There was no answer! With one accord, never pausing to think of personal danger, knowing that Nicky was not the sort to play a joke, that if he failed to answer their hail he must be in peril, they slipped into the water and used their utmost effort to reach the bend. Hardly had they left the tiny beach when a Seminole Indian, with an almost expressionless face, emerged from a clump of heavy bushes through which he had been calmly, stolidly observing them for a half hour.

That was why, when Mr. Neale arrived ten minutes later, no clothes hung in the sun to furnish a clue to the presence of the boys. As the two chums reached the bend and could see around it they suspended their strokes and stared! Nicky was not in danger at all! But he was evidently too stupefied by what he was regarding to have heard their call; or, perhaps the dense growth had dulled the sound. At any rate, they paddled hastily forward until they could climb out beside their comrade.

“Why didn’t you answer?” demanded Cliff, his anxiety shifting to a natural anger at the fright Nicky had given them.

“Oh! Golly! I guess I was too surprised to hear you!”

Nicky lifted an arm and waved it at the scene before them. On the shore a light canoe of cedar, hollowed out of the virgin wood as the Seminoles create their water craft, lay upturned. Beyond that there was a spot cleared in the heavy brush growth, and there were piled cases and crates, perhaps fifty of them! It did not require the stenciled black letters at the visible ends of certain cases to indicate the truth to the chums. An old ship’s lantern of the sort used at the starboard and port sides, with a screen of green glass over its front indicated where the previous night’s uncanny glow had come from. But the cases themselves told more.

“Rum runners!” gasped Nicky.

“We ought to have guessed,” Cliff said. “Nelse is one of them. That’s why he tried to scare us away. This is a nest of them. I suppose they can run up from the islands—especially Cuba—get their large boat hidden from the Government patrol on some dark night, in among the keys, and then ferry the cases over here in smaller boats.”

“But what good does that do them?” Tom wondered. “How do they get the cases to market?”

“I guess the Seminole Indians, or maybe half-breeds, work with them. It must be the Seminoles because they know the waterways in the Big Cypress Swamp and the Everglades, and I don’t 

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