Chapter XX: APPENDICES & NOTES

O D T A A

I

Santa Barbara, being the most leeward of the Sugar States, is at the angle of the Continent, with two coasts, one facing north, the other east. The city of Santa Barbara is in a bay at the angle where these two coasts trend from each other.

Those who will look at the map of the State will see that it contains, in all, ten provinces: three eastern, four central, three western, each of which must be briefly described. The visitor sees the land as low-lying coast, growing sugar, with immense ranges of scrub, wild land and pasture behind the sugar country, then foothills above and behind the ranges, and behind the foothills, as the southern boundary of the State, the Sierras of the Three Kings, all forest to the snowline.

The easternmost province of the State is that of Santa Barbara, which contains the capital city. This, Meruel and Redemption, are the three eastern provinces.

Meruel, to the south of Santa Barbara, has a more temperate climate than the western provinces, owing to the cold Southern Drift which follows the prevalent southerly along the coast. Meruel, the capital of the province, stands on a rise of iron outcrop which gives the earth a reddish look. The people of Santa Barbara nicknamed the Meruel land “the Red Country” and the Meruel people “the Reds.”

Redemption, the coal country, lies to the south and west of Meruel. It was formerly a small independent Republic. It was seized by Santa Barbara in 1865, in the war of aggression known as the Redemption War, when a young man, Lopez Zubiaga, the son of a Meruel landowner, “wedded” (as they put it) “the Meruel iron to the Redemption coal.”

The four central provinces are Pituba, near the sea, San Jacinto, in the heart of the State, and the two mountain masses, Gaspar and Melchior.

Pituba, once the home of the warlike Carib race, the Pitubas, is now one of the richest sugar countries in the world. It stretches along the northern coast for nearly two hundred miles, no mile of which is without its plantation, either of sugar or of coffee.

San Jacinto, which lies to the south of Pituba, is the most barren of the provinces; most of it is of that poor soil known as scrubs or burnt land: it is mainly thorny waste, with patches of pasture. In spite of its barrenness, it is most beautiful, because of its expanses. Its chief town, the Mission city of San Jacinto, stands on a peninsula rock above the river of San Jacinto, which rises in the Sierras and comes down in force there, in a raddled and dangerous stream (now controlled so as to be navigable).

Gaspar and Melchior, to the south of San Jacinto, are vast, wild, forested mountain masses.

The three western provinces are Baltazar, Encinitas and Matoche.

Baltazar, to the south, is a mountain mass, forested to the snowline: it is part of the Sierra, like Gaspar and Melchior.

Encinitas, to the north of Baltazar, lies between the San Jacinto River and the Western Bay. Of all the provinces, Encinitas is the most delightful to an English mind. It is mainly an expanse of grass, marvellous to see. It rises from the river into a range of downs or gentle hills, called the Encarnacion Hills, which are crowned with a little walled town, called Encinitas, because the Conquistador, who founded it, came from the village of that name in Spain.

To the north of Encinitas there is a narrow, hilly strip which thrusts out a snout into the ocean. The strip is the western province of Matoche: the snout is the northernmost point of the State, Cape Caliente. The copper found in the hills is smelted and exported at Port Matoche, on the western coast of the snout, in the deep water at the mouth of the Western Bay, the State’s western boundary.

The bay is a deep, dangerous expanse dotted with volcanic islets.

At the time of this story, and for many years afterwards, only seven of the ten provinces ranked as inhabited. The mass of the Sierras, forest to the snowline, were hardly visited by white men: the three forest provinces of Gaspar, Melchior and Baltazar had not been explored. Seasonal rains made the forest unendurable from November until April: the forest fever, to which the Indians burnt copal in copper bowls, was fatal to man and beast from April till November.

* * * * *

At the time of the Spanish Conquest the lowlands were inhabited by small warlike tribes of Caribs who lived in stockaded settlements near the coasts. Of these tribes, the Araguayas, of Meruel, and the Pitubas, of Pituba, were the most important. When the Spaniards landed, Don Manuel of Encinitas, the Conquistador of the State, allied himself to the Pitubas by marrying the daughter of their chief. With the help of his allies he exterminated the Araguayas and drove the survivors of all other tribes into the forests of the south, where a few of their descendants still exist, as forest-Indians; that is, as the shadows of what they were.

After the conquest, vast tracks of land in Encinitas were granted to Don Manuel: other tracts in San Jacinto were granted to a Castilian noble, from whom they passed to a branch of the de Leyvas.

The colony or province of Santa Barbara was administered like all other Spanish possessions in the New World for a little more than three centuries. Jesuit missionaries converted the Indians; the owners of haciendas imported negroes. In the course of the three centuries the northward provinces became sparsely inhabited by horse and cattle breeders, sugar-growers, rum-makers and copper-miners, governed (if it can be called government) by a Viceroy in Santa Barbara city.

In the year 1817, the inhabitants, following the example of other Spanish colonists, broke the link with Spain, by declaring the land to be the Republic of Santa Barbara, with a Constitution partly modelled upon that of the United States. At the time of the foundation of the Republic the State contained, perhaps, one hundred thousand souls, of whom not more than one-third were white.

It happened that a retired English naval lieutenant named William Higgs-Rixon took a prominent part in the capture of Santa Barbara from the Spanish garrison. For this reason, and from the fact that English merchants were the only traders to and from the country, English was taught in the schools, and English people were (as they still are) popular throughout the State. After the War of Independence a good many Englishmen came (and were welcomed) as settlers in the land about Santa Barbara city. In the ’fifties and ’sixties the copper boom brought others, mostly Cornishmen, to Matoche. After the Redemption War a good many more (mostly from the northern Midlands) came to Meruel, to mine iron or coal. In the ’seventies others, from all parts of England, settled as sugar-planters along the northern sea coast in the Pituba country. These men, though they were but a sprinkling, helped profound changes in the land, which in three generations of men multiplied the population tenfold.

It is well, now, to talk of these changes.

Soon after the establishment of the Republic the two political parties in the land became defined as Feudalist and Modernist. In Encinitas and in western San Jacinto, the will of the great landowners was still law: in Santa Barbara City, Pituba and in Meruel a new and vigorous race was demanding freedom from the feudal lords and wider teaching than the priests gave. As the feeling between the two parties ran highest upon the point of Church teaching, the Church party, which was that of the great landlords, came to be known as the Surplices or Whites. For a while, as the Reds were without a leader, the governments of the Republic were White.

Mention was made of one Lopez Zubiaga, who seized the coal country of Redemption in 1865. This Lopez, born in 1840, was the first leader of the Red or forward party to count in affairs. At the time of the Redemption raid, he was a tall, strongly built, masterful and very handsome young man, with a contemptuous manner and savage courage. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, which made some think that he was not the son of the landowner, but of an Englishman, named variously Corbet, Corphitt or Cardiff, about whom there had been talk.

After his success in seizing Redemption, Lopez was elected President of the Republic in place of old General Chavez, the White. As President he rallied the Reds, and carried through what was called “the Liberal Struggle,” which made all Meruel and Redemption places of mines and factories, and took the schools from the control of the Church. After four years of his Presidency, the Whites returned to office, under the hidalgo, Miguel de Leyva, of San Jacinto, a man of burning faith, more ardent than wise, who provoked the forward party almost to the point of civil war. At the next election, the Whites were turned out of office and the Reds put in, with such unanimity that Lopez could rule as he chose. After the election of 1878, which repeated his triumph, Lopez declared himself Dictator, “while his country had need of him.”

Miguel de Leyva, disgusted, retired from politics: the Whites had no other leader, save young General Luis Chavez, who was indolent, and Hermengildo Bazan, who was only a speaker.

The Dictatorship of Lopez was marked outwardly by a great increase in the foreign trade of the eastern provinces, the threefold growth of the city of Santa Barbara, and an improvement of all the ports, harbours and coastwise railways. After 1884, those who studied the land’s politics felt that the real Dictator was no longer Lopez, but old Mordred Weycock, the manager of the United Sugar Company, an unscrupulous business man.

It was at this time that the oddness and brusqueness in Lopez’ character changed to a madness not likely to be forgotten.

* * * * *

The madness began to show itself in a passion for building big and costly public works. He rebuilt the cathedral (a Colonial Renaissance building) on the lines of the temple at Hloatl. He built himself a palace of glass, having heard, though wrongly, that the Queen of England lived in one. He then built himself a summerhouse, roofed with silver plates, and added to it an ivory room inlaid with gold. Being a Red, he caused all the bread used in his palace to be coloured red. He frequented shambles in order to see, as he said, “the divine colour.”

He had two favourites. Livio and Zarzas; two negro servants, Green Feather and the Knife; and one son, the child of his youth, Don José, born in 1860, a depraved youth of sickly beauty, who headed a clique of vicious lads at the court.

Late in the year 1886, the Dictator’s madness began to take other forms, of hatred and suspicion of the Whites, fear of assassination, and the belief that he was god. All these obsessions were fostered by Mordred Weycock, who contrived to win, from each of them, advantages for himself or his firm.

In all his schemes, Mordred was helped by his nephew, Roger Weycock, twenty-seven years of age, who had been in Santa Barbara since 1883, after having failed for the Diplomatic Service. Roger was a tall, polite, brown-haired, fair-bearded man, with a pleasant manner and a pale, inscrutable face. He was the channel through which Englishmen knew Santa Barbara. It was through his able weekly letters to the English press that English opinion was in favour of Lopez for so long. He knew Lopez to be mad; but the Red party favoured his firm and he had no pity for the Whites: old Miguel de Leyva had once kept him waiting in the hall, and had then brushed by to lunch.

Miguel de Leyva was now dead, leaving many children, including his youngest, the girl Carlotta, born in 1868, who even in infancy impressed people as a creature from another world. She comes into this story (as into many others) as a rare thing, whose passing made all things not quite the same. She was of a delicate, exquisite, unearthly charm, which swayed men, women and children: the Indians of San Jacinto used to kneel as she passed: some have said that animals and birds would come to her: at the least she had a beauty and grace not usual.

* * * * *

Nearly all the province of Encinitas was owned by the last descendant of the Conquistador, Don Manuel of Encinitas, who lived at his palace in his town, or in his hacienda below it, with his old mother, whom they called the Queen Dowager.

Don Manuel was born in 1857. He has been so often described, that it need only be said of him that he was a very glorious young man, noble in beauty and in intellect. In the days of this story he was an unmarried man of not quite thirty. In his youth, before his father died, he had had his wild time in the city with other young men. He had been a friend of Don José, Don Lopez’ son, and had practised black magic with Rafael Hirsch. All this ceased when his father died in 1879. Since then he had lived at Encarnacion, breeding horses, for the men of his State, who are among the great horsemen of the world. He took his stature, beauty and masterful fierce eyes from his mother, the Queen Dowager, who had been a Peralta from Matoche.

In October, 1886, Don Manuel met Carlotta de Leyva for the first time: they became betrothed that same month, to the great joy of the Queen Dowager, who had longed to see her son married.

Miguel de Leyva had a sister Emilia, who married a Piranha of Santa Barbara city, and lived there, after her husband’s death, in a house too big for her fortune. She had been much in England with her husband, either for pleasure or the marketing of copper. She spoke English well. She caused her daughter Rosa, who had been for some years a convent friend of her cousin Carlotta, to spend a year in an English household. Rosa returned to Santa Barbara from England some months before this tale begins.

Rosa Piranha was then nearly twenty, being a few months older than Carlotta. She was slight in build and not very strong, but had a mannish spirit, with courage and dash enough for anything. She had no looks: she was very short-sighted: she always wore tinted spectacles, even when indoors. Yet she was amusing, and very attractive: several Englishmen proposed to her during her stay in England; but she would not marry into their Church.

She was brown-haired, not dark like most of her country women. In herself she had that mixture of boyish cheek with feminine grace which one loves in Viola, in “Twelfth Night.”

On New Year’s Day, 1887, Carlotta and Manuel planned to be married at Easter, in the cathedral church of Santa Barbara.

On that same New Year’s Day, Don Lopez, the Dictator, in his palace of Plaza Verde, in Santa Barbara city, gave a lunch to some of the great of the State, the Red ministers, his son Don José, his creatures Don Livio and Don Zarzas, some merchants and English speculators and the Archbishop of Santa Barbara. At this lunch he publicly accused the prelate of using the power of the Church against the Red party. “I have my eyes everywhere, like the Almighty,” he said. “Nor can there be two supreme authorities, here or in heaven.”

To this the Archbishop replied: “There is but one supreme authority: Lucifer has always found that.”

To this Don Lopez answered: “A greater than Lucifer prepares his wings.” Having said this, in tones of threat, he rose from the banquet, told Pluma Verde to call the prelate’s carriage, and invited his other guests to come within, to watch some dancers.

Roger Weycock, who was present at this lunch, has left an account of it in his history, _The Last of the Dictators_, where he says that, “It made him feel that some explosion within the State was about to occur.” He wrote that evening to the English newspapers that Don Lopez had received information of a White conspiracy against him: “No names were mentioned; but all the great White families, as well as the Church, are said to be involved. It is possible that Don Lopez will be forced to take extreme measures, to end for ever the menace of White reprisals. The Whites have never forgiven and never will forgive his part in ‘the Liberal struggle’ and in the remaking of the land. The Church hates him for his establishment of secular schools: the great landowners hate him for his establishment of a commercial class which out-manœuvres them in Senate and out-votes them in Congress. This must not seem to suggest that either Church or hidalgos would go so far as to employ an assassin; but both parties of the White side control large numbers of violent, ignorant, passionate fanatics, to whom the killing of Lopez would be an act pleasing to God. What Don Lopez seems to expect is a _soulèvement générale_ of the Whites against his government at the time of the Easter celebrations.

“Undoubtedly, with such a ruler as Don Lopez, forewarned is forearmed: we need not doubt that he has the situation well in hand.”

As it happens, another Englishman, without any bias of party or interest, saw Don Lopez on this New Year’s Day, and described him thus: “I watched Don Lopez, while I was with him, very carefully, because of the strange tales I had heard of his extravagance in building, in cedarwood, ivory and silver, etc. I had thought that these were lies or exaggerations, but I am now convinced that they are true. He has built or begun to build such buildings, but not finished them: he never finishes: he begins, then begins something grander, and then begins something new.

“All the time that I was with him some unseen musicians made music upon some Indian instruments, seemingly of some kind of strings and a rattle. It was irritating at first, then perplexing, then troublesome and exciting. I was told that he has this music always in his palace. He listened to what I had to say with attention, and said that what I wished should be done. Then, to my surprise, he said, ‘They are seeking my life. One of them was behind the gateway this afternoon. See there, you see that man passing beyond the gates? He is a murderer, paid by those Whites to kill me. My mission here is not accomplished. It is but begun. What did Jove do in heaven? He forged thunderbolts. He crushed them. But Jove was all-seeing. I, too, am becoming all-seeing. This palace may seem stone to your eyes, but it is not stone. It is all eyes, and this city is all eyes, and I see into their hearts, into their councils, into the pretence of their God. But a little while longer and the world will see that a ruler can be godlike, as in Rome.’

“I was made a little uneasy by his words and by the restless, queer manner in which he uttered them. I had seen him some years before, when I had been much struck by his air of overbearing masterfulness. That air was still on him. He looked masterful and overbearing, but there was something about him now which did not look well. His hair seemed thin and somewhat staring, his skin seemed dry and his eyes both dry and bright. Then his mouth, which had always shown an expression between a snarl and a sneer, seemed permanently caught up at one side, so as to show the teeth. Possibly it was some malformation, possibly some play of muscle, which had become habitual or fixed, but it gave the effect of a state of nerves, never (as I should imagine) quite human, that had become those of a tiger about to bite. I was suddenly reminded of one of the late busts of Nero.

“Seeing me looking through the window at the marble tank surrounding the palace fountain, he said to me, ‘What colour is the water in the fountain?’

“‘It looks whiteish.’

“‘So has my mercy to the Whites been,’ he said. ‘But let them beware or I will fill that fountain with their blood and their daughters shall come to see it play. If they call too much upon God to help them, God shall reveal Himself. If you have any White friend, tell him that. I am as patient as God. But tell them that.’

“All the time that he spoke his two great negroes stood behind his throne, each holding his sword. They were naked to the waist. People mistook them sometimes for bronzes. That disgusting creature, his son, Don José, stood at another window, killing flies. He was a languid-looking youth, sickly and vicious, with a face of exquisite features, showing neither intellect nor will, nothing but depravity. He turned to me as his father ceased speaking.

“‘There will be a baptism of blood,’ he said, ‘to the sound of flutes.’

“It was time at that moment for the Dictator to ride abroad. His Indians entered with his riding costume, a golden head-dress and a tunic of gold chain-mail all set about with the plumes of the scarlet-crested dill-birds.

“‘See,’ he said, ‘this is what they force me to wear. I, who am God, the father of this land, have to wear gold mail, lest I be assassinated. Let them see to it.’

“When he had put this on, he looked, as he always did, magnificent beyond description. I understood how it was that his Indians worshipped him as God. They decked him with a scarlet serape and led him out to his horse. It was a white stallion, which he was afterwards said to have fed with human flesh. He and his bodyguard of Indians set out at a gallop. They always galloped at this time from this fear of assassination, which had become an obsession to him. I must say that I was glad when he had gone.

“One of his two negroes, the one with the knife, said, ‘He ride the White horse; that show the Whites he ride them. He ride with spur, too: you see.’”

Bill Ridden was an English gentleman who comes a little into this story. In his youth he spent some years in Santa Barbara, where he made a good deal of money in the copper boom at Matoche. He was a very good friend to the Piranhas at this time (and later in the copper crisis). He was a man of strong affections; he kept in touch with his friends in Santa Barbara long after he had returned to England and settled down. He married in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ocle, a loud, fresh-coloured, robust mare of a woman, by whom, as he put it, he “sired some colts and fillies, as well as a darned pup I might have drowned.” This “pup” was his youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, born in 1869, who was not quite eighteen when this tale begins. It was at Bill Ridden’s house that Rosa Piranha spent her year in England.

This house was the Foliats, in Berkshire, where Bill’s mother’s people, the Foliats, had lived. It was a small, red-brick Queen Anne house, with a racing stable at the back and the Downs behind the racing stable. Here Bill bred steeplechasers and rode much to hounds. Bill was an ugly devil, foul-mouthed and rude, something between a publican and a horse-coper in appearance, yet strangely gentle with women and horses. He had a Judge Jeffreys manner on the bench of magistrates. He loved his daughter Bell and hated his youngest son. “If he had been a pup,” he used to say, “I could have drowned him; if he had been a trout, I could have put him back; but being this, by God, there is nothing that I can do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he’s got guts enough not to sink.”

His wife, Sarah Ridden, was fond of this son, but wished that he would be like others boys, “not always messing about with cog-wheels.” Her children had gone from her into the world, with the exception of her daughter Bell, a year older than the boy. She found life easier with the boy out of the house, “not putting my old man’s back up.” Quiet life, the Liverpool Spring Meeting and asparagus were the things she loved best; but she was a fine rider and understood horses.

Bell Ridden, the daughter, was a lovely, shy girl, worshipped by her father and mother. As she lived at home, she helped her father in the stable: she was clever with horses; the stable boys loved her: she got more out of them than Bill could. It was her instinct that sent the Lilybud to Mandarin, by which Bill got Chinese White, the horse which won him his glory.

The five older children were scattered: Polly and Sally married, Harold in a line regiment, Chilcote and Rowton in the city, in copper.

This brings us to the youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, the Hi of these pages, the lad who had not yet found what he could do. He was of the middling height and build, with brown hair, and a pleasant, freckled face, somewhat puckered at the eyes from his habit of not wearing a hat. His eyes were grey-blue, under eyebrows darker than one would expect from the eyes: his nose was a small pug nose, neatly made and set. His ears were well made and placed. His mouth was wide, pleasant, thin-lipped and firm. He was a nice-looking lad, who would have done well enough under other parents, or with none.

Being the last of the seven, he came at a time when both his parents had had enough of children, but wanted, as they said, “a filly to finish up with.” As Hi turned out to be a colt, or as Bill put it, “another of these buck pups to have about,” he was a disappointment to them from the first.

He went to the school where the other Riddens had been, he got his second eleven colours in his last summer term; but learned nothing; he was “always messing about with cog-wheels.”

In the Christmas holidays Bill called him into his “study,” where he kept two hunting horns, six long hunting-pictures by Henry Alken, seven foxes’ masks (one of them almost white, killed in the winter of the great frost), eleven crops on a rack, three small oil portraits of Moonbird, Sirocco and Peter, much tobacco of all sorts, and many bottles of liqueur, made by himself.

“Now, Highworth,” he said, “you’ve come to an age now when you’ve got to decide what to do. You’ve had a first-rate education; at least, if you haven’t, it’s your own fault, I know it’s cost enough. Now what are you going to be? What do you want to do?”

“Well, sir, as you know, I’ve always wanted to be an engineer.”

“I’ve already gone into that, boy. I thought you knew my mind on that point once for all. But it’s the kind of answer I expected from this last report of yours. You waste your time at an expensive public school messing with toy engines with that young maniac you persuaded us to invite here, and then say you want to be an engineer. A nice thing it would be for your mother and sister to see you a . . . mechanic doing the drains with a spanner. By God, boy, you’ve got a fine sense of pride, I don’t think.”

Hi said that engineering was a fine profession and that lots of people went in for it.

“What do you know about its being a fine profession?”

“Because it gives men all sorts of power, sir.”

“Power be damned, boy. Power to stink of paraffin whenever they go out to dinner; though that must be seldom, even now, I’m glad to think.”

“Sir James Russel was a fine man, sir; and so was William Horrocks, who made the Gartishan Dam.”

“Sir James Russel may have been God Almighty, for all I know or care; I never heard of him; but William Horrocks I do know, or at least know of, for his uncle was old John Horrocks, the mealman down at Kill Hill, and a dirtier, old, snuffy scoundrel I never saw out of an almshouse.”

“I don’t know what his uncle was, sir.”

“No, boy, but if you will let me say so, the point is, that I do.”

“Yes, sir, but I am talking of William Horrocks.”

“I think I understand as much. I am merely pointing out to you, in the teeth of a great deal of interruption, that your hero was a man whom no one here would touch with a barge-pole or have inside his house.”

“Sir, a man ought not to be judged by what his uncle is, but by what he is in himself.”

“A man is judged by what his uncle is. In this country, thank God, having respectable relations counts for a good deal, and so it should. You’re a Ridden and a Foliat, and I’m not going to have you messing an honoured name with wheel-grease because you’ve read some damned subversive rag which you’ve neither the sense to drop nor the wit to judge. There are some things which a man can do and keep his self-respect and be asked out to dinner, but going round with a spanner isn’t one of them.”

“I don’t ask to go round with a spanner, sir, nor to be asked out to dinner.”

“What do you ask, then?”

“I would like to learn engineering, sir, because I’ve always enjoyed engines and the application of power, and that sort of thing.”

“What do you call that but going round with a spanner? And how do you propose to learn engineering?”

“I hoped, sir, that you would let me go to an engineering works.”

“Engineering works be damned.”

“I don’t see it, sir. It’s the thing I should do best.”

“Well, I do see it, sir, and it’s the thing I won’t have.”

“But why not, sir? I should work at it. I shouldn’t disgrace you.”

“Your notions of disgrace aren’t mine. Your notions of disgrace are the sort of damned sentiment that will wreck this country and all that’s in it.”

“I don’t see why, sir. I don’t want to argue with you, sir; but it is important to me: what I am to do all my life.”

“It is equally important to me that my son should not make a mistaken choice.”

“But what a man most wants to do, sir, can’t be a mistaken choice.”

“You’re not a man; but a damned young ass. That being so, and it is so, it’s for me to decide. I’ve got to supply the money whatever you do; I suppose you won’t deny that.”

“I was wondering, sir, whether you would advance to me Aunt Melloney’s money, that I’m to have when I’m of age, and let me pay for myself.”

“Pay what for yourself?”

“The fees or premiums, sir, for going through the shops.”

“So that’s what the fellow meant, was it? Now I know. ‘The shops,’ he said. There was a drunken engineer at Newmarket, who said, ‘Let the gentleman keep clear of the shops.’ He was drunk when he said it; but that’s what he meant; now I know; and he showed a fine sense of the situation.”

“Would you advance me the money, sir?”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort. These engineers and fellows are a gang I will not tolerate. They defile God’s country. They’ve already spoiled the hunting, and the racing’s following as fast as it can go. If you’d been a boy with any guts, instead of clockwork, you’d have been glad, I should have thought, to have been at home here, and borne a hand in the stable. Breeding is about the last thing this poor country’s got in these damned days. We’ve still got horses, thank God. We don’t depend on a traction-engine gang, doing a tenth of the work for double the money. Why don’t you take off your coat and come into the stable? It’s a needed job; a pleasant job; and a gentleman’s job, what’s more. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, sir; but I’m not very good at horses. Besides, you’ve got Bell in the stables. I should only be in the way.”

“Ashamed of working with your sister, are you?”

“No, sir; but Bell wouldn’t want me there, and you’d always be swearing at me.”

“Damme,” Bill said, “there are things in you boys that would make any father swear. You go to a prep. school for three years, then to a public school for five years, then you ask to be kept for another seven while you learn a profession, and by God, when you’ve learnt it, you can’t make a living at it. I’ve been talking to your mother about this, as well as to Rosa Piranha before she sailed. You’ll not go back to school, that I’m resolved on, after this last report. You’ll stay here a week or two to get some clothes, and then you’ll do what I did. You’ll go to Santa Barbara and see if you can keep your head above water by your own hands. If you can, well and good. You will have letters to people; a lot better people than I ever had; and you will have time given you to look about you. You ought to be able to make good; I don’t say in copper, that is over, but in a new land there are new things and new opportunities. There are always sugar, tobacco and ranching; there should be timber, cocoa, piacaba, countless things. As I said, you ought to be able to make good. If you can’t, it will be your own lookout. You’ve got to paddle your own canoe, like any other youngest son. Now I’m not going to have any argument about the superior beauties of cog-wheels. I’ve written to people and written about your ticket. Since you won’t work in the stable here and have no choice of your own, except a damned dirty falallery which I won’t have, you’ll go to Santa Barbara. You may count yourself more than lucky to have the chance. Very few youngest sons ever get into the sun at all, but stink in a rotten town, by God, where even the horses puke at the air they breathe.

“You turn up your nose, do you? I wish I was going to Santa Barbara to have my time again. You can turn up your nose as much as you like, but that’s what you’ll do, so make up your mind to it. When you’ve seen the place you’ll thank me for having sent you there. When you’ve been there a few days you’ll thank your stars for your luck.”

Hi did not answer his father, knowing that thumbs were down. His heart sank at the thought of the foreign country, yet leaped again at the thought of liberty from school and life beginning. He had still one little ray of hope, which his mother extinguished.

“Your father’s got his back up,” she said. “Between you and me, Hi, he has had a bad year. Newmarket was nearly a finisher. So be a good old sport and go; there’s a dear. There’s far more scope there than here; everybody says so. Besides, your Aunt Melloney’s money went into Hicks’s. I don’t know that you could get it out, even if your father agreed.”

* * * * * * *

There was a brief delay, in spite of Bill’s speed, because the first letter from Rosa Piranha brought the news that Santa Barbara politics were somewhat unsettled. Bill had to pause to make some enquiries, through his sons in the copper business and his friends in the United Sugar Company. “It’s probably nothing much,” he said, when he had heard the reports. “These Reds and Whites are always at each other, in the way these foreigners always are. It won’t concern the boy, if he’s got the sense to keep out of it. Let him go and learn sense in the only school for it.” After this, there was a second brief delay for farewell visits to relations. When Hi returned from these, his clothes, of drill and flannel, were ready in their ant-proof tin trunks. Towards the end of February, he sailed for Santa Barbara city in the _Recalde_.

During the week in which he left home, Don José, the son of the Dictator, caused his favourite, Lucas Zanja, to be beheaded in the ivory room, “so that he might enjoy,” as he said, “the beauty of the blood upon the ivory.” Don Lopez’ papers called this a

DASTARDLY ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE OUR PRESIDENT’S SON

and added in smaller type

ASSASSIN PERISHES IN THE ATTEMPT.

The Whites did nothing. Zanja was infamous, even for a Red of the palace set.

II

Hi had planned to learn “enough Spanish to rub along with” on the voyage out, but fate disposed of this plan. He was seasick till after Lisbon; then they started cricket; then, by chance, he met the third engineer, who was as fond of cog-wheels as himself. After this, he passed most of his time either in the third engineer’s cabin or in the engine-room. He learned no Spanish whatever. “You’ll not need it,” the third engineer said, “they’re very intelligent people: they’ll make out what you want.”

Ten mornings later Hi was roused from sleep by his cabin steward.

“The dawn is just breaking, Mr. Ridden,” he said. “We are just entering the outer harbour now.”

Hi turned out on deck in his pyjamas; he saw before him the promised land of Santa Barbara about which he had thought so much. It was still dim, close in shore. A big light was near at hand to his right; a small revolving light blinked far away to the left. In between, in the arc of the bay, were the lights of the city and of the ships at anchor. The city itself was little more than a smudge against a darkness. Far beyond the city, in a line like an army, were the high Sierras of the Three Kings. Their peaks rose up out of the clouds like mountains in another world. As they were now catching the dawn they seemed made of jewels. Mount Gaspar was golden. Mount Baltazar was like a bubble of blood, and Mount Melchior a blue and evil finger glistening. As Hi watched, amazed by the beauty of the scene, colour began to come upon the bay. He saw away to his left an enormous expanse of shallow water, over which strange birds, such as he had never seen, were now passing from their night ashore.

“You see those birds?” said the fourth officer of the _Recalde_ beside him. “They’re bobacherry birds. You always see them working their lower jaws as though to get the cherry in. It’s a pretty place, Santa Barb, of a morning like this.”

He passed away to get the watch to the washing of the decks; Hi remained staring at the shore.

“I had never thought that it was to be like this,” he thought. “It’s like an earthly paradise. I might have been stewing in London like Rowton; or being frozen up six months of the year in British Columbia. I shall be as happy here as the day is long.”

As the _Recalde_ passed the dead-slow limit Hi saw some lighters bearing down upon her from both sides, urged by the sweeps of such men as he had never seen nor dreamed of. They were wild-looking men of enormous stature. All were almost naked; all shone as though the life in them made them radiant. All were of a rich red-golden colour like new pennies. Even the smallest of them looked a match for two strong Europeans. Even the most benign of them looked like the devil he was and the cannibal he could be. All wore gold, ivory or copper placques, shaped like new moons, which hung from their noses and covered their mouths. They looked curiously like the lids of letter-boxes.

“See those fellows, Mr. Ridden?” said the captain on the bridge. “They’re Pitubas from up-country and they’re cannibals to a man. You’d better put a coat over those pyjamas of yours, or the sight of you may be more than they can stand. They like their meat white, and they like it young.”

Some of the lighters swept alongside and made fast, the winches at once began at all three hatches; baggage and mails were hove out before the _Recalde_ reached her moorings. At breakfast the tables were covered with flowers and fruits, of kinds new to Hi. Clinging to the flowers were insects, coloured like jewels, shaped like sticks, or leaves or blades of grass.

“This is your first taste of the new world, Mr. Ridden,” said the captain, “what d’you think of it?”

“I think it’s amazing, sir,” Hi said.

“Well, it’s all that,” said the captain, “but after a few years of it, you’ll curse these blue skies and give a year’s pay to be able to see your breath.”

“I don’t think I shall ever tire of this, sir,” Hi said. “It’s the kind of place I have dreamed of all my life.”

“Pretty scenery,” the captain said. “But give me Sefton Park.”

* * * * * * *

After breakfast, Hi was rowed ashore from the _Recalde_, to begin his new life. He saw the _Recalde_, which linked him with home (for his mother had walked her deck and leaned over her rail), now drop away into the past. In front of him was a new world, to which he had at present three keys, his friendship with the Piranhas, a letter to Mr. Roger Weycock of the Sugar Company, and a letter to Mr. Allan Winter, a sugar-planter (not far from the city) whom Bill had known in the past. These were his keys, but his father had told him not to trust to them. “The thing you’ve got to trust to, and the only thing, is just you yourself. That’s the only key that will open doors to a man, of any kind worth getting open.”

With some distrust of this key and some anxiety about his boatman’s fare, he drew near to the landing stairs, where pirates of five colours, in turbans and kerchiefs of every colour, showed their teeth at him and offered him all things, from brothels to the new cathedral. As the boat sidled up to the steps, he heard his name shouted: “Mr. Highworth. Mr. Ridden. Mr. Highworth.” He caught sight of a little man diving down the stairs at him and crying, “Dammy, dammy, dammy, I’ll get drunk to-night.”

“O, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Ridden,” he cried. “Don’t ’ee know me? I knew you, sir; the minute I seen ’ee.” Here he turned on the other pirates who were laying hold of Hi’s baggage. “Get out of this,” he said, in the seaport language made up of the oaths of all civilised lands. “Get out of this, heekoes de pooters. I take all the Señor’s gear. Don’t ’ee know me, Mr. Highworth? I know thee, soon’s I seen ’ee.” He was weeping like a child and sucking his tears into his mouth with twitches of his face: he had all Hi’s baggage in his hands. “Pay the boatman, sir,” he said. “One of the big ones and a small one. This sort is sharks. You’d ought to have took a licensed boat, which would have been only one peseta.” He led the way up the stairs and shoved through the crowd on the Mole. “O, dammy, dammy,” he kept saying, “I’ll break into my burial money, but I’ll get drunk to-night.” He was dressed in an old pair of English riding breeches, a black velvet coat, much too tight at the shoulders and elbows, a tall black sombrero, and part of a yellow serape. Hi didn’t like the look of the man, nor his display of emotion.

“Look at me, Master Highworth,” he said. “Don’t ’ee know me?”

“No, I don’t,” Hi said. “Who are you?”

“Don’t ’ee know ’Zekiel Rust?” the man said. “I did use to beat for Squire William Ridden, many’s the time, till I had to run for it. I knowed you and your father and Mr. Rowton and Miss Mary. But you were young, Mr. Highworth. You might never have heard tell. They may have kept it from you, the deed of gore I done. I’m not an ordinary man, you understand. I had to run for it; I’m Rust, the murderer. It was I killed old Keeper Jackson. I’d a-been hung, if they’d a-took me. Now you remember me? You remember how I killed Keeper Jackson?”

“Good Lord,” Hi said. “Yes; now I remember. And you have been here ever since.”

“Dammy, dammy, bless you for remembering,” the man said. “Now, but Master Highworth, I don’t want to presume; but I’ve been all these years, seven years now, in this unchristian land, and I never see a word of anyone come from the old part. Anyhow I’ll see to thy baggage, Master Ridden. Now you want to go to a good hotel. The Santiago is the one for you. I’ll see you to there, Master Highworth, and I’ll look after you, and don’t you turn from me, Master Highworth, for anyone would have killed Keeper Jackson, the way he spoke.

“I was out on a moony night, and I’ll tell ’ee just where I were. I were up there by the valley, where the water comes out; and it wasn’t murder really. I’d gone out with my old pin-fire. It was a lovely moony night, and I got a hare. Well then, a hare’s a rebel, ain’t he, and game? So I got a hare and put ’un in my pocket and I was going on away along up, when I see another hare. He was on a bank just above the road. So ‘I’ll have ’ee, my master,’ I says, and I up after him and I give him my pin-fire and he went over the bank, and I went over the bank; and he wasn’t a hare, not really, he was a fox. I see him when I got up the bank. And there was Keeper Jackson and he says, ‘I’ve got you, my man,’ he says, ‘you best come quiet.’ And I says, ‘That wasn’t a hare,’ I says, ‘that was a fox, and a fox is a rebel and he isn’t game.’ And he says, ‘You come quiet. I’ve had my eye on you a long time,’ he says, and he lets fly at me with his gun. And one of the pellets went through my gaiters, and so I give him pin-fire. And when I see I killed him, I go along up the downs and there I come upon a man driving sheep. I put old pin-fire in a ditch and cover him over. I goes along with the man driving the sheep, until we come to Salisbury. But I’ll tell you all about that. We’ll go along to the Santiago.”

Hi remembered the man very well now as a poacher, who did odd jobs for Squire Bill in the dog-breaking and ferret business. It was perfectly true that he had murdered Keeper Jackson and had been searched and advertised for as a murderer, but had escaped.

Hi had been only ten at the time; but the thing had made a stir in that quiet place.

By this time Ezekiel had hailed a carriage, partly by signs and partly by noises, which the signs explained. For a moment he showed Hi plainly that he meant to run after the carriage until it reached the hotel, but this Hi would not allow. He made him sit with him inside.

“You’re the first ever I’ve seen from anywhere near those parts, Mr. Highworth,” Ezekiel said. “You see, after I got to Salisbury, they read in a paper how the body was found and it was me, so I thought I’d best not stay there, so I out of the pub, and, as I come out of the pub, there come up thirteen policemen and they were looking for me. And they walked straight by me and never took me. So I thought the best thing I could do is to follow these men now they’ve passed me, so I followed them along a bit, and then they separated, and I thought, ‘This won’t do,’ so I went along the road a bit and there was a man driving some cows, so I said to him, ‘I’m going along the road a bit. Shall I help thee drive?’ So I drive them along a bit, and he said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ And I thought, ‘Well, it won’t do to tell anybody where I’m going,’ so I said, ‘I’ll just turn back and go into the town now.’ And so I turned back, because I thought, ‘Well, he’ll notice me,’ and he must have been suspicious or he wouldn’t have asked where I was going to. And I thought, ‘Now, I’ll diddle him like I diddled the policemen. I’ll go right across this town and out the other side. No one would think of looking for me there.’

“Well, I went across and, as I was going across, I passed like an inn yard, and just at that inn yard door, like a gateway, there was Black George Rylands that used to drive Mr. Hanshaw. If I’d a-took another step I’d a-been right into him, and so I thought, ‘Now, Ezekiel Rust, you’re doomed. They all knows that you’re here. They’re all on the scent.’ So then I don’t know what to do, and presently I see Black George turn away into the inn, so then I made one dart.

“So then I got out of Salisbury, and I come up out on a place, like it was downs, and there were some gipsy fellows there. I’d known some of them come round with baskets, but they didn’t know me, and I asked them which way I’d better go to get out of England, and they said they’d set me on the road, part of the way, and so we set off next day and we come to a town. I thought I was safe when I was with them, but, coming through that town, my blood run cold.”

“Why?” said Hi. “Were there more police?”

“No, Mr. Ridden, there was not more police, there was soldiers—soldiers after me, hundreds of ’em. I come into the town, and there was all they soldiers in red coats, looking for me. But I got past ’em and I come to a town, and there was a man wanting another man to help him take charge of a bull. He was coming out to these parts and there was to have been another man in charge of the bull, but the other man, if you understand me, Mr. Ridden, he didn’t want, when the time come, to live up to his bargain. And I didn’t want to let it be known, not at once, that I was eager to get out of the country, because that wouldn’t have done. They’d all have known that I was a murderer, if I let ’em think that. Naturally that was the first thing they’d have thought. So I pretended first I was afraid of bulls, and then I said I didn’t like to leave my old mother, and then I said I didn’t much like these foreign parts by what I’d heard of them. I let them think the wrong thing, you see, Mr. Highworth. But in the end I said I’d help take the bull. So then they said they didn’t want to run any risks, and said, ‘You’d better come on board straightaway.’ So they took me along and we passed through a gate where there was a lot of notices and there I read what made my blood run cold. Now I had always been against they photographs. Often people said to me, ‘Now you stand there and let me take your picture.’ But I knew better. ‘No,’ I always used to say. My golly, Mr. Highworth, I tell ’ee, there they’d got me all described and wrote out. ‘Wanted, for murder, suffering from a crushed left thumbnail,’ it said. It must have been Mrs. Thompson told them that.

“You may talk what you like, Mr. Ridden, about there not being a God, but there is a God. And how do I know that there is a God? Because, when I read that, there was a policeman there and I got my left thumb in my pocket at the moment, and, if I’d not had my left thumb in my pocket at that moment, why, he’d have seen it, wouldn’t he?

“There, that shows you whether there’s a God or not. So the other fellows that wanted me to take the bull, they didn’t want me to be reading there; they wanted me to come along. But it wouldn’t have done to come along, not with that policeman there. No, because he’d have thought at once, ‘There’s something funny,’ if I’d have gone along. There was fifty pounds reward, too, for me.

“And the policeman says to one of the chaps that was with me, ‘Seen anything of this chap?’ he says.

“‘No,’ they says, ‘worse luck, because we could do with fifty pounds.’

“‘Well,’ he says, ‘he’s pretty sure to be coming around here. Who’s this you’ve got?’

“‘Why,’ they says, ‘he’s a drover coming to look after the old Astounder, that big bull they’ve got on board.’

“‘Well, I wish him joy of his job, then,’ the policeman said, ‘for a bull is a fair coughdrop, when he’s seasick.’

“Well then, we got on board the ship. That’ll show you whether there’s a God or not.

“Well, I hope your troubles were at an end then,” said Hi.

“No, Mr. Highworth, they were not. And why were they not? Why, use is second nature, as we say. Soon as I got on board that old ship, they said the captain wanted to see me and so I thought, ‘Well, now they’ve caught me; now what am I to do?’ Then I thought I’d better go, I might brazen it out. And I went up to a place all shining, and there was all the chief detectives of London town come to look for me. And the captain, he says, ‘Now, my man, what’s your name?’ Now what would you have answered? Use is second nature, isn’t it? So I plumped out straightaway ‘Ezekiel Rust,’ I said. Then, directly I said that, I see what I done. And he said, ‘Well, you put your name on that paper there.’ And then I know what to do. I said, ‘Please, sir, I can’t write.’ And so he says, ‘Well, you must put your mark.’ And there was a man writing on a paper and he wrote my name, only he hadn’t wrote it right. He wrote it wrong, because he hadn’t followed what I said. He put ‘Jack Crust.’ And so I put my mark and the detectives they looked at me and they didn’t recognise me and I thought, ‘My boys, there’s the worth of fifty pounds in me and I never been worth more than eleven and a penny at one time before, and that they cheated me of, coming back from the races.’ And so he said, ‘Now, my man, go down to that bull and mind he don’t toss you. They call him the Wrekin’s Astounder,’ he said, ‘and he’ll astound you, if you don’t be careful.’

“And I went down and had a look at the bull and I thought ‘This ’ere creature will be a friend to me. They won’t come looking for me, not down with this old Astounder.’ But they did come looking for me, and a policeman come and they come with the captain and he says, ‘Who’ve we got here,’ he says.

“‘Oh, that’s the prize bull and his keeper,’ they says, ‘what you read about in the papers.’

“‘Well,’ I thought, ‘now I’m safe. There won’t be any more policemen come along for me.’ Then the steward come down. He calls me, ‘Crust, Crust. Where’s this man, Crust?’ he says. It make my blood run cold to hear my name called like that. So he says, ‘Come along and get your tea, man. Get your tea while you can eat it. We shall be gone in another hour and you’d best have something to be sick on, if you’re going to be sick.’

“Well, I sat down to supper with a lot of others, and be darned if one of them didn’t say, ‘Your name Crust? You any relation of the murderer?’

“‘No,’ I said, ‘thank God.’

“And another said, ‘What murderer’s that, Bert?’

“‘Why,’ he says, ‘a man called Crust shot a gamekeeper and there’s fifty pounds reward for him.’

“So then I saw that they suspected me and I said, ‘There’s only one way to deal with murderers and it’s what they call the old way. They used to get a great big tin of paraffin and they put the murderer into that and then they boil him. Wherever that’s been tried,’ I said, ‘people know enough not to do any more, because they know what they’ll get.’

“And then one of them said, ‘Yes, but they’re not always caught. They know that.’

“And I said, ‘No, they’re not always caught at once, but in the end they’re always caught.’

“Now you’d think that I’d run dare-devil escapes enough by that time. That very evening the ship began to go and I thought, ‘Now I’m free.’ And then I wake up in the night and the ship were groaning awful. She gave great creaking groans like right down and I thought, ‘I know how it’s going to be. There’s going to be a storm, because it knows that I’m on board and there’ll be a storm until they find out who it is.’ And then some men came by with a lantern and I was in the stall, if you understand me, next to my bull, and I lay down in the straw and they went past. They didn’t see me. And the next morning, when I got up, I thought, ‘I’ll see whether we’re away from England or not.’ So I went up, and the first thing I see you could have knocked me down. There was a lot of men-of-war’s men. Some of them was here and some of them was there, if you understand what I mean. They made my blood run cold. ‘I see what it is,’ I said, ‘They know I’ve come this way, but they don’t know which I am and so they’re stopping and watching every place. My only chance is to keep down just by the bull.’ So I went down to him and he knew I had shot old Jackson, and he rammed at me with his great horns and I stayed there all day. I stayed down there two weeks. Proper lot of whiskers I grew while I was down there. At the end of that time the captain said, ‘I’ve never had a man,’ he said, ‘look after a beast like you’ve looked after that old bull. Now I’ll give you five pounds,’ he said, those were his words, ‘I’ll give you five pounds,’ that’ll show you what he thought of me, ‘if you’ll stay and take the other bulls that we have, like you took this. He eats out of your hand just like a tame canary.’

“So I said, ‘No, thank you, sir, I’m sure. I’d like to go with my bull.’

“So you’d think my troubles were at an end then. We come to the foreign place where the bull was to go ashore. It wasn’t here, it was somewhere further down from here. I heard one of the men say, ‘The police-boat’s come alongside,’ and then my blood run cold. I thought, ‘They know that I’m on board here, because why, they’ll have sent the description and that. It would have gone quicker by post than we could have come.’ So I stayed down by my bull and presently, when we got the bull ashore, there was a policeman, at least he didn’t look like what we should call a policeman. He stopped me, but luckily for me there was the captain there and he knew me and he said, ‘He’s come with the bull.’ And so I went with that bull; oh, a matter of five hundred miles, I should think. I don’t know where we didn’t get to. I come to a very nice place. I never see more rabbits than were in that place, though they weren’t rabbits neither, come to think of it: I thought, ‘If I had got old pin-fire and my two ferrets, I’d have some of you fine chaps.’

“Well, that’s seven years ago, and I’ve been up and down since, and I’m married to one of these foreigners now. Isabella her name is. I don’t understand what she says half the time, because she don’t talk any Christian language. And we live in Medinas Close, Cercado as they call it, but it means close, three floors up, number 41; where we’ve got a room, and, if ever you want me, Mr. Highworth, it’s the middle room of three, and there’s no job I can’t turn my hand to; or if you want an English body-servant, it wouldn’t matter my having a wife, because I knowed your father, Mr. Highworth, Squire William, and I know all about this land, in case you wish to know. There’s goings on and there’s goings on, but what I once say a white man is a white man, isn’t he? You can’t get away from that. Isn’t he a white man? And why did the Lord make him a white man, do you suppose? Why, so that he shouldn’t be a black man, I suppose. Very well then, there’s fine goings on. I don’t say a word against black men. There’s very good ones here, very cheerful sort of people, the black men here. Only their feet—they don’t have feet like we do. The leg-bone comes down in the middle of the boot, not at the end, like with us. But, when you get used to that, they’re very nice, cheerful people; they wouldn’t do you any harm. You trust the black people and they’ll trust you. No, it’s these yellow fellows, those are the ones, and there’s queer goings on. Now, look there, look there, Master Highworth Foliat Ridden, there’s what I don’t like to see, those yellows.”

At that moment the carriage had to draw to the pavement. There came a noise of a barbaric music of rattles, drums and gongs, to which cavalry were marching. A column in twos came slouching by the carriage. They were led by an almost naked yellow savage who wore scarlet plumes in his hair. The music followed him, swaying from side to side or giving little leaps in their seats from the excitement of the rhythm. After the music came the troop of perhaps fifty savages, carrying red pennoned lances. They wore nothing which could be called uniform, except the metal moons over their mouths. Some wore linen coats or drawers, some had ponchos or serapes. They were smoking, singing and calling out to the passers-by.

“There,” Ezekiel said, “they’re the yellows. Tents of Shem, I call it. They all got lids to their mouths. Government’s made those yellow soldiers; and they come in, hundreds of them. Now, Government doesn’t see them in the way we see them; they don’t live with Government the way they live with us. But these yellow fellows, they’ve been brought into this here city, and they don’t look Christians do they, and they aren’t Christians. And why aren’t they Christians? Because they’re cannibals. And they’ve been billeted down Medina Close, and what do you think they say they’ve come here for? They’re going to eat baked Christians, they say, baked Christians!”

He said all this in a broad English country dialect, mixed up with scraps of Spanish and emphasised by a lot of signs, which no doubt could be understood by Isabella. Hi thought that the man was as mad as a hatter as well as being a murderer.

He did not quite like being with a mad murderer, even though it was seeing life, but it smote him to the heart to see the poor old fellow weeping at the sight of him, and swearing to be drunk that night, even if it took the burial money: his heart warmed to him.

They drove through a square where a squadron of Pituba lancers, newly arrived in town, were forming a bivouac. These men looked as though they had been on a foray. Some of them had newly-slaughtered sheep slung across their horses in front of them, others had big round loaves of army bread or, in some cases, chickens, on their lance-points. They rode uncared-for, wiry, evil little horses of a pale sorrel colour. They rode with a leather thong instead of reins. Most of them had no stirrups, but knotted leather thongs, hanging from the saddles, which they clutched between their toes.

“Now, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I don’t expect anything from you, neither now nor any time. You’re a great gentleman and you don’t want to come and speak with a murderer; not that he was a murderer. And why wasn’t it a murder? Because old Jackson, he was a rebel, and he fired at me, didn’t he, and he’d got a better gun than me, didn’t he, and he shot me through the gaiters, didn’t he, and besides it wasn’t a hare I was after, it was a fox, and he knew that as well as I, and I didn’t know, not really, when old pin-fire would go and when he wouldn’t, for the matter of that. But Number 41 Medinas Close, three floors up. Don Crust they calls me and my wife Señora Crust. Anybody knows me. I could tell you of queer goings on, very queer; things you’d want to know, so as you could watch out, Master Ridden. But there’s another thing, Master Highworth; you wouldn’t want to come to Medinas Close not after dark, not in your good things. It’s always safer to wear a poncho—because why? Why then, if they come at you, you’ve got something to stop it with. It isn’t like these ordinary tight things. You can’t really tell where a man ends inside a blanket.

“Besides, there’s another thing, Master Highworth, which I wouldn’t tell to everyone; but old Keeper Jackson’s forgiven me. He didn’t at first, not he. In the night, he used to come to me, ‘Darn ’ee,’ he said, ‘I’ll have ’ee yet,’ he said. He used to come all sideways at me with his blue teeth at first; not quite at first, you understand, Master Highworth; for he must have been a bit confused at first, from old pin-fire and being in the moon, but it was when I was with the bull he began to come. Many a shiny night he come at me. ‘You come back,’ he said, ‘you best come quiet, or darn ’ee I’ll make ’ee come.’ And he done his best to make me come; there were temptations come to make me go back, but I saw through them. But he lost track of me among this new religion. He didn’t know the lingo or something, or else their tiddlewinks upset him.

“Then one night he come again; be blest if he didn’t come again. But he didn’t come like he ever come afore. He come in sort of shiny, not what you would call an angel, Mr. Ridden and sir, but he hadn’t so many teeth as the other times, if you understand what I mean. ‘Darn ’ee, Rust,’ he says to me, ‘you’ve given me a bad go in Tencombe graveyard, along of all them damned and women. But I’m out of sitting there,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mind about it now, like I did. It’s a darned poor snipe,’ he said, ‘could sit on a grave seven years and bear malice at the end. Besides,’ he said, ‘I’m going; they’ve given me a horse, and I’m off in the morning.’

“He wouldn’t tell me where he was off to. He was always one of they artful ones. ‘I thought I’d tell ’ee I was going,’ he said, ‘there’s a whole lot of us got horses.’

“But 41 Medinas Close is where you’ll find me, Master Hi; it isn’t a nosegay, nor anything to please the eye. It’s back of the cathedral, not dead back of it, for that’s the Bishop’s, but keep to the right of that, and then there’s a gate, but you mustn’t take that, for it don’t lead anywhere, but bear round, and then you’ll come to a place stinks like chemicals, for it is chemicals; only you don’t go in there, but more round, if you understand, till you come into Two Brothers Fountain Lane. Well, it isn’t far from there. Two naked brothers in a fountain; you’d think they’d a-been ashamed; but these foreigners don’t know the value of clothes the same way that we do.”

“How did you know me?” Hi asked. “I was only ten or eleven when you saw me last.”

“Master Highworth, I’ve known all your family since I don’t know when. I know your blessed great-grandfather, when he wore his pigtail. But use is second nature, as we say; they all wore pigtails, come to think of it. Then I know old Mr. William and Master Rowton, not your brother Master Rowton, but your father’s, the squire’s, older brother that was. Lord, he was a proper one, Master Rowton. ‘A horse can jump anything,’ he used to say, ‘if you want him to.’ Well, he wouldn’t take warnings; not once, nor twice, so the third time they bring him home on a door. That was jumping into that pit at Beggar’s Ash. Old Mr. William didn’t say much about his son, but he took on about the six-year-old, for he’d backed him in a race.

“So when I seen ’ee, I said, ‘That’s a Ridden out of the Foliats,’ I said; ‘don’t tell me, because it can’t be anybody else. And it won’t be Mr. Chilcote, for Mr. Chilcote keeps his lip cocked up, and besides, this is too young for Mr. Chilcote. And Mr. Rowton’s got a swelled mouth, like old Mr. William had the same, almost as though he’d had a smack on it, so it won’t be him. It’s young Mr. Highworth.”

Hi promised to see him within a few days. He did not like to offer the old man money, but contrived to make him a present, partly as a wedding present, partly to celebrate his meeting with a Tencombe man. He found himself in an upper room of the hotel, looking out on an array of roofs from which washing was hanging. Somehow, the washing looked more romantic in that bright light than it had ever looked in England. He was cheered at being at last an independent man of the world. He had had a lovely voyage, and at the end of it there had been this welcome, from one who knew all his people and the land from which he came.

His room had a scarlet carpet and a red plush rocking-chair, which seemed out of place in that climate, already as hot as an English May. The walls, which had been white, were marked with dirty fingers. Somebody, who had occupied the room earlier that morning, had smoked cigars in it. Bitten ends of cigar were in a flower-pot near the window. The place seemed frowsy, untidy and feckless. The mosquito-curtains over his bed were smeared with the bloody corpses of old mosquitoes. All round the room, wherever the carpet failed to reach the wall, little pale yellow ants came and went. He sat down upon his bed, feeling suddenly homesick; then, realising that there were three electric fans in the room, he set them all going, knelt down and began to unpack. He had not knelt for thirty seconds when something bit him viciously in the leg; glancing down, he saw a small black thing flying at great speed along the floor. He looked at the place bitten, which had swollen and was itching. He scratched the place and went back to his unpacking, but was bitten again and then again. This time, having learned to be very swift, he slew his attacker, who smelt, when dead, worse than he liked. Feeling indignant at being placed in such a room, he went down to the hotel bar to see the proprietor.

“Yes, Mr. Ridden,” said the proprietor, “what is it? What can I do for you?”

“Look here,” Hi said, “you’ve put me in a room all full of bugs and things.”

“I haven’t got a bug in the house,” the man said. “Them ain’t bugs, them’s bichos. What you want to take is this bottle here, called Blenkiron’s Bicho Blaster. No bicho nor skeeto will come where Blenkiron blasts. Squirt Blaster freely round in floor and bed, the skeetos will be downed, the bichos dead.”

After unpacking, Hi walked out into the city to see the sights of the new world all shining in the sun. On the water-front, negroes and Caribs were loading a lighter with what looked like bunches of rusty wire: they were nearly naked: they shone and sang. Old negresses in scarlet turbans kept time for them by clinking bottles together. At the south end, were the gates of what had been the Viceroy’s garden in the old days. They stood ajar, yet still bore the device of the horse and globe. In the garden were flowers, butterflies like flying flowers, and birds like jewels and flowers. Beyond the flowers was the old white Spanish fortress, from which floated a blood-red banner, with a golden star for each province.

“I am glad I’ve come to this place,” Hi thought, “if only I can find something to do, I shall be as happy as the day is long.”

In his saunterings upon the water-front, he paused to look into the window of a picture-dealer’s shop, which was decked with three sketches in oil of scenes in a bull-ring. The picture-dealer, a man with a strangely broad face, was smoking a cigarette at his door. Hi asked him if the scenes had been sketched in Santa Barbara. The man replied, “You’d better inform yourself, sir.” The unusual rudeness of the answer made Hi wonder if the man were sane: he noted the name over the shop, and passed on, less happy than before.

Yet in spite of this one man’s rudeness, the morning proved to be a long adventure of delight.

The narrow, busy, crowded streets, so full of life, colour, strangeness and beauty, all lit as never in England, excited him. There were fruits and flowers, and costumes like fruits and flowers, men from the west, Indians from the plains and from the forest; negroes, Caribs; women in mantillas, women with roses in their ears; men in serapes, men hung with silver, like images in chapels; peones in black and silver driving ox-teams; church processions intoning Latin; all were marvellous. Yet an impression formed in his mind that all was not well; the Indian lancers and certain parties of foot soldiers, who looked as though they had been rolled in brickdust, seemed to be there for no good.

At the cathedral parvise, some workmen were sinking scarlet flag-poles into sockets in the gutters. Inside the cathedral, men were hanging scarlet draperies all round the sanctuary; Hi supposed that they were making ready for the Easter festivals. “They’re beginning early,” he thought.

Near the cathedral was the green in which the palace stood. “Palacio,” a guide, explained to him. “This is the palace of President Lopez.” He had never seen a palace before; he stopped to stare at it. The guards at the gate wore scarlet serapes; they rode white horses so bitted with heavy silver that Hi longed to protest. The palace was a big, squat, yellow building; at one end of it was a glittering pinnacle still surrounded by scaffolding. “I’ve heard of that,” Hi thought, “that’s his silver building. I’ll bet it isn’t silver, though; but quicksilver. I suppose the President is inside there somewhere, because the flag is flying.”

It was now drawing towards noon. Men in evening dress, wearing scarlet rosettes or sashes, were driving to the gates, dismounting from their carriages, and entering the palace precincts, either for a cabinet meeting or for lunch. Some of these people were cheered by the onlookers, especially one man, who had the look of a “spoiled priest.”

At noon, some gunners in red fired a noon-gun in front of the palace; instantly throughout the city there came a change in the noise of the day as though everyone had ceased suddenly from work and pattered out to dinner. Hi returned to his hotel, to lunch upon foods which were strange to him: okra, manati, water-melon and a sangaree of limes.

After lunch, he wrote to his mother and to Señora Piranha, to say that he had arrived. Having posted these letters, he set out to the offices of the Sugar Company, to present his letter to Mr. Roger Weycock, who received him very kindly and asked him to dine that night at the Club.

“Do you know any other Englishman here?” he asked.

“I’ve a letter to Mr. Allan Winter.”

“That’s lucky. He’s in town. He was here a few minutes ago; we’ll get him to dine with us. Oh, all the English here belong to the Club; we must see about making you a temporary member. But we’ll go into that to-night, shall we, at the Club?”

* * * * *

At dinner at the Club that night, Mr. Weycock introduced Hi to Mr. Allan Winter, who was a grizzled and rugged soul, of long standing as a sugar-planter.

“I’ll call for you at eight to-morrow,” he said, “and drive you out to my place, where you will see the sort of place it is.” Seeing that Hi was perplexed, he added, “But perhaps you’re doing something else to-morrow.”

“No, thanks, sir,” Hi said, “but I’ve written to a friend to say that I shall be here all day to-morrow.”

“Oh, have you friends in Santa Barbara?” Mr. Weycock asked.

“I know a girl,” Hi said. “Miss Rosa Piranha, sir. Perhaps if you know her you can tell me if she’s in town?”

“Oh, you know Miss Piranha, do you?” Mr. Weycock said. “I suppose you met her in England?”

“Yes, sir.”

A change came on Mr. Weycock’s face, as though the subject were unpleasant to him. “I have met her,” he said, “but I do not know whether she’s in town or not. You see, Ridden, my work brings me into touch with the dynamic party, the Reds, now in power here. I am not well in favour with people like the Piranhas. You can always call on the Piranhas. I would go with Winter to-morrow, if I were you.”

“I’d love to,” Hi said, “but I don’t feel quite free.”

“No, I see your point,” Mr. Winter said. “You aren’t quite free. So don’t decide now. I’ll call at eight to-morrow and you can come if you can. You may have had an answer by then. Leave it like that.”

Hi asked why so many soldiers were in the city.

“Precaution,” Mr. Weycock said; “the Reds, the present Government, are being threatened by the Whites. The feeling is running very high.”

“I should think it ought to run high,” Mr. Winter said, “when these gangs of cannibals are imported to keep order. I never saw such a set of ruffians in my life. ‘I will not ask what the disease be, the cure being what it is.’”

“They are surely as civilised,” Mr. Weycock said, “as some of these Whites, who would burn heretics here to-morrow if they had their will. Besides, you must know, Winter, that the Pitubas have always been allies here. They helped the Spaniards in the Conquest.”

“I’ve nothing against that,” Winter said. “But whatever my politics were, if I were a white citizen here, seeing those yellow cannibals brought in to keep me in order, would make me want to shoot someone. But I don’t meddle with politics here and, I hope, never will.”

“I do not meddle in them,” Mr. Weycock said, “but I’m bound to watch them for the sake of the firm. I only hope that the measures taken will be sufficient. It would be a disaster to this Republic if Don Lopez were to be killed now.”

“Killed,” Mr. Winter said, “killed and disaster? Rats.”

“Well, I’m glad you take that cheery view.”

After this, they put away all thought of Red and White, but dined and were merry. Hi was introduced to several very good fellows; he was nominated for election at the next ballot and admitted to the Club privileges pending election. He passed a very pleasant evening. As he walked back to his hotel, he thought that he had never passed so wonderful a day.

“And I may spend my life here,” he thought. “It may not have the charm of engineering; but it must be wonderful to pass one’s days in a place so beautiful.”

Yet as he walked, he saw three Pituba lancers dragging a white man to a divisional gaol, which had its entrance on the water-front. The sight angered him strangely; and again he had the feeling that things were wrong in the land. “There are strange goings on,” old Rust had said; “they’re going to eat baked Christians.” He noticed the looks of citizens who watched the dragging, and the looks of other citizens watching for looks of disapproval. “I’ll ask Rosa about all this,” he thought. “There ought to be a letter from her in the morning.”

There was no letter from her in the morning, but Mr. Winter called and drove him out to his plantation at Quezon.

III

During the drive, he asked Winter if he feared any civil trouble.

“Yes and no,” he said. “The Whites and Reds always bicker a bit at Easter; they go out of their way to do it. They’ll do it this year. But it will be nothing. And my advice to you is to pay no attention to politics here, unless you’re naturalised. I’m not a citizen, and don’t intend to be, so I keep clear of both parties. What you want to steer clear of in this country are foreigners with axes to grind, like Weycock’s old uncle. I say nothing against young Weycock; he’s friendly and decent, and all that, but when I hear him boosting the Reds I wonder how much his uncle’s had to make him sing.”

“But he said that Lopez was in fear of being murdered by the Whites.”

“Rats. The Whites won’t murder Lopez; they’ve got no one to put in his place, and they know it. Besides, they know that it isn’t Lopez who is running this land, but the foreign firms who’ve put money into it and mean to get it back. As for Lopez being afraid of being murdered, I say, rats again. He’s afraid of nothing, from hell-fire up; never has been.”

Hi spent a happy day at Quezon, slept there, and was driven back to his hotel the next morning. “You go in and see your friends,” Mr. Winter said, “then come out here again and spend a week or two. Everything’s hard work here, like everywhere else. A lot of these young bloods come out here thinking life’s going to dances and belonging to the Cocktail Club. You’re too wise for that foolishness; you’ve got some sense.

“And now just let me say this, I stand in _loco parentis_ here, mind. Don’t accept a job from the United Sugar people without just coming and talking it over with me. They may have nothing for you, of course. They’re in with a very queer set, who aren’t out for sugar or any other kind of sweetness, but just both hands in the till. I see their workings, and I know. The matter with Lopez is not that he’s afraid, but that he’s too darned indolent to watch their steps a little.”

* * * * * * *

When he returned to the hotel, Hi found no letter from the Piranhas. “No answer,” he thought. “She’s had time enough for a dozen answers. It means that she’s out of town. Yet Rosa, in her last letter, said that she would be in town now.”

He wandered out into the streets, where the work and beauty of a seaport filled every yard with wonder. He felt that he could never tire of a life so varied, so full of colour, passed in such light. Yet again the people gave him the impression that all was not well. He was a newcomer, who saw the game from outside, with fresh eyes. He felt that the Whites and Reds were certainly going out of their ways to bicker at this coming Easter. On his way back to the hotel, he saw some Red officials sacking (as it seemed) a little newspaper office. A young American, who seemed amused at his want of grasp of the case, explained that the cops were pulling the joint and pinching the editor.

“What for?”

“I dunno. He’s one of these White guys. I guess he wrote something some big bug didn’t quite stand for.”

He watched the sack to its completion. He could tell from the looks on people’s faces what their politics were, and his heart went out to the under dogs, the Whites, who were outnumbered there, and dared not show all that they felt. “Rosa is a White,” he thought, “I’ll get her to tell me what is going on.”

* * * * * * *

He was just about to lunch at his hotel, when a negro waiter, who seemed impressed by something, came to tell him, chiefly by signs, that he was wanted in the foyer. Wondering what he could have done wrong, or what could cause the negro’s manner, he went out to the foyer, where a footman, in a green and white livery, very politely told him, in Spanish and pantomime, that there was something very important for him, seemingly outside the doors. Looking as the footman’s signs directed, he saw an old carriage, in which two ladies sat, beneath green parasols. “Rosa,” he thought, “Rosa and her mother.”

One of the ladies was old, with white hair; she sat upright with an absorbed look as though she were praying. The other was Rosa, but changed indeed from the Rosa of the Foliats; this creature was painted into a kind of purple mask with high lights of white powder on her nose. Over her eyes, arches of plainly false eyebrows had been put in with the brow-stick. Great gold ear-rings, enclosing green stones, hung from her ears, her mouth was scarlet. He had never seen a more raddled-looking baggage, yet this was the Rosa of four months before, who had galloped hatless astraddle before breakfast with him. Both ladies turned to him at once with an air which made him feel ashamed that he had no hat to take off to them and very thankful that he hadn’t. The old lady was more subtly made up than her daughter, but even she seemed to wear a mask or glaze of enamel. “I suppose it’s the fashion here,” he thought.

Glaze or not, they were plainly great ladies here, conferring incredible honour upon the hotel. Half the staff was there to attend their pleasure already. The Señora held her hand for Hi to kiss (his good angel guarded him from shaking it), she bade him welcome in English. He had not seen her since he was a little child, but he remembered her clearly, as Donna Emilia, a lady who held herself very straight and was always praying. “She needed not to have made up,” Hi thought. “There is something very beautiful in her face.”

“Welcome,” she said; “your father has been a good friend to us. You and yours have been good friends to Rosa. I hope that all your household was well when you left England. Let me see you, Highworth. You are liker your mother than your father. But my eyes are failing, I cannot be sure of this. Come now, with us, will you, to spend some hours at our house?”

“I should love to,” Hi said.

“Go and get your hat, then, and put it on,” Rosa said. “Never, never come out without a hat again. Put it on at once, or this sun will skin you. It doesn’t come through a watery envelope as it does in England. That is your vanity, wanting to look brown. You wouldn’t look brown, you’d crack, and all your poor little brains would pop.”

They drove down the water-front, past the Viceroy’s garden, to the gate. Several houses on the water-front were displaying the scarlet banners, starred with gold, which Lopez had declared to be the national flag.

“Is there to be some sort of celebration?” Hi asked.

“A display, I understand,” Donna Emilia said.

“How wonderful the bay looks with the shipping,” Rosa said quickly. “Do you see, Hi, the shallows beyond the bay? All that southern bay is only about six feet deep.”

“Good bathing, I should think,” Hi said. “Is one allowed to bathe there?”

“I believe that some of the Indians sometimes bathe there,” Rosa said, “but there are swarms of sharks. If you go out in a boat, they’ll come all round you, and rub along the side and try to tip you out.”

“What do you do then?” Hi asked. “Sing them to sleep?”

“The best way is to hit them a bat with the flat of an oar-blade.”

“I wonder you don’t stare at them,” Hi said. “No shark can resist the power of the human eye.”

“Women’s eyes excite them,” Rosa said.

“I should have thought a haughty look would shrivel them. The books are full of it: ‘She darted a freezing glance at him.’”

At this moment they were passing through the gate of the city. On their right was a park of palms, flowers and busts, on their left, beyond the fortress, was the approach to the market pier, where the boats landed fish, fruit and other produce at dawn each morning. A party of men and women were coming from this pier with donkey carts laden with fruits, eggs and vegetables. “They’re the second market,” Rosa said, “they buy up the leavings from the boats and hawk them through the closes.”

The men of the second market recognised the liveries of the Piranhas. They stopped their carts, stood still, uncovered and cried, “Long live the Whites. Long live the Whites. Let the Reds perish.” To Hi’s astonishment neither woman took the slightest notice. They stared ahead as though they neither saw nor heard. Hi thought it odd that they did not bow; Rosa turned to him.

“Do you see the boats, Hi?” she asked. “Those are some of the coast boats which bring the produce. There are many market gardens along this great shallow bay, especially at La Boca, ten miles down. The gardeners send their things in the boats, which are just as fast as boats can be. They often race both ways. We can see them from our windows.”

Out in the bay there was enough wind to ruffle the water. About a dozen boats of queer rigs were rushing home under all the sail they could set. Some were lateen-rigged with striped sails of blue and white; most were polacca schooners with steeved bowsprits setting a sprit beneath upon a yard. The sails of these were of a bright orange colour. All had high curved whaler’s bows topped with gilt emblems. All were fast boats; even Hi was surprised at the way they travelled. A rounded white gleam at their sides showed their speed and the cleanness of their thrust.

“Aren’t they like dolphins?” Rosa said. “Don’t they seem to enjoy it?”

Less than half a mile from the gate of the city they entered the gates of the Piranhas’ estate, which lay to the left, between the road and the sea. In the niches of the masonry of the gates were figures of painted terra-cotta, representing Friendship and Affection, one on each side. They had been labelled when new, but time had destroyed the plaster on which the labels were painted. “We can’t tell t’other from which now,” Rosa said. “People think they’re both the Virgin, and lay little bunches of flowers before them on their way to work.”

The gates were old masterpieces of wrought iron, now frail from rust, their palm leaves were snapping, some of their bars had worn through. All within the gates showed the same marks of decay. It had once been an Italian garden, but time, poverty and the sea winds had helped to bring it to ruin. Marble busts of poets and nymphs were fallen, or overgrown with trailers. The great red clay or terra-cotta urns had been split by the roots of their flowers, so that they looked like fountains of flowers falling under the living glitter of the humming birds. The shingle of the walk, though marked with wheels and horse-hoofs, was almost overgrown with a thick green-leaved trailer, full of minute blue flowers. The house was a biggish, oblong, yellow building, with decorative panels of scarlet plaster in the recesses of the masonry. The scarlet had faded to pale red, it was scaley and mildewed; altogether, the house looked out of fashion. There had been a device between supporters over the door. The supporters were now nothing but legs, two hairy, with paws, two human, with feet. The device was wholly gone. Part of a label bore the legend:

non sufficit.

Hi wondered what it was that did not suffice.

As the carriage stopped below the perron an old negro with powdered hair, wearing the uniform of the Piranhas, white with green splashes on the shoulders, came down the steps to welcome them. He carried a long ebony cane with a gold pineapple at the end. Hi helped Donna Emilia up the steps. Outside the house, all things gave evidence of a great family coming down in the world. Inside, it was all as it had been in the time of its splendour, except that colours had faded.

“Come into my room, Highworth,” Donna Emilia said.

She led him into a pleasant room hung with portraits of her own and her husband’s families. She took her seat in a great brocaded chair that was like a throne. Hi was only a boy, but he was impressed by her bearing. She gave him the impression of being a work of art held together by nothing but will, and a sense of style.

Hi closed the door at her bidding. Rosa was gone.

“It is thirty years, Highworth,” she said, “since your father in this room brought news to my husband and myself that our fortunes were secured in the days of the copper crisis. My husband promised then that this house should be a home to any of your race. There to your right you will see a drawing of your father as he was then. It is a pleasure to me to see you stand where your father stood.”

She rang a little bell which stood on a table beside her; the negro with the ebony cane appeared. “This is my old retainer, Pablo,” she said, “faithful as one of the old age. Pablo,” she said, “this is Mr. Highworth, whose father you will remember. In all ways and at all times you are to consider him as one of this household.”

After Pablo had gone she turned again to Hi.

“This is talking beneath the surface,” she said, “which the English do not do. Now tell me. What are your plans for your life in this country? Your father says that you have letters and that we are not to help you till we see that you have helped yourself.”

“I have only just landed,” Hi said. “I have letters to Mr. Weycock and Mr. Winter.”

“To Mr. Mordred Weycock?” she asked.

“No, his nephew.”

“Did either Mr. Winter or Mr. Weycock tell you of troubles impending in this country.”

“They seemed to think that things were not perfectly settled,” Hi said.

“And what do you yourself think, now that you have seen them?”

“They don’t seem quite happy somehow,” Hi said.

“How can they be happy,” she said, “with Antichrist upon the throne? I am a woman and meddle little with politics, but very much with religion, which is a force that your Mr. Weycocks do not admit to exist. He and his friends, Highworth, are rousing up in this country something which they cannot understand, the very depths of the soul of this people. But come, Highworth, take this flower. Give me your arm. Open that door for me. This is the chapel of the Piranhas; this tomb is where my husband lies. He loved your father, who was more than a friend to us in a time of calamity. Lay the flower upon his tomb. He will be glad to know that your father’s son is in this house in this time of calamity.”

“Surely Señora,” he said, “the calamity is not so great.”

She looked at him and could not answer.

“Leave me here a little, Highworth,” she said. “There is a Greco over the altar. But you will not care for these things. You will find Rosa in the garden room.”

It was dim in the chapel. It was built of white Otorin marble in barrel vaulting, with one piercing in the sanctuary. Hi saw a blackness with bronze gleams where he laid his flower. He knew that Donna Emilia was crying.

“O Señora,” he said. He felt that he could not stay there: he went quickly back to the light.

Pablo led the way to a room full of sunlight: it opened upon the garden, but was itself more full of flowers than the garden, from a bank of white cuencas near the French windows. The light poured upon these, so that every white trumpet of the cuencas seemed to quiver with life. Little yellow butterflies poised above the flowers. A crested humming bird with a dazzling throat hovered in the light near the door.

“Well, Hi,” Rosa said, “how are you liking Santa Barbara?”

“Oh, I love it.”

“You came in the _Recalde_, of course. When did you write to mother; do you remember?”

“Yes, the day before yesterday; a few hours after I landed.”

“I thought so,” she said. “I suppose you wondered why we didn’t answer.”

“I thought you were out of town.”

“We did not receive your letter till this morning,” she said. “The censorship is on again.”

“What censorship?”

“The Government’s. You see, we are a White family. All our people are Whites, or Surplices even, the sort of purest of the pure. The Reds have been planning something unusual for some time. They have been talking about a conspiracy to kill Don Lopez and evidence of a White rebellion. They always talk like that before a devilry. Then they say that they were provoked to measures of safeguard.

“Latterly there has been no censorship of letters; but I was afraid that one had begun two or three days ago. Now I am sure of it.”

“What do they do?”

“Take all the letters addressed to eminent Whites to some Red officer in the fortress; then he steams them, I suppose, and reads them and has them photographed or copied before they are delivered.”

“I wonder they take the pains,” Hi said. “If they’re dirty enough skunks to read other people’s letters, they’re dirty enough skunks to forge false ones.”

“Oh, they are; but they like to know what is going on, as well as what they imagine. Don’t speak of these things to mother, or before her, Hi, if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I rather shut you up when you asked about the celebrations. But mother hasn’t been well for some time. She thinks that something terrible is happening; or soon going to happen. Any allusion to the Reds just now upsets her.”

“Right,” Hi said, “I’ll be silent. But I say, Rosa; I wish you’d tell me why you didn’t bow or smile or anything when those market people cheered you.”

“Did it seem very bad manners?”

“It struck me as a little odd.”

“We’re Whites,” she answered. “We’re watched pretty closely. What is to stop the Reds from sending agents to cheer the Whites in our presence, and watching whether we applaud? What would stop them arresting us for fomenting party feeling or ‘encouraging White excesses,’ as they would call it?”

“They couldn’t,”

“Why not? What is to stop them?”

“For smiling and bowing just because people cheer you?”

“Yes, Hi, and for even looking as though you wished to smile and bow. ‘Gestures prejudicial to civil peace,’ is the phrase they use, or ‘conduct deemed to be provocative of civil disturbance,’ that is another.”

“Arrest you and your mother?”

“Yes, rather; like billio.”

“But, good Lord, what are the Whites doing to let these Reds do these things? They must be jugginses.”

“There aren’t many Whites on this side of Santa Barbara: the Whites are all in the west.”

“Yes; but they must know.”

“It isn’t so easy as it sounds. The Whites did a lot of stupid things when they were in power; trying to stop the Schools Acts and other Acts which the Reds had just passed; naturally the Reds were furious.”

“Yes; but hang it all, Rosa, stopping a sort of Act of Parliament is done in a civilised way, by law; but these Reds have brought in all these yellow devils. I can’t see why the Whites allow that.”

“The Pitubas? We’re used to them here. They’re not so bad as they look. They don’t eat all the babies they’re credited with. They may munch a finger here and there. What I mind is the censorship and the spying, and the knowledge that all the time these Red officers are making dossiers against all whom one holds dear: false dossiers, with forged evidence, which they may use.”

“Why should they use them?”

“You haven’t seen the gang who governs us? They are in touch with a set of people who want to ‘open up’ this land, as they call it and will pay for the privilege. Naturally, they would get their money back a hundredfold. Since the Whites stand in the way, naturally the Reds want to get rid of them; and the dirty way is the way the Reds take by nature, being what they are, people without dignity and without belief.”

“I don’t know anything about it, of course,” Hi said, “but I should have thought it would be a good thing to get opened up a bit: have a few more railways and get more of the land under cultivation.”

“If a gang of scoundrels came down on England, to open England up a bit, would you like that, Hi?”

“Father always says that that is what is always happening in England, so I suppose we are used to it.”

“Well, we aren’t. Now I’ve got heaps to do. I’ve got to cut all this linen to pattern for our children’s Easter frocks. So although you may not think it a manly job, I want you to help me at it, will you, like a brick? We’ll open this linen up a bit to make little panties for our bambini.”

Hi was always ready for any job. They set to work.

“By the way, Hi,” Rosa said, “my cousin, Carlotta de Leyva, will be here at lunch. She talks English, so you needn’t be scared.”

“I shan’t be scared, if she’s anything like you,” he said.

“Well, she isn’t, worse luck,” Rosa said. “But I thought I’d have you alone to warn you. Carlotta is a very special person. She’s not like anybody else; but it’s no good your falling in love with her.”

“All right,” he said; “I shan’t fall in love.”

“It won’t be any good if you do,” she said. “Carlotta is to be married from here in less than a month. By the way, you’ll have to come to the wedding, heretic or no.”

“Who is she marrying?” he asked; not that he cared.

“Don Manuel.”

“A sort of local buck?”

“You would call him that.”

“Has he a surname?”

“Yes. Encinitas.”

“I thought that was a province.”

“So it is: he owns most of it.”

“And she owns most of the province next to it?”

“Her brother does.”

“So when the two marry, they will control about half of Santa Barbara between them?”

“Why shouldn’t they, if they are wise and good?”

“It seems rather a lot for two; what sort of a man is Don Manuel; a good sort?” Rosa made a grimace.

“He hasn’t done much good yet. Even if he had, he wouldn’t be good enough for her.”

“That is what women always say before a wedding,” he said, “‘. . . of course he isn’t good enough for her.’”

“Any man before his wedding will say it’s true.”

“Men in love will agree to anything. I say, Rosa, is there anything I ought not to do at lunch?”

“Any local custom?” she said. “Yes, we don’t eat with our knives and we always cluck as we swallow to show how much we are enjoying it.”

“No; I say Rosa, you’re always ragging. What ought I not to do? You might tell a fellow.”

“I’ve warned you, Hi: not to fall in love with my cousin.”

“Fall in love: rats,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” she said. “Rats.”

Someone in the hall outside was moving to and fro, arranging flowers in the bowls on the tables. At first, Hi thought that this was Donna Emilia; then the unseen woman began to sing in a low voice, as though thinking of something else. It was not Donna Emilia. Hi could not make out the words, but thought the voice and tune pretty.

“What’s the song, Rosa?” he asked.

“That? An old lullaby. It’s about roses going to bed because it’s late.”

“It’s pretty.”

“My dear boy, you’re cutting that thing so that it’ll have neither cut nor hang.”

“Oh, dash it, so I am.”

“You pay attention to what you’re doing and never mind about lullabies.”

Presently, after the song had stopped, something bumped upon the door; the voice of the singer called to them in English to “open the door, please.” Hi opened the door. A woman stood on the threshold, holding a jar full of sprays of white stellas.

“I’ve brought these for you, Rosa,” she said.

“That’s sweet of you,” Rosa said. “You two haven’t met yet. Carlotta, this is Mr. Highworth Ridden, an old flame of mine. He’s helping me to cut panties; men do these things in England. Hi, this is my cousin, Señorita de Leyva.”

“How do you do, Mr. Ridden?” Carlotta said. “Will you take these flowers for me?”

He said something in broken Spanish and took the jar to the table; the stellas were the sweetest flowers he had ever known. In a gush of memory he saw a hedge of honeysuckle at home in June. At the table, he turned to look at Carlotta, who was unlike anyone he had ever seen. “She’s an angel of Paradise,” he thought.

He had not thought of women; until that moment he had never bothered his head about them. He had considered them as a race apart, with ways of their own which, on the whole, he resented. From time to time he had met a girl who had been a jolly good sport: Rosa was rather a good sport; anyhow, they were the exceptions. The rest were in a world of their own, with nerves and standards of their own which he disliked but respected. Now suddenly there stood before him a woman who realised all his dreams of what a woman should be. Yet she was not like any other woman. She was as little like a woman as a humming bird is like a bird. She was a small, perfect, spiritual shape, glowing like a humming bird. He had once heard somebody say that “you only get perfection in small things”; he had thought the man an ass at the time, but remembered it now. This woman was perfect. Her hair was of a most deep, dark brown, very abundant, but caught close to her head by a narrow fillet of gold. This gave her something the look of a boy, enough, perhaps, to establish a sympathy with a boy like Hi. The eyes were darker than the hair. They shone as though the brain behind them were one glow of light. They were not only kind, good eyes, but so very merry. The eyebrows were remarkable. As in most clever faces, the base of her nose, at the brow, was broad, and the space between the eyes not small. The unusual beauty of the eyebrows was their length; they continued the demarcation of the brow to the right and left; they were straight in line over the eyes, and lifted a little at the right and left sides, in a way impossible to describe, though it made the face most vivid and unusual. The nose was straight. The ears, which are seldom beautiful, even in the beautiful, were perfect in her. The cheeks were of a rich colour as though the life within were very intense. The mouth was the great distinction: it was of a faultless beauty. All fun, all thoughtfulness, all generosity, were in those gentle, sensitive, proud curves. She wore white, with a green jacket. Her voice seemed to Hi to be the quality of voice he had always most longed to hear. She spoke English faultlessly.

“So Rosa has put you to cutting out Easter dresses?” she asked.

“Women are always making men slaves,” he said.

“Well, after lunch, you shall be free. Manuel will be here to lunch, Rosa, so if it’s cool enough we might play tennis afterwards. Would you play, Mr. Ridden?”

“I’d love some tennis.”

She picked up some pattern-paper, turned it, folded it, snipped it with scissors, refolded it, snipped it again, and then shook it out as a sort of cape or shawl of lace.

“That is what the negresses wear in San Jacinto,” she said. “They cut the linen and wear it over scarlet; it looks just like lace at a little distance.”

“You are clever,” Hi said, “to cut it all out like that. I wish you’d show me how you did it.”

“Like this,” she said, picking up another piece of paper.

“The English are always wanting to do things,” Rosa said. “They never say, ‘Here’s a perfect day, let’s think about perfection.’ They say, ‘Here, it’s stopped raining, let’s do something.’”

“You did your share when you were in England,” he said, “so you needn’t talk.”

“She seems to have been busy this morning,” Carlotta said. “We’ll talk about perfection, if you like.”

“I don’t want to talk, but to listen,” Rosa said. “Suppose you sing.”

Carlotta went to the piano and sang a couple of Spanish songs, one strange, the other grim, both haunting. Hi thought them the most beautiful things he had ever heard, sung by the most marvellous voice. He could not turn his eyes from her face and throat. She was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. He felt himself to be vile and a boor, and unfit to walk the same planet. He wondered whether he could possibly take the pattern-papers which she had cut, or the scissors she had used. He stared and stared. He knew it to be rude, but could not help it. “My God, she is beautiful,” he thought. “She is lovely, lovely. O God, I wish I could fight for her or do something for her.”

He noticed her hands. They were not the thin, pale, very knuckly bundles of skewers which ladies’ hands usually seemed to him, but perfections of form and marks of capacities. There was a ring on one finger. “There it is,” he thought; “she’s engaged to be married, to this devil Manuel, who isn’t good enough for her. This devil Manuel can kiss her. I’d like to call him out.” Glancing suddenly away from the lovely face he saw Rosa watching him with a certain malice tinged just a little, unselfish as she was, with envy. No one had stared at her in quite that way before she had taken any pains to secure it.

Rosa smiled somewhat bitterly; a gong was beaten to call them to lunch.

“Manuel is late,” Carlotta said; “he said he might be.”

Hi hated Manuel for being late, and for being called “Manuel,” and for being at all. He wanted to shine before her, but could think of nothing to say; he seemed to be spurting orange-juice everywhere. Then he was ashamed that three women, living in this lovely room, should all speak good English, in compliment to himself, while he could hardly say, “Thank you” in Spanish.

IV

“Rosa, my daughter,” Donna Emilia said, “I have had such a strange message from Señora Artigas. Her son, Estifanio, has disappeared.”

“We passed him in the cathedral last night, mother, at about six or half-past, as we left the service.”

“He was at home after that. At nearly midnight two young men, in evening dress, called for him to say that Porfirio Rivera, his great friend, had been hurt in a duel, was dying, and had asked for him. Estifanio did not know the young men; but, of course, he went with them, and he has not returned.”

“If his friend were dying, mother, he would stay with him.”

“But the story was false, my dear. Porfirio called for Estifanio this morning; he had fought no duel, is in perfect health, and has sent no message. Estifanio has disappeared. Imagine his mother’s anxiety.”

Hi saw Rosa and Carlotta look at each other with a glance which he could not interpret. He felt that there was trouble and that he had better say something.

“We had a fellow at school,” he said, “who disappeared one summer holidays. He went out in a boat with another fellow. The boat upset, but they were picked up by a steamer. However, the steamer was carrying the mails and could not stop, so these two fellows had to go all the way to New York before they could send a message home. They’d both been buried, or at least had the burial-service read over them by that time.”

“Estifanio will turn up, in the same way, mother,” Rosa said.

“I trust so,” the old lady said. “Suddenness of death is ever a thing I pray God to spare my friends.”

“Estifanio is a great hunter,” Carlotta said. “He rides out to this ‘drag,’ do you call it? which the English have started. Are you fond of hunting, Mr. Ridden?” He thought her an angel of tact to have changed the conversation a little.

“I love riding,” he said, “but of course, my father only lets me ride the old crocks. Still, sometimes he lets me be his second horseman, and then I have had some wonderful times.”

“Rosa said that you are fond of engines.”

“Yes, I love engines.”

“So do I,” she said. “I’m racing my brother with one. He is having an irrigation canal dug by men, and I am doing a little bit of it with machines; but the nature of the ground doesn’t make it quite a fair match. What engines interest you most?”

“No particular engine,” he said, “but more the nature of engines. I’m always thinking of all sorts of little engines which everybody could have. For instance, a little engine to sweep the floor of a room, or dust walls, or clean big glass panes like the windows of shops. Then, I expect you’ll think it very silly, but don’t you think one could have a little engine on a boat?”

“Oh, the engine on a boat,” Rosa said. “Hi is a lovely character, Carlotta. He would die for me or for you at a moment’s notice; but the engine on a boat is his mad streak. Of course it’s nice to have a mad streak; it shows the oldness of your family; but there it is.”

“Why should there not be an engine on a boat?” Carlotta asked. “What sort of little engine do you mean, Mr. Ridden?”

“Oh, call him Hi, Carlotta,” Rosa said. “This is his home here, remember; call him Hi.”

“I don’t know whether he will let me,” Carlotta said.

“I’ll be frightfully proud if you will,” Hi said, and blushed scarlet, and knew that Rosa watched the blush.

“What sort of engine . . . Hi?” Carlotta asked.

“Thank you,” he said, wondering whether he would ever be able to save her life and in reward be asked to call her Carlotta.

“You see,” he said, “Rosa is always ragging. She worked at this engine when she was in England. You see, we live in a part of England which is mostly rolling grass hills. We call them downs, but they are really a sort of ups. Well, we are a good long way from the Thames; too far to go for a day’s boating. Now I’m not much good at rowing, but I do love messing about in a boat. I mean, being in a boat.”

“I do, too,” Carlotta said; “there is a sort of lake at home. I go out in a boat to watch the flamingoes.”

“We’ve not got any lake, alas,” Hi said, “but there is a little sort of brook, or chalk-stream. It’s got plenty of water always, but it isn’t broad enough for oars. So what I’ve always wanted to do is to make a little engine to go in a boat. I don’t mean a steam-engine, but a hand engine, so that one could have the exercise of rowing. A man would sit on the thwart and turn a crank, or pull it to and fro, and that would turn a paddle-wheel; only I don’t want the paddle-wheel to be at the side, but either in front or let into the boat in a sort of well, so as not to take up room. They all say that it couldn’t go, but I say it must go.”

“Of course it would go,” Carlotta said.

“How could it go?” Rosa asked. “It could no more go than if you were to stand in the boat and pull the boat-rope.”

“You’ve not even got enough mechanical sense, Rosa,” Hi said, “to make you keep quiet when mechanics are being talked. If I’d had an old boat or punt to experiment on, instead of a clothes-basket covered with rick-cloth, I’d have proved that my thing would go.”

“If it would go, why hasn’t it been done? All the English are always messing about in boats.”

“My engine is not for ordinary rivers, but for the brooks at home, or even the canals, where you cannot always row, nor even paddle in comfort.”

“There wasn’t much comfort in your clothes-basket, if I remember rightly,” Rosa said.

“There isn’t much comfort in any good thing.”

“I should have thought religion,” Rosa said.

“You try it and see.”

“Manuel is very late,” Donna Emilia said. “We’re almost at an end here. Do you think that he will come, ’Lotta?”

“Yes, I think I hear him.” A horse came at a quick canter up the drive. Carlotta turned to Hi.

“After my marriage,” she said, “you must come out to stay with us, if you will. There are rivers there not unlike what I should imagine yours to be, and rolling hills of grass.”

“I would love that,” he said. He looked at her, and was at once shot through with anguish to think that she was to be married to a man not good enough for her. “He has frightened her,” he thought, “or got some hold upon her, in the way these beasts do.”

Suddenly he realised that Don Manuel was there, kissing Donna Emilia’s hand; he must have come in like a panther.

“I say,” he thought, “what a man.”

All manly strength, beauty and grace moved in that figure; but the face was the extraordinary thing; it won Hi at once, partly by its power, partly by its resemblance to the bust of the young Napoleon on the landing at the Foliats. The man turned to Hi, with eyes most strange, masterful, unbearable and bright as flames. “This is an extraordinary man,” Hi thought. “Either splendid or very queer, perhaps both.” The extraordinary man greeted him in English; then burst out with:

“Ah, I am glad to see you, Mr. Ridden. Your father sixteen years ago sent me two English hunting saddles, because I rode his stallion, what? And how is your father? And how do you like Santa Barbara? Ah, your father; I was proud of those saddles; no gift have I liked so. You shall come to me at Encinitas and ride and ride. That is the life, what?”

He took Hi’s hands in both his own, in his impulsive way, and looked into his eyes, in a way that was both frightening and winning; it entirely won Hi.

“You’re not a bit like your father,” he said, “not a little bit. Your father likes being top-dog; sometimes bully, sometimes blarney. You want to make things. I know your sort.

“Where are you staying?” he continued. “At the Santiago? That’s a vile hole, the Santiago. Yet all our visitors form their first impressions there. Whereabouts have they put you?”

“On the third floor,” Hi said, “Room 67.”

“Looking out on the back, what? Well, looking out on the front wouldn’t have been much more cheerful. The palace, the Santiago and the cathedral. I’d like to raze them all three and start afresh.

“By the way, about your Santiago. I am a night bird. I pass the back of that hotel at night at two in the morning. You can get in at the back through the cellar-grating. The negro waiters run a gambling hell there; fan-tan, what? They also do a private trade in the hotel liquor. And now forgive me everybody for being so late.”

“You are scandalously late, Manuel,” Rosa said. “You deserve no lunch.”

“I want no lunch,” he said, “but coffee and some bread. I am late, because I have been tracking a crime. Estifanio Artigas was murdered in this city last night.”

“Then it was murder?”

“We were talking of him a moment since.”

“That will be death to the poor mother; her only child.”

“There is more than this,” Carlotta said. “The murder was planned. By whom?”

“The Murder Gang of the Palace. A club of young criminals headed by Don José, the son of our Dictator, Mr. Ridden. They murdered the lad in that tunnel or passage where the windmills used to be. I have been with the murderer. Here’s a copy of his confession, made before Chacon, the notary. I’ve sent copies of it to Chavez and Hermengildo, as well as to your brother, Carlotta. Who could want food after this? Now the Whites move again; we have a cause and a case.

“This Murder Club was founded by Don José at the end of last year as a new excitement; he and eight young men are the members; all very select. They have now murdered five men; one a month is their rule, each in a different way.

“Pablo Hinestrosa was chosen to kill Estifanio. Two of the others came to help him; four were posted, to keep guard during the murder; the other two brought Estifanio to the place.

“I learned all this from Pablo’s own lips this morning.”

“Pablo Hinestrosa was always as weak as water,” Rosa said. “Cruel, too; I remember him putting worms under his rocking horse as a little child.”

“I found Pablo in the street, as I came back from my ride this morning,” Don Manuel continued. “He was crying and quaking; so I brought him to my rooms. Bit by bit, I got the story out of him.”

“One moment, Manuel,” Carlotta said; “this Hinestrosa man, who is plainly of weak intelligence, may have imagined all this.”

“Ah, no, alas,” Don Manuel said, “I have proved it to be true. One decoyed the victim to the carriage, one drove the carriage to the tunnel. Then the decoy led him into the tunnel, where Pablo killed him. Don José helped in the killing. There were the tracks and the body, everything corresponded exactly.

“You will think this next a strange thing:

“Don José is very clever as well as very vicious. He and Spallo took Pablo home after the murder, and, as they saw that he was shaken, they feared that he would betray them.

“Now Pablo feared that they feared this, so he contrived to leave them where he could hear them talking. He heard Don José say: ‘I knew that he would be sentimental. He will confess the whole thing to the first priest he can find. Shall we finish him? It would be rather a neat end to the night.’ It must have been an anxious moment for Pablo, waiting for the answer; but Spallo said, ‘Better not. . . . He’ll be all right after a sleep.’

“After that, Spallo and José went away, but now another strange thing happened. When they had gone (so Pablo says) the ghost of Estifanio’s father came in and sat beside him. He never spoke, but whenever Pablo tried to run from the room, this ghost slid in front of him.”

“What happened then?”

“Pablo said that he ‘burned the ghost away, with matches and texts of Scripture.’ When the ghost was gone he ran into the street; but it was worse there, he said, because Estifanio kept looking through the windows at him.

“I got a doctor to give him an opiate; now he’s asleep in Chacon’s house.”

“God give us mercy,” Donna Emilia said. “Is there to be no measure to the wickedness of this time?”

“When will General Chavez know of this?” Carlotta asked.

“Now. He’ll be in town by six. Congress meets at eight. We will arraign the palace on this question.”

“God help this unhappy land,” Donna Emilia said.

“God is helping this land,” Don Manuel said. “He gives us this sword against the Lopez gang; now we shall end them.”

“I am not so sure, Manuel,” Carlotta said. “There is much shrewdness in the men about Lopez. They would be only too glad to get rid of Don José. This case may rid the land of Don José; but I do not think that Lopez will be involved. His hands may even be strengthened.”

Manuel listened to her with much attention.

“Not as ours are strengthened,” he said. “Chavez and Bazan must stir at this. I have the confession and all the evidence. The Reds suspect nothing. We shall have a _coup de théâtre_ in only five hours. This magazine shall explode under their feet.”

“I wonder,” Carlotta said. “General Chavez may think the time inopportune.”

“Inopportune? When the Reds are declaiming about a White conspiracy?”

“If not inopportune, he may find some other excuse for not acting.”

“He must act upon this.”

“He is a very indolent man.”

“If he will not act, we will find who will. I see three here to start with; no, four, for I am sure that Mr. Ridden will be with us.”

“Rather, if you’ll have me, sir,” Hi said.

“It will begin your stay here well, to help in the downfall of a Dictator.”

“Manuel,” Rosa said, “you are not to drag Hi into our party politics.”

“Manuel,” Carlotta said, “I think that you are going beyond the present issue, which is, to denounce the Murder Club. Lopez has sufficient readiness, and bigness, to banish, or even to prosecute, his son; and then face you in a stronger position than ever.”

“I believe that Lopez is mad,” Manuel said. “To-night, when this begins, I shall declare him to be unfit to govern.”

As he spoke, the major-domo entered with a telegram upon a salver.

“For Don Manuel,” he said.

When Don Manuel had read the telegram, he changed countenance; it was plain that he had received a blow.

“Is it ill news from Encarnacion?” Donna Emilia asked.

“Is your mother worse, Manuel?” Carlotta asked.

“Yes,” he said, “my beloved mother is dangerously ill at Encarnacion. I must go at once.”

“There will be no train to San Jacinto till noon to-morrow.”

“No,” he said, “but I can go by the mountain train at four; and ride from Melchior, it is only sixty-seven miles. If I telegraph for horses, I can be at home by dusk to-morrow night. That will save five hours.”

“You must go at once, if you are to catch the four train,” Carlotta said. “I’ll drive you to the station.”

“We will go, then,” Manuel said. “While they bring the chaise, I’ll order horses; you shall send the telegrams when I am gone.”

* * * * * * *

As Don Manuel made his farewells, he took Hi’s hand in both his own hands. “My greetings to your father,” he said. “Tell him I remember the saddles. I shall expect you presently at my home.”

“You will stay with us, will you not?” Carlotta said.

“I would love to,” Hi said. “I would love it more than anything.”

They all went out of doors to see them start. Carlotta was driving two marvellous little horses, full of fire. Hi looking at her as she sat watching her horses, felt that the only possible happiness on earth would be to live and die for her; since everything about her was beautiful and came not from this world. He saw that all there thought as he thought and felt as he felt about her. “You beautiful and gracious and glorious thing,” he thought. “I wish I could die for you.”

The peones stepped from the horses’ heads, the gates opened, the horses strained to the collars and the marvellous girl was gone. Often, afterwards, he thought of that scene.

“I trust that he may find his mother alive,” Donna Emilia said.

“I must be going, too,” Hi said.

“Going! nonsense,” Rosa said. “You’ve come for the day. You’ve had neither tennis nor a swim. Come in.”

When he had come in, Rosa looked at him with malice.

“Isn’t he handsome, Hi?” she asked.

“Handsome? I should think he is,” Hi said. “He is everything and has everything.”

“No; he hasn’t everything,” Rosa said. “I know several things that he has not. But even if he had everything, he wouldn’t be good enough for her.”

Hi did not answer, for the thought of Manuel having the beautiful Carlotta went through him with a pang.

“He wouldn’t be good enough for her; would he?” Rosa repeated.

“I hope so.”

“No, you don’t,” Rosa said. “You know that he wouldn’t. Confess, Hi, he wouldn’t.”

Hi looked at her with a look of pain.

“Isn’t she wonderful?” she said.

“I understand your being fond of her.”

“Fond of her? People aren’t fond of her. They worship her and would die for her. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would,” he said, after a pause. “You know I would. And you would, too.”

“I told you not to,” Rosa said. “I gave you fair warning. You’d better put her out of your mind. Besides,” she added with malice, “he’s frightfully jealous.”

“He’ll have some cause, I should say.”

“Well, come on into the garden. I’ll play you tennis.”

“No, be square, Rosa. You don’t really want me. I must clear out.”

“I’ll tell you when to clear out,” she said. “But stay a little. Carlotta will be back in half an hour. Stay to see her. It will be the last time you’ll see her before she marries.”

“I thought you said that they wouldn’t be married till Easter.”

“Not now,” she said. “She’ll go to him by the noon train to-morrow; you will see. I shall have to go with her. She’ll be married by the Bishop to-morrow midnight, so that the mother may see the son married. Then she’ll be with that man all her life.”

“She chose him, out of all the men in the world,” he said. “And I don’t wonder; he’s a fine fellow.”

“A fine fellow? Only a few years ago he was the friend of this Don José of the Murder Gang.”

“I don’t know about that,” Hi said. “He’s a fine fellow now; and she thinks so.”

“She thinks so now, but in a week, in a month . . . with that man all the time.”

“Here’s Pablo, with a message for you,” Hi said.

“There is someone to see you, Señorita,” Pablo said, “Tomás Chacon, the notary from Santa Barbara.”

“Strange,” Rosa said to Hi. “This is the notary whom Manuel left in charge of the murderer. If you will stay by these roses, to watch the humming birds for a moment, I will speak to him.”

* * * * * * *

He watched the humming birds for ten minutes, while Rosa spoke with the man. He did not think of the humming birds; the love of Carlotta was eating him up, in an agony that was yet sweet.

I did but see her passing by, But I shall love her till I die.

“She will be married to-morrow midnight,” he thought, “and he will have her till she dies. If she could be chained to a rock by a dragon we could prove who loves her best.”

* * * * * * *

When the visitor had gone, Rosa returned to him. “I knew that there would be trouble,” she said. “Chacon has let the murderer escape. The Reds are warned now and all Manuel’s plan will miscarry. He’ll be furious.”

“How did he let him escape?”

“Somebody betrayed it, and the Reds rescued him. I’ve sent Chacon to tell General Chavez; but nothing will be done now that Manuel is away: Chavez is an idler.

“Of course,” she added, “he may act because Manuel is away. These soldiers and politicians are as jealous of each other as prime donne.”

“Surely,” Hi said, “this isn’t a matter for politicians, but for the police? Surely the police will take the murderer?”

“The police?” she said. “Why, Hi, they’re married men, with families, most of them. Do you think they’d risk their pensions by arresting a Red on a White warrant? They’re not philanthropists.”

“What are they, then?”

“Paid partisans.”

“Golly.”

“Well may you say golly. However, that is a little thing, compared with this marriage. I’m used to the police. I’m not used to the thought of that man with . . .”

She had paused at the little fountain, where she gazed down into the basin and let the fingers of one hand open and close in the water.

“But I’m not going to talk in this beastly way,” she said. “Forget what I said, will you?

“Of course, Hi, you’ll come here whenever you like. Mother told me to tell you that a place will be here for you at lunch on every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; when you can come, we’ll be glad, and when you can’t you needn’t write or send word. You needn’t think it’s decent of us. We’re only too glad. You were all lovely to me at your home, and your father simply saved us from beggary. Besides, it will be a charity to two lorn females.”

“Thank you,” Hi said, “you’re a jolly good friend.”

“There’s my hand on that,” she said. “And when you’re settled out here, we can always put you up. Now would you care to swim? We have a bathing pond here. It was made in the days of our glory, but, being made, it is easy to keep up.”

She led the way through a gap in a rose-hedge to a terrace of white marble, in the midst of which was a swimming pool, full of clear water.

“There you are,” she said, “if ever you want a swim. A plunge now would do us both good; but before we plunge, shall we just walk back to the house, to see if Carlotta has returned?”

“Yes, certainly,” Hi said; “but I haven’t heard her horses.”

“Nor I,” she said. “But she ought to be back. She is the swimmer amongst us. She does all things well, but she swims like a sea-bird.”

They found that Carlotta had not returned.

“She ought to be back by this time,” Rosa said. “But in this country trains are sometimes late in starting, as you will find. Let us walk to the gates, to see if she be on the road.”

They saw no one on the road, save three men with a handcart who were coming slowly from the direction of the city and pausing at intervals to paste handbills on walls and palings. They paused to paste a bill upon a ruinous wall opposite the Piranhas’ gate; Rosa and Hi watched them.

“Bill-stickers,” Hi said. “I did not know that you had them here.”

“Oh, yes,” Rosa said. “We are civilised here; bills, drains and only one wife, just like Europe. But we keep them for great occasions like bull-fights, these bills, I mean.”

“Bull-fights,” Hi said. “Do you still have them?”

“This is the season for them; probably this is an announcement of them.”

“I’d love to see a bull-fight; it must be frightfully exciting. Do let us wait to see what it is.”

The bill-sticker, with a few deft thrusts of his brush, set the poster in its place. It was a yellow poster, printed in blunt black type with a tall red heading:

“Proclamation of the Government.”

“It is only a pronunciamento,” Rosa said; “not bulls after all. Can you read it from here? I cannot see anything without my glasses.”

“Something about religion, as far as I can make it out,” Hi said. “Dios is God, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it is, then; all about religion.”

“There are rather a lot of Dioses,” Hi said after a pause; “but then I suppose it’s Lent.”

“Yes,” Rosa said, a little snappily. “In my Church it is the season for Dioses.”

Donna Emilia met them on their way back through the house to the pond. “Carlotta not yet back?” she said. “She has probably driven to one of the stores. Come in, then, to drink maté. Tea here is never good, Highworth; we drink maté amargo, a bitter drink; not unlike your camomile tea, they tell me; we think it refreshing.”

Hi did not find it refreshing, but drank one little silver pipkin for the experience and a second for politeness.

V

“Is anyone coming here this afternoon?” Rosa asked. “No one, so far as I can tell,” her mother answered. “I am not asking people, because I want you to see Carlotta while you can. Besides, it is Lent; one should be quiet in Lent.”

“They are putting placards in the road,” Rosa said. “We could not read them; but they seemed to be about quiet at Easter.”

“I am glad,” Donna Emilia said. “The last exhibition of disorder disgraced our country.”

The old butler entered. “Señora,” he said, “Don Inocencio desires to speak with you, if it be your pleasure.”

“Let him come in,” she answered. “Don Inocencio, Highworth, is one of the Senators of the White party, to which we belong. He was an old friend of my husband’s.”

“Shall I not go?” Hi asked.

“No, stay, it’s very good for you,” Rosa said.

Don Inocencio was a little pale man with a habit of inflating his cheeks; when he did this, he looked more important than at other times. He held a roll of paper in his left hand; he had very nice manners and spoke in English on finding Hi there. He was in a state of some agitation.

“My dear lady,” he said, “I have come all this way, in a great hurry, because of the importance of the occasion. The man has been permitted and permitted till he has presumed and presumed; but now he has outstepped all bounds; he has, if I may say so, without inelegance, burst, like the frog in the fable.”

“Who has burst without inelegance?” Rosa asked. “Do tell us. Could he do it again, publicly?”

“He has done it publicly,” Don Inocencio said, “It cannot be done twice in a civilised country.”

“Who is this?” Donna Emilia asked. “I do not quite understand? Has there been some accident?”

“I thought that at first,” Don Inocencio answered. “I thought at first, this is not genuine; this is a ruse or trick, designed by an enemy. It would be a skilled thrust, though that of a devil, to lead people to suppose that this came from our enemy. Then I thought, no, this thing is too mad to be anything but genuine; no counterfeit would be so crazy.”

“But what is it, Don Inocencio?”

“Have you not read the proclamation?”

“A proclamation; which; what proclamation?”

“There is at present only one, which will be historical. This is it, this scroll. They started to put this upon the walls at the time of the siesta; it is now everywhere; can it be that you have not seen it?”

“No; no, indeed.”

“Then I am a bringer of news. When I read it, I thought, this, if genuine, will be a landmark in our story. I must have copies of this; so must Donna Emilia; therefore I procured copies from the bill-stickers.

“You know that I am a collector of documents, which will go to my nephew; all things, especially documents, if old enough, have romance; this will have much more than romance, being the cause, if I am not much mistaken, of great events in the near future. We live in stirring times, Miss Rosa. You, Mr. Ridden, will see great events, really great events, as the Blanco party reasserts its ideals. Wait, now; for this big document; I will display my wares upon this chair.”

He pulled a chair towards him so that he could spread the paper upon the back: it was a yellow paper, printed in blunt, black type with a tall red heading:

“PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT.”

He glanced at the faces of his audience for some expression, which he did not find.

“What,” he said, “no comment?”

“None,” Rosa said. “Mother and I cannot read well without our glasses.”

“And I,” Hi said, “cannot read Spanish very fluently yet. In fact, I can only get as far as ‘Government.’”

“Perhaps, Inocencio,” Donna Emilia said, “you will be so kind as to read it for us.”

“Certainly,” he said, “I will read it aloud: only I must warn you, that its contents are not such as are usual, I will not say in a proclamation, but in print of any kind. To begin with, it is, I must warn you, from first to last a print of the last blasphemy of madness.”

The listeners did not answer this, but looked and felt uncomfortable.

“Will you not read, then?” Donna Emilia said at last. Don Inocencio began to read aloud. He bent a little over the paper, so that he might read; he beat time with his left hand, in a pumping stroke, to mark his cadence. He began as follows:—

“This,” he said, “is his preludium or exordium.

PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT.

Forasmuch as I, Don Lopez de Meruel, King, Emperor and Dictator of Santa Barbara, am convinced of my divinity and of my oneness with God. Know all men, that henceforth, throughout this my heaven of Santa Barbara, I assume the style and name of God, with the titles of Thrice Holy, Thrice Blessed, Thrice Glorious.

“What do you make of that?” he said, “for a beginning?”

“The man is mad,” Rosa said.

“It is blasphemy unspeakable,” Donna Emilia said. “I tremble lest fire descend on us.”

“This is nothing to what follows,” Don Inocencio said. “I will read on. The rest is incredibly much worse. But the rest, I, for one, rejoice at. It continues thus:

I therefore, thy God, decree, that henceforth my mortals worship and sacrifice to me in all churches, chapels and places of worship whatsoever; that all prayer, praise, worship and adoration, with all hymns, psalms and spiritual ejaculations of whatever kind, be henceforth addressed to me, whether in public or in private, I, thy God Lopez, decree it.

Likewise thy God decrees (and in reading this, Donna Emilia, I ask pardon of my Maker) thy God decrees, that all other Gods, saints and suchlike, hitherto worshipped in this my Heaven, such as (here he writes in a way that cannot be quoted) shall be cast aside, their images defaced, their altars denied and their rituals omitted, upon pain of death.

Furthermore, thy God decrees that my image be placed in all churches and in all chapels of churches, wheresoever there be an altar; and that instead of the services hitherto used at such places, a service to me only shall be used, with the title the Red Mass to God Lopez, the Thrice Holy.

And thy God decrees, that at the mention of thy God, at His passing, at His coming, upon His feast days, as at the passing of His priests and in the presence of His decrees, all My people, without exception, shall cry, Blessed be God Lopez, and shall sign the mark of thy God, a circle and a dot, upon breast and head.

Lopez, Thrice Glorious, Thrice Blessed, Thrice Holy.

All who infringe This My Decree, in Thought or Word or Deed, shall suffer Death.

From My Heaven in Plaza Verde,

⊙ LOPEZ GOD LOPEZ. ⊙

“That,” Don Inocencio said, “is our ruler’s proclamation in this year of grace. What do you think of it?”

Rosa went to the paper to read some printing at the foot.

“It is genuine,” she said. “It is printed at the palace press.”

“I believe it to be genuine,” Don Inocencio said.

Donna Emilia crossed herself for the third time: she spoke with some difficulty.

“Did you say, Inocencio, that you rejoice at this proclamation?”

“I do,” he said, “sincerely, Emilia, I do. We have been for far too long apathetic: now this outrage will rouse us from sleep: it may be our salvation as a nation. We ourselves are in some measure responsible for this madness. We have connived at madness in the palace too long: he takes advantage of our supineness to seize us by the throats. Now there can be but one answer.”

“Surely,” Donna Emilia said, “a vengeance of Heaven will fall upon a man like that.”

“Our Caligula will not long survive his decree,” Don Inocencio said. “Our old days of the Blancos will begin again.”

“What will people do?” Hi asked.

“They will do much,” Don Inocencio said. “For a beginning, the priests are already leading their young men to tear down these placards. In the New Town, a priest known to me was gathering the fraternity of his parish as I passed by on my way here. The week will see Don Lopez out of his palace.”

“I wonder,” Rosa said.

“Wonder what, dear?” her mother asked.

“Whether this follows on what Chacon told me half an hour ago. The Hinestrosa creature escaped in some way. The Reds must know by this time that the Whites are planning something. This is their counter-stroke.”

“Let us at least be thankful that General Chavez must be in the city by this time.”

“I think he must be,” Don Inocencio said. “Perhaps it is too early for General Chavez to be here, or indeed to be already on his way, but preparing to be on his way, that, yes, we might declare with confidence. Undoubtedly, he is preparing to be on his way, to, how shall we put it? to draw the sword of outraged religion.”

“Thank God that we may think that,” Donna Emilia said. “We know, that however indolent Luis may be, he is great enough to overcome his indolence when his country calls.”

“I don’t think so, mother,” Rosa said. “I don’t think he is. His country has called ever since the last election. What has he done? He has been at home distilling liqueurs and trying to grow Pommard grapes.”

“And why not?” Don Inocencio said. “Thus the great Roman patriots were employed when their country cried to them. They were on their farms, pruning their vines, or ‘binding faggots,’ as I think Horace puts it, ‘at the bidding of a Sabine grandmother.’ But when their country called, they arose; exchanging, as someone says, the service of the rustic god, whose name I forget, for that of Mars. Besides, Luis Chavez is a soldier. He needs the opportunities of the soldier, attack or defence, rather than those of the debater and intriguer.”

“I do not think that he is a soldier any more than he is a statesman,” Rosa said. “He is a self-indulgent, indolent country gentleman, who loves his garden and his book.”

“I have known Luis Chavez for a great many years, Rosa,” her mother said. “You are not just to him. He is a good man. If he be not hasty, it is because he is wise. He weighs situations before he decides. He asks God’s direction before he acts. I think that we ought all now to pray that he may be directed to act wisely now.”

“Before we do that, mother,” Rosa said, “we really ought to send into the town for Carlotta. She has not yet returned. There is a good deal of noise in the town; listen to that. There may be rioting or shooting.”

“Let me go,” Hi said.

“I thought I heard the horses,” Donna Emilia said.

“There are no horses.”

“There is a noise though,” Hi said. “There is shouting. Someone is shouting and coming along the road.”

Rosa was sitting beside Hi. She clutched his arm as though she wished to crush it. He felt her tremble or thrill like a taut guy suddenly stricken.

“Hi,” she whispered, “is it rioters in the road, mobbing her?”

“No, no,” Hi said, “it sounds like a man crying news.”

“Listen,” Don Inocencio said.

“It is only one voice,” Hi said.

“Yes, it is only one voice.”

“Have you town-criers here?” Hi asked.

“It is a newspaper seller crying some special edition,” Don Inocencio said. Pablo, the major domo appeared, with maté for Don Inocencio.

“Pablo, is this shouter in the road a newspaper seller?” Donna Emilia asked.

“Yes, Señora. He announces some murder.”

“Cause Felipe to procure a copy of the paper for me, will you, Pablo?” Don Inocencio asked.

“I will, Señor.”

When Pablo had gone, Don Inocencio rose, with a look of great importance.

“It is quite clear to me,” he said. “Judgment has overtaken the blasphemer already. Some deliverer has stricken Lopez in the moment of his blasphemy. I knew that our nation did but sleep.”

“I trust that no such thing as that has happened,” Donna Emilia said. “Of all the terrible things, to be flung suddenly into death is the most terrible; and for one to die in the very utterance of blasphemy is what no enemy could wish.”

“One cannot think of him as a blasphemer, mother,” Rosa said, “but as a poor madman. And if some other poor madman has mak’d him siccar, I don’t think one should examine the ways of Providence too critically.”

“It would be like the slaying of the Philistine,” Don Inocencio said. “Another David has arisen.”

“Carlotta has not returned, mother,” Rosa said. “I think Felipe ought to go to enquire what is happening.”

“May I go?” Hi asked.

“She has Manuel with her,” Donna Emilia said. “It may well be that the trains are stopped. In these crises they often put embargo on the trains. Manuel will have taken her to her brother’s at Medinas.”

“Well, won’t you let me go, to make sure for you?” Hi asked.

Pablo entered with the newspaper, which he gave to Don Inocencio. Hi noticed that Pablo looked much shaken and that he said something in a very low voice as he gave the paper. Plainly something terrible had happened. Don Inocencio opened the paper, with a trembling pair of hands; he looked suddenly deflated. Pablo left the room softly closing the door. Don Inocencio turned very white, sat down hurriedly and dropped the paper.

“What is it, Inocencio?” Emilia said.

“Not Carlotta?”

“No, no, no, no,” Inocencio said. “Chavez. General Chavez has been murdered.”

“My God. Luis? But how?”

“It tells little. ‘We grieve to announce the terrible news, that General Luis Chavez was assassinated by a ruffian, at the station of Aguas Dulces, at half-past two this afternoon, while waiting for the train to Santa Barbara, where he was expected to speak in Congress to-night. The murderer has been arrested.’”

“My God.”

“And where is Carlotta?” Rosa cried. “She is in the city all this while. Is she, too, in the hands of the Red murderers?”

“God in Heaven forbid, child.”

“There are her horses,” Hi said. “That is the jingle of their silver; they are almost at the door.”

“Let us come down, then, to meet her.”

They found her chaise and horses at the door: Carlotta was not there.

“Were you in time for the Meruel train?” Donna Emilia asked the driver.

“Yes, Señora, in good time,” the man said. “Afterwards, the train being gone, on hearing of rumours, the Señorita drove to Medinas, whence she sends this letter.”

“Thank you,” Donna Emilia said. “You had better stable your horses, then.” As the man drove to the stables. Donna Emilia opened the letter, and dropped the envelope, which Hi picked up (and kept). “She has gone to Miguel’s,” Donna Emilia said. “Miguel is her brother, Highworth. Miguel thinks she had better stay there for the present.”

“Wisely decided,” Don Inocencio said. “And I will now take my leave, since I must go to the Circle, to see Hermengildo before the House to-night. Let me drive you, Mr. Ridden, since I pass your hotel.”

* * * * * * *

While they waited in the drive for the caleche a party of Pitubas, under a negro who wore a green feather in his hat, rode up to them. He saluted Rosa, and presented a warrant. Rosa read it, called Pablo, and gave him some directions. Pablo led the troops to the stables, from which they removed all the horses, including Carlotta’s team. The Senator’s horse, being old, they left. When they had secured these horses, they rode off with them to another White house further down the bay.

“They’re taking the horses,” Rosa explained. “They always begin by taking our horses. That’s the first danger sign.”

“But good heaven,” Hi said. “Why?”

“‘Military reasons,’ they say in their warrant; but they really mean, so that the Whites shall not communicate with each other.”

“Will you get them back?”

“No, probably not. You see, they’ve only gone to the White house down the bay; not to those two Red houses. This may make you understand our local politics a little. It shows you Santa Barbara as she is. It isn’t the Paradise it looks, is it?”

“It’s got angels in it,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m so anxious about her.”

“She is safe at her brother’s, surely?”

“She ought not to have gone there.”

“Why ever not?”

“I don’t know, but she ought not. I knew it when I saw the chaise had not brought her. She has done the wrong thing.”

“I will take a note to her if you like,” Hi said, “and bring her back here, too, if she wishes.”

“She won’t come back here,” Rosa said. “Nor could she, after dark, with these patrols in the streets; but if you will take a letter for me, I shall be grateful. The de Leyvas live outside the West Gate, off the Anselmo Road, in a part called Medinas.”

“Medinas Close is where my old murderer lives,” Hi said.

“There are fearful rookeries close to the palace,” Rosa said. “They are all owned by the de Leyvas.”

She wrote a letter, which she gave to Hi to take.

“If she wants to send any message,” Hi said, “of course, I will bring it back at once.”

“Hi,” she said, “you really are a dear.” She caught him by the neck and kissed his forehead.

“Somewhat rougey,” Hi thought, as he mopped his brow, while he drove with Don Inocencio. “But an awfully good-hearted sort, Rosa.”

* * * * * * *

The drive to the hotel was interesting; Hi had never before seen a city in a state of excitement. The newsboys were crying special editions; parties of men and boys were marching to drums and fifes under Red banners; certain shops, which did not display Red colours, were having their windows broken. On the water-front a guardia warned Don Inocencio and his driver that the Martial Law was proclaimed, and that all carriages were to be off the streets by eight o’clock. “Bad, bad,” Don Inocencio muttered. “I know not which of us will escape such nets.” He left Hi at his hotel.

Here Hi found two envelopes waiting for him. The first contained a printed card from Roger Weycock, asking him to attend a special meeting of the English in Santa Barbara, at the Club, at seven o’clock that evening; the second contained a similar card, with a few words written in pencil by Allan Winter: “Don’t go to this. Keep clear of politics here.—A. W.” The cards had been hurriedly printed, probably as soon as the proclamation had appeared, the ink on them was still moist.

“Winter was right,” Hi thought. “Weycock is in with the Reds, trying to turn English opinion that way, He’s organising this meeting for that end. But Winter’s right; we ought to keep clear of politics here; I won’t go. But all the same, I am jolly well a White in this business, and I’ll help the Whites all I can. By George, I suppose those devils, the Reds, could arrest me for carrying letters.”

* * * * * * *

The sun was setting when he drove off in a caleche for the de Leyva house at Medinas. On his way, he saw scenes between parties of Reds and Whites which made him wonder at the strength of the feelings between them. “Killing Chavez and claiming to be God did not rouse this,” he thought. “This hate has been simmering for years; this is only the boiling over.”

At the West Gate, a Red patrol was stopping the traffic for examination before permitting it to pass; its officer turned back a carriage which had been trundling in front of Hi for some minutes. He then came forward to question Hi, found that he was English and allowed him to proceed. He did this, as Hi thought, grudgingly, in a way which made him wonder, whether the English were as much loved as his father had always said.

Beyond the gate, the Anselmo road was a narrow street from which narrow courts opened. Street and courts swarmed with people, all talking at the tops of their voices, but above all the talking the harsh bellow of public orators in praise of violence sounded. The place stank of mice, sweat, fried fish and damp washing. Hi called to the driver: “Is this Medinas?”

“Medinas, si,” the driver said.

Little boys clambered on to the caleche, asking for “Frencha penny. Ingles penny.” A fat, pale-faced young man hopped on to the step and poised there while he made his proposals.

“You want to see the sights?” he said. “I be your guide. I show you very funny sights. I show you not the usual sort of thing. You like a nice cock-fight, no? You like a quail-fight, no? See now, I take you to a special thing, not many knows about, a good dog-fight. There now, only three dollar. Well, I take you to a special thing to-night; something you never see, perhaps ever again. No? Well, you go to dam prayer-meeting, see? dam prayer-meeting.”

He swung off to seek for a client elsewhere. The caleche passed from the narrows into a broader space, went under an old archway of withering red and yellow plaster and came out into an avenue of palms lit by electric light. Turning from this through an ilex grove it stopped at the de Leyva palace.

Hi was admitted into a great cool hall built of white Otorin marble. All round it and against its columns were the stands of the de Leyva armour, some of which had marched in the Conquest. Carlotta joined him almost at once; he gave her the letter.

“I thought that perhaps you would bring a letter,” she said. “I suppose Rosa wants me to go back to her? My brother is against that.”

“I hope,” Hi said, “I do hope that Don Manuel will not be attacked by these Reds.”

“He is far away by this time.”

Hi felt that he had said a tactless thing, even to suggest that Don Manuel might be attacked, so he added:

“I should pity the man who attacked Don Manuel.”

“It is nice of you to say that, Hi,” she said.

“Did he see the proclamation, or hear of the murder, before he started?” Hi asked.

“No. Rosa tells me that his captive, the Hinestrosa, has been rescued.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think of my country?”

“It’s produced you and Don Manuel and Donna Emilia,” he said. “I think it’s a marvellous country.”

“It may be marvellous, if it turn now.”

“It will turn,” he said. “No nation will stand that proclamation.”

“If a nation be only mad enough, it will stand anything,” she said.

“I hope,” Hi said, “that Don Manuel will find his mother better, when he gets there.”

“I fear that there is little hope of that,” she said. “A telegram came here . . . he can hardly see his mother alive again.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“Others are not so sorry,” she said, in a strange voice. He looked at her with a rush of understanding that she was standing alone, through her love of Don Manuel.

“Oh, but they must be,” he said.

“Sorry?” she said. “Alas, they are thanking God that my lover is out of the way at this time. You do not know the Whites: how broken we are into cliques. My brother, a great man in so many ways, dreads and hates my lover: he thinks him too dangerous: he wants Bazan to lead the party. If Manuel were here now, Bazan would not stand for five minutes. Then, I suppose, my brother would challenge Manuel to a duel. So, if I bring Manuel back, I break with all I have loved in the past.”

“But you will bring him back,” Hi said.

She looked at him in a way which he never forgot; but she did not answer.

“Let me go and bring him back for you,” Hi pleaded. “Of course, I’m only a boy, but I’ll go like a shot. I’ll take any message you like. Do let me. I’ll never be anything again all my life, probably, except just a planter. But just this once let me ride for you. I only saw you for the first time this morning; but you don’t know what you are to me . . . in my life, I mean . . . you I mean, just there being such a person. Of course, you’re sick of men saying this to you. Miss de Leyva, will you let me go?”

“Carlotta will not let you go,” she said, “I’m sure Miss de Leyva won’t. But I cannot bring Manuel here, against my brother’s prayers, even if I would, from his mother’s death-bed. But there is one thing which I wish you would do for me: take a note from me to Rosa.”

“Of course, I’ll gladly take a note,” he said, “and bring back an answer.”

“There will be no answer. You will just have time to leave the note and get back to your hotel before the streets are cleared.”

While she wrote the note, Hi thought of a suggestion.

“I say,” he said. “Quite apart from calling Don Manuel here, there is some point in letting him know the news and telling him not to come. Couldn’t you let me do that for you?”

“You’re very determined, Hi,” she said. “But you must stay in Santa Barbara and keep out of our politics.”

“But why? You will have to send someone.”

“I will not send you, Hi.”

“Why not? Have you anybody better?”

“There could not be anybody better, nor as good; but this is not a thing I could let you attempt. Do you know, that if the Reds were to find you doing this you might be expelled the country, or even shot.”

“For taking a message?”

“That counts as spying in time of war.”

“Who would know that I was taking a message? I should just be an English tourist. That settles it. I’ll go off and get a horse and start at once and find him and tell him.”

“No, no,” she said. “It is impossible.”

“Because I’m a boy and don’t know Spanish?”

“No, no, indeed,” she said, “but because we want you to settle here. Become a citizen later, if you wish, but, until then, you must avoid our troubles. Now here is my note to Rosa, if you will deliver it.”

It was very dim in the hall away from the tapers on the writing table. There were amphoræ full of sweet-smelling shrubs. He could see her face and hands against the darkness of the leaves: her head seemed crowned by white flowers. She switched on some lights so that the hall seemed suddenly full of armed men.

“Will you give me a sprig of those flowers?” he asked.

“Willingly.” She broke a spray for him.

“What is the flower?”

“Hermosita.”

“May I ever see you again?”

“Of course. Come to-morrow to lunch: you must meet my brother.”

“Oh, thank you. I’ll bring back an answer from Rosa, if she sends one. Anything that I can ever do for you will always be absolute happiness; you know that, don’t you?”

“Thank you, Hi.”

She gave him her hand, in the foreign fashion, to kiss: he was grateful for this. A clock chimed for half-past seven. “You must go,” she said, “you haven’t much time.”

* * * * * * *

His caleche jolted him back through Medinas, which was now lit for the night from its many windows. He saw it as a darting of children and a slinking of men, amid a noise of babies squalling, men singing and women screaming. A gas-lamp at a corner of a lane lit the words on a wooden direction post, To Medinas Close; he could just see a lit space surrounded by decaying old black houses, seven or nine storeys high. “So that is where ’Zeke lives,” he thought. “I’ll go to see the old man as I come back to-morrow.”

There was delay in getting through the gates, in spite of his pleading that he was English. He delivered his letter to Rosa, learned that there was to be no answer, and then drove off (his driver in a hurry) to reach the hotel before eight o’clock. On coming to the gate on his way back, he had some trouble with the guard. Unfortunately it was not the guard which had passed him through ten minutes before. The sergeant of this guard was a mulatto (with an Irish accent), who was very rude and smelt of aniseed.

“You damned English,” he said. “What’s stopping ye staying in your homes? I suppose ye’re ate up by your lice, and think ye can scrape them off on us. Well, get through and be damned to ye and obey the proclamation another time.”

The hotel people opened their doors grudgingly to him. They gave him a tasteless supper in the ill-lit, frowsy dining-room, from which all the life had gone; everybody seemed to have gone to bed. He hurried through the meal and then went up to his bedroom.

Here, in bed, he went over the events of the day with a great deal of relish.

“I have had a day,” he thought. “I have never enjoyed a day so much. She is beautiful, she is marvellous, and to-morrow I shall see her again. Oh, my God, she is beautiful.”

He kept repeating this as he thought of her image with praise and blessing: he could not sleep at first because of her. At a little before midnight some rifles were fired in the streets.

“By George, rifles,” he thought. “I say, this is the heart of life.” The firing, whatever it was, stopped after a couple of minutes. In the quiet which followed, perhaps not long after twelve, he fell asleep.

VI

When he had slept for nearly a watch, he was wakened by a ticking as though the wind were shaking a slat in a Venetian blind. As the noise continued, he sat up, thinking, “Here is the breeze. I’ll have to shut my window.”

He realised, then, that the noise was from the door. It was a little light ticking noise, not unlike the gnawing of a mouse, except that it never varied nor grated.

“It’s only a death-watch,” he said. “No, it’s the breeze, rattling the door. I’ll jam it up with a piece of paper.” He turned out of bed and groped in the dark for the cover of his paper-backed novel. “I’ll wedge it up with this,” he thought. He tore off the cover and folded it into a wedge.

“By George,” he thought, suddenly, with a leaping heart. “It isn’t the door rattling, it’s somebody knocking.”

It was no doubt somebody knocking, but with a special secret midnight knock which might awaken him but alarm no other person on the corridor.

“By George,” he thought, “somebody’s tapping with finger-nails. This is romance, by George. I’ll have to be jolly careful now, or very likely I’ll have my throat cut. Who can be knocking?”

He could not think who would be knocking, but he did not for one moment think that it was a woman come for love of him. He was not frightened. The knocking was of a piece with the romance of the day before. It gave him a thrill of delight to think that the knocker might be in peril and the knock a warning to himself.

“Why not?” he thought. “I’m a foreigner here, as well as a heretic. Why shouldn’t there be a sort of Bartholomew massacre beginning?”

He crept to the door. The key was in the keyhole; he could see nothing there but darkness. By the fanlight, he could tell that the corridor beyond was almost pitch dark. The knocker paused, as though he had heard the creak of his approach.

“Who is there?” Hi whispered. “Who is there?”

To his amazement, Rosa answered him.

“It is I, Rosa. Rosa Piranha. Open, Hi; open quick.”

He opened the door swiftly yet silently; Rosa glided in.

“It’s only me, Hi,” she whispered. “I thought I’d never make you hear. Lock the door, lock it, but don’t make a sound. Oh, my God, my God.”

“I’ll strike a light,” he said. “Whatever is the matter? I’ll have a light in a minute.”

“No light,” she said. “Don’t strike a light. We might be seen from outside.”

“I must get you a light,” he whispered, “or you’ll be falling over things, and rousing the house.”

He struck a match: he had a glimpse of Rosa dressed as a peon with a sombrero jammed over her eyes.

“I’ll sit on the bed,” she whispered. “Put the match out, Hi.”

He put out the match; she sat on the bed and began to shudder till the bed quaked. As he did not know what to do, he did nothing. He stood well away from Rosa, waiting for her to speak.

“Good old Rosa,” he said at last.

“Yes, good old Rosa,” she said with a giggle; then she trembled until she began to sob.

“Good Lord, Rosa,” he said, “pull yourself together. Good Lord, what is it? What has happened?”

“Those devils, Hi. They’ve got Carlotta.”

“What devils? The Pitubas?”

“Yes. At least, I don’t know if they were Pitubas. Anyhow the Reds have got her.”

“But I saw her after seven o’clock.”

“They arrested her at ten. They got her brother, too. They’re rounding up all the Whites. A peon of the de Leyvas came to us to tell us. They shot at him, but he got away. Hi, they’ve put her into prison. The Reds have put Carlotta into prison.”

“Good Lord. But, hang it, Rosa, they’ve got no case against her. They’ll certainly let her out in the morning.”

“But Lopez has gone mad, Hi. We don’t know what is happening.”

“But . . . good Lord. It’s four o’clock in the morning; more. How on earth did you get in? Look here, is there anything that I can do?”

“They’ve got her in their prison on a charge of resisting authority, or being deemed to be the associate of those planning to resist authority. The peon heard her deny the first charge. The officer said that he should arrest her on the other. And they may shoot her, Hi.”

“Shoot Carlotta? Never.”

“They may.”

“Oh, hang it, Rosa.”

“This isn’t England, Hi, but a place where we hate; you don’t know how we hate. Mother cannot stand these shocks, but I had to wake her and tell her. She said at once, ‘We must get word through to Manuel.’”

Here she stopped at a horrible memory.

“Go ahead,” Hi said.

“This isn’t like England, Hi,” she said. “Twice, even in my life-time, Whites and Reds have made it dangerous for each other. So we make arrangements and codes for messages. We had one of our boys, Estevan Osmeña, sworn to take a message in case of need. We roused him up. Our horses were gone, as you saw; the horses are always the first thing they take, but we sent him off to where he could get a horse. I thought nobody saw him go.”

Here she stopped to tremble till the bed seemed to giggle at her.

“Go on,” Hi said, “cheer up and go on.”

“About two hours ago,” she said, “when we had all gone back to bed, a patrol rode up to the house and summoned mother to open the door. I said that she was too ill, but that I would open. So I lit up and opened. There was the mulatto, Zarzas, with some Pitubas. He said, ‘This is for you.’ He gave me Estevan’s hand, cut off at the wrist, with mother’s letter pinned to it. He said, ‘This is the Dead Letter Post; the White letter comes back Red. I would recommend you send no more.’

“Then I had to serve him and his men with drinks, of course; he called it ‘postage for midnight delivery.’”

“Then they had killed your groom?”

“Yes.”

“I say,” Hi said. “But hold on a minute, I’ll just dress, if you’ll excuse me. But tell me, how did you pass the patrols and the gates?”

“Market people can always pass in the early mornings. I brought in a basket of flowers like a gardener’s peon. You remember Manuel said at lunch that there was a way into this hotel at the back. I came in by that. I knew your floor and room. But I nearly died of terror when I heard the negroes at their gambling.”

“I don’t wonder. But I say you have got some pluck.”

“Oh, Hi, forgive me,” she said, “but you’re the only person I can think of. Will you take the news to Manuel?”

“Why, of course I will, Rosa. I wanted to last night but Carlotta wouldn’t let me. I’ll go like a shot.”

She fell upon her knees and kissed his hands, calling upon God and the saints to bless him.

“That’s all right, Rosa,” he said. “That’s all right. We’ll save her.”

“This devil, Lopez, is going to wipe out the Whites,” she said.

“Not he,” Hi said. “Don’t you think it, Rosa.”

“What is to stop him? We’re all in his power.”

“Not you,” Hi said. “He’s done something wicked and stupid, which won’t prosper; you’ll see it won’t. Now about getting to Manuel. I don’t know a word of Spanish, except Dios and si and the oaths those sailors told me. Where can I get a horse, to begin with? I suppose all the livery stables will be closed?”

“You’ll get no horse here.”

“Even though I’m English?”

“No. This city is isolated. No trains, no horses. You’ll have to walk to a place called Anselmo, about fifteen miles from here.”

“You mean, out past the de Leyvas’ place? That Anselmo?”

“Yes. There are two White brothers there, the Elenas, George and William, horse-breeders. They will give you horses and put you in the way to get relays further west. There are two ways of getting to Anselmo; one, by the road, past the de Leyvas’ place, which you’d have to walk; the other is, to take a boat down the bay, nine or ten miles, to the place La Boca, where you could probably hire a horse or trap and ride or drive there.”

“How would I take a boat?”

“At the pier there are scores of market-boats. Ask for Pedro Ruiz and ask him to take you to La Boca. If Pedro isn’t there, dozens of others will be; they’re mostly Italians.”

“I’ll make them understand,” Hi said. “Will they let me down the pier?”

“Yes, if you aren’t stopped beforehand.”

“The boat way seems the quicker,” he said. “I’ll try the boat way. But look here, Rosa, they’ll surely watch the boats for people trying to get away.”

“They may, but that and the road are the only ways to Anselmo.”

“Well, we’d better try both. Why not send my old English murderer from Medinas? He’d go like a shot and you could trust him absolutely.”

“That is an idea, Hi. I suppose he can ride?”

“He was a stable-lad in his youth. He was even a jockey once, of sorts, I think they said, but he was warned off for something or other. I know he sounds awful; so he is, as well as a little mad, but I know that you could trust him.”

“You say that he is mad? Could he remember a message?”

“Yes.”

“All he’ll have to remember is, ‘Reds have seized Carlotta: come at once’; that and the address, ‘Don Manuel, Encinitas.’”

“He’ll have to know more than that,” Hi said. “He’ll have to get the horses out of these Elena people, at Anselmo.”

“Our code word, _Dorothea_, will do that.”

“And suppose the Elenas aren’t there?”

“George or William must be there.”

“Right, then; between us we’ll fix it. I say, this is exciting. You are a brick to come to me for this.”

“If you knew what I think of you for taking it as you do.”

“I suppose,” Hi said, “I suppose there’s no means of telegraphing from Anselmo to Don Manuel.”

“None. We’ve no telegraphs here, except along the railways, and no railway at all across the central provinces. You’ll have to ride.”

“No means of telegraphing to anyone, in code, or something of that sort? It would save so much time.”

“The telegraphs are all under censorship, no message would be sent. There’s no telegraph within seventy miles of Encinitas, anyway.”

“It’ll be a long ride,” Hi said. “I wish I were more in trim for a long ride. It will take three days.”

“Oh, Hi.”

“I might do it in two, with luck.”

“Oh, if you only can,” she said.

“Now how about you.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I’m blest if you will be. I’ll see you home.”

“Oh, Hi; no.”

“Yes, I will.”

“No, no, Hi. I shan’t be stopped with my market basket and in this dress. And by the Farola there is a short cut through the waste to our garden.”

“I’ll see you there, then. I must. I’ve got to ask you scores of things which I must know. When you’re reasonably safe, I’ll get to Medinas, see my murderer off, and then come back to the pier and yell for Pedro Ruiz.”

“Please God, the boats will be late this morning,” she said.

“Why?”

“If they come early, they go early; there may be no boat for you.”

“Golly.”

“There’s a lot to say ‘Golly’ about in this Republic.”

“There’s more in it than meets the eye,” he said. “I suppose you’ve got no map of this city?”

“No. Why?”

“Can I get to Medinas from the pier without going back through the city?”

“Yes, easily. There’s a road from the Farola to Medinas, on the line of the old city ditch.”

“All right, then; that’s a weight off my chest. Our main task is to get out of this hotel to the pier: if we can do that, we shall be fairly clear. Will there be patrols on the roads outside the walls, or people on the watch at La Boca and Anselmo?”

“Probably.”

“All right,” he said, to cheer her. “We’ll fix them. I suppose the Elenas will know some English?”

“Not much; but if you say _Dorothea_ to them, they’ll make your next course clear, even if they have to send a guide with you.”

“Good. I think I’ve got it all pretty straight. All right. I’m ready. We’ll start, then. Oh, but wait one minute. I must get something out of my trunk.”

Some hours before, when he had returned from Carlotta, he had pressed her spray of hermosita between two sheets of the hotel blotting-paper, which he had then laid away in the trunk. He now opened this precious packet, broke off a leaf from the spray, and placed it in his pocket-book; the rest he put back into the trunk. He then wrote a few words to the hotel proprietor.

“I’m ready now,” he said. “I’ll leave this note to say that I’m coming back, and want my room kept.”

“Oh, Hi,” she said, “I’ve brought no money.”

“I have got money enough,” Hi said, “but I have not got a revolver. Father wouldn’t let me take one. I knew he knew nothing about it. Now we had better have a story in case we’re stopped. We had better say that your mother wanted me and that you had come to fetch me. They couldn’t object to that. Where is your market basket? In the cellar?”

“No, in the hall.”

“We had better go out by the hall,” he said. “And I had better take no baggage. Then they would ask no questions. If I were caught going out with a bag, they would think I was shooting the moon. I have got some handkerchiefs. That’s enough.”

“What will they think of my market basket?” she said. “They will think I have come to steal the linen.”

“Leave it here,” Hi said.

“But I must have it to pass the gates.”

“Well, you can show that it’s empty,” he said. “We must chance it. Come on.”

They crept out into the deserted corridor, where all was silent save for a snorer in one of the near-by rooms. They crept to the stairs. All seemed silent on the landing below. On the next floor they heard a child wake up with a whimper. The coarse voice of a nurse from one of the French-speaking islands called “Chocolat” to quiet it. As this failed she made a testy reproof and turned grunting out of bed.

All seemed silent on the floor below. Rosa touched Hi’s arm at the stairs.

“There’s a night porter asleep there,” she said, “on that sofa on the landing.”

“He’s sound asleep,” Hi said. “Come on.”

On the third step from the bottom the porter had left a small tray with glasses and a soda-water bottle. Hi trod upon this, so that both he and it fell. The glasses broke, the soda-water bottle rolled on to the broad uncarpeted steps which led to the ground floor. It fell on to the first step, then on to the second, then on, step by step, making a noise like “Keblonk, Keblonk” at each step. Hi sat on the mat at the stair-foot in fits of laughter. Rosa stood beside him, giggling hysterically.

“Hark at the beastly thing going ‘Keblonk,’” he said.

With a little tinkle the bottle rolled itself still. The porter on the sofa sneezed suddenly and sat up.

“Oh, for de Lord,” he said.

“For de Lord,” Hi said.

He and Rosa clutched each other, shaking with laughter.

“Oh, you lovely angels, keep away the flies,” said the porter and settled himself to sleep again.

“Come along,” Hi whispered. “He’s asleep. We must slide down the banisters of this flight. Don’t kick old Keblonk as you pass.”

All was dark on the ground floor, but far away some servant was already sweeping. This was the only sound save the occasional crackle in the wicker chairs, as though some ghost had sat down or arisen. In front of them was the main entrance of the hotel, a glass barrier, broad steps with deserted offices at each side, then the front doors. A light was burning in the office to the left. Hi stole forward upon tip-toe.

“The night porter’s asleep in the office,” he whispered.

He stole through the glass doors and tried the front doors, which were locked and the key not there.

“The key’s gone,” he whispered.

“It’s in the office, I expect,” she said.

He looked, but could not see it on the key hooks nor on the table.

“It must be somewhere here,” she said.

“I expect he’s got it in his pocket,” he whispered.

There came a little flop upon the floor. Rosa had knocked off a time-table from the edge of the table. The man stirred in his sleep but did not wake.

“If he’s got it in his trouser pocket,” Hi whispered, “or even in his side pocket, we’re done.”

“Well, Hi,” she whispered, “come on down the back way through the cellar. Besides, I have got to get my flower basket.”

“Oh, dash, I had forgotten the flower basket.”

“Hi,” Rosa said, “there’s someone coming.”

They edged out into the hall as some of the hall lights went up. A woman with a broom came along the corridor. She took a good look at them, and Hi said, “It’s all right, thanks. I’m English.”

She seemed to think that it was not quite all right. She made a gesture to show Hi that he could rouse the porter.

“Si, si,” Hi said, “but it’s absolutely all right, thanks.”

“Are you looking for the key?” she asked in English. “The key is here on this palm.”

She unhooked a key from one of the stubs of the palm tree, fitted it to the lock and opened the door. She gave a searching glance at Rosa. She closed the door behind them on the instant.

The breeze was coming in from the sea bitterly cold. They looked up and down the deserted street. They saw no sign of life except a cat on the other side of the road.

“Come on,” Hi said, “down to the water-front.”

In the darkness of the cross roads a mounted policeman, drawn into the shadows, watched them approach without making a sign. When they were within a few yards of him he put his horse suddenly across their path.

“It’s all right. I’m English,” Hi said.

The man seemed to have orders not to molest foreigners. He drew his horse back and jerked with his hand for them to pass. Perhaps it was a guilty conscience which made them think that he stared hard at Rosa. Anyhow he let them pass.

On the water-front the tide of life had begun to flow to the quays. Men and women were going to work that had to be done, whatever rebellion came. They saw the bright light at the pier end.

“It’s there,” Rosa whispered, “that the market-boats come.”

Two men who were slouching in front of them paused to light cigarettes. They watched Hi and Rosa as they passed and made remarks evidently very offensive, which made Rosa catch her breath.

“Come on. Don’t stop,” Rosa whispered.

Colour was all over the eastern heaven and touching the upper roofs and spires.

“Hi,” Rosa said, when they had gone a little distance, “we shall never be able to do it. I am seen to be a woman and there is a patrol in the streets stopping people.”

“Where?”

“There in front.”

About a hundred yards in front of them there was an interruption in the flow of people. They could see the gleam of helmets beyond the blackness of the crowd, which grew greater as men and women flocked up to it. Plainly the police or troops were examining all who were going that way.

“Hi,” Rosa said, “I can’t face the police in this dress. It’s very silly, but I shall faint.”

“Hold up,” Hi said. “It will be perfectly all right. We will get down to that barge on the beach there and you can pin your cloak round you for a skirt.”

Within a stone’s throw from the water-front was a green barge, which Hi had noticed on the day of his landing. She was lying on her bilge with the butts of her timbers sticking out like bones. In the shelter of this wreck Rosa pinned her cloak as a skirt and made her hat look less manly. After this they marched into the crowd, which closed up behind them as others arrived. It was a silent crowd of men and women not fully awake. One or two voices asked, “What are they stopping us for?” Some said, “Dogana,” or “Search of suspects,” or “Search of the accursed Whites, the murderers.”

The light grew upon the faces at each instant, the crowd gathered and the delay continued.

“What are they stopping us for?”

“Close up, brothers.”

“Who are you shoving?”

“It’s not me that’s shoving.”

“This way for the harem. Get your money ready.”

“The whistle will be gone. We shall be fined half a peseta.”

“What are they stopping us for?”

No one could answer that question.

Hi could make out that several times a minute one or two people in front were allowed to pass on. At every such passing the crowd surged forward till they were all jammed up together, feeling breathless and inclined to faint. They could hear a kind of catechism going on at the barrier, voices bullying and voices submissive.

“Why can’t they let us pass? What are they asking?”

The crowd was not to know why they were stopped. After they had annoyed some hundreds of people with it, the police suddenly removed the barrier and told the people that they might get along out of it. The crowd slowly surged forward among growls of “Keeping us waiting all this time and in the end they didn’t want us. Now we shall be fined a peseta for being late.”

They passed through the city gates, to the open space where the market folk had cheered the Piranhas the day before.

“There is the pier, Hi,” Rosa said. “I can get home through that waste piece, the old graveyard. You go up that gully to the right, to Medinas.”

“All right. Good luck. I’ll fetch Manuel.”

“God bless you, Hi.”

“You, too. My love to your mother. And good luck. And cheer up.”

She nodded, not having more words; she turned out of the stream of workers into the old graveyard of the town and did not look back.

As Hi set off for Medinas, he looked back several times after her, till she had disappeared.

“She’s got some pluck,” he thought. “I don’t think she’ll be stopped now, going that way.”

His own way led through a road which having once been the city ditch, was still a city dump and refuse pit under the walls. On the left hand of the refuse were shacks and sties of wood, for pigs, cows, horses and fowls; though men lived in them, too. The road was an unpaven track in a kind of gulley between the dump and the sheds. It was in a mucky state at that time from the recent rains and the habits of the market people. It stank, it was littered with tins and stalks, rats were rummaging among the garbage, and pariah dogs with the mange were scraping against the sides of the sties. However, no men were abroad in it nor any sign of a patrol. In about twelve minutes he was in Medinas.

For some minutes he had noticed a glow upon the city buildings, which he had thought to be the dawn. He now found that it came from the red-hot shell of what had been the de Leyva palace, which had been burnt since midnight. A good many Medinas people were grubbing in the embers for what they could find. Others were carrying away what they had already found. A heap of things of all sorts, armour, pictures, marbles, bronzes, furniture, porcelain, curtains, clothes, cushions, musical instruments, antiques, books, and portfolios, which had been looted before the fire took hold, were being sold to all comers by a ruffian with a big voice, who bellowed aloud his bargains, joked, tossed the money received to a guard of Reds, and often gave away what he could not readily sell. He was in the act of selling a bronze female torso when Hi came up. Hi noticed among the crowd the broad-faced picture-dealer who had been rude two days before on the water-front. This man winked at the auctioneer that the bronze should be set aside for him. The auctioneer stopped his obscene remarks and laid it aside.

* * * * * * *

Medinas Close looked marvellous in that light of nearly dawn, helped out by dying lamps. Its well of tall, mean, narrow tenements, built on a slope, about a triangle of grassless earth, needed some murderous half-light to give it its quality. At the entrance to the Close an imbecile woman, with the face of a corpse, held her hand for alms. At the entrance of No. 41, black as the mouth of a cave, two little boys, who talked through their noses as though their throats were rotted away, were sharing what they had stolen from the burning. Most of the Medinas tenants had been picking plums from that same snapdragon. In the well of the Close were some chairs and other furniture which had been pitched down and smashed, because they would not readily go through the narrow doors.

“On the third floor,” Hi said to himself, “the middle room of the three, if I don’t have my throat cut on the way.” He went into that black cave, which stank of rat and mouse; he struck himself a light so that he might see the stairs, and came at once on a woman and a man clasped at the stair-foot. He saw the woman’s eyes, like the eyes in a skull. The man detached himself from her; he stank of wine, she of musk. “You like to see my sister?” he said, thickly to Hi.

“No.”

“Three pesetas.”

“No.”

“Two pesetas.”

“No.”

“You like to buy a nice watch, very cheap, very good?” The woman, who had caught some glimpse of Hi, said something in a low voice, which made the man stand aside to let Hi pass to the next floor, where a man was beating his wife in the intervals of a sermon. The morning light gleamed a little on to this landing from a room which had no door. Up above was the third floor, much darker, being lit only with a taper.

Some weeks before this a man had been murdered at the head of the stairs there. The dwellers of 41, having scruples about the murder, had placed upon the wall a coloured print of the Virgin, to whom they lit a taper each night. This taper now showed Hi the three doors of the landing; he knocked gently on the middle door.

After knocking a second time, he was aware of a tenseness in the room within, though no one answered. At a third knock, he felt, rather than heard, other doors in the tenement softly opened, while unseen eyes took stock of him. Someone inside the room was moving something: “putting something under the bed,” he thought. A board dropped with a clatter, then a chair (so it seemed) was jammed against the door from within, then a woman’s cautious voice asked, “Who is it?”

“Señor Rust,” Hi said, in a low voice, “Señor Rust.”

She did not let him in. He heard her moving about inside, with queer little clicking noises as though she were snapping on some pairs of stays (which indeed she was).

“Señor Rust,” he repeated, “Señor Rust.”

The lamp in the room, which had been turned down, now turned up; the door opened a little; a short, sharp, elderly dwarf of a woman stared at him, and motioned him to come in. He went into a hot little lamp-lit room, where ’Zeke stood stock still, fumbling with his hat, beside the bed. The woman bolted the door carefully behind him. She had a skin like parchment, coloured like old ivory. She looked at him out of sharp, black, beady eyes which missed nothing. Her head trembled a little; her long green ear-rings waggled and clicked. She looked like a gimlet about to pierce. Hi knew, without any telling, that he had come at a ticklish time, when the two were appraising loot from the burning. His knock had been mistaken for the knock of the police. Something had been stuffed under the floor and a mat drawn over the place: ’Zeke was now standing on the mat.

The woman asked him in Spanish about his health, adding that for her own part she asked nothing better from God, since she was ever better after the rains, which, as it was well known, drew away from the air we breathe many most pestilential vapours. Hi replied in English that he was afraid that he came at a very inconvenient time.

“Rust,” he said, “could you take a message for me, and be away, perhaps, for some days?”

“Yes, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I daresay.”

“Starting at once?”

“Where would it be to, Master Highworth?”

“Could we speak out of doors somewhere?”

“It’s a bit unsettled out of doors, sir. We could slip into the church for a bit.”

“Let us go there, then.”

’Zeke said something with gestures to Isabella, who seemed suspicious and not well pleased. She questioned ’Zeke several times before she let them out. She then followed him to the stair-head with questions, which ’Zeke put from him with gestures and ejaculations. She was not satisfied with these replies, because she went back to the room, growling. Glancing upwards as he entered the Close, Hi saw her head and shoulders craned from the window to see where they were going.

In the almost complete darkness of the church, Hi told ’Zeke what was wanted.

“I been to ’Carnacion,” he said. “It was there I went with my bull, where the rabbits were. It was this Don Manuel owned my bull; only I didn’t go so much by land, as by sea, to Port ’Toche. I know the way to Anselmo; it’s by the Foxes Inn. And I know the Mr. Elenas at Anselmo, Mr. George and Mr. William, only they don’t pronounce it like that. They breed horses, the Mr. Elenas.

“I did a job of work for the Misters Elenas one time. You see, Mr. Highworth, they got a stallion one time; my word, he were a horse, only he wasn’t what we would call a stallion, you understand, being for draught. Not a shire horse, neither, but one of they French sort, really. ‘Whicker,’ he went, and ‘Whicker,’ he went, oh, it was a treat to hear him: down he would go and up he come; and all in play, really: only he hate his grooms, Mr. Highworth, one after the other. It was all in play, really, only they didn’t understand him, that was what it was, really. You know he couldn’t abide velvet, this velvet stuff the grooms wear. You’ve heard of the red rag to a bull? Well, it was the same with him, only velvet. That was all it was. When I showed ’em, they left off this velvet, then he didn’t eat them, except, maybe, now and then a pinch and that. And is that all I’m to say to the Misters Elenas and to Mr. Manuel, just _Dorothea_, and he’s to come at once?”

“Yes, that’s all. How soon could you reach Anselmo?”

“Three hours and that. But I’ll get a horse out along the road, maybe.”

“It’s a long way to Encarnacion,” Hi said.

“I like a bit of sport, when I get a horse like these country ones that’s got meat on the ribs.”

“You’ll hurry all you can, won’t you? People’s lives depend on it.”

“Dammy, Mr. Highworth, I’ll go like your old grandfather, and like what the old gentleman, old Mr. Ridden done.”

“Thank you.”

“I suppose it’s all right, Master Highworth?”

“Yes, it’s all right.”

“These foreigners aren’t like us, most of the time. They got this devil-worship and all sorts. Now a man likes to know what’s what and that. That’s only fair. But it’s these yellow devils makes them not go above board. They brought in the yellows to rule the whites; it’s that causes all the trouble.”

“That’s the cause of the trouble.”

“Well, I’ll do my best, Mr. Highworth.”

“Thank you. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Nothing I like better, really, than a bit of sport. I was having difficulty, if you understand me, Master Highworth; but then first I met you and now comes this other job. I never had so much luck at one time before, except that once at the races; and then I was cheated of it.”

Hi gave him some money for expenses, thanked him and urged him to go.

“Not by the door we came in by, Mr. Highworth,” he said. “That would never do. Them that see you go in may watch for you out.”

They were near the High Altar as he spoke. The door by which they had entered the church was opened: someone crept into the church. Hi saw the snub-nosed profile of Isabella motionless for an instant, while she sought in the darkness for her prey. ’Zeke on the instant plucked him through a curtain to a swing-door and thence to a lane.

“We dodge the Close this way,” he said, “and I’ll be back in a week or a bit better. And that will be all right, Mr. Highworth; and I thank you, sir, I’m sure, very kindly. And I wish you a happy Christmas, sir, though I know it’s a long time to wait.”

He set off as he finished speaking, in the shambling run with much bending of the leg which old Bill Ridden called “the poachers’ trot.” Hi had often seen old men of the ’Zeke kind running in that way on winter mornings when the hounds moved off to covert. He himself set off at once by the old city ditch to the pier: it was almost full morning. He wondered whether there would be any boat for him.

He also wondered, with some misgivings, about poor old Ezekiel. The phrase, “He never had so much luck at one time before,” smote him to the heart. It might not be much luck; it might be deadly; it certainly would be dangerous, to go off on this errand when the Reds were out. “I’ve taken him from his wife, too,” he thought. “However, she’s no chicken.” As he went on, he wondered whether Isabella might not have seen, chased and caught her husband: in which case the message would not go. Or suppose the Foxes Inn proved too much for him? “I must chance all that,” he thought. “He’s as likely to get through as I am.”

Thinking these things, he came out of the ditch into the colour and life of the racing of the carts to market from the Farola, with fish and fruit. These carts were light, open lorries, each drawn by two horses, driven by natives, who stood bare-armed, cloaked with coloured serapes, singeing their lips with the sucked stubs of cigarettes across which they cursed their horses. The workers scattered from before them as they raced. The horses’ hooves struck fire, the drivers leaned on the reins, beat with their sticks, and screamed:—

“Ar-re. Ar-re, sons of malediction.”

“Accursed be thy fool mare of a mother.”

“Dog of a Pablo, give room.”

“Ay, ay, ay, we bring fish into the city.”

All the carts swayed into each other yet did not touch. They swerved together as the road narrowed for the gate and so disappeared. Hi turned from the open plaza on to the pier. It was then a few minutes after six o’clock.

VII

On the pier, Hi found a scene of confusion and shouting, men and boys staggering with boxes and baskets to carts; women urging them to hurry, or screaming at their children, or cursing at the mules and horses: carts were being backed and baskets dropped: everybody was violent and abusive, not from ill-temper but excitement, for this race to market was the event of the day.

Hi thrust into the midst of the crowd, treading on a litter of leaves, upon which the beasts had browsed. All that part of the pier was heaped with things for the market, bundles of living fowls tied five and five by the legs, baskets of pigeons, geese from the sea marsh, musk melons, water melons, pumpkins, gourds and vegetables of every sort and shape, oranges, limes, bananas in crates and gaily painted earthenware jars packed in the paper-like streamers of corn sheathes. Hi came upon an Englishman, who was superintending the lading of some big red clay jars into a lorry.

“Where shall I find the fish boats?” he asked.

“At the upper end of the pier,” the man said. “That’s where they auction the fish. You may find the fish boats gone by this, though.”

At the end of the pier was a wooden building, above which was a pharos or pier light, which made a big, rosy star against the dawn. Underneath this light the fish market was being held. Hi heard a jabber and chatter of bargaining.

“Look you, I will tell you what I will do. I will do it for you, because I like you. I would not do it for anyone else on earth, may St. James be my witness. I will give you 3.75 the tierce.”

“By God, I had rather fling them back into the sea. By God, I will fling them back into the sea. Here go some back into the sea. The rest shall follow. 4.30 the tierce or back they go.”

“Now look here, I will tell you what I will do. I will do it for you because I like you. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else on earth,” etc., etc.

Beside the bidders lay heaps of fish, many of them still gasping. Small, black, slimy things, which looked like pickles, crawled over their bodies. The fish lay in heaps of shining paleness with odd jags of fins and prickles, vacuous eyes, and mouths which bulged out and then collapsed in.

Hi stopped a fisherman with the question:

“Are you Pedro Ruiz?”

“How?”

“Are you Pedro Ruiz?”

“Who knows?”

“Pedro Ruiz?”

“Ruiz?”

“Yes, Pedro Ruiz?”

“Not know,” the man answered.

“Pedro Ruiz of La Boca?”

“How?”

“Of La Boca.”

“Ayla Poca?”

“Yes. Si.”

“Not know Ayla Poca.”

“No; not Ayla Poca,” Hi explained, “but of La Boca. Of, that is, de, La Boca, a place, a sort of a ciudad, sabe? in the bay par la; La Boca.”

“I do not know at all,” the man answered.

“What does the Englishman want?” another man asked.

“Pedro Ruiz of La Boca,” Hi said.

“Ayla Poca?”

“No, not Ayla Poca. Of La Boca. De la Boca.”

“Boca?”

“Yes. Si.”

“La Boca?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, La Boca?”

“Yes, yes. La Boca.”

“The poblacion beside the bay, La Boca?”

“Yes, that is it.”

“Oh, La Boca. Hear you, Enrique, the gentleman wants La Boca.”

“Oh, La Boca. Ah, yes, indeed. Truly, it is that. Oh, yes, La Boca,” Enrique repeated.

“It is there, La Boca,” the man said, pointing south along the bay. “La Boca is there.”

“I want Pedro Ruiz of La Boca.”

“How?”

“Pedro Ruiz.”

“Pedro?”

“Si. Yes. Pedro Ruiz,” Hi said. “R-u-i-z.” The men looked at him in bewilderment yet with courtesy. They smiled and shook their heads. Hi thanked them and turned from them. He did not much relish shouting aloud in that crowd of foreigners; but he shouted:

“Pedro Ruiz. Pedro Ruiz.”

A couple of lads mimicked his method with some success. He repeated his cry.

“Ah, ha,” Enrique said to him full of pride. “You want Pedro Ruiz?”

“Yes, si.”

“Ah, yes, indeed, Pedro Ruiz.”

“Is he here?” Hi asked.

“No,” Enrique said.

Enrique began a long harangue in Spanish, of which Hi understood not one word. Hi could not make out from the gestures whether Pedro Ruiz had been disembowelled or had been drinking soda water.

“See you,” he said, “can I get a boat to La Boca? A boat to La Boca by the sea?”

He made signs of going by boat in the direction of La Boca. Three other men had gathered about them to give counsel. Some of them suggested Giordano.

Hi turned to these men and asked, “Is Pedro Ruiz here? Pedro Ruiz?”

They did not understand what he meant. They repeated the syllables. All were courteous and eager to help, but they were puzzled by the words.

Enrique asked, “You want go La Boca?”

“Yes please, si,” Hi answered.

“Giordano,” the men repeated. “Giordano.”

Hi had a suspicion that “Giordano” meant to-morrow. There was, he knew, some foreign word like “Giordano” which meant either yesterday or to-morrow. It was “oggi” or “aujourd’hui” or some other word with “jour” in it. What would he do if there were to be no boat till to-morrow?

“This way Giordano,” Enrique said.

He led him to the end of the pier. Some birds were wheeling about the rosy light. From time to time they swerved down with exquisite white grace, which glowed into rose colour in the beam of the lamp, to snatch some fish from the pile. Enrique looked over the rail at the edge of the pier.

“Giordano,” he called.

“Si,” a voice answered.

Enrique explained that here was a gentleman eager to go to La Boca; he displayed Hi. Giordano was a very tall, thin, melancholy man, dark and distinguished.

“Can you take me to La Boca, please?” Hi asked.

“La Boca? Si.”

“It is so,” Enrique exclaimed. “Giordano can take you to La Boca.”

“There,” another man said. “Giordano will convey you.”

Giordano spread a boat rug for Hi. When Hi was seated in the boat, he bent over a job of fitting two pieces of wood together. He explained what he was doing, but Hi could not understand. He sat in the boat, which bobbed and rocked at the side of the steps. Giordano went on with his work, whittling a piece of wood with his knife and trying if the pieces would fit, then whittling some more. Presently a boat shoved off from the pier beside them and stood away for La Boca. Then another boat pushed off and presently a third. But Giordano still went on with his carpentry with no apparent thought of starting. Hi thought that perhaps there had been some mistake.

“I say,” he said, “you are going to La Boca, aren’t you? You go La Boca?”

“Si,” Giordano answered.

He went on trying to fit the pieces of wood. After some time, with a gesture of triumph, he showed that at last they fitted.

“Bueno,” he said.

Yet even now he made no effort to start. He rummaged in the after locker and presently produced some nails, which were bent, and a hammer with a broken handle. Then he set himself to repair the hammer handle by lashing another piece of wood to it. Next he rummaged among the bottom boards of the boat for a pig of ballast. He placed this on the stern sheets thwart as an anvil. Then with great deliberation he began to straighten his nails. Time seemed to have no meaning for him.

“You go La Boca soon?” Hi asked. “La Boca pronto?”

“Si, si.”

But he made no attempt to start. He hammered his nails straight with great skill, then very neatly he straightened the heads, which had been bent. Then he rummaged for a file and touched up the points with it. Another boat stood away from the pier towards La Boca. Her helmsman called out something to Giordano, which Giordano answered reflectively. After the boat had gone he fitted the two pieces of wood together and with great care drove his nails so as to clinch them.

“You start La Boca?” Hi asked.

“Si, si. La Boca.”

“I believe the brute isn’t going to La Boca at all,” Hi thought. “There, they’ve put out the pier light now. I might have been at La Boca an hour ago. If there’s another boat going, I would go in that.”

He clambered up the stairs of the pier to look for someone who could speak English. The rush of the market was now over. He found Enrique and his friends in a corner among the baskets.

“I want to go at once, pronto, to La Boca,” he said.

“Giordano go pronto,” they said.

“But I want to go now.”

“Si, si,” they said, “La Boca.”

“Yes, but now.”

“Si, si.”

He took off his hat to them and hurried along the pier to the Englishman, who was still there, superintending the packing of the jars.

“You want to go to La Boca?” he asked. “Oh well, I wish I’d known. I thought you wanted one of the fish hands. I could have sent you to La Boca an hour ago. What do you want at La Boca?”

“I have an appointment there.”

“Oh, who is your appointment with?”

“A friend,” Hi said.

The man paused to say something to one of the packers, then turned again to Hi.

“Who was your appointment with, did you say?”

“A friend.”

“Ah,” said the man, “what’s your friend’s name? I only ask because I know La Boca, and it might be a question of putting you ashore either to the north or to the south.”

“He will be at the inn,” Hi said.

“Which inn?” the man said.

“Is there more than one?” Hi asked.

“Is your friend an Englishman? What’s his name?”

“Excuse me,” Hi said, “but can you get me to La Boca?”

“Let me see,” the man said, “did you mention your name and your friend’s name?”

“Jones,” Hi said in desperation.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” the man said, “if you’ll step along with me, I’ll see if that boat’s gone that was here. Is it your brother that you’re going to see in La Boca?”

“No.”

“Oh, I see. Not a brother, only a friend. I don’t remember the name of Jones in La Boca. What’s he doing there?”

“He’s only just gone there,” Hi said.

“Oh, a newcomer, like yourself. Well, this is the La Boca boat.”

He spoke to the master of the boat, who was putting what is called a fish in the yard of his sail.

“That man will take you to La Boca,” the man said. “He’s just going to start. If you had come to me on your way, I could have sent you off in one of the vegetable boats hours ago. Don’t give him more than two pesetas. By the way, where will you be staying at La Boca, Mr. Jones? If you or your friend should want any of these earthenware jars, I am in a position to get them as cheap as anybody. What initial did you say yours was?”

“H,” Hi said.

“And your friend’s?”

“R,” Hi answered.

“Mr. H. and Mr. R. Jones,” the man said. “Where are you stopping, did you say? Because I can get you nice rooms in a boarding-house, which would be cheaper for you than any hotel.”

Here the boatman invited Hi into the boat.

“Where are you stopping?” the man called. “Where did you say you were stopping? I should like to call round in the evening and see you, if you’re not doing anything. They always say that Englishmen ought to stick together.”

Hi was about to answer, but the boom gybed at that instant and knocked his hat into the well. The boat had shoved off.

“Inquisitive beast,” Hi thought. “I never knew a man ask questions like that before. I shouldn’t wonder if he’s a detective put there to stop passengers leaving the city. If that’s the case, I’ll very likely be stopped at La Boca. If that devil telegraphs, I shall very likely be met at the pier and shadowed. However, for the moment I am off. That’s the main thing. But I’ve wasted simply hours.”

His boat passed close beside Giordano. He was bent over his carpentry in deep attention, putting a whipping over the join.

“He doesn’t mean to start for another hour,” Hi thought. “I am glad I tried to find someone starting sooner.”

The master of the boat, Chigo, the boatman, and Luigi, the boy, ran up their new striped sails, so that the boat leaned down and sheered the water. Then they brought out bread, onions, wine and water and some little transparent fish, which were meant to be eaten raw. They invited Hi to their feast and all breakfasted together. After breakfast, while the boat was still moving swiftly to the south, Hi amused himself by looking into the shallow water at the fish and the weeds of all the colours of the rainbow. Presently something, which seemed like a piece of the bottom of the bay, blundered up alongside, turned over and seethed out of the water into a whiteish blunt thing, which had a kind of cat’s mouth that clicked. The click missed by at least two feet, as the thing did not aim very well. It blundered over, rubbed against the side of the boat with a slow rasping movement and disappeared.

“A shark, by George,” Hi said.

The boatman laughed at his scare and the master signed to him not to lean over the side. Soon after this Hi noticed that La Boca did not seem to be getting any nearer. The wind, before falling, had drawn ahead, so that they had to make a short board out to sea.

“This is a bore,” he thought. “I may not be at La Boca till mid-day, if this goes on. But I’ll do it yet.”

The wind, which had drawn ahead, now chopped round a few points to the west and failed altogether.

“What’s the matter?” Hi asked.

“Wait for de breeze,” the master said.

“Shall we have to wait long?”

“Sometimes half hour, sometimes hour.”

“Would it be possible to row in to the shore?” Hi asked.

“Not got oars,” the boatman said. “Only one oar and a boat hook.”

There was nothing for it but to wait while the sun climbed up out of the sea and became hotter. Hi tried to judge the distance from La Boca. It seemed so near across that fore-shortened glitter of sea. Three miles, possibly four miles, he thought. The sea and the boat seemed to settle down to sleep.

“We shall be hours at it like this,” Hi thought. And they were.

What was hardest to bear came an hour later, as they lay becalmed. Hi saw a boat further inshore creeping down to La Boca under sweeps. Something in her helmsman’s figure seemed familiar to Hi, who was watching her with envy.

“Is that Giordano?” he asked.

“Giordano, si,” they answered.

She was helped by more than the sweeps. She was a better boat in light airs and, being much further inshore, she missed the northward current then moving across the outward bay.

“Why, we are further from La Boca than we were before,” he thought. “We are drifting back. She will be in hours before us and I might have been in her, if I had had a little patience. I was an ass,” he thought. “If I had only stuck to Giordano, I might have been almost there now.”

There was no remedy but patience, which is no remedy but a substitute. Hi watched Giordano’s boat edge on and on. After what seemed to be hours he noticed that the men in Giordano’s boat laid in their sweeps and tended sails. Chigo, who had been watching for something of the sort, laid aside his fender making.

“Here is the breeze,” he said.

The breeze came down to them with a darkening of the water. Very gently the boat began to steal southward again. At a little after ten o’clock they began to draw in to the settlement of fishermen and market gardeners at the mouth of the Miamia river. It was an array of little lime-washed houses, roofed with red tiles. It had a mission church of three bells. At the mouth of the river there was a harbour made by baulks of green-heart timber, which had been steeped in a red enamel as a defence against the worm. Hi had been intent upon his thoughts, planning his ride. Looking up, he saw that Giordano’s boat had not entered the harbour, but had stood on down the coast towards the south. Looking up at the dock in front of him, he saw some Pituba soldiers watching the approach of the boat. Among them was a white man, who seemed to be an officer.

“Just as I thought,” Hi said to himself. “That man on the pier in the city was a detective. Now here I am being shadowed and am going to be questioned.”

He looked at this officer. He didn’t like his looks at all. He looked too snappish and ill-tempered.

“A bite from that lipless mouth would be worse than its bark,” he thought, “though the bark has a curse in it.”

This man called out something to the master of the boat, who stood up and answered with a question, which Hi thought civilly put. It brought down a storm of oaths from the officer, who repeated his original remark in the tone of an order. Very politely the master again objected, pointing to Hi.

“What is it?” Hi whispered to Chigo.

“He tells us not to land,” Chigo whispered. “The padron ask if you may land.”

“Sir,” Hi called to him, “I am English. May I not land here?”

“What you say?” the officer asked.

“I am English. May I land here?”

“You are Inglays?”

“Si.”

“Inglays?”

“Si.”

“Inglays with cat’s tripes?”

“No.”

“But I say, yes. Meester Inglays with cat’s tripes, I say, yes. Take your baboon-face hence lest I mistake it for your stern and kick it. And tell your Inglays brothers that this is not their land, but a land of men. It is not for Inglays Miss, no tank you, nor for Meester Aow and Pipe Tooth. You come here you be shot.”

“You’d get into pretty hot water, if you shot me,” Hi said.

“You say?”

“You’d get into pretty hot water, if you shot me.”

“What the pretty mouth say? I no catch?”

“You’ll get into pretty hot water, if you shoot me.”

“Oh, dear, the Inglays Meester threaten me.” He came a step or two nearer to the edge of the pier, so as to read the number on the boat’s bows. “Padron,” he said, “your boat, number B 71, is suspect. You will take your boat down to Carpinche and report to the commandant there. If you try to land anywhere nearer, you shall be arrest, you and cat’s tripes; yes, and shot. To Carpinche: go.”

The padron civilly asked whether there were any warrant upon which he could be ordered to Carpinche.

“Yes,” the officer said, “a very good warrant. The proclamation of martial law.” Here he drew out a revolver. “I command here for the Republic, which now scrapes off the foreign lice that cling to her. You rebel, I shoot. To Carpinche.”

“One moment, please,” Hi said. “I want to see the English Consul here.”

“No, no,” the padron said. “No consul here.”

“Well, anyway, I’ve a right to land.”

“No, no,” Chigo whispered. “You get into trouble.”

“What does Miss tank you, the Inglays, say?” the officer asked.

“I want to see the English Consul,” Hi said.

“Oh, he wants to see the Inglays Consul?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The Inglays Consul, you say?”

“Yes, please.”

“Tank you, but I not please. I tell you to go to Carpinche. You know your Consul live in Santa Barbara, where you just come from. Why you lie to me you want him here? To Carpinche, or I send you back to your Consul, on my ordnance mule, by phê, with your feet tied under his belly.”

The boat had by this time drifted across the mouth of the harbour, where she caught a gust which drove her a few yards out. The padron, who was in that land only to make a living, shook his head, as he let the sails fill on the new course. “We must to Carpinche,” he said. When the boat was some lengths from the pier, he took a stiletto from his boot and snicked it to and fro, passionately, on his boot-leg.

“Ise kill-a that man,” he said.

Hi hesitated. If he tried to land there, he might be shot: if he did land, he might be sent back to Santa Barbara.

“Where is this Carpinche?” he asked.

“South, ten miles.”

“Could I get a horse there?”

“Si.”

“Is it far from Anselmo? A place called San Anselmo? San An-selm-o?”

“San Anselmo?” Chigo suddenly said. “Si, si. There.” He pointed inland to the west.

“Can I get there from Carpinche?”

“To San Anselmo from Carpinche?”

“Yes,” he said. “Can I get there?”

“Si, si.”

“How far is it?”

“How far?”

“Yes, how far?”

Chigo debated with the padron; the boy made some suggestions. They thought it might be forty kilometres, thirty kilometres; perhaps not so much.

“Twenty kilometres, we going there,” the padron said.

Twenty kilometres was about eleven miles, Hi thought. He tried to figure it out, how it could be so little, but thought that these men might know. All the time the boat was moving away from the pierhead.

“Say that it is twenty miles,” Hi thought, “and this ten miles more sailing added on to it, I shall not be there till the afternoon.”

“See,” the padron said, to Hi, with reproach, “you should not have angered the commandant.”

“No,” Chigo added. “If you not speak at all, if you leave it to the padron, he let you land all right.”

“I’m blest if he would,” Hi said.

“Si, si.”

“He would not have: he had refused.”

“No, see,” Chigo explained, “the padron he explain: he say what, that man not go any sense, he let you land all right.”

“Then you ask, then he stop you.”

Hi could not see it as they saw it; but their point of view, however, imperfectly grasped by him, added to his trouble. What if they were right? What if he had been hasty? What if he might have landed at the pier, had he left it all to the padron?

“Won’t you turn back, then, and let me try him again?” he asked. The padron shook his head.

“Not turn back,” he said.

“He angry now,” Chigo said. “He shoot you now.”

“Well, can you put me ashore somewhere near here, at one of the little landing places?”

“Ashore here?”

“Si.”

“Not now,” they said. “The commandant angry now.”

“But he would never know. He is not following the boat, and cannot see.”

The padron shook his head with a gesture which meant that it would be well not to think of any such thing.

“Besides,” he said, “look, we are past the landing places. We cannot take the boat in to the shore here.”

This was true; a short way to the south from La Boca the beach changed character from sandy to boulder-strewn. The boulders were packed together almost like a paving of cobbles, and as it were cemented with the broken shell of the beach. It looked a bad beach to beach on.

“The boat is made only of very thin wood,” the patron said, mainly by signs; “she bump and bump and bump and knock herself all to pieces.”

“When we get to Carpinche,” Chigo said, “another officer will say, ‘Back to La Boca.’ Then, when we come back, Yellow Face will say, ‘Back to Carpinche.’ Thus we shall pass our day.”

“Such are soldiers,” the padron said.

It was not a cheerful prospect to Hi, but it seemed possible and likely. “I may not be started before dark,” he thought.

“If we have another commandant at Carpinche,” he thought, “I’ll say nothing.”

Carpinche lay in the south-west angle of the bay, among wooded foothills. A dark, romantic glen of trees, marking a water course, sloped inland from it in the easy places of the hill. Great trees grew about Carpinche. The hill to the south of the bay lay like a lioness crouched to drink with her head between her paws. As they drew nearer to this hill the wind failed them. “See,” Chigo said, “we too near the shore: see? The shore stop the wind.”

“Blanketed,” Hi said.

“How?”

“The shore stops the wind.”

Gusts of it came in a baffling way; then these, too, ceased. They drifted rather than sailed into a place of shelter, where the trees looked down into a water like glass. The blackness of the rock near the shore made the water seem deep as the pit. Chigo and the boy helped the boat forward by paddling with her bottom boards. Hi also took a bottom board and paddled, with thoughts of that machine of which he had talked to Carlotta only the day before. All four of them stared ahead for some sign of soldiers: they could see none.

“No commandant here,” Hi said.

“Siesta,” the padron said.

The boat edged slowly into the Carpinche river towards a village among the trees, which towered up there to a vast height. The forest made the place dark, though glaring light fell beyond. Giordano’s boat lay tied to the pier in front of them. She had lain there for perhaps a couple of hours. “Oh, if I had only stayed in her,” Hi thought, “I might have been in Anselmo by this time.”

They edged alongside the pier and made fast.

“No commandant here to report to,” Hi said.

“Ah, the commandant,” the padron answered. “That man a bad man. He know there no commandant.”

“Is there an inn here where I could get a horse?”

“Si, si, in the village.”

“Perhaps,” Hi said, “since you have all been kind and are here partly through me, you will all come with me to the inn for some refreshment?”

They all accepted this: they set out along a track of red earth which had recently been mud. The raised wooden ways on each side of the track had lately been washed out of position, so that they lay all poked up, like stretchers on a battlefield. The village seemed dead save for a yellow dog, who came out and howled at them.

“The people here get up very early,” the boatman explained, “so they have siesta early.”

In the inn, half a dozen men, including Giordano, were lying asleep on the benches or leaning over the table. The boat-master called out to the hostess that here was a gentleman who wished to hire a horse.

“Alas,” the hostess said, “the horses are all gone with the men to the fiesta. There will be no horses till to-morrow.”

“What then can the gentleman do?”

“Who knows?” she said.

One of the sleepers at the table roused.

“There are horses at the house at the cross roads,” he said. “If he will ask there, he might have a horse.”

“How far are the cross roads?”

“Four miles.”

“Are there no horses nearer?”

“Not here. All went early this morning to the fiesta. At five or even at six you might have had your pick of horses, but now there are none.”

It occurred to Hi that, when he had paid for some drinks, the hostess might be more helpful.

“Ask her to serve some wine,” Hi said. “You deserve the best wine after your morning.”

The hostess was pleased to serve wine, but the order did not make her more forthcoming about horses. Plainly there were none.

“I must go on to the cross roads then,” Hi said, “if you will point out the road. I will try for a horse there.”

By his watch it was a quarter to two when he stepped across the bridge, which led out of the village.

“Nearly ten hours,” he thought, “since Rosa called me.”

His track led uphill into the forest. “Now best foot foremost,” he said to himself. “Never mind the heat or anything else. You’ve got to save Carlotta and every minute is precious.”

Very soon the trees closed over the road, so that he walked in the cool twilight of a tunnel. He saw nothing remarkable for the first couple of miles. Then he came upon a hare sitting upon its hind legs, seeming to be praying, while a big snake sat opposite, swaying a little, making up its mind to strike. Hi flung some stones at the snake, which ducked its head and turned towards him with an ugly raising of the crest. With a few more stones he drove it away. He then walked to the hare and stroked it and spoke to it. Its fur was sick and staring. Presently it fell over on one side, recovered and went shambling away.

“What an ass my father is,” Hi thought. “He knew that I might meet things like this, yet said that I should never need a revolver. I shall need one twenty times a day. If I came on one of these snakes asleep, I should never see it until I trod on it. I had better have a stick.”

Unfortunately there was no stick nearer than forty feet from the ground. He was in a place which grew nothing but feathery thorn and gigantic timber in a solitude which might have been thousands of miles from men. Giving up the stick, he went on for half an hour without seeing a soul. The only living things he saw, apart from the flies, were deer, moving like shadows among the trees, and very bright things, which he supposed to be parrots against the sky, when the sky showed. After he had walked for an hour he saw a gleam of water below him; soon he came to a wooden bridge at which some tracks converged. There had been a ford or drinking place for cattle above the bridge. This was now a collection of pockets of red mud full of little snakes: beyond the bridge were houses; a farm, somewhat old and untidy, built of wood in need of paint, with stabling beside and behind it. Nearer to the river were two very ramshackle sheds or cottages of wood, which had once been tarred but were now rust-coloured. Dirty bedding hung from the windows of these sheds. Over the door of one of them was a tiling shingle on which someone had drawn in tar, with his forefinger, the word

CAMAS

(with the final S reversed). To the left of these, well away from the river, and on the other side of the road, was a trim, white, prosperous looking house, with a tiled stable. A cornfield of red earth strewn with the shocks of young maize, stretched uphill behind this house. A fair-haired, blue-eyed white man was hoeing among these maize shocks, although it was the heat of the day. He was a South German, who spoke a little English. He said that it was fine vetter and that Hi might tank Gott for such fine vetter. As for a horse, his brother had gone with the horse to the fiesta, but the old frau in the house opposite might lend her colt.

He was a friendly, helpful young man. He took Hi across the tracks to the old untidy farm where everybody seemed to be asleep. Here, after they had both knocked and called for some minutes, a negress appeared, rubbing her eyes with her skirt. This girl took them through a darkness, which stank, into a hot shuttered room, where she called several times by whistling like a kite. When something between a snarl and a gurgle answered to her call, she opened the southward shutters so that Hi could see.

He found himself near the door of a bare room, the floor of which was trodden earth. A table, with fragments of fruit upon it, stood against one wall. Against the end wall, opposite the window, was a tall-backed red chair or throne, in which an enormously fat old woman, swathed in folds of black, sat blinking as she roused from sleep. She was mopping her brow with the handkerchief which had kept the flies from her face while she slept. Hi had the feeling that she lived and slept in the chair. She had a book of hours upon her lap; its marker, hanging from a red ribbon, dangled from her knee. She soon checked her gurglings: she woke up with great completeness. A pair of sharp and very cold grey eyes shone out of her vast pale face with that narrowed glimmer which made Hi think of the snake.

“You want a horse?” she said, in fair English, in a guttural voice that was half a cough.

“Yes, please, Señora.”

“Where will you go with the horse?”

“To Anselmo?”

“Where to in Anselmo?”

“George Elena’s house.”

“When you bring him back?”

“How far is it?”

“Thirty kilometre: twenty kilometre. When you bring my horse back?”

“I’ll send him back to-morrow.”

“Send? Eh?”

“Yes.”

“Why not bring him back yourself?”

“I may not be coming back.”

“Who will bring him back?”

“One of Elena’s men will bring him.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

“What you do?” she asked after a pause. “Why you go this way to Anselmo? Where you from?”

“Santa Barbara.”

“Which way you come from there?”

“Carpinche.”

“You know the road to Anselmo?”

“No; but I can find it.”

“How you know you can?”

“I have found you, Señora.”

She sat staring at him, fanning her face with her handkerchief; her face was without more expression than a large uncut ham.

“What you going to do in Anselmo?”

“I’ve business with George Elena.”

“What business?”

“Horses.”

“Why you come this way, if you go on business? This ain’t the way. Why you not go the proper road?”

Hi wavered at the question, but said:

“I thought it might be quicker to sail down the bay and come this way.”

“How long you been here?”

“Three or four days.”

“Horses,” she grunted in a tone of great disgust. She fanned herself, looking over Hi’s head at the wall. There was no expression on her face, but her big jaw worked a little: she was solving the problem of what brought Hi there.

“I got no horse,” she said at last.

This, besides being ungracious, was false. Hi felt that she spoke thus because she was cross from being wakened and did not want to be bothered.

“I tell him, maybe you lend your colt,” the German said.

“I got no horse to lend.”

“No, of course, Señora,” Hi said. “I don’t ask you to lend him. I want to hire him.”

“How much you pay?”

“How much do you want, for the two days?”

“What you pay?”

“What do you usually charge?”

“How much you pay? I can’t be buyer and seller, too.”

“I don’t know how much these things cost in this country,” Hi said.

“Well, what you give, see?”

Hi produced his peseta notes and small change, to which the woman made an emphatic gesture that this was child’s play.

“Well, how much, then?” Hi asked.

A tall, lean man had come silently into the room behind Hi; he had taken up his position facing Hi, with his back against the table. He was picking his teeth with a sprig of macilente, which he chewed. Hi did not like the fellow’s looks. He had almost no brow; his hair and eyebrows merged into each other. Under this shag, the man’s eyes were very black; his face was hungry-looking, with pale, sunken cheeks. The mouth was greedy-looking or wolfish, although it split into a smile over the toothpick. The teeth glittered; they looked evil, being pointed and inclined inward, something like snakes’ fangs. His ear-rings glittered at each bite upon the sprig. There was a glittering about the man’s person, apart from ear-rings and teeth, because his waistcoat was buttoned up to the throat with some thirty small globular silver buttons.

“All is not gold that glitters,” Hi thought. “Mr. Bright Tooth, you look like a wolf who would scratch up a grave.”

“Well, how much, do you think, would be fair for a horse for two days?” Hi asked.

The woman fanned herself for a moment, then she said:

“You see, we not know you. You may be very fine gentleman, but we not know you. My horse, all the horse I got. You want to go to Anselmo? That fifty kilometre, forty kilometre from here through the forest; pumas in the forest; eat horses; then you go over the fords; the fords all out with rain. Very like you get my horse drowned. Then you not know how to look out. You get the horse bitten by snakes, or else you lose your way. Then suppose you reach Anselmo. You say, that old woman, pah, she not want her horse. I got to Anselmo, what the hell, see? How I to know you send the horse back?”

“I promise you I will.”

“Promise. Look. I’m a woman: see? I don’t believe any promise any man ever make. When a man want a thing, he promise anything. Does he pay? Nit, I don’t think; with the fore sheet, what? So don’t promise me nothing, Albert; it’s pretty to hear you, but it don’t lead to nothing.”

Bright Tooth entered the conversation with the question:

“You got English sovereign?”

Hi had three English sovereigns; he offered one of them, which at that time, in that country, would have bought two horses, with their harness, outright. After some more haggling, backed by Bright Tooth, the old woman agreed to lend a horse, saddled and bridled, for two days, for one English sovereign and all the small change Hi had. It was, however, agreed that this small change, amounting to seventeen Santa Barbara pesetas, should be returned to the man who brought back the horse. Hi thought that they drove a very hard bargain with him; but to have a horse and to be away upon his journey were the desires of his heart at the moment. Even so, he knew enough not to pay for a horse till he had a little knowledge of it. He asked to see the horse.

Bright Tooth led him out to the yard at the back of the house, with the remark that he was a very nice horse, a horse for a king or queen, being tireless and good spirited, as well as so beautifully boned. Hi had heard horses sold in England, by his father. He waited till they were in the stable, where two horses were in stalls. The one nearer to the door was a nice dark chestnut mare, which seemed somehow, even at a first glance, a little too good for such a stall.

“Is this the horse?” Hi asked.

“No,” Bright Tooth said, “the other.”

The other was a sour-coloured pony engaged at that minute in gnawing off the top of the partition between the stalls. He was doing this with an ugly chucklehead screwed sideways, so that his yellow hooked teeth might get a purchase on the splinter. He was rough-haired, having been out in the rains (apparently in a hog wallow). The hair, stuck to patches of mud, was scaling off him. He had not been shod nor had his feet been pared. They stuck forward in long, splitting growths of horn almost like slippers. A sort of gaiter of hard red mud coated his legs to his hocks. He was straight-shouldered, and what old Bill always called “a bit goosey in the rump.” His head, when he ceased from gnawing the barrier, was loutish and ill set on. “Stunsail ears and a Roman nose,” Hi thought. “Worth six bob a corner.”

“This is a horse,” Bright Tooth said.

“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for horse,” Hi quoted to himself, from the Macbeth his form had “done” the term before. “Good Lord,” he said aloud, “I can’t take a beast like that.”

“There, a lovely horse,” Bright Tooth said. “Never fail. He never, never fail. There come soldiers here for horses, one time. They say, he too small, not allowed to take so small a horse; but that the horse for a soldier; he got the good guts.”

“Guts. Good Lord,” Hi said. “He’s got no more guts than a herring. I never saw such a beast in all my born days. Let me have the other, the mare.”

“No, not,” Bright Tooth said. “The other one not belong here. She not our horse.”

“Whose is she? Perhaps I could hire her.”

“No, no,” Bright Tooth said, “she wait here till after the fiesta; then the man come to ride her home. He be here in a few minutes now.”

“In a few minutes?” Hi said. “I could wait a few minutes.”

“He not be here in a few minutes. I make mistake, see. This yellow horse the only horse. He go like the wind.”

“With those feet?”

“I tell you about those feet. The rains make it very slippy. With those feet he never, never fail: any kind of mud, any kind of stick, he stand fast.”

“I’ll bet he will stand fast,” Hi said. “Is there no other horse?”

“No other horse anywhere, except the mare. And the man who owns the mare, he very proud man; he not let anyone ride the mare.”

“Well, all right, then,” Hi said, “I suppose I must take the pony. Let me see the saddle and bridle.”

The old woman had hobbled to the stable, the German had gone back to his work.

“I like to see the colour of your money,” the old woman said. “I not know you, see, so you make me a little present.”

Hi paid over the money, which mother and son (if that was, as he supposed, the relationship between the pair) watched with eyes that burned with voracity. The old woman bit the sovereign, to test its goodness, as though she were going to eat it.

“You go armed, in case of robbers?” the old woman asked.

“Yes.” Hi said. “Rather.”

He was feeling at the moment uneasy about this couple, lest they should go back upon their bargain and deny the horse, after taking the money. But the man Bright Tooth saddled and bridled the horse and led him out. Hi noticed that the pony was an arm-snapper.

“I’ll borrow this stick of yours,” he said, picking up a crooked stick which rested against the wall. “Your beast is too free with his nippers.”

“Where you keep your gun?” the old woman asked.

“In my pocket, all ready,” Hi said. He noticed that she had a sharp eye upon his pockets as he mounted. “Now, which way to Anselmo?” he asked.

She swung her hand round to the west, to point to the track leading past the German’s house.

“Straight on,” she said, “past the ford and out of the wood.”

“Thank you, and how far is it?”

“Seventy kilometre: sixty kilometre.”

“Oh, rats, Señora,” Hi said, “it can’t be. You said it was twenty a little while ago.”

“Quien sabe?”

Bright Tooth stepped down the yard from them to open the gate.

“Adios, Señora,” Hi said, moving off. It was twenty-seven minutes to four; but he felt that he was now really started. A kind of gleam came upon the Señora’s face: the horse with the slippered feet clacked slowly down the slope to the track. Hi saw the German leaning on his hoe, watching him as he drew near.

VIII

The German came slowly towards him, waving with his left arm towards the left.

“Dot der way to Anselmo,” he said. “You mind out at der ford.”

“Thank you for your help,” Hi said.

“Very welcome.”

The German turned back to his hoeing and Hi set out upon his path. When he was out of sight of that settlement, really on his way to Anselmo, he thought of those warning words, “You mind out at the ford.”

“You meet highwaymen at the fords,” his father had said, “or did in my day, but I expect it’s all altered since then.”

“I wonder what that German meant,” he thought. “Perhaps that devil Bright Tooth may be playing some trick, but probably what he meant was that the floods are out. It will be rotten if I can’t get across.”

Then the question rose in his mind how far Anselmo was. “Twelve or fifteen miles,” he thought. “I can be there by 5 or 5.30 and I will be.”

He whacked up the horse into a solitude of rocky barren, densely grown with small thorn and prickly pear. The strangeness of the landscape, the blueness of the sky where the eagles were cruising for their prey and the glory of the adventure on which he rode made his ride a dream of delight for some miles, till the rocks on both sides of him grew in towards him, so that he rode in a kind of gully, where the hooves made more echo than he liked. The gloom of the place was made greater by the prevalence of the pudding-cactus, which exuded over his path like jellyfish flecked with blood or snakes which had been pressed to death. Multitudes of flies feasting on the stickiness of the plant gave it the appearance of corruption. In nearly all the puddles there were snakes. The noise of the echoes of the horse’s hooves became louder and louder. Hi, looking back, saw that a horse and man were coming after him.

The man was bent down in his seat with his sombrero jammed down over his eyes. He had a look of Bright Tooth. His horse looked like the dark chestnut mare which Hi had seen in the stable. She had seemed a beauty then, if a little small. She showed like a beauty now in the grace of her going.

“It’s Bright Tooth all right,” Hi thought. “I’ll bet he comes for no good.”

Seeing that he was seen, the man sat up and called to Hi to stop. He was certainly Bright Tooth.

“Why should I stop?” Hi thought. “I am not going to stop for a swine like that. Let him jolly well catch me up and explain.”

As he saw that Bright Tooth was not carrying a gun, he rode on, though Bright Tooth called repeatedly something about stopping or returning, to which Hi answered, “Si,” or “Bueno” or “That’s the ticket.” Bright Tooth pressed his horse up to Hi’s off quarter with the cry, “You Englishman return.” He motioned back towards the cross roads.

“I am not going to return,” Hi said.

“Then you give back the horse, see?” Bright Tooth cried.

“I don’t see,” Hi said. “Why should I?”

They were now riding side by side at a good speed, because both horses thought that it was a race.

“You turn back, see,” Bright Tooth cried. He motioned backwards, shaking his head.

“All right, old sport,” Hi said. He did not turn, nor did he mean to turn; he kept on, with an eye for the road and the next move. He shoved his stick into his bridle hand, so as to have his right hand free.

“Give up the horse, see?” Bright Tooth cried again. “Your money bad. Bad English money.” He gave a violent imitation of biting a coin and being sick. “You come back,” he cried, “or pay good money.”

“Rats,” Hi said.

“Your money bad.”

“The money was good,” Hi said.

“You pay more money. Another sovereign, see?”

“I won’t pay a red cent more.”

Bright Tooth shot forward, stooped and made a clutch at Hi’s rein. The yellow horse shied away from him, so that he missed his clutch and nearly fell. Hi, too, was nearly off. He recovered first. He dropped his right hand to the pocket where he kept his knife. He poked the end of the knife from within the pocket towards Bright Tooth, as though it were a revolver muzzle. He had read somewhere of men shooting through the pocket. He called out, “All right, old sport, I’ve got you covered. Cuidado.” He did not know what cuidado meant; but he had heard the third officer in the _Recalde_ use the word as an alarm note. He saw Bright Tooth whip out a knife with a blade a foot long, sharp on two edges and spear-pointed.

They looked at each other a few feet apart. Hi enjoyed it, because Bright Tooth did not attack.

“You pay another sovereign,” Bright Tooth said. There was about Bright Tooth a sort of suggestion of a rush preparing.

“Clear out,” Hi said, “clear right out of it. Get back where you belong.”

“You give the bad money,” Bright Tooth said; there was a whine in his voice. Hi edged towards him; he edged away.

“Clear out.”

Bright Tooth cleared out. He turned, in an anxious manner, to a point ten yards away. As Hi turned after him, he retreated hurriedly for fifty or sixty yards; then, as Hi still slowly followed, he retreated further.

“You keep where you are. Don’t you try to follow me,” Hi called. He tapped his pocket, and added, “This is what you’ll get, if you try any monkey-tricks with me, my son.”

He watched Bright Tooth for half a minute; then, as he seemed not disposed to try any monkey-tricks, he turned again upon his way through the woodland across the puddings of the cactus. Whenever he looked back he saw Bright Tooth following. If he paused, Bright Tooth paused. If he turned back, Bright Tooth turned back. When he went on, Bright Tooth followed.

“I haven’t done with him yet,” Hi thought. “He knows of some place ahead where he can get me.”

After some time he passed a turning to the right. Looking back, he saw Bright Tooth turn down this track at a quickened pace.

“He’s riding to head me off,” Hi thought. “I wish I had at least a club.”

There was, however, no chance of getting a club in that wood. He rode on into a meaner country and from this to a forest darker than the last, where he could hear nothing except a murmur or steady beat like the noise of water somewhere ahead. “That’s the ford,” Hi thought, “and the river’s in spate. Well, the longer I think of it, the less I shall like it.”

Almost at once the forest became sparser. He rode out on to a hill of moist red soil, at the foot of which was a violent little river, blood-red and bank high. Tracks led to what had been a ford there, but the water was romping over the ford in a way terrible to see. Not far below the ford the water went down a rapid. Near the ford, where the tracks ceased to be boggy, Bright Tooth and a friend sat on horses waiting for him. Bright Tooth had his knife, the friend had a revolver. “Here we are,” Hi said.

They signed to him to come forward and moved towards him. Hi had not any time for thought; he moved on the impulse of the moment. He banged his horse forwards down the slope towards the water in such a way that he could not stop, even had he wished. He yelled as he went. His horse went scattering down the slope. The man struck at him and someone shot at him. The water went up suddenly in a bright sheet over him and then he was in the hands of the river. In the first rush of the fall he lost his horse, and nearly choked with the filthy water in his mouth. Catching a gulp of air, he saw his horse again as the banks of the stream ran away from him. Then he saw Bright Tooth on a jibbing mare gathering the coils of a lasso for a swing. Then he was tumbled headlong and endlong down into a roaring pit that banged him and wouldn’t let him get his breath. He felt that he had tumbled down all the stairs in Christendom. The tumbling and banging seemed to last through this life into eternity. In another few seconds, when he had leisure to open his eyes, he was in a round, filthy, surging pool, where boughs, shrubs, trees and drowned beasts were milling and churning amid enormous bubbles of red yeast.

Striking out to the side of this, he came to a steep bank covered with trailers of bindweed dripping down upon him. Putting down his feet, he touched rock and stood. He caught the trailing plants, waded to the bank and then felt suddenly faint. Holding on to the trailers, he saw that they were not the bank, but a screen to it. Behind them was a cave, into which the sun shone. He clambered into this and lay down upon a water-smoothed rock, closed his eyes and wished that the world would stop spinning.

After he had lain there for some minutes he heard voices. Through the creepers he could see Bright Tooth and his friend on the other bank of the river, peering for his body. Presently he saw them lie down upon the bank in an effort to see under the creepers which hid him. They went up the stream for a little, then went down it, then came back to point, jabber and explain their theories over the pool. He could see what was in their minds. Bright Tooth thought that he had been washed underneath the bank. His friend thought that he had been jammed under water in the pool. They were there, watching the water, for a full quarter of an hour. Suddenly he saw them exclaim and point at something. The body of the sour colt, which had jammed in a snag in the rapids, came blindly down. The current shot it over to Bright Tooth’s side on the way down-stream. He saw them watch for the rider, but no rider followed. After some more searching and consulting, the two seemed to be agreeing to return later, when the water had fallen. They mounted and surveyed the water from their saddles and then slowly rode away with many glances back.

“They won’t be gone for long,” Hi said to himself. “They will come back separately soon, each hoping to find me before the other has a chance.”

As soon as they were hidden from him by the forest, Hi ventured out of his cover. By a little scrambling among slippery rocks he found a way out of the river-bed to the dry land. He saw the sour colt’s body drifting across a rock in mid-stream. The rage and rush of the filthy falls down which he had come made him marvel that he was not jammed there with the horse. He went on into the scrub away from the river till he came to a pool in the hollow of a rock. Here he stripped, washed, dried his clothes in the hot sun and took stock of his position. His nose was swollen and uncomfortable; he had an after-football feeling that he would be very stiff in the morning. “But that’s nothing,” he thought, “I ought to be thankful to be still alive.” His horse and hat were gone; his watch had stopped at seven minutes to five. His money was safe; among the coins were two crumpled, soaked ten peseta notes, which he had forgotten; he dried these carefully. He had a pocket-book, a knife, two handkerchiefs, a box of matches, which he dried one by one, a pair of pocket-scissors, some string, two pencils and a small shield-shaped silver locket containing camphor. His sister Bell had given this to him at Christmas; he had carried it with him ever since.

All his clothes looked as though they had been dipped in old blood, but they soon dried in the sun on that hot rock. He made his second handkerchief into a sunbonnet. His tie, which had been black with green spots, had spread a greenish black tinge all over his collar; the tie itself looked like a snake which had been run over. He judged that he would look more like a tramp with these two things than without them, so he left tie and collar under a bush, with a qualm, that he was leaving bits of England there. “The Elenas,” he thought, “will fit me out with a tie and collar when I reach Anselmo. After all, everybody has a collar.

“And now,” he added, “I will be off for Anselmo, as hard as I can put foot to ground. It can’t be more than eight miles.”

Away from the river the ground was desert-like and hard, growing scrub, mezquite, cactus and prickly pear in the spaces clear of rock. He picked up the trail for Anselmo, and went on at a good pace till he came out into the sage in the open country. He had often heard his father speak of the Santa Barbara landscape, now he saw it in its sweep, with the mountains near at his left, Gaspar thrusting out in front of them, above a rolling plain over which the wind exulted. Santa Barbara made a smudge against the paleness of the lower sky far behind him to his right. In front was this infinity of swaying sage, which ran on into grass for hours and hours of going. The forest lay dark to the left, all over the foothills of the Sierras; but one could not look at the darkness with all that light to choose. Straight in front of him, how far away he could not tell, in that clear light, which had so often deceived him already, was a round hill topped by a tower. It seemed to be not much more than a mile away in that clearness. The tower was foursquare and tall. One of its angles was topped by the figure of an angel clasping a banner.

“That is it,” Hi said, “there it is. That is Anselmo tower; the village must be beyond the hill; I shall be at the Elenas in half an hour. Oh, cheers; come on, now, for the last lap.”

He was so much cheered by the sight of his landmark that he began to run towards it. Soon he drew clear of a patch of scrub into sight of the great south road from Santa Barbara to Meruel. It went straight from the city across his path through a copse or woodland half a mile in front of him. On the road, coming from the city towards this wood, were four ox-waggons each with teams of eight oxen. He could see the slow, stately lurch of each swaying ox and hear the songs and cries of the negro teamsters. They were going with heavy loads. The whips cracked like rifle shots; the soft tenor voices adjured the oxen to pull in the names of countless saints. Hi saw a waggon enter the cover of the copse, then a second, then a third, then the last, but as he went on he did not see them emerge on the other side. “They can’t have stopped for siesta at this time,” he thought. “I suppose they are taking a halt.”

He went on towards the copse or little wood, watching idly, as one will, for the teams to emerge on the other side. They did not appear, so that he thought suddenly, “I know what it is; there is a turning in the wood towards Anselmo. They have turned off to Anselmo, and so of course the wood hides them. Yet that can’t be, either; for they aren’t singing nor cracking their whips. I suppose they have pulled up for maté or a cigarette.”

It took him longer than he had expected to reach the copse. When he was close to its edge, he heard from within it a sudden scream of pain followed by the laughter of men.

“What on earth is that?” he thought.

He broke into the covert, past a water; he heard voices and horses, and smelt woodsmoke and tobacco; soon he came out into the open upon a curious scene.

For three hundred years, carters and horsemen using that road had turned into that copse to camp or siesta. A wide space on both sides of the road had been browsed and trampled clear; the cleared ground was black with old camp-fire marks. In the road, in the midst of this cleared and trampled space, the four teams of oxen stood with straying bent heads in front of their waggons. All about them was a troop of Pituba lancers, perhaps fifty strong, who had been halted there boiling maté at little reed fires when the waggons had come in upon them. Now the lancers were standing guard over the teamsters, who were being questioned by their captain.

Hi recognised the captain at once. He was the little, short, fierce, bullet-headed snappy man who had forbidden him to land at La Boca. His yellow eyes were still bloodshot with rage. He was barking at one of the teamsters, who had perhaps made some rash or unfortunate reply. After he had sworn at this man, he gave an order to some of his men, who threw the teamster to the ground and bent his head down to his knees. Two Indians then pressed a piece of wood across the back of his neck and lashed it there with strips of hide. Hi knew at once that they were going to make the man what is called a broody hen; his father had told him of this torture. But before the order could be given to complete the trussing of the victim, the officer looked up, and recognised Hi.

“Ah,” he said, “the Inglays from La Boca; the Inglays with the too much talk.”

“Si,” Hi said.

“Then you did not land at Carpinche as I bade?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Yes,” the officer said. “But what does Mr. Inglays do here, on the Meruel Road, after being told to stay in Carpinche?”

“I’m going to Anselmo.”

“To Anselmo? And where is your permit to go to Anselmo?”

“Surely I do not need a permit. I am English.”

“So? He does not need a permit: he is Inglays. To whom is the Inglays going in Anselmo?”

“I’m not going to anybody. I want to see that angel on the tower.”

“Ah, to see the angel on the tower? A holy Inglays. You will come to Ribote, where your angel of the tower shall be a little searched into. You are under arrest.”

“I’m English,” Hi said. “I have not broken any of your laws. You had better let me go.”

“It is for me to judge whether to let you go,” the officer said, “and whether you have broken the laws. You are walking without a permit on a forbidden road. You will come with me to Ribote.”

“But I can prove that I am doing no harm,” Hi said.

“If you can prove it, you can prove it at Ribote,” the officer answered. “But to Ribote you will certainly come.”

He turned his back upon Hi. He left him in charge of two troopers, while he strolled away to drink his maté. When he had finished his maté, he gave orders that Hi should mount a spare horse. When the troop had formed up, with Hi in the midst of them, they set off at a quick pace along the great road to the south. It was half-past five, as Hi judged, when they set out. The mountains were stretching their shadows like fingers along the plain. Glancing back, he saw the angel of the tower of Anselmo growing smaller and smaller. “We are miles from Anselmo now,” he thought. “It will be midnight now before I can get there.” He had no fears for himself. “They won’t really dare to harm me,” he thought, but he did bother acutely about the delay of the message. “Here’s the whole day gone,” he thought, “and I haven’t started yet and these beasts may jail me for a week.”

He was going, as far as he could judge, south or south with a little east in it. Presently they were riding in the dark, except for a flaring lower sky behind them and the young moon westering over the plain. “This is ten miles,” he thought, “or fifteen miles from Anselmo. I am no nearer than I was in Santa Barbara.”

At about seven or later he saw lights in front of him running up a slope. They came into a town of some size built on the side of a hill, which was crowned with pine trees. “Here is Ribote,” he thought. The town, though it was mainly a collection of wooden houses, was lit with electric light. Near the entrance of the town there was a big enclosure containing a mansion. The troop rode past this, up the hill to an important stone building, which looked like a large public-house partially converted into a Greek temple. As it had a flagstaff with two small guns in front of it, Hi judged it to be the city hall. The troop halted outside this hall. The officer with about a dozen men dismounted, drew their revolvers and entered. Perhaps thirty seconds later there came a cry from within and shots were fired. A few minutes later, three men, the better sort of citizen, were brought out from the hall. As the officer brought these men into the open, he caught sight of Hi, whom he seemed to have forgotten.

“Here is this Inglays again,” he said. “You shall rest from your horse ride.”

He said something to a native in a ragged blue uniform, who looked like a sweeper or a porter of the building.

“Yes, it is so,” he said. “You shall rest awhile to consider the angel on the tower and other matters. You shall have your hands free, so that you can catch your lice. You will find some brother Inglays where you are going.”

Hi realised that he was going to be jailed.

“Sir,” Hi said, “will you please let me go? I am not a subject of this State.”

“Sir, we will please let him go,” the officer said. “He is not a subject of this State.”

The man in the blue rags led the way into the house. The officer ordered the Indians to take Hi in after him. Hi was thrust along a hall into a corridor, then across a yard, paved with concrete, to a low building or shed, where the ragged man unlocked a door. When the door was opened, Hi was flung through it. He went staggering for a couple of steps, stumbled over a body which grunted, staggered on and trod upon a second body, which roused up, cursed in English and subsided.

The door clicked to and the lock turned. The key was withdrawn and the footsteps of the jailer passed away across the yard. A door closed behind them. It seemed to Hi to shut him into an “everlasting prison, remediless.” He apologised to the two bodies, on which he had trodden, but had no answer, except drunken muttering.

“I am jailed,” he thought, “locked up in a jail and can’t get out. And I can’t tell when I shall get out. I may be here for days.”

After a little time the room seemed less dark. He began to have glimmerings of its shape. There was a grated opening high up which let in air. A little grating in the door let him peer into the yard. It was a biggish, long prison room about twenty-four feet by eight. There were three people in it, a dead drunk man, a less drunk man and himself. The dead drunk man was out of all knowledge of the world. The second, from words uttered when trodden on, Hi judged to be a deserter from the Navy.

Peering through the grating, he could see little beyond except the four concreted sides of the yard sloping to a central drain. An evergreen stood in a tub at each corner of the yard. The slopes of the pent-houses surrounding the yard kept him from sight of the heavens, but a glimmer in the water of the drain showed that the stars were shining. He shook at the door, which rattled a little. It was an iron slab. He was a prisoner. “And Carlotta is a prisoner,” he thought. “And how on earth is Don Manuel to be warned?” He saw no way. “They’ve diddled us between them,” he thought.

While he stood at the little grating, rattling at the door, a great tumult broke out at the lower end of the town where Hi had seen the mansion. After twenty minutes of this he noticed that the pent-house on his right began to take colour. A glow came upon the tiles. The racket continued for half an hour. “They’re having a good old racket of destruction,” he thought. When he looked again through the grating, he noticed that the glare upon the tiles of the pent-house had changed to a glittering intermittence. “I believe they’re burning the town,” he thought. “If they are, we shall be burned like rats in a trap.”

“What say?” a voice asked.

Hi looked round startled. He saw the second of the two drunkards sitting up and looking at him. He was a littleish man with a flushed hatchet face which shone in the light.

“The town’s on fire,” Hi said; “we may be burnt if they don’t let us out.”

“What say?”

“The town’s on fire: we may be burnt.”

“’Ere, let me come on deck.”

He came on deck, a little unsteady on his legs and smelling very strong of aniseed. “Damn to hell,” he said, when he had come on deck and looked through the grating.

“A bit of fair old, rare old,” he said.

He turned on Hi suddenly to ask:

“What you in for, mate?”

“Nothing. They shoved me in.”

“That’s me, to rights,” he answered. “Nothing: same ’ere. Burning’s pineful, too. Let’s ’ave a look at that door. Say, mate, got a bit of wire?”

“No.” Hi said, “I haven’t.”

The man took hold of the door, struck a match and examined the lock. He lit a cigarette before the match burned out. He had a packet of cigarettes. Hi thought him rather scurvy not to offer him one.

“You’ve not got a bit of wire?” the man said.

Hi said he hadn’t.

“What are you doing here?” the man said.

“Come to learn sugar-planting,” Hi said. “What are you doing?”

“None of your damned business,” the man said. “If I’d got a bit of wire,” he said, “I’d soon have this door open. But you haven’t got a bit of wire?”

“No.”

“That’s a proper barracker. Coo lummy, she ain’t half caught fire. The skylight’s no cop, neither. It’s a bit of all Sir Garnet, if you ask me. You ain’t got a bit of wire?”

“No.”

Here the other drunkard gurgled in his sleep.

“Cor blimey,” the little man said, “what was that?”

“The other man.”

“What other man? I didn’t know there was another bloke; that’s straight. Lummy, ’e’s been in luck. ’E’s enjoyed ’is lunch. I’ll ’ave a look, see, if ’e’s got a bit of wire.”

He was down on his knees on the instant, rummaging in the drunkard’s clothes; for more than wire, Hi thought. He sucked his cigarette to a glow till his face shewed sharp as a wolf’s over the body.

“Not a bleeding bit,” he said at last. “The grating’s out of reach too, unless I stood on your back.”

“Come on,” Hi said. “Stand on it, and try.”

“Right,” the man said. “Tuck in your tuppeny.”

Hi tucked in his tuppeny beneath the window, the little man made a run and leap and fell over.

“Mizzled the bleeding dick,” he said. “I’ll do it next time.”

The next time he did do it; he leaped on to Hi’s back and poised there; he was a horrid weight, but Hi was struck by the ease and certainty of the jump, and also by the silence of his tread: he was wearing old white deck shoes with rubber soles. He felt the man try the gratings by heaving all his weight on them.

“Not a give in the whole bleeding barrow,” the man said, leaping lightly down. “Now if old Alf was along, what got out of Princetown, it would be all right, wouldn’t it? You ain’t got a bit of wire?”

“No.”

“’Alf a mo’; go easy,” the man said. “You ain’t seen my cap since you come in?”

“No.”

“It ought to be somewheres, unless they pincht it. It’s a fair barracker when they pinch kit as well as quod a bloke. You ain’t got a cap: did they pinch yours?”

“No: I had none.”

“Cor blimey, I’d a sweet jag; coo. This sweet shumpine, the sime the toffs; coo. But you feel it in the sweetbreads; that’s where it is; next day’s the day; that’s straight. Say, mate, would you mind looking for me cap. This grilling’s a steak’s game.”

They groped on the floor for the cap; the glare without increased so that they could see a little.

“We’ll be as nice as mother makes it, no bleeding error,” the man said. “If we don’t get out of here, we’ll be bleeding pancakes; that’s straight. Cor blimey, I seen men burned. Coo, kid; it’s a barracker, being burned; a fair barracker. You can always tell when a man’s dead, when you see him being burned; yes, you can, because. . . . Cor blimey, here’s me cap. Nar then.”

He struck another match, lit another cigarette, and rummaged swiftly at his cap in the glow at the door grating.

“Got a bit ’a wire,” he said. “Nar then, to be or not to be.”

He had taken the piece of wire which made the frame for the top of his cheese-cutter cap. With this, when he had bent it in a certain way, he began to fish within the lock, using a niceness of touch which Hi had not expected from a drunkard. He took some little time. The lock rattled and clicked under his fishing: often he swore a little and readjusted his wire. Once he stopped to look at the glare upon the tiles.

“It won’t ’alf be a bit of real life,” he said, “if the fire reaches Matiro’s. ’E’s got seventy tons of blasting powder under where ’e keeps ’is chickens. Cor, mate, that’ll mike them think the bleeding post’s come: seventy ton. Now, you bleeder, I’ve got you.”

Very delicately, he brought pressure to bear on the tough twisted wire: the lock turned: the door opened.

“There’s the bleeding door,” the man said. “We’d best hop it, mate. What’s the way out is the barracker for me.”

“Across the yard and then through the house,” Hi said.

They set out across the yard; some rats in the drain sat up to look at them. Hi saw their eyes glisten. All was still in the municipio. The door into the building was shut but not locked; Hi opened it and peered into a dark passage droning with mosquitoes.

“It’s through here, then to the right,” Hi whispered.

“Lummy,” the man said, “I ain’t half got the sours in my sweetbreads.”

“We must get the other man out,” Hi whispered.

“What other man?”

“The drunk man.”

“Garn.”

“We can’t leave him to be burned.”

“Burned. Blimey, you can see the fire ain’t anyways near. Besides, ’e’s bin lunching; ’e’s necked all what come in the waggon.”

“Well, I’ll get him out of the cell anyway. Will you give me a hand?”

“No bleeding fear.” The man passed into the passage and closed the door noiselessly behind him. Hi stole back to the cell to rouse the drunkard. It was strange how differently the glare of the fire seemed from the yard. It was not near at hand, but at the far end of the town. All the same, it was burning fiercely and perhaps drawing near to Matiro’s. Hi shook the drunkard’s arm.

IX

“Come along,” Hi said, “wake up. Come on out of this.”

“What’s that?” the man said.

“Wake up, man,” Hi said, “we’ve got the door open; we can get away.”

The man sat up, pulled out a sheath-knife, spat, and said:

“I’ll cut your guts out.”

“Never mind my guts,” Hi said, “they’ll keep; but we may be spotted, if we don’t hurry.”

“Garrrr,” the man screamed, “Garrrr and guts. See? Garrrr and guts. Harrar.” He rose upon his feet, with a brandish of his knife. “Come on the lot of you,” he yelled, “you don’t daunt me. I’m Henery Peach Kezia and my blood’s vitriol. I’ll seal you for your tombstone. Harrar you planets, I’ll put some of your lights out, once I get a hold of you.” Here he lifted up his voice into a yell.

“Ayayayayay,” he yelled, “I’m the frog who would a-wooing go. See me hop.”

“Hop out of the door,” Hi said. He held the door so that the frog might hop. He was frightened not only of the madman, but of his noise, which might bring the guards.

“Where’s the door?” the man asked.

“Here.”

“Where’s here?” the man asked. “How am I to know where _here_ is?”

“Are you blind?” Hi asked. “I didn’t know you were blind.”

“I been blind since I was a poor little orphan child,” the man said. “I only smell things. There’s a smell of roses here, or maybe it’s lavender. You guide me to the door, my dear young Bible friend. Just reach me your hand and the blessings of the poor blind man will follow you. Oh, Heaven bless you, my sweet young gentleman angel, Heaven will bless you for this.”

Hi had taken the man by the left arm, while he kept the door open with his body. The man came unsteadily through the opening into the yard.

“There,” he said, “there.” He drew a deep breath, suddenly wheeled upon Hi, stabbed at him with his knife, and screamed:

“And now I’ll cut your guts out, like I said.”

Hi had half expected something of the kind. By a twist of his body he shook himself clear, so that the door, at once swinging-to, struck Henery Peach Kezia and made him miss his stab.

“Don’t you think to dodge me like that, when my blood’s up,” Kezia said, “you young swine. I’ll cut you double for that. I’ll cut you crossways, so’s your own mother will deny you.” He began to laugh with a deep down, joyless chuckle, which made Hi’s blood run cold. He was not very steady on his feet, but he had a horrid danger about him, because of his sideways lurches. Hi dodged him in his rush, but not by much, for they were on the concrete slopes of the yard and Hi wore English walking-shoes, the man stockings. It was as bright as bright moonlight from the fire.

“Now, then,” Kezia said. “Now we’ll see. Some would have took pity on you; but not me. Do you see jouncer? This knife’s jouncer. And as soon as I’ve breathed on the blade he’s going into you.”

He panted on to the blade like a hound getting breath, then he made a sudden dart, missed by about a foot, and then followed with dreadful speed and certainty round and round the yard. The fire, wherever it was, burned up with a brighter blaze to light him. Hi aimed to reach the door into the municipal building, but the man was too close behind him for him to try to open it. He slipped on the concrete, caught one of the pillars which held the pent-house roof, and swung round it with such force that he struck Kezia from behind. The rush and excitement seemed to steady Kezia.

“Ha,” he said, “ain’t this fun? Ain’t this nice hide and seek? And I’ll bleed you into veal in the drain; white meat; eightpence a pound, prime cuts.”

Here there came a crash. Perhaps the brightness of the fire had been fed for the past twenty minutes by the timbers and rafters of the roof. These now suddenly gave way and launched the blaze into the pit of the wreck; the glare of the burning died at once from about them. Hi was in the dark, poised behind a pillar, trying to see the drunkard, who was near the desired door. There was silence for about thirty seconds, each was trying to see the other; at last the drunkard spoke.

“Say, brother,” he said, “will you shake hands and let’s be friends?”

“I can’t shake hands,” Hi said, “when you’ve got a knife in your hand.”

“The knife’s nothing. I took the knife out to cut you a nice nosegay from all these pretty little bloody roses.”

“That was kind of you,” Hi said.

“I love you,” the man said; “you are like a lovely little angel.”

“I am, rather,” Hi said. The darkness of the man seemed to edge a shade nearer.

“I love angels,” the man said.

“That’s right,” Hi said.

“I always loved angels,” the man said, “since a boy.”

“Stick to them,” Hi said; “you can’t do better.”

“You blasted young swine,” the man screamed, making a rush. “I’ll cut your gall and your milt and your pancridge.”

Hi had expected the rush; he slipped to the left as it surged out at him. The man had expected this movement; he slashed out sideways with his knife, but missed. He was after Hi on the instant, roaring, as he rushed, his war cry of “Harrar.” Hi twisted sharp to his right; the man followed, he seemed horribly near. Hi heard a splash, followed by an oath, and a fall; the man had put a foot into the drain and fallen.

Hi fled to the door into the hall, where he paused; the man had not risen; he was lying in a heap in the well or drain, muttering oaths. The fall may have hurt him: it had certainly knocked the fight out of him.

“Will you come and give me a hand up?” he said.

“No.”

“Oh, Lord, my leg’s broke, man; I can’t hurt you.”

“Rats.”

“God, man; I’d not leave you, if you’d got a broken leg.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“The bone’s coming through the calf of me leg; I’m just bleeding away.”

Hi did not answer this; the man went on:

“It’s pretty poor goods,” he said, “when an Englishman will leave another Englishman to rot in agony. Oh, the torment, it’s awful. I feel it corrupting the blood.”

Hi was touched by the man’s moans, but did not answer. The man groaned some more.

“Young fellow,” he said, “if I die, and I am dying, you’ll take my love to my poor mother? Mrs. Jones, her name is. She lives at No. 27, Cowpop Street, Sale, Cheshire. It’s the only house in the street with a brass knocker. Say my last thought was of her. And I want you to sing “Rock of Ages” over my tomb. It’s cruel to die in a foreign land, but I’d rest better after “Rock of Ages”. Won’t you come and just hold my head up; I can’t breathe; there’s darkness coming. Lift me; won’t you lift me?”

“No, I won’t,” Hi said.

“You young swine,” the man said; “it’s lucky for you you didn’t, for if you had, I’d have settled you.”

Hi went through the door and bolted it behind him. He tiptoed swiftly along the passage to the corridor down which the Indians had dragged him. The corridor stretched right and left along the length of the house. Hi could make out a staircase, the blackness of doors, and light in one place from a half-opened door. Hi listened.

All was silent at first. Then from somewhere upstairs he heard the noise of stealthy footsteps, moving slowly. To his right, from time to time, there was a little light fluttering noise, as though the wind were stirring an ill-fitting shutter or loosened jalousie. The man in the prison yard was quiet. The smell of tobacco smoke shewed that the other prisoner had passed that way.

Hi went quietly to the half-opened door, listened there, heard nothing suspicious, and peeped in.

The room was lit by an oil-lamp which had been turned so low that it stank. He could not see far into the room. From within there came again the fluttering noise, which was now not quite that of a shutter, but liker the yielding of paper under pressure, as though someone were opening a book and pressing the pages down so that it should remain open at the place. It gave Hi the sense that some industrious old man was working there in the half darkness gumming papers together.

He pushed the door very gently till he could see that the room was a kind of board-room, with shuttered windows. The table, from which the chairs had been flung back, was littered with papers. A big picture, partly out of its frame, was hanging askew on the wall to the right. Nobody was to be seen; but the noise of the pressed papers came from somewhere on the floor beyond the table.

Hi thought, “It is rats gnawing papers,” but on coming into the room he saw that it was a dead man beset by myriads of cockroaches. The man’s pockets had been turned inside out.

Hi suddenly whirled about in terror: someone was at his elbow.

He saw at once that he had no need to be terrified; it was the little man who had opened the prison door. He had stolen up in his silent way. He grinned at having scared Hi.

“Didn’t ’ear me, did yer, cocky?” he said. “Seen the stiff? They done him in and gone through him; grizzled party; one of these Digos. We’d better ’op it arter ’ere.”

Hi noticed that the man was carrying a long heavy ebony ruler which had been a part of the office equipment. He had the feeling that this was the man who had turned out the dead man’s pockets.

“Bleedin’ old beano goin’ on down the boulevard,” the man said; “kind of a Brock’s benefit. If they come on ’ere agine, the goin’ won’t ’elp us; we shan’t ’alf ’ave all right.”

He led the way out of the room and so away towards the front door, from which fresh air was blowing into the house. On the top step a great yellow pariah dog stood, longing to enter, but scared by their approach. He snarled and slunk away from them as they came out into the open. Moved by the thought that the dog might eat the body, Hi closed the door behind him.

That part of the town was empty of life, except for the moths about the globe of the electric light. The houses were shuttered and seemed to be deserted; but Hi saw that a great disorder had raged there since he had been thrust into the prison. Household gear of many kinds had been dragged into the street and left. Far away down the hill was the glow of the shell of the mansion, each window red as a furnace mouth. All the inhabitants, as well as the lancers, seemed to be at the fire, except a few who came thence quietly with sidelong glances, having pickings from the wreck under their cloaks.

“I’m goin’ to ’op it arter ’ere,” the man said. “No ’ot potitoes in mine. Coo lummy, what’s that?”

From the back of the city hall, from the direction of the prison yard, there came a sound of song, mixed with the tolling of a cuckoo. Henery Peach Kezia was lapping himself in soft Lydian airs:

O the cuckoo bird sings in the merry May morn. Singing cuckoo, O cuckoo, how happy am I. O cuckoo, O cuckoo, O cuckoo. Cuckoo.

“It’s the drunkard,” Hi said.

“The stiff? You woke him?”

“Yes.”

Hi noticed that the man’s eyes were fixed upon him somewhat strangely.

“Which way you goin’, cocky?” he asked.

“Anselmo,” Hi said. “Do you know it?”

“I know it well,” the man said. “I don’t mind setting you there, or on the way there.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Hi said. “But are you going that way?”

“Never you mind where I’m going,” the man said. “You’re a damn sight too nosy.”

“No more nosy, as you call it, than you,” Hi answered. “I know the way to Anselmo; if it’s out of your own way, I can find it myself. But we’d better not go straight past the fire; we might be recognised.”

“Come along ’ere, cocky,” the man said. “If we go along this road a piece, we can easy cut across later.”

They turned up a road which opened to the north not far from the city hall. The houses near it were small adobe bungalows, with roofs of red tiles. The stars in the heaven shone like lamps.

“I say, look at the stars,” Hi said.

“Are you being pleasant?” the man asked. “You’re doing ‘Oh, the starlight’; but they’re cocky little bleeders, stars.”

They walked on together for a minute, till they were in the midst of a grove, where a night singing bird was making a plaintive, exquisite haunting call. The man paused.

“What was the nime of the plice you was goin’ to?” he asked.

“Anselmo.”

“Anselmo, that was it; Anselmo.” He seemed to think for an instant. “Well, there’s no plice of that nime anywheres abaht ’ere.”

“But you said you knew it,” Hi said.

“What was the nime agine?”

“Anselmo.”

“Oh, Anselmo,” the man said, “the plice you see over there?”

“No; over there,” Hi said, turning to point. Some instinct told him to look out, but it came a fraction of a second too late. He never knew certainly what happened next, because he was knocked unconscious by a blow on the point of his jaw, which ended the world for him for four minutes.

When he came to himself, with a dizzy head full of confusion, he tried to stand, but found that his feet hurt. Groping down to find out why, he found that his shoes were gone. Instead of them, a pair of old white deck shoes, with rubber soles, lay beside him in the track. Then a certain slackness at his waist seemed unaccustomed. He put his hand to his waist and found that his money belt was gone; then he found that his pockets had been searched: he had been robbed. He called aloud at this. Then he looked about for his companion, whom he at once judged to be the thief. There was neither sight nor sound of him. He had vanished into the night where he belonged. There was no sound of anyone running, no noise of steps, nor of bushes being thrust aside. The bird was still making a plaintive call in the tree.

“I can’t think what has happened,” Hi said. He sat down to try to compose himself. When he began to know that he had been knocked out, he wondered, “for how long?” The stars had not changed position much, so far as he could see, and there was still some warmth or so he thought in the toes of the shoes.

“He knocked me out and robbed me,” he thought. “I’d gladly have gone halves with him. I don’t know what the deuce to do now. Well, I must get to Anselmo, that’s the first thing. And it must be nearly midnight by this time and I’m further from Anselmo than I was when I started.”

He put on the deck shoes. There was a meanness in the theft of his shoes which hurt him more even than the loss of his precious pocket-book with the sprig of hermosita. When he had put on the shoes and felt their discomforts, as well as their kind, which was specially loathsome to him, he walked back to the town, he could not afterwards tell why. He had no very clear thought of what he was doing nor of what he ought to do, for the brains were still shaky in his head from the knock upon his jaw.

When he turned into the street in front of the city hall, he saw some of the lancers, followed by a mob, riding uphill towards him. He turned uphill away from them, till he was out of the town, in a rocky path near a pine wood. The lancers paused at the city hall, as though to bivouac. Hi felt a deadly weariness overcoming the need of reaching Anselmo.

“I am done,” he thought. “I have done nothing, but I have been through a good deal to-day. I must rest for a bit before I go on.” He was cold as well as weary, for the cold sea breeze was blowing. “It must be midnight,” he thought. “I will rest for just an hour among those rocks. If I had only not spoken to that officer at La Boca, I would have been fifty miles on beyond Anselmo by this.”

He was so stupid from fatigue and the blow that he paid little heed to his going, as he pushed through the scrub towards what looked like shelter. Suddenly he caught a whiff of scent, a rustle of movement and a gleam of something: he was aware that people were hiding there. A startled somebody, speaking intensely, in a hiss of anxiety, said “Padre? . . . padre mio?”

“I’m not the man,” Hi said.

Immediately somebody surged out of the darkness, flung him down and got him by the throat. He realised at once that he was in the hands of someone much stronger than himself, who could break his neck at will, if he made a noise. Some years before, at the Old Berks Steeplechases, he had seen a welsher caught by the crowd. When overtaken, the man had fallen and lain perfectly still, as though dead; this came back to Hi on the instant as wise.

The man who had grappled him got him well by the throat with one hand, while he reached back for his knife with the other. Hi saw a darkness of face staring into his, and beyond it pine boughs and stars. Other people were there: he smelt the scent of verbena: a woman’s voice gave a caution. A woman seemed to be trying to open a box of matches and to take out a match: her fingers fumbled on the matches and people whispered. A man who came hurriedly from among the rocks struck a match upon his trouser leg, screened and held it down. Hi saw a lot of faces staring with surprise at him. He counted four persons: an old woman with white hair, a girl with great black eyes, a man with a somewhat finicky pale face, like the Aztec in the waxworks (he was the one who held the match), and a swarthy, fierce, very splendid-looking young man who had him by the throat. Hi noticed the muscles in the clear brown flesh of the arms which held him. “Golly,” he thought, “this man could tear a pack of cards across.” At this instant the match went out.

“It’s all right,” Hi said. “I’m English.”

“Inglis,” they repeated. The younger of the two women asked him in halting English: “What you doing here?”

Hi felt inclined to ask them what they were doing there, four civilised people, with jewels and scents, in the wilderness at midnight, garrotting strangers. He said that he was going to Anselmo and that he had been robbed. They seemed to understand a part of what he said, but they were puzzled by it.

The man, who was holding him, allowed him to sit up and said something in apology for having been so rough.

“What are they doing in the city?” the young woman asked.

“They are plundering and robbing, Señorita,” Hi said.

At this instant some horses were heard trotting near to the pine clump. The man, who had held Hi, signed to him to remain still, while he stole away through the scrub to see who came. In a few minutes he returned with the riders of the horses, one of whom carried a lantern. This man was a swarthy, bearded, elderly don, more than sixty years of age, but still lean and alert. His face was both hard and melancholy, with something of watchfulness stamped on it by a life passed upon a frontier. He held up the lantern to examine Hi, while the others repeated to him Hi’s story of Anselmo, which he did not seem altogether to accept. “Allan Winter said there was a feeling against us,” Hi thought. “Now here it is.” He debated whether he should tell them that he was a White, going on a White errand. “It might be all right,” he thought. “But supposing it were all wrong. Supposing these people were really Reds. Then I should be in a fine mess.”

The family drew aside to debate what should be done. Presently the daughter left the group and explained to Hi that they had to ride to safety, that they did not doubt his good faith, but that their lives depended on leaving no witness of their going and that, in short, Hi must come with them.

“We are most sad to ask it,” she said, “but it is for our mother and sister. You see, this is war. They might kill us.”

“We not take you far,” the young man said. “We set you on your journey, when we get to friends.”

There was something good-natured and well-bred about the young man which won Hi, who was, in any case, too utterly weary to protest. He said he understood and would gladly do as they asked. The girl and the young man said that it was very nice of him to take it like that. They mounted him on one of their spare horses, and set off together, through a woodland track, which set, for a while, to the south, and then curved west. Hi watched the direction as well as he could by the stars, so as to keep his bearings clear. About north-north-west was his course, he judged. “Now here I am going south,” he thought. “The Lord alone knows when I shall get to Anselmo.” He fell asleep on his horse and knew nothing more of his journey till he was wakened by the horses stopping.

He saw that they had reached a point in the hill from which, looking down a ravine, they could see far below them the lights of the town and the glowing of the burnt house. The night wind had roused up the flames on the last of the wreck so that it made a beacon still. The riders were staring at this, all strangely moved. The two women were sobbing: the men were muttering curses, or prayers that were of the nature of curses.

“Ah, the accursed, the accursed.”

“For all this they shall pay sevenfold.”

“You saints that bear the sword grant me the sword that I may smite these accursed ones.”

“It is their home,” Hi thought, “where all their past lies burnt. They were chased out of it and then it was fired.”

The father interrupted the scene by saying, “It suffices. To-morrow is a new day: let us get to-morrow.” He took his wife’s rein and led the way on, the others followed him. Hi heard the nice young man say something to him, but he was too heavy with sleep to know what it was or to answer. He fell asleep again upon his horse. The high southern saddle kept him in his seat; sometimes he joggled forwards, sometimes backwards, while the horse went quietly on with the others.

At about two o’clock in the morning they came to a ranch which was guarded by mounted men. Here they all dismounted and went indoors (Hi with them) to what seemed to be a gathering of the clan.

There was a long room, lit by electric light, like all the houses in those hills even at that early age. There was a fire at one end of the room, for the night was cold enough. A maid of enormous strength, with a fine, square, good-humoured face, was making or dispensing maté among the gathering. There were perhaps forty men there, most of them talking at once, yet the room was so big that they did not crowd it.

As the party entered the room, the girl with the verbena scent noticed how weary Hi was.

“You are tired,” she said. “Enrique, this gentleman is weary. Anton, get him a maté.” (Enrique was the Aztec; Anton the nice one.)

“Sit down,” she said, showing a seat which ran round the wall. “Anton will bring you a maté.”

“You sit,” he said. “Let me bring you a maté.” Anton shoved him down on to his seat.

“Our guests do not wait, they are waited on,” he said. “You are not a Red, I am sure, to rob us of the last of all our pleasures.”

“I am a White,” Hi said.

“You are a White?” the girl said. “But we thought all you English were Reds.”

“I’m a heretic, of course,” Hi said, “but a White.”

Anton brought him a maté, which revived him. He saw the Aztec step into the midst of the gathering call for silence, and begin a long harangue, with many gestures. The babble of his voice, the heat of the room and more than twenty-four hours of strain together made him fall asleep with the bombilla in his hand.

This falling asleep may be said to mark the end of the first day of Hi’s going to warn Don Manuel. His going had not prospered, mainly because one of Don Lopez’ chief supporters, the half-breed Don Livio, a man of vengeful temper, had detached some lancers to burn the mansion of the Ribotes, who had had the misfortune to be the lords in the village in which he had passed his youth.

This act of private vengeance brought the lancers across Hi’s path at the wrong time.

While Hi was being checked by event after event, on this first day, Ezekiel Rust was riding to the west with his message. At the very moment, when Hi was falling asleep, Ezekiel Rust was rousing from his rest eighty miles away to begin his second day’s ride.

X

Hi may have slept for half an hour, when he was wakened by the tinkle of his bombilla falling on the floor. He roused up as a big, elderly rogue-bull of a man, with bloodshot eyes and a heavy ruminating mouth, which seemed to be chewing the cud of fifty different plans, came in, to take charge of the gathering. Plainly all there looked up to him as a leader. A flock of talkers surged up to him with a gabble of explanation and persuasion: some of it very hot, Hi thought.

Presently, Hi found this man staring at him, though as yet without comprehension. His eyes were fixed on Hi while his lower lip moved in and out under the strain of thought. After a time, his bull-like brain began to notice that Hi was a stranger in the camp: he turned to a man, indicated Hi by a jerk of the head, and asked, “Who is that?” Then, turning to Hi, whom of course he knew to be English, he jerked with his head, saying, “Come here, you. What are you?”

Anton explained as Hi came forward; Hi heard the words “caballero ingles”: then Anton, after asking his name, introduced him to Don Pablo something of Meruel. Hi was refreshed by his sleep and eager to be doing. He made up his mind that as these were Whites he would tell his tale, so he did. He said that he was going on urgent White business to Don Manuel at Encinitas; he asked for a horse that he might proceed.

When he had said his say, he knew that he had said something wrong. “I believe they are Reds, after all,” he thought. “Now I’ve put my foot in it.” Anton drew him aside a moment and explained: “All the Whites here are anti-clerical, they hate Don Manuel like poison. You have said, ‘I take nice Luteran message to the Pope.’” Anton seemed to think it very funny, but Hi was appalled. “I’ve done for myself now,” he thought, “they’ll probably jail me for a week.”

“Business with Don Manuel at Encinitas?” Don Pablo repeated. “And what business?”

“To tell him that the Reds have put Señorita de Leyva into prison.”

This was news to the assembly, but on the whole pleasant news: the de Leyvas were blamed for most of the troubles which had fallen on the Whites.

“At least,” Don Pablo said, “you cannot reach Don Manuel from here.”

“I don’t want to,” Hi said. “I want to reach Anselmo from here, and from there go on to Don Manuel.”

“Very pretty,” Don Pablo said. “There are telegraphs in Anselmo. You could warn Santa Barbara of all that has been said here.”

“No, sir,” Hi said, “unfortunately, I know no Spanish, and have not understood what has been said here: besides, I am not a spy.”

“You are the first to mention the word,” Don Pablo answered. “You are here, we are here, the trouble exists, the telegraph exists, Santa Barbara exists. I consider the situation.”

“Yes, sir,” Hi said, “but I have been only four nights in this land, I know nothing of your politics.”

“How comes it then,” Don Pablo interrupted, “that you go at all upon this errand? Why are you sent? Who sent you?”

“I must not tell you that, sir,” Hi answered, “but I was sent because the need was great, and because an Englishman will not be suspected by the Reds.”

“Very true,” Don Pablo answered, “but he may be suspected by the Whites. See you,” he added, turning to address the assembly in Spanish, “this boy may justly be suspected by us, when he comes from we know not where and says that he wishes to reach Anselmo.”

As most of those there were like water, ready to flow in any direction opened to it, as long as it were downhill, this turned the company against Hi. They agreed that he might justly be suspected. Why should he be there, they asked, if he wished to reach Anselmo? This was now war; Anselmo was a place of the Reds undoubtedly; this was an English boy; that he should be sent on a message was a farce. Undoubtedly he was a spy or might be used as a spy. Hi did not know their words, but their meanings were plain.

“You may be this or you may be that,” Don Pablo said, in English, “but you cannot go to Anselmo.”

“But, sir, I must go.”

“What say you?”

“Sir, I must go.”

Don Pablo pretended to be deaf, he held one of his ears with his hand, so as to catch the sound: the company tittered.

“What say you?”

“Sir, I must go to Anselmo.”

“Ah,” Don Pablo said with a smile, turning to the men, “He says that he must go to Anselmo. _Must go_; this very important English word. No, sir,” he said, turning to Hi, “you may go to your Reds in Carpinteria, or you may go home to your English in England; no one shall stop you; it is a healthy walk, for you English are accustomed to walk; but you shall not go to Anselmo. You shall not go to Anselmo, because it is a special place, which I am determined that you shall not see.”

His face, as he spoke, became gorged with blood like the wattles of a turkey cock. Having settled Hi, as he judged, he turned to the assembled men and made them a long harangue in Spanish. Long afterwards Hi learned that the purpose of the meeting was to keep the Pituba raiders out of that part of Meruel. The men there were Whites, but anti-clerical and, on the whole, in favour of Lopez, because he was a Meruel man. Pablo’s purpose, at that moment, was to get the party to ride to a well-known ranch to get from it the reinforcement of its company.

All there seemed pleased at his suggestion, except those whose mansion had been burned in Ribote. These retired in a group in some indignation when the others left the room. Hi was left alone in the great room, save for the broad, good-humoured maid, who was gathering up the bombillas. She was a friendly soul; she made remarks in Spanish to Hi, so that he might feel at ease.

“Many bombillas.”

“Si,” Hi answered.

“Better many guests than many locusts.”

This was beyond Hi, who grinned. After a little time, she added, with a sigh:

“There are more guests than lovers.”

Hi did not know what she said, but he answered, in English, “Such is life.”

After some twenty minutes of talking outside the house the assembled men mounted their horses, which had been kicking and snapping at each other, from anger at the cold, through all the hours of the discussion. Even when they had mounted they made no effort to start. They continued to discuss till it was broad daylight, when they all set off together.

Anton entered with his sister. He came up to Hi to apologise for Don Pablo.

“It is absurd,” he said, “that that man should have stopped your going to Anselmo. There is no reason why you shouldn’t go to Anselmo. Of course you may go there.”

“I have no horse,” Hi said. “Would you lend me a horse so that I could go there?”

“Do you know the way?” the girl asked.

“No.”

“It must be forty kilometres and a difficult way except through Ribote.”

“I could find it,” Hi said.

The brother and sister looked at each other with some hesitation. Hi was afraid that they were wondering whether to trust a tramp, who came at midnight, with neither collar nor tie, from God knows where.

“I am sorry to say,” he said, “that I have got no money with me, but Mr. Winter, of Quezon, beyond Santa Barbara, knows me, and Señora Piranha and her daughter know me.”

“Rosa Piranha?” the girl said. “You know her?”

“Very well. Do you?”

“We were at the convent together,” the girl said. “Of course we will lend you a horse. What is your name?”

“Ridden. Will you tell me yours?”

“We are Ribotes,” she said. “But what makes us consider is, the road to Anselmo. It is no road, my brother says.”

“It is a bad road,” Anton said.

“I don’t mind how bad it is as long as it is a road,” he said. “And I’ll not let your horse down or give him a sore back or anything; I swear I won’t. And I don’t know how to thank you for saying you will lend me one. The point is, getting him back to you. I’m going to the Elenas, the horse-breeders, of Anselmo; I am sure they would send him back or I would bring him back myself, if you would not mind waiting a few days.”

“Bring him back yourself,” Anton said.

“Yes, yes,” the girl said.

“The horse will be all right,” Anton said, “but how about the rider? First you must have food.”

They gave him sausage, bread, coffee and figs. Then they filled saddle-bags with these things and with corn for him to take with him. Anton brought him a silk scarf.

“You will want this for your neck,” he said. “There will be ticks or mosquitoes in the forest.”

No doubt they would have given him money, had they not feared to hurt his feelings.

“I don’t know how to thank you two,” he said. “You have been most frightfully kind.”

“The least we could do,” Anton said, “after nearly murdering you in the dark, as I did.”

They brought him out to the stables, where they saddled a horse for him.

“He will take you to Anselmo all right,” Anton said. “The question is, will you be able to find your way there?”

“I will try,” Hi said.

“Not so easy,” Anton said. “Look there.”

From where he stood Hi could see nothing but great swathes of rolling forest, amid a mist that was lifting and falling as though it were alive.

“You see that it is not easy,” Anton said, “even when you get out of the forest.”

“I think I’ll find it all right,” Hi said. “I’m good at finding my way.”

Anton pursed up his lips and shook his head. “I hope,” he said, “I hope. You got good remembrance?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then I tell you all the way.”

“Right. I’ll remember.”

“It is difficult,” Anton said. “You follow this track here for three kilometres, through the scrub. Then you come to a place very big as a saucer; big, big. Then north-west across it to a hole, snap, cut off, like so, in the hills, a long way, fifteen kilometres. Out there you will see peones who ride. One will show you. You must not go so, no; but so, because, so, there is no ground; all is gone. But this not for twenty kilometres. Till then, you look for the place big as a pan, very big; and the hill that has like so; high, yet so, snap, see; no, more like so.”

This was not clear as a course should be, but his gestures made it clearer. Anton knew the dangers of losing a trail; he turned to his sister for an English rendering of what he wished to explain. Unfortunately she had not seen the place which he strove to describe, nor was her English much better than his, but she added a few words.

“After this track,” she said, “there is a . . . very big.”

“A lake?” Hi suggested.

“A what?”

“A water?”

“No, no, no; very big dry.”

“I understand. A dry valley?”

“Si, si. Then you cross this; oh, it is long. Then you look a way out. There is a hole in the hill, like so.”

“A pass?” Hi said. “A gap? A way to go through?”

“Si, si.”

“But,” Anton said, “you must not go to this side, right side, because no ground; go to left side. Ask peones.”

“Will there be peones?”

“Always peones.”

“And if I cannot find a peon to ask?” Hi said.

“Bad, bad,” Anton said. “A difficult way. Not for some kilometres. But keep north through the path through the forest; see?”

“Anselmo is north from the pass,” the girl said.

“I’ll find it,” Hi said.

“Si, si, you will find it. It is narrow road in the forest; but to the left. Then you get out of the forest you will see.”

Hi was well used to finding his way on the downs; he had plenty of confidence in himself. “I’ll find it,” he repeated. “But one thing more; if any people stop me, may I say that I come from you?”

“They will see that you come from us.”

“How?”

“The brand,” Anton said, pointing to two wavy marks, one above the other, on the horse’s quarter.

“Thank you again,” Hi said, “for all that you have done for me.”

“Good luck,” the girl said.

“Come tell us how you got on,” Anton said.

“I will, indeed, if I may. Thank you.”

His horse was one of the rather small, sturdy, savannah ranch horses, bred in the uplands from the descendants of the conquerors’ mares by the stallions imported from England. He was dark, wise and full of go.

“Will he buck?” Hi asked.

“If you meet a tiger.”

“If a pig, he kick; so you know,” the girl said.

“Right. Thanks. Good-bye.”

“Con Dios.”

The horse was as eager to be gone as Hi to go. He sailed sideways down the avenue. Just as he turned into the thicket, Hi looked back to wave to his friends; they waved back to him. In two seconds more they were out of sight; he was riding through forest that was all dropping dew and trailing mist.

“I am really off at last,” he thought. “Twenty-four hours late in starting and twice as far from Anselmo as I was.”

The mist strayed itself out into clearness and the tops of the trees began to glitter as the sun rose higher. Little birds came flying just in front of him, as though to show their speed. Their cries, as they flew, sounded as though each bird were calling to “go it.” “I’ll go it fast enough,” he said.

For a long time he heard no other noise than the cries of these birds and the drumming of the feet of the horse. As he went on, he caught another noise, which at first he thought must be the wind in the tree-tops. Then, as it grew louder, he recognised it as the noise of water. He came round a curve upon a scene so beautiful that it made him pull up.

He came unexpectedly upon a ravine or gash in the hill. Close to him, on his left side, the hill, which had always been steep, changed suddenly to crag, over which a brook was falling in white, delaying mists, for some seven hundred feet. At the foot of the fall some long distant collapse had made an undercliff, nearly flat, across which the water loitered in a broad shallow rock basin, till it reached another fall. What he had been hearing was the noise of the falls.

As the ravine and pool made a wide open space, all the hillside in front of him was in such light that he could see, for the first time, what colour can be. The timber grew to great heights beyond the pool, but all the timber down the glade was heaped and piled with a pouring fire of creeper in blossom. A white flowered creeper had piled itself like snow even to the tops of the green-hearts, and fell thence in streamers and banners.

All the crags, as well as the rocks of the pool, were of a pale blue colour, like lapis lazuli. Mists from the falling water made rainbows all down the cliff. White birds cruised among the rainbows and changed colour in them.

He saw all this in a few seconds of admiration. Then he saw that the broad shallow pool was peopled by a priesthood, in rosy mantles, moving with an exquisite peace along the water. The leading priest rose into the air silently and gracefully; the others followed, till all the flight were moving away, more like flowers or thoughts or dreams than birds. He watched them till their effortless wings drooped them to some lower pool out of sight. “Those are the rosy ibises,” he thought.

“Damned pretty birds,” his father had said, “only you don’t often get a shot at them.”

He rode through the pool to the rising trail beyond; soon he was in the gloom again, winding up into the hills among forest. “I must be near the big dry pan or valley,” he thought. “I hope I haven’t gone wrong.”

Almost as he uttered the thought the thickets thinned to an undergrowth in blossom noisy with bees. A few yards more brought him out to the “very big dry” of the savannah, which was unlike anything ever seen by him.

His first thought was that it was the crater of a volcano or the bed of a lake, perhaps twenty miles long by seven broad. It may well have been both, in turn. Now it was an expanse of grass ringed by hills. Some eagles were cruising over it; their majesty suited the vastness of the expanse. The emptiness and the freedom of the vastness made Hi catch his breath. He was the king of that space; there was nothing there but wind and grass, with clumps of tussock-grass standing out here and there.

He did not take it all in at once; then he thought, “I was to meet peones here, who will set me on my way. I see no peones.”

A searching of the distance showed him, far off, some specks, some white, some dark. “Those are the herds,” he thought. “And the peones are with them. How those white cattle shine in the sun. But they are all miles away from here. There is none near me.

“But what was it that they said I was to look for? I was to go ‘north-west across it to a hole, snap, so,’ ten miles away. Well, let’s have a look. That will be north-west, roughly. And there, by George, is a sort of snap in the hills, as though they were cut or broken. That is the pass he means; that is my way. So let us forward for there. But what a place, what a land, what a life.”

It was a good enough life for a man, to ride that expanse on a horse worthy of such going. The horse felt the stir of that freedom. Hi felt him kindle beneath him into the tireless stride of the horse of the savannah. As he went, his hoofs drummed up myriads of glittering green beetles which whirled about them and flew with them, sometimes settling on horse or man, then whirling on again, now with shrillness, now with droning, till the noise they made was the ride itself set to music. “I shall save her,” he sang to the music, “I shall save Carlotta. And she will marry her man, of course, but all the same I shall have done that; and we shall be friends of a special sort all our lives. It will be something that nobody else will have.”

He kept headed for the pass, but his eyes roved the land for a peon. Soon he was startled by the light on the distance to his left; he had seen nothing like it. All the things in that southern distance became so distinct that he felt that he was looking at them through a telescope. At the same time, the calls of the peones, the beating of their horses’ hoofs, and the movings of the cattle came to him from across the miles of the savannah. “It is odd that things should be so clear,” he thought. “I should say it means rain.” The tops of the southern hills brightened till they seemed to spout flames into the sky. These flames soon changed into streamers of cirrus, less fiery than copper-coloured, with rose half-way up the heavens. “It is just as though the sky were feeling bilious,” he thought. With this change in the heavens, a change came into the air and into the horse; all the delight of the going went; the beetles gave up their play. Presently the copper-colour darkened along the hilltops to something like the smoke of a burning.

“It’s going to be a storm,” Hi thought. “I’d be just as well in the cover of the pass before it breaks. Come up, horse.”

The horse made it clear that he was uneasy about something, or was in some way feeling Hi’s uneasiness. He had become nervy and on edge in a way which Hi could not explain. He himself felt nervy, but the restlessness of his horse frightened him. “I believe he smells some wild beast or snakes,” Hi thought; but he could see neither; there seemed to be no creatures on that llano save some beasts like tailless rats and a few birds which piped and fled. The edge of the clouds tattered out into rags which soon laid hold of the sun so that all the joy died from the scene.

“We’re in for a storm and a half,” Hi thought, “one of those electrical storms my father was always gassing about.” He took a look to his left, where now the darkness had blotted out the line of the hills, then he took a look to his right, where the hills stood in a glow which made them look like hills in hell. Straight ahead was the gash or pass by which he was to descend. He could see no cattle nor peones there. “Perhaps they are in the pass,” he thought, “in some ranch or corral there. But I hope they are, for then I may find some shelter.”

The air had long since lost its zest. It was flat yet heavy, though both Hi and the horse were sweating, there was a feeling of death being present, which suggested cold; all kinds of evil seemed about to happen. Waifs and strays of thought came into Hi’s mind and went out of it; he felt that he could not concentrate upon any one of them. A few drops of rain splashed down, like florins and half-crowns, with a rattle on the tough grass.

He had made an effort to be in the pass before the storm broke. He reached it in time but, being there, he found it grim enough. It was a gash, between two cliffs of rotten rock, which curved round into a grimmer gash, all black with a grove of vast trees. “Better under the trees than in the open,” he thought, so he turned towards the cover. The noise of the hoofs upon the stones made echoes like the smacking of nails into a coffin. “That’s got you, that’s got you,” the smacking seemed to say, “that’s got you.” He stopped the horse, so that the echoes might stop. Looking back at the crater over which he had ridden, he found that he could see little save a greyness out of which came a sighing. All the place seemed to moan at him with a moan of despair, that sounded like, “Oh, it’s got us at last.” Out of the greyness a coldness came suddenly from the icefields on the mountain. Then the great grassy expanse disappeared from view. The storm, sweeping up, shut out the world. “Very little more,” he thought, “and I should have been caught in the open.” Suddenly streaks of greyness ran like men along the ground and struck flashes with their feet. “By George, it’s rain,” he said; “it’s all rain. This is rain indeed.”

On the instant, the greyness sighed into a hissing, hissed into a rushing, and rushed into a roaring. It sucked up all the last of the savannah, surged over the mouth of the pass, beat Hi breathless and engulfed him, in a roaring of pouring, as though a river were falling. Hi felt that he was freezing and that everything else had turned to water: he was in water and under water, the air he breathed was water: the earth his horse stood on was running water. Thunder sounded not far off: he could not see the lightning, but remembered his father’s stories of iron outcrops in the rocks near the Meruel border, which seemed to “attract” any lightning there might be. He did not know whether iron outcrops could “attract” lightning; probably it was one of his father’s insane theories, but it might be the fact, in which case he was near the Meruel border, and might be standing on the magazine waiting for the spark. The thought of trying to push on, through the rain, did not enter his head: he could not see twenty yards in any direction.

The violence of the rain lasted for some two hours, after which it relented to a downpour not worse than that of steady rain in England. When once it had relented thus, it steadied, as though it would never cease: it was this steadiness which daunted Hi. “It’s raining like an eight-day clock,” Hi thought. “It might keep on at this pace for days.” He sought to the thickest cover that he could find and hoped for the best. In another hour, the heavens descended on him, so that while water streamed from heaven and forest, the air was a greyness of melting and moving cloud. All the forest was alive with the rushings, the laughters and the forebodings of rain falling or being shaken: sometimes it came at him like the footsteps of enemies, sometimes like lamentings, anon with a crackle as though a pack were afoot. “The horse would take me out of this,” he thought, “but he would take me straight back to the estancia, so that I should have to start again. I’d better wait here. After all, if it rains like this it must rain itself out before long: no clouds could stand it. I wonder where all the cloud can come from. As soon as this mist or cloud or fog goes, I’ll push on.”

Having made his plan, he stuck to it: the cloud seemed to do the same; it did not go: it even increased till the earth seemed melting and the air liquid. “Golly,” Hi thought, “this cloud isn’t going to go. I may be here for days.” He reckoned that he had been there already for some hours. “I must find some browsing for the horse.”

This the horse found without going far from where they were: he led the way to some shrubs, which he ate with relish. “I hope he knows what is good for him,” Hi thought, “for I don’t.”

He secured the horse from straying: then he sought about for a shelter from this never-ceasing drip: there was no shelter in sight. “Probably there isn’t one anywhere,” he thought, shuddering. “I shall be here for the day and night, and goodness knows how much longer besides.”

He had come back to his horse, partly from fear of losing him, partly for his company, when the greyness dimmed to a greater density, so that he could not see his outstretched hand. In this dimness an eternity passed. The rain continued unabated. He contrived to tend the horse, and to give him some of the corn which Anton had provided; later, when he had watered him, he contrived to tether him securely near the bushes where he could browse. After this he himself ate, very sparingly, of the food which Anton had given. When he had supped, it was dark: the night had fallen. Hi made himself a nest of unease in the edible bush, which smelt like his mother’s tooth-powder. Lying on a mess of trampled boughs, which kept him off the mud, he crouched himself into a ball till something like warmth came into him; then he even slept a little, in starts and nightmares, from which he would leap up, terrified that the horse had gone.

This was his second night upon the road to fetch Don Manuel. At about the time when he lay down upon his boughs Ezekiel Rust, dead beat, pulled up somewhere in sight of the lights of San Jacinto city, at the other end of the Central Province. Out there in the barrens, the old man was comforting his horse, before lying down in the sage with a rope round him to keep off the snakes. He had had such a ride as he had never dreamed of; but being soft to the saddle, after some years in a town, he could go no further without a rest.

XI

Some hours after midnight, Hi woke aching with cramps and dripping with sweat: it was oppressively hot and still: all the forest was holding its breath, as though about to do something dreadful. There was a deliberation, even about the droppings from the trees. “Golly,” Hi thought, “it feels as though the earth were going to open.” It was pitch dark in the forest: the mist had gone from the trees, yet there was no glimmer of any star: the moon, being young, was long since gone. The stew of air gave Hi the feeling that a heaven of cast-iron was descending bodily upon the tree-tops to squeeze the earth flat.

The suspense of waiting for the heaven to fall was broken suddenly by thunder, rain and wind, all rising in violence until, at about an hour after dawn, they reached a pitch such as Hi had not believed to be possible. Then, while the forest was crashing with falling boughs and trees, and the air all vehement water and flying fragments, the heart suddenly went out of the storm; the darkness from above rolled away to leeward, showing the sun. The wind, which had been a thing of death, at once became a thing of healing: the storm was over: nature was freed from prison: Hi could go on.

He could go on; but he had lost another complete day and the going was changed. He was in a world of mud like the first chaos. All the wood was littered with thousands of young leaves, twigs and caterpillars. The millioned life, which had thrust at the first rains, had been washed to a smalm by these last. The ground of the wood had been so worked by the rain that it looked and trod like a ploughed field in a wet November. He rode out of the wood, all streaming as he was, towards the gulley of the pass. For one glorious minute, he saw all things glitter in the sun: the warmth beat upon him like life itself; then the rain began again: not heavy rain, but a steady trickle.

By this time, he was in the ravine of the pass into which every gulley, meuse and cranny, as well as the gashes cut by the storm, had been draining for many hours. A mess as of a dozen ploughed fields, of different colours of clay, had been washed into the pass, plastered there and sprinkled with boulders. Here and there boulders too big to shift had stood as obstructions to the floods. Near these, small boulders and ridges of rotten stone had been washed or flung so as to form moraines or dams across the hollow of the valley. Sometimes these dams held pools of water many feet in depth. All the pass rang with the noise of falling water.

He went on, cold and soaked; on foot in the mud, leading a miserable horse through pools, morasses and over stones. The rain fell steadily, and there was no road nor signpost, nothing but the direction of the gulley down the hill, the noise of water, sometimes birds, but never beast nor man.

“And the worse of it is,” he thought, “that I must be coming to that place where I was to turn off, if I was to turn off. That was what he meant, I think: that I had to go to the left of a crossing. I only hope that it will clear before I reach the place.”

It did not clear: it went on raining.

“This is what father meant,” he thought, “when he said, ‘You’ll thank me before the year’s out for sending you to a land of the sun.’”

He wondered much into what kind of country he had come, for he could see so little, except the faces of rocks all streaming, then mist, then folds of hill, from which streamers of rain came out and passed. Presently he came to trees which had hard leaves that clacked: his teeth clacked in sympathy. Not long after this, he came to a bridge, not over but in a torrent; and here he had to blindfold his horse to get him across. On the other side of the bridge, at a little distance above the waters, was a stone with an inscription in Latin:

Pray for the souls Of Espinar, Gamarro, Velarde. Drowned here.

He wondered as he looked back at the bridge, with the water swirling across it between the balusters of the parapets, how he had ever crossed. He patted his horse “for being such a sport.” He judged that this river must be the upper waters of the river at La Boca; but any sense of direction was long since gone from him: he did not know where he was.

Memory of his friend’s direction, that there was no road to the right, made him edge to his left, whenever there was an opening. He was not on any track or trail now, but in mud or scrub among the clouds; sometimes rocks loomed out at him, sometimes trees. When he halted, as he sometimes did, to shout, in the hope of an answer, he had no answer, save the noise of the rain that wept as though all hope were gone. “Well, if I go on, I must reach somewhere,” he said. “I can’t go back, even if I wanted to, because the river’s rising, and nothing would take me over that bridge again, with the water worse than it was. One good thing about this rain is, that there won’t be any forest fever yet, since the rains aren’t at an end.”

It was consolation of a kind; but he was as sick and shaking from cold and misery as most fevers could have made him. He noticed after a time that he was going uphill again. After some hours of this he came into a forest of giant trees. There was no undergrowth and little light in this forest. He rode in a gloom full of sighing like voices and full of dropping like footsteps. The rain seeped in films and streaks through this wood: mists of it paused in places, like ghosts looking at him from behind trees. Sudden gusts sent rushes of water to the ground with the noise of the steps of beasts. It was in this wood that the rain began to slacken.

At first, he thought that this was only a seeming, due to the shelter of the trees; but soon the mists of the rain cleared from the boles, which at once became like gods for bulk and silence. Soon the birds and insects reappeared; ants came to forage among what the rain had brought to earth; ticks fell from the trees; the big red and yellow fungi at the tree roots unrolled themselves into enormous spiders which waved their front legs at Hi in a terrifying rhythm, as though they were trying to hypnotise him. They did it slowly, with their eyes fixed upon him. They seemed to be repeating:

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Hi could see no tracks anywhere on that wet earth, but he realised that his horse was leading him somewhere.

“Good old boy,” he said, “you know more about these parts than I do. If you can bring me to any comfort I’ll be grateful.”

A long time passed before comfort appeared. It came with the brightening of the light in the gaps among the tree-tops: the very sight of this was warmth to him. “The sun,” he said, “I’ll do it yet, if I can only find someone to direct me.” The horse went straight ahead till at about two in the afternoon, as Hi guessed, he paused and whinnied, and horses whinnied in reply.

There, at a little distance in front of him, on a level patch, where the trees, being small, had been easily cleared, was a hut or shack with smoke rising from the chimney. It was a white man’s, not an Indian’s hut, because it was sided and ended with unbarked planks and roofed with shingles. It was old and falling to pieces. It must have been deserted for years, Hi thought, yet smoke was rising from it. Beside it was a long, ruinous pent-house or shed, with a torn canvas crib or manger running along its wall. “I suppose it is an outlying camp,” Hi thought, “or some old winter house for the timber cutters; anyhow, thank Heaven, there are people there.” He could see two pale faces peering round the half-opened door at him. When he lifted his eyes from the house, he saw, at a little distance, two tethered horses pausing from their grass to stare at him. As he advanced from his halting place, the faces at the door moved forward, so that he could make out a man and a woman. The man advanced to a pace beyond the door. He was a short, fresh-coloured man, with fair hair, and a small sandy moustache. What Hi noticed more particularly was that the man looked guilty, as though he had been caught in the act of something. “He’s scared at something,” Hi thought. When the man saw that Hi was only a boy, a relief came over his face, a relief so great that it made him laugh unpleasantly.

The woman had drawn back out of sight inside the shed, where (from the sound) she seemed to be doing something with bedclothes, making a bed or packing something in blankets. Hi thought: “There’s something fishy here. I’ve caught them in the act at something. And it must be pretty bad or he wouldn’t be in such a funk.”

“Is this the way to Anselmo?” Hi asked. The man looked blank. Hi repeated the question, more than once; after a while the woman came to the door.

“Anselmo?” she asked.

“Si, si, Anselmo.”

“Por aqui, Anselmo.”

She was a willowy woman, all slink and gleam, with a speck in one eye and something swollen in lip and nose.

“This is, then, the way to Anselmo,” Hi said. “La via a Anselmo? The calle or route a l’Anselmo?”

“Si, si,” the woman said, nodding.

The first wish of the couple, to get the stranger away from the hut, without letting him peep inside, now changed to another wish: a strange look passed between them, which made Hi uneasy. The man had enormous fore-arm muscles: his right fore-arm had been bruised or scraped quite recently. In his trousers he had a gun pocket which plainly had been used for a gun, though no gun was there at the moment.

“Por aqui, Anselmo,” the man said, taking Hi’s bridle and turning the horse away from the shack.

“He show you,” the woman said in English.

“Is it far to Anselmo?” Hi asked.

The man said he could not understand.

“I don’t understand, either,” Hi thought, “what you two have been up to, here in the forest. You aren’t living here; you only came here an hour ago; because there are no tracks to the door, except brand new ones. Why do you two come here in the rains to pack something in blankets? What were you packing in blankets?” What indeed?

The man led him past the two tethered horses into the forest on the trail by which the horses had come there an hour or so before. Hi had noticed horse tracks ever since he was a child: he noticed suddenly the tracks of a third horse in the soft earth. Three horses had come towards the shack that morning: the third had gone off suddenly into the forest. Why?

The man led on, saying nothing, but thinking the more. Glancing back, Hi saw the woman moving from the shack into the forest. “I wonder if I’m going to be led round to meet her,” he thought. “And if so, why?” Glancing forward, Hi saw that the man was looking at him with a strange expression.

“I believe they’re up to no good,” he thought. “I’ll get out of it.”

For a moment, he did not know how to get out of it, nor how he could manage without a guide if he did. Then the certainty that this couple were wicked urged him to act. Something said in his brain, “Behind that door they had a lad like you, whom they had murdered.” A picture formed in his brain of the woman behind the door, rolling a body in a blanket. Whenever she rolled the body face up, the face which showed was his own. “It may be all imagination,” he thought, “but I’ll go on alone.”

He checked the horse, with a sign to the man: he did not know what on earth he was to do next.

“Dis donc,” he said in a mixed speech. “Esta Anselmo loin d’ici? Anselmo . . . sabe? Anselmo, est il bien loin? La ville d’Anselmo, est il far?”

The man nodded his head and grinned, as though to reassure him. Something in the man’s face, the pouchy look under the eyes, reminded Hi of one of the portraits of Henry VIII: it looked evil from evil done and evil planning. The man turned to his path and seemed about to lead the horse off the trail. “I daresay,” Hi thought, “the woman is the shot: she has the revolver. He’ll lead me round to her and she’ll pot me from behind a bush. Yet he’s as strong as an ox. I can’t hit him or break from him without getting the worst of it. What can I do?”

The voice in his brain said, “Scare him”; but he did not seem to be an easy man to scare. “I could make the horse shy,” he thought, “though if I do that, I may be bucked off myself.”

“Dis donc,” he said again, “sont ils beaucoup de guardias civiles in Anselmo? Moi, je ne veux pas le police. Sabe? Comprende Usted? Police? Muchas guardias me muchas afraido.”

The man said something in his sullen way that all would be well, better than well: again he turned to his task, leading the horse off the trail.

“Things are getting to be critical,” Hi thought. “I must try a scare.”

He was about to try some sudden startling of the horse, when the woman called out something. The man stopped and shouted in reply: from the woman’s answer Hi made out that she wanted the man for some reason, to do something which she could not do. “Wants him to load the revolver, probably,” he thought. The man seemed vexed at the request: he seemed to ask if she could not manage as she was: she answered “No.”

The man growled in his throat. “Bah. Las mujeres.” He let go the rein, with a look of threat and misgiving. He said something to Hi, which seemed to mean: “You stay here a minute: I’ll be back directly.” He strode off in the direction from which the woman had called. Hi let him go about ten yards, then he turned his horse, and urged him up. The man turned and called out to him to stop. Glancing back, as the horse got into his stride, Hi saw the man running back to where the horses were tethered.

“The brute’s going to chase me,” he thought. “And he’ll track me, even if I dodge him. The worst of it is, that I don’t know whether I am headed for Anselmo or the new Jerusalem; but I must come out somewhere if I keep on. This forest can’t go on for ever.”

This was true; but he had a memory of his father saying, “The forest goes all the way to Cualimaçu on the Matulingas, 1,500 miles if its an inch.” If he happened to be heading for Cualimaçu, his journey to Anselmo was likely to be protracted. For the moment, however, his thought was to get away from these people.

Almost at once, his horse shied from a pool of blood where men had trodden within the hour. It was surrounded by big blue butterflies as greedy for salt as English butterflies for honey. “That’s where the murder was,” he thought, “and those two will follow me because they know that I know.”

After an hour, however, when he halted for the third time to listen for the sound of pursuit, he felt sure that he was not pursued. He rode on slowly through the forest, leaving the direction to the horse, who now seemed to know where he was going. As far as he could tell, in the gloom of under the trees, he went westwards but not directly, for the thorn thickets forced him now in one direction, now in another.

Presently the horse cocked his ears at something and challenged. Hi halted, expecting and fearing to see some wild beast, but in a few seconds he saw that there was a horse in front of him, standing still among the tree trunks, watching him, some fifty yards ahead. He was almost invisible at first, for a horse will fade into any background or dimness; as he became distinct, Hi saw that he was saddled and bridled, though not mounted.

“That is it,” he thought, “the brute has headed me off. This is the murderer. He has slipped off his horse there, and is somewhere among the trees waiting to pot me. Even if I dodge him, there’ll still be Mrs. Now my only chance is to dodge.”

He was about to dodge, knowing the futility of dodging, when the horse strode out of his covert into view. He was a darker horse than the two big sorrels tethered near the shack. He had a running cut on his side and a saddle twisted underneath him. He came ramping from his place, full of power and alarm. “By George, it’s the dead man’s horse,” Hi cried, “and what a beauty. I’ll have him.” However, the horse had been terrified once that day; Hi’s coming set him off again full tilt into the wilderness, with his stirrups flying from flank to foreleg or swinging back to clank under his belly. Presently, the girth buckle broke, the saddle fell and made him stumble, but he recovered, shook it clear and strode off into the woods.

Soon after his stridings had ceased to beat in the ears, the air above began to sigh with the homings of countless birds which settled on the trees with cryings and shriekings. Then suddenly there came a darkening all over the forest, as though the light had been turned off at a tap. Hi knew what this meant. His father had often told him that when the sun went behind Mount Melchior the light went off, so that you couldn’t see to shoot. “Now here I am with the day gone,” he thought. “It will soon be dark, and I have not yet started for Anselmo. Buck up, old horse, and get me out of the forest.”

The horse seemed to be bound for somewhere; but after another hour of going, when it was beginning to be dark, he was still in the forest. He could see no gleam of open country nor hear anywhere any noise of men. When he halted to shout, he had no answer, except the sudden silence of birds and beasts. He was there in the depths, out of the reach of his kind, as alone as a man can be.

Perhaps in the past the horse had had some happiness in that part of the forest, which led him thither now. When it was almost too dark to go further, he bore his rider into a space where Indians had made a cassava patch by burning off the trees. Indians and cassava shrubs were long since gone, but the space was still clear of forest. In that patch of ground, some eighty by fifty yards across, there was tall grass of a bright yellow colour between two and three feet high. About this, the trees grew to less than their usual size, being (as it seemed) bowed down by the weight of the creepers. Over the patch was the dome or depth of violet sky in which there were already stars.

The horse thrust into the patch and fell to eating greedily. Hi dismounted to look about him; he found that there was water at one edge of the patch.

“I’d better stay here for the night,” he thought, “because I’m lost. In the morning perhaps I may be able to find a way out. If I could only see the sun or Polaris I would be out in no time.”

He unsaddled his horse, rubbed him well down with grass, and having haltered him, hitched him to a tree. He gathered him some armsfull of the grass, and talked to him, as he ate, for comfort.

All through his ride he had not tasted food, because of something he had said to himself at breakfast, “I hope my next meal may be at Anselmo.” Now, when he saw plainly that he could not reach Anselmo for many hours to come, he drew his food from his bags. The rain had made a paste of the bread, but he scraped some of the paste together and ate it with some sausage; he drank of the water of the pan, which smacked of the marsh. He reckoned that he still had one tolerable meal of paste left in his bag, and one good feed of oats for the horse. These things he resolved to keep in reserve. Under the paste of the bread he found five silver pesetas, which Anton or the girl had hidden for him.

He was much touched by this.

But his main feeling was one of overwhelming anxiety for his friends who were depending on him. “Oh, they must feel that I have failed them,” he thought. “They must have sent someone else. If this has happened to ’Zeke as well, God help Carlotta. God help her.”

A strange whiteness of light glimmered high up in the trees: in a few moments it died, leaving all things strangely dark.

“Here is the night,” he thought. “Oh, it is lonely. This is my third night away and I haven’t even started yet. But I’ll get my bearings and start at dawn. I’ll get through somehow.”

The stars deepened overhead: the birds lapsed into silence: what noises there had been in the wood became suddenly stealthier. Little bright burnings came and went in the air as the fireflies began. Hi gathered more grass for the horse, tried his tether, and then made himself a nest of grass in which he could not sleep, because of the cold.

During the morning of this, the third day, of Hi’s journey, Ezekiel Rust came at a gallop to the house at Encarnacion, where Don Manuel watched beside the dead body of his mother. Being admitted to Don Manuel, he delivered his message, with what news he could add from the underworld of Medinas. Don Manuel waited for half an hour, while his mother’s body was buried; then he rode to San Jacinto city, to intercept any other messenger coming from the capital. By the early afternoon he was summoning all his friends and adherents in the Western Provinces to come with arms, fodder and horses to a rendezvous east of the river. At about the time when Hi was settling to his nest, Don Manuel’s first supporter, Pascual Mestas, came in to the rendezvous with twenty men from Santiago. Ezekiel Rust was given a bed in the inn at San Jacinto, with the promise that he should not want again in life.

XII

After some hours, by crouching knee to chin, covered by his saddle, a kind of warmth crept over Hi, so that he slept an uneasy sleep, full of cramps and nightmares.

Uneasy as it was, it was deep. Eternity seemed to go over him like a sea. Down at the bottom of its pit, he became conscious that the universe was vast, and that in the depth of it, one little ache, which went from his back into his stomach, from the cold, was himself. All kinds of vast things watched this ache with indifference; but the ache was all-important to himself. It kept urging him to rise. “That is the point,” he muttered, “I’ve got to rise. I’ve got to rise.”

Something from the heart of things was calling him to rise. With an effort he shook himself out of the cramps and nightmares into the coolness and stillness of reality. He thrust aside the saddle and sat up, aching. There were the stars overhead, in all those odds and ends of constellations of the southern heaven which have no easy guides for the wanderer like King Charles’s Wain. The grass was all pale about him, the trees were all black, tree-tops and grass-tops seemed to waver a little: something near the water pan made a ticking noise, as though some mouse were snouting there under fallen twigs.

From all these things, he came suddenly to focus on the thing which mattered. His horse was staring intently, rigidly and silently at something which Hi could not see. This was why he had been called upon to rise. The sleeping partner in his horse had called him up to face the enemy. A wave of fear passed from the horse into the master; Hi sat up to stare as the horse stared; he rose to his knees and stared.

He could see nothing but the film of the grass against the black of the forest, yet somewhere in that space was something at which the horse was staring with all his nature. In that dimness and indistinctness before the darkness something was abroad, not stirring, but staring at them. What was it? Was it a snake waiting to strike, or a puma, or a ghost out of the grave? There was nothing to show, nothing to see; but both knew that there was something, deadly unspeakable. Hi felt the hair rise on his brow: he heard the sweat drip from himself and his horse.

How long this lasted he never knew, but at last, from that indistinctness in front, there came the faintest of sounds, that marked the ending of the tension. Something dark seemed on the instant to merge back into the darkness behind it. There was no noise of step or tread, no motion in the grass, nothing that one could swear to seeing, only the suggestion of a scent, like the ghost of the flavour of musk, and then the knowledge that the thing was no longer there. He believed that his horse sighed with relief, as he himself did.

He could see nothing, but the horse saw. Hi saw the horse’s eyes follow the thing slowly round. What thing was it that could move so slowly? What thing of precaution was moving, pausing and deliberating? When it deliberated, its will hardened against them, the horse knew it, and Hi knew it from the horse. The fear came again, that the thing might strike, had almost made up its mind to strike: it had some kind of a mind.

Yet again the tension snapped suddenly, with a sigh of relief from horse and man: the evil seemed to withdraw, so that the horse felt free to change his position. Then the night, which for some minutes had seemed to hold her breath, began again to speak with her myriad voices out of the darkness of her cruelty. The whisper and the droning of the forest sharpened into the rustlings of snakes, the wails of victims, the cry of the bats after the moths, and the moan of the million insects seeking blood.

For some two hours Hi stayed by his horse, waiting and watching, till at last he felt free to lie down to rest. The insects took toll of him, but he contrived some shelter, and being young, as well as weary, he slept again. He may perhaps have slept for as much as an hour.

He was wakened suddenly by that inner messenger who told him that the danger, whatever it was, had returned. He heard the horse wheel round with a little cry to face in a new direction. Hi faced it, but again could see nothing but a blackness of trees, now like steel at the tops from the false dawn. Hi stood beside the horse, with an arm on his neck, staring. There was tenseness and silence, with fear passing from beast to man and back again. What was there, Hi could not see, but the horse saw. All that Hi thought that he could distinguish was a blotch of blackness which wavered against the blackness that was steadfast. It seemed to him to be some snake swollen to the size of an upright at Stonehenge. When the waiting became unbearable he challenged.

“I see you,” he said. “What do you want?”

There came no answer, nor any sound from the thing; the only result of the challenge seemed to be that the tenseness became more tense and the silence more still. Staring forward more intently, Hi felt that the blotch of blackness was not there, but that something was there, but what thing? Ah, what thing could it be that was slow, silent as the coming of a fever, and deadlier than pestilence? It was there making up its mind for half an hour.

Then, as before, in one instant it was not: it was gone. Hi looked up at the heaven suddenly, to find that the steel of the tree-tops was now burnished with colour. Some birds in those tree-tops right over where the danger had been now woke all together with ejaculations and the clapping of wings, which spread from tree to tree, till all the forest was awake. High, shrill cacklings and screamings, full of good spirits and energy rang aloud all over the wood. With a clattering of the quills of wing-feathers, some big birds shook themselves loose from sleep. After a time, flocks of little birds passed overhead with thin, sweet cries. The false dawn, which had made the sky warm with colour, died away into dimness; then, almost at once, the darkness thinned and dispersed: colour surged into mid-heaven in flames of scarlet, which made the tree-tops glow. Within a few minutes it was dawn. Hi was cold, miserable, swollen and itching from bites, but safe from the powers of darkness; the night was gone; he had never understood what night was, now he knew.

In the glow of the warmth with all things so full of colour he looked at the place where the danger had threatened. The danger had now gone, the horse was eating at peace. There was no trace nor track that Hi could read, nor any mark that he could find, that might not have been made by himself or the horse. Yet about the places where the danger had been a flavour or sickliness of musk still lingered, so faintly that it could hardly be noted. “It is not musk, either,” Hi said to himself. “It has a sort of edge to it. It is the smell of some stuff that kills, it has to do with death. This is a deadly place; we’ll be gone from it.”

Having groomed and fed his horse and himself, he set out from that clearing. “I have got my bearings now,” he said. “I am facing north, probably straight towards Anselmo. Any going to the right will bring me out towards La Boca; any going to the left will put me too far to the west. As I am headed now, I ought to be clear of the forest by noon. I don’t know what Rosa will think of me, losing all this time, but I’ll get there somehow, so that she shan’t be too much ashamed of me.”

He had not ridden for two minutes before he felt a change in his horse; all the gallantry was gone from his going, there was no spark nor stir passing from horse to rider. “Poor old boy,” he thought, “he has been awake all night, from that thing in the clearing, he is feeling a bit tucked up.” He went gently through the forest for rather more than an hour. It was good going, more open than it had been the day before, with patches of savannah where the trend of the shadows gave him his directions. He was thankful for these savannahs, because of their warmth and colour, which restored him like draughts of wine. But his horse went on like a log beneath him, with no life nor spirit, and his own heart was troubled enough at all the delays. “At least, I am started now,” he thought.

He came to a green expanse, broken up with pools of water, where reeds of delicate stems, topped by pale blue tufts of flowers, attracted multitudes of golden-throats, which poised at each tuft and glittered as they fluttered. The patch was perhaps three hundred yards across and of an intense glittering greenness. “Soft going,” Hi muttered; “this is bog.”

The horse knew something about earth of that greenness. He would have none of it. Hi dismounted to look at it; it looked like bottomless bog leading to deep water, with bog on the further side. In the midst of the green expanse there was a sort of bubbling wriggle of small snakes. Sometimes a red turtle crawled out of a pool, wallowed along the mud and sank into another. “Here’s a lively place,” Hi thought. “I’ll have to get round it. I’ll work round here to the right and go round the end of it.”

He set off in good spirits, but after two miles or more of exploration he found no end of it. Instead of an end, the bog seemed to have a growth in that direction into a lake or pool edged with bottomless mud. Something in the water, whether tincture or germ, had killed the trees which it had touched. Three or four hundred dead trees stood in a pool the colour of stagnant blood, each tree was leafless and barkless: they stood as bones, silent save for the beetles clicking on them. “Here’s a nice place,” Hi thought. “It would be first rate as a shrubbery to a morgue.”

There was no sign of any way across or round that bog. The blood-pool stretched on to what looked like an oil-pool, black and rancid, with prismatic gleams oozing outwards from it. Beyond this, there was swamp, with enormous plants with branches like water-lily roots, or like knots of snakes intertwisted, rising from the pools. The bark of these twigless branches had been gashed, perhaps in some act of growth, so that it hung in weepers, showing the red or yellow flesh beneath; “beggars with sores,” Hi called them.

“Since I can’t get round here,” he said, “I must go back and try the other end.” The mosquitoes were eating him alive here, so that when he clapped his neck suddenly his hand was covered with blood. As he had heard that oil will drive away mosquitoes, he smeared his hands, face and neck with the skimmings of one of the pools; this relieved him for a time.

At the other end, he found a tongue of dry land which seemed to thrust right across the bog. “Here is a way,” he thought, “this will take me over.” He set out upon it with good hope.

After a mile of open going, the reeds closed in on both sides of him, so that he rode in a narrow space between ranks of stems, grey-green and golden, topped by plumes of blue. The horse needed continual urging forward, until he came to a patch of a plant like rest-harrow, which attracted him; he seemed eager to crop it.

“Well, if it’s going to do you good, old boy,” Hi said, “you’d better eat some.” He slipped the bit from his mouth to let him eat, but it proved to be a sick beast’s fancy; he would not eat. He plucked two or three croppings, but dropped them from his mouth. Hi didn’t like the look of his eyes nor the feel of his skin. “What is it, old son?” he asked. “What is turning you up? Was it the rain yesterday, or what?”

The horse drooped his head and trembled a little. “This is bad,” Hi thought, “but I must get on, cruelty or no. He may be better presently.”

He led the horse forward till he reached a place where the reeds grew across the causeway. He thrust into the reeds for a minute, when he found that he was treading in water over his shoes. Four or five inches down, the roots of the reeds, the surface of the earth, or both things together, made a hard bed on which he could walk. “I think it will be all right,” he said; “it seems fairly safe: anyway, this is my direction; this bog can’t last much longer: I must be almost across, and I simply won’t waste time by trying for another way.”

He slopped on slowly for another hundred yards, leading the horse. The reeds grew thicker as he proceeded. They were hard in the leaf like cactus and tough in the stem like bamboo. He had to back into them, dragging the horse, who came unwillingly; sometimes he could not break through, but had to edge round a clump. It was hot work paddling backward thus. After the first hundred yards the water began to deepen. Birds which had never before seen a man moved away at his coming; a deep, intense droning of insects sounded about him: insects got into his eyes and seemed to like being there. Many midges, with tiny black spots upon their wings, thrust under the wrist-bands of his shirt and below his collar, where they bit like sparks of fire. Suddenly the reeds let in a great deal more light: he had backed through into the open. He found himself standing almost knee deep in a lake of water two or three miles long by a mile broad. There was no way across from there: he had come the wrong way.

Perhaps, in his disappointment, had his horse been fit, he might have tried to swim across, holding to his horse’s tail. The temptation to try was strong in him; the water, though deep, looked so beautiful, and the distance, in that light, so small. What made him hesitate was a patch of weed near the further shore. “I might get snarled up in that,” he thought, “or come to a mud patch and not be able to land.”

At the instant, something gave a sharp and savage pluck at his leg; he kicked the thing from him and at once splashed back among the reeds. “One of those snappers that father was always gassing about,” he thought, as he recovered from his start; “he always said that the fresh-water fish would eat a man. I must give up swimming it, that’s all.”

He turned back in depression through the reeds. “Just as I thought I’d crossed it,” he muttered. His horse seemed to share his depression. He came back through the reeds in a way which seemed to say, “I could have told you that you couldn’t cross here. Now you’ll have to fag all the way back again, and you know that I have not any strength to waste.” Going back made him realise how much further he had come than he had supposed. It seemed to be miles to the starting place, but he reached it at last.

“Dash it all,” he said, while he halted to consider, “I believe that this is the place which Anton mentioned: the place he meant when he said I couldn’t go so, because there was no ground. Well, if I’d only thought of that sooner, I might have spared myself some pain. Now he said that there was some sort of a track hereabouts, which would take me clean out of the forest. Puzzle, find the track. I see no trace of any track. I’ll take a cast, to see if I can hit it off.”

He took two casts, one in each direction, but could see nothing like a track. “If there was one,” he thought, “it was very likely washed out by the rain yesterday. Anyhow, I have tried the east and the middle: they are both wrong. If there’s any way at all to the north from here, it must be to the west. Here it is mid-day pretty nearly, and I have not started yet.”

He set out to the west, through a forest of vast trees, which stood over him like gods watching a beetle. When he had ridden for an hour, he turned into a valley, down which suddenly a mist of rain came sweeping. It came less violently than the rain of the day before, but settled in as though it would last for ever. In a few minutes the forest had changed to a dimness full of footsteps and sighings, across which shapes of cloud faded and formed and faded.

“I must keep on, and then bear to the right,” Hi said. “This won’t last as long as it did yesterday.”

He kept on for some hours at a walk, till he was stopped by a bog. A river or large stream which perhaps ran into the lake at its western end here had silted up its mouth over some acres of forest. A rotting mush barred the way; there was no passing. As moving to the right brought him to reeds growing in water, he moved to the left, uphill, until his horse stopped.

He had saved a feed of corn against an emergency: the horse nosed at it, but would not eat. “Poor beast,” Hi thought, “he’s in a pretty bad way. I’ll rub him down and give him a rest. If we both rest for a little it will do no harm.” After grooming the horse, he contrived what shelter he could, and fell asleep. He woke once, to find the rain streaming on his face, woke a second time, to find that the rain had stopped; then sleep took hold of him body and soul and held him as one dead.

He slept all through the afternoon and would have slept longer far into the night, but that he was suddenly startled by the shattering of a volley of shots from some place far away. “There it is,” he cried, starting up, “that is Don Manuel coming to the rescue.” Other shots followed, some, at first, close together in volleys, the later ones singly. After the shots, listening intently as he was, he thought that he heard the sound of many horses going together at a fast trot. Some such noise there was, it rang out, died down, clopped and clinked and then clattered. “Of course, it can’t be Don Manuel,” he said, coming to himself. “But it may be the Whites driving away the Reds. Anyhow, people are there: the forest ends. It may even be Anselmo. Come on, horse, here’s the world again. ‘They must be men, because they’re fighting, and they must be civilised because they’re doing it with guns.’”

The horse seemed the better either for the rest or the sound of his fellows; when Hi mounted, he set off with some kind of spirit. In a quarter of an hour he came to something which made the horse whinny; it was a trail.

“Here it is,” Hi cried, “the very little trail which Anton spoke of. Now I shall be out of it in no time. Just as well, too, because I’ve slept a lot longer than I thought: it is almost night.”

The sun was indeed behind Melchior; the birds had homed and were now screaming before falling silent. The patches of sky over the forest turned slowly scarlet, paled yellow, then changed to a green in which stars were bright. The sparks of the fireflies began to pass upon the air: cold silence and darkness came with them into the forest, so that Hi shivered. His heart, none the less, was beating with hope, because the horse was going with confidence. Then from somewhere ahead came the distant lowing of cattle, which brought tears to Hi’s eyes. It was the noise made by the cows of home coming into the barton at Tencombe: now here, in this strange place, it told of the homes of men, where life was lived wisely, away from towns, and far from the madness of rulers like Don Lopez.

Suddenly, from somewhere ahead, a single shot rang out: it may have been far away, but in that still air it sounded near by. It was followed almost at once by the sound of the gallop of a horse, which was either running away or being ridden by a man in fear for his life. It stretched at a full gallop across his front and so away into the west: one horse only, mad with fear, or with his rider’s fear, going at his utmost: from what?

“I wish I knew from what,” Hi thought. “Listen.”

He listened: many men were talking and shouting. Then there came the noise of many horses together: seventy or a hundred; “as many as in a hunt at home,” moving along a paven place at a walk, then rising to a fast trot together. “And they are within two miles of me,” Hi thought, “going from me.” He shouted, but had no answer save the sound of the horses dying away into the west. The cattle lowed again. “There must be a ranch there,” Hi said. “I’ll go to where those cows are.” He hailed again and was answered by little white owls which followed him on both sides, perhaps for grubs or beetles kicked up by the horse in his going.

Presently he came out of the forest into a little plantation of trees made as a wind-screen, possibly for cocoa. Beyond this, he saw a cleared space in which, less than half a mile away, were the long, low white buildings of a ranch lit up as for a festival. To his right, there seemed to be ordered plantations of fruit trees in blossom: he saw long streaks of paleness which he judged to be peach trees. To the left, rather further from him, were high corrales, where pale cattle moved and lowed; he heard them stamp and push: often they rattled their horns upon the bars.

He rode nearer to the buildings, then paused to hail, crying out that he was English, and that they were not to shoot. He had no answer to any of his hails. The place was still, save for the cattle: there was not even a dog. “The men must be all at supper,” he thought, “or milking, if they milk in these parts. But it is odd that they have no dog.”

The moon, now some three or four nights old, was low down over the house, near the tops of Sierras, which glittered. “I don’t know what sort of a course I’ve been riding,” he thought, “I seem to have been going due west: or is the moon different down here? It seems to slop about all over the place.”

Leaving the moon for the moment, he rode on towards the house, calling out that he was a friend. Some shrubs, newly planted, on both sides of his track, gave out a strong sweet scent: beetles and fireflies were swarming over them with a droning of wings which made the silence the more apparent.

“Is anybody there?” he cried. “Hullo there. Don’t shoot: I am a friend. House ahoy, I’m a friend.”

By this time he was at a long white gate which had been thrust and propped open far back to its supporting posts and rails. He entered the gate, riding cautiously, still calling that he was a friend, but having no answer, and hearing no sound, save the moving of the cattle in the corrales and the buzz of insects in the shrubs.

“Not even a dog,” he repeated, “and there must be fifty men in a ranch like this. What if they are all in ambush, waiting for me to come on?”

“It’s not likely,” he thought, after a moment, “but it is possible. They may be waiting at those windows to plug me like a nutmeg grater. But if they are, they’ll wait to see who is coming with me. It feels to me as if the house were deserted.”

Beyond the gate, the way had been paven, the horse’s hoofs struck on a road; the house cast back the echoes, clink, clink, at each step. As he advanced, the young moon bobbed lower down towards the house-roof: no sound came from the house.

“Hey,” Hi called, “I am a friend, an amigo; un ami. Je suis Anglais. Ingles.”

Something in the ominousness of the silence brought his calling to an end. There was something dreadful at work here. Something had stricken the heart of that house so that its life had ceased. Yet not quite ceased, for as Hi dismounted he saw a breath of smoke blow from one of the chimneys across the curve of the moon. “What in the wide earth is happening here?” he asked himself.

At a little distance from the house, to the left of the entrance, were tethering posts from which iron rings hung. He had thought at first that they were the posts at which the slaves were flogged; but he now knew better. He hitched his horse to one of the rings, and then went slowly towards the door. The house seemed to grow bigger as he approached it: he felt himself shrink. He wished that his footsteps did not make such a noise upon the road. “It is deserted,” he told himself, “it is all deserted. But it is all lit up, so that it can only have been deserted within the hour, after that shot was fired here.”

Six steps from the door a thought came to him which made his heart leap for joy. “Of course, this is Anselmo,” he said. “I’ve come to Anselmo. This is the Elena’s ranch, and the Elenas and all their men have either gone to Don Manuel or joined the other Whites. That is it of course. Well, here I am. And they’ve moved all their horses with them; those were the horses which I heard. I’m late enough, but word has reached them. ’Zeke must have got through.”

Thinking thus he crossed the two broad stone steps of the perron to the estancia door.

An electric light burned over the door: some moths were butting at it. The door itself was of black maruca, bound with steel. A big bronze pipkin, such as the country people all over Meruel use for milking, hung beside the door. “I suppose this is the bell,” he thought. “It’s just like a castle in the Morte d’Arthur. Here goes for a bang.”

He struck the bronze, which clanged aloud, spinning round upon its cord and thrilling: then he struck again more loudly, twice. The clang died down into a trembling of the air, but all within the house was silent, there was neither voice nor footstep. There came a rustling of wind from the madre de cacao trees; nobody came, nobody spoke. “Is anyone inside there?” Hi cried. There was no answer.

“I don’t believe that there is anybody here,” he said. Then the thought came: “Suppose the people have all been rounded up or killed by the Reds?”

“But, no,” he thought, “the Reds would have sacked and burned the place. It is not that. I don’t know what it is: it must be something queer.” He struck the bronze for a last time.

XIII

“Well, if they won’t answer, I’ll see if I can go in,” he said. He lifted the latch by plucking the plaited leather bobbin: the door was not locked, it opened before him into a long lit corridor or hall where an English clock was ticking. As he opened the door, the wind blowing in shook the pictures on the wall: they swayed and clacked for an instant, then steadied. There were lighted rooms opening from each side of the corridor, but no sound of any living being.

“Hullo, you inside here,” Hi called. “I am a friend. Is anyone there? Señor Elena. Señor George, Señor William. Hey, hey, heya. Is anyone here at all?”

His voice rang along the corridor and died away: no one was there. “Very well, I’ll go in,” Hi said. He stepped in, and closed the door against the wind. As he did so a letter and envelope, which had been lying on the edge of a table near him, fell to the stone flags with a clatter. He replaced them on the table; then paused to look about him.

He had heard that men of the great ranches lived like princes. The hall in which he stood was bare, big and white, lit by electric lights. There were two stiff black chairs, two black pictures of yellow nymphs, a table heaped with silver horse-trappings, and the English grandfather’s clock, gravely telling the time. He walked up to the clock and read the words on the dial:

Edward Hendred. 1807 Abingdon.

These two little things of old Berkshire met thus in this strange house so many miles from Thames and Down. “Hendred of Abingdon,” he repeated. “There may be a Berkshire man here who may know father.” He glanced at the pictures of the yellow nymphs in their clothes blown out in the grand manner. “Religious pictures,” he thought and glanced away. The house was so still that he hardly dared to go further.

“What can have happened?” he asked. “Some fight or some show or what?”

He walked to the nearest door, on his left. The door was ajar, shewing a lit room: he knocked at the door, had no answer, and therefore looked in. It was a big, long room, in use as the messroom of the household, for whom thirty places had been laid on the table. Food in abundance had been set there for a meal, which had been begun. Baskets of small Meruel loaves were on a sideboard near the door: he felt these by accident as he put out his hand: the under loaves were still warm from the oven. There was warmth in the vast silver cazuela tureen, which stood, more than half empty at the head of the table. The table was littered with the mess of the meal: broken loaves, bowls which had been used for cazuela, halves of oranges, skins of bananas, and the bones of big birds like turkeys. Yet from the look of the plates Hi felt that the meal had never been finished: something had interrupted it before they had reached the coffee and cigarettes. Somebody with some news had come there soon after they were half way through, then chairs had been thrust back and food left, half eaten and the eaters and talkers had gone. Why had they gone, and where? Hi did not like the feeling of this house.

He went again to the hall and cried: “Is there anybody here?” But there was no answer. “There must be someone somewhere in all this barrack,” he said. “Surely in the kitchen or outhouses there will be a woman or a negro or a peon. There must be at least a caretaker or night-watchman. The kitchens will be along the corridor somewhere at the back.”

He went down the corridor, where he found the kitchen. It was a vast room, bare, clean, and empty of people. The fire, which had done the work of cooking, had been allowed to die down; but the castle-kettle, once full of water for coffee and the washing-up of the dishes, was still boiling and half full. A black cat with its paw round its face was curled up asleep on a mat on a chair. “I’m glad that there is something alive here,” he said.

Doors opened from the kitchen into outhouses, sculleries and larders: Hi felt a dread of looking into these rooms, but he overcame it: no one was there.

“Well,” he said, “if there’s no one to ask, I will make a mash for my poor horse. No one could object to that.”

He took one of the big round-up stew cauldrons which lay against a wall. In this he made a hot mash of bread for his horse, adding some salt. He carried it out to the horse, who seemed glad of the warm food for a few instants; but it was not all that he had hoped; in a few instants his muzzle dropped from it. “Poor old boy,” Hi said, “I wish I knew what I could give you, that you would like.”

He lingered by the horse for a few minutes, to pull his ears, and rub him down. The breeze which had set in struck cold, so Hi moved the horse to a more sheltered place behind the immense rain vats a few yards from the tethering posts. He had hoped that somebody would come there while he was outside with the horse, but there came neither sight nor sound of anybody.

“I’ll go in to explore,” Hi said. “There must be someone, and if there’s someone there may be something I can do.”

It was harder to enter the house for this second time than it had been before. The uncanniness was greater now. The clock still ticked, the light still burned, the table still stood uncleared. “I don’t want to be caught bagging things in a strange house,” Hi thought, “but I’m jolly well going to bag some food and leave some money for it.”

He ate and drank of what was on the table, to the amount (as he judged) of a peseta, reckoning in the bread for the horse. He left one of his five pesetas on the table for this. “What am I to do, and where am I to go?” he wondered. “If I leave this? This may be Anselmo; almost must be: yet where are all the Elenas gone? Perhaps I’ll find something in the other rooms.”

There were three more rooms in the corridor of the hall: two on the opposite side, one on his side, nearer the kitchens. The rooms further down the corridor had the look of being offices or studies. “I’ll go into those, first,” he said. “Very likely I’ll come upon somebody dead in one, or on the old mad doctor who runs this private madhouse.” He knocked at the door beside him, which was shut: for one instant he was shocked by thinking that at the sound of his knocking someone within the room had turned the pages of a book. He opened the door upon a dark room, into which the breeze blew from an open ventilator high up in the wall. He saw the light switches and switched the lights fully on. The room was the estancia office, as he had supposed. There was a safe, built into the wall. There were two long tables heaped with papers; but another thing impressed Hi: chairs had been lifted from the floor on to these tables, so that the floor might be swept. Two brooms had begun to sweep the floor: there was the tide mark of dust, earth, torn paper, cigarette ends and cigar butts half way across the room. There were the two brooms resting against the table, just as the unknown sweepers had left them when their task had been interrupted by what? On a third table was a row of flat, square, white china dishes, each containing about a pint of brown or reddish liquid. Hi judged that the liquid was a chemical of some sort, perhaps a parasite mixture.

He crossed the corridor to the room opposite. This was plainly a room for the women. It contained a long settle which faced a row of spinning wheels. On a table there were heaps of palm-blades partly unravelled into the white bast from which the Meruel women plaited their hats. At the further end of the room were two hand-looms on which some weavers had already woven parts of saints for the back cloth of an altar. Someone had spilled a little bottle of scent upon the palm-blades. It was oozing from its cork into a rivulet which had dripped into a pool upon the floor. “There has been a hurry, even here,” Hi said. “Oh, I wish to goodness I had come here an hour ago. If only I had not taken that wrong turn, or slept quite so long, I might have found the people here: and they are good people, doing good things.”

He went again into the corridor to listen: no one had entered the house. “There are all the outhouses to search through presently,” he said. “I must find someone before I can leave here. I’ll try this other room, opposite the dining-room.”

This proved to be the main living-room of a company of men. One side of it was slung with Indian hammocks, loosely woven of dyed fibres: the rest was in the confusion in which undisciplined men will live. It was littered with clothes, shot-guns, cartridges, belts, knives, books, papers, watches, money, cigars, broken cigarettes, pipes, spurs, quirts, matches, plugs of tobacco, photographs of girls, prints of horses, shoes, laces, straps and twitches. Tobacco had been smoked there not more than an hour before, but another smell also struck Hi’s nostrils. It was a familiar smell, yet for an instant in that smell of tobacco he could not say what it was. Then the sight of an empty brass revolver shell upon the floor reminded him that what he smelt was the smell of gunpowder. Somebody had burned a cartridge in that room not more than an hour before: there was the shell of the cartridge.

He picked it up, with the thought that it was the heaviest revolver cartridge he had ever seen. “Why,” he thought, “a thing like this would stop a bison. This is a Jack the Giant Killer. Whoever has fired a thing like this in here?” He put the brass shell to his nose and instantly the pungent smell brought scenes into his mind of two months before. The first scene was of the wood on the down above Tencombe, on a sunny January afternoon, when he had shot a pheasant, and had stood to jerk out the shell. A red squirrel had appeared on one of the leafless oaks there: it had run along the branch to jabber at him, to within six feet of him. This scene floated by into another of the Blowbury Woods at sunset, when he had waited in the cold for wood-pigeons. The orange sky to the west had been netted black by the elm twigs, and the woods had stood still in the cold. He had had a shot at last, but had missed with both barrels, had jerked out the cartridges, and had smelt just this smell, from fumes curling up at him out of the breech.

He dropped the shell: it fell with a tinkle and rolled from him. He was standing, at that moment, some four feet from the door, within the room; he had not much more than entered to take his survey. Fear, anxiety, homesickness, and the torment of failing his friends were all preying upon him. Then he looked up, suddenly, towards one of the windows, where something made his heart stand still. A man with a white face and blazing eyes was watching him through the window with a look of rage which made his blood run cold. The man’s brow was pressed on the pane, while his right hand reached back for a gun. That man was no dweller in the house, but a spy and an enemy.

He did not stay for the hand to come round with the gun, but slipped sideways into the hall, closed the door behind him and drew the bolt with which each of those doors was fitted. He slipped sideways along the hall to the front door, which he bolted likewise. Then he stood for a minute with his heart thumping, listening to hear whether the man were breaking through the window or coming to the door for him.

After a minute, during which nothing happened, his eye caught the letter that had been blown to the floor when he entered the house. The letter was on the table within a few feet of him. “It must have been the last thing read in this house,” he thought. “What if it were the cause of all the people leaving here? It may have brought the deciding news, probably