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Chapter VI
Mariano Vercara E Hijos, Jefe Politico of San Antonio, leaned back in his chair in the courtroom and with a quiet smile of satisfaction proceeded to roll a cigarette. The case had gone through as prearranged. He had kept the little old judge away from his mescal all day, and had been rewarded by having the judge try the case and give judgment according to program. He had not made a slip. The six peón s, fined heavily, were ordered back to the plantation at Santos. The working out of the fines was added to the time of their contract slavery. And the Jefe was two hundred dollars good American gold richer for the transaction. Those Gringos at Santos, he smiled to himself, were men to tie to. True, they were developing the country with their henequen plantation. But, better than that, they possessed money in untold quantity and paid well for such little services as he might be able to render.
His smile was even broader as he greeted Alvarez Torres.
‘Listen,’ said the latter, whispering low in his ear. ‘We can get both these devils of Morgans. The Henry pig hangs to-morrow. There is no reason that the Francis pig should not go out to-day.’
The Jefe remained silent, questioning with a lift of his eyebrows.
‘I have advised him to storm the jail. The Solanos have listened to his lies and are with him. They will surely attempt to do it this evening. They could not do it sooner. It is for you to be ready for the event, and to see to it that Francis Morgan is especially shot and killed in the fight.’
‘For what and for why?’ the Jefe temporized. ‘It is Henry I want to see out of the way. Let the Francis one go back to his beloved New York.’
‘He must go out to-day, and for reasons you will appreciate. As you know, from reading my telegrams through the government wireless – ’
‘Which was our agreement for my getting you your permission to use the government station,’ the Jefe reminded.
‘And of which I do not complain,’ Torres assured him. ‘But as I was saying, you know my relations with the New York Regan are confidential and important.’ He touched his hand to his breast pocket. ‘I have just received another wire. It is imperative that the Francis pig be kept away from New York for a month if forever, and I do not misunderstand Señor Regan, so much the better. In so far as I succeed in this, will you fare well.’
‘But you have not told me how much you have received, nor how much you will receive,’ the Jefe probed.
‘It is a private agreement, and it is not so much as you may fancy. He is a hard man, this Señor Regan, a hard man. Yet will I divide fairly with you out of the success of our venture.’
The Jefe nodded acquiescence, then said:
‘Will it be as much as a thousand gold you will get?’
‘I think so. Surely the pig of an Irish stock-gambler could pay me no less a sum, and five hundred is yours if pig Francis leaves his bones in San Antonio.’
‘Will it be as much as a hundred thousand gold?’ was the Jefe’s next query.
Torres laughed as if at a joke.
‘It must be more than a thousand,’ the other persisted.
‘And he may be generous,’ Torres responded., ‘He may even give me five hundred over the thousand, half of which, naturally, as I have said, will be yours as well.’
‘I shall go from here immediately to the jail,’ the Jefe announced. ‘You may trust me, Señor Torres, as I trust you. Come. We will go at once, now, you and I, and you may see for yourself the preparation I shall make for this Francis Morgan’s reception. I have not yet lost my cunning with a rifle. And, as well, I shall tell off three of the gendarmes to fire only at him. So this Gringo dog would storm our jail, eh? Come. We will depart at once.’
He stood up, tossing his cigarette away with a show of determined energy. But, half way across the room, a ragged boy, panting and sweating, plucked his sleeve and whined:
‘I have information. You will pay me for it, most high Señor? I have run all the way.’
‘I’ll have you sent to San Juan for the buzzards to peck your carcass for the worthless carrion that you are,’ was the reply.
The boy quailed at the threat, then summoned courage from his emptiness of belly and meagerness of living and from his desire for the price of a ticket to the next bull-fight. ‘You will remember I brought you the information, Señor. I ran all the way until I am almost dead, as you can behold, Señor. I will tell you, but you will remember it was I who ran all the way and told you first.’
‘Yes, yes, animal, I will remember. But woe to you if I remember too well. What is the trifling information? It may not be worth a centavo. And if it isn’t I’ll make you sorry the sun ever shone on you. And buzzard-picking of you at San Juan will be paradise compared with what I shall visit on you.’
‘The jail,’ the boy quavered. ‘The strange Gringo, the one who was to be hanged yesterday, has blown down the side of the jail. Merciful Saints! The hole is as big as the steeple of the cathedral! And the other Gringo, the one who looks like him, the one who was to hang to-morrow, has escaped with him out of the hole. He dragged him out of the hole himself. This I saw, myself, with my two eyes, and then I ran here to you all the way, and you will remember…’
But the Jefe Politico had already turned on Torres witheringly.
‘And if this Señor Regan be princely generous, he may give you and me the munificent sum that was mentioned, eh? Five times the sum, or ten times, with this Gringo tiger blowing down law and order and our good jail-walls, would be nearer the mark.’
‘At any rate, the thing must be a false alarm, merely the straw that shows which way blows the wind of this Francis Morgan’s intention,’ Torres murmured with a sickly smile. ‘Remember, the suggestion was mine to him to storm the jail.’
‘In which case you and Señor Regan will pay for the good jail wall?’ the Jefe demanded, then, with a pause, added: ‘Not that I believe it has been accomplished. It is not possible. Even a fool Gringo would not dare.’
Rafael, the gendarme, rifle in hand, the blood still oozing down his face from a scalp-wound, came through the courtroom door and shouldered aside the curious ones who had begun to cluster around Torres and the Jefe. ‘We are devastated,’ were Rafael’s first words. ‘The jail is ‘most destroyed. Dynamite! A hundred pounds of it: A thousand! We came bravely to save the jail. But it exploded the thousand pounds of dynamite. I fell unconscious, rifle in hand. When sense came back to me, I looked about. All others, the brave Pedro, the brave Ignacio, the brave Augustino all, all, lay around me dead!’ Almost could he have added, ‘drunk’; but, his Latin American nature so compounded, he sincerely stated the catastrophe as it most valiantly and tragically presented itself to his imagination. ‘They lay dead. They may not be dead, but merely stunned. I crawled. The cell of the Gringo Morgan was empty. There was a huge and monstrous hole in the wall. I crawled through the hole into the street. There was a great crowd. But the Gringo Morgan was gone. I talked with a moso who had seen and who knew. They had horses waiting. They rode toward the beach. There is a schooner that is not anchored. It sails back and forth waiting for them. The Francis Morgan rides with a sack of gold on his saddle. The moso saw it. It is a large sack.’
‘And the hole?’ the Jefe demanded. ‘The hole in the wall?’
‘Is larger than the sack, much larger,’ was Rafael’s reply. ‘But the sack is large. So the moso said. And he rides with it on his saddle.’
‘My jail!’ the Jefe cried. He slipped a dagger from inside his coat under the left arm-pit and held it aloft by the blade so that the hilt showed as a true cross on which a finely modeled ‘Christ hung crucified. ‘I swear by all the Saints the vengeance I shall have. My jail! Our justice! Our law! Horses! Horses! Gendarme, horses!’ He whirled about upon Torres as if the latter had spoken, shouting: ‘To hell with Señor Regan! I am after my own! I have been defied! My jail is desolated! My law our law, good friends has been mocked. Horses! Horses! Commandeer them on the streets. Haste! Haste!’
Captain Trefethen, owner of the Angelique, son of a Maya Indian mother and a Jamaica negro father, paced the narrow after-deck of his schooner, stared shoreward toward San Antonio, where he could make out his crowded long-boat returning, and meditated flight from his mad American charterer. At the same time he meditated remaining in order to break his charter and give a new one at three times the price; for he was strangely torn by his conflicting bloods. The negro portion counseled prudence and observance of Panamanian law. The Indian portion was urgent to unlawfulness and the promise of conflict.
It was the Indian mother who decided the issue and made him draw his jib, ease his mainsheet, and begin to reach in-shore the quicker to pick up the oncoming boat. When he made out the rifles carried by the Solanos and the Morgans, almost he put up his helm to run for it and leave them. When he made out a woman in the boat’s sternsheets, romance and thrift whispered in him to hang on and take the boat on board. For he knew wherever woman entered into the transactions of men that peril and pelf as well entered hand in hand.
And aboard came the woman, the peril and the pelf Leoncia, the rifles, and a sack of money all in a scramble; for, the wind being light, the captain had not bothered to stop way on the schooner.
‘Glad to welcome you on board, sir,’ Captain Trefethen greeted Francis with a white slash of teeth between his smiling lips. ‘But who is this man?’ He nodded his head to indicate Henry.
‘A friend, captain, a guest of mine, in fact, a kinsman.’
‘And who, sir, may I make bold to ask, are those gentlemen riding along the beach in fashion so lively?’
Henry looked quickly at the group of horsemen galloping along the sand, unceremoniously took the binoculars from the skipper’s hand, and gazed through them.
‘It’s the Jefe himself in the lead,’ he reported to Leoncia and her menfolk, ‘with a bunch of gendarmes.’ He uttered a sharp exclamation, stared through the glasses intently, then shook his head. ‘Almost I thought I made out our friend Torres.’
‘With our enemies!’ Leoncia cried incredulously, remembering Torres’ proposal of marriage and proffer of service and honor that very day on the hacienda piazza.
‘I must have been mistaken,’ Francis acknowledged. ‘They are riding so bunched together. But it’s the Jefe all right, two jumps ahead of the outfit.’
‘Who is this Torres duck?’ Henry asked harshly. ‘I’ve never liked his looks from the first, yet he seems always welcome under your roof, Leoncia.’
‘I beg jour parson, sir, most gratifiedly, and with my humilious respects,’ Captain Trefethen interrupted suavely. ‘But I must call your attention to the previous question, sir, which is: who and what is that cavalcade disporting itself with such earnestness along the sand?’
‘They tried to hang me yesterday,’ Francis laughed. ‘And to-morrow they were going to hang my kinsman there. Only we beat them to it. And here we are. Now, Mr. Skipper, I call your attention to your head-sheets flapping in the wind. You are standing still. How much longer do you expect to stick around here?’
‘Mr. Morgan, sir,’ came the answer, ‘it is with dumbfounded respect that I serve you as the charterer of my vessel. Nevertheless, I must inform you that I am a British subject. King George is my king, sir, and I owe obedience first of all to him and to his laws of maritime between all nations, sir. It is lucid to my comprehension that you have broken laws ashore, or else the officers ashore would not be so assiduously in quest of you, sir. And it is also lucid to clarification that it is now your wish to have me break the laws of maritime by enabling you to escape. So, in honor bound, I must stick around here until this little difficulty that you may have appertained ashore is adjusted to the satisfaction of all parties concerned, sir, and to the satisfaction of my lawful sovereign.’
‘Fill away and get out of this, skipper!’ Henry broke in angrily.
‘Sir, assuring you of your gratification of pardon, it is my unpleasant task to inform you of two things. Neither are you my charterer; nor are you the noble King George to whom I give ambitious allegiance.’
‘Well, I’m your charterer, skipper,’ Francis said pleasantly, for he had learned to humor the man of mixed words and parentage. ‘So just kindly put up your helm and sail us out of this Chiriqui Lagoon as fast as God and this failing wind will let you.’
‘It is not in the charter, sir, that my Angelique shall break the laws of Panama and King George.’
‘I’ll pay you well,’ Francis retorted, beginning to lose his temper. ‘Get busy.’
‘You will then recharter, sir, at three times the present charter?’
Francis nodded shortly.
‘Then wait, sir, I entreat. I must procure pen and paper from the cabin and make out the document.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ Francis groaned. ‘Square away and get a move on first. We can make out the paper just as easily while we are running as standing still. Look! They are beginning to fire.’
The half-breed captain heard the report, and, searching his spread canvas, discovered the hole of the bullet high up near the peak of the mainsail.
‘Very well, sir,’ he conceded. ‘You are a gentleman and an honorable man. I trust you to affix your signature to the document at your early convenience Hey, you nigger! Put up your wheel! Hard up! Jump, you black rascals, and slack away mainsheet. Take a hand there, you, Percival, on the boom-tackle!’
All obeyed, as did Percival, a grinning shambling Kingston negro who was as black as his name was white, and as did another, addressed more respectfully as Juan, who was more Spanish and Indian than negro, as his light yellow skin attested, and whose fingers, slacking the foresheet, were as slim and delicate as a girl’s.
‘Knock the nigger on the head if he keeps up this freshness,’ Henry growled in an undertone to Francis. ‘For two cents I’ll do it right now.’
But Francis shook his head.
‘He’s all right, but he’s a Jamaica nigger, and you know what they are. And he’s Indian as well. We might as well humor him, since it’s the nature of the beast. He means all right, but he wants the money, he’s risking his schooner against confiscation, and he’s afflicted with vocabularies. He just must get those long words out of his system or else bust.’
Here Enrico Solano, with quivering nostrils and fingers restless on his rifle as with half an eye he kept track of the wild shots being fired from the beach, approached Henry and held out his hand.
‘I have been guilty of a grave mistake, Señor Morgan,’ he said. ‘In the first hurt of my affliction at the death of my beloved brother, Alfaro, I was guilty of thinking you guilty of his murder.’ Here old Enrico’s eyes flashed with anger consuming but inconsumable. ‘For murder it was, dastardly and cowardly, a thrust in the dark in the back. I should have known better. But I was overwhelmed, and the evidence was all against you. I did not take pause of thought to consider that my dearly beloved and only daughter was betrothed to you; to remember that all I had known of you was straightness and man-likeness and courage such as never stabs from behind the shield of the dark. I regret. I am sorry. And I am proud once again to welcome you into my family as the husband-to-be of my Leoncia.’
And while this whole-hearted restoration of Henry Morgan into the Solano family went on, Leoncia was irritated because her father, in Latin-American fashion, must use so many fine words and phrases, when a single phrase, a handgrip, and a square look in the eyes were all that was called for and was certainly all that either Henry or Francis would have vouchsafed had the situation been reversed. Why, why, she asked of herself, must her Spanish stock, in such extravagance of diction, seem to emulate the similar extravagance of the Jamaica negro?
While this reiteration of the betrothal of Henry and Leoncia was taking place, Francis, striving to appear uninterested, could not help taking note of the pale-yellow sailor called Juan, conferring forward with others of the crew, shrugging his shoulders significantly, gesticulating passionately with his hands.
Chapter VII
‘And now we’ve lost both the Gringo pigs,’ Alvarez Torres lamented on the beach as, with a slight freshening of the breeze and with booms winged out to port and starboard, the Angelique passed out of range of their rifles.
‘Almost would I give three bells to the cathedral,’ Mariano Vercara e Hijos proclaimed, ‘to have them within a hundred yards of this rifle. And if I had will of all Gringos they would depart so fast that the devil in hell would be compelled to study English.’
Alvarez Torres beat the saddle pommel with his hand in sheer impotence of rage and disappointment.
‘The Queen of my Dreams!’ he almost wept. ‘She is gone and away, of! with the two Morgans. I saw her climb up the side of the schooner. And there is the New York Regan. Once out of Chiriqui Lagoon, the schooner may sail directly to New York. And the Francis pig will not have been delayed a month, and the Señor Regan will remit no money.’
‘They will not get out of Chiriqui Lagoon,’ the Jefe said solemnly. ‘I am no animal without reason. I am a man. I know they will not get out. Have I not sworn eternal vengeance? The sun is setting, and the promise is for a night of little wind. The sky tells it to one with half an eye. Behold those trailing wisps of clouds. What wind may be, and little enough of that, will come from the north-east. It will be a head beat to the Chorrera Passage. They will not attempt it. That nigger captain knows the lagoon like a book. He will try to make the long tack and go out past Bocas del Toro, or through the Cartago Passage. Even so, we will outwit him. I have brains, reason. Reason. Listen. It is a long ride. We will make it straight down the coast to Las Palmas. Captain Rosaro is there with the Dolores-’
‘The second-hand old tugboat? that cannot get out of her own way?’ Torres queried.
‘But this night of calm and morrow of calm she will capture the Angelique,’ the Jefe replied. ‘On, comrades! We will ride! Captain Rosaro is my friend. Any favor is but mine to ask.’
At daylight, the worn-out men, on beaten horses, straggled through the decaying village of Las Palmas and down to the decaying pier, where a very decayed-looking tugboat, sadly in need of paint, welcomed their eyes. Smoke rising from the stack advertised that steam was up, and the Jefe was wearily elated.
‘A happy morning, Señor Capitan Rosaro, and well met,’ he greeted the hard-bitten Spanish skipper, who was reclined on a coil of rope and who sipped black coffee from a mug that rattled against his teeth.
‘It would be a happier morning if the cursed fever had not laid its chill upon me,’ Captain Rosaro grunted sourly, ‘the hand that held the mug, the arm, and all his body shivering so violently as to spill the hot liquid down his chin and into the black-and-gray thatch of hair that covered his half-exposed chest. ‘Take that, you animal of hell!’ he cried, flinging mug and contents at a splinter of a half-breed boy, evidently his servant, who had been unable to repress his glee.
But the sun will rise and the fever will work its will and shortly depart,’ said the Jefe, politely ignoring the display of spleen. ‘And you are finished here, and you are bound for Bocas del Toro, and we shall go with you, all of us, on a rare adventure. We will pick up the schooner Angelique, calm-bound all last night in the lagoon, and I shall make many arrests, and all Panama will so ring with your courage and ability, Capitan, that you will forget that the fever ever whispered in you.’
‘How much?’ Capitan Rosaro demanded bluntly.
Much?’ the Jefe countered in surprise. ‘This is an affair of government, good friend. And it is right on your way to Bocas del Toro. It will not cost you an extra shovelful of coal.’
‘Muchacho! More coffee!’ the tug-skipper roared at the boy.
A pause fell, wherein Torres and the Jefe and all the draggled following yearned for the piping hot coffee brought by the boy. Captain Rosaro played the rim of the mug against his teeth like a rattling of castanets, but managed to sip without spilling and so to burn his mouth.
A vacant-faced Swede, in filthy overalls, with a soiled cap on which appeared ‘Engineer,’ came up from below, lighted a pipe, and seemingly went into a trance as he sat on the tug’s low rail.
‘How much?’ Captain Rosaro repeated.
‘Let us get under way, dear friend,’ said the Jefe. ‘And then, when the fever-shock has departed, we will discuss the matter with reason, being reasonable creatures ourselves and not animals.’
‘How much?’ Captain Rosaro repeated again. ‘I am never an animal. I always am a creature of reason, whether the sun is up or not up, or whether this thrice-accursed fever is upon me. How much?’
‘Well, let us start, and for how much?’ the Jefe conceded wearily.
‘Fifty dollars gold,’ was the prompt answer.
‘You are starting anyway, are you not, Capitan?’ Torres queried softly.
‘Fifty gold, as I have said.’
The Jefe Politico threw up his hands with a hopeless gesture and turned on his heel to depart.
‘Yet you swore eternal vengeance for the crime committed, on your jail,’ Torres reminded him.
‘But not if it costs fifty dollars,’ the Jefe snapped back, out of the corner of his eye watching the shivering captain for some sign of relenting.
‘Fifty gold,’ said the Captain, as he finished draining the mug and with shaking fingers strove to roll a cigarette. He nodded his head in the direction of the Swede, and added, ‘and five gold extra for my engineer. It is our custom.’
Torres stepped closer to the Jefe and whispered:
‘I will pay for the tug myself and charge the Gringo Regan a hundred, and you and I will divide the difference. We lose nothing. We shall make. For this Regan pig instructed me well not to mind expense.’
As the sun slipped brazenly above the eastern horizon, one gendarme went back into Las Palmas with the jaded horses, the rest of the party descended to the deck of the tug, the Swede dived down into the engine-room, and Captain Rosaro, shaking off his chill in the sun’s beneficent rays, ordered the deck-hands to cast off the lines, and put one of them at the wheel in the pilot-house.
And the same day-dawn found the Angelique, after a night of almost perfect calm, off the mainland from which she had failed to get away, although she had made sufficient northing to be midway between San Antonio and the passages of Bocas del Toro and Cartago. These two passages to the open sea still lay twenty-five miles away, and the schooner truly slept on the mirror surface of the placid lagoon. Too stuffy below for sleep in the steaming tropics, the deck was littered with the sleepers. On top the small house of the cabin, in solitary state, lay Leoncia. On the narrow runways of deck on either side lay her brothers and her father. Aft, between the cabin companionway and the wheel, side by side, Francis’ arm across Henry’s shoulder, as if still protecting him, were the two Morgans. On one side the wheel, sitting, with arms on knees and head on arms, the negro-Indian skipper slept, and just as precisely postured, on the other side of the wheel, slept the helmsman, who was none other than Percival, the black Kingston negro. The waist of the schooner was strewn with the bodies of the mixed-breed seamen, while forward, on the tiny forecastlehead, prone, his face buried upon his folded arms, slept the lookout.
Leoncia, in her high place on the cabin-top, awoke first. Propping her head on her hand, the elbow resting on a bit of the poncho on which she lay, she looked down past one side of the hood of the companionway upon the two young men. She yearned over them, who were so alike, and knew love for both of them, remembered the kisses of Henry on her mouth, thrilled till the blush of her own thoughts mantled her cheek at memory of the kisses of Francis, and was puzzled and amazed that she should have it in her to love two men at the one time. As she had already learned of herself, she would follow Henry to the end of the world and Francis even farther. And she could not understand such wantonness of inclination.
