Meanwhile, after the manner of cross purposes in New York, wherein Regan
craftily proceeded with his gigantic raid on all Francis’ holdings while
Francis and Bascom vainly strove to find his identity, so in Panama were
at work cross purposes which involved Leoncia and the Solanos, Torres
and the Jefe, and, not least in importance, one, Yi Poon, the rotund and
moon-faced Chinese.
The little old judge, who was the Jefe’s creature, sat asleep in court
in San Antonio. He had slept placidly for two hours, occasionally
nodding his head and muttering profoundly, although the case was a grave
one, involving twenty years in San Juan, where the strongest could not
survive ten years. But there was no need for the judge to consider
evidence or argument. Before the case was called, decision and sentence
were in his mind, having been put there by the Jefe. The prisoner’s
lawyer ceased his perfunctory argument, the clerk of the court sneezed,
and the judge woke up. He looked about him briskly and said:
“Guilty.”
No one was surprised, not even the prisoner.
“Appear to-morrow morning for sentence.——Next case.”
Having so ordered, the judge prepared to settle down into another nap,
when he saw Torres and the Jefe enter the courtroom. A gleam in the
Jefe’s eye was his cue, and he abruptly dismissed court for the day.
“I have been to Rodriguez Fernandez,” the Jefe was explaining five
minutes later, in the empty courtroom. “He says it was a natural gem,
and that much would be lost in the cutting, but that nevertheless he
would still give five hundred gold for it.——Show it to the judge, Senor
Torres, and the rest of the handful of big ones.”
And Torres began to lie. He had to lie, because he could not confess the
shame of having had the gems taken away from him by the Solanos and the
Morgans when they threw him out of the hacienda. And so convincingly did
he lie that even the Jefe he convinced, while the judge, except in the
matter of brands of strong liquor, accepted everything the Jefe wanted
him to believe. In brief, shorn of the multitude of details that Torres
threw in, his tale was that he was so certain of the jeweler’s
under-appraisal that he had despatched the gems by special messenger to
his agent in Colon with instructions to forward to New York to Tiffany’s
for appraisement that might lead to sale.
As they emerged from the courtroom and descended the several steps that
were flanked by single adobe pillars marred by bullet scars from
previous revolutions, the Jefe was saying:
“And so, needing the ægis of the law for our adventure after these gems,
and, more than that, both of us loving our good friend the judge, we
will let him in for a modest share of whatever we shall gain. He shall
represent us in San Antonio while we are gone, and, if needs be, furnish
us with the law’s protection.”
Now it happened that behind one of the pillars, hat pulled over his
face, Yi Poon half-sat, half-reclined. Nor was he there by mere
accident. Long ago he had learned that secrets of value, which always
connoted the troubles of humans, were markedly prevalent around
courtrooms, which were the focal points for the airing of such troubles
when they became acute. One could never tell. At any moment a secret
might leap at one or brim over to one. Therefore it was like a fisherman
casting his line into the sea for Yi Poon to watch the defendant and the
plaintiff, the witnesses for and against, and even the court hanger-on
or casual-seeming onlooker.
So, on this morning, the one person of promise that Yi Poon had picked
out was a ragged old peon who looked as if he had been drinking too much
and yet would perish in his condition of reaction if he did not get
another drink very immediately. Bleary-eyed he was, and red-lidded, with
desperate resolve painted on all his haggard, withered lineaments. When
the courtroom had emptied, he had taken up his stand outside on the
steps close to a pillar.
And why? Yi Poon had asked himself. Inside remained only the three chief
men of San Antonio——the Jefe, Torres, and the judge. What connection
between them, or any of them, and the drink-sodden creature that shook
as if freezing in the scorching blaze of the direct sun-rays? Yi Poon
did not know, but he did know that it was worth while waiting on a
chance, no matter how remote, of finding out. So, behind the pillar,
where no atom of shade protected him from the cooking sun which he
detested, he lolled on the steps with all the impersonation of one
placidly infatuated with sun-baths. The old peon tottered a step, swayed
as if about to fall, yet managed to deflect Torres from his companions,
who paused to wait for him on the pavement a dozen paces on, restless
and hot-footed as if they stood on a grid, though deep in earnest
conversation. And Yi Poon missed no word nor gesture, nor glint of eye
nor shifting face-line, of the dialogue that took place between the
grand Torres and the wreck of a peon.
“What now?” Torres demanded harshly.
“Money, a little money, for the love of God, senor, a little money,” the
ancient peon whined.
“You have had your money,” Torres snarled. “When I went away I gave you
double the amount to last you twice as long. Not for two weeks yet is
there a centavo due you.”
“I am in debt,” was the old man’s whimper, the while all the flesh of
him quivered and trembled from the nerve-ravishment of the drink so
palpably recently consumed.
“On the pulque slate at Peter and Paul’s,” Torres, with a sneer,
diagnosed unerringly.
“On the pulque slate at Peter and Paul’s,” was the frank acknowledgment.
“And the slate is full. No more pulque can I get credit for. I am
wretched and suffer a thousand torments without my pulque.”
“You are a pig creature without reason!”
A strange dignity, as of wisdom beyond wisdom, seemed suddenly to
animate the old wreck as he straightened up, for the nonce ceased from
trembling, and gravely said:
“I am old. There is no vigor left in the veins or the heart of me. The
desires of my youth are gone. Not even may I labor with this broken body
of mine, though well I know that labor is an easement and a forgetting.
Not even may I labor and forget. Food is a distaste in my mouth and a
pain in my belly. Women—they are a pest that it is a vexation to
remember ever having desired. Children—I buried my last a dozen years
gone. Religion—it frightens me. Death—I sleep with the terror of it.
Pulque—ah, dear God! the one tickle and taste of living left to me!
“What if I drink over much? It is because I have much to forget, and
have but a little space yet to linger in the sun, ere the Darkness, for
my old eyes, blots out the sun forever.”
Impervious to the old man’s philosophy, Torres made an impatient threat
of movement that he was going.
“A few pesos, just a handful of pesos,” the old peon pleaded.
“Not a centavo,” Torres said with finality.
“Very well,” said the old man with equal finality.
“What do you mean?” Torres rasped with swift suspicion.
“Have you forgotten?” was the retort, with such emphasis of significance
as to make Yi Poon wonder for what reason Torres gave the peon what
seemed a pension or an allowance.
“I pay you, according to agreement, to forget,” said Torres.
“I shall never forget that my old eyes saw you stab the Senor Alfaro
Solano in the back,” the peon replied.
Although he remained hidden and motionless in his posture of repose
behind the pillar, Yi Poon metaphorically sat up. The Solanos were
persons of place and wealth. That Torres should have murdered one of
them was indeed a secret of price.
“Beast! Pig without reason! Animal of the dirt!” Torres’ hands clenched
in his rage. “Because I am kind do you treat me thus! One blabbing of
your tongue and I will send you to San Juan. You know what that means.
Not only will you sleep with the terror of death, but never for a moment
of waking will you be free of the terror of living as you stare upon the
buzzards that will surely and shortly pick your bones. And there will be
no pulque in San Juan. There is never any pulque in San Juan for the men
I send there. So? Eh? I thought so. You will wait two weeks for the
proper time when I shall again give you money. If you do not wait, then
never, this side of your interment in the bellies of buzzards, will you
drink pulque again.”
Torres whirled on his heel and was gone. Yi Poon watched him and his two
companions go down the street, then rounded the pillar to find the old
peon sunk down in collapse at his disappointment of not getting any
pulque, groaning and moaning and making sharp little yelping cries, his
body quivering as dying animals quiver in the final throes, his fingers
picking at his flesh and garments as if picking off centipedes. Down
beside him sat Yi Poon, who began a remarkable performance of his own.
Drawing gold coins and silver ones from his pockets he began to count
over his money with chink and clink that was mellow and liquid and that
to the distraught peon’s ear was as the sound of the rippling and
riffling of fountains of pulque.
“We are wise,” Yi Poon told him in grandiloquent Spanish, still clinking
the money, while the peon whined and yammered for the few centavos
necessary for one drink of pulque. “We are wise, you and I, old man, and
we will sit here and tell each other what we know about men and women,
and life and love, and anger and sudden death, the rage red in the heart
and the steel bitter cold in the back; and if you tell me what pleases
me, then shall you drink pulque till your ears run out with it, and your
eyes are drowned in it. You like that pulque, eh? You like one drink
now, _now_, soon, very quick?”
* * * * *
The night, while the Jefe Politico and Torres organized their expedition
under cover of the dark, was destined to be a momentous one in the
Solano hacienda. Things began to happen early. Dinner over, drinking
their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, the family, of which Henry
was accounted one by virtue of his brotherhood to Leoncia, sat on the
wide front veranda. Through the moonlight, up the steps, they saw a
strange figure approach.
“It is like a ghost,” said Alvarado Solano.
“A fat ghost,” Martinez, his twin brother, amended.
“A Chink ghost you couldn’t poke your finger through,” Ricardo laughed.
“The very Chink who saved Leoncia and me from marrying,” said Henry
Morgan, with recognition.
“The seller of secrets,” Leoncia gurgled. “And if he hasn’t brought a
new secret, I shall be disappointed.”
“What do you want, Chinaman?” Alesandro, the eldest of the Solano
brothers, demanded sharply.
“Nice new secret, very nice new secret maybe you buy,” Yi Poon murmured
proudly.
“Your secrets are too expensive, Chinaman,” said Enrico discouragingly.
“This nice new secret very expensive,” Yi Poon assured him complacently.
“Go away,” old Enrico ordered. “I shall live a long time, yet to the day
of my death I care to hear no more secrets.”
But Yi Poon was suavely certain of himself.
“One time you have very fine brother,” he said. “One time your very fine
brother, the Senor Alfaro Solano, die with knife in his back. Very well.
Some secret, eh?”
But Enrico was on his feet quivering.
“You know?” he almost screamed his eager interrogation.
“How much?” said Yi Poon.
“All I possess!” Enrico cried, ere turning to Alesandro to add: “You
deal with him, son. Pay him well if he can prove by witness of the eye.”
“You bet,” quoth Yi Poon. “I got witness. He got good eye-sight. He see
man stick knife in the Senor Alfaro’s back in the dark. His name ...”
“Yes, yes,” Enrico breathed his suspense.
“One thousand dollars his name,” said Yi Poon, hesitating to make up his
mind to what kind of dollars he could dare to claim. “One thousand
dollars gold,” he concluded.
Enrico forgot that he had deputed the transaction to his eldest son.
“Where is your witness?” he shouted.
And Yi Poon, calling softly down the steps into the shrubbery, evoked
the pulque-ravaged peon, a real-looking ghost who slowly advanced and
tottered up the steps.
* * * * *
At the same time, on the edge of town, twenty mounted men, among whom
were the gendarmes Rafael, Ignacio, Augustino, and Vicente, herded a
pack train of more than twenty mules and waited the command of the Jefe
to depart on they knew not what mysterious adventure into the
Cordilleras. What they did know was that, herded carefully apart from
all other animals, was a strapping big mule loaded with two hundred and
fifty pounds of dynamite. Also, they knew that the delay was due to the
Senor Torres, who had ridden away along the beach with the dreaded Caroo
murderer, José Mancheno, who, only by the grace of God and of the Jefe
Politico, had been kept for years from expiating on the scaffold his
various offenses against life and law.
And, while Torres waited on the beach and held the Caroo’s horse and an
extra horse, the Caroo ascended on foot the winding road that led to the
hacienda of the Solanos. Little did Torres guess that twenty feet away,
in the jungle that encroached on the beach, lay a placid-sleeping,
pulque-drunken, old peon, with, crouching beside him, a very alert and
very sober Chinese with a recently acquired thousand dollars stowed
under his belt. Yi Poon had had barely time to drag the peon into hiding
when Torres rode along in the sand and stopped almost beside him.
Up at the hacienda, all members of the household were going to bed.
Leoncia, just starting to let down her hair, stopped when she heard the
rattle of tiny pebbles against her windows. Warning her in low whispers
to make no noise, José Mancheno handed her a crumpled note which Torres
had written, saying mysteriously:
“From a strange Chinaman who waits not a hundred feet away on the edge
of the shrubbery.”
And Leoncia read, in execrable Spanish:
“First time, I tell you secret about Henry Morgan. This time I have
secret about Francis. You come along and talk with me now.”
Leoncia’s heart leaped at mention of Francis, and as she slipped on a
mantle and accompanied the Caroo it never entered her head to doubt that
Yi Poon was waiting for her.
And Yi Poon, down on the beach and spying upon Torres, had no doubts
when he saw the Caroo murderer appear with the Solano senorita, bound
and gagged, slung across his shoulder like a sack of meal. Nor did Yi
Poon have any doubts about his next action, when he saw Leoncia tied
into the saddle of the spare horse and taken away down the beach at a
gallop, with Torres and the Caroo riding on either side of her. Leaving
the pulque-sodden peon to sleep, the fat Chinaman took the road up the
hill at so stiff a pace that he arrived breathless at the hacienda. Not
content with knocking at the door, he beat upon it with his fists and
feet and prayed to his Chinese gods that no peevish Solano should take a
shot at him before he could explain the urgency of his errand.
“O go to hell,” Alesandro said, when he had opened the door and flashed
a light on the face of the importunate caller.
“I have big secret,” Yi Poon panted. “Very big brand new secret.”
“Come around to-morrow in business hours,” Alesandro growled as he
prepared to kick the Chinaman off the premises.
“I don’t sell secret,” Yi Poon stammered and gasped. “I make you
present. I give secret now. The Senorita, your sister, she is stolen.
She is tied upon a horse that runs fast down the beach.”
But Alesandro, who had said good night to Leoncia, not half an hour
before, laughed loudly his unbelief, and prepared again to boot off the
trafficker in secrets. Yi Poon was desperate. He drew forth the thousand
dollars and placed it in Alesandro’s hand, saying:
“You go look quick. If the Senorita stop in this house now, you keep all
that money. If the Senorita no stop, then you give money back....”
And Alesandro was convinced. A minute later he was rousing the house.
Five minutes later the horse-peons, their eyes hardly open from sound
sleep, were roping and saddling horses and pack-mules in the corrals,
while the Solano tribe was pulling on riding gear and equipping itself
with weapons.
* * * * *
Up and down the coast, and on the various paths leading back to the
Cordilleras, the Solanos scattered, questing blindly in the blind dark
for the trail of the abductors. As chance would have it, thirty hours
afterward, Henry alone caught the scent and followed it, so that, camped
in the very Footstep of God where first the old Maya priest had sighted
the eyes of Chia, he found the entire party of twenty men and Leoncia
cooking and eating breakfast. Twenty to one, never fair and always
impossible, did not appeal to Henry Morgan’s Anglo-Saxon mind. What did
appeal to him was the dynamite-loaded mule, tethered apart from the
off-saddled forty-odd animals and left to stand by the careless peons
with its load still on its back. Instead of attempting the patently
impossible rescue of Leoncia, and recognising that in numbers her
woman’s safety lay, he stole the dynamite-mule.
Not far did he take it. In the shelter of the low woods, he opened the
pack and filled all his pockets with sticks of dynamite, a box of
detonators, and a short coil of fuse. With a regretful look at the rest
of the dynamite which he would have liked to explode but dared not, he
busied himself along the line of retreat he would have to take if he
succeeded in stealing Leoncia from her captors. As Francis, on a
previous occasion at Juchitan, had sown the retreat with silver dollars,
so, this time, did Henry sow the retreat with dynamite——the sticks in
small bundles and the fuses, no longer than the length of a detonator,
and with detonators fast to each end.
* * * * *
Three hours Henry devoted to lurking around the camp in the Footstep of
God, ere he got his opportunity to signal his presence to Leoncia; and
another precious two hours were wasted ere she found her opportunity to
steal away to him. Which would not have been so bad, had not her escape
almost immediately been discovered and had not the gendarmes and the
rest of Torres’ party, mounted, been able swiftly to overtake them on
foot.
When Henry drew Leoncia down to hide beside him in the shelter of a
rock, and at the same time brought his rifle into action ready for play,
she protested.
“We haven’t a chance, Henry,” she said. “They are too many. If you fight
you will be killed. And then what will become of me? Better that you
make your own escape, and bring help, leaving me to be retaken, than
that you die and let me be retaken anyway.”
But he shook his head.
“We are not going to be taken, dearest sister. Put your trust in me and
watch. Here they come now. You just watch.”
Variously mounted, on horses and pack mules—whichever had come handiest
in their haste—Torres, the Jefe, and their men clattered into sight.
Henry drew a sight, not on them, but on the point somewhat nearer where
he had made his first plant of dynamite. When he pulled trigger, the
intervening distance rose up in a cloud of smoke and earth dust that
obscured them. As the cloud slowly dissipated, they could be seen, half
of them, animals and men, overthrown, and all of them dazed and shocked
by the explosion.
Henry seized Leoncia’s hand, jerked her to her feet, and ran on side by
side with her. Conveniently beyond his second planting, he drew her down
beside him to rest and catch breath.
“They won’t come on so fast this time,” he hissed exultantly. “And the
longer they pursue us the slower they’ll come on.”
True to his forecast, when the pursuit appeared, it moved very
cautiously and very slowly.
“They ought to be killed,” Henry said. “But they have no chance, and I
haven’t the heart to do it. But I’ll surely shake them up some.”
Again he fired into his planted dynamite, and again, turning his back on
the confusion, he fled to his third planting.
After he had fired off the third explosion, he raced Leoncia to his
tethered horse, put her in the saddle, and ran on beside her, hanging on
to her stirrup.