I. MR. BEETLE MAN
II. AT THE KAST
III. THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
IV. TWO ON A MOUNTAIN-SIDE
V. AN UPHOLDER OF TRADITIONS
VI. FORKED TONGUES
VII. “THAT WHICH THY SERVANT IS—”
VIII. LOS YANKIS
IX. THE BLACK WARNING
X. THE FOLLY OF PERK
XI. PRESTO CHANGE
XII. THE WOMAN AT THE QUINTA
XIII. LEFT BEHIND
XIV. THE YELLOW FLAG
I.
MR. BEETLE MAN
The man sat in a niche of the mountain, busily hating the Caribbean
Sea. It was quite a contract that he had undertaken, for there was a
large expanse of Caribbean Sea in sight to hate; very blue, and still,
and indifferent to human emotions. However, the young man was a good
steadfast hater, and he came there every day to sit in the shade of the
overhanging boulder, where there was a little trickle of cool air down
the slope and a little trickle of cool water from a crevice beneath the
rock, to despise that placid, unimpressionable ocean and all its works
and to wish that it would dry up forthwith, so that he might walk back
to the blessed United States of America. In good plain American, the
young man was pretty homesick.
Two-man’s-lengths up the mountain, on the crest of the sturdy hater’s
rock, the girl sat, loving the Caribbean Sea. Hers, also, was a large
contract, and she was much newer to it than was the man to his, for she
had only just discovered this vantage-ground by turning accidentally
into a side trail—quite a private little side trail made by her
unsuspected neighbor below—whence one emerges from a sea of verdure
into full view of the sea of azure. For the time, she was content to
rest there in the flow of the breeze and feast her eyes on that broad,
unending blue which blessedly separated her from the United States of
America and certain perplexities and complications comprised therein.
Presently she would resume the trail and return to the city of
Caracuña, somewhere behind her. That is, she would if she could find
it, which was by no means certain. Not that she greatly cared. If she
were really lost, they’d come out and get her. Meantime, all she wished
was to rest mind and body in the contemplation of that restful plain of
cool sapphire, four thousand feet below.
But there was a spirit of mischief abroad upon that mountain slope. It
embodied itself in a puff of wind that stirred gratefully the curls
above the girl’s brow. Also, it fanned the neck of the watcher below
and cunningly moved his hat from his side; not more than a few feet,
indeed, but still far enough to transfer it from the shade into the
glaring sun and into the view of the girl above. The owner made no
move. If the wind wanted to blow his new panama into some lower
treetop, compelling him to throw stones, perhaps to its permanent
damage, in order to dislodge it, why, that was just one more cause of
offense to pin to his indictment of irritation against the great island
republic of Caracuña. Such is the temper one gets into after a year in
the tropics.
Like as peas are panama hats to the eyes of the inexpert; far more like
than men who live under them. For the girl, it was a direct inference
that this was a hat which she knew intimately; which, indeed, she had
rather maliciously eluded, not half an hour before. Therefore, she
addressed it familiarly: “Boo!”
The result of this simple monosyllable exceeded her fondest
expectations. There was a sharp exclamation of surprise, followed by a
cry that might have meant dismay or wrath or both, as something
metallic tinkled and slid, presently coming to a stop beside the hat,
where it revealed itself as a pair of enormous, aluminum-mounted
brown-green spectacles. After it, on all fours, scrambled the owner.
Shock number one: It wasn’t the man at all! Instead of the
black-haired, flanneled, slender Adonis whom the trouble-maker
confidently assumed to have been under that hat, she beheld a
brownish-clad, stocky figure with a very blond head.
Shock number two: The figure was groping lamentably and blindly in the
undergrowth, and when, for an instant, the face was turned half toward
her, she saw that the eyes were squinted tight-closed, with a painful
extreme of muscular tension about them.
Presently one of the ranging hands encountered the spectacles, and
settled upon them. With careful touches, it felt them all over. A mild
grunt, presumably of satisfaction, made itself heard, and the figure
got to its feet. But before the face turned again, the girl had stepped
back, out of range.
Silence, above and below; a silence the long persistence of which came
near to constituting shock number three. What sort of hermit had she
intruded upon? Into what manner of remote Brahministic contemplation
had she injected that impertinent “Boo!”? Who, what, how, why—
“Say it again.” The request came from under the rock. Evidently the
spectacled owner had resumed his original situation.
“Say _what_ again?” she inquired.
“Anything,” returned the voice, with child-like content.
“Oh, I—I hope you didn’t break your glasses.”
“No; you didn’t.”
On consideration, she decided to ignore this prompt countering of the
pronoun.
“I thought you were some one else,” she observed.
“Well, so I am, am I not?”
“So you are what?”
“Some one else than you thought.”
“Why, yes, I suppose—But I meant some one else besides yourself.”
“I only wish I were.”
“Why?” she asked, intrigued by the fervid inflection of the wish.
“Because then I’d be somewhere else than in this infernal hell-hole of
a black-and-tan nursery of revolution, fever, and trouble!”
“I think it one of the loveliest spots I’ve ever seen,” said she
loftily.
“How long have you been here?”
“On this rock? Perhaps five minutes.”
“Not on the rock. In Caracuña?”
“Quite a long time. Nearly a fortnight.”
The commentary on this was so indefinite that she was moved to
inquire:—
“Is that a local dialect you’re speaking?”
“No; that was a grunt.”
“I don’t think it was a very polite grunt, even as grunts go.”
“Perhaps not. I’m afraid I’m out of the habit.”
“Of grunting? You seem expert enough to satisfy—”
“No; of being polite. I’ll apologize if—if you’ll only go on talking.”
She laughed aloud.
“Or laughing,” he amended promptly. “Do it again.”
“One can’t laugh to order!” she protested; “or even talk to order. But
why do you stay ’way out here in the mountains if you’re so eager to
hear the human voice?”
“The human voice be—choked! It’s _your_ human voice I want to hear—your
kind of human voice, I mean.”
“I don’t know that my kind of human voice is particularly different
from plenty of other human voices,” she observed, with an effect of
fine impartial judgment.
“It’s widely different from the kind that afflicts the suffering ear in
this part of the world. Fourteen months ago I heard the last American
girl speak the last American-girl language that’s come within reach of
me. Oh, no,—there _was_ one, since, but she rasped like a rheumatic
phonograph and had brick-colored freckles. Have you got brick-colored
freckles?”
“Stand up and see.”
“No, _sir!_—that is, ma’am. Too much risk.”
“Risk! Of what?”
“Freckles. I don’t like freckles. Not on _your_ voice, anyway.”
“On my _voice?_ Are you—”
“Of course I am—a little. Any one is who stays down here more than a
year. But that about the voice and the freckles was sane enough. What
I’m trying to say—and you might know it without a diagram—is that, from
your voice, you ought to be all that a man dreams of when—well, when he
hasn’t seen a real American girl for an eternity. Now I can sit here
and dream of you as the loveliest princess that ever came and went and
left a memory of gold and blue in the heart of—”
“I’m not gold and blue!”
“Of course you’re not. But your speech is. I’ll be wise, and content
myself with that. One look might pull down, In irrevocable ruin, all
the lovely fabric of my dream. By the way, are you a Cookie?”
“A _what?_”
“Cookie. Tourist. No, of course you’re not. No tour would be imbecile
enough to touch here. The question is: How did you get here?”
“Ah, that’s my secret.”
“Or, rather, are you here at all? Perhaps you’re just a figment of the
overstrained ear. And if I undertook to look, there wouldn’t be
anything there at all.”
“Of course, if you don’t believe in me, I’ll fly away on a sunbeam.”
“Oh, please! Don’t say that! I’m doing my best.”
So panic-stricken was the appeal that she laughed again, in spite of
herself.
“Ah, that’s better! Now, come, be honest with me. You’re not pretty,
are you?”
“Me? I’m as lovely as the dawn.”
“So far, so good. And have you got long golden—that is to say, silken
hair that floats almost to your knees?”
“Certainly,” she replied, with spirit.
“Is it plentiful enough so that you could spare a little?”
“Are you asking me for a lock of my hair?” she queried, on a note of
mirth. “For a stranger, you go fast.”
“No; oh, no!” he protested. “Nothing so familiar. I’m offering you a
bribe for conversation at the price of, say, five hairs, if you can
sacrifice so many.”
“It sounds delightfully like voodoo,” she observed. “What must I do
with them?”
“First, catch your hair. Well up toward the head, please. Now pull it
out. One, two, three—yank!”
“Ouch!” said the voice above.
“Do it again. Now have you got two?”
“Yes.”
“Knot them together.”
There was a period of silence.
“It’s very difficult,” complained the girl.
“Because you’re doing it in silence. There must be sprightly
conversation or the charm won’t work. Talk!”
“What about?”
“Tell me who you thought I was when you said, ‘Boo!’ at me.”
“A goose.”
“A—a _goose!_ Why—what—”
“Doesn’t one proverbially say ‘Boo!’ to a goose?” she remarked
demurely.
“If one has the courage. Now, I haven’t. I’m shy.”
“Shy! You?” Again the delicious trill of her mirth rang in his ears. “I
should imagine that to be the least of your troubles.”
“No! Truly.” There was real and anxious earnestness in his assurance.
“It’s because I don’t see you. If I were face to face with you, I’d
stammer and get red and make a regular imbecile of myself. Another
reason why I stick down here and decline to yield to temptation.”
“O wise young man! _Are_ you young? Ouch!”
“Reasonably. Was that the last hair?”
“Positively! I’m scalped. You’re a red Indian.”
“Tie it on. Now, fasten a hairpin on the end and let it down. All
right. I’ve got it. Wait!” The fragile line of communication twitched
for a moment. “Haul, now. Gently!”
Up came the thread, and, as its burden rose over the face of the rock,
the girl gave a little cry of delight:—
“How exquisite! Orchids, aren’t they?”
“Yes, the golden-brown bee orchid. Just your coloring.”
“So it is. How do you know?” she asked, startled.
“From the hair. And your eyes have gold flashes in the brown when the
sun touches them.”
“Your wits are _your_ eyes. But where do you get such orchids?”
“From my little private garden underneath the rock.”
“Life will be a dull and dreary round unless I see that garden.”
“No! I say! Wait! Really, now, Miss—er—” There was panic in the
protest.
“Oh, don’t be afraid. I’m only playing with your fears. One look at you
as you chased your absurd spectacles was enough to satisfy my
curiosity. Go in peace, startled fawn that you are.”
“Go nothing! I’m not going. Neither are you, I hope, until you’ve told
me lots more about yourself.”
“All that for a spray of orchids?”
“But they are quite rare ones.”
“And very lovely.”
The girl mused, and a sudden impulse seized her to take the unseen
acquaintance at his word and free her mind as she had not been able to
do to any living soul for long weeks. She pondered over it.
“You aren’t getting ready to go?” he cried, alarmed at her long
silence.
“No; I’m thinking.”
“Please think aloud.”
“I was thinking—suppose I did.”
There was so much of weighty consideration in her accents that the
other fear again beset him.
“Did what? Not come down from the rock?”
“Be calm. I shouldn’t want to face you any more than you want to face
me, if I decided to do it.”
“Go on,” he encouraged. “It sounds most promising.”
“More than that. It’s fairly thrilling. It’s the awful secret of my
life that I’m considering laying bare to you, just like a dime novel.
Are you discreet?”
“As the eternal rocks. Prescribe any form of oath and I’ll take it.”
“I’m feeling just irresponsible enough to venture. Now, if I knew you,
of course I couldn’t. But as I shall never set eyes on you again—I
never shall, shall I?”
“Not unless you creep up on me unawares.”
“Then I’ll unburden my overweighted heart, and you can be my augur and
advise me with supernatural wisdom. Are you up to that?”
“Try me.”
“I will. But, remember: this means truly that we are never to meet. And
if you ever do meet me and recognize my voice, you must go away at
once.”
“Agreed,” he said cheerfully, just a bit too cheerfully to be
flattering.
“Very well, then. I’m a runaway.”
“From where?”
“Home.”
“Naturally. Where’s home?”
“Utica, New York,” she specified.
“U.S.A.,” he concluded, with a sigh. “What did you run away from?”
“Trouble.”
“Does any one ever run away from anything else?” he inquired
philosophically. “What particular brand?”
“Three men,” she said dolorously. “All after poor little me. They all
thought I ought to marry them, and everybody else seemed to think so,
too—”
“Go slow! Did you say Utica or Utah?”
“Everybody thought I ought to marry one or the other of ’em, I mean. If
I could have married them all, now, it might have been easier, for I
like them ever so much. But how could I make up my mind? So I just
seized papa around the neck and ran away with him down here.”
“Why here, of all places on earth?”
“Oh, he’s interested in some mines and concessions and things. It’s
very beautiful, but I almost wish I’d stayed at home and married
Bobby.”
“Which is Bobby?”
“He’s one of the home boys. We’ve grown up together, and I’m so fond of
him. Only it’s more the brother-and-sister sort of thing, if he’d let
it be.”
“Check off No. 1. What’s No. 2?”
“Lots older. Mr. Thomas Murray Smith is an unspoiled millionaire. If he
weren’t so serious and quite so dangerously near forty—well, I don’t
know.”
“Have you kept No. 3 for the last because he’s the best?”
“No-o-o-o. Because he’s the nearest. He followed me down. You can see
his name in all its luster on the Hotel Kast register, when you get
back to the city—Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll, at your service.”
“Sounds Southern,” commented the man below.
“Southern! He’s more Southern than the South Pole. His ancestors fought
all the wars and owned all the negroes—he calls them ‘niggers’—and
married into all the first families of Virginia, and all that sort of
thing. He must quite hate himself, poor Fitz, for falling in love with
a little Yankee like me. In fact, that’s why I made him do it.”
“And now you wish he hadn’t?”
“Oh—well—I don’t know. He’s awfully good-looking and gallant and
devoted and all that. Only he’s such a prickly sort of person. I’d have
to spend the rest of my life keeping him and his pride out of trouble.
And I’ve no taste for diplomacy. Why, only last week he declined to
dine with the President of the Republic because some one said that his
excellency had a touch of the tar brush.”
“He’d better get out of this country before that gets back to
headquarters.”
“If he thought there was danger, he’d stay forever. I don’t suppose
Fitz is afraid of anything on earth. Except perhaps of me,” she added
after-thoughtfully.
“Young woman, you’re a shameless flirt!” accused the invisible one in
stern tones.
“If I am, it isn’t going to hurt you. Besides, I’m not. And, anyway,
who are you to judge me? You’re not here as a judge; you’re an augur.
Now, go on and aug.”
“Aug?” repeated the other hesitantly.
“Certainly. Do an augury. Tell me which.”
“Oh! As for that, it’s easy. None.”
“Why not?”
“Because I much prefer to think of you, when you are gone, as
unmarried. It’s more in character with your voice.”
“Well, of all the selfish pigs! Condemned to be an old maid, in order
not to spoil an ideal! Perhaps you’d like to enter the lists yourself,”
she taunted.
“Good Heavens, no!” he cried in the most unflattering alarm. “It isn’t
in my line—I mean I haven’t time for that sort of thing. I’m a very
busy man.”
“You look it! Or you did look it, scrambling about like a doodle bug
after your absurd spectacles.”
“There is no such insect as a doodle bug.”
“Isn’t there? How do you know? Are you personally acquainted with all
the insect families?”
“Certainly. That’s my business. I’m a scientist.”
“Oh, gracious! And I’ve appealed to you in a matter of sentiment! I
might better have stuck to Fitz. Poor Fitz! I wonder if he’s lost.”
“Why should he be lost?”
“Because I lost him. Back there on the trail. Purposely. I sent him for
water and then—I skipped.”
“Oh-h-h! Then _he’s_ the goose.”
“Goose! Preston Fairfax Fitz—”
“Yes, the goose you said ‘Boo!’ to, you know.”
“Of course. You didn’t steal his hat, did you?”
“No. It’s my own hat. Why did you run away from him?”
“He bored me. When people bore me, I always run away. I’m beginning to
feel quite fugitive this very minute.”
There was silence below, a silence that piqued the girl.
“Well,” she challenged, “haven’t you anything to say before the court
passes sentence of abandonment to your fate?”
“I’m thinking—frantically. But the thoughts aren’t girl thoughts. I
mean, they wouldn’t interest you. I might tell you about some of my
insects,” he added hopefully.
“Heaven forbid!”
“They’re very interesting.”
“No. You’re worthless as an augur, and a flat failure as a
conversationalist, when thrown on your own resources. So I shall shake
the dust from my feet and depart.”
“Good-bye!” he said desolately. “And thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making music in my desert.”
“That’s much better,” she approved. “But you’ve paid your score with
the orchids. If you have one or two more pretty speeches like that in
stock, I might linger for a while.”
“I’m afraid I’m all out of those,” he returned. “But,” he added
desperately, “there’s the hexagonal scarab beetle. He’s awfully queer
and of much older family even than Mr. Fitzwhizzle’s. It is the
hexagonal scarab’s habit when dis—”
“We have an encyclopaedia of our own at home,” she interrupted coldly.
“I didn’t climb this mountain to talk about beetles.”
“Well, I’ll talk some more about you, if you’ll give me a little time
to think.”
“I think you are very impertinent. I don’t wish to talk about myself.
Just because I asked your advice in my difficulties, you assume that
I’m a little egoist—”
“Oh, please don’t—”
“Don’t interrupt. I’m very much offended, and I’m glad we are never
going to meet. Just as I was beginning to like you, too,” she added,
with malice. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye,” he answered mournfully.
But his attentive ears failed to discern the sound of departing
footsteps. The breeze whispered in the tree-tops. A sulphur-yellow
bird, of French extraction, perched in a flowering bush, insistently
demanded: “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”—What’s he say?
_What’s_ he say?—over and over again, becoming quite wrathful because
neither he nor any one else offered the slightest reply or explanation.
The girl sympathized with the bird. If the particular he whose blond
top she could barely see by peeping over the rock would only say
something, matters would be easier for her. But he didn’t. So
presently, in a voice of suspiciously saccharine meekness, she said:—
“Please, Mr. Beetle Man, I’m lost.”
“No, you’re not,” he said reassuringly. “You’re not a quarter of a mile
from the Puerto del Norte Road.”
“But I don’t know which direction—”
“Perfectly simple. Keep on over the top of the rock; turn left down the
slope, right up the dry stream bed to a dead tree; bear right past—”
“That’s too many turns, I never could remember more than two.”
“Now, listen,” he said persuasively. “I can make it quite plain to you
if—”
“I don’t _wish_ to listen! I’ll never find it.”
“I’ll toss you up my compass.”
“I don’t want your compass,” she said firmly.
A long patient sigh exhaled from below.
“Do you want me to guide you?”
“No,” she retorted, and was instantly panic-stricken, for the
monosyllable was of that accent which sets fire to bridges and burns
them beyond hope of return.
Slowly she got to her feet. Perhaps she would have dared and gone;
perhaps she would have swallowed pride and her negative, and made one
more appeal. She turned hesitantly and saw the devil.
It was a small devil on stilts, not more than three or four inches
tall, but there was no mistaking his identity. No other living thing
could possess such demoniac little red-hot pin points of eyes, or be so
bristly and grisly and vicious. The stilts suddenly folded flat, and
the devil rushed upon his prey. The girl stepped back; her foot turned
and caught, and—
“Of course,” the patient voice below was saying, “if you really think
that you couldn’t find the road, I could draw you a map and send it up
by the hair route. But I really think—”
“_Blump!_”
The rock had turned over on his unprotected head and flattened him out
forever. Such was his first thought. When he finally collected himself,
his eyeglasses, and his senses, he sustained a second shock more
violent than the first.
Two paces away, the Voice, duly and most appropriately embodied, sat
half-facing him. The Voice’s eyes confirmed his worst suspicions, and,
dazed though they were at the moment, there were deep lights in them
that wholly disordered his mental mechanism. Nor were her first words
such as to restore his deranged faculties.
“Oh-h! Aren’t you _gogglesome!_” she cried dizzily.
He raised his hands to the huge brown spectacles.
“Wh—wh—what did you come down for?” he babbled. There was a distinct
note of accusation in the query.
“_Come_ down! I fell!”
“Yes, yes; that may be true—”
“_May_ be!”
“Of course, it is true. I—I—I see it’s true. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Sorry? What for?”
“That you came. That you fell, I mean to say. I—I—I don’t really know
what I mean to say.”
“No wonder, poor boy! I landed right on you, didn’t I?”
“Did you? Something did. I thought it was the mountain.”
“You aren’t very complimentary,” she pouted. “But there! I dare say I
knocked your thoughts all to bits.”
“No; not at all. Certainly, I mean. It doesn’t matter. See here,” he
said, with an injured sharpness of inquiry born of his own exasperation
at his verbal fumbling, “you said you wouldn’t, and here you are. I ask
you, is that fair and honorable?”
“Well, if it comes to that,” she countered, “you promised that you’d
never speak to me if you saw me, and here you are telling me that you
don’t want me around the place at all. It’s very rude and inhospitable,
I consider.”
“I can’t help it,” he said miserably. “I’m afraid.”
“You don’t look it. You look disagreeable.”
“As long as you stayed where you belonged—Excuse me—I don’t mean to be
impolite—but I—I—You see—as long as you were just a voice, I could
manage all right, but now that you are—er—er—you—” His speech trailed
off lamentably into meaningless stutterings.
The girl turned amazed and amused eyes upon him.
“What on earth ails the poor man?” she inquired of all creation.
“I told you. I—I’m shy.”
“Not really! I thought it was a joke.”
“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” demanded the
yellow-breasted inquisitor, from his flowery perch.
“What does he say? He says he’s shy. Poor poo—er young, helpless
thing!” And her laughter put to shame a palm thrush who was giving what
he had up to that moment considered a highly creditable musical
performance.
“All right!” he retorted warmly. “Laugh if you want to! But after
stipulating that we should be strangers, to—to act this way—well, I
think it’s—it’s—forward. That’s what I think it is.”
“Do you, indeed? Perhaps you think it’s pleasant for me, after I’ve
opened my heart to a stranger, to have him forced on me as an
acquaintance!”
From the depths of those limpid eyes welled up a little film of
vexation.
“O Lord! Don’t do that!” he implored. “I didn’t mean—I’m a bear—a
pig—a—a—a scarab—I’m anything you choose. Only don’t do that!”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Of course you’re not. That’s fine! As for your secrets, I dare say I
wouldn’t know you again if I saw you.”
“Oh, wouldn’t you?” she cried in quite another tone.
“Quite likely not. These glasses, you see. They make things look quite
queer.”
“Or if you heard me?” she challenged.
“Ah, well, that’s different. But I forget quite easily—even things like
voices.”
She leaned forward, her hands in her lap, her eyes upon the goggled
face before her.
“Then take them off.”
“What? My glasses?”
“Take them off!”
“Wh—wh—why should I?”
“So that you can see me better.”
“I don’t want to see you better.”
“Yes, you do. I’m much more interesting than a scarab.”
“But I know about scarabs and I don’t know about—about—”
“Girls. So one might suspect. Do you know what I’m doing, Mr. Beetle
Man?”
“N-n-no.”
“I’m flirting with you. I never flirted with a scientific person
before. It’s awfully one-sided, difficult, uphill work.”
This last was all but drowned out in his flood of panicky instructions,
from which she disentangled such phrases as “first to left”—“dry
river-bed-hundred-yards”—“dead tree—can’t miss it.”
“If you send me away now, I’ll cry. Really, truly cry, this time.”
“No, you won’t! I mean I won’t! I—I’ll do anything! I’ll talk! I’ll
make conversation! How old are you? That’s what the Chinese ask. I used
to have a Chinese cook, but he lost all my shirt studs, playing
fan-tan. Can you play fan-tan? Two can’t play, though. They have funny
cards in this country, like the Spanish. Have you seen a bullfight yet?
Don’t do it. It’s dull and brutal. The bull has no more chance
than—than—”
“Than an unprotected man with a conscienceless flirt, who falls on his
neck and then threatens to submerge him in tears.”
“Now you’re beginning again!” he wailed. “What did you jump for,
anyway?”
“I slipped. An awful, red-eyed, scrambly fiend scared me—a real, live,
hairy devilkin on stilts. He ran at me across the rock. Was that one of
your pet scarabs, Mr. Beetle Man?”
“That was a tarantula, I suppose, from the description.”
“They’re deadly, aren’t they?”
“Of course not. Unscientific nonsense. I’ll go up and chase him off.”
“Flying from perils that you know not of to more familiar dangers?” she
taunted.
“Well, you see, with the tarantula out of the way, there’s no reason
why you shouldn’t—er—”
“Go, and leave you in peace? What do you think of that for gallantry,
Birdie?”
The gay-feathered inquisitor had come quite near.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” he queried, cocking his curious head.
“He says he doesn’t like me one little, wee, teeny bit, and he wishes
I’d go home and stay there. And so I’m going, with my poor little
feelings all hurted and ruffled up like anything.”
“Nothing of the sort,” protested the badgered spectacle-wearer.
“Then why such unseemly haste to make my path clear?”
“I just thought that maybe you’d go back on the top of the rock, where
you came from, and—and be a voice again. If you won’t go, I will.”
He made three jumps of it up the boulder, bearing a stick in his hand.
Presently his face, preternaturally solemn and gnomish behind the
goggles, protruded over the rim. The girl was sitting with her hands
folded in her lap, contemplating the scenery as if she’d never had
another interest in her life. Apparently she had forgotten his very
existence.
“Ahem!” he began nervously.
“Ahem!” she retorted so promptly that he almost fell off his precarious
perch. “Did you ring? Number, please.”
“I wish I knew whether you were laughing at me or not,” he said
ruefully.
“When?”
“All the time.”
“I am. Your darkest suspicions are correct. Did you abolish my
devilkin?”
“I drove him back into his trapdoor home and put a rock over it.”
“Why didn’t you destroy him?”
“Because I’ve appointed him guardian of the rock, with strict
instructions to bite any one that ever comes there after this except
you.”
“Bravo! You’re progressing. As soon as you’re free from the blight of
my regard, you become quite human. But I’ll never come again.”
“No, I suppose not,” he said dismally. “I shan’t hear you again,
unless, perhaps, the echoes have kept your voice to play with.”
“Oh, oh! Is this the language of science? You know I almost think I
should like to come—if I could. But I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we leave to-morrow.”
“Not across to the southern coast? It isn’t safe. Fever—”
“No; by Puerto del Norte.”
“There’s no boat.”
“Yes, there is. You can just see her funnel over that white slope. It’s
our yacht.”
“And you think you are going in her to-morrow?”
“Think? I know it.”
“No,” he contradicted.
“Yes,” she asserted, quite as concisely.
“No,” he repeated. “You’re mistaken.”
“Don’t be absurd. Why?”
“Look out there, over that tree to the horizon.”
“I’m looking.”
“Do you see anything?”
“Yes; a sort of little smudge.”
“That’s why.”
“It’s a very shadowy sort of why.”
“There’s substance enough under it.”
“A riddle? I’ll give it up.”
“No; a bet. I’ll bet you the treasures of my mountain-side. Orchids of
gold and white and purple and pink, butterflies that dart on wings of
fire opal—”
“Beetles, to know which is to love them, and love but them forever,”
she laughed. “And my side of the wager—what is that to be?”
“That you will come to the rock day after to-morrow at this hour and
stand on the top and be a voice again and talk to me.”
“Done! Send your treasures to the pier, for you’ll surely lose. And now
take me to the road.”
It was a single-file trail, and he walked in advance, silent as an
Indian. As they emerged from a thicket into the highway, above the
red-tiled city in its setting of emerald fields strung on the silver
thread of the Santa Clara River, she turned and gave him her hand.
“Be at your rock to-morrow, and when you see the yacht steam out,
you’ll know I’ll be saying good-bye, and thank you for your mountain
treasures. Send them to Miss Brewster, care of the yacht Polly. She’s
named after me. Is there anything the matter with my shoes?” she broke
off to inquire solicitously.
“Er—what? No.” He lifted his eyes, startled, and looked out across the
quaint old city.
“Then is there anything the matter with my face?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? Well, what?”
“It’s going to be hard to forget,” complained he of the goggles.
“Then look away before it’s too late,” she cried merrily; but her color
deepened a little. “Good-bye, O friend of the lowly scarab!”
At the dip of the road down into the bridged arroyo, she turned, and
was surprised—or at least she told herself so—to find him still looking
after her.
II.
AT THE KAST
One dines at the Gran Hotel Kast after the fashion of a _champignon
sous cloche_. The top of the _cloche_ is of fluted glass, with a wide
aperture between it and the sides, to admit the rain in the wet season
and the flies in the dry. Three balconies run up from the dining-room
well to this roof, and upon these, as near to the railings as they
choose, the rather conglomerate patronage of the place sleeps, takes
baths, dresses, gossips, makes love, quarrels, and exchanges prophecies
as to next Sunday’s bullfight, while the diners below strive to select
from the bill of fare special morsels upon which they will stake their
internal peace for the day. No cabaret can hold a candle to it for
variety of interest. When the sudden torrential storms sweep down the
mountains at meal times, the little human _champignons_, beneath their
insufficient _cloche_, rush about wildly seeking spots where the
drippage will not wash their food away. Commercial travelers of the
tropics have a saying: “There are worse hotels in the world than the
Kast—but why take the trouble?” And, year upon year, they return there
for reasons connected with the other hostelries of Caracuña, which I
forbear to specify.
To Miss Polly Brewster, the Kast was a place of romance. Five miles
away, as the buzzard flies, she could have dined well, even elegantly,
on the Brewster yacht. Would she have done it? Not for worlds! Miss
Brewster was entranced by the courtly manners of her waiter, who had
lost one ear and no small part of the countenance adjacent thereto,
only too obviously through the agency of some edged instrument not
wielded in the arts of peace. She was further delightedly intrigued by
the abrupt appearance of a romantic-hued gentleman, who thrust out over
the void from the second balcony an anguished face, one side of which
was profusely lathered, and addressed to all the hierarchy of heaven
above, and the peoples of the earth beneath, a passionate protest upon
the subject of a cherished and vanished shaving brush; what time,
below, the head waiter was hastily removing from sight, though not from
memory, a soup tureen whose agitated surface bore a creamy froth not of
a lacteal origin. One may not with impunity balance personal implements
upon the too tremulous rails of the ancient Kast.
With an appreciative and glowing eye, Miss Brewster read from her
mimeographed bill of fare such legends as “_ropa con carne_,” “_bacalao
secco_,” “_enchiladas_,” and meantime devoured _chechenaca_, which, had
it been translated into its just and simple English of “hash,” she
would not have given to her cat.
Nor did her visual and prandial preoccupations inhibit her from a
lively interest in the surrounding Babel of speech in mingled Spanish,
Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch,
for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all
the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice
gained any heed in that contest. Even after the bells paused, the habit
of effort kept the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a
few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience
from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table
to the right of her. The remark that first fixed her attention was in
English, of the super-British _patois_.
“Can’t tell wot the blighter might look like behind those bloomin’
brown glasses.”
“But he’s not bothersome to any one,” suggested a second speaker, in a
slightly foreign accent. “He regards his own affairs.”
“Right you are, bo!” approved a tall, deeply browned man of thirty, all
sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested nothing so much as
a club with a gnarled knob on the end of it, a tough, reliable,
hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in an honest cause. “If
he deals in conversation, he must _sell_ it. I don’t notice him giving
any of it away.”
“He gave some to Kast the last time he dined here,” observed a languid
and rather elegant elderly man, who occupied the fourth side of the
table. “Mine host didn’t like it.”
“I should suppose Señor Kast would be hardened,” remarked the young
Caracuñan who had defended the absent.
“Our eyeglassed friend scored for once, though. They had just served
him the usual table-d’hôte salad—you know, two leaves of lettuce with a
caterpillar on one. Kast happened to be passing. Our friend beckoned
him over. ‘A little less of the fauna and more of the flora, Señor
Kast,’ said he in that gritty, scientific voice of his. I really
thought Kast was going to forget his Swiss blood, and chase a whole
peso of custom right out of the place.”
“If you ask me, I think the blighter is barmy,” asserted the Briton.
“Well, I’ll ask you,” proffered the elegant one kindly. “Why do you
consider him ‘barmy,’ as you put it?”
“When I first saw him here and heard him speak to the waiter, I knew
him for an American Johnny at once, and I went, directly I’d finished
my soup, and sat down at his table. The friendly touch, y’ know. ‘I
say,’ I said to him, ‘I don’t know you, but I heard you speak, and I
knew at once you were one of these Americans—tell you at once by the
beastly queer accent, you know. You are an American, ay—wot?’ Wot d’
you suppose the blighter said? He said, ‘No, I’m an ichthyo’—somethin’
or other—”
“Ichthyosaurus, perhaps,” supplied the Caracunuan, smiling.
“That’s it, whatever it may be. ‘I’m an ichthyosaurus,’ he says. ‘It’s
a very old family, but most of the buttons are off. Were you ever
bitten by one in the fossil state? Very exhilaratin’, but poisonous,’
he says. ‘So don’t let me keep you any longer from your dinner.’ Of
course, I saw then that he was a wrong un, so I cut him dead, and
walked away.”
“Served him right,” declared the elderly American, with a solemn
twinkle directed at the tall brown man, who, having opened his mouth,
now thought better of it, and closed it again, with a grin.
“But he is very kind,” said the native. “When my brother fell and broke
his arm on the mountain, this gentleman found him, took care of him,
and brought him in on muleback.”
“Lives up there somewhere, doesn’t he, Mr. Raimonda?” asked the big
man.
“In the _quinta_ of a deserted plantation,” replied the Caracuñan.
“Wot’s he do?” asked the Englishman.
“Ah, _that_ one does not know, unless Senor Sherwen can tell us.”
“Not I,” said the elderly man. “Some sort of scientific investigation,
according to the guess of the men at the club.”
“You never can tell down here,” observed the Englishman darkly. “Might
be a blind, you know. Calls himself Perkins. Dare say it isn’t his name
at all.”
“Daughter,” said Mr. Thatcher Brewster at this juncture, in a patient
and plaintive voice, “for the fifth and last time, I implore you to
pass me the butter, or that which purports to be butter, in the dish at
your elbow.”
“Oh, poor dad! Forgive me! But I was overhearing some news of an—an
acquaintance.”
“Do you know any of the gentlemen upon whose conversation you are
eavesdropping?”
In financial circles, Mr. Brewster was credited with the possession of
a cold blue eye and a denatured voice of interrogation, but he seldom
succeeded in keeping a twinkle out of the one and a chuckle out of the
other when conversing with his daughter.
“Not yet,” observed that damsel calmly.
“Meaning, I suppose I am to understand—”
“Precisely. Haven’t you noticed them looking this way? Presently
they’ll be employing all their strategy to meet me. They’ll employ it
on you.”
Mr. Brewster surveyed the group dubiously.
“In a country such as this, one can’t be too—too cau—”
“Too particular, as you were saying,” cut in his daughter cheerfully.
“Men are scarce—except Fitzhugh, who is rather less scarce than I wish
he were lately. You know,” she added, with a covert glance at the
adjoining table, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself an
extremely popular papa immediately after dinner. It might even go so
far as cigars. Do you suppose that lovely young Caracuñan is a
bullfighter?”
“No; I believe he’s a coffee exporter. Less romantic, but more
respectable. Quite one of the gilded youth of Caracuña. His name is
Raimonda. Fitzhugh knows him. By the way, where on earth is Fitzhugh?”
“Trying to fit a kind and gentlemanly expression over a swollen sense
of injury, for a guess,” replied the girl carelessly. “I left him in
sweet and lone communion with nature three hours ago.”
“Polly, I wish—”
“Oh, dad, dear, don’t! You’ll get your wish, I suppose, and Fitz, too.
Only I don’t want to be hurried. Here he is, now. Look at that smile! A
sculptor couldn’t have done any better. Now, as soon as he comes, I’m
going to be quite nice and kind.”
But Mr. Fairfax Preston Fitzhugh Carroll did not come direct to the
Brewster table. Instead, he stopped to greet the elderly man in the
near-by group, and presently drew up a chair. At first, their
conversation was low-toned, but presently the young native added his
more vivacious accents.
“Who can tell?” the Brewsters heard him say, and marked the fatalistic
gesture of the upturned hands. “They disappear. One does not ask
questions too much.”
“Not here,” confirmed the big man. “Always room for a few more in the
undersea jails, eh?”
“Always. But I think it was not that with Basurdo. I think it was
underground, not undersea.” He brushed his neck with his finger tips.
“Is it dangerous for foreigners?” asked Carroll quickly.
“For every one,” answered Sherwen; adding significantly: “But the
Caracuñan Government does not approve of loose fostering of rumors.”
Carroll rose and came over to the Brewsters.
“May I bring Mr. Graydon Sherwen over and present him?” he asked. “I
can vouch for him, having known his family at home, and—”
“Oh, bring them all, Fitzhugh,” commanded the girl.
The exponent of Southern aristocracy looked uncomfortable.
“As to the others,” he said, “Mr. Raimonda is a native—”
“With the manners of a prince. I’ve quite fallen in love with him
already,” she said wickedly.
“Of course, if you wish it. But the other American is an
ex-professional baseball player, named Cluff.”
“What? ‘Clipper’ Cluff? I knew I’d seen him before!” cried Miss Polly.
“He got his start in the New York State League. Why, we’re quite old
friends, by sight.”
“As for Galpy, he’s an underbred little cockney bounder.”
“With the most naive line of conversation I’ve ever listened to. I want
all of them.”
“Let me bring Sherwen first,” pleaded the suitor, and was presently
introducing that gentleman. “Mr. Sherwen is in charge here of the
American Legation,” he explained.
“How does one salute a real live minister?” queried Miss Brewster.
“Don’t mistake me for anything so important,” said Sherwen. “We’re not
keeping a minister in stock at present. My job is being a superior kind
of janitor until diplomatic relations are resumed.”
“Goodness! It sounds like war,” said Miss Brewster hopefully. “Is there
anything as exciting as that going on?”
“Oh, no. Just a temporary cessation of civilities between the two
nations. If it weren’t indiscreet—”
“Oh, do be indiscreet!” implored the girl, with clasped hands. “I
admire indiscretion in others, and cultivate it in myself.”