Mort Beecher and Henry Morgan, in their commandeered—to use a polite word—canoe, gave the cruiser plenty of seaway, and passed her well on the far side. However, Bill, using the glasses, recognized Henry and set up a shout. It was decided to row over to the sloop, on which they were seen to embark; at once Bob got the boat up and he, Andy and Bill tumbled in; but before they were half-way over the lagoon to the outer water which had depth for the deep-keeled sloop, she had hoisted sail and was bearing away.
“That’s funny,” Bill commented, when, giving up, they returned to the Porto Bello. “They didn’t come near us, and how they did hurry that boat away from here.”
“They could not have seen or heard of our boys,” Mr. Gray said. “They would, in decency, have stopped to tell us, no matter how great their haste.”
“They were in a big hurry,” Bill reflected. “I wonder why! They had no one with them. Could they have found Tom’s sister? In that case they would have brought her out.”
“They got into this Chucunaque country and came out safe again,” suggested Andy. “Might the lads have got there too?”
They could come to no conclusion, and while they all agreed that there was something decidedly strange about the haste with which Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher sailed North, and their avoidance of the very men who had helped Henry, they dared not go in pursuit to compel the elusive Henry to reveal his ’Cause why!
Nearly a week later, after being treated with dignity accorded to people of real prestige, Tom Nicky, Cliff and Margery were permitted, well-escorted, to leave the Chucunaque’s village for the coast.
Probably the chief’s experience with the motion picture film helped to establish them as true wonder-workers. The chief had seen Tom’s startling demonstration of fire, when he used the strip of celluloid “leader” torn off the end of a film. He therefore feared Tom until one of his medicine men, a little jealous of the white lad’s superior prestige, whispered that there was no great trick or secret, that he, too, could produce the smoke and flame with a piece of the picture-ribbon.
Nicky, Tom, Cliff and Margery, walking from but to hut, visiting the hammock-bound sick people, who believed that if Tom touched them it. would help to heal them, saw the portable picture projector apparatus, abandoned by Henry, being examined by the chief. He gingerly touched it, but his medicine man, with a contemptuous grunt, drew a length of the coiling film out of the lower magazine and ripped off a short bit. This he handed to the chief with some directions. The chief, hesitating, walked gingerly to the fire over which the community cook-pot hung, and stood irresolute.
“Look, Tom,” Nicky whispered. “He’s trying to nerve himself to make your magic. If he does, we are beaten.”