Hearts of Three 23

Hearts of Three 23

His musing ceased as abruptly as appeared the Jefe, Torres, and the

gendarmes down the trail. As abruptly he fired his rifle, and as

abruptly they fell back out of sight. He could not tell whether he had

hit one, or whether the man had merely fallen in precipitate retreat.

The pursuers did not care to make a rush of it, contenting themselves

with bushwhacking. Francis and the peon did the same, sheltering behind

rocks and bushes and frequently changing their positions.

 

At the end of an hour, the last cartridge in Francis’ rifle was all that

remained. The peon, under his warnings and threats, still retained two

cartridges in the automatic. But the hour had been an hour saved for

Leoncia and her people, and Francis was contentedly aware that at any

moment he could turn and escape by wading across the river of oil. So

all was well, and would have been well, had not, from above, come an

eruption of another body of men, who, from behind trees, fired as they

descended. This was the haciendado and his fellow haciendados, in chase

of the fugitive peon—although Francis did not know it. His conclusion

was that it was another posse that was after him. The shots they fired

at him were strongly confirmative.

 

The peon crawled to his side, showed him that two shots remained in the

automatic he was returning to him, and impressively begged from him his

box of matches. Next, the peon motioned him to cross the bottom of the

canyon and climb the other side. With half a guess of the creature’s

intention, Francis complied, from his new position of vantage emptying

his last rifle cartridge at the advancing posse and sending it back into

shelter down the ravine.

 

The next moment, the river of oil flared into flame from where the peon

had touched a match to it. In the following moment, clear up the

mountainside, the well itself sent a fountain of ignited gas a hundred

feet into the air. And, in the moment after, the ravine itself poured a

torrent of flame down upon the posse of Torres and the Jefe.

 

Scorched by the heat of the conflagration, Francis and the peon clawed

up the opposite side of the ravine, circled around and past the blazing

trail, and, at a dog-trot, raced up the recovered trail.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER X

 

 

While Francis and the peon hurried up the ravine-trail in safety, the

ravine itself, below where the oil flowed in, had become a river of

flame, which drove the Jefe, Torres, and the gendarmes to scale the

steep wall of the ravine. At the same time the party of haciendados in

pursuit of the peon was compelled to claw back and up to escape out of

the roaring canyon.

 

Ever the peon glanced back over his shoulder, until, with a cry of joy,

he indicated a second black-smoke pillar rising in the air beyond the

first burning well.

 

“More,” he chuckled. “There are more wells. They will all burn. And so

shall they and all their race pay for the many blows they have beaten on

me. And there is a lake of oil there, like the sea, like Juchitan Inlet

it is so big.”

 

And Francis recollected the lake of oil about which the haciendado had

told him—that, containing at least five million barrels which could not

yet be piped to sea transport, lay open to the sky, merely in a natural

depression in the ground and contained by an earth dam.

 

“How much are you worth?” he demanded of the peon with apparent

irrelevance.

 

But the peon could not understand.

 

“How much are your clothes worth—all you’ve got on?”

 

“Half a peso, nay, half of a half peso,” the peon admitted ruefully,

surveying what was left of his tattered rags.

 

“And other property?”

 

The wretched creature shrugged his shoulders in token of his utter

destitution, then added bitterly:

 

“I possess nothing but a debt. I owe two hundred and fifty pesos. I am

tied to it for life, damned with it for life like a man with a cancer.

That is why I am a slave to the haciendado.”

 

“Huh!” Francis could not forbear to grin. “Worth two hundred and fifty

pesos less than nothing, not even a cipher, a sheer abstraction of a

minus quantity without existence save in the mathematical imagination of

man, and yet here you are burning up not less than millions of pesos’

worth of oil. And if the strata is loose and erratic and the oil leaks

up outside the tubing, the chances are that the oil-body of the entire

field is ignited—say a billion dollars’ worth. Say, for an abstraction

enjoying two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of non-existence, you are

some hombre, believe me.”

 

Nothing of which the peon understood save the word “hombre.”

 

“I am a man,” he proclaimed, thrusting out his chest and straightening

up his bruised head. “I am a hombre and I am a Maya.”

 

“Maya Indian—you?” Francis scoffed.

 

“Half Maya,” was the reluctant admission. “My father is pure Maya. But

the Maya women of the Cordilleras did not satisfy him. He must love a

mixed-breed woman of the _tierra caliente_. I was so born; but she

afterward betrayed him for a Barbadoes nigger, and he went back to the

Cordilleras to live. And, like my father, I was born to love a mixed

breed of the _tierra caliente_. She wanted money, and my head was

fevered with want of her, and I sold myself to be a peon for two hundred

pesos. And I saw never her nor the money again. For five years I have

been a peon. For five years I have slaved and been beaten, and behold,

at the end of five years my debt is not two hundred but two hundred and

fifty pesos.”

 

* * * * *

 

And while Francis Morgan and the long-suffering Maya half-breed plodded

on deeper into the Cordilleras to overtake their party, and while the

oil fields of Juchitan continued to go up in increasing smoke, still

farther on, in the heart of the Cordilleras, were preparing other events

destined to bring together all pursuers and all pursued—Francis and

Henry and Leoncia and their party; the peon; the party of the

haciendados; and the gendarmes of the Jefe, and, along with them,

Alvarez Torres, eager to win for himself not only the promised reward of

Thomas Regan but the possession of Leoncia Solano.

 

In a cave sat a man and a woman. Pretty the latter was, and young, a

_mestiza_, or half-caste woman. By the light of a cheap kerosene lamp

she read aloud from a calf-bound tome which was a Spanish translation of

Blackstone. Both were barefooted and bare-armed, clad in hooded

gabardines of sackcloth. Her hood lay back on her shoulders, exposing

her black and generous head of hair. But the old man’s hood was cowled

about his head after the fashion of a monk. The face, lofty and ascetic,

beaked with power, was pure Spanish. Don Quixote might have worn

precisely a similar face. But there was a difference. The eyes of this

old man were closed in the perpetual dark of the blind. Never could he

behold a windmill at which to tilt.

 

He sat, while the pretty _mestiza_ read to him, listening and brooding,

for all the world in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.” Nor was he a

dreamer, nor a tilter of windmills, like Don Quixote. Despite his

blindness, that ever veiled the apparent face of the world in

invisibility, he was a man of action, and his soul was anything but

blind, penetrating unerringly beneath the show of things to the heart

and the soul of the world and reading its inmost sins and rapacities and

noblenesses and virtues.

 

He lifted his hand and put a pause in the reading, while he thought

aloud from the context of the reading.

 

“The law of man,” he said with slow certitude, “is to-day a game of

wits. Not equity, but wit, is the game of law to-day. The law in its

inception was good; but the way of the law, the practice of it, has led

men off into false pursuits. They have mistaken the way for the goal,

the means for the end. Yet is law law, and necessary, and good. Only,

law, in its practice to-day, has gone astray. Judges and lawyers engage

in competitions and affrays of wit and learning, quite forgetting the

plaintiffs and defendants, before them and paying them, who are seeking

equity and justice and not wit and learning.

 

“Yet is old Blackstone right. Under it all, at the bottom of it all, at

the beginning of the building of the edifice of the law, is the quest,

the earnest and sincere quest of righteous men, for justice and equity.

But what is it that the Preacher said? ‘They made themselves many

inventions.’ And the law, good in its beginning, has been invented out

of all its intent, so that it serves neither litigants nor injured ones,

but merely the fatted judges and the lean and hungry lawyers who achieve

names and paunches if they prove themselves cleverer than their

opponents and than the judges who render decision.”

 

He paused, still posed as Rodin’s “Thinker,” and meditated, while the

_mestiza_ woman waited his customary signal to resume the reading. At

last, as out of a profound of thought in which universes had been

weighed in the balance, he spoke:

 

“But we have law, here in the Cordilleras of Panama, that is just and

right and all of equity. We work for no man and serve not even paunches.

Sack-cloth and not broadcloth conduces to the equity of judicial

decision. Read on, Mercedes. Blackstone is always right if always

rightly read—which is what is called a paradox, and is what modern law

ordinarily is, a paradox. Read on. Blackstone is the very foundation of

human law—but, oh, how many wrongs are cleverly committed by clever men

in his name!”

 

Ten minutes later, the blind thinker raised his head, sniffed the air,

and gestured the girl to pause. Taking her cue from him, she, too,

sniffed:

 

“Perhaps it is the lamp, O Just One,” she suggested.

 

“It is burning oil,” he said. “But it is not the lamp. It is from far

away. Also, have I heard shooting in the canyons.”

 

“I heard nothing——” she began.

 

“Daughter, you who see have not the need to hear that I have. There have

been many shots fired in the canyons. Order my children to investigate

and make report.”

 

Bowing reverently to the old man who could not see but who, by

keen-trained hearing and conscious timing of her every muscular action,

knew that she had bowed, the young woman lifted the curtain of blankets

and passed out into the day. At either side the cave-mouth sat a man of

the peon class. Each was armed with rifle and machete, while through

their girdles were thrust naked-bladed knives. At the girl’s order, both

arose and bowed, not to her, but to the command and the invisible source

of the command. One of them tapped with the back of his machete against

the stone upon which he had been sitting, then laid his ear to the stone

and listened. In truth, the stone was but the out-jut of a vein of

metalliferous ore that extended across and through the heart of the

mountain. And beyond, on the opposite slope, in an eyrie commanding the

magnificent panorama of the descending slopes of the Cordilleras, sat

another peon who first listened with his ear pressed to similar

metalliferous quartz, and next tapped response with his machete. After

that, he stepped half a dozen paces to a tall tree, half-dead, reached

into the hollow heart of it, and pulled on the rope within as a man

might pull who was ringing a steeple bell.