"Don't sidetrack the relish," chirped Jordan. "Let Matt's hot work come on with the beans. Go on, Matt—or you tell us, Dick, if Matt's too bashful."
Thereupon Dick waded into past events as he and Matt had experienced them. He slighted his own deeds to give a greater lustre to Matt's, and finally Matt, in self-defense, had to take the telling into his own hands and finish it.
"Well, Jupiter!" exclaimed Jordan, "there's enough tabasco in that run of work to satisfy almost anybody. But, if Motor Matt hadn't come up under that launch like he did, all of us prisoners, my dear friends, would now be tramping through the jungle toward Pitou's new camp."
"I'm glad that note of mine proved so valuable to us," spoke up Coleman.
"How did you come to lay all that information aboard, Mr. Coleman?" inquired Dick. "It seemed main queer that a prisoner could have got wise to all that."
"Pitou told me," said Coleman, with a twinkle in his eye, "over a game of seven-up. He indulged in liquid refreshment, as I remember, and the more he beat me, and the more he indulged, the more confidential he became. I knew Pedro was a friend of Ysabel's, and that he was helping her to leave the camp, so I managed to write down what I had heard, hoping that Ysabel might get to Port Livingstone and give the news to somebody there who could and would help us."
"You haven't told us, Mr. Jordan," said Matt, "what happened to your landing party."
"I hesitate to put it into cold words," answered Jordan, "after listening to a recital which shows that you are a general in that sort of affair, Matt, while I am only a private. By rights, my lad, you are the one who should have gone with that landing party. However, since it appears necessary to have our experiences in order to make the testimony complete, here goes.
"By accident we struck a path. Tirzal said he knew about the path, but I think the good-natured rascal was talking for effect, and that he had never seen it before. I was fairly sure in my own mind, mainly because we had seen nothing of Fingal's schooner after leaving Belize nor of a small boat after leaving Port Livingstone, that Fingal and Cassidy hadn't reached the revolutionists and told what they knew. I suspect that that's what made me careless, for I was that when you consider that we were out on a reconnoitring expedition and ought to have been looking for traps as well as for revolutionists.
"Well, the trap was sprung at a turn in the path. I wasn't able to see around the turn, and a bunch of colored persons in ragged clothes were on us before you could say Jack Robinson. This happened quite a little while after we got away from the boat. As I recollect, we had reconnoitred, and had been led away from the path on some wild-goose chase or other by Tirzal half a dozen times. I was just thinking about returning to the boat when we pushed around that turn.