Little as Frank believed Bellman’s tentative promise that he would send relief to them if they afforded him the opportunity to raid their camp and destroy their canoes and the Golden Eagle II, yet both boys realized not without dismay that there was a good deal of deadly earnest in the last words he had spoken.
“Leave them there to rot.”
Involuntarily both boys shuddered.
Bellman’s malevolent eye saw this and interpreted it at once as a sign of weakening.
“Ah,” he said viciously, “I touched you there, eh?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Frank, “but if you intend to convey that we are afraid of you, we are not.”
“Or of any cad that has been kicked out of the United States’ Navy, and has turned against his country,” added Harry.
“You young whelp,” shouted Bellman, beside himself at the sneer, “you have tried to checkmate me at every turn, but you’ll find out I am more than your match.”
“You come here to find Lieutenant Chapin, the dog who was instrumental in my disgrace. Well, I’ll introduce you to him.”
He gave a sharp order in the same tongue his followers used and the next minute the boys were seized. With a good, left-hand punch to the jaw Frank knocked one of the amazed little brown men half across the room and the next minute Harry had served another the same way. But it was no good. The opposing force was too many for them and ignominiously handcuffed they were at length led down several steep flights of stairs into what they knew, by its musty smell, must be an underground chamber.