“Leith will fix ’em!” cried the Professor, ignoring the youngster’s comment on the inoffensive nature of men of his type.  “Leith will put them off the place—­”

“Stop chattering and read that!” I interrupted.  “Your precious friend sent this ahead by Soma.  He dropped it and we got hold of it.”

Holman struck a match and held it over the scrap of paper while the scientist stared at it through his thick glasses.

“Well?” he queried.  “What has this nonsense to do with me?”

“The five babies,” snapped Holman.

“Five babies?” repeated the Professor.  “I know nothing about babies!”

His small head wagged backward and forward as he made the statement, and his evident inability to see that the reference concerned us irritated the youngster beyond measure.

“You’re the biggest baby of the five!” he roared.  “You’re a madman!  Come away, Verslun; it’s no use arguing with him!”

The Professor gave an indignant snort, straightened his small body, as if he contemplated an attack upon the youngster, then dashed madly back to the fire, where we watched him bobbing his head up and down as he spoke to the two girls.  His confidence in the rascal who was possibly luring him to his death was pitiful to see, and we recognized at that moment that it would be useless to waste any further arguments with him.

“We’ve got to get out of this scrape by our own efforts,” muttered Holman.  “The girls won’t leave him, worse luck.  If they would I’d turn tail this minute and make an attempt to fight our way back to the yacht.”

“And I doubt if you will find a haven there,” I remarked.  “That bilious captain was in a great hurry to send word to Leith that I had got safely by his farewell bombardment.  We’re in for it, old man, and we might as well realize the fact right now.”

“You’re not sorry I found you on that pile of pearl shell?”

“Sorry?” I cried.  “I’m glad, man—­I’m infernally glad.”

Holman gripped my hand, and then we crawled through the bushes toward the spot where Soma and Leith had started off on their supposed work of exploration.

“What can we do?” I asked.

“Wait round here and pot him when he is coming back,” said the youngster cheerfully.  “But we should let the girls know something, shouldn’t we?  That old fool will tell them a garbled account that will frighten them out of their wits.  One of us had better go and try to quiet their fears.”

“You go then,” I remarked.  “I’ll wait here till you come back.”

Holman crept quietly toward the campfire, and I waited in the undergrowth.  The moon was rising in the east and a soft gray light wiped out the intense blackness that had come upon the place after the short twilight.  The tops of the cliffs toward which we were journeying were tipped by a brilliant thread of silver as the moon peeped above their ramparts, and I crept deeper into the shadows as the full glory of the glowing orb turned the night into day.