“Renan Carmichael Pemberton!” he laughed and proffering his hand gripped the other’s with a hearty pressure.
“Well, I hear you’ve got the dope all firsthand, eh, Keen?”
“And how!” Hal laughed. “But I don’t know which I like better—Rene or Renan! I’ll change off to vary the monotony, huh? Just the same I’m darn glad to see you—boy, how glad!”
“And you’re well and safe, eh, chappie? Heavens, but I was worried about you. I suppose you thought that I didn’t care what happened to you, eh?”
“Never. I just didn’t know, that’s all.”
Renan pointed to two rickety stools. They sat down.
“Not knowing that it was a put-up job by that skunk Goncalves, I came straight here to get Ceara to help me. That’s where I made my mistake, for Goncalves was here and when he heard me mention your name to the general, all was off. He accused me of being an informer to the Federals and all that sort of thing. Ceara understood that I didn’t know Rodriguez from Adam and he thought it was pretty rotten work for Goncalves to do, but he couldn’t say too much. He was afraid of Goncalves, that’s the long and short of it. That’s why he had to put me in here—he had to, or that little trouble maker would have gone all over this camp saying the General played me for a favorite—which he did.”
“And here you’ve been ever since, huh?”
“Here I’ve been. But tell me about yourself?”
Hal told him briefly, yet missing no important detail, and summed it up with his singular interview with the Coronel Goncalves.