THE BANQUET HALL
Then Jim looked up at the wall which was paneled in some light wood and
there his eyes saw something that gave him the clue. He straightened up
and moved quickly towards the ghostly figure.
"How are you, Brian de Bois Guilbert?" he said as he came up. "I should
like to borrow your suit of armor if you don't mind."
The audacity of James. It was a gigantic suit of armor, and for the
moment Jim thought of trying to get into it, but he gave it up. Perhaps
as a last resort he might use it, to strike terror into the
superstitious greasers and cutthroats who were making their foul nest in
this once beautiful home.
It would be perfectly useless for him to try and put it on in the hall,
for it would make clangor enough to arouse the deaf or the dead. So Jim
very gently wheedled the image of the late Sir Brian inch by inch
towards the library and finally got it inside. Luckily there was only a
few feet to go, but it took Jim the better half of an hour. This
incident of the armor goes to show how carefully Jim was looking to a
possible chance in the future. Our old college chum, Jim, was certainly
strong on strategy.
"Now, you stay here, Brian, old Boy," he said, "until I come back; if
you don't I'll Ivanhoe your old block for you."
Then Jim slipped out in the passageway once more, and went immediately
to the place in the hall from whence he had sighted the armor man. There
on the wall were medieval weapons--battle-axes, swords and poniards.
These were what had given Jim his clue as to what the ghostly figure
really represented.
"I reckon that I will have to appropriate some of this hardware, before
I explore any further."
He finally selected a small and exceedingly keen poniard, also a short,
heavy sword, and thus equipped he was ready for what might come, which
as he well knew was apt to be the unexpected. As he stood motionless in
the dark hall, with its dimmed radiance at one end, he was sure that he
heard the faint sound of voices, which is not saying that the voices
were faint by any means.
As he went cautiously along, the sound of the voices came no nearer, but
they did not grow less distinct. This puzzled Jim exceedingly.
"I'd give my hat to be able to locate this serenade," he remarked to
himself; "it sounds most peculiar."
James went slowly along, feeling the wall as he went, and all at once
his fingers came to a slight break in the smooth wood, and the voices
became slightly clearer and Jim was positive that he heard the thrum,
thrum of a guitar. He ran his fingers up and down near the minute break,
until they touched a small wooden button. He hesitated a moment before
pressing it, not knowing what might happen nor what might possibly be on
the other side.
"Nothing venture, nothing have," he said, and standing to one side he
pressed the button and the door came quietly back.
"Well-oiled piece of machinery that," thought Jim; "I wonder who uses
this stage entrance anyhow."
Then there came distinctly and clear the voices of several men singing a
Mexican song and Jim saw several steps leading to a lower level under a
low-arched passageway. He also heard besides the singing the low voices
of men speaking and the occasional moving of a chair. He was soon to
solve this particular mystery.
Moving cautiously along he reached the end of the short passageway and
there he saw that it opened on a balcony that ran across one end of a
high vaulted room, embellished with a beautifully carved ceiling of oak.
As the balcony was quite high up and shut in by big panels of wood about
four feet in height, he could not see the floor below.
Jim dared not raise his head to see who were in the room, which was
evidently intended originally for a banquet hall and not a den of
thieves. However, he was not long in doubt as to what to do, for he
slipped the poniard from its sheath, and began to cut a hole through the
wood in front of him and it did not take him long to have a place large
enough to see perfectly what was going on below. He took one long
earnest look.
"Gosh," he muttered to himself, "what a chance, what a chance; if I only
had my revolver with me, I'd corner that gang in short order." And so he
would.
Now this is what he saw, by the light of a mammoth fireplace filled with
great logs that sent a weird, but beautiful light glowing and then
wavering in shadows across the high arched ceiling. A few feet back from
the wide high fireplace with its roaring flame were four men playing
cards. They sat around a table, and three in appearance were villainous
cutthroats, probably Mexicans by their dark visages, swaggeringly armed
with knives and revolvers, with gaudy handkerchiefs knotted at their
throats.
The firelight showed the flash of their cruel eyes and teeth at some
stroke of fortune in the play, and Jim, who was not unaccustomed to see
and deal with dubious citizens, felt that right below him was the
hardest bunch that ill fortune had ever brought across his path. He was
not forgetting either the Apaches with whom he and his brothers had
enjoyed more than one fracas in the great Southwest.
But what the observer regarded with greatest interest was a group of
three well back in the shadow, and he needed none to tell him who that
short, squat figure was. He held a guitar, and was accompanying his own
songs while the other two joined in the refrain. It was his _bête noir_,
the Mexican dwarf who had recently robbed him, and out-maneuvered him on
two occasions at least.
Strange to say that if you did not see him, and only heard his voice you
would be certain that he was a lithe, Spanish cavalier, of the "oh
Juanita" type of lover, for his tone was neither guttural nor harsh but
smooth and melodious, and to-night for some reason he was inclined to
sentimental songs of the serenade kind, but this reason was soon to
appear.
"Who gets the Señorita Manuel, the one who came in the carriage this
evening, as though to a ball?" queried one of the players at the card
table. The words were spoken at an interval between games.
Jim almost stood up in his sudden enlightenment and wrath but he
bethought himself in time and with whitened knuckles he drove the
poniard held in his hand deep into the wood of the floor. This, in a
mild way served to express his feelings. At the question the dwarf
swaggered into the full light of the fire.
"I, Manuel de Gorzaga, will have the señorita, my voice will charm her,
and my money please her."
Jim could hardly restrain a scornful laugh at the audacity of the dwarf,
but he noticed that though the others regarded him askance they did not
ridicule him, but seemed to have a certain fear of his malignity, and
his cunning craft. Jim saw that he was clean shaven now and that he
moved his head back and forth in front of his hump, like an ugly hooded
bird, and his shadow was distorted on the high vaulted ceiling into
something horrible and of ill omen. To complete the picture, it is
necessary to say that he was dressed in gorgeous fashion in a suit of
slashed velvet, and a resplendent sash around his waist.
There was a marvelous celerity in his every movement, so that he was
like nothing so much as a richly colored spider, that darts from shadow
to pounce upon its victim. Jim vowed that he would not leave the castle
that night until the Señorita da Cordova, if a prisoner, was freed from
the power of this contemptible creature. But he was to find the
adventure which he had planned more difficult than was expected and that
was saying a good deal.
"How about the señorita's nice little nurse, Señor Manuel da Gorzaga?"
questioned one of the card players, with a sneer. "Perchance that person
may have something to say to your pretensions."
The dwarf regarded his questioner with a venomous look and then spat
emphatically on the floor, but he gave no reply except by an expressive
drawing of his fingers across his throat.
"The Duenna's throat is iron," replied the other speaker to this
pantomime; "she guards the captain's treasures like the dragon the
golden apples."
"I, too, am valuable to that old shark of the seas," replied the
Mexican, in most uncomplimentary terms to his master captain, William
Broome. "I know his many secrets, and it was I, Manuel, who got the
treasure from that long-legged, white-headed gringo" (Jim grinned at
this description of himself), "who would make one meal of the brave
captain if it were not for me, who am too wise for his thick head."
"Good for you, Humpty Dumpty," said Jim, under his breath, "you won't
have to hire anybody to blow your trumpet for you. Sorry I can't stay,
old chap, to hear the rest of your interesting and eloquent speech."