Kitobni o'qish: «The Boy Aviators in Nicaragua; or, In League with the Insurgents»

CHAPTER I.
THE BOYS START FOR THE TROPICS

It was a bitter evening in late December. Up and down the East River tugs nosed their way through the winter twilight’s gloom, shouldering aside as they snorted along big drifting cakes of ice.

At her pier, a short distance below the Brooklyn Bridge, the steamer Aztec, of the Central American Trading Company’s line had just blown a long, ear-piercing blast – the signal that in half-an-hour she would cast off her lines. In the shrill summons there was a note of impatience; as if the ship was herself as eager as her fortunate passengers to be off for the regions of sunshine and out of the misery of the New York winter.

The Aztec had been due to sail at noon that day, as the Blue Peter floating at her mainmast head had signified. Here it was, however, a good hour since the towering mass of skyscrapers on the opposite side of the river had blossomed, as if by magic, into a jewel-spangled mountain of light and her steam winches were still clanking and the ’longshore men, under the direction of the screech of the boss stevedore’s whistle, as hard at work as ever. No wonder her passengers fretted at the delay.

Not the least eager among them to see the ship’s restraining lines cast off were Frank and Harry Chester, known to the public, through the somewhat hysterical pæans of the Daily Press and the rather more dignified, but not less enthusiastic articles of the technical and scientific reviews, as the Boy Aviators. It was an hour since they had bade their mother and an enthusiastic delegation of boy and girl friends good-bye.

Side by side the youths paced the deck muffled in huge overcoats and surveying anxiously, as from time to time they approached the forward end of the promenade deck, a lofty pile of boxes that contained the various sections of their aeroplane the Golden Eagle which had made the sensation of the year in aviation circles.

Ever since the Golden Eagle, a biplane of novel construction, had carried off from all competitors the $10,000 prize for a sustained flight offered by J. Henry Gage, the millionaire aeronaut at the White Plains Aerodrome, the boys had become as well-known figures in New York life as any of the air prize contestants during the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. Frank, the eldest, was sixteen. A well-grown, clean-lived-looking boy with clear blue eyes and a fearless expression. His brother, a year younger, was as wholesome appearing and almost as tall, but he had a more rollicking cast in his face than his graver brother Frank, whose equal he was, however, in skill, coolness and daring in the trying environment of the treacherous currents of the upper air.

With the exception of a brief interval for lunch the two boys had amused themselves since noon by watching the, to them novel, scene of frantic activity on the wharf. The ships of the Central American Trading Co. had a reputation for getting away on time and the delay had grated on everybody’s nerves from the Aztec’s captain’s to the old wharfinger’s; in the case of the latter indeed, he had attempted to chastise, a short time before, an adventurous newsboy who had ventured on the pier to sell his afternoon papers. Frank had intervened for the ragged little scarecrow and the boys had purchased several copies of his wares. They had a startling interest for the boys which they had not suspected. In huge type it was announced in all, that the long threatened revolution in Nicaragua had at last broken out with a vengeance, and seemed likely to run like wildfire from one end of the turbulent republic to the other. Troops were in the field on both sides – so the despatch said – and the insurgents were loudly boasting of their determination to march on and capture Managua, the capital, and overthrow the government of President Zelaya. Practically every town in the country had been well posted with the manifesto of the reactionaries, and had taken the move as being one in the right direction.

In the news that the revolution, the storm clouds of which had long been ominously rumbling had actually broken out, the boys had an intense and vital interest. Their father’s banana plantation, one of the largest and best known in Central America, lay inland about twenty miles from Greytown, a seacoast town, on the San Juan River. The boys were on their way there after a long and trying season of flights and adulation to rest up and continue, in the quiet they had hoped to find there, a series of experiments in aviation which had already made them among the most famous graduates the Agassiz High School on Washington Heights had turned out in its years of existence. Already in their flights at White Plains, and later during the Hudson-Fulton celebration, the boys had earned, and earned well, laurels that many an older experimenter in aviation might have worn with content, but they were intent on yet further distinction. Already they had given several trials to a wireless telegraph appliance for attachment to aeroplanes and the Golden Eagle in some private flights had had this apparatus in use. The results had been encouraging in the extreme. With the use of a greater lifting surface the boys felt that they would be justified in adding to the weight the aeroplane could lift and that this weight would be in form of additional power batteries for the wireless outfit both had agreed. In the boxes piled on the foredeck they had indeed a supply of balloon silk, canvas, wire, spruce stretchers and aluminum frames which they intended to put into use as soon as they should reach Nicaragua in the furtherance of their experiments. The conquest of the air both in aviation and communication was the lofty goal the boys had set themselves.

“The revolution has really started at last, old boy – hurray!” shouted Harry, throwing his arm in boyish enthusiasm about his staid brother Frank, as both boys eagerly assimilated the news.

“I say, Frank,” he continued eagerly, “it’s always been our contention that an aeroplane capable of invariable command by its operator would be of immense value in warfare. What a chance to prove it! Three cheers for the Golden Eagle.” In his excitement Harry pulled his soft cap from his head and waved it enthusiastically.

Frank, however, seemed to view the situation more gravely than his light-hearted brother. As has been said, Frank, while but little older in point of years possessed a temperament diametrically opposed to the mercurial nature of his younger brother. He weighed things, and indeed in the construction of the Golden Eagle, while Harry had suggested all the brilliant imaginative points, it had been the solid practical Frank who had really figured out the abstruse details of the wonder-ship’s structure.

Despite this difference of temperament – in fact Harry often said, “If Frank wasn’t so clever and I wasn’t so optimistic we’d never have got anywhere,” – in spite of this contrast between the two there was a deep undercurrent of brotherly love and both possessed to the highest degree the manly courage and grit which had tided them over many a discouraging moment. Nor in the full tide of their success, when people turned on the street to point them out, were either of the boys at all above recognizing their old playfellows and schoolmates as has been known to be the case, it is said, with other successful boys – and men.

“I don’t know, Harry,” replied Frank at length to his brother’s enthusiastic reception of the news of the rebellion, “there are two sides to every question.”

“Yes, but Frank, think,” protested Harry, “we shall have a chance to see a real skirmish if only they keep at it long enough. Confound it though,” he added with an expression of keen regret, “the paper says it’s another ‘comic opera revolution.’”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Harry,” replied Frank, seriously. “When father was north last he told us, if you recollect, that a Central American revolution was not by any means a picnic. In the battle in which the United States of Colombia drove the Venezuelans from their territory, for instance, there were ten thousand dead left on the field.”

Frank halted under one of the wire-screened lights screwed into the bulkhead beside which they had been pacing to let the light of the incandescent stream brighter upon his paper. He scanned the page with rapid eye and suddenly looked up with an exclamation that made Harry cry:

“What’s the trouble, Frank?”

“Well, it looks as if on the day we are sailing for Nicaragua that that country is monopolizing the news to the exclusion of the important fact that ‘The Boy Aviators’” – he broke off with a laugh.

“Hear! hear,” exclaimed Harry, striking a pose.

“ – I say,” continued Frank, “that it seems as we haven’t a look in any more. The country for which we are bound has the floor. Listen – ”

Holding the paper high beneath the light, Frank read the following item which under a great wood-type scare-head occupied most of the front page space not given over to the announcement of the revolution.

NICARAGUAN MYSTERIOUSLY STRANGLED.

ROBBERY NOT MOTIVE; BUT ROOM IN HOTEL IS RANSACKED BY HIS SLAYERS.

-

Dr. Ramon Moneague, of city of Rivas, is Done

To Death in M – Hotel on West 14th

Street

-

POLICE HAVE NO CLUES. BUT LOOK FOR

TWO-FINGERED MAN

-

Coroner says Man of Great Strength did

the Deed

“Almost as big a head as they gave us when we won the prize,” laughed Harry. “Newspaper head I mean.”

“I wish you’d be serious, Harry,” said Frank, though he couldn’t help smiling at his brother’s high flow of spirits. “This is really very interesting. Listen:”

“The body of a man about forty-five or possibly fifty years old was discovered this afternoon in an upper floor bedroom of the M – Hotel on West Fourteenth Street. A brief scrutiny established that the man, who had registered at the hotel a few hours before as Dr. Ramon Moneague of Rivas, Nicaragua, had been strangled to death with exceptional brutality. He had been dead only about an hour when the body was discovered by a chambermaid who found the door unlocked.

“Whatever may have been the object of the murder it was not robbery, as, although the dead man’s trunk and suit-case had been ransacked and money lay scattered about the room, his watch and valuable diamond pin and rings had not been disturbed.

“Whoever strangled Dr. Moneague to death he was no weakling. Both Coroners, Physician Schenck and the detectives who swarmed on the scene are agreed upon this. The marks of the murderer’s fingers are clearly impressed upon both sides of the dead man’s throat.

“Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the case, and one which may lead to the slayer’s speedy detection, is the fact that his right hand had only two fingers. The police and the coroner’s physician and the coroner himself came to this conclusion after a brief examination of the marks on the throat. On the left side of the larynx where the murderer’s right hand must have pressed the breath out of the Nicaraguan there is a hiatus between the mark made by the thumb and first finger of the right hand, indicating clearly to the minds of the authorities that the man who killed Dr. Moneague is minus the middle and index fingers of his right hand.

“Every available detective at headquarters and from the different precincts have been put upon the case and every employee of the hotel connected with it even in the remotest way examined closely. No result has developed to date however. The clerk of the hotel admits that he was chatting with a friend most of the morning and after he had assigned Dr. Moneague to a room, and it might have been possible for a stranger to slip in and up the stairs without his noticing it.”

“There,” concluded Frank, throwing the paper into a scupper, “how’s that for a ringtailed roarer of a sensation?”

“It seems queer – ” began Harry, but the sudden deafening roar of the Aztec’s whistle cut him short. His words were drowned in the racket. It was her farewell blast this time. As the sound died away, echoing in a ringing note on the skyscrapers opposite, the boys felt a sudden trembling beneath their feet.

Far down in the engine-room the force was tuning her up for her long run which would begin in a few minutes now. Already a couple of tugs that had been hanging alongside since noon had wakened up and now made fast lines thrown from the Aztec’s lofty counter to their towing bitts. It was their job to pull her stern first out into the stream where the current of the ebb-tide would swing her head to the south.

“All clear there for’ard?” it was the bearded muffled-up skipper bellowing through a megaphone from the bridge, where the equally swaddled pilot stood beside him.

“We’re off at last, Frank old boy,” said Harry jubilantly as what seemed a silence compared to the racket of hoisting in the last of the cargo fell over the wharf.

Anything Frank might have had to reply was cut short by a hoarse echo of the skippers hail, it came from the bow.

“All go – o – ne for’ard, sir.”

The officer in charge of casting off the bow lines waved his hand and a quartermaster at the stern wigwagged to the tugs to go as far as they liked.

“All go – o – ne aft,” suddenly came another roar from that quarter as the tug’s screws began to churn up the water. The hawsers tightened and the Aztec began to glide slowly backward into the stream.

At that moment from far down the wharf, there came a loud hail.

“Stop the ship – twenty dollars if I make the ship.”

A loud yell of derision was the reply from several steerage passengers clustered in the bow of the Aztec.

“Hold on, there,” suddenly roared the same vigilant old wharfinger who had earlier in the day shown such a respect for discipline that he had shooed the newsboy off the wharf, “hold on there.”

The boys heard coming up the wharf the staccato rattle of a taxicab running at top speed.

The two sailors in charge of the gangplank were at that moment casting it loose and lowering it to the wharf. They hesitated as they heard the frantic cries of the old wharfinger.

“Let go, there. Do you want to carry something away,” yelled the second officer, as he saw the gangplank under the impetus of the ship being crushed against the stanchions of the wharf.

The taxicab dashed up abreast of the landward end of the imperilled gangway. Out of it shot a man whom the boys, in the blue-white glare of the arc-lights on the pier, noticed wore a short, black beard cropped Van Dyke fashion, and whose form was enveloped in a heavy fur overcoat with a deep astrachan collar.

“Five dollars a piece to you fellows if I make the ship,” he shouted to the men holding the gangplank in place. Already the wood was beginning to crumple as the moving ship jammed it against the edge of the stanchion.

The stranger made a wild leap as he spoke, was up the runway in two bounds, it seemed, and clutched the lower rail of the main deck bulwarks just as the two men holding the crackling gangway up, dropped it in fear of the wrath of their superior officer. The man in the fur coat dived down in his pocket and fished out a yellow-backed ten-dollar bill.

“Divide it,” he said in a slightly foreign accent. Suddenly he whirled round on his heel. The old wharfinger was bellowing from the wharf that the man in the fur coat would have to wireless his address and his baggage would be forwarded. There were several pieces of it on the taxi. A steamer trunk, two suit-cases and a big Saratoga. These, however, seemed to give the new addition to the Aztec ship’s company no concern.

“My bag. My black bag,” he fairly shrieked, running forward along the deck to a spot opposite where the wharfinger and the taxi-cabby stood.

“My black bag. Throw me my black bag,” he repeated.

With trembling fingers he managed to get out a bill from his wallet. He wrapped it round a magazine he carried with a rubber-band which had confined his bill roll.

“This is yours,” he shouted, holding the bill-wrapped magazine high, so that the taxi-cabby could see it. “Throw me the black bag.”

The taxi-cabby, like most of his kind, was not averse to making a tip.

He dived swiftly into his cab and emerged with a small black grip, not much bigger than a lady’s satchel, bound at the corners with silver. It was a time for quick action. By this time the sharp cutwater of the Aztec’s bow was at the end of the wharf. In another moment she cleared it. The tide caught her and majestically she swung round into midstream, while the tugs lugged her stern inshore.

The chauffeur poised himself on the stringpiece at the extreme outer end of the wharf.

“Chuck me the money first,” he shouted at the gesticulating figure on the Aztec, “I might miss your blooming boat.”

The magazine whizzed through the air and landed almost at his feet, carrying with it the bill. The taxi-cabby, satisfied that all was ship-shape, bent his back for a second like a baseball pitcher.

“I used to twirl ’em,” he said to the wharfinger, as with a supreme effort, he impelled the black bag from his hand. There was a good thirty feet of water between the end of the wharf and the Aztec by this time, but the taxi-cabby’s old time training availed him. It was a square throw. The stranger with a strange guttural cry of relief caught his precious black bag and tucked it hurriedly into the voluminous inner pocket of his fur coat.

“He must have diamonds in it at least,” exclaimed Harry, with a laugh. Both boys, with the rest of the passengers, had been watching the scene with interest, as well they might. As for the man in the fur coat his interested scrutiny was directed with an almost fierce intensity to the pile of blue oblong cases on the fore deck, all neatly labeled in big white letters:

HANDLE WITH CARE

AIRSHIP “GOLDEN EAGLE.”

F. and H. CHESTER, GREYTOWN, Nicaragua

The man in the fur coat seemed fascinated by the boxes and the lettering on them. From his expression, as a great bunch light placed on the foredeck for the convenience of the men readjusting the hastily laden cargo, fell upon him, one would have said he was startled. Had anyone been near enough or interested enough they might also have seen his lips move.

“Well, he wants to know our bag of tricks again when he sees them,” remarked Harry, as the boys with a keen appetite, and no dread of sea sickness to come, turned to obey the dinner-gong.

With frequent hoarse blasts of her strong-lunged siren the belated Aztec passed down the bay through the narrows and into the Ambrose Channel. A short time after the cabin passengers had concluded their dinner the pilot took his leave. From his dancing cockleshell of a dory alongside he hoarsely shouted up to the bridge far above him:

“Good-bye, good luck.”

Then he was rowed off into the darkness to toss about till the steam pilot-boat New York should happen along and pick him up with her searchlight.

“Good-bye, old New York!” cried both boys, seized with a common instinct and a most unmanly catch at their throats at the same instant. From the chart house above them eight bells rang out. Already the Aztec was beginning to lift with the long Atlantic swell. The Boy Aviators’ voyage toward the unknown had begun.

CHAPTER II.
THE STORM-CLOUDS GATHER

Señor Don Alfredo Chester, as the boy aviators’ father was known in Nicaragua, sat in a grass chair on the cool patio of his dazzlingly whitewashed hacienda on his plantation of La Merced. He thoughtfully smoked a long black cigar of native tobacco as he reclined. The lazy smoke from his weed curled languidly up toward the sparkling sapphire sky of the Nicaraguan dry season, which had just begun; but the thoughts of Planter Chester did not follow the writhing column.

Nor had he in fact any eye for the scene that stretched for miles about him, although it was one of perfect tropic beauty and luxuriance. Refreshed by the long rainy season which here endures from April to December everything glittered with a fresh, crisp green that contrasted delightfully with the occasional jeweled radiance of some gorgeously-plumaged bird flashing across a shaft of sunlight like a radiant streak of lightning. These brilliant apparitions vanished in the darker shades of the luxuriant growth like very spirits of the jungle.

The dense tangle of rank greenery that surrounded the plantation, like a conservatory run wild, held, however, far more dangerous inhabitants than these gaudy birds. In its depths lurked the cruel but beautiful ocelots – prettiest and most treacherous of the cat family. Jaguars of huge size, – and magnificently spotted, – hung in its tree limbs, on the lookout for monkeys, fat wild hogs, or an occasional philosophic tapir. And here too in the huge trees, whose branches afforded homes for a host of multi-colored orchids lurked the deadly coral snake with its vivid checkerings of red and black and the red and yellow blood snake, the bite of either of which is as instantaneously fatal as a bullet through the heart.

From where the hacienda stood – high on the side of a steep hill on whose flanks waved everywhere the graceful broad fronds of the banana – could be obtained a distant glimpse of the Caribbean, flashing a deep sapphire as it hurled its huge swells thundering shoreward. It was on this occasional gleaming glimpse far down the San Juan valley that Señor Chester’s gaze was fixed as he thoughtfully enjoyed his cigar.

It was easy to see from even a casual glance at Mr. Chester’s strong face that his boys had inherited from him in undiminished measure the keen intellectuality that showed there, as well as the vigorous nervous frame and general impression of mental and physical power that the man gave out. It was on these boys of his that his mind was fixed at that moment. They were then by his calculations about a day away from Greytown, although as the Aztec made usually a good many ports of call on her way down the coast it was only a rough guess at her whereabouts.

As he sat on his patio that afternoon Mr. Chester would have given all he possessed to have had it in his power at that minute to have been able to keep his boys in New York, but it was too late for that now.

When it was arranged that they were going to visit him to display to his proud eyes the Golden Eagle that had made them famous, neither he, nor any other of the American planters, dreamed that the revolution was so near. So much talk had preceded it that it seemed hard to realize that it was really on and that life and property were in real danger. Some of the editors who write so blithely of comic opera revolutions, should visit Central America during one of them. They would sustain a change of heart.

In common with his brother planters he was heartily in sympathy with the reactionaries, although of course he could not honorably take an active part in the revolution as the United States and Nicaragua were nominally at peace. At Washington, however, the trend of affairs was even then being watched more closely than they guessed.

If the revolution succeeded it meant fair treatment and equitable taxes for the American planters and business men of the republic, if it failed – well, as he had expressed it a few days before at a sort of informal meeting of half-a-dozen influential planters – “We might as well shut up shop.”

Another piece of disquieting news which had come to him by cable from New York, and which had set the reactionaries and their secret friends in a frenzy, was the announcement of the murder of Dr. Moneague. As his mind reverted to this subject there was a sound of wheels on the steep drive leading up the hill to the house, and an old-fashioned chariot hung on C. springs, driven by an aged negro, in livery as old as himself, it seemed, drove up with a great flourish.

Señor Chester sprang to his feet hat in hand as it came to a halt, for beside the dignified looking old Spaniard, who occupied one side of its luxuriously-cushioned seat, there sat a young woman of the most dazzling type of the famous Castilian beauty.

“Can usta usted, Señor Chester,” exclaimed the old man, with a courteous bow full of old-fashioned grace, as the proprietor of La Merced ranch, hat in hand after the Spanish custom, approached the carriage. “We are going down to Restigue and dropped in here by the way to see if you are still alive, it is so long since you have favored us with a visit. Not since this glorious strike for liberty was made, in fact.”

“When do you expect those wonderful boys of yours?” he went on, “whose doings, you see, even we have heard of in this out-of-the-way corner of the earth.”

“Indeed, Señor Chester,” said the young woman at the yellow old Don’s side, “you must bring them to see us the very minute they arrive. My husband – Don Ramon – ” she sighed.

“Brave Don Ramon,” supplemented her father, “a man in the field fighting at the head of his troops for his country is to be envied. The name of General Pachecho was not unknown when I was younger, but now – ” he broke off with a quizzical smile full of the pathos of the involuntary inactivity of age.

“When Don Ramon returns triumphant from the field he can do better than merely discuss his favorite subject of aviation with my boys,” proudly remarked Señor Chester, “he can see the Golden Eagle itself. Let us hope that he will introduce it into the new army of the hoped for republic of Estrada.”

“Viva Estrada!” cried the girl, and her aged father; caught with common enthusiasm at the name of Zelaya’s foe.

“I only wish, though,” said Señor Chester, with a half sigh, “that the country was more settled. For us it is all right. But, you see, their mother – ”

“Ah, the heart of a woman, it bleeds for her sons, is it not so?” cried Señora Ruiz, in her emotional Spanish manner.

“But, Señor Chester, never fear,” she continued. “My husband will not let the troops of Zelaya drive Estrada’s forces as far to the east as this.”

“But this is the hot-bed of the revolutionary movement. Zelaya has declared he will lay it waste,” objected the planter.

“While Don Ramon Ruiz leads the reactionary troops,” proudly retorted the woman with feverish enthusiasm, “Zelaya will never reach Restigue or La Merced or the Rancho del Pachecho.”

“Where the torch is laid, who can tell how far the fire will run?” remarked the Don, with true Spanish love of a proverb.

“Oh, don’t let’s think of such things!” suddenly exclaimed Señora Ruiz, “we revolutionists will be in Managua in a month. Oh, that Zelaya – bah. He is a terrible man. I met him at a ball at Managua a year ago. When he took my hand I shivered as if I had touched a toad or a centipede. He looked at me in a way that made me tremble.”

Both his visitors declined Señor Chester’s courteous invitation to enter the dark sala and partake of a cup of the native chocolate as prepared by his mocho, or man servant.

“It grows late, Señor,” said the old Spaniard, “like my life the sun is declining. Oh, that I should have lived to have heard of the death of brave Moneague! You know of it?”

A nod from Chester assured him. He went on:

“When he went to New York alone to collect revolutionary funds, I told them it was foolish, but I was old, and there were many who would not listen. Peste! how foolhardy to give him the parchment with the mystic plans on it. The secret of the lost mines of King Quetzalcoatl are worth more than one man’s life and have indeed cost many.”

“Do you mean that Dr. Moneague had the plans of the mines with him when he was killed?” quickly asked Señor Chester. “I always thought the mines were a native fable.”

“The young think many things that are not so,” was the old Don’s reply. “No, my son, Dr. Moneague did not have the plans of the mines themselves but he had what was as good, he had the bit of parchment on which – in the lost symbols of the Toltecs – the secret of the long lost paths by which the precious metals were brought to the coast was inscribed. He spent his life at this work of deciphering the hieroglyphics of that mysterious race, and he solved them; but, brave man, he was willing to yield up the secret of his life work if for it he could get money enough to save his country. You knew that his visit to New York was to see if he could not induce one of your American millionaires to give us funds?”

“I guessed it,” was the brief reply. “But why, if he knew the secret of the mines, did he not go there himself?”

“He went there once; but you who have lived long in this country know that, under Zelaya’s cruel rule he would have been worse than foolhardy to have brought out any of the miraculous wealth stored there. If Zelaya had heard of it he would have wrung the secret from him by torturing his children before his eyes.”

Shaking with excitement the old patriot gave a querulous order to the aged coachman to drive on, and waved his thin yellow hand in farewell. Señor Chester stood long watching the dust of his visitor’s carriage as it rose from the banana-fringed road that zig-zagged down the mountain side. At last he turned away and entering the house emerged a few minutes later with a light poncho thrown over his shoulders.

The chill of the breeze that sets seaward in the tropics at twilight had already sprung up and in the jungle the myriad screaming, booming, chirping voices of the jungle night had begun to awaken.

Chester made his way slowly to a small, whitewashed structure a short distance removed from the main hacienda. As he swung open the door and struck a light a strange scene presented itself – doubly strange when considered as an adjunct of a banana planter’s residence. On shelves and racks extending round the room were test tubes and retorts full and empty. The floor was a litter of scribbled calculations, carboys of acid, broken bottles, straw and in one corner stood an annealing forge. Here Señor Chester amused himself. He had formerly been a mining engineer and was as fond of scientific experimentation as were his sons.

Stepping to a rack he took from it a tube filled with an opaque liquid. He stepped to the doorway to hold it up to the fading light in order to ascertain what changes had taken place in its contents since the morning.