“Do you know, Jack,” Bert said confidentially, “that I went into the wireless game simply because it appeared to me to offer the best chance of meeting Miss Adventure. I’ve been at it for five years now and I’ve never even had the pleasure of getting a look at her face. “Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me a _tumble_. I took that sealing job because I certainly thought I’d meet Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the Arctic North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what my Captain wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your Captain had to say to my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a few rich men could get richer by enabling vain women to run around the streets of New York and a few other big burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals that had been clubbed to death. Now that’s big business for men and women to be in, isn’t it? “I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in some punk Central American country. And it’s funny,” he went on complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the service a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the sinking of the _Andalusian_, I’d have given a year of my life to have been in your place. “Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber plantations, savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and all the garnishings that go to make up a first class tropical jungle. I know a man in New York that does business with a rubber concern in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we sailed north, that the _Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil_ had a contract to put up half a dozen wireless stations along the river. “It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I took a trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you say?” Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we could get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert assured me that he could _fix it_ and he was as good as his word. So it was we sailed in due time on the _Ceara_ of the _Holliday Line_. It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have ample opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim back, if he got back at all, for the _Ceara_ had no wireless equipment--such was her regard for the laws of the U.S.