Hearts of Three 17

Hearts of Three 17

“It would be a happier morning if the cursed fever had not laid its

chill upon me,” Captain Rosaro grunted sourly, the hand that held the

mug, the arm, and all his body shivering so violently as to spill the

hot liquid down his chin and into the black-and-gray thatch of hair that

covered his half-exposed chest. “Take that, you animal of hell!” he

cried, flinging mug and contents at a splinter of a half-breed boy,

evidently his servant, who had been unable to repress his glee.

 

“But the sun will rise and the fever will work its will and shortly

depart,” said the Jefe, politely ignoring the display of spleen. “And

you are finished here, and you are bound for Bocas del Toro, and we

shall go with you, all of us, on a rare adventure. We will pick up the

schooner _Angelique_, calm-bound all last night in the lagoon, and I

shall make many arrests, and all Panama will so ring with your courage

and ability, Capitan, that you will forget that the fever ever whispered

in you.”

 

“How much?” Capitan Rosaro demanded bluntly.

 

“Much?” the Jefe countered in surprise. “This is an affair of

government, good friend. And it is right on your way to Bocas del Toro.

It will not cost you an extra shovelful of coal.”

 

“Muchacho! More coffee!” the tug-skipper roared at the boy.

 

A pause fell, wherein Torres and the Jefe and all the draggled following

yearned for the piping hot coffee brought by the boy. Captain Rosaro

played the rim of the mug against his teeth like a rattling of

castanets, but managed to sip without spilling and so to burn his mouth.

 

A vacant-faced Swede, in filthy overalls, with a soiled cap on which

appeared “Engineer,” came up from below, lighted a pipe, and seemingly

went into a trance as he sat on the tug’s low rail.

 

“How much?” Captain Rosaro repeated.

 

“Let us get under way, dear friend,” said the Jefe. “And then, when the

fever-shock has departed, we will discuss the matter with reason, being

reasonable creatures ourselves and not animals.”

 

“How much?” Captain Rosaro repeated again. “I am never an animal. I

always am a creature of reason, whether the sun is up or not up, or

whether this thrice-accursed fever is upon me. How much?”

 

“Well, let us start, and for how much?” the Jefe conceded wearily.

 

“Fifty dollars gold,” was the prompt answer.

 

“You are starting anyway, are you not, Capitan?” Torres queried softly.

 

“Fifty——gold, as I have said.”

 

The Jefe Politico threw up his hands with a hopeless gesture and turned

on his heel to depart.

 

“Yet you swore eternal vengeance for the crime committed on your jail,”

Torres reminded him.

 

“But not if it costs fifty dollars,” the Jefe snapped back, out of the

corner of his eye watching the shivering captain for some sign of

relenting.

 

“Fifty gold,” said the Captain, as he finished draining the mug and with

shaking fingers strove to roll a cigarette. He nodded his head in the

direction of the Swede, and added, “and five gold extra for my engineer.

It is our custom.”

 

Torres stepped closer to the Jefe and whispered:

 

“I will pay for the tug myself and charge the Gringo Regan a hundred,

and you and I will divide the difference. We lose nothing. We shall

make. For this Regan pig instructed me well not to mind expense.”

 

As the sun slipped brazenly above the eastern horizon, one gendarme went

back into Las Palmas with the jaded horses, the rest of the party

descended to the deck of the tug, the Swede dived down into the

engine-room, and Captain Rosaro, shaking off his chill in the sun’s

beneficent rays, ordered the deck-hands to cast off the lines, and put

one of them at the wheel in the pilot-house.

 

* * * * *

 

And the same day-dawn found the _Angelique_, after a night of almost

perfect calm, off the mainland from which she had failed to get away,

although she had made sufficient northing to be midway between San

Antonio and the passages of Bocas del Toro and Cartago. These two

passages to the open sea still lay twenty-five miles away, and the

schooner truly slept on the mirror surface of the placid lagoon. Too

stuffy below for sleep in the steaming tropics, the deck was littered

with the sleepers. On top the small house of the cabin, in solitary

state, lay Leoncia. On the narrow runways of deck on either side lay her

brothers and her father. Aft, between the cabin companionway and the

wheel, side by side, Francis’ arm across Henry’s shoulder, as if still

protecting him, were the two Morgans. On one side of the wheel, sitting,

with arms on knees and head on arms, the negro-Indian skipper slept, and

just as precisely postured, on the other side of the wheel, slept the

helmsman, who was none other than Percival, the black Kingston negro.

The waist of the schooner was strewn with the bodies of the mixed-breed

seamen, while for’ard, on the tiny forecastlehead, prone, his face

buried upon his folded arms, slept the lookout.

 

Leoncia, in her high place on the cabin-top, awoke first. Propping her

head on her hand, the elbow resting on a bit of the poncho on which she

lay, she looked down past one side of the hood of the companionway upon

the two young men. She yearned over them, who were so alike, and knew

love for both of them, remembered the kisses of Henry on her mouth,

thrilled till the blush of her own thoughts mantled her cheek at memory

of the kisses of Francis, and was puzzled and amazed that she should

have it in her to love two men at the one time. As she had already

learned of herself, she would follow Henry to the end of the world and

Francis even farther. And she could not understand such wantonness of

inclination.

 

Fleeing from her own thoughts, which frightened her, she stretched out

her arm and dangled the end of her silken scarf to a tickling of

Francis’ nose, who, after restless movements, still in the heaviness of

sleep, struck with his hand at what he must have thought to be a

mosquito or a fly, and hit Henry on the chest. So it was Henry who was

first awakened. He sat up with such abruptness as to awaken Francis.

 

“Good morning, merry kinsman,” Francis greeted. “Why such violence?”

 

“Morning, morning, and the morning’s morning, comrade,” Henry muttered.

“Such was the violence of your sleep that it was you who awakened me

with a buffet on my breast. I thought it was the hangman, for this is

the morning they planned to kink my neck.” He yawned, stretched his

arms, gazed out over the rail at the sleeping sea, and nudged Francis to

observance of the sleeping skipper and helmsman.

 

They looked so bonny, the pair of Morgans, Leoncia thought; and at the

same time wondered why the English word had arisen unsummoned in her

mind rather than a Spanish equivalent. Was it because her heart went out

so generously to the two Gringos that she must needs think of them in

their language instead of her own?

 

To escape the perplexity of her thoughts, she dangled the scarf again,

was discovered, and laughingly confessed that it was she who had caused

their violence of waking.

 

Three hours later, breakfast of coffee and fruit over, she found herself

at the wheel taking her first lesson of steering and of the compass

under Francis’ tuition. The _Angelique_, under a crisp little breeze

which had hauled around well to north’ard, was for the moment heeling it

through the water at a six-knot clip. Henry, swaying on the weather side

of the after-deck and searching the sea through the binoculars, was

striving to be all unconcerned at the lesson, although secretly he was

mutinous with himself for not having first thought of himself

introducing her to the binnacle and the wheel. Yet he resolutely

refrained from looking around or from even stealing a corner-of-the-eye

glance at the other two.

 

But Captain Trefethen, with the keen cruelty of Indian curiosity and the

impudence of a negro subject of King George, knew no such delicacy. He

stared openly and missed nothing of the chemic drawing together of his

charterer and the pretty Spanish girl. When they leaned over the wheel

to look into the binnacle, they leaned toward each other and Leoncia’s

hair touched Francis’ cheek. And the three of them, themselves and the

breed skipper, knew the thrill induced by such contact. But the man and

woman knew immediately what the breed skipper did not know, and what

they knew was embarrassment. Their eyes lifted to each other in a flash

of mutual startlement, and drooped away and down guiltily. Francis

talked very fast and loud enough for half the schooner to hear, as he

explained the lubber’s point of the compass. But Captain Trefethen

grinned.

 

A rising puff of breeze made Francis put the wheel up. His hand to the

spoke rested on her hand already upon it. Again they thrilled, and again

the skipper grinned.

 

Leoncia’s eyes lifted to Francis’, then dropped in confusion. She

slipped her hand out from under and terminated the lesson by walking

slowly away with a fine assumption of casualness, as if the wheel and

the binnacle no longer interested her. But she had left Francis afire

with what he knew was lawlessness and treason as he glanced at Henry’s

shoulder and profile and hoped he had not seen what had occurred.

Leoncia, apparently gazing off across the lagoon to the jungle-clad

shore, was seeing nothing as she thoughtfully turned her engagement ring

around and around on her finger.

 

But Henry, turning to tell them of the smudge of smoke he had discovered

on the horizon, had inadvertently seen. And the negro-Indian captain had

seen him see. So the captain lurched close to him, the cruelty of the

Indian dictating the impudence of the negro, as he said in a low voice:

 

“Ah, be not downcast, sir. The senorita is generously hearted. There is

room for both you gallant gentlemen in her heart.”

 

And the next fraction of a second he learned the inevitable and

invariable lesson that white men must have their privacy of intimate

things; for he lay on his back, the back of his head sore from contact

with the deck, the front of his head, between the eyes, sore from

contact with the knuckles of Henry Morgan’s right hand.

 

But the Indian in the skipper was up and raging as he sprang to his

feet, knife in hand. Juan, the pale-yellow mixed breed, leaped to the

side of his skipper flourishing another knife, while several of the

nearer sailors joined in forming a semi-circle of attack on Henry, who,

with a quick step back and an upward slap of his hand, under the

pin-rail, caused an iron belaying pin to leap out and up into the air.

Catching it in mid-flight, he was prepared to defend himself. Francis,

abandoning the wheel and drawing his automatic as he sprang, was through

the circle and by the side of Henry.

 

“What did he say?” Francis demanded of his kinsman.

 

“I’ll say what I said,” the breed skipper threatened, the negro side of

him dominant as he built for a compromise of blackmail. “I said——”

 

“Hold on, skipper!” Henry interrupted. “I’m sorry I struck you. Hold

your hush. Put a stopper on your jaw. Saw wood. Forget. I’m sorry I

struck you. I....” Henry Morgan could not help the pause in speech

during which he swallowed his gorge rising at what he was about to say.

And it was because of Leoncia, and because she was looking on and

listening, that he said it. “I ... I apologize, skipper.”