Hearts of Three by Jack London Chapter XXV
MEANWHILE, after the manner of cross purposes in New York, wherein Regan craftily proceeded with his gigantic raid on all Francis' holdings while Francis and Bascom vainly strove to find his identity, so in Panama were at work cross purposes which involved Leoncia and the Solanos, Torres and the Jefe, and, not least in importance, one, Yi Poon, the rotund and moon-faced Chinese.
The little old judge, who was the Jefe's creature, sat asleep in court in San Antonio. He had slept placidly for two hours, occasionally nodding his head and muttering profoundly, although the case was a grave one, involving twenty years in San Juan, where the strongest could not survive ten years. But there was no need for the judge to consider evidence or argument. Before the case was called, decision and sentence were in his mind, having been put there by the Jefe. The prisoner's lawyer ceased his perfunctory argument, the clerk of the court sneezed, and the judge woke up. He looked about him briskly and said: "Guilty." No one was surprised, not even the prisoner.
"Appear to-morrow morning for sentence. Next case."
Having so ordered, the judge prepared to settle down into another nap, when he saw Torres and the Jefe enter the courtroom. A gleam in the Jefe's eye was his cue, and he abruptly dismissed court for the day.
"I have been to Rodriguez Fernandez," the Jefe was explaining five minutes later, in the empty courtroom. "He says it was a natural gem, and that much would be lost in the cutting, but that nevertheless he would still give five hundred gold for it. Show it to the judge, Senor Torres, and the rest of the handful of big ones."
And Torres began to lie. He had to lie, because he could not confess the shame of having had the gems taken away from him by the Solanos and the Morgans when they threw him out of the hacienda. And so convincingly did he lie that even the Jefe he convinced, while the judge, except in the matter of brands of strong liquor, accepted everything the Jefe wanted him to believe. In brief, shorn of the multitude of details that Torres threw in, his tale was that he was so certain of the jeweler's under-appraisal that he had despatched the gems by special messenger to his agent in Colon with instructions to forward to New York to Tiffany's for appraisement that might lead to sale.
As they emerged from the courtroom and descended the several steps that were flanked by single adobe pillars marred by bullet scars from previous revolutions, the Jefe was saying:
"And so, needing the aegis of the law for our adventure after these geins, and, more than that, both of us loving our good friend the judge, we will let him in for a modest share of whatever we shall gain. He shall represent us in San Antonio while we are gone, and, if needs be, furnish us with the law's protection."
Now it happened that behind one of the pillars, hat pulled over his face, Yi Poon half — sat, half — reclined. Nor was he there by mere accident. Long ago he had learned that secrets of value, which always connoted the troubles of humans, were markedly prevalent around courtrooms, which were the focal points for the airing of such troubles when they became acute. One could never tell. At any moment a secret might leap at one or brim over to one. Therefore it was like a fisherman casting his line into the sea for Yi Poon to watch the defendant and the plaintiff, the witnesses for and against, and even the court hangeron or casual-seeming onlooker.
So, on this morning, the one person of promise that Yi Poon had picked out was a ragged old peon who looked as if he had been drinking too much and yet would perish in his condition of reaction if he did not get another drink very immediately. Bleary-eyed he was, and red-lidded, with desperate resolve painted on all his haggard, withered lineaments. When the court-room had emptied, he had taken up his stand. outside on the steps close to a pillar.
And why? Yi Poon had asked himself. Inside remained only the three chief men of San Antonio the Jefe, Torres, and the judge. What connection between them, or any of them, and the drink-sodden creature that shook as if freezing in the scorching blaze of the direct sun-rays? Yi Poon did not know, but he did know that it was worth while waiting on a chance, no matter how remote, of finding out. So, behind the pillar, where no atom of shade protected him from the cooking sun which he detested, he lolled on the steps with all the impersonation of one placidly infatuated with sun-baths. The old peon tottered a step, swayed as if about to fall, yet managed to deflect Torres from his companions, who paused to wait for him on the pavement a dozen paces on, restless and hot-footed as if they stood on a grid, though deep in earnest conversation. And Yi Poon missed no word nor gesture, nor glint of eye nor shifting face-line, of the dialogue that took place between the grand Torres and the wreck of a peon. "What now?" Torres demanded harshly.
"Money, a little money, for the love of God, senor, a little money," the ancient peon whined.
"You have had your money," Torres snarled. "When I went away I gave you double the amount to last you twice as long. Not for two weeks yet is there a centavo due you."
"I am in debt," was the old man's whimper, the while all the flesh of him quivered and trembled from the nerveravishment of the drink so palpably recently consumed.
"On the pulque slate at Peter and Paul's," Torres, with a sneer, diagnosed unerringly.
"On the pulque slate at Peter and Paul's," was the frank acknowledgment. "And the slate is full. No more pulque can I get credit for. I am wretched and suffer a thousand torments without my pulque."
"You are a pig creature without reason!"
A strange dignity, as of wisdom beyond wisdom, seemed suddenly to animate the old wreck as he straightened up, for the nonce ceased from trembling, and gravely said:
"I am old. There is no vigor left in the veins or the heart of me. The desires of my youth are gone. Not even may I labor with this broken body of mine, though well I know that labor is an easement and a forgetting. Not even may I labor and forget. Food is a distaste in my mouth and a pain in my belly. Women they are a pest that it is a vexation to remember ever having desired. Children I buried my last a dozen years gone. Religion it frightens me. Death I sleep with the terror of it. Pulque ah, dear God! the one tickle and taste of living left to me!
"What if I drink over much? It is because I have much to forget, and have but a little space yet to linger in the sun, ere the Darkness, for my old eyes, blots out the sun forever."
Impervious to the old man's philosophy, Torres made an impatient threat of movement that he was going.
"A few pesos, just a handful of pesos," the old peon pleaded.
"Not a centavo," Torres said with finality.
"Very well," said the old man with equal finality.
"What do you mean?" Torres rasped with swift suspicion.
"Have you forgotten?" was the retort, with such emphasis of significance as to make Yi Poon wonder for what reason Torres gave the peon what seemed a pension or an allowance.
"I pay you, according to agreement, to forget," said. Torres.
"I shall never forget that my old eyes saw you stab the Senor Alfaro Solano in the back," the peon replied.
Although he remained hidden and motionless in his posture of repose behind the pillar, Yi Poon metaphorically sat up. The Solanos were persons of place and wealth. That Torres should have murdered one of them was indeed a secret of price.
"Beast! Pig without reason! Animal of the dirt!" Torres' hands clenched in his rage. "Because I am kind do you treat me thus! One blabbing of your tongue and I will send you to San Juan. You know what that means. Not only will you sleep with the terror of death, but never for a moment of waking will you be free of the terror of living as you stare upon the buzzards that will surely and shortly pick your bones. And there will be no pulque in San Juan. There is never any pulque in San Juan for the men I send there. So? Eh? I thought so. You will wait two weeks for the proper time when I shall again give you money. If you do not wait, then never, this side of your interment in the bellies of buzzards, will you drink pulque again."
Torres whirled on his heel and was gone. Yi Poon watched him and his two companions go down the street, then rounded the pillar to find the old peon sunk down in collapse at his disappointment of not getting any pulque, groaning and moaning and making sharp little yelping cries, his body quivering as dying animals quiver in the final throes, his fingers picking at his flesh and garments as if picking off centipedes. Down beside him sat Yi Poon, who began a remarkable performance of his own. Drawing gold coins and silver ones from his pockets he began to count over his money with chink and clink that was mellow and liquid and that to the distraught peon's ear was as the sound of the rippling and riffling of fountains of pulque
"We are wise," Yi Poon told him in grandiloquent Spanish, still clinking the money, while the peon whined and yammered for the few centavos necessary for one drink of pulque. "We are wise, you and I, old man, and we will sit here and tell each other what we know about men and women, and life and love, and anger and sudden death, the rage red in the heart and the steel bitter cold in the back; and if you tell me what pleases me, then shall you drink pulque till your ears run cut with it, and your eyes are drowned in it. You like that pulque, eh? You like one drink now, now, soon, very quick?"
The night, while the Jefe Politico and Torres organized their expedition under cover of the dark, was destined to be a momentous one in the Solano hacienda. Things began to happen early. Dinner over, drinking their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, the family, of which Henry was accounted one by virtue of his brotherhood to Leoncia, sat on the wide front veranda. Through the moonlight, up the steps, they saw a strange figure approach.
"It is like a ghost," said Alvarado Solano.
"A fat ghost," Martinez, his twin brother, amended.
"A Chink ghost you couldn't poke your finger through," Bicardo laughed.
"The very Chink who saved Leoncia and me from marrying," said Henry Morgan, with recognition.
"The seller of secrets," Leoncia gurgled. "And if he hasn't brought a new secret, I shall be disappointed."
"What do you want, Chinaman?" Alesandro, the eldest of the Solano brothers, demanded sharply.
"Nice new secret, very nice new secret maybe you buy," Yi Poon murmured proudly.
"Your secrets are too' expensive, Chinaman," said Enrico discouragingly.
"This nice new secret very expensive," Yi Poon assured complacentJy.
"Go away," old Enrico ordered. "I shall live a long time, yet to the day of my death I care to hear no more secrets."
But Yi Poon was suavely certain of himself.
"One time you have very fine brother," he said. "One time your very fine brother, the Senor Alfaro Solano, die with knife in his back. Very well. Some secret, eh?"
But Enrico was on his feet quivering.
"You know?" he almost screamed his eager interrogation.
"How much?" said Yi Poon.
"All I possess!" Enrico cried, ere turning to Alesandro to add: "You deal with him, son. Pay him well if he can prove by witness of the eye."
"You bet," quoth Yi Poon. "I got witness. He got good eye-sight. He see man stick knife in the Senor Alfaro 's back in the dark. His name …"
"Yes, yes," Enrico breathed his suspense.
"One thousand dollars his name," said Yi Poon, hesitating to make up his mind to what kind of dollars he could dare to claim. "One thousand dollars gold," he concluded.
Enrico forgot that he had deputed the transaction to his eldest son.
"Where is your witness?" he shouted.
And Yi Poon, calling softly down the steps into the shrubbery, evoked the pulque-ravaged peon, a real-looking ghost who slowly advanced and tottered up the steps.
At the same time, on the edge of town, twenty mounted men, among whom were the gendarmes Bafael, Ignacio, Augustino, and Vicente, herded a pack train of more than twenty mules and waited the command of the Jefe to depart on they knew not what mysterious adventure into the Cordilleras. What they did know was that, herded carefully apart from all other animals, was a strapping big mule loaded with tw r o hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite. Also, they knew that the delay was due to the Senor Torres, who had ridden away along the beach with the dreaded Caroo murderer, Jose" Mancheno, who, only by the grace of God and of the Jefe Politico, had been kept for years from expiating on the scaffold his various offenses against life and law.
And, while Torres waited on the beach and held the Caroo's horse and an extra horse, the Caroo ascended on foot the winding road that led to the hacienda of the Solanos. Little did Torres guess that twenty feet away, in the jungle that encroached on the beach, lay a placid-sleeping, pulquedrunken, old peon, with, crouching beside him, a very alert and very sober Chinese with a recently acquired thousand dollars stowed under his belt. Yi Poon had had barely time to drag the peon into hiding when Torres rode along in the sand and stopped almost beside him.
Up at the hacienda, all members of the household were going to bed. Leoncia, just starting to let down her hair, stopped when she heard the rattle of tiny pebbles against her windows. Warning her in low. whispers to make no noise, Jose" Mancheno handed her a crumpled note which Torres had written, saying mysteriously:
"From a strange Chinaman who waits not a hundred feet away on the edge of the shrubbery."
And Leoncia read, in execrable Spanish:
"First time, I tell you secret about Henry Morgan. This time I have secret about Francis. You come along and talk with me now."
Leoncia's heart leaped at mention of Francis, and as she slipped on a mantle and accompanied the Caroo it never entered her head to doubt that Yi Poon was waiting for her.
And Yi Poon, down on the beach and spying upon Torres, had no doubts when he saw the Caroo murderer appear with the Solano senorita, bound and gagged, slung across his shoulder like a sack of meal. Nor did Yi Poon have any doubts about his next action, when he saw Leoncia tied into the saddle of the spare horse and taken away down the beach at a gallop, with Torres and the Caroo riding on either side of her. Leaving the pulque-sodden peon to sleep, the fat Chinaman took the road up the hill at so stiff a pace that he arrived breathless at the hacienda. Not content with knocking at the door, he beat upon it with his fists and feet and prayed to his Chinese gods that no peevish Solano should take a shot at him before he could explain the urgency of his errand.
"O go to hell," Alesandro said, when he had opened the door and flashed a light on the face of the importunate caller.
"I have big secret," Yi Poon panted. "Very big brand new secret." "Come around to-morrow in business hours," Alesandro growled as he prepared to kick the Chinaman off the premises.
"I don't sell secret," Yi Poon stammered and gasped. "I make you present. I give secret now. The Senorita, your sister, she is stolen. She is tied upon a horse that runs fast down the beach."
But Alesandro, who had said good night to Leoncia, not half an hour before, laughed loudly his unbelief, and prepared again to boot off the trafficker in secrets. Yi Poon was desperate. He drew forth the thousand dollars and placed it in Alesandro's hand, saying:
"You go look quick. If the Senorita stop in this house now, you keep all that money. If the Senorita no stop, then you give money back…"
And Alesandro was convinced. A minute later he was rousing the house. Five minutes later the horse-peons, their eyes hardly open from sound sleep, were roping and saddling horses and pack-mules in the corrals, while the Solano tribe was pulling on riding gear and equipping itself with weapons.
Up and down the coast, and on the various paths leading back to the Cordilleras, the Solanos scattered, questing blindly in the blind dark for the trail of the abductors. As chance would have it, thirty hours afterward, Henry alone caught the scent and followed it, so that, camped in the very Footstep of God where first the old Maya priest had sighted the eyes of Chia, he found the entire party of twenty men and Leoncia cooking and eating breakfast. Twenty to one, never fair and always impossible, did not appeal to Henry Morgan's Anglo-Saxon mind. What did appeal to him was the dynamite-loaded mule, tethered apart from the off-saddl-ed forty-odd animals and left to stand by the careless peons with its load still on its back. Instead of attempting the patently impossible rescue of Leoncia, and recognising that in numbers her woman's safety lay^ he stole the dynamite — mule.
Not far did he take it. In the shelter of the low woods, he opened the pack and filled all his pockets with sticks of dynamite, a box of detonators, and a short coil of fuse. With a regretful look at the rest of the dynamite which he would have liked to explode but dared not, he busied himself along the line of retreat he would have to take if he succeeded in stealing Leoncia from her captors. As Francis, on a previous occasion at Juchitan, had sown the retreat with silver dollars, so, this time, did Henry sow the retreat with dynamite the sticks in small bundles and the fuses, no longer than the length of a detonator, and with detonators fast to each end.
Three hours Henry devoted to lurking around the camp in the Footstep of God, ere he got his opportunity to signal his presence to Leoncia; and another precious two hours were wasted ere she found her opportunity to steal away to him. Which would not have been so bad, had not her escape almost immediately been discovered and had not the gendarmes and the rest of Torres' party, mounted, been able swiftly to overtake them on foot.
When Henry drew Leoncia down to hide beside him in the shelter of a rock, and at the same time brought his rifle into action ready for play, she protested.
"We haven't a chance, Henry," she said. "They are too many. If you fight you will be killed. And then what will become of me? Better that you make your own escape, and bring help, leaving me to be retaken, than that you die and let me be retaken anyway."
But he shook his head.
"We are not going to be taken, dearest sister. Put your trust in me and watch. Here they come now. You just watch."
Variously mounted, on horses and pack mules whichever had come handiest in their haste Torres, the Jefe, and their men clattered into sight. Henry drew a sight, not on them, but on the point somewhat nearer where he had made his first plant of dynamite. When he pulled trigger, the intervening distance rose up in a cloud of smoke and earth dust that obscured them. As the cloud slowly dissipated, they could be seen, half of them, animals and men, overthrown, and all of them dazed and shocked by the explosion.
Henry seized Leoncia's hand, jerked her to her feet, and ran on side by side with her. Conveniently beyond his second planting, he drew her down beside him to rest and catch breath.
"They won't come on so fast this time," he hissed exultantly. " And the longer they pursue us the slower they'll come on."
True to his forecast, when the pursuit appeared, it moved very cautiously and very slowly.
"They ought to be "killed," Henry said. "But they have no chance, and I haven't the heart to do it. But I'll surely shake them up some."
Again he fired into his planted dynamite, and again, turning his back on the confusion, he fled to his third planting.
After he had fired off the third explosion, he raced Leoncia to his tethered horse, put her in the saddle, and ran on beside her, hanging on to her stirrup.