Hearts of Three
“What gun are you using?” he asked with cool politeness.
“Colt’s,” came the answer.
Francis stepped boldly into the open, saying: “Then you’re all out. I counted ‘em. Eight. Now we can talk.”
The stranger stepped out, and Francis could not help admiring the fine figure of him, despite the fact that a dirty pair of canvas pants, a cotton undershirt, and a floppy sombrero constituted his garmenting. Further, it seemed he had previously known him, though it did not enter his mind that he was looking at a replica of himself.
“Talk!” the stranger sneered, throwing down his pistol and drawing a knife. “Now we’ll just cut off your ears, and maybe scalp you.”
“Gee! You’re sweet-natured and gentle animals in this neck of the woods,” Francis retorted, his anger and disgust increasing. He drew his own hunting knife, brand new from the shop and shining. “Say, let’s wrestle, and cut out this ten-twenty-and-thirty knife stuff.”
“I want your ears,” the stranger answered pleasantly, as he slowly advanced.
“Sure. First down, and the man who wins the fall gets the other fellow’s ears.”
“Agreed.” The young man in the canvas trousers sheathed his knife.
“Too bad there isn’t a moving picture camera to film this,” Francis girded, sheathing his own knife. “I’m sore as a boil. I feel like a heap bad Injun. Watch out! I’m coming in a rush! Anyway and everyway for the first fall!”
Action and word went together, and his glorious rush ended ignominiously, for the stronger, apparently braced for the shock, yielded the instant their bodies met and fell over on his back, at the same time planting his foot in Francis’ abdomen and, from the back purchase on the ground, transforming Francis’ rush into a wild forward somersault.
The fall on the sand knocked most of Francis’ breath out of him, and the flying body of his foe, impacting on him, managed to do for what little breath was left him. As he lay speechless on his back, he observed the man on top of him gazing down at him with sudden curiosity.
“What d’ you want to wear a mustache for?” the stranger muttered.
“Go on and cut ‘em off,” Francis gasped, with the first of his returning breath. “The ears are yours, but the mustache is mine. It is not in the bond. Besides, that fall was straight jiu jiutsu.”
“You said ‘anyway and everyway for the first fall,’” the other quoted laughingly. “As for your ears, keep them. I never intended to cut them off, and now that I look at them closely the less I want them. Get up and get out of here. I’ve licked you. Vamos! And don’t come sneaking around here again! Git! Scut!”
In greater disgust than ever, to which was added the humiliation of defeat, Francis turned down to the beach toward his canoe.
“Say, Little Stranger, do you mind leaving your card?” the victor called after him.
“Visiting cards and cut-throating don’t go together,” Francis shot back across his shoulder, as he squatted in the canoe and dipped his paddle. “My name’s Morgan.”
Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, “Same stock – no wonder we look alike.”
Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Bull, sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and gloomily meditated. Crazy, everybody, was the run of his thought. Nobody acts with reason. “I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with these people. They’d get his ears.”
Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a grass-thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he uttered aloud, “I guess I put the fear of God into that particular member of the Morgan family,” had just begun to stare at a photographic reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry Morgan.
“Well, Old Pirate,” he continued grinning, “two of your latest descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that would make your antediluvian horse-pistols look like thirty cents.”
He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was monogramed with an “M,” and again addressed the portrait:
“Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you played it yourself.”
A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age-worn and moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added: “Well, here’s the old duds on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to tell me a point of looks in which we differ.”
Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on around the middle and two flintlock pistols of huge and ponderous design thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since resolved to dust, was striking.
“Back to back against the mainmast,Held at bay the entire crew…”As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded into another picture and that he saw:
The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing, facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed and accoutred man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.
The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately. And in the sharp pause of silence, it seemed that a fresh vision of old Sir Henry came to him, down out of the frame and beside him, real in all seeming, plucking at his sleeve to lead him out of the hut and whispering a ghostly repetition of:
“Back to back against the mainmastHeld at bay the entire crew.”The young man obeyed his shadowy guide, or some prompting of his own profound of intuition, and went out the door and down to the beach, where, gazing across the narrow channel, on the beach of the Bull, he saw his late antagonist, backed up against the great boulder of coral rock, standing off an attack of sack-clouted, machete-wielding Indians with wide sweeping strokes of a driftwood timber.
And Francis, in extremity, swaying dizzily from the blow of a rock on his head, saw the apparition, that almost convinced him he was already dead and in the realm of the shades, of Sir Henry Morgan himself, cutlass in hand, rushing up the beach to his rescue. Further, the apparition, brandishing the cutlass and laying out Indians right and left, was bellowing:
“Back to back against the mainmast,Held at bay the entire crew.”As Francis’ knees gave under him and he slowly crumpled and sank down, he saw the Indians scatter and flee before the onslaught of the weird pirate figure and heard their cries of:
“Heaven help us!” “The Virgin protect us!” “It’s the ghost of old Morgan!”
Francis next opened his eyes inside the grass hut in the midmost center of the Calf. First, in the glimmering of sight of returning consciousness, he beheld the pictured lineaments of Sir Henry Morgan staring down at him from the wall. Next, it was a younger edition of the same, in three dimensions of living, moving flesh, who thrust a mug of brandy to his lips and bade him drink. Francis was on his feet ere he touched lips to the mug; and both he and the stranger man, moved by a common impulse, looked squarely into each other’s eyes, glanced at the picture on the wall and touched mugs in a salute to the picture and to each other ere they drank.
“You told me you were a Morgan,” the stranger said. “I am a Morgan. That man on the wall fathered my breed. Your breed?”
“The old buccaneer’s,” Francis returned. “My first name is Francis. And yours?”
“Henry – straight from the original. We must be remote cousins or something or other. I’m after the foxy old niggardly old Welshman’s loot.”
“So’m I,” said Francis, extending his hand. “But to hell with sharing.”
“The old blood talks in you,” Henry smiled approbation. “For him to have who finds. I’ve turned most of this island upside down in the last six months, and all I’ve found are these old duds. I’m with you to beat you if I can, but to put my back against the mainmast with you any time the needed call goes out.”
“That song’s a wonder,” Francis urged. “I want to learn it. Lift the stave again.”
And together, clanking their mugs, they sang:
“Back to back against the mainmast,Held at bay the entire crew…”CHAPTER III
But a splitting headache put a stop to Francis’ singing and made him glad to be swung in a cool hammock by Henry, who rowed off to the Angelique with orders from his visitor to the skipper to stay at anchor but not to permit any of his sailors to land on the Calf. Not until late in the morning of the following day, after hours of heavy sleep, did Francis get on his feet and announce that his head was clear again.
“I know what it is – got bucked off a horse once,” his strange relative sympathised, as he poured him a huge cup of fragrant black coffee. “Drink that down. It will make a new man of you. Can’t offer you much for breakfast except bacon, sea biscuit, and some scrambled turtle eggs. They’re fresh. I guarantee that, for I dug them out this morning while you slept.”
“That coffee is a meal in itself,” Francis praised, meanwhile studying his kinsman and ever and anon glancing at the portrait of their relative.
“You’re just like him, and in more than mere looks,” Henry laughed, catching him in his scrutiny. “When you refused to share yesterday, it was old Sir Henry to the life. He had a deep-seated antipathy against sharing, even with his own crews. It’s what caused most of his troubles. And he’s certainly never shared a penny of his treasure with any of his descendants. Now I’m different. Not only will I share the Calf with you; but I’ll present you with my half as well, lock, stock, and barrel, this grass hut, all these nice furnishings, tenements, hereditaments, and everything, and what’s left of the turtle eggs. When do you want to move in?”
“You mean…?” Francis asked.
“Just that. There’s nothing here. I’ve just about dug the island upside down and all I found was the chest there full of old clothes.”
“It must have encouraged you.”
“Mightily. I thought I had a hammerlock on it. At any rate, it showed I’m on the right track.”
“What’s the matter with trying the Bull?” Francis queried.
“That’s my idea right now,” was the answer, “though I’ve got another clue for over on the mainland. Those old-timers had a way of noting down their latitude and longitude whole degrees out of the way.”
“Ten North and Ninety East on the chart might mean Twelve North and Ninety-two East,” Francis concurred. “Then again it might mean Eight North and Eighty-eight East. They carried the correction in their heads, and if they died unexpectedly, which was their custom, it seems, the secret died with them.”
“I’ve half a notion to go over to the Bull and chase those turtle-catchers back to the mainland,” Henry went on. “And then again I’d almost like to tackle the mainland clue first. I suppose you’ve got a stock of clues, too?”
“Sure thing,” Francis nodded. “But say, I’d like to take back what I said about not sharing.”
“Say the word,” the other encouraged.
“Then I do say it.”
Their hands extended and gripped in ratification.
“Morgan and Morgan strictly limited,” chortled Francis.
“Assets, the whole Caribbean Sea, the Spanish Main, most of Central America, one chest full of perfectly no good old clothes, and a lot of holes in the ground,” Henry joined in the other’s humor. “Liabilities, snake-bite, thieving Indians, malaria, yellow fever – ”
“And pretty girls with a habit of kissing total strangers one moment, and of sticking up said total strangers with shiny silver revolvers the next moment,” Francis cut in. “Let me tell you about it. Day before yesterday, I rowed ashore over on the mainland. The moment I landed, the prettiest girl in the world pounced out upon me and dragged me away into the jungle. Thought she was going to eat me or marry me. I didn’t know which. And before I could find out, what’s the pretty damsel do but pass uncomplimentary remarks on my mustache and chase me back to the boat with a revolver. Told me to beat it and never come back, or words to that effect.”
“Whereabouts on the mainland was this?” Henry demanded, with a tenseness which Francis, chuckling his reminiscence of the misadventure, did not notice.
“Down toward the other end of Chiriqui Lagoon,” he replied. “It was the stamping ground of the Solano family, I learned; and they are a red peppery family, as I found out. But I haven’t told you all. Listen. First she dragged me into the vegetation and insulted my mustache; next she chased me to the boat with a drawn revolver; and then she wanted to know why I didn’t kiss her. Can you beat that?”
“And did you?” Henry demanded, his hand unconsciously clinching by his side.
“What could a poor stranger in a strange land do? It was some armful of pretty girl – ”
The next fraction of a second Francis had sprung to his feet and blocked before his jaw a crushing blow of Henry’s fist.
“I … I beg your pardon,” Henry mumbled, and slumped down on the ancient sea chest. “I’m a fool, I know, but I’ll be hanged if I can stand for – ”
“There you go again,” Francis interrupted resentfully. “As crazy as everybody else in this crazy country. One moment you bandage up my cracked head, and the next moment you want to knock that same head clean off of me. As bad as the girl taking turns at kissing me and shoving a gun into my midrif.”
“That’s right, fire away, I deserve it,” Henry admitted ruefully, but involuntarily began to fire up as he continued with: “Confound you, that was Leoncia.”
“What if it was Leoncia? Or Mercedes? Or Dolores? Can’t a fellow kiss a pretty girl at a revolver’s point without having his head knocked off by the next ruffian he meets in dirty canvas pants on a notorious sand-heap of an island?”
“When the pretty girl is engaged to marry the ruffian in the dirty canvas pants – ”
“You don’t mean to tell me – ” the other broke in excitedly.
“It isn’t particularly amusing to said ruffian to be told that his sweetheart has been kissing a ruffian she never saw before from off a disreputable Jamaica nigger’s schooner,” Henry completed his sentence.
“And she took me for you,” Francis mused, glimpsing the situation. “I don’t blame you for losing your temper, though you must admit it’s a nasty one. Wanted to cut off my ears yesterday, didn’t you?”
“Yours is just as nasty, Francis, my boy. The way you insisted that I cut them off when I had you down – ha! ha!”
Both young men laughed in hearty amity.
“It’s the old Morgan temper,” Henry said. “He was by all the accounts a peppery old cuss.”
“No more peppery than those Solanos you’re marrying into. Why, most of the family came down on the beach and peppered me with rifles on my departing way. And your Leoncia pulled her little popgun on a long-bearded old fellow who might have been her father and gave him to understand she’d shoot him full of holes if he didn’t stop plugging away at me.”
“It was her father, I’ll wager, old Enrico himself,” Henry exclaimed. “And the other chaps were her brothers.”
“Lovely lizards!” ejaculated Francis. “Say, don’t you think life is liable to become a trifle monotonous when you’re married into such a peaceful, dove-like family as that!” He broke off, struck by a new idea. “By the way, Henry, since they all thought it was you, and not I, why in thunderation did they want to kill you? Some more of your crusty Morgan temper that peeved your prospective wife’s relatives?”
Henry looked at him a moment, as if debating with himself, and then answered.
“I don’t mind telling you. It is a nasty mess, and I suppose my temper was to blame. I quarreled with her uncle. He was her father’s youngest brother – ”
“Was?” interrupted Francis with significant stress on the past tense.
“Was, I said,” Henry nodded. “He isn’t now. His name was Alfaro Solano, and he had some temper himself. They claim to be descended from the Spanish conquistadores, and they are prouder than hornets. He’d made money in logwood, and he had just got a big henequen plantation started farther down the coast. And then we quarreled. It was in the little town over there – San Antonio. It may have been a misunderstanding, though I still maintain he was wrong. He always was looking for trouble with me – didn’t want me to marry Leoncia, you see.
“Well, it was a hot time. It started in a pulqueria where Alfaro had been drinking more mescal than was good for him. He insulted me all right. They had to hold us apart and take our guns away, and we separated swearing death and destruction. That was the trouble – our quarrel and our threats were heard by a score of witnesses.
“Within two hours the Comisario himself and two gendarmes found me bending over Alfaro’s body in a back street in the town. He’d been knifed in the back, and I’d stumbled over him on the way to the beach. Explain? No such thing. There were the quarrel and the threats of vengeance, and there I was, not two hours afterward, caught dead to right with his warm corpse. I haven’t been back in San Antonio since, and I didn’t waste any time in getting away. Alfaro was very popular, – you know the dashing type that catches the rabble’s fancy. Why, they couldn’t have been persuaded to give me even the semblance of a trial. Wanted my blood there and then, and I departed very pronto.
“Next, up at Bocas del Toro, a messenger from Leoncia delivered back the engagement ring. And there you are. I developed a real big disgust, and, since I didn’t dare go back with all the Solanos and the rest of the population thirsting for my life, I came over here to play hermit for a while and dig for Morgan’s treasure… Just the same, I wonder who did stick that knife into Alfaro. If ever I find him, then I clear myself with Leoncia and the rest of the Solanos and there isn’t a doubt in the world that there’ll be a wedding. And now that it’s all over I don’t mind admitting that Alfaro was a good scout, even if his temper did go off at half-cock.”
“Clear as print,” Francis murmured. “No wonder her father and brothers wanted to perforate me. – Why, the more I look at you, the more I see we’re as like as two peas, except for my mustache – ”
“And for this…” Henry rolled up his sleeve, and on the left forearm showed a long, thin white scar. “Got that when I was a boy. Fell off a windmill and through the glass roof of a hothouse.”
“Now listen to me,” Francis said, his face beginning to light with the project forming in his mind. “Somebody’s got to straighten you out of this mess, and the chap’s name is Francis, partner in the firm of Morgan and Morgan. You stick around here, or go over and begin prospecting on the Bull, while I go back and explain things to Leoncia and her people – ”
“If only they don’t shoot you first before you can explain you are not I,” Henry muttered bitterly. “That’s the trouble with those Solanos. They shoot first and talk afterward. They won’t listen to reason unless it’s post mortem.”
“Guess I’ll take a chance, old man,” Francis assured the other, himself all fire with the plan of clearing up the distressing situation between Henry and the girl.
But the thought of her perplexed him. He experienced more than a twinge of regret that the lovely creature belonged of right to the man who looked so much like him, and he saw again the vision of her on the beach, when, with conflicting emotions, she had alternately loved him and yearned toward him and blazed her scorn and contempt on him. He sighed involuntarily.
“What’s that for?” Henry demanded quizzically.
“Leoncia is an exceedingly pretty girl,” Francis answered with transparent frankness. “Just the same, she’s yours, and I’m going to make it my business to see that you get her. Where’s that ring she returned? If I don’t put it on her finger for you and be back here in a week with the good news, you can cut off my mustache along with my ears.”
An hour later, Captain Trefethen having sent a boat to the beach from the Angelique in response to signal, the two young men were saying good-bye.
“Just two things more, Francis. First, and I forgot to tell you, Leoncia is not a Solano at all, though she thinks she is. Alfaro told me himself. She is an adopted child, and old Enrico fairly worships her, though neither his blood nor his race runs in her veins. Alfaro never told me the ins and outs of it, though he did say she wasn’t Spanish at all. I don’t even know whether she’s English or American. She talks good enough English, though she got that at convent. You see, she was adopted when she was a wee thing, and she’s never known anything else than that Enrico is her father.”
“And no wonder she scorned and hated me for you,” Francis laughed, “believing, as she did, as she still does, that you knifed her full blood-uncle in the back.”
Henry nodded, and went on.
“The other thing is fairly important. And that’s the law. Or the absence of it, rather. They make it whatever they want it, down in this out-of-the-way hole. It’s a long way to Panama, and the gobernador of this state, or district, or whatever they call it, is a sleepy old Silenus. The Jefe Politico at San Antonio is the man to keep an eye on. He’s the little czar of that neck of the woods, and he’s some crooked hombre, take it from yours truly. Graft is too weak a word to apply to some of his deals, and he’s as cruel and blood-thirsty as a weasel. And his one crowning delight is an execution. He dotes on a hanging. Keep your weather eye on him, whatever you do… And, well, so long. And half of whatever I find on the Bull is yours: … and see you get that ring back on Leoncia’s finger.”
Two days later, after the half-breed skipper had reconnoitered ashore and brought back the news that all the men of Leoncia’s family were away, Francis had himself landed on the beach where he had first met her. No maidens with silver revolvers nor men with rifles were manifest. All was placid, and the only person on the beach was a ragged little Indian boy who at sight of a coin readily consented to carry a note up to the young senorita of the big hacienda. As Francis scrawled on a sheet of paper from his notebook, “I am the man whom you mistook for Henry Morgan, and I have a message for you from him,” he little dreamed that untoward happenings were about to occur with as equal rapidity and frequence as on his first visit.
For that matter, could he have peeped over the out-jut of rock against which he leaned his back while composing the note to Leoncia, he would have been startled by a vision of the young lady herself, emerging like a sea-goddess fresh from a swim in the sea. But he wrote calmly on, the Indian lad even more absorbed than himself in the operation, so that it was Leoncia, coming around the rock from behind, who first caught sight of him. Stifling an exclamation, she turned and fled blindly into the green screen of jungle.
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.”