“How?”

“Every man has to pay for his sins.”

“That’s what we were taught in Sunday school,” Harry nodded, “and I’ve always believed it.  Yet here, in these remote mountains of the state of Bonista, if anywhere, Don Luis would appear to be safe.  If a few of his men crept up here, late some night, with pistols or knives, and finished us before we had time to wake up, do you imagine that any one hereabouts would dare to make any report of the matter?  Would our fate ever reach the outside world?”

“It would be sure to, in time, I believe,” Tom answered, thoughtfully.

“How?”

“That I can’t tell.  But I believe in the invariable triumph of right, no matter how great the odds against it may seem.”

“Let right triumph, after we’re buried,” continued Harry, “and what good would it do us?”

“None, in any ordinary material sense.  Yet good would come to the world through our fate, even if only in proclaiming, once more, the sure defeat of all wicked plans in the end.”

Harry said no more, just then.  Tom Reade, who ordinarily was intensely practical, was also the kind of young man who could perish for an ideal, if need be.  Tom went outside, stretching himself on the grass under a tree.  He sighed for a book, but there was none, so he lay staring off over the valley below.

Twenty minutes later Harry, after trying vainly to take a nap on a cot in the tent, followed his chum outside.

“Odd, isn’t it, Tom?” questioned Hazelton.  “We’re living what looks like a wholly free life.  Nothing to prevent us from tramping anywhere we please on these hills, and yet we know to a certainty that we wouldn’t be able to get twenty miles from here before soldiers would have us nabbed, and marching away to a prison from which, very likely, no one in the outside world would ever hear of us again.”

“It is queer,” agreed Tom, nodding.  “Oh, just for one glimpse of Yankee soil!”

“Twice,” went on Harry, “we’ve even persuaded Nicolas to bribe some native to take a letter from us, to be mailed at some distant point.  After two or three days Don Luis, in each instance, has come here, and, with a smile, has shown us our own intercepted letter.  Yet Nicolas has been honest in the matter, beyond a doubt.  It is equally past question that the native whom Nicolas has trusted and paid has made an honest attempt to get away and post our letter; but always the cunning of a Montez overtakes the trusted messenger.”

“And one can only guess what has happened to the messengers,” Tom said, soberly.  “Undoubtedly both of the two poor fellows are now passing the days incommunicado.  It makes a fellow a bit heartsick, doesn’t it, chum, to think of the probable fates of two men who have tried to serve us.  And what, in the end, is to be the fate of poor little Nicolas?  Don Luis Montez is not the sort of man to forgive him his fidelity to us.”