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"If you'll excuse me, I'll go back and get the camera I was so careless as to leave out," spoke Mr. Alcando. "I'm glad he's gone," Captain Wiltsey said, as the cabin door closed. "I'd rather tell this to just you boys. I've just had a queer warning," he said. "A warning?" repeated Joe. "Yes, about Gatun Dam. There's a rumor that it is going to be destroyed!"
As he spoke there came in through the window a puff of air, that scattered the papers on the table. One, seemingly part of a letter, was blown to Blake's feet. He picked it up, and, as he handed it back to Mr. Alcando, the lad could not help seeing part of a sentence. It read: "... go to Panama, get all the pictures you can, especially the big guns...."
"Yes, of course I am, and yet " "Still suspicious I see," laughed Joe. "Better drop it." Blake did not answer. Inquiry of the hotel clerk gave Blake and Joe the information that Mr. Alcando was in his room, and, being shown to the apartment by a bell-boy, Blake knocked on the door. "Who's there?
He did not tell how Joe had nearly lost his life in helping get the films, for Blake was modest, as was his chum, and, as he said, it was "all in the day's work." Joe was left to recover from the shock and slight injuries at Gatun, while Blake and Mr. Alcando were at Culebra.
And as the sturdy vessel swayed this way and that, rolling at her moorings and threatening every moment to break and rush down the Canal, Blake and Joe stood at their posts, turning the cranks. And beside them stood Mr. Alcando, if not as calm as the boys, at least as indifferent to impending fate.
Alcando wanted to purchase for Blake and Joe complete camping outfits, portable stoves, guns, knives, patent acetylene lamps, portable tents, automatic revolvers and all sorts of things. "But we don't need them, thank you!" Blake insisted. "We're not going to do any hunting, and we won't camp out if we can help it." "Oh, but we might have to!" said Mr.
"I want to get some pictures of the breakwater," Blake had said, since he and his chum were to present, in reels, a story of a complete trip through the Canal, and the breakwater was really the starting point. It extends out into the Caribbean Sea eleven thousand feet. "And you are taking pictures now?" asked Mr. Alcando, as Blake and Joe set up a camera in the bow of the boat.
The inference was, then, that he had had a visitor, who was smoking when the boys knocked, but there was no sign of the caller then, except in the aroma of the cigar. He might have gone into one of the other rooms that opened from the one into which the boys looked, for Mr. Alcando had a suite in the hotel.
"And suspicion might easily have fallen on us. It was a clever trick. Once we had the Government permission to go all over with our cameras, and Alcando, as a pupil, could go with us, he could have done almost anything he wanted. But the plot failed." "Lucky it did," remarked Joe. "I guess they'll get after that railroad man next."
It is just like going up stairs at one end of a long board walk and down again at the other end, only the steps are of water, and not wood. The tug bearing Blake, Joe and Mr. Alcando was now steaming over toward Toro Point break-water, which I have before alluded to. This was built to make a good harbor at Colon, where violent storms often occur.
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