CHAPTER XXIV.
A STARTLING MEETING.
The legion of little brown men at once fell in round the two boys, whose clean cut young figures towered above their squat forms, and after they had surrendered their weapons—not without a momentary qualm of regret on Frank’s part—the march to the camp began.
Bellman said little as they made their way along the trail, but strode along with his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep thought. He was a huge man, with a singularly brutal face bronzed by the suns of a dozen countries over which he had been a wanderer, and a heavy drooping mustache which hid a cruel mouth. His eyes were steely gray and as keen as a hawk’s. Such was the man into whose power the Boy Aviators had fallen and even they did not realize the extent to which such a man will go to gain an end—and that he had an end in view his action in sparing their lives fully convinced them.
At last they emerged—after passing once more over the luckless wire—on the settlement under the hill that Frank had noted the night before from the boat. There was every evidence of abandonment about it, however, even now, although it had been so recently the scene of activity.
“If you had come to-morrow I should not have had the pleasure of receiving you,” said Bellman, with a sardonic grin, waving his hand to indicate the preparations for the abandonment of the settlement.
The blast furnace had been almost completely demolished and a gang of men, compatriots of the small brown men who formed the boys’ escort, were busily engaged in completing the work of destruction with crowbars and picks. Several of the small houses which Frank had seen from the boat had also vanished and the rest were portable contrivances. They were being rapidly taken to pieces and carried up the hill into the woods, where doubtless they were to be destroyed, for the smoke of a big fire was beginning to rise from there.
In the side of the hill back of the blast furnace, a great ragged hole had been torn like a small quarry, and a runway from this to the shattered blast-furnace indicated that some earth found in the hillside was reduced in the crucible to a condition in which it formed an ingredient of Chapinite. The large building was evidently a sort of bunk-house for the workmen and packing-house for the product that Captain Bellman and his men had been making there, for from its wide door a perpetual stream of dwarfed brown men were carrying packing cases carefully wrapped in straw to a small fleet of canoes that lay moored alongside a primitive wharf.
All these things the boys’ eyes took in as they were led across the bare earth to the barrack-like building; but of the man to search for whom they had come to the Everglades they could see no sign.
Bellman’s first care was for his wounded dogs, after which he ordered his men to bring the boys into a long, low ceiled room, apparently from its heat right under the roof of the bunk-house. Straw mats laid all along the walls also indicated that it was used as a sleeping attic by the Orientals employed on the island.
There was a small table in the room with a rickety chair by it, and Bellman took up a seat at it.