“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.
“A fat ghost,” Martinez, his twin brother, amended.
“A Chink ghost you couldn’t poke your finger through,” Ricardo laughed.
“The very Chink who saved Leoncia and me from marrying,” said Henry Morgan, with recognition.
“The seller of secrets,” Leoncia gurgled. “And if he hasn’t brought a new secret, I shall be disappointed.”
“What do you want, Chinaman?” Alesandro, the eldest of the Solano brothers, demanded sharply.
“Nice new secret, very nice new secret maybe you buy,” Yi Poon murmured proudly.
“Your secrets are too expensive, Chinaman,” said Enrico discouragingly.
“This nice new secret very expensive,” Yi Poon assured him complacently.
“Go away,” old Enrico ordered. “I shall live a long time, yet to the day of my death I care to hear no more secrets.”
But Yi Poon was suavely certain of himself.
“One time you have very fine brother,” he said. “One time your very fine brother, the Senor Alfaro Solano, die with knife in his back. Very well. Some secret, eh?”
But Enrico was on his feet quivering.
“You know?” he almost screamed his eager interrogation.
“How much?” said Yi Poon.
“All I possess!” Enrico cried, ere turning to Alesandro to add: “You deal with him, son. Pay him well if he can prove by witness of the eye.”
“You bet,” quoth Yi Poon. “I got witness. He got good eye-sight. He see man stick knife in the Senor Alfaro’s back in the dark. His name ...”
“Yes, yes,” Enrico breathed his suspense.
“One thousand dollars his name,” said Yi Poon, hesitating to make up his mind to what kind of dollars he could dare to claim. “One thousand dollars gold,” he concluded.
Enrico forgot that he had deputed the transaction to his eldest son.
“Where is your witness?” he shouted.
And Yi Poon, calling softly down the steps into the shrubbery, evoked the pulque-ravaged peon, a real-looking ghost who slowly advanced and tottered up the steps.
At the same time, on the edge of town, twenty mounted men, among whom were the gendarmes Rafael, Ignacio, Augustino, and Vicente, herded a pack train of more than twenty mules and waited the command of the Jefe to depart on they knew not what mysterious adventure into the Cordilleras. What they did know was that, herded carefully apart from all other animals, was a strapping big mule loaded with two hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite. Also, they knew that the delay was due to the Senor Torres, who had ridden away along the beach with the dreaded Caroo murderer, José Mancheno, who, only by the grace of God and of the Jefe Politico, had been kept for years from expiating on the scaffold his various offenses against life and law.
And, while Torres waited on the beach and held the Caroo’s horse and an extra horse, the Caroo ascended on foot the winding road that led to the hacienda of the Solanos. Little did Torres guess that twenty feet away, in the jungle that encroached on the beach, lay a placid-sleeping, pulque-drunken, old peon, with, crouching beside him, a very alert and very sober Chinese with a recently acquired thousand dollars stowed under his belt. Yi Poon had had barely time to drag the peon into hiding when Torres rode along in the sand and stopped almost beside him.
Up at the hacienda, all members of the household were going to bed. Leoncia, just starting to let down her hair, stopped when she heard the rattle of tiny pebbles against her windows. Warning her in low whispers to make no noise, José Mancheno handed her a crumpled note which Torres had written, saying mysteriously:
“From a strange Chinaman who waits not a hundred feet away on the edge of the shrubbery.”
And Leoncia read, in execrable Spanish:
“First time, I tell you secret about Henry Morgan. This time I have secret about Francis. You come along and talk with me now.”
Leoncia’s heart leaped at mention of Francis, and as she slipped on a mantle and accompanied the Caroo it never entered her head to doubt that Yi Poon was waiting for her.
And Yi Poon, down on the beach and spying upon Torres, had no doubts when he saw the Caroo murderer appear with the Solano senorita, bound and gagged, slung across his shoulder like a sack of meal. Nor did Yi Poon have any doubts about his next action, when he saw Leoncia tied into the saddle of the spare horse and taken away down the beach at a gallop, with Torres and the Caroo riding on either side of her. Leaving the pulque-sodden peon to sleep, the fat Chinaman took the road up the hill at so stiff a pace that he arrived breathless at the hacienda. Not content with knocking at the door, he beat upon it with his fists and feet and prayed to his Chinese gods that no peevish Solano should take a shot at him before he could explain the urgency of his errand.
“O go to hell,” Alesandro said, when he had opened the door and flashed a light on the face of the importunate caller.
