CHAPTER V.
ROGERO IS CHECKMATED
In front of the hotel an excited crowd was clustered about a man who lay in the dust. He was evidently badly wounded if not dead. Near by, a sneer on his evil face, stood Rogero, his still smoking pistol in his hand. As Mr. Chester and the boys hurried up he turned to them and exclaimed:
“You see, Señor, that it is not safe to be a revolutionist in these days.”
“Why it’s poor Juan!” cried Mr. Chester as he bent over the man who had been shot. “Good God, he’s dead!” he exclaimed a second later after a brief examination of the prostrate figure.
“Yes; one of your servants I believe,” remarked Rogero carelessly, “the dog was pointed out to me as being a runaway from Estrada’s army and, when I called him to me to give him a little wholesome advice, he started to run off so I was compelled in the interests of discipline to shoot him.”
There was no more emotion in his voice than if he had been speaking of some ordinary event of life.
“This is a coward’s trick!” exclaimed Mr. Chester angrily, “this man was my servant and any complaint you had against him you should have referred to me.”
Rogero lightly flicked some ash off the cigarette he was smoking.
“I should be more temperate in my language, Señor, if I were you,” he said.
“I am an American citizen, sir,” replied Mr. Chester; “the flag of my country floats over that consulate.” He pointed to a neat, verandered building a few blocks away. “I shall see that you are made to answer for this wanton crime.”
“I am afraid that you will have to defer such action for the present,” sneered Rogero, as a file of ragged Nicaraguan soldiers came running from the barracks and, after saluting him respectfully, fell in behind him with fixed bayonets.
“This city is under martial law and I should advise you to be circumspect in your behavior. A suspected insurgent sympathizer is on dangerous ground in these days.”
“By the way,” he went on viciously, “I am afraid that I shall have to interdict the orders you have given to have that celebrated air-ship,” – there was a bitter irony in his tones that made the boys clinch their fists, “conveyed to your hacienda. I am of the opinion that air-ships in the hands of revolutionists sympathizers come under the head of contraband of war and I intend to have this particular one destroyed.”
The effect on Harry and Frank of these words was magical. The elder brother sprang angrily forward although his father and Blakely tried to hold him back.
“You mean you would dare to destroy the property of non-combatant American citizens?” he demanded, his blood aboil.
“I don’t talk to boys,” was Rogero’s contemptuous reply.
“Well, you’ll have to talk to us,” angrily chimed in Harry coming forward, “if you put a finger on the Golden Eagle, or harm her in any way you will find that the United States’ government resents any insult or injury to her citizens in a way that you will remember.”
So excited were the boys at the dastardly threat of Rogero, and so thunderstruck were their father and Blakely at the man’s brutal arrogance that none of them had noticed Billy Barnes who had been standing behind the party. Now he stepped up, with his camera, bellows pulled out and ready for action. Rogero was standing defiantly, his hand on his sword-hilt. For the first time the boys saw his right hand.
There were two fingers missing!
“Just hold that pose for a second, General,” exclaimed Billy, his finger on the button of his machine. Rogero turned with a snarl as the button clicked and his image was irrevocably fixed on the film.
“It will be a beautiful picture,” remarked Billy amiably. “You see the light was very good and the lamentable fact that you are shy two fingers will be clearly shown, I hope, in the print I intend to make at the earliest opportunity.”
“You dog of a newspaper spy,” snarled Rogero, his face a pasty yellow and fear in his eyes, “I know you. You are a sneaking reporter. We don’t like such renegades as you in my country. We have a way of dealing with them, however, that usually causes them to cease from troubling us.”
He raised his hand to his throat and gave an unpleasant sort of an imitation of the “garrotte” which is the instrument of execution in most Latin-American countries.
“And we in the States have also got a way of dealing with men like you,” said Billy meaningly. “Now,” he went on in a low voice, stepping close to Rogero, “if you harm that aeroplane in any way I’ll forward the picture, I just took to Detective Connolly of the New York Central Office, and I think he can have a very interesting time with it tracing your movements in New York before the murder of Dr. Moneague!”
If he had been struck full in the face the effect on Rogero could not have been more magical. He opened his dried lips as if to speak, but no sound came. In his eyes there was a hunted look.
“I’ll have you – ,” he began when he at last found his voice.
“You’ll have nothing,” replied Billy cheerfully, “because you don’t dare. Now, then; tell these boys they can have their aeroplane unharmed. Write them an order – here’s my pad and a fountain pen – don’t forget to give them back.”
Rogero snarled like a cornered tiger, but he took the pen and scrawled a passport in Spanish on Billy’s pad.
“Take your wonderful flying machine then, and I only hope you break your necks,” he muttered. With an evil look at Billy which did not at all seem to worry that amiable young gentleman who merely winked knowingly in reply, he turned on his heel and strode off followed by his soldiers.
“By Jove, you American pressmen have a high-handed way of doing things, I must say,” remarked Blakely. The boys, too, were much delighted and amused and congratulated Billy warmly on his successful bit of strategy. Mr. Chester, however, by no means took the matter so lightly. After he had given orders that the body of the unfortunate Juan be properly cared for and sent back to La Merced for burial, he turned to young Barnes.
“My boy,” he said, “we are not in America now, and in the present state of the country Rogero can be a very dangerous man.”
“He ought to be shot,” indignantly cried Harry.
“Or hanged,” put in Frank.
“Both,” concluded Billy, with conviction.
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Chester, as he headed the little group into the hotel once more, “but in Nicaragua the law of might prevails and that man means mischief.”
As he uttered the last words in a grave tone there came a rattle of hoofs far down the street, and the next minute a horseman flashed by the hotel in a cloud of yellow dust. He spurred his horse desperately up to the barracks and, as he drew rein, Mr. Chester and the boys saw Rogero come out on the balcony and the messenger standing in his stirrups, hand him an envelope.
“News from the front,” commented Mr. Chester. Rogero disappeared for a few minutes and when he came out again he handed the messenger another envelope, evidently containing a reply to the despatch he had just received. The man wheeled his horse almost on its haunches and spurred down the street again.
“What is it?” shouted Mr. Chester in Spanish to him as he dashed by the hotel riding as if his life depended on speed.
“Another great victory,” he shouted reining his sweating horse in for an imperceptible fragment of time.
As the clatter of his horse’s hoofs died away in the direction of the mountains there was a great commotion in the barracks. Bugles sounded and men ran about with horses, arms and bundles, in the confusion that characterizes improperly-disciplined troops. After about half an hour of this frenzied preparation the troops, some two hundred in number, with Rogero and his dark-skinned