He found that gentleman quite openly preparing for the road. Lariarty’s face was whiter than ever and his eyes looked tortured; but they also looked most furiously alive, and his whole body seemed to have woken into an hysterical life.
“Ho, Senor,” Luis exclaimed. “Do you follow us into exile? I thought you would await the conqueror here—seeing that you have no politics—and advise him wisely about Gran Seco business. That was also Senor Rosas’s belief.”
Lariarty looked at him with a composure which seemed to be the result of a strong effort, for the man was obviously ill at ease.
“Some of us remain,” he said. “But not I. I wish to be at the Gobernador’s side, for his interests are my interests. I have to-day been at Headquarters, and it is arranged that I go with General Escrick.”
“What makes you so certain you will find the Gobernador with Escrick?”
“I am not certain. But if I am with the field army, it stands to reason that I must sooner or later come across the commander-in-chief.”
“Who are staying behind?”
“All the others.”
“Suvorin?”
“Yes.”
“And Pasquali?”
“Certainly. Why do you ask?”
“No reason at all… I congratulate you, Senor, on your courage, for we of Escrick’s command must ride fast and far. You are perhaps out of training for the savannahs and the mountains?”
“I am not in good form. But there was a time when I was never off a horse.”
Luis abounded in friendly advice, as from an old campaigner, and finally took his leave. “We shall meet in the darkness,” he said, and was told that Lariarty had orders to report himself at midnight.
It was now within an hour of nightfall and Luis repaired to Blenkiron’s house for a bath. As he splashed in the tepid water, he reflected. “I am certain that they are all going with Escrick,” he told himself. “Lariarty alone will go openly, but the others will be there somehow—Suvorin and Pasquali and Calvo—likewise that trinity of cherubs, Judson, Carreras, and Biretti. Larbert and D’Ingraville will wait here till Romanes comes, and then join them… there’s going to be a gathering of the vultures somewhere in the North… They’re after the Gobernador, and if they fail to get him they may do some miscellaneous looting.”
After his bath Luis made a careful toilet from a store of clothes which he carried in an old saddlebag. A yellow shirt with a fancy collar, flapping trousers of dirty grey, skin brogues, a dark poncho, and a high-crowned, broad-brimmed at transformed him into a mestizo peasant, at least three-quarters Indian. He rolled some cigarettes of leaf tobacco and placed them behind his ear, and then sauntered across the Avenida, down through the narrows of the Market, to the cluster of yards and huts above the dry ravine which separated the city from the smelting works. His disguise was perfect, for he stopped now and then to engage in a street-corner argument, and mixed as naturally with the disputants as if he were one of the vegetable-sellers whose mules lined the causeway.
He found the place he sought, an alley close to the sunken street called St. Martin’s Port, where had stood centuries go a tiny monkish settlement. All had gone except a tooth of ancient brick masonry, which had once been part of an arched gateway. The street was a warren, full of bolt-holes that looked like cul-de-sacs and cul-de-sacs that looked like bolt-holes, but Luis seemed to know his way about it. At the head of a court, the paving of which may have been contemporary with Pizarro, there was a green gate in an adobe wall. He pushed through it and said something to a slatternly half-caste woman, who sat dozing in a chair outside a second door. He opened this and stumbled into what was obviously the back-room of a cafe, the front of which was in another street. Stumbled, for he seemed suddenly to have become rather drunk.
There were few in the place, three or four peasants drinking small glasses of aguardiente, and one man in the shadows who had before him a tankard of beer. Luis joined the group of peasants and gave his order. An albino negro, a weird sight in that ill-lit place, brought him his drink, and he commanded another glass for the man opposite him. This was a gipsy-looking fellow with long earrings, who had been discoursing to the company on cock fighting. A dispute presently arose in which Luis’s hiccuping voice was predominant. It was about the merit of Gomez’s red cock which had won the championship at Maddalo on St. Rosalia’s feast-day.
The dispute grumbled, died down, flared up, for all had the air of having drunk too well. Then the talk became confidential between Luis and his vis-a-vis, and they shuffled little apart from the others. More drinks were brought. There was a sudden gust of quarrel, and Luis in dudgeon removed himself across the room. But his new friend followed, and there seemed to be a reconciliation, for one again the two heads were close together and the talk was all of cocks and challenges.
In his new position Luis was scarcely a yard from the dark corner where the man with the tankard of beer was sitting. There were now three of them there. They looked viciously at the argumentative peasants, but there was no other part of the room which promised greater peace, and they remained sitting. Luis was by way of now being very drunk, and he made his confidences at close quarters into the garlic-smelling ear of his companion. But this position left his eyes free to wander, without the other noticing it, and he had a good view of the men in the shadows.
One had the face which he had seen three hours before in the crowded calle—a small man, very thickly made, with rabbit teeth, an underhung jaw, and a broken nose. This was the famous Daniel Judson. Beside him sat a taller man with a long, sallow, clean-shaven face and thick, dark eyebrows which made a straight band almost from ear to ear. This Luis knew for Laschallas, who, as he had told Blenkiron, was the most dangerous of the survivors of the Bodyguard. But it was the man opposite the two who surprised him. He wore a thin dark overcoat with the collar turned up, but the face above the collar had the unmistakable waxy pallor of Lariarty.
In the intervals of his drunken wrangling Luis tried to catch their conversation. But not a word could he overhear. They spoke in low tones, and when he sidled nearer them, still in the embrace of his cock-fighting colleague, Judson rose and cursed them. The other was scared into sobriety, for Mr Judson in his wrath was not a pretty sight, and Luis had perforce to follow him and put as much distance as possible between the three and themselves. Presently he gave up the attempt to eavesdrop, extricated himself with some difficulty from his companion, and staggered out of the cafe by the road he had come. He had learned several things—that the trusties, or at least one of them, were in Olifa, that Laschallas was alive, and that Lariarty was not leading an idle life.
He went home, got into proper clothes and hunted up one of Escrick’s staff-officers. There was a good deal of sound coming from the south, where the retreat from the trenches was being covered by machine-gun activity, and some of the troops already withdrawn were filing through the streets.
What had been infantry was now being transformed into light cavalry at the horse-lines north of the city. Luis found the staff-officer he sought, and learned from him that he only civilian accompanying Escrick was Lariarty-Blenkiron himself had sanctioned it—for whom a seat had been provided in one of the staff cars. He left the office with injunctions that no civilian passes were to be given without further reference, and that the occupants of every car were to be jealously scrutinised.
Then he supped with Blenkiron, and told him what he had discovered. Blenkiron, still sleepy as an owl, was slow to take it in. “They can’t do anything,” he reflected. “They’re bottled up in this city, whether it’s me or Lossberg that’s in charge. They’re town rats, Luis; they won’t thrive out in the wilds. Where are you going?”
“I thought