E-text prepared by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

Nore: Images of the original pages are available through
      https://archive.org/details/heartsofthreejack00londrich

HEARTS OF THREE

by

JACK LONDON

Author of “The Valley of the Moon,”
“Jerry of the Islands,”
“Michael, Brother of Jerry,” &c., &c.

Mills & Boon, Limited
49 Rupert Street
London, W.

Copyright in the United States of America by Jack London.

                                FOREWORD

I hope the reader will forgive me for beginning this foreword with a
brag. In truth, this yarn is a celebration. By its completion I
celebrate my fortieth birthday, my fiftieth book, my sixteenth year in
the writing game, and a new departure. “Hearts of Three” is a new
departure. I have certainly never done anything like it before; I am
pretty certain never to do anything like it again. And I haven’t the
least bit of reticence in proclaiming my pride in having done it. And
now, for the reader who likes action, I advise him to skip the rest of
this brag and foreword, and plunge into the narrative, and tell me if it
just doesn’t read along.

For the more curious let me explain a bit further. With the rise of
moving pictures into the overwhelmingly most popular form of amusement
in the entire world, the stock of plots and stories in the world’s
fiction fund began rapidly to be exhausted. In a year a single producing
company, with a score of directors, is capable of filming the entire
literary output of the entire lives of Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens,
Scott, Zola, Tolstoy, and of dozens of less voluminous writers. And
since there are hundreds of moving pictures producing companies, it can
be readily grasped how quickly they found themselves face to face with a
shortage of the raw material of which moving pictures are fashioned.

The film rights in all novels, short stories, and plays that were still
covered by copyright, were bought or contracted for, while all similar
raw material on which copyright had expired was being screened as
swiftly as sailors on a placer beach would pick up nuggets. Thousands of
scenario writers—literally tens of thousands, for no man, nor woman, nor
child was too mean not to write scenarios—tens of thousands of scenario
writers pirated through all literature (copyright or otherwise), and
snatched the magazines hot from the press to steal any new scene or plot
or story hit upon by their writing brethren.

In passing, it is only fair to point out that, though only the other
day, it was in the days ere scenario writers became respectable, in the
days when they worked overtime for rough-neck directors for fifteen and
twenty a week or freelanced their wares for from ten to twenty dollars
per scenario and half the time were beaten out of the due payment, or
had their stolen goods stolen from them by their equally graceless and
shameless fellows who slaved by the week. But to-day, which is only a
day since the other day, I know scenario writers who keep their three
machines, their two chauffeurs, send their children to the most
exclusive prep schools, and maintain an unwavering solvency.

It was largely because of the shortage in raw material that scenario
writers appreciated in value and esteem. They found themselves in
demand, treated with respect, better remunerated, and, in return,
expected to deliver a higher grade of commodity. One phase of this new
quest for material was the attempt to enlist known authors in the work.
But because a man had written a score of novels was no guarantee that he
could write a good scenario. Quite to the contrary, it was quickly
discovered that the surest guarantee of failure was a previous record of
success in novel-writing.

But the moving pictures producers were not to be denied. Division of
labor was the thing. Allying themselves with powerful newspaper
organisations, or, in the case of “Hearts of Three,” the very reverse,
they had highly-skilled writers of scenario (who couldn’t write novels
to save themselves) make scenarios, which, in turn, were translated into
novels by novel-writers (who couldn’t, to save themselves, write
scenarios).

Comes now Mr. Charles Goddard to one, Jack London, saying: “The time,
the place, and the men are met; the moving pictures producers, the
newspapers, and the capital, are ready: let us get together.” And we
got. Result: “Hearts of Three.” When I state that Mr. Goddard has been
responsible for “The Perils of Pauline,” “The Exploits of Elaine,” “The
Goddess,” the “Get Rich Quick Wallingford” series, etc., no question of
his skilled fitness can be raised. Also, the name of the present
heroine, Leoncia, is of his own devising.

On the ranch, in the “Valley of the Moon,” he wrote his first several
episodes. But he wrote faster than I, and was done with his fifteen
episodes weeks ahead of me. Do not be misled by the word “episode.” The
first episode covers three thousand feet of film. The succeeding
fourteen episodes cover each two thousand feet of film. And each episode
contains about ninety scenes, which makes a total of some thirteen
hundred scenes. Nevertheless, we worked simultaneously at our respective
tasks. I could not build for what was going to happen next or a dozen
chapters away, because I did not know. Neither did Mr. Goddard know. The
inevitable result was that “Hearts of Three” may not be very vertebrate,
although it is certainly consecutive.

Imagine my surprise, down here in Hawaii and toiling at the novelization
of the tenth episode, to receive by mail from Mr. Goddard in New York
the scenario of the fourteenth episode, and glancing therein, to find my
hero married to the wrong woman!—and with only one more episode in which
to get rid of the wrong woman and duly tie my hero up with the right and
only woman. For all of which please see last chapter of fifteenth
episode. Trust Mr. Goddard to show me how.

For Mr. Goddard is the master of action and lord of speed. Action
doesn’t bother him at all. “Register,” he calmly says in a film
direction to the moving picture actor. Evidently the actor registers,
for Mr. Goddard goes right on with more action. “Register grief,” he
commands, or “sorrow,” or “anger,” or “melting sympathy,” or “homicidal
intent,” or “suicidal tendency.” That’s all. It has to be all, or how
else would he ever accomplish the whole thirteen hundred scenes?

But imagine the poor devil of a me, who can’t utter the talismanic
“register” but who must describe, and at some length inevitably, these
moods and modes so airily created in passing by Mr. Goddard! Why,
Dickens thought nothing of consuming a thousand words or so in
describing and subtly characterizing the particular grief of a
particular person. But Mr. Goddard says, “Register,” and the slaves of
the camera obey.

And action! I have written some novels of adventure in my time, but
never, in all of the many of them, have I perpetrated a totality of
action equal to what is contained in “Hearts of Three.”

But I know, now, why moving pictures are popular. I know, now, why
Messrs. “Barnes of New York” and “Potter of Texas” sold by the millions
of copies. I know, now, why one stump speech of high-falutin’ is a more
efficient vote-getter than a finest and highest act or thought of
statesmanship. It has been an interesting experience, this novelization
by me of Mr. Goddard’s scenario; and it has been instructive. It has
given me high lights, foundation lines, cross-bearings, and illumination
on my anciently founded sociological generalizations. I have come, by
this adventure in writing, to understand the mass mind of the people
more thoroughly than I thought I had understood it before, and to
realize, more fully than ever, the graphic entertainment delivered by
the demagogue who wins the vote of the mass out of his mastery of its
mind. I should be surprised if this book does not have a large sale.
(“Register surprise,” Mr. Goddard would say; or “Register large sale”).

If this adventure of “Hearts of Three” be collaboration, I am
transported by it. But alack!—I fear me Mr. Goddard must then be the one
collaborator in a million. We have never had a word, an argument, nor a
discussion. But then, I must be a jewel of a collaborator myself. Have I
not, without whisper or whimper of complaint, let him “register” through
fifteen episodes of scenario, through thirteen hundred scenes and
thirty-one thousand feet of film, through one hundred and eleven
thousand words of novelization? Just the same, having completed the
task, I wish I’d never written it—for the reason that I’d like to read
it myself to see if it reads along. I am curious to know. I am curious
to know.

                                                            JACK LONDON.

 Waikiki, Hawaii,
         _March 23, 1916_.

                   Back to Back Against the Mainmast

                 Do ye seek for fun and fortune?
                   Listen, rovers, now to me!
                 Look ye for them on the ocean:
                   Ye shall find them on the sea.

                                 CHORUS:

                     Roaring wind and deep blue water!
                       We’re the jolly devils who,
                     Back to back against the mainmast,
                       Held at bay the entire crew.

                 Bring the dagger, bring the pistols!
                   We will have our own to-day!
                 Let the cannon smash the bulwarks!
                   Let the cutlass clear the way!

                                 CHORUS:

                     Roaring wind and deep blue water!
                       We’re the jolly devils who,
                    Back to back against the mainmast,
                       Held at bay the entire crew.

                 Here’s to rum and here’s to plunder!
                   Here’s to all the gales that blow!
                 Let the seamen cry for mercy!
                   Let the blood of captains flow!

                                 CHORUS:

                   Roaring wind and deep blue water!
                     We’re the jolly devils who,
                   Back to back against the mainmast,
                     Held at bay the entire crew.

                 Here’s to ships that we have taken!
                   They have seen which men were best.
                 We have lifted maids and cargo,
                   And the sharks have had the rest.

                                 CHORUS:

                   Roaring wind and deep blue water!
                     We’re the jolly devils who,
                   Back to back against the mainmast,
                     Held at bay the entire crew.

                                                     —_George Sterling._

                            HEARTS OF THREE

                               CHAPTER I.

Events happened very rapidly with Francis Morgan that late spring
morning. If ever a man leaped across time into the raw, red drama and
tragedy of the primitive and the medieval melodrama of sentiment and
passion of the New World Latin, Francis Morgan was destined to be that
man, and Destiny was very immediate upon him.

Yet he was lazily unaware that aught in the world was stirring, and was
scarcely astir himself. A late night at bridge had necessitated a late
rising. A late breakfast of fruit and cereal had occurred along the
route to the library—the austerely elegant room from which his father,
toward the last, had directed vast and manifold affairs.

“Parker,” he said to the valet who had been his father’s before him,
“did you ever notice any signs of fat on R.H.M. in his last days?”

“Oh, no, sir,” was the answer, uttered with all the due humility of the
trained servant, but accompanied by an involuntarily measuring glance
that scanned the young man’s splendid proportions. “Your father, sir,
never lost his leanness. His figure was always the same,
broad-shouldered, deep in the chest, big-boned, but lean, always lean,
sir, in the middle. When he was laid out, sir, and bathed, his body
would have shamed most of the young men about town. He always took good
care of himself; it was those exercises in bed, sir. Half an hour every
morning. Nothing prevented. He called it religion.”

“Yes, he was a fine figure of a man,” the young man responded idly,
glancing to the stock-ticker and the several telephones his father had
installed.

“He was that,” Parker agreed eagerly. “He was lean and aristocratic in
spite of his shoulders and bone and chest. And you’ve inherited it, sir,
only on more generous lines.”

Young Francis Morgan, inheritor of many millions as well as brawn,
lolled back luxuriously in a huge leather chair, stretched his legs
after the manner of a full-vigored menagerie lion that is overspilling
with vigor, and glanced at a headline of the morning paper which
informed him of a fresh slide in the Culebra Cut at Panama.

“If I didn’t know we Morgans didn’t run that way,” he yawned, “I’d be
fat already from this existence.... Eh, Parker?”

The elderly valet, who had neglected prompt reply, startled at the
abrupt interrogative interruption of the pause.

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said hastily. “I mean, no, sir. You are in the pink
of condition.”

“Not on your life,” the young man assured him. “I may not be getting
fat, but I am certainly growing soft.... Eh, Parker?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir; no, I mean no, sir. You’re just the same as when you
came home from college three years ago.”

“And took up loafing as a vocation,” Francis laughed. “Parker!”

Parker was alert attention. His master debated with himself ponderously,
as if the problem were of profound importance, rubbing the while the
bristly thatch of the small toothbrush moustache he had recently begun
to sport on his upper lip.

“Parker, I’m going fishing.”

“Yes, sir!”

“I ordered some rods sent up. Please joint them and let me give them the
once over. The idea drifts through my mind that two weeks in the woods
is what I need. If I don’t, I’ll surely start laying on flesh and
disgrace the whole family tree. You remember Sir Henry?—the old original
Sir Henry, the buccaneer old swashbuckler?”

“Yes, sir; I’ve read of him, sir.”

Parker had paused in the doorway until such time as the ebbing of his
young master’s volubility would permit him to depart on the errand.

“Nothing to be proud of, the old pirate.”

“Oh, no, sir,” Parker protested. “He was Governor of Jamaica. He died
respected.”

“It was a mercy he didn’t die hanged,” Francis laughed. “As it was, he’s
the only disgrace in the family that he founded. But what I was going to
say is that I’ve looked him up very carefully. He kept his figure and he
died lean in the middle, thank God. It’s a good inheritance he passed
down. We Morgans never found his treasure; but beyond rubies is the
lean-in-the-middle legacy he bequeathed us. It’s what is called a fixed
character in the breed—that’s what the profs taught me in the biology
course.”

Parker faded out of the room in the ensuing silence, during which
Francis Morgan buried himself in the Panama column and learned that the
canal was not expected to be open for traffic for three weeks to come.

A telephone buzzed, and, through the electric nerves of a consummate
civilization, Destiny made the first out-reach of its tentacles and
contacted with Francis Morgan in the library of the mansion his father
had builded on Riverside Drive.

“But my dear Mrs. Carruthers,” was his protest into the transmitter.
“Whatever it is, it is a mere local flurry. Tampico Petroleum is all
right. It is not a gambling proposition. It is legitimate investment.
Stay with. Tie to it.... Some Minnesota farmer’s come to town and is
trying to buy a block or two because it looks as solid as it really
is.... What if it is up two points? Don’t sell. Tampico Petroleum is not
a lottery or a roulette proposition. It’s bona fide industry. I wish it
hadn’t been so almighty big or I’d have financed it all myself....
Listen, please, it’s not a flyer. Our present contracts for tanks is
over a million. Our railroad and our three pipe-lines are costing more
than five millions. Why, we’ve a hundred millions in producing wells
right now, and our problem is to get it down country to the
oil-steamers. This is the sober investment time. A year from now, or two
years, and your shares will make government bonds look like something
the cat brought in....”

“Yes, yes, please. Never mind how the market goes. Also, please, I
didn’t advise you to go in in the first place. I never advised a friend
to that. But now that they are in, stick. It’s as solid as the Bank of
England.... Yes, Dicky and I divided the spoils last night. Lovely
party, though Dicky’s got too much temperament for bridge.... Yes, bull
luck.... Ha! ha! My temperament? Ha! Ha!... Yes?... Tell Harry I’m off
and away for a couple of weeks.... Fishing, troutlets, you know, the
springtime and the streams, the rise of sap, the budding and the
blossoming and all the rest.... Yes, good-bye, and hold on to Tampico
Petroleum. If it goes down, after that Minnesota farmer’s bulled it, buy
a little more. I’m going to. It’s finding money.... Yes.... Yes,
surely.... It’s too good to dare sell on a flyer now, because it mayn’t
ever again go down.... Of course I know what I’m talking about. I’ve
just had eight hours’ sleep, and haven’t had a drink.... Yes, yes....
Good-bye.”

He pulled the ticker tape into the comfort of his chair and languidly
ran over it, noting with mildly growing interest the message it
conveyed.

Parker returned with several slender rods, each a glittering gem of
artisanship and art. Francis was out of his chair, ticker flung aside
and forgotten as with the exultant joy of a boy he examined the toys
and, one after another, began trying them, switching them through the
air till they made shrill whip-like noises, moving them gently with
prudence and precision under the lofty ceiling as he made believe to
cast across the floor into some unseen pool of trout-lurking mystery.

A telephone buzzed. Irritation was swift on his face.

“For heaven’s sake answer it, Parker,” he commanded. “If it is some
silly stock-gambling female, tell her I’m dead, or drunk, or down with
typhoid, or getting married, or anything calamitous.”

After a moment’s dialogue, conducted on Parker’s part, in the discreet
and modulated tones that befitted absolutely the cool, chaste, noble
dignity of the room, with a “One moment, sir,” into the transmitter, he
muffled the transmitter with his hand and said:

“It’s Mr. Bascom, sir. He wants you.”

“Tell Mr. Bascom to go to hell,” said Francis, simulating so long a
cast, that, had it been in verity a cast, and had it pursued the course
his fascinated gaze indicated, it would have gone through the window and
most likely startled the gardener outside kneeling over the rose bush he
was planting.

“Mr. Bascom says it’s about the market, sir, and that he’d like to talk
with you only a moment,” Parker urged, but so delicately and subduedly
as to seem to be merely repeating an immaterial and unnecessary message.

“All right.” Francis carefully leaned the rod against a table and went
to the ‘phone.

“Hello,” he said into the telephone. “Yes, this is I, Morgan. Shoot,
What is it?”

He listened for a minute, then interrupted irritably: “Sell—hell.
Nothing of the sort.... Of course, I’m glad to know. Even if it goes up
ten points, which it won’t, hold on to everything. It may be a
legitimate rise, and it mayn’t ever come down. It’s solid. It’s worth
far more than it’s listed. I know, if the public doesn’t. A year from
now it’ll list at two hundred ... that is, if Mexico can cut the
revolution stuff.... Whenever it drops you’ll have buying orders from
me.... Nonsense. Who wants control? It’s purely sporadic ... eh? I beg
your pardon. I mean it’s merely temporary. Now I’m going off fishing for
a fortnight. If it goes down five points, buy. Buy all that’s offered.
Say, when a fellow’s got a real bona fide property, being bulled is
almost as bad as having the bears after one ... yes.... Sure ... yes.
Good-bye.”

And while Francis returned delightedly to his fishing-rods, Destiny, in
Thomas Regan’s down-town private office, was working overtime. Having
arranged with his various brokers to buy, and, through his divers
channels of secret publicity having let slip the cryptic tip that
something was wrong with Tampico Petroleum’s concessions from the
Mexican government, Thomas Regan studied a report of his own oil-expert
emissary who had spent two months on the spot spying out what Tampico
Petroleum really had in sight and prospect.

A clerk brought in a card with the information that the visitor was
importunate and foreign. Regan listened, glanced at the card, and said:

“Tell this Mister Senor Alvarez Torres of Ciodad de Colon that I can’t
see him.”

Five minutes later the clerk was back, this time with a message
pencilled on the card. Regan grinned as he read it:

    “_Dear Mr. Regan_,
      “_Honoured Sir_:—

    “_I have the honour to inform you that I have a tip on the location
    of the treasure Sir Henry Morgan buried in old pirate days._

                                                     “_Alvarez Torres._”

Regan shook his head, and the clerk was nearly out of the room when his
employer suddenly recalled him.

“Show him in—at once.”

In the interval of being alone, Regan chuckled to himself as he rolled
the new idea over in his mind. “The unlicked cub!” he muttered through
the smoke of the cigar he was lighting. “Thinks he can play the lion
part old R.H.M. played. A trimming is what he needs, and old Grayhead
Thomas R. will see that he gets it.”

Senor Alvarez Torres’ English was as correct as his modish spring suit,
and though the bleached yellow of his skin advertised his Latin-American
origin, and though his black eyes were eloquent of the mixed lustres of
Spanish and Indian long compounded, nevertheless he was as thoroughly
New Yorkish as Thomas Regan could have wished.

“By great effort, and years of research, I have finally won to the clue
to the buccaneer gold of Sir Henry Morgan,” he preambled. “Of course
it’s on the Mosquito Coast. I’ll tell you now that it’s not a thousand
miles from the Chiriqui Lagoon, and that Bocas del Toro, within reason,
may be described as the nearest town. I was born there—educated in
Paris, however—and I know the neighbourhood like a book. A small
schooner—the outlay is cheap, most very cheap—but the returns, the
reward—the treasure!”

Senor Torres paused in eloquent inability to describe more definitely,
and Thomas Regan, hard man used to dealing with hard men, proceeded to
bore into him and his data like a cross-examining criminal lawyer.

“Yes,” Senor Torres quickly admitted, “I am somewhat embarrassed—how
shall I say?—for immediate funds.”

“You need the money,” the stock operator assured him brutally, and he
bowed pained acquiescence.

Much more he admitted under the rapid-fire interrogation. It was true,
he had but recently left Bocas del Toro, but he hoped never again to go
back. And yet he would go back if possibly some arrangement....

But Regan shut him off with the abrupt way of the master-man dealing
with lesser fellow-creatures. He wrote a check, in the name of Alvarez
Torres, and when that gentleman glanced at it he read the figures of a
thousand dollars.

“Now here’s the idea,” said Regan. “I put no belief whatsoever in your
story. But I have a young friend—my heart is bound up in the boy but he
is too much about town, the white lights and the white-lighted ladies,
and the rest—you understand?” And Senor Alvarez Torres bowed as one man
of the world to another. “Now, for the good of his health, as well as
his wealth and the saving of his soul, the best thing that could happen
to him is a trip after treasure, adventure, exercise, and ... you
readily understand, I am sure.”

Again Alvarez Torres bowed.

“You need the money,” Regan continued. “Strive to interest him. That
thousand is for your effort. Succeed in interesting him so that he
departs after old Morgan’s gold, and two thousand more is yours. So
thoroughly succeed in interesting him that he remains away three months,
two thousand more—six months, five thousand. Oh, believe me, I knew his
father. We were comrades, partners, I—I might say, almost brothers. I
would sacrifice any sum to win his son to manhood’s wholesome path. What
do you say? The thousand is yours to begin with. Well?”

With trembling fingers Senor Alvarez Torres folded and unfolded the
check.

“I ... I accept,” he stammered and faltered in his eagerness. “I ... I
... How shall I say?... I am yours to command.”

Five minutes later, as he arose to go, fully instructed in the part he
was to play and with his story of Morgan’s treasure revised to
convincingness by the brass-tack business acumen of the stock-gambler,
he blurted out, almost facetiously, yet even more pathetically:

“And the funniest thing about it, Mr. Regan, is that it is true. Your
advised changes in my narrative make it sound more true, but true it is
under it all. I need the money. You are most munificent, and I shall do
my best.... I ... I pride myself that I am an artist. But the real and
solemn truth is that the clue to Morgan’s buried loot is genuine. I have
had access to records inaccessible to the public, which is neither here
nor there, for the men of my own family—they are family records—have had
similar access, and have wasted their lives before me in the futile
search. Yet were they on the right clue—except that their wits made them
miss the spot by twenty miles. It was there in the records. They missed
it, because it was, I think, a deliberate trick, a conundrum, a puzzle,
a disguisement, a maze, which I, and I alone, have penetrated and
solved. The early navigators all played such tricks on the charts they
drew. My Spanish race so hid the Hawaiian Islands by five degrees of
longitude.”

All of which was in turn Greek to Thomas Regan, who smiled his
acceptance of listening and with the same smile conveyed his busy
business-man’s tolerant unbelief.

Scarcely was Senor Torres gone, when Francis Morgan was shown in.

“Just thought I’d drop around for a bit of counsel,” he said, greetings
over. “And to whom but you should I apply, who so closely played the
game with my father? You and he were partners, I understand, on some of
the biggest deals. He always told me to trust your judgment. And, well,
here I am, and I want to go fishing. What’s up with Tampico Petroleum?”

“What _is_ up?” Regan countered, with fine simulation of ignorance of
the very thing of moment he was responsible for precipitating. “Tampico
Petroleum?”

Francis nodded, dropped into a chair, and lighted a cigarette, while
Regan consulted the ticker.

“Tampico Petroleum is up—two points—you should worry,” he opined.

“That’s what I say,” Francis concurred. “I should worry. But just the
same, do you think some bunch, onto the inside value of it—and it’s
big—I speak under the rose, you know, I mean in absolute confidence?”
Regan nodded. “It is big. It is right. It is the real thing. It is
legitimate. Now this activity—would you think that somebody, or some
bunch, is trying to get control?”

His father’s associate, with the reverend gray of hair thatching his
roof of crooked brain, shook the thatch.

“Why,” he amplified, “it may be just a flurry, or it may be a hunch on
the stock public that it’s really good. What do you say?”

“Of course it’s good,” was Francis’ warm response. “I’ve got reports,
Regan, so good they’d make your hair stand up. As I tell all my friends,
this is the real legitimate. It’s a damned shame I had to let the public
in on it. It was so big, I just had to. Even all the money my father
left me, couldn’t swing it—I mean, free money, not the stuff tied
up—money to work with.”

“Are you short?” the older man queried.

“Oh, I’ve got a tidy bit to operate with,” was the airy reply of youth.

“You mean...?”

“Sure. Just that. If she drops, I’ll buy. It’s finding money.”

“Just about how far would you buy?” was the next searching
interrogation, masked by an expression of mingled good humor and
approbation.

“All I’ve got,” came Francis Morgan’s prompt answer. “I tell you, Regan,
it’s immense.”

“I haven’t looked into it to amount to anything, Francis; but I will say
from the little I know that it listens good.”

“Listens! I tell you, Regan, it’s the Simon-pure, straight legitimate,
and it’s a shame to have it listed at all. I don’t have to wreck anybody
or anything to pull it across. The world will be better for my shooting
into it I am afraid to say how many hundreds of millions of barrels of
real oil——say, I’ve got one well alone, in the Huasteca field, that’s
gushed 27,000 barrels a day for seven months. And it’s still doing it.
That’s the drop in the bucket we’ve got piped to market now. And it’s
twenty-two gravity, and carries less than two-tenths of one per cent. of
sediment. And there’s one gusher—sixty miles of pipe to build to it, and
pinched down to the limit of safety, that’s pouring out all over the
landscape just about seventy thousand barrels a day.—Of course, all in
confidence, you know. We’re doing nicely, and I don’t want Tampico
Petroleum to skyrocket.”

“Don’t you worry about that, my lad. You’ve got to get your oil piped,
and the Mexican revolution straightened out before ever Tampico
Petroleum soars. You go fishing and forget it.” Regan paused, with
finely simulated sudden recollection, and picked up Alvarez Torres’ card
with the pencilled note. “Look, who’s just been to see me.” Apparently
struck with an idea, Regan retained the card a moment. “Why go fishing
for mere trout? After all, it’s only recreation. Here’s a thing to go
fishing after that there’s real recreation in, full-size man’s
recreation, and not the Persian-palace recreation of an Adirondack camp,
with ice and servants and electric push-buttons. Your father always was
more than a mite proud of that old family pirate. He claimed to look
like him, and you certainly look like your dad.”

“Sir Henry,” Francis smiled, reaching for the card. “So am I a mite
proud of the old scoundrel.”

He looked up questioningly from the reading of the card.

“He’s a plausible cuss,” Regan explained. “Claims to have been born
right down there on the Mosquito Coast, and to have got the tip from
private papers in his family. Not that I believe a word of it. I haven’t
time or interest to get started believing in stuff outside my own
field.”

“Just the same, Sir Henry died practically a poor man,” Francis
asserted, the lines of the Morgan stubbornness knitting themselves for a
flash on his brows. “And they never did find any of his buried
treasure.”

“Good fishing,” Regan girded good-humoredly.

“I’d like to meet this Alvarez Torres just the same,” the young man
responded.

“Fool’s gold,” Regan continued. “Though I must admit that the cuss is
most exasperatingly plausible. Why, if I were younger—but oh, the devil,
my work’s cut out for me here.”

“Do you know where I can find him?” Francis was asking the next moment,
all unwittingly putting his neck into the net of tentacles that Destiny,
in the visible incarnation of Thomas Regan, was casting out to snare
him.

The next morning the meeting took place in Regan’s office. Senor Alvarez
Torres startled and controlled himself at first sight of Francis’ face.
This was not missed by Regan, who grinningly demanded:

“Looks like the old pirate himself, eh?”

“Yes, the resemblance is most striking,” Torres lied, or half-lied, for
he did recognize the resemblance to the portraits he had seen of Sir
Henry Morgan; although at the same time under his eyelids he saw the
vision of another and living man who, no less than Francis and Sir
Henry, looked as much like both of them as either looked like the other.

Francis was youth that was not to be denied. Modern maps and ancient
charts were pored over, as well as old documents, handwritten in faded
ink on time-yellowed paper, and at the end of half an hour he announced
that the next fish he caught would be on either the Bull or the Calf—the
two islets off the Lagoon of Chiriqui, on one or the other of which
Torres averred the treasure lay.

“I’ll catch to-night’s train for New Orleans,” Francis announced. “That
will just make connection with one of the United Fruit Company’s boats
for Colon—oh, I had it all looked up before I slept last night.”

“But don’t charter a schooner at Colon,” Torres advised. “Take the
overland trip by horseback to Belen. There’s the place to charter, with
unsophisticated native sailors and everything else unsophisticated.”

“Listens good!” Francis agreed. “I always wanted to see that country
down there. You’ll be ready to catch to-night’s train, Senor Torres?...
Of course, you understand, under the circumstances, I’ll be the
treasurer and foot the expenses.”

But at a privy glance from Regan, Alvarez Torres lied with swift
efficientness.

“I must join you later, I regret, Mr. Morgan. Some little business that
presses—how shall I say?—an insignificant little lawsuit that must be
settled first. Not that the sum at issue is important. But it is a
family matter, and therefore gravely important. We Torres have our
pride, which is a silly thing, I acknowledge, in this country, but which
with us is very serious.”

“He can join afterward, and straighten you out if you’ve missed the
scent,” Regan assured Francis. “And, before it slips your mind, it might
be just as well to arrange with Senor Torres some division of the loot
... if you ever find it.”

“What would you say?” Francis asked.

“Equal division, fifty-fifty,” Regan answered, magnificently arranging
the apportionment between the two men of something he was certain did
not exist.

“And you will follow after as soon as you can?” Francis asked the Latin
American. “Regan, take hold of his little law affair yourself and
expedite it, won’t you?”

“Sure, boy,” was the answer. “And, if it’s needed, shall I advance cash
to Senor Alvarez?”

“Fine!” Francis shook their hands in both of his. “It will save me
bother. And I’ve got to rush to pack and break engagements and catch
that train. So long, Regan. Good-bye, Senor Torres, until we meet
somewhere around Bocas del Toro, or in a little hole in the ground on
the Bull or the Calf—you say you think it’s the Calf? Well, until
then—adios!”

And Senor Alvarez Torres remained with Regan some time longer, receiving
explicit instructions for the part he was to play, beginning with
retardation and delay of Francis’ expedition, and culminating in similar
retardation and delay always to be continued.

“In short,” Regan concluded, “I don’t almost care if he never comes
back—if you can keep him down there for the good of his health that long
and longer.”

                               CHAPTER II

Money, like youth, will not be denied, and Francis Morgan, who was the
man-legal and nature-certain representative of both youth and money,
found himself one afternoon, three weeks after he had said good-bye to
Regan, becalmed close under the land on board his schooner, the
_Angelique_. The water was glassy, the smooth roll scarcely perceptible,
and, in sheer ennui and overplus of energy that likewise declined to be
denied, he asked the captain, a breed, half Jamaica negro and half
Indian, to order a small skiff over the side.

“Looks like I might shoot a parrot or a monkey or something,” he
explained, searching the jungle-clad shore, half a mile away, through a
twelve-power Zeiss glass.

“Most problematic, sir, that you are bitten by a _labarri_, which is
deadly viper in these parts,” grinned the breed skipper and owner of the
_Angelique_, who, from his Jamaica father had inherited the gift of
tongues.

But Francis was not to be deterred; for at the moment, through his
glass, he had picked out, first, in the middle ground, a white hacienda,
and second, on the beach, a white-clad woman’s form, and further, had
seen that she was scrutinising him and the schooner through a pair of
binoculars.

“Put the skiff over, skipper,” he ordered. “Who lives around here?—white
folks?”

“The Enrico Solano family, sir,” was the answer. “My word, they are
important gentlefolk, old Spanish, and they own the entire general
landscape from the sea to the Cordilleras and half of the Chiriqui
Lagoon as well. They are very poor, most powerful rich ... in
landscape—and they are prideful and fiery as cayenne pepper.”

As Francis, in the tiny skiff, rowed shoreward, the skipper’s alert eye
noted that he had neglected to take along either rifle or shotgun for
the contemplated parrot or monkey. And, next, the skipper’s eye picked
up the white-clad woman’s figure against the dark edge of the jungle.

Straight to the white beach of coral sand Francis rowed, not trusting
himself to look over his shoulder to see if the woman remained or had
vanished. In his mind was merely a young man’s healthy idea of
encountering a bucolic young lady, or a half-wild white woman for that
matter, or at the best a very provincial one, with whom he could fool
and fun away a few minutes of the calm that fettered the _Angelique_ to
immobility. When the skiff grounded, he stepped out, and with one sturdy
arm lifted its nose high enough up the sand to fasten it by its own
weight. Then he turned around. The beach to the jungle was bare. He
strode forward confidently. Any traveller, on so strange a shore, had a
right to seek inhabitants for information on his way—was the idea he was
acting out.

And he, who had anticipated a few moments of diversion merely, was
diverted beyond his fondest expectations. Like a jack-in-the-box, the
woman, who, in the flash of vision vouchsafed him demonstrated that she
was a girl-woman, ripely mature and yet mostly girl, sprang out of the
green wall of jungle and with both hands seized his arm. The hearty
weight of grip in the seizure surprised him. He fumbled his hat off with
his free hand and bowed to the strange woman with the imperturbableness
of a Morgan, New York trained and disciplined to be surprised at
nothing, and received another surprise, or several surprises compounded.
Not alone was it her semi-brunette beauty that impacted upon him with
the weight of a blow, but it was her gaze, driven into him, that was all
of sternness. Almost it seemed to him that he must know her. Strangers,
in his experience, never so looked at one another.

The double grip on his arm became a draw, as she muttered tensely:

“Quick! Follow me!”

A moment he resisted. She shook him in the fervor of her desire, and
strove to pull him toward her and after her. With the feeling that it
was some unusual game, such as one might meet up with on the coast of
Central America, he yielded, smilingly, scarcely knowing whether he
followed voluntarily or was being dragged into the jungle by her
impetuosity.

“Do as I do,” she shot back at him over her shoulder, by this time
leading him with one hand of hers in his.

He smiled and obeyed, crouching when she crouched, doubling over when
she doubled, while memories of John Smith and Pocahontas glimmered up in
his fancy.

Abruptly she checked him and sat down, her hand directing him to sit
beside her ere she released him, and pressed it to her heart while she
panted:

“Thank God! Oh, merciful Virgin!”

In imitation, such having been her will of him, and such seeming to be
the cue of the game, he smilingly pressed his own hand to his heart,
although he called neither on God nor the Virgin.

“Won’t you ever be serious?” she flashed at him, noting his action.

And Francis was immediately and profoundly, as well as naturally,
serious.

“My dear lady...” he began.

But an abrupt gesture checked him; and, with growing wonder, he watched
her bend and listen, and heard the movement of bodies padding down some
runway several yards away.

With a soft warm palm pressed commandingly to his to be silent, she left
him with the abruptness that he had already come to consider as
customary with her, and slipped away down the runway. Almost he whistled
with astonishment. He might have whistled it, had he not heard her
voice, not distant, in Spanish, sharply interrogate men whose Spanish
voices, half-humbly, half-insistently and half-rebelliously, answered
her.

He heard them move on, still talking, and, after five minutes of dead
silence, heard her call for him peremptorily to come out.

“Gee! I wonder what Regan would do under such circumstances!” he smiled
to himself as he obeyed.

He followed her, no longer hand in hand, through the jungle to the
beach. When she paused, he came beside her and faced her, still under
the impress of the fantasy which possessed him that it was a game.

“Tag!” he laughed, touching her on the shoulder. “Tag!” he reiterated.
“You’re It!”

The anger of her blazing dark eyes scorched him.

“You fool!” she cried, lifting her finger with what he considered undue
intimacy to his toothbrush moustache. “As if that could disguise you!”

“But my dear lady...” he began to protest his certain unacquaintance
with her.

Her retort, which broke off his speech, was as unreal and bizarre as
everything else which had gone before. So quick was it, that he failed
to see whence the tiny silver revolver had been drawn, the muzzle of
which was not presented merely toward his abdomen, but pressed closely
against it.

“My dear lady...” he tried again.

“I won’t talk with you,” she shut him off. “Go back to your schooner,
and go away....” He guessed the inaudible sob of the pause, ere she
concluded, “Forever.”

This time his mouth opened to speech that was aborted on his lips by the
stiff thrust of the muzzle of the weapon into his abdomen.

“If you ever come back—the Madonna forgive me—I shall shoot myself.”

“Guess I’d better go, then,” he uttered airily, as he turned to the
skiff, toward which he walked in stately embarrassment, half-filled with
laughter for himself and for the ridiculous and incomprehensible figure
he was cutting.

Endeavoring to retain a last shred of dignity, he took no notice that
she had followed him. As he lifted the skiff’s nose from the sand, he
was aware that a faint wind was rustling the palm fronds. A long breeze
was darkening the water close at hand, while, far out across the
mirrored water the outlying keys of Chiriqui Lagoon shimmered like a
mirage above the dark-crisping water.

A sob compelled him to desist from stepping into the skiff, and to turn
his head. The strange young woman, revolver dropped to her side, was
crying. His step back to her was instant, and the touch of his hand on
her arm was sympathetic and inquiring. She shuddered at his touch, drew
away from him, and gazed at him reproachfully through her tears. With a
shrug of shoulders to her many moods and of surrender to the
incomprehensibleness of the situation, he was about to turn to the boat,
when she stopped him.

“At least you...” she began, then faltered and swallowed, “you might
kiss me good-bye.”

She advanced impulsively, with outstretched arms, the revolver dangling
incongruously from her right hand. Francis hesitated a puzzled moment,
then gathered her in to receive an astounding passionate kiss on his
lips ere she dropped her head on his shoulder in a breakdown of tears.
Despite his amazement he was aware of the revolver pressing flat-wise
against his back between the shoulders. She lifted her tear-wet face and
kissed him again and again, and he wondered to himself if he were a cad
for meeting her kisses with almost equal and fully as mysterious
impulsiveness.

With a feeling that he did not in the least care how long the tender
episode might last, he was startled by her quick drawing away from him,
as anger and contempt blazed back in her face, and as she menacingly
directed him with the revolver to get into the boat.

He shrugged his shoulders as if to say that he could not say no to a
lovely lady, and obeyed, sitting to the oars and facing her as he began
rowing away.

“The Virgin save me from my wayward heart,” she cried, with her free
hand tearing a locket from her bosom, and, in a shower of golden beads,
flinging the ornament into the waterway midway between them.

From the edge of the jungle he saw three men, armed with rifles, run
toward her where she had sunk down in the sand. In the midst of lifting
her up, they caught sight of Francis, who had begun rowing a strong
stroke. Over his shoulder he glimpsed the _Angelique_, close hauled and
slightly heeling, cutting through the water toward him. The next moment,
one of the trio on the beach, a bearded elderly man, was directing the
girl’s binoculars on him. And the moment after, dropping the glasses, he
was taking aim with his rifle.

The bullet spat on the water within a yard of the skiff’s side, and
Francis saw the girl spring to her feet, knock up the rifle with her
arm, and spoil the second shot. Next, pulling lustily, he saw the men
separate from her to sight their rifles, and saw her threatening them
with the revolver into lowering their weapons.

The _Angelique_, thrown up into the wind to stop way, foamed alongside,
and with an agile leap Francis was aboard, while already, the skipper
putting the wheel up, the schooner was paying off and filling. With
boyish zest, Francis wafted a kiss of farewell to the girl, who was
staring toward him, and saw her collapse on the shoulders of the bearded
elderly man.

“Cayenne pepper, eh—those damned, horrible, crazy-proud Solanos,” the
breed skipper flashed at Francis with white teeth of laughter.

“Just bugs—clean crazy, nobody at home,” Francis laughed back, as he
sprang to the rail to waft further kisses to the strange damsel.

Before the land wind, the _Angelique_ made the outer rim of Chiriqui
Lagoon and the Bull and Calf, some fifty miles farther along on the rim,
by midnight, when the skipper hove to to wait for daylight. After
breakfast, rowed by a Jamaica negro sailor in the skiff, Francis landed
to reconnoiter on the Bull, which was the larger island and which the
skipper had told him he might find occupied at that season of the year
by turtle-catching Indians from the mainland.

And Francis very immediately found that he had traversed not merely
thirty degrees of latitude from New York but thirty hundred years, or
centuries for that matter, from the last word of civilisation to almost
the first word of the primeval. Naked, except for breech-clouts of
gunny-sacking, armed with cruelly heavy hacking blades of machetes, the
turtle-catchers were swift in proving themselves arrant beggars and
dangerous man-killers. The Bull belonged to them, they told him through
the medium of his Jamaican sailor’s interpreting; but the Calf, which
used to belong to them for the turtle season now was possessed by a
madly impossible Gringo, whose reckless, dominating ways had won from
them the respect of fear for a two-legged human creature who was more
fearful than themselves.

While Francis, for a silver dollar, dispatched one of them with a
message to the mysterious Gringo that he desired to call on him, the
rest of them clustered about Francis’ skiff, whining for money,
glowering upon him, and even impudently stealing his pipe, yet warm from
his lips, which he had laid beside him in the sternsheets. Promptly he
had laid a blow on the ear of the thief, and the next thief who seized
it, and recovered the pipe. Machetes out and sun-glistening their
clean-slicing menace, Francis covered and controlled the gang with an
automatic pistol; and, while they drew apart in a group and whispered
ominously, he made the discovery that his lone sailor-interpreter was a
weak brother and received his returned messenger.

The negro went over to the turtle-catchers and talked with a
friendliness and subservience, the tones of which Francis did not like.
The messenger handed him his note, across which was scrawled in pencil:

“Vamos.”

“Guess I’ll have to go across myself,” Francis told the negro whom he
had beckoned back to him.

“Better be very careful and utmostly cautious, sir,” the negro warned
him. “These animals without reason are very problematically likely to
act most unreasonably, sir.”

“Get into the boat and row me over,” Francis commanded shortly.

“No, sir, I regret much to say, sir,” was the black sailor’s answer. “I
signed on, sir, as a sailor to Captain Trefethen, but I didn’t sign on
for no suicide, and I can’t see my way to rowin’ you over, sir, to
certain death. Best thing we can do is to get out of this hot place
that’s certainly and without peradventure of a doubt goin’ to get hotter
for us if we remain, sir.”

In huge disgust and scorn Francis pocketed his automatic, turned his
back on the sacking-clad savages, and walked away through the palms.
Where a great boulder of coral rock had been upthrust by some ancient
restlessness of the earth, he came down to the beach. On the shore of
the Calf, across the narrow channel, he made out a dinghy drawn up.
Drawn up on his own side was a crank-looking and manifestly leaky dugout
canoe. As he tilted the water out of it, he noticed that the
turtle-catchers had followed and were peering at him from the edge of
the coconuts, though his weak-hearted sailor was not in sight.

To paddle across the channel was a matter of moments, but scarcely was
he on the beach of the Calf when further inhospitality greeted him on
the part of a tall, barefooted young man, who stepped from behind a
palm, automatic pistol in hand, and shouted:

“Vamos! Get out! Scut!”

“Ye gods and little fishes!” Francis grinned, half-humorously,
half-seriously. “A fellow can’t move in these parts without having a gun
shoved in his face. And everybody says get out pronto.”

“Nobody invited you,” the stranger retorted. “You’re intruding. Get off
my island. I’ll give you half a minute.”

“I’m getting sore, friend,” Francis assured him truthfully, at the same
time, out of the corner of his eye, measuring the distance to the
nearest palm-trunk. “Everybody I meet around here is crazy and
discourteous, and peevishly anxious to be rid of my presence, and
they’ve just got me feeling that way myself. Besides, just because you
tell me it’s your island is no proof——”

The swift rush he made to the shelter of the palm left his sentence
unfinished. His arrival behind the trunk was simultaneous with the
arrival of a bullet that thudded into the other side of it.

“Now, just for that!” he called out, as he centered a bullet into the
trunk of the other man’s palm.

The next few minutes they blazed away, or waited for calculated shots,
and when Francis’ eighth and last had been fired, he was unpleasantly
certain that he had counted only seven shots for the stranger. He
cautiously exposed part of his sun-helmet, held in his hand, and had it
perforated.

“What gun are you using?” he asked with cool politeness.

“Colt’s,” came the answer.

Francis stepped boldly into the open, saying: “Then you’re all out. I
counted ‘em. Eight. Now we can talk.”

The stranger stepped out, and Francis could not help admiring the fine
figure of him, despite the fact that a dirty pair of canvas pants, a
cotton undershirt, and a floppy sombrero constituted his garmenting.
Further, it seemed he had previously known him, though it did not enter
his mind that he was looking at a replica of himself.

“Talk!” the stranger sneered, throwing down his pistol and drawing a
knife. “Now we’ll just cut off your ears, and maybe scalp you.”

“Gee! You’re sweet-natured and gentle animals in this neck of the
woods,” Francis retorted, his anger and disgust increasing. He drew his
own hunting knife, brand new from the shop and shining. “Say, let’s
wrestle, and cut out this ten-twenty-and-thirty knife stuff.”

“I want your ears,” the stranger answered pleasantly, as he slowly
advanced.

“Sure. First down, and the man who wins the fall gets the other fellow’s
ears.”

“Agreed.” The young man in the canvas trousers sheathed his knife.

“Too bad there isn’t a moving picture camera to film this,” Francis
girded, sheathing his own knife. “I’m sore as a boil. I feel like a heap
bad Injun. Watch out! I’m coming in a rush! Anyway and everyway for the
first fall!”

Action and word went together, and his glorious rush ended
ignominiously, for the stronger, apparently braced for the shock,
yielded the instant their bodies met and fell over on his back, at the
same time planting his foot in Francis’ abdomen and, from the back
purchase on the ground, transforming Francis’ rush into a wild forward
somersault.

The fall on the sand knocked most of Francis’ breath out of him, and the
flying body of his foe, impacting on him, managed to do for what little
breath was left him. As he lay speechless on his back, he observed the
man on top of him gazing down at him with sudden curiosity.

“What d’ you want to wear a mustache for?” the stranger muttered.

“Go on and cut ‘em off,” Francis gasped, with the first of his returning
breath. “The ears are yours, but the mustache is mine. It is not in the
bond. Besides, that fall was straight jiu jiutsu.”

“You said ‘anyway and everyway for the first fall,’” the other quoted
laughingly. “As for your ears, keep them. I never intended to cut them
off, and now that I look at them closely the less I want them. Get up
and get out of here. I’ve licked you. _Vamos!_ And don’t come sneaking
around here again! Git! Scut!”

In greater disgust than ever, to which was added the humiliation of
defeat, Francis turned down to the beach toward his canoe.

“Say, Little Stranger, do you mind leaving your card?” the victor called
after him.

“Visiting cards and cut-throating don’t go together,” Francis shot back
across his shoulder, as he squatted in the canoe and dipped his paddle.
“My name’s Morgan.”

Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his
mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, “Same
stock—no wonder we look alike.”

Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Bull,
sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and
gloomily meditated. Crazy, everybody, was the run of his thought. Nobody
acts with reason. “I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with
these people. They’d get his ears.”

Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants
and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but
lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a
grass-thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he
uttered aloud, “I guess I put the fear of God into that particular
member of the Morgan family,” had just begun to stare at a photographic
reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry
Morgan.

“Well, Old Pirate,” he continued grinning, “two of your latest
descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that
would make your antediluvian horse-pistols look like thirty cents.”

He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was
monogramed with an “M,” and again addressed the portrait:

“Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old
duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really
fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you
played it yourself.”

A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age-worn and
moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added: “Well, here’s the old duds
on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to
tell me a point of looks in which we differ.”

Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on
around the middle and two flintlock pistols of huge and ponderous design
thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and
the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since
resolved to dust, was striking.

                  “Back to back against the mainmast,
                    Held at bay the entire crew....”

As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old
buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded
into another picture and that he saw:

The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing,
facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while
behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed
and accoutred man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of
cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.

The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a
guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately. And in the sharp
pause of silence, it seemed that a fresh vision of old Sir Henry came to
him, down out of the frame and beside him, real in all seeming, plucking
at his sleeve to lead him out of the hut and whispering a ghostly
repetition of:

                   “Back to back against the mainmast
                     Held at bay the entire crew.”

The young man obeyed his shadowy guide, or some prompting of his own
profound of intuition, and went out the door and down to the beach,
where, gazing across the narrow channel, on the beach of the Bull, he
saw his late antagonist, backed up against the great boulder of coral
rock, standing off an attack of sack-clouted, machete-wielding Indians
with wide sweeping strokes of a driftwood timber.

And Francis, in extremity, swaying dizzily from the blow of a rock on
his head, saw the apparition, that almost convinced him he was already
dead and in the realm of the shades, of Sir Henry Morgan himself,
cutlass in hand, rushing up the beach to his rescue. Further, the
apparition, brandishing the cutlass and laying out Indians right and
left, was bellowing:

                  “Back to back against the mainmast,
                    Held at bay the entire crew.”

As Francis’ knees gave under him and he slowly crumpled and sank down,
he saw the Indians scatter and flee before the onslaught of the weird
pirate figure and heard their cries of:

“Heaven help us!” “The Virgin protect us!” “It’s the ghost of old
Morgan!”

Francis next opened his eyes inside the grass hut in the midmost center
of the Calf. First, in the glimmering of sight of returning
consciousness, he beheld the pictured lineaments of Sir Henry Morgan
staring down at him from the wall. Next, it was a younger edition of the
same, in three dimensions of living, moving flesh, who thrust a mug of
brandy to his lips and bade him drink. Francis was on his feet ere he
touched lips to the mug; and both he and the stranger man, moved by a
common impulse, looked squarely into each other’s eyes, glanced at the
picture on the wall and touched mugs in a salute to the picture and to
each other ere they drank.

“You told me you were a Morgan,” the stranger said. “I am a Morgan. That
man on the wall fathered my breed. Your breed?”

“The old buccaneer’s,” Francis returned. “My first name is Francis. And
yours?”

“Henry—straight from the original. We must be remote cousins or
something or other. I’m after the foxy old niggardly old Welshman’s
loot.”

“So’m I,” said Francis, extending his hand. “But to hell with sharing.”

“The old blood talks in you,” Henry smiled approbation. “For him to have
who finds. I’ve turned most of this island upside down in the last six
months, and all I’ve found are these old duds. I’m with you to beat you
if I can, but to put my back against the mainmast with you any time the
needed call goes out.”

“That song’s a wonder,” Francis urged. “I want to learn it. Lift the
stave again.”

And together, clanking their mugs, they sang:

                  “Back to back against the mainmast,
                    Held at bay the entire crew....”

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
_Angelique_ 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 life. 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 you 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 old-timers 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
off 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 off 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.”

“Guess 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 out-jut of rock against
which he leaned his back while composing the note to Leoncia, he would
have been startled 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 live 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 face.
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,” he 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
driveway. And he saw what made him grit his teeth and draw very
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 finger.
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 least one 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 _mestiza_ 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, revolver-belted, 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 è 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 shook 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 è 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 courtroom 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,
barefooted, under 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 _knew_ 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.

                               CHAPTER IV

“We must work quickly—that is the one thing sure,” Francis said to the
little conclave of Solanos on the piazza of the Solano hacienda.

“One thing sure!” Leoncia cried out scornfully ceasing from her
anguished pacing up and down. “The one thing sure is that we must save
him.”

As she spoke, she shook a passionate finger under Francis’ nose to
emphasize her point. Not content, she shook her finger with equal
emphasis under the noses of all and sundry of her father and brothers.

“Quick!” she flamed on. “Of course we must be quick. It is that, or....”
Her voice trailed off into the unvoiceable horror of what would happen
to Henry if they were not quick.

“All Gringos look alike to the Jefe,” Francis nodded sympathetically.
She was splendidly beautiful and wonderful, he thought. “He certainly
runs all San Antonio, and short shrift is his motto. He’ll give Henry no
more time than he gave us. We must get him out to-night.”

“Now listen,” Leoncia began again. “We Solanos cannot permit this ...
this execution. Our pride ... our honor. We cannot permit it. Speak! any
of you. Father—you. Suggest something....”

And while the discussion went on, Francis, for the time being silent,
wrestled deep in the throes of sadness. Leoncia’s fervor was
magnificent, but it was for another man and it did not precisely
exhilarate him. Strong upon him was the memory of the jail patio after
he had been released and Henry had been arrested. He could still see,
with the same stab at the heart, Leoncia in Henry’s arms, Henry seeking
her hand to ascertain if his ring was on it, and the long kiss of the
embrace that followed.

Ah, well, he sighed to himself, he had done his best. After Henry had
been led away, had he not told Leoncia, quite deliberately and coldly,
that Henry was her man and lover, and the wisest of choices for the
daughter of the Solanos?

But the memory of it did not make him a bit happy. Nor did the rightness
of it. Right it was. That he never questioned, and it strengthened him
into hardening his heart against her. Yet the right, he found in his
case, to be the sorriest of consolation.

And yet what else could he expect? It was his misfortune to have arrived
too late in Central America, that was all, and to find this flower of
woman already annexed by a previous comer—a man as good as himself, and,
his heart of fairness prompted, even better. And his heart of fairness
compelled loyalty to Henry from him—to Henry Morgan, of the breed and
blood; to Henry Morgan, the wild-fire descendant of a wild-fire
ancestor, in canvas pants, and floppy sombrero, with a penchant for the
ears of strange young men, living on sea biscuit and turtle eggs and
digging up the Bull and the Calf for old Sir Henry’s treasure.

And while Enrico Solano and his sons talked plans and projects on their
broad piazza, to which Francis lent only half an ear, a house servant
came, whispered in Leoncia’s ear, and led her away around the ell of the
piazza, where occurred a scene that would have excited Francis’
risibilities and wrath.

Around the ell, Alvarez Torres, in all the medieval Spanish splendor of
dress of a great haciendado-owner, such as still obtains in Latin
America, greeted her, bowed low with doffed sombrero in hand, and seated
her in a rattan settee. Her own greeting was sad, but shot through with
curiousness, as if she hoped he brought some word of hope.

“The trial is over, Leoncia,” he said softly, tenderly, as one speaks of
the dead. “He is sentenced. To-morrow at ten o’clock is the time. It is
all very sad, most very sad. But....” He shrugged his shoulders. “No, I
shall not speak harshly of him. He was an honorable man. His one fault
was his temper. It was too quick, too fiery. It led him into a mischance
of honor. Never, in a cool moment of reasonableness, would he have
stabbed Alfaro——”

“He never killed my uncle!” Leoncia cried, raising her averted face.

“And it is regrettable,” Torres proceeded gently and sadly, avoiding any
disagreement. “The judge, the people, the Jefe Politico, unfortunately,
are all united in believing that he did. Which is most regrettable. But
which is not what I came to see you about. I came to offer my service in
any and all ways you may command. My life, my honor, are at your
disposal. Speak. I am your slave.”

Dropping suddenly and gracefully on one knee before her, he caught her
hand from her lap, and would have instantly flooded on with his speech,
had not his eyes lighted on the diamond ring on her engagement finger.
He frowned, but concealed the frown with bent face until he could drive
it from his features and begin to speak.

“I knew you when you were small, Leoncia, so very, very charmingly
small, and I loved you always.—No, listen! Please. My heart must speak.
Hear me out. I loved you always. But when you returned from your
convent, from schooling abroad, a woman, a grand and noble lady fit to
rule in the house of the Solanos, I was burnt by your beauty. I have
been patient. I refrained from speaking. But you may have guessed. You
surely must have guessed. I have been on fire for you ever since. I have
been consumed by the flame of your beauty, by the flame of you that is
deeper than your beauty.”

He was not to be stopped, as she well knew, and she listened patiently,
gazing down on his bent head and wondering idly why his hair was so
unbecomingly cut, and whether it had been last cut in New York or San
Antonio.

“Do you know what you have been to me ever since your return?”

She did not reply, nor did she endeavour to withdraw her hand, although
his was crushing and bruising her flesh against Henry Morgan’s ring. She
forgot to listen, led away by a chain of thought that linked far. Not in
such rhodomontade of speech had Henry Morgan loved and won her, was the
beginning of the chain. Why did those of Spanish blood always voice
their emotions so exaggeratedly? Henry had been so different. Scarcely
had he spoken a word. He had acted. Under her glamor, himself glamoring
her, without warning, so certain was he not to surprise and frighten
her, he had put his arms around her and pressed his lips to hers. And
hers had been neither too startled nor altogether unresponsive. Not
until after that first kiss, arms still around her, had Henry begun to
speak at all.

And what plan was being broached around the corner of the ell by her men
and Francis Morgan? Her mind strayed on, deaf to the suitor at her feet.
Francis! Ah—she almost sighed, and marveled, what of her self-known love
for Henry, why this stranger Gringo so enamored her heart. Was she a
wanton? Was it one man? Or another man? Or any man? No! No! She was not
fickle nor unfaithful. And yet?... Perhaps it was because Francis and
Henry were so much alike, and her poor stupid loving woman’s heart
failed properly to distinguish between them. And yet—while it had seemed
she would have followed Henry anywhere over the world, in any luck or
fortune, it seemed to her now that she would follow Francis even
farther. She did _love_ Henry, her heart solemnly proclaimed. But also
did she love Francis, and almost did she divine that Francis loved
her—the fervor of his lips on hers in his prison cell was inerasable;
and there was a difference in her love for the two men that confuted her
powers of reason and almost drove her to the shameful conclusion that
she, the latest and only woman of the house of Solano, was a wanton.

A severe pinch of her flesh against Henry’s ring, caused by the
impassioned grasp of Torres, brought her back to him, so that she could
hear the spate of his speech pouring on:

“You have been the delicious thorn in my side, the spiked rowel of the
spur forever prodding the sweetest and most poignant pangs of love into
my breast. I have dreamed of you ... and for you. And I have my own name
for you. Ever the one name I have had for you: the Queen of my Dreams.
And you will marry me, my Leoncia. We will forget this mad Gringo who is
as already dead. I shall be gentle, kind. I shall love you always. And
never shall any vision of him arise between us. For myself, I shall not
permit it. For you ... I shall love you so that it will be impossible
for the memory of him to arise between us and give you one moment’s
heart-hurt.”

Leoncia debated in a long pause that added fuel to Torres’ hopes. She
felt the need to temporise. If Henry were to be saved ... and had not
Torres offered his services? Not lightly could she turn him away when a
man’s life might depend upon him.

“Speak!—I am consuming!” Torres urged in a choking voice.

“Hush! Hush!” she said softly. “How can I listen to love from a live
man, when the man I loved is yet alive?”

_Loved!_ The past tense of it startled her. Likewise it startled Torres,
fanning his hopes to fairer flames. Almost was she his. She had said
_loved_. She no longer bore love for Henry. She _had_ loved him, but no
longer. And she, a maid and woman of delicacy and sensibility, could
not, of course, give name to her love for him while the other man still
lived. It was subtle of her. He prided himself on his own subtlety, and
he flattered himself that he had interpreted her veiled thought aright.
And ... well, he resolved, he would see to it that the man who was to
die at ten next morning should have neither reprieve nor rescue. The one
thing clear, if he were to win Leoncia quickly, was that Henry Morgan
should die quickly.

“We will speak of it no more ... now,” he said with chivalric
gentleness, as he gently pressed her hand, rose to his feet, and gazed
down on her.

She returned a soft pressure of thanks with her own hand ere she
released it and stood up.

“Come,” she said. “We will join the others. They are planning now, or
trying to find some plan, to save Henry Morgan.”

The conversation of the group ebbed away as they joined it, as if out of
half-suspicion of Torres.

“Have you hit upon anything yet?” Leoncia asked.

Old Enrico, straight and slender and graceful as any of his sons despite
his age, shook his head.

“I have a plan, if you will pardon me,” Torres began, but ceased at a
warning glance from Alesandro, the eldest son.

On the walk, below the piazza, had appeared two scarecrows of beggar
boys. Not more than ten years of age, by their size, they seemed much
older when judged by the shrewdness of their eyes and faces. Each wore a
single marvelous garment, so that between them it could be said they
shared a shirt and pants. But such a shirt! And such pants! The latter,
man-size, of ancient duck, were buttoned around the lad’s neck, the
waistband reefed with knotted twine so as not to slip down over his
shoulders. His arms were thrust through the holes where the side-pockets
had been. The legs of the pants had been hacked off with a knife to suit
his own diminutive length of limb. The tails of the man’s shirt on the
other boy dragged on the ground.

“Vamos!” Alesandro shouted fiercely at them to be gone.

But the boy in the pants gravely removed a stone which he had been
carrying on top of his bare head, exposing a letter which had been thus
carried. Alesandro leaned over, took the letter, and with a glance at
the inscription passed it to Leoncia, while the boys began whining for
money. Francis, smiling despite himself at the spectacle of them, tossed
them a few pieces of small silver, whereupon the shirt and the pants
toddled away down the path.

The letter was from Henry, and Leoncia scanned it hurriedly. It was not
precisely in farewell, for he wrote in the tenour of a man who never
expected to die save by some inconceivable accident. Nevertheless, on
the chance of such inconceivable thing becoming possible, Henry did
manage to say good-bye and to include a facetious recommendation to
Leoncia not to forget Francis, who was well worth remembering because he
was so much like himself, Henry.

Leoncia’s first impulse was to show the letter to the others, but the
portion about Francis with-strained her.

“It’s from Henry,” she said, tucking the note into her bosom. “There is
nothing of importance. He seems to have not the slightest doubt that he
will escape somehow.”

“We shall see that he does,” Francis declared positively.

With a grateful smile to him, and with one of interrogation to Torres,
Leoncia said:

“You were speaking of a plan, Senor Torres?”

Torres smiled, twisted his mustache, and struck an attitude of
importance.

“There is one way, the Gringo, Anglo-Saxon way, and it is simple,
straight to the point. That is just what it is, straight to the point.
We will go and take Henry out of jail in forthright, brutal and direct
Gringo fashion. It is the one thing they will not expect. Therefore, it
will succeed. There are enough unhung rascals on the beach with which to
storm the jail. Hire them, pay them well, but only partly in advance,
and the thing is accomplished.”

Leoncia nodded eager agreement. Old Enrico’s eyes flashed and his
nostrils distended as if already sniffing gunpowder. The young men were
taking fire from his example. And all looked to Francis for his opinion
or agreement. He shook his head slowly, and Leoncia uttered a sharp cry
of disappointment in him.

“That way is hopeless,” he said. “Why should all of you risk your necks
in a madcap attempt like that, doomed to failure from the start?” As he
talked, he strode across from Leoncia’s side to the railing in such way
as to be for a moment between Torres and the other men, and at the same
time managed a warning look to Enrico and his sons. “As for Henry, it
looks as if it were all up with him——”

“You mean you doubt me?” Torres bristled.

“Heavens, man,” Francis protested.

But Torres dashed on: “You mean that I am forbidden by you, a man I have
scarcely met, from the councils of the Solanos who are my oldest and
most honored friends.”

Old Enrico, who had not missed the rising wrath against Francis in
Leoncia’s face, succeeded in conveying a warning to her, ere, with a
courteous gesture, he hushed Torres and began to speak.

“There are no councils of the Solanos from which you are barred, Senor
Torres. You are indeed an old friend of the family. Your late father and
I were comrades, almost brothers. But that—and you will pardon an old
man’s judgment—does not prevent Senor Morgan from being right when he
says your plan is hopeless. To storm the jail is truly madness. Look at
the thickness of the walls. They could stand a siege of weeks. And yet,
and I confess it, almost was I tempted when you first broached the idea.
Now when I was a young man, fighting the Indians in the high
Cordilleras, there was a very case in point. Come, let us all be seated
and comfortable, and I will tell you the tale....”

But Torres, busy with many things, declined to wait, and with soothed
amicable feelings shook hands all around, briefly apologized to Francis,
and departed astride his silver-saddled and silver-bridled horse for San
Antonio. One of the things that busied him was the cable correspondence
maintained between him and Thomas Regan’s Wall Street office. Having
secret access to the Panamanian government wireless station at San
Antonio, he was thus able to relay messages to the cable station at Vera
Cruz. Not alone was his relationship with Regan proving lucrative, but
it was jibing in with his own personal plans concerning Leoncia and the
Morgans.

“What have you against Senor Torres, that you should reject his plan and
anger him?” Leoncia demanded of Francis.

“Nothing,” was the answer, “except that we do not need him, and that I’m
not exactly infatuated with him. He is a fool and would spoil any plan.
Look at the way he fell down on testifying at my trial. Maybe he can’t
be trusted. I don’t know. Anyway, what’s the good of trusting him when
we don’t need him? Now his plan is all right. We’ll go straight to the
jail and take Henry out, if all you are game for it. And we don’t need
to trust to a mob of unhung rascals and beach-sweepings. If the six men
of us can’t do it, we might as well quit.”

“There must be at least a dozen guards always hanging out at the jail,”
Ricardo, Leoncia’s youngest brother, a lad of eighteen, objected.

Leoncia, her eagerness alive again, frowned at him; but Francis took his
part.

“Well taken,” he agreed. “But we will eliminate the guards.”

“The five-foot walls,” said Martinez Solano, twin brother to Alvarado.

“Go through them,” Francis answered.

“But how?” Leoncia cried.

“That’s what I am arriving at. You, Senor Solano, have plenty of saddle
horses? Good. And you, Alesandro, does it chance you could procure me a
couple of sticks of dynamite from around the plantation? Good, and
better than good. And you, Leoncia, as the lady of the hacienda, should
know whether you have in your store-room a plentiful supply of that
three-star rye whiskey?”

“Ah, the plot thickens,” he laughed, on receiving her assurance. “We’ve
all the properties for a Rider Haggard or Rex Beach adventure tale. Now
listen. But wait. I want to talk to you, Leoncia, about private
theatricals....”

                               CHAPTER V.

It was in the mid-afternoon, and Henry, at his barred cell-window,
stared out into the street and wondered if any sort of breeze would ever
begin to blow from off Chiriqui Lagoon and cool the stagnant air. The
street was dusty and filthy—filthy, because the only scavengers it had
ever known since the town was founded centuries before were the carrion
dogs and obscene buzzards even then prowling and hopping about in the
debris. Low, whitewashed buildings of stone and adobe made the street a
furnace.

The white of it all, and the dust, was almost achingly intolerable to
the eyes, and Henry would have withdrawn his gaze, had not the several
ragged _mosos_, dozing in a doorway opposite, suddenly aroused and
looked interestedly up the street. Henry could not see, but he could
hear the rattling spokes of some vehicle coming at speed. Next, it
surged into view, a rattletrap light wagon drawn by a runaway horse. In
the seat a gray-headed, gray-bearded ancient strove vainly to check the
animal.

Henry smiled and marveled that the rickety wagon could hold together, so
prodigious were the bumps imparted to it by the deep ruts. Every wheel,
half-dished and threatening to dish, wobbled and revolved out of line
with every other wheel. And if the wagon held intact, Henry judged, it
was a miracle that the crazy harness did not fly to pieces. When
directly opposite the window, the old man made a last effort,
half-standing up from the seat as he pulled on the reins. One was
rotten, and broke. As the driver fell backward into the seat, his weight
on the remaining rein caused the horse to swerve sharply to the right.
What happened then—whether a wheel dished, or whether a wheel had come
off first and dished afterward—Henry could not determine. The one
incontestable thing was that the wagon was a wreck. The old man,
dragging in the dust and stubbornly hanging on to the remaining rein,
swung the horse in a circle until it stopped, facing him and snorting at
him.

By the time he gained his feet a crowd of _mosos_ was forming about him.
These were roughly shouldered right and left by the gendarmes who
erupted from the jail. Henry remained at the window and, for a man with
but a few hours to live, was an amused spectator and listener to what
followed.

Giving his horse to a gendarme to hold, not stopping to brush the filth
from his person, the old man limped hurriedly to the wagon and began an
examination of the several packing cases, large and small, which
composed its load. Of one case he was especially solicitous, even trying
to lift it and seeming to listen as he lifted.

He straightened up, on being addressed by one of the gendarmes, and made
voluble reply.

“Me? Alas senors, I am an old man, and far from home. I am Leopoldo
Narvaez. It is true, my mother was German, may the Saints preserve her
rest; but my father was Baltazar de Jesus y Cervallos é Narvaez, son of
General Narvaez of martial memory, who fought under the great Bolivar
himself. And now I am half ruined and far from home.”

Prompted by other questions, interlarded with the courteous expressions
of sympathy with which even the humblest _moso_ is over generously
supplied, he managed to be polite-fully grateful and to run on with his
tale.

“I have driven from Bocas del Toro. It has taken me five days, and
business has been poor. My home is in Colon, and I wish I were safely
there. But even a noble Narvaez may be a peddler, and even a peddler
must live, eh, senors, is it not so? But tell me, is there not a Tomas
Romero who dwells in this pleasant city of San Antonio?”

“There are any God’s number of Tomas Romeros who dwell everywhere in
Panama,” laughed Pedro Zurita, the assistant jailer. “One would need
fuller description.”

“He is the cousin of my second wife,” the ancient answered hopefully,
and seemed bewildered by the roar of laughter from the crowd.

“And a dozen Tomas Romeros live in and about San Antonio,” the assistant
jailer went on, “any one of which may be your second wife’s cousin,
Senor. There is Tomas Romero, the drunkard. There is Tomas Romero, the
thief. There is Tomas Romero—but no, he was hanged a month back for
murder and robbery. There is the rich Tomas Romero who owns many cattle
on the hills. There is....”

To each suggested one, Leopoldo Narvaez had shaken his head dolefully,
until the cattle-owner was mentioned. At this he had become hopeful and
broke in:

“Pardon me, senor, it must be he, or some such a one as he. I shall find
him. If my precious stock-in-trade can be safely stored, I shall seek
him now. It is well my misfortune came upon me where it did. I shall be
able to trust it with you, who are, one can see with half an eye, an
honest and an honorable man.” As he talked, he fumbled forth from his
pocket two silver pesos and handed them to the jailer. “There, I wish
you and your men to have some pleasure of assisting me.”

Henry grinned to himself as he noted the access of interest in the old
man and of consideration for him, on the part of Pedro Zurita and the
gendarmes, caused by the present of the coins. They shoved the more
curious of the crowd roughly back from the wrecked wagon and began to
carry the boxes into the jail.

“Careful, senors, careful,” the old one pleaded, greatly anxious, as
they took hold of the big box. “Handle it gently. It is of value, and it
is fragile, most fragile.”

While the contents of the wagon were being carried into the jail, the
old man removed and deposited in the wagon all harness from the horse
save the bridle.

Pedro Zurita ordered the harness taken in as well, explaining, with a
glare at the miserable crowd: “Not a strap or buckle would remain the
second after our backs were turned.”

Using what was left of the wagon for a stepping block, and ably assisted
by the jailer and his crew, the peddler managed to get astride his
animal.

“It is well,” he said, and added gratefully: “A thousand thanks, senors.
It has been my good fortune to meet with honest men with whom my goods
will be safe—only poor goods, peddler’s goods, you understand; but to
me, everything, my way upon the road. The pleasure has been mine to meet
you. To-morrow I shall return with my kinsman, whom I certainly shall
find, and relieve from you the burden of safeguarding my inconsiderable
property.” He doffed his hat. “Adios, senors, adios!”

He rode away at a careful walk, timid of the animal he bestrode which
had caused his catastrophe. He halted and turned his head at a call from
Pedro Zurita.

“Search the graveyard, Senor Narvaez,” the jailer advised. “Full a
hundred Tomas Romeros lie there.”

“And be vigilant, I beg of you, senor, of the heavy box,” the peddler
called back.

Henry watched the street grow deserted as the gendarmes and the populace
fled from the scorch of the sun. Small wonder, he thought to himself,
that the old peddler’s voice had sounded vaguely familiar. It had been
because he had possessed only half a Spanish tongue to twist around the
language—the other half being the German tongue of the mother. Even so,
he talked like a native, and he would be robbed like a native if there
was anything of value in the heavy box deposited with the jailers, Henry
concluded, ere dismissing the incident from his mind.

In the guardroom, a scant fifty feet away from Henry’s cell, Leopoldo
Narvaez was being robbed. It had begun by Pedro Zurita making a profound
and wistful survey of the large box. He lifted one end of it to sample
its weight, and sniffed like a hound at the crack of it as if his nose
might give him some message of its contents.

“Leave it alone, Pedro,” one of the gendarmes laughed at him. “You have
been paid two pesos to be honest.”

The assistant jailer sighed, walked away and sat down, looked back at
the box, and sighed again. Conversation languished. Continually the eyes
of the men roved to the box. A greasy pack of cards could not divert
them. The game languished. The gendarme who had twitted Pedro himself
went to the box and sniffed.

“I smell nothing,” he announced. “Absolutely in the box there is nothing
to smell. Now what can it be? The caballero said that it was of value!”

“Caballero!” sniffed another of the gendarmes. “The old man’s father was
more like to have been peddler of rotten fish on the streets of Colon
and his father before him. Every lying beggar claims descent from the
conquistadores.”

“And why not, Rafael?” Pedro Zurita retorted. “Are we not all so
descended?”

“Without doubt,” Rafael readily agreed. “The conquistadores slew many——”

“And were the ancestors of those that survived,” Pedro completed for him
and aroused a general laugh. “Just the same, almost would I give one of
these pesos to know what is in that box.”

“There is Ignacio,” Rafael greeted the entrance of a turnkey whose heavy
eyes tokened he was just out of his siesta. “He was not paid to be
honest. Come, Ignacio, relieve our curiosity by letting us know what is
in the box.”

“How should I know?” Ignacio demanded, blinking at the object of
interest. “Only now have I awakened.”

“You have not been paid to be honest, then?” Rafael asked.

“Merciful Mother of God, who is the man who would pay me to be honest?”
the turnkey demanded.

“Then take the hatchet there and open the box,” Rafael drove his point
home. “We may not, for as surely as Pedro is to share the two pesos with
us, that surely have we been paid to be honest. Open the box, Ignacio,
or we shall perish of our curiosity.”

“We will look, we will only look,” Pedro muttered nervously, as the
turnkey prized off a board with the blade of the hatchet. “Then we will
close the box again and——Put your hand in, Ignacio. What is it you
find?... eh? what does it feel like? Ah!”

After pulling and tugging, Ignacio’s hand had reappeared, clutching a
cardboard carton.

“Remove it carefully, for it must be replaced,” the jailer cautioned.

And when the wrappings of paper and tissue paper were removed, all eyes
focused on a quart bottle of rye whiskey.

“How excellently is it composed,” Pedro murmured in tones of awe. “It
must be very good that such care be taken of it.”

“It is Americano whiskey,” sighed a gendarme. “Once, only, have I drunk
Americano whiskey. It was wonderful. Such was the courage of it, that I
leaped into the bull-ring at Santos and faced a wild bull with my hands.
It is true, the bull rolled me, but did I not leap into the ring?”

Pedro took the bottle and prepared to knock its neck off.

“Hold!” cried Rafael. “You were paid to be honest.”