“I’m not so sure,” said Johnny grimly. “I’d like to have the chance at it, even now. I’d risk it. I—why, I’d hunt up my old friend Tony, the push-cart man, if necessary, and I’d say, ‘Tony, I have a ship load of fruit at half price down at the dock. Go tell your pals.’
“In a half hour’s time there would be a mile of push-carts coming my way.
“But now,” he said slowly, almost despondently, “this is the end.”
In this he was mistaken. It was scarcely the beginning of what was to prove a thrilling adventure. “The _North Star_!” he exclaimed suddenly. “She was tied to the dock. What will happen to her?”
Since the girl did not know the answer, she did not reply.
A moment later, the Carib crept up the bank of the pit to disappear into the storm. Ten minutes later, when he reappeared, his jacket was filled with cocoanuts.
“Food and drink,” smiled Madge. “We shall not fare so badly in our cave, after all.”
Still the wind raged on. Rain came and with it night.
A great flat boulder, turned half over by the uprooted tree, left a sort of narrow grotto with a stone floor. By crowding well back into this grotto, Johnny and the girl were able to escape the terrific downpour of rain. The Carib, who minded a wetting about as much as a duck, sat chuckling to himself beneath the tree’s great roots.
For a time the girl and the boy talked of many things, of their homes, of their native lands, of strange customs and stranger laws, of the sea and of the land.
The conversation turned to chicle gathering. Then it was that Johnny told of his friend Pant, how he had found his long lost grandfather and how they were, beyond doubt, at that very moment gathering chicle in the forest around Rio de Grande.
“The Rio de Grande!” exclaimed the girl. “Diaz gathers chicle there. He will stop them if he can.”
“Diaz!” came from Johnny. “He has a hand in everything down here!”
“By the way,” he said a moment later, “I have a queer sort of message from my pal here in my pocket. It’s all done in figures and signs. How he could expect me to read it is more than I know. And yet, somehow I feel that it must be important.”
Johnny drew the crumpled bit of paper from his pocket, smoothed it out on his knee, then gave it to the girl.