CHAPTER IV
WHEN Jerome returned to his seat, the serious look in Webster's hitherto laughing eyes challenged his immediate attention. “Now what's gone and broken loose?” he demanded.
“Neddy,” said John Stuart Webster gently, “do you remember my crossing my fingers and saying, 'King's X' when you came at me with that proposition of yours?”
“Yes. But I noticed you uncrossed them mighty quick when I told you the details of the job. You'll never be offered another like it.”
“I know, Neddy, I know. It just breaks my heart to have to decline it, but the fact of the matter is, I think you'd better give that job to your brother after all. At any rate, I'm not going to take it.”
“Why?” the amazed Jerome demanded. “Johnny, you're crazy in the head. Of course you'll take it.”
For answer Webster handed his friend the letter he had just received.
“Read that, old horse, and see if you can't work up a circulation,” he suggested.
Jerome adjusted his spectacles and read:
Calle de Concordia 19, Buenaventura,
Sobrante, C. A.
Dear John:
I would address you as “dear friend John,” did I but possess sufficient courage. In my heart of hearts you are still that, but after three years of silence, due to my stupidity and hardness of heart, it is, perhaps, better to make haste slowly.
To begin, I should like to be forgiven, on the broad general grounds that I am most almighty sorry for what I went and done! Am I forgiven? I seem to see your friendly old face and hear you answer “Aye,” and with this load off my chest at last I believe I feel better already.
I did not know until very recently what had become of you, and that that wretched Cripple Creek business had been cleared up at last. I met a steam-shovel man a month or two ago on the Canal. He used to be a machine-man in the Portland mine, and he told me the whole story.
Jack, you poor, deluded old piece of white meat, do you think for a moment that I held against you your testimony for the operators in Cripple Creek? You will never know how badly it broke me up when that Canal digger sprung his story of how you went the limit for my measly reputation after I had quit the company in disgrace. Still, it was not that which hurt me particularly. I thought you believed the charges and that you testified in a firm belief that I was the guilty man, as all of the circumstantial evidence seemed to indicate. I thought this for three long, meagre years, old friend, and I'm sorry. After that, I suppose there isn't any need for me to say more, except that you are an old fool for not saying you were going to spend your money and your time and reputation trying to put my halo back on straight! I doubt if I was worth it, and you knew that; but let it pass, for we have other fish to fry.
The nubbin of the matter is this: There is only one good gold mine left in this weary world—and I have it. It's the sweetest wildcat lever struck, and we stand the finest show in the world of starving to death if we tackle it without sufficient capital to go through. (You will notice that I am already—and unconsciously—employing the plural pronoun. How rapidly the old habits return with the old friendships rehabilitated!) It will take at least thirty thousand dollars, and we ought to have double that to play safe. I do not know whether you have, or can raise, sixty cents, but at any rate I am going to put the buck up to you and you can take a look.
Here are the specifications. Read them carefully and then see if there is anybody in the U. S. A. whom you can interest to the tune mentioned above. We could probably get by with thirty thousand, but I would not jeopardize anybody's money by tackling it with less.
Jack, I have a mining concession. It is low-grade—a free-milling gold vein—twelve feet of ore between good solid walls on a contact between Andesite and Silurian limestone. The ore is oxidized, and we can save ninety per cent, of the values on amalgamating plates without concentrating or cyaniding machinery. I have had my own portable assay outfit on the ground for a month, and you can take my opinion for what it is worth when I assure you that this concession is a winner, providing the money is forthcoming with which to handle it.
This is a pretty fair country, Jack—if you survive long enough to get used to it. At first you think it's Paradise; then you grow to hate it and know it for hell with the lid off; and finally all your early love for it returns and you become what I am now—a tropical tramp! There is only one social stratum lower than mine, and that's the tropical beachcomber. I am not that—yet; and will not be if my landlady will continue to listen to my blandishments. She is a sweet soul, with a divine disposition, and I am duly grateful.
I would tell you all about the geography, topography, flora and fauna of Sobrante, but you can ascertain that in detail by consulting any standard encyclopedia. Governmentally the country is similar to its sister republics. The poor we have always with us; also a first-class, colorado-maduro despot in the political saddle, and it's a cold day indeed when two patriots, two viva's and a couple of old Long Tom Springfield rifles cannot upset the Sobrante apple cart. We have the usual Governmental extravagance in the matter of statues to countless departed “liberators” in all the public squares, and money is no object. It is depreciated shin-plasters, and I had to use a discarded sugar-barrel to hold mine when I arrived and changed four hundred pesos oro into the national currency. If a waiter brings you a jolt of hooch, you're stingy if you tip him less than a Sobrante dollar.
We have a Malicon along the bay shore and back again, with a municipal bandstand in the middle thereof, upon which the fine city band of Buenaventura plays nightly those languid Spanish melodies that must have descended to us from the Inquisition. If you can spare the cash, send me a bale of the latest New York rags and a banjo, and I'll start something. I have nothing else to do until I hear from you, save shake dice at The Frenchman's with the Présidente, who has nothing else to do except lap up highballs and wait for the next drawing of the lottery. I asked him for a job to tide me over temporarily, and he offered me a portfolia! I could have been Minister of Finance!
I declined, from a constitutional inability, inherent in the Irish, to assimilate a joke from a member of an inferior race.
We haven't had a revolution for nearly six months, but we have hopes.
There are some white men here, neither better nor worse. We tolerate each other.
I am addressing you at the Engineers' Club, in the hope that my letter may reach you there, or perhaps the secretary will know your address and forward it to you. If you are foot-loose and still entertain a lingering regard for your old pal, get busy on this mining concession P. D. Q. Time is the essence of the contract, because I am holding on to the thin edge of nothing, and if we have a change of government I may lose even that. I need you, John Stuart Webster, worse than I need salvation. I enclose you a list of equipment required.
If you receive this letter and can do anything for me, please cable. If you cannot, please cable anyway. It is needless for me to state that the terms of division are as you make them, although I think fifty-fifty would place us both on Easy Street for the rest of our days. Do let me hear from you, Jack, if only to tell me the old entente cordiale still exists. I know now that I was considerable of a heedless pup a few years ago and overlooked my hand quite regularly, but now that I have a good thing I do not know of anybody with whom I care to share it except your own genial self. Please let me hear from you.
Affectionately,
Billy.
Jerome finished reading this remarkable communication; then with infinite amusement he regarded John Stuart Webster over the tops of his glasses as one who examines a new and interesting species of bug.
“So Billy loves that dear Sobrante, eh?” he said with abysmal sarcasm. “Jack Webster, listen to a sane man and be guided accordingly. I was in this same little Buenaventura once. I was there for three days, and I wouldn't have been there three minutes if I could have caught a steamer out sooner. Of all the miserable, squalid, worthless, ornery, stinking holes on the face of God's green footstool, Sobrante is the worst—if one may judge it by its capital city. Jack, there is an old bromide that describes aptly the republic of Sobrante, and it's so trite I hesitate to repeat it—but I will, for your benefit. Sobrante is a country where the flowers are without fragrance, the men without honour, and the women without virtue. It is hot and unhealthy, and the mosquitoes wear breechclouts; and when they bite you, you die. You get mail three times a month, and there isn't a white man in the whole Roman-candle republic that a gentleman would associate with.”
“You forget Billy Geary,” Webster reminded him gently.
“He's a boy. What does his judgment amount to? Are you going to chase off to this God-forsaken fever-hole at the behest of a lad scarcely out of his swaddling clothes? Jack Webster, surely you aren't going to throw yourself away—give up the sure thing I offer you—to join Billy Geary in Sobrante and finance a wildcat prospect without a certificate of title attached. Why, Jack, my dear boy, don't you know that if you develop your mine to-morrow and get it paying well, the first 'liberator' may take it away from you or tax you for the entire output?”
“We'll have government protection, Neddy. This will be American capital, and if they get fresh, our Uncle Sam can send a warship, can't he?”
“He can—but he won't. Are you and Billy Geary of sufficient importance at home or abroad to warrant the vast consumption of coal necessary to send a battleship to protect your dubious prospect-hole? Be reasonable. What did you wire that confounded boy?”
“That I was coming.”
“Cable him you've changed, your mind. We'll send him some money to come home, and you can give him a good job under you. I'll O. K. the voucher and charge it to your personal expense account.”
“That's nice of you, old sport, and I thank you kindly. I'll talk to Billy when I arrive in Buenaventura, and if the prospect doesn't look good to me, I'll argue him out of it and we'll come home.”
“But I want you now. I don't want you to go away.”
“You promised me thirty days in which to have a good time——”
“So I did. But is this having a good time? How about that omelette soufflé all blazing with blue fire, and that shower-bath and the opera and mushing through the art centres, and Sousa's band——”
“They have a band down in Buenaventura. Billy says so.”
“It plays 'La Paloma' and 'Sobre las Olas' and 'La Golondrina' and all the rest of them. Jack, you'll go crazy listening to it.”
“Oh, I don't want any omelette soufflé, and I had a bath before I left the hotel. I was just hearing myself talk, Neddy,” the culprit protested weakly. “Let me go. I might come back. But I must go. I want to see Billy.”
“You just said a minute ago you'd turned the forty-year post,” Jerome warned him. “And you're now going to lose a year or two more in which you might better be engaged laying up a foundation of independence for your old age. You will get out of Sobrante with the price of a second-class ticket on a vile fruit boat, and you'll be back here panhandling around for a job at a quarter of what I am offering you. For Heaven's sake, man, don't be a fool.”
“Oh, but I will be a fool,” John Stuart Webster answered; and possibly, by this time, the reader has begun to understand the potency of his middle name—the Scotch are notoriously pig-headed, and Mr. Webster had just enough oatmeal in his blood to have come by that centre-fire name honestly. “And you, you poor old horse, you could not possibly understand why, if you lived to be a million years old.”
He got up from his chair to the full height of his six-feet-one, and stretched one hundred and ninety pounds of bone and muscle.
“And so I shall go to Sobrante and lose all of this all-important money, shall I?” he jeered. “Then, by all the gods of the Open Country, I hope I may! Old man, you have browsed through a heap of literature in your day, but I doubt if it has done you any good. Permit me to map out a course of reading for you. Get a copy of 'Paradise Lost' and another of 'Cyrano de Bergerac.' In the former you will find a line running somewhat thusly: 'What tho' the cause be lost, all is not lost!' And in the immortal work of Monsieur Rostand, let me recommend one little page—about fifteen lines. Read them, old money-grubber, and learn! On second thought, do not read them. Those lines would only be wasted on you, for you have become afflicted with hypertrophy of the acquisitive sense, which thins the blood, dwarfs the understanding, stunts the perception of relative values, and chills the feet. .
“Let me foretell your future for the next twenty years, Neddy. You will spend about forty per cent, of your time in this lounging-room, thirty per cent, of it in piling up a bank-roll, out of which you will glean no particular enjoyment, and the remaining thirty per cent, you will spend in bed. And then some bright morning your heart-beat will slow down almost imperceptibly, and the House Committee will order a wreath of autumn leaves hung just above Number Four domino table, and it will remain there until the next annual house-cleaning, when some swamper 'will say, 'What the devil is this stuff here for?' and forthwith he will tear it down and consign it to the fireplace.”
“Ba-a-li,” growled Jerome.
“The truth hurts, I know,” Webster pursued relentlessly, “but hear me to the bitter end. And then presently shall enter the club no less a personage than young John Stuart Webster, even as he entered it to-day. He will be smelling of country with the hair on, and he will glance toward Table Number Four and murmur sympathetically: 'Poor old Jerome! I knowed him good!' Did I hear you say 'Huh!' just then? I thank thee for teaching me that word. Take careful note and see I use it correctly—'Huh!' Dad burn you, Neddy, I'm not a Methuselah. I want some fun in life. I want to fight and be broke and go hungry and then make money for the love of making it and spending it, and I want to live a long time yet. I have a constitutional weakness for foregathering with real he-men, doing real he-things, and if I'm to be happy, I'll just naturally have to be the he-est of the whole confounded pack! I want to see the mirage across the sagebrush and hear it whisper: 'Hither, John Stuart Webster! Hither, you fool, and I'll hornswaggle you again, as in an elder day I horn,swaggled you before.'”
Jerome shook his white thatch hopelessly.
“I thought you were a great mining engineer, John,” he said sadly, “but you're not. You're a poet. You do not seem to care for money.”
“Well,” Webster retorted humorously, “it isn't exactly what you might term a ruling passion. I like to make it, but there's more fun spending it. I've made a hundred thousand dollars, and now I want to go blow it—and I'm going to. Do not try to argue with me. I'm a lunatic and I will have my way. If I didn't go tearing off to Sobrante and join forces with Billy Geary, there to play the game, red or black, I'd feel as if I had done something low and mean and small. The boy's appealed to me, and I have made my answer. If I come back alive but broke, you know in your heart you'll give me the best job you have.”
“You win,” poor Jerome admitted.
“Hold the job open thirty days. At the end of that period I'll give you a definite answer, Neddy.”
“There is no Balm in Gilead,” Jerome replied sadly. “Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.”
“It's six-thirty,” Webster suggested. “Let's eat. Last call for that omelette soufflé, and we'll go to a show afterward. By the way, Neddy, how do you like this suit? Fellow in Salt Lake built it for me—ninety bucks!”
But Jerome was not interested in clothing and similar foolishness. He only knew that he had lost the services of a mining engineer for whom he had searched the country for a month. He rose, dusting the cigar ashes from his vest, and followed sulkily.
Despite the evidences of “grouch” which Jerome brought to the dinner table with John Stuart Webster, he was not proof against the latter's amazing vitality and boundless good spirits. The sheer weight of the Websterian optimism and power of enjoying simple things swept all of Jerome's annoyance from him as a brisk breeze dissipates the low-lying fog that hides a pleasant valley, and ere the second cocktail had made its appearance, the president of the Colorado Consolidated Mines Company, Limited, was doing his best to help Webster enjoy this one perfect night snatched from the grim processional of sunrise and sunset that had passed since last he had dallied with the fleshpots—that were to pass ere he should dally with them again according to his peculiar nature and inclination.
Lovingly, lingeringly, Mr. Webster picked his way through the hors d'ouvres, declared against the soup as too filling, mixed the salad after a recipe of his own, served it and consumed it prior to the advent of the entrée, which if not the fashion in the West, at present, has not as yet gone entirely out of fashion. He revelled in breast of pheasant, with asparagus tips, and special baked potato; he thrilled with champagne at twelve dollars the quart, and a tender light came into his quizzical glance at sight of a brick of ice cream in four colours; he cheered for the omelette soufflé. In the end he demanded a tiny cheese fit for active service, cracked himself a peck of assorted nuts, and with a pot of black coffee and the best cigars possible of purchase in Denver, he leaned back at his ease and forgot the theatre in the long-denied delight of yarning with his old friend.
At one o'clock next morning they were still seated in the cosy grill, smoking and talking. Jerome looked at his watch.
“Great grief, Johnny!” he declared. “I must be trotting along. Haven't been out this late in years.”
“It's the shank of the evening, Neddy,” Webster pleaded, “and I'm hungry again. We'll have a nice broiled lobster, with drawn butter—eh, Ned? And another quart of that '98?”
“My liver would never stand it. I'd be in bed for a week,” Jerome protested. “See you at the club to-morrow afternoon before you leave, I presume.”
“If I get through with my shopping in time,” Webster answered, and reluctantly abandoning the lobster and accessories, he accompanied Jerome to the door and saw him safely into a taxicab.
“Sure you won't think it over, Jack, and give up this crazy proposition?” he pleaded at parting.
Webster shook his head. “I sniff excitement and adventure and profit in Sobrante, Neddy, and I've just got to go look-see. I'm like an old burro staked out knee-deep in alfalfa just now. I won't take kindly to the pack—-”
“And like an old burro, you won't be happy until you've sneaked through a hole in the fence to get out into a stubble-field and starve.” Jerome swore halfheartedly and promulgated the trite proverb that life is just one blank thing after the other—an inchoate mass of liver and disappointment!
“Do you find it so?” Webster queried sympathetically.
Suspecting that he was being twitted, Jerome looked up sharply, prepared to wither Webster with that glance. But no, the man was absolutely serious; whereupon Jerome realized the futility of further argument and gave John Stuart Webster up for a total loss. Still, he could not help smiling as he reflected how Webster had planned a year of quiet enjoyment and Fate had granted him one brief evening. He marvelled that Webster could be so light-hearted and contented under the circumstances.
Webster read his thoughts. “Good-bye, old man,” he said, and extended his hand. “Don't worry about me. Allah is always kind to fools, my friend; sorrow is never their portion. I've led rather a humdrum life. I've worked hard and never had any fun or excitement to speak of, and in answering Billy's call I have a feeling that I am answering the call of a great adventure.”
He did not know how truly he spoke, of course, but if he had, that knowledge would not have changed his answer.
CHAPTER V
THE morning following his decision to play the rôle of angel to Billy Geary's mining concession in Sobrante, John Stuart Webster, like Mr. Pepys, was up betimes.
Nine o'clock found him in the office of his friend Joe Daingerfield, of the Bingham Engineering Works, where, within the hour, he had in his characteristically decisive fashion purchased the machinery for a ten-stamp mill and an electric light plant capability of generating two hundred and fifty horsepower two electric hoists with cable, half a dozen steel ore buckets, as many more ore-cars with five hundred feet of rail, a blacksmithing outfit, a pump, motors, sheet steel to line the crushing-bins and form shovelling platforms for the ore in the workings, picks, shovels drills, and so forth. It was a nice order and Dangerfield fwas delighted.
“This is going to cost you about half your fortune, Jack,” he informed Webster when the order was finally made up.
Webster grinned. “You don't suppose I'm chump enough to pay for it now, do you, Joe?” he queried.
“You'll pay at least half, my son. We love you, Jack; we honour and respect you; but this stuff is going to Central America, and in the event of your premature demise, we might not get it back. They have wars down there, you know, and when those people are war-mad, they destroy things.”
“I know. But I'm going first to scout the country, Joe, and in the meantime keep all this stuff in your warehouse until I authorize you by cable to ship, when you can draw on me at sight for the entire invoice with bill of lading attached. If, upon investigation, I find that this mine isn't all my partner thinks it is, I'll cable a cancellation, and you can tear that nice fat order up and forget it. I don't intend to have you and that gang of penny-pinching card-room engineers up at the Engineers' Club remind me of the old adage that a fool and his money are soon parted.”
From Daingerfield's office Webster went forth to purchase a steamer-trunk, his railway ticket and sleeping-car reservation—after which he returned to his hotel and set about packing for the journey.
He sighed regretfully as he folded his brand-new raiment, packed it in moth balls in his wardrobe-trunk, and ordered the trunk sent to a storage warehouse.
“Well, I was a giddy old bird of paradise for one night, at least,” he comforted himself, as he dressed instead in a suit of light-weight olive drab goods in which he hoped to enjoy some measure of cool comfort until he should reach Buenaventura and thus become acquainted with the foibles of fashion in that tropical centre.
The remainder of the afternoon he spent among his old friends of the Engineers' Club, who graciously tendered him a dollar table d'hote dinner that evening and saw him off for his train at ten o'clock, with many a gloomy prophecy as to his ultimate destiny—the prevailing impression appearing to be that he would return to them in a neat long box labelled: This Side Up—With Care—Use No Hooks.
Old Neddy Jerome, as sour and cross as a setting hen,' accompanied him in the taxicab to the station, loth to let him escape and pleading to the last, in a forlorn hope that Jack Webster's better nature would triumph over his friendship and boyish yearning for adventure. He clung to Webster's arm as they walked slowly down the track and paused at the steps of the car containing the wanderer's reservation, just as a porter, carrying some hand-baggage, passed them by, followed by a girl in a green tailor-made suit. As she passed, John Stuart Webster looked fairly into her face, started as if bee-stung, and hastily lifted his hat. The girl briefly returned his scrutiny with sudden interest, decided she did not know him, and reproved him with a glance that even passé old Neddy Jerome did not fail to assimilate.
“Wow, wow!” he murmured. “The next time you try that, Johnny Webster, be sure you're right——”
“Good land o' Goshen, Neddy,” Webster replied. “Fry me in bread-crumbs, if that isn't the same girl! Come to think of it, the conductor who gave me her name told me her ticket called for a stop-over in Denver! Let me go, Neddy. Quick! Good-bye, old chap. I'm on my way.”
“Nonsense! The train doesn't pull out for seven minutes yet. Who is she, John, and why does she excite you so?” Jerome recognized in his whimsical friend the symptoms of a most unusual malady—with Webster—and so he held the patient fast by the arm.
“Who is she, you ancient horse-thief? Why, if I have my way—and I'm certainly going to try to have it—she's the future Mrs. W.”
“Alas! Poor Yorick, I knowed him well,” Jerome answered. “Take a tip from the old man, John. I've been through the mill and I know. Never marry a girl that can freeze you with a glance. It isn't safe, and remember, you're not as young as you used to be. By the way, what's the fair charmer's name?”
“I've got it down in my memorandum book, but I can't recall it this minute—Spanish name.”
“John, my dear boy, be careful,” Neddy Jerome counseled. “Stick to your own kind of people——”
“I'll not. That girl is as trim and neat and beautiful as a newly minted guinea. What do I want with a Scotch lassie six feet tall and a believer in hell-fire and infant damnation?”
“Is this—a—er—a nice girl, John?”
“How do I know—I mean, how dare you ask? Of course she's nice. Can't you see she is? And besides, why should you be so fearful——”
“I'll have you understand, young man, that I have considerable interest in the girl you're going to marry. Drat it, boy, if you marry the wrong girl she may interfere with my plans. She may be a spoil-sport and not want to live up at the mine—after you return from this wild-goose chase, dragging your fool tail behind you. By the way, where did you first meet this girl? Who introduced you?”
“I haven't met her, and I've never been introduced,” Webster complained, and poured forth the tale of his adventure on the train from Death Valley. Neddy was very sympathetic.
“Well, no wonder she didn't recognize you when you saluted her to-night,” he agreed. “Thought you were another brute of a man trying to make a mash. By thunder, Jack, I'm afraid you made a mistake when you shed your whiskers and buried your old clothes. You don't look nearly so picturesque and romantic now, and maybe she'll refuse to believe you're the same man!”
“I don't care what she thinks. I found her, I lost her, and I've found her again; and I'm not going to take any further chances. I wired a detective agency to pick her up in Salt Lake and trail her to New Orleans and get me all the dope on her, while I was in temporary retirement with my black eye. Brainless fellows, these amateur detectives. I'll never employ one again. I described her accurately—told them she was beautiful and that she was wearing a green tailor-made suit; and will you believe me, Neddy, they reported to me next day that their operative failed to pick her up at the station? He said three beautiful women got off the train there, and that none of them wore a green dress.”
“Well, it's just barely possible she may have another dress,” Jerome retorted slyly. “Women are funny that way. They change their dresses about as often as they change their minds.”
“Why, that's so,” Webster answered innocently. “I never thought of that.”
The porter, having delivered his charge's baggage in her section, was returning for another tip. Webster reached out and accosted him.
“Henry,” he said, “do you want to earn a dollar?”
“Yes, sah. Yes indeed, sah.'
“Where did you stow that young lady's hand-baggage?”
“Lower Six, Car Nine, sah.”
“I have a weakness for coloured boys who are quick at figures,” Webster declared, and dismissed the porter with the gratuity. He turned to Jerome. “Neddy, I feel that I am answering the call to a great adventure,” he declared solemnly.
“I know it, Jack. Good-bye, son, and God bless you. If your fit of insanity passes within ninety days, cable me; and if you're broke, stick the Colorado Con' for the cable tolls.”
“Good old wagon!” Webster replied affectionately. Then he shook hands and climbed aboard the train. The instant he disappeared in the vestibule, however, Neddy Jerome waddled rapidly down the track to Car Nine, climbed aboard, and made his way to Lower Six. The young lady in the green tailor-made suit was there, looking idly out the window.
“Young lady,” Jerome began, “may I presume to address you for a moment on a matter of very great importance to you? Don't be afraid of me, my dear. I'm old enough to be your father, and besides, I'm one of the nicest old men you ever met.”
She could not forbear a smile. “Very well, sir,” she replied.
Neddy Jerome produced a pencil and card. “Please write your name on this card,” he pleaded, “and I'll telegraph what I want to say to you. There'll be a man coming through this car in a minute, and I don't want him to see me here—besides which, the train leaves in half a minute, and I live in Denver and make it a point to be home and in bed not later than ten each night. Please trust me, young lady.” ^
The young lady did not trust him, however, although she wrote on the card. Jerome thanked her and fled as fast as his fat old legs could carry him. Under the station arc he read the card.
“'Henrietta Wilkins,'” he murmured. “By the gods, one would never suspect a name like that belonged to a face like that. I know that name is going to jar Jack and cause him to seethe with ambition to change it. He'll trim the Henrietta down to plain Retta, and change Wilkins to Webster! By jingo, it would be strange if that madman persuaded her to marry him. I hope he does. If I'm any judge of character, Jack Webster won't be cruel enough to chain that vision to Sobrante; and besides, she's liable to make him decide who's most popular with him—Henrietta or Billy Geary. If she does, I'll play Geary to lose. However, if that confirmed old bachelor wants to chase rainbows, I might as well help him out, since whichever way the cat jumps I can't lose. It's to my interest to have him marry that girl, or any girl, for that matter, because she'll have something to say about the advisability of kicking aside what amounts, approximately, to thirty thousand a year, in order to sink the family bankroll in a wildcat mine in the suburbs of hell. Well! Needs must when the devil drives.” And he entered the station telegraph office and commenced to write.
An hour later Miss Dolores Ruey, alias Henrietta Wilkins, was handed this remarkably verbose and truly candid telegram:
Denver, Colo., Aug. 7, 1913. Miss Henrietta Wilkins,
Lower 6, Car 9,
On board train 24.
Do you recall the bewhiskered, ragged individual you met on the S.P., L.A. & S.L. train in Death Valley ten days ago? He thrashed a man who annoyed you, but owing to a black eye and his generally unpresentable appearance, he remained in his stateroom the remainder of the trip and you did not see him again until to-night. He lifted his hat to you to-night, and you almost killed him with a look. It did not occur to him that you would not recognize him disguised as a gentleman, and he lifted his hat on impulse. Do not hold it against him. The sight of you again set his reason tottering on its throne, and he told me his sad story.
This man, John Stuart Webster, is wealthy, single, forty, fine, and crazy as a March hare. He is in love with you.
You might do worse than fall in love with him. He is the best mining engineer in the world, and he is now aboard the same train with you, en route to New Orleans, thence to take the steamer to Buenaventura, Sobrante, C. A., where he is to meet another lunatic and finance a hole in the ground. He has just refused a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year job from me to answer the call of a mistaken friendship. I do not want him to go to Sobrante. If you marry him, he will not. If you do not marry him, you still might arrange to make him listen to reason. If you can induce him to come to work for me within the next ninety days, whether you marry him or not, I will give you five thousand dollars the day he reports on the job. Please bear in mind that he does not know I am doing this. If he did, he would kill me, but business is business, and this is a plain business proposition. I am putting you wise, so you will know your power and can exercise it if you care to earn the money. If not, please forget about it. At any rate, please do me the favour to communicate with me on the subject, if at all interested.
Edward P. Jerome.
President Colorado Consolidated Mines, Limited.
Care Engineers' Club.
The girl read and reread this telegram several times, and presently a slow little smile commenced to creep around the corners of her adorable mouth, for out of the chaos of emotions induced by Ned Jerome's amazing proposition, the humour of the situation had detached itself to the elimination of everything else.
“I believe that amazing old gentleman is absolutely dependable,” was the decision at which she ultimately arrived, and calling for a telegraph blank, she wired the old schemer:
Five thousand not enough money. Make it ten thousand and I will guarantee to deliver the man within ninety days. I stay on this train to New Orleans.
Henrietta.
That telegram arrived at the Engineers' Club about midnight, and pursuant to instructions, the night barkeeper read it and phoned the contents to Neddy Jerome, who promptly telephoned his reply to the telegraph office, and then sat on the edge of his bed, scratching his toes and meditating.
“That's a remarkable young woman,” he decided, “and business to her finger-tips. Like the majority of her sex, she's out for the dough. Well, I've done my part, and it's now up to Jack Webster to protect himself in the clinches and breakaways.”
About daylight a black hand passed Neddy Jerome's reply through the berth-curtains to Dolores Ruey. She read:
Accept. When you deliver the goods, communicate with me and get your money.
Jerome.
She snuggled back among the pillows and considered the various aspects of this amazing contract which she had undertaken with a perfect stranger. Hour after hour she lay there, thinking over this.
As she passed, John Stuart Webster looked fairly into her face, v started as if bee-stung, and hastily lifted his hat preposterous situation, and the more she weighed it, the more interesting and attractive the proposition appeared. But one consideration troubled her. How would the unknown knight manage an introduction? Or, if he failed to manage it, how was she to overcome that obstacle?
“Oh, dear,” she murmured, “I do hope he's brave.”
She need not have worried. Hours before, the object of her thought had settled all that to his own complete satisfaction, and as a consequence was sleeping peacefully and gaining strength for whatever of fortune, good or ill, the morrow might bring forth.
CHAPTER VI
DAY was dawning in Buenaventura, republic of Sobrante, as invariably it dawns in the tropics—without extended preliminary symptoms. The soft, silvery light of a full moon that had stayed out scandalously late had merged imperceptibly into gray; the gray was swiftly yielding place to a faint crimson that was spreading and deepening upward athwart the east.
In the Calle Nueva a game cock, pride of an adoring family of Sobrante's lower class, crowed defiance to a neighbouring bird. A dog barked. From the patch of vivid green at the head of the Calle San Rosario a troupe of howling monkeys raised a sun-up cheer that marked the finish of a night of roystering; from wattled hut and adobe casa brunette women in red calico wrappers came forth, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled; and presently from a thousand little adobe fireplaces in a thousand backyards thin blue spirals of smoke mounted—incense to the household gods of Sobrante—Tortilla and Frijoles. Brown men, black men, lemon-tinted men, and white men whose fingernails showed blue instead of white at the base, came to the doors of their respective habitations, leaned against them, lighted post-breakfast cigarettes, and waited for somebody to start something.
To these indolent watchers of the dawn was vouchsafed presently the sight of Senora Concepcion Josefina Morelos on her way to early mass at the Catedral de la Vera Cruz. Men called to each other, when she passed, that Senora Morelos shortly would seek, in a Carmelite convent, surcease from the grief caused by the premature demise of her husband, General Pablo Morelos, at the hands of a firing-squad in the cuartel yard, as a warning to others of similar kidney to forbear and cease to tamper with the machinery of politics. And when Senora Morelos had passed, came Alberto Guzman with two smart mules hitched to a dilapidated street-car; came Don Juan Cafetéro, peseta-less, still slightly befuddled from his potations of the night before, and raising the echoes in the calle with a song singularly alien to his surroundings:
Green were the fields where my forefathers dwelt—
O, Erin, mavourneen, slan laght go bragh!
At the theatre we sit patiently waiting for the stage electrician to switch on the footlights and warn us that the drama is about to begin. Let us, in a broader sense, appropriate that cue to mark the beginning of the drama with which this story deals; instead of a stage, however, we have the republic of Sobrante; in lieu of footlights we have the sun popping up out of the Caribbean Sea.
Those actors whose acquaintance we have so briefly made thus far must be presumed to be supers crossing the stage and loitering thereon while the curtain is down. Now, therefore, let us drive them into the wings while the curtain rises on a tropical scene.
In the patio of Mother Jenks's establishment in the Çalle de Concordia, No. 19, the first shafts of morning light were filtering obliquely through the orange trees and creeping in under the deep, Gothic-arched veranda flanking the western side of the patio, to reveal a dusky maiden of more or less polyglot antecedents, asleep upon a bright, parti-coloured blanket spread over a wicker couch.
Presently, through the silent reaches of the Calle de Concordia, the sound of a prodigious knocking and thumping echoed, as of some fretful individual seeking admission at the street door of El Buen Amigo, by which euphonious designation Mother Jenks's caravansary was known to the public of Buenaventura. In the second story, front, a window slid back and a woman's voice, husky with that huskiness that speaks so accusingly of cigarettes and alcohol, demanded:
“Quien es? Who is it? Que quiere usted? Wot do yer want?”
“Ye might dispinse wit' that paraqueet conversation whin addhressin' the likes av me,” a voice replied. “'Tis me—Cafferty. I have a cablegram Leber give me to deliver——”
“Gawd's truth! Would yer wake the 'ole 'ouse with yer'ammering?”
“All right. I'll not say another worrd!”
A minute passed; then the same husky voice, the owner of which had evidently descended from her sleeping chamber above, spoke in a steadily rising crescendo from a room just off the veranda:
“Car-may-lee-ta-a-a!”
We can serve no useful purpose by endeavouring to conceal from the reader, even temporarily, the information that Carmelita was the sleeping naiad on the couch; also that she continued to sleep, for hers was that quality of slumber which is the heritage of dark blood and defies any commotion short of that incident to a three-alarm fire. Three times the husky voice addressed Carmelita with cumulative vehemence; but Carmelita slept on, and presently the husky voice ceased to cry aloud for her. Followed the sound of bare feet thudding across the floor.
Forth from the house came Mother Jenks, a redfaced, coarse-jowled, slightly bearded lady of undoubted years and indiscretion, in curl-papers and nightgown, barefoot and carrying a bucket. One scornful glance at the sleeping Carmelita, and mother Jenks crossed to the fountain plashing in the centre of the patio, filled her bucket, stepped to the veranda and dashed three gallons of tepid water into Carme-lita's face.
That awakened Carmelita—Mother Jenks's raucous “Git up, yer bloody wench! Out, yer 'ussy, an' cook almuerzo. Gawd strike me pink, if I don't give yer the sack for this—an' sleepin' on my best new blenkit!” being in the nature of a totally unnecessary exordium.
Carmelita shrieked and fled, while Mother Jenks scuttled along in pursuit like a belligerent old duck, the while she heaped opprobrium upon Carmelita and all her tribe, the republic of Sobrante, its capital, its government officials, and the cable company: Finally she disappeared into El Buen Amigo with a hearty Cockney oath at her own lack of foresight in ever permitting her sainted 'Enery to set foot on a foreign shore.
Once inside, Mother Jenks proceeded down a tiled hallway to the cantina of her hostelry and opened the street door a few inches. Without the portal stood Don Juan Cafetéro, of whom a word or two before proceeding.
To begin, Don Juan Cafetéro was not his real name, but rather a free Spanish translation of the Gaelic, John Cafferty. As would be indicated by the song he was singing when first we made his acquaintance, coupled with the unstable condition of his legs, Mr. Cafferty was an exile of Erin with a horrible thirst. He had first arrived in Sobrante some five years before, as section-boss in the employ of the little foreign-owned narrow-gauge railway which ran from Buenaventura on the Caribbean coast to San Miguel de Padua, up-country where the nitrate beds were located. Prior to his advent the railroad people had tried many breeds of section-boss without visible results, until a Chicago man, who had come to Sobrante to install an intercommunicating telephone system in the Government buildings, suggested to the superintendent of the road, who was a German, that the men made for bosses come from Erin's isle; wherefore Mr. Cafferty had been imported at a price of five dollars a day gold. Result—a marked improvement in the road-bed and consequently the train-schedules, and the ultimate loss of the Cafferty soul.
Don Juan, with the perversity of the Celt, and contrary to precept and example, forbore to curse Sobrante. On the contrary, he liked Sobrante immediately upon arrival and so stated in public—this unusual state of affairs doubtless being due to the fact that his job furnished much of excitement and interest, for his driving tactics were not calculated to imbue in his dusky section-hands a love for the new section-boss; and from the day he took charge until he lost the job, the life of Don Juan Cafetéro had been equivalent in intrinsic value to two squirts of swamp water—possibly one.
Something in the climate of Sobrante must have appealed to a touch of laissez faire in Don Juan's amiable nature, for in the course of time he had taken unto himself, without bell or book, after the fashion of the proletariat of Sobrante, the daughter of one Estebân Manuel Enrique José Maria Pasqual y Miramontes, an estimable peon who was singularly glad to have his daughter off his hands and no questions asked. Following the fashion of the country, however, Esteban had forthwith moved the remainder of his numerous progeny under the mantle of Don Juan Cafetéro's philanthropy, and resigned a position which for many years he had not enjoyed—to wit: salting and packing green hides at a local abattoir. This foolhardy economic move had so incensed Don Juan that in a fit of pique he spurned his father-in-law (we must call Esteban something and so why split hairs?) under the tails of his camisa, with such vigour as to sever forever the friendly relations hitherto existing between the families. Mrs. Cafferty (again we transgress, but what of it?) subsequently passed away in childbirth, and no sooner had she been decently buried than Don Juan took a week off to drown his sorrows.
In this condition he had encountered Esteban Manuel Enrique José Maria Pasqual y Miramontes and called him out of his name—for which there appears to be little excuse, in view of the many the latter possessed. In the altercation that ensued Esteban, fully convinced that he had received the nub end of the transaction from start to finish, cut Don Juan severely in the region of the umbilicus; Don Juan had thereupon slain Esteban with a .44-calibre revolver, and upon emerging from the railroad hospital a month later had been tried by a Sobrantean magistrate and fined the sum of twenty thousand dollars, legal tender of the Republic of Sobrante. Of course he had paid it off within six months from his wages as section-boss, but the memory of the injustice always rankled in him, and gradually he moved down the scale of society from section-boss to day labourer, day labourer to tropical tramp, and tropical tramp to beach-comber, in which latter state he had now existed for several months.
While waiting to round out the brief period of existence which drink and the devil had left him, this poor human fragment had become a protégé of Ignatz Leber, an Alsatian, manager for a German importing and exporting house, and agent for the cable company. By the grace of the philanthropic Ignatz, Don Juan slept under Leber's warehouse and ate in his kitchen.
To return to Mother Jenks.