as to whether it was the Toreno wells, or the bungalow on
Merrick's banana plantation that flared so fiercely.

At the end of an hour, Peter slowed down and ran in to the bank.

"I got a cache of gasoline here--ten gallons," he explained, "and it's
just as well to know it's here for the back trip." Without leaving the
boat, fishing arm-deep into the brush, he announced, "All hunky-dory."
He proceeded to oil the engine. "Huh!" he soliloquized for their
benefit. "I was just readin' a magazine yarn last night. 'Whose Business
Is to Die,' was its title. An' all I got to say is, 'The hell it is.' A
man's business is to live. Maybe you thought it was our business to die
when the _Topila_ was pepper-in' us. But you was wrong. We're
alive, ain't we? We beat her to it. That's the game. Nobody's got any
business to die. I ain't never goin' to die, if I've got any say about
it."

He turned over the crank, and the roar and rush of the _Chill_ put
an end to speech.

There was no need for Wemple or Davies to speak further in the affair
closest to their hearts. Their truce to love-making had been made as
binding as it was brief, and each rival honored the other with a firm
belief that he would commit no infraction of the truce. Afterward was
another matter. In the meantime they were one in the effort to get Beth
Drexel back to the safety of riotous Tampico or of a war vessel.

It was four o'clock when they passed by Panuco Town. Shouts and songs
told them that the federal detachment holding the place was celebrating
its indignation at the landing of American bluejackets in Vera Cruz.
Sentinels challenged the _Chill_ from the shore and shot at random
at the noise of her in the darkness.

A mile beyond, where a lighted river steamer with steam up lay at the
north bank, they ran in at the Apshodel wells. The steamer was small,
and the nearly two hundred Americans--men, women, and children--crowded
her capacity. Blasphemous greetings of pure joy and geniality were
exchanged between the men, and Habert learned that the steamboat was
waiting for his Billy Boy, who, astride a horse, was rounding up
isolated drilling gangs who had not yet learned that the United States
had seized Vera Cruz and that all Mexico was boiling.

Habert climbed out to wait and to go down on the steamer, while the
three that remained on the _Chill_, having learned that Miss Drexel
was not with the refugees, headed for the Dutch Company on the south
shore. Thi