"What's comin' off here?" demanded the boy, trying hard to get a glimpse of Jack from where he lay.
"We're pinched!" Jack called out.
Then the two were dragged hastily to their feet and pushed through the jungle toward the camp. Jimmie thought this a place for optimism, and decided to try it on the low-browed chap who was rather rudely forcing him along. "I was just thinking of going down to see your camp," he said with a grin, "but I didn't know the way exactly. I'm glad you happened along. I've got the left hind foot of a rabbit that was caught by a black cat at midnight, in the dark of the moon, in a negro cemetery, on the grave of a black man who was hanged for murder. Guess that's brought me luck."
"You'll need four rabbits' feet if you get out of this," Jack grumbled. "Suppose we take a quick hike for the boat, right now?" he added, believing the Filipinos would not be able to understand English.
In this he was mistaken, for one of the men said:
"Don't you ever try it. Your left hind foot won't protect you if you do."
The boys gazed about the group, now halted, trying to pick out the speaker.
"But this is a magic rabbit-foot," Jimmie retorted, scornfully as if any sane person ought to know of the virtues of a left hind rabbit-foot. "It used to be owned by an armless man who rowed over the Great American Desert in an open boat!"
This, of course, was all for the purpose of inducing the one who had spoken in English to speak again, in order that he might be sorted out of the others. Jimmie's imaginative powers proved equal to the occasion.
A man who, regarded closely, did not look at all like a Filipino—a slender, though broad-shouldered, man with sharp gray eyes and the awkward manner of one unused to disguise—laughed lightly at the boy's odd conceit and said: