send word to the engineers of the mines that I, an Englishman, am in the
cells here?”
“Assuredly.”
“At once, can you go or send at once?”
“Assuredly.”
“I will see that you are rewarded.”
“Assuredly.”
“Send to the chief English or Scotch engineer at the chief mine.”
“Assuredly,” the corporal said. “Meanwhile, enter.”
Sard entered and was locked in. The corporal opened the grating in the
door and said, “How am I to be rewarded for this sending to the
engineers?”
“You shall be rewarded when they come.”
“Who will reward me?” the corporal asked; “will it be yourself or the
engineers?”
“It will be myself.”
“Truly, then,” the corporal said, “since it will be you who will reward
me, when the work is done, it must be you who shall make it worth my
while to do it. How much then? A hundred pesetas?”
“Not a penny piece,” Sard said, “till the engineers are here. Then
indeed you shall be rewarded.”
“There is a very wise proverb,” the corporal said, “‘Paid first never
grieves.’ And yet another proverb says, ‘Will-pay is a fine bird, but
cash-down sings.’”
“There is yet another proverb,” Sard answered, “‘The fed hound never
hunts,’ and another still, ‘Penny-pouched is promise-broken.’”
“These are English proverbs,” the corporal said, “and do not concern me.
Show me at least the colour of your money, or no message will go.”
“There is another proverb,” Sard said, “which says, ‘Grudging greed gets
not.’”
“Adios,” the corporal said, “grudging greed will get no food nor drink;
no message to any engineer; nor blanket at night, if blanket be needed.”
He slipped the shutter across the grating and moved across the yard,
back into the barton, leaving Sard alone. The cell was empty of any
furniture. It measured about seven feet each way. Its roof sloped down
from about eight feet at the door to six feet at the back. The floor was
earth, the walls adobe, the roof ceiled with plaster, European fashion,
against tarantulas. The cell was lit by the omission of one block of
adobe just under the eaves at the back. Sard could just see out of this
hole by standing on tiptoe. He saw a patch of sandy soil which had been
channelled and pitted by people wanting sand; rats were humping about in
this among refuse tipped there from the barracks. Beyond the sandy strip
and distant about 120 yards was the railway, with its platform, water
tank, fuel heap, and the legend
Tlotoatin.
Beyond this was the desert reaching to infinity, where violet rocks
gleaming with snow merged into the shimmer of the sky.
The shutter of his door was pulled back: a private soldier peered at him
through the bars.
“See,” he said, “you want a message taken to an engineer?”
“Yes,” Sard said.
“Which engineer?”
“Any English engineer. There must be some.”
“Yes. There is one, Mason, at Chicuna Mine.”
“Can you go to him? Will you go?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell him of me and ask him to come here?”
“Yes. Listen. That corporal is a fool. He is put on to ask money by the
lieutenant.”
“Indeed.”
“He is a greedy one, the lieutenant. But one who will squeeze his feet
will bleed his mother, as we say. And to ask money of one whom God has
afflicted . . .”
“You, who ask no money, shall be well rewarded.”
“I ask no reward,” the man said. “God forbid that I should make profit
from distress. One thing only I would ask: that you would lend me your
coat, so that I could leave the barracks, since in uniform it is
forbidden.”
“Truly I will do that,” Sard said.
“If you will pass it through the bars,” the man said, “then I will put
it on and hurry to the Chicuna Mine, so as to be there before the
whistle blows. It will blow for dinner and siesta in a few minutes now.”
Sard knew that the siesta hour must be very near and that the moment was
propitious for the finding of a fellow-countryman. He had only been a
few minutes in prison, but already the thought of being locked up
through the siesta when he might be outside made him anxious for the
engineer to be there.
“Give to the engineer this card,” he said, “and urge him hither at once;
any engineer who speaks my tongue.”
“There is a penalty,” the man said, “if we are caught outside the gates
in uniform.”
“What penalty?”
“That of the thumbs.”
“Still, in this coat,” Sard said, “you could surely pass out
unobserved?”
“They will not catch me,” the man said; “and if they do (though they
will not), it will be well worth while, since to help the afflicted can
never be a sin. This will I always maintain.”
“Surely rightly,” Sard said, stripping off the old and oily jacket. “But
here is the disguise for you; this coat. You had better take the cap as
well.”
Sard could just make out that some other soldiers were in the yard not
very far away.
“Is it safe?” he asked. “There are men there who may see you take the
coat. Will they betray you, if they see you?”
“Never,” the man answered. “They are my brothers, set there to watch for
the corporal.”
“Take then the coat and cap.”
The soldier cast a glance about him, to see if it were safe to take
them; then he slipped them through the bars and under his coat. “Wait
yet, one moment,” he said; “should you desire food or drink, I would buy
some, if you would give the penny. I mention this, because otherwise you
will have neither food nor drink.”
“Thank you, I need neither food nor drink,” Sard said, “but only the
engineer, as soon as you can bring him.”
“Right, Excellency,” the man said. “And now it will be necessary that I
close the shutter.”
“Right,” Sard said. “And thank you.”
The man closed the shutter. “I will start straight away,” he said.
Sard heard him move away to the other soldiers who were standing in the
shade of the wall.
“I have the coat,” he said proudly to his comrades. “And not only that,
he said, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ I had asked for the coat
as a disguise, thinking it the limit that I could ask, when, lo, he
himself says, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’”
There came a roar of laughter from the soldiers.
“Cap and coat too?”
“Yes; and it was he himself who said, ‘You had better take the cap as
well.’ And I had not thought of the cap. Never once should I have
dreamed of it. But he himself thrust it on me, ‘Take the cap as well, O
take the cap as well.’ ‘I beseech you,’ he said to me, ‘take the cap as
well.’”
“It is a French cap, Martin,” one of the soldiers said. “The Little
Twig-Legs remarked of it, that it is a French cap. Thus we have the
Paris fashions at Tlotoatin.”
“Mind” (another said) “that the French cap do not bring within itself
the French crown.”
“This Englishman is more innocent than Joseph.”
“Wait, Martin,” one of the men said; “did not this Englishman offer you
money?”
“Money? Why, he has no money. I, who watched his face, know well that he
has no money.”
“No money and no coat and no cap.”
“Stay yet,” one objected. “He handed you paper, as I myself observed.
Was not that money?”
“It was this, which I was to give to an engineer.”
“What engineer?”
“One Mason, of the Chicuna Mine: such being the names which came into my
head. He asked, ‘Is there an English engineer?’ ‘Truly,’ I said,
following my inspiration, ‘there is Mason of the Chicuna Mine.’ ‘Give
him this, then,’ he said.”
“What is it?”
“I know not. Writing. He had several like it.”
“Is it English money?”
“No. The English use only gold.”
“Accursed Lutherans, and that they steal!”
“I think that the writing is the symbol of a secret society to which all
these dogs belong,” one of the soldiers said. “These symbols they pass
to each other by messengers to give warning of their accursednesses.”
“Tear it up then.”
“Meanwhile,” Martin said, “I will with this coat and this cap to
Eustaphia; madre de las putas that she is, even she will assuredly give
me one twenty-five for them.”
“They are old,” a soldier objected. “She will not give one twenty-five,
but one five, or one ten, not a Portuguese milrei more.”
“One five or one ten. They are of European weaving and will last for
many lives. But to market.”
As the soldier passed Sard’s door, to market the coat and cap, he called
out, with a fair imitation of Sard’s voice and accent:
“Take then the coat and cap. You had better take the cap as well.”
As a blow, which would have been pleasanter than an answer, was
impossible, Sard kept silent, though his thoughts were bitter. In about
ten minutes, Martin returned triumphantly. He passed close to the
cell-door, so that Sard not only heard him but smelt the fragrant reek
of the hot tamales and annis brandy, which he had bought with the
spoils.
“See,” he said, “she being glad with brandy gave me one-forty.”
“One-forty; is it possible?”
“Let us, then, into our room, away from corporal and Little Twig-Legs.”
“Stay yet,” one soldier said. “Shall we not give a tamale and a tot of
brandy to this Englishman?”
“He has refused it,” Martin answered. “He refused it with scorn, almost
with insult. ‘I need neither food nor drink,’ he said, ‘only the
engineer, who is my sole passion, now that my wife has fled with the
lodger.’”
Sard would have been very glad of a tamale and a drink of water, but
neither was offered. The men moved off and closed a door behind them.
Soon after that, the hooter-whistles blew at three different mines. A
trumpeter, taking the time from them, blew a call in the patio of the
barracks. For a few minutes Sard could hear the shuffling of many feet,
hurrying to those calls to dinner and siesta. “No one will come to me
now,” Sard said, “for three hours. I am locked in till they choose to
remember me, and nobody who knows me knows where I am.” He tried the
door, which was locked, as well as barred across: the upper and lower
panels of it were metalled. He tried the walls: they were made of a kind
of adobe which had been furnace-burnt: they were brick. The roof he
could not easily reach, except at the back of the cell. The floor was of
clay which had been puddled and beetled.
Of all these four barriers, the floor seemed to him to be the most easy
to remove. He hung the handkerchief, “A present from Bradford,” over the
grating in the door, lest some spy should pull back the shutter. When he
had done this, he knelt down close to the back of the cell, took out his
knife and began to dig bare the lowest courses of adobe.
His knife had been given to him years before as a keepsake by his second
in the port main; it had been with him in his first voyage in the
_Venturer_, and ever since, in all his sea-going. It had not been taken
from him by the soldiers, because they had not expected that any man
would carry a weapon where a sailor carries his knife. They had tapped
his side, breast and hip pockets, but not the middle of his back. The
knife was of the common type of sailors’ sheath-knife. He had cut nicks
on the handle, a nick for every passage completed between port and port;
thirty-six nicks altogether. The sheath was not the original sheath, but
a gift from a sailor called Panther Jack, who had made it for him in the
_Pathfinder_ out of an old boot. The knife-blade was worn away to a thin
crescent of steel by repeated sharpenings at the grindstone. It was as
good a knife as a man might hope for in work aloft, cutting stops or
ropes’ ends, but it was the poorest kind of trowel. In his eagerness, he
put too much weight upon it and snapped the blade across about an inch
from the handle.
He was disheartened by this, but continued to scrape till he discovered
that the pounded clay on the floor had been laid on a spread of pebbles
set in mortar. The mortar was queer stuff, very hard near the pebbles,
but soft between them. It took Sard one hour to clear out three pebbles.
Under the third was an iron bolt, or nail, the length and weight of a
marline-spike. It had been bent a little. In its day it had had a good
deal of battering. It was rusty, but very well fitted to be a punch to
drift out other pebbles. Using a pebble as a mallet, Sard was making
good progress when a low voice called him:
“Kid!”
“Who’s there?” he asked.
“Say, Kid, don’t make any noise, but come right up to the hole there.”
Sard came cautiously, half expecting a missile through the hole. He saw
that the hole was blocked by a man’s face, which so shut out the light
that he could not recognise it.
“Say, Kid.”
The face swung away from the hole, for the stone on which the man was
standing slipped a little. Sard recognised the ugly-looking train-hand
who had watched him from the after-car.
“Say, Kid,” the man repeated, as he clawed back into position, “you
wanna get quit of here, or you’ll line the cold-meat cart.”
“I’m trying to get quit,” Sard said.
“Well, you wanna try pretty dam’ hard. You was on the silver line and
you ain’t got any plunks, I guess.”
“No.”
“Well, you wanna get out before sundown, sport. These silver-escort
guys, they’ll keep a man till sundown, to see if he’ll pay to be let
out. If he can’t, they bring him into the yard ‘for exercise’ and shoot
him full of holes. If any question’s asked, they say they shot him while
he was trying to escape. What the hell did you stay on the train for
till she pulled up? I gave you the flag to beat it, and you put your
dam’ hoof right on it.”
“I thought you were going to shoot me,” Sard said. “Anyhow, I could not
have jumped from the train, because my leg is queer.”
“Hell!” the man said. “You ain’t got ten plunks?”
“No.”
“I mean, sewed away anywheres, against an emergency?”
“I haven’t a penny.”
“Because if you have ten plunks, you’re up against your emergency, don’t
you make any mistake.”
“I haven’t a farthing.”
“Hell!” the man said, “I was cleaned out at pinochle myself, only last
night, by that dam’ Dutchman. Hell!” He climbed from his perch,
readjusted his foothold and clambered back.
“Dam’ that Dutchman’s soul and that dam’ Las Palomas Pilsener.” He
seemed to be busy with his hands and eyes: soon he spoke again.
“Say, Kid, you gotta get out-a here. Watch-a doing? Digging?”
“Yes.”
“Is the roof ceiled inside? I see it is. Hold on, then, till I have a
try.”
Sard heard him heave himself up on to the roof, where he seemed to lie
prone, working busily, with very little noise, for ten minutes. It was
still siesta time, but Sard judged that someone in the barracks might
see or hear at any moment. Mutterings, mainly curses, came from the man
on the roof, with the scraping and raking of tiles. For all the attempt
to keep quiet, a good deal of force was being used; soon pieces of tile
went slithering down the roof with what seemed to Sard a devilish
tumult. Then the man seemed to get a purchase on a key-tile and wrench
it this way and that, with the noise of a riveter’s yard. Sard felt that
any sleeper within a hundred yards must be roused by the racket. Worse
followed, for the tile broke; some of it flew off into the yard and
smashed upon a stone, the rest bounced on the roof and then slithered
down it and off it: the train-hand cursed it and its parents.
One of the soldiers, who had been sleeping in the barton, came into the
yard, looked about him, saw the man on the roof and challenged.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m mending this dam’ roof. Remediando this dam’ teja.”
“Who told you to mend the roof?”
“The capataz and also the teniente.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes, my brave, it is true. Go you and ask them if you don’t believe
me.”
“What do you say?”
“Go you and ask them, if you do not believe.”
“They did not say so to me, that the roof should be mended.”
“See here, brother: they said so to me. Do you get that? To me, that is
me here, they dicoed that I should mend this dam’ roof; and I’m mending
it; and when it’s ended, you can have the dam’ bits to scratch with.”
“Bueno,” the man said, after a pause. “Esta bueno.”
“I guess it is bueno,” the train-hand muttered. “It’s pretty dam’ bueno,
if you ask me.”
He went on working. Having cleared away two tiles, his task was easier,
because he could get at the pegs in the heads of the course below them.
He cracked each tile at the peg by a smart tap, then shook it clear and
piled it to one side. Presently he wrenched a couple of laths away, beat
violently downwards with them and knocked a foot of the ceiling into
Sard’s cell. He had begun his work with some precautions against noise:
he now took none. A second soldier came yawning out of the barton. He
stood staring with his mate at the breaking of the tiles.
“What is he doing?” he asked.
“Mending the roof.”
“Verdad?”
“Verdad.”
“See here now,” the train-hand said to Sard, “can you ketch aholt of
these laths and give a swig down on them?”
“Yes.”
“He is talking to the prisoner,” the second soldier said to his comrade.
“He ought not to talk to the prisoner.”
“Assuredly he ought not.”
“And what was I saying to the prisoner?” the train-hand answered. “The
prisoner was talking to me. He was complaining that I broke his siesta.”
He bent his head down, as though speaking to Sard. “You say you’ll
complain at having your siesta broken; complain to the capataz. You’ll
complain hell. I’m doing my duty in mending this roof.” Then under his
breath he added in English: “Two more swigs like that and she’ll make
hell-gate on the flood. Heave, Kid, you can git more purchase on it than
I can.”
Sard could get purchase on it, by leaping up, catching at a lath or at
the plaster, and tearing it down by his weight. The noise of the
wreckage falling into the cell gave the two soldiers some uneasiness.
They looked at each other at each fall, with comments.
“He is making much mess.”
“Assuredly.”
“Do you think that it is all right? What?”
“That is what I ask.”
“I heard no word of the mending of this roof.”
“Nor I.”
“I half think that I ought to report it.”
“Such is half my thought also.”
“Assuredly, if aught should happen that should not . . .”
“Then, indeed . . .”
“Suppose, then, that you acquaint the corporal . . .”
“Yes; but if all be truly well, if the roof be entitled to this mending,
then shall we be like him who, fearing the burglar, shot the priest.”
“If it be not so entitled, on the other hand, what then?”
“Then, indeed . . .”
The train-hand judged that this conversation had reached a danger-point.
He started a counter-topic.
“My aunt hell,” he cried.
“What is it?” the soldiers asked.
“Good Sarah, watch the devils.”
“Watch what?”
“Say,” the train-hand said, in an excited tone, “Pronto now, where does
this ceiling end? At each end of the building, isn’t it?”
“Yes; but why, what has happened?”
“Get you within doors, then; one at each end; quick now; take sticks. Do
as I tell you; quickly.”
“Yes, yes; here are sticks; what are we to do?”
“Into the building, one at each end, quickly now. It is rattlesnakes
curled up here, twenty at least. Get in. I’ll drive them down to you.
There is a reward, half a peseta a rattle. One at each end, now. And
watch. I’ll drive them down to you.”
“Watch where?”
“Where shall we watch?”
“At the ventilators. Quick, quick, or they’ll be gone. Get down and kill
them as they crawl out. It will be ten pesetas each.”
The men did not know where to go, but realised that they were to be
indoors, watching the ventilators. They had picked up laths from a
bundle lying against a wall. After a half a minute of confusion, turning
this way and that, they did as they were bidden, they ran indoors, one
at each end of the building.
“Shut the doors behind you,” the train-hand cried, “or they’ll be out
into the yard.”
The doors were slammed to.
“Now,” the train-hand said to Sard, “now, Kid, hump yourself. Get a holt
of this rafter and out, pretty P.D.Q.”
Sard leaped to the rafter, caught it, drew himself up to it, got an arm
over it, got his head above the roof and saw the station and the desert,
both beautiful with freedom. The train-hand gripped him by the belt and
hove upon him. With a wrestle and a struggle he got his other arm over a
rafter, then his knees; he was on the roof top.
“Beat it, Kid, like hell,” the train-hand said. “Here’s Twig-Legs.”
Sard just saw that someone was entering the yard from the barton. He did
not stay to see who it was, but shot himself off the roof into the waste
with one heave. He swerved to his left under cover of the barrack wall
and “beat it” as his helper had bade. His helper hurled bits of tile
into Twig-Legs’ face, then flung himself off the roof and “beat it” in
the other direction.
Sard turned at the angle of the barracks into a sandy street of adobe
houses, some of which had white canvas screens spread across their
stoops. The street was like a street of the dead in the siesta. A few
dogs, the exact colour of the sand, lay in the sun as though killed by a
pestilence. Sard dodged their bodies, darted down a lane to the right,
and found himself barred by a wall, which was topped by spikes. He got
hold of a spike, swung himself up and scrambled over, into a graveyard
in which the dead seemed to be coming out of their graves.
The rats and dogs snarled at him as he crossed the graveyard, the skulls
looked out at him, the hands clutched at him. He went across the
graveyard and out of it, by a gap where the wall had fallen, into a
lane. He turned to his left, ran along the lane for about fifty yards
and turned sharply to his right into a street of detached houses, some
of which had palms growing in boxes at their gates. He walked along this
street for a little way, listening for pursuers but hearing none.
“I must find out if they’re after that train-hand,” he said; “I must
find that train-hand and thank him.”
He listened intently, expecting to hear a tumult at the barracks, but
all was still there. He brushed the plaster and tile dust from his
clothes. He regretted that he had no hat: not even “A present from
Bradford,” which he had left screening the shutter on the door of his
cell. He remembered suddenly three cases of murderers arrested from
having lost their hats at the scene of their crimes. He remembered
another case, from the time of the Terror in Paris, of a man saved from
the guillotine by having a hat thrust suddenly upon his head, while he
waited his turn in the dusk and rain at the place of execution. When his
turn came at the end of the batch, he was judged to be one of the
spectators and passed by.
“I’m suspect without a hat,” he thought, “and I am also guilty of
train-trespass and prison-breaking. But I’m not going to beat it from
here till I know whether that man has beaten it.”
He turned to his left, walked along another sandy road of silent adobe
houses and sleeping dogs, and soon reached a road which he recognised.
Far down it, a quarter of a mile away, on the left, was the barrack
entrance, with its flag-pole, bearing the green-grey-blue tricolour of
the Occidental Republic. Opposite Sard, as he stopped to reconnoitre,
was a pulperia, with a hoarding on its roof. It was this hoarding which
was familiar; he had noticed it while he was being led to the barracks;
it bore a legend which he could now read, in translation:
Palace of Pleasure.
Look. The biggest Glass in Tlotoatin. 5_¢._
Beds for Knights, Artists, Travellers.
Beans. Beer. Wine. Beds.
“Beans, beer and a bed,” Sard thought, “how good those things are, and
how lucky they are who can afford them. Well is it called a palace of
pleasure, if that is the kind of life they live here. I begin to
understand the phrase now: ‘he hasn’t got a bean.’ And at this time
yesterday I was mate of a crack ship.”
From a mine to the westward from him there came the blare of a hooter,
giving warning that siesta was nearly ended. Other hooters took up the
blast, till the place rang with echoes coming back from the hills. Now
from some of the houses workers came half awake, like sailors coming on
deck, buttoning their shirts. They went slouching off towards the mines,
rubbing their eyes.
A man came yawning from the door of the Palace of Pleasure. He had a
straw-broom in one hand with which he pretended to sweep the doorstep.
Half his face was covered with one hand as he yawned. It was the
train-hand.
“Say, Kid,” he said, “step inside here.”
He stepped inside and shook the man’s hand and thanked him.
“Aw, come off,” the man said, shutting the door. “Come in here.” He led
the way by a dark passage past a flight of stairs. Sard heard the rustle
of skirts and smelt scent; looking up suddenly, he saw the heads of two
women looking over the stair-rail on the landing above. One of them
coquettishly sucked her cigarette to a glow as he passed, so that he
might see her face the better.