Chapter 5

“He owns it,” Aiken answered. “It’s like this,” he began. “You must understand that almost every republic in Central America is under the thumb of a big trading firm or a banking house or a railroad. For instance, all these revolutions you read about in the papers--it’s seldom they start with the people. The _puebleo_ don’t often elect a president or turn one out. That’s generally the work of a New York business firm that wants a concession. If the president in office won’t give it a concession the company starts out to find one who will. It hunts up a rival politician or a general of the army who wants to be president, and all of them do, and makes a deal with him. It promises him if he’ll start a revolution it will back him with the money and the guns. Of course, the understanding is that if the leader of the fake revolution gets in he’ll give his New York backers whatever they’re after. Sometimes they want a concession for a railroad, and sometimes it’s a nitrate bed or a rubber forest, but you can take my word for it that there’s very few revolutions down here that haven’t got a money-making scheme at the bottom of them.

“Now this present revolution was started by the Isthmian Steamship Line, of which Joe Fiske is president. It runs its steamers from New Orleans to the Isthmus of Panama. In its original charter this republic gave it the monopoly of the fruit-carrying trade from all Hondurian ports. In return for this the company agreed to pay the government $10,000 a year and ten per cent, on its annual receipts, if the receipts ever exceeded a certain amount. Well, curiously enough, although the line has been able to build seven new steamers, its receipts have never exceeded that fixed amount. And if you know these people the reason for that is very simple. The company has always given each succeeding president a lump sum for himself, on the condition that he won’t ask any impertinent questions about the company’s earnings. Its people tell him that it is running at a loss, and he always takes their word for it. But Garcia, when he came in, either was too honest, or they didn’t pay him enough to keep quiet. I don’t know which it was, but, anyway, he sent an agent to New Orleans to examine the company’s books. The agent discovered the earnings have been so enormous that by rights the Isthmian Line owed the government of Honduras $500,000. This was a great chance for Garcia, and he told them to put up the back pay or lose their charter. They refused and he got back at them by preventing their ships from taking on any cargo in Honduras, and by seizing their plant here and at Truxillo. Well, the company didn’t dare to go to law about it, nor appeal to the State Department, so it started a revolution. It picked out a thief named Alvarez as a figure-head and helped him to bribe the army and capture the capital. Then he bought a decision from the local courts in favor of the company. After that there was no more talk about collecting back pay. Garcia was an exile in Nicaragua. There he met Laguerre, who is a professional soldier of fortune, and together they cooked up this present revolution. They hope to put Garcia back into power again. How he’ll act if he gets in I don’t know. The common people believe he’s a patriot, that he’ll keep all the promises he makes them--and he makes a good many--and some white people believe in him, too. Laguerre believes in him, for instance. Laguerre told me that Garcia was a second Bolivar and Washington. But he might be both of them, and he couldn’t beat the Isthmian Line. You see, while he has prevented the Isthmian Line from carrying bananas, he’s cut off his own nose by shutting off his only source of supply. For these big corporations hang together at times, and on the Pacific side the Pacific Mail Company has got the word from Fiske, and they won’t carry supplies, either. That’s what I meant by saying that Joe Fiske owns Honduras. He’s cut it off from the world, and only _his_ arms and _his_ friends can get into it. And the joke of it is he can’t get out.”

“Can’t get out?” I exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

“Why, he’s up there at Tegucigalpa himself,” said Aiken. “Didn’t you know that? He’s up at the capital, visiting Alvarez. He came in through this port about two weeks ago.”

“Joseph Fiske is fighting in a Hondurian revolution?” I exclaimed.

“Certainly not!” cried Aiken. “He’s here on a pleasure trip; partly pleasure, partly business. He came here on his yacht. You can see her from the window, lying to the left of the buoy. Fiske has nothing to do with this row. I don’t suppose he knows there’s a revolution going on.”

I resented this pretended lack of interest on the part of the Wall Street banker. I condemned it as a piece of absurd affectation.

“Don’t you believe it!” I said. “No matter how many millions a man has, he doesn’t stand to lose $500,000 without taking an interest in it.”

“Oh, but he doesn’t know about _that_,” said Aiken. “He doesn’t know the ins and outs of the story--what I’ve been telling you. That’s on the inside--that’s cafe scandal. That side of it would never reach him. I suppose Joe Fiske is president of a _dozen_ steamship lines, and all he does is to lend his name to this one, and preside at board meetings. The company’s lawyers tell him whatever they think he ought to know. They probably say they’re having trouble down here owing to one of the local revolutions, and that Garcia is trying to blackmail them.”

“Then you don’t think Fiske came down here about this?” I asked.

“About this?” repeated Aiken, in a tone of such contempt that I disliked him intensely. For the last half hour Aiken had been jumping unfeelingly on all my ideals and illusions.

“No,” he went on. “He came here on his yacht on a pleasure trip around the West India Islands, and he rode in from here to look over the Copan Silver Mines. Alvarez is terribly keen to get rid of him. He’s afraid the revolutionists will catch him and hold him for ransom. He’d bring a good price,” Aiken added, reflectively. “It’s enough to make a man turn brigand. And his daughter, too. She’d bring a good price.”

“His daughter!” I exclaimed.

Aiken squeezed the tips of his fingers together, and kissed them, tossing the imaginary kiss up toward the roof. Then he drank what was left of his rum and water at a gulp and lifted the empty glass high in the air. “To the daughter,” he said.

It was no concern of mine, but I resented his actions exceedingly. I think I was annoyed that he should have seen the young lady while I had not. I also resented his toasting her before a stranger. I knew he could not have met her, and his pretence of enthusiasm made him appear quite ridiculous. He looked at me mournfully, shaking his head as though it were impossible for him to give me an idea of her.

“Why they say,” he exclaimed, “that when she rides along the trail, the native women kneel beside it.

“She’s the best looking girl I ever saw,” he declared, “and she’s a thoroughbred too!” he added, “or she wouldn’t have stuck it out in this country when she had a clean yacht to fall back on. She’s been riding around on a mule, so they tell me, along with her father and the engineering experts, and just as though she enjoyed it. The men up at the mines say she tired them all out.”

I had no desire to discuss the young lady with Aiken, so I pretended not to be interested, and he ceased speaking, and we smoked in silence. But my mind was nevertheless wide awake to what he had told me. I could not help but see the dramatic values which had been given to the situation by the presence of this young lady. The possibilities were tremendous. Here was I, fighting against her father, and here was she, beautiful and an heiress to many millions. In the short space of a few seconds I had pictured myself rescuing her from brigands, denouncing her father for not paying his honest debt to Honduras, had been shot down by his escort, Miss Fiske had bandaged my wounds, and I was returning North as her prospective husband on my prospective father-in-law’s yacht. Aiken aroused me from this by rising to his feet. “Now then,” he said, briskly, “if you want to go to Laguerre you can come with me. I’ve got to see him to explain why his guns haven’t arrived, and I’ll take you with me.” He made a wry face and laughed. “A nice welcome he’ll give me,” he said. I jumped to my feet. “There’s my trunk,” I said; “it’s ready, and so am I. When do we start?”

“As soon as it is moonlight,” Aiken answered.

The remainder of the day was spent in preparing for our journey. I was first taken to the commandante and presented to him as a commercial traveller. Aiken asked him for a passport permitting me to proceed to the capital “for purposes of trade.” As consular agent Aiken needed no passport for himself, but to avoid suspicion he informed the commandante that his object in visiting Tegucigalpa was to persuade Joseph Fiske, as president of the Isthmian Line, to place buoys in the harbor of Porto Cortez and give the commission for their purchase to the commandante. Aiken then and always was the most graceful liar I have ever met. His fictions were never for his own advantage, at least not obviously so. Instead, they always held out some pleasing hope for the person to whom they were addressed. His plans and promises as to what he would do were so alluring that even when I knew he was lying I liked to pretend that he was not. This particular fiction so interested the commandante that he even offered us an escort of soldiers, which honor we naturally declined.

That night when the moon had risen we started inland, each mounted on a stout little mule, and followed by a third, on which was swung my trunk, balanced on the other side by Aiken’s saddle bags. A Carib Indian whom Aiken had selected because of his sympathies for the revolution walked beside the third mule and directed its progress by the most startling shrieks and howls. To me it was a most memorable and marvellous night, and although for the greater part of it Aiken dozed in his saddle and woke only to abuse his mule, I was never more wakeful nor more happy. At the very setting forth I was pleasantly stirred when at the limit of the town a squad of soldiers halted us and demanded our passports. This was my first encounter with the government troops. They were barefooted and most slovenly looking soldiers, mere boys in age and armed with old-fashioned Remingtons. But their officer, the captain of the guard, was more smartly dressed, and I was delighted to find that my knowledge of Spanish, in which my grandfather had so persistently drilled me, enabled me to understand all that passed between him and Aiken. The captain warned us that the revolutionists were camped along the trail, and that if challenged we had best answer quickly that we were Americanos. He also told us that General Laguerre and his legion of “gringoes” were in hiding in the highlands some two days’ ride from the coast. Aiken expressed the greatest concern at this, and was for at once turning back. His agitation was so convincing, he was apparently so frightened, that, until he threw a quick wink at me, I confess I was completely taken in. For some time he refused to be calmed, and it was only when the captain assured him that his official position would protect him from any personal danger that he consented to ride on. Before we crossed the town limits he had made it quite evident that the officer himself was solely responsible for his continuing on his journey, and he denounced Laguerre and all his works with a picturesqueness of language and a sincerity that filled me with confusion. I even began to doubt if after all Aiken was not playing a game for both sides, and might not end my career by leading me into a trap. After we rode on I considered the possibility of this quite seriously, and I was not reassured until I heard the _mozo_, with many chuckles and shrugs of the shoulder, congratulate Aiken on the way he had made a fool of the captain.

“That’s called diplomacy, Jose,” Aiken told him. “That’s my statecraft. It’s because I have so much statecraft that I am a consul. You keep your eye on this American consul, Jose, and you’ll learn a lot of statecraft.”

Jose showed his teeth and grinned, and after he had dropped into a line behind us we could hear him still chuckling.

“You would be a great success in secret service work, Aiken,” I said, “or on the stage.”

We were riding in single file, and in order to see my face in the moonlight he had to turn in his saddle.

“And yet I didn’t,” he laughed.

“What do you mean,” I asked, “were you ever a spy or an actor?”

“I was both,” he said. “I was a failure at both, too. I got put in jail for being a spy, and I ought to have been hung for my acting.” I kicked my mule forward in order to hear better.

“Tell me about it,” I asked, eagerly. “About when you were a spy.”

But Aiken only laughed, and rode on without turning his head.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said after a pause. Then he looked at me over his shoulder. “It needs a big black background of experience and hard luck to get the perspective on that story,” he explained. “It wouldn’t appeal to you; you’re too young. They’re some things they don’t teach at West Point.”

“They teach us,” I answered, hotly, “that if we’re detailed to secret service work we are to carry out our orders. It’s not dishonorable to obey orders. I’m not so young as you think. Go on, tell me, in what war were you a spy?”

“It wasn’t in any war,” Aiken said, again turning away from me. “It was in Haskell’s Private Detective Agency.”

I could not prevent an exclamation, but the instant it had escaped me I could have kicked myself for having made it. “I beg your pardon,” I murmured, awkwardly.

“I said you wouldn’t understand,” Aiken answered. Then, to show he did not wish to speak with me further, he spurred his mule into a trot and kept a distance between us.

Our trail ran over soft, spongy ground and was shut in on either hand by a wet jungle of tangled vines and creepers. They interlaced like the strands of a hammock, choking and strangling and clinging to each other in a great web. From the jungle we came to ill-smelling pools of mud and water, over which hung a white mist which rose as high as our heads. It was so heavy with moisture that our clothing dripped with it, and we were chilled until our teeth chattered. But by five o’clock in the morning we had escaped the coast swamps, and reached higher ground and the village of Sagua la Grande, and the sun was drying our clothes and taking the stiffness out of our bones.

CANAL COMPANY’S FEVER HOSPITAL, PANAMA

The nurse brought me my diary this morning. She found it in the inside pocket of my tunic. All of its back pages were scribbled over with orders of the day, countersigns, and the memoranda I made after Laguerre appointed me adjutant to the Legion. But in the first half of it was what I see I was pleased to call my “memoirs,” in which I had written the last chapter the day Aiken and I halted at Sagua la Grande. When I read it over I felt that I was somehow much older than when I made that last entry. And yet it was only two months ago. It seems like two years. I don’t feel much like writing about it, nor thinking about it, but I suppose, if I mean to keep my “memoirs” up to date, I shall never have more leisure in which to write than I have now. For Dr. Ezequiel says it will be another two weeks before I can leave this cot. Sagua seems very unimportant now. But I must not write of it as I see it now, from this distance, but as it appealed to me then, when everything about me was new and strange and wonderful.

It was my first sight of a Honduranian town, and I thought it most charming and curious. As I learned later it was like any other Honduranian town and indeed like every other town in Central America. They are all built around a plaza, which sometimes is a park with fountains and tessellated marble pavements and electric lights, and sometimes only an open place of dusty grass. There is always a church at one end, and the cafe or club, and the alcalde’s house, or the governor’s palace, at another. In the richer plazas there must always be the statue of some Liberator, and in the poorer a great wooden cross. Sagua la Grande was bright and warm and foreign looking. It reminded me of the colored prints of Mexico which I had seen in my grandfather’s library. The houses were thatched clay huts with gardens around them crowded with banana palms, and trees hung with long beans, which broke into masses of crimson flowers. The church opposite the inn was old and yellow, and at the edge of the plaza were great palms that rustled and courtesied. We led our mules straight through the one big room of the inn out into the yard behind it, and while doing it I committed the grave discourtesy of not first removing my spurs. Aiken told me about it at once, and I apologized to everyone--to the alcalde, and the priest, and the village school-master who had crossed the plaza to welcome us--and I asked them all to drink with me. I do not know that I ever enjoyed a breakfast more than I did the one we ate in the big cool inn with the striped awning outside, and the naked brown children watching us from the street, and the palms whispering overhead. The breakfast was good in itself, but it was my surroundings which made the meal so remarkable and the fact that I was no longer at home and responsible to someone, but that I was talking as one man to another, and in a foreign language to people who knew no other tongue. The inn-keeper was a fat little person in white drill and a red sash, in which he carried two silver-mounted pistols. He looked like a ring-master in a circus, but he cooked us a most wonderful omelette with tomatoes and onions and olives chopped up in it with oil. And an Indian woman made us tortillas, which are like our buckwheat cakes. It was fascinating to see her toss them up in the air, and slap them into shape with her hands. Outside the sun blazed upon the white rim of huts, and the great wooden cross in the plaza threw its shadow upon the yellow facade of the church. Beside the church there was a chime of four bells swinging from a low ridge-pole. The dews and the sun had turned their copper a brilliant green, but had not hurt their music, and while we sat at breakfast a little Indian boy in crumpled vestments beat upon them with a stick, making a sweet and swinging melody. It did not seem to me a scene set for revolution, but I liked it all so much that that one breakfast alone repaid me for my long journey south. I was sure life in Sagua la Grande would always suit me, and that I would never ask for better company than the comic-opera landlord and the jolly young priest and the yellow-skinned, fever-ridden schoolmaster with his throat wrapped in a great woollen shawl. But very soon, what with having had no sleep the night before and the heat, I grew terribly drowsy and turned in on a canvas cot in the corner, where I slept until long after mid-day. For some time I could hear Aiken and the others conversing together and caught the names of Laguerre and Garcia, but I was too sleepy to try to listen, and, as I said, Sagua did not seem to me to be the place for conspiracies and revolutions. I left it with real regret, and as though I were parting with friends of long acquaintanceship.

From the time we left Sagua the path began to ascend, and we rode in single file along the edges of deep precipices. From the depths below giant ferns sent up cool, damp odors, and we could hear the splash and ripple of running water, and at times, by looking into the valley, I could see waterfalls and broad streams filled with rocks, which churned the water into a white foam. We passed under tall trees covered with white and purple flowers, and in the branches of others were perched macaws, giant parrots of the most wonderful red and blue and yellow, and just at sunset we startled hundreds of parroquets which flew screaming and chattering about our heads, like so many balls of colored worsted.

When the moon rose, we rode out upon a table-land and passed between thick forests of enormous trees, the like of which I had never imagined. Their branches began at a great distance from the ground and were covered thick with orchids, which I mistook for large birds roosting for the night. Each tree was bound to the next by vines like tangled ropes, some drawn as taut as the halyards of a ship, and others, as thick as one’s leg; they were twisted and wrapped around the branches, so that they looked like boa-constrictors hanging ready to drop upon one’s shoulders. The moonlight gave to this forest of great trees a weird, fantastic look. I felt like a knight entering an enchanted wood. But nothing disturbed our silence except the sudden awakening of a great bird or the stealthy rustle of an animal in the underbrush. Near midnight we rode into a grove of manacca palms as delicate as ferns, and each as high as a three-story house, and with fronds so long that those drooping across the trail hid it completely. To push our way through these we had to use both arms as one lifts the curtains in a doorway.

{Illustration: I was sure life in Sagua la Grande would always suit me.}

Aiken himself seemed to feel the awe and beauty of the place, and called the direction to me in a whisper. Even that murmur was enough to carry above the rustling of the palms, and startled hundreds of monkeys into wakefulness. We could hear their barks and cries echoing from every part of the forest, and as they sprang from one branch to another the palms bent like trout-rods, and then swept back into place again with a strange swishing sound, like the rush of a great fish through water.