‘I shall go from here immediately to the jail,’ the Jefe announced. ‘You may trust me, Señor Torres, as I trust you. Come. We will go at once, now, you and I, and you may see for yourself the preparation I shall make for this Francis Morgan’s reception. I have not yet lost my cunning with a rifle. And, as well, I shall tell off three of the gendarmes to fire only at him. So this Gringo dog would storm our jail, eh? Come. We will depart at once.’
He stood up, tossing his cigarette away with a show of determined energy. But, half way across the room, a ragged boy, panting and sweating, plucked his sleeve and whined:
‘I have information. You will pay me for it, most high Señor? I have run all the way.’
‘I’ll have you sent to San Juan for the buzzards to peck your carcass for the worthless carrion that you are,’ was the reply.
The boy quailed at the threat, then summoned courage from his emptiness of belly and meagerness of living and from his desire for the price of a ticket to the next bull-fight. ‘You will remember I brought you the information, Señor. I ran all the way until I am almost dead, as you can behold, Señor. I will tell you, but you will remember it was I who ran all the way and told you first.’
‘Yes, yes, animal, I will remember. But woe to you if I remember too well. What is the trifling information? It may not be worth a centavo. And if it isn’t I’ll make you sorry the sun ever shone on you. And buzzard-picking of you at San Juan will be paradise compared with what I shall visit on you.’
‘The jail,’ the boy quavered. ‘The strange Gringo, the one who was to be hanged yesterday, has blown down the side of the jail. Merciful Saints! The hole is as big as the steeple of the cathedral! And the other Gringo, the one who looks like him, the one who was to hang to-morrow, has escaped with him out of the hole. He dragged him out of the hole himself. This I saw, myself, with my two eyes, and then I ran here to you all the way, and you will remember…’
But the Jefe Politico had already turned on Torres witheringly.
‘And if this Señor Regan be princely generous, he may give you and me the munificent sum that was mentioned, eh? Five times the sum, or ten times, with this Gringo tiger blowing down law and order and our good jail-walls, would be nearer the mark.’
‘At any rate, the thing must be a false alarm, merely the straw that shows which way blows the wind of this Francis Morgan’s intention,’ Torres murmured with a sickly smile. ‘Remember, the suggestion was mine to him to storm the jail.’
‘In which case you and Señor Regan will pay for the good jail wall?’ the Jefe demanded, then, with a pause, added: ‘Not that I believe it has been accomplished. It is not possible. Even a fool Gringo would not dare.’
Rafael, the gendarme, rifle in hand, the blood still oozing down his face from a scalp-wound, came through the courtroom door and shouldered aside the curious ones who had begun to cluster around Torres and the Jefe. ‘We are devastated,’ were Rafael’s first words. ‘The jail is ‘most destroyed. Dynamite! A hundred pounds of it: A thousand! We came bravely to save the jail. But it exploded the thousand pounds of dynamite. I fell unconscious, rifle in hand. When sense came back to me, I looked about. All others, the brave Pedro, the brave Ignacio, the brave Augustino all, all, lay around me dead!’ Almost could he have added, ‘drunk’; but, his Latin American nature so compounded, he sincerely stated the catastrophe as it most valiantly and tragically presented itself to his imagination. ‘They lay dead. They may not be dead, but merely stunned. I crawled. The cell of the Gringo Morgan was empty. There was a huge and monstrous hole in the wall. I crawled through the hole into the street. There was a great crowd. But the Gringo Morgan was gone. I talked with a moso who had seen and who knew. They had horses waiting. They rode toward the beach. There is a schooner that is not anchored. It sails back and forth waiting for them. The Francis Morgan rides with a sack of gold on his saddle. The moso saw it. It is a large sack.’
‘And the hole?’ the Jefe demanded. ‘The hole in the wall?’
‘Is larger than the sack, much larger,’ was Rafael’s reply. ‘But the sack is large. So the moso said. And he rides with it on his saddle.’
‘My jail!’ the Jefe cried. He slipped a dagger from inside his coat under the left arm-pit and held it aloft by the blade so that the hilt showed as a true cross on which a finely modeled ‘Christ hung crucified. ‘I swear by all the Saints the vengeance I shall have. My jail! Our justice! Our law! Horses! Horses! Gendarme, horses!’ He whirled about upon Torres as if the latter had spoken, shouting: ‘To hell with Señor Regan! I am after my own! I have been defied! My jail is desolated! My law our law, good friends has been mocked. Horses! Horses! Commandeer them on the streets. Haste! Haste!’
Captain Trefethen, owner of the Angelique, son of a Maya Indian mother and a Jamaica negro father, paced the narrow after-deck of his schooner, stared shoreward toward San Antonio, where he could make out his crowded long-boat returning, and meditated flight from his mad American charterer. At the same time he meditated remaining in order to break his charter and give a new one at three times the price; for he was strangely torn by his conflicting bloods. The negro portion counseled prudence and observance of Panamanian law. The Indian portion was urgent to unlawfulness and the promise of conflict.
It was the Indian mother who decided the issue and made him draw his jib, ease his mainsheet, and begin to reach in-shore the quicker to pick up the oncoming boat. When he made out the rifles carried by the Solanos and the Morgans, almost he put up his helm to run for it and leave them. When he made out a woman in the boat’s sternsheets, romance and thrift whispered in him to hang on and take the boat on board. For he knew wherever woman entered into the transactions of men that peril and pelf as well entered hand in hand.
And aboard came the woman, the peril and the pelf Leoncia, the rifles, and a sack of money all in a scramble; for, the wind being light, the captain had not bothered to stop way on the schooner.
‘Glad to welcome you on board, sir,’ Captain Trefethen greeted Francis with a white slash of teeth between his smiling lips. ‘But who is this man?’ He nodded his head to indicate Henry.
‘A friend, captain, a guest of mine, in fact, a kinsman.’
‘And who, sir, may I make bold to ask, are those gentlemen riding along the beach in fashion so lively?’
Henry looked quickly at the group of horsemen galloping along the sand, unceremoniously took the binoculars from the skipper’s hand, and gazed through them.
‘It’s the Jefe himself in the lead,’ he reported to Leoncia and her menfolk, ‘with a bunch of gendarmes.’ He uttered a sharp exclamation, stared through the glasses intently, then shook his head. ‘Almost I thought I made out our friend Torres.’
‘With our enemies!’ Leoncia cried incredulously, remembering Torres’ proposal of marriage and proffer of service and honor that very day on the hacienda piazza.
‘I must have been mistaken,’ Francis acknowledged. ‘They are riding so bunched together. But it’s the Jefe all right, two jumps ahead of the outfit.’
‘Who is this Torres duck?’ Henry asked harshly. ‘I’ve never liked his looks from the first, yet he seems always welcome under your roof, Leoncia.’
‘I beg jour parson, sir, most gratifiedly, and with my humilious respects,’ Captain Trefethen interrupted suavely. ‘But I must call your attention to the previous question, sir, which is: who and what is that cavalcade disporting itself with such earnestness along the sand?’
‘They tried to hang me yesterday,’ Francis laughed. ‘And to-morrow they were going to hang my kinsman there. Only we beat them to it. And here we are. Now, Mr. Skipper, I call your attention to your head-sheets flapping in the wind. You are standing still. How much longer do you expect to stick around here?’
‘Mr. Morgan, sir,’ came the answer, ‘it is with dumbfounded respect that I serve you as the charterer of my vessel. Nevertheless, I must inform you that I am a British subject. King George is my king, sir, and I owe obedience first of all to him and to his laws of maritime between all nations, sir. It