Hearts of Three 4

Hearts of Three 4

“Don’t you worry about that, my lad. You’ve got to get your oil piped,

and the Mexican revolution straightened out before ever Tampico

Petroleum soars. You go fishing and forget it.” Regan paused, with

finely simulated sudden recollection, and picked up Alvarez Torres’ card

with the pencilled note. “Look, who’s just been to see me.” Apparently

struck with an idea, Regan retained the card a moment. “Why go fishing

for mere trout? After all, it’s only recreation. Here’s a thing to go

fishing after that there’s real recreation in, full-size man’s

recreation, and not the Persian-palace recreation of an Adirondack camp,

with ice and servants and electric push-buttons. Your father always was

more than a mite proud of that old family pirate. He claimed to look

like him, and you certainly look like your dad.”

 

“Sir Henry,” Francis smiled, reaching for the card. “So am I a mite

proud of the old scoundrel.”

 

He looked up questioningly from the reading of the card.

 

“He’s a plausible cuss,” Regan explained. “Claims to have been born

right down there on the Mosquito Coast, and to have got the tip from

private papers in his family. Not that I believe a word of it. I haven’t

time or interest to get started believing in stuff outside my own

field.”

 

“Just the same, Sir Henry died practically a poor man,” Francis

asserted, the lines of the Morgan stubbornness knitting themselves for a

flash on his brows. “And they never did find any of his buried

treasure.”

 

“Good fishing,” Regan girded good-humoredly.

 

“I’d like to meet this Alvarez Torres just the same,” the young man

responded.

 

“Fool’s gold,” Regan continued. “Though I must admit that the cuss is

most exasperatingly plausible. Why, if I were younger—but oh, the devil,

my work’s cut out for me here.”

 

“Do you know where I can find him?” Francis was asking the next moment,

all unwittingly putting his neck into the net of tentacles that Destiny,

in the visible incarnation of Thomas Regan, was casting out to snare

him.

 

* * * * *

 

The next morning the meeting took place in Regan’s office. Senor Alvarez

Torres startled and controlled himself at first sight of Francis’ face.

This was not missed by Regan, who grinningly demanded:

 

“Looks like the old pirate himself, eh?”

 

“Yes, the resemblance is most striking,” Torres lied, or half-lied, for

he did recognize the resemblance to the portraits he had seen of Sir

Henry Morgan; although at the same time under his eyelids he saw the

vision of another and living man who, no less than Francis and Sir

Henry, looked as much like both of them as either looked like the other.

 

Francis was youth that was not to be denied. Modern maps and ancient

charts were pored over, as well as old documents, handwritten in faded

ink on time-yellowed paper, and at the end of half an hour he announced

that the next fish he caught would be on either the Bull or the Calf—the

two islets off the Lagoon of Chiriqui, on one or the other of which

Torres averred the treasure lay.

 

“I’ll catch to-night’s train for New Orleans,” Francis announced. “That

will just make connection with one of the United Fruit Company’s boats

for Colon—oh, I had it all looked up before I slept last night.”

 

“But don’t charter a schooner at Colon,” Torres advised. “Take the

overland trip by horseback to Belen. There’s the place to charter, with

unsophisticated native sailors and everything else unsophisticated.”

 

“Listens good!” Francis agreed. “I always wanted to see that country

down there. You’ll be ready to catch to-night’s train, Senor Torres?...

Of course, you understand, under the circumstances, I’ll be the

treasurer and foot the expenses.”

 

But at a privy glance from Regan, Alvarez Torres lied with swift

efficientness.

 

“I must join you later, I regret, Mr. Morgan. Some little business that

presses—how shall I say?—an insignificant little lawsuit that must be

settled first. Not that the sum at issue is important. But it is a

family matter, and therefore gravely important. We Torres have our

pride, which is a silly thing, I acknowledge, in this country, but which

with us is very serious.”

 

“He can join afterward, and straighten you out if you’ve missed the

scent,” Regan assured Francis. “And, before it slips your mind, it might

be just as well to arrange with Senor Torres some division of the loot

... if you ever find it.”

 

“What would you say?” Francis asked.

 

“Equal division, fifty-fifty,” Regan answered, magnificently arranging

the apportionment between the two men of something he was certain did

not exist.

 

“And you will follow after as soon as you can?” Francis asked the Latin

American. “Regan, take hold of his little law affair yourself and

expedite it, won’t you?”

 

“Sure, boy,” was the answer. “And, if it’s needed, shall I advance cash

to Senor Alvarez?”

 

“Fine!” Francis shook their hands in both of his. “It will save me

bother. And I’ve got to rush to pack and break engagements and catch

that train. So long, Regan. Good-bye, Senor Torres, until we meet

somewhere around Bocas del Toro, or in a little hole in the ground on

the Bull or the Calf—you say you think it’s the Calf? Well, until

then—adios!”

 

And Senor Alvarez Torres remained with Regan some time longer, receiving

explicit instructions for the part he was to play, beginning with

retardation and delay of Francis’ expedition, and culminating in similar

retardation and delay always to be continued.

 

“In short,” Regan concluded, “I don’t almost care if he never comes

back—if you can keep him down there for the good of his health that long

and longer.”

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

Money, like youth, will not be denied, and Francis Morgan, who was the

man-legal and nature-certain representative of both youth and money,

found himself one afternoon, three weeks after he had said good-bye to

Regan, becalmed close under the land on board his schooner, the

_Angelique_. The water was glassy, the smooth roll scarcely perceptible,

and, in sheer ennui and overplus of energy that likewise declined to be

denied, he asked the captain, a breed, half Jamaica negro and half

Indian, to order a small skiff over the side.

 

“Looks like I might shoot a parrot or a monkey or something,” he

explained, searching the jungle-clad shore, half a mile away, through a

twelve-power Zeiss glass.

 

“Most problematic, sir, that you are bitten by a _labarri_, which is

deadly viper in these parts,” grinned the breed skipper and owner of the

_Angelique_, who, from his Jamaica father had inherited the gift of

tongues.

 

But Francis was not to be deterred; for at the moment, through his

glass, he had picked out, first, in the middle ground, a white hacienda,

and second, on the beach, a white-clad woman’s form, and further, had

seen that she was scrutinising him and the schooner through a pair of

binoculars.

 

“Put the skiff over, skipper,” he ordered. “Who lives around here?—white

folks?”

 

“The Enrico Solano family, sir,” was the answer. “My word, they are

important gentlefolk, old Spanish, and they own the entire general

landscape from the sea to the Cordilleras and half of the Chiriqui

Lagoon as well. They are very poor, most powerful rich ... in

landscape—and they are prideful and fiery as cayenne pepper.”

 

As Francis, in the tiny skiff, rowed shoreward, the skipper’s alert eye

noted that he had neglected to take along either rifle or shotgun for

the contemplated parrot or monkey. And, next, the skipper’s eye picked

up the white-clad woman’s figure against the dark edge of the jungle.

 

Straight to the white beach of coral sand Francis rowed, not trusting

himself to look over his shoulder to see if the woman remained or had

vanished. In his mind was merely a young man’s healthy idea of

encountering a bucolic young lady, or a half-wild white woman for that

matter, or at the best a very provincial one, with whom he could fool

and fun away a few minutes of the calm that fettered the _Angelique_ to

immobility. When the skiff grounded, he stepped out, and with one sturdy

arm lifted its nose high enough up the sand to fasten it by its own

weight. Then he turned around. The beach to the jungle was bare. He

strode forward confidently. Any traveller, on so strange a shore, had a

right to seek inhabitants for information on his way—was the idea he was

acting out.

 

And he, who had anticipated a few moments of diversion merely, was

diverted beyond his fondest expectations. Like a jack-in-the-box, the

woman, who, in the flash of vision vouchsafed him demonstrated that she

was a girl-woman, ripely mature and yet mostly girl, sprang out of the

green wall of jungle and with both hands seized his arm. The hearty

weight of grip in the seizure surprised him. He fumbled his hat off with

his free hand and bowed to the strange woman with the imperturbableness

of a Morgan, New York trained and disciplined to be surprised at

nothing, and received another surprise, or several surprises compounded.

Not alone was it her semi-brunette beauty that impacted upon him with

the weight of a blow, but it was her gaze, driven into him, that was all

of sternness. Almost it seemed to him that he must know her. Strangers,

in his experience, never so looked at one another.

 

The double grip on his arm became a draw, as she muttered tensely:

 

“Quick! Follow me!”

 

A moment he resisted. She shook him in the fervor of her desire, and

strove to pull him toward her and after her. With the feeling that it

was some unusual game, such as one might meet up with on the coast of

Central America, he yielded, smilingly, scarcely knowing whether he

followed voluntarily or was being dragged into the jungle by her impetuosity.