“And so will I,” agreed Tom.
“Here too,” Cliff echoed the sentiment.
They were led across the cleared space. Around it, without any particular order, huts were erected. They were built of an open fashion, with stakes at the corners, and at intervals, to support the roofs of thatch, woven together quite tightly and sloped to shed water.
Toward one of these the chums were ushered.
“Do you see what I see?” whispered Cliff, his observant eyes taking in a squatted figure in the shade of a hut across the quadrangle.
His friends looked that way. “It’s a white man,” Nicky admitted. “But what makes you so excited about him?”
“Well,” said Cliff, “we know that Henry and that Mort Beecher got started ahead of us. I wouldn’t be surprised——”
At the instant that he paused the white man looked up. He turned his head and called to another figure resting in a hammock.
“Wake up, Henry!” he cried, in a fat, hoarse voice. “Wake up. Seems like we got visitors, seems like!”
He stood up and the chums saw a portly, very short body on two brief pillars of legs, with a round, bullet head, twinkling eyes and a smiling mouth, over which an extremely red nose spoke of the many nights he had spent with Jack in Porto Bello, for there was no doubt that the man was Mort Beecher.