CHAPTER XIV

THE PORTO BELLO PUZZLE

Out from the Mosquito country the cruiser fought her way again; her machinery did not fail, and information given by the Indians, coupled with a fairly quiet sea, enabled the adventurers to make a safe passage through the treacherous rocks and the surging rollers.

There was no excitement during the run down the coast. Into the well-traveled route to and from the Panama Canal the voyagers worked the boat, and, by agreement, a stop was made at Colon.

In an earlier adventure the three chums, Tom, Cliff and Nicky, had visited Panama, and the great achievement of the Canal was therefore not a novelty to them, although they never ceased to marvel at the engineering skill by which it had been planned and built, nor did the vastness of its locks, the precision of its machinery, ever fail to make them thrill as they thought—the United States—“our country”—accomplished that feat. To them it was the Spirit of American success in an undertaking that made the world better and communication easier.

They did not wait long in Colon; only until Bill and Mr. Gray made inquiries about Mort Beecher.

As they traced the story, they learned, through many contacts which Mr. Gray’s reputation as a great scholar opened to them, that Morton Beecher had come to Colon, a few years before, and had seemed to be a very rich person. He had spent money freely and had gotten into a group of Spanish and of American pleasure-seekers who spent lavishly on the more sordid delights of a tropical life. Not many months ago Mort, broken in health and with no more money, had been compelled, as far as was known, to seek his fortune elsewhere. No one would give him employment because he was not dependable, had no strength, and spent all of his time bemoaning the vanished past of his opulence. No one knew just what had happened to him.

However, through the story that Henry Morgan had told them, they guessed that Mort’s misfortunes had finally led him to Porto Bello, that decayed spot on the Panama coast of the Caribbean which had once been a stronghold of the notorious pirate, Henry Morgan the first, the man who had first raided the Central and South American shipping and the towns of the coast, robbing and pillaging, and then had become reformed to such an extent that he had ended by making war on piracy and had achieved the great fame of being the governor of Jamaica who had done more than any other to “clean out” that nest of piratical looters.

With the wind kicking up a rough sea, the cruiser, namesake of the place they were bound for, headed toward Porto Bello.

With a pilot, a negro who called himself Bob, taking the place in their party vacated by Henry’s defection, they made the run safely, if under rough conditions. The entrance into the harbor of the ancient Spanish port was attended with only the usual dangers of any of the reef-locked, rock-studded passages along the coast.

Tom, Nicky and Cliff saw, with amazement, the ruins of the once noted place. There were the demolished battlements of its old fortifications, visible as they dropped anchor in a quiet harbor.

They found the population composed of Spanish and Negro people, of the most advanced state of dejection. No trade came to Porto Bello, no ships bothered to run the menace of her reefs, except for a very rare sailing sloop which might put in rather than to face a storm.

It took only a short time to land, and the crowd which assembled at the decrepit old shacks near the beach, astonished the boys by its slovenliness and its apathy. The people watched but made no effort to be pleasant or to help them.

“Did you ever see so many sickly people?” Nicky asked, and with good cause: hookworm was prevalent, from a diet that never varied; and the unclad bodies of the younger children seemed a very breeding place for sores. The ragged adults were in a like state.

“Father says that’s what comes of this kind of a life,” Cliff declared. “These folks never see anybody but themselves. They don’t have anything to interest them. They just eat, and sleep and exist, waiting till they die.”

“I don’t think I’d stay here, even if I had to build a canoe and run the risk of the reefs and the ocean rollers,” Tom stated. “I’d rather meet my end fighting for life than sitting down and waiting for the other thing.”

“So would I,” Nicky agreed. “But these people are just too lazy and dejected to care, I guess.”

“They have lost their self-respect and their wills,” Bill said. “I suppose I ought to feel sorry for them, but I don’t, because I was always of the idea that it’s up to every man to make himself what he wants to be.”

“I feel that way,” Tom agreed. “It isn’t easy, though.”

“Maybe it isn’t easy,” Bill nodded, “but it can be done if we stick to it. I always wanted to have a ranch in Uncle Sam’s good old West. I was down in Peru. Had no money. Just got enough to live on; but I stuck to my ideas and kept saying to myself that if I wanted it long enough and hard enough, and worked for it, I’d get what I had a desire for.”

“And you did,” admitted Nicky, for he had been with Bill during the adventure among the Incas in which Bill had been able to save Cliff’s father and eventually realize his desire for a ranch. “But it was a good deal by good luck, Bill.”

“Why, Nicky!” chided Tom, while they waited for Mr. Gray to make some arrangement with the “alcalde,” or head man, a sort of governor of the town. “You always say ‘there is something that looks out for us!’ and I’m surprised to hear you talk about luck.”

“That’s so,” Nicky agreed. “I didn’t stop to think. It looked like luck, that Bill, in Peru, found the eaglet that had Cliff’s father’s note tied to its leg.”

“But if you are sure that there is something, besides just chance,” Bill argued, “you’d see that sort of something could bring the bird to where I’d find it, and all the rest would come around through the same sort of purpose, instead of by pure chance.”

They all agreed to that, and Mr. Gray brought the alcalde to meet them. He was an elderly man, very sober and impressed with his dignity, though what he had to be dignified about Tom and his chums failed to see. However, with all the show of authority that he could put into what was really laziness and vanity, he pretended that he could not give them the information they sought until he prepared for an “audience” in the shabby old shack which served as his home and office.

“He makes me think of the little frog in the puddle,” Tom commented, as they stood about the beach, trying to be patient while Bill and Mr. Gray argued and asked questions. “He’s so swelled up because he has a little authority that he forgets to be decent or helpful.”

However, if the alcalde chose to be slow in his help, they found what they wanted in another way. They had come to Porto Bello to get information about Mort Beecher. This they secured through rather strange channels.

“Look what’s coming!” whispered Tom, nodding his head toward a figure slowly hobbling along the beach from a decrepit old lean-to among the palms and the bush.

They all looked, and stared!

Bent with apparent age, halting in his steps, clad in rags so far beyond repair that they scarcely covered him respectably, even in that half-clothed community, came a white man.

His face was covered with a rank, bushy beard. His figure, when he came close, was seen to be not only bronzed and roughened as to skin by exposure, but was, as well, in a pitiful condition with the ravages of drink. His eyes were more bleary and unpleasant than had been those of Henry Morgan. His voice, high and shaky, whined and implored.

“A beach comber,” Bill told them. “That’s what a white man comes to when he gets stranded in one of these dead spots, if he lets himself go.”

“It’s a pity,” Tom said. “He looks as if he has lost his own self-respect, for he isn’t even clean; and he has no will power, I’ll bet, or he wouldn’t have stayed here.”

“Laziness, drink—they tell the story,” Bill responded. “They’d sap the vitality of one of the old Greek Gods!”

The pitiable figure sidled up, whining, a shaky hand extended in supplication.

“I don’t suppose you’d give me a drink!” he whined.

Bill shook his head.

“No,” replied the bent figure, which looked seventy but which might have seen no more than fifty years of life—but such a life! “No, nobody ever does. Nor—a smoke—not even a little ’baccy for me pipe.”

Bill drew out a sack of tobacco and some thin papers and shook a little tobacco into one of the latter. He saw it spilled from the shaking fingers that tried to roll the paper, and made a cigarette.

“How long have you been here?” he asked, offering a light.

“I don’t know.”

“Long?”

“I can’t say, mister.”

“How did you get here?” Nicky inquired.

“I don’t seem to recall—I can’t seem to remember.”

They looked at one another. The alcalde came up.

“He is of no account,” he declared. “He cannot help you,” he continued in his slow Spanish, using the words as though he was trying to recall the proper ones; his usual conversation was in a degenerate dialect form that he seemed to feel was too undignified for the occasion of the visit of such dignitaries. “Come away!” he added. “Tomorrow I will receive you and talk to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

Bill looked after him and made a wry grimace of disgust.

“Tomorrow!” he said. “That’s what you hear all through the Spanish tropics, ‘tomorrow!’” And he might have added that “tomorrow” may also bring its “tomorrow,” for the hot countries breed delays and indolence and the slow, dragging moments seem interminable to the Americans, with their purposeful, aggressive manner and their habit of doing things at once!

“We can’t spend a night here,” Nicky urged.

“Don’t say ‘can’t,’” admonished Tom. “Look at this man. He’s said ‘can’t’ or ‘don’t’ to everything we ask him. That’s what ‘can’t’ gets you to—it breaks down everything you try to accomplish. Say ‘we won’t!’”

“Then, ‘we won’t,’” Nicky grinned.

“Mister,” Tom turned to the old man, sniffling and slumped down on the sand as though unable to sustain himself on his two legs, “you can tell us, I guess, what we want to know. Is there anybody in this place named Mort Beecher?”

The man looked at him dully.

“I don’t remember any names,” he replied.

“Well,” urged Nicky, “was there any white man besides you here?”

“Yes,” the other responded, “I guess you wouldn’t give me another smoke, would you?” He looked toward Bill. “Or something to—” he made a suggestive movement as if tilting a glass. “No—I guess nobody would give nothing to me no more.”

“There was another white man here,” Nicky persisted. “Was his name Mort Beecher?”

“I don’t recall his name. I can’t remember if he ever told me.”

They looked at one another in dismay.

“It must have been Mort Beecher,” Tom asserted confidently; then he turned to the derelict again. “Did he ever talk about being in Mexico?”

“Mexico—Mexico? I ain’t sure.”

“Did he ever mention a—a Golden Sun?” Bill, rolling and retaining a fresh cigarette just out of reach of the eager fingers.

“Sun? I—I don’t just—seems as if maybe he did, but——”

“It’s no use,” Bill said, quite gruffly, tossing the rolled paper contemptuously to the other who snatched it greedily. “We’ll have to wait for the old slow-poke alcalde. We’ll go back to the boat—I won’t spend a night in this sordid place!”

“Wait,” pleaded Tom, “I feel, some way, as if this man knows it, but he has got into such a state that he doesn’t make even an effort.”

“Look, mister,” said Cliff. “Try to think back. Did he stay here a long time? Did he talk to you?”

“I guess it was quite awhile, but I don’t know how long—I forget. He talked some, I guess.”

“What about—did he talk of his past?”

“I don’t know? It bothers me to think. I can’t think. If I had, maybe—a bit o’ drink—but I’m not sure, even then——”

“Look here, Bill,” said Tom, “let’s take him out to the boat.”

“What for?” demanded Bill.

“I see what Tom is after,” Nicky broke in. “When we give him some food and clean him up some, maybe we can quiz him.”

Mr. Gray, who had been quietly listening, nodded.

“You are a psychologist,” he said, amused at Nicky.

“Psy—? Oh, yes, Mr. Gray. Our instructor at Amadale told us about that. It’s studying people’s minds, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” nodded the scholar. “Scientists have watched people and studied them, just as we study animals, until they have learned that almost all people will act in much the same way under certain ways of stimulating them.”

“I know,” agreed Tom. “We all want to run when we are scared; we all do, if there is a fire and a panic.”

“Yes,” chimed in Cliff, “and when we think about something nice we smile, and if we think about a lemon, we act and feel almost as though we tasted it.”

“Quite correct,” smiled the scholar. “And we can go further than that, as I believe Tom guesses. If we say ‘I cannot’ often enough, and keep thinking and declaring that we are victims of fate, and have no chance to get away from some place, or to succeed, we get ourselves into almost as bad a condition as this poor chap.”

“That’s how Mr. Whitley put it, once,” Tom conceded. “That’s what I was thinking about. If we get this man where he is more like a civilized man and talk about ‘you can’ and get him to feeling that he can remember instead of that he can’t—maybe——”

“It’s better than hanging around doing nothing,” Nicky urged.

“We can try it,” Mr. Gray agreed. “There have been many wonders worked by ‘Modern Magic’—psychology applied to daily life.”

“What’s your name?” he inquired of the shaking man.

“Why—I didn’t use it for so long—Jack—just call me Jack.”

“All right, Jack,” said Bill. “You throw back those shoulders and step out like a young fellow. You’re going back to civilization, for awhile.”

The look of surprise in the dim eyes became one of pleading.

“It can’t be—I can’t hear you right, saying that! Nobody would bother with an old beach comber like me.”

“Well,” said Tom, “we think we’re somebody, and we are going to bother. It not only can be true, it is true!”

“I can’t believe——”

“Well, come and see!”

So the procession started through the indolent cluster of natives toward the cruiser’s tender.

They were going to try modern magic.

But Jack held back.

“You can’t be going to take me out on that fine boat—and feed me, and treat me like a white man!” he demurred, unable to believe in his good angels.

“We certainly are;” asserted Bill. “And loan you decent clothes, and treat you like a king!”

He had hardly finished when Jack turned on his heel and started away; over his shoulder, in his whining tones, he called to them.

“Then wait—I got to bathe me first!”

The magic was already working!