A mile beyond, where a lighted river steamer with steam up lay at the north bank, they ran in at the Apshodel wells.  The steamer was small, and the nearly two hundred Americans—­men, women, and children—­crowded her capacity.  Blasphemous greetings of pure joy and geniality were exchanged between the men, and Habert learned that the steamboat was waiting for his Billy Boy, who, astride a horse, was rounding up isolated drilling gangs who had not yet learned that the United States had seized Vera Cruz and that all Mexico was boiling.

Habert climbed out to wait and to go down on the steamer, while the three that remained on the Chill, having learned that Miss Drexel was not with the refugees, headed for the Dutch Company on the south shore.  This was the big gusher, pinched down from one hundred and eighty-five thousand daily barrels to the quantity the company was able to handle.  Mexico had no quarrel with Holland, so that the superintendent, while up, with night guards out to prevent drunken soldiers from firing his vast lakes of oil, was quite unemotional.  Yes, the last he had heard was that Miss Drexel and her brother were back at the hunting lodge.  No; he had not sent any warnings, and he doubted that anybody else had.  Not till ten o’clock the previous evening had he learned of the landing at Vera Cruz.  The Mexicans had turned nasty as soon as they heard of it, and they had killed Miles Forman at the Empire Wells, run off his labor, and looted the camp.  Horses?  No; he didn’t have horse or mule on the place.  The federals had commandeered the last animal weeks back.  It was his belief, however, that there were a couple of plugs at the lodge, too worthless even for the Mexicans to take.

“It’s a hike,” Davies said cheerfully.

“Six miles of it,” Wemple agreed, equally cheerfully.  “Let’s beat it.”

A shot from the river, where they had left Peter in the boat, started them on the run for the bank.  A scattering of shots, as from two rifles, followed.  And while the Dutch superintendent, in execrable Spanish, shouted affirmations of Dutch neutrality into the menacing dark, across the gunwale of Chill II they found the body of the tow-headed youth whose business it had been not to die.

* * * * *

For the first hour, talking little, Davies and Wemple stumbled along the apology for a road that led through the jungle to the lodge.  They did discuss the glares of several fires to the east along the south bank of Panuco River, and hoped fervently that they were dwellings and not wells.

“Two billion dollars worth of oil right here in the Ebano field alone,” Davies grumbled.

“And a drunken Mexican, whose whole carcass and immortal soul aren’t worth ten pesos including hair, hide, and tallow, can start the bonfire with a lighted wad of cotton waste,” was Wemple’s contribution.  “And if ever she starts, she’ll gut the field of its last barrel.”