Carmichael, I should think you’d get your wish before you die.” He looked across the field and saw a short, helmeted figure coming toward them. “Don Rodriguez, I bet. He’s smiling, so that must be he. He’s smiling with recognition as if he’s been given a pretty accurate description of me.”

“And a description one could never forget,” said Carmichael. “You must tell me more about yourself, Keen—that is if you care to. If all Americans are like you, then I want to meet heaps of them.”

“Well, I’m glad I’ve done so much for my country,” Hal laughed. “And I’ll tell you all you want to hear. Wait until we get up in the air—we’ll have a little shouting party, huh?”

“Righto.”

The helmeted figure came straight to Hal with outstretched hand and black, smiling eyes.

“Señor Hal Keen—tall like a mountain and red at the top,” he said in broken English, and laughed. Then he turned to Rene. “And this is the Señor uncle—no?”

“Yes,” answered Carmichael with a swift chuckle, “his Dutch uncle.” And in an undertone to Hal, he said: “Do I look as old as that?”

“It depends on how old looking you think an uncle ought to look,” Hal grinned. “My unk seems like a kid to me yet. He’s not forty.”

“And I’m not thirty,” said Carmichael with a poignancy in his voice that did not escape Hal. But he was all laughter the next second and he added: “At that I can still be your Dutch uncle, eh? Your Uncle Rene?”

“I’ll tell the world you can! You are!” Hal turned then to the still-smiling Rodriguez. “When do we hop off in your bus?”

“Ah, to be sure,” said the aviator. “The plane, you mean, eh? She is there—see?” he said, pointing to a small, single-motor cabin plane. “Now shall we take a fly over the jungle, you and the Señor uncle?”

“Sure,” they answered unanimously. And as they followed at the aviator’s heels, Rene whispered: “I kind of like this, being your Dutch uncle. And as long as he thinks so....”

“Why bother to explain, huh?” Hal returned in the spirit of the thing. “There’s not that much difference between a real uncle and a Dutch uncle anyway.”

But Hal was to learn that there was a difference as far as Rodriguez was concerned.

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