"It is a wonderful piece of work," the captain said, as Blake and Joe packed up the cameras they had been using. "Think of it—a cut nine miles long, with an average depth of one hundred and twenty feet, and in some places the sides are five hundred feet above the bottom, which is, at no point, less than three hundred feet in width. A big pile of dirt had to be taken out of here, boys."
"Yes, and more dirt will have to be," said Mr. Alcando.
"What do you mean?" asked the tug commander quickly, and rather sharply.
"I mean that more slides are likely to occur; are they not?"
"Yes, worse luck!" growled the captain. "There have been two or three small ones in the past few weeks, and the worst of it is that they generally herald larger ones."
"Yes, that's what I meant," the Spaniard went on.
"And it's what we heard," spoke Blake. "We expect to get some moving pictures of a big slide if one occurs."
"Not that we want it to," explained Joe quickly.
"I understand," the captain went on with a smile. "But if it is going to happen you want to be here."
"Exactly," Blake said. "We want to show the people what a slide in Culebra looks like, and what it means, in hard work, to get rid of it."