“Dynamite, eh!” exclaimed the captain.  “I’d just like to see any one try it.  This canal is better guarded than you think, my friend,” and he looked meaningly at the other.

“Oh, I have no doubt that is so,” was the quick response.  “But it seems such a simple matter for one to do a great damage to it.  Possibly the indifference to guarding it is but seeming only.”

“That’s what it is!” went on Captain Watson.  “Dynamite!  Huh!  I’d like to see someone try it!” He meant, of course, that he would not like to see this done, but that was his sarcastic manner of speaking.

“What do you think of him, anyhow?” asked Joe of Blake a little later when they were putting away their cameras, having taken all the views they wanted.

“I don’t know what to say, Joe,” was the slow answer.  “I did think there was something queer about Alcando, but I guess I was wrong.  It gave me a shock, though, to hear him speak so about the Canal.”

“The same here.  But he’s a nice chap just the same, and he certainly shows an interest in moving pictures.”

“That’s right.  We’re getting some good ones, too.”

The work in Culebra Cut, though nearly finished, was still in such a state of progress that many interesting films could be made of it, and this the boys proposed to do, arranging to stay a week or more at the place which, more than any other, had made trouble for the canal builders.

“Well, it surely is a great piece of work!” exclaimed Blake, as he and Joe, with Mr. Alcando and Captain Watson, went to the top of Gold Hill one day.  They were on the highest point of the small mountain through which the cut had to be dug.

“It is a wonderful piece of work,” the captain said, as Blake and Joe packed up the cameras they had been using.  “Think of it—­a cut nine miles long, with an average depth of one hundred and twenty feet, and in some places the sides are five hundred feet above the bottom, which is, at no point, less than three hundred feet in width.  A big pile of dirt had to be taken out of here, boys.”

“Yes, and more dirt will have to be,” said Mr. Alcando.

“What do you mean?” asked the tug commander quickly, and rather sharply.

“I mean that more slides are likely to occur; are they not?”

“Yes, worse luck!” growled the captain.  “There have been two or three small ones in the past few weeks, and the worst of it is that they generally herald larger ones.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant,” the Spaniard went on.

“And it’s what we heard,” spoke Blake.  “We expect to get some moving pictures of a big slide if one occurs.”

“Not that we want it to,” explained Joe quickly.

“I understand,” the captain went on with a smile.  “But if it is going to happen you want to be here.”

“Exactly,” Blake said.  “We want to show the people what a slide in Culebra looks like, and what it means, in hard work, to get rid of it.”