ine if
you want to get anywhere."

* * * * *

"Won't do you no good to lay low," Peter Tonsburg remarked, as, at full
speed, headed up river, the _Topila's_ searchlight stabbed them.
"High or low, if one of them shells hits in the vicinity--_good
night_!"

Immediately thereafter the _Topila_ erupted. The roar of the
_Chill's_ exhaust nearly drowned the roar of the guns, but the
fragile hull of the craft was shaken and rocked by the bursting shells.
An occasional bullet thudded into or pinged off the _Chill_, and,
despite Peter's warning that, high or low, they were bound to get it if
it came to them, every man on board, including Peter, crouched, with
chest contracted by drawn-in shoulders, in an instinctive and purely
unconscious effort to lessen the area of body he presented as a target
or receptacle for flying fragments of steel.

The _Topila_ was a federal gunboat. To complicate the affair, the
constitutionalists, gathered on the north shore in the siege of Tampico,
opened up on the speedboat with many rifles and a machine gun.

"Lord, I'm glad they're Mexicans, and not Americans," Habert observed,
after five mad minutes in which no damage had been received. "Mexicans
are born with guns in their hands, and they never learn to use them."

Nor was the _Chill_ or any man aboard damaged when at last she
rounded the bend of river that shielded her from the searchlight.

"I'll have you in Panuco town in less'n three hours, ... if we don't hit
a log," Peter leaned back and shouted in Wemple's ear. "And if we do hit
driftwood, I'll have you in the swim quicker than that."

_Chill II_ tore her way through the darkness, steered by the
tow-headed youth who knew every foot of the river and who guided his
course by the loom of the banks in the dim starlight. A smart breeze,
kicking up spiteful wavelets on the wider reaches, splashed them with
sheeted water as well as fine-flung spray. And, in the face of the
warmth of the tropic night, the wind, added to the speed of the boat,
chilled them through their wet clothes.

"Now I know why she was named the _Chill_," Habert observed betwixt
chattering teeth.

But conversation languished during the nearly three hours of drive
through the darkness. Once, by the exhaust, they knew that they passed
an unlighted launch bound down stream. And once, a glare of light, near
the south bank, as they passed through the Toreno field, aroused brief
debate