Hearts of Three Page 5

  His first warning of her proximity was immediately thereafter, when a startled scream of fear aroused him. Note and pencil fell to the sand as he sprang toward the direction of the cry and collided with a wet and scantily dressed young woman who was recoiling backward from whatever had caused her scream. The unexpectedness of the collision was provocative of a second startled scream from her ere she could turn and recognize that it was not a new attack but a rescuer.

  She darted past him, her face colorless from the fright, stumbled over the Indian boy, nor paused until she was out on the open sand.

  “What is it?” Francis demanded. “Are you hurt? What’s happened?”

  She pointed at her bare knee, where two tiny drops of blood oozed forth side by side from two scarcely perceptible lacerations.

  “It was a viperine,” she said. “A deadly viperine. I shall be a dead woman in five minutes, and I am glad, glad, for then my heart will be tormented no more by you.”

  She leveled an accusing finger at him, gasped the beginning of denunciation she could not utter, and sank down in a faint.

  Francis knew about the snakes of Central America merely by hearsay, but the hearsay was terrible enough. Men talked of even mules and dogs dying in horrible agony five to ten minutes after being struck by tiny reptiles fifteen to twenty inches long. Small wonder she had fainted, was his thought, with so terribly rapid a poison doubtlessly beginning to work. His knowledge of the treatment of snake-bite was likewise hearsay, but flashed through his mind the recollection of the need of a tourniquet to shut off the circulation above the wound and prevent the poison from reaching the heart.

  He pulled out his handkerchief and tied it loosely around her leg above the knee, thrust in a short piece of driftwood stick, and twisted the handkerchief to savage tightness. Next, and all by hearsay, working swiftly, he opened the small blade of his pocket-knife, burned it with several matches to make sure against germs, and cut carefully but remorsely into the two lacerations made by the snake’s fangs.

  He was in a fright himself, working with feverish deftness and apprehending at any moment that the pangs of dissolution would begin to set in on the beautiful form before him. From all he had heard, the bodies of snake��� victims began to swell quickly and prodigiously. Even as he finished excoriating the fang-wounds, his mind was made up to his next two acts. First, he would suck out all poison he possibly could; and, next, light a cigarette and with its rive end proceed to cauterize the flesh.

  But while he was still making light, criss-cross cuts with the point of his knifeblade, she began to move restlessly.

  “Lie down,” he commanded, as she sat up, and just when he was bending his lips to the task.

  In response, he received a resounding slap alongside of his face from her little hand. At the same instant the Indian lad danced out of the jungle, swinging a small dead snake by the tail and crying exultingly:

  “Labarri! Labarri!”

  At which Francis assumed the worst.

  “Lie down, and be quiet!” he repeated harshly. “You haven’t a second to lose.”

  But she had eyes only for the dead snake. Her relief was patent; but Francis was no witness to it, for he was bending again to perform the classic treatment of snake-bite.

  “You dare!” she threatened him. “It’s only a baby labarri, and its bite is harmless. I thought it was a viperine. They look alike when the labarri is small.”

  The constriction of the circulation by the tourniquet pained her, and she glanced down and discovered his handkerchief knotted around her leg.

  “Oh, what have you done?”

  A warm blush began to suffuse her face.

  “But it was only a baby labarri,” she reproached him.

  “You told me it was a viperine,” he retorted.

  She hid her face in her hands, although the pink of flush burned furiously in her ears. Yet he could have sworn, unless it were hysteria, that she was laughing; and he knew for the first time how really hard was the task he had undertaken to put the ring of another man on her finger. So he deliberately hardened his heart against the beauty and fascination of her, and said bitterly:

  “And now, I suppose some of your gentry will shoot me full of holes because I don’t know a labarri from a viperine. You might call some of the farm hands down to do it. Or maybe you’d like to take a shot at me yourself.”

  But she seemed not to have heard, for she had arisen with the quick litheness to be expected of so gloriously fashioned a creature, and was stamping her foot on the sand.

  “It’s asleep my foot,” she explained with laughter unhidden this time by her hands.

  “You’re acting perfectly disgracefully,” he assured her wickedly, “when you consider that I am the murderer of your uncle.”

  Thus reminded, the laughter ceased and the color receded from her fa^e. She made no reply, but bending, with fingers that trembled with anger she strove to unknot the handkerchief as if it were some loathsome thing.

  “Better let me help,” he suggested pleasantly.

  “You beast!” she flamed at him. “Step aside. Your shadow falls upon me.”

  “Now you are delicious, charming,” he girded, belying the desire that stirred compellingly within him to clasp her in his arms. “You quite revive my last recollection of you here on the beach, one second reproaching me for not kissing you, the next second kissing me yes, you did, too ��� and the third second threatening to destroy my digestion forever with that little tin toy pistol of yours. No; you haven’t changed an iota from last time. You’re the same spitfire of a Leoncia. You’d better let me untie that for you. Don’t you see the knot is jammed? Your little fingers can never manage it.”

  She stamped her foot in sheer inarticulateness of rage.

  “Lucky for me you don’t make a practice of taking your tin toy pistol in swimming with you,” ho teased on, “or else there ‘d be a funeral right here on the beach pretty pronto of a perfectly nice young man whose intentions are never less than the best.”

  The Indian boy returned at this moment running with her bathing wrap, which she snatched from him and put on hastily. Next, with the boy’s help, she attacked the knot again. When the handkerchief came off she flung it from her as if in truth it were a viperine.

  “It was contamination,” she flashed, for his benefit.

  But Francis, still engaged in hardening his heart against her, shook his head slowly and said:

  “It doesn’t save you, Leoncia. I’ve left my mark on you that never will come off.”

  He pointed to the excoriations he had made on her knee and laughed.

  “The mark of the beast,” she came back, turning to go. “I warn you to take yourself off, Mr. Henry Morgan.”

  But he stepped in her way.

  “And now we’ll talk business, Miss Solano,” he said in changed tones. “And you will listen. Let your eyes flash all they please, but don’t interrupt me.” He stooped and picked up the note he had been engaged in writing. “I was just sending that to you by the boy when you screamed. Take it. Read it. It won’t bite you. It isn’t a viperine.”

  Though she refused to receive it, her eyes involuntarily scanned the opening line:

  I am the man whom you mistook for Henry Morgan���

  She looked at him with startled eyes that could not comprehend much but which were guessing many vague things.

  “On my honor,” he said gravely.

  “You��� are��� not��� Henry?” she gasped.

  “No, I am not. Won’t you please take it and read.”

  This time she complied, while he gazed with all his eyes upon the golden pallor of the sun on her tropic-touched blonde face which colored the blood beneath, or which was touched by the blood beneath, to the amazingly beautiful golden pallor.

  Almost in a dream he discovered himself looking into her startled, questioning eyes of velvet brown.

  “And who should have signed this?” she repeated.

&
nbsp; He came to himself and bowed.

  “But the name? your name?”

  “Morgan, Francis Morgan. As I explained there, Henry and I are some sort of distant relatives forty-fifth cousins, or something like that.”

  To his bewilderment, a great doubt suddenly dawned in her eyes, and the old familiar anger flashed.

  “Henry,” she accused him. “This is a ruse, a devil’s trick you’re trying to play on me. Of course you are Henry.”

  Francis pointed to his mustache.

  “You’ve grown that since,” she challenged.

  He pulled up his sleeve and showed her his left arm from wrist to elbow. But she only looked her incomprehension of the meaning of his action.

  “Do you remember the scar?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Then find it.”

  She bent her head in swift vain search, then shook it slowly as she faltered:

  “I��� I ask your forgiveness. I was terribly mistaken, and when I think of the way I��� I’ve treated you���”

  “That kiss was delightful,” he naughtily disclaimed.

  She recollected more immediate passages, glanced down at her knee and stifled what he adjudged was a most adorable giggle.

  “You say you have a message from Henry,” she changed the subject abruptly. “And that he is innocent���? This is true? Oh, I do want to believe you!”

  “I am morally certain that Henry no more killed your uncle than did I.”

  “Then say no more, at least not now,” she interrupted joyfully. “First of all I must make amends to you, though you must confess that some of the things you have done and said were abominable. You had no right to kiss me.”

  “If you will remember,” he contended, “I did it at the pistol point. How was I to know but what I would get shot if I didn’t.”

  “Oh, hush, hush,” she begged. “You must go with me now to the house. And you can tell me about Henry on the way.”

  Her eyes chanced upon the handkerchief she had flung so contemptuously aside. She ran to it and picked it up.

  “Poor, ill-treated kerchief,” she crooned to it. “To you also must I make amends. I shall myself launder you, and���” Her eyes lifted to Francis as she addressed him. “And return it to you, sir, fresh and sweet and all wrapped around my heart of gratitude���”

  “And the mark of the beast?” he queried.

  “I am so sorry,” she confessed penitently.

  “And may I be permitted to rest my shadow upon you?”

  “Do! Do!” she cried gaily. “There! I am in your shadow now. And we must start.”

  Francis tossed a peso to the grinning Indian boy, and, in high elation, turned and followed her into the tropic growth on the path that led up to the white hacienda.

  Seated on the broad piazza of the Solano Hacienda, Alvarez Torres saw through the tropic shrubs the couple approaching along the winding driveway. And he saw what made him grit his teeth and draw v^-ry erroneous conclusions. He muttered imprecations to himself��� and forgot his cigarette.

  What he saw was Leoncia and Francis in such deep and excited talk as to be oblivious of everything else. He saw Francis grow so urgent of speech and gesture as to cause Leoncia to stop abruptly and listen further to his pleading. Next and Torres could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes, he saw Francis produce a ring, and Leoncia, with averted face, extend her left hand and receive the ring upon her third ringer. Engagement finger it was, and Torres could have sworn to it.

  What had really occurred was the placing of Henry’s engagement ring back on Leoncia’s hand. And Leoncia, she knew not why, had been vaguely averse to receiving it.

  Torres tossed the dead cigarette away, twisted his mustache fiercely, as if to relieve his own excitement, and advanced to meet them across the piazza. He did not return the girl’s greeting at the first. Instead, with the wrathful face of the Latin, he burst out at Francis:

  “One does not expect shame in a murderer, but at leastone does expect simple decency.”

  Francis smiled whimsically.

  “There it goes again,” he said. “Another lunatic in this lunatic land. The last time, Leoncia, that I saw this gentleman was in New York. He was really anxious to do business with me. Now I meet him here and the first thing he tells me is that I am an indecent, shameless murderer.”

  “Senor Torres, you must apologize,” she declared angrily. “The house of Solano is not accustomed to having its guests insulted.”

  “The house of Solano, I then understand, is accustomed to having its men murdered by transient adventurers,” he retorted. “No sacrifice is too great when it is in the name of hospitality.”

  “Get off your foot, Senor Torres,” Francis advised him pleasantly. “You are standing on it. I know what your mistake is. You think I am Henry Morgan. I am Francis Morgan, and you and I, not long ago, transacted business together in Regan’s office in New York. There’s my hand. Your shaking of it will be sufficient apology under the circumstances.”

  Torres, overwhelmed for the moment by his mistake, took the extended hand and uttered apologies both to Francis and Leoncia.

  “And now,” she beamed through laughter, clapping her hands to call a house-servant, “I must locate Mr. Morgan, and go and get some clothes on. And after that, Senor Torres, if you will pardon us, we will tell you about Henry.”

  While she departed, and while Francis followed away to his room on the heels of a young and pretty mestizo woman. Torres, his brain resuming its functions, found he was more amazed and angry than ever. This, then, was a newcomer and stranger to Leoncia whom he had seen putting a ring on her engagement finger. He thought quickly and passionately for a moment. Leoncia, whom to himself he always named the queen of his dreams, had, on an instant’s notice, engaged herself to a strange Gringo from New York. It was unbelievable, monstrous.

  He clapped his hands, summoned his hired carriage from San Antonio, and was speeding down the drive when Francis strolled forth to have a talk with him about further details of the hiding place of old Morgan’s treasure.

  After lunch, when a land-breeze sprang up, which meant fair wind and a quick run across Chiriqui Lagoon and along the length of it to the Bull and the Calf, Francis, eager to bring to Henry the good word that his ring adorned Leoncia’s finger, resolutely declined her proffered hospitality to remain for the night and meet Enrico Solano and his tall sons. Francis had a further reason for hasty departure. He could not endure the presence of Leoncia and this in no sense uncomplimentary to her. She charmed him, drew him, to such extent that he dared not endure her charm and draw if he were to remain man-faithful to the man in the canvas pants even then digging holes in the sands of the Bull.

  So Francis departed, a letter to Henry from Leoncia in his pocket. The last moment, ere he departed, was abrupt. With a sigh so quickly suppressed that Leoncia wondered whether. or not she had imagined it, he tore himself away. She gazed after his retreating form down the driveway until it was out of sight, then stared at the ring on her finger with a vaguely troubled expression.

  From the beach, Francis signaled the Angelique, riding at anchor, to send a boat ashore for him. But before it had been swung into the water, half a dozen horsemen, revolverbelted, rifles across their pommels, rode down the beach upon him at a gallop. Two men led. The following four were hang-dog half-castes. Of the two leaders, Francis recognized Torres. Every rifle came to rest on Francis, and he could not but obey the order snarled at him by the unknown leader to throw up his hands. And Francis opined aloud:

  “To think of it! Once, only the other day or was it a million years ago? I thought auction bridge, at a dollar a point, was some excitement. Now, sirs, you on your horses, with your weapons threatening the violent introduction of foreign substances into my poor body, tell me what is doing now. Don’t I ever get off this beach without gunpowder complications? Is it my ears, or merely my mustache, you want?”

  “We want you,” answere
d the stranger leader, whose mustache bristled as magnetically as his crooked black eyes.

  “And in the name of original sin and of all lovely lizards, who might you be?”

  “He is the honorable Senor Mariano Vercara e Hijos, Jefe Politico of San Antonio,” Torres replied.

  “Good night,” Francis laughed, remembering the man’s description as given to him by Henry. “I suppose you think I’ve broken some harbor rule or sanitary regulation by anchoring here. But you must settle such things with my captain, Captain Trefethen, a very estimable gentleman. I am only the charterer of the schooner just a passenger. You will find Captain Trefethen right up in maritime law and custom.”

  “You are wanted for the murder of Alfaro Solano,” was Torres’ answer. “You didn’t fool me, Henry Morgan, with your talk up at the hacienda that you were some one else. I know that some one else. His name is Francis Morgan, and I do not hesitate to add that he is not a murderer, but a gentleman.”

  “Ye gods and little fishes!” Francis exclaimed. “And yet you ahook hands with me, Senor Torres.”

  “I was fooled,” Torres admitted sadly. “But only for a moment. Will you come peaceably?”

  “As if,” Francis shrugged his shoulders eloquently at the six rifles. “I suppose you’ll give me a pronto trial and hang me at daybreak.”

  “Justice is swift in Panama,” the Jefe Politico replied, his English queerly accented but understandable. “But not so quick as that. We will not hang you at daybreak. Ten o’clock in the morning is more comfortable all around, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, by all means,” Francis retorted. “Make it eleven, or twelve noon I won’t mind.”

  “You will kindly come with us, Senor,” Mariano Vercara e Hijos, said, the suavity of his diction not masking the iron of its intention. “Juan! Ignacio!” he ordered in Spanish. “Dismount! Take his weapons. No, it will not be necessary to tie his hands. Put him on the horse behind Gregorio.”