguan bandit whose cruelty and rapacity had long been a byword in the Central American republics. There must have been a blind spot in my memory at the moment, for the name and ill fame of Gustave the Fat were known even in distant Venezuela.
"That fiend!" I choked. And then: "You never shipped Gustave Le Gros in New York as cook on the Andromeda!"
"Oh, no. We shipped the real Bassinette, doubtless. Where and how the change was made—unless our repair stop at Gracias á Dios gave them their chance—I don't know."
"Wait a minute," said I. "Isn't it occurring to you now that the Gracias á Dios stop might have been prearranged? Haskell couldn't account for that propeller shaft running dry, and neither could I, after I had examined it. It had every appearance of having been tampered with; sand or some other abrasive put into it. If such a thing were done, and timed so that we'd have to put in at Gracias——"
"Sure!" he replied. "And the gold—my gold—was probably the main-spring of the whole plot. The secret of it must have leaked out some way in New York, and it was handed on to this bandit bunch; with Lequat to trail us, first to Havana, and afterwards to New Orleans. But that's all ancient history now. Our original job is still before us, and that is not to let them get away with the yacht and leave us as we were."
We had reached the appointed picket line, and short detours to right and left put us in touch with Dupuyster and Grey on the south beach and Sanford and Billy Grisdale on the north. Grey had scouted ahead a little way, and he told us that the long-boat and the disabled electric launch were lying at the beach at the place which had been our late battle-ground, with two men guarding them. And Grisdale and the professor had a similar report to make concerning the mutineers' vigilance. Billy had also made a forward reconnaissance, and he had seen two sentries pacing back and forth on the sands in the little indentation which we had named "Spaniards' Bay."