CHAPTER XV

MODERN MAGIC

While the party returned to the cruiser, Jack, the beach comber, betook himself to a land-locked lagoon where he proceeded to begin his return to self-respect by taking his first bath for a long time. The chums, excited and with much gusto, assembled a set of clothes to give him.

“Now, Cliff, Tom and Nicky,” said Mr. Gray, “you all know that you feel much better if you are dressed up when you go among people. It gives you self-respect. That is the way we will work with this man: we will build up his idea that there is something good in him yet, and then Bill will offer him a chance to go away from here and work his way back to decency. Bill says he can use him on his ranch.”

“That ought to be fine,” Tom agreed. “And I guess we will let Cliff’s father do most of the talking.”

“After we get him on board and feed him well, we will have a talk with him,” Mr. Gray conceded. “At that time, make only what I would call positive statements——”

“I know,” Cliff said. “‘I can,’ instead of ‘I can’t,’ and ‘We will’ instead of ‘We wish.’”

“Exactly that,” Mr. Gray nodded. “We will first substitute a picture in his mind that will make him feel like his old self. Then we will make him want something better than this terrible life he is living, not offering him a reward, but letting him see that he wants it enough to make a try for it. Then probably he will try to remember and tell us what we want to know—he will feel that in helping us he is helping himself.”

“We’ll do it!” declared Nicky. “I know we will!”

The trio rowed to the lagoon with the bundle of clothes and when Jack had them on he seemed to take on a different look; and, as if he felt already more like a man, he stood up straighter and his shoulders did not hunch down so much.

After a good meal and his first decent shave for, perhaps, years, he looked and acted like a different person—and declared that he felt that way.

“You want to get away from here, of course!” Bill said, when they were all on deck, Bob, the Colon pilot, and Andy, the engineer, watching in the background, much interested.

“Nobody——” began Jack.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Mr. Gray stated quietly. “You might find somebody who would help you along. Certainly, in such a case, you want to——”

“Indeed, I do!” declared Jack—and the voluntary change from indecision to assertion showed that the experiment was succeeding.

“Then I’ll see that you get to my ranch, in Colorado,” Bill said, and they all showed some surprise at the sudden movement Jack made.

“Colorado!” he almost yelled. “I was there once—a long time—I can’t remember—it was before I got down and out——”

“You’ll remember it all when you see Colorado, with its ranges and its painted rocks and its wonderful, soft sunshine, and its fine people,” Mr. Gray broke in, quickly taking advantage of this recollection, and using it to stimulate memories. “When you get there you will remember some of your old friends and you will find a lot to enjoy!”

Jack nodded, and his face took on a reflective look. Bill, and the chums, watching Mr. Gray as well as Jack, saw a slight shake of the scholar’s head and decided not to interrupt the flow of old Jack’s thought. They wanted Jack to think of the past.

Finally he asked Bill several questions about old range locations and Bill answered as well as he could, about a rather strange, and to him unfamiliar, part of the state.

Then, gently, by suggesting ideas to Jack, Mr. Gray got him to tell some incidents of range life that he recollected, and then went on from that, letting Jack talk as much as he would, to get from him the story of the past. It seemed to become even more clear as he talked.

“That is natural,” Mr. Gray explained later. “We never forget anything. It’s all hidden somewhere in our minds. But we keep track of things that interest us most and ‘forget’ or bury, the others. But if we try hard enough, and practice and keep at it, we can recall anything we want to.”

Finally—and it took time!—they got Jack to talk about his life in Porto Bello, not insisting on knowing how he came there, for he had “gone to the dogs” at that time and his brain was so befuddled by lust and bad habits that he had simply fallen into a state of indolence and drifted there.

They worked hard to get him to recall when Mort Beecher arrived, and after a time, Tom, by a fortunate remark, opened the gates of memory.

“Did he get shipwrecked?” he suggested.

“Now I recall,” Jack said, accepting a fresh smoke. “Yes, sir—my lad, I recall it plain. There was a great storm.”

Getting into the spirit of excitement as his story unfolded, he related the broad details of a great storm during which a boat had been, by the whim of tide and wind, swept over the barrier reefs and into calmer water. Of her occupants, three men, one alone swam to shore through the shark-ridden waters. It was Mort Beecher.

“He and me, we got chummy,” Mort’s acquaintance told them, while they listened with avidity. “But we took to using liquor too free, and I know he talked a heap to me, but only when he was ‘fired up’ with this native poison we have to use. I wasn’t in condition to listen and so I can’t tell you nothing. I don’t remember. But we stayed here, going from bad to worse, till a few days since—I don’t recall just what day, but another man come here from a sloop that lay-to off the reef, and he looked for a man named Mort Beecher—that’s how I recall his name, come to think, I heard him ask.

“But he wouldn’t have nothing to do with me—who would——?”

“We would, so forget that sort of talk!” commanded Bill. “Well, he only wanted Mort—for some private business, maybe?”

“It must be, but I don’t recall. I didn’t hear him. He gave Mort some money and Mort gave me a lot of—you know—” he lifted a hand as if it held a bottle, tilting back his hand, “and I went off and didn’t care, so long as I got what I come to crave for.”

“But they went away, back to the boat, I suppose,” Mr. Gray asserted. Jack nodded.

“Well, we want to find out where they went,” began Bill.

“Mort was my pal while he was here,” Jack said. “I don’t remember nothing, but if it’s account of the law, or anything, I won’t help you to track down a pal.”

“No decent man would, unless his pal had done wrong!” agreed Mr. Gray. “We aren’t after him. We don’t know of anything he has done that is wrong. But we think he can help us to locate the sister of our Tom, here—” he related briefly the circumstances of her disappearance. “As a decent, self-respecting man, you want to help us all you can, of course!”

Jack nodded sturdily. The appeal had its effect.

“I do,” he agreed. “But I wasn’t in condition to pay ’tention and I can’t remember——”

“You recall him talking about Mexico—” suggested Mr. Gray.

“Mexico—Mexico—I can’t just seem to—maybe he did, but I don’t recollect what he said.”

“Something about the Golden Sun—” suggested Bill.

“The—Golden—the Golden Sun—” Jack said, trying to screw up his forehead in his effort to rebuild the old story.

“Golden Sun—he used to talk about it a lot,” said Mr. Gray.

“Golden Sun—was it, maybe—I don’t just—let me think—I was too fuddled to notice when he used to brag and boast,” Jack said.

“I suppose he bragged how he had found some money that he had hidden,” Bill broke in, referring to his supposition that Mort had hidden the loot from the mine, gone back to get it, taken it to Colon and wasted it in riotous living.

“He did brag—I recall that well,” Jack acknowledged. “Seems to me——”

“Just let it come to you—it will! You may have been ‘under the weather’ but you heard it all—it made an impression on you. You do remember it. It will all come back!” Mr. Gray was making suggestions almost in the way a hypnotist does when he is putting someone to sleep, only he was using the principle rightly, to awaken a man’s memories.

“Oh—yes! There was a Golden Sun,” Jack declared. “It was a—wasn’t it a mine——”

“No!” cried Nicky incautiously. “Remember, Bill, Toosa said it wasn’t—” He stopped, feeling the glare of Tom’s and Cliff’s warning eyes. He subsided, crimson with disgust at his carelessness, for Jack turned with a blank face.

“Wasn’t it?” he asked. “You see; I don’t re—I can’t be sure——”

Mr. Gray did not change his expression.

“Well, let’s not worry about it,” he said. “He must have told you it was the Golden Sun mine—and that might be true. Nicky referred to something an old Indian said—the Indian thought the Golden Sun might be a girl, a name applied to a girl.”

“A girl?” said Jack, a blank look on his face. “Was it a girl? I don’t recall—I’ve tried. I want to help you—”

“Of course you do,” declared Mr. Gray, “and you will. As soon as it comes to you clearly—and it will!—you can tell us. Now, go and lie down and have your afternoon siesta.”

“Siesta!” Jack said. “On cushions! In good clo’es! With my stomach full! And yesterday I laid under a palm tree and roasted and sweat and starved.”

Bill rose to show him where he could take his nap.

“I want to remember!” said Jack, rather pitifully and huskily. “I don’t know what it may mean for you—but you’ve been decent and more than I deserve——”

“Oh, no,” Tom declared. “You’d do as much for us, if it was the other way ’round.”

“I hope so,” agreed Jack. “Anyhow, I’ll try to think——”

“Now I’ve done it!” said Nicky ruefully, when Jack was out of hearing.

“Maybe not,” said Tom. “You didn’t remember what Mr. Gray said about being positive—and you denied what he said and shook his confidence, but he’s trying, and he will succeed.”

“Everybody succeeds if they keep trying on a certain line,” Cliff stated, and then they waited—but not long. Suddenly Jack came on his shaky legs, almost babbling in his excitement.

“It’s just come to me!” he said eagerly. “Listen——”

And they soon saw that “it” had “come to him” in full.