n the cookroom.

"Gastong," continued Jack, looking longingly into the cook room, "was born
on the Isthmus, and knows all about conditions here, but he's too
aristocratic to mix with the inhabitants for any great length of time.
He's got the highfaluting blood all right, but he is shy of the skads, so
he protects his dignity and pride of race by bumming his way over the
world, like an English milord with a ruined castle and an overdraft at the
bank. He learned to talk United States in New York, and got to be a Boy
Scout in Philadelphia."

"Details of pedigree and biography later," said Ned. "Did he have an
airship?"

"He had the next best thing to it," Jack replied. "He had a motor car
which he was running for some gazabo over in Gatun. He was out for his
health when he saw the boys shooting by in a car with a man he knew to be
a crook, and was about to follow on and see what was doing when he saw me
speeding up the right of way, looking as if I was obliged to catch the
machine ahead.

"He left his car around the corner of the hill and met me on foot, with
about a dozen Boy Scout signs on tap and a score of badges of honor hidden
away in his ragged clothes. He told me what he thought of the man who was
running the car ahead, and I told him how he would be patrol leader on the
Golden Streets just because he was a Boy Scout and was there at that time,
so we got into his machine and followed the crook in the lead."

"What about the tramps?" laughed Frank.

"When we saw the boys go into that old house, we knew there was something
crooked going on, and Gastong said to me that if I wouldn't give him away
he would put me wise to a bunch of hoboes that were camping out in the
jungle, too lazy to work, and just about ripe for a scrap. So we rounded
up the hoboes and made a break for the old house."

"That's all," cried Frank.

"And got there just in time to see Frank and his friends going to the
floor with a lot of has-been wrestlers the man in charge of the house had
precipitated on them," Jack went on.

"Where are the people who were in the house?" asked Ned.

"Up in the air," cried Frank. "Say, they got out so fast that they melted
a path all down the hill to the motor car. We ought to have fixed that so
it wouldn't run."

"Where are the hoboes?" asked the lieutenant.

"Gone back to camp, wearied out with their exertions," laughed Jack. "They
came to the Isthmus to work on the canal, but found the climate didn't