“They do,” agreed Mr. Gray.
“And,” finished Tom, “if the Golden Sun isn’t a mine—my sister had golden hair—do you suppose?——” No one answered.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE
Out from the Mosquito country the cruiser fought her way again; her machinery did not fail, and information given by the Indians, coupled with a fairly quiet sea, enabled the adventurers to make a safe passage through the treacherous rocks and the surging rollers.
There was no excitement during the run down the coast. Into the well-traveled route to and from the Panama Canal the voyagers worked the boat, and, by agreement, a stop was made at Colon.
In an earlier adventure the three chums, Tom, Cliff and Nicky, had visited Panama, and the great achievement of the Canal was therefore not a novelty to them, although they never ceased to marvel at the engineering skill by which it had been planned and built, nor did the vastness of its locks, the precision of its machinery, ever fail to make them thrill as they thought—the United States—“our country”—accomplished that feat. To them it was the Spirit of American success in an undertaking that made the world better and communication easier.
They did not wait long in Colon; only until Bill and Mr. Gray made inquiries about Mort Beecher.
As they traced the story, they learned, through many contacts which Mr. Gray’s reputation as a great scholar opened to them, that Morton Beecher had come to Colon, a few years before, and had seemed to be a very rich person. He had spent money freely and had gotten into a group of Spanish and of American pleasure-seekers who spent lavishly on the more sordid delights of a tropical life. Not many months ago Mort, broken in health and with no more money, had been compelled, as far as was known, to seek his fortune elsewhere. No one would give him employment because he was not dependable, had no strength, and spent all of his time bemoaning the vanished past of his opulence. No one knew just what had happened to him.
However, through the story that Henry Morgan had told them, they guessed that Mort’s misfortunes had finally led him to Porto Bello, that decayed spot on the Panama coast of the Caribbean which had once been a stronghold of the notorious pirate, Henry Morgan the first, the man who had first raided the Central and South American shipping and the towns of the coast, robbing and pillaging, and then had become reformed to such an extent that he had ended by making war on piracy and had achieved the great fame of being the governor of Jamaica who had done more than any other to “clean out” that nest of piratical looters.
With the wind kicking up a rough sea, the cruiser, namesake of the place they were bound for, headed toward Porto Bello.