“All right, I know you’ll not break your word—you don’t look like that kind. Mount and let’s ride and talk to the old gent.”
“Well!” exclaimed Nicky. “Off again for adventure—and success, I hope!”
CHAPTER III
HENRY MORGAN’S STORY
They rode back to the mine property quickly. It did not take long to locate Mr. Gray, Cliff’s elderly father: he listened in silence to the eager trio as they broke in upon one another, so excited were they, and so eager to get his opinion in regard to the feasibility of starting at once for the Central American coast.
Henry Morgan had exacted from them all a promise that they would not disclose what he had told them to the mine superintendent, a rather lazy and careless man who seemed to realize that since the mine was hardly paying for its expense, his work was only a means of making a living until the mine finally “petered out” and he went elsewhere. The chums had already discovered that there were many adventurous and roving white men, from Mexico down all the Central American coast and into South America, as well as among the Virgin Islands, who eked out a living wherever and however chance offered. Henry Morgan was of that type, but much drinking and loose living had made him a very poor specimen, indeed, of the adventure-loving, roving American.
“If Mr. Morgan knew so much, why did he not come to us at once?” was Mr. Gray’s natural first question.
“I think he explains it logically,” answered Tom, “and Nicky and Cliff agree with me.” They nodded. “He is afraid that he might get ‘mixed up’ with the Mexican authorities, and that would spoil everything,” Nicky explained. “Let him tell you what he told us, won’t you, Mr. Gray?”
The elderly scholar and writer nodded. Henry Morgan cleared his throat and, in his husky, rusty voice, related the tale again.
“I’ve been a rover all my life,” he began, “from kid days on. ’Cause why? ’Cause I liked to see new places and have excitement. Sometimes I got more nor I bargained for. Sometimes I near starved. But I always come through all right.”
He sketched briefly the years he had spent roving up and down the Caribbean coast of the Central American states, and the adjacent islands, and over to Cuba during an insurrection, and in Haiti, while a revolution was in progress, and gold-prospecting in Spanish Honduras.