"There is another one coming down with it," the old sailor said gloomily. "Rama has been yawning and complaining of aching bones all day."
"Send him in here and to-morrow take out one of the guards in his place," said the lad promptly. "I am going to have the rest of the men move out of this tent into the others and turn this one into a hospital tent where the men can be quiet and undisturbed."
THE Spaniards sharing the sick man's tent willingly complied with Charley's request and moved their belongings to the other tents in which there was plenty of room for them. With Walter's assistance the lad cleaned the tent out thoroughly and tied back the flaps at both ends to permit the free circulation of air. Rama was made to go to bed on a second cot and given a dose of the same medicine given the other. This done, Charley called the balance of the graders and ground men together and gave them a large bottle of carbolic acid and a box of salve, instructing them how to use both. It was now getting dark, and after a hasty supper the boys with their two Spaniards repaired to the guard line. Before night, however, Walter had climbed a small tree and taken a survey of the country. Much to his disappointment, he had seen smoke rising from the convicts' old camping place, showing that the gunmen had returned to their old haunts.
"I wonder how they manage to find our camp so easy at night," the lad remarked, as he and his chum met on their rounds. "When McCarty and I were out hunting that time we could not see this camp from theirs, and after we camped in the thicket we could not see their camp, although we were not over half a mile away. The white mist blotted out everything."
"That digging light way up on the machine's boom guides them," Charley answered. "The mist is densest close to the ground. The further up one goes the thinner it gets; consequently they can see that light even when they can't see our campfire."
"Simple enough, after all," Walter commented. "It's the simple things that puzzle one the most sometimes."
"Which reminds me of what Mr. Bruce hinted," Charley said, "that the solution of our mystery was in plain sight all the time, but hanged if I haven't puzzled over it till I made my head swim and can't make it out."