LITMIR.BIZ

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at a privy glance from Regan, Alvarez Torres lied with swift efficientness.

      ‘I must join you later, I regret, Mr. Morgan. Some little business that presses how shall I say? An insignificant little lawsuit that must be settled first. Not that the sum at issue is important. But it is a family matter, and therefore gravely important. We Torres have our pride, which is a silly thing, I acknowledge, in this country, but which with us is very serious.’

      ‘He can join afterward, and straighten you out if you’ve missed the scent,’ Regan assured Francis. ‘And, before it slips your mind, it might be just as well to arrange with Señor Torres some division of the loot… if you ever find it.’

      ‘What would you say?’ Francis asked.

      ‘Equal division, fifty-fifty,’ Regan answered, magnificently arranging the apportionment between the two men of something he was certain did not exist.

      ‘And you will follow after as soon as you can?’ Francis asked the Latin American. ‘Regan, take hold of his little law affair yourself and expedite it, won’t you?’

      ‘Sure, boy,’ was the answer. ‘And, if it’s needed, shall I advance cash to Señor Alvarez?’

      ‘Fine!’ Francis shook their hands in both of his. ‘It will save me bother. And I’ve got to rush to pack and break engagements and catch that train. So long, Regan. Good-bye, Señor Torres, until we meet somewhere around Bocas del Toro, or in a little hole in the ground on the Bull or the Calf you say you think it’s the Calf? Well, until then adiós!’

      And Señor Alvarez Torres remained with Regan some time longer, receiving explicit instructions for the part he was to play, beginning with retardation and delay of Francis’ expedition, and culminating in similar retardation and delay always to be continued.

      ‘In short,’ Regan concluded, ‘I don’t almost care if he never comes back if you can keep him down there for the good of his health that long and longer.’

      Chapter II

      Money, like youth, will not be denied, and Francis Morgan, who was the man-legal and nature-certain representative of both youth and money, found himself one afternoon, three weeks after he had said good-bye to Regan, becalmed close under the land on board his schooner, the Angelique. The water was glassy, the smooth roll scarcely perceptible, and, in sheer ennui and overplus of energy that likewise declined to be denied, he asked the captain, a breed, half Jamaica negro[7] and half Indian, to order a small skiff over the side.

      ‘Looks like I might shoot a parrot or a monkey or something,’ he explained, searching the jungle-clad shore, half a mile away, through a twelve-power Zeiss glass.

      ‘Most problematic, sir, that you are bitten by a labarri, which is deadly viper in these parts,’ grinned the breed skipper and owner of the Angelique, who, from his Jamaica father had inherited the gift of tongues.

      But Francis was not to be deterred; for at the moment, through his glass, he had picked out, first, in the middle ground, a white hacienda,[8] and second, on the beach, a white-clad woman’s form, and further, had seen that she was scrutinising him and the schooner through a pair of binoculars.

      ‘Put the skiff over, skipper,’ he ordered. ‘Who lives around here? white folks?’

      ‘The Enrico Solano family, sir,’ was the answer. ‘My word, they are important gentlefolk, old Spanish, and they own the entire general landscape from the sea to the Cordilleras and half of the Chiriqui Lagoon as well. They are very poor, most powerful rich… in landscape and they are prideful and fiery as cayenne pepper.’

      As Francis, in the tiny skiff, rowed shoreward, the skipper’s alert eye noted that he had neglected to take along either rifle or shotgun for the contemplated parrot or monkey. And, next, the skipper’s eye picked up the white-clad woman’s figure against the dark edge of the jungle.

      Straight to the white beach of coral sand Francis rowed, not trusting himself to look over his shoulder to see if the woman remained or had vanished. In his mind was merely a young man’s healthy idea of encountering a bucolic young lady, or a half-wild white woman for that matter, or at the best a very provincial one, with whom he could fool and fun away a few minutes of the calm that fettered the Angelique to immobility. When the skiff grounded, he stepped out, and with one sturdy arm lifted its nose high enough up the sand to fasten it by its own weight. Then he turned around. The beach to the jungle was bare. He strode forward confidently. Any traveller, on so strange a shore, had a right to seek inhabitants for information on his way was the idea he was acting out.

      And he, who had anticipated a few moments of diversion merely, was diverted beyond his fondest expectations. Like a jack-in-the-box,[9] the woman, who, in the flash of vision vouchsafed him demonstrated that she was a girl-woman, ripely mature and yet mostly girl, sprang out of the green wall of jungle and with both hands seized his arm. The hearty weight of grip in the seizure surprised him. He fumbled his hat off with his free hand and bowed to the strange woman with the imperturbableness of a Morgan, New York trained and disciplined to be surprised at nothing, and received another surprise, or several surprises compounded. Not alone was it her semi-brunettebeauty that impacted upon him with the weight of a blow, but it was her gaze, driven into him, that was all of sternness. Almost it seemed to him that he must know her. Strangers, in his experience, never so looked at one another.

      The double grip on his arm became a draw, as she muttered tensely:

      ‘Quick! Follow me!’

      A moment he resisted. She shook him in the fervor of her desire, and strove to pull him toward her and after her. With the feeling that it was some unusual game, such as one might meet up with on the coast of Central America, he yielded, smilingly, scarcely knowing whether he followed voluntarily or was being dragged into the jungle by her impetuosity.

      ‘Do as I do,’ she shot back at him over her shoulder, by this time leading him with one hand of hers in his.

      He smiled and obeyed, crouching when she crouched, doubling over when she doubled, while memories of John Smith and Pocahontas[10] glimmered up in his fancy.

      Abruptly she checked him and sat down, her hand directing him to sit beside her ere she released him, and pressed it to her heart while she panted:

      ‘Thank God! Oh, merciful Virgin!’

      In imitation, such having been her will of him, and such seeming to be the cue of the game, he smilingly pressed his own hand to his heart, although he called neither on God nor the Virgin.

      ‘Won’t you ever be serious?’ she flashed at him, noting his action.

      And Francis was immediately and profoundly, as well as naturally, serious.

      ‘My dear lady…’ he began.

      But an abrupt gesture checked him; and, with growing wonder, he watched her bend and listen, and heard the movement of bodies padding down some runway several yards away.

      With a soft warm palm pressed commandingly to his to be silent, she left him with the abruptness that he had already come to consider as customary with her, and slipped away down the runway. Almost he whistled with astonishment. He might have whistled if, had he not heard her voice, not distant, in Spanish, sharply interrogate men whose Spanish voices, half-humbly, half-insistently and half-rebelliously, answered her.

      He heard them move on, still talking, and, after five minutes of dead silence, heard her call for him peremptorily to come out.

      ‘Gee! I wonder what Regan would do under such circumstances!’ he smiled to himself as he obeyed.

      He followed her, no longer hand in hand, through the jungle to the beach. When she paused, he came beside her and faced her, still under the impress of the fantasy which possessed him that it was a game.

      ‘Tag![11]’ he laughed, touching her on the shoulder. ‘Tag!’ he reiterated.

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