“Shall we set you down for a moment or can you keep going?”
Something indistinct was replied. It does not help communication to have been gagged for some little time. And Ted was laughing at the reply! Betty and Kathryn were horrified; but all in a moment they saw who it was that was being carried as more than once he had been helped from the football field at Lyon High. It was the Don! Obviously Chet had not waited to see who it was.
Ted grinned when he saw Betty. “He says it’s a little worse than athletics, Betty, but he can make it.” Then Ted’s expression changed.
“Please hurry up Chet with that coffee and then tell him to see to it that the boys tie up that old villain!”
In a flash Betty sensed the situation. It was the “villain!” She had only seen him once, and then not any too well—but she should have known the voice, though not quite so suave as when he had called upon her father to inquire for Ramon.
“Ramon Sevilla!” she gasped. But it was no time to learn how all this had happened. She turned back with Kathryn, but Chet in a great hurry passed them and was giving Ramon a drink of the coffee.
Affairs moved rapidly after this. Betty and Kathryn gathered up the rest of the picnic supplies and hurried to the boat. There Larry and Archie had secured the “villain,” who was angry and dangerous, they said. “Oh, you’d go off and leave somebody to die, would you?” belligerently queried Chet.
“I would have come back with my friends for him,” growled the angry man.
“And what would you have done with him then? Yes, you’ll tell that to the judge!”
But they fed the villain as well as Ramon, the “Don” of football fame, over whom they all rejoiced. Ramon was in no condition to tell his story and interested as they all were, they waited and asked no questions. The boys made him comfortable in the little cabin, fed him and left him to sleep. They told the girls how they had found the boat, really disabled as the man had said, and as they investigated they heard a low moan. Ramon could not call to them for the man had gagged him, presumably when he knew that the picnickers had landed there. There had evidently been a struggle against the gagging process, though Ramon had been securely tied before, he had given them to understand. Half conscious now, he had still recognized Ted and when freed had gradually come to himself. “You can’t get a good football player down!” declared Chet, referring to the characteristic nerve with which Ramon insisted on trying to walk up the path and over the rocks to the boat. “I didn’t recognize him, though—and the other boys untied him.”