CHAPTER XXIV.
A STARTLING MEETING.
The legion of little brown men at once fell in round the two boys, whose clean cut young figures towered above their squat forms, and after they had surrendered their weapons—not without a momentary qualm of regret on Frank’s part—the march to the camp began.
Bellman said little as they made their way along the trail, but strode along with his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep thought. He was a huge man, with a singularly brutal face bronzed by the suns of a dozen countries over which he had been a wanderer, and a heavy drooping mustache which hid a cruel mouth. His eyes were steely gray and as keen as a hawk’s. Such was the man into whose power the Boy Aviators had fallen and even they did not realize the extent to which such a man will go to gain an end—and that he had an end in view his action in sparing their lives fully convinced them.
At last they emerged—after passing once more over the luckless wire—on the settlement under the hill that Frank had noted the night before from the boat. There was every evidence of abandonment about it, however, even now, although it had been so recently the scene of activity.
“If you had come to-morrow I should not have had the pleasure of receiving you,” said Bellman, with a sardonic grin, waving his hand to indicate the preparations for the abandonment of the settlement.
The blast furnace had been almost completely demolished and a gang of men, compatriots of the small brown men who formed the boys’ escort, were busily engaged in completing the work of destruction with crowbars and picks. Several of the small houses which Frank had seen from the boat had also vanished and the rest were portable contrivances. They were being rapidly taken to pieces and carried up the hill into the woods, where doubtless they were to be destroyed, for the smoke of a big fire was beginning to rise from there.
In the side of the hill back of the blast furnace, a great ragged hole had been torn like a small quarry, and a runway from this to the shattered blast-furnace indicated that some earth found in the hillside was reduced in the crucible to a condition in which it formed an ingredient of Chapinite. The large building was evidently a sort of bunk-house for the workmen and packing-house for the product that Captain Bellman and his men had been making there, for from its wide door a perpetual stream of dwarfed brown men were carrying packing cases carefully wrapped in straw to a small fleet of canoes that lay moored alongside a primitive wharf.
All these things the boys’ eyes took in as they were led across the bare earth to the barrack-like building; but of the man to search for whom they had come to the Everglades they could see no sign.
Bellman’s first care was for his wounded dogs, after which he ordered his men to bring the boys into a long, low ceiled room, apparently from its heat right under the roof of the bunk-house. Straw mats laid all along the walls also indicated that it was used as a sleeping attic by the Orientals employed on the island.
There was a small table in the room with a rickety chair by it, and Bellman took up a seat at it.
“We need not occupy much time,” were his first words, as the boys stood facing him, surrounded by their impassive-faced guards. “I and my men are leaving the Everglades forever to-night. We wish to be secure against anybody following us. Where is this air-ship of yours and where are the canoes in which you brought it here?”
“Why do you wish to know?” demanded Frank.
“I naturally wish to make myself secure from pursuit by destroying them,” was the cool reply, “if you don’t wish to tell me I shall find them.”
Frank knew that this last was an empty boast as to search the Everglades for their canoes or for their air-ship either would be a work occupying much more time than Bellman could afford to spare.
“Under no circumstances will I give you any such information,” said Frank.
“I admire your pluck but deplore your lack of common sense,” rejoined Bellman with a sneer.
“We don’t care any more for your admiration than we do for your sympathy,” replied Frank, proudly.
Bellman’s dark face flushed angrily.
“This is the way you treat my intended kindness,” he thundered, striking the table with his clenched fist till its crazy legs wobbled under it.
“Well, I shall try another method. If you had answered me I would have sent some Seminoles here to pick you up, once I was safe at sea, but as it is now I shall leave you here to rot.”
Little as Frank believed Bellman’s tentative promise that he would send relief to them if they afforded him the opportunity to raid their camp and destroy their canoes and the Golden Eagle II, yet both boys realized not without dismay that there was a good deal of deadly earnest in the last words he had spoken.
“Leave them there to rot.”
Involuntarily both boys shuddered.
Bellman’s malevolent eye saw this and interpreted it at once as a sign of weakening.
“Ah,” he said viciously, “I touched you there, eh?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Frank, “but if you intend to convey that we are afraid of you, we are not.”
“Or of any cad that has been kicked out of the United States’ Navy, and has turned against his country,” added Harry.
“You young whelp,” shouted Bellman, beside himself at the sneer, “you have tried to checkmate me at every turn, but you’ll find out I am more than your match.”
“You come here to find Lieutenant Chapin, the dog who was instrumental in my disgrace. Well, I’ll introduce you to him.”
He gave a sharp order in the same tongue his followers used and the next minute the boys were seized. With a good, left-hand punch to the jaw Frank knocked one of the amazed little brown men half across the room and the next minute Harry had served another the same way. But it was no good. The opposing force was too many for them and ignominiously handcuffed they were at length led down several steep flights of stairs into what they knew, by its musty smell, must be an underground chamber.
The darkness of the place was made visible, so to speak, by a smoky oil-torch, like those used in the stoke-hold of a steamer, that hung in one corner. It was miserably damp and several subterranean streams fed by the mountain above trickled across the floor. In one corner the boys noticed, as their eyes grew accustomed to the light, was a curious contrivance formed of two long bars of heavy wood with holes pierced in them at regular intervals.
Two heavy posts stood at each end of this contrivance, to which were attached heavy padlocks and hasps. With a quick thrill of horror the boys realized that they faced that instrument of confinement of blue-law days—the stocks.
After another sharp order from Bellman their captors carried them to the appliance and raising the heavy upper block of wood thrust the boys’ legs into the semicircular openings cut in the lower section for that purpose. Similar holes were cut in the upper bar and when it was lowered and padlocked down the unfortunate person confined there could in no way release himself till somebody unlocked the padlocks.
“Now,” said Bellman, when this work was completed to his satisfaction, and the boys were securely fastened in their prison, “I am going to introduce you to the man you have been looking for. Serang,” he ordered, turning to the little brown man with the red stripe on his arm, “Sahib Chapin bring.”
The man nodded obediently and left the fetid chamber. The boys wondered that he did not take any companion with him, but when he returned, leading a stumbling, helpless figure, they understood that even a small man of his caliber was able now to handle the once strapping Lieutenant Chapin. For that in the figure before them, for all his unshaven cheeks and blinking eyes, like those of a bat, they had the man they had come all the way in search of, his uniform, now bagging in unsightly fashion about his shrunken form left them no room to doubt. The miserable scarecrow figure that gazed apologetically about it, was the inventor of Chapinite, and once the most popular man in the United States Navy.
The boys’ cheeks burned with indignation at the sight, and if they might have had any weak inclination to save their lives by yielding to Bellman’s demand that they reveal the whereabouts of the Golden Eagle II, the sight of the miserable wreck before them would at once have decided them. They would stick by the unfortunate officer come what might and if possible, avenge the indignities he had suffered.
“Put him in alongside them, serang,” ordered Bellman, as Chapin gazed about in a dazed manner, evidently realizing little of what was transpiring and in a few minutes Lieutenant Chapin, Frank Chester and his brother Harry, were trussed up in a row absolutely helpless. It was a bitter thought that here they were within hand’s reach of the man they had come so far and endured so much to succor, and now they were as helpless to aid him as he seemed to be to care for himself.
“I wish you a pleasant afternoon,” said Bellman, as, signing to the serang, he and his myrmidons left the subterranean chamber.
As soon as their footsteps had died out Frank determined to make an effort to arouse the dormant faculties of Lieutenant Chapin.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “we are your friends. Can you understand us?”
To his amazement a light of brighter intelligence shone in the captive officer’s face and he answered with what was absolute briskness compared to his former listless manner:
“Of course I can; but who are you?”
Rapidly Frank sketched out to him the events that had brought them there and all they had hoped to accomplish. Then in a saddened voice he had related the failure of their hopes and aspirations.
The lieutenant thanked them warmly for their loyalty, but urged them to save their lives if possible by acceding to Bellman’s demands. For himself, he said, he expected no better fate than to be left there to die.
“My life has been a living death at any rate,” he said, “since I came to this terrible place. Yours are the first kindly faces I have seen. I have lived as if in a dream.” He pressed his hand to his forehead. “It seems that I must do what they told me. I have even, as you know, aided in the betrayal of my government by aiding these men in preparing my invention. For the last two days, though, my mind has been getting clearer. I have realized what is going on about me. I can judge things in their true proportions.”
“But—pardon me for the question—” said Frank, “but when you——”
“I know,” interrupted the lieutenant, “you are going to say that when I came in here, I seemed stupefied. I was acting a part. I did not want Bellman to think that I had recovered my senses. I cannot understand it myself. Until yesterday everything was like a dream, now I can think once more like a rational man.”
Frank detailed to him the conversation that they had overheard in the boat the night before and the boast that Foyashi had made that he had placed the captive under his control.
“Ah, that is it,” exclaimed the lieutenant eagerly, “since Foyashi has gone I have felt this new life of my brain, but hark—there’s somebody coming.”
His ears, sharpened by his long captivity, were keener than the boys’ for it was not till the serang with the red band on his arm entered the place that they heard any indication of the arrival of the newcomer. He came straight up to the boys and informed them that it was the order of his master that he should search them. His manner was not insolent or rough, it was simply the manner of the lay figure who does as he is told and asked no questions. Indignant but helpless Harry submitted to the search. He begged the man to let him keep his mother’s picture which he carried in a case in his inside pocket, but the man refused with a mechanical shake of the head.
“No, my orders. Tuan he say take everything,” he muttered.
Then came Frank’s turn. As with Harry one by one his most treasured possessions were stripped from him by the immobile faced, yellow man. But suddenly something happened that had been entirely unlooked for. Frank had entirely forgotten the squatting Buddha, which he had placed in his pocket the day the moonshiner had sold it to him, and had not given it a thought since.
Now, however, the serang’s searching hand found it in the boy’s pocket and the effect on him was electrical.
He fell on his knees reverentially before the absurd looking piece of jade and beat his head on the damp floor and then gazed at Frank in awe.
“How came you by this, master?” he asked.
Frank saw that the possession of the thing had made a strong effect on the man and that to deceive him as to the fact in the case, might have a beneficial bearing on their position, so he simply shook his head and as Harry would have said, “looked wise.”
“Him great Buddha of Lhasa,” moaned the serang, bobbing up and down before it. “You great man. Me worship you if you give him me for keep.”
“Why don’t you steal it from us; we can’t prevent you?” Harry could not help saying.
“No can steal. If steal heap curse all time. Plenty soon die,” was the response, “but if give then great blessing—plenty blessing all time.”
A sudden idea struck Frank.
“You are leaving here to-night in canoes for the coast?” he asked.
“Yes,” was the reply, “we leave here never no more to come back.”
“If I give you that Buddha will you unlock these stocks and these handcuffs before you go?” he asked.
The man thought a minute.
“If you don’t I will make the Buddha curse you,” pursued Frank. This seemed to decide the yellow man.
“All litee,” he said, “before I go I lettee you out but no let Bellman know; he kill me.”
“We won’t let him know,” said Frank with emphasis, “but how do we know that you will keep your word?”
“If I don’t then Buddha curse me and I die,” said the man simply as he left the dungeon. The boys felt that they had secured a pledge of freedom by the merest chance that was better than all the promises that could be made from now till Doomsday.