It took Bell just eight days to reach the Paraguay, and those eight days
were like an age-long nightmare of toil and discomfort and more than a
little danger. The launch was headed downstream, of course, and with the
current behind it, it made good time. But the distances of Brazil are
infinite, and the jungles of Brazil are malevolent, and the route down
the Rio Laurenco was designed by the architect of hell. _Raudales_ lay
in wait to destroy the little boat. Insects swarmed about to destroy its
voyagers. And the jungle loomed above them, passively malignant, and
waited for them to die.
And as if physical sufferings were not enough, Bell saw Paula wilt and
grow pale. All the way down the river they passed little clearings at
nearly equal distances. And men came trembling out of the little houses
upon those _fazendas_ and fawned upon the Senhor who was in the launch
that had come from up-river and so must be in the service of The Master
himself. The clearings and the tiny houses had been placed upon the
river for the service of the terribly laboring boat gangs who brought
the heavier supplies up the river to The Master's central depot. Men at
these clearings had been enslaved and ordered to remain at their posts,
serving all those upon the business of The Master. They fawned abjectly
upon Bell, because he was of _os gentes_ and so presumably was
empowered, as The Master had empowered his more intelligent subjects, to
exact the most degraded of submission from all beneath him in the
horrible conspiracy. Once, indeed, Bell was humbly implored by a panic
stricken man to administer "the grace of The Master" to a moody and
irritable child of twelve or so.
"She sees the red spots, Senhor. It is the first sign. And I have served
The Master faithfully...."
* * * * *
And Bell could do nothing. He went on savagely. And once he passed a
gang of _camaradas_ laboring to get heavily loaded dugouts up a fiendish
_raudal_. They had ropes out and were hauling at them from the bank,
while some of their number were breast-deep in the rushing water,
pushing the dugouts against the stream.
"They're headed for the plantation," said Bell grimly, "and they'll need
the grace of The Master by the time they get there. And it's abandoned.
But if I tell them...."
Men with no hope at all are not to be trusted. Not when they are
mixtures of three or more races--white and black and red--and steeped in
ignorance and superstition and, moreover, long subject to such masters
as these men had had. Bell had to think of Paula.
He could have landed and haughtily ordered them to float or even carry
the light boat to the calmer waters below. They would have obeyed and
cringed before him. But he shot the rapids from above, with the little
motor roaring past rocks and walls of jungle beside the foaming water,
at a speed that chilled his blood.
* * * * *
Paula said nothing. She was white and listless. Bell, himself, was being
preyed upon by a bitter blend of horror and a deep-seated rage that
consumed him like a fever. He had fever itself, of course. He was
taking, and forcing Paula to take, five grains of quinine a day. It had
been included among his stores as a matter of course by those who had
loaded his boat. And with the fever working in his brain he found
himself holding long, imaginary conversations, in which one part of his
brain reproached the other part for having destroyed the plantation of
The Master. The laborers upon that plantation had been abandoned to the
murder madness because of his deed. The caretakers of the tiny _fazenda_
on the river bank were now ignored. Bell felt himself a murderer because
he had caused The Master's deputies to cast them off in a callous
indifference to their inevitable fate.
He suffered the tortures of the damned, and grew morose and bitter, and
could only escape that self torture by coddling his hatred of Ribiera
and The Master. He imagined torments to be inflicted upon them which
would adequately repay them for their crimes, and racked his feverish
brain for memories of the appalling atrocities which can be committed
upon the human body without destroying its capacity to suffer.
It was not normal. It was not sane. But it filled Bell's mind and
somehow kept him from suicide during the horrible passage of the river.
He hardly dared speak to Paula. There was a time when he counted the
days since he had been a guest at Ribiera's estate outside of Rio, and
frenziedly persuaded himself that he saw red spots before his eyes and
soon would have the murder madness come upon him. And then he thought of
the supplies in Ribiera's plane, in which they had escaped from Rio.
They had eaten that food.
* * * * *
It was almost unconsciously, then, that he saw the narrow water on which
the launch floated valiantly grow wider day by day. When at last it
debouched suddenly into a vast stream whereon a clumsy steamer plied
beneath a self made cloud of smoke, he stared dully at it for minutes
before he realized.
"Paula," he said suddenly, and listened in amazement to his voice. It
was hoarse and harsh and croaking. "Paula, we've made it. This must be
the Paraguay."
She roused herself and looked about like a person waking from a
lethargic sleep. And then her lips quivered, and she tried to speak and
could not, and tears fell silently from her eyes, and all at once she
was sobbing bitterly.
That sign of the terrific strain she had been under served more than
anything else to jolt Bell out of his abnormal state of mind. He moved
over to her and clumsily put his arm about her, and comforted her as
best he could. And she sat sobbing with her head on his shoulder,
gasping in a form of hysterical relief, until the engine behind them
sputtered, and coughed, and died.
When Bell looked, the last drop of gasoline was gone. But the motor had
served its purpose. It had run manfully on an almost infinitesimal
consumption of gasoline for eight days. It had not missed an explosion
save when its wiring was wetted by spray. And now....
* * * * *
Bell hauled the engine inboard and got out the oars from under the
seats. He got the little boat out to mid-stream, and they floated down
until a village of squalid huts appeared on the eastern bank. He landed,
there, and with much bargaining and a haughty demeanor disposed of the
boat to the skipper of a _batelao_ in exchange for passage down-river as
far as Corumba. The rate was outrageously high. But he had little
currency with him and dared go no farther on a vessel which carried a
boat of The Master's ownership conspicuously towed behind.
At Corumba he purchased clothes less obviously of _os gentes_, both for
himself and for Paula, and that same afternoon was able to arrange for
their passage to Asuncion as deck passengers on a river steamer going
downstream.
It was as two peasants, then, that they rode in sweltering heat amid a
swarming and odorous mass of fellow humanity downstream. But it was a
curious relief, in some ways. The people about them were gross and
unwashed and stupid, but they were human. There was none of that
diabolical feeling of terror all about. There were no strained, fear
haunted faces upon the deck reserved for deck passengers and other
cattle. The talk was ungrammatical and literal and of the earth. The
women were stolid-faced and reserved. But when the long rows of hammocks
were slung out in the open air, in the casual fashion of sleeping
arrangements in the back-country of all South America, it was blessedly
peaceful to realize that the folk who snored so lustily were merely
human; human animals, it might be, with no thought above their _farinha_
and _feijos_ on the morrow, but human.
* * * * *
And the second day they passed the old fort at Coimbra, and went on. The
passage into Paraguayan territory was signalized by an elaborate customs
inspection, and three days later Asuncion itself displayed its red-tiled
roofs and adobe walls upon the shore.
Bell had felt some confidence in his ability to pass muster with his
Spanish, though his Portuguese was limited, and it was a shock when the
captain of the steamer summoned him to his cabin with a gesture, before
the steamer docked. Bell left Paula among the other deck passengers and
went with the peasant's air of suspicious humility into the captain's
quarters. But the captain's pose of grandeur vanished at once when the
door closed.
"Senor," said the steamer captain humbly, "I have not spoken to you
before. I knew you would not wish it. But tell me, senor! Have you any
news of what The Master plans?"
Bell's eyes flickered, at the same time that a cold apprehension filled
him.
"Why do you speak to me of The Master?" he demanded sharply.
The steamer captain stammered. The man was plainly frightened at Bell's
tone. Bell relaxed, his flash of panic for Paula gone.
"I know," said the captain imploringly, "that the great _fazenda_ has
been deserted. On my last trip, down, senor, I brought many of the high
deputies who had been there. They warned me not to speak, senor, but I
saw that you were not what you seemed, and I thought you might be going
about to see who obeyed The Master's orders...."
* * * * *
Bell nodded.
"That is my mission," he said curtly. "Do not speak of it further--not
even to the deputy in Asuncion."
The captain stammered again.
"But I must see the Senor Francia," he said humbly. "I report to him
after every trip, and if he thought that I did not report all that I
learn...."
"It is my order," snapped Bell angrily. "If he reproaches you, say that
one who has orders from The Master himself gave them to you. And do not
speak of the destruction of the _fazenda_. I am searching especially for
the man who caused it. And--wait! I will take your name, and you shall
give me--say--a thousand pesos. I had need of money to bribe a fool I
could not waste time on, up-country. It will be returned to you."
And again the captain stammered, but Bell stared at him haughtily, and
he knelt abjectly before the ship's safe.
* * * * *
Asuncion, as everybody knows, is a city of sixty thousand people, and
the capital of a republic which enjoyed the rule of a family of
hereditary dictators for sixty years; which rule ended in a war wherein
four-fifths of the population was wiped out. And since that beginning it
has averaged eight revolutions to Mexico's three, has had the joy of
knowing seven separate presidents in five years--none of them
elected--and now boasts a population approximately two-thirds
illegitimate and full of pride in its intellectual and artistic tastes.
Bell and Paula made their way along the cobbled streets away from the
river, surrounded by other similarly peasant-seeming folk. Bell told her
curtly what had happened with the steamer captain.
"It's the devil," he said coldly, "because this whole republic is under
The Master's thumb. Except among the peasants we can count on nearly
everybody being on the lookout for us, if they so much as suspect we're
alive. And they may because I burned their damned _fazenda_. So...."
Paula smiled at him, rather wanly.
"What are you going to do, Charles?"
"Get a boat," said Bell curtly. "One with three or four men, if I can.
If I can buy it with the skipper's money, I will. But I can't take you
to go bargaining. It would look suspicious."
They had reached the central plaza of the town. The market swarmed with
brown skinned folk and seemed to overflow with fruits. A man was
unconcernedly shoveling oranges out of a cart with a shovel, as if they
had been so much coal. A market woman as unconcernedly dropped some of
the same golden fruit within a small pen where a piglet awaited a
purchaser. To the left, there were rows of unshaded stalls where the
infinitely delicate handmade Paraguayan lace was exposed for sale.
"I--think," said Paula, "I think I will go in the cathedral. I will be
very devout, Charles, and you will find me there when you return. I will
be safe there, certainly."
* * * * *
He walked with her across the crowded plaza. He should have known that
your peasant does not stride with head up, but regarding the ground.
That a man who works heavily droops his shoulders with weariness at the
end of a day. And especially he should have realized that Paraguay is
not, strictly speaking, a Latin-American nation. It is Latin-Indian, in
which the population graduates very definitely from a sub-stratum of
nearly or quite pure Indian race to an aristocracy of nearly or quite
pure Spanish descent, and that the color of a man's skin fixes his place
in society. Both Bell and Paula were too light of skin for the peasant's
clothes they wore. They aroused curiosity at once. If it was not an
active curiosity, it was nevertheless curiosity of a sort.
But Bell left her in the shadowy, cool interior of the cathedral which
seems so pitifully small to be the center of religion for a nation. He
saw her move toward one of the little candle-lit niches in the wall and
fall quite simply on her knees there.
And he moved off, to wander aimlessly down to the river shore and stare
about and presently begin a desultory conversation with sleepy boatmen.
* * * * *
It was three hours and more before he returned to the Cathedral, and
Paula was talking to someone. More, talking to a woman in the most
discreet of mantilla'd church-going costumes. Paula saw him in the
doorway, and uttered a little cry of relief. She came hurrying to him.
"Charles! I have found a friend! Isabella Ybarra. We were schoolmates in
the United States and she has just come back from Paris! So you see, she
cannot--"
"I see," said Bell very quietly.
Paula was speaking swiftly and very softly.
"We went to school together, Charles. I trust her. You must trust her
also. There is no danger, this time. Isabella has never even heard of
The Master. So you see...."
"I see that you need someone you can trust," said Bell grimly. "_I_
found that the captain of the steamer had gone to The Master's deputy
here. While I was talking to some boatmen a warning was given to look
out for a man and woman, together, who may try to buy a boat. We're
described, and only the fact that I was alone kept me from being
suspected. Police, soldiers--everybody is looking out for us. Paraguay's
under The Master's thumb more completely than any other nation on the
continent."
The figure to which Paula had been talking was moving slowly toward
them. A smiling, brown-eyed face twinkled at them.
"You must be Charles!" said a warm and cluckling voice. "Paula has
raved, Senor. Now I am going to take her off in my carriage. She is my
maid. And you will follow the carriage on foot and I will have the
major-domo let you in the servants' entrance, and the three of us will
conspire."
* * * * *
It was incongruous to hear the English of a girl's finishing school from
the mantilla'd young woman who beamed mischievously at him. She had the
delighted air of one aiding a romance. It was doubly incongruous because
of the dark and shadowy Cathedral in which they were, and the raucous
noises of the market in the plaza without. Bell had a sense of utter
unreality as Isabella's good humored voice went on:
"Do you remember, Paula, the time the French teacher caught us in the
pantry? I shall feel just like that time."
"This is dangerous," said Bell, steadily, "and it is very serious
indeed."
"Pooh!" said Isabella comfortably. "Paula, you didn't even know I was
married! A whole year and a half! And he's a darling, really. I'm the
Senora Isabella Ybarra de Zuloaga, if you please! Bow gracefully!" She
chuckled. "Jaime came all the way to Rio to meet me last month. I'm wild
about him, Paula.... But come on! Follow me humbly, like a nice little
_mestizo_ girl who wants to be my maid, and I'll let you ride with the
_cochero_ and Charles shall follow behind us."
She swept out of the Cathedral with the air of a grande dame suppressing
a giggle, and Paula went humbly behind her.
And Bell trudged through the dust and the blistering sun while the
highly polished carriage jolted over cobble stones and the youthful
Senora Isabella Ybarra de Zuloaga beamed blissfully at the universe
which did not realize that she was a conspirator, and Paula sat modestly
beside the brown skinned _cochero_.
* * * * *
It was not a long ride nor a long walk, though the sun was insufferable.
The capital of Paraguay is not large. It is a sleepy, somnolent little
town in which the most pretentious building was begun as the
Presidential Palace and wound up as the home of a bank. But there are
bullet marks on the facade of the _Museo Nacional_, and there is still
an empty pedestal here and there throughout the city where the heroes of
last year's revolution, in bronze, have been pulled down and the heroes
of this year's uprising of the people have not yet been set up. Red
tiled roofs give the city color, and the varying shades of its populace
give it variety, and the fact that below the whiter class of inhabitants
_Guarani_ is spoken instead of Spanish adds to the individuality of its
effect.
But the house into which the carriage turned could have been built in
Rio or Buenos Aires without comment on its architecture. It had the
outer bleakness of most private homes of South America, but if it was
huge and its windows were barred, the patio into which Bell was ushered
by a bewildered and suspicious major-domo made up in color and in charm
for all that the exterior lacked.
A fountain played amid flowers, and macaws and parrots and myriad other
caged birds hung in their cages about the colonnade around the court,
and Bell found Paula being introduced to a pale young man in the stiff
collar and unspeakably formal morning clothes of the South American who
is of the upper class.
"Jaime," said Isabella, beaming. "And this is Charles, whom Paula is to
marry! It is romantic! It is fascinating! And I depend on you to give
him clothes so that all our servants won't stare goggle-eyed at him, and
I am going to take Paula off at once and dress her! They are our guests!
And, Jaime, you must threaten all the servants terribly so they will
keep it very secret--that we have two such terrible people with us."
* * * * *
Paula smiled at Bell, and he saw that she felt utterly safe and wholly
at peace. Something was hammering at Bell's brain, warning him, and he
could not understand what it was. But he exchanged the decorous limp
handshake which is conventional south of Panama, and followed his
unsmiling host to rooms where a servant laid out a bewildering
assortment of garments. They were all rather formal, the sort of
clothing that is held to be fitting for a man of position where Spanish
is the official if not the common tongue.
His host retired, without words, and Bell came out later to find him
sipping moodily at a drink, waiting for him. He wiped his forehead.
"Be seated, Senor," he said heavily, "until the ladies join us."
He wiped his forehead again and watched somberly while Bell poured out a
drink.
"Isabella...." He seemed to find it difficult to speak. "She has told me
a little, but there has been no time for more than a little: I do not
wish to have her tell me too much. She does not understand. She was
educated in North America, where customs are different. She demands that
I assist you and the senorita--it is the senorita?"
Bell stiffened. In all Spanish America the conventions are strict. For a
man and woman to travel together, even perforce and for a short
distance, automatically damns the woman.
"Go on," said Bell grimly.
His host was very pale indeed.
"She demands that I assist you and the senorita to escape the police and
the government. Provided that you do not tell me who you are, I will
attempt it. But--"
"I wonder," said Bell quietly, "if you have ever seen red spots dancing
before your eyes."
His host went utterly livid.
* * * * *
Zuloaga looked down at his hands, as if expecting unguessable things of
them. And then he shrugged, and said harshly:
"I have, Senor. So you see that Isabella, who does not know, is asking
me to risk, not only my life, but her honor."
Bell said nothing for a moment. He was a little pale.
"And your honor?" he asked quietly.
The pallor on the face of the Senor Jaime Zuloaga was horrible. He tried
to speak, and could not. He stood up, and managed to say:
"So much I will risk, because you have been my guest. Until to-morrow
morning you are safe, unless the Senor Francia has his spies within my
own house. I--I will attempt, even to procure a boat. But--"
Something made Bell turn. The major-domo was moving quickly out of
sight. Like a flash Bell was upon him, and like a flash a knife came
out.
Bell's host gasped. The fact that his servant had spied was more than
obvious, and he had spoke treason against The Master. He leaned against
the table, sick and trembling and mumbling of despair, while there were
crashes in the room into which Bell had plunged, while bodies thrashed
about on the floor, and while stertorous breathing grew less, and
stopped....
Bell came back, breathing hard. The front of his coat was slashed open.
"He's dead," he said harshly. "He'd have reported what you said, so I
killed him.... And now we've got to do something with his body."
He helped in the horrible task, while his host grew more and more
shaken. No other servants came near. And Bell could almost read the
thoughts that went through Zuloaga's brain. One servant had spied, to
report his treason. And that meant assassination for himself, as the
least of punishments, and for his wife....
But there would be no punishment if he went first to the deputy and said
that Bell had killed the major-domo.
Bell left the house before dusk, desperately determined to steal a craft
of some sort, return for Paula, and get away from Asuncion before dawn.
He returned after an hour. In the morning a man would be found bound and
gagged, with five hundred pesos stuffed into his pockets. His boat would
have vanished.
But there was a commotion before the house where Paula waited fearfully.
A carriage stood there, with a company of mounted soldiers about it.
Someone was being put into it. As Bell broke into a run toward the house
the carriage started up and the soldiers trotted after it.
Paula was taken.