Hearts of Three 6

Hearts of Three 6

In huge disgust and scorn Francis pocketed his automatic, turned his

back on the sacking-clad savages, and walked away through the palms.

Where a great boulder of coral rock had been upthrust by some ancient

restlessness of the earth, he came down to the beach. On the shore of

the Calf, across the narrow channel, he made out a dinghy drawn up.

Drawn up on his own side was a crank-looking and manifestly leaky dugout

canoe. As he tilted the water out of it, he noticed that the

turtle-catchers had followed and were peering at him from the edge of

the coconuts, though his weak-hearted sailor was not in sight.

 

To paddle across the channel was a matter of moments, but scarcely was

he on the beach of the Calf when further inhospitality greeted him on

the part of a tall, barefooted young man, who stepped from behind a

palm, automatic pistol in hand, and shouted:

 

“Vamos! Get out! Scut!”

 

“Ye gods and little fishes!” Francis grinned, half-humorously,

half-seriously. “A fellow can’t move in these parts without having a gun

shoved in his face. And everybody says get out pronto.”

 

“Nobody invited you,” the stranger retorted. “You’re intruding. Get off

my island. I’ll give you half a minute.”

 

“I’m getting sore, friend,” Francis assured him truthfully, at the same

time, out of the corner of his eye, measuring the distance to the

nearest palm-trunk. “Everybody I meet around here is crazy and

discourteous, and peevishly anxious to be rid of my presence, and

they’ve just got me feeling that way myself. Besides, just because you

tell me it’s your island is no proof——”

 

The swift rush he made to the shelter of the palm left his sentence

unfinished. His arrival behind the trunk was simultaneous with the

arrival of a bullet that thudded into the other side of it.

 

“Now, just for that!” he called out, as he centered a bullet into the

trunk of the other man’s palm.

 

The next few minutes they blazed away, or waited for calculated shots,

and when Francis’ eighth and last had been fired, he was unpleasantly

certain that he had counted only seven shots for the stranger. He

cautiously exposed part of his sun-helmet, held in his hand, and had it

perforated.

 

“What gun are you using?” he asked with cool politeness.

 

“Colt’s,” came the answer.

 

Francis stepped boldly into the open, saying: “Then you’re all out. I

counted ‘em. Eight. Now we can talk.”

 

The stranger stepped out, and Francis could not help admiring the fine

figure of him, despite the fact that a dirty pair of canvas pants, a

cotton undershirt, and a floppy sombrero constituted his garmenting.

Further, it seemed he had previously known him, though it did not enter

his mind that he was looking at a replica of himself.

 

“Talk!” the stranger sneered, throwing down his pistol and drawing a

knife. “Now we’ll just cut off your ears, and maybe scalp you.”

 

“Gee! You’re sweet-natured and gentle animals in this neck of the

woods,” Francis retorted, his anger and disgust increasing. He drew his

own hunting knife, brand new from the shop and shining. “Say, let’s

wrestle, and cut out this ten-twenty-and-thirty knife stuff.”

 

“I want your ears,” the stranger answered pleasantly, as he slowly

advanced.

 

“Sure. First down, and the man who wins the fall gets the other fellow’s

ears.”

 

“Agreed.” The young man in the canvas trousers sheathed his knife.

 

“Too bad there isn’t a moving picture camera to film this,” Francis

girded, sheathing his own knife. “I’m sore as a boil. I feel like a heap

bad Injun. Watch out! I’m coming in a rush! Anyway and everyway for the

first fall!”

 

Action and word went together, and his glorious rush ended

ignominiously, for the stronger, apparently braced for the shock,

yielded the instant their bodies met and fell over on his back, at the

same time planting his foot in Francis’ abdomen and, from the back

purchase on the ground, transforming Francis’ rush into a wild forward

somersault.

 

The fall on the sand knocked most of Francis’ breath out of him, and the

flying body of his foe, impacting on him, managed to do for what little

breath was left him. As he lay speechless on his back, he observed the

man on top of him gazing down at him with sudden curiosity.

 

“What d’ you want to wear a mustache for?” the stranger muttered.

 

“Go on and cut ‘em off,” Francis gasped, with the first of his returning

breath. “The ears are yours, but the mustache is mine. It is not in the

bond. Besides, that fall was straight jiu jiutsu.”

 

“You said ‘anyway and everyway for the first fall,’” the other quoted

laughingly. “As for your ears, keep them. I never intended to cut them

off, and now that I look at them closely the less I want them. Get up

and get out of here. I’ve licked you. _Vamos!_ And don’t come sneaking

around here again! Git! Scut!”

 

In greater disgust than ever, to which was added the humiliation of

defeat, Francis turned down to the beach toward his canoe.

 

“Say, Little Stranger, do you mind leaving your card?” the victor called

after him.

 

“Visiting cards and cut-throating don’t go together,” Francis shot back

across his shoulder, as he squatted in the canoe and dipped his paddle.

“My name’s Morgan.”

 

Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his

mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, “Same

stock—no wonder we look alike.”

 

Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Bull,

sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and

gloomily meditated. Crazy, everybody, was the run of his thought. Nobody

acts with reason. “I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with

these people. They’d get his ears.”

 

Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants

and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but

lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a

grass-thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he

uttered aloud, “I guess I put the fear of God into that particular

member of the Morgan family,” had just begun to stare at a photographic

reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry

Morgan.

 

“Well, Old Pirate,” he continued grinning, “two of your latest

descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that

would make your antediluvian horse-pistols look like thirty cents.”

 

He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was

monogramed with an “M,” and again addressed the portrait:

 

“Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old

duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really

fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you

played it yourself.”

 

A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age-worn and

moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added: “Well, here’s the old duds

on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to

tell me a point of looks in which we differ.”

 

Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on

around the middle and two flintlock pistols of huge and ponderous design

thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and

the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since

resolved to dust, was striking.

 

“Back to back against the mainmast,

Held at bay the entire crew....”

 

As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old

buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded

into another picture and that he saw:

 

The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing,

facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while

behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed

and accoutred man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of

cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.

 

The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a

guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately. And in the sharp

pause of silence, it seemed that a fresh vision of old Sir Henry came to

him, down out of the frame and beside him, real in all seeming, plucking

at his sleeve to lead him out of the hut and whispering a ghostly

repetition of:

 

“Back to back against the mainmast

Held at bay the entire crew.”

 

The young man obeyed his shadowy guide, or some prompting of his own

profound of intuition, and went out the door and down to the beach,

where, gazing across the narrow channel, on the beach of the Bull, he

saw his late antagonist, backed up against the great boulder of coral

rock, standing off an attack of sack-clouted, machete-wielding Indians

with wide sweeping strokes of a driftwood timber.

 

* * * * *

 

And Francis, in extremity, swaying dizzily from the blow of a rock on

his head, saw the apparition, that almost convinced him he was already

dead and in the realm of the shades, of Sir Henry Morgan himself,

cutlass in hand, rushing up the beach to his rescue. Further, the

apparition, brandishing the cutlass and laying out Indians right and

left, was bellowing:

 

“Back to back against the mainmast,

Held at bay the entire crew.”

 

As Francis’ knees gave under him and he slowly crumpled and sank down,

he saw the Indians scatter and flee before the onslaught of the weird

pirate figure and heard their cries of:

 

“Heaven help us!” “The Virgin protect us!” “It’s the ghost of old

Morgan!”

 

* * * * *

 

Francis next opened his eyes inside the grass hut in the midmost center

of the Calf. First, in the glimmering of sight of returning

consciousness, he beheld the pictured lineaments of Sir Henry Morgan

staring down at him from the wall. Next, it was a younger edition of the

same, in three dimensions of living, moving flesh, who thrust a mug of

brandy to his lips and bade him drink. Francis was on his feet ere he

touched lips to the mug; and both he and the stranger man, moved by a

common impulse, looked squarely into each other’s eyes, glanced at the

picture on the wall and touched mugs in a salute to the picture and to

each other ere they drank.