Juan! Speak up! What is it?” demanded his master sharply. Juan groveled in the dust. He mumbled in Spanish and a queer jargon of his own; thought by him to be correct English.
“Get back there!” shouted Señor Chester to the crowd of wailing women and scared natives from the quarters that pressed around. They fell back obediently.
“What is all this, Blakely?” asked Chester impatiently, as Jimmie Blakely, the young English overseer, strolled up as unruffled as if he had been playing tennis.
“Scat!” said Jimmie waving his arm at the crowd and then, adjusting his eyeglass, he remarked:
“It seems that Estrada’s chaps have had a jolly good licking.”
“What!” exclaimed the planter, “this is serious. Speak up, Juan, at once. Where is General Ruiz?”
It was with a sinking heart that Chester heard the answer as the thought what the news would mean to the radiant beauty he had been talking with but a short time before, flashed across his mind.
“Muerto! muerto!” wailed the prostrate Juan, “dead! dead!”
At this, although they didn’t understand it, the women set up a great howl of terror.
“Oh Zelaya is coming! He will kill us and eat our babies! Oh master save us – don’t let Zelaya’s men eat our babies.”
The men blubbered and cried as much as the women, but from a different and more selfish reason.
“Oh, they will kill us too and spoil all our land. The land we have grown with so much care,” they bemoaned in piercing tones, “moreover, we shall be forced to join the army and be killed in battle.”
“Blakely, for heaven’s sake take that bit of glass out of your eye, and get this howling mob out of here!” besought Chester desperately. “If you don’t I’ll kill some of them myself. Here you, get up,” he exclaimed bestowing a most unmerciful kick on the still prostrate Juan. “Oh, for a few Americans – or Englishmen,” he added, out of deference to Blakely.
“Couldn’t do a thing with them without the eyeglass, Mr. Chester,” drawled the imperturbable Blakely, “they think it’s witchcraft. Don’t twig how the dickens I keep it in.”
“All right, all right, meet me here at the house and we must hold a council of war, as soon as you’ve got them herded safe in the barracks,” impatiently said Chester, turning on his heel.
“Now come on, you gibbering idiots,” shouted the consolatory Briton at his band of weeping men and women, “come on now – get out of here, or I’ll eat your blooming babies myself – my word I will,” and the amiable Jimmie put on such a terrifying expression that his charges fled before him too terrified to make any more noise.
Out of sight of the governor, however, the Hon. Jimmie’s careless manner dropped.
“Well, this is a jolly go and no mistake;” he muttered, giving the groveling Juan a kick, where it would do the most good, “well, Jimmie – my boy – you’ve always been looking for a bit of row and it looks as if you’d jolly well put your foot in it this time – eh, what?”
While all this transpired on the ranchero El Merced, the Aztec with our heroes on board surprised everybody in Greytown, and no one more than her captain, by arriving there ahead of time. Just about the time that the Hon. Jimmie was herding his weeping charges to the barracks, her mud-hook rattled down and she swung at anchor off the first really tropical town on which the Boy Aviators’ eyes had ever rested.
CHAPTER III.
BILLY BARNES OF THE PLANET
Before sun up the next day there was a busy scene of bustling activity at the plantation of La Merced. The bustle extended from the hacienda to the barracks, – the news of the arrival of the Aztec having been brought to the estancia the night before by a native runner.
Old Matula, Señor Chester’s personal mocho had been down at the stables since the time that the stars began to fade urging the men, whose duty it was to look after the horses, to greater activity in saddling up the mounts, which his master, Jimmie Blakely, and their cortege needed in their ride to the coast to meet the boys.
The native plantation hands, as volatile as most of their race had forgotten the events of the preceding night in their child-like excitement at the idea of the arrival of The Big Man Bird, as they called the Golden Eagle; this being their conception of the craft gained after numerous consultations of Señor Chester.
Even Juan was strutting around the quarters and posing as a wounded hero, to the great admiration of his wife and the other women who entirely forgot that the night before he had appeared anything but a man of arms, and that his wife had subsisted mainly on the Señor Chester’s charity, since his desertion of her to become a patriot.
Jimmie Blakely and Señor Chester had sat far into the night talking over the situation, and it had struck midnight before they arrived at the conclusion that it would be inflicting a needless shock to inform Señora Ruiz of Juan’s report of her husband’s death until some sort of confirmation had been obtained. Fate, however, took the painful task out of their hands. The gossipy servants who had heard Jose’s lamentations lost no time in conveying the news to the estancia of Señor Pachecho. Señora Ruiz received the report of her husband’s death bravely enough while the servants were in the room, but after they had left she fell in a swoon and speedily became so ill that the old doctor at Restigue had to be routed out of bed and driven at post haste in a rickety volante to Don Pachecho’s home.
After a hasty snack – a la Espagnole – the real breakfast in the tropics not being taken till eleven o’clock or so – the master of La Merced and Blakely mounted their horses and set out at top speed for Greytown.
“I’ve got my own ideas of welcoming the boys to Nicaragua,” confided Mr. Chester to his overseer as they put spurs to their mounts, “I ordered a bonga to be in readiness for us as soon as the Aztec arrived. I guess a trip through the surf in one of those will astonish them, eh?”
“I should jolly well think so,” replied the Hon. Jimmie, screwing his monocule more firmly in his eye.
The young Britisher was immaculate in khaki riding breeches, long gray coat and yellow puttees. The admired and feared eyeglass, to which he owed so much of his power over the natives, was gleaming firmly from his face, nor did the rapid pace at which the rough-gaited horses were urged over the road, affect its equilibrium. To save time Mr. Chester had elected to take a trail instead of the main road. By doing this they cut off at least ten miles of the distance. It was a wild looking cavalcade that galloped along through clouds of dust over the none too sure footing of the rock-strewn trail. Behind Mr. Chester and Jimmie rode old Matula and the redoubtable Jose. The latter proudly wore about his classic brow a white bandage – in token of his being a hero and wounded. Both Jose and Matula led after them extra ponies for the use of the boys in the ride back to La Merced.
Bringing up the rear was a particular friend of Jimmie’s mounted on a razor-backed, single-footing mule that somehow managed to get over the ground as fast as the other animals and without any apparent exertion. Jose’s friend was a peculiarly villainous-looking old Nicaraguan Indian, who eked out a scanty living at rubber cutting – that is, slashing the rubber trees for their milk and carting the product in wooden pails to the coast.
He had arrived at the ranchero a few days before and not finding Jose there, the patriot being at the front, had just hung around after the easy fashion
