"Out there?" asked the Spaniard, with a motion of his hand toward the side of the big hill through which the Canal had been cut.
"Out there—of course!" cried Joe. "We can't get moving pictures of the slide in here."
He did not intend to speak shortly, but it sounded so in the stress of his hurry.
"Then I'm coming!" said Mr. Alcando quietly. "If I'm to do this sort of work in the jungle, along our railroad, I'll need to have my nerve stiffened."
"This will stiffen it all right," returned Blake, sternly, as a louder sound from without told of a larger mass of the earth sliding into the waters of the Canal, whence the drift had been excavated with so much labor.
It was a bad slide—the worst in the history of the undertaking—and the limit of it was not reached when Joe and Blake, with their cameras and spare boxes of film, went out on deck.
The brown-red earth, the great rocks and the little stones, masses of gravel, shale, schist, cobbles, fine sand—all in one intermingled mass was slipping, sliding, rolling, tumbling, falling and fairly leaping down the side of Gold Hill.
"Come on!" cried Blake to Joe.
"I'm with you," was the reply.
"And I, also," said Mr. Alcando with set teeth.