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CHAPTER XVII.
THE WATCHER IN THE THICKET

Between Tabernilla and Gamboa, a distance of about fifteen miles, the restless Chagres river, in its old days of freedom, crossed the canal line no less than fifteen times. At Gamboa the river finds a break in the rough hills and winds off to the northeast, past Las Cruces and off into more hills and jungles.

Where the river turns the canal enters the nine-mile cut through the Cordilleras, which form the backbone of the continent. Here at the Culebra cut, the greatest amount of excavation for the waterway is being done. This cut ends at Pedro Miguel locks, which will ease the ships down into the Pacific ocean.

Where the river turns to the northeast, at Gamboa, a wild and hilly country forms both banks. The hillsides as well as the plateaux are overgrown with dense vegetation. As in all tropical lands, the fight for survival is fierce and merciless. Trees are destroyed by great creepers, great creepers are destroyed by smaller growths, and every form of life, vegetable as well as animal, has its enemy. Every living thing springs up from the dead body of another.

Sheltered and half concealed from view in this wild country between Gamboa and Las Cruces, on the day the Boy Scouts set out in their search for Jimmie and Peter, there stood a house of stone which seemed as old as the volcanic formation upon which it stood. It was said that the structure had been there, even then looking old and dismantled, when the French began their operations on the Isthmus.

This house faced the valley of the Chagres river, having its back against a hill, which was one of the steps leading up to the top of the Cordilleras. There was a great front entrance way, and many windows, but the latter seemed closed. Few signs of life were seen about the place at five o’clock that afternoon.

From a front room in the second story the sounds of voices came, and now and then a door opened and closed and a footstep was heard on the stairway. However, those who walked about the place seemed either going or coming, for the house gained no added population because of the men who climbed the slope at the front and, ignoring the main entrance, passed on to the second floor by a secret staircase in the wall, entrance to which seemed easy for them to find.

At the hour named three acquaintances of the reader occupied the front room on the second floor of the stone house. They were Col. Van Ellis, the military man Frank Shaw had talked with in the old house near the Culebra cut, Harvey Chester, the father of the boy Jimmie and Peter had encountered in the jungle, and Gostel, the man who had approached the two boys the night before on the lip of the great excavation.

In a rear apartment, a sort of lumber-room, devoted now to wornout and broken furniture and odds and ends of house furnishing goods, was still another acquaintance – Ned Nestor. The patrol leader had met the two lost boys at Culebra, in the company of Harvey Chester and his son, Tony, and had spent enough time with the party to learn that Pedro, the ex-servant of the Shaw home, had been seen at the Chester camp, and that he had fled at the approach of Jimmie and his chum.

The story of Gostel’s watching the cut at night, probably assisted by Pedro, and Harvey Chester standing guard, or seeming to do so, by day, had interested Ned greatly. The presence on the Isthmus of Pedro gave an extra kink to the problem. The attempt to capture the two boys, as previously told by Gastong, on the previous night, and the unmistakable anxiety of Chester to remain in their company, had led Ned to believe that at last he was getting to some of the people “high up” in the conspiracy against the canal. Surely a man of the education and evident wealth of Harvey Chester was not loitering along the Culebra cut just for the excitement there was in it. It was plain that he was there for a purpose, and the arrival of a man Jimmie declared to be Gostel had convinced Ned that the heads of the plot were not far away.

Gostel had greeted the boys heartily, expressing relief at the knowledge that they had escaped in safety from the jungle, and Chester had urged them all to accept of his continued hospitality. Nothing had been said of Gostel’s pursuit of the two boys, and Ned had reached the conclusion that Gostel did not know that his movements had been observed.

Anxious to see what Gostel really was up to, Ned had instructed the boys to remain at a hotel at Culebra or visit the Chester camp, just as they saw fit, and had followed Gostel back to Gamboa and out to the stone house, where he had managed to hide himself in the room above described without his presence on the premises being suspected. One thing, however, Ned did not know, and that was that Jimmie McGraw, full of life and curious to know what was going on, had trained on after him and was now watching the house from a thicket on the hillside.

Ned had heard a good deal of talk since hiding himself in the rear room, much of which was of no account. Men who had delivered notes and messages had come and gone. Col. Van Ellis seemed to be doing a general business there. Some of the men who came appeared to be canal workmen, and these left what seemed to be reports of some kind.

From a break in the wall Ned could hear all that was said and see a great deal of what went on in the front room. At five o’clock a tall, dark, slender man whose black hair was turning gray in places entered the front room by way of the secret stairway in the side wall. He handed some papers to Col. Van Ellis and seated himself without being asked to do so.

“What, as a whole, are the indications?” Van Ellis asked.

“Excellent,” was the short reply.

“And the latest prospect?” asked Chester.

“In the valley, near Bohio.”

“What have you found there?”

“Clay-slate, hornblende, emeralds.”

“In large quantities?” asked Chester, anxiously.

“There is a fortune underground there,” was the reply. “Green argillaceous rock means something.”

There was silence for some moments, during which Van Ellis pored over some drawings on his desk, Chester walked the floor excitedly, Gostel regarded the others with a sinister smile on his face, and Itto, the recent arrival, sat watching all the others as a cat watches a mouse.

“And this territory will be under the Lake of Gatun?” Chester asked, presently.

“Yes, very deep under the Lake of Gatun,” was Itto’s reply.

Again Van Ellis bent over the drawings, tracing on one with the point of a pencil.

“There are millions here,” he said. “We have only to stretch forth our hands and take them.”

“The wealth of a world,” Itto observed.

The men talked together in Spanish for a long time, and Ned tried hard to make something of the discussion, but failed. He was convinced, however, that Chester was being urged and argued with by the others and was not consenting to what they were proposing to him.

In half an hour a man who looked fully as Oriental in size, manner and dress as Itto stepped inside the door and beckoned to that gentleman. Asking permission to retire for a few moments, Itto passed out of the door with the newcomer. Instead of going on down the secret staircase, however, the two opened a door at the end of the little hall upon which the front room gave, and appeared in the apartment where Ned was hiding.

The boy, however, was not in view from the place where they stood, and they had no reason to suspect his presence there, so he remained quiet and listened with all his ears to the low-voiced conversation carried on between the two.

“And these are the latest?” Itto asked, referring to papers in his hand.

“Yes, they are the last.”

“And the showing – ”

The newcomer shrugged his shoulders.

“You see for yourself,” he said.

“Well,” Itto said, directly, “it does not matter, does it?”

“Not in the least.”

“If the information does not leak out,” Itto went on, “there will be no change in our plans. We cannot afford to wait.”

“For our country’s sake there must be no delay.”

Ned was slowly piecing this talk with the one which he had heard from the front room, and the significance of it all was sending little shivers down his back. He thought he understood at last.

As the two men left the room Ned heard a paper rustle on the floor, and at once made search for it. It was a drawing, similar to the one discovered in the bomb-room at the old temple, and was a complete sketch of the Gatun dam, the spillway, the locks – everything was shown, with character of fills and suggestions regarding the foundations. Here and there on the drawing were little red spots.

The significance of the red marks brought a date to Ned’s mind. The drawings found in the bomb-room had borne a date, Saturday, April 15. If what he surmised was correct, he had only a little more than twenty-four hours in which to work. In the period of time thus given him he might, without doubt, succeed in averting the destruction of the big dam. But that was not the point.

His business there was not only to protect the Gatun dam but also to get to the core of the conspiracy and bring the plotters to punishment. The men who were plotting on the Isthmus were also plotting in New York. An inkling of the true state of affairs came to him, and he saw that in order to accomplish what he had set out to do his reach must be long enough to stretch across the Atlantic and there grapple with the subordinates in the treacherous plot.

Itto returned to the front room when the newcomer left and again the talk and the arguments went on, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English. Mr. Chester seemed to be asking for more time. Presently the date Ned had found on the two drawings was mentioned.

“The time set was Saturday – to-morrow,” Itto said, grimly.

“That was decided upon a long time ago,” Van Ellis said.

“Before the New York complications arose,” Chester argued. “We did not know at that time what complications might result from the defection of one of our number. It is injudicious to go on now.”

“The date referred to was also set for action in New York,” Itto said.

“Yes, but the thing is inadvisable now, for Shaw has been warned.”

It was plain to Ned that he would have to get away from the old stone house and decide upon some effective means of meeting this emergency. He had work to do in New York as well as in Gatun. The drawing found in the bomb-chamber had told him that. Now this new information emphasized the demand for instant action.

There was no doubt in his mind that it was the purpose of the plotters to blow up the great dam on the next day, probably after nightfall. As has been said, he could thwart the plans of the traitors by communicating with the secret service men under Lieutenant Gordon, but that course would not be apt to bring about all the desired results. He wanted to arrest every man connected with the plot. Not only that; he wanted proof to convict every one of them.

There seemed to the boy only one way in which he could attain the results sought for. He must catch the plotters “with the goods on,” as the police say. He must catch them with explosives in their hands under the shadow of the dam! Ned knew that Harvey, Van Ellis, Gostel, and Itto were deep in the treacherous game, but he did not know how many others were taking part in it. He suspected that men high up in finance were back of the plot, and wanted to get the whole group.

He thought he knew why Harvey, Van Ellis and some of the others were in the plot. He was quite certain that he did. But he was not so certain of the motives of Itto, the Japanese. They might never be revealed unless the game was checked at the right moment.

There was an air of insincerity about the Japanese which Ned did not like. It seemed to the boy that he was leading the others on – or trying to lead them on – in a sinister way. The impression was in the lad’s mind from the moment of his meeting Gostel that the two men, Itto and Gostel, were in the plot for some purpose of their own, a purpose which was not the accumulation of money, and which did not match the motives of the others.

About six o’clock Chester arose to his feet.

“I must go back to camp,” he said.

“But there is a meeting to-night,” Van Ellis urged.

“An important one,” Gostel put in.

“And a midnight visit to the dam,” Itto said.

“I have a previous engagement at the camp,” Harvey insisted. “We have guests from New York, my son and myself.”

“The secret service lads,” exclaimed Gostel, scornfully. “Leave them to me to-night, and you can then keep your engagement with us.”

“I have my doubts about their being connected with the secret service,” Chester replied.

“We are positive,” Gostel said. “They were followed from New York. We know the plotting that has been going on between Gordon and Nestor.”

Much more concerning the boys was said, but Ned was too anxious to get away to pay full attention to it. Another burden was now on his mind. He must see that the boys were warned and came to no harm.

He had left them with the understanding that they might remain at the Culebra hotel or return with Tony Chester to the cottage where they had been taken when brought out of the jungle. If they had returned to the camp, they might already be in great danger.

Chester insisted on taking his departure, and the others accompanied him to the foot of the stairs in the wall, arguing with him every foot of the way. Ned stood at the door of the rear room when they returned, and while they were getting settled in the front apartment he slipped out and moved cautiously down the steps.

When he gained the grounds outside he dodged into a thicket not ten feet away from the exit and waited to make sure that no one was moving about on the outside. He was anxious to get away from the place without his presence there being known. A struggle, even if he succeeded in getting away, would put the plotters on their guard.

In a few moments he realized that the grounds were not so devoid of human life as he had believed. He heard voices on the side toward the hill, and a rustling in the thicket told him that some one was stealthily moving there.

Knowing that it would be dark in a short tune, Ned remained crouched low in the bushes, hoping to escape detection in that way, but footsteps came closer and closer to his hiding place, and he sprang up just in time to see a lithe figure hurtling toward him, the figure of a tall, slender man with an Oriental cast of countenance.

Glad that there was only one, Ned braced himself for the attack, which, however, did not come. When within a yard of its object, the lithe figure turned, staggered forward, uttered a low cry of anger and surprise, and lay swathed in a cluster of vines which had tripped and now held him to the ground.

CHAPTER XVIII.
JIMMIE RELEASES A PRISONER

Realizing that the man who had attacked him, or attempted to, must not escape or be permitted to utter a cry of warning, Ned sprang forward and caught him by the throat. The fallen man squirmed about in the thicket for a moment and then feebly motioned for Ned to remove the pressure from his neck.

Then the patrol leader saw that the fellow had been lassoed, caught about the neck by a running noose in a slender rope. This accounted for his antics when first observed by the boy. Puzzled beyond measure, Ned loosened the noose so the captive would not die from lack of air.

The man sat up in the tangle of bushes, pressing his hands to his neck and rocking to and fro with pain. It was plain that the rope which had caught him had been drawn by a merciless hand. But whose hand was it? Ned was greatly interested in that question.

“I have released the rope so as to give you a little longer lease of life,” Ned said to the prisoner, “but if you try to call out for help, or to escape, you’ll be killed. Do you understand?”

Ned shifted the noose to the man’s wrists, which were fastened behind his back, and relieved him of a revolver and a wicked-looking knife. Then he asked:

“Were you watching me?”

“Yes,” was the short reply, in good English.

“You knew that I was in the house?”

“Yes. I saw you go in.”

“Do the others know that I was in there?” asked Ned, then, anxiously.

If the others knew, then all his plans must be revised.

“No,” came the reply. “I had had no opportunity of telling them.”

“You were placed on guard here by the man called Gostel?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who was it that pulled you down? There is something strange about that.”

“I saw no one,” replied the other, feeling of his throat again.

“Were others watching here with you?”

The prisoner shook his head.

“Then who did it?” demanded Ned. “That rope never dropped down from the clouds and brought you up so cleverly. Why, man, you would have had a knife into me in a second only for the rope.”

“I hoped to,” was the calm reply.

Then Ned heard a giggle in the thicket, and in a moment the vines parted and Jimmie looked out, a shrewd smile on his freckled face.

“Why didn’t you follow the line to the end?” he asked, with a chuckle. “Then you would have come to the life saver.”

“I was so rattled for a moment that I did not think of that,” was the reply. “How did you come to be here?”

“I followed you,” replied the boy.

“And you have been lying out there in the thicket all the time I have been in the house?”

“Why, yes, of course.”

“Well, you did a good job,” Ned said, taking the boy by the hand. “The cowboy stunt you have been practicing so long came into good use at last.”

It was now getting quite dark, and lights showed in the house. From where the boys stood they could not see the lighted front windows, but only the reflections on the slope in front of the structure.

“I knew it would prove handy in time,” grinned Jimmie. “I caught this gazabo on the fly, eh?”

“I can’t understand how you managed it, in this thicket,” Ned said.

“There’s a clear space there where he leaped at you,” Jimmie said. “I saw him rising to spring and dropped it over his head, like a bag over a blind pig. What you goin’ to do with him, now you’ve got him?”

Ned turned to the prisoner with a smile on his face.

“What would you suggest?” he asked.

“Gee! You’ve got your nerve,” Jimmie exclaimed. “Leave it to him an’ you’ll fill his pocket with yellow ones an’ turn him loose to carve you up.”

“If you release me,” the captive replied, evidently taking the question in good faith, “I’ll leave the country.”

“Is that on the square?” demanded Jimmie, with a grin at Ned.

“There is a condition, however,” the man added, “and that is that you make it appear that I was killed in defending the house.”

“What’s the answer?” asked Jimmie, while Ned stood by wondering if he had not struck a lead of good luck at last.

“I’m sick of the game,” the prisoner replied. “I’m not in it for money, anyway, and the other motive is no longer of avail to me.”

“If you’ll tell me everything you know concerning this plot against the Gatun dam,” Ned said, “I’ll release you after the case is ended.”

“Not a word,” replied the other, closing his lips tightly, as if to shut back words seeking utterance.

“Then we’ll have to find a little coop to put you in,” Jimmie said. “I wish we had you back at Culebra.”

While the temporary disposition of the prisoner was being discussed, and while Ned was questioning him as to the immediate movements of the plotters and receiving no satisfactory replies, the lights in the house were extinguished and the men who had occupied the front room were heard descending the stairs. In a moment some one called out:

“Gaga.”

“Is that your name?” demanded Ned of the prisoner.

“Yes.”

“Then answer him.”

Gaga did not respond at once, and the keen point of a knife came in contact with his throat.

“Answer him.”

The call came again, farther away now.

“What shall I say?” asked the captive.

“Answer him as you would have answered if nothing had happened to you here,” was the reply.

The prisoner uttered a long, low cry, and the boys waited with suspended breath. Even at the peril of his life the fellow might warn the others. Ned knew how loyal the people of his nation are.

But the reply was not a warning, or a call for help. The man who had called out the prisoner’s name answered now with an “All right. Remain about here.” Then the men moved away in a body, taking the road to Gamboa.

“Are they coming back to-night?” asked Ned.

“I can tell you nothing,” was the reply.

When the men who had left the house had disappeared from sight Ned bade the captive rise that he might be searched closely for weapons.

“Say,” Jimmie cried. “There’s your tall, slender man with black hair turning gray in places. Ever in New York, Mister?” he added.

The prisoner made no reply.

“You are enough like Itto to be his brother,” Ned said. “Perhaps you won’t mind telling me which one of you stole Frank Shaw’s necklace?”

The prisoner turned his back indignantly. He was indeed a fair copy of the man called Itto, and his shoulders, narrow and high, might have made the damp stains Ned had found on the wall of the closet in the Shaw house in New York.

The stone house was now, seemingly, without an occupant and the thickets about were silent save for the noises of the night. A faint clamor came from the canal, where workmen were hewing away at the ribs of the Cordilleras, now the slight jar of an explosion, now the grinding of a steam shovel, now the nervous shrieking of the trains pushing back and forth.

The electrics over the cut drew lines of silver light on the tall trees and the foliage of the hills farther away, but here there was only a faint suggestion of illumination.

“Now you’ve got him,” Jimmie said, presently, “what you goin’ to do with him? We can’t get him to Culebra or Gatun without bumpin’ into some fresh guy who would want to take him away from us.”

“I’m afraid you’re right about that,” Ned said. “We can’t afford to have him get away and inform his companions that something of their plot is known.”

“What would they do?”

“Make new plans, and we should have to begin all over again. As the case rests now we stand a good chance of catching every one of the conspirators.”

“And the chap that stole the emerald necklace?”

“Even the necklace may drift to the surface in the eruption which is sure to take place in the near future,” smiled Ned. “Now about Gaga,” he continued. “Suppose you look around and see if you can’t find a room in the old house which would not be used to-night, even if the plotters should come.”

Jimmie hustled away and soon returned with the information that there was a room in the rear of the house, on the first floor, which would answer for a prison very well.

“But there ain’t no door to it,” he added, “an’ the glass is all out of the window. Looks like it had been deserted for a hundred years.”

“Perhaps we can rig up a door,” suggested Ned.

“What’s the use?” asked Jimmie. “I’m goin’ to stay right here with the captive until the secret service men come an’ take him away.”

“But they will not come until the case is ended,” urged Ned. “The knowledge that Gaga is a prisoner – arrested by a spy who overheard what was said in the house – ”

“I wouldn’t call myself a spy,” Jimmie said, indignantly.

“There is no dishonor in serving as a spy in a good cause,” Ned replied. “As I was saying, the mere knowledge of his arrest would disarrange our plans as much as his escape would. We would better make him secure here and leave him to his own thoughts, it seems to me.”

“I would like to have him remain,” said Gaga, much to the amazement of the boys.

“He can’t resist my winnin’ ways,” cried Jimmie. “All right. I’ll stay if you will send out about a ton of grub.”

“Perhaps the boys will object to bringing it.”

“Jack, or Frank, or any one of them,” Jimmie exclaimed. “No trouble about that. Perhaps it will take two to bring enough.”

The prisoner’s bonds were loosened so that he would not feel them drawing into the flesh, but still he was left securely tied up. The room was not unpleasant, with the starlight shining in through the dismantled doorway and the broken window, and Jimmie planned to have a good rest there during his watch.

The boy had been on his feet all the previous night, wandering about the jungle, and had taken only a short rest at the Chester camp. The prisoner was so secured that it did not seem possible for him to get away, even if left there alone, so the lad rolled a dilapidated old easy chair up to the window and lay back at his ease.

For a long time neither spoke, and then the prisoner asked:

“When will I be taken to prison?”

“Search me!” Jimmie replied.

“I take it,” the captive continued, “that the whole plot is discovered?”

“Bet your life!” Jimmie answered, drowsily.

“Then the United States government will have to put up a couple of extra prisons,” was the comment of the prisoner.

“What you doin’ it for?” demanded the boy.

The prisoner did not see fit to reply to this leading question, and Jimmie put another, equally pertinent:

“Who let you into the Shaw house that night?”

“Why do you think I was in the Shaw house?” asked the other. “Where is the Shaw house?”

“You know where it is, all right,” Jimmie said. “Who was it that let you in? That is what I want to know. An’ who opened the door for you to go out?”

There was no reply, and Jimmie piled on another question:

“Why did Pedro run away from Shaw’s and why did he run away from Chester’s camp when he saw me coming from the jungle?”

The prisoner gave a quick start, and something like a groan came from his lips.

“Is Pedrarias, the man you call Pedro, here on the Isthmus?” he asked.

“Sure he is. Didn’t he report to you after he got here?”

“Living at the Chester camp, you say?”

“He was there this morning, but ran away when he recognized me. I was at the Shaw house in New York on the night of the robbery.”

The prisoner checked a Spanish oath and struggled to rise to his feet, but fell back into his chair because of his bonds.

“There is bad blood between this man and myself,” he said, then. “If he saw me with Chester to-day he will present himself here to-night. If he comes and finds me a prisoner, bound and at his mercy – if he comes here to-night, and finds us in this room, and you are unable to deal with him, will you cut my bonds?”

“And permit you to run away together and give me the laugh?” said Jimmie. “You’re a modest kind of a fellow after all, and with nerve to spare.”

“If you do this,” Gaga replied, “I promise to return to you and submit to be bound again, if I come out of the conflict alive.”

“Do you think Pedro would murder an unarmed man, and a bound one, at that?”

“Yes, the hatred he has for me is so great that he would take any advantage of me.”

Jimmie was getting the notion that there was something tragic in the air, and was even considering the proposition seriously when there was a movement at the open doorway.

“If he comes here,” Gaga went on, “you must either kill him yourself or let me. He will spare neither of us.”

The boy was listening for a repetition of the sound at the doorway, when a form lifted from the crumbling threshold and stood peering in. Gaga gave a cry of terror and the intruder drew back for an instant.

The boy knew that the man whose figure he had seen outlined against the star-sprinkled sky was the man he had seen standing by the couch of the owner of the Daily Planet on the night of the robbery, the man he had seen later in the Chester camp in the jungle.

“For the love of Heaven!” the prisoner whispered.

The entreaty struck home to the heart of the boy. He had always prided himself on his love of fair play. He knew that he could not successfully defend the doorless, windowless room until the arrival of his friends, or the return of the plotters. Pedro could hide in the thicket and rain bullets upon himself and the prisoner until both were killed.

He could not make his own escape and leave the prisoner bound and at the mercy of his enemy, nor could he shoot the intruder in cold blood when he appeared in the doorway again. He was only a boy, and his inherent love of a square deal conquered.

While the movements at the door continued, he slipped over to Gaga, ran his knife through the cords which bound him, pointed to the weapons which had been taken from him, and crouched down in a corner of the room, his heart beating like a trip-hammer.