Johnny chuckled. “We’re in a larger river, much larger. In fact, it is a great river, and something tells me——,” his words came swift and eager now, “that it is the good old Rio Hondo!”
“Johnny, it can’t be!”
“It could be, and is!” said Johnny emphatically. “I haven’t ridden that old river for nothing. She has a way of teasing and tossing your dugout while she whirls it forward that no other river ever had.
“Besides,” he added with another chuckle, “I can smell the water. It actually smells black.”
“What’s that?” the girl exclaimed suddenly.
“Sounds like thunder,” said Johnny.
* * * * * * * *
It was thunder, the forerunner of a storm. It was not a local storm, either, but one of those wide sweeping storms that tear at the timber on all the headwaters of a great river. Pant, at the edge of his camp, where he was assisting in shooting the last of the mahogany logs into their boom, heard it and his face grew thoughtful.
The hour of great suspense came at last. Their boom was loaded. They were ready to go down the river. Daego had not yet led his men to the attack.
“We’ll get away in the darkness,” Pant said to his Carib foreman, fairly dancing about in his eagerness to be away. “We’ll give old Daego the slip.”