Whereupon he shook Dick by the shoulder, calling upon him urgently to give up slumber and come back to earth.
“Say, what’s the matter with you?” groaned Dick, trying to shake off Phil’s grip of his shoulder. “We only just got to bed. Don’t you know that?”
“Snap out of it,” retorted Phil and there was a note in his voice that caused Dick to blink at him owlishly. “When you hear what I have to tell you, you’ll agree with me that this is no time for sleeping!”
One after another, the boys roused up, helped no doubt by the urgent quality in Phil’s voice. When they were awake enough to know what he was talking about he began swiftly to tell them of his adventure.
At his first words, they forgot all about their desire to go back to bed. Bimbo had lit the one lamp their quarters boasted and in the light of this they stared at Phil as though they thought he were weaving fairy stories for their benefit.
“Ramirez—on this island,” said Tom, dazedly. “How did he get here?”
“How many men were there with him, Phil?” asked Jack Benton quietly. In the light of the lamp his eyes glowed and his lips were set in a straight line.
“About nineteen or twenty, I should say,” returned Phil, adding with a grim smile, “If the fellow is dead that Ramirez took a shot at that makes one less against us, anyway.”
“It’s—it’s hard to realize yet,” said Tom, softly. “How could they have been here all the time on the island and we not know about it? It seems as if we must have heard something or seen something—”
“I did,” Phil interrupted him. “But when I told you about it, you wouldn’t believe me.”