Hearts of Three

“Listen carefully, Senor Snake, and make no move until you have heard. The Snake has but one shot. The Snake cannot tamper with his blindfold. If he so tampers it is our duty to see that he immediately dies. The Snake has no time limit. He may take the rest of the day, and all of the night, and the remainder of eternity ere he fires his one shot. As for the Bird, the one rule is that never must the bell leave his hand, and never may he stop the clapper of it from making the full noise intended of the clapper against the sides of the bell. Should he do so, then will he immediately die. We are here above you, both of you Senors, rifles in hand, to see that you die the second you infract any of the rules. And now, God be with the right, proceed!”

The Jefe turned slowly about and listened, while Henry, essaying gingerly to move with the bell, caused it to tinkle.

The rifle was quick to bear upon the sound, and to pursue it as Henry ran. With a quick shift he transferred the bell to the other extended hand and ran back in the opposite direction, the rifle sweeping after him in inexorable pursuit. But the Jefe was too cunning to risk all on a chance shot, and slowly advanced across the arena. Henry stood still, and the bell made no sound.

So unerringly had the Jefe’s ear located the last silvery tinkle, and so straightly did he walk despite his blindfold, that he advanced just to the right of Henry and directly at the bell. With infinite caution, provoking no tinkle, Henry slightly raised his arm and permitted the Jefe’s head to go under the bell with a bare inch of margin.

His rifle pointed, and within a foot of the pit-wall, the Jefe halted in indecision, listened vainly for a moment, then made a further stride that collided the rifle muzzle with the wall. He whirled about, and, with the rifle extended, like any blind man felt out the air-space for his enemy. The muzzle would have touched Henry had he not sprung away on a noisy and zig-zag course.

In the center of the pit he came to a frozen pause. The Jefe stalked past a yard to the side and collided with the opposite wall. He circled the wall, walking cat-footed, his rifle forever feeling out into the empty air. Next he ventured across the pit. After several such crossings, during which the stationary bell gave him no clue, he adopted a clever method. Tossing his hat on the ground for the mark of his starting point, he crossed the edge of the pit on a shallow chord, extended the chord by a pace farther along the wall, and felt his way back along the new and longer chord. Again against the wall, he verified the correctness of the parallelness of the two chords, by pacing back to his hat. This time, with three paces along the wall from the hat, he initiated his third chord.

Thus he combed the area of the pit, and Henry saw that he could not escape such combing. Nor did he wait to be discovered. Tinkling the bell as he ran and zigzagged and exchanging it from one hand to the other, he froze into immobility in a new place.

The Jefe repeated the laborious combing out process; but Henry was not minded longer to prolong the tension. He waited till the Jefe’s latest chord brought him directly upon him. He waited till the rifle muzzle, breast high, was within half a dozen inches of his heart. Then he exploded into two simultaneous actions. He ducked lower than the rifle and yelled “Fire!” in stentorian command.

So startled, the Jefe pulled the trigger, and the bullet sped above Henry’s head. From above, the sackcloth men applauded wildly. The Jefe tore off his blindfold and saw the smiling face of his foe.

“It is well – God has spoken,” announced the sackcloth leader, as he descended into the pit. “The man uninjured is innocent. Remains now to test the other man.”

“Me?” the Jefe almost shouted in his surprise and consternation.

“Greetings, Jefe,” Henry grinned. “You did try to get me. It’s my turn now. Pass over that rifle.”

But the Jefe, with a curse, in his disappointment and rage forgetting that the rifle had contained only one cartridge, thrust the muzzle against Henry’s heart and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a metallic click.

“It is well,” said the leader, taking away the rifle and recharging it. “Your conduct shall be reported. The test for you remains, yet must it appear that you are not acting like God’s chosen man.”

Like a beaten bull in the ring seeking a way to escape and gazing up at the amphitheatre of pitiless faces, so the Jefe looked up and saw only the rifles of the sackcloth men, the triumphing faces of Leoncia and Francis, the curious looks of his own gendarmes, and the blood-eager faces of the haciendados that were like the faces of any bull-fight audience.

The shadowy smile drifted the stern lips of the leader as he handed the rifle to Henry and started to blindfold him.

“Why don’t you make him face the wall until I’m ready?” the Jefe demanded, as the silver bell tinkled in his passion-convulsed hand.

“Because he is proven God’s man,” was the reply. “He has stood the test. Therefore he cannot do a treacherous deed. You now must stand the test of God. If you are true and honest, no harm can befall you from the Snake. For such is God’s way.”

Far more successful as the hunter than as the hunted one, did the Jefe prove. Across the pit from Henry, he strove to stand motionless; but out of nervousness, as Henry’s rifle swept around on him, his hand trembled and the bell tinkled. The rifle came almost to rest and wavered ominously about the sound. In vain the Jefe tried to control his flesh and still the bell.

But the bell tinkled on, and, in despair, he flung it away and threw himself on the ground. But Henry, following the sound of his enemy’s fall, lowered the rifle and pulled trigger. The Jefe yelled out in sharp pain as the bullet perforated his shoulder, rose to his feet, cursed, sprawled back on the ground, and lay there cursing.

Again in the cave, with the mestiza beside him at his knee, the Blind Brigand gave judgment.

“This man who is wounded and who talks much of the law of the tierra caliente, shall now learn Cordilleras law. By the test of the Snake and the Bird has he been proven guilty. For his life a ransom of ten thousand dollars gold shall be paid, or else shall he remain here, a hewer of wood and a carrier of water, for the remainder of the time God shall grant him to draw breath on earth. I have spoken, and I know that my voice is God’s voice, and I know that God will not grant him long to draw breath if the ransom be not forthcoming.”

A long silence obtained, during which even Henry, who could slay a foe in the heat of combat, advertised that such cold-blooded promise of murder was repugnant to him.

“The law is pitiless,” said the Cruel Just One; and again silence fell.

“Let him die for want of a ransom,” spoke one of the haciendados. “He has proved a treacherous dog. Let him die a dog’s death.”

“What say you?” the Blind Brigand asked solemnly. “What say you, peon of the many beatings, man new-born this day, half-Maya that you are and lover of the woman wonderful? Shall this man die the dog’s death for want of a ransom?”

“This man is a hard man,” spoke the peon. “Yet is my heart strangely soft this day. Had I ten thousand gold I would pay his ransom myself. Yea, O Holy One and Just, and had I two hundred and fifty pesos, even would I pay off my debt to the haciendado of which I am absolved.”

The old man’s blind face lighted up to transfiguration.

“You, too, speak with God’s voice this day, regenerate one,” he approved.

But Francis, who had been scribbling hurriedly in his check book, handed a check, still wet with the ink, to the mestiza.

“I, too, speak,” he said. “Let not the man die the dog’s death he deserves, proven treacherous hound that he is.”

The mestiza read the check aloud.

“It is not necessary to explain,” the Blind Brigand shut Francis off. “I am a creature of reason, and have not lived always in the Cordilleras. I was trained in business in Barcelona. I know the Chemical National Bank of New York, and through my agents have had dealings with it aforetime. The sum is for ten thousand dollars gold. This man who writes it has told the truth already this day. The check is good. Further, I know he will not stop payment. This man who thus pays the ransom of a foe is one of three things: a very good man; a fool; or a very rich man. Tell me, O Man, is there a woman wonderful?”

And Francis, not daring to glance to right or left, at Leoncia or Henry, but gazing straight before him on the Blind Brigand’s face, answered because he felt he must so answer:

“Yes, O Cruel Just One, there is a woman wonderful.”

CHAPTER XII

At the precise spot where they had been first blindfolded by the sackcloth men, the cavalcade halted. It was composed of a number of the sackcloth men; of Leoncia, Henry, and Francis, blindfolded and mounted on mules; and of the peon, blindfolded and on foot. Similarly escorted, the haciendados, and the Jefe and Torres with their gendarmes, had preceded by half an hour.

At permission given by the stern-faced leader, the captives, about to be released, removed their blindfolds.

“Seems I’ve been here before,” Henry laughed, looking about and identifying the place.

“Seems the oil-wells are still burning,” Francis said, pointing out half the field of day that was eaten up by the black smoke-pall. “Peon, look upon your handiwork. For a man who possesses nothing, you are the biggest spender I ever met. I have heard of drunken oil-kings lighting cigars with thousand dollar bank-notes, but here are you burning up a million dollars a minute.”

“I am not a poor man,” the peon boasted in proud mysteriousness.

“A millionaire in disguise!” Henry twitted.

“Where do you deposit?” was Leoncia’s contribution. “In the Chemical National Bank?”

The peon did not understand the allusions, but knew that he was being made fun of, and drew himself up in proud silence.

The stern leader spoke:

“From this point you may now go your various ways. The Just One has so commanded. You, senors, will dismount and turn over to me your mules. As for the senorita, she may retain her mule as a present from the Just One, who would not care to be responsible for compelling any senorita to walk. The two senors, without hardship, may walk. Especially has the Just One recommended walking for the rich senor. The possession of riches, he advised, leads to too little walking. Too little walking leads to stoutness; and stoutness does not lead to the woman wonderful. Such is the wisdom of the Just One.”

“Further, he has repeated his advice to the peon to remain in the mountains. In the mountains he will find his woman wonderful, since woman he must have; and it is wisest that such woman be of his own breed. The woman of the tierra caliente are for the men of the tierra caliente. The Cordilleras women are for the Cordilleras men. God dislikes mixed breeds. A mule is abhorrent under the sun. The world was not intended for mixed breeds, but man has made for himself many inventions. Pure races interbred leads to impurity. Neither will oil nor water congenially intermingle. Since kind begets kind, only kind should mate. Such are the words of the Just One which I have repeated as commanded. And he has especially impressed upon me to add that he knows whereof he speaks, for he, too, has sinned in just such ways.”

And Henry and Francis, of Anglo-Saxon stock, and Leoncia of the Latin, knew perturbation and embarrassment as the vicarious judgment of the Blind Brigand sank home. And Leoncia, with her splendid eyes of woman, would have appealed protest to either man she loved, had the other been absent; while both Henry and Francis would have voiced protest to Leoncia had either of them been alone with her. And yet, under it all, deep down, uncannily, was a sense of the correctness of the Blind Brigand’s thought. And heavily, on the heart of each, rested the burden of the conscious oppression of sin.

A crashing and scrambling in the brush diverted their train of thought, as descending the canyon slope on desperately slipping and sliding horses, appeared on the scene the haciendado with several followers. His greeting of the daughter of the Solanos was hidalgo-like and profound, and only less was the heartiness of his greeting to the two men for whom Enrico Solano had stood sponsor.

“Where is your noble father?” he asked Leoncia. “I have good news for him. In the week since I last saw you, I have been sick with fever and encamped. But by swift messengers, and favoring winds across Chiriqui Lagoon to Bocas del Toro, I have used the government wireless – the Jefe of Bocas del Toro is my friend – and have communicated with the President of Panama – who is my ancient comrade whose nose I rubbed as often in the dirt as did he mine in the boyhood days when we were schoolmates and cubicle-mates together at Colon. And the word has come back that all is well; that justice has miscarried in the court at San Antonio from the too great but none the less worthy zeal of the Jefe Politico; and that all is forgiven, pardoned, and forever legally and politically forgotten against all of the noble Solano family and their two noble Gringo friends – ”

Here, the haciendado bowed low to Henry and Francis. And here, skulking behind Leoncia’s uncle, his eyes chanced to light on the peon; and, so lighting, his eyes blazed with triumph.

“Mother of God, thou has not forgotten me!” he breathed fervently, then turned to the several friends who accompanied him. “There he is, the creature without reason or shame who has fled his debt of me. Seize him! I shall put him on his back for a month from the beating he shall receive!”

So speaking, the haciendado sprang around the rump of Leoncia’s mule; and the peon, ducking under the mule’s nose, would have won to the freedom of the jungle, had not another of the haciendados, with quick spurs to his horse’s sides, cut him off and run him down. In a trice, used to just such work, the haciendados had the luckless wight on his feet, his hands tied behind him, a lead-rope made fast around his neck.

In one voice Francis and Henry protested.

“Senors,” the haciendado replied, “my respect and consideration and desire to serve you are as deep as for the noble Solano family under whose protection you are. Your safety and comfort are sacred to me. I will defend you from harm with my life. I am yours to command. My hacienda is yours, likewise all I possess. But this matter of this peon is entirely another matter. He is none of yours. He is my peon, in my debt, who has run away from my hacienda. You will understand and forgive me, I trust. This is a mere matter of property. He is my property.”

Henry and Francis glanced at each other in mutual perplexity and indecision. It was the law of the land, as they thoroughly knew.

“The Cruel Just One did remit my debt, as all here will witness,” the peon whispered.

“It is true, the Cruel Justice remitted his debt,” Leoncia verified.

The haciendado smiled and bowed low.

“But the peon contracted with me,” he smiled. “And who is the Blind Brigand that his foolish law shall operate on my plantation and rob me of my rightful two hundred and fifty pesos?”

“He’s right, Leoncia,” Henry admitted.

“Then will I go back to the high Cordilleras,” the peon asserted. “Oh, you men of the Cruel Just One, take me back to the Cordilleras.”

But the stern leader shook his head.

“Here you were released. Our orders went no further. No further jurisdiction have we over you. We shall now bid farewell and depart.”

“Hold on!” Francis cried, pulling out his check book and beginning to write. “Wait a moment. I must settle for this peon now. Next, before you depart, I have a favor to ask of you.”

He passed the check to the haciendado, saying:

“I have allowed ten pesos for the exchange.”

The haciendado glanced at the check, folded it away in his pocket, and placed the end of the rope around the wretched creature’s neck in Francis’ hand.

“The peon is now yours,” he said.

Francis looked at the rope and laughed.

“Behold! I now own a human chattel. Slave, you are mine, my property now, do you understand?”

“Yes, Senor,” the peon muttered humbly. “It seems, when I became mad for the woman I gave up my freedom for, that God destined me always afterward to be the property of some man. The Cruel Just One is right. It is God’s punishment for mating outside my race.”

“You made a slave of yourself for what the world has always considered the best of all causes, a woman,” Francis observed, cutting the thongs that bound the peon’s hands. “And so, I make a present of you to yourself.” So saying, he placed the neck-rope in the peon’s hand. “Henceforth, lead yourself, and put not that rope in any man’s hand.”

While the foregoing had been taking place, a lean old man, on foot, had noiselessly joined the circle. Maya Indian he was, pure-blooded, with ribs that corrugated plainly through his parchment-like skin. Only a breech-clout covered his nakedness. His unkempt hair hung in dirty-gray tangles about his face, which was high-cheeked and emaciated to cadaverousness. Strings of muscles showed for his calves and biceps. A few scattered snags of teeth were visible between his withered lips. The hollows under his cheek-bones were prodigious. While his eyes, beads of black, deep-sunk in their sockets, burned with the wild light of a patient in fever.

He slipped eel-like through the circle and clasped the peon in his skeleton-like arms.

“He is my father,” proclaimed the peon proudly. “Look at him. He is pure Maya, and he knows the secrets of the Mayas.”

And while the two re-united ones talked endless explanations, Francis preferred his request to the sackcloth leader to find Enrico Solano and his two sons, wandering somewhere in the mountains, and to tell them that they were free of all claims of the law and to return home.

“They have done no wrong?” the leader demanded.

“No; they have done no wrong,” Francis assured him.

“Then it is well. I promise you to find them immediately, for we know the direction of their wandering, and to send them down to the coast to join you.”

“And in the meantime shall you be my guests while you wait,” the haciendado invited eagerly. “There is a freight schooner at anchor in Juchitan Inlet now off my plantation, and sailing for San Antonio. I can hold her until the noble Enrico and his sons come down from the Cordilleras.”

“And Francis will pay the demurrage, of course,” Henry interpolated with a sly sting that Leoncia caught, although it missed Francis, who cried joyously:

“Of course I will. And it proves my contention that a checkbook is pretty good to have anywhere.”

To their surprise, when they had parted from the sackcloth men, the peon and his Indian father attached themselves to the Morgans, and journeyed down through the burning oil-fields to the plantation which had been the scene of the peon’s slavery. Both father and son were unremitting in their devotion, first of all to Francis, and, next, to Leoncia and Henry. More than once they noted father and son in long and earnest conversations; and, after Enrico and his sons had arrived, when the party went down to the beach to board the waiting schooner, the peon and his Maya parent followed along. Francis essayed to say farewell to them on the beach, but the peon stated that the pair of them were likewise journeying on the schooner.

“I have told you that I was not a poor man,” the peon explained, after they had drawn the party aside from the waiting sailors. “This is true. The hidden treasure of the Mayas, which the conquistadores and the priests of the Inquisition could never find, is in my keeping. Or, to be very true, is in my father’s keeping. He is the descendant, in the straight line, from the ancient high priest of the Mayas. He is the last high priest. He and I have talked much and long. And we are agreed that riches do not make life. You bought me for two hundred and fifty pesos, yet you made me free, gave me back to myself. The gift of a man’s life is greater than all the treasure in the world. So are we agreed, my father and I. And so, since it is the way of Gringos and Spaniards to desire treasure, we will lead you to the Maya treasure, my father and I, my father knowing the way. And the way into the mountains begins from San Antonio and not from Juchitan.”

“Does your father know the location of the treasure? – just where it is?” Henry demanded, with an aside to Francis that this was the very Maya treasure that had led him to abandon the quest for Morgan’s gold on the Calf and to take to the mainland.

The peon shook his head.

“My father has never been to it. He was not interested in it, caring not for wealth for himself. Father, bring forth the tale written in our ancient language which you alone of living Mayas can read.”

From within his loin-cloth the old man drew forth a dirty and much-frayed canvas bag. Out of this he pulled what looked like a snarl of knotted strings. But the strings were twisted sennit of some fibrous forest bark, so ancient that they threatened to crumble as he handled them, while from under the touch and manipulation of his fingers a fine powder of decay arose. Muttering and mumbling prayers in the ancient Maya tongue, he held up the snarl of knots, and bowed reverently before it ere he shook it out.

“The knot-writing, the lost written language of the Mayas,” Henry breathed softly. “This is the real thing, if only the old geezer hasn’t forgotten how to read it.”

All heads bent curiously toward it as it was handed to Francis. It was in the form of a crude tassel, composed of many thin, long strings. Not alone were the knots, and various kinds of knots, tied at irregular intervals in the strings, but the strings themselves were of varying lengths and diameters. He ran them through his fingers, mumbling and muttering.

“He reads!” cried the peon triumphantly. “All our old language is there in those knots, and he reads them as any man may read a book.”

Bending closer to observe, Francis and Leoncia’s hair touched, and, in the thrill of the immediately broken contact, their eyes met, producing the second thrill as they separated. But Henry, all eagerness, did not observe. He had eyes only for the mystic tassel.

“What d’you say, Francis?” he murmured. “It’s big! It’s big!”

“But New York is beginning to call,” Francis demurred. “Oh, not its people and its fun, but its business,” he added hastily, as he sensed Leoncia’s unuttered reproach and hurt. “Don’t forget, I’m mixed up in Tampico Petroleum and the stock market, and I hate to think how many millions are involved.”

“Hell’s bells!” Henry ejaculated. “The Maya treasure, if a tithe of what they say about its immensity be true, could be cut three ways between Enrico, you and me, and make each of us richer than you are now.”

Still Francis was undecided, and, while Enrico expanded on the authenticity of the treasure, Leoncia managed to query in an undertone in Francis’ ear:

“Have you so soon tired of … of treasure-hunting?”

He looked at her keenly, and down at her engagement ring, as he answered in the same low tones:

“How can I stay longer in this country, loving you as I do, while you love Henry?”

It was the first time he had openly avowed his love, and Leoncia knew the swift surge of joy, followed by the no less swift surge of mantling shame that she, a woman who had always esteemed herself good, could love two men at the same time. She glanced at Henry, as if to verify her heart, and her heart answered yes. As truly did she love Henry as she did Francis, and the emotion seemed similar where the two were similar, different where they were different.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to connect up with the Angelique, most likely at Bocas del Toro, and get away,” Francis told Henry. “You and Enrico can find the treasure and split it two ways.”

But the peon, having heard, broke into quick speech with his father, and, next, with Henry.

“You hear what he says, Francis,” the latter said, holding up the sacred tassel. “You’ve got to go with us. It is you he feels grateful to for his son. He isn’t giving the treasure to us, but to you. And if you don’t go, he won’t read a knot of the writing.”

But it was Leoncia, looking at Francis with quiet wistfulness of pleading, seeming all but to say, “Please, for my sake,” who really caused Francis to reverse his decision.