The shop of Rodriguez Fernandez was small and dirty, and contained scarcely more than a small and dirty showcase that rested upon an equally small and dirty counter. The place was grimy with the undusted and unswept filth of a generation. Lizards and cockroaches crawled along the walls. Spiders webbed in every corner, and Torres saw, crossing the ceiling above, what made him step hastily to the side. It was a seven-inch centipede which he did not care to have fall casually upon his head or down his back between shirt and skin. And, when he appeared crawling out like a huge spider himself from some inner den of an unventilated cubicle, Fernandez looked like an Elizabethan stage-representation of Shylock——withal he was a dirtier Shylock than even the Elizabethan stage could have stomached.
The jeweler fawned to Torres and in a cracked falsetto humbled himself even beneath the dirt of his shop. Torres pulled from his pocket a haphazard dozen or more of the gems filched from the Queen’s chest, selected the smallest, and, without a word, while at the same time returning the rest to his pocket, passed it over to the jeweler.
“I am a poor man,” he cackled, the while Torres could not fail to see how keenly he scrutinised the gem.
He dropped it on the top of the show case as of little worth, and looked inquiringly at his customer. But Torres waited in a silence which he knew would compel the garrulity of covetous age to utterance.
“Do I understand that the honorable Senor Torres seeks advice about the quality of the stone?” the old jeweler finally quavered.
Torres did no more than nod curtly.
“It is a natural gem. It is small. It, as you can see for yourself, is not perfect. And it is clear that much of it will be lost in the cutting.”
“How much is it worth?” Torres demanded with impatient bluntness.
“I am a poor man,” Fernandez reiterated.
“I have not asked you to buy it, old fool. But now that you bring the matter up, how much will you give for it?”
“As I was saying, craving your patience, honorable senor, as I was saying, I am a very poor man. There are days when I cannot spend ten centavos for a morsel of spoiled fish. There are days when I cannot afford a sip of the cheap red wine I learned was tonic to my system when I was a lad, far from Barcelona, serving my apprenticeship in Italy. I am so very poor that I do not buy costly pretties——”
“Not to sell again at a profit?” Torres cut in.
“If I am sure of my profit,” the old man cackled. “Yes, then will I buy; but, being poor, I cannot pay more than little.” He picked up the gem and studied it long and carefully. “I would give,” he began hesitatingly, “I would give——but, please, honorable senor, know that I am a very poor man. This day only a spoonful of onion soup, with my morning coffee and a mouthful of crust, passed my lips——”
“In God’s name, old fool, what will you give?” Torres thundered.
“Five hundred dollars—but I doubt the profit that will remain to me.”
“Gold?”
“Mex.,” came the reply, which cut the offer in half and which Torres knew was a lie. “Of course, Mex., only Mex., all our transactions are in Mex.”
Despite his elation at so large a price for so small a gem, Torres play-acted impatience as he reached to take back the gem. But the old man jerked his hand away, loath to let go of the bargain it contained.
“We are old friends,” he cackled shrilly. “I first saw you, when, a boy, you came to San Antonio from Boca del Toros. And, as between old friends, we will say the sum is gold.”
And Torres caught a sure but vague glimpse of the enormousness, as well as genuineness, of the Queen’s treasure which at some remote time the Lost Souls had ravished from its hiding place in the Maya Mountain.
“Very good,” said Torres, with a quick, cavalier action recovering the stone. “It belongs to a friend of mine. He wanted to borrow money from me on it. I can now lend him up to five hundred gold on it, thanks to your information. And I shall be grateful to buy for you, the next time we meet in the pulqueria, a drink—yes, as many drinks as you can care to carry—of the thin, red, tonic wine.”
And as Torres passed out of the shop, not in any way attempting to hide the scorn and contempt he felt for the fool he had made of the jeweler, he knew elation in that Fernandez, the Spanish fox, must have cut his estimate of the gem’s value fully in half when he uttered it.
In the meanwhile, descending the Gualaca River by canoe, Leoncia, the Queen, and the two Morgans, had made better time than Torres to the coast. But ere their arrival and briefly pending it, a matter of moment that was not appreciated at the time, had occurred at the Solano hacienda. Climbing the winding pathway to the hacienda, accompanied by a decrepit old crone whose black shawl over head and shoulders could not quite hide the lean and withered face of blasted volcanic fire, came as strange a caller as the hacienda had ever received.
He was a Chinaman, middle-aged and fat, whose moon-face beamed the beneficent good nature that seems usual with fat persons. By name, Yi Poon, meaning “the Cream of the Custard Apple,” his manners were as softly and richly oily as his name. To the old crone, who tottered beside him and was half-supported by him, he was the quintessence of gentleness and consideration. When she faltered from sheer physical weakness and would have fallen, he paused and gave her chance to gain strength and breath. Thrice, at such times, on the climb to the hacienda, he fed her a spoonful of French brandy from a screw-cap pocket flask.
Seating the old woman in a selected, shady corner of the piazza, Yi Poon boldly knocked for admittance at the front door. To him, and in his business, back-stairs was the accustomed way; but his business and his wit had taught him the times when front entrances were imperative.
The Indian maid who answered his knock, took his message into the living room where sat the disconsolate Enrico Solano among his sons—disconsolate at the report Ricardo had brought in of the loss of Leoncia in the Maya Mountain. The Indian maid returned to the door. The Senor Solano was indisposed and would see nobody, was her report, humbly delivered, even though the recipient was a Chinese.
“Huh!” observed Yi Poon, with braggart confidence for the purpose of awing the maid to carrying a second message. “I am no coolie. I am smart Chinaman. I go to school plenty much. I speak Spanish. I speak English. I write Spanish. I write English. See—I write now in Spanish for the Senor Solano. You cannot write, so you cannot read what I write. I write that I am Yi Poon. I belong Colon. I come this place to see Senor Solano. Big business. Much important. Very secret. I write all this here on paper which you cannot read.”
But he did not say that he had further written:
“The Senorita Solano. I have great secret.”
It was Alesandro, the eldest of the tall sons of Solano, who evidently had received the note, for he came bounding to the door, far outstripping the returning maid.
“Tell me your business!” he almost shouted at the fat Chinese. “What is it? Quick!”
“Very good business,” was the reply, Yi Poon noting the other’s excitement with satisfaction. “I make much money. I buy—what you call—secrets. I sell secrets. Very nice business.”
“What do you know about the Senorita Solano?” Alesandro shouted, gripping him by the shoulder.
“Everything. Very important information——”
But Alesandro could no longer control himself. He almost hurled the Chinaman into the house, and, not relaxing his grip, rushed him on into the living room and up to Enrico.
“He has news of Leoncia!” Alesandro shouted.
“Where is she?” Enrico and his sons shouted in chorus.
Hah!—was Yi Poon’s thought. Such excitement, although it augured well for his business, was rather exciting for him as well.
Mistaking his busy thinking for fright, Enrico stilled his sons back with an upraised hand, and addressed the visitor quietly.
“Where is she?” Enrico asked.
Hah!—thought Yi Poon. The senorita was lost. That was a new secret. It might be worth something some day, or any day. A nice girl, of high family and wealth such as the Solanos, lost in a Latin-American country, was information well worth possessing. Some day she might be married—there was that gossip he had heard in Colon—and some later day she might have trouble with her husband or her husband have trouble with her——at which time, she or her husband, it mattered not which, might be eager to pay high for the secret.
“This Senorita Leoncia,” he said, finally, with sleek suavity. “She is not your girl. She has other papa and mama.”
But Enrico’s present grief at her loss was too great to permit startlement at this explicit statement of an old secret.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Though it is not known outside my family, I adopted her when she was a baby. It is strange that you should know this. But I am not interested in having you tell me what I have long since known. What I want to know now is: where is she now?”
Yi Poon gravely and sympathetically shook his head.
“That is different secret,” he explained. “Maybe I find that secret. Then I sell it to you. But I have old secret. You do not know the name of the Senorita Leoncia’s papa and mama. I know.”
And old Enrico Solano could not hide his interest at the temptation of such information.
“Speak,” he commanded. “Name the names, and prove them, and I shall reward.”
“No,” Yi Poon shook his head. “Very poor business. I no do business that way. You pay me I tell you. My secrets good secrets. I prove my secrets. You give me five hundred pesos and big expenses from Colon to San Antonio and back to Colon and I tell you name of papa and mama.”
Enrico Solano bowed acquiescence, and was just in the act of ordering Alesandro to go and fetch the money, when the quiet, spirit-subdued Indian maid created a diversion. Running into the room and up to Enrico as they had never seen her run before, she wrung her hands and wept so incoherently that they knew her paroxysm was of joy, not of sadness.
