“Danger? Well, we knew we were going into a desperate game, but, as MacDuffy said, we couldn’t do otherwise than our best to rescue your father. As we made our way through the jungle we discussed the situation. It looked black and no mistake. In the first place, as Captain Andrews pointed out, the revolution was raging in northern Mexico, and Diaz, in his last desperate stand, had withdrawn troops from every province in Mexico. Captain Andrews told us that the descendants of the Mayas, who inhabited this part of Yucatan, were endowed with a fierce hatred of Mexicans and white men in general, and that they had been kept in subjugation solely by the presence of large bodies of troops. With this menace to their warlike ideas withdrawn, the Mayas were probably ripe for any mischief. “All this, as you can imagine, didn’t tend to raise our spirits, and the prospect of rescuing your father began to seem remote indeed. Well, to cut a long story short, we followed the trail for two days till we began to arrive in the foothills of the range we had seen. Occasionally we came across what were evidently the sites of recent camps, so we knew that we were on the track all right. “The third day, about noon, we marched right out of a canyon, threaded by a swift river, into an Indian settlement. Before we could say ‘knife,’ or raise a weapon, we were surrounded and made captives. We were thrown into a palm-thatched hut and placed under strict guard, and we faced the prospect of a speedy death. But at the moment we thought little of these matters, for the hut already contained three other captives, and they were Professor Chadwick, Abner Jennings and Jack Allworthy, the last wounded in the shoulder by the spear thrust that had knocked him down, but luckily not seriously. “You can guess how delighted we were in the first few moments, and then how depressed we all became as we began to realize that so far as an escape was concerned we might as well have been imprisoned in an iron-walled dungeon. We were deprived of nothing in the way of food, and were not bound in any way, but the hut was surrounded by too strong a guard to make any idea of escape practicable. So the night passed, a night that we spent in discussing and rejecting a hundred plans of escape, for each, in turn, was discarded as hopeless.