“Can’t be sure,” he warned himself. “Too dark down there. Have to get closer,” he said. “Will, too, after a while. See if I don’t.”
CHAPTER XVIII
TWO BLADE JOHNNY
On the dock at Porte Zelaya, the task of loading bananas was at last progressing. At regular intervals all that long forenoon and well into the day, the little engine with its string of cars came puffing and rattling down the narrow gauge track. With its cars groaning under the great loads of green which it brought, it came to a halt on the dock. There, in exact imitation of the ants that had entertained Johnny on the previous day, the barefooted, perspiring Caribs seized upon the precious fruit, to pass it from hand to hand and store it carefully away in the hold of the ship.
Johnny, with an eye out for trouble, was everywhere. Now on the dock, now on the train and now in the heart of the banana plantation, his keen eye took in everything. Yet no trouble came. A few disconsolate Spanish banana workers hung about. Such of these as seemed willing to render honest service Johnny set to work.
Dressed in the simplest of garb, cotton shirt, khaki trousers and high-topped boots, Johnny nevertheless drew forth many a covert smile from the black Caribs, for he wore at his belt not one machete, but two—one on either side, and none of the Caribs had ever before seen a man carry two such weapons.
The sun was hanging low over the storm wrecked banana plantation, their task was well nigh completed when Johnny, seeing some straggling young banana plants growing in a half cleared patch to the right of the track and believing that here he might find a few superb bunches, hurried away down a narrow deer trail.
He had reached the nearest bunch of bananas and was about to cut it down when something sprang at him.
His first thought, as his heart went racing and he dropped to earth with the quickness of a cat, was that he had come close to the lair of a jaguar.
This thought was dispelled by the white gleam of a blade.
“Diaz!” he told himself. “And we are alone. There is to be a battle after all, a battle, perhaps to the death, with weapons which he has been familiar with since a child.”