“Home?” repeated Jimmie, in disgust, “we’re more’n fifty miles from camp, the way the roads run. If we can get a train at Culebra, we may be able to get home by dark. You must remember that we rode a long way with the lieutenant. Culebra is almost to the Pacific. The locks are there, or near there.”
“We can get a train, I guess,” Peter said, sleepily. “I wonder if any of the boys are sitting up for us?”
“You bet they’re out hunting for the two of us,” Jimmie said. “It takes one half of our party to keep the other half from getting killed,” he added.
There were still no signs of the canal line. The jungle was as dense as ever, and seemed more desolate and uncanny than ever under the growing light of day. As the sun arose and looked down into the green pools vapors arose, vapors unpleasant to the nostrils and bewildering to the sight.
Presently the boys came to a little knoll from which they could look a long way into the jungle stretching around them. Below were slimy thickets, tangles of creepers and vines which seemed to be sentient, but no signs of the work of man. It was now eight o’clock in the morning, and the boys were worn out and hungry.
“If they’re out lookin’ for us,” Jimmie said, “I’ll give ’em somethin’ to follow. Watch me.”
“But they won’t be anywhere around here,” Peter said, as Jimmie began gathering dry twigs and branches from the ground.
“They’ll begin where Lieutenant Gordon left us,” insisted the boy. “Now you see if I don’t wake some Boy Scout up. Here, you carry this bunch of wood over to that other knoll.”
“All right,” Peter said. “Perhaps another jaguar will see the signal and give us a call.”
In a short time the boys had gathered two great piles of dry leaves and branches lying some fifty feet apart. Then a quantity of green boughs were gathered and placed on top of the dry fuel. When matches were touched to the piles a dense smoke ascended far above the tops of the trees. There were two straight columns of it lifting into the sky above the jungle.