Hearts of Three 14

Hearts of Three 14

“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.”

 

“By a man who was not himself honest,” came the retort. “The stuff is

contraband. It has never paid duty. The old man was in possession of

smuggled goods. Let us now gratefully and with clear conscience invest

ourselves in its possession. We will confiscate it. We will destroy it.”

 

Not waiting for the bottle to pass, Ignacio and Rafael unwrapped fresh

ones and broke off the necks.

 

“Three stars—most excellent,” Pedro Zurita orated in a pause, pointing

to the trade mark. “You see, all Gringo whiskey is good. One star shows

that it is very good; two stars that it is excellent; three stars that

it is superb, the best, and better than beyond that. Ah, I know. The

Gringos are strong on strong drink. No pulque for them.”

 

“And four stars?” queried Ignacio, his voice husky from the liquor, the

moisture glistening in his eyes.

 

“Four stars? Friend Ignacio, four stars would be either sudden death or

translation into paradise.”

 

In not many minutes, Rafael, his arm around another gendarme, was

calling him brother and proclaiming that it took little to make men

happy here below.

 

“The old man was a fool, three times a fool, and thrice that,”

volunteered Augustino, a sullen-faced gendarme, who for the first time

gave tongue to speech.

 

“Viva Augustino!” cheered Rafael. “The three stars have worked a

miracle. Behold! Have they not unlocked Augustino’s mouth?”

 

“And thrice times thrice again was the old man a fool!” Augustino

bellowed fiercely. “The very drink of the gods was his, all his, and he

has been five days alone with it on the road from Bocas del Toro, and

never taken one little sip. Such fools as he should be stretched out

naked on an ant-heap, say I.”

 

“The old man was a rogue,” quoth Pedro. “And when he comes back

to-morrow for his three stars I shall arrest him for a smuggler. It will

be a feather in all our caps.”

 

“If we destroy the evidence—thus?” queried Augustino, knocking off

another neck.

 

“We will save the evidence—thus!” Pedro replied, smashing an empty

bottle on the stone flags. “Listen, comrades. The box was very heavy—we

are all agreed. It fell. The bottles broke. The liquor ran out, and so

were we made aware of the contraband. The box and the broken bottles

will be evidence sufficient.”

 

The uproar grew as the liquor diminished. One gendarme quarreled with

Ignacio over a forgotten debt of ten centavos. Two others sat upon the

floor, arms around each other’s necks, and wept over the miseries of

their married lot. Augustino, like a very spendthrift of speech,

explained his philosophy that silence was golden. And Pedro Zurita

became sentimental on brotherhood.

 

“Even my prisoners,” he maundered. “I love them as brothers. Life is

sad.” A gush of tears in his eyes made him desist while he took another

drink. “My prisoners are my very children. My heart bleeds for them.

Behold! I weep. Let us share with them. Let them have a moment’s

happiness. Ignacio, dearest brother of my heart. Do me a favor. See, I

weep on your hand. Carry a bottle of this elixir to the Gringo Morgan.

Tell him my sorrow that he must hang to-morrow. Give him my love and bid

him drink and be happy to-day.”

 

And as Ignacio passed out on the errand, the gendarme who had once leapt

into the bull-ring at Santos, began roaring:

 

“I want a bull! I want a bull!”

 

“He wants it, dear soul, that he may put his arms around it and love

it,” Pedro Zurita explained, with a fresh access of weeping. “I, too,

love bulls. I love all things. I love even mosquitoes. All the world is

love. That is the secret of the world. I should like to have a lion to

play with....”

 

* * * * *

 

The unmistakable air of “Back to Back Against the Mainmast” being

whistled openly in the street, caught Henry’s attention, and he was

crossing his big cell to the window when the grating of a key in the

door made him lie down quickly on the floor and feign sleep. Ignacio

staggered drunkenly in, bottle in hand, which he gravely presented to

Henry.

 

“With the high compliments of our good jailer, Pedro Zurita,” he

mumbled. “He says to drink and forget that he must stretch your neck

to-morrow.”

 

“My high compliments to Senor Pedro Zurita, and tell him from me to go

to hell along with his whiskey,” Henry replied.

 

The turnkey straightened up and ceased swaying, as if suddenly become

sober.

 

“Very well, senor,” he said, then passed out and locked the door.

 

In a rush Henry was at the window just in time to encounter Francis face

to face and thrusting a revolver to him through the bars.

 

“Greetings, camarada,” Francis said. “We’ll have you out of here in a

jiffy.” He held up two sticks of dynamite, with fuse and caps complete.

“I have brought this pretty crowbar to pry you out. Stand well back in

your cell, because real pronto there’s going to be a hole in this wall

that we could sail the _Angelique_ through. And the _Angelique_ is right

off the beach waiting for you.—Now, stand back. I’m going to touch her

off. It’s a short fuse.”

 

Hardly had Henry backed into a rear corner of his cell, when the door

was clumsily unlocked and opened to a babel of cries and imprecations,

chiefest among which he could hear the ancient and invariable war-cry of

Latin-America, “Kill the Gringo!”

 

Also, he could hear Rafael and Pedro, as they entered, babbling, the

one: “He is the enemy of brotherly love”; and the other, “He said I was

to go to hell—is not that what he said, Ignacio?”

 

In their hands they carried rifles, and behind them urged the drunken

rabble, variously armed, from cutlasses and horse-pistols to hatchets

and bottles. At sight of Henry’s revolver, they halted, and Pedro,

fingering his rifle unsteadily, maundered solemnly:

 

“Senor Morgan, you are about to take up your rightful abode in hell.”

 

But Ignacio did not wait. He fired wildly and widely from his hip,

missing Henry by half the width of the cell and going down the next

moment under the impact of Henry’s bullet. The rest retreated

precipitately into the jail corridor, where, themselves unseen, they

began discharging their weapons into the room.

 

Thanking his fortunate stars for the thickness of the walls, and hoping

no ricochet would get him, Henry sheltered in a protecting angle and

waited for the explosion.

 

It came. The window and the wall beneath it became all one aperture.

Struck on the head by a flying fragment, Henry sank down dizzily, and,

as the dust of the mortar and the powder cleared, with wavering eyes he

saw Francis apparently swim through the hole. By the time he had been

dragged out through the hole, Henry was himself again. He could see

Enrico Solano and Ricardo, his youngest born, rifles in hand, holding

back the crowd forming up the street, while the twins, Alvarado and

Martinez, similarly held back the crowd forming down the street.

 

But the populace was merely curious, having its lives to lose and

nothing to gain if it attempted to block the way of such masterful men

as these who blew up walls and stormed jails in open day. And it gave

back respectfully before the compact group as it marched down the

street.

 

“The horses are waiting up the next alley,” Francis told Henry, as they

gripped hands. “And Leoncia is waiting with them. Fifteen minutes’

gallop will take us to the beach, where the boat is waiting.”

 

“Say, that was some song I taught you,” Henry grinned. “It sounded like

the very best little bit of all right when I heard you whistling it. The

dogs were so previous they couldn’t wait till to-morrow to hang me. They

got full of whiskey and decided to finish me off right away. Funny thing

that whiskey. An old caballero turned peddler wrecked a wagon-load of it

right in front of the jail——”

 

“For even a noble Narvaez, son of Baltazar de Jesus y Cervallos è

Narvaez, son of General Narvaez of martial memory, may be a peddler, and

even a peddler must live, eh, senors, is it not so?” Francis mimicked.

 

Henry looked his gleeful recognition, and added soberly: