Hearts of Three 22

Hearts of Three 22

“I shall shoot down upon you and kill you!” the Jefe bullied.

 

“Shoot or drown me,” Guillermo’s voice floated up; “but it will buy you

nothing, for the treasure will still be in the well.”

 

There was a pause, in which those at the surface questioned each other

with their eyes as to what they should do.

 

“And the Gringos are running away farther and farther,” Torres fumed. “A

fine discipline you have, Senor Mariano Vercara è Hijos, over your

gendarmes!”

 

“This is not San Antonio,” the Jefe flared back. “This is the bush of

Juchitan. My dogs are good dogs in San Antonio. In the bush they must be

handled gently, else may they become wild dogs, and what then will

happen to you and me?”

 

“It is the curse of gold,” Torres surrendered sadly. “It is almost

enough to make one become a socialist, with a Gringo thus tying the

hands of justice with ropes of gold.”

 

“Of silver,” the Jefe corrected.

 

“You go to hell,” said Torres. “As you have pointed out, this is not San

Antonio but the bush of Juchitan, and here I may well tell you to go to

hell. Why should you and I quarrel because of your bad temper, when our

prosperity depends on standing together?”

 

“Besides,” the voice of Guillermo drifted up, “the water is not two feet

deep. You cannot drown me in it. I have just felt the bottom and I have

four round silver pesos in my hand right now. The bottom is carpeted

with pesos. Do you want to let go? Or do I get ten pesos extra for the

filthy job? The water stinks like a fresh graveyard.”

 

“Yes! Yes!” they shouted down.

 

“Which? Let go? Or the extra ten?”

 

“The extra ten!” they chorused.

 

“In God’s name, haste! haste!” cried the Jefe.

 

They heard splashings and curses from the bottom of the well, and, from

the lightening of the strain on the riata, knew that Guillermo had left

the bucket and was floundering for the coin.

 

“Put it in the bucket, good Guillermo,” Rafael called down.

 

“I am putting it in my pockets,” up came the reply. “Did I put it in the

bucket you might haul it up first and well forget to haul me up

afterward.”

 

“The double weight might break the riata,” Rafael cautioned.

 

“The riata may not be so strong as my will, for my will in this matter

is most strong,” said Guillermo.

 

“If the riata should break ...” Rafael began again.

 

“I have a solution,” said Guillermo. “Do you come down. Then shall I go

up first. Second, the treasure shall go up in the bucket. And, third and

last, shall you go up. Thus will justice be triumphant.”

 

Rafael, with dropped jaw of dismay, did not reply.

 

“Are you coming, Rafael?”

 

“No,” he answered. “Put all the silver in your pockets and come up

together with it.”

 

“I could curse the race that bore me,” was the impatient observation of

the Jefe.

 

“I have already cursed it,” said Torres.

 

“Haul away!” shouted Guillermo. “I have everything in my pockets save

the stench; and I am suffocating. Haul quick, or I shall perish, and the

three hundred pesos will perish with me. And there are more than three

hundred. He must have emptied his bag.”

 

* * * * *

 

Ahead, on the trail, where the way grew steep and the horses without

stamina rested and panted, Francis overtook his party.

 

“Never again shall I travel without minted coin of the realm,” he

exulted, as he described what he had remained behind to see from the

edge of the deserted plantation. “Henry, when I die and go to heaven, I

shall have a stout bag of cash along with me. Even there could it redeem

me from heaven alone knows what scrapes. Listen! They fought like cats

and dogs about the mouth of the well. Nobody would trust anybody to

descend into the well unless he deposited what he had previously picked

up with those that remained at the top. They were out of hand. The Jefe,

at the point of his gun, had to force the littlest and leanest of them

to go down. And when he was down he blackmailed them before he would

come up. And when he came up they broke their promises and gave him a

beating. They were still beating him when I left.”

 

“But now your sack is empty,” said Henry.

 

“Which is our present and most pressing trouble,” Francis agreed. “Had I

sufficient pesos I could keep the pursuit well behind us forever. I’m

afraid I was too generous. I did not know how cheap the poor devils

were. But I’ll tell you something that will make your hair stand up.

Torres, Senor Torres, Senor Alvarez Torres, the elegant gentleman and

old-time friend of you Solanos, is leading the pursuit along with the

Jefe. He is furious at the delay. They almost had a rupture because the

Jefe couldn’t keep his men in hand. Yes, sir, and he told the Jefe to go

to hell. I distinctly heard him tell the Jefe to go to hell.”

 

Five miles farther on, the horses of Leoncia and her father in collapse,

where the trail plunged into and ascended a dark ravine, Francis urged

the others on and dropped behind. Giving them a few minutes’ start, he

followed on behind, a self-constituted rearguard. Part way along, in an

open space where grew only a thick sod of grass, he was dismayed to find

the hoof-prints of the two horses staring at him as large as dinner

plates from out of the sod. Into the hoof-prints had welled a dark,

slimy fluid that his eye told him was crude oil. This was but the

beginning, a sort of seepage from a side stream above off from the main

flow. A hundred yards beyond he came upon the flow itself, a river of

oil that on such a slope would have been a cataract had it been water.

But being crude oil, as thick as molasses, it oozed slowly down the hill

like so much molasses. And here, preferring to make his stand rather

than to wade through the sticky mess, Francis sat down on a rock, laid

his rifle on one side of him, his automatic pistol on the other side,

rolled a cigarette, and kept his ears pricked for the first sounds of

the pursuit.

 

* * * * *

 

And the beaten peon, threatened with more beatings and belaboring his

over-ridden mare, rode across the top of the ravine above Francis, and,

at the oil-well itself, had his exhausted animal collapse under him.

With his heels he kicked her back to her feet, and with a stick

belabored her to stagger away from him and on and into the jungle. And

the first day of his adventures, although he did not know it, was not

yet over. He, too, squatted on a stone, his feet out of the oil, rolled

a cigarette, and, as he smoked it, contemplated the flowing oil-well.

The noise of approaching men startled him, and he fled into the

immediately adjacent jungle, from which he peered forth and saw two

strange men appear. They came directly to the well, and, by an iron

wheel turning the valve, choked down the flow still further.

 

“No more,” commanded the one who seemed to be leader. “Another turn, and

the pressure will blow out the pipes—for so the Gringo engineer has

warned me most carefully.”

 

And a slight flow, beyond the limited safety, continued to run from the

mouth of the gusher down the mountain side. Scarcely had the two men

accomplished this, when a body of horsemen rode up, whom the peon in

hiding recognized as the haciendado who owned him and the overseers and

haciendados of neighboring plantations who delighted in running down a

fugitive laborer in much the same way that the English delight in

chasing the fox.

 

No, the two oil-men had seen nobody. But the haciendado who led saw the

footprints of the mare, and spurred his horse to follow, his crowd at

his heels.

 

The peon waited, smoked his cigarette quite to the finish, and

cogitated. When all was clear, he ventured forth, turned the mechanism

controlling the well wide open, watched the oil fountaining upward under

the subterranean pressure and flowing down the mountain in a veritable

river. Also, he listened to and noted the sobbing, and gasping, and

bubbling of the escaping gas. This he did not comprehend, and all that

saved him for his further adventures was the fact that he had used his

last match to light his cigarette. In vain he searched his rags, his

ears, and his hair. He was out of matches.

 

So, chuckling at the river of oil he was wantonly running to waste, and,

remembering the canyon trail below, he plunged down the mountainside and

upon Francis, who received him with extended automatic. Down went the

peon on his frayed and frazzled knees in terror and supplication to the

man he had twice betrayed that day. Francis studied him, at first

without recognition, because of the bruised and lacerated face and head

on which the blood had dried like a mask.

 

“Amigo, amigo,” chattered the peon.

 

But at that moment, from below on the ravine trail, Francis heard the

clatter of a stone dislodged by some man’s foot. The next moment he

identified what was left of the peon as the pitiable creature to whom he

had given half the contents of his whiskey flask.

 

“Well, amigo,” Francis said in the native language, “it looks as if they

are after you.”

 

“They will kill me, they will beat me to death, they are very angry,”

the wretch quavered. “You are my only friend, my father and my mother,

save me.”

 

“Can you shoot?” Francis demanded.

 

“I was a hunter in the Cordilleras before I was sold into slavery,

Senor,” was the reply.

 

Francis passed him the automatic, motioned him to take shelter, and told

him not to fire until sure of a hit. And to himself he mused: The

golfers are out on the links right now at Tarrytown. And Mrs. Bellingham

is on the clubhouse veranda wondering how she is going to pay the three

thousand points she’s behind and praying for a change of luck. And——here

am I,—Lord! Lord——backed up to a river of oil....