Сердца трех / Hearts of Three

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 drive-way. And he saw what made him grit his teeth and draw very 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 least one 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.’

‘Señor 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, Señor 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, Señor 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, 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 her own clinging, drew Henry’s ring from her finger, and threw it on the floor. Francis was so beyond himself that he knew not what was going to happen the next moment, and was only saved from whatever it might be by the entrance of the Comisario, watch in hand, with averted face striving to see naught else than the moments registered by the second-hand on the dial.

She stiffened herself proudly, and all but broke down again as Francis slipped Henry’s ring back on her finger and kissed her hand in farewell. Just ere she passed out the door she turned and with a whispered movement of the lips that was devoid of sound told him: ‘I love you.’

Promptly as the stroke of the clock, at ten o’clock Francis was led out into the jail patio where stood the gallows. All San Antonio was joyously and shoutingly present,’ including much of the neighboring population and Leoncia, Enrico Solano, and his five tall sons. Enrico and his sons fumed and strutted, but the Jefe Politico, backed by the Comisario and his gendarmes, was adamant. In vain, as Francis was forced to the foot of the scaffold, did Leoncia strive to get to him and did her men strive to persuade her to leave the patio. In vain, also, did her father and brothers protest that Francis was not the man. The Jefe Politico smiled contemptuously and ordered the execution to proceed.

On top the scaffold, standing on the trap, Francis declined the ministrations of the priest, telling him in Spanish that no innocent man being hanged needed intercessions with the next world, but that the men who were doing the hanging were in need of just such intercessions.

They had tied Francis’ legs, and were in the act of tying his arms, with the men who held the noose and the black cap hovering near to put them on him, when the voice of a singer was heard approaching from without; and the song he sang was:

‘Back to back against the mainmast,

Held at bay the entire crew… ‘

Leoncia, almost fainting, recovered at the sound of the voice, and cried out with sharp delight as she descried Henry Morgan entering, thrusting aside the guards at the gate who tried to bar his way.

At sight of him the only one present who suffered chagrin was Torres, which passed unnoticed in the excitement. The populace was in accord with the Jefe, who shrugged his shoulders and announced that one man was as good as another so long as the hanging went on. And here arose hot contention from the Solano men that Henry was likewise innocent of the murder of Alfaro. But it was Francis, from the scaffold, while his arms and legs were being untied, who shouted through the tumult:

‘You tried me! You have not tried him! You cannot hang a man without trial! He must have his trial!’

And when Francis had descended from the scaffold and was shaking Henry’s hand in both his own, the Comisario, with the Jefe at his back, duly arrested Henry Morgan for the murder of Alfaro Solano.