Hearts of Three by Jack London Chapter III
BUT a splitting headache put a stop to Francis' singing and made him glad to be swung' in a cool hammock by Henry, who rowed off to the Angeligue with orders from his visitor to the skipper to stay at anchor but not to permit any of his sailors to land on the Calf. Not until late in the morning of the following day, after hours of heavy sleep, did Francis get on his feet and announce that his head was clear again.
"I know what it is got bucked off a horse once," his strange relative sympathised, as he poured him a huge cup of fragrant black coffee. "Drink that down. It will make a new man of you. Can't offer you much for breakfast except bacon, sea biscuit, and some scrambled turtle eggs. They're fresh. I guarantee that, for I dug them out this morning while you slept."
"That coffee is a meal in itself," Francis praised, meanwhile studying his kinsman and ever and anon glancing at the portrait of their relative.
"You're just like him, and in more than mere looks," Henry laughed, catching him in his scrutiny. "When you refused to share yesterday, it was old Sir Henry to the fife. He had a deep-seated antipathy against sharing, even with his own crews. It's what caused most of his troubles. And he's certainly never shared a penny of his treasure with any of his descendants. Now I'm different. Not only will I share the Calf with you; but I'll present you with my half as well, lock, stock, and barrel, this grass hut, all these nice furnishings, tenements, hereditaments, and everything, and what's left of the turtle eggs. When do vou want to move in?"
"You mean…?" Francis asked.
"Just that. There's nothing here. I've just about dug the island upside down and all I found was the chest there full of old clothes."
"It must have encouraged you."
"Mightily. I thought I had a hammerlock on it. At any rate, it showed I'm on the right track."
"What's the matter with trying the Bull?" Francis queried.
"That's my idea right now," was the answer, "though I've got another clue for over on the mainland. Those oldtimers had a way of noting down their latitude and longitude whole degrees out of the way."
"Ten North and Ninety East on the chart might mean Twelve North and Ninety-two East," Francis concurred. "Then again it might mean Eight North and Eighty-eight East. They carried the correction in their heads, and if they died unexpectedly, which was their custom, it seems, the secret died with them."
"I've half a notion to go over to the Bull and chase those turtle-catchers back to the mainland," Henry went on. "And then again I'd almost like to tackle the mainland clue first. I suppose you've got a stock of clues, too?"
"Sure thing," Francis nodded. "But say, I'd like to take back what I said about not sharing."
"Say the word," the other encouraged.
"Then I do say it."
Their hands extended and gripped in ratification.
"Morgan and Morgan strictly limited," chortled Francis.
"Assets, the whole Caribbean Sea, the Spanish Main, most of Central America, one chest full of perfectly no good old clothes, and a lot of holes in the ground," Henry joined in the other's humor. "Liabilities, snake-bite, thieving Indians, malaria, yellow fever-"
"And pretty girls with a habit of kissing total strangers one moment, and of sticking up said total strangers with shiny silver revolvers the next moment," Francis cut in. "Let me tell you about it. Day before yesterday, I rowed ashore over on the mainland. The moment I landed, the prettiest girl in the world pounced out upon me and dragged me away into the jungle. Thought she was going to eat me or marry me. I didn't know which. And before I could find out, what's the pretty damsel do but pass uncomplimentary remarks on my mustache and chase me back to the boat with a revolver. Told me to beat it and never come back, or words to that effect."
"Whereabouts on the mainland was this?" Henry demanded, with a tenseness which Francis, chuckling his reminiscence of the misadventure, did not notice.
"Down' toward the other end of Chiriqui Lagoon," he replied. "It was the stamping ground of the Solano family, I learned; and they are a red peppery family, as I found out. But I haven't told you all. Listen. First she dragged me into the vegetation and insulted my mustache; next she chased me to the boat with a drawn revolver; and then she wanted to know why I didn't kiss her. Can you beat that?"
"And did you?" Henry demanded, his hand unconsciously clinching by his side.
"What could a poor stranger in a strange land do? It was some armful of pretty girl-"
The next fraction of a second Francis had sprung to his feet and blocked before his jaw a crushing blow of Henry's fist.
"I … I beg your pardon," Henry mumbled, and slumped down on the ancient sea chest. I'm a fool, I know, but I'll be hanged if I can stand for-"
"There you go again," Francis interrupted resentfully. "As crazy as everybody else in this crazy country. One moment you bandage up my cracked head, and the next moment you want to knock that same head clean of? of me. As bad as the girl taking turns at kissing me and shoving a gun into my midrif."
"That's right, fire away, I deserve it," Henry admitted ruefully, but involuntarily began to fire up as he continued with: "Confound you, that was Leoncia."
"What if it was Leoncia? Or Mercedes? Or Dolores? Can't a fellow kiss a pretty girl at a revolver's point without having his head knocked off by the next ruffian he meets in dirty canvas pants on a notorious sand-heap of an island?"
"When the pretty girl is engaged to marry the ruffian in the dirty canvas pants."
"You don't mean to tell me," the other broke in excitedly.
"It isn't particularly amusing to said ruffian to be told that his sweetheart has been kissing a ruffian she never saw before from off a disreputable Jamaica nigger's schooner," Henry completed his sentence.
"And she took me for you," Francis mused, glimpsing the situation. "I don't blame you for losing your temper, though you must admit it's a nasty one. Wanted to cut off my ears yesterday, didn't you?"
"Yours is just as nasty, Francis, my boy. The way you insisted that I cut them off when I had you down ha! ha!" Both young men laughed in hearty amity.
"It's the old Morgan temper," Henry said. "He was by all the accounts a peppery old cuss."
"No more peppery than those Solanos you're marrying into. Why, most of the family came down on the beach and peppered me with rifles on my departing way. And your Leoncia pulled her little popgun on a long-bearded old fellow who might have been her father and gave him to understand she'd shoot him full of holes if he didn't stop plugging away at me."
"It was her father, I'll wager, old Enrico himself," Henry exclaimed. "And the other chaps were her brothers."
"Lovely lizards!" ejaculated Francis. "Say, don't you think life is liable to become a trifle monotonous when you're married into such a peaceful, dove-like family as that!" He broke off, struck by a new idea. "By the way, Henry, since they all thought it was you, and not I, why in thunderation did they want to kill you? Some more of your crusty Morgan temper that peeved your prospective wife's relatives?"
Henry looked at him a moment, as if debating with himself, and then answered.
"I don't mind telling you. It is a nasty mess, and I suppose my temper was to blame. I quarreled with her uncle. He was her father's youngest brother."
"Was?" interrupted Francis with significant stress on the past tense.
"Was, I said," Henry nodded. "He isn't now. His name was Alfaro Solano, and he had some temper himself. They claim to be descended from the Spanish conquistadores, and they are prouder than hornets. He'd made money in logwood, and he had just got a big henequen plantation started farther down the coast. And then we quarreled. It was in the little town over there San Antonio. It may have been a misunderstanding, though I still maintain he was wrong. He always was looking for trouble with me didn't want me to marry Leoncia, you see.
"Well, it was a hot time. It started in a pulqueria where Alfaro had been drinking more mescal than was good for him. He insulted me all right. They had to hold us apart and take our guns away, and we separated swearing death and destruction. That was the trouble our quarrel and our threats were heard by a score of witnesses.
"Within two hours the Comisario himself and two gendarmes found me bending over Alfaro's body in a back street in the town. He'd been knifed in the back, and I'd stumbled over him on the way to the beach. Explain? No such thing. There were the quarrel and the threats of vengeance, and there I was, not two hours afterward, caught dead to right with his warm corpse. I haven't been back in San Antonio since, and I didn't waste any time in getting away. Alfaro was very popular, you know the dashing type that catches the rabble's fancy. Why, they couldn't have been persuaded to give me even the semblance of a trial. Wanted my blood there and then, and I departed very pronto.
"Next, up at Bocas del Toro, a messenger from Leoncia delivered back the engagement ring. And there you are. I developed a real big disgust, and, since I didn't dare go back with all the Solanos and the rest of the population thirsting for my life, I came over here to play hermit for a while and dig for Morgan's treasure… Just the same, I wonder who did stick that knife into Alfaro. If ever I find him, then I clear myself with Leoncia and the rest of the Solanos and there isn't a doubt in the world that there'll be a wedding. And now that it's all over I don't mind admitting that Alfaro was a good scout, even if his temper did go off at half-cock."
"Clear as print," Francis murmured. "No wonder her father and brothers wanted to perforate me. Why, the more I look at you, the more I see we're as like as two peas, except for my mustache-"
"And for this…" Henry rolled up his sleeve, and on the left forearm showed a long, thin white scar. "Got that when I was a boy. Fell oft a windmill and through the glass roof of a hothouse."
"Now listen to me," Francis said, his face beginning to light with the project forming in his mind. "Somebody's got to straighten you out of this mess, and the chap's name is Francis, partner in the firm of Morgan and Morgan. You stick around here, or go over and begin prospecting on the Bull, while I go back and explain things to Leoncia and her people."
"If only they don't shoot you first before you can explain you are not I," Henry muttered bitterly. "That's the trouble with those Solanos. They shoot first and talk afterward. They won't listen to reason unless it's post mortem."
"Quess I'll take a chance, old man," Francis assured the other, himself all fire with the plan of clearing up the distressing situation between Henry and the girl.
But the thought of her perplexed him. He experienced more than a twinge of regret that the lovely creature belonged of right to the man who looked so much like him, and he saw again the vision of her on the beach, when, with conflicting emotions, she had alternately loved him and yearned toward him and blazed her scorn and contempt on him. He sighed involuntarily.
"What's that for?" Henry demanded quizzically.
"Leoncia is an exceedingly pretty girl," Francis answered with transparent frankness. "Just the same, she's yours, and I'm going to make it my business to see that you get her. Where's that ring she returned? If I don't put it on her finger for you and be back here in a week with the good news, you can cut off my mustache along with my ears."
An hour later, Captain Trefethen having sent a boat to the beach from the Angelique in response to signal, the two young men were saying good-bye.
"Just two things more, Francis. First, and I forgot to tell you, Leoncia is not a Solano at all, though she thinks she is. Alfaro told me himself. She is an adopted child, and old Enrico fairly worships her, though neither his blood nor his race runs in her veins. Alfaro never told me the ins and outs of it, though he did say she wasn't Spanish at all. I don't even know whether she's English or American. She talks good enough English, though she got that at convent. You see, she was adopted when she was a wee thing, and she's never known anything else than that Enrico is her father."
"And no wonder she scorned and hated me for you," Francis laughed, "believing, as she did, as she still does, that you knifed her full blood-uncle in the back."
Henry nodded, and went on.
"The other thing is fairly important. And that's the law. Or the absence of it, rather. They make it whatever they want it, down in this out-of-the-way hole. It's a long way to Panama, and the gobernador of this state, or district, or whatever they call it, is a sleepy old Silenus. The Jefe Politico at San Antonio is the man to keep an eye on. He's the little czar of that neck of the woods, and he's some crooked hombre, take it from yours truly. Graft is too weak a word to apply to some of his deals, and he's as cruel and blood-thirsty as a weasel. And his one crowning delight is an execution. He dotes on a hanging. Keep your weather eye on him, whatever you do … And, well, so long. And half of whatever I find on the Bull is yours:… and see you get that ring back on Leoncia's finger."
Two days later, after the half-breed skipper had reconnoitered ashore and brought back the news that all the men of Leoncia's family were away, Francis had himself landed on the beach where he had first met her. No maidens with silver revolvers nor men with rifles were manifest. All was placid, and the only person on the beach was a ragged little Indian boy who at sight of a coin readily consented to carry a note up to the young senorita of the big hacienda. As Francis scrawled on a sheet of paper from his notebook, "I am the man whom,you mistook for Henry Morgan, and I have a— message for you from him," he little dreamed that untoward happenings were about to occur with as equal rapidity and frequence as on his first visit.
For that matter, could he have peeped over the outjut of rock against which he leaned his back while composing the note to Leoncia, he would have been star bled by a vision of the young lady herself, emerging like a sea-goddess fresh from a swim in the sea. But he wrote calmly on, the Indian lad even more absorbed than himself in the operation, so that it was Leoncia, coming around the rock from behind, who first caught sight of him. Stifling an exclamation, she turned and fled blindly into the green screen of jungle.
His first warning of her proximity was immediately thereafter, when a startled scream of fear aroused him. Note and pencil fell to the sand as he sprang toward the direction of the cry and collided with a wet and scantily dressed young woman who was recoiling backward from whatever had caused her scream. The unexpectedness of the collision was provocative of a second startled scream from her ere she could turn and recognize that it was not a new attack but a rescuer.
She darted past him, her face colorless from the fright, stumbled over the Indian boy, nor paused until she was out on the open sand.
"What is it?" Francis demanded. "Are you hurt? What's happened?"
She pointed at her bare knee, where two tiny drops of blood oozed forth side by side from two scarcely perceptible lacerations.
"It was a viperine," she said. "A deadly viperine. I shall be a dead woman in five minutes, and I am glad, glad, for then my heart will be tormented no more by you."
She leveled an accusing finger at him, gasped the beginning of denunciation she could not utter, and sank down in a faint.
Francis knew about the snakes of Central America merely by hearsay, but the hearsay was terrible enough. Men talked of even mules and dogs dying in horrible agony five to ten minutes after being struck by tiny reptiles fifteen to twenty inches long. Small wonder she had fainted, was his thought, with so terribly rapid a poison doubtlessly beginning to work. His knowledge of the treatment of snake-bite was likewise hearsay, but flashed through his mind the recollection of the need of a tourniquet to shut off the circulation above the wound and prevent the poison from reaching the heart.
He pulled out his handkerchief and tied it loosely around her leg above the knee, thrust in a short piece of driftwood stick, and twisted the handkerchief to savage tightness. Next, and all by hearsay, working swiftly, he opened the small blade of his pocket-knife, burned it with several matches to make sure against germs, and cut carefully but remorsely into the two lacerations made by the snake's fangs.
He was in a fright himself, working with feverish deftness and apprehending at any moment that the pangs of dissolution would begin to set in on the beautiful form before him. From all he had heard, the bodies of snake— victims began to swell quickly and prodigiously. Even as he finished excoriating the fang-wounds, his mind was made up to his next two acts. First, he would suck out all poison he possibly could; and, next, light a cigarette and with its rive end proceed to cauterize the flesh.
But while he was still making light, criss-cross cuts with the point of his knife-blade, she began to move restlessly.
"Lie down," he commanded, as she sat up, and just when he was bending his lips to the task.
In response, he received a resounding slap alongside of his face from her little hand. At the same instant the Indian lad danced out of the jungle, swinging a small dead snake by the tail and crying exultingly:
"Labarri! Labarri!"
At which Francis assumed the worst.
"Lie down, and be quiet!" he repeated harshly. "You haven't a second to lose."
But she had eyes only for the dead snake. Her relief was patent; but Francis was no witness to it, for he was bending again to perform the classic treatment of snake-bite.
"You dare!" she threatened him. "It's only a baby labarri, and its bite is harmless. I thought it was a viperine. They look alike when the labarri is small."
The constriction of the circulation by the tourniquet pained her, and she glanced down and discovered his handkerchief knotted around her leg.
"Oh, what have you done?"
A warm blush began to suffuse her face.
"But it was only a baby labarri," she reproached him.
"You told me it was a viperine," he retorted.
She hid her face in her hands, although the pink of flush burned furiously in her ears. Yet he could have sworn, unless it were hysteria, that she was laughing; and he knew for the first time how really hard was the task he had undertaken to put the ring of another man on her finger. So he deliberately hardened his heart against the beauty and fascination of her, and said bitterly:
"And now, I suppose some of your gentry will shoot me full of holes because I don't know a labarri from a viperine. You might call some of the farm hands down to do it. Or maybe you'd like to take a shot at me yourself."
But she seemed not to have heard, for she had arisen with the quick litheness to be expected of so gloriously fashioned a creature, and was stamping her foot on the sand.
"It's asleep my foot," she explained with laughter unhidden this time by her hands.
"You're acting perfectly disgracefully," he assured her wickedly, "when you consider that I am the murderer of your uncle."
Thus reminded, the laughter ceased and the color receded from her fa^e. She made no reply, but bending, with fingers that trembled with anger she strove to unknot the handkerchief as if it were some loathsome thing.
"Better let me help," he suggested pleasantly.
"You beast!" she flamed at him. "Step aside. Your shadow falls upon me."
"Now you are delicious, charming," he girded, belying the desire that stirred compellingly within him to clasp her in his arms. "You quite revive my last recollection of you here on the beach, one second reproaching me for not kissing you, the next second kissing me yes, you did, too — and the third second threatening to destroy my digestion forever with that little tin toy pistol of yours. No; you haven't changed an iota from last time. You're the same spitfire of a Leoncia. You'd better let me untie that for you. Don't you see the knot is jammed? Your little fingers can never manage it."
She stamped her foot in sheer inarticulateness of rage.
"Lucky for me you don't make a practice of taking your tin toy pistol in swimming with you," ho teased on, "or else there 'd be a funeral right here on the beach pretty pronto of a perfectly nice young man whose intentions are never less than the best."
The Indian boy returned at this moment running with her bathing wrap, which she snatched from him and put on hastily. Next, with the boy's help, she attacked the knot again. When the handkerchief came off she flung it from her as if in truth it were a viperine.
"It was contamination," she flashed, for his benefit.
But Francis, still engaged in hardening his heart against her, shook his head slowly and said:
"It doesn't save you, Leoncia. I've left my mark on you that never will come off."
He pointed to the excoriations he had made on her knee and laughed.
"The mark of the beast," she came back, turning to go. "I warn you to take yourself off, Mr. Henry Morgan."
But he stepped in her way.
"And now we'll talk business, Miss Solano," he said in changed tones. "And you will listen. Let your eyes flash all they please, but don't interrupt me." He stooped and picked up the note he had been engaged in writing. "I was just sending that to you by the boy when you screamed. Take it. Read it. It won't bite you. It isn't a viperine."
Though she refused to receive it, her eyes involuntarily scanned the opening line:
I am the man whom you mistook for Henry Morgan…
She looked at him with startled eyes that could not comprehend much but which were guessing many vague things.
"On my honor," he said gravely.
"You… are… not… Henry?" she gasped.
"No, I am not. Won't you please take it and read."
This time she complied, while he gazed with all his eyes upon the golden pallor of the sun on her tropic-touched blonde face which colored the blood beneath, or which was touched by the blood beneath, to the amazingly beautiful golden pallor.
Almost in a dream he discovered himself looking into her startled, questioning eyes of velvet brown.
"And who should have signed this?" she repeated.
He came to himself and bowed.
"But the name? your name?"
"Morgan, Francis Morgan. As I explained there, Henry and I are some sort of distant relatives forty-fifth cousins, or something like that."
To his bewilderment, a great doubt suddenly dawned in her eyes, and the old familiar anger flashed.
"Henry," she accused him. "This is a ruse, a devil's trick you're trying to play on me. Of course you are Henry."
Francis pointed to his mustache.
"You've grown that since," she challenged.
He pulled up his sleeve and showed her his left arm from wrist to elbow. But she only looked her incomprehension of the meaning of his action.
"Do you remember the scar?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Then find it."
She bent her head in swift vain search, then shook it slowly as she faltered:
"I… I ask your forgiveness. I was terribly mistaken, and when I think of the way I… I've treated you…"
"That kiss was delightful," he naughtily disclaimed.
She recollected more immediate passages, glanced down at her knee and stifled what he adjudged was a most adorable giggle.
"You say you have a message from Henry," she changed the subject abruptly. "And that he is innocent…? This is true? Oh, I do want to believe you!"
"I am morally certain that Henry no more killed your uncle than did I."
"Then say no more, at least not now," she interrupted joyfully. "First of all I must make amends to you, though you must confess that some of the things you have done and said were abominable. You had no right to kiss me."
"If you will remember," he contended, "I did it at the pistol point. How was I to know but what I would get shot if I didn't."
"Oh, hush, hush," she begged. "You must go with me now to the house. And you can tell me about Henry on the way."
Her eyes chanced upon the handkerchief she had flung so contemptuously aside. She ran to it and picked it up.
"Poor, ill-treated kerchief," she crooned to it. "To you also must I make amends. I shall myself launder you, and…" Her eyes lifted to Francis as she addressed him. "And return it to you, sir, fresh and sweet and all wrapped around my heart of gratitude…"
"And the mark of the beast?" he queried.
"I am so sorry," she confessed penitently.
"And may I be permitted to rest my shadow upon you?"
"Do! Do!" she cried gaily. "There! I am in your shadow now. And we must start."
Francis tossed a peso to the grinning Indian boy, and, in high elation, turned and followed her into the tropic growth on the path that led up to the white hacienda.
Seated on the broad piazza of the Solano Hacienda, Alvarez Torres saw through the tropic shrubs the couple approaching along the winding drive-way. And he saw what made him grit his teeth and draw v^-ry erroneous conclusions. He muttered imprecations to himself— and forgot his cigarette.
What he saw was Leoncia and Francis in such deep and excited talk as to be oblivious of everything else. He saw Francis grow so urgent of speech and gesture as to cause Leoncia to stop abruptly and listen further to his pleading. Next and Torres could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes, he saw Francis produce a ring, and Leoncia, with averted face, extend her left hand and receive the ring upon her third ringer. Engagement finger it was, and Torres could have sworn to it.
What had really occurred was the placing of Henry's engagement ring back on Leoncia's hand. And Leoncia, she knew not why, had been vaguely averse to receiving it.
Torres tossed the dead cigarette away, twisted his mustache fiercely, as if to relieve his own excitement, and advanced to meet them across the piazza. He did not return the girl's greeting at the first. Instead, with the wrathful face of the Latin, he burst out at Francis:
"One does not expect shame in a murderer, but at leastone does expect simple decency."
Francis smiled whimsically.
"There it goes again," he said. "Another lunatic in this lunatic land. The last time, Leoncia, that I saw this gentleman was in New York. He was really anxious to do business with me. Now I meet him here and the first thing he tells me is that I am an indecent, shameless murderer."
"Senor Torres, you must apologize," she declared angrily. "The house of Solano is not accustomed to having its guests insulted."
"The house of Solano, I then understand, is accustomed to having its men murdered by transient adventurers," he retorted. "No sacrifice is too great when it is in the name of hospitality."
"Get off your foot, Senor Torres," Francis advised him pleasantly. "You are standing on it. I know what your mistake is. You think I am Henry Morgan. I am Francis Morgan, and you and I, not long ago, transacted business together in Regan's office in New York. There's my hand. Your shaking of it will be sufficient apology under the circumstances."
Torres, overwhelmed for the moment by his mistake, took the extended hand and uttered apologies both to Francis and Leoncia.
"And now," she beamed through laughter, clapping her hands to call a house-servant, "I must locate Mr. Morgan, and go and get some clothes on. And after that, Senor Torres, if you will pardon us, we will tell you about Henry."
While she departed, and while Francis followed away to his room on the heels of a young and pretty mestizo woman. Torres, his brain resuming its functions, found he was more amazed and angry than ever. This, then, was a newcomer and stranger to Leoncia whom he had seen putting a ring on her engagement finger. He thought quickly and passionately for a moment. Leoncia, whom to himself he always named the queen of his dreams, had, on an instant's notice, engaged herself to a strange Gringo from New York. It was unbelievable, monstrous.
He clapped his hands, summoned his hired carriage from San Antonio, and was speeding down the drive when Francis strolled forth to have a talk with him about further details of the hiding place of old Morgan's treasure.
After lunch, when a land-breeze sprang up, which meant fair wind and a quick run across Chiriqui Lagoon and along the length of it to the Bull and the Calf, Francis, eager to bring to Henry the good word that his ring adorned Leoncia's finger, resolutely declined her proffered hospitality to remain for the night and meet Enrico Solano and his tall sons. Francis had a further reason for hasty departure. He could not endure the presence of Leoncia and this in no sense uncomplimentary to her. She charmed him, drew him, to such extent that he dared not endure her charm and draw if he were to remain man-faithful to the man in the canvas pants even then digging holes in the sands of the Bull.
So Francis departed, a letter to Henry from Leoncia in his pocket. The last moment, ere he departed, was abrupt. With a sigh so quickly suppressed that Leoncia wondered whether. or not she had imagined it, he tore himself away. She gazed after his retreating form down the driveway until it was out of sight, then stared at the ring on her finger with a vaguely troubled expression.
From the beach, Francis signaled the Angelique, riding at anchor, to send a boat ashore for him. But before it had been swung into the water, half a dozen horsemen, revolverbelted, rifles across their pommels, rode down the beach upon him at a gallop. Two men led. The following four were hang-dog half-castes. Of the two leaders, Francis recognized Torres. Every rifle came to rest on Francis, and he could not but obey the order snarled at him by the unknown leader to throw up his hands. And Francis opined aloud:
"To think of it! Once, only the other day or was it a million years ago? I thought auction bridge, at a dollar a point, was some excitement. Now, sirs, you on your horses, with your weapons threatening the violent introduction of foreign substances into my poor body, tell me what is doing now. Don't I ever get off this beach without gunpowder complications? Is it my ears, or merely my mustache, you want?"
"We want you," answered the stranger leader, whose mustache bristled as magnetically as his crooked black eyes.
"And in the name of original sin and of all lovely lizards, who might you be?"
"He is the honorable Senor Mariano Vercara e Hijos, Jefe Politico of San Antonio," Torres replied.
"Good night," Francis laughed, remembering the man's description as given to him by Henry. "I suppose you think I've broken some harbor rule or sanitary regulation by anchoring here. But you must settle such things with my captain, Captain Trefethen, a very estimable gentleman. I am only the charterer of the schooner just a passenger. You will find Captain Trefethen right up in maritime law and custom."
"You are wanted for the murder of Alfaro Solano," was Torres' answer. "You didn't fool me, Henry Morgan, with your talk up at the hacienda that you were some one else. I know that some one else. His name is Francis Morgan, and I do not hesitate to add that he is not a murderer, but a gentleman."
"Ye gods and little fishes!" Francis exclaimed. "And yet you ahook hands with me, Senor Torres."
"I was fooled," Torres admitted sadly. "But only for a moment. Will you come peaceably?"
"As if," Francis shrugged his shoulders eloquently at the six rifles. "I suppose you'll give me a pronto trial and hang me at daybreak."
"Justice is swift in Panama," the Jefe Politico replied, his English queerly accented but understandable. "But not so quick as that. We will not hang you at daybreak. Ten o'clock in the morning is more comfortable all around, don't you think?"
"Oh, by all means," Francis retorted. "Make it eleven, or twelve noon I won't mind."
"You will kindly come with us, Senor," Mariano Vercara e Hijos, said, the suavity of his diction not masking the iron of its intention. "Juan! Ignacio!" he ordered in Spanish. "Dismount! Take his weapons. No, it will not be necessary to tie his hands. Put him on the horse behind Gregorio."
Francis, in a venerably whitewashed adobe cell with walls five feet thick, its earth floor carpeted with the forms of half a dozen sleeping peon prisoners, listened to a dim hammering not very distant, remembered the trial from which he had just emerged, and whistled long and low. The hour was half-past eight in the evening. The trial had begun at eight. The hammering was the hammering together of the scaffold beams, from which place of eminence he was scheduled at ten next morning to swing off into space supported from the ground by a rope around his neck. The trial had lasted half an hour by his watch. Twenty minutes would have covered it had Leoncia not burst in and prolonged it by the ten minutes courteously accorded her as the great lady of the Solano family.
"The Jefe was right," Francis acknowledged to himself in a matter of soliloquy. "Panama justice does move swiftly."
The very possession of the letter given him by Leoncia and addressed to Henry Morgan had damned him. The rest had been easy. Half a dozen witnesses had testified to the murder and identified him as the murderer. The Jefe Politico himself had so testified. The one cheerful note had been the eruption on the scene of Leoncia, chaperoned by a palsied old aunt of the Solano family. That had been sweet the fight the beautiful girl had put up for his life, despite the fact that it was foredoomed to futility.
When she had made Francis roll up the sleeve and expose his left forearm, he had seen the Jefe Politico shrug his shoulders contemptuously. And he had seen Leoncia fling a passion of Spanish words, too quick for him to follow, at Torres. And he had seen and heard the gesticulation and the roar of the mob-filled court-room as Torres had taken the stand.
But what he had not seen was the whispered colloquy between Torres and the Jefe, as the former was in the thick of forcing his way through the press to the witness box. He no more saw this particular side-play than did he know that Torres was in the pay of Regan to keep him away from New York as long as possible, and as long as ever if possible, nor than did he know that Torres himself, in love with Leoncia, was consumed with a jealousy that knew no limit to its ire.
All of which had blinded Francis to the play under the interrogation of Torres by Leoncia, which had compelled Torres to acknowledge that he had never seen a scar on Francis Morgan's left forearm. While Leoncia had looked at the little old judge in triumph, the Jefe Politico had advanced and demanded of Torres in stentorian tones:
"Can you swear that you ever saw a scar on Henry Morgan's arm?"
Torres had been baffled and embarrassed, had looked bewilderment to the judge and pleadingness to Leoncia, and, in the end, without speech, shaken his head that he could not so swear.
The roar of triumph had gone up from the crowd of ragamuffins. The judge had pronounced sentence, the roar had doubled on itself, and Francis had been hustled out and to his cell, not entirely unresistingly, by the gendarmes and the Comisario, all apparently solicitous of saving him from the mob that was unwilling to wait till ten next morning for his death.
"That poor dub, Torres, who fell down on the scar on Henry!" Francis was meditating sympathetically, when the bolts of his cell door shot back and he arose to greet Leoncia.
But she declined to greet him for the moment, as she flared at the Comisario in rapid-fire Spanish, with gestures of command to which he yielded when he ordered the jailer to remove the peons to other cells, and himself, with a nervous and apologetic bowing, went out and closed the door.
And then Leoncia broke down, sobbing on his shoulder, in his arms: "It is a cursed country, a cursed country. There is no fair play."
And as Francis held her pliant form, meltingly exquisite in its maddeningness of woman, he remembered Henry, in his canvas pants, bare-footed, un^er his floppy sombrero, digging holes in the sand of the Bull.
He tried to draw away from the armful of deliciousness, and only half succeeded. Still, at such slight removal of distance, he essayed the intellectual part, rather than the emotional part he desired all too strongly to act.
"And now I know at last what a frame-up is," he assured her, farthest from the promptings of his heart. "If these Latins of your country thought more coolly instead of acting so passionately, they might be building railroads and developing their country. That trial was a straight passionate frame-up. They just knew I was guilty and were so eager to punish me that they wouldn't even bother for mere evidence or establishment of identity. Why delay? They Imew Henry Morgan had knifed Alfaro. They knew I was Henry Morgan. When one knows, why bother to find out?"
Deaf to his words, sobbing and struggling to cling closer while he spoke, the moment he had finished she was deep again in his arms, against him, to him, her lips raised to his; and, ere he was aware, his own lips to hers. "I love you, I love you," she whispered brokenly.
"No, no," he denied what he most desired. "Henry and I are too alike. It is Henry you love, and I am not Henry."
She tore herself away from her own clinging, drew Henry's ring from her finger, and threw it on the floor. Francis was so beyond himself that he knew not what was going to happen the next moment, and was only saved from whatever it might be by the entrance of the Comisario, watch in hand, with averted face striving to see naught else than the moments registered by the second-hand on the dial.
She stiffened herself proudly, and all but broke down again as Francis slipped Henry's ring back on her finger and kissed her hand in farewell. Just ere she passed out the door she turned and with a whispered movement of the lips that was devoid of sound told him: "I love you."
Promptly as the stroke of the clock, at ten o'clock Francis was led out into the jail patio where stood the gallows. All San Antonio was joyously and shoutingly present,' including much of the neighboring population and Leoncia, Enrico Solano, and his five tall sons. Enrico and his sons fumed and strutted, but the Jefe Politico, backed by the Comisario and his gendarmes, was adamant. In vain, as Francis was forced to the foot of the scaffold, did Leoncia strive to get to him and did her men strive to persuade her to leave the patio. In vain, also, did her father and brothers protest that Francis was not the man. The Jefe Politico smiled contemptuously and ordered the execution to proceed.
On top the scaffold, standing on the trap, Francis declined the ministrations of the priest, telling him in Spanish that no innocent man being hanged needed intercessions with the next world, but that the men who were doing the hanging were in need of just such intercessions.
They had tied Francis' legs, and were in the act of tying his arms, with the men who held the noose and the black cap hovering near to put them on him, when the voice of a singer was heard approaching from without; and the song he sang was:
"Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew… "
Leoncia, almost fainting, recovered at the sound of the voice, and cried out with sharp delight as she descried Henry Morgan entering, thrusting aside the guards at the gate who tried to bar his way.
At sight of him the only one present who suffered chagrin was Torres, which passed unnoticed in the excitement. The populace was in accord with the Jefe, who shrugged his shoulders and announced that one man was as good as another so long as the hanging went on. And here arose hot contention from the Solano men that Henry was likewise innocent of the murder of Alfaro. But it was Francis, from the scaffold, while his arms and legs were being untied, who shouted through the tumult:
"You tried me! You have not tried him! You cannot hang a man without trial! He must have his trial!"
And when Francis had descended from the scaffold and was shaking Henry's hand in both his own, the Comisario, with the Jefe at his back, duly arrested Henry Morgan for the murder of Alfaro Solano.