s was the big gusher, pinched down from one hundred and
eighty-five thousand daily barrels to the quantity the company
was able to handle. Mexico had no quarrel with Holland, so that the
superintendent, while up, with night guards out to prevent drunken
soldiers from firing his vast lakes of oil, was quite unemotional. Yes,
the last he had heard was that Miss Drexel and her brother were back at
the hunting lodge. No; he had not sent any warnings, and he doubted that
anybody else had. Not till ten o'clock the previous evening had he
learned of the landing at Vera Cruz. The Mexicans had turned nasty as
soon as they heard of it, and they had killed Miles Forman at the Empire
Wells, run off his labor, and looted the camp. Horses? No; he didn't
have horse or mule on the place. The federals had commandeered the last
animal weeks back. It was his belief, however, that there were a couple
of plugs at the lodge, too worthless even for the Mexicans to take.

"It's a hike," Davies said cheerfully.

"Six miles of it," Wemple agreed, equally cheerfully. "Let's beat it."

A shot from the river, where they had left Peter in the boat, started
them on the run for the bank. A scattering of shots, as from two rifles,
followed. And while the Dutch superintendent, in execrable Spanish,
shouted affirmations of Dutch neutrality into the menacing dark, across
the gunwale of _Chill II_ they found the body of the tow-headed
youth whose business it had been not to die.

* * * * *

For the first hour, talking little, Davies and Wemple stumbled along the
apology for a road that led through the jungle to the lodge. They did
discuss the glares of several fires to the east along the south bank of
Panuco River, and hoped fervently that they were dwellings and not
wells.

"Two billion dollars worth of oil right here in the Ebano field alone,"
Davies grumbled.

"And a drunken Mexican, whose whole carcass and immortal soul aren't
worth ten pesos including hair, hide, and tallow, can start the bonfire
with a lighted wad of cotton waste," was Wemple's contribution. "And if
ever she starts, she'll gut the field of its last barrel."

Dawn, at five, enabled them to accelerate their pace; and six o'clock
found them routing out the occupants of the lodge.

"Dress for rough travel, and don't stop for any frills," Wemple called
around the corner of Miss Drexel's screened sleeping porch.

"Not a wash, nothing," Davies suppl