And through it all, the Wall Street battle went on against the undiscoverable and powerful enemy who had launched what Francis and Bascom could not avoid acknowledging was a catastrophic, war-to-the-death raid on his fortune.
“If only we can avoid throwing Tampico Petroleum into the whirlpool,” Bascom prayed.
“I look to Tampico Petroleum to save me,” Francis replied. “When every security I can lay hand to has been engulfed, then, throwing in Tampico Petroleum will be like the eruption of a new army upon a losing field.”
“And suppose your unknown foe is powerful enough to swallow down that final, splendid asset and clamor for more?” Bascom queried.
Francis shrugged his shoulders.
“Then I shall be broke. But my father went broke half a dozen times before he won out. Also was he born broke. I should worry about a little thing like that.”
For a time, in the Solano hacienda, events had been moving slowly. In fact, following upon the rescue of Leoncia by Henry along his dynamite-sown trail, there had been no events. Not even had Yi Poon appeared with a perfectly fresh and entirely brand new secret to sell. Nothing had happened, save that Leoncia drooped and was apathetic, that neither Enrico nor Henry, her full brother, nor her Solano brothers who were not her brothers at all, could cheer her.
But, while Leoncia drooped, Henry and the tall sons of Enrico worried and perplexed themselves about the treasure in the Valley of the Lost Souls, into which Torres was even then dynamiting his way. One thing they did know, namely, that the Torres’ expedition had sent Augustino and Vicente back to San Antonio to get two more mule-loads of dynamite.
It was Henry, after conferring with Enrico and obtaining his permission, who broached the matter to Leoncia.
“Sweet sister,” had been his way, “we’re going to go up and see what the scoundrel Torres and his gang are doing. We do know, thanks to you, their objective. The dynamite is to blow an entrance into the Valley. We know where the Lady Who Dreams sank her treasure when her house burned. Torres does not know this. The idea is that we can follow them into the Valley, when they have drained the Maya caves, and have as good a chance, if not a better chance than they in getting possession of that marvelous chest of gems. And the very tip of the point is that we’d like to take you along on the expedition. I fancy, if we managed to get the treasure ourselves, that you wouldn’t mind repeating that journey down the subterranean river.”
But Leoncia shook her head wearily.
“No,” she said, after further urging. “I never want to see the Valley of the Lost Souls again, nor ever to hear it mentioned. There is where I lost Francis to that woman.”
“It was all a mistake, darling sister. But who was to know? I did not. You did not. Nor did Francis. He played the man’s part fairly and squarely. Not knowing that you and I were brother and sister, believing that we were truly betrothed——as we were at the time——he refrained from trying to win you from me, and he rendered further temptation impossible and saved the lives of all of us by marrying the Queen.”
“I miss you and Francis singing your everlasting ‘Back to back against the mainmast,’” she murmured sadly and irrelevantly.
Quiet tears welled into her eyes and brimmed over as she turned away, passed down the steps of the veranda, crossed the grounds, and aimlessly descended the hill. For the twentieth time since she had last seen Francis she pursued the same course, covering the same ground from the time she first espied him rowing to the beach from the Angelique, through her dragging him into the jungle to save him from her irate menfolk, to the moment, with drawn revolver, when she had kissed him and urged him into the boat and away. This had been his first visit.
Next, she covered every detail of his second visit from the moment, coming from behind the rock after her swim in the lagoon, she had gazed upon him leaning against the rock as he scribbled his first note to her, through her startled flight into the jungle, the bite on her knee of the labarri (which she had mistaken for a deadly viperine), to her recoiling collision against Francis and her faint on the sand. And, under her parasol, she sat down on the very spot where she had fainted and come to, to find him preparing to suck the poison from the wound which he had already excoriated. As she remembered back, she realized that it had been the pain of the excoriation which brought her to her senses.
Deep she was in the sweet recollections of how she had slapped his cheek even as his lips approached her knee, blushed with her face hidden in her hands, laughed because her foot had been made asleep by his too-efficient tourniquet, turned white with anger when he reminded her that she considered him the murderer of her uncle, and repulsed his offer to untie the tourniquet. So deep was she in such fond recollections of only the other day that yet seemed separated from the present by half a century, such was the wealth of episode, adventure, and tender passages which had intervened, that she did not see the rattletrap rented carriage from San Antonio drive up the beach road. Nor did she see a lady, fashionably clad in advertisement that she was from New York, dismiss the carriage and proceed toward her on foot. This lady, who was none other than the Queen, Francis’ wife, likewise sheltered herself beneath a parasol from the tropic sun.
Standing directly behind Leoncia, she did not realize that she had surprised the girl in a moment of high renunciation. All that she did know was that she saw Leoncia draw from her breast and gaze long at a tiny photograph. Over her shoulder the Queen made it out to be a snapshot of Francis, whereupon her mad jealousy raged anew. A poniard flashed to her hand from its sheath within the bosom of her dress. The quickness of this movement was sufficient to warn Leoncia, who tilted her parasol forward so as to look up at whatever person stood at her back. Too utterly dreary even to feel surprise, she greeted the wife of Francis Morgan as casually as if she had parted from her an hour before. Even the poniard failed to arouse in her curiosity or fear. Perhaps, had she displayed startlement and fear, the Queen might have driven the steel home to her. As it was, she could only cry out.
“You are a vile woman! A vile, vile woman!”
To which Leoncia merely shrugged her shoulders, and said:
“You would better keep your parasol between you and the sun.”
The Queen passed round in front of her, facing her and staring down at her with woman’s wrath compounded of such jealousy as to be speechless.
“Why?” Leoncia was the first to speak, after a long pause. “Why am I a vile woman?”
“Because you are a thief,” the Queen flamed. “Because you are a stealer of men, yourself married. Because you are unfaithful to your husband——in heart, at least, since more than that has so far been impossible.”
“I have no husband,” Leoncia answered quietly.
“Husband to be, then——I thought you were to be married the day after our departure.”
“I have no husband to be,” Leoncia continued with the same quietness.
So swiftly tense did the other woman become that Leoncia idly thought of her as a tigress.
“Henry Morgan!” the Queen cried.
“He is my brother.”
“A word which I have discovered is of wide meaning, Leoncia Solano. In New York there are worshippers at certain altars who call all men in the world ‘brothers,’ all women ‘sisters.’”
“His father was my father,” Leoncia explained with patient explicitness. “His mother was my mother. We are full brother and sister.”
“And Francis?” the other queried, convinced, with sudden access of interest. “Are you, too, his sister?”
Leoncia shook her head.
“Then you do love Francis!” the Queen charged, smarting with disappointment.
“You have him,” said Leoncia.
“No; for you have taken him from me.”
Leoncia slowly and sadly shook her head and sadly gazed out over the heat-shimmering surface of Chiriqui Lagoon.
After a long lapse of silence, she said, wearily, “Believe that. Believe anything.”
“I divined it in you from the first,” the Queen cried. “You have a strange power over men. I am a woman not unbeautiful. Since I have been out in the world I have watched the eyes of men looking at me. I know I am not all undesirable. Even have the wretched males of my Lost Valley with downcast eyes looked love at me. One dared more than look, and he died for me, or because of me, and was flung into the whirl of waters to his fate. And yet you, with this woman’s power of yours, strangely exercise it over my Francis so that in my very arms he thinks of you. I know it. I know that even then he thinks of you!”
