“It’s you that is mistaken. He’s the corp himself. See how white he is.”
This last witticism drew a roar of appreciative laughter.
“Think ye’re smart, don’t ye?” said Jack, beginning with dignity and ending in companionable mirth. “Waal, fellers, I look like I feel.”
Jack was going to the “party.” So were seven spruce young men in white ducks donned by command invitation instead of their hot uniforms, who entered the lobby at that moment. The foremost saw Hannaford and hailed him, and the old Texan at once deserted his tormentors to join the newcomers.
“Le’s sit down, boys,” invited Hannaford, “nobody but ourselves ain’t come yet.”
With comfortable sighs, all eight sank into chairs which were drawn in a semi-circle. Jack looked around the group. None of the aviators with whom he had shared the honor of Ramirez’s capture and the rounding-up and scattering of the Smuggling Band was absent.
“Ain’t seen you since that night, Captain,” said Hannaford, his deep voice booming as he sought ineffectually to modulate it, and addressing himself to Captain Cornell. “We got a minute’s time before the party begins. Lay ’er out for me. What happened?”
So then Hannaford was told of how three De Havilands, each with its crew of two men, had gone cruising through the moonlight of that memorable night, high above the silvery reaches of the Rio Grande, to a landing near Carana; how there the members of the Border Patrol, commandeering a battered flivver, had piled into it and departed down river in time to round up a full dozen of Ramirez’s band before ever a boat had put out across the river for the purpose of transferring the Orientals into the United States, and had sent the others flying.
“You know the rest, Jack,” said Captain Cornell. “The fellows that we rounded up were all Mexicans lured from Don Ferdinand’s mine by Ramirez with specious promises of the much gold they would receive. They’re still in jail, but I expect that Uncle Sam will make it easy for them, inasmuch as they were not caught in the act and as they had not yet brought Orientals into the country. Besides, Don Ferdinand needs them back at his mine, and he and the Mexican Consul are making representations which ought to carry weight. How about Ramirez?”
“With him and his two lieutenants,” Hannaford said, “it’s some different. We got enough on ’em to hang ’em. And good riddance, too, if it could really be done—but it cain’t.”