LITMIR.BIZ

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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, revolver belted, 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,’ answered 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 Señor 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 someone else. I know that someone 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 shook hands with me, Señor 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, Señor,’ 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.’

      Francis, in a venerably whitewashed adobe cell with walls five feet thick, its earth floor carpeted with the forms of half a dozen sleeping peón[22] prisoners, listened to a dim hammering not very distant, remembered the trial from which he had just emerged, and whistled long and low. The hour was half-past eight in the evening. The trial had begun at eight. The hammering was the hammering together of the scaffold beams, from which place of eminence he was scheduled at ten next morning to swing off into space supported from the ground by a rope around his neck. The trial had lasted half an hour by his watch. Twenty minutes would have covered it had Leoncia not burst in and prolonged it by the ten minutes courteously accorded her as the great lady of the Solano family.

      ‘The Jefe was right,’ Francis acknowledged to himself in a matter of soliloquy. ‘Panama justice does move swiftly.’

      The very possession of the letter given him by Leoncia and addressed to Henry Morgan had damned him. The rest had been easy. Half a dozen witnesses had testified to the murder and identified him as the murderer. The Jefe Politico himself had so testified. The one cheerful note had been the eruption on the scene of Leoncia, chaperoned by a palsied old aunt of the Solano family. That had been sweet the fight the beautiful girl had put up for his life, despite the fact that it was foredoomed to futility.

      When she had made Francis roll up the sleeve and expose his left forearm, he had seen the Jefe Politico shrug his shoulders contemptuously. And he had seen Leoncia fling a passion of Spanish words, too quick for him to follow, at Torres. And he had seen and heard the gesticulation and the roar of the mob-filled court-room as Torres had taken the stand.

      But what he had not seen was the whispered colloquy between Torres and the Jefe, as the former was in the thick of forcing his way through the press to the witness box. He no more saw this particular side-play than did he know that Torres was in the pay of Regan to keep him away from New York as long as possible, and as long as ever if possible, nor than did he know that Torres himself, in love with Leoncia, was consumed with a jealousy that knew no limit to its ire.

      All of which had blinded Francis to the play under the interrogation of Torres by Leoncia, which had compelled Torres to acknowledge that he had never seen a scar on Francis Morgan’s left forearm. While Leoncia had looked at the little old judge in triumph, the Jefe Politico had advanced and demanded of Torres in stentorian tones:

      ‘Can you swear that you ever saw a scar on Henry Morgan’s arm?’

      Torres had been baffled and embarrassed, had looked bewilderment to the judge and pleadingness to Leoncia, and, in the end, without speech, shaken his head that he could not so swear.

      The roar of triumph had gone up from the crowd of ragamuffins. The judge had pronounced sentence, the roar had doubled on itself, and Francis had been hustled out and to his cell, not entirely unresistingly, by the gendarmes and the Comisario, all apparently solicitous of saving him from the mob that was unwilling to wait till ten next morning for his death.

      ‘That poor dub, Torres, who fell down on the scar on Henry!’ Francis was meditating sympathetically, when the bolts of his cell door shot back and he arose to greet Leoncia.

      But she declined to greet him for the moment, as she flared at the Comisario in rapid-fire Spanish, with gestures of command to which he yielded when he ordered the jailer to remove the peón s to other cells, and himself, with a nervous and apologetic bowing, went out and closed the door.

      And then Leoncia broke down, sobbing on his shoulder, in his arms: ‘It is a cursed country, a cursed country. There is no fair play.’

      And as Francis held her pliant form, meltingly exquisite in its maddeningness of woman, he remembered Henry, in his canvas pants, bare-footed, under his floppy sombrero, digging holes in the sand of the Bull.

      He tried to draw away from the armful of deliciousness, and only half succeeded. Still, at such slight removal of distance, he essayed the intellectual part, rather than the emotional part he desired all too strongly to act.

      ‘And now I know at last what a frame-up is,’ he assured her, farthest from the promptings of his heart. ‘If these Latins of your country thought more coolly instead of acting so passionately, they might be building railroads and developing their country. That trial was a straight passionate frame-up. They just knew I was guilty and were so eager to punish me that they wouldn’t even bother for mere evidence or establishment of identity. Why delay? They knew Henry Morgan had knifed Alfaro. They knew I was Henry Morgan. When one knows, why bother to find out?’

      Deaf to his words, sobbing and struggling to cling closer while he spoke, the moment he had finished she was deep again in his arms, against him, to him, her lips raised to his; and, ere he was aware, his own lips to hers. ‘I love you, I love you,’ she whispered brokenly.

      ‘No, no,’ he denied what he most desired. ‘Henry and I are too alike. It is Henry you love, and I am not Henry.’

      She tore herself away from

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