And the Queen, listening and looking upon the intense exaltation of his face, smiled with proud fondness and certitude to herself, for had she not won a husband who remained a lover?
“And did the lady, er——ah——did she reciprocate?” Johnny Pathmore ventured.
The Queen saw Francis nod as he solemnly replied.
“She loves me as I love her——this I know in all absoluteness.” He stood up suddenly. “Wait. I will show her to you.”
And as he started toward the door, the Queen, in roguishness of a very extreme of happiness at her husband’s confession she had overheard, fled trippingly to hide in the wide doorway of a grand room which the maid had informed her was the drawing room, whatever such room might be. Deliciously imagining Francis’ surprise at not finding her in bed, she watched him go up the wide marble staircase. In a few moments he descended. With a slight chill at the heart she observed that he betrayed no perturbation at not having found her. In his hand he carried a scroll or roll of thin, white cardboard. Looking neither to right nor left, he re-entered the library.
Peeping in, she saw him unroll the scroll, present it before Johnny Pathmore’s eyes, and heard him say:
“Judge for yourself. There she is.”
“But why be so funereal about it, old man?” Johnny Pathmore queried, after a prolonged examination of the photograph.
“Because we met too late. I was compelled to marry another. And I left her forever just a few hours before she was to marry another, which marriage had been compelled before either of us ever knew the other existed. And the woman I married, please know, is a good and splendid woman. She will have my devotion forever. Unfortunately, she will never possess my heart.”
In a great instant of revulsion, the entire truth came to the Queen. Clutching at her heart with clasped hands, she nearly fainted of the vertigo that assailed her. Although they still talked inside the library, she heard no further word of their utterance as she strove with slow success to draw herself together. Finally, with indrawn shoulders, a little forlorn sort of a ghost of the resplendent woman and wife she had been but minutes before, she staggered across the hall and slowly, as if in a nightmare wherein speed never resides, dragged herself upstairs. In her room, she lost all control. Francis’ ring was torn from her finger and stamped upon. Her boudoir cap and her turtle-shell hairpins joined the general havoc under her feet. Convulsed, shuddering, muttering to herself in her extremity, she threw herself upon her bed and only managed, in an ecstasy of anguish, to remain perfectly quiet when Francis peeped in on his way to bed.
An hour, that seemed a thousand centuries, she gave him to go to sleep. Then she arose, took in hand the crude jeweled dagger which had been hers in the Valley of the Lost Souls, and softly tiptoed into his room. There on the dresser it was, the large photograph of Leoncia. In thorough indecision, clutching the dagger until the cramp of her palm and fingers hurt her, she debated between her husband and Leoncia. Once, beside his bed, her hand raised to strike, an effusion of tears into her dry eyes obscured her seeing so that her dagger-hand dropped as she sobbed audibly.
Stiffening herself with changed resolve, she crossed over to the dresser. A pad and pencil lying handy, caught her attention. She scribbled two words, tore off the sheet, and placed it upon the face of Leoncia as it lay flat and upturned on the surface of polished wood. Next, with an unerring drive of the dagger, she pinned the note between the pictured semblance of Leoncia’s eyes, so that the point of the blade penetrated the wood and left the haft quivering and upright.
CHAPTER XXV
Meanwhile, after the manner of cross purposes in New York, wherein Regan craftily proceeded with his gigantic raid on all Francis’ holdings while Francis and Bascom vainly strove to find his identity, so in Panama were at work cross purposes which involved Leoncia and the Solanos, Torres and the Jefe, and, not least in importance, one, Yi Poon, the rotund and moon-faced Chinese.
The little old judge, who was the Jefe’s creature, sat asleep in court in San Antonio. He had slept placidly for two hours, occasionally nodding his head and muttering profoundly, although the case was a grave one, involving twenty years in San Juan, where the strongest could not survive ten years. But there was no need for the judge to consider evidence or argument. Before the case was called, decision and sentence were in his mind, having been put there by the Jefe. The prisoner’s lawyer ceased his perfunctory argument, the clerk of the court sneezed, and the judge woke up. He looked about him briskly and said:
“Guilty.”
No one was surprised, not even the prisoner.
“Appear to-morrow morning for sentence.——Next case.”
Having so ordered, the judge prepared to settle down into another nap, when he saw Torres and the Jefe enter the courtroom. A gleam in the Jefe’s eye was his cue, and he abruptly dismissed court for the day.
“I have been to Rodriguez Fernandez,” the Jefe was explaining five minutes later, in the empty courtroom. “He says it was a natural gem, and that much would be lost in the cutting, but that nevertheless he would still give five hundred gold for it.——Show it to the judge, Senor Torres, and the rest of the handful of big ones.”
And Torres began to lie. He had to lie, because he could not confess the shame of having had the gems taken away from him by the Solanos and the Morgans when they threw him out of the hacienda. And so convincingly did he lie that even the Jefe he convinced, while the judge, except in the matter of brands of strong liquor, accepted everything the Jefe wanted him to believe. In brief, shorn of the multitude of details that Torres threw in, his tale was that he was so certain of the jeweler’s under-appraisal that he had despatched the gems by special messenger to his agent in Colon with instructions to forward to New York to Tiffany’s for appraisement that might lead to sale.
As they emerged from the courtroom and descended the several steps that were flanked by single adobe pillars marred by bullet scars from previous revolutions, the Jefe was saying:
“And so, needing the ægis of the law for our adventure after these gems, and, more than that, both of us loving our good friend the judge, we will let him in for a modest share of whatever we shall gain. He shall represent us in San Antonio while we are gone, and, if needs be, furnish us with the law’s protection.”
Now it happened that behind one of the pillars, hat pulled over his face, Yi Poon half-sat, half-reclined. Nor was he there by mere accident. Long ago he had learned that secrets of value, which always connoted the troubles of humans, were markedly prevalent around courtrooms, which were the focal points for the airing of such troubles when they became acute. One could never tell. At any moment a secret might leap at one or brim over to one. Therefore it was like a fisherman casting his line into the sea for Yi Poon to watch the defendant and the plaintiff, the witnesses for and against, and even the court hanger-on or casual-seeming onlooker.
So, on this morning, the one person of promise that Yi Poon had picked out was a ragged old peon who looked as if he had been drinking too much and yet would perish in his condition of reaction if he did not get another drink very immediately. Bleary-eyed he was, and red-lidded, with desperate resolve painted on all his haggard, withered lineaments. When the courtroom had emptied, he had taken up his stand outside on the steps close to a pillar.
And why? Yi Poon had asked himself. Inside remained only the three chief men of San Antonio——the Jefe, Torres, and the judge. What connection between them, or any of them, and the drink-sodden creature that shook as if freezing in the scorching blaze of the direct sun-rays? Yi Poon did not know, but he did know that it was worth while waiting on a chance, no matter how remote, of finding out. So, behind the pillar, where no atom of shade protected him from the cooking sun which he detested, he lolled on the steps with all the impersonation of one placidly infatuated with sun-baths. The old peon tottered a step, swayed as if about to fall, yet managed to deflect Torres from his companions, who paused to wait for him on the pavement a dozen paces on, restless and hot-footed as if they stood on a grid, though deep in earnest conversation. And Yi Poon missed no word nor gesture, nor glint of eye nor shifting face-line, of the dialogue that took place between the grand Torres and the wreck of a peon.
“What now?” Torres demanded harshly.
“Money, a little money, for the love of God, senor, a little money,” the ancient peon whined.
“You have had your money,” Torres snarled. “When I went away I gave you double the amount to last you twice as long. Not for two weeks yet is there a centavo due you.”
“I am in debt,” was the old man’s whimper, the while all the flesh of him quivered and trembled from the nerve-ravishment of the drink so palpably recently consumed.
“On the pulque slate at Peter and Paul’s,” Torres, with a sneer, diagnosed unerringly.
“On the pulque slate at Peter and Paul’s,” was the frank acknowledgment. “And the slate is full. No more pulque can I get credit for. I am wretched and suffer a thousand torments without my pulque.”
“You are a pig creature without reason!”
A strange dignity, as of wisdom beyond wisdom, seemed suddenly to animate the old wreck as he straightened up, for the nonce ceased from trembling, and gravely said:
“I am old. There is no vigor left in the veins or the heart of me. The desires of my youth are gone. Not even may I labor with this broken body of mine, though well I know that labor is an easement and a forgetting. Not even may I labor and forget. Food is a distaste in my mouth and a pain in my belly. Women—they are a pest that it is a vexation to remember ever having desired. Children—I buried my last a dozen years gone. Religion—it frightens me. Death—I sleep with the terror of it. Pulque—ah, dear God! the one tickle and taste of living left to me!
“What if I drink over much? It is because I have much to forget, and have but a little space yet to linger in the sun, ere the Darkness, for my old eyes, blots out the sun forever.”
Impervious to the old man’s philosophy, Torres made an impatient threat of movement that he was going.
“A few pesos, just a handful of pesos,” the old peon pleaded.
“Not a centavo,” Torres said with finality.
“Very well,” said the old man with equal finality.
“What do you mean?” Torres rasped with swift suspicion.
“Have you forgotten?” was the retort, with such emphasis of significance as to make Yi Poon wonder for what reason Torres gave the peon what seemed a pension or an allowance.
“I pay you, according to agreement, to forget,” said Torres.
“I shall never forget that my old eyes saw you stab the Senor Alfaro Solano in the back,” the peon replied.
Although he remained hidden and motionless in his posture of repose behind the pillar, Yi Poon metaphorically sat up. The Solanos were persons of place and wealth. That Torres should have murdered one of them was indeed a secret of price.
“Beast! Pig without reason! Animal of the dirt!” Torres’ hands clenched in his rage. “Because I am kind do you treat me thus! One blabbing of your tongue and I will send you to San Juan. You know what that means. Not only will you sleep with the terror of death, but never for a moment of waking will you be free of the terror of living as you stare upon the buzzards that will surely and shortly pick your bones. And there will be no pulque in San Juan. There is never any pulque in San Juan for the men I send there. So? Eh? I thought so. You will wait two weeks for the proper time when I shall again give you money. If you do not wait, then never, this side of your interment in the bellies of buzzards, will you drink pulque again.”
Torres whirled on his heel and was gone. Yi Poon watched him and his two companions go down the street, then rounded the pillar to find the old peon sunk down in collapse at his disappointment of not getting any pulque, groaning and moaning and making sharp little yelping cries, his body quivering as dying animals quiver in the final throes, his fingers picking at his flesh and garments as if picking off centipedes. Down beside him sat Yi Poon, who began a remarkable performance of his own. Drawing gold coins and silver ones from his pockets he began to count over his money with chink and clink that was mellow and liquid and that to the distraught peon’s ear was as the sound of the rippling and riffling of fountains of pulque.
“We are wise,” Yi Poon told him in grandiloquent Spanish, still clinking the money, while the peon whined and yammered for the few centavos necessary for one drink of pulque. “We are wise, you and I, old man, and we will sit here and tell each other what we know about men and women, and life and love, and anger and sudden death, the rage red in the heart and the steel bitter cold in the back; and if you tell me what pleases me, then shall you drink pulque till your ears run out with it, and your eyes are drowned in it. You like that pulque, eh? You like one drink now, now, soon, very quick?”
The night, while the Jefe Politico and Torres organized their expedition under cover of the dark, was destined to be a momentous one in the Solano hacienda. Things began to happen early. Dinner over, drinking their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, the family, of which Henry was accounted one by virtue of his brotherhood to Leoncia, sat on the wide front veranda. Through the moonlight, up the steps, they saw a strange figure approach.
“It is like a ghost,” said Alvarado Solano.
