Chapter 8

It came, at mid-afternoon, in the person of Miss Polly herself. Why packing trunks, with the aid of an experienced maid, should, even in a hot climate, produce heavy circles under the eyes, a droop at the mouth corners, and a complete submersion of vivacity, is a problem which Carroil then and there gave up. He had too much tact to question or comment.

“Oh, I’m so tired!” she said, giving him her hand. “Have you much packing to do, Fitzhugh?”

“No one has given me any notice to get ready, Miss Polly.”

“How very neglectful of me! We may leave at any time.”

“Yes; you may. But my ship doesn’t seem to be coming in very fast.”

The _double entente_ was unintentional, but the girl winced.

“Aren’t you coming with us on the yacht?”

“Am I?” His handsome face lighted hopefully.

“Of course. Dad expects you to. What kind of people should we be to leave any friend behind, with matters as they are?”

“Ah, yes.” The hope passed out of his face. “Dictates of humanity, and that sort of thing. I think, if you and Mr. Brewster—”

“Please don’t be silly, Fitz,” she pleaded. “You know it would make me most unhappy to leave you.”

Rarely did the scion of Southern blood and breeding lose the self-control and reserve on which he prided himself, but he had been harassed by events to an unwonted strain of temper.

“Is it making you unhappy to leave any one else here?” he blurted out.

The challenge stirred the girl’s spirit.

“No, indeed! I wouldn’t care if I never saw any of them again. I’m tired of it all. I want to go home,” she said, like a pathetic child.

“Oh, Miss Polly,” he began, taking a step toward her, “if you’d only let me—”

She put up one little sunburned hand.

“Please, Fitz! I—I don’t feel up to it to-day.”

Humbly he subsided.

“I’d no right to ask you the question,” he apologized. “It was kind of you to answer me at all.”

“You’re really a dear, Fitz,” she said, smiling a little wanly. “Sometimes I wish—”

She did not finish her sentence, but wandered over to the window, and gazed out across the square. On the far side something quite out of the ordinary seemed to be going on.

“The legless beggar seems to have collected quite an audience,” she remarked idly.

Her suitor joined her on the parlor balcony.

“Possibly he’s starting a revolution. Any one can do it down here.”

Vehement adjuration, in a high, strident voice, came floating across to them.

“Listen!” cried the girl. “He’s speaking. English, isn’t he?”

“It seems to be a mixture of English, French, and Spanish. Quite a polyglot the friend of your friend Perkins appears to be.”

She turned steady eyes upon him.

“Mr. Perkins is not my friend.”

“No?”

“I never want to see him, or to hear his name again.”

“Ah, then you’ve found out about him?”

“Yes.” She flushed. “Yes—at least—Yes,” she concluded.

“He admitted it to you?”

“No, he lied about it.”

“I think I shall go up and make a call on Mr. Perkins,” said Carroll, with formidable quiet.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she answered wearily. “He’d only run away and hide.” As she said it, her inner self convicted her tongue of lying.

“Very likely. Yet, see here, Miss Polly,—I want to be fair to that fellow. It doesn’t follow that because he’s a coward he’s a cad.”

“He isn’t a coward!” she flashed.

“You just said yourself that he’d run and hide.”

“Well, he wouldn’t, and he IS a cad.”

“As you like. In any case, I shall make it a point to see him before I leave. If he can explain, well and good. If not—” He did not conclude.

“Our orator seems to have finished,” observed the girl. “I shall go back upstairs and write some good-bye notes to the kind people here.”

“Just for curiosity, I think I’ll drive across and look at the legless Demosthenes,” said her companion. “I was going to do a little shopping, anyway. So I’ll report later, if he’s revoluting or anything exciting.”

From her own balcony, when she reached it, Polly had a less obstructed view of the beggar’s appropriated corner, and she looked out a few minutes after she reached the room to see whether he had resumed his oratory. Apparently he had not, for the crowd had melted away. The legless one was rocking himself monotonously upon his stumps. His head was sunk forward, and from his extraordinary mouthings the spectator judged that he must be talking to himself with resumed vehemence. From what next passed before her astonished vision, Miss Brewster would have suspected herself of a hallucination of delirium had she not been sure of normal health.

One of the well-horsed, elegant little public victorias with which the city is so well supplied stopped at the curb, and the handsome head of Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll was thrust forth. At almost the same moment the Unspeakable Perk appeared upon the steps. He was wearing a pair of enormous, misfit white gloves. He went down to the beggar, reached forth a hand, and, to the far-away spectator’s wonder-struck interpretation, seemed to thrust something, presumably a document, into the breast of the mendicant’s shirt. Having performed this strange rite, he leaped up the steps, hesitated, rushed over to Carroll’s equipage, and laid violent hands upon the occupant, with obvious intent to draw him forth. For a moment they seemed to struggle upon the sidewalk; then both rushed upon the unfortunate beggar and proceeded to kidnap him and thrust him bodily into the cab.

The driver turned in his seat at this point, his cue in the mad farce having been given, and opened speech with many gestures, whereupon Carroll arose and embraced him warmly. And with this grouping, the vehicle, bearing its lunatic load, sped around the corner and disappeared, while the sole interested witness retired to obscurity, with her reeling head between her hands.

One final touch of phantasy was given to the whole affair when, two hours later, she met Carroll, soiled and grimy, coming across the plaza, smoking—he, the addict to thirty-cent Havanas!—an awful native cheroot, whose incense spread desolation about him. Further and more extraordinary, when she essayed to obtain a solution of the mystery from him, he repelled her with emphatic gestures and a few half-strangled words with whose unintelligibility the cheroot fumes may have had some connection, and hurried into the hotel, where he remained in seclusion the rest of the day.

What in the name of all the wonders could it mean? On Mr. Brewster’s return, she laid the matter before him at the dinner table.

“Touch of the sun, perhaps,” he hazarded. “Nothing else I know of would explain it.”

“Do two Americans, a half-breed beggar, and a local coachman get sunstruck at one and the same time?” she inquired disdainfully.

“Doesn’t seem likely. By your account, though, the crippled beggar seems to have been the little Charlie Ross of melodrama.”

“Then why didn’t he shout for help? I listened, but didn’t hear a sound from him.”

“Movie-picture rehearsal,” grunted Mr. Brewster. “I can’t quite see the heir of all the Virginias in the part. Isn’t he coming down to dinner this evening?”

“His dinner was sent up to his room. Isn’t it extraordinary?”

“Ask Sherwen about it. He’s coming around this evening for coffee in our rooms.”

But the American representative had something else on his mind besides casual kidnapings.

“I’ve just come from a talk with the British Minister,” he remarked, setting down his cup. “He’s officially in charge of American interests, you know.”

“Thought you were,” said Mr. Brewster.

“Officially, I have no existence. The United States of America is wiped off the map, so far as the sovereign Republic of Caracuña is concerned. Some of its politicians wouldn’t be over-grieved if the local Americans underwent the same process. The British Minister would, I’m sure, sleep easier if you were all a thousand miles away from here.”

“Tell Sir Willet that he’s very ungallant,” pouted Miss Polly. “When I sat next to him at dinner last week he offered to establish woman suffrage here and elect me next president if I’d stay.”

Sherwen hardly paid this the tribute of a smile.

“That was before he found out certain things. The Hochwald Legation”—he lowered his voice—“is undoubtedly stirring up anti-American sentiment.”

“But why?” inquired Mr. Brewster. “There’s enough trade for them and for us?”

“For one thing, they don’t like your concessions, Mr. Brewster. Then they have heard that Dr. Pruyn is on his way, and they want to make all the trouble they can for him, and make it impossible for him to get actual information of the presence of plague. I happen to know that their consul is officially declaring fake all the plague rumors.”

“That suits me,” declared the magnate. “We don’t want to have to run Dutch and quarantine blockade both.”

“Meantime, there are two or three cheap but dangerous demagogues who have been making anti-‘Yanki,’ as they call us, speeches in the slums. Sir Willet doesn’t like the looks of it. If there were any way in which you could get through, and to sea, it would be well to take it at once. Am I correct in supposing that you’ve taken steps to clear the yacht, Mr. Brewster?”

“Yes. That is, I’ve sent a message. Or, at least, so my daughter, to whose management I left it, believes.”

“Don’t tell me how,” said Sherwen quickly. “There is reason to believe that it has been dispatched.”

“You’ve heard something?”

“I have a message from our consul at Puerto del Norte, Mr. Wisner.”

“For me?” asked the concessionaire.

“Why, no,” was the hesitant reply. “It isn’t quite clear, but it seems to be for Miss Brewster.”

“Why not?” inquired that young lady coolly. “What is it?”

“The best I could make of it over the phone—Wisner had to be guarded—was that people planning to take Dutch leave would better pay their parting calls by to-morrow at the latest.”

“That would mean day after to-morrow, wouldn’t it?” mused the girl.

“If it means anything at all,” substituted her father testily.

“Meantime, how do you like the Gran Hotel Kast, Miss Brewster?” asked Sherwen.

“It’s awful beyond words! I’ve done nothing but wish for a brigade of Biddies, with good stout mops, and a government permit to clean up. I’d give it a bath!”

“Yes, it’s pretty bad. I’m glad you don’t like it.”

“Glad? Is every one ag’in’ poor me?”

“Because—well, the American Legation is a very lonely place. Now, the presence of an American lady—”

“Are you offering a proposal of marriage, Mr. Sherwen?” twinkled the girl. “If so—Dad, please leave the room.”

“Knock twenty years off my battle-scarred life and you wouldn’t be safe a minute,” he retorted. “But, no. This is a measure of safety. Sir Willet thinks that your party ought to be ready to move into the American Legation on instant notice, if you can’t get away to sea to-morrow.”

“What’s the use, if the legation has no official existence?” asked Mr. Brewster.

“In a sense it has. It would probably be respected by a mob. And, at the worst, it adjoins the British Legation, which would be quite safe. If it weren’t that Sir Willet’s boy has typhoid, you’d be formally invited to go there.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Miss Polly warmly. “But surely it would be an awful nuisance to you.”

“On the contrary, you’d brace up my far-too-casual old housekeeper and get the machinery running. She constantly takes advantage of my bachelor ignorance. If you say you’ll come, I’ll almost pray for the outbreak.”

“Certainly we’ll come, at any time you notify us,” said Mr. Brewster. “And we’re very grateful. Shall you have room for Mr. Carroll, too?”

“By all means. And I’ve notified Mr. Cluff. You won’t mind his being there? He’s a rough diamond, but a thoroughly decent fellow.”

“Useful, too, in case of trouble, I should judge,” said the magnate. “Then I’ll wait for further word from you.”

“Yes. I’ve got my men out on watch.”

“Wouldn’t it be—er—advisable for us to arm ourselves?”

“By no means! There’s just one course to follow; keep the peace at any price, and give the Hochwaldians not the slightest peg on which to hang a charge that Americans have been responsible for any trouble that might arise. May I ask you,” he added significantly, “to make this clear to Mr. Carroll?”

“Leave that to me,” said Miss Brewster, with superb confidence.

“Content, indeed! You’ll find our locality very pleasant, Miss Brewster. Three of the other legations are on the same block, not including the Hochwaldian, which is a quarter of a mile down the hill. On our corner is a house where several of the English railroad men live, and across is the Club Amicitia, made up largely of the _jeunesse dorée_, who are mostly pro-American. So you’ll be quite surrounded by friends, not to say adherents.”

“Call on me to housekeep for you at any time,” cried Polly gayly. “I’ll begin to roll up my sleeves as soon as I get dressed to-morrow.”

IX. THE BLACK WARNING

That weird three-part drama in the plaza which had so puzzled Miss Polly Brewster had developed in this wise:—

Coincidently with the departure of Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll from the hotel in his cab, the Unspeakable Perk emerged from a store near the far corner of the square, which exploited itself in the purest Castilian as offering the last word in the matter of gentlemen’s apparel. “_Articulos para Caballeros_” was the representation held forth upon its signboard.

If it had articled Mr. Perkins, it must be confessed that it had done its job unevenly, not to say fantastically. His linen was fresh and new, quite conspicuously so, and, therefore, in sharp contrast to the frayed and patched, but scrupulously clean and neatly pressed khaki suit, which set forth rather bumpily his solid figure. A serviceable pith helmet barely overhung the protrusive goggles. His hands were encased in white cotton gloves, a size or two too large. Dismal buff spots on the palms impaired their otherwise virgin purity. As the wearer carried his hands stiffly splayed, the blemishes were obtrusive. Altogether, one might have said that, if he were going in for farce, he was appropriately made up for it.

At the corner above the beggar’s niche he was turning toward a pharmacist’s entrance, when the mirth of the departing crowd that had been enjoying the free oratory attracted his attention. He glanced across at the beggar, now rocking rhythmically on his stumps, hesitated a moment, then ran down the steps.

At the same moment Carroll’s cab stopped on the other angle of the curb. The occupant put forth his head, saw the goggled freak descending to the legless freak, and sat back again.

“Hola, Pancho! Are you ill?” asked the newcomer.

The beggar only swung back and forth, muttering with frenzied rapidity. With one hand the Unspeakable Perk stopped him, as one might intercept the runaway pendulum of a clock, setting the other on his forehead. Then he bent and brought his goblin eyes to bear on the dark face. The features were distorted, the eyelids tremulous over suffused eyes, and the teeth set. Opening the man’s loose shirt, Perkins thrust his hand within. It might have been supposed that he was feeling for the heart action, were it not that his hand slid past the breast and around under the arm. When he drew it out, he stood for a moment with chin dropped, in consideration.

Midday heat had all but cleared the plaza. As he looked about, the helper saw no aid, until his eye fell upon the waiting cab. He fairly bounded up the stairs, calling something to the coachman.

“No,” grunted that toiler, with the characteristic discourtesy of the Caracuñan lower class, and jerked his head backward toward his fare.

“I beg your pardon,” said the Unspeakable Perk eagerly, in Spanish, turning to the dim recess of the victoria. “Might I—Oh, it’s you!” He seized Carroll by the arm. “I want your cab.”

“Indeed!” said Carroll. “Well, you’re cool enough about it.”

“And your help,” added the other.

“What for?”

“Do you have to ask questions? The man may be dying—is dying, I think.”

“All right,” said Carroll promptly. “What’s to be done?”

“Get him home. Help me carry him to the cab.”

Between them, the two men lifted the heavy, mumbling cripple, carried him up the steps with a rush, and deposited him in the cab, while the driver was still angrily expostulating. The beggar was shivering now, and the cold sweat rolled down his face. His bearers placed themselves on each side of him. Perkins gave an order to the driver, who seemed to object, and a rapid-fire argument ensued.

“What’s wrong?” asked Carroll.

“Says he won’t go there. Says he was hired by you for shopping.”

Carroll took one look at the agony-wrung face of the beggar, who was being held on the seat by his companion.

“Won’t he?” said he grimly. “We’ll see.”

Rising, he threw a pair of long arms around those of the driver, pinning him, caught the reins, and turned the horses.

“Now ask him if he’ll drive,” he directed Perkins.

“Si, señor!” gasped the coachman, whose breath had been squeezed almost through his crackling ribs.

“See that you do,” the Southerner bade him, in accents that needed no interpretation.

Presently Perkins looked up from his charge.

“Got a cigar?” he asked abruptly.

“No,” replied the other, a little disgusted by this levity in the presence of imminent death.

Perkins bade the driver stop at the corner.

“Don’t let him fall off the seat,” he admonished Carroll, and jumped out.

In the course of a minute he reappeared, smoking a cheroot that appeared to be writhing and twisting in the effort to escape from its own noxious fumes.

“Have one,” he said, extending a handful to his companion.

“I don’t care for it,” returned the other superciliously. While willing to aid in a good work, he did not in the least approve either of the Unspeakable Perk or of his offhand manners.

Before they had gone much farther, his resentment was heated to the point of offense.

“Is it necessary for you to puff every puff of that infernal smoke in my face?” he demanded ominously.

“Well, you wouldn’t smoke, yourself.”

“If it weren’t for this poor devil of a sick man—” began Carroll, when a second thought about the smoke diverted his line of thought. “Is it contagious?” he asked.

“It’s so regarded,” observed the other dryly.

“I’ll take one of those, thank you.”

Perkins handed him one of the rejected spirals. In silence, except for the outrageous rattling of the wheels on the cobbles, they drove through mean streets that grew ever meaner, until they drew up at the blind front of a building abutting on an arroyo of the foothills. Here they stopped, and Carroll threw his jehu a five-bolivar piece, which the driver caught, driving away at once, without the demand for more which usually follows overpayment in Caracuña. Convenient to hand lay a small rock. Perkins used it for a knocker, hammering on the guarded wooden door with such vehemence as to still the clamor that arose from within.

Through the opening, as the barrier was removed by a leather-skinned old crone, Carroll gazed into a passageway, beyond which stretched a foul mule yard, bordered by what the visitor at first supposed to be stalls, until he saw bedding and utensils in them. The two men lifted the cripple in, amid the outcries and lamentations of the aged woman, who had looked at his face and then covered her own. At once they were surrounded by a swarm of women and children, who pressed upon them, hampering their movements, until a shrill voice cried:—

“_La muerte negra!_”

The swarm fell into silence, scattered, vanished, leaving only the moaning woman to help. At her direction they settled the patient on a straw pallet in a side room.

“That’s all you can do,” said the Unspeakable Perk to his companion. “And thank you.”

“I’ll stay.”

The goggles gloomed upon him in the dim room.

“I thought probably you would,” commented Perkins, and busied himself over the cripple with a knife and some cloths. He had stuffed his ludicrous white gloves into his pocket, and was tearing strips from his handkerchief with skillful fingers.

“Oughtn’t he to have a doctor?” asked Carroll. “Shall I go for one?”

“His mother has sent. No use, though.”

“He can’t be saved?”

“Not a chance on earth. I should say he was in the last stages.”

“What is it?” said Carroll hesitantly.

“_La muerte negra_. The black death.”

“Plague?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? Are you an expert?”

“One doesn’t have to be to recognize a case like that. The lump in the armpit is as big as a pigeon’s egg.”

“Why have you interested yourself in the man to such an extent?” asked Carroll curiously.

“He’s a friend of mine. Why did you?”

“Oh, that’s quite different. One can’t disregard a call for help such as yours.”

“A certain kind of ‘one’ can’t,” returned the Unspeakable Perk, with his half-smile. “You don’t mind my saying, Mr. Carroll, you’re a brave man.”

“And I’d have said that you weren’t,” replied the other bluntly. “I give it up. But I know this: I’m going to be pretty wretchedly frightened until I know that I haven’t got it. I’m frightened now.”

“Then you’re a braver man than I thought. But the danger may be less than you think. Stick to that cigar—here are two more—and wait for me outside. Here’s the doctor.”

Profound and solemn under a silk hat, the local physician entered, bowing to Carroll as they passed in the hallway. Almost immediately Perkins emerged. On his face was a sardonic grin.

“Malaria,” he observed. “The learned professor assures me that it’s a typical malaria.”

“Then it isn’t the plague,” said Carroll, relieved.

His relief was of brief duration.

“Of course it’s plague. But if Professor Silk Hat, in there, officially declared it such, he’d have bracelets on his arms in twelve hours. The present Government of Caracuia doesn’t believe in bubonic plague. I fancy our unfortunate friend in there will presently disappear, either just before or just after death. It doesn’t greatly matter.”

“What is to be done now?” asked Carroll.

“See that brush fire up there?” The hermit pointed to the hillside. “If we steep ourselves in that smoke until we choke, I think it will discourage any fleas that may have harbored on us. The flea is the only agent of communication.”

Soot-begrimed, strangling, and with streaming eyes, they emerged, five minutes later, from the cloud of smoke. From his pocket the Unspeakable Perk dragged forth his white gloves. The action attracted his companion’s attention.

“Good Lord!” he cried. “What has happened to your hands?”

“They’re blistered.”

“Stripped, rather. They look as if you’d fallen into a fire, or rowed a fifty-mile race. That message of Mr. Brewster’s—See here, Perkins, you didn’t row that over to the mainland? No, you couldn’t. That’s absurd. It’s too far.”

“No; I didn’t row it to the mainland.”

“But you’ve been rowing. I’d swear to those hands. Where? The blockading Dutch warship?”

The other nodded.

“Last night. Yah-h-h!” he yawned. “It makes me sleepy to think of it.”

“Why didn’t they blow you out of the water?”

“Oh, I was semiofficially expected. Message from our consul. They transferred the message by wireless. I’m telling you all this, Mr. Carroll, because I think you’ll get your release within forty-eight hours, and I want you to see that some of your party keeps constantly in touch with Mr. Sherwen. It’s mighty important that your party should get out before plague is officially declared.”

“Are you going to report this case?”

“All that I know about it.”

“But, of course, you can’t report officially, not being a physician,” mused the other. “Still, when Dr. Pruyn comes, it will be evidence for him, won’t it?”

“Undoubtedly. I should consider any delay after twenty-four hours risky for your party.”

“What shall you do? Stay?”

“Oh, I’ve my place in the mountains. That’s remote enough to be safe. Thank Heaven, there’s a cloud over the sun! Let’s sit down by this tree for a minute.”