The skipper sighed and surrendered, although he sighed again at Henry’s next act, which was to uncork the bottles and begin emptying the beer out into the scuppers.
“Please, sir,” begged Percival. “If you must empty the beer please empty it into me.”
No further beer was wasted, and the crew swiftly laid the empty bottles beside Henry. At intervals of six feet he fastened the recorked bottles to the half-inch line. Also, he cut off two-fathom lengths of the line and attached them like streamers between the beer bottles. The coffee-pot and two empty coffee tins were likewise added among the bottles. To one end of the main-line he made fast the kerosene can, to the other end the empty beer-case, and looked up to Francis, who replied:
“Oh, I got you five minutes ago. El Tigre must be narrow, or else the tug will go around that stuff.”
“El Tigre is just that narrow,” was the response. “There’s one place where the channel isn’t forty feet between the shoals. If the skipper misses our trap, he’ll go around, aground. Say, they’ll be able to wade ashore from the tug if that happens.—Come on, now, we’ll get the stuff aft and ready to toss out. You take starboard and I’ll take port, and when I give the word you shoot that beer case out to the side as far as you can.”
Though the wind eased down, the Angelique, square before it, managed to make five knots, while the Dolores, doing six, slowly overhauled her. As the rifles began to speak from the Dolores, the skipper, under the direction of Henry and Francis, built up on the schooner’s stern a low barricade of sacks of potatoes and onions, of old sails, and of hawser coils. Crouching low in the shelter of this, the helmsman, managed to steer. Leoncia refused to go below as the firing became more continuous, but compromised by lying down behind the cabin-house. The rest of the sailors sought similar shelter in nooks and corners, while the Solano men, lying aft, returned the fire of the tug.
Henry and Francis, in their chosen positions and waiting until the narrowness of El Tigre was reached, took a hand in the free and easy battle.
“My congratulations, sir,” Captain Trefethen said to Francis, the Indian of him compelling him to raise his head to peer across the rail, the negro of him flattening his body down until almost it seemed to bore into the deck. “That was Captain Rosaro himself that was steering, and the way he jumped and grabbed his hand would lead one to conclude that you had very adequately put a bullet through it. That Captain Rosaro is a very hot-tempered hombre, sir. I can almost hear him blaspheming now.”
“Stand ready for the word, Francis,” Henry said, laying down his rifle and carefully studying the low shores of the islands of El Tigre on either side of them. “We’re almost ready. Take your time when I give the word, and at ‘three’ let her go.”
The tug was two hundred yards away and overtaking fast, when Henry gave the word. He and Francis stood up, and at “three” made their fling. To either side can and beer-case flew, dragging behind them through the air the beaded rope of pots and cans and bottles and rope-streamers.
In their interest, Henry and Francis remained standing in order to watch the maw of their trap as denoted by the spread of miscellaneous objects on the surface of their troubled wake. A fusillade of rifle shots from the tug made them drop back flat to the deck; but, peering over the rail, they saw the tug’s forefoot press the floated rope down and under. A minute later they saw the tug slow down to a stop.
“Some mess wrapped around that propeller,” Francis applauded. “Henry, salute.”
“Now, if the wind holds ...” said Henry modestly.
The Angelique sailed on, leaving the motionless tug to grow smaller in the distance, but not so small that they could not see her drift helplessly onto the shoal, and see men going over the side and wading about.
“We just must sing our little song,” Henry cried jubilantly, starting up the stave of “Back to Back Against the Mainmast.”
“Which is all very nice, sir,” Captain Trefethen interrupted at the conclusion of the first chorus, his eyes glistening and his shoulders still jiggling to the rhythm of the song. “But the wind has ceased, sir. We are becalmed. How are we to get out of Juchitan Inlet without wind? The Dolores is not wrecked. She is merely delayed. Some nigger will go down and clear her propeller, and then she has us right where she wants us.”
“It’s not so far to shore,” Henry adjudged with a measuring eye as he turned to Enrico.
“What kind of a shore have they got ashore here, Senor Solano?” he queried. “Maya Indians and haciendados—which?”
“Haciendados and Mayas, both,” Enrico answered. “But I know the country well. If the schooner is not safe, we should be safe ashore. We can get horses and saddles and beef and corn. The Cordilleras are beyond. What more should we want?”
“But Leoncia?” Francis asked solicitously.
“Was born in the saddle, and in the saddle there are few Americanos she would not weary,” came Enrico’s answer. “It would be well, with your acquiescence, to swing out the long boat in case the Dolores appears upon us.”
CHAPTER VIII
“It’s all right, skipper, it’s all right,” Henry assured the breed captain, who, standing on the beach with them, seemed loath to say farewell and pull back to the Angelique adrift half a mile away in the dead calm which had fallen on Juchitan Inlet.
“It is what we call a diversion,” Francis explained. “That is a nice word—diversion. And it is even nicer when you see it work.”
“But if it don’t work,” Captain Trefethen protested, “then will it spell a confounded word, which I may name as catastrophe.”
“That is what happened to the Dolores when we tangled her propeller,” Henry laughed. “But we do not know the meaning of that word. We use diversion instead. The proof that it will work is that we are leaving Senor Solano’s two sons with you. Alvarado and Martinez know the passages like a book. They will pilot you out with the first favoring breeze. The Jefe is not interested in you. He is after us, and when we take to the hills he’ll be on our trail with every last man of his.”
“Don’t you see!” Francis broke in. “The Angelique is trapped. If we remain on board he will capture us and the Angelique as well. But we make the diversion of taking to the hills. He pursues us. The Angelique goes free. And of course he won’t catch us.”
“But suppose I do lose the schooner!” the swarthy skipper persisted. “If she goes on the rocks I will lose her, and the passages are very perilous.”
“Then you will be paid for her, as I’ve told you before,” Francis said, with a show of rising irritation.
“Also are there my numerous expenses——”
Francis pulled out a pad and pencil, scribbled a note, and passed it over, saying:
“Present that to Senor Melchor Gonzales at Bocas del Toro. It is for a thousand gold. He is the banker; he is my agent, and he will pay it to you.”
Captain Trefethen stared incredulously at the scrawled bit of paper.
“Oh, he’s good for it,” Henry said.
“Yes, sir, I know, sir, that Mr. Francis Morgan is a wealthy gentleman of renown. But how wealthy is he? Is he as wealthy as I modestly am? I own the Angelique, free of all debt. I own two town lots, unimproved, in Colon. And I own four water-front lots in Belen that will make me very wealthy when the Union Fruit Company begins the building of the warehouses——”
“How much, Francis, did your father leave you?” Henry quipped teasingly. “Or, rather, how many?”
Francis shrugged his shoulders as he answered vaguely: “More than I have fingers and toes.”
“Dollars, sir?” queried the captain.
Henry shook his head sharply.
“Thousands, sir?”
Again Henry shook his head.
“Millions, sir?”
“Now you’re talking,” Henry answered. “Mr. Francis Morgan is rich enough to buy almost all of the Republic of Panama, with the Canal cut out of the deal.”
The negro-Indian mariner looked his unbelief to Enrico Solano, who replied:
“He is an honorable gentleman. I know. I have cashed his paper, drawn on Senor Melchor Gonzales at Bocas del Toro, for a thousand pesos. There it is in the bag there.”
He nodded his head up the beach to where Leoncia, in the midst of the dunnage landed with them, was toying with trying to slip cartridges into a Winchester rifle. The bag, which the skipper had long since noted, lay at her feet in the sand.
“I do hate to travel strapped,” Francis explained embarrassedly to the white men of the group. “One never knows when a dollar mayn’t come in handy. I got caught with a broken machine at Smith River Comers, up New York way, one night, with nothing but a check book, and, d’you know, I couldn’t get even a cigarette in the town.”
“I trusted a white gentleman in Barbadoes once, who chartered my boat to go fishing flying fish——” the captain began.
“Well, so long, skipper,” Henry shut him off. “You’d better be getting on board, because we’re going to hike.”
And for Captain Trefethen, staring at the backs of his departing passengers, remained naught but to obey. Helping to shove the boat off, he climbed in, took the steering sweep, and directed his course toward the Angelique. Glancing back from time to time, he saw the party on the beach shoulder the baggage and disappear into the dense green wall of vegetation.
