Hearts of Three Page 11

  “It is some mistake,” the haciendado was explaining to his overseer. “Enrico Solano is an honorable man. Anything to which he pledges himself is honorable. He has pledged himself to this, whatever it may be, and yet is Mariano Vercara e” Hijos on their trail. We shall mislead him if he comes this way.”

  “And here he comes,” the overseer remarked, “without luck so far in finding horses.” Casually he turned on the laboring peons and with horrible threats urged them to do at least half a day’s decent work in a day.

  From the corner of his eye, the haciendado observed the fast-walking group of men, with Alvarez Torres in the lead; but, as if he had not noticed, he conferred with his overseer about the means of grubbing out the particular stump the peons were working on.

  He returned the greeting of Torres pleasantly, and inquired politely, with a touch of devilry, if he led the party of men on some oil-prospecting adventure.

  “No, Senor,” Torres answered. “We are in search of Senor Enrico Solano, his daughter, his sons, and two tall Gringos with them. It is the Gringos we want. They have passed this way, Senor?”

  “Yes, they have passed. I imagined they, too, were in some oil excitement, such was their haste that prevented them from courteously passing the time of day and stating their destination. Have they committed some offence? But I should not ask. Senor Enrico Solano is too honorable a man���”

  “Which way did they go?” the Jefe demanded, thrusting himself breathlessly forward from the rear of his gendarmes with whom he had just caught up.

  And while the haciendado and his overseer temporized and prevaricated, and indicated an entirely different direction, Torres noted one of the peons, leaning on his spade, listen intently. And still while the Jefe was being misled and was giving orders to proceed on the false scent, Torres flashed a silver dollar privily to the listening peon. The peon nodded his head in the right direction, caught the coin unobserved, and applied himself to his digging at the root of the huge stump.

  Torres countermanded the Jefe’s order.

  “We will go the other way,” Torres said, with a wink to the Jefe. “A little bird has told me that our friend here is mistaken and that they have gone the other way.”

  As the posse departed on the hot trail, the haciendado and his overseer looked at each other in consternation and amazement. The overseer made a movement of his lips for silence, and looked swiftly at the group of laborers. The offending peon was working furiously and absorbedly, but another peon, with a barely perceptible nod of head, indicated him to the overseer.

  “There’s the little bird,” the overseer cried, striding to the traitor and shaking him violently.

  Out of the peon’s rags flew the silver dollar.

  “Ah, ha,” said the haciendado, grasping the situation. “He has become suddenly affluent. This is horrible, that my peons should be wealthy. Doubtless, he has murdered some one for all that sum. Beat him, and make him confess.”

  The creature, on his knees, the stick of the overseer raining blows on his head and back, made confession of what he had done to earn the dollar.

  “Beat him, beat him some more, beat him to death, the beast who betrayed my dearest friends,” the haciendado urged placidly. “But no caution. Do not beat him to death, but nearly so. We are short of labor now and cannot afford the full measure of our just resentment. Beat him to hurt him much, but that he shall be compelled to lay off work no more than a couple of days.”

  Of the immediately subsequent agonies, adventures, and misadventures of the peon, a volume might be written which w%uld be the epic of his life. Besides, to be beaten nearly to death is not nice to contemplate or dwell upon. Let it suffice to tell that when he had received no more than part of his beating; he wrenched free, leaving half his rags in the overseer’s grasp, and fled madly for the jungle, outfooting the overseer who was unused to rapid locomotion save when on a horse’s back.

  Such was the speed of the wretched creature’s flight, spurred on by the pain of his lacerations and the fear of the overseer, that, plunging wildly on, he overtook the Solano party and plunged out of the jungle and into them as they were crossing a shallow stream, and fell upon his knees, whimpering for mercy. He whimpered because of his betrayal of them. But this they did not know, and Francis, seeing his pitiable condition, lingered behind long enough to unscrew the metal top from a pocket flask and revive him with a drink of half the contents. Then Francis hastened on, leaving the poor devil muttering inarticulate thanks ere he dived ofi into the sheltering jungle in a different direction. But, underfed, overworked, his body gave way, and he sank down in collapse in the green covert. Next, Alvarez Torres in the lead and tracking lika a hound, the gendarmes at his back, the Jefe panting in the rear from shortness of breath, the pursuit arrived at the stream. The foot-marks of the peon, still wet on the dry stones beyond the margin of the stream, caught Torres’ eye. In a trice, by what little was left of his garments, tne peon was dragged out. On his knees, which portion of his anatomy he was destined to occupy much this day, he begged for mercy and received his interrogation. And he denied knowledge of the Solano party. He, who had betrayed and been beaten, but who had received only succor from those he had betrayed, felt stir in him some atom of gratitude and good. He denied knowledge of the Solanos since in the clearing where he had sold them for the silver dollar. Torres’ stick fell upon his head, five times, ten times, and went on falling with the certitude that in all eternity there would be no cessation unless he told the truth. And, after all, he was a miserable and wretched thing, spirit-broken by beatings from the cradle, and the sting of Torres’ stick, with the threat of the plenitude of the stick that meant the death his own owner, the haciendado, could not afford, made him give in and point the way of the chase.

  But his day of tribulation had only begun. Scarcely had be betrayed the Solanos the second time, and still on his knees, when the haciendado, with the posse of neighboring haciendados and overseers he had called to his help, burst upon the scene astride sweating horses.

  “My peon, senors,” announced the haciendado, itching to be at him. “You maltreat him.”

  “And why not?” demanded the Jefe.

  “Because he is mine to maltreat, and I wish to do it myself.”

  The peon crawled and squirmed to the Jefe’s feet and begged and entreated not to be given up. But he begged for mercy where was no mercy.

  “Certainly, senor,” the Jefe said to the haciendado. “We give him back to you. We must uphold the law, and he is your property. Besides, we have no further use for him. Yet is he a most excellent peon, senor. He has done what no peon has ever done in the history of Panama. He has told the truth twice in one day.”

  His hands tied together in front of him and hitched by a rope to the horn of the overseer’s saddle, the peon was towed away on the back-track with a certain apprehension that the worst of his beatings for that day was very imminent. Nor was he mistaken. Back at the plantation, he was tied like an animal to a post of a barbed wire fence, while his owner and the friends of his owner who had helped in the capture went into the hacienda to take their twelve o’clock breakfast. After that, he knew what he was to receive. But the barbed wire of the fence, and the lame mare in the paddock behind it, built an idea in the desperate mind of the peon. Though the sharp barbs of the wire again and again cut his wrist, he quickly sawed through his bonds, free save for the law, crawled under the fence, led the lame mare through the gate, mounted her barebacked, and, with naked heels tattooing her ribs, galloped her away toward the safety of the Cordilleras.

  CHAPTER IX

  IN the meantime the Solanos were being overtaken, and Henry teased Francis with:

  “Here in the jungle is where dollars are worthless. They can buy neither fresh horses, nor can they repair these two spineless creatures, which must likewise be afflicted with the murrain that carried off the rest of the haciendado’s riding animals.”

  “I’ve never been in a place yet where money wo
uldn’t work,” Francis replied.

  “I suppose it could even buy a drink of water in hell,” was Henry’s retort.

  Leoncia clapped her hands.

  “I don’t know,” Francis observed. “I have never been there.”

  Again Leoncia clapped her hands.

  “Just the same I have an idea I can make dollars work in the jungle, and I am going to try it right now,” Francis continued, at the same time untying the coin-sack from Leoncia’s pommel. “You go ahead and ride on.”

  “But you must tell me,” Leoncia insisted; and, aside, in her ear as she leaned to him from the saddle, he whispered what made her laugh again, while Henry, conferring with Enrico and his sons, inwardly berated himself for being a jealous fool.

  Before they were out of sight, looking back, they saw Francis, with pad and pencil out, writing something. What he wrote was eloquently brief, merely the figure “50.” Tearing off the sheet, he laid it conspicuously in the middle of the trail and weighted it down with a silver dollar. Counting out forty-nine other dollars from the bag, he sowed them very immediately about the first one and ran up the trail after his party.

  Augustino, the gendarme who rarely spoke when he was sober, but who when drunk preached volubly the wisdom of silence, was in the lead, with bent head nosing the track of the quarry, when his keen eyes lighted on the silver dollar holding down the sheet of paper. The first he appropriated; the second he turned over to the Jefe. Torres looked over his shoulder, and together they read the mystic “50.” The Jefe tossed the scrap of paper aside as of little worth, and was for resuming the chase, but Augustino picked up and pondered the “50 “thoughtfully. Even as he pondered it, a shout from Kafael advertised the finding of another dollar. Then Augustino knew. There were fifty of the coins to be had for the picking up. Flinging the note to the wind, he was on hands and knees overhauling the ground. The rest of the party joined in the scramble, while Torres and the Jefe screamed curses on them in a vain effort to make them proceed.

  When the gendarmes could find no more, they counted up what they had recovered. The toll came to forty-seven.

  “There are three more,” cried Eafael, whereupon all flung themselves into the search again. Five minutes more were lost, ere the three other coins were found. Each pocketed what he had retrieved and obediently swung into the pursuit at the heels of Torres and the Jefe.

  A mile farther on, Torres tried to trample a shining dollar into the dirt, but Augustino’s ferret eyes had been too quick, and his eager fingers dug it out of the soft earth. Where was one dollar, as they had already learned, there were more dollars. The posse came to a halt, and while the two leaders fumed and imprecated, the rest of the members cast about right and left from the trail.

  Vicente, a moon ��� faced gendarme, who looked more like a Mexican Indian than a Maya or a Panamanian “breed,” lighted first on the clue. All gathered about, like hounds around a tree into which the ‘possum has been run. In truth, it was a tree, or a rotten and hollow stump of one, a dozen feet in height and a third as many feet in diameter. Five feet from the ground was an opening. Above the opening, pinned on by a thorn, was a sheet of paper the same size as the first they had found. On it was written “100.”

  In the scramble that ensued, half a dozen minutes were lost as half a dozen right arms strove to be first in dipping into the hollow heart of the stump to the treasure. But the hollow extended deeper than their arms were long. “We will chop down the stump,” Eafael cried, sounding with the back of his machete against the side of it to locate the base of the hollow. “We will all chop, and we will count what we find inside and divide equally.”

  By this time their leaders were frantic, and the Jefe had begun threatening, the moment they were back in San Antonio, to send them to San Juan where their carcasses would be picked by the buzzards.

  “But we are not back in San Antonio, thank God,” said Augustino, breaking his sober seal of silence in order to enunciate wisdom.

  “We are poor men, and we will divide in fairness,” spoke up Rafael. “Augustino is right, and thank God for it that we are not back in San Antonio. This rich Gringo scatters more money along the way in a day for us to pick up than could we earn in a year where we come from. I, for one, am for revolution, where money is so plentiful.”

  “With the rich Gringo for a leader,” Augustino supplemented. “For as long as he leads this way could I follow forever.”

  “If,” Rafael nodded agreement, with a pitch of his head toward Torres and the Jefe, “if they do not give us opportunity to gather what the gods have spread for us, then to the last and deepest of the roasting hells of hell for them. We are men, not slaves. The world is wide. The Cordilleras are just beyond. We will all be rich, and free men, and live in the Cordilleras where the Indian maidens are wildly beautiful and desirable-”

  “And we will be well rid of our wives, back in San Antonio,” said Vicente. “Let us now chop down this treasure tree.”

  Swinging their machetes with heavy, hacking blows, the wood, so rotten that it was spongy, gave way readily before their blades. And when the stump fell over, they counted and divided, in equity, not one hundred silver dollars, but one hundred and forty-seven.

  “He is generous, this Gringo,” quoth Vicente. “He leaves more than he says. May there not be still more?”

  And, from the debris of rotten wood, much of it crumbled to powder under their blows, they recovered five more coins, in the doing of which they lost ten more minutes that drove Torres and Jefe to the verge of madness.

  “He does not stop to count, the wealthy Gringo,” said Rafael. “He must merely open that sack and pour it out. And that is the sack with which he rode to the beach of San Antonio when he blew up with dynamite the wall of our jail.”

  The chase’ was resumed, and all went well for half an hour, when they came upon an abandoned freehold, already half ��� overrun with the returning jungle. A dilapidated, strawthatched house, a fallen-in labor barracks, a broken-down corral the very posts of which had sprouted and leaved into growing trees, and a well showing recent use by virtue of a fresh length of riata attaching bucket to well-sweep, showed where some man had failed to tame the wild. And, conspicuously on the well-sweep, was pinned a familiar sheet of paper on which was written “300.”

  “Mother of God! a fortune!” cried Eafael.

  “May the devil forever torture him in the last and deepest hell!” was Torres’ contribution.

  “He pays better than your Senor Regan,” the Jefe sneered in his despair and disgust.

  “His bag of silver is only so large,” Torres retorted. “It seems we must pick it all up before we catch him. But when we have picked it all up, and his bag is empty, then will we catch him.”

  “We will go on now, comrades,” the Jefe addressed his posse ingratiatingly. “Afterwards, we will return at our leisure and recover the silver.”

  Augustino broke his seal of silence again.

  “One never knows the way of one’s return, if one ever returns,” he enunciated pessimistically. Elated by the pearl of wisdom he had dropped, he essayed another. “Three hundred in hand is better than three million in the bottom of a well we may never see again.”

  “Some one must descend into the well,” spoke Rafael, testing the braided rope with his weight. “See! The riata is strong. We will lower a man by it. Who is the brave one who will go down?”

  “I,” said Vicente. “I will be the brave one to go down-”

  “And steal half that you find,” Eafael uttered his instant suspicion. “If you go down, first must you count over to us the pesos you already possess. Then, when you come up, we can search you for all you have found. After that, when we have divided equitably, will your other pesos be returned to you.”

  “Then will I not go down for comrades who have no trust in me,” Vicente said stubbornly. “Here, beside the well, I am as wealthy as any of you. Then why should I go down? I have heard of men dying in the bottom of wells
.”

  “In God’s name go down!” stormed the Jefe. “Haste! Haste!”

  “I am too fat, the rope is not strong, and I shall not go down,” said Vicente.

  All looked to Augustino, the silent one, who had already spoken more than he was accustomed to speak in a week. “Guillermo is the thinnest and lightest,” said Augustino. “Guillermo will go down!” the rest chorused. But Guillermo, glaring apprehensively at the mouth of the well, backed away, shaking his head and crossing himself.

  “Not for the sacred treasure in the secret city of the Mayas,” he muttered.

  The Jefe pulled his revolver and glanced to the remainder of the posse for confirmation. With eyes and head-nods they gave it.

  “In heaven’s name go down,” he threatened the little gendarme. “And make haste, or I shall put you in such a fix that never again will you go up or down, but you will remain here and rot forever beside this hole of perdition. Is it well, comrades, that I kill him if he does not go down?” “It is well,” they shouted.

  And Guillermo, with trembling fingers, counted out the coins he had already retrieved, and, in the throes of fear, crossing himself repeatedly and urged on by the handthrusts of his companions, stepped upon the bucket, sat down on it with legs wrapped about it, and was lowered away out of the light of day.

  “Stop!” he screamed up the shaft. “Stop! Stop! The water! I am upon it!”

  Those on the sweep held it with their weight. “I should receive ten pesos extra above my share,” he called up.

  “You shall receive baptism,” was called down to him, and, variously: “You will have your fill of water this day”; “We will let go”; “We will cut the rope”; “There will be one less with whom to share.”