Money, like youth, will not be denied, and Francis Morgan, who was the
man-legal and nature-certain representative of both youth and money,
found himself one afternoon, three weeks after he had said good-bye to
Regan, becalmed close under the land on board his schooner, the
_Angelique_. The water was glassy, the smooth roll scarcely perceptible,
and, in sheer ennui and overplus of energy that likewise declined to be
denied, he asked the captain, a breed, half Jamaica negro and half
Indian, to order a small skiff over the side.
“Looks like I might shoot a parrot or a monkey or something,” he
explained, searching the jungle-clad shore, half a mile away, through a
twelve-power Zeiss glass.
“Most problematic, sir, that you are bitten by a _labarri_, which is
deadly viper in these parts,” grinned the breed skipper and owner of the
_Angelique_, who, from his Jamaica father had inherited the gift of
tongues.
But Francis was not to be deterred; for at the moment, through his
glass, he had picked out, first, in the middle ground, a white hacienda,
and second, on the beach, a white-clad woman’s form, and further, had
seen that she was scrutinising him and the schooner through a pair of
binoculars.
“Put the skiff over, skipper,” he ordered. “Who lives around here?—white
folks?”
“The Enrico Solano family, sir,” was the answer. “My word, they are
important gentlefolk, old Spanish, and they own the entire general
landscape from the sea to the Cordilleras and half of the Chiriqui
Lagoon as well. They are very poor, most powerful rich ... in
landscape—and they are prideful and fiery as cayenne pepper.”
As Francis, in the tiny skiff, rowed shoreward, the skipper’s alert eye
noted that he had neglected to take along either rifle or shotgun for
the contemplated parrot or monkey. And, next, the skipper’s eye picked
up the white-clad woman’s figure against the dark edge of the jungle.
Straight to the white beach of coral sand Francis rowed, not trusting
himself to look over his shoulder to see if the woman remained or had
vanished. In his mind was merely a young man’s healthy idea of
encountering a bucolic young lady, or a half-wild white woman for that
matter, or at the best a very provincial one, with whom he could fool
and fun away a few minutes of the calm that fettered the _Angelique_ to
immobility. When the skiff grounded, he stepped out, and with one sturdy
arm lifted its nose high enough up the sand to fasten it by its own
weight. Then he turned around. The beach to the jungle was bare. He
strode forward confidently. Any traveller, on so strange a shore, had a
right to seek inhabitants for information on his way—was the idea he was
acting out.
And he, who had anticipated a few moments of diversion merely, was
diverted beyond his fondest expectations. Like a jack-in-the-box, the
woman, who, in the flash of vision vouchsafed him demonstrated that she
was a girl-woman, ripely mature and yet mostly girl, sprang out of the
green wall of jungle and with both hands seized his arm. The hearty
weight of grip in the seizure surprised him. He fumbled his hat off with
his free hand and bowed to the strange woman with the imperturbableness
of a Morgan, New York trained and disciplined to be surprised at
nothing, and received another surprise, or several surprises compounded.
Not alone was it her semi-brunette beauty that impacted upon him with
the weight of a blow, but it was her gaze, driven into him, that was all
of sternness. Almost it seemed to him that he must know her. Strangers,
in his experience, never so looked at one another.
The double grip on his arm became a draw, as she muttered tensely:
“Quick! Follow me!”
A moment he resisted. She shook him in the fervor of her desire, and
strove to pull him toward her and after her. With the feeling that it
was some unusual game, such as one might meet up with on the coast of
Central America, he yielded, smilingly, scarcely knowing whether he
followed voluntarily or was being dragged into the jungle by her
impetuosity.
“Do as I do,” she shot back at him over her shoulder, by this time
leading him with one hand of hers in his.
He smiled and obeyed, crouching when she crouched, doubling over when
she doubled, while memories of John Smith and Pocahontas glimmered up in
his fancy.
Abruptly she checked him and sat down, her hand directing him to sit
beside her ere she released him, and pressed it to her heart while she
panted:
“Thank God! Oh, merciful Virgin!”
In imitation, such having been her will of him, and such seeming to be
the cue of the game, he smilingly pressed his own hand to his heart,
although he called neither on God nor the Virgin.
“Won’t you ever be serious?” she flashed at him, noting his action.
And Francis was immediately and profoundly, as well as naturally,
serious.
“My dear lady...” he began.
But an abrupt gesture checked him; and, with growing wonder, he watched
her bend and listen, and heard the movement of bodies padding down some
runway several yards away.
With a soft warm palm pressed commandingly to his to be silent, she left
him with the abruptness that he had already come to consider as
customary with her, and slipped away down the runway. Almost he whistled
with astonishment. He might have whistled it, had he not heard her
voice, not distant, in Spanish, sharply interrogate men whose Spanish
voices, half-humbly, half-insistently and half-rebelliously, answered
her.
He heard them move on, still talking, and, after five minutes of dead
silence, heard her call for him peremptorily to come out.
“Gee! I wonder what Regan would do under such circumstances!” he smiled
to himself as he obeyed.
He followed her, no longer hand in hand, through the jungle to the
beach. When she paused, he came beside her and faced her, still under
the impress of the fantasy which possessed him that it was a game.
“Tag!” he laughed, touching her on the shoulder. “Tag!” he reiterated.
“You’re It!”
The anger of her blazing dark eyes scorched him.
“You fool!” she cried, lifting her finger with what he considered undue
intimacy to his toothbrush moustache. “As if that could disguise you!”
“But my dear lady...” he began to protest his certain unacquaintance
with her.
Her retort, which broke off his speech, was as unreal and bizarre as
everything else which had gone before. So quick was it, that he failed
to see whence the tiny silver revolver had been drawn, the muzzle of
which was not presented merely toward his abdomen, but pressed closely
against it.
“My dear lady...” he tried again.
“I won’t talk with you,” she shut him off. “Go back to your schooner,
and go away....” He guessed the inaudible sob of the pause, ere she
concluded, “Forever.”
This time his mouth opened to speech that was aborted on his lips by the
stiff thrust of the muzzle of the weapon into his abdomen.
“If you ever come back—the Madonna forgive me—I shall shoot myself.”
“Guess I’d better go, then,” he uttered airily, as he turned to the
skiff, toward which he walked in stately embarrassment, half-filled with
laughter for himself and for the ridiculous and incomprehensible figure
he was cutting.
Endeavoring to retain a last shred of dignity, he took no notice that
she had followed him. As he lifted the skiff’s nose from the sand, he
was aware that a faint wind was rustling the palm fronds. A long breeze
was darkening the water close at hand, while, far out across the
mirrored water the outlying keys of Chiriqui Lagoon shimmered like a
mirage above the dark-crisping water.
A sob compelled him to desist from stepping into the skiff, and to turn
his head. The strange young woman, revolver dropped to her side, was
crying. His step back to her was instant, and the touch of his hand on
her arm was sympathetic and inquiring. She shuddered at his touch, drew
away from him, and gazed at him reproachfully through her tears. With a
shrug of shoulders to her many moods and of surrender to the
incomprehensibleness of the situation, he was about to turn to the boat,
when she stopped him.
“At least you...” she began, then faltered and swallowed, “you might
kiss me good-bye.”
She advanced impulsively, with outstretched arms, the revolver dangling
incongruously from her right hand. Francis hesitated a puzzled moment,
then gathered her in to receive an astounding passionate kiss on his
lips ere she dropped her head on his shoulder in a breakdown of tears.
Despite his amazement he was aware of the revolver pressing flat-wise
against his back between the shoulders. She lifted her tear-wet face and
kissed him again and again, and he wondered to himself if he were a cad
for meeting her kisses with almost equal and fully as mysterious
impulsiveness.
With a feeling that he did not in the least care how long the tender
episode might last, he was startled by her quick drawing away from him,
as anger and contempt blazed back in her face, and as she menacingly
directed him with the revolver to get into the boat.
He shrugged his shoulders as if to say that he could not say no to a
lovely lady, and obeyed, sitting to the oars and facing her as he began
rowing away.
“The Virgin save me from my wayward heart,” she cried, with her free
hand tearing a locket from her bosom, and, in a shower of golden beads,
flinging the ornament into the waterway midway between them.
From the edge of the jungle he saw three men, armed with rifles, run
toward her where she had sunk down in the sand. In the midst of lifting
her up, they caught sight of Francis, who had begun rowing a strong
stroke. Over his shoulder he glimpsed the _Angelique_, close hauled and
slightly heeling, cutting through the water toward him. The next moment,
one of the trio on the beach, a bearded elderly man, was directing the
girl’s binoculars on him. And the moment after, dropping the glasses, he
was taking aim with his rifle.
The bullet spat on the water within a yard of the skiff’s side, and
Francis saw the girl spring to her feet, knock up the rifle with her
arm, and spoil the second shot. Next, pulling lustily, he saw the men
separate from her to sight their rifles, and saw her threatening them
with the revolver into lowering their weapons.
The _Angelique_, thrown up into the wind to stop way, foamed alongside,
and with an agile leap Francis was aboard, while already, the skipper
putting the wheel up, the schooner was paying off and filling. With
boyish zest, Francis wafted a kiss of farewell to the girl, who was
staring toward him, and saw her collapse on the shoulders of the bearded
elderly man.
“Cayenne pepper, eh—those damned, horrible, crazy-proud Solanos,” the
breed skipper flashed at Francis with white teeth of laughter.
“Just bugs—clean crazy, nobody at home,” Francis laughed back, as he
sprang to the rail to waft further kisses to the strange damsel.
* * * * *
Before the land wind, the _Angelique_ made the outer rim of Chiriqui
Lagoon and the Bull and Calf, some fifty miles farther along on the rim,
by midnight, when the skipper hove to to wait for daylight. After
breakfast, rowed by a Jamaica negro sailor in the skiff, Francis landed
to reconnoiter on the Bull, which was the larger island and which the
skipper had told him he might find occupied at that season of the year
by turtle-catching Indians from the mainland.
And Francis very immediately found that he had traversed not merely
thirty degrees of latitude from New York but thirty hundred years, or
centuries for that matter, from the last word of civilisation to almost
the first word of the primeval. Naked, except for breech-clouts of
gunny-sacking, armed with cruelly heavy hacking blades of machetes, the
turtle-catchers were swift in proving themselves arrant beggars and
dangerous man-killers. The Bull belonged to them, they told him through
the medium of his Jamaican sailor’s interpreting; but the Calf, which
used to belong to them for the turtle season now was possessed by a
madly impossible Gringo, whose reckless, dominating ways had won from
them the respect of fear for a two-legged human creature who was more
fearful than themselves.
While Francis, for a silver dollar, dispatched one of them with a
message to the mysterious Gringo that he desired to call on him, the
rest of them clustered about Francis’ skiff, whining for money,
glowering upon him, and even impudently stealing his pipe, yet warm from
his lips, which he had laid beside him in the sternsheets. Promptly he
had laid a blow on the ear of the thief, and the next thief who seized
it, and recovered the pipe. Machetes out and sun-glistening their
clean-slicing menace, Francis covered and controlled the gang with an
automatic pistol; and, while they drew apart in a group and whispered
ominously, he made the discovery that his lone sailor-interpreter was a
weak brother and received his returned messenger.
The negro went over to the turtle-catchers and talked with a
friendliness and subservience, the tones of which Francis did not like.
The messenger handed him his note, across which was scrawled in pencil:
“Vamos.”
“Guess I’ll have to go across myself,” Francis told the negro whom he
had beckoned back to him.
“Better be very careful and utmostly cautious, sir,” the negro warned
him. “These animals without reason are very problematically likely to
act most unreasonably, sir.”
“Get into the boat and row me over,” Francis commanded shortly.
“No, sir, I regret much to say, sir,” was the black sailor’s answer. “I
signed on, sir, as a sailor to Captain Trefethen, but I didn’t sign on
for no suicide, and I can’t see my way to rowin’ you over, sir, to
certain death. Best thing we can do is to get out of this hot place
that’s certainly and without peradventure of a doubt goin’ to get hotter
for us if we remain, sir.”
In huge disgust and scorn Francis pocketed his automatic, turned his
back on the sacking-clad savages, and walked away through the palms.
Where a great boulder of coral rock had been upthrust by some ancient
restlessness of the earth, he came down to the beach. On the shore of
the Calf, across the narrow channel, he made out a dinghy drawn up.
Drawn up on his own side was a crank-looking and manifestly leaky dugout
canoe. As he tilted the water out of it, he noticed that the
turtle-catchers had followed and were peering at him from the edge of
the coconuts, though his weak-hearted sailor was not in sight.
To paddle across the channel was a matter of moments, but scarcely was
he on the beach of the Calf when further inhospitality greeted him on
the part of a tall, barefooted young man, who stepped from behind a
palm, automatic pistol in hand, and shouted:
“Vamos! Get out! Scut!”
“Ye gods and little fishes!” Francis grinned, half-humorously,
half-seriously. “A fellow can’t move in these parts without having a gun
shoved in his face. And everybody says get out pronto.”
“Nobody invited you,” the stranger retorted. “You’re intruding. Get off
my island. I’ll give you half a minute.”
“I’m getting sore, friend,” Francis assured him truthfully, at the same
time, out of the corner of his eye, measuring the distance to the
nearest palm-trunk. “Everybody I meet around here is crazy and
discourteous, and peevishly anxious to be rid of my presence, and
they’ve just got me feeling that way myself. Besides, just because you
tell me it’s your island is no proof——”
The swift rush he made to the shelter of the palm left his sentence
unfinished. His arrival behind the trunk was simultaneous with the
arrival of a bullet that thudded into the other side of it.
“Now, just for that!” he called out, as he centered a bullet into the
trunk of the other man’s palm.
The next few minutes they blazed away, or waited for calculated shots,
and when Francis’ eighth and last had been fired, he was unpleasantly
certain that he had counted only seven shots for the stranger. He
cautiously exposed part of his sun-helmet, held in his hand, and had it
perforated.
“What gun are you using?” he asked with cool politeness.
“Colt’s,” came the answer.
Francis stepped boldly into the open, saying: “Then you’re all out. I
counted ‘em. Eight. Now we can talk.”
The stranger stepped out, and Francis could not help admiring the fine
figure of him, despite the fact that a dirty pair of canvas pants, a
cotton undershirt, and a floppy sombrero constituted his garmenting.
Further, it seemed he had previously known him, though it did not enter
his mind that he was looking at a replica of himself.
“Talk!” the stranger sneered, throwing down his pistol and drawing a
knife. “Now we’ll just cut off your ears, and maybe scalp you.”
“Gee! You’re sweet-natured and gentle animals in this neck of the
woods,” Francis retorted, his anger and disgust increasing. He drew his
own hunting knife, brand new from the shop and shining. “Say, let’s
wrestle, and cut out this ten-twenty-and-thirty knife stuff.”
“I want your ears,” the stranger answered pleasantly, as he slowly
advanced.
“Sure. First down, and the man who wins the fall gets the other fellow’s
ears.”
“Agreed.” The young man in the canvas trousers sheathed his knife.
“Too bad there isn’t a moving picture camera to film this,” Francis
girded, sheathing his own knife. “I’m sore as a boil. I feel like a heap
bad Injun. Watch out! I’m coming in a rush! Anyway and everyway for the
first fall!”
Action and word went together, and his glorious rush ended
ignominiously, for the stronger, apparently braced for the shock,
yielded the instant their bodies met and fell over on his back, at the
same time planting his foot in Francis’ abdomen and, from the back
purchase on the ground, transforming Francis’ rush into a wild forward
somersault.
The fall on the sand knocked most of Francis’ breath out of him, and the
flying body of his foe, impacting on him, managed to do for what little
breath was left him. As he lay speechless on his back, he observed the
man on top of him gazing down at him with sudden curiosity.
“What d’ you want to wear a mustache for?” the stranger muttered.
“Go on and cut ‘em off,” Francis gasped, with the first of his returning
breath. “The ears are yours, but the mustache is mine. It is not in the
bond. Besides, that fall was straight jiu jiutsu.”
“You said ‘anyway and everyway for the first fall,’” the other quoted
laughingly. “As for your ears, keep them. I never intended to cut them
off, and now that I look at them closely the less I want them. Get up
and get out of here. I’ve licked you. _Vamos!_ And don’t come sneaking
around here again! Git! Scut!”
In greater disgust than ever, to which was added the humiliation of
defeat, Francis turned down to the beach toward his canoe.
“Say, Little Stranger, do you mind leaving your card?” the victor called
after him.
“Visiting cards and cut-throating don’t go together,” Francis shot back
across his shoulder, as he squatted in the canoe and dipped his paddle.
“My name’s Morgan.”
Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his
mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, “Same
stock—no wonder we look alike.”
Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Bull,
sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and
gloomily meditated. Crazy, everybody, was the run of his thought. Nobody
acts with reason. “I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with
these people. They’d get his ears.”
Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants
and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but
lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a
grass-thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he
uttered aloud, “I guess I put the fear of God into that particular
member of the Morgan family,” had just begun to stare at a photographic
reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry
Morgan.
“Well, Old Pirate,” he continued grinning, “two of your latest
descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that
would make your antediluvian horse-pistols look like thirty cents.”
He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was
monogramed with an “M,” and again addressed the portrait:
“Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old
duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really
fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you
played it yourself.”
A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age-worn and
moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added: “Well, here’s the old duds
on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to
tell me a point of looks in which we differ.”
Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on
around the middle and two flintlock pistols of huge and ponderous design
thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and
the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since
resolved to dust, was striking.
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew....”
As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old
buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded
into another picture and that he saw:
The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing,
facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while
behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed
and accoutred man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of
cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.
The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a
guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately. And in the sharp
pause of silence, it seemed that a fresh vision of old Sir Henry came to
him, down out of the frame and beside him, real in all seeming, plucking
at his sleeve to lead him out of the hut and whispering a ghostly
repetition of:
“Back to back against the mainmast
Held at bay the entire crew.”
The young man obeyed his shadowy guide, or some prompting of his own
profound of intuition, and went out the door and down to the beach,
where, gazing across the narrow channel, on the beach of the Bull, he
saw his late antagonist, backed up against the great boulder of coral
rock, standing off an attack of sack-clouted, machete-wielding Indians
with wide sweeping strokes of a driftwood timber.
* * * * *
And Francis, in extremity, swaying dizzily from the blow of a rock on
his head, saw the apparition, that almost convinced him he was already
dead and in the realm of the shades, of Sir Henry Morgan himself,
cutlass in hand, rushing up the beach to his rescue. Further, the
apparition, brandishing the cutlass and laying out Indians right and
left, was bellowing:
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.”
As Francis’ knees gave under him and he slowly crumpled and sank down,
he saw the Indians scatter and flee before the onslaught of the weird
pirate figure and heard their cries of:
“Heaven help us!” “The Virgin protect us!” “It’s the ghost of old
Morgan!”
* * * * *
Francis next opened his eyes inside the grass hut in the midmost center
of the Calf. First, in the glimmering of sight of returning
consciousness, he beheld the pictured lineaments of Sir Henry Morgan
staring down at him from the wall. Next, it was a younger edition of the
same, in three dimensions of living, moving flesh, who thrust a mug of
brandy to his lips and bade him drink. Francis was on his feet ere he
touched lips to the mug; and both he and the stranger man, moved by a
common impulse, looked squarely into each other’s eyes, glanced at the
picture on the wall and touched mugs in a salute to the picture and to
each other ere they drank.
“You told me you were a Morgan,” the stranger said. “I am a Morgan. That
man on the wall fathered my breed. Your breed?”
“The old buccaneer’s,” Francis returned. “My first name is Francis. And
yours?”
“Henry—straight from the original. We must be remote cousins or
something or other. I’m after the foxy old niggardly old Welshman’s
loot.”
“So’m I,” said Francis, extending his hand. “But to hell with sharing.”
“The old blood talks in you,” Henry smiled approbation. “For him to have
who finds. I’ve turned most of this island upside down in the last six
months, and all I’ve found are these old duds. I’m with you to beat you
if I can, but to put my back against the mainmast with you any time the
needed call goes out.”
“That song’s a wonder,” Francis urged. “I want to learn it. Lift the
stave again.”
And together, clanking their mugs, they sang:
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew....”