Our heroes were among the first to be granted permission to land, and soon they were speeding toward the town in cutters. There were only a few small piers in what was a very small harbor, and not well protected at that, so the battleship had to anchor out. Up to the public pier raced the cutters, and out on shore leaped the eager sailors.
CHAPTER XX—THE RIOT
“Well, we’re here at last!” exclaimed Ned, as he fell into step beside his brother, walking along the water front.
“Yes, Ned, and it remains to be seen what we can do—I mean about our business and uncle’s. As for quelling any trouble here, there doesn’t seem to be any.”
This was true enough, as far as it went. The two battleship boys and their comrades found themselves in a typical city of the tropics. It was a large one, and there were many improvements that would scarcely have been looked for. But a number of European firms, including many Germans, were in business, and this accounted, in part, for the up-to-dateness.
“But I don’t see any signs of a revolution,” declared Ned.
“Maybe they’ve cleared it all away,” Frank suggested. “Don’t you think, though, Ned, that there is a sort of air of expectancy about the people—as though they were looking for something unpleasant to happen, as we were last night on board?”
“Well, maybe you’re right, Frank,” Ned admitted, as he looked into the faces of the inhabitants. There were furtive glances cast at the men from the United States battleship, but, back of that, there seemed to be something else. And more than once Ned and Frank saw little knots of men gathered on the street corners. And they would look and point in the direction of the hills, where the big guns had made great holes in the earth.
“I wonder what they’d say if they knew you had a hand in making the dirt fly?” said Ned.
“Well, not much more of a hand than you had, Ned. We all had a finger in the pie, even if I actually did fire the big gun. I couldn’t have done that unless you fellows had helped. But I guess there’s no danger of ’em knowing what I did. Not that I care. Though they don’t seem much concerned at what we did.”