Chapter VII

‘And now we’ve lost both the Gringo pigs,’ Alvarez Torres lamented on the beach as, with a slight freshening of the breeze and with booms winged out to port and starboard, the Angelique passed out of range of their rifles.

‘Almost would I give three bells to the cathedral,’ Mariano Vercara e Hijos proclaimed, ‘to have them within a hundred yards of this rifle. And if I had will of all Gringos they would depart so fast that the devil in hell would be compelled to study English.’

Alvarez Torres beat the saddle pommel with his hand in sheer impotence of rage and disappointment.

‘The Queen of my Dreams!’ he almost wept. ‘She is gone and away, of! with the two Morgans. I saw her climb up the side of the schooner. And there is the New York Regan. Once out of Chiriqui Lagoon, the schooner may sail directly to New York. And the Francis pig will not have been delayed a month, and the Señor Regan will remit no money.’

‘They will not get out of Chiriqui Lagoon,’ the Jefe said solemnly. ‘I am no animal without reason. I am a man. I know they will not get out. Have I not sworn eternal vengeance? The sun is setting, and the promise is for a night of little wind. The sky tells it to one with half an eye. Behold those trailing wisps of clouds. What wind may be, and little enough of that, will come from the north-east. It will be a head beat to the Chorrera Passage. They will not attempt it. That nigger captain knows the lagoon like a book. He will try to make the long tack and go out past Bocas del Toro, or through the Cartago Passage. Even so, we will outwit him. I have brains, reason. Reason. Listen. It is a long ride. We will make it straight down the coast to Las Palmas. Captain Rosaro is there with the Dolores-’

‘The second-hand old tugboat? that cannot get out of her own way?’ Torres queried.

‘But this night of calm and morrow of calm she will capture the Angelique,’ the Jefe replied. ‘On, comrades! We will ride! Captain Rosaro is my friend. Any favor is but mine to ask.’

At daylight, the worn-out men, on beaten horses, straggled through the decaying village of Las Palmas and down to the decaying pier, where a very decayed-looking tugboat, sadly in need of paint, welcomed their eyes. Smoke rising from the stack advertised that steam was up, and the Jefe was wearily elated.

‘A happy morning, Señor Capitan Rosaro, and well met,’ he greeted the hard-bitten Spanish skipper, who was reclined on a coil of rope and who sipped black coffee from a mug that rattled against his teeth.

‘It would be a happier morning if the cursed fever had not laid its chill upon me,’ Captain Rosaro grunted sourly, ‘the hand that held the mug, the arm, and all his body shivering so violently as to spill the hot liquid down his chin and into the black-and-gray thatch of hair that covered his half-exposed chest. ‘Take that, you animal of hell!’ he cried, flinging mug and contents at a splinter of a half-breed boy, evidently his servant, who had been unable to repress his glee.

But the sun will rise and the fever will work its will and shortly depart,’ said the Jefe, politely ignoring the display of spleen. ‘And you are finished here, and you are bound for Bocas del Toro, and we shall go with you, all of us, on a rare adventure. We will pick up the schooner Angelique, calm-bound all last night in the lagoon, and I shall make many arrests, and all Panama will so ring with your courage and ability, Capitan, that you will forget that the fever ever whispered in you.’

‘How much?’ Capitan Rosaro demanded bluntly.

Much?’ the Jefe countered in surprise. ‘This is an affair of government, good friend. And it is right on your way to Bocas del Toro. It will not cost you an extra shovelful of coal.’

‘Muchacho! More coffee!’ the tug-skipper roared at the boy.

A pause fell, wherein Torres and the Jefe and all the draggled following yearned for the piping hot coffee brought by the boy. Captain Rosaro played the rim of the mug against his teeth like a rattling of castanets, but managed to sip without spilling and so to burn his mouth.

A vacant-faced Swede, in filthy overalls, with a soiled cap on which appeared ‘Engineer,’ came up from below, lighted a pipe, and seemingly went into a trance as he sat on the tug’s low rail.

‘How much?’ Captain Rosaro repeated.

‘Let us get under way, dear friend,’ said the Jefe. ‘And then, when the fever-shock has departed, we will discuss the matter with reason, being reasonable creatures ourselves and not animals.’

‘How much?’ Captain Rosaro repeated again. ‘I am never an animal. I always am a creature of reason, whether the sun is up or not up, or whether this thrice-accursed fever is upon me. How much?’

‘Well, let us start, and for how much?’ the Jefe conceded wearily.

‘Fifty dollars gold,’ was the prompt answer.

‘You are starting anyway, are you not, Capitan?’ Torres queried softly.

‘Fifty gold, as I have said.’

The Jefe Politico threw up his hands with a hopeless gesture and turned on his heel to depart.

‘Yet you swore eternal vengeance for the crime committed, on your jail,’ Torres reminded him.

‘But not if it costs fifty dollars,’ the Jefe snapped back, out of the corner of his eye watching the shivering captain for some sign of relenting.

‘Fifty gold,’ said the Captain, as he finished draining the mug and with shaking fingers strove to roll a cigarette. He nodded his head in the direction of the Swede, and added, ‘and five gold extra for my engineer. It is our custom.’

Torres stepped closer to the Jefe and whispered:

‘I will pay for the tug myself and charge the Gringo Regan a hundred, and you and I will divide the difference. We lose nothing. We shall make. For this Regan pig instructed me well not to mind expense.’

As the sun slipped brazenly above the eastern horizon, one gendarme went back into Las Palmas with the jaded horses, the rest of the party descended to the deck of the tug, the Swede dived down into the engine-room, and Captain Rosaro, shaking off his chill in the sun’s beneficent rays, ordered the deck-hands to cast off the lines, and put one of them at the wheel in the pilot-house.

And the same day-dawn found the Angelique, after a night of almost perfect calm, off the mainland from which she had failed to get away, although she had made sufficient northing to be midway between San Antonio and the passages of Bocas del Toro and Cartago. These two passages to the open sea still lay twenty-five miles away, and the schooner truly slept on the mirror surface of the placid lagoon. Too stuffy below for sleep in the steaming tropics, the deck was littered with the sleepers. On top the small house of the cabin, in solitary state, lay Leoncia. On the narrow runways of deck on either side lay her brothers and her father. Aft, between the cabin companionway and the wheel, side by side, Francis’ arm across Henry’s shoulder, as if still protecting him, were the two Morgans. On one side the wheel, sitting, with arms on knees and head on arms, the negro-Indian skipper slept, and just as precisely postured, on the other side of the wheel, slept the helmsman, who was none other than Percival, the black Kingston negro. The waist of the schooner was strewn with the bodies of the mixed-breed seamen, while forward, on the tiny forecastlehead, prone, his face buried upon his folded arms, slept the lookout.

Leoncia, in her high place on the cabin-top, awoke first. Propping her head on her hand, the elbow resting on a bit of the poncho on which she lay, she looked down past one side of the hood of the companionway upon the two young men. She yearned over them, who were so alike, and knew love for both of them, remembered the kisses of Henry on her mouth, thrilled till the blush of her own thoughts mantled her cheek at memory of the kisses of Francis, and was puzzled and amazed that she should have it in her to love two men at the one time. As she had already learned of herself, she would follow Henry to the end of the world and Francis even farther. And she could not understand such wantonness of inclination.

Fleeing from her own thoughts, which frightened her, she stretched out her arm and dangled the end of her silken scarf to a tickling of Francis’ nose, who, after restless movements, still in the heaviness of sleep, struck with his hand at what he must have thought to be a mosquito or a fly, and hit Henry on the chest. So it was Henry who was first awakened. He sat up with such abruptness as to awaken Francis.

‘Good morning, merry kinsman,’ Francis greeted. ‘Why such violence?’

‘Morning, morning, and the morning’s morning, comrade,’ Henry muttered. ‘Such was the violence of your sleep that it was you who awakened me with a buffet on my breast. I thought it was the hangman, for this is the morning they planned to kink my neck.’ He yawned, stretched his arms, gazed out over the rail at the sleeping sea, and nudged Francis to observance of the sleeping skipper and helmsman.

They looked so bonny, the pair of Morgans, Leoncia thought; and at the same time wondered why the English word had arisen unsummoned in her mind rather than a Spanish equivalent. Was it because her heart went out so generously to the two Gringos that she must needs think of them in their language instead of her own?

To escape the perplexity of her thoughts, she dangled the scarf again, was discovered, and laughingly confessed that it was she who had caused their violence of waking.

Three hours later, breakfast of coffee and fruit over, she found herself at the wheel taking her first lesson of steering and of the compass under Francis’ tuition. The Angelique, under a crisp little breeze which had hauled around well to northward, was for the moment heeling it through the water at a six – knot clip. Henry, swaying on the weather side of the after-deck and searching the sea through the binoculars, was striving to be all unconcerned at the lesson, although secretly he was mutinous with himself for not having first thought of himself introducing her to the binnacle and the wheel. Yet he resolutely refrained from looking around or from even stealing a corner-of-the-eye glance at the other two.

But Captain Trefethen, with the keen cruelty of Indian curiosity and the impudence of a negro subject of King George, knew no such delicacy. He stared openly and missed nothing of the chemic drawing together of his charterer and the pretty Spanish girl. When they leaned over the wheel to look into the binnacle, they leaned toward each other and Leoncia’s hair touched Francis’ cheek. And the three of them, themselves and the breed skipper, knew the thrill induced by such contact. But the man and woman knew immediately what the breed skipper did not know, and what they knew was embarrassment. Their eyes lifted to each other in a flash of mutual startlement, and drooped away and down guiltily. Francis talked very fast and loud enough for half the schooner to hear, as he explained the lubber’s point of the compass. But Captain Trefethen grinned.