“Me,” he answered Habert.  “I ain’t hellbent nowhere exceptin’ to get away from the shell-fire.  She’s a caution, that Topila.  Huh! but I limbered ’em up some.  I was goin’ every inch of twenty-five.  They was like amateurs blazin’ away at canvasback.”

“Which Chill is it?” Wemple asked.

“Chill II,” Peter answered.  “It’s all that’s left. Chill I a Greaser—­you know ‘m—­Campos—­commandeered this noon.  I was runnin’ Chill III when they caught me at sundown.  Made me come in under their guns at the East Coast outfit, and fired me out on my neck.

“Now the boss’d gone over in this one to Tampico in the early evening, and just about ten minutes ago I spots it landin’ with a sousy bunch of Federals at the East Coast, and swipes it back according.  Where’s the boss?  He ain’t hurt, is he?  Because I’m going after him.”

“No, you’re not, Peter,” Davies said.  “Mr. Frisbie is safe at the Southern Hotel, all except a five-inch scalp wound from a brick that’s got him down with a splitting headache.  He’s safe, so you’re going with us, going to take us, I mean, up beyond Panuco town.”

“Huh?—­I can see myself,” Peter retorted, wiping his greasy nose on a wad of greasy cotton waste.  “I got some cold.  Besides, this night-drivin’ ain’t good for my complexion.”

“My boy’s up there,” Habert said.

“Well, he’s bigger’n I am, and I reckon he can take care of himself.”

“And there’s a woman there—­Miss Drexel,” Davies said quietly.

“Who?  Miss Drexel?  Why didn’t you say so at first!” Peter demanded grievedly.  He sighed and added, “Well, climb in an’ make a start.  Better get your Dutch friends to donate me about twenty gallons of gasoline if you want to get anywhere.”

* * * * *

“Won’t do you no good to lay low,” Peter Tonsburg remarked, as, at full speed, headed up river, the Topila’s searchlight stabbed them.  “High or low, if one of them shells hits in the vicinity—­good night!”

Immediately thereafter the Topila erupted.  The roar of the Chill’s exhaust nearly drowned the roar of the guns, but the fragile hull of the craft was shaken and rocked by the bursting shells.  An occasional bullet thudded into or pinged off the Chill, and, despite Peter’s warning that, high or low, they were bound to get it if it came to them, every man on board, including Peter, crouched, with chest contracted by drawn-in shoulders, in an instinctive and purely unconscious effort to lessen the area of body he presented as a target or receptacle for flying fragments of steel.

The Topila was a federal gunboat.  To complicate the affair, the constitutionalists, gathered on the north shore in the siege of Tampico, opened up on the speedboat with many rifles and a machine gun.

“Lord, I’m glad they’re Mexicans, and not Americans,” Habert observed, after five mad minutes in which no damage had been received.  “Mexicans are born with guns in their hands, and they never learn to use them.”