CHAPTER XXV
THE TRUMP CARD
It was eight hours later that the Laminian made her way under half-speed into the road stead at Puerto Locombia.
She drifted guardedly in over shoals of translucent verdancy, with her screw churning the lettuce-green waters into coiling and copperas-tinted eddies.
A long iron pier ran out into this green-watered roadstead, its trestles spanned by the single track of a narrow-gauge railway. On either side of the concrete breakwater that lipped the sea-edge of the town itself stretched away two curves of white sand with their intermittently whitening surf. Then came scattering clumps of lonely palms, then a lower mist-hung coast of ooze and mangrove and steaming lagoon.
Behind the concreted crescent of shore-line, to which the roadstead pier seemed like an arrow set in a drawn bow, stood irregular lines of thatched huts, of mud and bamboo wattle, crowding on narrow streets that sloped to the centre and held sidewalks no wider than a wall-top. Still nearer ranged the more substantial part of the town, the bald, sun-scorched buildings of corrugated iron and tin, the one-story, open-front shops, with red tile roofs, the uninviting rectangular bodegas and the austere and gloomy government buildings. Over the latter drooped strange flags of yellow and red and blue.
On the higher ground to the right ran rusty streets lined with pink and yellow-tinted house walls of stucco, with heavy Spanish shutters and terra-cotta roof-tiles. Along the fringe of lower ground to the extreme left stood irregular rows of wattled huts, raised the height of a man from the "sand-jiggers" and the miasmal tundra under them, looking like lines of patient herons as they balanced on their rotting palm-wood stilts.
Beyond the town, leading into the slowly rising ground of the southwest, wound a road of shell and limestone, leaving a crooked scar of white against the blackness of the lowlands through which it crept. Close in by the concrete breakwater lay the ribs and spars of a wrecked schooner, mysteriously adding to the atmosphere of gloom and neglect. On a side-track curving from the pier-end stood a dismantled train of cars, so small that they looked like a child's toys. Near-by lay a derailed locomotive, brown with rust, strangely pathetic in its attitude of resigned helplessness. Thirty paces from this stood the tottering remains of a corrugated-iron warehouse, its fallen roof and twisted wall-plates showing plainly enough that it had been blown up by either Ulloa or the insurgents.
Farther out along the broken pier rolled and creaked a soft-coal-burning tug. About her single deck, under her overlarge and drooping ensign of red and yellow and blue, lounged and waited a number of figures in red-striped uniforms. Obsolete brass cannon shimmered at her bow and stern, and a carbine-rack showed out just aft of her wheel-house.
It was while this strangely accoutred tug cast off and came puffing and wheeling about to meet the newcomer into the roadstead that McKinnon and Alicia Boynton stood at the rail, gazing landward. Nothing seemed left for them now but to watch and wait. Everything that lay in their power had been done; all they could do now was to study the cards as Fate threw them on the board.
"That's one of De Brigard's gunboats!" said the watching and anxious-eyed girl.
"So those are the tools that Ganley works with!" said the operator, looking with open scorn at the strange tug, the strange ensign, the still stranger figures in uniform. He tried to hide his anxiety and depression under a lightness of tone that seemed as incongruous, even to his own ears, as the tricoloured ensign flapping over the soft-coal-burning craft before them.
"Those are the tools that can cut deep, when they have to," was the woman's answer, as she once more looked landward.
"They're burning Parroto!" cried some one from a lower deck, in plaintive wonder. "That's Parroto going up in smoke there!"
McKinnon, under the rocking awning that could not altogether shut out the hot sun of the late afternoon, leaned farther over the rail and peered inland.
Far to the south and west stretched the flat and gloomy swamps, steaming under the sun's rays, mephitic and menacing. Still farther away, tier by tier, rose the hills, with a condor wheeling above them here and there.
They lifted, in gentle waves softened with the green of orange and banana and cocoanut-palm, of bamboo and breadfruit, until they crowded mistily up to the huddled blue line of the mountain-ridges, to the very peaks of the Cordilleras, lonely, forbidding, and seemingly impenetrable.
From one of the nearer tiers of hills black columns of smoke twined and curled and billowed up into the air. It was the town of Parroto, still in flames.
But no sound or sign of movement came from shore. A mysterious and drug-like sleep seemed to envelop both town and swamp and hills. Yet McKinnon, watching with set and thoughtful face, knew that somewhere in the dust-laden streets between the stucco walls señoritas were peering from jalousies, and naked children were playing and lean curs were prowling. In the yellow church facing the Prado priests were moving about. In the shadowy bodegas flies were buzzing and glasses were clinking, and swarthy and undersized patriots were rolling cigarettes and enlarging on the true paths that led to liberty. In each tesselated patio shadowed by rustling palm-fronds, were women and old men, and beside the mud oven of each wattled hut meals were being made ready and eaten. It took him back to the past, painfully, to the past that he would much rather have forgotten.
"Does it look like home?" he asked the girl at his side, a little absently, a little bitterly.
She was silent for another minute or two, as her eyes turned through the broken line of the Cordilleras to where Guariqui lay, to where still waited the life for which she had fought and risked so much.
"It will never seem home to me again," she answered.
"But it was your home once!"
"Yes, I used to think it was almost beautiful. The movement and colour and mystery of it! The fiestas, and the music, the glitter and pomp of its little court life that so satisfied my foolish vanity, the riding and the freedom, the passion and warmth of everything! You may not believe me, or understand me when I say it, but I can remember when it used to make me almost drunk, especially at night!"
He felt vaguely envious of those earlier and happier days ; he felt that he had been cheated out of something. But her eyes, through all their mournfulness, glowed like a tropical sea touched with moonlight, as she smiled up at him; and he forgot the feeling.
"It was beautiful to me—then," she confessed. "But the beauty was there, I think, because I put it there."
To the eyes of the tired and anxious man at her side it seemed anything but beautiful. It seemed a land of unbroken silence, of sullen mystery, of primordial shadow and gloom, from the white lip of the beach that sucked so feverishly at the pale copper-green of the sea-water to the misty line of its farthest mountain-tops. And he wondered if it was to be allowed him ever to reach those mountains, and what would await him there. He wondered, with such odds against him, if the hour for activity would bring with it an honest fighting-chance.
He turned his anxious eyes to the tug swinging authoritatively in under the Laminian's quarter. He knew only too well, from the gasconading attitudes of its uniformed officials, from the sheer effrontery with which they swung in and overhauled the bigger steamship, that he was at last beholding the local instruments of the new "Liberal" dictatorship. And he knew that with their advent the curtain was about to rise on a new act of the tangled drama. He racked his brain to understand what Ganley's move would be. He knew that all day long the gun-runner had kept to his cabin. A steward had reported that his head was bad and causing him much pain. He had eaten nothing; he had kept his berth, cursing the Laminian and the heat of her coffinlike cabins and, above all, her sottish and pigheaded captain.
Yet McKinnon knew it would take more than a sore head to keep Ganley from acting when the moment for action arrived. The one thing that puzzled the operator was what form that first move of Ganley's was to take.
Some hint as to the solution of that problem came even as he stood there at the ship's rail, watching. It came in the form of a shoe, flung from an open port-hole of the Laminian to the deck of the indrawing tug. This shoe—it was a ludicrous, wide-toed, well-worn thing of humble calfskin—was picked up by the epauletted officer of the local comandante, looked at with open disgust, and flung openly overboard. But McKinnon noticed that before this took place, the officer in question had extracted from its wide-toed interior a slip of closely folded paper. He promptly disappeared from sight, in the wheel-house, and when he reappeared, his tug was grating and bumping along the Lamininan's side-plates, heedless of the blasphemous and stentorian imprecations of Captain Yandel, bellowing and gesticulating from his bridge-end.
McKinnon himself neither heard nor noticed any of this. He was too busily engaged in watching the port-hole, from which the shoe had appeared. He saw a boat-hook swung carelessly up to it, a red hand reach out and lift something from the end of it, and the boat-hook continue to scratch along the ship's side-plates as though searching for a hold. Then the tug made fast.
Two minutes later a coffee-coloured official wearing cavalry boots, red-striped, blue denim trousers, a yellow-faced white jacket and a gold-braided cap, came aboard. He carried a sword, held at his side by a red sash, and was followed by an alert-eyed, narrow-shouldered, yellow-faced youth in blue denim striped with red.
The officer with the sword brought his heels together and saluted Captain Yandel. That worthy seaman, descending from his bridge, demanded to know, in English, why he was so damned slow about getting pratique, and what all the damned fuss was about.
Before any reply was proffered to these impatient queries, Ganley himself appeared from below deck. A crooked smile rested on his bruised and swollen face, a smile that seemed more sinister than the light in his baleful and blood-shot little eyes.
"Come in off the deck!" he commanded, with the calmness of unquestioned authority.
That was all that McKinnon heard, for the talk was resumed in the captain's stateroom, with thunderous volleys of broken Spanish on the one side, with calm and dictatorial insolence on the other. It was to this talk that Alicia, as she leaned over the ship's rail, listened so attentively.
"What is it?" asked McKinnon, noticing her wide and terrified eyes.
"We are in quarantine," she answered.
"In quarantine?"
"Yes."
"Do they say why?"
"The comandante has ordered us to be held here. They are sending a detachment of soldiers to watch the ship. We are to be kept here, prisoners."
"But there's no fever!"
"No; of course not! It's the old trick! They daren't outrage our flag openly—we are an American ship! They daren't insult our colours by open capture. But they draw what they call a dead line, and they shoot down everyone who crosses it!"
"So that's how they intend to hold us!"
"Yes—I heard Ganley say, in Spanish, that he'd keep up here until he finished his game. He told Captain Yandel that he was going to tie him up here until his anchor-flukes were barnacled.
"But what's their excuse for this?" he asked, with absent and preoccupied eyes, for his busy brain was already reconnoitring into the menacing future.
"He claims that it's yellow fever—that we've entered the affected zone."
"So that was his trump card, after all!" said the meditative McKinnon.
"It's the card that makes us lose," was the girl's hopeless rejoinder. "We must stay here prisoners, as much prisoners as though we were cooped up in a quartel, for a whole day and a whole night! We are here, worse than helpless, until the Princeton comes!"
She came to a stop, and shuddered a little.
"Oh, believe me," she told him, in her tense and low-toned voice, "believe me, I am not a coward! …… But anything, anything, can happen on this ship to-night!"
The intentness with which he was studying her face brought her wondering eyes up to his.
"I'm afraid you've got to be very brave," he said, as gently as he could.
"Yes ..... I know," she said, a little brokenly.
"But braver in a different way," he amended.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because you and I are going to break this quarantine to-night!"
She looked from him to the smoke-columns that hung over Parroto, and then back at the carbine-rack and the brass guns of the comandante's smoke-belching ship-of-war.
"We can't," she said, with a little gasp of despair. "We would have no chance. There is no place to go to—and they will have orders to shoot. It would be giving them the chance they are waiting for. We can't go!"
"We've got to!" McKinnon said, doggedly.
"But where could we go? Where could we find safety?" she demanded, as her hopeless and unhappy eyes swept the inhospitable country that confronted them. In all that country, she knew, there was not a hamlet or town, not a valley or jungle, that could offer them safety. There was not a square mile of it, outside the beleaguered walls of Guariqui itself, that would offer them harbour.
"We're going to Giuiriqui to-night—you and I!" said McKinnon, meeting her wondering gaze with his clear and steadfast eyes.