"Out of the frying pan—" breathed Cliff! He and Tom elevated their hands and Nicky, with reluctant strokes, drew close to the bow. Tom discerned a name in glimmering gold against white paint.

"Fellows," he whimpered, "it's that boat we saw in Jamaica!"

It was—El Libertad! CHAPTER XVIII A SURPRISE!

"That's a nice way to welcome mariners!" exclaimed Cliff as they came alongside; the colored man on deck merely grunted.

"Pass your line!" he said.

When they clambered onto the small aft deck they saw that their new captor was a large, heavy, but lithe-looking negro.

"I wanted you to go away, before," he said, more pleasantly. "When I saw you this time I wouldn't take chances on letting you go!"

"What do you mean by that?" Nicky demanded.

"Oh!" replied the man, "it's this way: we got the maps back in Jamaica, and got El Libertad ready. When you tried to hire her Senor Ortiga let your chief think she was laid up waiting for machinery—but before you were ten miles away we started for the archipelago."

"Then I suppose it was one of your crowd who tried to scare us with the blue light and rapping on the sloop," cried Nicky.

"It was me," he answered, not very grammatically. "I used a blue ship's flare we had on the boat, burned in a box so you only saw the light and not the flame. Then I swam out under water and hit the sloop and then coaxed you back to the island with another flare."

"So it was you who put the message there," Tom exclaimed, feeling somewhat ashamed of his terror of the past, now that a perfectly natural explanation made it all seem so easy to understand.

"I put it there, but Cap'n Ortiga, he planned it—with the man who got the maps."

"And who was that?" demanded Nicky.

"You'll see," declared the colored man. "Come this way!"

He led them into the cabin, a much smaller one than on the Senorita, since the Libertad was a narrower, shorter vessel.Under the ceiling electric dome two men sat at a table, playing some game of cards. The man facing them was of Spanish type, not as tall or as excitable as his brother, but clearly 

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