"Mr. Chicken."

A half hour of climbing in low range brought them to a divide on the long ridge which appeared to be a spur of Castle de Oro. Their route had taken them in the shape of a half circle. The peak now stood between them and Panama City.

Artillio pointed out that from this spot a person could see both the Pacific, and Atlantic Ocean. Jed suggested they stop for a little sight-seeing. As with most visitors to Panama, he had trouble comprehending, because of the country's fish hook shape, that a ship making a transit of the canal entered from the Atlantic side farther west than where it exited on the Pacific. Climbing a small knoll, even without the field glasses, he could plainly see that the Atlantic did lay to the north, and the Pacific to the south, instead of the east and west relationship everybody assumed.

Mesmerized by this quirk of geography, he missed the movement, far below, on the road they had just climbed. Instead Jed commented to himself, and anyone else who cared to listen, that according to the recently released plate tectonic theory, they were standing upon the juncture of the North and South American Plates —the last of the floating land masses to unite! He also noted the extreme differences in vegetation. One side of the ridge was open grassland. The other, dense jungle. This. too, had an explanation. The prevailing marine winds had trouble carrying moisture across the mountain so one side became a rain forest, the other, a rain shadow.

One of Jed's quirks was that he always "burned daylight" whenever an overpowering view captured his attention. Jenny had to grab hold of his hand to suggest they take the time for a picnic lunch. She knew from experience that if she didn't, Jed would forget about lunch until an hour before dinnertime.

His concentration broken, Jed noticed Arty had been looking at something else. He had just been too polite to break into Jed's exuberant dissertation to mention his interest.

"What?" Jed asked in English.

Arty pointed down the hill. Jed focused the binoculars and there was the green car, taking another run at a steep slope, while trying to avoid the ruts that the bigger tires of the Power Wagon had carved in the mud of the track.

"Let's move," Jed commanded.

"Fill Arty in on what is happening," he said, throwing the truck into gear. "I had to look twice with the glasses to catch onto what had him so absorbed, so tell him to sing out right away if he notices anything unusual again."