Cliff and Nicky looked at one another dubiously. This was a predicament. Cliff’s father had gone ashore to pay the Indians in fancy articles for helping to beach the cruiser first and then to drive her back into the water. Cliff had caught Henry packing a “ditty bag” and the resulting declaration that he was “quitting them,” brought Nicky racing to Cliff’s hail. But they were puzzled to know how to summon the older men from the village.
Finally, with a shrug, touching his left ear gently, to indicate to his chum that he wanted the Mystery Boys’ signals to be noted and understood, Cliff pushed his hair over his right ear with an index finger, indicating to Nicky, “Come with me!” Nicky promptly swung on his heel, with a contemptuous glance at Henry, and went below.
“We can’t tie him, or anything!” Nicky objected when Cliff asked what they could do. “I can’t see what good it will do to stop him. We know all he knows—that Mort Beecher is at Porto Bello.”
“All right,” Cliff agreed. “We’ll let him go. I guess we can get along just as well without him.”
“Better,” Nicky declared. “I don’t trust him.”
They took no action, therefore, when Henry climbed aboard the ship’s shore-boat and went out, across the sand bars, across the reefs, and, one would suppose, out of their lives.
However, the afternoon was well along before they stopped talking about him, about Tom and Bill, and about everything that had happened. By that time Mr. Gray and Andy had arrived.
“What do we care if that Morgan is gone?” demanded Joe Anderson. “He’s a poor comrade on a cruise. First he almost let us be broken up on the reefs because he liked ‘tonic’ better than watching; then he deserted our companions, and for all we know, did worse.”
“We can start up the river, anyhow,” Mr. Gray stated. “The river towns are no longer quarantined against the lower coast or the upper river. We can run as far up river as the boat will navigate and then several of us can go to Tom and Billy Sanders by canoe.”
Accordingly the anchor was raised the next morning and with a river Indian aboard as pilot, they ran smoothly and quickly up the lagoon. When they were about a day’s run up the Rio Patuca, Nicky, at the bow, watching the alligators slide off of the sand banks, seeing the strange, bright birds flying over the water, suddenly gave a cry.