“I really don’t know,” he hesitated. “Of course, the lad is in hard luck, but somehow I don’t exactly like his looks and I don’t see what use he could be to us. I’d rather leave money here to pay for his living till some ship arrives he could get a berth on.”
“If you left him money in a place like this he might fall back into his old bad ways,” suggested Jack.
“That is true. I wouldn’t wish to push any one down the hill when there was a chance of helping them up,” said the millionaire, musingly. “Well, I’ll see about it,” he added after an interval of thought. Just then, as Captain Sparhawk came up, the incident was ended and the two elders set out for a trading store to arrange for supplies and other necessaries for their dash into the interior, for Mr. Jukes had resolved to act on Donald Judson’s unexpected clue and make his way up the river.
“I’ve got a notion that if we did take that fellow Donald along that he would make trouble for us,” said Raynor as soon as they were out of ear-shot.
“I don’t see how he could, or what object he would have,” doubted Jack. “Still, I myself wouldn’t trust him very far, in spite of his declarations of reform.”
But as it so happened neither of the boys need have troubled themselves over the matter, for that evening, when Mr. Jukes sent for Donald to have a talk with him, the boy’s manner had changed entirely. He was no longer servile and cringing as he had been earlier. In fact, he intimated very plainly that he wanted nothing more to do with the Jukes party.
There was a reason for this, a reason that none of the party naturally was able at the time to guess. Donald’s change of front was not due to any mere caprice. A deep-seated reason lay behind it, and that reason was rooted in an encounter he had had just after he left the boys in the hotel garden.
CHAPTER XX.—A TRAITOR IN CAMP.
Donald’s encounter had been with no less a personage than ‘Bully’ Broom himself, whose spies in the town had informed him that a party of Americans had arrived on a yacht and had been making inquiries about a missing man named Jukes. Broom at once knew that the half-suspected had happened, and that a strong party in search of the missing man had, by some inexplicable (to him) chance, arrived in Bomobori.