Francis had left orders for Parker to call him at eight o’clock, and
when Parker softly entered he found his master still asleep. Turning on
the water in the bathroom and preparing the shaving gear, the valet
re-entered the bedroom. Still moving softly about so that his master
would have the advantage of the last possible second of sleep, Parker’s
eyes lighted on the strange dagger that stood upright, its point pinning
through a note and a photograph and into the hard wood of the
dresser-top. For a long time he gazed at the strange array, then,
without hesitation, carefully opened the door to Mrs. Morgan’s room and
peeped in. Next, he firmly shook Francis by the shoulder.
The latter’s eyes opened, for a second betraying the incomprehension of
the sleeper suddenly awakened, then lighting with recognition and memory
of the waking order he had left the previous night.
“Time to get up, sir,” the valet murmured.
“Which is ever an ill time,” Francis yawned with a smile.
He closed his eyes with a, “Let me lie a minute, Parker. If I doze,
shake me.”
But Parker shook him immediately.
“You must get up right away, sir. I think something has happened to Mrs.
Morgan. She is not in her room, and there is a queer note and a knife
here that may explain. I don’t know, sir——”
Francis was out of bed in a bound, staring one moment at the dagger, and
next, drawing it out, reading the note over and over as if its simple
meaning, contained in two simple words, were too abstruse for his
comprehension.
“Adios forever,” said the note.
What shocked him even more, was the dagger thrust between Leoncia’s
eyes, and, as he stared at the wound made in the thin cardboard, it came
to him that he had seen this very thing before, and he remembered back
to the lake-dwelling of the Queen when all had gazed into the golden
bowl and seen variously, and when he had seen Leoncia’s face on the
strange liquid metal with the knife thrust between the eyes. He even put
the dagger back into the cardboard wound and stared at it some more.
The explanation was obvious. The Queen had betrayed jealousy against
Leoncia from the first, and here, in New York, finding her rival’s
photograph on her husband’s dresser, had no more missed the true
conclusion than had she missed the pictured features with her point of
steel. But where was she? Where had she gone?——she who was the veriest
stranger that had ever entered the great city, who called the telephone
the magic of the flying speech, who thought of Wall Street as a temple,
and regarded Business as the New York man’s god. For all the world she
was as unsophisticated and innocent of a great city as had she been a
traveler from Mars. Where and how had she passed the night? Where was
she now? Was she even alive?
Visions of the Morgue with its unidentified dead, and of bodies drifting
out to sea on the ebb, rushed into his brain. It was Parker who steadied
him back to himself.
“Is there anything I can do, sir? Shall I call up the detective bureau?
Your father always——”
“Yes, yes,” Francis interrupted quickly. “There was one man he employed
more than all others, a young man with the Pinkertons——do you remember
his name?”
“Birchman, sir,” Parker answered promptly, moving away. “I shall send
for him to come at once.”
And thereupon, in the quest after his wife, Francis entered upon a
series of adventures that were to him, a born New Yorker, a liberal
education in conditions and phases of New York of which, up to that
time, he had been profoundly ignorant. Not alone did Birchman search,
but he had at work a score of detectives under him who fine-tooth-combed
the city, while in Chicago and Boston, he directed the activities of
similar men.
Between his battle with the unguessed enemy of Wall Street, and the
frequent calls he received to go here and there and everywhere, on the
spur of the moment, to identify what might possibly be his wife, Francis
led anything but a boresome existence. He forgot what regular hours of
sleep were, and grew accustomed to being dragged from luncheon or
dinner, or of being routed out of his bed, to respond to hurry calls to
come and look over new-found missing ladies. No trace of one answering
her description, who had left the city by train or steamer had been
discovered, and Birchman assiduously pursued his fine-tooth combing,
convinced that she was still in the city.
Thus, Francis took trips to Mattenwan and down Blackwell’s, and the
Tombs and the All-Night court knew his presence. Nor did he escape being
dragged to countless hospitals nor to the Morgue. Once, a fresh-caught
shoplifter, of whom there was no criminal record and to whom there was
no clew of identity, was brought to his notice. He had adventures with
mysterious women cornered by Birchman’s satellites in the back rooms of
Raines’ Hotels, and, on the West Side, in the Fifties, was guilty of
trespassing upon two comparatively innocent love-idyls, to the
embarrassment of all concerned including himself.
Perhaps his most interesting and tragic adventure was in the
ten-million-dollar mansion of Philip January, the Telluride mining king.
The strange woman, a lady slender, had wandered in upon the Januarys a
week before, ere Francis came to see her. And, as she had
heartbreakingly done for the entire week, so she heartbreakingly did for
Francis, wringing her hands, perpetually weeping, and murmuring
beseechingly: “Otho, you are wrong. On my knees I tell you you are
wrong. Otho, you, and you only, do I love. There is no one but you,
Otho. There has never been any one but you. It is all a dreadful
mistake. Believe me, Otho, believe me, or I shall die....”
And through it all, the Wall Street battle went on against the
undiscoverable and powerful enemy who had launched what Francis and
Bascom could not avoid acknowledging was a catastrophic,
war-to-the-death raid on his fortune.
“If only we can avoid throwing Tampico Petroleum into the whirlpool,”
Bascom prayed.
“I look to Tampico Petroleum to save me,” Francis replied. “When every
security I can lay hand to has been engulfed, then, throwing in Tampico
Petroleum will be like the eruption of a new army upon a losing field.”
“And suppose your unknown foe is powerful enough to swallow down that
final, splendid asset and clamor for more?” Bascom queried.
Francis shrugged his shoulders.
“Then I shall be broke. But my father went broke half a dozen times
before he won out. Also was he born broke. I should worry about a little
thing like that.”
For a time, in the Solano hacienda, events had been moving slowly. In
fact, following upon the rescue of Leoncia by Henry along his
dynamite-sown trail, there had been no events. Not even had Yi Poon
appeared with a perfectly fresh and entirely brand new secret to sell.
Nothing had happened, save that Leoncia drooped and was apathetic, that
neither Enrico nor Henry, her full brother, nor her Solano brothers who
were not her brothers at all, could cheer her.
But, while Leoncia drooped, Henry and the tall sons of Enrico worried
and perplexed themselves about the treasure in the Valley of the Lost
Souls, into which Torres was even then dynamiting his way. One thing
they did know, namely, that the Torres’ expedition had sent Augustino
and Vicente back to San Antonio to get two more mule-loads of dynamite.
It was Henry, after conferring with Enrico and obtaining his permission,
who broached the matter to Leoncia.
“Sweet sister,” had been his way, “we’re going to go up and see what the
scoundrel Torres and his gang are doing. We do know, thanks to you,
their objective. The dynamite is to blow an entrance into the Valley. We
know where the Lady Who Dreams sank her treasure when her house burned.
Torres does not know this. The idea is that we can follow them into the
Valley, when they have drained the Maya caves, and have as good a
chance, if not a better chance than they in getting possession of that
marvelous chest of gems. And the very tip of the point is that we’d like
to take you along on the expedition. I fancy, if we managed to get the
treasure ourselves, that you wouldn’t mind repeating that journey down
the subterranean river.”
But Leoncia shook her head wearily.
“No,” she said, after further urging. “I never want to see the Valley of
the Lost Souls again, nor ever to hear it mentioned. There is where I
lost Francis to that woman.”
“It was all a mistake, darling sister. But who was to know? I did not.
You did not. Nor did Francis. He played the man’s part fairly and
squarely. Not knowing that you and I were brother and sister, believing
that we were truly betrothed——as we were at the time——he refrained from
trying to win you from me, and he rendered further temptation impossible
and saved the lives of all of us by marrying the Queen.”
“I miss you and Francis singing your everlasting ‘Back to back against
the mainmast,’” she murmured sadly and irrelevantly.
Quiet tears welled into her eyes and brimmed over as she turned away,
passed down the steps of the veranda, crossed the grounds, and aimlessly
descended the hill. For the twentieth time since she had last seen
Francis she pursued the same course, covering the same ground from the
time she first espied him rowing to the beach from the _Angelique_,
through her dragging him into the jungle to save him from her irate
menfolk, to the moment, with drawn revolver, when she had kissed him and
urged him into the boat and away. This had been his first visit.
Next, she covered every detail of his second visit from the moment,
coming from behind the rock after her swim in the lagoon, she had gazed
upon him leaning against the rock as he scribbled his first note to her,
through her startled flight into the jungle, the bite on her knee of the
labarri (which she had mistaken for a deadly viperine), to her recoiling
collision against Francis and her faint on the sand. And, under her
parasol, she sat down on the very spot where she had fainted and come
to, to find him preparing to suck the poison from the wound which he had
already excoriated. As she remembered back, she realized that it had
been the pain of the excoriation which brought her to her senses.
Deep she was in the sweet recollections of how she had slapped his cheek
even as his lips approached her knee, blushed with her face hidden in
her hands, laughed because her foot had been made asleep by his
too-efficient tourniquet, turned white with anger when he reminded her
that she considered him the murderer of her uncle, and repulsed his
offer to untie the tourniquet. So deep was she in such fond
recollections of only the other day that yet seemed separated from the
present by half a century, such was the wealth of episode, adventure,
and tender passages which had intervened, that she did not see the
rattletrap rented carriage from San Antonio drive up the beach road. Nor
did she see a lady, fashionably clad in advertisement that she was from
New York, dismiss the carriage and proceed toward her on foot. This
lady, who was none other than the Queen, Francis’ wife, likewise
sheltered herself beneath a parasol from the tropic sun.
Standing directly behind Leoncia, she did not realize that she had
surprised the girl in a moment of high renunciation. All that she did
know was that she saw Leoncia draw from her breast and gaze long at a
tiny photograph. Over her shoulder the Queen made it out to be a
snapshot of Francis, whereupon her mad jealousy raged anew. A poniard
flashed to her hand from its sheath within the bosom of her dress. The
quickness of this movement was sufficient to warn Leoncia, who tilted
her parasol forward so as to look up at whatever person stood at her
back. Too utterly dreary even to feel surprise, she greeted the wife of
Francis Morgan as casually as if she had parted from her an hour before.
Even the poniard failed to arouse in her curiosity or fear. Perhaps, had
she displayed startlement and fear, the Queen might have driven the
steel home to her. As it was, she could only cry out.
“You are a vile woman! A vile, vile woman!”
To which Leoncia merely shrugged her shoulders, and said:
“You would better keep your parasol between you and the sun.”
The Queen passed round in front of her, facing her and staring down at
her with woman’s wrath compounded of such jealousy as to be speechless.
“Why?” Leoncia was the first to speak, after a long pause. “Why am I a
vile woman?”
“Because you are a thief,” the Queen flamed. “Because you are a stealer
of men, yourself married. Because you are unfaithful to your husband——in
heart, at least, since more than that has so far been impossible.”
“I have no husband,” Leoncia answered quietly.
“Husband to be, then——I thought you were to be married the day after our
departure.”
“I have no husband to be,” Leoncia continued with the same quietness.
So swiftly tense did the other woman become that Leoncia idly thought of
her as a tigress.
“Henry Morgan!” the Queen cried.
“He is my brother.”
“A word which I have discovered is of wide meaning, Leoncia Solano. In
New York there are worshippers at certain altars who call all men in the
world ‘brothers,’ all women ‘sisters.’”
“His father was my father,” Leoncia explained with patient explicitness.
“His mother was my mother. We are full brother and sister.”
“And Francis?” the other queried, convinced, with sudden access of
interest. “Are you, too, his sister?”
Leoncia shook her head.
“Then you do love Francis!” the Queen charged, smarting with
disappointment.
“You have him,” said Leoncia.
“No; for you have taken him from me.”
Leoncia slowly and sadly shook her head and sadly gazed out over the
heat-shimmering surface of Chiriqui Lagoon.
After a long lapse of silence, she said, wearily, “Believe that. Believe
anything.”
“I divined it in you from the first,” the Queen cried. “You have a
strange power over men. I am a woman not unbeautiful. Since I have been
out in the world I have watched the eyes of men looking at me. I know I
am not all undesirable. Even have the wretched males of my Lost Valley
with downcast eyes looked love at me. One dared more than look, and he
died for me, or because of me, and was flung into the whirl of waters to
his fate. And yet you, with this woman’s power of yours, strangely
exercise it over my Francis so that in my very arms he thinks of you. I
know it. I know that even then he thinks of you!”
Her last words were the cry of a passion-stricken and breaking heart.
And the next moment, though very little to Leoncia’s surprise, being too
hopelessly apathetic to be surprised at anything, the Queen dropped her
knife in the sand and sank down, buried her face in her hands, and
surrendered to the weakness of hysteric grief. Almost idly, and quite
mechanically, Leoncia put her arm around her and comforted her. For many
minutes this continued, when the Queen, growing more calm, spoke with
sudden determination.
“I left Francis the moment I knew he loved you,” she said. “I drove my
knife into the photograph of you he keeps in his bedroom, and returned
here to do the same to you in person. But I was wrong. It is not your
fault, nor Francis’. It is my fault that I have failed to win his love.
Not you, but I it is who must die. But first, I must go back to my
valley and recover my treasure. In the temple called Wall Street,
Francis is in great trouble. His fortune may be taken away from him, and
he requires another fortune to save his fortune. I have that fortune,
and there is no time to lose. Will you and yours help me? It is for
Francis’ sake.”