"Oh, I don't know," answered Pat. "It is all a muddle. I can't understand how a man could follow us with instructions, anyway. We came fast in the motor boat, and could not have been followed in a canoe. I don't know where this messenger was to spring from, I'm sure. Anyhow, the wrong one came, or the right one brought the wrong dispatches, and Lieutenant Rowe wouldn't stand for it, and there was a conference, and then the brown men came in and we were geezled. Looked like a raid on a pool room in little old New York!"
"But this false messenger—the wrong man, or the right man with the wrong instructions—was captured also?"
"Yes, he was; and he made a row about it. I'll tell you what I think. There's treachery in the secret service somewhere. Some interest or some nation is trying to take the Philippines away from Uncle Sam."
"And receiving assistance from those in the employ of Uncle Sam!" Ned said, musingly. "Well, I'm here to see what can be done in the line of locking the traitors up in a nice hot cell at Manila."
"You needn't look much farther," Jimmie said. "There's a second motor boat out in a bay west of the island, and I'm tellin' you that it came across from China. It is the washee-washee people who are kicking up this mess, all right."
"You seem to have solved the mystery," laughed Ned. "From the first we have known that there was a conspiracy against Uncle Sam, but the question has always been 'Who?' and not 'What for?' The purpose of the alleged treaty has never been a mystery. What we are here for is to catch the conspirators with the goods, as Inspector Byrnes used to say. And now you've solved the puzzle!"
"Quit yer kiddin'!" exclaimed Jimmie. "I can say what I think, can't I? Besides, if it ain't the Chinks, who is it?"
"That is just what we want to know," Ned replied, more soberly. "There is a notion at Washington that it may be some financial interest. The newspapers were saying, when we left civilization, that a certain monopoly was financing the Mexican revolution, and there is a suspicion that some disloyal men in the United States are doing the same with the ignorant natives of the Philippines—urging them on and supplying them with guns and ammunition."
"Well," Pat observed, "whoever it is that is doing the business, there are traitors in the secret service department. The Americans who acted with the Filipinos who captured us are posted as to what is going on at Washington, all right."
"Let's go and get them," suggested Jimmie. "I guess the third degree would make them tell all about it!"