Henry Morgan wiped his dry lips and cleared his roughened throat. Tom hurried him along.
“When you backed down the trail—what?”
“Nothing!” said Henry.
“Nothing?” Mr. Gray exclaimed, adding to the chorus of the younger voices, for they had not heard the details before.
“Nothing!” Henry repeated. “Not a sign of help. That fellow was gone, slicker’n grease, with the little girl and the burros and the gold. I was caught, of course. The bandits tried to get out of me what I knew and I told them exact facts like you’ve just heard. I was mad at being made to help him ‘double-cross’ his gang and they saw I was telling the truth. Well——” he broke off.
“But he got a letter, a couple of months ago, he says,” Tom took up the recital. “Another adventurer Mr. Morgan knows, wrote him, and—what did you say he wrote?”
“He wrote me that he had run onto—this fellow we been talking about, down in Colon—Panama, you know! Said he was livin’ like a millionaire, and was talkin’ that he was gettin’ gold off of——” ‘from’ he meant, of course—“off of some Indians. I guess it’s out of the Golden Sun. So, now, gent, my proposal is this:
“I know how to get where that Toosa, the old Indian, is. He will know about—this fellow—if he’s located that Golden Sun. But I couldn’t pay the fare from here to the coast, let alone get to Spanish Honduras. That’s where you come in. You finance me, while I try to find—that man. Then we’ll all learn what we want—you, where he took the little girl, what happened to her. Me, where that mine is. I staked him plenty of times, I have right to a share in it.”
“How would we get there?” asked Tom.
“Have to hire a boat to coast along to the outer reefs and the mouth o’ the Rio Patuca, then we’d have to get them Mosquito Indians to take us up the river in canoes. It’s rough country. What say if I go alone?”