TOTTERING WALLS
It was at an early hour of that same night that Johnny, having wakened
from some vaguely remembered dream, found himself rudely shaken by a
strange convulsion beneath and about him.
“Ship’s pitching something terrible,” he told himself. “Must be a
hurricane.”
“Ship?” something within him seemed to whisper. “Ship? When did you
embark upon a ship?”
Vaguely he groped about in his brain for facts. The sensations that come
to one just before he falls asleep are, more often than not, awaiting him
when he awakes. Johnny’s had remained with him. They were earth
sensations, solid earth, a place close and stuffy, and stone, solid
stone, not shifting sea.
But there was now a strange rocking and shuddering, no mistake about
that. There it was again! Zowie! What a lurch!
“Like a ship at sea in a storm,” he told himself. “No, not quite. More
like a ship stuck fast on a coral reef, being beaten to pieces by the
waves.”
The thought was startling. Again he attempted to sit up. This time he
succeeded.
Light streamed down upon him, moonlight broken into little squares.
“Bars,” he thought. “Prison bars!”
Yes, now he remembered. This bed, not a bed at all, merely a broad ledge
of stone left by the prison masons in lieu of a bed. Strange sort, these
Central American prisons!
Then, as if to refute all this, there came again that horrible rocking
shudder.
Struggling to grasp reality, Johnny’s eyes, roving the dark spaces about
him, arrived at the crisscross iron bars of the window. To his vast
astonishment he saw those iron bars, in a solid mass, literally torn from
the masonry.
“I don’t know where I am,” he told himself, “but I won’t be there very
long.”
With one thought uppermost in his mind, that of escape, he leaped for the
window, gripped the sill, drew himself up, balanced for a second there in
the moonlight, then dropped.
He landed rather solidly, not upon the tossing sea, but upon tossing dry
land.
A moving figure loomed before him.
“A guard!” His quickened senses registered the thought.
“Strike first, and talk afterwards.” His head buried itself into the soft
center of the moving object. With a grunt the man went down.
He wished the earth would stand still. It made him seasick, that rocking
motion. They hadn’t had a reason for putting him in prison—not any real
reason. He had done nothing except insist upon buying twenty thousand
bunches of bananas. He had tried to do a great service to a splendid old
man and a beautiful girl. He had reason enough for wanting to be out of
prison, plenty of reasons. There was the girl, Madge Kennedy, back there
in the orchard of forbidden fruit, and her grandfather, the aged
Britisher who was so much of a man and so little of a business man that
his orchards and banana plantations would never make him a cent unless
some one took a hand. And there was old Jorgensen, good old salt water
skipper, walking his deck night and day and staring gloomily at the
Caribbean Sea.
The earth stopped rocking for an instant. An open court lay before him.
He was beginning to realize that he was having a new experience. One of
those frequent Central American earthquakes had broken loose. That was
why a stone prison had seemed so like a ship on a tossing sea.
“Open places are best,” he told himself.
He had taken a dozen steps when there came a shock which sent him down
like a ten-pin. At the same instant he touched an object lying near him.
He found it soft and yielding. It was a weeping child, a beautiful,
black-haired, black-eyed girl of seven.
“There now,” he said, sitting up and talking quietly to her. “The storm
will pass in a short while. We’re not shipping any water. She’s a staunch
old barge. We’ll weather this little blow and never lose a mast or a
yardarm.”
Since the girl was unquestionably Spanish, it seems probable that she
understood not one word that he said. She did understand the steady
comforting tone and the kindly touch of his hand. She stopped crying,
cuddled down in his arms and, since it was now well into night, she fell
asleep.
As Johnny sat there, a motley throng gathered about him. Like him, they
came to this open spot for safety. Some, like himself, were fully
dressed. Some were in pajamas. The mild moonlight was kind to these last.
Some carried things in their hands, things they had salvaged from the
doom of their homes. A parrot in a cage, an iron strong box, an alarm
clock, a broom; these and many more things, somber, precious, ludicrous,
had been brought into the open plaza.
Johnny’s mind began to travel back, to gather up the slender thread of
circumstances that had brought him there. He traced it thread by thread.
“To-morrow,” he told himself, “will bring something quite new.”