ed
out, when we'll get back.... You can't pinch down Jaramillo under
twenty-five hundred barrels. We've got storage for ten days. Gabriel'll
have to handle it. Keep it moving, if we have to run it into the
river----"

"Ask him if he has a launch," Habert broke in.

"He hasn't," was Wemple's answer. "The federals commandeered the last
one at noon."

"Say, Carson, how are you going to make your get-away?" Wemple queried.

The man to whom he talked was across the Panuco, on the south side, at
the tank farm.

"Says there isn't any get-away," Wemple vouchsafed to the other two.
"The federals are all over the shop, and he can't understand why they
haven't raided him hours ago."

"... Who? Campos? That skunk! ... all right.... Don't be worried if you
don't hear from me. I'm going up river with Davies and Habert.... Use
your judgment, and if you get a safe chance at Campos, pot him.... Oh,
a hot time over here. They're battering our doors now. Yes, by all
means ... Good-by, old man."

Wemple lighted a cigarette and wiped his forehead.

"You know Campos, Jose H. Campos," he
volunteered. "The dirty cur's stuck Carson up
for twenty thousand pesos. We had to pay,
or he'd have compelled half our peons to enlist
or set the wells on fire. And you know,
Davies, what we've done for him in past years.
Gratitude? Simple decency? Great Scott!"

* * * * *

It was the night of April twenty-first. On the morning of the
twenty-first the American marines and bluejackets had landed at Vera
Cruz and seized the custom house and the city. Immediately the news was
telegraphed, the vengeful Mexican mob had taken possession of the
streets of Tampico and expressed its disapproval of the action of the
United States by tearing down American flags and crying death to the
Americans.

There was nothing save its own spinelessness to deter the mob from
carrying out its threat. Had it battered down the doors of the Southern
Hotel, or of other hotels, or of residences such as Wemple's, a fight
would have started in which the thousands of federal soldiers in Tampico
would have joined their civilian compatriots in the laudable task of
decreasing the Gringo population of that particular portion of Mexico.
There should have been American warships to act as deterrents; but
through some inexplicable excess of delicacy, or strategy, or heaven
knows what, the United States, when it gave its orders to take Vera
Cruz, had