Hearts of Three 5

Hearts of Three 5

“Do as I do,” she shot back at him over her shoulder, by this time

leading him with one hand of hers in his.

 

He smiled and obeyed, crouching when she crouched, doubling over when

she doubled, while memories of John Smith and Pocahontas glimmered up in

his fancy.

 

Abruptly she checked him and sat down, her hand directing him to sit

beside her ere she released him, and pressed it to her heart while she

panted:

 

“Thank God! Oh, merciful Virgin!”

 

In imitation, such having been her will of him, and such seeming to be

the cue of the game, he smilingly pressed his own hand to his heart,

although he called neither on God nor the Virgin.

 

“Won’t you ever be serious?” she flashed at him, noting his action.

 

And Francis was immediately and profoundly, as well as naturally,

serious.

 

“My dear lady...” he began.

 

But an abrupt gesture checked him; and, with growing wonder, he watched

her bend and listen, and heard the movement of bodies padding down some

runway several yards away.

 

With a soft warm palm pressed commandingly to his to be silent, she left

him with the abruptness that he had already come to consider as

customary with her, and slipped away down the runway. Almost he whistled

with astonishment. He might have whistled it, had he not heard her

voice, not distant, in Spanish, sharply interrogate men whose Spanish

voices, half-humbly, half-insistently and half-rebelliously, answered

her.

 

He heard them move on, still talking, and, after five minutes of dead

silence, heard her call for him peremptorily to come out.

 

“Gee! I wonder what Regan would do under such circumstances!” he smiled

to himself as he obeyed.

 

He followed her, no longer hand in hand, through the jungle to the

beach. When she paused, he came beside her and faced her, still under

the impress of the fantasy which possessed him that it was a game.

 

“Tag!” he laughed, touching her on the shoulder. “Tag!” he reiterated.

“You’re It!”

 

The anger of her blazing dark eyes scorched him.

 

“You fool!” she cried, lifting her finger with what he considered undue

intimacy to his toothbrush moustache. “As if that could disguise you!”

 

“But my dear lady...” he began to protest his certain unacquaintance

with her.

 

Her retort, which broke off his speech, was as unreal and bizarre as

everything else which had gone before. So quick was it, that he failed

to see whence the tiny silver revolver had been drawn, the muzzle of

which was not presented merely toward his abdomen, but pressed closely

against it.

 

“My dear lady...” he tried again.

 

“I won’t talk with you,” she shut him off. “Go back to your schooner,

and go away....” He guessed the inaudible sob of the pause, ere she

concluded, “Forever.”

 

This time his mouth opened to speech that was aborted on his lips by the

stiff thrust of the muzzle of the weapon into his abdomen.

 

“If you ever come back—the Madonna forgive me—I shall shoot myself.”

 

“Guess I’d better go, then,” he uttered airily, as he turned to the

skiff, toward which he walked in stately embarrassment, half-filled with

laughter for himself and for the ridiculous and incomprehensible figure

he was cutting.

 

Endeavoring to retain a last shred of dignity, he took no notice that

she had followed him. As he lifted the skiff’s nose from the sand, he

was aware that a faint wind was rustling the palm fronds. A long breeze

was darkening the water close at hand, while, far out across the

mirrored water the outlying keys of Chiriqui Lagoon shimmered like a

mirage above the dark-crisping water.

 

A sob compelled him to desist from stepping into the skiff, and to turn

his head. The strange young woman, revolver dropped to her side, was

crying. His step back to her was instant, and the touch of his hand on

her arm was sympathetic and inquiring. She shuddered at his touch, drew

away from him, and gazed at him reproachfully through her tears. With a

shrug of shoulders to her many moods and of surrender to the

incomprehensibleness of the situation, he was about to turn to the boat,

when she stopped him.

 

“At least you...” she began, then faltered and swallowed, “you might

kiss me good-bye.”

 

She advanced impulsively, with outstretched arms, the revolver dangling

incongruously from her right hand. Francis hesitated a puzzled moment,

then gathered her in to receive an astounding passionate kiss on his

lips ere she dropped her head on his shoulder in a breakdown of tears.

Despite his amazement he was aware of the revolver pressing flat-wise

against his back between the shoulders. She lifted her tear-wet face and

kissed him again and again, and he wondered to himself if he were a cad

for meeting her kisses with almost equal and fully as mysterious

impulsiveness.

 

With a feeling that he did not in the least care how long the tender

episode might last, he was startled by her quick drawing away from him,

as anger and contempt blazed back in her face, and as she menacingly

directed him with the revolver to get into the boat.

 

He shrugged his shoulders as if to say that he could not say no to a

lovely lady, and obeyed, sitting to the oars and facing her as he began

rowing away.

 

“The Virgin save me from my wayward heart,” she cried, with her free

hand tearing a locket from her bosom, and, in a shower of golden beads,

flinging the ornament into the waterway midway between them.

 

From the edge of the jungle he saw three men, armed with rifles, run

toward her where she had sunk down in the sand. In the midst of lifting

her up, they caught sight of Francis, who had begun rowing a strong

stroke. Over his shoulder he glimpsed the _Angelique_, close hauled and

slightly heeling, cutting through the water toward him. The next moment,

one of the trio on the beach, a bearded elderly man, was directing the

girl’s binoculars on him. And the moment after, dropping the glasses, he

was taking aim with his rifle.

 

The bullet spat on the water within a yard of the skiff’s side, and

Francis saw the girl spring to her feet, knock up the rifle with her

arm, and spoil the second shot. Next, pulling lustily, he saw the men

separate from her to sight their rifles, and saw her threatening them

with the revolver into lowering their weapons.

 

The _Angelique_, thrown up into the wind to stop way, foamed alongside,

and with an agile leap Francis was aboard, while already, the skipper

putting the wheel up, the schooner was paying off and filling. With

boyish zest, Francis wafted a kiss of farewell to the girl, who was

staring toward him, and saw her collapse on the shoulders of the bearded

elderly man.

 

“Cayenne pepper, eh—those damned, horrible, crazy-proud Solanos,” the

breed skipper flashed at Francis with white teeth of laughter.

 

“Just bugs—clean crazy, nobody at home,” Francis laughed back, as he

sprang to the rail to waft further kisses to the strange damsel.

 

* * * * *

 

Before the land wind, the _Angelique_ made the outer rim of Chiriqui

Lagoon and the Bull and Calf, some fifty miles farther along on the rim,

by midnight, when the skipper hove to to wait for daylight. After

breakfast, rowed by a Jamaica negro sailor in the skiff, Francis landed

to reconnoiter on the Bull, which was the larger island and which the

skipper had told him he might find occupied at that season of the year

by turtle-catching Indians from the mainland.

 

And Francis very immediately found that he had traversed not merely

thirty degrees of latitude from New York but thirty hundred years, or

centuries for that matter, from the last word of civilisation to almost

the first word of the primeval. Naked, except for breech-clouts of

gunny-sacking, armed with cruelly heavy hacking blades of machetes, the

turtle-catchers were swift in proving themselves arrant beggars and

dangerous man-killers. The Bull belonged to them, they told him through

the medium of his Jamaican sailor’s interpreting; but the Calf, which

used to belong to them for the turtle season now was possessed by a

madly impossible Gringo, whose reckless, dominating ways had won from

them the respect of fear for a two-legged human creature who was more

fearful than themselves.

 

While Francis, for a silver dollar, dispatched one of them with a

message to the mysterious Gringo that he desired to call on him, the

rest of them clustered about Francis’ skiff, whining for money,

glowering upon him, and even impudently stealing his pipe, yet warm from

his lips, which he had laid beside him in the sternsheets. Promptly he

had laid a blow on the ear of the thief, and the next thief who seized

it, and recovered the pipe. Machetes out and sun-glistening their

clean-slicing menace, Francis covered and controlled the gang with an

automatic pistol; and, while they drew apart in a group and whispered

ominously, he made the discovery that his lone sailor-interpreter was a

weak brother and received his returned messenger.

 

The negro went over to the turtle-catchers and talked with a

friendliness and subservience, the tones of which Francis did not like.

The messenger handed him his note, across which was scrawled in pencil:

 

“Vamos.”

 

“Guess I’ll have to go across myself,” Francis told the negro whom he

had beckoned back to him.

 

“Better be very careful and utmostly cautious, sir,” the negro warned

him. “These animals without reason are very problematically likely to

act most unreasonably, sir.”

 

“Get into the boat and row me over,” Francis commanded shortly.

 

“No, sir, I regret much to say, sir,” was the black sailor’s answer. “I

signed on, sir, as a sailor to Captain Trefethen, but I didn’t sign on

for no suicide, and I can’t see my way to rowin’ you over, sir, to

certain death. Best thing we can do is to get out of this hot place

that’s certainly and without peradventure of a doubt goin’ to get hotter

for us if we remain, sir.”