Although the two boys were woefully disappointed at not being able to see anything of Trinidad, yet the fact that they were going to Demerara and would actually have a chance to see something of South America more than made up for it.

Rawlins assured them that in British Guiana they would find a far more interesting spot than Trinidad and the boys plied him with questions.

“Isn’t that the place the blow gun and those poisoned arrows came from?” asked Tom.

“Sure thing,” replied the diver. “I don’t know much about the country--except what I’ve read and been told--but I’ve been at Georgetown, or Demerara as it’s called, and you’ll find enough to keep you busy right there.”

“Gosh, then there must be wild Indians there--if they use blow guns,” said Frank. “Will we be able to see any of them?”

“Country’s full of them,” declared Rawlins. “But they’re all peaceable. If we go trailing that plane into the bush as I want Mr. Pauling to do, you’ll see Indians all right. If we don’t, you may see a few in town. I’ve always wanted to get into the interior myself. It’s a wonderful place--most of it unexplored--and there’s gold and diamonds and wild animals and the highest waterfall in the world.”

“Now don’t get these boys all worked up over it, Rawlins,” laughed Mr. Pauling. “If we don’t look out, they’ll mutiny and refuse to go home until they’ve had their fill of sightseeing. I admit I’d like nothing better than to stretch my legs ashore for a time and see something of the country, but this is no pleasure jaunt, you know.”

“But if those men are there, we could go after them and then it wouldn’t be a pleasure trip,” argued Tom.

“You can be sure it would not,” replied his father. “It’s bad enough trailing those scoundrels all over the Caribbean, let alone trying to run them to earth in a tropical jungle. No, I think our chase ends at Georgetown.”

But Rawlins was not to be readily discouraged. He was a most persistent character and having once made up his mind to follow the “Reds” to “Kingdom Come,” as he put it, he was not easily to be dissuaded. “I’ll say it would be a blamed shame to give up now,” he declared. “We’ve got ’em narrowed down to two and the plane (the bunch on the Devon don’t count) and those two are the chaps you want, Mr. Pauling. We’ve got ’em on the run--smoked ’em out of every hole they had--chased ’em into the sea and under it and into the air. Now they’ve played their last trump. We’d be a lot of boobs to let ’em get away with it now.”

“But you seem to forget that we haven’t the least idea where they are and that Guiana’s a big country,” Mr. Pauling reminded him. “I’ve been going over the maps with Henderson and Disbrow and it’s hopeless. Why, they may be in Dutch Guiana or Brazil or Venezuela by now. While we were paddling up a few miles of jungle river, that plane could be flying a couple of hundred miles. It would be worse than chasing a bird with your hat.”

“Just the same I’ve a hunch that we’re going to get ’em,” declared Rawlins. “And by glory, if you won’t go after ’em, I’m going to drop off and go it alone!”

Mr. Pauling laughed. “Any one would think you had a personal grudge against them,” he chuckled.

“So I have--confound them!” cried the diver. “Didn’t they cop my diving suit idea and didn’t they play a dozen low-down, dirty tricks on us? And weren’t they trying to stick a wurali-tipped dart in me back there at St. John? Besides, I’ve never gone back on one of my hunches yet and it’s too late to begin now.”

“Well, we’ll see what we find out over at Georgetown, before we decide,” said Mr. Pauling. “After I talk with the officials we can make plans for our next move. For all we know they may have important information.”

The destroyer had now left Port of Spain far astern and was passing out through the Bocas to the open sea. Throughout the afternoon she steamed steadily eastward through the muddy water and when the boys came on deck early the following morning there was still no sign of land.

“Where’s Demerara?” asked Tom of the lieutenant in charge. “Commander Disbrow said we’d be in by breakfast time, but I don’t see a sign of land.”

“Straight ahead,” replied the officer. “There’s the lightship--see, that little schooner there.”

“Yes I see it,” said Tom, “but what is it out in the ocean here for?”

The lieutenant laughed. “It’s not!” he replied. “We’re in the river now. The lightship’s on the bar. We’ll be slowing down to take on the pilot in a few moments.”

“In the river!” exclaimed Frank. “Oh, you’re just fooling! How can this be a river when there are no banks?”

“Honest Injun, ’tis though,” declared the officer. “The banks are there all right, but they’re so low you can’t see them and the river’s thirty-five miles wide.”

“Jimminy crickets!” cried Tom. “Thirty-five miles wide! Say, I thought the Amazon and the Orinoco were the only big rivers down here.”

“Oh, this is just a brook compared to the Amazon,” said the lieutenant, “but it’s wider than the Orinoco. It’s really the mouth of two big rivers--the Demerara and the Essequibo. Look, there comes the pilot.”

A small boat had put off from the lightship and came bobbing towards the destroyer, which had slowed down, and presently a grizzled old negro came scrambling over the side.

With all the pomposity and dignity of an admiral he saluted the lieutenant and climbed to the bridge and a moment later the destroyer was steaming once more on its way under the guidance of the incongruous old negro. Presently, far ahead, the boys saw bits of hazy detached land. Then tall chimneys of sugar mills and the slender towers of a wireless station became visible; the detached bits of dull green, which the boys had taken for islands, joined and formed a low green bank, and before they realized it, the boys found they were passing up a wide muddy stream and that roofs, buildings and spires of a large town were just ahead.

“Gosh, isn’t everything flat!” exclaimed Frank. “I don’t see a hill or a mountain or anything but that line of low brush anywhere. And the town looks as if it were below the water.”

“So it is,” replied Commander Disbrow. “Or rather it’s below the water level. There’s a dyke or sea wall to keep the water out, there are canals running through the streets to drain the place and there are big tide gates, or ‘kokers’ as they call them, which are closed at high tide and opened at low water.”

“Why, it must be like Holland then!” exclaimed Tom.

“It used to be Dutch,” explained the Commander, “and the Dutchmen always seem to like to build towns below sea level--sort of habit, I guess--though why they didn’t put it on high land up the river a bit gets me. You’ll find Dutch names everywhere, too, and old Dutch buildings, and if you went a hundred miles or so up the Essequibo you’d find an old Dutch fort.”

The destroyer had now drawn close to the town and a few minutes later was being moored to the government dock.

From the height of the vessel’s decks the boys could look right over the buildings. Beyond the sea of roofs and spires they could see waving palms, long avenues of green shade trees and busy, interesting streets and they were fairly crazy to go ashore.

The arrival of an American warship at Demerara was such an unusual event that a huge crowd had collected at the pier and among the multicolored throng of black, white, and yellow were the gold lace and uniforms of officers.

Knowing that his father and the others would be thoroughly occupied in the formalities of an official welcome, Tom asked permission to go ashore with Frank and Rawlins and scarcely was the destroyer moored when the three darted down the gangway and edging through the crowd came out on the noisy, busy street.

“Gee, this is some town!” exclaimed Tom as the three glanced about. “They’ve automobiles and trolley cars and everything.”

“Sure it’s some town!” agreed Rawlins. “Come on, let’s take a carriage and drive about. We’ll see it quicker and better that way.”

Tumbling into a rubber-tired Victoria driven by a grinning negro, the diver told him to drive them about Georgetown and out to the botanic station.

The boys were wildly enthusiastic over everything and Rawlins, who was almost as much of a boy as themselves, pointed out the more interesting features of the place. The picturesque Hindu men and women, who, garbed in their native costumes, swarmed everywhere, fascinated the boys. They were delighted with the shady streets, with the cool houses half-hidden in masses of strange tropical flowers, and they reveled in the calm canals spanned by Oriental-looking bridges and filled with pink lotus and water lilies.

“It’s the quaintest, prettiest place I’ve ever seen!” declared Tom. “And so foreign looking.”

“And these bright red roads!” exclaimed Frank. “And all those East Indians! Why, it’s like being in another world!”

“And just look at the way all the houses are built on posts or brick pillars!” put in Tom.

“Yes, that’s to keep them dry,” Rawlins explained. “In the rainy season the streets get flooded at times and so they build their houses on stilts.”

But all the other sights they had seen were forgotten when at last they came to the huge botanic station. Here they drove for miles through a veritable tropical forest among gigantic trees, under trailing lianas, beside jungle streams, all of which, as far as appearances went, might have been in the very heart of South America. But everywhere the red earth roads were as smooth and well kept as asphalt, the grass was green and velvety, beds of gorgeous flowers were all about, and all the trees and plants were carefully labeled. Only such things were in evidence to show it was a park or garden and not the untamed wild and when, to the boys’ delight, they saw a flock of gaudy parrots feeding overhead and caught a glimpse of huge-billed toucans, they felt as though they were actually in the “bush.” Everywhere, too, were canals filled with the gigantic leaves and huge flowers of the Victoria Regia lily and at one spot was a lily and lotus-filled lake, bordered with thickets of palms and fairly swarming with herons, egrets, and boat-bills, with a pair of great, scarlet macaws screeching from a dead limb over the water.

“Gosh!” exclaimed Frank. “It’s like a zoological garden, only better. Oh, look, look there! What’s that?” As he spoke, a great, dark object had risen through the water and with a hissing noise slowly disappeared.

“Only a manatee,” laughed Rawlins. “Didn’t you recognize it? It was one of those fellows that led you astray in Santo Domingo, you know.”

“But I never expected to see one here, right in the town,” declared Frank.

“Lots of ’em in here,” said the diver, “and plenty of alligators too. But everywhere you go about Georgetown you’ll find wild animals and birds. See herons and egrets feeding beside the roads and scarlet ibis on the mud flats alongside the docks. The city’s just at the edge of the jungle, you might say, and you could go right through to the Amazon without ever seeing a sign of civilization.”

“Golly, I do hope Dad goes after those fellows!” cried Tom. “After seeing this place I’m just crazy to see the real jungle.”

“And Indians!” added Frank.

“Well, I’ve a hunch he’s going,” declared Rawlins. “I’ll bet a dollar to a sixpence we’re all in the jungle inside of three days.”

From the gardens they drove through a picturesque village, swarming with East Indians, to the seawall, then through the town to the market, out to a big sugar estate with miles of enormous royal palms bordering the road, and finally to the museum where they spent an hour or more looking at the collections of native birds, animals, insects and Indian curios.

When at last they boarded the destroyer in time for lunch, they found Mr. Pauling and Mr. Henderson in earnest conversation with a tall, lean-faced, quiet man dressed in spotless white and a short, roly-poly, red-faced officer who wore a gorgeous uniform and whose enormous, fiercely twisted mustaches belied the merry twinkle in his eyes.

“It’s all right, Tom, come in, and you too, Frank, and you, Rawlins,” cried Mr. Pauling, as Tom, who had burst impetuously into the room, saw that his father was engaged and hastened to withdraw. “This is Colonel Maidely,” he continued, introducing the officer, “and this is Mr. Thorne. We’ve been discussing Rawlins’ idea of going into the bush after those rascals. By the way, Rawlins, I told the Colonel your opinion of him for letting the Devon slip by and he’s prepared to take a good dressing down!”

The jovial officer laughed heartily. “’Pon my word I deserve it!” he declared. “Jolly stupid of me, eh? Fact was we were all so interested in the two chaps with the plane we were careless--yes, I’ll admit it. Wager you if it hadn’t been for that we’d have suspected her. Jolly clever idea that--pulling the wool over our eyes with the airship! And my word! What nerve, as you Yankees say--using a name as much like Devon as Devonshire! But we’ll get her yet, old dear--don’t worry.”

“And I’m beginning to think your idea is worth trying, Rawlins,” went on Mr. Pauling. “Mr. Thorne here is an explorer--just came in from a long trip through the interior, and the Colonel says he knows more about the bush than the Indians themselves. He says it will be easy to trace the plane--just as you did--and he seems to think that in all probability they landed somewhere and will await word from their confederates that we’ve abandoned the chase when they can safely come out of hiding.”

“Hurrah!” shouted Tom, quite forgetful of the strangers’ presence. “Then we are going into the bush!”

“Provided I can induce Mr. Thorne to accompany us,” said his father. “None of us knows anything about the interior and we’d be helplessly at sea.”

“Oh, you will go, won’t you?” begged Frank. “We’re crazy to see Indians and wild animals and everything.”

The explorer smiled at the boys’ enthusiasm. “I’m inclined to think I will,” he replied. “I had hoped to go to the States next week--my work is done--but I’m anxious to be of any service I can to Uncle Sam, as well as to my British Colonial friends, and I’m still young enough in spirit, if not in years, to love adventure and excitement, and this trip promises both. Yes, Mr. Pauling, you can count on me and the sooner we get off the better.”

“Hurrah! Hip hurrah!” yelled the two boys, fairly dancing with joy.

“Bully for you!” cried Rawlins grasping Mr. Thorne’s hand. “I’ll say you’re a good sport. Didn’t I tell you we’d be in the bush in three days, boys?”

“Well I hope the rest of your hunch comes true as quickly,” laughed Mr. Pauling. “I’ve been telling the Colonel and Mr. Thorne about your famous hunches and the way they’ve saved the day so many times.”

“Bet you didn’t tell them about the inspector over at Trinidad thinking they were a new Yankee drink!” chuckled the diver.

“My word, that is rich!” choked Colonel Maidely when the laughter had subsided, “Jolly good joke! Just like old May--wait ’til I tell that to His Excellency and to Philip! By Jove, yes!”

Mr. Thorne rose. “I’ll be starting things going,” he announced. “Can you gentlemen be ready to leave to-morrow morning? I think my Indian boys are still here--at least some of them are, and if we get off on to-morrow morning’s steamer so much the better.”

“We can be ready,” Mr. Pauling assured him. “I suppose we had better take a radio outfit along.”

“By all means,” replied the other. “Doubtless these men with the plane are in touch with events by radio and I count largely on trailing them by that means. I understand you boys have a radio compass outfit.”

“Better than that,” declared Tom. “We’ve got a resonance coil.”

“Well, take it,” directed the explorer. “Don’t bother about the rest of the outfit--except arms and ammunition and old clothes. I’ll see to supplies and camp kit.”

“Gosh, isn’t it great?” exclaimed Tom after Mr. Thorne had gone. “Just to think we’re really going into the jungle!”

“You bet!” agreed Frank.

“And when we get back we can go looking for that loot that they hid,” went on Tom, “unless these rascals confess and tell us where it is.”

“Jehoshaphat! I’d forgotten all about that,” exclaimed Frank.

“You might just as well forget it, once and for all,” declared Mr. Pauling, laughing at the boys’ enthusiasm. “I don’t think even Rawlins has any idea of being able to recover that.”

“I’ll say I have!” cried the diver. “But it will take some figuring with what we have to go on. But I’m more keen on getting the old High Muck-a-Muck and his mate than finding that loot just now.”

Throughout the rest of the day the boys busied themselves with preparations for their trip, going over their radio instruments and packing the few belongings they were to take with them. Finally, in the evening, when Mr. Pauling and Mr. Henderson left for the reception at Government House, they took another long drive about the town and outlying country with Rawlins. Early the next morning, Mr. Thorne arrived, accompanied by two short, stockily built, broad-faced, brown men, who shouldered the party’s baggage and carried it to a waiting cart.

“Everything’s arranged,” the explorer told Mr. Pauling. “Most of my boys have gone up the river, but I telegraphed for them to be ready and I found a couple of them still in town.”

“Why, were those men you brought Indians?” asked Tom in surprise. “I thought they were Chinese or something.”

“Akawoias,” replied Mr. Thorne. “All the Indians here have a Mongolian appearance.”

“Gosh, if I’d known that, I’d have been more interested,” declared Frank.

“You’ll see them and a lot more for day after day,” laughed the explorer, “and you’ll find them very decent boys. They’ve been with me for months.”

“Do they talk English?” asked Tom.

“Well, not exactly,” replied Mr. Thorne. “They have a queer jargon they call ‘talky-talky’--something like Pigeon English. You’ll learn to speak it easily enough. Now if you’re all ready, let’s be off. The boat leaves in half an hour.”

“By the way,” remarked the explorer, as the party left the destroyer and walked up the street towards the dock or “stelling” where the river steamer was moored, “I’ve a bit of news for you. The seaplane passed over Wismar and was headed almost due south. I think that rather does away with the idea that they were making for Venezuela or Dutch Guiana.”

“Hmm,” muttered Mr. Pauling. “Is there any place in that vicinity where they could hide?”

“It’s the least known district in the entire colony,” Mr. Thorne assured him. “Until I explored it, the upper reaches of the Demerara were absolutely unknown--even the source of the river had never been discovered--and between the Berbice and the Essequibo rivers above the Demerara is a vast area of absolutely unexplored territory. They could come down anywhere in that district without the slightest chance of being seen--except by Indians--and it’s near enough the coast to be in radio communication with a confederate here or a ship at sea. But my own opinion is that their friends are over in Dutch Guiana. Judging by your experiences, they have a particular fondness for the Dutch and Dutch colonies.”

“Could they communicate with people there at this distance?” asked Mr. Henderson.

“I don’t see why not,” replied the explorer. “In a direct line, Paramaribo, the capital and port, is a little over two hundred miles distant. Of course, I do not know the sending range of the plane’s outfit, but they could certainly receive and I suppose that’s just as important.”

“If they’ve got as good an outfit on the plane as they had on the sub and at St. John they could send twice that distance,” declared Tom. “Do you understand radio, Mr. Thorne?”

The explorer smiled, “As Colonel Maidley would say, ‘rawther’,” he replied. “I don’t suppose I’m up-to-date, but it is something of a hobby with me.”

“Gee, that’s bully!” cried Tom. “Did Dad tell you about our subsea radio?”

Once started on this subject the two boys and Mr. Thorne forgot all else and held an animated conversation which continued without cessation until they reached the little river steamer and the boys’ interests were aroused by new sights.

Never had the two boys seen such an odd, many colored cosmopolitan crowd as thronged the “stelling” and the boat. Swathed in cotton, bare-legged and with their heads covered with immense turbans of red, white, or green the East Indian men stalked about. There were Parsees with their odd embroidered hats; Brahmins with the painted marks of holy men upon their foreheads; fakirs in rags, with long matted hair and beards, carrying their highly polished brass begging bowls and their goatskins as their total possessions; fat, sleek “Baboos” in silk, protecting their turbaned heads under huge, green umbrellas; and East Indian women by the score, ablaze with color and laden down with heavy barbaric jewelry, their wrists, ankles and arms encircled by scores of heavy bands and rings of beaten silver and gold, their sleek, black hair bound with dangling silver and jeweled ornaments, huge golden hoops in their noses--clad, besides, in brilliant embroidered jackets, fluttering gauze veils and silken draperies. A chattering, dark-hued throng that transformed the spot to a bit of India. Back and forth among them, elbowed the big, burly negroes--“pork knockers,” as Mr. Thorne called them--each carrying his “battell” or gold pan strapped to his pack and all bound for the gold and diamond diggings. Chinese there were too, prosperous merchants in European garments; farmers with huge, saucerlike hats, loose trousers and blouses; Chinese women in flapping, pajamalike costumes, and toddling Chinese kiddies that might have stepped from an Oriental screen. To swell the crowd and add to the multiplicity of nationalities there were sallow Portuguese, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons; bronzed English planters; dark-eyed Venezuelans; broad-shouldered, mighty-muscled “Boviander” rivermen; and half a dozen short, deep-chested, stolid-faced native Indians or “bucks,” as the explorer told the boys they were called.

And such confusion! Such a chaos of live stock, baggage, squalling babies, and wildly clucking and clacking fowls! How they would ever get straightened out; how they would ever find their own belongings, or how the tiny side-wheel steamer could ever accommodate them all was a mystery to the boys. But gradually order came out of chaos; the big, heavily booted, blue-clad “bobbies” shooed and berated and shoved and ordered and helped and at last, with a toot of the whistle, the gang plank was drawn in, the mooring lines were cast off and loaded to the gunwales, the little steamer swung into the swirling muddy stream and poked her blunt bow up river to the deafening cheers, farewells, and parting shouts of the kaleidoscopic crowd upon the stelling.

“Well, we’re off!” exclaimed Rawlins, “We may not know where we’re going but we’re on our way!”

“Yes, and to think we’re way down in South America!” cried Tom. “I can’t really believe it yet.”

“It isn’t much like the popular idea of South America, I admit,” laughed the explorer who had joined them. “But you’ve only begun to see unexpected and surprising things.”

“You’ll have to tell us everything,” declared Frank. “We want to learn all we can and everything’s absolutely new to us, you know.”

“I’ll do my best,” replied Mr. Thorne, “but even I learn something new every time I go into the bush.”

“If we learn where that plane’s hanging out, I’ll be satisfied,” declared the diver.