He left Sadie in a large hollow on the summit of the eminence, and returned to his comrades. By then bullets were coming thick from the depths of the jungle, and here and there queer little jets of dust spurted up from the ground, while there was a strange whistling in the air. But our hero had been under fire before, and took not the smallest notice of the missiles. He reached the camping ground which he and his friends had been occupying but a short while before, and at once snatched up the two black bundles which contained the store of notes which Jaime and his rascals had stolen. Then, waiting to see that the others were already running up the hill, he followed swiftly, the huge Tom bearing a case of ammunition just before him. Two minutes later all were under cover. "What now?" said Phineas, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I never did come across such a fellow as you are, Jim. Always getting into scrapes, and dragging your friends into them with you. But what now? Here we are under cover, and I ain't so sorry. But there must have been fifty of those natives down below, as well as the three white men. Jaime and his crew, I suppose?" "Jaime for sure, and sorry he'll be that he ventured to follow," answered Jim curtly. "I tell you straight, that fellow has been no end of a bother to me. And now, to add to all the mischief he's done, he deliberately fires at Sadie. Luckily the bullet just missed her. But there you are! I say he'll live to be sorry. I'll teach him a lesson this time that he won't forget." They were big words, spoken in a moment of intense vexation; but big words for all that, as Jim was the first to acknowledge when his temper had cooled a little. Here was his slender little party surrounded, and the enemy were by no means to be laughed at; for Jaime and his comrades had been busy on those occasions when they had been away from the Panama zone. They had done a big trade in rifles, or, rather, in obsolete muzzle loaders, with which almost every one of the natives accompanying them was armed; while the latter began to prove already that, obsolete though their weapons might be, they could at that range make fine practice with them. Indeed, every second now a ball struck the boulders behind which Jim and his friends were crouching, while before many minutes had passed the shots came from almost the entire circle of jungle. The party who had come to rescue Sadie was, in fact, practically surrounded. "Which don't say as they're goin' to take us," growled Tomkins, who was endowed with splendid pluck. "Now that we've got this shelter, and each man has selected a spot from which to fire, I guess we'll give a good account of ourselves. But what are the orders?" He appealed as if by custom to our hero, and Jim answered promptly.