The day was but a repetition of their former afternoon with their sole recreation being the chance it gave them to watch Slippery Slim’s movements whenever he appeared coming out of what seemed to be a cavern of some sort from which at several times when the racket from many tongues died down Perk could catch a strange rumbling sound, accompanied by what seemed to be a blow, and which he could easily believe must be the working of the printing press that had been carried all the way from the States in order to be able to produce those wonderfully clever notes that had deceived many shrewd bank tellers by their deceptive qualities.
Then at last Jack discovered, just as night had begun to fall, three columns of smoke rising toward the heavens from far down the wild Sierra, telling how that Morales and his troop had arrived, and that the curtain was about to rise on the last scene of the international drama.
Immediately on discovering the welcome signal, Jack dispatched Perk to put a match to the heap of brush they had arranged well out of sight from the depression where the skeleton revolutionary army was slowly assembling its pitiful force of the dissatisfied generals who had been counted out in the last national election.
Perk understood what was expected of him, and managed to send up a single smoke signal, allowing it to have but a brief life and then hastening to smother the fire. As Morales was expected to be on the watch for just such a sign, he would lose little time in starting to carry out his part in the attack.
“In three hours they will be climbing the mountain by way of the old Yaqui trail we followed,” Jack was telling his chum, when the other returned to his side, flushed with the success of his labors. “It is time for us to make a forward move, so that we may be ready to strike as soon as the camp quiets down and corral our man, leaving it to Morales to carry the fort itself by storm.”
This they set about doing without any further delay. Dodging from rock to rock, taking advantage of every outlying spur, as well as patches of hardy bushes, and other objects that were likely to conceal their movements from any watchful eyes but always creeping downward, they crawled along like two great lizards such, as Perk could remember seeing when in the Philippines.