Fifteen minutes later the Boy Aviators were on board the insurgent gunboat General Estrada and safe.
[1]. S. O. S. is now the wireless distress call. C. Q. D., the former tocsin having being used by too many would-be humorous amateurs to make its continuance advisable.—Author’s note.
CHAPTER XXIV.
UNLOADING AN ARMY.
After what they had passed through the previous night the boys, as may be imagined, did not awaken till late next day, to find the sun streaming through the porthole of their cabin and the ship rolling in a heavy beam-end sort of a way that showed them at once that they were at anchor. Hurriedly dressing they hastened on deck and found themselves on board what was evidently a converted yacht, to judge by her brass and mahogany fittings. Several machine guns, though, and the presence forward of hundreds of ragged soldiers gambling and chicken-fighting, showed them that they were not on board any pleasure craft, but one that was equipped strictly for business—and the grim business of war at that.
They had hardly poked their heads out of the companion before a dapper little man in a brass-buttoned sea uniform hastened up to them. This personage introduced himself as Captain Hans Scheffel, of the vessel and a former commander of a German passenger boat. In a few words he informed the boys that the craft was one of the yachts purchased by the revolutionists for conversion into gunboats and that she was at that moment anchored a few miles south of Bluefields, where it was the present plan that the revolutionaries should be put ashore and commence a march to the Rama River, and possibly across it, to gain the main body, as somewhere in the Rama country Rogero and his troops were supposed to be encamped.
The boys were much relieved to learn that the vessel on which they found themselves was not, as they had at first feared, one of the government’s craft. They well knew that the government of Nicaragua was no friend to Americans and that, in their case especially, Rogero’s enmity would make it risky,—if not actually perilous,—for them to fall into the hands of Zelayan troops.
After the first introductions and explanations of the stout little German and the profuse thanks of the boys for their rescue, he led them below to breakfast in what had been the elaborately decorated saloon of the American millionaire who formerly owned the gunboat. All the “gilt and gingerbread,” however, had been stripped from her when she was converted into a fighting-craft, and now she was as plain as a barge in her interior fittings.
The loss of their Golden Eagle had been a severe blow to the boys and they were not feeling in any too cheerful a mood as Captain Scheffel ushered them into the room and motioned to a table on which was spread an ample breakfast served by black stewards. They were just sitting down to it with healthy young appetites, that even regret over the loss of their ship could not dull, when one of the doors opening off the saloon opened and a tall, black-mustached young man of unmistakably South American descent entered.