“Then there is no further secrecy about this?”
“About what?”
“Her identity.” He pointed to the grave.
“No; I suppose not. Why?”
“Because Miss Brewster has a right to know.”
“Do you propose to tell her?”
“Yes.”
“Very well,” agreed the scientist, after a pause for consideration.
“But not until after the yacht is at sea.”
Carroll did not reply directly to this.
“What shall you do?”
“Get out, if I can. I’m ordered to Curaçao. Wisner left word for me.”
“Come down the mountain with me.”
“Impossible. There are matters here to be attended to.”
“Then when will you come down?”
“Before you sail. I must be sure that you get off.”
“You’ll come to the yacht, then?”
“No.”
“I think you should. There are reasons why—why—Miss Brewster—”
“It isn’t a question that I can argue,” the other cut him off. “I can’t
do it.” There was so much pain in his voice that Carroll forbore to
press him. “But I’ll ask you to take a note.”
Carroll nodded, and his host, disappearing within the quinta, returned
almost at once with an envelope on which the address was written in
pencil. The Southerner took it and rose from the porch, where he had
flung himself to rest.
“Perkins,” he said, with some effort, “I’ve thought and said some hard
things about you.”
“Naturally enough,” murmured the other.
“Do you want me to apologize?”
The scientist stared. “Do you want me to thank you for to-night’s
work?” he countered.
“No.”
“Well—”
“All right.”
The two men, different in every quality except that of essential
manhood, smiled at each other with a profound mutual understanding.
There was a silent handshake, and Carroll set off down the mountain
toward the sunrise glow.
XIII.
LEFT BEHIND
Dawn crested, poised, and broke in a surf of splendor upon the great
mountain-line that overhangs Puerto del Norte. Where, at the
corporation dock, there had lurked the shadow of a yacht, gray-black
against blue-black, there now swung a fairy ship of purest silver,
cradled upon a swaying mirror. Tiny insects, touched to life by the
radiance, scuttled busily about her decks and swarmed out upon the
dock. The seagoing yacht Polly had awakened early.
Down the mule path that forms the shortest cut from the railway station
straggled a group of minute creatures. To one watching from the
mountain-side with powerful field-glasses—such as, for example, a
convinced and ardent hater of the Caribbean Sea, curled up with his
back against a cold and Voiceless rock—it might have appeared that the
group was carrying an unusual quantity of hand luggage. Yet they were
not porters; so much, even at a great distance, their apparel
proclaimed. The pirates of porterdom do not get up to meet
five-o’clock-in-the-morning specials in Caracuña.
The little group gathered close at the pier, then separated, two going
aboard, and the others disappearing into sundry streets and reappearing
presently at the water-front with other figures. The human form cannot
be distinctly seen, at a distance of three miles, to rub its eyes;
neither can it be heard to curse; but there was that in the newer
figures which suggested a sudden and reluctant surrender of sleeping
privileges. Had our supposititious watcher possessed an intimate and
contemptuous knowledge of Caracuña officialdom, he would have surmised
that lavish sums of money had been employed to stir the port and
customs officials to such untimely activity.
But not money or any other agency is potent to stir Caracuñan
officialdom to undue speed. Hence the observer from the heights,
supposing that he had a personal interest in the proceedings, might
have assured himself of ample time to reach the coast before the
formalities could be completed and the ship put forth to sea. Had he
presently humped himself to his feet with a sluggish effort, abandoned
his field-glasses in favor of a pair of large greenish-brown goggles,
and set out on a trail straight down the mountains, staggering a bit at
the start, a second supposititious observer of the first supposititious
observer—if such cumulative hypothesis be permissible—might have
divined that the first supposititious observer was the Unspeakable
Perk, going about other people’s business when he ought to have been in
bed. And so, not to keep any reader in unendurable suspense, it was.
While the Unspeakable Perk was making his way down the dim and narrow
trail, another equally weary figure shambled out from the main road
upon the flats and made for the landing. The apparel of Mr. Preston
Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll was in a condition that he would have deemed
quite unfit for one of his station, had he been in a frame of mind to
consider such matters at all. He was not. Affairs vastly more weighty
and human occupied his mind. What he most wished was to find Miss Polly
Brewster and unburden himself of them.
At the entrance to the pier, he was detained by the American Consul.
Cluff came running down the long structure in great strides.
“Moses, Carroll! I’m glad to see you! Where’ve you been?”
A week earlier, the scion of all the Virginias would have resented this
familiarity from a professional athlete. But neither Mr. Carroll’s mind
nor his heart was a sealed inclosure. He had learned much in the last
few days.
“Up on the mountain,” he said. “For Heaven’s sake, give me a drink,
Cluff!”
The other produced a flask.
“You do look shot to pieces,” he commented. “Find Perk—Pruyn?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you later. Where’s Miss Brewster?”
“In her stateroom. Asleep, I guess. Said she wanted rest, and nobody
was to disturb her till we sail.”
“When do we start?”
“Eight o’clock, they say. That means ten. Will Dr. Pruyn get here?”
“He isn’t going with us.”
“Oh, no. I forgot his Dutch permit. Well, he’d better use it quick, or
he’ll go in a box when he does go. I wouldn’t insure his life for a
two-cent stamp in this country.”
“You wouldn’t if you’d seen what I saw last night,” said the
Southerner, very low.
Wisner, the busy, efficient little consul, who had been arranging with
the officials for Carroll’s embarkation, now returned, bringing with
him a viking of a man whom he introduced as Dr. Stark, of the United
States Public Health Service.
“Either of you know anything about Dr. Pruyn?” he inquired anxiously.
“He’s on his way down the mountain now,” said Carroll.
“Good! He’s ordered away, I’m glad to say. Just got the message.”
“Then perhaps he will go out with us,” said Cluff, with obvious relief.
“I sure did hate to think of leaving that boy here, with the game laws
for goggle-eyed Americans entirely suspended.”
“No. He’s ordered to Curaçao to stay and watch. We’ve got to get him
out to the Dutch ship somehow.”
“Couldn’t the yacht take him and transfer him outside?” asked Carroll.
“Mr. Carroll,” said Dr. Stark earnestly, “before this yacht is many
minutes out from the dock, you’ll see a yellow flag go up from the end
of the corporation pier. After that, if the yacht turns aside or comes
back for a package that some one has left, or does anything but hold
the straightest course on the compass for the blue and open sea—well,
she’ll be about the foolishest craft that ever ploughed salt water.”
“I suppose so,” admitted Carroll. “Well, I have matters to look after
on board.”
Into Mr. Carroll’s cabin it is nobody’s business to follow him. A man
has a right to some privacy of room and of mind, and if the
Southerner’s struggle with himself was severe, at least it was of brief
duration. Within half an hour, he was knocking at Polly Brewster’s
door.
“_Please_ go ’way, whoever it is,” answered a pathetically weary voice.
“Miss Polly, it’s Fitzhugh. I have a note for you.”
“Leave it in the saloon.”
“It’s important that you see it right away.”
“From whom is it?” queried the spent voice.
“From Dr. Pruyn.”
“I—I don’t want to see it.”
“You must!” insisted her suitor.
“Did he say I must?”
“No. I say you must. Forgive me, Miss Polly, but I’m going to wait here
till you say you’ll read it.”
“Push it under the door,” said the girl resignedly.
He obeyed. Polly took the envelope, summoned up all her spirit, and
opened it. It contained one penciled line and the signature:—
Good-bye. All my heart goes with you forever.