Hearts of Three 10

Hearts of Three 10

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.