Page:Lost with Lieutenant Pike (1919).djvu/331

 with you," sighed his father. "But maybe you'll be back again, by the thousand, and then we'll see the flag floating."

"Maybe. There'll be a time," replied Freegift. "There'll be a time when the flag'll float over this very spot. But we won't need any thousand. Five hundred of us under Cap'n Pike could take the whole country. An' now we know a way in."

"I've half a notion that the lieutenant wasn't so sorry to be made prisoner, after all," Stub's father remarked to him, on the way home. "There's something secret about this that he doesn't tell. As that soldier friend of yours said, in case of war—and war over this borderland dispute is likely to break out any day—the army will know what's ahead of it."

"They'll let Lieutenant Pike go, won't they?"

His father chuckled.

"They'll have to. He's not the kind of man they can keep. They can't prove he's a spy, for he's in uniform (what there is of it), and his orders are plain to read."

This day was March 4. It was two weeks later, or March 18, when at last Lieutenant Saltelo brought in Sergeant Meek and Corporal Jerry Jackson, Terry Miller, John Mountjoy, poor John Sparks and Tom Dougherty, Baroney, Pat Smith and the few miser