ide of the big hill through which the Canal had been cut.

"Out there--of course!" cried Joe. "We can't get moving pictures
of the slide in here."

He did not intend to speak shortly, but it sounded so in the
stress of his hurry.

"Then I'm coming!" said Mr. Alcando quietly. "If I'm to do this
sort of work in the jungle, along our railroad, I'll need to have
my nerve stiffened."

"This will stiffen it all right," returned Blake, sternly, as a
louder sound from without told of a larger mass of the earth
sliding into the waters of the Canal, whence the drift had been
excavated with so much labor.

It was a bad slide--the worst in the history of the
undertaking--and the limit of it was not reached when Joe and
Blake, with their cameras and spare boxes of film, went out on
deck.

The brown-red earth, the great rocks and the little stones, masses
of gravel, shale, schist, cobbles, fine sand--all in one
intermingled mass was slipping, sliding, rolling, tumbling,
falling and fairly leaping down the side of Gold Hill.

"Come on!" cried Blake to Joe.

"I'm with you," was the reply.

"And I, also," said Mr. Alcando with set teeth.

Fortunately for them the tug was tied to a temporary dock on the
side of the hill where the slide had started, so they did not have
to take a boat across, but could at once start for the scene of
the disaster.

"We may not be here when you come back!" called Captain Wiltsey
after the boys.

"Why not?" asked Joe.

"I may have to go above or below. I don't want to take any chances
of being caught by a blockade."

"All right. We'll find you wherever you are," said Blake.

As yet the mass of slipping and sliding earth was falling into the
waters of the Canal some distance from the moored tug. But there
was no telling when the slide might take in a larger area, and
extend both east and west.

Up a rude trail ran Blake and Joe, making their way toward where
the movement of earth was most pronounced. The light was not very
good on account of the rain, but they slipped into the cameras the
most sensitive film, to insure good pictures even when light
conditions were most unsatisfactory.

The moving picture boys paused for only a glance behind them. They
had heard the emergency orders being given. Soon they would be
flashed along the whole length of the Canal, bringing to the scene
the scows, the dredges, the centrifugal pumps--the men and the
machinery that would tear out the earth tha