“Not so quiet as you might think, Captain,” he said. “That’s what I intended to tell you about.”
His father and the army flyer sat forward alertly, with a sudden scraping of chair legs on the flagstone paving of the patio.
“What do you mean, Jack?” asked Mr. Hampton.
Jack pushed back his plate and slumped down comfortably in his chair, his crossed ankles resting on the curbing of the fountain.
“Something I learned at Don Ferdinand’s today,” he said.
Don Ferdinand was an irascible yet lovable old Spanish aristocrat living in the Sonoran mountains of old Mexico below the border. Several years before Jack and his father had made the old Don’s acquaintance under strange circumstances. Don Ferdinand was immensely wealthy and lived in feudal state in a palace in the wilderness, surrounded by many retainers. At that time he had been in opposition to the Obregon government. Seeking to embroil Mexico and the United States and thus further his plans for unseating Obregon as President, he had made a raid across the border and carried Mr. Hampton away captive. He then had sent word to Mr. Temple, his prisoner’s partner and the father of Jack’s big pal, Bob Temple, to the effect that Mr. Hampton would be held for ransom. Don Ferdinand had figured that Mr. Temple would appeal to the American government and that thus trouble between the Obregon government and the United States would be engendered. But Jack Hampton and his pals undertook to rescue the older man without public appeal, and penetrating the Sonoran wilderness they managed to accomplish their object. Since then Don Ferdinand and Mr. Hampton had become fast friends. As for Jack and the Senorita Rafaela, they had corresponded with each other, and now that Jack was back in the South-west, he had spent more and more time below the border.
After his remark, Jack sat silent an appreciable space of time. Finally, his father becoming impatient broke out with:
“Well, well, Jack, go on. You say something happened down at Don Ferdinand’s today, and you get us all excited. What was it?”
“I don’t know that you could really say something happened,” said Jack, choosing his words carefully. “But Don Ferdinand got pretty warm under the collar. Anyway, I’ll start at the beginning—it wasn’t much, and yet it might mean a lot—and I’ll give it to you as I got it.”
Old Ramon came slithering, across the flagstones in the moccasins which he always wore because of tender feet, and Jack cast a glance at him and then ceased speaking until the Mexican had deposited the coffee cups and departed with the luncheon plates.