Chapter 1

Chapter 14,198 wordsPublic domain

Produced by Al Haines

THE PLUNDERER

HENRY OYEN

AUTHOR OF

BIG FLAT, GASTON OLAF, THE SNOW BURNER, ETC.

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE PLUNDERER

Roger Payne had come to a decision. He waited until the office door had closed behind the departing stenographer, then swung his long legs recklessly upon his flat-top desk and shouted across the room at his partner:

"Jim Tibbetts!"

Tibbetts frowned. He was footing a column of cost figures and the blast from his young partner nearly made him lose count.

Payne grinned. He liked his partner. Had he not done so he would never have allowed himself to be dragged into business--Tibbetts & Payne, Manufacturers' Agents. Two years of it. Two years from the day on a Western irrigation dam when Payne had installed the cement machine that Tibbetts was selling. Two years--to Payne--of prison. And now his moment of decision had arrived.

Roger Payne was out of place. He did not fit the furniture. There was a look of permanence to the dark tan upon his face which labeled it not the surface sunburn which may be collected during a two weeks' vacation or gradually acquired by spending Saturday afternoon and Sunday on the golf links. It was a tan that suggested leather, and which comes as much from frostbite as sunburn, and from the whip of frozen snowflakes as the heated winds of summer.

Beneath the tan the face was too lean and hard to be in sympathy with the high polish of flat-top desks.

His body also was lean and hard. Even the proper cut of a carefully tailored business suit could not conceal a certain bunchiness about the shoulders which had nothing at all in common with office efficiency. The shoulders were outrageously broad, the barrel of his chest was scandalously deep, the hands distressingly large and brown, considered in intimate association with filing systems and adding machines. And the keen blue eyes, sometimes gazing with a far-away, unbusiness-like look out into the grimy, roaring cañon called Wabash Avenue, sometimes twinkling with unbusinesslike mischief, inevitably completed the exposure of Roger Payne.

He did not belong there, and he knew it. Hence it was that he suddenly jerked his long legs from the desk, sat up and said swiftly:

"Jim Tibbetts, I want you to buy me out!"

Tibbetts blinked. He was bald, plump, spectacled and kindly.

"Eh? What say? Dang it, Rog, you made me lose count!"

He began all over to foot the column of cost figures. He footed from bottom to top, checked the result by footing from top to bottom, erased his light penciled figures and rewrote them in ink, laid the sheet to one side and folded his hands in resignation.

"I knew it was coming, Rog. I've seen the signs for weeks past. You've been ramping round like a man in prison. Dang it, Rog, I'm sorry."

"Jim," said Roger, "this is no business for me to be in."

"It's a good business, Roger," protested Tibbetts mildly. "There's nothing wrong with it. We've been running only two years. Look what we've done. Look at our prospects. We're pretty well off already. We'll be rich pretty soon. Why? Because Roger Payne comes pretty near being a genius with machinery and Jim Tibbetts can beat most fellows selling. It's too good to spoil, Roger."

"Two years," repeated Payne slowly. "Jim, it seems like a lifetime to me, and it doesn't seem real. The other did--bridgebuilding, irrigation, timber cruising. That was living."

"That was bumming, and you know it!" protested Tibbetts. "That was kid stuff; it was your way of sowing your wild oats. How much money did you have when it was over? How much have you got now, after only two years of business? It was time-wasting, that's what it was, and you know it."

"It was outdoors," said Payne.

They were silent for a while.

"Roger," said Tibbetts sorrowfully, "are you beginning to turn dreamer?"

"No," said Payne emphatically, "I'm waking up. I'm like a man who's been asleep for the last two years. I'm just coming out of it. I'm wide awake; and that's why I've come to see that this game and I don't belong together. You said you'd noticed me ramping round like a man in prison. That's right! Can you guess why? Well, just because of what I tell you; I've come to myself, Jim, and I've got to get out."

"Why? Why have you got to get out?"

Roger Payne shook a hard brown fist at the gray-stone walls of the other side of the clanging street.

"That's why, Jim. It's a prison--to me. Easy enough if you fit in it. I don't. So I'm going to get out; and it's got to be now."

"But why, in the name of Sam, now? You're getting old, I'll admit. Let's see, how long ago is it since I gave you that scarfpin for your twenty-seventh birthday? Twenty-seven! Come out of it, Rog. Fifty-seven is the proper age to begin dreaming about quitting business."

"I know it. That's why I'm going to do it now, before the game gets me. It gets everybody who stays in it. It would even get me. Then at fifty-seven, as you say, I might quit and go outdoors and begin to live--too late. Jim, did you ever see a more pitiful spectacle than a natural-born outdoor man who's kept his nose on a desk for thirty years and then realized his lifelong dream? Neither have I. He thinks he's going to get out and start living then, but what he does is to begin to die--from the shoulders up. No, sir!" The young man sprang to his feet, flinging the swivel chair away with a kick. "I'm not going to be trapped. I'd rather hike back to-morrow to that irrigation job out West and boss Hunkies for Higgins than sit cooped up here day after day and get rich."

"You--crazy young fool!" said Tibbetts affectionately.

"All right, Jim. Crazy, if you please. But that is what's going to happen; you're going to buy me out, or get another partner, and I"--he filled his great lungs with air--"I'm going to get outdoors."

"What're you going to do? I'll bet you don't know. Have you got any plans?"

"Yes, I'm going to get out of the city the day after I wind things up here."

"Where you going?"

"Back home to Jordan City and look the old town over, first of all."

"Jordan City! Why--why you aren't a retired farmer."

Payne laughed. "Not going to settle there, Jim."

"Oh, and after you've looked it over, what then?"

"I'll make my plans there. I don't know what it will be. But whatever it is, it will be something that won't bring me back to town."

James Tibbetts looked long and hopefully at the browned face of his young partner; but at what he saw there his hopes vanished.

"You're set on this, I see, Rog," he said sorrowfully.

"Cheer up, Jim!" responded Payne.

"I'll give you a deal that will help you get rich a lot quicker than if I stayed with you."

Tibbetts shook his head and was silent a long time. "Well, if you're bound to sell, you won't go out of here exactly busted--after two years with me," he said at last. "Rog! Do you mean it? We're going to part?"

"It would be plain hell for me to stick, Jim."

Tibbetts grasped the extended hard brown hand in his own soft white fingers. After a while he managed to stammer:

"I see. This just had to come!"

On the fat rolling lands about Jordan City pedigreed kine graze by the hundreds, corn grows high and thick and silos are to be seen in every barnyard. And in Jordan City bank accounts are large and permanent.

It is an old town, as age goes in the Mississippi Valley. Maple trees with huge, solid trunks and immense branches line its older streets. The streets themselves, save for the strip of asphalt where the state highway sweeps through the town, are largely paved with hard red bricks. In the older streets in the residence sections the sidewalks are of the same material, and in many places soft green moss grows undisturbed upon these hard red paths. Back from the little-used sidewalks of these sections, surrounded by hedges of Osage orange or box elder, stand old staid houses in good paint and repair. Rich retired owners of the fat acres of Jordan County live in most of them and own ponderous eight-cylinder cars.

There is a new section of the town, too, where the architecture runs to bungalow styles, where the installment collectors from the phonograph houses are regularly seen, and where papa gets out in front and twirls the crank when the family car goes out for its airing. No important line of demarcation separates the old staid section of town from the new and brighter one. Major Trimble, President of the Jordan Bank & Trust Company, accepts deposits from both sections with strict impartiality; the spire of the Methodist Episcopal Church is the Sunday lodestone to folk on both sides of town, as well as for much of the country round. They talk mainly of farms, of cattle and of the weather on the streets of Jordan; and the young folk largely go off to Chicago to make their way in the world.

Into this farm-ringed islet of tranquillity, where faith in one's fellowman, and hoarded money, are in abundance, about the time that Roger Payne was beginning to know that his place was not in the city, the afternoon train from the east deposited a large, dignified personage of robust, well-nourished, ministerial manner and apparel, who bore comfortably upon his well-padded shoulders the name, Isaiah Granger.

Isaiah Granger! The name alone would have been an open sesame to the important circle which made possible the prosperity of Major Tumble's bank and the First M. E. Church. But Mr. Granger had other things to recommend him. He came, quoth the _Jordan Record_--whose editor's notes Major Trimble held--to make his home in that most beautiful of towns, Jordan City. He was an old friend of Major Tumble's. Mr. Granger was "well fixed"--Major Trimble gave his word for that.

Hence Mr. Granger was met at the station by Major Trimble, driven in the Major's ponderous car to his home and there introduced to Mrs. Trimble--strange that being so old a friend of the Major's he should not have met Mrs. Trimble before--and then in the seclusion of the Major's library he had shucked his coat, as it were, and said:

"Well, what's the prospects for a killing? Got any of 'em lined up?"

"First," retorted Major Trimble, stroking his knife-edged nose, "let me see your credentials from Senator Fairclothe."

The visitor smiled and passed over the requested credentials. Major Trimble inspected them as an astute banker should.

"All right," he said, and waited.

Mr. Granger passed over a bank draft.

"All right," repeated the banker, "and ten percent on all sales made here or through connections from here."

"Ten per cent," agreed Granger, "and no responsibility to be attached to you."

"I'll take care of that," snapped Trimble, "Now, Granger, I think you ought to do some real business here."

And Granger did.

Long before Roger Payne had sold his share in his business, Isaiah Granger was leading the choir in the First M. E. Church and Mrs. Granger, a lady of girth and charm, was President of the Jordan Beautiful Society. Their position in Jordan was solid and assured. Long before Roger finally escaped from the large city, Isaiah Granger, and therefore Jordan, had been most significantly honored.

Granger had been appointed by United States Senator Lafayette Fairclothe, in a letter written on Senate stationery, as district manager for that great organization, The Prairie Highlands Association, Senator Fairclothe, President, Washington, D. C.--which, under the encouragement of the Government, was bestowing a boon on a land-hungry nation of developing the fabulously rich prairie lands of the Western Everglades, Florida. Long before the afternoon when Roger swung boyishly off the train at Jordan, Isaiah Granger's fellow townsmen, led by Major Trimble, had become insistent in their demands that he give them first chance at that land right there in Jordan--a demand which Granger had admitted to be entirely just.

It was Major Trimble, as an old family friend, who hinted to Roger about the snap that Brother Granger was letting his fellow citizens in on in Florida land. It was Senator Fairclothe's direct, sincere replies to Roger's letters of inquiry that convinced him. There is magic in the words "United States Senator." But after all, it was the spirit of adventure, the love of outdoors, the instinct of the pioneer, which prompted him to buy a 1000-acre block of "prairie highland," at the headwaters of the Chokohatchee River. It was necessary to buy at once, for Trimble was after that tract for himself. Having made the purchase Payne sent a wire to the Far West asking one Higgins, engineer, if he were open for a job. And then Roger Payne turned his eager eyes toward sunny Southern Florida.

III

A flaring ray of purple sun came flashing over the sea to Gumbo Key, a warning of the brazen subtropical dawn that was to come. It pierced a vista in the jungle of coco palms on the narrow key, colored purple the white side of the Paradise Gardens Colony excursion boat Swastika, which lay at the tiny wharf on the key's western shore, and splashed without warning into an open porthole well aft.

Roger Payne awoke with a start. It was his first experience with the shock of a Southern Florida dawn. Dawns of many sorts he had seen--the ghastly ashy, clanging dawns of cities, the gray, creeping dawns of Northern winter, the bluish dawns of the Western mountains--but a dawn which came flaring up from the sea like a clap of thunder was a novelty.

He lay for a moment, stretching his buoyant body on the shelflike berth, his soles firmly against one wall, his head touching another, and wondered how a man could sleep in that bunk who was over six feet one. The Swastika had come from the railroad terminus at Flora City during the night, laden with small land buyers bound up the Chokohatchee River for the Paradise Gardens Colony, and had laid up at Gumbo Key at the mouth of the river to wait for daylight. Payne had secured passage upon it, bound for his prairie land beyond the head waters of the Chokohatchee. As he realized that dawn was coming and that soon he would see his land, he tumbled from his berth with something of the eagerness of a boy on the first day of the long vacation.

"Come on, Hig; daylight's coming."

Higgins, the other man in the room, stirred grudgingly. He was young in years but old in the ways of men, hardened by many hard jobs in rough corners of the world, and broad of body and round and red of head.

"Like the sunrise, do you?" grumbled Higgins. "Go ahead; soak your soul in it. My soul don't need soaking, so lemme sleep. Or, here; mebbe you're out early for a glimpse at the young lady who kept to her room all last evening?"

"I scarcely noticed her."

"You're right; you didn't. That's why I been wondering if there ain't something wrong with you. Tall, slim, carried herself like a princess, and dressed----"

"Go back to sleep, Hig, you're still dreaming."

"A dream is right--but in the flesh--and you never noticed her!"

"I'm down here on business; haven't time for anything else. I'm going out and see what the country is like."

"Go ahead. By the purple shadows I can tell you that in a few minutes 'twill be sunrise, and all gaudier than a campmeeter's picture of heaven. So I'll just roll over and tear off ten winks more."

Out on the narrow wharf Payne caught his foot on the painter of a rowboat moored near the Swastika's stern, and found the soft blue haze of the subtropical night still undisturbed save for the first ray of dawn.

The tree growth on the key was jungle-like in density. A path had been cut through to the eastern shore. It was almost a tunnel, for the fronds of the coco palms and the branches of the red-trunked gumbo limbo, and of live oak formed an arch overhead, from which hung long, listless streamers of Spanish moss. The red rays touched the hanging tips of the moss, as if the streamers had been dipped in vermilion, and it tinted softly the palm fronds, wet with the night's dew.

Payne walked down the path to the east shore of the key, and suddenly he seemed to behold a world being born anew. Dawn was coming with a rush. The soft velvety blackness of night in the heavens was giving way to a faint purple. Up from the mystic spaces of the east rays of deep purple, of burnt umber, vermilion, scarlet and flame were leaping into the sky. Black dots began to appear on the horizon, keys and trees silhouetted against the rising light. A huge heron flapped grotesquely up from the top of a mangrove bush as the sun struck it; a flamingo flapped by, matching its dainty pink with the sun's best tints; a dolphin's fin broke the dark purple water near shore.

Then the eastern horizon became a flare of flame and fire, and the sea grew rosy. Beyond its brim a great conflagration seemed to be raging, throwing its flames of gold, of red and of uncountable tints high into the sky. Higher it rose, its rays more insistent; and then, as with a clashing of brazen cymbals, the full-blown dawn was upon the world.

Payne now saw that the light had revealed two yachts moored to a short pier which ran out from the eastern shore. One, a splendid sixty-foot cruiser of the luxurious type seen in Florida waters during the tourist season, lay at the end of the pier ready to sail. From bow to stern she was immaculate white with shiny brown trimmings, and on her bow the sun revealed in small gilt letters the name Egret.

The second boat was a low, dirty forty-footer--the Cormorant--the boat to which the Swastika's passengers were to transfer for the trip up the river.

A Japanese steward, in spick and span whites, came down the Egret's shiny gangway, entered the path leading to the Swastika's dock, and in a few minutes came hurrying back to his boat carrying a handbag.

The sun now had splashed boldly upon the languid wet fronds of the palms, upon the trunks of trees and the hanging moss. It lighted up the tunnellike vista, painting rosy the shell path underfoot and revealing the Swastika beyond. In the morning stillness Payne heard light, swift steps creaking crisply upon the crushed shells of the path. Then, from his place in the shadows beneath a palm, he saw the girl. She came to the open space before the sea, whistling softly to herself an irrepressible, tuneless matin song of youth, and thus she walked unexpectingly into the full power of the relentless dawn. For a moment she halted, blinking, astounded.

"Ah!"

Her exclamation was a cry of the joy of youth. She stood facing the coming day, and the sea and sun; and a puff of morning breeze flung behind her a vagrant strand of golden hair.

She was quite tall, and upon her young figure, long of waist and lithe, yet well-rounded, the thin white dress of the subtropics was but a filament, a feminine accessory to the virgin beauty and the message of her budding womanhood.

Payne heard a soft, heavy step at his back and saw that Higgins, too, had answered the call of dawn.

The girl stood entranced by the spectacle before her. She placed her hands upon her bosom and stood with uplifted visage, like a young goddess of the dawn. She stretched her arms passionately out over the sea and said quite loudly and fervently:

"I love you, I love you!"

In the shadow of the palm Payne and Higgins began to retreat guiltily.

"No use your sticking round, Payne," whispered the engineer. "You're too late; she's took. You heard what she said."

"Sh-h!"

"I love you," repeated the girl with the same ecstatic tone and pose. "Ah! How I love you!"

From the arch over the path there dropped with a swish and crash the ten-foot branch of a coco palm, falling without warning or apparent reason, as the overripe branches of coco palms do fall. The girl whirled round; and Payne was shocked and chilled to the marrow by the sight of her as she faced toward them.

Beautiful she was, her face as beautiful as her vibrant young body, but for the moment she was like a thing at bay. Fear shown in her eyes, not the passing fear of a sudden alarm, but a deep-seated, wearing fear suddenly awakened. Her face was a deadly white. For an instant it seemed to Roger that the depths of her soul were revealed, and at the mystery and dread in her eyes he took a step forward. He did not speak. Her expression baffled him. He stood irresolute for the moment, and in that moment she recovered her poise. She drew herself upright slowly, the red came flowing back into the cream of her cheeks, and she relaxed, leaning her weight upon one foot. As she looked at Roger, and from him to the weather-beaten Higgins and back to Roger, her eyes grew easy with assurance.

She began to smile.

"Didn't know there were tigers or other dangerous beasts on this island, miss," chuckled Higgins. "Say the word and we'll clean 'em out for you."

Neither the girl nor Payne appeared to hear. Payne looked at her without attempting to speak; he had tried to smile and carry the thing off easily, but as their eyes met his lips remained half parted without uttering a word. He looked at her in utter helplessness, caught for the moment, at least, in the grip of a force greater than himself. The girl shot Higgins a smile of understanding and friendliness, but as her eyes came back to Roger's the smile vanished by degrees; and upon her visage for the while was the same look of awesome seriousness as was upon the young man's.

"Mebbe they're gorillas, miss," chuckled Higgins.

She turned, reluctant yet relieved at the release from the tension, and looked at him speculatively.

"Why did you say that?" she asked.

"Gorillas, miss? Pshaw! Don't be afraid; I juggle them for morning exercise. Eh? What?" he continued, as he realized that her expression was not one of jesting. "By the great smoked fish--excuse me for cussin', miss--if it wasn't ridiculous I'd say I'd hit it!"

"Do you know anything about this place?" she asked quietly.

"Not a thing, miss."

"Or about the people round here?"

"No."

"It was strange," she said, "your saying 'tiger' and 'gorilla' just then. It was what I would have said--if I could have spoken."

"I am sorry, very sorry we alarmed you," said Roger. "We didn't want to intrude."

"Oh, I am glad you were here," she cried. "You don't know how glad I was to turn round and see you two instead of----"

"Instead of tigers and gorillas?" laughed Roger. "Oh! I beg your pardon!" he cried in swift contrition at the look which the words brought back to her eyes. "I wouldn't for the world--but, surely--it's impossible; there are no dangerous wild animals on this pretty little key."

"No," she said slowly, looking away from him. "No, there are not any dangerous--wild beasts on this key. It--it was just a morning nightmare." She laughed, looking up. "Perhaps I wasn't thoroughly awake yet." But she shuddered, and swiftly made pretense she was shaking herself. "There; I'm awake now. There are no dangerous wild animals here. There are only--people. It--it was just--just moonshine."

"Do they make a little of it round here, miss?" Higgins winked eagerly and with such energy that his ears and hat moved.

"Oh, Higgins!" groaned Roger; but the girl threw back her head and laughed with relief and gratitude for the chance of merriment until the virgin morning seemed filled with song. Higgins' hair-trigger laughter rumbled deep accompaniment; and, as always, the engineer's merriment forced itself upon Roger, and he joined in, while the silver of the girl's tones pealed above both, tinkling in the sun-kissed palms above, rolling out over the purple water, out to the mooring of the immaculate Egret.

"We were on the Swastika, and rose early," explained Roger.

"You're land buyers?"

"Yes, I've invested in a big tract way up the river."

"You're going up to-day?"

"Yes."