# The Margus Cheavey Embezzlement

Extracted from Everybody's Magazine, Nov 1923, pp. 105–140. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
A Novel Complete in This Issue
The
Mangus Cheavey Embezzlement
South of Panama, Where Presidents Preside, and Secret Service Still is Secret—Adventure and Humor a-Plenty
By Reginald Wright Kauffman
Illustrations by Sidney H. Riesenberg
THE President embraced the short, puffy figure of his departing guest.
“My good, good friend,” he cried. “I do not know how I should survive without you!” He added, as if by way of afterthought: “Nor how the Republic can adequately reward you.”
The stout guest freed himself gently. One hand stroked the disarranged bosom of his dress-shirt; the fingers of the other fumbled at his drooping gray mustache.
“I live for those who love me,” he murmured; “I serve the common good.”
His Excellency himself held open the door from the balcony on which they had been drinking their after-dinner coffee. In the room beyond stood a soldier-servant bearing the guest's silk hat. The guest ambled toward him.
“Good night, your Excellency,” he said.
“God be with you,” said the President. “My heart is yours, Don Cipriano.”
He waited until the room was empty. Then he returned to the twilight of the balcony.
“There are days,” he said to someone in the shadow, “when Don Cipriano does not possess my entire confidence.”
He looked down, across the rail, at the Plaza de la Constitución. A military band was playing on the central platform that encircled the fountain. Lights sparkled from the score of cafés, and at the tables on the pavements in front of them citizens and soldiers drank their wine and chatted with the ladies of the capital. A cooling air blew from the harbor, and overhead the stars hung large and low.
His Excellency Don Ricardo Ayalo Ruiz was a dapper man and lithe. His pointed, black beard never hid the vivid red of his full lips; and when he smiled, he displayed rows of little sharp teeth.
He was smiling now, as he lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of its predecessor. He resumed his wicker easy-chair beside the table.
“When the time comes,” he mused, “for Don Cipriano to think he can succeed me, he will hire somebody to put a bullet into my head. I am beginning to believe he thinks that time at hand. Yes, decidedly there are days when our good friend Barboza does not possess my entire confidence.”
A full-foliaged vine draped the farther end of the balcony. There something white and reclining was just visible. It laughed now: a merry, silver, mocking laugh.
“Nonsense!” it said. “Often I have heard you declare that Don Cipriano was the very model chief of a Secret Service.”
It was a woman's voice, clear as a bell, and as cold. It was the voice of a woman professionally trained to music.
“Not a Secret Service,” the President suavely corrected: “an Intelligence Department. The useful intelligence department looks outward only; when it begins to develop an eye in the back of its head, its virtue decreases.”
“My dear Ricardo, are you dreaming again of going a-traveling?”
“The yacht is in the harbor. Would you come with me?”
“This is a very amusing city.”
“Would you come with me to cities more amusing?”
“No.”
“To New York?”
“Thrice three-times no!”
“First to New York—on business, for a day. Then to the Riviera—on pleasure, and forever?”
The notes of a Viennese waltz drifted up from the Plaza. A half-minute passed. Then the voice of the shadows spoke:
“Why at all New York?”
“There are certain bank-deposits there.”
“The American authorities would seize you.”
“They could not: I should be a political refugee.”
“Not unless first there was a revolution.”
His Excellency snapped the fingers of both hands. “A revolution! We may trust Don Cipriano to see to that. No mere coup d'état: our loyal Jouanne and his Guards will fight for us. Ah, it will be a genuine affair: blood will flow out there in this pretty Plaza de la Constitución. And while it flows, we shall be en route.”
“When?”
Don Ruiz made a gesture that meant “What matter?” “Quién sabe?” he replied. “Tomorrow—next week—when Don Cipriano thinks he can depose me. Besides, I cannot wait forever: that conscientious Trujillo is becoming too inquisitive—as if prying into the business transactions of a President were among the duties of a Minister of Finance! It certainly must not be more than a month hence.”
The lady laughed at the picture thus presented. However, in this selfish world, the most disinterested must sometimes think of themselves.
“And you want me with you—truly?” Her voice cooed provocatively.
“Can a man,” asked His Excellency, “live without his heart?”
“I have heard those words before, dear Ricardo. You want me to accompany you: very good. But in what capacity?”
The President coughed. The cough ended in words: “As my wife.”
“Then,” she said slowly, “I must have the title before we embark.”
Ever so slightly he fidgeted. “A public wedding might precipitate matters. The imbecile populace does not love you.”
“As secret a wedding as you please, Ricardo; but a true wedding—and a preliminary marriage-settlement.”
The fidget became a squirm. “If that can be arranged——”
“I shall attend to it—if I agree to go. But will you, at the last, be willing to leave your country to Don Cipriano?”
“When I have squeezed the orange, I do not care what pig devours the rind. Now, my dearest soul: your answer.”
The reclining figure hummed the air of the waltz.
“Well?” demanded the President.
“The Riviera is expensive,” sighed the lady; “and forever is such a long, long time, my friend. No, I do not think that I am enamored of your journey.”
The President bit his lip, cogitated—resolved.
“Have I ever,” he whispered, “shown you the executive wine-cellars? The wine-cellars of the Presidential Palace of Catamarca abut the vaults of the National Treasury,”
WHILE President Ruiz and his valued Secret Service Chief were dining in Catamarca, two other presidents, and the son of one of them, were dining together in New York. These other executives were T. Stanwood Atwater—among other things head of the Travelers' and Tailors' Trust Co.—and J. L. Kent, originator and guiding genius of the Independence Surety, Bonding and Indemnification Corporation, which specializes in the insurance of financial concerns against robbery and embezzlement—and in ungratefully catching and imprisoning the robbers and embezzlers to whose operations it owes its existence.
Butler covered the space between them in three leaps.... Crooked fingers tore his shirt from neck to waist-line. The woman screamed.
The scene was the dining-room of Atwater's house in East Seventy-third Street; the time was six seconds after the butler had withdrawn, leaving President Atwater free to produce the last bottle but one of his late father's Napoleon brandy. The banker looked like Chauncey M. Depew ten years ago; John Kent like Will H. Hays ten years hence, and the six-foot-two gridiron figure of “Buster” Kent looked as if it were bored to death and wanted to run away.
“What do you think of that?” inquired Atwater as he held a glass to his pink nose.
“I think,” said Kent, “that if you'd let us bond your butler, you wouldn't have to hide it.” He always twitted the other's old-fashioned prejudice against any form of insurance.
Atwater grunted. “If Thomas drank my brandy, you couldn't replace it.”
“If he knew he'd go to jail, Thomas wouldn't drink it.”
“He's been with me ever since I built this house.”
Buster Kent raised his blue eyes from a contemplation of the liquor. “Hadn't Mangus Cheavey,” he asked, “been with you ever since you founded the Travelers' and Tailors'?”
When they were together, the seniors paid little attention to this young fellow just graduated from his university; it was the daily complaint of the elder Kent that Buster, for his part, never paid much attention to business. The interruption consequently startled the host and delighted the father.
“The boy's got you there, Stan!” Kent chuckled.
Atwater didn't see the joke. Cheavey was the sole casualty of his later career, and a tremendous casualty he had proved. A decade of faithful service and regular advancement had been followed by a long period of adroit misappropriation, wholly unsuspected; then, when matters could not be bettered, this under-officer of the trust-company perpetrated an impartially sweeping coup—and disappeared as completely as the rabbit that a conjurer returns to the hat from which he has produced it. Like so many of the really large embezzlements, Cheavey's had been sedulously kept from the newspapers, but scores of thief-catchers had secretly scoured the world for him for five years in vain.
“Young man,” said Stanwood Atwater, “if we'd had a policy in your father's concern, that concern'd simply have been out the face-value of it.”
“But you people,” countered the elder Kent, “would have been that much to the good.”
“We might have got something back on the bonds; but there's the fundamental error of your business, John: you confuse price with value. You could have paid us the price of the jewels—just as we did to their owners—but that wouldn't have satisfied the owners, the renters of those safe-deposit boxes. Nothing would satisfy them but the jewels themselves.”
“What jewels?” demanded Buster.
“Mrs. Van Astren's rubies—she offered $25,000 reward for 'em; Jimmie Sutphen's wife's whole outfit; the Charlie Wests—oh, a dozen or more!” His face grew darker. “And Sarah's pearls.”...
“YOUR own wife?” asked John Kent.
“Certainly. Couldn't I trust my own vaults with my own wife's valuables? Good Heavens, John, you don't mean you've believed all this gossip about her! You haven't thought she was going to end by getting a divorce at her age and weight? She lives in Paris because she's sore at me for losing that pearl necklace I gave her on our twenty-fifth anniversary—and I can hardly blame her: there wasn't its equal in America.”
“Weren't they ever”—this was Buster again—“ever offered on the market?”
“If they had been, don't you think we'd have got 'em? Every pawnbroker and jeweler in the world has a description.”
“Couldn't they cut the rubies and such things?”
“Cheavey wouldn't. He got away with enough cash and convertible paper—which he converted, all right—to be rich for life.”
“I think I heard something about his having married a movie-star. Perhaps he gave them to her, Mr. Atwater.”
The banker laughed mirthlessly. “Go ask her! He left the poor woman high and dry. She's pathetically loyal—never'd tell the detectives anything—but it's plain as the nose on your face she hasn't anything to tell. Of course we've had her watched: she'd too old for leads now, and she's hanging around studios and picking up odd jobs.”
John Kent swung back to the main theme: “We'd have caught the man for you.”
“We've had three of the best detective-agencies working independently for five years, and nothing doing. Could your company beat that?”
“Mr. Atwater,” Buster suggested, “I'll make you a sporting proposition: if I deliver Mangus Cheavey at the Travelers' and Tailors' within the next six months—him and the jewels—you'll take out one of our minimum policies; if I don't, we'll give you a ten-year maximum policy free.”
“What's that?” cried the young man's father. “We'll not——”
“Then I will. I've got a little money of my own, you know, Mr. Atwater: my Aunt Florence left it to me.”
John Kent would have protested again, but the banker forestalled him: here was a chance to end his old argument with his old friend.
“I'll go you, Buster,” he promised. “I won't take anything if you lose, but if you deliver the goods, I'll make it a perpetual maximum.”...
THE lady who had dined with the President of Catamarca drew a Catamarcan mantilla so far over her head as to leave observable only a beautifully formed nose and the dark contours of perfect cheeks and, gesturing denial to the waiting servant in the room beyond the balcony, made an unattended progress downstairs.
Under the full light from the great chandelier of the main hallway, stood a slim gentleman of middle-age, all fierce mustaches and bristling hair and the uniform of a colonel in the national army. He bowed by a creaking hinge at the middle.
“My dear Don Ignacio Jouanne!” breathed the lady. She was a tall lady, of movements quick and graceful. She extended a slim white hand, exquisitely cared for. “How fares the pride of your life?” she inquired.
“The Presidential Guards,” said Jouanne, “are what they have always been: as splendid troops as any in the world.”
“They are what you have made them, Colonel. Every loyal citizen knows how much the Republic owes you. So does the President.”
If Jouanne noted what might have been intentional distinction between the loyal citizens and President Ruiz, he offered no correction.
A slight turn of the mantilla hinted that the lady was looking for eavesdroppers: “Let us hope that the Guard need not soon be tested.”
“Let us hope so.” The Colonel's words had as much fervor as those of most military men expressing a desire for peace. “Otherwise”—his nostrils dilated, his eyes shone—“His Excellency will see what absolute devotion and perfect discipline can accomplish.”
There was no doubting his sincerity, and its effect was to produce in his companion an intensity of loyal interest that must have effaced any doubts he had of her. Was he indeed sure of his troops? To the last man? Absolutely? Ah, that was capital! It gave one the sense of security—especially a lonely woman who might not be loved by a misguided populace. She bade him a gracious good night.
She went out by a side-door, where her motor-car was waiting.
“Home,” she distinctly directed the Indian chauffeur.
The car swung toward the Plaza, but turned abruptly into a quiet street. The lady whispered a fresh order through the speaking-tube, and progress was diverted until half the city had been traversed. Then came a command to stop.
Wrapping her mantilla still more carefully about her head and face, the lady looked from the window. The poorly lighted street was deserted. She stepped out.
“Wait here,” she said.
She threaded two by-streets, doubled, and then pressed a hidden button in a long, high wall. A gate opened.
“Tell Don Cipriano that I would see him on a matter of state.”
She was left waiting in the garden for scarcely five minutes. Then she was taken to a handsomely furnished study in the house, where the puffy Chief of Secret Service expressed his delighted surprise at her call.
The lady cut him short: “There is too much light.”
From an electric switch he partially darkened the room.
“The doors,” said the lady.
Don Cipriano opened one and then the other: nobody there.
“And now?” he asked.
“The stability of the present government is entirely in your hands, Don Cipriano.”
He extended those plump members. “There are the police.”
“Poof!”
“And the army.”
“Poof!”
“I'm sorry you think so much depends on me.”
"Are you?”
“It is a great responsibility.”
She spoke slowly: “And a great—opportunity. Suppose you were tempted?”
“Impossible!”
“By ambition.”
“Not at all.”
“By—romance.”
Don Cipriano bent forward: “I don't understand.”
She laughed her low, musical laughter. “For the Chief of a Bureau of Intelligence, you are singularly unintelligent. In a word, the office of His Excellency—even his life—is between your fingers. If you wished, you need open your fingers only so little——”
“You don't mean that the President mistrusts me!”
“Do you dare to tell me you are loyal to him?”
“As loyal as I have often tried to tell you I want to be to you! My life is pledged to him—more: my honor.”
The lady laughed again. “The President,” she said, “has just done me the distinction of asking me to marry him.”
Don Cipriano's fat body heaved. A loud gasp hissed through his drooping mustache. “He—he——”
“Exactly.”
“The people; they won't——”
“Do not hesitate: you would say they won't allow it. But they will—if I undertake to make them. There is no hurry! I can wait a year. Colonel Jouanne's troops are a mere handful, but they are something to begin with.”
Don Cipriano tried to read her face, but the room was too dark. “That would mean revolution.”
“So will the verification of Señor Trujillo's perfectly patent suspicions. You know well that the Minister of Finance is looking for certain irregularities on the part of the President. Revolution! Is this the first time that you, on your own part, have ever thought of revolution?”
“The President would run away; he'd not fight.”
“He would not run without me—and I would not run away.”
“You?” The man seized her hands. “You know I love you! And now this damned cur has asked you to marry him! What was your answer?”
“I haven't given any—yet. It depends on what you are now going to tell me: the truth about your plans for the future of Catamarca....”
PERSONS connected with the high art of the moving picture are not accustomed to early hours. Buster Kent was readily enough admitted to a tiny Bronx apartment. It was furnished with some scanty remnants salvaged from the days of Mangus Cheavey's respectability, and many pathetically cheap and gaudy items to be classed only as makeshifts.
“I haven't the least idea how to do the sort of thing I want to do,” began Buster, blushing to the roots of his blond hair and looking uncommonly handsome about it, “and so I might as well begin by telling you what you'll be clever enough to find out anyhow.”
There was a certain shrewdness in his crimson-kimonoed hostess, but of the beauty that had once been her greatest asset only a pathetic trace remained. Her cheeks were flabby; the attempts to conceal the crow's-feet and the wrinkles about her drooping mouth had failed. A row of faint lines ran upward, along her upper lip; her hair was very scanty and very yellow. She made a measured gesture of welcome.
“Are you from the Red Star Studios?”
“Lord, no—I've nothing to do with the movies!”
Her eyes, their pupils permanently dilated .by long exposure to the spot-lights, betrayed real disappointment; her other features, being under better command, registered the screen's conventional equivalent of polite inquiry.
“Then to what do I owe this visit?”
She spoke the jargon of her trade. Her lips moved as if to the clicking of a camera.
“I want you to help me find your husband.”
Mazie Cheavey—Minnie Milson of the movies—had been used to that, too. Her reaction to his bold request was precisely that raising of the eyebrows which a picture director would have demanded.
“A detective?”
It gave Buster the cue he wanted: “I'm not after the rewards—if you fix it so's I can find him, they're yours.”
Instantly all artificiality dropped from her. Her body shook with vindictiveness, her voice with greed.
“If you're' telling the truth, that's the first sensible word I've heard about this business. Detectives and gum-shoe men and more detectives, all asking a wife to blow on her husband—and they to pocket every cent there was in it!”
Buster had come prepared to expatiate upon her husband's base ill-treatment of her; it was amazingly unnecessary: during five years, the facts had spoken only too plainly. Just because she was bitter against Cheavey's failure to share the fruits of his dishonesty, she would not betray him unrewarded. Buster's predecessors had accepted as genuine the pose of the neglected yet loyal wife, into which she had naturally fallen from long training in hack-scenarios. Nobody had thought of the simple truth, and she, overtricked by her own cunning, had assumed that the detectives were as mercenary as she.
“This will show you who I am,” said Buster.
There were a few personal papers in the pockets of his dinner-jacket. She looked at them.
“Then draw up a contract,” she said.
“A contract?”
“Sure. You're hiring me, aren't you?”
He'd had two years in law-school. He wrote rapidly and signed a memorandum, promising her the rewards if she gave him information leading to Cheavey's arrest.
“Now we got to have a witness.”
“But nobody must know!”
“Just to your signature. I'll get the janitor.”
She did. When the sleepy man had gone, she turned again to Buster: “My husband's in Catamarca!”
Buster had heard of the turbulent little republic, but he had never been within a thousand miles of it. For the first time in his brief business experience, he was glad that, in college, he had specialized in Spanish.
“He's communicated with you?”
“Never a line—the stingy thing!”
“Then how do you know?”
“I know he started for there.”
“Did he tell you he was going to Catamarca?”
“Do you think if I'd known he was going anywhere, I'd 'a' let him leave me high and dry?” She moved to a little bookcase. One shelf was lined with a row of red guide books. “For a good year before he made his get-away, he was studying these.” Her voice grew still harder. “Said he was going to retire—going to take me on a trip—and I was dumb enough to fall for it!”
Buster hurried to her side, but the gilt titles of the guide-books covered all the world.
“How do you know he picked Catamarca?”
“There's only one that's been marked.” She drew out the volume. “This one.”
The book opened at the small section devoted to the suspected country. A glance at all the other pages showed them virgin, but these had been heavily marked and then treated to a severe interview with an eraser.
“It was the one thing he forgot,” said Mazie. “It must 'a' dropped out of one of his suit-cases. I found it under the bed next morning.”
Buster scarcely heard; he was looking at the margin of the page opposite that on which the account of Catamarca began: there, made by the left hand which had held the book while the right wielded the eraser, was the imprint of an ink-stained thumb.
“I'll take this with me,” he said.
NEXT morning, at Stanwood Atwater's office, he secured all the data in that gentleman's possession, but he did not mention one word of his interview with Mazie.
“Still think you'll make me an insurer?” mocked Atwater.
“Certain,” said Buster, with a good deal more assurance than he really felt.
“You've taken on a pretty big proposition. If I thought you had a chance in the world of making me change the business practises of a lifetime, do you suppose I'd ever have taken your bet?”
“If I thought I hadn't several chances, do you suppose I'd ever have offered it, Mr. Atwater?”
The banker studied him with a new attention. “Look here, this is a serious matter: what do you know?”
“I know you've made a bet with me.”
“Oh, I'll stick to my agreement! But you're too young to let run loose with any really valuable information. What do you propose to do?”
“To find Mangus Cheavey, of course. Good morning, Mr. Atwater.”
The door had barely closed on Buster before the president of the Travelers' and Tailors' was in telephonic communication with one of the agencies that had been hunting Mangus Cheavey—or been paid to do so—for five long years.
“... Yes, J. L. Kent's son.... Seems to know something, and so young he's sure to spoil it.... Personal reasons, too: there's a sporting proposition involved.... I don't give a damn what it costs!... Sure, wherever he goes—and get there first!...”
IT WAS a dull voyage for Buster. There was the usual run of uninteresting passengers: only one that he cared to talk to and another who insisted on talking to him. The former was a tiny, bald-headed man, with a white beard streaked with yellow, and birdlike eyes that peered up at Buster through thick spectacles. Cyrus G. McReynolds, his readily produced card called him. Buster planned to keep the card:
CYRUS G. McREYNOLDS
R. P. D., DR. PHILOL., M. AR.
WAMEGO POTTAWATOMIE CO. KANSAS
WUFFORD UNIVERSITY
“Doctor of Political Science,” he explained, “Doctor of Philology and Master of Architecture.”
He had two subjects of conversation: the ruins and language of the aborigines of Catamarca, which he was going south to study, and the superiority of Pottawatomie County to all the rest of the world.
Buster was willing to take doses of the second subject in order to learn something about the first. His difficulty was the continuous interruption of Thomas N. Bridgeman. Mr. Bridgeman, as he took pains to explain to everybody, was a native of Cundy's Harbor, Maine, and an oil-operator in Oklahoma, bound for Catamarca in quest of petroleum concessions. He talked a great deal about himself, yet found time to ask Buster a good many questions.
“My theory,” Dr. McReynolds would be saying in a quiet corner of the smoking-room, after Buster had successfully led him through miles of Pottawatomie County, “my theory of the ancient civilization of Catamarca——”
Just then, Mr. Bridgeman would move over from his table, bearing his own highball with him and bringing no invitation to treat.
“Kent?” he would begin, as if repeating a sound Buster had just emitted. “No relative, now, of J. L. of the Independence Surety?”
Mr. Bridgeman was a large person with a large manner. He had sandy curls on his forehead and bristling sandy hair on his upper lip. He wore a brown coat edged with braid, because he was an oil-magnate; and white trousers, because he had been born at the seashore. His note was loud good-fellowship.
Buster admitted he was his father's son.
“Why, I know him!” said Mr. Bridgeman. “All our people are bonded by the Keystone Indemnity; but your concern's a pacemaker. Going to establish a branch in Catamarca?”
Buster was not on his way to the little republic without a reasonable excuse, quite apart from his real purpose: he prided himself on a new idea in insurance. He said that he intended to survey the field.
“Better lay off it!” laughed Bridgeman. “I understand there ain't a good risk in the whole country. How long you going to stop there?”
Dr. McReynolds had faded away. “It all depends,” said Buster.
“Well, maybe I can be of some use to you. Never been there before, but I've got some letters to the President. One from his New York banker, who's mine, too: Atwater—Travelers' and Tailors' Trust—know him?”
“Why, yes!” said Buster. “In fact, it was—I mean, I had dinner with him only a few days before I sailed.”
“Fine man—solid concern,” boomed Bridgeman. “Understand they've never had but one defalcation: feller named Cheavey. Queer story. Ever hear it?”
“I've heard rumors.”
Bridgeman told it. “And it's mighty funny,” he concluded, “that they've never been able to locate the man. Now, your company must have had a lot of experience with that sort of thing. Where'd you suppose he'd go?”
“Give it up,” said Buster. “Catamarca, as like as not. I think I heard the professor calling me.”
“Catamarca? That's a good one! The place is too little to hide in—except the jungle: they say it's thicker'n friendship. But any sensible man'd rather be in jail than there.”
It was all very dull indeed until they were about to leave Port of Spain....
THE setting sun threw a rosy glow over the clustering housetops; the sky shaded from pink to crimson, moment by moment, and the waters limpidly darkened. Then, preceded by three black porters, staggering under unbelievable heaps of baggage, a woman came aboard.
She might have been any age from twenty-five to thirty-six. She had the grace of a child, the figure of a houri, the air of an empress. Her feet were incredibly small; her hands, fluttering infinite gestures of command to the porters, seemed possessed of separate individualities, each subservient to the regal head with its piled masses of blue-black hair. Her features were as delicately wrought as those of a statue, the nose sensitive, the red lips parting in a bewildering smile, and on the cheeks a faint flush spread over a smoothness colored like the keys of a harpsichord. But it was her eyes that invited attention; under curling lashes, they shone like woodland pools, brownly clear, yet absolutely unrevealing.
“Who is she?”
The question ran through the boat. The Captain was new to this route: he didn't know. The purser said only that the name given him was that of the Señorita Savedra y Loreto and that she was booked for Catamarca.
Buster's glance, on her arrival, wandered—he could never tell why—to a deck-hand, a swarthy, sinister man, who had been moving about busily enough a moment earlier. This man had come to a sudden standstill. His gaze, like that of most of those around him, was all for the new passenger—but it was unmistakably a gaze of hate.
Mr. Bridgeman, of course, was the first to talk to the Señorita Savedra y Loreto. No passenger-steamer ever sailed without an acquaintance-maker: to this rôle the red-curled oilman had appointed himself when the Almirante Villar passed the Goddess of Liberty, and he now courageously pursued it in the face of all the hauteur of the newcomer from Port of Spain.
He heeded no rebuff; he couldn't distinguish cold from warmth. The only way in which the señorita could have escaped him was to cloister herself in her cabin—and she liked fresh air.
“See that fellow with the two-colored beard, Miss Loreto? The one that looks like a cross between a nanny-goat and a hoot-owl?” He indicated Dr. McReynolds. “Well, you ought to meet him: one of the biggest professors we've got in America, and he's going to your country to study the Indians. Your country is Catamarca, isn't it?”
She did not answer; though her eyes granted one glance to the doctor, one glance was enough. Bridgeman, however, was not in the least disconcerted.
“Then that young athlete that's just come up to him. Say, there's a typical American of our best sort!”
Her gaze, taking in Buster, betrayed a hint of interest.
“That's J. L. Kent's son—son of the Independence Surety Corporation's president—worth half a million in his own right and certain to come in for all his father's ten million. And do you know what he's doing? Learning the bonding business from the bottom up.”
Buster's was a handsome figure. Perhaps for that reason, the señorita now gave him a second glance.
“And what,” she inquired, in a deliciously drawling and charmingly accented English, “is a bonding business?”
Bridgeman was delighted to explain. The señorita smiled into his reddish eyes: her smile was ravishing.
“How funny for him to come so far!”
Bridgeman had a theory about Buster's voyage, and he hinted it. During the next day or two, he more than hinted it. The fact soon developed that Mr. Bridgeman was overplaying his rôle of acquaintance-maker. An impressionable heart beat beneath his braided coat: the oil-operator was falling in love. He did not introduce Buster.
Nothing happened—until the incredible event occurred. The Almirante Villar's chief officers were on the bridge, taking the sun. The deck-stewards were below, preparing to reappear as dining-room stewards at the last luncheon. Nearly all the passengers had sought the smoking-room for a* cocktail; Buster was conscientiously doing a two-mile walk and formulating his revolutionary ideas about insurance. The señorita stepped from her cabin amidships—a swarthy form leaped from behind a ventilator-shaft and laid hold of her: he was the sinister person whom Buster had seen ominously scrutinizing her at the moment of her arrival—and his free arm ended in a gleam of steel.
Buster covered the space between them in three leaps. A jerk of his left hand wrenched the woman free. His right hand gripped the wrist on the tension of which possession of the knife depended. Crooked fingers tore his silk shirt and the running shirt beneath it from neck to waist-line; yellow fangs sank into a bared shoulder.
The woman screamed. The deck filled with people.
But the brief fight was over. A stunning half-hook to the jaw had made a passive captive, and Buster, his shirt flapping about his waist, was bowing to the señorita as gravely as if he were dressed for a reception.
“I hope you weren't scared,” he said in his best Castilian.
The eyes that resembled woodland pools were shot through with tropical sunlight.
“Señor, I was too much engaged in watching. Never have I seen a back with such magnificent muscles!”
She was smiling openly. Was she laughing secretly? Suddenly aware of his condition, Buster gathered the tattered folds of his shirt about him and started through the crowd of passengers among whom only the flushed Bridgeman was not congratulatory. But her cool hand on his bare arm stayed him.
“Señor Buster Kent,” she said, “do not misunderstand. I owe you my life. I shall repay——”
A shout from the crow's-nest interrupted her.
“Land ho!” it cried. “On the starboard bow!”
Out of the sapphire sea there had risen, at the horizon's edge, the pearly mountains of Catamarca....
“RIO DE ADRAR?” repeated the President. He looked keenly, across his desk, at the slim, beak-nosed official confronting him. “Still, I suppose, anthropological researches?”
The Minister of Finance assented. He was a clean-shaven man, with high cheekbones and a hard eye. “This work, so important to the history of our country——”
“Is safe in your competent hands,” Don Ricardo assured him. “For me, the dull, but pressing, matters of daily routine. How long do you expect to be gone?”
“One week—ten days: who knows?”
“Well, the Republic owes you a vacation.”
Not five minutes later, the; President was closeted, in the same room, with another caller.
“My honored sir”—Don Ricardo stroked his pointed beard; then tapped Buster's letter of introduction—“of course I know him well—Mr. Quimby. He is the head of the great New York banking-institution condescending to handle that very little account which I manage to maintain in the United States.”
What Buster started to reply was: “You mean one of your little accounts, don't you?” Quimby had told him that Atwater's bank had another. However, the words did not escape him. As he glanced about the huge, ornate apartment, he remarked only: “Yes, so Mr. Quimby told my father.”
Don Ricardo elevated his heavy brows. “What did he tell the Señor Kent?”
“Oh, just that you kept an account with them.”
“Ah,” said His Excellency. He rang from his desk for cooling drinks and offered Buster the freedom of Catamarca. “We are gay, if diminutive. Whatever you desire, it is yours.”
Buster leaned back in his comfortable chair, and regarded the affable figure of his host, who sat with piles of papers neatly before him and a telephone at his elbow.
“Thanks,” said he, “but I'm here on business.”
“You were not thinking of extending the activities of your corporation to Catamarca?”
“Well, yes—I was rather.”
“Alas, dear sir” Don Ricardo wagged his regretful head—“we bond no one here: we trust to honor.”
“Don't you find it expensive?”
“Everyone must pay for his luxuries: about that you should talk to the excellent chief of our Intelligence Department, Señor Cipriano Barboza.”
“Thanks, again. Will you give me a card to him?”
It was provided immediately. Across the large piece of pasteboard was written:
“Anything that my friend Señor Kent may wish.”
“Now, another thing, Mr. President, if you don't mind: it struck me on the trip down, I might interest you. Personally, I mean.”
“Surely,” smiled Don Ricardo, “you would not bond a President?”
“Oh, no! That might be a good line, but it would interest the people of a country, not their Chief Executive. Here's my idea: We've been branching out into all sorts of insurance, and it struck me all of a sudden: why not insure Central and South American presidents against revolutions?” Buster shone with honest pride. “Brand-new idea, isn't it?”
His Excellency seemed mildly amused—surprised, but interested, too. “Just between us, Señor Kent—is it what you would call a good risk? Your ship brought down for me an airplane in which I intend to learn to fly and then, if it goes, I may persuade our Minister of War to order some for our army: you might do better to insure me against a fall from that airplane.”
“We'll do that, too. But you're not looking for any domestic trouble, are you?”
Did His Excellency flush? “I am a bachelor.”
“I don't mean that,” Buster hurried to explain. “Domestic, not foreign, you know: a revolution.”
“Ah,” the President as quickly replied, “certainly not, but I should like very well some such clever insurance, if a reasonable rate——”
“We'd manage to fix that to suit both parties.”
“But, Señor Kent, I am nothing if not honest: it is only fair to remind you that the Catamarcans are a temperamental folk.”
“How long is it since the last one?”
“The last revolution? Oh, a long time: five years.”
“Successful?”
The President bowed. “I led it.”
“That might just possibly affect the rate.”
“If one can seize a government, one should be able to hold it.”
“Not necessarily. I'll bet your predecessor did—and wasn't.”
“There is now,” said His Excellency, “no other Ricardo Ayalo Ruiz in Catamarca.”
“Still, it's a rich soil, isn't it? Things grow overnight—even presidents.”
Their positions, though Buster did not seem to notice it, had been reversed: His Excellency was now more eager to buy than Buster to sell. Ricardo talked of a $500,000 policy, Buster of a $100,000. The semi-annual premium? There again there was an amicable difference of opinion, Buster pulling out series of rate-sheets and consulting them with much figuring.
“You see,” said Buster, “the way I figure it, this proposition ought to be just the other way 'round from regular life-insurance. There, the longer you're on earth, the higher your premium; here, the longer you've been in office, the less you give up: the more, the steeper; but the less, the higher. Get me?”
“But in any event,” smiled Don Ricardo, “you must lay the matter before the Señor Kent senior.”
Buster brought his chair-legs to the floor and struck the presidential desk with an open palm.
“Your Excellency,” he said, “I'll tell you what I'm prepared to do, and it's my last word. I'll take you on personally. I'll go as high as $150,000 and as low as your own rate, and if my father's company doesn't O. K. the deal by 6 p.m. today. I'll underwrite you myself: provided”—he bent across the desk; their eyes met again—“provided you tell me the whereabouts of Mangus Cheavey.”
The bell of the President's telephone gave forth a silver tinkle....
DON CIPRIANO grumblingly took the bit of paper that, when handed to his employe, had been wrapped around a substantial coin, and read:
“From the Pinkerburns Detective Agency New York. After American boy just landed from the Almirante Villar. Five minutes only. Will share reward.”
“Show him up,” said Don Cipriano.
A moment later, in the light that poured over his shoulders upon the visitor, he was appraising the robust figure of Mr. Thomas N. Bridgeman.
The oil-operator from Oklahoma placed a square-topped brown derby on a chair and advanced with extended hand.
“Glad to know you, Chief,” said he. “Speak English?”
“I do,” the Señor Barboza assured him, in that language. “But I am very busy.”
“Don't say a word, Chief. I know how it is. Here's my credentials.”
Don Cipriano scrutinized them. “And now?”
“Well, it's like this, Chief: our people have been after a fellow named Cheavey for five years, and we've just got a tip he's in your country.”
“That is not a Catamarcan name. Is he perhaps Brazilian?”
“No, straight American. Embezzler. Travelers' and Tailors' Trust.”
“And he arrived today on the Almirante Villar?”
“You got me wrong. He's been here some time, but we just got that tip——”
“What was your—your 'tip'?”
Mr. Bridgeman grinned and looked wise: “Aw now. Chief: is that fair—between members of our profession?”
On a convenient ash-tray, Don Cipriano tapped the stump of his cigar. “Then what do you want?”
“This,” said Bridgeman, “and you can count yourself in for twenty-five per cent of the reward if we pull it off. A young fellow named Kent has got some inside information, same as we have, and he's come down here to bag this guy Cheavey.” He told all he knew about Buster, and a bit more. “Unless I'm careful, the kid'll gum the cards for me.”
“Or,” suggested Señor Barboza, “secure an arrest before you do?”
“Oh, well, it might be that, too—by dumb luck. Anyway, I've got to sidetrack him.”
Don Cipriano was fat, he was gray; but he had apparently been a man of the world in his time. “There is no other reason?”
“Hell, yes!” laughed Bridgeman uneasily: he had himself played his host's game too often not to know when it was best to be frank with a cross-examiner. “That young fool's butted into me in all sorts of ways. There was a skirt on the boat——”
“A skirt?”
“Yes, a lady-skirt: one of your Catamarcans, and I'll tell the world, when it comes to frou-frou, you people——”
“I see. And you want this young man removed?”
“Just for a day or two. Nothing serious. Something irregular with his passport, perhaps. You know: I can see I can't tell you anything!”
He chuckled. Don Cipriano chuckled.
“Just till I can take a little quiet look-around for Mangus Cheavey,” concluded Bridgeman.
“And for the lady,” murmured the Señor Barboza.
“You said a mouthful, Chief!”
There was a brief pause.
“And there's that reward,” said Mr. Bridgeman.
“I think that you mentioned thirty-five per cent?”
“Twenty-five. But—oh, well, we'll call it thirty.”
They became excellent friends. They talked long and pleasantly. When the detective left, Señor Barboza followed the same course that Stanwood Atwater had followed in somewhat similar circumstances. He took up his private telephone:
“Get me the Presidential Palace,” he said. “I want to talk to His Excellency himself.”...
“A THOUSAND pardons,” said the President to Buster.
Buster bowed.
The President put the receiver to an ear.
“Yes?—You know my voice, I yours—I understand—I know that already—Here—Now—Perfectamente—A little later—“Ah, my friend, how often have I said the Republic can never adequately reward you!”
He hung up the receiver.
“It is regrettable that affairs of state must interfere with life's amenities, Mr. Kent. What makes you to suppose that I can find your Mr. Cheavey?”
“This is a small country, and you're a big man.”
“Hum—come up to the roof.”
“As high as you like: the sky's my limit in this game.”
Don Ricardo led the way to the top of the Presidential Palace—a large, flat square, whence one looked from the jungle's edge and the bases of the white-capped mountains to the blue harbor with its dancing ships, the white presidential yacht among them. At the center of the roof was a pile of thin boarding and a heap of wires, over which two soldiers were working.
“The airplane!” explained His Excellency.
With the pride of a show-dog in a new collar, he asked questions of the soldiers. Then, quickly, he dismissed them and turned to his guest with a slightly weary smile: “The most difficult luxury for a public man is privacy, Mr. Kent. Are you quite sincere in your offer?”
“If,” said Buster, “you will put me on the sure trail, you can have a notary draw those underwriting-papers—you can take whatever steps the Catamarcan law requires—and I'll sign up before I leave this house. If you want any guarantee, all you've got to do is take me to the United States consul.”
The President smiled again. “Quite unnecessary. My agents made a satisfactory report concerning you before you had been an hour ashore.”
“Well, then you know I'll keep my word. All I must be sure of is that your Mangus Cheavey is mine.”
“You will be sure when you learn his importance in this country. Your friend, Mr. Cheavey——”
“Not my friend! He——”
“I know! Pray attend. Statecraft, Mr. Kent, necessitates the employment of strange tools, and we statesmen are compelled, for our countries' welfare, to use the ax nearest to hand. Five years ago, a stranger came to Catamarca.” His Excellency's voice was very sad. “He possessed no passport, but the times were unsettled. He spoke Spanish; we accepted his word that he was Peruvian: the common people have not yet learned that this is false. Those were terrible days, when an unscrupulous tyrant had our dear republic beneath his iron heel and was stripping her, for his own aggrandizement, of—of the very shirt upon her back. I, with a few other patriots—we burned to give our lives for the salvation of Catamarca, for the rescue of her civil liberties. But such things are not to be bought by lives alone: the seizure of a government is expensive. This stranger had much money, and he joined our cause.”
“He financed the rebellion?”
“He financed the glorious Revolution. We were thankful. We gave him exalted office. Nor should we cavil today, had he been true: alas, he has betrayed the gratitude of a beneficent country!”
“He's gone in for graft?”
“You shall hear the unbelievable!”
“Why haven't you impeached him, or something?”
“Why do not you, in the great United States, impeach your dishonest politicians? This man,” said the President, “by lavishing his ill-gotten gains upon the undeserving poor, has won popularity. You must seize him clandestinely. I shall show you the papers that my Secret Service has discovered: they leave no doubt of his identity. Only, you must have him safe out of the country—I shall find a way—before I dare to publish the evidence that Señor Esteban Trujillo has robbed the Republic.”
“Trujillo?” repeated Buster. “What's his job?”
“Señor Esteban Orellano y Trujillo is the Minister of Finance.”
EVENING had come before everything was arranged. There was no denying the authenticity of the identification papers—they even included a faded “still” of the deserted Minnie Milson, preserved because of only Heaven and Dr. Freud know what sentimental complex: their rightful owner was beyond question Mangus Cheavey.
It was too late to cable New York regarding the wild-cat insurance project: Buster undertook the underwriting on his own responsibility, and, by oaths, red seals and notaries, it was executed and confirmed—a document imperative in the country of its origin and binding everywhere. As for Señor Trujillo:
“Almost as you entered,” said the President, “he left. He has what you call a hobby: our prehistoric monuments. He exhumes huge columns from strange corners and presents them to the National Museum; he has compelled us to add a new wing to the building! The Chamber of Deputies votes him whatever he asks. Now he has gone to Rio de Adrar to dig up some more.”
“Rio de Adrar? Where's that? I'll start tonight.”
“There is no train until tomorrow. Why go? Rio de Adrar is only a stupid village on the edge of the jungle.”
“But I'm not going there for jazz.”
“Don Esteban will return in a week or ten days: men do not flee from dangers of the existence of which they are ignorant.”
“But a whole week! I can't afford the time!”
His Excellency shrugged. “You North Americans!”
“I'll have to start tomorrow at the latest.”
That was Buster's last word. He declined the President's dinner-invitation and left the palace.
He considered that it would be as well to have immediately the help of the national Secret Service for his expedition, but he realized that Don Cipriano must, by this time, have deserted his desk for his dinner. When Kent was finally headed in the right direction to Barboza's home-address, night lay over the city.
The Plaza and the streets leading into it were well lighted, but beyond these centers brooded a darkness that the rare lamps rather compressed than dispelled. All save the business thoroughfares of the City of Catamarca are narrow and winding, badly paved and worse drained. Even the patricians of that ancient town house themselves in quarters thus approached, and the Chief of the Secret Service was evidently a patrician.
Buster kept, though with slow progress, in the right way; no yard of the journey invited confidence. Once he thought he saw a dim shape dodging around a comer ahead; again, he could have sworn to the sound of soft footfalls a brief distance back. At last a broken plaque informed him that he was at the end of his quest. Beyond this junction of two narrow passages, the gate to Señor Barboza's residence should be the second to the right.
Buster found it: twenty paces from the corner, an oaken door in a ten-foot wall. He lit a match. An unpolished knocker—a crouching goblin, green from neglect—presented clasped arms for his seizure. The match went out.
There came a rush of feet from around the corner, the whir of charging men.
Kent wheeled. They were upon him: three or four.
He jumped aside. One went by, hurled on by sheer momentum. Buster tripped a second. Another was at his throat, and somebody had leaped upon him from behind.
Buster hurled himself to the wall, bashing this last opponent against the uncompromising stones. His throat was in a vise; the blood pounded in his temples; pale sparks flew before Ms bulging eyes. But he could see the outline of the garroter's face, and, bringing into play every remaining ounce of strength, he placed both palms under the far-protruding chin and began to compel it upward and backward—backward—backward——
They fought in silence. There was no sound except the slow scraping of feet, the panting of the two assailants and the whistle of Buster's breath as it forced its way through a steadily constricting channel.
The weight on his shoulders lessened. He pushed harder against the wall. The hold of the man on his back slackened. It ceased: the burden slid away——
But the garroter was still there. He was venomously there. His head yielded; but not his fingers: they tightened; they dug and dug——
They tightened.
Buster increased his pressure on the chin—increased it desperately——
But the garroter's fingers tightened all the more.
THE electric lamps had not been lighted in the presidential study, but the President was still there. And he had another visitor.
“So that,” inquired Don Ricardo, “was the only untoward incident? Good! To revert, then: the Habana banker gave you some little receipt—eh?” A paper rustled. The President flashed a pocket torch upon it. The light flickered over his white hands; then, again, darkness. “Made out, I see, in your name.”
“As you agreed, my Ricardo.”
“And as you suggested, my heart. Ah, well, I congratulate you, and I trust that you are now satisfied of the sincerity of my devotion.” The President paused; then: “Of course, there still remains one proof more. But first as to politics: Señor Trujillo is gone to one of his buried temples, and, in his absence, I have arranged a new occupation for him—not that he is to be feared, but that a stranger's precipitancy might spoil your plans and mine.” In three strokes of the brush, the President sketched the motive of Buster's visit: “I exhibited to this Americano certain documents that you may recall disposing to me a year ago. Then, metaphorically, I pointed straight at the Minister of Finance.”
The silvery ripple of her laughter was the lady's best applause, but she added:
“Ah, Vuecencia, what a courageous coup!”
“I completed the case,” said His Excellency, “by referring to Señor Trujillo's latest defalcation.”
“You told him—do you mean you told him that Don Esteban has robbed the national treasury?”
“Well, he has, you know.... So,” the I President continued, “we need now fear I only that Don Cipriano may delay too long in striking us. We must not go until he compels me; always we have realized that there were the appearances to be preserved—and now there is to be preserved the even more important insurance. In the end, it may be necessary to let him learn that I suspect him. But he is almost certain to act against me of his own initiative. So far as we are concerned, everything is ready.”
“He does not guess that—Don Cipriano?”
“Nobody guesses. Barboza tugs at the leash. The sole question is how soon he can tear it.”
“Of course there remains our—our wedding.” The lady's tone was modestly lowered. “But perhaps you are right that it should wait the very eve of our departure....”
THE boat had docked at three o'clock. Everyone in Catamarca had known that the Señorita Eulalia Savedra y Loreto was somewhere out of the country. By four o'clock everyone knew she had returned.
Strong personalities are speedily felt. Señorita Eulalia had landed from Spain less than eighteen months before the evening of her balcony conversation with Don Ricardo. She had come as a coloratura soprano; had captured all ears and most hearts—but she had begun by being too popular with the gentlemen to suit any of the ladies, and shortly became too expensive a stage-idol for the worship of any of the gentlemen except the gilded few.
These, however, were the rulers of their country. While the populace hated her for what it deemed her disregard of its well being in the exercise of her influence in legislative, executive and judicial precincts, while the people of the street referred to her as the Euskara—a derisive reference to her supposedly Basque origin—Eulalia, although conscientiously singing to smaller and smaller audiences, became “La Dorada” among the men in command. Each rivaled his neighbor in bestowing favors upon her. But she preferred to remain the Señorita Savedra y Loreto.
From the palace she went straight, as once before she had done, to Barboza's house. Its grounds ran completely through a block. The lady knocked at a gate opposite to that at which Buster Kent had essayed to apply; Don Cipriano himself opened it.
“I trust you had a pleasant voyage?”
“It was rather tiresome. But it was rest that I went for.”
They walked. Don Cipriano persisted:
“No interesting persons in Port of Spain?”
“You know that I went thence to Habana. Habana was dull. There was one entertaining passenger on the return-voyage: a handsome American of the North.”
“A young one?”
“I care nothing for unfinished sketches. He said that he was rich—in oil.”
“He said so?”
“He at last confided to me that he was a detective.”
“Nobody else aboard?”
“If there was, he would not permit me to realize it. He wanted to marry me.”
“What insolence!”
“There may be rich detectives in the colossal republic.” The lady's voice softened: “There is one rich detective in Catamarca, Don Cipriano.”
“You should not,” he said, “confuse a chief of Secret Service with a detective.”
“This American detective interested me.”
Señor Barboza, in the darkness, frowned heavily. “If I see him again——”
“You have seen him?”
“Yes, and if I see him again——”
“I shall.”
Don Cipriano found her hand. “Why will you play with me? Am I not planning to risk——”
He was rudely interrupted. They had reached the other side of the grounds. They were, in fact, beside the other gate, and from the farther side of it rose a strange shuffling noise.
“What is that? Open the door!”
“It might be someone who has traced you here.”
“If anyone has traced me, I must see who it is.” She was fumbling at the latch.
“For God's sake, señorita——”
“Light! Light! Is there no light?”
His frightened fingers found a switch in the wall. A yellow glare flooded the doorway as she opened it.
She opened it, but she closed and bolted it immediately. Two struggling figures, savagely entwined, had pitched into the garden and sprawled on the gravel path. One of them leaped up dragging the other by the collar.
Eulalia, her black gown relieved by a splendid necklace of pearls, was regarding him that rose first, but Don Cipriano had eyes only for the other.
“Mr. Bridgeman!” he spluttered.
The oil-operator's square derby had vanished, his red hair was in sad disorder, and his braided coat was torn.
“Here's that fellow,” roared Bridgeman. His passport——”
“Read this card,” gasped Buster Kent. “From the President.—Tells you to do anything I say.—Arrest this man——”
“Arrest Mr, Bridgeman?”
“Sure.—Tell you why when I get my breath.—Bridgeman.—Not his real name.—His real name's Mangus Cheavey!”
BUSTER'S captive attempted instant protest.
“Mangus Cheavey! Listen to that, will you, Barboza! This guy attacked me——”
“He's a liar!” panted Buster.
Don Cipriano scarcely glanced at the President's card. He thrust stubby fingers into a waistcoat-pocket and drew out a silver whistle, on which he blew a single blast. Eulalia vanished into the shrubbery.
“Lemme go!” Bridgeman blustered. “Didn't you hear that whistle?” He wriggled impotently. “Tell him to let me go, Barboza!”
Don Cipriano gave them a brief consideration with his heavy, impartial eyes.
“Wait!” said he. Three other men ran up. “There is a lady somewhere in these grounds: my guest. Find her, Diego, and bid her wait in the blue reception-room. You others, take this fellow.”
“Now!” exulted Bridgeman.
“I mean the redhead,” explained Señor Barboza.
Bridgeman sprang back with an oath. “What's all this stuff——”
They seized him. He fought; but they had him.
“You know who I am! You'll pay for this!”
“And lock him up,” concluded Don Cipriano, “in the strongroom.” He slipped an arm through one of Buster's and turned on his heel. “If you are not too tired, I should like five minutes' talk.”
They passed down a shadowy alley at right angles to that up which they heard the clamoring Bridgeman being dragged. When the last sound of protest had died, Barboza spoke again:
“This fellow says I know who he is. Who is he?”
“His name's Mangus Cheavey.”
“Exactly; but that means nothing to me. I acted because of the President's card. Who is Mangus Cheavey?”
As briefly as he could, Buster explained.
“If the fellow is so badly wanted, we must have some record of the case. I'll look into it. This is the right man?”
“Sure.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Why, hold him for extradition, of course.”
They were walking under bright stars, which it seemed a tall man on a housetop might pluck from the sky. The air was scented with flowers.
A yellow glare flooded the doorway as she opened it.... Two struggling figures, savagely entwined, pitched into the garden
“In Catamarca,” said Don Cipriano, “we prefer certainty to red tape. If you had this man on an American ship, there would be no necessity for formalities. The Senator Reed is an American passenger-steamer. She is due here, from Benito to New York, tomorrow. I know the captain. Go aboard at four o'clock in the afternoon: you will find your man there, in irons.”
“But,” began Buster, “that wouldn't be——”
They were arrived at the gate by which the Señorita Eulalia had entered. “Don't thank me: I am simply doing what President Ruiz has asked. You have had a difficult evening; I must not detain you.” He opened the door.
“Good—good night,” stammered Buster.
The door closed behind him. Making a blind guess at the general direction of his hotel, he started along the dark street. He had not gone ten paces when somebody touched his arm.
“Señor Kent!”
He had no appetite for further fighting, but that velvety feminine whisper reassured him: he knew her voice.
“Señorita Loreto?”
“Sí, sí. Señor, are you mad?”
“I don't understand.”
“And I must hurry. This Señor Bridgeman: after you so splendidly saved my life on the ship, did I not tell you he was a detective, and that he wanted to secure your Señor Cheavey before you could? How then can you think that Señor Bridgeman is Señor Cheavey?”
Buster chuckled. “I never thought it for a minute!”
“But, Don Buster——”
“Listen, señorita: the real Cheavey is a big man in the government: it's a fellow named Trujillo, the Minister of Finance.”
“Trujillo? Bah! You said to Señor Barboza——”
“I meant to ask his help to catch Trujillo, but when that detective and his fellows jumped me, I knew I had to get them out of my way first.”
“And you have succeeded? Don Cipriano has arrested Señor Bridgeman?”
“Don Cipriano's done a lot more than I asked. He's done too much: that's the trouble. He's going to put Bridgeman on a ship bound for New York tomorrow, and he expects me to go along. I can't. I've got to stay and find the real Cheavey. But if I'd told your Secret Service chief all that, he'd have turned Bridgeman loose, and Bridgeman's convinced me that he's the sort of rival that's best out of the way.”
The woman's fingers tightened on Buster's arm.
“Oh, Don Buster, do you not understand why Señor Barboza has done this? He wants both you and this detective safely out of Catamarca. Find the real Mangus Cheavey? You have found him. The real Mangus Cheavey is Señor Cipriano Barboza!”
“CIPRIANO?” gasped Buster. “Why, the President said——”
“The President wants to save Señor Barboza.”
“They're friends?”
“Enemies. Don Ricardo counts on Don Cipriano to lead a revolution.”
“What? I've just insured him against one! Why can't he let me scotch the fellow, now, instead of waiting to kill him off in a revolution?”
“He wants the revolution to succeed.”
Buster clapped his bewildered brow: “He wants——”
“Sí, Sí.—I must go!”
“You mean the President——”
“The President has taken money from the treasury. There must be revolution—to cover his tracks; to make him a political refugee. He will take more money and go.”
“He'll take my money, too!”
“If you have madly insured him, of course he will collect that—later.”
“So he's got Barboza to fake a revolution——”
“No, no! They were friends only when Don Cipriano's money put Don Ricardo into power. Now Don Cipriano knows nothing of the President's plans, except that he has stolen. By use of that knowledge, he is quietly fomenting a revolution. He does not know the President knows this, but His Excellency does. Let me go, Don Buster!”
“Excellency! I'll tell the world he's that!”
“You must tell nobody. You must wait until all is ready. On the ship I told you of my influence: I shall make all well for you.”
“Wait? If I'm not on the Senator Reed tomorrow, Barboza will smell a rat and lock me up! Oh, you've got it wrong, somehow! What makes you think Cipriano's. Cheavey? The President showed me some papers of Trujillo——”
“They were Señor Barboza's.”
“How do you know that? This man Barboza doesn't look like Cheavey.”
She shrugged. “An old man—five years—much worry—the climate.”
“I have his description and a picture.”
“His description as he was five years ago! Look at the picture, put a gray mustache on it.”
She carried conviction.
“Now just tell me how you know about those papers. I don't want to keep you here; I'm your friend——”
“Ah, Don Buster”—her voice thrilled as with a quick tenderness—“if only I can make you understand how much I am yours! I do not want to tell about these papers, because I do not want you to think me unworthy to be your—your very best of friends!”
He was glad she couldn't see him! “Just tell me.”
“It is the only advice possible. Attend: I am Spanish; the people, because they hate me, call me Basque; but I am true Spanish. The President brings me here to be prima donna. Oh, only because he loves music, Don Buster: music and money he loves, but no woman. Very good. It is my best luck in all my life. Do I not owe him a return?”
“Of course—of course. Well?”
“Well, this silly Don Cipriano wants me to marry him. Ah, Señor Kent, if you knew how hard was my life because so many want to marry me! But if I marry one, all the others will make life dangerous—I love none of them. I have a dream: I wait for that. I must keep my place, so I do not say 'No'; but I have my dream, so I do not say 'Yes.' I had it; now, perhaps, it is a reality. Don Buster——”
He shook himself. “So you put Barboza off?”
“Yes.” She took his cue. “Then one day, to prove that he was rich, he told me who he was. Since then he tells me everything. And he gives me jewels. You can not here see me, but you saw me in the garden: this necklace of pearls—I dared not refuse—it belonged to the wife of the banker whom he robbed.”
“Sarah Atwater's pearls!”
“Atwater was the name. I burn to restore them!”
“But the papers?”
“I secured them—took them to His Excellency—everything but one thing. That I got later and forgot to give. On the ship, in our one talk too brief, you said you had studied about finger-prints, and that you had of this Cheavey——”
“A thumb-print. Yes?”
“Men here are such liars—so deep. I had asked myself: Does this Barboza blacken himself for some purpose I do not guess? I determine to obtain the infallible proof. That was a fortnight since. It might be well to have further evidence: who could tell? If His Excellency should change mind and decide to crush Don Cipriano before a revolution—Señor Barboza shows me in his office how they make and keep finger-prints. He makes print of his own two thumbs and mine and throws it afterwards, in a waste-basket. Left alone one little minute, that I secured.”
KENT freed her hand. It went to her breast and returned to press a bit of paper into his outstretched palm.
“And your advice?” asked Buster.
“You must wait. He dare not let Señor Bridgeman go. Señor Bridgeman is as dangerous to Señor Barboza as are you. I shall tell him the President suspects the revolution—that he must cause it immediately or be delivered up for extradition. He needs more ready money: the army demands it if it is to rebel. He has not enough here. All his jewels he has hidden in an old temple in the jungle beyond Rio de Adrar, which everybody knows and none visits: even Señor Trujillo goes to that one no more.
“I shall say to Don Cipriano that he must get the jewels to buy the generals. That will take him days. He will leave a lieutenant to look out for you, and I can attend to the lieutenant. Meantime, there is a Yankee war-ship at Tierra Blanca, two hundred miles the other way; there are marines: you must get them to seize here your Señor Barboza-Cheavey immediately he returns—before he can succeed in his revolt. So you will both have your prisoner and prevent the revolution. But not until I have seen you again, dear friend—at your hotel—tomorrow morning—early!”
“By Jove, I believe you've hit it!” cried Buster.
“You”—her hand sought his—“you like me, Don Buster?”
“I guess yes!”
“Then come,” she laughed. “You help me over this so high wall.”
"THEY looked for you everywhere,” said Don Cipriano.
His short arms making it just possible for his hands to meet behind him, he was pacing the blue reception-room.
“Everywhere inside these grounds,” smiled the lady.
He stopped. “You were outside?”
“I was not where you yourself looked for me: at your strongroom door, whispering sweet words to Señor Bridgeman.”
Don Cipriano breathed heavily. “Well, why not? You wanted me to be jealous, didn't you?”
“But of course I wanted you to be jealous!” she laughed. “Was that why you locked up the poor fellow?”
“Certainly. I'd promised to help him.”
“Only he acted on his own initiative against this Señor Kent?”
“Well—I did lend him a man or two.”
“And you locked him up for love of me.” She patted her suitor's shoulder. “That is flattering, that. I thought it was because he was after Mangus Cheavey.”
“Don't talk so loud!”
“And I thought that when another North American sought this same Cheavey and mistook your Mr. Bridgeman for him, you conceived it a brilliant stroke to surrender the first seeker to the second.”
“I did want to gain time: I must be President of Catamarca before I dare face the law. But I'd never have thought of this dodge if I hadn't been jealous. I love you——”
“And you want to marry me! But I will not marry a man in danger such as this: I will not marry you until”—she faced him, exultation in her eyes—“until you are the President!”
His usually heavy face was illuminated. “But then?”
“As soon as possible!”
“Eulalia!”
She did not rush to the opened arms. “Then—not now. You consider that, when you are President, you can dispose of those who guess your identity—that no one would suspect the Chief Executive to be the New York embezzler—that, even if it were suspected, Americans would not let their great country make war on a little sister republic to avenge a wrong committed only against their Wall Street. But you want to gain time: I am here to warn you that you must act at once.”
He was his cautious self again. “What has happened?”
“Something,” she poutingly answered, “that you would not give me the chance to tell because you must ask foolish questions about my journey! His Excellency knows.”
“About—about the revolution?”
She nodded.
“How?” He breathed hard.
The señorita raised her arched brows. “Who can say?”
“He told you?”
“Was I not at the palace this afternoon—and has he not asked my hand? Attend.” She outlined the Ruiz plot, even to the accusation against Trujillo made to Buster.
Don Cipriano chuckled fatly. “But then we could work together, Ruiz and I. He wants what I want.”
Her eyes flashed. “He wants me!”
The dull red glow of jealousy spread again over Don Cipriano's cheeks. “You wouldn't go?”
She scorned a direct answer: “He counts on that idiot Colonel Jouanne's loyalty: that the Colonel will fight for the President, though the President runs away. You might be killed. You must know the presidential yacht is in the harbor, ready to sail. You think it could be seized. Surely! But do even you know this: that the parts of the War Office's sample airplane are on the roof of the palace; that they have been assembled; that there is one of the mechanicians, Alvaro Lopez, who is also a pilot?”
“What of it?”
“This: it is less than a hundred miles over the mountains to the boundary-line of Maldonado! No, the President fears only one thing: delay. He is a coward, and he is afraid his thefts may be discovered. Then the people—not the mere officials—would rise; even the worm Jouanne would turn. If it came too unexpectedly. President Ricardo Ruiz might be caught in a trap.”
“All right then: we'll wait.”
“Wait?” Her anger rose. “If the people depose one thief, will they elect another?” She saw him wince, but hurried on: “Oh, I know well that, under this constitution, without a Vice-President the Chamber alone elects a President to fill any unexpired term; but would the people let it elect a known thief? Once you have the power, you can hold it. To get the power: that is your problem.”
She had swept him with her, but he managed to begin:
“This boy Kent believes that Bridgeman——”
“Suppose,” she cut him short, “you lock up that one as you locked up Señor Bridgeman: it would delay discovery only a little. His rich father will be inquiring for him, and there is that North American war-ship at Tierra Blanca. You must lock him up, yes—but tonight, before he can communicate with this war-ship; you must get the jewels from the jungle—buy whatever of the army remains unbought—strike too suddenly to suit even the taste of Don Ricardo Ruiz—and then release your Kent and Bridgeman on condition of their sworn silence for all time!”
Don Cipriano had been retreating from her.
“What is all this about Kent?” he demanded.
“He knows who you are.”
Mangus Cheavey turned livid. “He knows that?”
She laughed lightly. “While you looked for me to be consoling Señor Bridgeman through the strongroom door, I was outside in the street, telling Señor Kent.”
Cheavey's mouth worked. His eyes changed from amazement to rage. He fumbled in a pocket.
But she was before him, a figure of power.
“Yes, I told! How else could I force you into action? Am I not to marry you? And is it conceivable that I marry a man in danger of arrest for embezzlement? Your one chance—you have said it—is to seize the Presidency. Seize it now—and be safe—and then claim me!”
An hour later, when Don Cipriano believed her to be asleep in her own house, Eulalia was again closeted with His Excellency.
“These Yankees are sudden,” she said. “Señor Kent was with Don Cipriano tonight: you thought you could wait, and that he would—until tomorrow! Tomorrow? Everybody knows everything: Señor Kent knows who is Cheavey, and Señor Barboza has by now seized him. Señor Barboza-Cheavey knows that you know his plot, but does not guess that you dread delay, and so he goes to the jungle for his jewels to hurry the plot's execution. These two know these things because I told them. I learned their intentions, I suggested their actions, because they both are in love with me—both, though this handsome Don Buster is not yet aware of his devotion. Keep up steam in the yacht; do not let Lopez leave the palace. Don Cipriano will strike on the moment of his return: have all your remaining plunder ready for that moment's confusion—for your escape.” She laughed contentedly. “You wanted no delay of the revolution. I have precipitated the event for you. Good night, Ricardo!”
DEEP in the forest, thirty miles north of Rio de Adrar, two men slept through a brief night beside the black river. They slept in hammocks to avoid the giant ants, and they were cunningly covered with fine nettings to escape the dwarf mosquitoes. Close overhead, the branches intertwined so thickly that scarce a hint of sky might trickle through; the sun must be long risen before the jungle's morning came; but all about the sleepers were those who knew, by surer signs, the dawn's arrival: as if at the rising of a conductor's baton, the invisible orchestra of monkeys, which had fallen silent so short a time before, burst into unbelievable noise.
“There goes the top-sergeant's whistle!” yawned Buster, and he threw a boot at the other hammock.
Two things had thus far saved him: his passion for action and his lack of it for Eulalia. Once he had painstakingly verified the thumb-print by comparison with that in the guide-book, he began to contemplate with horror the prospect of delay the señorita had advised. He could not sit still and do nothing while Mangus Cheavey secured the jewels. Cipriano had been almost too easy: suppose he suspected—suppose he went right on through the jungle and into the neighboring country.
And Kent was asked to dally with this mysterious woman! She was coming to call in the morning! What was that sentimental nonsense about being the best of his good friends? You couldn't count on these foreign ladies. He simply ran away. He woke the hotel's dozing night-clerk with preposterous inquiries; half an hour later he roused a cursing liveryman and rode for Rio de Adrar. There the folk may have thought him mad, but they were too polite to say so.
He paused at a barn that called itself an inn, hired Hipólito Chaco, a shifty half-breed guide, bought a canoe and the clothes off its owner's back and thus embarked on the sluggish, sullen river from which the outpost took its name.
A group of dark men in huge hats watched him start: they murmured uninterested prophecies about swamp-fever and previous adventurers; they smoked cigarettes and spat. A barefoot woman, gowned in red and yellow, stood beside them, also smoking and spitting. They diminished; the last mud-house was passed; the forest closed upon the river: Buster and Hipólito were alone on their way.
Each piragüero worked at a paddle; but the Indian, as Buster found after sundry attempts at light conversation, preferred to work in silence. An alligator floated by; long-legged, violently colored birds waded beside the mossy banks or flashed across the bows. The water resisted every paddle-stroke; the heat grew heavier. It grew intolerable, and at noonday they landed, lunched on Hipólito's preparation of jerked beef and black beans—and slept.
Kent wanted no avoidable delay: once started for the temple, he would spare no effort toward reaching it before Cipriano, whose later advance might be expedited by the knowledge of a short-cut. Buster had no idea where he was to look for the jewels once he attained his destination; but find them he would, if he had to uproot every stone of the ruin; then he would pick up this Cheavey-Barboza on the way back. Consequently, and despite the half-breed's protests, the siesta was of unheard-of brevity: they were afloat again by mid afternoon.
The walls of green, in which the thickets ended on either hand, were now noiseless. Buster felt as if nothing lived there—as if nothing could live—and yet as if the jungle itself had a sort of malignant existence, a slow, evil consciousness, biding its certain chance to envelop and asphyxiate them in a gaseous embrace.
Nevertheless, the wilderness has, as truly as the city, its daily schedule. At last, on the half-light of the river, night descended with startling suddenness. Enormous fire-beetles lit their thousand lamps, and immediately forest and river leaped into a deafening cacophony. Until the invisible moon rose the tumult continued; then it ended as abruptly as it had begun. Buster and his Indian worked on in another quiet, made shore again, supped and again slept
And now it was morning. Kent's boot struck the half-breed into being. He leaped to the ground and soon had coffee ready and the farina mixed with boiled water. Buster finished his share and picked up a paddle.
“No,” said Hipólito. “Not any more.” He pointed to the jungle. “That way.”
“Long?” asked Buster.
The Indian held up two fingers.
“TWO days' journey—for you! Then we'll get there by this afternoon!”
Hipólito made no comment, but headed directly into the forest. A moment more, and it had closed around them, stifling, stubborn, poisonous.
They cut their way with machetes; they tore it with their hands. Now they were knee-deep in mud, again their feet sank into virgin moss. Little insects buzzed and stung; small snakes slid, hissing, away from them; once the sneering head of a great serpent swung frightfully from a tree-limb within a yard of Buster's head.
The tortuous progress kept up for many hours, slow beyond realization. Again and again the Indian protested: Buster was heartless. Hipólito threatened to leave his charge to proceed at his own risk; Kent drew his gun and motioned forward.
The heat grilled them; the air was loathsome with decay; the awful silence returned to press upon their skulls until their ears ached. Only the sound of their own progress, infinitely slow, disturbed the quiet and, once in a while, the crash of an unseen tree, dragged down after years of stubborn struggle with preying vines.
Buster, from a hillock, looked down upon a partial clearing—a basin of open land—from which rose a few columns of weed-topped stone, and over the face of which lay a mass of scattered masonry. It was the temple, the ruin of an ancient civilization's dead religion; but not time alone had ravaged it.
A jaguar coughed in the forest. Overhead, in the intense blue, a flapping vulture circled. Otherwise the spot was deserted; but the clumps of freshly turned earth told the searchers that it had not been so for long. Somebody had been there—perhaps only that morning!...
“NO,” PROTESTED the almost prostrate proprietor of what had been Buster's hotel in Catamarca City: “God forbid that I should lie to the illustrious señorita! The night-clerk knows only that Señor Kent sought a horse in the dead of night, and that he has not returned.”
It may be that the Doña Eulalia was the more incredulous because she had urged Cipriano to arrest Kent during the night. She had stopped at the hotel to ask for Buster, not so much to keep her promise to him as because of a vague premonition. Moreover, again, she failed to relish the insensibility to her charms implicit in what the landlord had told her. The liveryman, called to wait upon her, added nothing to what she had learned at the hotel.
Where had the Señor proposed to go? But nowhere! No mention of a destination had been made, and what was he, the liveryman, that he should pry on a gentleman?
Convinced at last that these professions were more than lies from persons sharing the general desire to thwart her, the lady called hurriedly at Don Cipriano's.
“Why didn't you lock the boy up when I told you to?”
Mangus Cheavey tugged at his gray mustache. He was greatly worried. He had made no arrest immediately because he feared publicity and hoped to kidnap Buster when the chances of observation were negligible.
“Negligible? In the daylight?” cried the lady.
He had meant to summon Kent to his presence and then to secure him: Buster was more likely to come by day.
The Señorita laughed mockingly. There were recriminations: Don Cipriano decided to advance by some hours his journey to Rio de Adrar; Buster, he decided, had started in the opposite direction, toward Tierra Blanca and his country's war-ship: whatever was to be done in the way of seizing the presidency must be accomplished before that vessel could reach Catamarca.
“You will first get that other Yankee out of harm's way?” Eulalia demanded.
“Bridgeman? That's all attended to, anyhow. He's safe aboard the Senator Reed, and she sails on time, Kent or no Kent.” Cheavey drew his visitor to a window overlooking the garden. His voice trembled. “If I should be too late!”
Fear was in his dull eyes. It was not a sort to excite sympathy, but Eulalia showed some signs of relenting:
“I shall not be idle. You must have the generals, and to get the generals you must have the jewels. But remember that the Chamber is in session. I have still some influence there. Perhaps, too, I can find a way to get money and to reach these generals.”
“Eulalia!”
“Not certainly. Let no false hope lessen your efforts or relax your speed; but be sure I shall be busy.”
He knew her too well to ask many questions. “God be with you, my dear!” He kissed her hand, breathing excitedly. “It'll all be settled soon now, one way or the other.”
“There is but one way,” she again reassured him. “God be with you, my dear!”
She, too, was convinced that Buster's departure had for its object the fetching of the war-ship, but, to assure herself of matters in this connection, she opened—as soon as Don Cipriano had set forth—cipher telegraphic communications with an acquaintance at the port of Tierra Blanca. Then she sought the President.
“Don Cipriano has started for Rio de Adrar,” she reported. “Señor Kent has disappeared.”
The smile on the red lips in the presidential beard stiffened. “You could not hold him? Yet he loved you!”
“I said,” replied the lady with a toss of her delicate chin, “that he did not yet know it.”
“A pity,” Ruiz reflected, “that he should be so slow of wit. We do not want any of his nation's navy in Catamarca. Such an appearance might cool revolutionary ardor.”
“Aid it, rather. His government has yet to recognize yours.”
“We want no official foreign spectators, yet it seems likely this meddler has started for Tierra Blanca.”
Eulalia laughed. “And that he may be delayed en route. I have not been sleeping.”
Don Ricardo expressed his admiration for her diplomatic talent.
“You keep Alvaro Lopez at hand?” inquired his visitor.
“Assuredly—and there is room, as you well know, for two passengers. But let us hope not to need him.”
“And the yacht?”
His Excellency could laugh now. Lopez had had his last practice-flight: if Captain Crespo, on the yacht, heard the airplane fly by night or saw it fly by day, he was to set sail instantly, to pick up its passengers at Maldonado. Otherwise, the yacht was ready to take them to Habana—New York—the Riviera.” Señor Ruiz laughed again. “But that is not what is so amusing about the yacht.”
The Señorita's eyes asked her question.
“That yacht,” pursued the President, “is known to be my hobby. So each evening I visit it; but first I go to the wine-cellars of this palace.”
“That is not good for the nation's gold reserve,” she nodded, “but it is beneficial to ours.”
“Still another thing amusing, my Eulalia: Who, think you—warned that there may be a bloody revolution in favor of that rascal Barboza, and that a means of temporary escape may be needed—who, since a day during your absence in Habana, guards this yacht?”
“Not Colonel Jouanne?”
“None other. Honest Jouanne! Is not this droll? He has no conception of what I bring aboard, save that it is part of my fortune left from my donations to the State—and he and his men will be fighting for it and us at the harbor-mouth when we go sailing!”
She evidently thought it quite as droll as did the President; but she had a cautious mind for all her mirth.
“In your absence might he not investigate?”
“That incorruptible one? He knows but to obey.”
“Still, there are always mutterings, rumors, going about the city, even in the best of times. Don Cipriano might wish them to reach him. If only I had some influence over Colonel Jouanne; if only he possessed a heart——”
“I believe, then, he does not possess even eyes! Yet he respects you: I have carefully said to him that, when the popular prejudice is overcome, I shall marry you.”
“Did not that alone make him dislike me?”
“I say he has neither likes nor dislikes: he has only orders.”
She pondered. “I fear the poison of Barboza. Give me a pass to the yacht, Ricardo. I shall sound this honest Jouanne. After all, I am a woman.”
On her way to the harbor, she saw the Senator Reed steaming for the open sea. So much for Mr. Bridgeman!...
JUST behind the curtain of the jungle, something moved.
Buster, in the center of the basin, wheeled. With the intrenching tools forming part of that hurriedly purchased outfit from Rio de Adrar, he had been hopelessly prodding the recently upturned earth beside a fallen column. A green lizard scuttled through dry grass, a yard away. Had it been the noise of this reptile's progress that pierced the idle clamor of Kent's spade? But the sound, whatever it was, issued from a farther point.
Despite his weariness, despite the bitter heat, the first half-hour following Buster's arrival had been given to a search for the jewels he was sure were gone. Don Cipriano, Kent soon understood, must originally have distributed his store among several spots within the ruins: the young man's reconnaissance was as thorough as it was feverish, but it was undertaken in the foreknowledge of defeat. The somebody who had preceded him had been as thorough as, lacking a large equipment for excavation, was possible. The figure of the Minister of Finance had long since been dismissed from Buster's calculations: the President had used Trujillo as a stool-pigeon, to protect Cipriano and so save the revolution. Therefore, only the chief of Secret Service remained in the reckoning. Well, that feared short-cut through the jungle seemed to have proved effective. Kent was about to throw down his useless spade when the noise startled him.
What was it? Not Hipólito. The Indian lay beneath an encroaching tree, where he had thrown himself on their arrival, heedless even of the insects swarming over him.
Buster, still apparently intent upon the digging, took stock of his position. Upright in the center of that clearing, he presented a perfect mark. He had one doubtful ally: a sleeping Indian. He had an army automatic that he barely knew how to use.
There came a loud crack. Something whistled past his ear.
Kent leaped the pile of masonry and dropped flat on the other side. A rifle shot. His untrained ears had played him false in receiving the sound that preceded it: the attack came from the other side.
Behind him he heard a cry and the crash of underbrush. The deserting Hipólito had plunged into the thicket.
Another shot. A puff of powdered stone sprang into the heavy air from that fallen pillar which scantily sheltered Buster. Cautiously he poked his head around one end. Though no figure was visible before the mat of vines that faced him, a faint curl of smoke hung lazily there.
Buster jerked free his automatic and fired at the smoke wreath. His unaccustomed finger tightened on the trigger: the weapon barked and barked. Through its flashes, he saw two men running forward, rifles in their hands.
His pistol grew silent—empty. He snatched up his spade. Before he could raise it, a rifle was at his breast:
“The señor will put up his hands.”
The man was ominously polite. Buster obeyed.
“Careful,” called the other man.
In answer, a short, puffy personage in riding clothes emerged from the vine-screen: Barboza-Cheavey.
“Well done!” he cried. “Stand aside—but stand ready.” They drew off, and he confronted their captive. “Have you got another gun?”
He was savagely angry; the veins stood out on his temples. But he was patently by no means so sure of himself as he wanted Buster to believe.
“I'm unarmed,” said Kent.
“Then you can put down your hands.”
Buster wished that the man were not quite so much afraid: a coward is always dangerous. “What are you going to do with me?”
A queer touch of pride brushed Cheavey; it alleviated, somewhat, his ferocity.
“I'm going to take you to Catamarca City and lock you up. I'm President of Catamarca—or will be in a few hours after we get there. Well, I'll turn you loose, as soon as that's arranged—on two conditions.”
Somehow Buster felt confidence returning. He tried to utter a guarded reply with seeming spontaneity:
“It begins to look as if you'd made it no-trump and held all the cards for a grand slam. What's the damage?”
“You'll have to do what Bridgeman did. I put him aboard the Senator Reed after he'd sworn to an affidavit that he'd made a mistake in my identity. In your case, your word of honor'll do.”
“Thanks. First condition. What's the next?”
“You must have guessed the next. I want the jewels that you've dug up here.”
BUSTER tried to think. Cheavey puffed. “I can take them if I must!”
Was the man trying to pretend he really didn't have those jewels? And if so, why?
“Try it,” said Buster.
Cheavey called his guard. “Search this man.”
They obeyed and found nothing.
“You were hiding the stuff again! That's what you were doing! I wonder why.” Cheavey waved to his Secret Service agents and pointed to the pillar. “Dig there! Hurry!”
They fell to, frantically.
“I haven't the loot,” said Buster, “and you know it.”
The earth flew right and left. “You know where it is.”
“Sure: you've got it.”
“I've half a mind to shoot you.”
“That wouldn't help, but neither will this repair-gang play. Why don't you?”
“Only because it would bring the whole U. S. A. nosing around Catamarca. Oh”—Cheavey broke off petulantly—“where's the use of lying, Kent?”
“You said you'd take my word of honor: I tell you I haven't got your swag and never had it.”
The agents had torn away all the fresh earth about the pillar. “Then try over there!” cried Cheavey. “Try everywhere. It's got to be found!” He turned again to Buster. “That was about my freedom; this is about my jewels: when it comes to jewels, I wouldn't take the word of honor of the Archbishop of Catamarca.”
“All right,” said Buster. All that worried him was the puzzle of what could possibly be Cheavey's motive for deception. The bluff seemed absurd. He sat upon the pillar. “Dig and be damned.”
He was taken at his word. If Cheavey really did need proof, he soon received it.
“Where have you hidden them?” he demanded.
“I said I didn't have them,” answered Buster, in slow disgust, “and I said you did.”
The first portion of his sentence carried, in its final iteration, a shade of conviction, and, by the same token, the latter part left its speaker less confident than before. But, just as the words were uttered, the two unarmed men engaged in conversation, and the pair of Secret Service agents, now armed only with tools, became aware of the presence of a newcomer. He was already half-way across the basin; a lean, clean-shaven man, quietly dressed—a man with a beak nose, high cheek-bones and a hard eye.
“Trujillo!” cried Cheavey.
“Of course,” thought Buster. “I'd stopped believing he was headed for these parts. I wonder how it happened the President didn't lie about that, too!”
If the Señor Orellano y Trujillo felt any tension in the atmosphere, he gave no hint. Quite as if such a meeting were usual, he bowed punctiliously to Cheavey and secured the presentation of Kent.
But Cheavey could not long conceal his anxiety:
“I thought your interest was in the other temple, the one to the northwest. Wasn't it understood that this was my property——”
“You must forgive my trespass, señor,” said Trujillo, gravely. “I should not think of digging here: it was by chance that 1 walk in this direction.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Cheavey, and the words rasped. “You are alone?”
“I have seven men, who have been helping me in my excavations over there.” He made a backward gesture: three or four swarthy fellows had emerged from the underbrush. “If you are sufficiently interested in my poor attempts at anthropological research, I should be enchanted——”
“Seven men? No, no, thanks. Not now. How long will you be in this—this general neighborhood?”
“We are on our way to Catamarca City. It is thus that we happened to come here: we are taking this route.”
Mangus Cheavey turned from Trujillo to Buster and back again. “And you two never met before? Oh, no, I remember!” He puffed, he panted: he was one of those in whom the process of thought, although proficient, is painful and nearly always ac companied by physical manifestations. Now he patently achieved first what he conceived to be a clear comprehension of the situation and, thereon, a great decision. “So you are on your way back to Catamarca City, Señor Trujillo? That's fortunate. We'll all go with you.”
IT WAS late in the night when he bent over Buster's hammock. Explanations, regrets, accusations against the Minister of Finance, bribes for Kent and threats for all tumbled out of lips fearful lest each syllable might betray their owner to his sleeping companions:
“He's got them—somewhere—Trujillo: and I believed he was an honest man! He thinks I'm up to something: I can see that. I never was so disappointed in anybody! We're both Americans, you and me, and we've got to stick together. You can't trust any of these foreigners. I'd offer to whack up, if I thought you'd do it, but of course you won't. Anyhow, you don't want a dago-Indian to have 'em: you can't win yourself, so you'd rather see an American win—eh?
“And I'm sure he's got 'em in his clothes—he's probably working some side-game with the President—only I daren't search him here, when he's got crowd with him. Maybe there'll be a chance to get them on the way. I've got enough friends in town, if there isn't, to take 'em away from him as soon as he gets there. Nothing's lost if I hurry. And I'll tell you this: there's somebody working for me back there. I'm going to be President, Mr. Kent; and if you feel like playing in with me, here's the time to say so. Otherwise, once we're in Catamarca City, you get locked up till I get your word of honor.”
“Oh, go back to bed,” said Buster loudly. “I've got to get some sleep!”
PRESIDENT RUIZ sat on the accustomed balcony, facing the renaissance Cathedral of Santo Basilio and overlooking the Plaza de la Constitución. He had had a hard day, but a profitable one, and, reviewing his accomplishments, he pronounced them good. Don Ricardo regarded his people in the square below with a beneficent sadness, even while he considered his immediate future with high content.
The Chamber of Deputies was scheduled to adjourn at noon next day, and in accord with immemorial custom—that is to say, is accord with a custom dating from the happy Era of Liberation and the age of Simon Bolivar—the assembled members, with the Senate at the bar, had respectfully summoned their chief executive to learn whether his pleasure had any other business to lay before them. The chief executive's responding oration, made from the tribune, was a polished and lengthy negative: sixteen hours hence, the members would pass an almost unanimous vote of confidence and a wholly unanimous vote of thanks, and go home—in good time to leave the fate of the country to the unsuspected issue between Ruiz and Barboza.
But the President's speech had, in reality, been far more than a formal commendation of the legislative labors. Knowing, as his hearers did not, that it was his valedictory, he made it the effort of his public career.
The Catamarcans are proverbially an emotional folk. Floor and galleries cheered him to the echo. Ladies wept, and some gentlemen. They did not know what the morrow had in store, and they of course revived the right to alter their political opinions; but they knew an artist when they heard one. Even stolid Colonel Jouanne showed something less than his habitual military immobility.
Well, the President reflected, no one could justly accuse him of insincerity. He was a native of Catamarca; here, too, he had acquired his fortune—or the fortune that was in his possession. It is not an unalloyed pleasure to leave one's country, even for that country's, and one's own, good.
“Not,” he reflected to his seventh cigarette, “that I really want to remain.”
The military band had been playing every Viennese waltz from “The Beautiful Blue Danube” to the “Kinemakónigin.” Lights sparkled from a score of cafés, and at the tables on the pavements in front of them soldiers and men of affairs drank their wine and laughed with the ladies of the capital. A cooling air blew from the waterfront—the waterfront where the presidential yacht waited—and overhead the stars hung large and low. It was just such a night as that on which he had confided in Eulalia.
“The Señorita Savedra y Loreto,” whispered a servant at the open French window and, at a shadowy wave of the executive's hand, left singer and President together.
“I kiss your feet!”
She interrupted Don Ricardo's fervent courtesies:
“No, I shall not sit. This morning you told me you were ready. Is that word still good?”
He dropped the hand he had been kissing: “You have news?”
“The first of my runners has arrived.”
“Runners? Cipriano is returning?”
“There is a little strike somewhere on the railroad, and travelers must resort to horses. The telegraphs northward are inactive, and I have to depend on runners. It is annoying—no more than that. Good; I say the first has arrived, and,” the lady added, “Señor Barboza is due to-morrow morning.”
“Not afternoon? The Chamber does not adjourn until midday.”
“What difference—if you are ready? Are you, Ricardo?”
He stroked his beard. “Yes. I could have wished for one more vote of thanks—but 'Yes.'”
“What greed!” she laughed. “You cannot have everything!”
“But I have”—he gallantly pulled himself together—“since I have you. Has he the jewels?”
“Did you fancy he would be wearing them?”
“But he must have them if he is to have his revolution and we our excuse. How am I to collect my moneys abroad and retain my freedom, except as a political refugee?”
“My good Ricardo, he knew where the jewels were; he went for them; he returns, and there is no word of his molestation. Of course he has them!”
“Then we go to-morrow. If all is as fully prepared against me, as you have reported, he can strike within two hours of his arrival—no?”
“I understand he plans to strike within one hour.”
“There must be enough fighting to constitute legally a revolution as distinct from a coup d'état. There is no change of plan?”
“How should I know, since Don Cipriano has been away?”
“From the citadel”—the President chuckled good-humoredly—“they are to go at once to the National Treasury! I shall warn Jouanne to-night and persuade him not to mass all his men in the Plaza. We shall want one company at the harbor and one, mounted, at our back door, to guard our progress to the yacht before the revolutionists round the comer at the Café Republicano. You had better call here early in the morning, señorita.” His tone grew tender. “Say six o'clock. He cannot arrive before six—Cipriano—can he?”
She thought not.
“I shall have here a priest from the cathedral.”
“Lopez, the aviator: is he here now?”
“Really, Eulalia!” The President protested. “Your concern for Lopez is depressing. Everything is simple. We shall not require wings.”
“Is he here?”
“He is bidding good-by to his old parents in Heredia. But he will be back in the early morning! I tell you we cannot need him. Do you wish proof? I should enjoy a drive: motor with me to the yacht to see that all is indeed in readiness.”
The lady laughed again. “Empty-handed?”
“Well”—he met her humor—“there is still much left next door, and there is no reason why it should not be a few bags less before our friends seize the treasury to-morrow. Come with me: it is amusing.”
He led the way into the next room. Behind a curtain, he touched the hidden spring in a panel. It slid aside. The President took up an electric torch from a near-by table and began to descend the steep and narrow stairway that the panel had revealed.
Holding her skirts carefully, the lady followed. She followed until the stairs stopped and opened into the darkness of a musty cellar filled with great casks and high bins whence protruded the noses of cobwebbed bottles.
The torch played elfishly upon them.
“It is not easy to leave all this,” sighed His Excellency.
“I am told,” murmured Doña Eulalia, “that the best-stocked vaults in the world are on the Riviera.”
The President found this very clever. He was expressing his merriment when, having swung aside a mock bin, he confronted the foundations of the building, showed how these had been tunneled by a passage—“The poor man went abroad who contrived it,” he explained—and came finally to a huge slab of what appeared to be solid rock. Indeed, a swaying of the torch showed his enjoyment when this rock proved as easily removable as the panel in the palace.
“THE vaults of the National Treasury!” announced the President.
His torch rose upward, but it did not dance over bags of gold. It stopped, because it centered on a man in uniform with a revolver in his hand: Colonel Jouanne.
The President leaped back so quickly that he struck the lady and drove her against the wall of the passage. Before the soldier had moved—before a word was spoken—Don Ricardo had pressed the spring that sent the great rock into place again.
It was as if they had seen a vision. He and Doña Eulalia were facing each other beside a blank wall.
The President dropped his torch. The Señorita Loreto picked it up and turned it on him: sweat stood out on his forehead; his beard jerked grotesquely with the trembling of his hidden chin.
“A—a traitor?” he gasped. “A rival?”
The lady laughed. “Absurd, Your Excellency.”
“Then a thief! Honest Jouanne! Who would have believed it? Who is to be relied upon?”
The musical critics of anti-Administration newspapers had lately been hinting that hardness was creeping into the voice of “La Dorada.” There was something of that new quality in it now as she answered:
“Neither traitor nor thief, Don Ricardo. A guard.”
He stared at her. “You mean——” He turned as if to run. “The yacht! We must get to the yacht.”
“There is no hurry,” she answered. “Nothing more will occur until morning.”
At that he reversed and came toward her savagely.
“How do you know all this?”
“Be careful: I have friends in the cellar. Your yacht, señor, has been seized by Colonel Jouanne.”
“He was always true to me until——”
“He was always true to his country. The seizure has been quiet—and it was made in the name of the Republic. Lentamente, Señor Ruiz! There is some one in the darkness there, only a yard behind you.”
Don Ricardo's lifted hands fell to his side. He looked about; some one else was there—a large and official shape: his own body-servant, armed.
“Treason!” the trapped President cried. “You have sold me, you she-Judas!”
She laughed at him.
“You be quite safe here in the palace—until Don Cipriano arrives.”
THE railway strike was on the line between the capital and Acosta, which is only five miles southeast of Rio de Adrar. It was one of those local disputes that are mostly spontaneous, but temporarily effective, and the oddly assorted company of antiquarians from the jungle had been compelled to resort to horseflesh for their means of transport. They came by the State Highway—so called—and, at the farther end of the famous Santo Cirilo Pass, where the road emerges from that narrow cañon in the lofty plateau before its abrupt descent to the Plains of Raquel, there burst upon them the generous view of the valley and of the haven where, because of such mixed motives, they would be.
Behind them yawned the dark mouth of the Pass; its sheer cliffs towered above. Far to the south rose, in the clear air of morning, the jagged peaks of the snow-capped Alajuelas, and, it seemed at their feet, set amid luxuriant greenery, gleamed the City of Catamarca, its flat roofs lighted by the sun, the spires of the cathedral pointing heavenward, and a score of little boats riding the blue waters of its bay. There was no foreign vessel discernible among the shipping; but Cheavey could distinguish the presidential yacht, without its master's flag, and, a mile inshore, at the heart of the town, beside the Plaza, the Palace from which fluttered serenely the tricolor of the Republic.
There had been no chance to rob the uncommunicative Trujillo, and the accident of the strike lost several hours. Nevertheless, the Chief of Secret Service felt elated. He was still ahead of time, for he had origin ally counted on devoting a full day to his excavations; the thief, whatever other dam age was done, had saved him that, and, once these fools were within the city, the one would speedily be forced to disgorge his plunder, the other go behind locked doors—the discontinuance of the telegraphs had prevented communication with his office, or Cheavey would even now be their master. No, things were not bad; somewhere down there in the capital, Eulalia had been busy, and she had had word of him; as far back as Elena, the previous afternoon, he had seen one of her servants, nodded and, while his own party lunched, heard the clatter of the fellow's departure.
“How beautiful!” said the Minister of Finance, gazing over his horse's drooping head at the view before them. “It is a magnificent landscape. I never cease to admire it.”
“I wonder,” said Buster, very perplexed, “if I shall.”
“We must hurry!” said Cheavey. What if they should ask him why? His access of courage had made him imperative.
Nobody, however, just then asked him anything. The little cavalcade was too occupied with the difficulties of its steep progress downward.
The pilgrims swung into the plain. They rode in silence for an hour. The city was now hidden.
Suddenly, from its direction, there came a rumbling sound. Every man of them drew rein.
“What's that?” asked Buster.
Another dull boom came before the puffing Cheavey answered:
“Cannon!”
“The revolution!” gasped Buster ruefully. “There goes my insurance-policy!”
Señor Trujillo raised his heavy brows. “Surely there is no revolution?” The booming continued. “Besides, if it were, there would be machine-guns. This sounds like a salvo.”
Cheavey's flabby cheeks glowed with relief. “I know: the guns before the Chamber of Deputies!”
“Only,” said the Minister of Finance, “if they are celebrating some momentous decision.”
“They are,” declared Cheavey—“and I can guess what!”
He clapped spurs to his horse and jolted forward. He remembered again the influence of Eulalia and the constitutional power of the Chamber to elect a president for the fulfilment of an unexpired term.
Buster and Trujillo came on, neck-and-neck with him; but the young man had seen enough of Catamarca to be by no means sure that he had not lost his money.
They galloped. Cheavey's flapping cheeks were purple; his hat flew off: he did not stop. The other two principals were better horsemen, but the road was rough; only the lesser members of the company, two secret-service agents and the seven workmen of Trujillo, were at ease.
The roadside houses thickened. There were more people on the highway, and accidents were only just avoided. They came to a guard-house, still a mile beyond the yellow walls of the Old Town, and saw trooping up a group of horsemen, soldiers and civilians, equal in numbers to their own.
Not to halt immediately would be to court collision: the travelers from Rio de Adrar stopped in their tracks.
“What's the trouble now?” asked Buster.
“It seems to be a deputation,” the Minister of Finance answered. “You see the señor in the front?” He indicated a broad man with a rosette in his buttonhole. “That is Dr. Atanasio Gondra, President of the Chamber of Deputies.”
Mangus Cheavey turned between a snarl and a grin, but the grin conquered, and he swelled to swift importance.
“It is a deputation,” he said, “and they're looking for me. I have expected this for the last twelve hours. You men are my prisoners, and these gentlemen have come to tell me that Don Ricardo is out of a job—and that I've got his place!”
The head of the advancing column had reached them. Its dozen hats flourished. The broad man with the rosette was speaking:
“We are a duly authorized delegation from the Chamber of Deputies. We have been sent to announce the resignation of Ricardo Ayalo Ruiz from the presidency and officially to notify you, Señor Esteban Orellano y Trujillo, of your legal election as the Chief Executive of the Republic of Catamarca.”
PERHAPS Trujillo met the news with a fitting reply. Buster had the impression that Dr. Gondra's announcement left the former Minister of Finance in command of that calm which was the outstanding testimony to his character. It did flash through Kent's brain that Ruiz, in accusing such a man of any theft whatever, had been an outrageous liar, and he did feel that the Catamarcans had at last a really strong man to rule them. But the self-appointed representative of the Independence Indemnity Corporation spared little thought to foreign politics; he had other fish to fry: Mangus Cheavey's astonished eyes were patently seeking an opening in the crowd for their owner's flight.
Already there was a favorable confusion in the re-grouping of the two dozen horses for their ride to the capital, and of this Buster grasped advantage. He nosed his mount up to that of Cheavey, deftly plucked his pistol from its bulging retreat in a jacket side-pocket and, shoving the weapon into his own coat, pressed the muzzle against the embezzler's ribs.
“I don't know how you stand with Trujillo,” he said. “I don't think you're ace-high, but I'm not going to take any chances. You trot along beside me.”
Cheavey vouchsafed one look of livid malice; but he did as he was told.
“A splendid choice,” said a deputy who rode beside Kent. “Trujillo is popular.”
“It looks that way. Do you call this a revolution?”
“Not at all, señor—at least not yet. Don Ricardo has resigned. Under pressure? None can ever prove it. Of course, so long as he remains among us—he is still secluded in the palace—there is chance of some misguided persons fighting for him; but it is not likely. Certainly the Chamber hopes not; we wish he would go away: revolutions do not help our country's good name abroad.”
Well, reflected Buster—always with one eye on the white-faced captive, riding with him in apparent freedom—the event surely resembled more a holiday than a fight. The nearer the deputation approached the core of the town, the denser grew the crowds. Men of all degrees flung hats aloft; women tossed roses, or held children high for a glimpse of the new executive.
Buster's hopes for his mad insurance venture waxed apace; but not for his other mission. His conviction of Trujillo's per sonal honesty deepened; politics, however, too frequently have an unfortunate habit of interference with private character. Especially in this garden of conspiracy, who dared say to what extent some far-flung roots of the Cheavey greed might not entangle those of the Trujillo flower? Of course, Buster could fight, but publicity before arrest was precisely what the Travelers' and Tailors' Trust Company did not want. There was a treaty of extradition between the United States of America and Catamarca, but the former country had for five years failed to recognize the de facto government of the latter, and it must rest, after all, with a Catamarcan court to decide whether—no matter what his evidence—the person he produced really was Mangos Cheavey.
THERE was no long time for debate. The deputation clattered down the avenue and into the Plaza from which, at right angles to the Cathedral and the Presidential Palace, rise the long steps and Corinthian pillars of the Chamber of Deputies. Troops held back the huzzaing multitude and cleared a square and an entrance to it.
Buster all but rubbed his eyes. In the open space stood at ease a quite authentic company of American Marines.
“Here,” he said to Cheavey, “you ride over there with me!”
Cheavey gave the Marines one green glance: “I won't.”
“You will if you don't want to be shot,” said Buster. He was so excited that he meant it, and this his captive realized. Unnoted, they drew away from the deputation, and Buster, bending from his saddle, addressed the slim young captain: “Pardon me for not getting off this nag. I'm an American, and you don't know how glad I am to see you.”
Captain Matthews had received a similar greeting more than once in his brief military career:
“That's all right. Our ship put in behind that promontory, so's nobody'd be expecting us; but we're here to protect American interests.”
“I didn't know there were any,” said Buster, still watching Cheavey.
“Oh, yes. It seems there's a wild man down here starting a branch of the Independence Indemnity concern.”
“That's me,” admitted Buster. “Only, how in thunder did you folks hear about it? Trujillo couldn't have sent word himself—and he didn't know.”
“It was kind of queer. Not Trujillo—though I'm glad they've elected him: he's on the level. No, the old man got a message through a Tierra Blanca fisherman—some sort of spy. Trujillo's crowd don't want an open revolution, and they must have figured our presence'd put a damper on that kind of thing, and perhaps that a government set up under our inspection'd fetch recognition from the Washington stiffs. But all the message mentioned was you, and”—the Captain smiled—“it was signed by a lady.”
Buster was ashamed of himself for blushing. Then he was ashamed of himself for never once having so much as wondered what, in all this mess, had been the fate of the Doña Eulalia.
Somehow, his eyes wandered to the Presidential Palace, and there, from between the curtains of a high window, he saw a white arm wave.
“This man,” said Buster, with the most cursory of nods at Cheavey, “is a New York embezzler that I came down to get. Look after him for a minute, will you?”
Mangus Cheavey nearly fell from his horse. “I protest!” he panted. “The man lies. I'm the Chief——”
“Oh, he's Secret Service Chief of Catamarca, all right,” Buster interrupted, “and I haven't a warrant, and it's all as irregular as——”
But Captain Matthews had seen the arm and could himself interpret: “That's all right; only don't be too long.”
Not waiting to hear the torrent of words on which Cheavey embarked, Buster forced his horse through the crowd to the Palace door, where, apparently warned of his coming, a Guards officer—Colonel Jouanne, no less—admitted him.
He was afraid to see Eulalia—fearful of what sentimental reward she might demand for her care of him. However, he was equally clear that thank her he must, and he was immensely relieved when, alone with him in a vast reception-room, her undeniable charm concerned itself with business. She cut short protestations:
“Take this document, señor. I do not understand it all, but it grants you power to extradite a fellow-countryman named Mangus Cheavey, 'alias,' it says, 'Cipriano Barboza'; and it has been made out, in accord with Catamarcan laws, by a friend who is a Justice of the Supreme Court.”
THERE came a rattle like that of a sawmill overhead, and a roar, this time of anger, from the populace in the Square.
“And that,” laughed the lady, “is our ex-president beginning his unpursued flight over the Alajuelas Mountains to Maldonado. I know, for I myself permitted the entrance of his aviator. You have your prisoner; you have saved your insurance: did I not call myself your best good friend, Don Buster?”
All that Kent could do was stammer: “Do you mean to say this show—this whole blow-up—is your work?”
She was pleased with his amazement:
“It was all planned long ago—before I went on the journey from which you saw me return: your search for Señor Barboza-Cheavey, it only hurried me a little. I wanted ever to secure a good government for this people which had adopted me—even when, doing it, they suspected and hated me. Then, when you arrived,' I saw that perhaps it could so be done as to secure your nation's recognition. Sit down. No, by me—so.”
She patted a sofa. He had to obey. She lit for herself the cigarette that he nervously refused.
“Always I wanted no bloodshed: there is enough of that in opera. Therefore I pitted one against other.”
In her rippling laughter, he understood that he, too, had been one of her pawns. He had feared she loved him; his natural pride was not altogether happy now to realize that she didn't.
“You fooled me.”
“So?” She blew complacent smoke. “But I am indeed a poor liar, so, not wishing to be caught, I told—mostly—the truth. Even to you! Also it was easiest to tell everybody almost everything about nearly everybody else. When you conspire in your colossal republic, my friend, remember that the more truth you tell, the less likely you are to be suspected of conspiring.”
“Thanks,” said Buster.
“Then,” she ran joyously on, “there was another reason for hurry: Don Ricardo might perhaps have got too much government gold, not on his yacht, but out of the country. He is what your clever people call 'some fast worker,' eh?”
Trujillo—“the most honest of men”—had been early scheduled to go to the jungle, on the date he went: there he would be distant from suspicion, yet produceable at the opportune moment, of which, when it came, secret runners informed him. The señorita realized that Jouanne's loyalty was for the country of his birth rather than for the person of its president: on an unaccompanied afternoon visit to the yacht, she had shown him that the bags beneath the presidential mattress bore government seals.
“Then all was settled. The funds at my private disposal were small; but some of those bags—it was for the public good—went to buy the deputies: deputies are cheaper than generals. Brave Jouanne arranged to shut up Don Ricardo and to extract his abdication.”
“I see.” Buster was really beginning to do so.
“And,” she smiled, “you also I should have had shut up, but that you were too sudden.”
“Me?”
“You are so impulsive: you might hurt or be hurt. I wished you safe where—if Cipriano happened to make real difficulties—you could be produced and save bloodshed by telling who he was. Till I heard from an agent in Tierra Blanca, I thought you had gone to the war-ship. Why did you go otherwhere?”
He countered her question: “Won't Ruiz starve?”
She would not press him: “He has much money in New York. That Catamarca will not contest with him: the new government wants no scandal. Let us call it a pension.”
“I believe,” said Buster sulkily, “that you're in love with him.”
“No, no!” she laughed. “But one does not arrest a suitor solely for the reason of not loving him.”
“Then how about Cheavey?”
The lady's eyes were unfathomable. She made a little grimace. “He was too fat,” she said.
She turned to diplomacy. Wouldn't Don Buster secure Washington's recognition of the new government? Trujillo was a man with a vision for the public weal. Handsome, chivalrous——
“It looks to me,” Kent expostulated, “as if you're as much interested in him as a human being as you are in his statesmanship.”
The lady tossed away her cigarette.
“Of course. Now it will be made public. We have been secretly married these two years.”
For long thereafter, Buster regretted the sole words his astonishment framed: “Will the people stand for that?”
But the Señora Trujillo was too happy to care. “Yesterday it was 'that huzzy'; tomorrow I shall be the people's idol and,” she added with a dignity new to her hearer, “shall, for my husband, devote my life to remaining that. They love him, they will love me. In the Chamber, in his speech of acceptance, he is generously telling them that not he, but I, am their deliverer.”
He came in, Trujillo, looking all she had called him, before Buster could make his apologies. After her kiss, her first words were: “The people?”
Trujillo patted her shoulder: “They are content.”
Kent would have gone, but she would not permit it until he had admired the new president. “Is he not wonderful?” It was the real Eulalia at last. Only once her former mockery peeped out: “You will insure him also against revolution—yes? But he is so popular we should waste money to pay for it!” Not until then did she return to the affairs of their visitor. “And you recovered those jewels?”
It was the last thing needed to complete Buster's embarrassment. “Why—Cheavey hasn't got 'em. I've frisked him a dozen times. I thought perhaps your husband——”
Rapidly she explained to Trujillo.
“My presence at 'Don Cipriano's temple' was only to keep an eye on a possible rival,” said the President. “But if jewels have been lost because of a Catamarcan official, Catamarca shall pay. Beyond that, I know nothing, señor: you have my word of honor.”
And Buster looked into those clear eyes and had to believe him! “Certainly,” he said. “Don't mention it.”
The room was circling round him, though, with a firm grip, Trujillo shook his hand.
He sailed, with a carefully guarded Cheavey, that night for New York:, on the presidential yacht, which, relieved of its gold, Trujillo placed at his disposal. As Buster passed, on his way to it, through the Plaza de la Constitución, a cooling air blew from the harbor, and the stars hung large and low. The military band was playing the old waltzes, beside the fountain. Lights sparkled from the score of cafés, and, at the tables on the pavements in front of them, officers and men-about-town sipped their wine and laughed with the ladies of the capital. One only sign there was of the recent disturbance: from the tower of the distant citadel, a searchlight played, now and again, over the old town. Its shaft flickered over the balcony of the Presidential Palace and picked out the figure of a lean man standing there, illuminated his ascetic face and showed a woman beside him, their hands clasped on the railing. The people at the tables rose and cheered.
“I'd rather like to insure that fellow,” said Buster, “all on my own. It'd be a gilt-edged investment. It'd pay me what I'll never get now: the reward for those jewels....”
THEY were all—all of them who now had any concern there—in Stanwood Atwater's office on the ground-floor of the Travelers' and Tailors' Trust Company. Atwater belonged to that rapidly obsolescent species, the trust-company president who sometimes visits his trust company; his office even had a door of unobscured glass that looked directly upon the counting-rooms. Mangus Cheavey had just been removed, his sadness somewhat alleviated by the realization that jail would sequester him from the tongue of an indignant wife: Mrs. Cheavey still sat at one side of the Atwater desk, her loose cheeks naturally reddened by her own philippic eloquence. She gave the elder Kent a histrionic permission to light a cigar.
“By the way, Buster,” that obviously proud parent interjected, “there was a man in to see me the other day—fellow named Bridgeman—talking about false arrest.”
“Yes, I know,” said Buster, who was in a nervous hurry: “Cheavey arrested him.”
“Cheavey?”—Atwater had been smelling irregularities. “The thief arrest the detective?”
“Yes,” said Buster: “things were like that down there. 'Were': they're not any more. Now, then, Mr. Atwater, I've brought back your man: are you ready to take out that policy?”
“When you make good, young fellow. The agreement was for the man and the jewels. Hand them over.”
It was come! Buster had been dreading this moment all the way from Catamarca. He hung his head.
“I couldn't find 'em.”
“Buster!” cried his father.
“They were never put on the market,” declared Atwater. “I'll swear to that.”
Mrs. Cheavey fanned herself with a scented handkerchief and registered proper dismay.
“No,” said Buster, “I don't believe they were, but I never saw any of them.” He hesitated, yet truth compelled the conclusion: “Except Mrs. Atwater's pearls—I saw them on her.”
“On Sarah?” Atwater couldn't follow him.
“No, around the Señora Trujillo's neck. She's got a corking neck and shoulders.”
The banker bent forward, his brows in a tangle. “Seems to have corked you. Shut up, J. L.! This is my affair, and it's a serious family matter, I tell you. If you saw that woman with Mrs. Atwater's necklace, my lad, why didn't you get it?”
“Well,” Buster elucidated, “at the time, it mightn't have been safe, and when I met her again, she wasn't wearing 'em, and I hadn't the heart to ask her.”
“The idea!” said Mrs. Cheavey.
Atwater shot a “Silence, madam,” over his shoulder. He glared at Buster like a man on the thin edge of apoplexy:
“You hadn't the heart to ask a receiver of stolen goods for my wife's pearls? What'd you mean 'hadn't the heart'?”
“She isn't a receiver of stolen goods, or else——”
Atwater picked up a pen and threw it down again. “Bah!”
“She's a plain adventuress!” protested John L. Kent, who saw his boy as innocence led astray.
“She's nothing of the kind,” said Buster warmly; “and I'm not in love with her, either. Adventuress? She was all the time fighting for her husband, for recognition of the new government by the United States, and for the real good of the Catamarcans, who hated her.”
“We don't care anything about them, young man.”
“Well, it'd be a good thing if you did—if the U. S. A. thought a little more about its next-door neighbors: I've found that out, anyhow. And what your trust company has got from me, Mr. Atwater, it owes to her—Señora Trujillo. I don't deserve any credit——”
“You're not getting any too much, my boy.”
“It was all her doing,” Buster determinedly pursued: “all I did was good luck.” He had gone on record for her; he rose, thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and, giving his back to his audience, stared moodily out of the glass door and into the banking room.
“None of that,” said Atwater. “I propose to learn——”
But just then Buster shouted “Wow!”
HE flung open the door and ran among the depositors. He rushed up to a tiny man with a white beard streaked yellow, the eyes of a spectacled bird and a general air of absent-mindedness—a scholarly man who clasped to his breast a badly done-up brown-paper parcel.
“My dear Mr. Kent,” said Professor McReynolds, R.P.D., Dr. Philol. and M.Ar., “they told me at your father's place of business you were here: I wanted your advice. You're hurting my hand a little, Mr. Kent. I came back sooner than I expected, because I have made a discovery of remarkable anthropological interest. It is so remarkable that I am afraid to carry it alone all the way to Pottawatomie County——”
“Yes, yes!” said Buster.
Through the flashes of his automatic saw two men running forward, rifles in their hands. His pistol grew silent—empty.
“And I regret to say that, even in science, men steal——”
“I know, professor.”
“Other men's ideas, Mr. Kent. I thought you might advise me how, until I shall have published my paper, I might store these at some place, here in New York, where they will have safe keeping.” He nodded at the parcel.
“You come along with me,” said Buster, “and, if they're what I think, they'll be kept absolutely safe.”
Dr. McReynolds skipped trustfully beside him. “You can't think what they are. Of probably little intrinsic value—for we know that the ancient Catamarcans were utterly ignorant of precious stones—I believe that, by the ingenuity, delicacy and durability of their settings, they prove a degree of civilization——”
Buster stopped him. “You found them in a temple north of Rio de Adrar, didn't you?”
The professor blinked. “How did you know?”
“Listen, doctor,” said Buster, as he stopped with his hand on the knob of Mr. Atwater's office-door. “I think you're on the wrong track. If you are, nobody'll ever know your mistake, and I'll see that there's an endowed chair of your specialty in Wufford University, and you can sit in it as long as you live, except when you feel like going abroad and digging—and you'll do that every year, if you want to, with all the latest equipment for an upnto-date excavation!”
“IF THERE'S a notary-public in this bank,” said Mrs. Cheavey a half-hour later, “I'll sign your release as soon as this gentleman”—she indicated Atwater—“makes out a certified check for the rewards—and I've cashed it.”
“Anything to get rid of you,” snapped the ungallant Atwater, pressing a button in his desk: “I'm authorized by the owners to pay 'em. But”—he turned again to Buster—“those pearls aren't here. This doesn't include our bargain, or square me with Sarah.”
And almost immediately he was squared: a bank-guard ushered in that non-political commander of the Catamarcan presidential yacht, Captain Crespo, short, pudgy, a prosperous replica, darkly done, of Mangus Cheavey, who had brought Buster to New York.
The captain flourished his gold-braided cap right and left, but especially in the direction of her who had been Minnie Milson. To her he had been officially sent—he had diligently found her Bronx address and thence traced her here—but upon his non-official and middle-aged susceptibilities, it was clear, she made a distinct impression. He had had entrusted to his care, by Her Excellency the Señora Trujillo, a gift for her and a letter, both of which he forth with delivered. It was in English:
    I know your husband, and therefore I know your distress. As a token of my sympathy, as a proof of my honor, I send you these pearls, which he mistakenly lent me, when he gratuitously offended me by the confession of his treatment of you and by the offer of his unworthy heart. I weep with you. There is, I understand, a reward: collect it.
    Accept, Madame, I pray you, my most sincere regards.
Eulalia.
“Now will you believe me?” asked Buster of Atwater—“and will you be a sport and sign up for that policy?”
“Oh, shut up!” said Atwater—he was all but chemically testing his wife's pearls. “Of course I will.”
John L. Kent clapped his son's broad back. “Some boy!” said he. “You can head any department in the Independence Corporation that you feel like heading.”
“It was all the Señora Trujillo,” said his son.
“But you've got a drag in Washington, Stan,” persisted the father. “See what you can do about that recognition business.”
The president of the Travelers' and Tailors' Trust Company grinned broadly: he had identified the pearls.
“Leave it to me,” said the banker. “Just now I've got to cable Sarah.”
Catain Crespo bent to Buster's ear. “Imprisonment for a felony: that is ground for divorce in your United States, is it not? What a dowry!”
“Sure it is,” said Buster. “I'll take the head of our Information Department, father. I've got to earn some money: Professor McReynolds has won all that Aunt Florence left me.” He held out his hand to Atwater, while Minnie Milson waited for her checks. “Con Dios, señor.”
The banker's grin became sheepish.
“Oh, shut up!” he said again. “You young fellows know it all, don't you?”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 64 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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