Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/296

 with!" said the operator, looking with open scorn at the strange tug, the strange ensign, the still stranger figures in uniform. He tried to hide his anxiety and depression under a lightness of tone that seemed as incongruous, even to his own ears, as the tricoloured ensign flapping over the soft-coal-burning craft before them.

"Those are the tools that can cut deep, when they have to," was the woman's answer, as she once more looked landward.

"They're burning Parroto!" cried some one from a lower deck, in plaintive wonder. "That's Parroto going up in smoke there!"

McKinnon, under the rocking awning that could not altogether shut out the hot sun of the late afternoon, leaned farther over the rail and peered inland.

Far to the south and west stretched the flat and gloomy swamps, steaming under the sun's rays, mephitic and menacing. Still farther away, tier by tier, rose the hills, with a condor wheeling above them here and there.

They lifted, in gentle waves softened with the green of orange and banana and cocoanut-palm, of bamboo and breadfruit, until they crowded mistily up to the huddled blue line of the mountain-ridges, to the very peaks of the Cordilleras, lonely, forbidding, and seemingly impenetrable.