THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE
Out from the Mosquito country the cruiser fought her way again; her
machinery did not fail, and information given by the Indians, coupled
with a fairly quiet sea, enabled the adventurers to make a safe passage
through the treacherous rocks and the surging rollers.
There was no excitement during the run down the coast. Into the
well-traveled route to and from the Panama Canal the voyagers worked the
boat, and, by agreement, a stop was made at Colon.
In an earlier adventure the three chums, Tom, Cliff and Nicky, had
visited Panama, and the great achievement of the Canal was therefore not
a novelty to them, although they never ceased to marvel at the
engineering skill by which it had been planned and built, nor did the
vastness of its locks, the precision of its machinery, ever fail to make
them thrill as they thought—the United States—“our country”—accomplished
that feat. To them it was the Spirit of American success in an
undertaking that made the world better and communication easier.
They did not wait long in Colon; only until Bill and Mr. Gray made
inquiries about Mort Beecher.
As they traced the story, they learned, through many contacts which Mr.
Gray’s reputation as a great scholar opened to them, that Morton Beecher
had come to Colon, a few years before, and had seemed to be a very rich
person. He had spent money freely and had gotten into a group of Spanish
and of American pleasure-seekers who spent lavishly on the more sordid
delights of a tropical life. Not many months ago Mort, broken in health
and with no more money, had been compelled, as far as was known, to seek
his fortune elsewhere. No one would give him employment because he was
not dependable, had no strength, and spent all of his time bemoaning the
vanished past of his opulence. No one knew just what had happened to
him.
However, through the story that Henry Morgan had told them, they guessed
that Mort’s misfortunes had finally led him to Porto Bello, that decayed
spot on the Panama coast of the Caribbean which had once been a
stronghold of the notorious pirate, Henry Morgan the first, the man who
had first raided the Central and South American shipping and the towns
of the coast, robbing and pillaging, and then had become reformed to
such an extent that he had ended by making war on piracy and had
achieved the great fame of being the governor of Jamaica who had done
more than any other to “clean out” that nest of piratical looters.
With the wind kicking up a rough sea, the cruiser, namesake of the place
they were bound for, headed toward Porto Bello.
With a pilot, a negro who called himself Bob, taking the place in their
party vacated by Henry’s defection, they made the run safely, if under
rough conditions. The entrance into the harbor of the ancient Spanish
port was attended with only the usual dangers of any of the reef-locked,
rock-studded passages along the coast.
Tom, Nicky and Cliff saw, with amazement, the ruins of the once noted
place. There were the demolished battlements of its old fortifications,
visible as they dropped anchor in a quiet harbor.
They found the population composed of Spanish and Negro people, of the
most advanced state of dejection. No trade came to Porto Bello, no ships
bothered to run the menace of her reefs, except for a very rare sailing
sloop which might put in rather than to face a storm.
It took only a short time to land, and the crowd which assembled at the
decrepit old shacks near the beach, astonished the boys by its
slovenliness and its apathy. The people watched but made no effort to be
pleasant or to help them.
“Did you ever see so many sickly people?” Nicky asked, and with good
cause: hookworm was prevalent, from a diet that never varied; and the
unclad bodies of the younger children seemed a very breeding place for
sores. The ragged adults were in a like state.
“Father says that’s what comes of this kind of a life,” Cliff declared.
“These folks never see anybody but themselves. They don’t have anything
to interest them. They just eat, and sleep and exist, waiting till they
die.”
“I don’t think I’d stay here, even if I had to build a canoe and run the
risk of the reefs and the ocean rollers,” Tom stated. “I’d rather meet
my end fighting for life than sitting down and waiting for the other
thing.”
“So would I,” Nicky agreed. “But these people are just too lazy and
dejected to care, I guess.”
“They have lost their self-respect and their wills,” Bill said. “I
suppose I ought to feel sorry for them, but I don’t, because I was
always of the idea that it’s up to every man to make himself what he
wants to be.”
“I feel that way,” Tom agreed. “It isn’t easy, though.”
“Maybe it isn’t easy,” Bill nodded, “but it can be done if we stick to
it. I always wanted to have a ranch in Uncle Sam’s good old West. I was
down in Peru. Had no money. Just got enough to live on; but I stuck to
my ideas and kept saying to myself that if I wanted it long enough and
hard enough, and worked for it, I’d get what I had a desire for.”
“And you did,” admitted Nicky, for he had been with Bill during the
adventure among the Incas in which Bill had been able to save Cliff’s
father and eventually realize his desire for a ranch. “But it was a good
deal by good luck, Bill.”
“Why, Nicky!” chided Tom, while they waited for Mr. Gray to make some
arrangement with the “alcalde,” or head man, a sort of governor of the
town. “You always say ‘there is something that looks out for us!’ and
I’m surprised to hear you talk about luck.”
“That’s so,” Nicky agreed. “I didn’t stop to think. It looked like luck,
that Bill, in Peru, found the eaglet that had Cliff’s father’s note tied
to its leg.”
“But if you are sure that there is something, besides just chance,” Bill
argued, “you’d see that sort of something could bring the bird to where
I’d find it, and all the rest would come around through the same sort of
purpose, instead of by pure chance.”
They all agreed to that, and Mr. Gray brought the alcalde to meet them.
He was an elderly man, very sober and impressed with his dignity, though
what he had to be dignified about Tom and his chums failed to see.
However, with all the show of authority that he could put into what was
really laziness and vanity, he pretended that he could not give them the
information they sought until he prepared for an “audience” in the
shabby old shack which served as his home and office.
“He makes me think of the little frog in the puddle,” Tom commented, as
they stood about the beach, trying to be patient while Bill and Mr. Gray
argued and asked questions. “He’s so swelled up because he has a little
authority that he forgets to be decent or helpful.”
However, if the alcalde chose to be slow in his help, they found what
they wanted in another way. They had come to Porto Bello to get
information about Mort Beecher. This they secured through rather strange
channels.
“Look what’s coming!” whispered Tom, nodding his head toward a figure
slowly hobbling along the beach from a decrepit old lean-to among the
palms and the bush.
They all looked, and stared!
Bent with apparent age, halting in his steps, clad in rags so far beyond
repair that they scarcely covered him respectably, even in that
half-clothed community, came a white man.
His face was covered with a rank, bushy beard. His figure, when he came
close, was seen to be not only bronzed and roughened as to skin by
exposure, but was, as well, in a pitiful condition with the ravages of
drink. His eyes were more bleary and unpleasant than had been those of
Henry Morgan. His voice, high and shaky, whined and implored.
“A beach comber,” Bill told them. “That’s what a white man comes to when
he gets stranded in one of these dead spots, if he lets himself go.”
“It’s a pity,” Tom said. “He looks as if he has lost his own
self-respect, for he isn’t even clean; and he has no will power, I’ll
bet, or he wouldn’t have stayed here.”
“Laziness, drink—they tell the story,” Bill responded. “They’d sap the
vitality of one of the old Greek Gods!”
The pitiable figure sidled up, whining, a shaky hand extended in
supplication.
“I don’t suppose you’d give me a drink!” he whined.
Bill shook his head.
“No,” replied the bent figure, which looked seventy but which might have
seen no more than fifty years of life—but such a life! “No, nobody ever
does. Nor—a smoke—not even a little ’baccy for me pipe.”
Bill drew out a sack of tobacco and some thin papers and shook a little
tobacco into one of the latter. He saw it spilled from the shaking
fingers that tried to roll the paper, and made a cigarette.
“How long have you been here?” he asked, offering a light.
“I don’t know.”
“Long?”
“I can’t say, mister.”
“How did you get here?” Nicky inquired.
“I don’t seem to recall—I can’t seem to remember.”
They looked at one another. The alcalde came up.
“He is of no account,” he declared. “He cannot help you,” he continued
in his slow Spanish, using the words as though he was trying to recall
the proper ones; his usual conversation was in a degenerate dialect form
that he seemed to feel was too undignified for the occasion of the visit
of such dignitaries. “Come away!” he added. “Tomorrow I will receive you
and talk to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.
Bill looked after him and made a wry grimace of disgust.
“Tomorrow!” he said. “That’s what you hear all through the Spanish
tropics, ‘tomorrow!’” And he might have added that “tomorrow” may also
bring its “tomorrow,” for the hot countries breed delays and indolence
and the slow, dragging moments seem interminable to the Americans, with
their purposeful, aggressive manner and their habit of doing things at
once!
“We can’t spend a night here,” Nicky urged.
“Don’t say ‘can’t,’” admonished Tom. “Look at this man. He’s said
‘can’t’ or ‘don’t’ to everything we ask him. That’s what ‘can’t’ gets
you to—it breaks down everything you try to accomplish. Say ‘we won’t!’”
“Then, ‘we won’t,’” Nicky grinned.
“Mister,” Tom turned to the old man, sniffling and slumped down on the
sand as though unable to sustain himself on his two legs, “you can tell
us, I guess, what we want to know. Is there anybody in this place named
Mort Beecher?”
The man looked at him dully.
“I don’t remember any names,” he replied.
“Well,” urged Nicky, “was there any white man besides you here?”
“Yes,” the other responded, “I guess you wouldn’t give me another smoke,
would you?” He looked toward Bill. “Or something to—” he made a
suggestive movement as if tilting a glass. “No—I guess nobody would give
nothing to me no more.”
“There was another white man here,” Nicky persisted. “Was his name Mort
Beecher?”
“I don’t recall his name. I can’t remember if he ever told me.”
They looked at one another in dismay.
“It must have been Mort Beecher,” Tom asserted confidently; then he
turned to the derelict again. “Did he ever talk about being in Mexico?”
“Mexico—Mexico? I ain’t sure.”
“Did he ever mention a—a Golden Sun?” Bill, rolling and retaining a
fresh cigarette just out of reach of the eager fingers.
“Sun? I—I don’t just—seems as if maybe he did, but——”
“It’s no use,” Bill said, quite gruffly, tossing the rolled paper
contemptuously to the other who snatched it greedily. “We’ll have to
wait for the old slow-poke alcalde. We’ll go back to the boat—I won’t
spend a night in this sordid place!”
“Wait,” pleaded Tom, “I feel, some way, as if this man knows it, but he
has got into such a state that he doesn’t make even an effort.”
“Look, mister,” said Cliff. “Try to think back. Did he stay here a long
time? Did he talk to you?”
“I guess it was quite awhile, but I don’t know how long—I forget. He
talked some, I guess.”
“What about—did he talk of his past?”
“I don’t know? It bothers me to think. I can’t think. If I had, maybe—a
bit o’ drink—but I’m not sure, even then——”
“Look here, Bill,” said Tom, “let’s take him out to the boat.”
“What for?” demanded Bill.
“I see what Tom is after,” Nicky broke in. “When we give him some food
and clean him up some, maybe we can quiz him.”
Mr. Gray, who had been quietly listening, nodded.
“You are a psychologist,” he said, amused at Nicky.
“Psy—? Oh, yes, Mr. Gray. Our instructor at Amadale told us about that.
It’s studying people’s minds, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” nodded the scholar. “Scientists have watched people and studied
them, just as we study animals, until they have learned that almost all
people will act in much the same way under certain ways of stimulating
them.”
“I know,” agreed Tom. “We all want to run when we are scared; we all do,
if there is a fire and a panic.”
“Yes,” chimed in Cliff, “and when we think about something nice we
smile, and if we think about a lemon, we act and feel almost as though
we tasted it.”
“Quite correct,” smiled the scholar. “And we can go further than that,
as I believe Tom guesses. If we say ‘I cannot’ often enough, and keep
thinking and declaring that we are victims of fate, and have no chance
to get away from some place, or to succeed, we get ourselves into almost
as bad a condition as this poor chap.”
“That’s how Mr. Whitley put it, once,” Tom conceded. “That’s what I was
thinking about. If we get this man where he is more like a civilized man
and talk about ‘you can’ and get him to feeling that he can remember
instead of that he can’t—maybe——”
“It’s better than hanging around doing nothing,” Nicky urged.
“We can try it,” Mr. Gray agreed. “There have been many wonders worked
by ‘Modern Magic’—psychology applied to daily life.”
“What’s your name?” he inquired of the shaking man.
“Why—I didn’t use it for so long—Jack—just call me Jack.”
“All right, Jack,” said Bill. “You throw back those shoulders and step
out like a young fellow. You’re going back to civilization, for awhile.”
The look of surprise in the dim eyes became one of pleading.
“It can’t be—I can’t hear you right, saying that! Nobody would bother
with an old beach comber like me.”
“Well,” said Tom, “we think we’re somebody, and we are going to bother.
It not only can be true, it is true!”
“I can’t believe——”
“Well, come and see!”
So the procession started through the indolent cluster of natives toward
the cruiser’s tender.
They were going to try modern magic.
But Jack held back.
“You can’t be going to take me out on that fine boat—and feed me, and
treat me like a white man!” he demurred, unable to believe in his good
angels.
“We certainly are;” asserted Bill. “And loan you decent clothes, and
treat you like a king!”
He had hardly finished when Jack turned on his heel and started away;
over his shoulder, in his whining tones, he called to them.
“Then wait—I got to bathe me first!”
The magic was already working!