Hearts of Three 16

Hearts of Three 16

And aboard came the woman, the peril and the pelf—Leoncia, the rifles,

and a sack of money—all in a scramble; for, the wind being light, the

captain had not bothered to stop way on the schooner.

 

“Glad to welcome you on board, sir,” Captain Trefethen greeted Francis

with a white slash of teeth between his smiling lips. “But who is this

man?” He nodded his head to indicate Henry.

 

“A friend, captain, a guest of mine, in fact, a kinsman.”

 

“And who, sir, may I make bold to ask, are those gentlemen riding along

the beach in fashion so lively?”

 

Henry looked quickly at the group of horsemen galloping along the sand,

unceremoniously took the binoculars from the skipper’s hand, and gazed

through them.

 

“It’s the Jefe himself in the lead,” he reported to Leoncia and her

menfolk, “with a bunch of gendarmes.” He uttered a sharp exclamation,

stared through the glasses intently, then shook his head. “Almost I

thought I made out our friend Torres.”

 

“With our enemies!” Leoncia cried incredulously, remembering Torres’

proposal of marriage and proffer of service and honor that very day on

the hacienda piazza.

 

“I must have been mistaken,” Francis acknowledged. “They are riding so

bunched together. But it’s the Jefe all right, two jumps ahead of the

outfit.”

 

“Who is this Torres duck?” Henry asked harshly. “I’ve never liked his

looks from the first, yet he seems always welcome under your roof,

Leoncia.”

 

“I beg your parson, sir, most gratifiedly, and with my humilius

respects,” Captain Trefethen interrupted suavely. “But I must call your

attention to the previous question, sir, which is: who and what is that

cavalcade disporting itself with such earnestness along the sand?”

 

“They tried to hang me yesterday,” Francis laughed. “And to-morrow they

were going to hang my kinsman there. Only we beat them to it. And here

we are. Now, Mr. Skipper, I call your attention to your head-sheets

flapping in the wind. You are standing still. How much longer do you

expect to stick around here?”

 

“Mr. Morgan, sir,” came the answer, “it is with dumbfounded respect that

I serve you as the charterer of my vessel. Nevertheless, I must inform

you that I am a British subject. King George is my king, sir, and I owe

obedience first of all to him and to his laws of maritime between all

nations, sir. It is lucid to my comprehension that you have broken laws

ashore, or else the officers ashore would not be so assiduously in quest

of you, sir. And it is also lucid to clarification that it is now your

wish to have me break the laws of maritime by enabling you to escape.

So, in honor bound, I must stick around here until this little

difficulty that you may have appertained ashore is adjusted to the

satisfaction of all parties concerned, sir, and to the satisfaction of

my lawful sovereign.”

 

“Fill away and get out of this, skipper!” Henry broke in angrily.

 

“Sir, assuring you of your gratification of pardon, it is my unpleasant

task to inform you of two things. Neither are you my charterer; nor are

you the noble King George to whom I give ambitious allegiance.”

 

“Well, I’m your charterer, skipper,” Francis said pleasantly, for he had

learned to humor the man of mixed words and parentage. “So just kindly

put up your helm and sail us out of this Chiriqui Lagoon as fast as God

and this failing wind will let you.”

 

“It is not in the charter, sir, that my _Angelique_ shall break the laws

of Panama and King George.”

 

“I’ll pay you well,” Francis retorted, beginning to lose his temper.

“Get busy.”

 

“You will then recharter, sir, at three times the present charter?”

 

Francis nodded shortly.

 

“Then wait, sir, I entreat. I must procure pen and paper from the cabin

and make out the document.”

 

“Oh, Lord,” Francis groaned. “Square away and get a move on first. We

can make out the paper just as easily while we are running as standing

still. Look! They are beginning to fire.”

 

The half-breed captain heard the report, and, searching his spread

canvas, discovered the hole of the bullet high up near the peak of the

mainsail.

 

“Very well, sir,” he conceded. “You are a gentleman and an honorable

man. I trust you to affix your signature to the document at your early

convenience——Hey, you nigger! Put up your wheel! Hard up! Jump, you

black rascals, and slack away mainsheet! Take a hand there, you,

Percival, on the boom-tackle!”

 

All obeyed, as did Percival, a grinning shambling Kingston negro who was

as black as his name was white, and as did another, addressed more

respectfully as Juan, who was more Spanish and Indian than negro, as his

light yellow skin attested, and whose fingers, slacking the foresheet,

were as slim and delicate as a girl’s.

 

“Knock the nigger on the head if he keeps up this freshness,” Henry

growled in an undertone to Francis. “For two cents I’ll do it right

now.”

 

But Francis shook his head.

 

“He’s all right, but he’s a Jamaica nigger, and you know what they are.

And he’s Indian as well. We might as well humor him, since it’s the

nature of the beast. He means all right, but he wants the money, he’s

risking his schooner against confiscation, and he’s afflicted with

_vocabularitis_. He just must get those long words out of his system or

else bust.”

 

Here Enrico Solano, with quivering nostrils and fingers restless on his

rifle as with half an eye he kept track of the wild shots being fired

from the beach, approached Henry and held out his hand.

 

“I have been guilty of a grave mistake, Senor Morgan,” he said. “In the

first hurt of my affliction at the death of my beloved brother, Alfaro,

I was guilty of thinking you guilty of his murder.” Here old Enrico’s

eyes flashed with anger consuming but unconsumable. “For murder it was,

dastardly and cowardly, a thrust in the dark in the back. I should have

known better. But I was overwhelmed, and the evidence was all against

you. I did not take pause of thought to consider that my dearly beloved

and only daughter was betrothed to you; to remember that all I had known

of you was straightness and man-likeness and courage such as never stabs

from behind the shield of the dark. I regret. I am sorry. And I am proud

once again to welcome you into my family as the husband-to-be of my

Leoncia.”

 

And while this whole-hearted restoration of Henry Morgan into the Solano

family went on, Leoncia was irritated because her father, in

Latin-American fashion, must use so many fine words and phrases, when a

single phrase, a handgrip, and a square look in the eyes were all that

was called for and was certainly all that either Henry or Francis would

have vouchsafed had the situation been reversed. Why, why, she asked of

herself, must her Spanish stock, in such extravagance of diction, seem

to emulate the similar extravagance of the Jamaica negro?

 

While this reiteration of the betrothal of Henry and Leoncia was taking

place, Francis, striving to appear uninterested, could not help taking

note of the pale-yellow sailor called Juan, conferring for’ard with

others of the crew, shrugging his shoulders significantly, gesticulating

passionately with his hands.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII

 

 

“And now we’ve lost both the Gringo pigs,” Alvarez Torres lamented on

the beach as, with a slight freshening of the breeze and with booms

winged out to port and starboard, the _Angelique_ passed out of range of

their rifles.

 

“Almost would I give three bells to the cathedral,” Mariano Vercara è

Hijos proclaimed, “to have them within a hundred yards of this rifle.

And if I had will of all Gringos they would depart so fast that the

devil in hell would be compelled to study English.”

 

Alvarez Torres beat the saddle pommel with his hand in sheer impotence

of rage and disappointment.

 

“The Queen of my Dreams!” he almost wept. “She is gone and away, off

with the two Morgans. I saw her climb up the side of the schooner. And

there is the New York Regan. Once out of Chiriqui Lagoon, the schooner

may sail directly to New York. And the Francis pig will not have been

delayed a month, and the Senor Regan will remit no money.”

 

“They will not get out of Chiriqui Lagoon,” the Jefe said solemnly. “I

am no animal without reason. I am a man. I know they will not get out.

Have I not sworn eternal vengeance? The sun is setting, and the promise

is for a night of little wind. The sky tells it to one with half an eye.

Behold those trailing wisps of clouds. What wind may be, and little

enough of that, will come from the north-east. It will be a head beat to

the Chorrera Passage. They will not attempt it. That nigger captain

knows the lagoon like a book. He will try to make the long tack and go

out past Bocas del Toro, or through the Cartago Passage. Even so, we

will outwit him. I have brains, reason. Reason. Listen. It is a long

ride. We will make it—straight down the coast to Las Palmas. Captain

Rosaro is there with the _Dolores_.”

 

“The second-hand old tugboat?—that cannot get out of her own way?”

Torres queried.

 

“But this night of calm and morrow of calm she will capture the

_Angelique_,” the Jefe replied. “On, comrades! We will ride! Captain

Rosaro is my friend. Any favor is but mine to ask.”

 

At daylight, the worn-out men, on beaten horses, straggled through the

decaying village of Las Palmas and down to the decaying pier, where a

very decayed-looking tugboat, sadly in need of paint, welcomed their

eyes. Smoke rising from the stack advertised that steam was up, and the

Jefe was wearily elated.

 

“A happy morning, Senor Capitan Rosaro, and well met,” he greeted the

hard-bitten Spanish skipper, who was reclined on a coil of rope and who

sipped black coffee from a mug that rattled against his teeth.