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HEARTS OF THREE
by
JACK LONDON
Author of “The Valley of the Moon,”
“Jerry of the Islands,”
“Michael, Brother of Jerry,” &c., &c.
Mills & Boon, Limited
49 Rupert Street
London, W.
Copyright in the United States of America by Jack London.
FOREWORD
I hope the reader will forgive me for beginning this foreword with a
brag. In truth, this yarn is a celebration. By its completion I
celebrate my fortieth birthday, my fiftieth book, my sixteenth year in
the writing game, and a new departure. “Hearts of Three” is a new
departure. I have certainly never done anything like it before; I am
pretty certain never to do anything like it again. And I haven’t the
least bit of reticence in proclaiming my pride in having done it. And
now, for the reader who likes action, I advise him to skip the rest of
this brag and foreword, and plunge into the narrative, and tell me if it
just doesn’t read along.
For the more curious let me explain a bit further. With the rise of
moving pictures into the overwhelmingly most popular form of amusement
in the entire world, the stock of plots and stories in the world’s
fiction fund began rapidly to be exhausted. In a year a single producing
company, with a score of directors, is capable of filming the entire
literary output of the entire lives of Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens,
Scott, Zola, Tolstoy, and of dozens of less voluminous writers. And
since there are hundreds of moving pictures producing companies, it can
be readily grasped how quickly they found themselves face to face with a
shortage of the raw material of which moving pictures are fashioned.
The film rights in all novels, short stories, and plays that were still
covered by copyright, were bought or contracted for, while all similar
raw material on which copyright had expired was being screened as
swiftly as sailors on a placer beach would pick up nuggets. Thousands of
scenario writers—literally tens of thousands, for no man, nor woman, nor
child was too mean not to write scenarios—tens of thousands of scenario
writers pirated through all literature (copyright or otherwise), and
snatched the magazines hot from the press to steal any new scene or plot
or story hit upon by their writing brethren.
In passing, it is only fair to point out that, though only the other
day, it was in the days ere scenario writers became respectable, in the
days when they worked overtime for rough-neck directors for fifteen and
twenty a week or freelanced their wares for from ten to twenty dollars
per scenario and half the time were beaten out of the due payment, or
had their stolen goods stolen from them by their equally graceless and
shameless fellows who slaved by the week. But to-day, which is only a
day since the other day, I know scenario writers who keep their three
machines, their two chauffeurs, send their children to the most
exclusive prep schools, and maintain an unwavering solvency.
It was largely because of the shortage in raw material that scenario
writers appreciated in value and esteem. They found themselves in
demand, treated with respect, better remunerated, and, in return,
expected to deliver a higher grade of commodity. One phase of this new
quest for material was the attempt to enlist known authors in the work.
But because a man had written a score of novels was no guarantee that he
could write a good scenario. Quite to the contrary, it was quickly
discovered that the surest guarantee of failure was a previous record of
success in novel-writing.
But the moving pictures producers were not to be denied. Division of
labor was the thing. Allying themselves with powerful newspaper
organisations, or, in the case of “Hearts of Three,” the very reverse,
they had highly-skilled writers of scenario (who couldn’t write novels
to save themselves) make scenarios, which, in turn, were translated into
novels by novel-writers (who couldn’t, to save themselves, write
scenarios).
Comes now Mr. Charles Goddard to one, Jack London, saying: “The time,
the place, and the men are met; the moving pictures producers, the
newspapers, and the capital, are ready: let us get together.” And we
got. Result: “Hearts of Three.” When I state that Mr. Goddard has been
responsible for “The Perils of Pauline,” “The Exploits of Elaine,” “The
Goddess,” the “Get Rich Quick Wallingford” series, etc., no question of
his skilled fitness can be raised. Also, the name of the present
heroine, Leoncia, is of his own devising.
On the ranch, in the “Valley of the Moon,” he wrote his first several
episodes. But he wrote faster than I, and was done with his fifteen
episodes weeks ahead of me. Do not be misled by the word “episode.” The
first episode covers three thousand feet of film. The succeeding
fourteen episodes cover each two thousand feet of film. And each episode
contains about ninety scenes, which makes a total of some thirteen
hundred scenes. Nevertheless, we worked simultaneously at our respective
tasks. I could not build for what was going to happen next or a dozen
chapters away, because I did not know. Neither did Mr. Goddard know. The
inevitable result was that “Hearts of Three” may not be very vertebrate,
although it is certainly consecutive.
Imagine my surprise, down here in Hawaii and toiling at the novelization
of the tenth episode, to receive by mail from Mr. Goddard in New York
the scenario of the fourteenth episode, and glancing therein, to find my
hero married to the wrong woman!—and with only one more episode in which
to get rid of the wrong woman and duly tie my hero up with the right and
only woman. For all of which please see last chapter of fifteenth
episode. Trust Mr. Goddard to show me how.
For Mr. Goddard is the master of action and lord of speed. Action
doesn’t bother him at all. “Register,” he calmly says in a film
direction to the moving picture actor. Evidently the actor registers,
for Mr. Goddard goes right on with more action. “Register grief,” he
commands, or “sorrow,” or “anger,” or “melting sympathy,” or “homicidal
intent,” or “suicidal tendency.” That’s all. It has to be all, or how
else would he ever accomplish the whole thirteen hundred scenes?
But imagine the poor devil of a me, who can’t utter the talismanic
“register” but who must describe, and at some length inevitably, these
moods and modes so airily created in passing by Mr. Goddard! Why,
Dickens thought nothing of consuming a thousand words or so in
describing and subtly characterizing the particular grief of a
particular person. But Mr. Goddard says, “Register,” and the slaves of
the camera obey.
And action! I have written some novels of adventure in my time, but
never, in all of the many of them, have I perpetrated a totality of
action equal to what is contained in “Hearts of Three.”
But I know, now, why moving pictures are popular. I know, now, why
Messrs. “Barnes of New York” and “Potter of Texas” sold by the millions
of copies. I know, now, why one stump speech of high-falutin’ is a more
efficient vote-getter than a finest and highest act or thought of
statesmanship. It has been an interesting experience, this novelization
by me of Mr. Goddard’s scenario; and it has been instructive. It has
given me high lights, foundation lines, cross-bearings, and illumination
on my anciently founded sociological generalizations. I have come, by
this adventure in writing, to understand the mass mind of the people
more thoroughly than I thought I had understood it before, and to
realize, more fully than ever, the graphic entertainment delivered by
the demagogue who wins the vote of the mass out of his mastery of its
mind. I should be surprised if this book does not have a large sale.
(“Register surprise,” Mr. Goddard would say; or “Register large sale”).
If this adventure of “Hearts of Three” be collaboration, I am
transported by it. But alack!—I fear me Mr. Goddard must then be the one
collaborator in a million. We have never had a word, an argument, nor a
discussion. But then, I must be a jewel of a collaborator myself. Have I
not, without whisper or whimper of complaint, let him “register” through
fifteen episodes of scenario, through thirteen hundred scenes and
thirty-one thousand feet of film, through one hundred and eleven
thousand words of novelization? Just the same, having completed the
task, I wish I’d never written it—for the reason that I’d like to read
it myself to see if it reads along. I am curious to know. I am curious
to know.
JACK LONDON.
Waikiki, Hawaii,
_March 23, 1916_.
Back to Back Against the Mainmast
Do ye seek for fun and fortune?
Listen, rovers, now to me!
Look ye for them on the ocean:
Ye shall find them on the sea.
CHORUS:
Roaring wind and deep blue water!
We’re the jolly devils who,
Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.
Bring the dagger, bring the pistols!
We will have our own to-day!
Let the cannon smash the bulwarks!
Let the cutlass clear the way!
CHORUS:
Roaring wind and deep blue water!
We’re the jolly devils who,
Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.
Here’s to rum and here’s to plunder!
Here’s to all the gales that blow!
Let the seamen cry for mercy!
Let the blood of captains flow!
CHORUS:
Roaring wind and deep blue water!
We’re the jolly devils who,
Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.
Here’s to ships that we have taken!
They have seen which men were best.
We have lifted maids and cargo,
And the sharks have had the rest.
CHORUS:
Roaring wind and deep blue water!
We’re the jolly devils who,
Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.
—_George Sterling._
HEARTS OF THREE
CHAPTER I.
Events happened very rapidly with Francis Morgan that late spring
morning. If ever a man leaped across time into the raw, red drama and
tragedy of the primitive and the medieval melodrama of sentiment and
passion of the New World Latin, Francis Morgan was destined to be that
man, and Destiny was very immediate upon him.
Yet he was lazily unaware that aught in the world was stirring, and was
scarcely astir himself. A late night at bridge had necessitated a late
rising. A late breakfast of fruit and cereal had occurred along the
route to the library—the austerely elegant room from which his father,
toward the last, had directed vast and manifold affairs.
“Parker,” he said to the valet who had been his father’s before him,
“did you ever notice any signs of fat on R.H.M. in his last days?”
“Oh, no, sir,” was the answer, uttered with all the due humility of the
trained servant, but accompanied by an involuntarily measuring glance
that scanned the young man’s splendid proportions. “Your father, sir,
never lost his leanness. His figure was always the same,
broad-shouldered, deep in the chest, big-boned, but lean, always lean,
sir, in the middle. When he was laid out, sir, and bathed, his body
would have shamed most of the young men about town. He always took good
care of himself; it was those exercises in bed, sir. Half an hour every
morning. Nothing prevented. He called it religion.”
“Yes, he was a fine figure of a man,” the young man responded idly,
glancing to the stock-ticker and the several telephones his father had
installed.
“He was that,” Parker agreed eagerly. “He was lean and aristocratic in
spite of his shoulders and bone and chest. And you’ve inherited it, sir,
only on more generous lines.”
Young Francis Morgan, inheritor of many millions as well as brawn,
lolled back luxuriously in a huge leather chair, stretched his legs
after the manner of a full-vigored menagerie lion that is overspilling
with vigor, and glanced at a headline of the morning paper which
informed him of a fresh slide in the Culebra Cut at Panama.
“If I didn’t know we Morgans didn’t run that way,” he yawned, “I’d be
fat already from this existence.... Eh, Parker?”
The elderly valet, who had neglected prompt reply, startled at the
abrupt interrogative interruption of the pause.
“Oh, yes, sir,” he said hastily. “I mean, no, sir. You are in the pink
of condition.”
“Not on your life,” the young man assured him. “I may not be getting
fat, but I am certainly growing soft.... Eh, Parker?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir; no, I mean no, sir. You’re just the same as when you
came home from college three years ago.”
“And took up loafing as a vocation,” Francis laughed. “Parker!”
Parker was alert attention. His master debated with himself ponderously,
as if the problem were of profound importance, rubbing the while the
bristly thatch of the small toothbrush moustache he had recently begun
to sport on his upper lip.
“Parker, I’m going fishing.”
“Yes, sir!”
“I ordered some rods sent up. Please joint them and let me give them the
once over. The idea drifts through my mind that two weeks in the woods
is what I need. If I don’t, I’ll surely start laying on flesh and
disgrace the whole family tree. You remember Sir Henry?—the old original
Sir Henry, the buccaneer old swashbuckler?”
“Yes, sir; I’ve read of him, sir.”
Parker had paused in the doorway until such time as the ebbing of his
young master’s volubility would permit him to depart on the errand.
“Nothing to be proud of, the old pirate.”
“Oh, no, sir,” Parker protested. “He was Governor of Jamaica. He died
respected.”
“It was a mercy he didn’t die hanged,” Francis laughed. “As it was, he’s
the only disgrace in the family that he founded. But what I was going to
say is that I’ve looked him up very carefully. He kept his figure and he
died lean in the middle, thank God. It’s a good inheritance he passed
down. We Morgans never found his treasure; but beyond rubies is the
lean-in-the-middle legacy he bequeathed us. It’s what is called a fixed
character in the breed—that’s what the profs taught me in the biology
course.”
Parker faded out of the room in the ensuing silence, during which
Francis Morgan buried himself in the Panama column and learned that the
canal was not expected to be open for traffic for three weeks to come.
A telephone buzzed, and, through the electric nerves of a consummate
civilization, Destiny made the first out-reach of its tentacles and
contacted with Francis Morgan in the library of the mansion his father
had builded on Riverside Drive.
“But my dear Mrs. Carruthers,” was his protest into the transmitter.
“Whatever it is, it is a mere local flurry. Tampico Petroleum is all
right. It is not a gambling proposition. It is legitimate investment.
Stay with. Tie to it.... Some Minnesota farmer’s come to town and is
trying to buy a block or two because it looks as solid as it really
is.... What if it is up two points? Don’t sell. Tampico Petroleum is not
a lottery or a roulette proposition. It’s bona fide industry. I wish it
hadn’t been so almighty big or I’d have financed it all myself....
Listen, please, it’s not a flyer. Our present contracts for tanks is
over a million. Our railroad and our three pipe-lines are costing more
than five millions. Why, we’ve a hundred millions in producing wells
right now, and our problem is to get it down country to the
oil-steamers. This is the sober investment time. A year from now, or two
years, and your shares will make government bonds look like something
the cat brought in....”
“Yes, yes, please. Never mind how the market goes. Also, please, I
didn’t advise you to go in in the first place. I never advised a friend
to that. But now that they are in, stick. It’s as solid as the Bank of
England.... Yes, Dicky and I divided the spoils last night. Lovely
party, though Dicky’s got too much temperament for bridge.... Yes, bull
luck.... Ha! ha! My temperament? Ha! Ha!... Yes?... Tell Harry I’m off
and away for a couple of weeks.... Fishing, troutlets, you know, the
springtime and the streams, the rise of sap, the budding and the
blossoming and all the rest.... Yes, good-bye, and hold on to Tampico
Petroleum. If it goes down, after that Minnesota farmer’s bulled it, buy
a little more. I’m going to. It’s finding money.... Yes.... Yes,
surely.... It’s too good to dare sell on a flyer now, because it mayn’t
ever again go down.... Of course I know what I’m talking about. I’ve
just had eight hours’ sleep, and haven’t had a drink.... Yes, yes....
Good-bye.”
He pulled the ticker tape into the comfort of his chair and languidly
ran over it, noting with mildly growing interest the message it
conveyed.
Parker returned with several slender rods, each a glittering gem of
artisanship and art. Francis was out of his chair, ticker flung aside
and forgotten as with the exultant joy of a boy he examined the toys
and, one after another, began trying them, switching them through the
air till they made shrill whip-like noises, moving them gently with
prudence and precision under the lofty ceiling as he made believe to
cast across the floor into some unseen pool of trout-lurking mystery.
A telephone buzzed. Irritation was swift on his face.
“For heaven’s sake answer it, Parker,” he commanded. “If it is some
silly stock-gambling female, tell her I’m dead, or drunk, or down with
typhoid, or getting married, or anything calamitous.”
After a moment’s dialogue, conducted on Parker’s part, in the discreet
and modulated tones that befitted absolutely the cool, chaste, noble
dignity of the room, with a “One moment, sir,” into the transmitter, he
muffled the transmitter with his hand and said:
“It’s Mr. Bascom, sir. He wants you.”
“Tell Mr. Bascom to go to hell,” said Francis, simulating so long a
cast, that, had it been in verity a cast, and had it pursued the course
his fascinated gaze indicated, it would have gone through the window and
most likely startled the gardener outside kneeling over the rose bush he
was planting.
“Mr. Bascom says it’s about the market, sir, and that he’d like to talk
with you only a moment,” Parker urged, but so delicately and subduedly
as to seem to be merely repeating an immaterial and unnecessary message.
“All right.” Francis carefully leaned the rod against a table and went
to the ‘phone.
“Hello,” he said into the telephone. “Yes, this is I, Morgan. Shoot,
What is it?”
He listened for a minute, then interrupted irritably: “Sell—hell.
Nothing of the sort.... Of course, I’m glad to know. Even if it goes up
ten points, which it won’t, hold on to everything. It may be a
legitimate rise, and it mayn’t ever come down. It’s solid. It’s worth
far more than it’s listed. I know, if the public doesn’t. A year from
now it’ll list at two hundred ... that is, if Mexico can cut the
revolution stuff.... Whenever it drops you’ll have buying orders from
me.... Nonsense. Who wants control? It’s purely sporadic ... eh? I beg
your pardon. I mean it’s merely temporary. Now I’m going off fishing for
a fortnight. If it goes down five points, buy. Buy all that’s offered.
Say, when a fellow’s got a real bona fide property, being bulled is
almost as bad as having the bears after one ... yes.... Sure ... yes.
Good-bye.”
And while Francis returned delightedly to his fishing-rods, Destiny, in
Thomas Regan’s down-town private office, was working overtime. Having
arranged with his various brokers to buy, and, through his divers
channels of secret publicity having let slip the cryptic tip that
something was wrong with Tampico Petroleum’s concessions from the
Mexican government, Thomas Regan studied a report of his own oil-expert
emissary who had spent two months on the spot spying out what Tampico
Petroleum really had in sight and prospect.
A clerk brought in a card with the information that the visitor was
importunate and foreign. Regan listened, glanced at the card, and said:
“Tell this Mister Senor Alvarez Torres of Ciodad de Colon that I can’t
see him.”
Five minutes later the clerk was back, this time with a message
pencilled on the card. Regan grinned as he read it:
“_Dear Mr. Regan_,
“_Honoured Sir_:—
“_I have the honour to inform you that I have a tip on the location
of the treasure Sir Henry Morgan buried in old pirate days._
“_Alvarez Torres._”
Regan shook his head, and the clerk was nearly out of the room when his
employer suddenly recalled him.
“Show him in—at once.”
In the interval of being alone, Regan chuckled to himself as he rolled
the new idea over in his mind. “The unlicked cub!” he muttered through
the smoke of the cigar he was lighting. “Thinks he can play the lion
part old R.H.M. played. A trimming is what he needs, and old Grayhead
Thomas R. will see that he gets it.”
Senor Alvarez Torres’ English was as correct as his modish spring suit,
and though the bleached yellow of his skin advertised his Latin-American
origin, and though his black eyes were eloquent of the mixed lustres of
Spanish and Indian long compounded, nevertheless he was as thoroughly
New Yorkish as Thomas Regan could have wished.
“By great effort, and years of research, I have finally won to the clue
to the buccaneer gold of Sir Henry Morgan,” he preambled. “Of course
it’s on the Mosquito Coast. I’ll tell you now that it’s not a thousand
miles from the Chiriqui Lagoon, and that Bocas del Toro, within reason,
may be described as the nearest town. I was born there—educated in
Paris, however—and I know the neighbourhood like a book. A small
schooner—the outlay is cheap, most very cheap—but the returns, the
reward—the treasure!”
Senor Torres paused in eloquent inability to describe more definitely,
and Thomas Regan, hard man used to dealing with hard men, proceeded to
bore into him and his data like a cross-examining criminal lawyer.
“Yes,” Senor Torres quickly admitted, “I am somewhat embarrassed—how
shall I say?—for immediate funds.”
“You need the money,” the stock operator assured him brutally, and he
bowed pained acquiescence.
Much more he admitted under the rapid-fire interrogation. It was true,
he had but recently left Bocas del Toro, but he hoped never again to go
back. And yet he would go back if possibly some arrangement....
But Regan shut him off with the abrupt way of the master-man dealing
with lesser fellow-creatures. He wrote a check, in the name of Alvarez
Torres, and when that gentleman glanced at it he read the figures of a
thousand dollars.
“Now here’s the idea,” said Regan. “I put no belief whatsoever in your
story. But I have a young friend—my heart is bound up in the boy but he
is too much about town, the white lights and the white-lighted ladies,
and the rest—you understand?” And Senor Alvarez Torres bowed as one man
of the world to another. “Now, for the good of his health, as well as
his wealth and the saving of his soul, the best thing that could happen
to him is a trip after treasure, adventure, exercise, and ... you
readily understand, I am sure.”
Again Alvarez Torres bowed.
“You need the money,” Regan continued. “Strive to interest him. That
thousand is for your effort. Succeed in interesting him so that he
departs after old Morgan’s gold, and two thousand more is yours. So
thoroughly succeed in interesting him that he remains away three months,
two thousand more—six months, five thousand. Oh, believe me, I knew his
father. We were comrades, partners, I—I might say, almost brothers. I
would sacrifice any sum to win his son to manhood’s wholesome path. What
do you say? The thousand is yours to begin with. Well?”
With trembling fingers Senor Alvarez Torres folded and unfolded the
check.
“I ... I accept,” he stammered and faltered in his eagerness. “I ... I
... How shall I say?... I am yours to command.”
Five minutes later, as he arose to go, fully instructed in the part he
was to play and with his story of Morgan’s treasure revised to
convincingness by the brass-tack business acumen of the stock-gambler,
he blurted out, almost facetiously, yet even more pathetically:
“And the funniest thing about it, Mr. Regan, is that it is true. Your
advised changes in my narrative make it sound more true, but true it is
under it all. I need the money. You are most munificent, and I shall do
my best.... I ... I pride myself that I am an artist. But the real and
solemn truth is that the clue to Morgan’s buried loot is genuine. I have
had access to records inaccessible to the public, which is neither here
nor there, for the men of my own family—they are family records—have had
similar access, and have wasted their lives before me in the futile
search. Yet were they on the right clue—except that their wits made them
miss the spot by twenty miles. It was there in the records. They missed
it, because it was, I think, a deliberate trick, a conundrum, a puzzle,
a disguisement, a maze, which I, and I alone, have penetrated and
solved. The early navigators all played such tricks on the charts they
drew. My Spanish race so hid the Hawaiian Islands by five degrees of
longitude.”
All of which was in turn Greek to Thomas Regan, who smiled his
acceptance of listening and with the same smile conveyed his busy
business-man’s tolerant unbelief.
Scarcely was Senor Torres gone, when Francis Morgan was shown in.
“Just thought I’d drop around for a bit of counsel,” he said, greetings
over. “And to whom but you should I apply, who so closely played the
game with my father? You and he were partners, I understand, on some of
the biggest deals. He always told me to trust your judgment. And, well,
here I am, and I want to go fishing. What’s up with Tampico Petroleum?”
“What _is_ up?” Regan countered, with fine simulation of ignorance of
the very thing of moment he was responsible for precipitating. “Tampico
Petroleum?”
Francis nodded, dropped into a chair, and lighted a cigarette, while
Regan consulted the ticker.
“Tampico Petroleum is up—two points—you should worry,” he opined.
“That’s what I say,” Francis concurred. “I should worry. But just the
same, do you think some bunch, onto the inside value of it—and it’s
big—I speak under the rose, you know, I mean in absolute confidence?”
Regan nodded. “It is big. It is right. It is the real thing. It is
legitimate. Now this activity—would you think that somebody, or some
bunch, is trying to get control?”
His father’s associate, with the reverend gray of hair thatching his
roof of crooked brain, shook the thatch.
“Why,” he amplified, “it may be just a flurry, or it may be a hunch on
the stock public that it’s really good. What do you say?”
“Of course it’s good,” was Francis’ warm response. “I’ve got reports,
Regan, so good they’d make your hair stand up. As I tell all my friends,
this is the real legitimate. It’s a damned shame I had to let the public
in on it. It was so big, I just had to. Even all the money my father
left me, couldn’t swing it—I mean, free money, not the stuff tied
up—money to work with.”
“Are you short?” the older man queried.
“Oh, I’ve got a tidy bit to operate with,” was the airy reply of youth.
“You mean...?”
“Sure. Just that. If she drops, I’ll buy. It’s finding money.”
“Just about how far would you buy?” was the next searching
interrogation, masked by an expression of mingled good humor and
approbation.
“All I’ve got,” came Francis Morgan’s prompt answer. “I tell you, Regan,
it’s immense.”
“I haven’t looked into it to amount to anything, Francis; but I will say
from the little I know that it listens good.”
“Listens! I tell you, Regan, it’s the Simon-pure, straight legitimate,
and it’s a shame to have it listed at all. I don’t have to wreck anybody
or anything to pull it across. The world will be better for my shooting
into it I am afraid to say how many hundreds of millions of barrels of
real oil——say, I’ve got one well alone, in the Huasteca field, that’s
gushed 27,000 barrels a day for seven months. And it’s still doing it.
That’s the drop in the bucket we’ve got piped to market now. And it’s
twenty-two gravity, and carries less than two-tenths of one per cent. of
sediment. And there’s one gusher—sixty miles of pipe to build to it, and
pinched down to the limit of safety, that’s pouring out all over the
landscape just about seventy thousand barrels a day.—Of course, all in
confidence, you know. We’re doing nicely, and I don’t want Tampico
Petroleum to skyrocket.”
“Don’t you worry about that, my lad. You’ve got to get your oil piped,
and the Mexican revolution straightened out before ever Tampico
Petroleum soars. You go fishing and forget it.” Regan paused, with
finely simulated sudden recollection, and picked up Alvarez Torres’ card
with the pencilled note. “Look, who’s just been to see me.” Apparently
struck with an idea, Regan retained the card a moment. “Why go fishing
for mere trout? After all, it’s only recreation. Here’s a thing to go
fishing after that there’s real recreation in, full-size man’s
recreation, and not the Persian-palace recreation of an Adirondack camp,
with ice and servants and electric push-buttons. Your father always was
more than a mite proud of that old family pirate. He claimed to look
like him, and you certainly look like your dad.”
“Sir Henry,” Francis smiled, reaching for the card. “So am I a mite
proud of the old scoundrel.”
He looked up questioningly from the reading of the card.
“He’s a plausible cuss,” Regan explained. “Claims to have been born
right down there on the Mosquito Coast, and to have got the tip from
private papers in his family. Not that I believe a word of it. I haven’t
time or interest to get started believing in stuff outside my own
field.”
“Just the same, Sir Henry died practically a poor man,” Francis
asserted, the lines of the Morgan stubbornness knitting themselves for a
flash on his brows. “And they never did find any of his buried
treasure.”
“Good fishing,” Regan girded good-humoredly.
“I’d like to meet this Alvarez Torres just the same,” the young man
responded.
“Fool’s gold,” Regan continued. “Though I must admit that the cuss is
most exasperatingly plausible. Why, if I were younger—but oh, the devil,
my work’s cut out for me here.”
“Do you know where I can find him?” Francis was asking the next moment,
all unwittingly putting his neck into the net of tentacles that Destiny,
in the visible incarnation of Thomas Regan, was casting out to snare
him.
* * * * *
The next morning the meeting took place in Regan’s office. Senor Alvarez
Torres startled and controlled himself at first sight of Francis’ face.
This was not missed by Regan, who grinningly demanded:
“Looks like the old pirate himself, eh?”
“Yes, the resemblance is most striking,” Torres lied, or half-lied, for
he did recognize the resemblance to the portraits he had seen of Sir
Henry Morgan; although at the same time under his eyelids he saw the
vision of another and living man who, no less than Francis and Sir
Henry, looked as much like both of them as either looked like the other.
Francis was youth that was not to be denied. Modern maps and ancient
charts were pored over, as well as old documents, handwritten in faded
ink on time-yellowed paper, and at the end of half an hour he announced
that the next fish he caught would be on either the Bull or the Calf—the
two islets off the Lagoon of Chiriqui, on one or the other of which
Torres averred the treasure lay.
“I’ll catch to-night’s train for New Orleans,” Francis announced. “That
will just make connection with one of the United Fruit Company’s boats
for Colon—oh, I had it all looked up before I slept last night.”
“But don’t charter a schooner at Colon,” Torres advised. “Take the
overland trip by horseback to Belen. There’s the place to charter, with
unsophisticated native sailors and everything else unsophisticated.”
“Listens good!” Francis agreed. “I always wanted to see that country
down there. You’ll be ready to catch to-night’s train, Senor Torres?...
Of course, you understand, under the circumstances, I’ll be the
treasurer and foot the expenses.”
But at a privy glance from Regan, Alvarez Torres lied with swift
efficientness.
“I must join you later, I regret, Mr. Morgan. Some little business that
presses—how shall I say?—an insignificant little lawsuit that must be
settled first. Not that the sum at issue is important. But it is a
family matter, and therefore gravely important. We Torres have our
pride, which is a silly thing, I acknowledge, in this country, but which
with us is very serious.”
“He can join afterward, and straighten you out if you’ve missed the
scent,” Regan assured Francis. “And, before it slips your mind, it might
be just as well to arrange with Senor Torres some division of the loot
... if you ever find it.”
“What would you say?” Francis asked.
“Equal division, fifty-fifty,” Regan answered, magnificently arranging
the apportionment between the two men of something he was certain did
not exist.
“And you will follow after as soon as you can?” Francis asked the Latin
American. “Regan, take hold of his little law affair yourself and
expedite it, won’t you?”
“Sure, boy,” was the answer. “And, if it’s needed, shall I advance cash
to Senor Alvarez?”
“Fine!” Francis shook their hands in both of his. “It will save me
bother. And I’ve got to rush to pack and break engagements and catch
that train. So long, Regan. Good-bye, Senor Torres, until we meet
somewhere around Bocas del Toro, or in a little hole in the ground on
the Bull or the Calf—you say you think it’s the Calf? Well, until
then—adios!”
And Senor Alvarez Torres remained with Regan some time longer, receiving
explicit instructions for the part he was to play, beginning with
retardation and delay of Francis’ expedition, and culminating in similar
retardation and delay always to be continued.
“In short,” Regan concluded, “I don’t almost care if he never comes
back—if you can keep him down there for the good of his health that long
and longer.”