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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Unspeakable Perk, by Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Unspeakable Perk
+
+Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+Release Date: April 9, 2002 [eBook #5009]
+[Most recently updated: April 13, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNSPEAKABLE PERK ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Unspeakable Perk
+
+by Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+Contents
+
+ I. MR. BEETLE MAN
+ II. AT THE KAST
+ III. THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
+ IV. TWO ON A MOUNTAIN-SIDE
+ V. AN UPHOLDER OF TRADITIONS
+ VI. FORKED TONGUES
+ VII. “THAT WHICH THY SERVANT IS—”
+ VIII. LOS YANKIS
+ IX. THE BLACK WARNING
+ X. THE FOLLY OF PERK
+ XI. PRESTO CHANGE
+ XII. THE WOMAN AT THE QUINTA
+ XIII. LEFT BEHIND
+ XIV. THE YELLOW FLAG
+ 
+
+
+
+I.
+MR. BEETLE MAN
+
+
+The man sat in a niche of the mountain, busily hating the Caribbean
+Sea. It was quite a contract that he had undertaken, for there was a
+large expanse of Caribbean Sea in sight to hate; very blue, and still,
+and indifferent to human emotions. However, the young man was a good
+steadfast hater, and he came there every day to sit in the shade of the
+overhanging boulder, where there was a little trickle of cool air down
+the slope and a little trickle of cool water from a crevice beneath the
+rock, to despise that placid, unimpressionable ocean and all its works
+and to wish that it would dry up forthwith, so that he might walk back
+to the blessed United States of America. In good plain American, the
+young man was pretty homesick.
+
+Two-man’s-lengths up the mountain, on the crest of the sturdy hater’s
+rock, the girl sat, loving the Caribbean Sea. Hers, also, was a large
+contract, and she was much newer to it than was the man to his, for she
+had only just discovered this vantage-ground by turning accidentally
+into a side trail—quite a private little side trail made by her
+unsuspected neighbor below—whence one emerges from a sea of verdure
+into full view of the sea of azure. For the time, she was content to
+rest there in the flow of the breeze and feast her eyes on that broad,
+unending blue which blessedly separated her from the United States of
+America and certain perplexities and complications comprised therein.
+Presently she would resume the trail and return to the city of
+Caracuña, somewhere behind her. That is, she would if she could find
+it, which was by no means certain. Not that she greatly cared. If she
+were really lost, they’d come out and get her. Meantime, all she wished
+was to rest mind and body in the contemplation of that restful plain of
+cool sapphire, four thousand feet below.
+
+But there was a spirit of mischief abroad upon that mountain slope. It
+embodied itself in a puff of wind that stirred gratefully the curls
+above the girl’s brow. Also, it fanned the neck of the watcher below
+and cunningly moved his hat from his side; not more than a few feet,
+indeed, but still far enough to transfer it from the shade into the
+glaring sun and into the view of the girl above. The owner made no
+move. If the wind wanted to blow his new panama into some lower
+treetop, compelling him to throw stones, perhaps to its permanent
+damage, in order to dislodge it, why, that was just one more cause of
+offense to pin to his indictment of irritation against the great island
+republic of Caracuña. Such is the temper one gets into after a year in
+the tropics.
+
+Like as peas are panama hats to the eyes of the inexpert; far more like
+than men who live under them. For the girl, it was a direct inference
+that this was a hat which she knew intimately; which, indeed, she had
+rather maliciously eluded, not half an hour before. Therefore, she
+addressed it familiarly: “Boo!”
+
+The result of this simple monosyllable exceeded her fondest
+expectations. There was a sharp exclamation of surprise, followed by a
+cry that might have meant dismay or wrath or both, as something
+metallic tinkled and slid, presently coming to a stop beside the hat,
+where it revealed itself as a pair of enormous, aluminum-mounted
+brown-green spectacles. After it, on all fours, scrambled the owner.
+
+Shock number one: It wasn’t the man at all! Instead of the
+black-haired, flanneled, slender Adonis whom the trouble-maker
+confidently assumed to have been under that hat, she beheld a
+brownish-clad, stocky figure with a very blond head.
+
+Shock number two: The figure was groping lamentably and blindly in the
+undergrowth, and when, for an instant, the face was turned half toward
+her, she saw that the eyes were squinted tight-closed, with a painful
+extreme of muscular tension about them.
+
+Presently one of the ranging hands encountered the spectacles, and
+settled upon them. With careful touches, it felt them all over. A mild
+grunt, presumably of satisfaction, made itself heard, and the figure
+got to its feet. But before the face turned again, the girl had stepped
+back, out of range.
+
+Silence, above and below; a silence the long persistence of which came
+near to constituting shock number three. What sort of hermit had she
+intruded upon? Into what manner of remote Brahministic contemplation
+had she injected that impertinent “Boo!”? Who, what, how, why—
+
+“Say it again.” The request came from under the rock. Evidently the
+spectacled owner had resumed his original situation.
+
+“Say _what_ again?” she inquired.
+
+“Anything,” returned the voice, with child-like content.
+
+“Oh, I—I hope you didn’t break your glasses.”
+
+“No; you didn’t.”
+
+On consideration, she decided to ignore this prompt countering of the
+pronoun.
+
+“I thought you were some one else,” she observed.
+
+“Well, so I am, am I not?”
+
+“So you are what?”
+
+“Some one else than you thought.”
+
+“Why, yes, I suppose—But I meant some one else besides yourself.”
+
+“I only wish I were.”
+
+“Why?” she asked, intrigued by the fervid inflection of the wish.
+
+“Because then I’d be somewhere else than in this infernal hell-hole of
+a black-and-tan nursery of revolution, fever, and trouble!”
+
+“I think it one of the loveliest spots I’ve ever seen,” said she
+loftily.
+
+“How long have you been here?”
+
+“On this rock? Perhaps five minutes.”
+
+“Not on the rock. In Caracuña?”
+
+“Quite a long time. Nearly a fortnight.”
+
+The commentary on this was so indefinite that she was moved to
+inquire:—
+
+“Is that a local dialect you’re speaking?”
+
+“No; that was a grunt.”
+
+“I don’t think it was a very polite grunt, even as grunts go.”
+
+“Perhaps not. I’m afraid I’m out of the habit.”
+
+“Of grunting? You seem expert enough to satisfy—”
+
+“No; of being polite. I’ll apologize if—if you’ll only go on talking.”
+
+She laughed aloud.
+
+“Or laughing,” he amended promptly. “Do it again.”
+
+“One can’t laugh to order!” she protested; “or even talk to order. But
+why do you stay ’way out here in the mountains if you’re so eager to
+hear the human voice?”
+
+“The human voice be—choked! It’s _your_ human voice I want to hear—your
+kind of human voice, I mean.”
+
+“I don’t know that my kind of human voice is particularly different
+from plenty of other human voices,” she observed, with an effect of
+fine impartial judgment.
+
+“It’s widely different from the kind that afflicts the suffering ear in
+this part of the world. Fourteen months ago I heard the last American
+girl speak the last American-girl language that’s come within reach of
+me. Oh, no,—there _was_ one, since, but she rasped like a rheumatic
+phonograph and had brick-colored freckles. Have you got brick-colored
+freckles?”
+
+“Stand up and see.”
+
+“No, _sir!_—that is, ma’am. Too much risk.”
+
+“Risk! Of what?”
+
+“Freckles. I don’t like freckles. Not on _your_ voice, anyway.”
+
+“On my _voice?_ Are you—”
+
+“Of course I am—a little. Any one is who stays down here more than a
+year. But that about the voice and the freckles was sane enough. What
+I’m trying to say—and you might know it without a diagram—is that, from
+your voice, you ought to be all that a man dreams of when—well, when he
+hasn’t seen a real American girl for an eternity. Now I can sit here
+and dream of you as the loveliest princess that ever came and went and
+left a memory of gold and blue in the heart of—”
+
+“I’m not gold and blue!”
+
+“Of course you’re not. But your speech is. I’ll be wise, and content
+myself with that. One look might pull down, In irrevocable ruin, all
+the lovely fabric of my dream. By the way, are you a Cookie?”
+
+“A _what?_”
+
+“Cookie. Tourist. No, of course you’re not. No tour would be imbecile
+enough to touch here. The question is: How did you get here?”
+
+“Ah, that’s my secret.”
+
+“Or, rather, are you here at all? Perhaps you’re just a figment of the
+overstrained ear. And if I undertook to look, there wouldn’t be
+anything there at all.”
+
+“Of course, if you don’t believe in me, I’ll fly away on a sunbeam.”
+
+“Oh, please! Don’t say that! I’m doing my best.”
+
+So panic-stricken was the appeal that she laughed again, in spite of
+herself.
+
+“Ah, that’s better! Now, come, be honest with me. You’re not pretty,
+are you?”
+
+“Me? I’m as lovely as the dawn.”
+
+“So far, so good. And have you got long golden—that is to say, silken
+hair that floats almost to your knees?”
+
+“Certainly,” she replied, with spirit.
+
+“Is it plentiful enough so that you could spare a little?”
+
+“Are you asking me for a lock of my hair?” she queried, on a note of
+mirth. “For a stranger, you go fast.”
+
+“No; oh, no!” he protested. “Nothing so familiar. I’m offering you a
+bribe for conversation at the price of, say, five hairs, if you can
+sacrifice so many.”
+
+“It sounds delightfully like voodoo,” she observed. “What must I do
+with them?”
+
+“First, catch your hair. Well up toward the head, please. Now pull it
+out. One, two, three—yank!”
+
+“Ouch!” said the voice above.
+
+“Do it again. Now have you got two?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Knot them together.”
+
+There was a period of silence.
+
+“It’s very difficult,” complained the girl.
+
+“Because you’re doing it in silence. There must be sprightly
+conversation or the charm won’t work. Talk!”
+
+“What about?”
+
+“Tell me who you thought I was when you said, ‘Boo!’ at me.”
+
+“A goose.”
+
+“A—a _goose!_ Why—what—”
+
+“Doesn’t one proverbially say ‘Boo!’ to a goose?” she remarked
+demurely.
+
+“If one has the courage. Now, I haven’t. I’m shy.”
+
+“Shy! You?” Again the delicious trill of her mirth rang in his ears. “I
+should imagine that to be the least of your troubles.”
+
+“No! Truly.” There was real and anxious earnestness in his assurance.
+“It’s because I don’t see you. If I were face to face with you, I’d
+stammer and get red and make a regular imbecile of myself. Another
+reason why I stick down here and decline to yield to temptation.”
+
+“O wise young man! _Are_ you young? Ouch!”
+
+“Reasonably. Was that the last hair?”
+
+“Positively! I’m scalped. You’re a red Indian.”
+
+“Tie it on. Now, fasten a hairpin on the end and let it down. All
+right. I’ve got it. Wait!” The fragile line of communication twitched
+for a moment. “Haul, now. Gently!”
+
+Up came the thread, and, as its burden rose over the face of the rock,
+the girl gave a little cry of delight:—
+
+“How exquisite! Orchids, aren’t they?”
+
+“Yes, the golden-brown bee orchid. Just your coloring.”
+
+“So it is. How do you know?” she asked, startled.
+
+“From the hair. And your eyes have gold flashes in the brown when the
+sun touches them.”
+
+“Your wits are _your_ eyes. But where do you get such orchids?”
+
+“From my little private garden underneath the rock.”
+
+“Life will be a dull and dreary round unless I see that garden.”
+
+“No! I say! Wait! Really, now, Miss—er—” There was panic in the
+protest.
+
+“Oh, don’t be afraid. I’m only playing with your fears. One look at you
+as you chased your absurd spectacles was enough to satisfy my
+curiosity. Go in peace, startled fawn that you are.”
+
+“Go nothing! I’m not going. Neither are you, I hope, until you’ve told
+me lots more about yourself.”
+
+“All that for a spray of orchids?”
+
+“But they are quite rare ones.”
+
+“And very lovely.”
+
+The girl mused, and a sudden impulse seized her to take the unseen
+acquaintance at his word and free her mind as she had not been able to
+do to any living soul for long weeks. She pondered over it.
+
+“You aren’t getting ready to go?” he cried, alarmed at her long
+silence.
+
+“No; I’m thinking.”
+
+“Please think aloud.”
+
+“I was thinking—suppose I did.”
+
+There was so much of weighty consideration in her accents that the
+other fear again beset him.
+
+“Did what? Not come down from the rock?”
+
+“Be calm. I shouldn’t want to face you any more than you want to face
+me, if I decided to do it.”
+
+“Go on,” he encouraged. “It sounds most promising.”
+
+“More than that. It’s fairly thrilling. It’s the awful secret of my
+life that I’m considering laying bare to you, just like a dime novel.
+Are you discreet?”
+
+“As the eternal rocks. Prescribe any form of oath and I’ll take it.”
+
+“I’m feeling just irresponsible enough to venture. Now, if I knew you,
+of course I couldn’t. But as I shall never set eyes on you again—I
+never shall, shall I?”
+
+“Not unless you creep up on me unawares.”
+
+“Then I’ll unburden my overweighted heart, and you can be my augur and
+advise me with supernatural wisdom. Are you up to that?”
+
+“Try me.”
+
+“I will. But, remember: this means truly that we are never to meet. And
+if you ever do meet me and recognize my voice, you must go away at
+once.”
+
+“Agreed,” he said cheerfully, just a bit too cheerfully to be
+flattering.
+
+“Very well, then. I’m a runaway.”
+
+“From where?”
+
+“Home.”
+
+“Naturally. Where’s home?”
+
+“Utica, New York,” she specified.
+
+“U.S.A.,” he concluded, with a sigh. “What did you run away from?”
+
+“Trouble.”
+
+“Does any one ever run away from anything else?” he inquired
+philosophically. “What particular brand?”
+
+“Three men,” she said dolorously. “All after poor little me. They all
+thought I ought to marry them, and everybody else seemed to think so,
+too—”
+
+“Go slow! Did you say Utica or Utah?”
+
+“Everybody thought I ought to marry one or the other of ’em, I mean. If
+I could have married them all, now, it might have been easier, for I
+like them ever so much. But how could I make up my mind? So I just
+seized papa around the neck and ran away with him down here.”
+
+“Why here, of all places on earth?”
+
+“Oh, he’s interested in some mines and concessions and things. It’s
+very beautiful, but I almost wish I’d stayed at home and married
+Bobby.”
+
+“Which is Bobby?”
+
+“He’s one of the home boys. We’ve grown up together, and I’m so fond of
+him. Only it’s more the brother-and-sister sort of thing, if he’d let
+it be.”
+
+“Check off No. 1. What’s No. 2?”
+
+“Lots older. Mr. Thomas Murray Smith is an unspoiled millionaire. If he
+weren’t so serious and quite so dangerously near forty—well, I don’t
+know.”
+
+“Have you kept No. 3 for the last because he’s the best?”
+
+“No-o-o-o. Because he’s the nearest. He followed me down. You can see
+his name in all its luster on the Hotel Kast register, when you get
+back to the city—Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll, at your service.”
+
+“Sounds Southern,” commented the man below.
+
+“Southern! He’s more Southern than the South Pole. His ancestors fought
+all the wars and owned all the negroes—he calls them ‘niggers’—and
+married into all the first families of Virginia, and all that sort of
+thing. He must quite hate himself, poor Fitz, for falling in love with
+a little Yankee like me. In fact, that’s why I made him do it.”
+
+“And now you wish he hadn’t?”
+
+“Oh—well—I don’t know. He’s awfully good-looking and gallant and
+devoted and all that. Only he’s such a prickly sort of person. I’d have
+to spend the rest of my life keeping him and his pride out of trouble.
+And I’ve no taste for diplomacy. Why, only last week he declined to
+dine with the President of the Republic because some one said that his
+excellency had a touch of the tar brush.”
+
+“He’d better get out of this country before that gets back to
+headquarters.”
+
+“If he thought there was danger, he’d stay forever. I don’t suppose
+Fitz is afraid of anything on earth. Except perhaps of me,” she added
+after-thoughtfully.
+
+“Young woman, you’re a shameless flirt!” accused the invisible one in
+stern tones.
+
+“If I am, it isn’t going to hurt you. Besides, I’m not. And, anyway,
+who are you to judge me? You’re not here as a judge; you’re an augur.
+Now, go on and aug.”
+
+“Aug?” repeated the other hesitantly.
+
+“Certainly. Do an augury. Tell me which.”
+
+“Oh! As for that, it’s easy. None.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Because I much prefer to think of you, when you are gone, as
+unmarried. It’s more in character with your voice.”
+
+“Well, of all the selfish pigs! Condemned to be an old maid, in order
+not to spoil an ideal! Perhaps you’d like to enter the lists yourself,”
+she taunted.
+
+“Good Heavens, no!” he cried in the most unflattering alarm. “It isn’t
+in my line—I mean I haven’t time for that sort of thing. I’m a very
+busy man.”
+
+“You look it! Or you did look it, scrambling about like a doodle bug
+after your absurd spectacles.”
+
+“There is no such insect as a doodle bug.”
+
+“Isn’t there? How do you know? Are you personally acquainted with all
+the insect families?”
+
+“Certainly. That’s my business. I’m a scientist.”
+
+“Oh, gracious! And I’ve appealed to you in a matter of sentiment! I
+might better have stuck to Fitz. Poor Fitz! I wonder if he’s lost.”
+
+“Why should he be lost?”
+
+“Because I lost him. Back there on the trail. Purposely. I sent him for
+water and then—I skipped.”
+
+“Oh-h-h! Then _he’s_ the goose.”
+
+“Goose! Preston Fairfax Fitz—”
+
+“Yes, the goose you said ‘Boo!’ to, you know.”
+
+“Of course. You didn’t steal his hat, did you?”
+
+“No. It’s my own hat. Why did you run away from him?”
+
+“He bored me. When people bore me, I always run away. I’m beginning to
+feel quite fugitive this very minute.”
+
+There was silence below, a silence that piqued the girl.
+
+“Well,” she challenged, “haven’t you anything to say before the court
+passes sentence of abandonment to your fate?”
+
+“I’m thinking—frantically. But the thoughts aren’t girl thoughts. I
+mean, they wouldn’t interest you. I might tell you about some of my
+insects,” he added hopefully.
+
+“Heaven forbid!”
+
+“They’re very interesting.”
+
+“No. You’re worthless as an augur, and a flat failure as a
+conversationalist, when thrown on your own resources. So I shall shake
+the dust from my feet and depart.”
+
+“Good-bye!” he said desolately. “And thank you.”
+
+“For what?”
+
+“For making music in my desert.”
+
+“That’s much better,” she approved. “But you’ve paid your score with
+the orchids. If you have one or two more pretty speeches like that in
+stock, I might linger for a while.”
+
+“I’m afraid I’m all out of those,” he returned. “But,” he added
+desperately, “there’s the hexagonal scarab beetle. He’s awfully queer
+and of much older family even than Mr. Fitzwhizzle’s. It is the
+hexagonal scarab’s habit when dis—”
+
+“We have an encyclopaedia of our own at home,” she interrupted coldly.
+“I didn’t climb this mountain to talk about beetles.”
+
+“Well, I’ll talk some more about you, if you’ll give me a little time
+to think.”
+
+“I think you are very impertinent. I don’t wish to talk about myself.
+Just because I asked your advice in my difficulties, you assume that
+I’m a little egoist—”
+
+“Oh, please don’t—”
+
+“Don’t interrupt. I’m very much offended, and I’m glad we are never
+going to meet. Just as I was beginning to like you, too,” she added,
+with malice. “Good-bye!”
+
+“Good-bye,” he answered mournfully.
+
+But his attentive ears failed to discern the sound of departing
+footsteps. The breeze whispered in the tree-tops. A sulphur-yellow
+bird, of French extraction, perched in a flowering bush, insistently
+demanded: “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”—What’s he say?
+_What’s_ he say?—over and over again, becoming quite wrathful because
+neither he nor any one else offered the slightest reply or explanation.
+The girl sympathized with the bird. If the particular he whose blond
+top she could barely see by peeping over the rock would only say
+something, matters would be easier for her. But he didn’t. So
+presently, in a voice of suspiciously saccharine meekness, she said:—
+
+“Please, Mr. Beetle Man, I’m lost.”
+
+“No, you’re not,” he said reassuringly. “You’re not a quarter of a mile
+from the Puerto del Norte Road.”
+
+“But I don’t know which direction—”
+
+“Perfectly simple. Keep on over the top of the rock; turn left down the
+slope, right up the dry stream bed to a dead tree; bear right past—”
+
+“That’s too many turns, I never could remember more than two.”
+
+“Now, listen,” he said persuasively. “I can make it quite plain to you
+if—”
+
+“I don’t _wish_ to listen! I’ll never find it.”
+
+“I’ll toss you up my compass.”
+
+“I don’t want your compass,” she said firmly.
+
+A long patient sigh exhaled from below.
+
+“Do you want me to guide you?”
+
+“No,” she retorted, and was instantly panic-stricken, for the
+monosyllable was of that accent which sets fire to bridges and burns
+them beyond hope of return.
+
+Slowly she got to her feet. Perhaps she would have dared and gone;
+perhaps she would have swallowed pride and her negative, and made one
+more appeal. She turned hesitantly and saw the devil.
+
+It was a small devil on stilts, not more than three or four inches
+tall, but there was no mistaking his identity. No other living thing
+could possess such demoniac little red-hot pin points of eyes, or be so
+bristly and grisly and vicious. The stilts suddenly folded flat, and
+the devil rushed upon his prey. The girl stepped back; her foot turned
+and caught, and—
+
+“Of course,” the patient voice below was saying, “if you really think
+that you couldn’t find the road, I could draw you a map and send it up
+by the hair route. But I really think—”
+
+“_Blump!_”
+
+The rock had turned over on his unprotected head and flattened him out
+forever. Such was his first thought. When he finally collected himself,
+his eyeglasses, and his senses, he sustained a second shock more
+violent than the first.
+
+Two paces away, the Voice, duly and most appropriately embodied, sat
+half-facing him. The Voice’s eyes confirmed his worst suspicions, and,
+dazed though they were at the moment, there were deep lights in them
+that wholly disordered his mental mechanism. Nor were her first words
+such as to restore his deranged faculties.
+
+“Oh-h! Aren’t you _gogglesome!_” she cried dizzily.
+
+He raised his hands to the huge brown spectacles.
+
+“Wh—wh—what did you come down for?” he babbled. There was a distinct
+note of accusation in the query.
+
+“_Come_ down! I fell!”
+
+“Yes, yes; that may be true—”
+
+“_May_ be!”
+
+“Of course, it is true. I—I—I see it’s true. I’m awfully sorry.”
+
+“Sorry? What for?”
+
+“That you came. That you fell, I mean to say. I—I—I don’t really know
+what I mean to say.”
+
+“No wonder, poor boy! I landed right on you, didn’t I?”
+
+“Did you? Something did. I thought it was the mountain.”
+
+“You aren’t very complimentary,” she pouted. “But there! I dare say I
+knocked your thoughts all to bits.”
+
+“No; not at all. Certainly, I mean. It doesn’t matter. See here,” he
+said, with an injured sharpness of inquiry born of his own exasperation
+at his verbal fumbling, “you said you wouldn’t, and here you are. I ask
+you, is that fair and honorable?”
+
+“Well, if it comes to that,” she countered, “you promised that you’d
+never speak to me if you saw me, and here you are telling me that you
+don’t want me around the place at all. It’s very rude and inhospitable,
+I consider.”
+
+“I can’t help it,” he said miserably. “I’m afraid.”
+
+“You don’t look it. You look disagreeable.”
+
+“As long as you stayed where you belonged—Excuse me—I don’t mean to be
+impolite—but I—I—You see—as long as you were just a voice, I could
+manage all right, but now that you are—er—er—you—” His speech trailed
+off lamentably into meaningless stutterings.
+
+The girl turned amazed and amused eyes upon him.
+
+“What on earth ails the poor man?” she inquired of all creation.
+
+“I told you. I—I’m shy.”
+
+“Not really! I thought it was a joke.”
+
+“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” demanded the
+yellow-breasted inquisitor, from his flowery perch.
+
+“What does he say? He says he’s shy. Poor poo—er young, helpless
+thing!” And her laughter put to shame a palm thrush who was giving what
+he had up to that moment considered a highly creditable musical
+performance.
+
+“All right!” he retorted warmly. “Laugh if you want to! But after
+stipulating that we should be strangers, to—to act this way—well, I
+think it’s—it’s—forward. That’s what I think it is.”
+
+“Do you, indeed? Perhaps you think it’s pleasant for me, after I’ve
+opened my heart to a stranger, to have him forced on me as an
+acquaintance!”
+
+From the depths of those limpid eyes welled up a little film of
+vexation.
+
+“O Lord! Don’t do that!” he implored. “I didn’t mean—I’m a bear—a
+pig—a—a—a scarab—I’m anything you choose. Only don’t do that!”
+
+“I’m not doing anything.”
+
+“Of course you’re not. That’s fine! As for your secrets, I dare say I
+wouldn’t know you again if I saw you.”
+
+“Oh, wouldn’t you?” she cried in quite another tone.
+
+“Quite likely not. These glasses, you see. They make things look quite
+queer.”
+
+“Or if you heard me?” she challenged.
+
+“Ah, well, that’s different. But I forget quite easily—even things like
+voices.”
+
+She leaned forward, her hands in her lap, her eyes upon the goggled
+face before her.
+
+“Then take them off.”
+
+“What? My glasses?”
+
+“Take them off!”
+
+“Wh—wh—why should I?”
+
+“So that you can see me better.”
+
+“I don’t want to see you better.”
+
+“Yes, you do. I’m much more interesting than a scarab.”
+
+“But I know about scarabs and I don’t know about—about—”
+
+“Girls. So one might suspect. Do you know what I’m doing, Mr. Beetle
+Man?”
+
+“N-n-no.”
+
+“I’m flirting with you. I never flirted with a scientific person
+before. It’s awfully one-sided, difficult, uphill work.”
+
+This last was all but drowned out in his flood of panicky instructions,
+from which she disentangled such phrases as “first to left”—“dry
+river-bed-hundred-yards”—“dead tree—can’t miss it.”
+
+“If you send me away now, I’ll cry. Really, truly cry, this time.”
+
+“No, you won’t! I mean I won’t! I—I’ll do anything! I’ll talk! I’ll
+make conversation! How old are you? That’s what the Chinese ask. I used
+to have a Chinese cook, but he lost all my shirt studs, playing
+fan-tan. Can you play fan-tan? Two can’t play, though. They have funny
+cards in this country, like the Spanish. Have you seen a bullfight yet?
+Don’t do it. It’s dull and brutal. The bull has no more chance
+than—than—”
+
+“Than an unprotected man with a conscienceless flirt, who falls on his
+neck and then threatens to submerge him in tears.”
+
+“Now you’re beginning again!” he wailed. “What did you jump for,
+anyway?”
+
+“I slipped. An awful, red-eyed, scrambly fiend scared me—a real, live,
+hairy devilkin on stilts. He ran at me across the rock. Was that one of
+your pet scarabs, Mr. Beetle Man?”
+
+“That was a tarantula, I suppose, from the description.”
+
+“They’re deadly, aren’t they?”
+
+“Of course not. Unscientific nonsense. I’ll go up and chase him off.”
+
+“Flying from perils that you know not of to more familiar dangers?” she
+taunted.
+
+“Well, you see, with the tarantula out of the way, there’s no reason
+why you shouldn’t—er—”
+
+“Go, and leave you in peace? What do you think of that for gallantry,
+Birdie?”
+
+The gay-feathered inquisitor had come quite near.
+
+“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” he queried, cocking his curious head.
+
+“He says he doesn’t like me one little, wee, teeny bit, and he wishes
+I’d go home and stay there. And so I’m going, with my poor little
+feelings all hurted and ruffled up like anything.”
+
+“Nothing of the sort,” protested the badgered spectacle-wearer.
+
+“Then why such unseemly haste to make my path clear?”
+
+“I just thought that maybe you’d go back on the top of the rock, where
+you came from, and—and be a voice again. If you won’t go, I will.”
+
+He made three jumps of it up the boulder, bearing a stick in his hand.
+Presently his face, preternaturally solemn and gnomish behind the
+goggles, protruded over the rim. The girl was sitting with her hands
+folded in her lap, contemplating the scenery as if she’d never had
+another interest in her life. Apparently she had forgotten his very
+existence.
+
+“Ahem!” he began nervously.
+
+“Ahem!” she retorted so promptly that he almost fell off his precarious
+perch. “Did you ring? Number, please.”
+
+“I wish I knew whether you were laughing at me or not,” he said
+ruefully.
+
+“When?”
+
+“All the time.”
+
+“I am. Your darkest suspicions are correct. Did you abolish my
+devilkin?”
+
+“I drove him back into his trapdoor home and put a rock over it.”
+
+“Why didn’t you destroy him?”
+
+“Because I’ve appointed him guardian of the rock, with strict
+instructions to bite any one that ever comes there after this except
+you.”
+
+“Bravo! You’re progressing. As soon as you’re free from the blight of
+my regard, you become quite human. But I’ll never come again.”
+
+“No, I suppose not,” he said dismally. “I shan’t hear you again,
+unless, perhaps, the echoes have kept your voice to play with.”
+
+“Oh, oh! Is this the language of science? You know I almost think I
+should like to come—if I could. But I can’t.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Because we leave to-morrow.”
+
+“Not across to the southern coast? It isn’t safe. Fever—”
+
+“No; by Puerto del Norte.”
+
+“There’s no boat.”
+
+“Yes, there is. You can just see her funnel over that white slope. It’s
+our yacht.”
+
+“And you think you are going in her to-morrow?”
+
+“Think? I know it.”
+
+“No,” he contradicted.
+
+“Yes,” she asserted, quite as concisely.
+
+“No,” he repeated. “You’re mistaken.”
+
+“Don’t be absurd. Why?”
+
+“Look out there, over that tree to the horizon.”
+
+“I’m looking.”
+
+“Do you see anything?”
+
+“Yes; a sort of little smudge.”
+
+“That’s why.”
+
+“It’s a very shadowy sort of why.”
+
+“There’s substance enough under it.”
+
+“A riddle? I’ll give it up.”
+
+“No; a bet. I’ll bet you the treasures of my mountain-side. Orchids of
+gold and white and purple and pink, butterflies that dart on wings of
+fire opal—”
+
+“Beetles, to know which is to love them, and love but them forever,”
+she laughed. “And my side of the wager—what is that to be?”
+
+“That you will come to the rock day after to-morrow at this hour and
+stand on the top and be a voice again and talk to me.”
+
+“Done! Send your treasures to the pier, for you’ll surely lose. And now
+take me to the road.”
+
+It was a single-file trail, and he walked in advance, silent as an
+Indian. As they emerged from a thicket into the highway, above the
+red-tiled city in its setting of emerald fields strung on the silver
+thread of the Santa Clara River, she turned and gave him her hand.
+
+“Be at your rock to-morrow, and when you see the yacht steam out,
+you’ll know I’ll be saying good-bye, and thank you for your mountain
+treasures. Send them to Miss Brewster, care of the yacht Polly. She’s
+named after me. Is there anything the matter with my shoes?” she broke
+off to inquire solicitously.
+
+“Er—what? No.” He lifted his eyes, startled, and looked out across the
+quaint old city.
+
+“Then is there anything the matter with my face?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Yes? Well, what?”
+
+“It’s going to be hard to forget,” complained he of the goggles.
+
+“Then look away before it’s too late,” she cried merrily; but her color
+deepened a little. “Good-bye, O friend of the lowly scarab!”
+
+At the dip of the road down into the bridged arroyo, she turned, and
+was surprised—or at least she told herself so—to find him still looking
+after her.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+AT THE KAST
+
+
+One dines at the Gran Hotel Kast after the fashion of a _champignon
+sous cloche_. The top of the _cloche_ is of fluted glass, with a wide
+aperture between it and the sides, to admit the rain in the wet season
+and the flies in the dry. Three balconies run up from the dining-room
+well to this roof, and upon these, as near to the railings as they
+choose, the rather conglomerate patronage of the place sleeps, takes
+baths, dresses, gossips, makes love, quarrels, and exchanges prophecies
+as to next Sunday’s bullfight, while the diners below strive to select
+from the bill of fare special morsels upon which they will stake their
+internal peace for the day. No cabaret can hold a candle to it for
+variety of interest. When the sudden torrential storms sweep down the
+mountains at meal times, the little human _champignons_, beneath their
+insufficient _cloche_, rush about wildly seeking spots where the
+drippage will not wash their food away. Commercial travelers of the
+tropics have a saying: “There are worse hotels in the world than the
+Kast—but why take the trouble?” And, year upon year, they return there
+for reasons connected with the other hostelries of Caracuña, which I
+forbear to specify.
+
+To Miss Polly Brewster, the Kast was a place of romance. Five miles
+away, as the buzzard flies, she could have dined well, even elegantly,
+on the Brewster yacht. Would she have done it? Not for worlds! Miss
+Brewster was entranced by the courtly manners of her waiter, who had
+lost one ear and no small part of the countenance adjacent thereto,
+only too obviously through the agency of some edged instrument not
+wielded in the arts of peace. She was further delightedly intrigued by
+the abrupt appearance of a romantic-hued gentleman, who thrust out over
+the void from the second balcony an anguished face, one side of which
+was profusely lathered, and addressed to all the hierarchy of heaven
+above, and the peoples of the earth beneath, a passionate protest upon
+the subject of a cherished and vanished shaving brush; what time,
+below, the head waiter was hastily removing from sight, though not from
+memory, a soup tureen whose agitated surface bore a creamy froth not of
+a lacteal origin. One may not with impunity balance personal implements
+upon the too tremulous rails of the ancient Kast.
+
+With an appreciative and glowing eye, Miss Brewster read from her
+mimeographed bill of fare such legends as “_ropa con carne_,” “_bacalao
+secco_,” “_enchiladas_,” and meantime devoured _chechenaca_, which, had
+it been translated into its just and simple English of “hash,” she
+would not have given to her cat.
+
+Nor did her visual and prandial preoccupations inhibit her from a
+lively interest in the surrounding Babel of speech in mingled Spanish,
+Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch,
+for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all
+the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice
+gained any heed in that contest. Even after the bells paused, the habit
+of effort kept the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a
+few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience
+from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table
+to the right of her. The remark that first fixed her attention was in
+English, of the super-British _patois_.
+
+“Can’t tell wot the blighter might look like behind those bloomin’
+brown glasses.”
+
+“But he’s not bothersome to any one,” suggested a second speaker, in a
+slightly foreign accent. “He regards his own affairs.”
+
+“Right you are, bo!” approved a tall, deeply browned man of thirty, all
+sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested nothing so much as
+a club with a gnarled knob on the end of it, a tough, reliable,
+hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in an honest cause. “If
+he deals in conversation, he must _sell_ it. I don’t notice him giving
+any of it away.”
+
+“He gave some to Kast the last time he dined here,” observed a languid
+and rather elegant elderly man, who occupied the fourth side of the
+table. “Mine host didn’t like it.”
+
+“I should suppose Señor Kast would be hardened,” remarked the young
+Caracuñan who had defended the absent.
+
+“Our eyeglassed friend scored for once, though. They had just served
+him the usual table-d’hôte salad—you know, two leaves of lettuce with a
+caterpillar on one. Kast happened to be passing. Our friend beckoned
+him over. ‘A little less of the fauna and more of the flora, Señor
+Kast,’ said he in that gritty, scientific voice of his. I really
+thought Kast was going to forget his Swiss blood, and chase a whole
+peso of custom right out of the place.”
+
+“If you ask me, I think the blighter is barmy,” asserted the Briton.
+
+“Well, I’ll ask you,” proffered the elegant one kindly. “Why do you
+consider him ‘barmy,’ as you put it?”
+
+“When I first saw him here and heard him speak to the waiter, I knew
+him for an American Johnny at once, and I went, directly I’d finished
+my soup, and sat down at his table. The friendly touch, y’ know. ‘I
+say,’ I said to him, ‘I don’t know you, but I heard you speak, and I
+knew at once you were one of these Americans—tell you at once by the
+beastly queer accent, you know. You are an American, ay—wot?’ Wot d’
+you suppose the blighter said? He said, ‘No, I’m an ichthyo’—somethin’
+or other—”
+
+“Ichthyosaurus, perhaps,” supplied the Caracunuan, smiling.
+
+“That’s it, whatever it may be. ‘I’m an ichthyosaurus,’ he says. ‘It’s
+a very old family, but most of the buttons are off. Were you ever
+bitten by one in the fossil state? Very exhilaratin’, but poisonous,’
+he says. ‘So don’t let me keep you any longer from your dinner.’ Of
+course, I saw then that he was a wrong un, so I cut him dead, and
+walked away.”
+
+“Served him right,” declared the elderly American, with a solemn
+twinkle directed at the tall brown man, who, having opened his mouth,
+now thought better of it, and closed it again, with a grin.
+
+“But he is very kind,” said the native. “When my brother fell and broke
+his arm on the mountain, this gentleman found him, took care of him,
+and brought him in on muleback.”
+
+“Lives up there somewhere, doesn’t he, Mr. Raimonda?” asked the big
+man.
+
+“In the _quinta_ of a deserted plantation,” replied the Caracuñan.
+
+“Wot’s he do?” asked the Englishman.
+
+“Ah, _that_ one does not know, unless Senor Sherwen can tell us.”
+
+“Not I,” said the elderly man. “Some sort of scientific investigation,
+according to the guess of the men at the club.”
+
+“You never can tell down here,” observed the Englishman darkly. “Might
+be a blind, you know. Calls himself Perkins. Dare say it isn’t his name
+at all.”
+
+“Daughter,” said Mr. Thatcher Brewster at this juncture, in a patient
+and plaintive voice, “for the fifth and last time, I implore you to
+pass me the butter, or that which purports to be butter, in the dish at
+your elbow.”
+
+“Oh, poor dad! Forgive me! But I was overhearing some news of an—an
+acquaintance.”
+
+“Do you know any of the gentlemen upon whose conversation you are
+eavesdropping?”
+
+In financial circles, Mr. Brewster was credited with the possession of
+a cold blue eye and a denatured voice of interrogation, but he seldom
+succeeded in keeping a twinkle out of the one and a chuckle out of the
+other when conversing with his daughter.
+
+“Not yet,” observed that damsel calmly.
+
+“Meaning, I suppose I am to understand—”
+
+“Precisely. Haven’t you noticed them looking this way? Presently
+they’ll be employing all their strategy to meet me. They’ll employ it
+on you.”
+
+Mr. Brewster surveyed the group dubiously.
+
+“In a country such as this, one can’t be too—too cau—”
+
+“Too particular, as you were saying,” cut in his daughter cheerfully.
+“Men are scarce—except Fitzhugh, who is rather less scarce than I wish
+he were lately. You know,” she added, with a covert glance at the
+adjoining table, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself an
+extremely popular papa immediately after dinner. It might even go so
+far as cigars. Do you suppose that lovely young Caracuñan is a
+bullfighter?”
+
+“No; I believe he’s a coffee exporter. Less romantic, but more
+respectable. Quite one of the gilded youth of Caracuña. His name is
+Raimonda. Fitzhugh knows him. By the way, where on earth is Fitzhugh?”
+
+“Trying to fit a kind and gentlemanly expression over a swollen sense
+of injury, for a guess,” replied the girl carelessly. “I left him in
+sweet and lone communion with nature three hours ago.”
+
+“Polly, I wish—”
+
+“Oh, dad, dear, don’t! You’ll get your wish, I suppose, and Fitz, too.
+Only I don’t want to be hurried. Here he is, now. Look at that smile! A
+sculptor couldn’t have done any better. Now, as soon as he comes, I’m
+going to be quite nice and kind.”
+
+But Mr. Fairfax Preston Fitzhugh Carroll did not come direct to the
+Brewster table. Instead, he stopped to greet the elderly man in the
+near-by group, and presently drew up a chair. At first, their
+conversation was low-toned, but presently the young native added his
+more vivacious accents.
+
+“Who can tell?” the Brewsters heard him say, and marked the fatalistic
+gesture of the upturned hands. “They disappear. One does not ask
+questions too much.”
+
+“Not here,” confirmed the big man. “Always room for a few more in the
+undersea jails, eh?”
+
+“Always. But I think it was not that with Basurdo. I think it was
+underground, not undersea.” He brushed his neck with his finger tips.
+
+“Is it dangerous for foreigners?” asked Carroll quickly.
+
+“For every one,” answered Sherwen; adding significantly: “But the
+Caracuñan Government does not approve of loose fostering of rumors.”
+
+Carroll rose and came over to the Brewsters.
+
+“May I bring Mr. Graydon Sherwen over and present him?” he asked. “I
+can vouch for him, having known his family at home, and—”
+
+“Oh, bring them all, Fitzhugh,” commanded the girl.
+
+The exponent of Southern aristocracy looked uncomfortable.
+
+“As to the others,” he said, “Mr. Raimonda is a native—”
+
+“With the manners of a prince. I’ve quite fallen in love with him
+already,” she said wickedly.
+
+“Of course, if you wish it. But the other American is an
+ex-professional baseball player, named Cluff.”
+
+“What? ‘Clipper’ Cluff? I knew I’d seen him before!” cried Miss Polly.
+“He got his start in the New York State League. Why, we’re quite old
+friends, by sight.”
+
+“As for Galpy, he’s an underbred little cockney bounder.”
+
+“With the most naive line of conversation I’ve ever listened to. I want
+all of them.”
+
+“Let me bring Sherwen first,” pleaded the suitor, and was presently
+introducing that gentleman. “Mr. Sherwen is in charge here of the
+American Legation,” he explained.
+
+“How does one salute a real live minister?” queried Miss Brewster.
+
+“Don’t mistake me for anything so important,” said Sherwen. “We’re not
+keeping a minister in stock at present. My job is being a superior kind
+of janitor until diplomatic relations are resumed.”
+
+“Goodness! It sounds like war,” said Miss Brewster hopefully. “Is there
+anything as exciting as that going on?”
+
+“Oh, no. Just a temporary cessation of civilities between the two
+nations. If it weren’t indiscreet—”
+
+“Oh, do be indiscreet!” implored the girl, with clasped hands. “I
+admire indiscretion in others, and cultivate it in myself.”
+
+Mr. Carroll looked pained, as the other laughed and said:—
+
+“Well, it would certainly be most undiplomatic for me to hint that the
+great and friendly nation of Hochwald, which wields more influence and
+has a larger market here than any other European power, has become a
+little jealous of the growing American trade. But the fact remains that
+the Hochwald minister and his secretary, Von Plaanden, who is a very
+able citizen when sober,—and is, of course, almost always sober,—have
+not exerted themselves painfully to compose the little misunderstanding
+between President Fortuno and us. The Dutch diplomats, who are not as
+diplomatic in speech as I am, would tell you, if there were any of them
+left here to tell anything, that Von Plaanden’s intrigues brought on
+the present break with them. So there you have a brief, but reliable
+‘History of Our Times in the Island Republic of Caracuña.’”
+
+“Highly informative and improving to the untutored mind,” Miss Brewster
+complimented him. “I like seeing the wires of empire pulled. More,
+please.”
+
+“Perhaps you won’t like the next so well,” observed Carroll grimly.
+“There is bubonic plague here.”
+
+“Oh—ah!” protested Sherwen gently. “The suspicion of plague. Quite a
+different matter.”
+
+“Which usually turns out to be the same, doesn’t it?” inquired Mr.
+Brewster.
+
+“Perhaps. People disappear, and one is not encouraged to ask about
+them. But then people disappear for many causes in Caracuña. Politics
+here are somewhat—well—Philadelphian in method. But—there is smoke
+rising from behind Capo Blanco.”
+
+“What is there?” inquired the girl.
+
+“The lazaretto. Still, it might be yellow fever, or only smallpox. The
+Government is not generous with information. To have plague discovered
+now would be very disturbing to the worthy plans of the Hochwald
+Legation. For trade purposes, they would very much dislike to have the
+port closed for a considerable time by quarantine. The Dutch difficulty
+they can arrange when they will. But quarantine would bring in the
+United States, and that is quite another matter. Well, we’ll see, when
+Dr. Pruyn gets here.”
+
+“Who is he?” asked Carroll.
+
+“Special-duty man of the United States Public Health Service. The best
+man on tropical diseases and quarantine that the service has ever had.”
+
+“That isn’t Luther Pruyn, is it?” inquired Mr. Brewster.
+
+“The same. Do you know him?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“More than I do, except by reputation.”
+
+“He was in my class at college, but I haven’t seen him since. I’d be
+glad to see him again. A queer, dry fellow, but character and grit to
+his backbone.”
+
+“I’d supposed he was younger,” said Sherwen. “Anyway, he’s
+comparatively new to the service. His rise is the more remarkable. At
+present, he’s not only our quarantine representative, with full powers,
+but unofficially he acts, while on his roving commission, for the
+British, the Dutch, the French, and half the South American republics.
+I suppose he’s really the most important figure in the Caracuña
+crisis—and he hasn’t even got here yet. Perhaps our Hochwaldian friends
+have captured him on the quiet. It would pay ’em, for if there is
+plague here, he’ll certainly trail it down.”
+
+“Oh, I’m tired of plague,” announced Miss Polly. “Bring the others here
+and let’s all go over to the plaza, where it’s cool.”
+
+To their open and obvious delight, exhibited jauntily by the
+Englishman, with awkward and admiring respectfulness by the
+ball-player, and with graceful ease by the handsome Caracuñan, the rest
+were invited to join the party.
+
+“Don’t let them scare you about plague, Miss Brewster,” said Cluff, as
+they found their chairs. “Foreigners don’t get it much.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not afraid! But, anyway, we shouldn’t have time to catch even
+a cold. We leave to-morrow.”
+
+The men exchanged glances.
+
+“How?” inquired Sherwen and Raimonda in a breath.
+
+“In the yacht, from Puerto del Norte.”
+
+“Not if it were a British battleship,” said Galpy. “Port’s closed.”
+
+“What? Quarantine already?” said Carroll.
+
+“Quarantine be blowed! It’s the Dutch.”
+
+“I thought you knew,” said Sherwen. “All the town is ringing with the
+news. It just came in to-night. Holland has declared a blockade until
+Caracuña apologizes for the interference with its cable.”
+
+“And nothing can pass?” asked Mr. Brewster.
+
+“Nothing but an aeroplane or a submarine.”
+
+There was a silence. Miss Polly Brewster broke it with a curious
+question:—
+
+“What day is day after to-morrow?”
+
+Several voices had answered her, but she paid little heed, for there
+had slipped over her shoulder a brown thin hand holding a cunningly
+woven closed basket of reedwork. A soft voice murmured something in
+Spanish.
+
+“What does he say?” asked the girl “For me?”
+
+“He thinks it must be for you,” translated Raimonda, “from the
+description.”
+
+“What description?”
+
+“He was told to go to the hotel and deliver it to the most beautiful
+lady. There could hardly be any mistaking such specific instructions
+even by an ignorant mountain peon,” he added, smiling.
+
+The girl opened the curious receptacle, and breathed a little gasp of
+delight. Bedded in fern, lay a mass of long sprays aquiver with bells
+of the purest, most lucent white, each with a great glow of gold at its
+heart.
+
+“Ah,” observed the young Caracuñan, “I see that you are _persona grata_
+with our worthy President, Miss Brewster.”
+
+“President Fortuno?” asked the girl, surprised. “No; not that I’m aware
+of. Why do you say that?”
+
+“That is his special orchid—almost the official flower. They call it
+‘the President’s orchid.’”
+
+“Has he a monopoly of growing them?” asked Miss Brewster.
+
+“No one can grow them. They die when transplanted from their native
+cliffs. But it’s only the President’s rangers who are daring enough to
+get them.”
+
+“Are they so inaccessible?”
+
+“Yes. They grow nowhere but on the cliff faces, usually in the wildest
+part of the mountains. Few people except the hunters and mountaineers
+know where, and it’s only the most adventurous of them who go after the
+flowers.”
+
+“Do you suppose this boy got these?” Miss Brewster indicated the shy
+and dusky messenger.
+
+Raimonda spoke to the boy for a moment.
+
+“No; he didn’t collect them. Nor is he one of the President’s men. I
+don’t quite understand it.”
+
+“Who did gather them?”
+
+“All that he will say is, ‘the master.’”
+
+“Oh!” said Miss Brewster, and retired into a thoughtful silence.
+
+“They’re very beautiful, aren’t they?” continued the Caracuñan. “And
+they carry a pretty sentiment.”
+
+“Tell me,” commanded the girl, emerging from her reverie.
+
+“The mountaineers say that their fragrance casts a spell which carries
+the thought back to the giver.”
+
+“Is that the language of science?” she queried absently, with a thought
+far away.
+
+“But no, señorita, assuredly not,” said the young Caracufian. “It is
+the language—permit that I say it better in French—c’est le langage
+d’amour.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
+
+
+Night fell with the iron clangor of bells, and day broke to the
+accompaniment of further insensate jangling, for Caracuña City has the
+noisiest cathedral in the world; and still the graceful gray yacht
+Polly lay in the harbor at Puerto del Norte, hemmed in by a thin film
+of smoke along the horizon where the Dutch warship promenaded.
+
+In one of the side caverns off the main dining-room of the Hotel Kast,
+the yacht’s owner, breakfasting with the yacht’s tutelary goddess and
+the goddess’s determined pursuer, discussed the blockade. Though Miss
+Polly Brewster kept up her end of the conversation, her thoughts were
+far upon a breeze-swept mountain-side. How, she wondered, had that dry
+and strange hermit of the wilds known the news before the city learned
+it? With her wonder came annoyance over her lost wager. The beetle man,
+she judged, would be coolly superior about it. So she delivered herself
+of sundry stinging criticisms regarding the conduct of the Caracuñan
+Administration in having stupidly involved itself in a blockade. She
+even spoke of going to see the President and apprising him of her
+views.
+
+“I’d like to tell him how to run this foolish little island,” said she,
+puckering a quaintly severe brow.
+
+“Now is the appointed time for you to plunge in and change the course
+of empire,” her father suggested to her. “There’s an official morning
+reception at ten o’clock. We’re invited.”
+
+“Then I shan’t go. I wouldn’t give the old goose the satisfaction of
+going to his _fiesta_.”
+
+“Meaning the noble and patriotic President?” said Carroll. “Treason
+most foul! The _cuartels_ are full of chained prisoners who have said
+less.”
+
+“Father can go with Mr. Sherwen. I shall do some important shopping,”
+announced Miss Brewster. “And I don’t want any one along.”
+
+Thus apprised of her intentions, Carroll wrapped himself in gloom, and
+retired to write a letter.
+
+Miss Polly’s shopping, being conducted mainly through the medium of the
+sign language, presently palled upon her sensibilities, and about
+twelve o’clock she decided upon a drive. Accordingly she stepped into
+one of the pretty little toy victorias with which the city swarms.
+
+“Para donde?” inquired the driver.
+
+His fare made an expansive gesture, signifying “Anywhere.” Being an
+astute person in his own opinion, the Jehu studied the pretty
+foreigner’s attire with an appraising eye, profoundly estimated that so
+much style and elegance could be designed for only one function of the
+day, whirled her swiftly along the two-mile drive of the Calvario Road,
+and landed her at the President’s palace, half an hour after the
+reception was over. Supposing from the coachman’s signs that she was
+expected to go in and view some public garden, she paid him, walked far
+enough to be stopped by the apologetic and appreciative guard, and
+returned to the highway, to find no carriage in sight. Never mind, she
+reflected; she needed the exercise. Accordingly, she set out to walk.
+
+But the noonday sun of Caracuia has a bite to it. For a time, Miss
+Brewster followed the car tracks which were her sure guide from the
+palace to the Kast; briskly enough, at first. But, after three cars had
+passed her, she began to think longingly of the fourth. When it stopped
+at her signal, it was well filled. The most promising ingress appeared
+to be across the blockade of a robust and much-begilded young man, who
+was occupying the familiar position of an “end-seat hog,” and
+displaying the full glories of the Hochwaldian dress uniform.
+
+Herr von Plaanden was both sleepy and cross, for, having lingered after
+the reception to have a word and several drinks with the Minister of
+Foreign Affairs, he had come forth to find neither coach nor automobile
+in attendance. There had been nothing for it but the plebeian trolley.
+Accordingly, when he heard a foreign voice of feminine timbre and felt
+a light pressure against his knee, he only snorted. What he next felt
+against his knee was the impact of a half-shove, half-blow, brisk
+enough to slue him around. The intruder passed by to the vacant seat,
+while the now thoroughly awakened and annoyed Hochwaldian whirled, to
+find himself looking into a pair of expressionless brown goggles.
+
+With a snort of fury, the diplomat struck backward. The glasses and the
+solemn face behind them dodged smartly. The next moment, Herr von
+Plaanden felt his neck encircled by a clasp none the less warm for
+being not precisely affectionate. He was pinned. Twisting, he worked
+one arm loose.
+
+“Be careful!” warned the cool voice of Polly Brewster, addressing her
+defender. “He’s trying to draw his sword.”
+
+The gogglesome one’s grip slid a little lower. The car had now stopped,
+and the conductor came forward, brandishing what was apparently the
+wand of authority, designed to be symbolic rather than utile, since at
+no point was it thicker than a man’s finger. From a safe distance on
+the running-board, he flourished this, whooping the while in a shrill
+and dissuasive manner. Somewhere down the street was heard a responsive
+yell, and a small, jerky, olive-green _policia_ pranced into view.
+
+Thereupon a strange thing happened. The rescuing knight relaxed his
+grip, leaped the back of his seat, dropped off the car, and darted like
+a hunted hare across a compound, around a wall, and so into the
+unknown, deserting his lady fair, if not precisely in the hour of
+greatest need, at least in a situation fraught with untoward
+possibilities. Indeed, it seemed as if these possibilities might
+promptly become actualities, for the diplomat turned his stimulated
+wrath upon the girl, and was addressing her in tones too emphatic to be
+mistaken when a large angular form interposed itself, landing with a
+flying leap on the seat between them.
+
+“Move!” the newly arrived one briefly bade Herr von Plaanden.
+
+Herr von Plaanden, feeling the pressure of a shoulder formed upon the
+generous lines of a gorilla’s, and noting the approach of the _policia_
+on the other side, was fain to obey.
+
+“Don’t you be scared, miss,” said Cluff, turning to the girl. “It’s all
+over.”
+
+“I’m not frightened,” she said, with a catch in her voice.
+
+“Of course you ain’t,” he agreed reassuringly. “You just sit quiet—”
+
+“But I—I—I’m _mad_, clean through.”
+
+“You gotta right. You gotta perfect right. Now, if this was New York,
+I’d spread that gold-laced guy’s face—”
+
+“I’m not angry at him. Not particularly, I mean.”
+
+“No?” queried her friend in need. “What got your goat, then?”
+
+Miss Brewster shot a quick and scornful glance over her shoulder.
+
+“Oh, _him!_” interpreted the athlete. “Well, he made his get-away like
+a man with some reason for being elsewhere.”
+
+“Reason enough. He was afraid.”
+
+“Maybe. Being afraid’s a queer thing,” remarked her escort
+academically. “Now, me, I’m afraid of a fuzzy caterpillar. But I ain’t
+exactly timid about other things.”
+
+“You certainly aren’t. And I don’t know how to thank you.”
+
+“Aw, that’s awright, miss. What else could I do? Our departed friend,
+Professor Goggle-Eye, when he made his jump, landed right in my shirt
+front. ‘Take my place,’ he says; ‘I’ve got an engagement.’ Well, I was
+just moving forward, anyway, so it was no trouble at all, I assure
+you,” asserted the doughty Cluff, achieving a truly elegant conclusion.
+
+“Most fortunate for me,” said the girl sweetly. “Mr. Perkins scuttled
+away like one of his own little wretched beetles. When I see him
+again—”
+
+“Again? Oh, well, if he’s a friend of yours, accourse he’d awtuv stood
+by—”
+
+“He isn’t!” she declared, with unnecessary vehemence.
+
+“Don’t you be too hard on him, miss,” argued her escort. “Seems to me
+he did a pretty good job for you, and stuck to it until he found some
+one else to take it up.”
+
+“Then why didn’t he stand by you?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t carry any ‘Help-wanted’ signs on me. You know, miss, you
+can’t size up a man in this country like he was at home. Now, me, I’d
+have natcherly hammered that Von Plaanden gink all to heh—heh—hash. But
+did I do it? I did not. You see, I got a little mining concession out
+here in the mountains, and if I was to get into any diplomatic mix-up
+and bring in the police, it’d be bad for my business, besides maybe
+getting me a couple of tons of bracelets around my pretty little
+ankles. Like as not your friend, Professor Lamps, has got an equally
+good reason for keeping the peace.”
+
+“Do you mean that this man will make trouble for you over this?”
+
+“Not as things stand. So long as nothing was done—no arrests or
+anything like that—he’ll be glad to forget it, when he sobers up. I’ll
+forget it, too, and maybe, miss, it wouldn’t be any harm to anybody if
+you did a turn at forgetting, yourself.”
+
+But neither by the venturesome Miss Polly nor by her athlete servitor
+was the episode to be so readily dismissed. Late that afternoon, when
+the Brewster party were sitting about iced fruit drinks amid the dingy
+and soiled elegance of the Kast’s one private parlor, Mr. Sherwen’s
+card arrived, followed shortly by Mr. Sherwen’s immaculate self,
+creaseless except for one furrow of the brow.
+
+“How you are going to get out of here I really don’t know,” he said.
+
+“Why should we hurry?” inquired Miss Brewster. “I don’t find Caracuña
+so uninteresting.”
+
+“Never since I came here has it been so charming,” said the legation
+representative, with a smiling bow. “But, much as your party adds to
+the landscape, I’m not at all sure that this city is the most healthful
+spot for you at present.”
+
+“You mean the plague?” asked Mr. Brewster.
+
+“Not quite so loud, please. ‘Healthful,’ as I used it, was, in part, a
+figure of speech. Something is brewing hereabout.”
+
+“Not a revolution?” cried Miss Polly, with eyes alight. “Oh, do brew a
+revolution for me! I should so adore to see one!”
+
+“Possibly you may, though I hardly think it. Some readjustment of
+foreign relations, at most. The Dutch blockade is, perhaps, only a
+beginning. However, it’s sufficient to keep you bottled up, though if
+we could get word to them, I dare say they would let a yacht go out.”
+
+“Senator Richland, of the Committee on Foreign Relations, is an old
+friend of my family,” said Carroll, in his measured tones. “A cable—”
+
+“Would probably never get through. This Government wouldn’t allow it.
+There are other possibilities. Perhaps, Mr. Brewster,” he continued,
+with a side glance at the girl, “we might talk it over at length this
+evening.”
+
+“Quite useless, Mr. Sherwen,” smiled the magnate. “Polly would have it
+all out of me before I was an hour older. She may as well get it
+direct.”
+
+“Very well, then. It’s this quarantine business. If Dr. Pruyn comes
+here and declares bubonic plague—”
+
+“But how will he get in?” asked Carroll.
+
+“So far as the blockade goes, the Dutch will help him all they can. But
+this Government will keep him out, if possible.”
+
+“He is not persona grata?” asked Brewster.
+
+“Not with any of the countries that play politics with pestilence. But
+if he’s sent here, he’ll get in some way. In fact, Stark, the
+public-health surgeon at Puerto del Norte, let fall a hint that makes
+me think he’s on his way now. Probably in some cockleshell of a small
+boat manned by Indian smugglers.”
+
+“It sounds almost too adventurous for the scholarly Pruyn whom I
+recall,” observed Mr. Brewster.
+
+“The man who went through the cholera anarchy on the lazar island off
+Camacho, with one case of medical supplies and two boxes of cartridges,
+may have been scholarly; he certainly didn’t exhibit any distaste for
+adventure. Well, I wish he’d arrive and get something settled. Only I’d
+like to have you out of the way first.”
+
+“Oh, don’t send _me_ away, Mr. Sherwen,” pleaded Miss Polly, with
+mischief in her eyes. “I’d make the cunningest little office assistant
+to busy old Dr. Pruyn. And he’s a friend of dad’s, and we surely ought
+to wait for him.”
+
+“If only I _could_ send you! The fact is, Americans won’t be very
+popular if matters turn out as I expect.”
+
+“Shall we be confined to our rooms and kept _incomunicado_, while Dr.
+Pruyn chases the terrified germ through the streets of Caracuña?”
+queried the irrepressible Polly.
+
+“You’ll probably have to move to the legation, where you will be very
+welcome, but none too comfortable. The place has been practically
+closed and sealed for two months.”
+
+“I’m sure we should bother you dreadfully,” said the girl.
+
+“It would bother me more dreadfully if you got into any trouble. Just
+this morning there was some kind of an affair on a street car in which
+some Americans were involved.”
+
+Miss Polly’s countenance was a design—a very dainty and ornamental
+design—in _insouciance_ as her father said:—
+
+“Americans? Any one we have met?”
+
+“No news has come to me. I understand one of the diplomatic corps,
+returning from the President’s matinée, spoke to an American woman, and
+an American man interfered.”
+
+“When did this happen?” asked Carroll.
+
+“About noon. Inquiries are going on quietly.”
+
+The young man directed a troubled and accusing look from his fine eyes
+upon Miss Brewster.
+
+“You see, Miss Polly,” he said, “no lady should go about unprotected
+down here.”
+
+“Ordinarily it’s as safe as any city,” said Sherwen. “Just now I can’t
+be so certain.”
+
+“I hate being watched over like a child!” pouted Miss Brewster. “And I
+love sight-seeing alone. The flowers along the Calvario Road were so
+lovely.”
+
+“That’s the road to the palace,” remarked Carroll, looking at her
+closely.
+
+“And the butterflies are so marvelous,” she continued cheerfully. “Who
+lives in that salmon-pink pagoda just this side of the curve?”
+
+Trouble sat dark and heavy upon the handsome features of Mr. Preston
+Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll, but he was too experienced to put a direct
+query to his _inamorata_. What suspicion he had, he cherished until
+after dinner, when he took it to the club and made it the foundation of
+certain inquiries.
+
+Thus it happened that at eleven o’clock that evening, he paused before
+a bench in the plaza, bowered in the bloom of creepers which flowed
+down from a balcony of the Kast, and occupied by the comfortably
+sprawled-out form of Mr. Thomas Cluff, who was making a burnt offering
+to Morpheus.
+
+“Good-evening!” said Mr. Carroll pleasantly.
+
+“Evenin’! How’s things?” returned the other.
+
+“Right as can be, thanks to you. On behalf of the Brewster family, I
+want to express our appreciation of your assistance to Miss Brewster
+this morning.”
+
+“Oh, that was nothing,” returned the other.
+
+“But it might have been a great deal. Mr. Brewster will wish to thank
+you in person—”
+
+“Aw, forget it!” besought Mr. Thomas Cluff. “That little lady is all
+right. I’d just as soon eat an ambassador, let alone a gilt-framed
+secretary, to help her out.”
+
+“Miss Brewster,” said the other, somewhat more stiffly, “is a wholly
+admirable young lady, but she is not always well advised in going out
+unescorted. By the way, you can doubtless confirm the rumor as to the
+identity of her insulter.”
+
+“His name is Von Plaanden. But I don’t think he meant to insult any
+one.”
+
+“You will permit me to be the best judge of that.”
+
+“Go as far as you like,” asserted the big fellow cheerfully. “That
+fellow Perkins can tell you more about the start of the thing than I
+can.”
+
+“From what I hear, he has no cause to be proud of his part in the
+matter,” said the Southerner, frowning.
+
+“He’s sure a prompt little runner,” asserted Cluff. “But I’ve run away
+in my time, and glad of the chance.”
+
+“You will excuse me from sympathizing with your standards.”
+
+“Sure, you’re excused,” returned the athlete, so placidly that Carroll,
+somewhat at a loss, altered his speech to a more gracious tone.
+
+“At any rate, you stood your ground when you were needed, which is more
+than Mr. Perkins did. I should like to have a talk with him.”
+
+“That’s easy. He was rambling around here not a quarter of an hour ago
+with young Raimonda. That’s them sitting on the bench over by the
+fountain.”
+
+“Will you take me over and present me? I think it is due Mr. Perkins
+that some one should give him a frank opinion of his actions.”
+
+“I’d like to hear that,” observed Cluff, who was not without humanistic
+curiosity. “Come along.”
+
+Heaving up his six-feet-one from the seat, he led the way to the two
+conversing men. Raimonda looked around and greeted the newcomers
+pleasantly. Cluff waved an explanatory hand between his charge and the
+bench.
+
+“Make you acquainted with Mr. Perkins,” he said, neglecting to mention
+the name of the first party of the introduction.
+
+Perkins, goggling upward to meet a coldly hostile glance, rose, nodded
+in some wonder, and said: “How do you do?” Raimonda sent Cluff a glance
+of interrogation, to which that experimentalist in human antagonisms
+responded with a borrowed Spanish gesture of pleasurable uncertainty.
+
+“I will not say that I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Perkins,” began Carroll
+weightily, and paused.
+
+If he expected a query, he was doomed to a disappointment. Such of the
+Perkins features as were not concealed by his extraordinary glasses
+expressed an immovable calm.
+
+“Doubtless you know to what I refer.”
+
+Still those blank brown glasses regarded him in silence.
+
+“Do you or do you not?” demanded Carroll, struggling to keep his temper
+in the face of this exasperating irresponsiveness.
+
+“Haven’t the least idea,” replied Perkins equably.
+
+“You were on the tram this morning when Miss Brewster was insulted,
+weren’t you?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And ran away?”
+
+“I did.”
+
+“What did you run away for?”
+
+“I ran away,” the other sweetly informed him, “on important business of
+my own.”
+
+Cluff snickered. The suspicion impinged upon Carroll’s mind that this
+wasn’t going to be as simple as he had expected.
+
+“Let that go for the moment. Do you know Miss Brewster’s insulter?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Are you telling me the truth?” asked the Southerner sternly.
+
+The begoggled one’s chin jerked up. To the trained eye of Cluff, swift
+to interpret physical indications, it seemed that Perkins’s weight had
+almost imperceptibly shifted its center of gravity.
+
+“Our Southern friend is going to run into something if he doesn’t look
+out,” he reflected.
+
+But there was no hint of trouble in Perkins’s voice as he replied:—
+
+“I know who he is. I don’t know him.”
+
+“Was it Von Plaanden?”
+
+“Why do you want to know?”
+
+“Because,” returned the other, with convincing coolness, “if it was, I
+intend to slap his face publicly as soon as I can find him.”
+
+“You must do nothing of the sort.”
+
+Now, indeed, there was a change in the other’s bearing. The words came
+sharp and crisp.
+
+“I shall do exactly as I said. Perhaps you will explain why you think
+otherwise.”
+
+“Because you must have some sense somewhere about you. Do you realize
+where you are?”
+
+“I hardly think you can teach me geography, or anything else, Mr.
+Perkins.”
+
+“Well, good God,” said the other sharply, “somebody’s got to teach you!
+What do you suppose would be the result of your slapping Von Plaanden’s
+face?”
+
+“Whatever it may be, I am ready. I will fight him with any weapons, and
+gladly.”
+
+“Oh, yes; gladly! Fun for you, all right. But suppose you think of
+others a little.”
+
+“Afraid of being involved yourself?” smiled Carroll. “I’m sure you
+could run away successfully from any kind of trouble.”
+
+“Others might not be so able to escape.”
+
+“Of course I’m wholly wrong, and my training and traditions are
+absurdly old-fashioned, but I’ve been brought up to believe that the
+American who will run from a fight, or who will not stand up at home or
+abroad for American rights, American womanhood, and the American flag,
+isn’t a man.”
+
+“Oh, keep it for the Fourth of July,” returned Perkins wearily. “You
+can’t get me into a fight.”
+
+“Fight?” Carroll laughed shortly. “If you had the traditions of a
+gentleman, you would not require any more provocation.”
+
+“If I had the traditions of a deranged doodle bug, I’d go around
+hunting trouble in a country that is full of it for foreigners—even
+those who behave themselves like sane human beings.”
+
+“Meaning, perhaps, that I’m not a sane human being?” inquired the
+Southerner.
+
+“Do you think you act like it? To satisfy your own petty vanity of
+courage, you’d involve all of us in difficulties of which you know
+nothing. We’re living over a powder magazine here, and you want to
+light matches to show what a hero you are. Traditions! Don’t you talk
+to me about traditions! If you can serve your country or a woman better
+by running away than by fighting, the sensible thing to do is to run
+away. The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and let Von Plaanden
+drop. Otherwise, you’ll have Miss Brewster the center of—”
+
+“Keep your tongue from that lady’s name!” warned Carroll.
+
+“You’re giving a good many orders,” said the other slowly. “But I’ll do
+almost anything just now to keep you peaceable, and to convince you
+that you must let Von Plaanden strictly alone.”
+
+“Just as surely as I meet him,” said the Southerner ominously, “on my
+word of honor—”
+
+“Wait a moment,” broke in the other sharply. “Don’t commit yourself
+until you’ve heard me. Just around the corner from here is a _cuartel_.
+It isn’t a nice clean jail like ours at home. Fleas are the pleasantest
+companions in the place. When a man—particularly an obnoxious
+foreigner—lands there, they are rather more than likely to forget
+little incidentals like food and water. And if he should happen to be
+of a nation without diplomatic representation here, as is the case with
+the United States at present, he might well lie there _incomunicado_
+until his hearing, which might be in two days or might not be for a
+month. Is that correct, Mr. Raimonda?”
+
+“Essentially,” confirmed the Caracuñan.
+
+“When you are through trying to frighten me—” began Carroll
+contemptuously.
+
+“Frighten you? I’m not so foolish as to waste time that way. I’m trying
+to warn you.”
+
+“Are you quite done?”
+
+“I am not. On _my_ honor—” He broke off as Carroll smiled. “Smile if
+you like, but believe what I’m telling you. Unless you agree to keep
+your hands and tongue off Von Plaanden I’ll lay an information which
+will land you in the _cuartel_ within an hour.”
+
+The smile froze on the Southerner’s lips.
+
+“Could he do that?” he asked Raimonda.
+
+“I’m afraid he could. And, really, Mr. Carroll, he’s correct in
+principle. In the present state of political feeling, an assault by an
+American upon the representative of Hochwald might seriously endanger
+all of your party.”
+
+“That’s right,” Cluff supported him. “I’m with you in wanting to break
+that gold-frilled geezer’s face up into small sections, but it just
+won’t do.”
+
+With an effort, Carroll recovered his self-control.
+
+“Mr. Raimonda,” he said courteously, “I give _you_ my word that there
+will be no trouble between Herr Von Plaanden and myself, of my seeking,
+until Mr. and Miss Brewster are safely out of the country.”
+
+“That’s enough,” said Cluff heartily. “The rest of us can take care of
+ourselves.”
+
+“Meantime,” said Raimonda, “I think the whole matter can be arranged.
+Von Plaanden shall apologize to Miss Brewster to-morrow. It is not his
+first outbreak, and always he regrets. My uncle, who is of the Foreign
+Office, will see to it.”
+
+“Then that’s settled,” remarked Perkins cheerfully.
+
+Carroll turned upon him savagely:—
+
+“To your entire satisfaction, no doubt, now that you’ve shown yourself
+an informer as well as—”
+
+“Easy with the rough stuff, Mr. Carroll,” advised Cluff, his
+good-natured face clouding. “We’re all a little het up. Let’s have a
+drink, and cool down.”
+
+“With you, with pleasure. I shall hope to meet you later, Mr. Perkins,”
+he added significantly.
+
+“Well, I hope not,” retorted the other. “My voice is still for peace.
+Meantime, please assure Miss Brewster for me—”
+
+“I warned you to keep that lady’s name from your lips.”
+
+“You did. But I don’t know by what authority. You’re not her father, I
+suppose. Are you her brother, by any chance?”
+
+As he spoke, Perkins experienced that curious feeling that some
+invisible person was trying to catch his eye. Now, as he turned
+directly upon Carroll, his glance, passing over his shoulder, followed
+a broad ray of light spreading from a second-story leaf-framed balcony
+of the hotel. There was a stir amid the greenery. The face of the Voice
+appeared, framed in flowers. Its features lighted up with mirth, and
+the lips formed the unmistakable monosyllable: “Boo!”
+
+The identification was complete—“Boo to a goose.”
+
+“Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll!” Unwittingly he spoke the name
+aloud, and, unfortunately, laughed.
+
+To a less sensitive temperament, even, than Carroll’s, the provocation
+would have been extreme. Perkins was recalled to a more serious view of
+the situation by the choking accents of that gentleman.
+
+“Take off your glasses!”
+
+“What for?”
+
+“Because I’m going to thrash you within an inch of your life!”
+
+“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” cried the young Caracuñan. “This is no place
+for such an affair.”
+
+Apparently Perkins held the same belief. Stepping aside, he abruptly
+sat down on the end of the bench, facing the fountain and not four feet
+from it. His head drooped a little forward; his hands dropped between
+his knees; one foot—but Cluff, the athlete, was the only one to note
+this—edged backward and turned to secure a firm hold on the pavement.
+Carroll stepped over in front of him and stood nonplused. He half drew
+his hand back, then let it fall.
+
+“I can’t hit a man sitting down,” he muttered distressfully.
+
+Perkins’s set face relaxed.
+
+“Running true to tradition,” he observed, pleasantly enough. “I didn’t
+think you would. See here, Mr. Carroll, I’m sorry that I laughed at
+your name. In fact, I didn’t really laugh at your name at all. It was
+at something quite different which came into my mind at that moment.”
+
+“Your apology is accepted so far,” returned the other stiffly. “But
+that doesn’t settle the other account between us, when we meet again.
+Or do you choose to threaten me with jail for that, also?”
+
+“No. It’s easier to keep out of your way.”
+
+“Good Lord!” cried the Southerner in disgust. “Are you afraid of
+everything?”
+
+“Why, no!” Perkins rose, smiling at him with perfect equanimity. “As a
+matter of fact, if you’re interested to know, I wasn’t particularly
+afraid of Von Plaanden, and, if I may say so without offense, I’m not
+particularly afraid of you.”
+
+Carroll studied him intently.
+
+“By Jove, I believe you aren’t! I give it up!” he cried desperately.
+“You’re crazy, I reckon—or else I am.” And he took himself off without
+the formality of a farewell to the others.
+
+Raimonda, with a courteous bow to his companions, followed him.
+
+Wearily the goggled one sank back in his seat. Cluff moved across,
+planting himself exactly where Carroll had stood.
+
+“Perkins!”
+
+“Eh?” responded the sitter absently.
+
+“What would you do if I should bat you one in the eye?”
+
+“Eh, what?”
+
+“What would you do to me?”
+
+“You, too?” cried the bewildered Perkins. “Why on earth—”
+
+“You’d dive into my knees, wouldn’t you, and tip me over backward?”
+
+“Oh, that!” A slow grin overspread the space beneath the glasses. “That
+was the idea.”
+
+“I know the trick. It’s a good one—except for the guy that gets it.”
+
+“It wouldn’t have hurt him. He’d have landed in the fountain.”
+
+“So he would. What then?”
+
+“Oh, I’d have held him there till he got cooled off, and then made a
+run for it. A wet man can’t catch a dry man.”
+
+“Say, son, _you’re_ a dry one, all right.”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“Wake up! I’m saying you’re all right.”
+
+“Much obliged.”
+
+“You certainly took enough off him to rile a sheep. Why didn’t you do
+it?”
+
+“Do what?”
+
+“Tip him in.”
+
+Perkins glanced upward at the balcony where the vines had closed upon a
+face that smiled.
+
+“Oh,” he said mildly, “he’s a friend of a friend of mine.”
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+TWO ON A MOUNTAIN-SIDE
+
+
+ORCHIDS do not, by preference, grow upon a cactus plant. Little though
+she recked of botany, Miss Brewster was aware of this fundamental
+truth. Neither do they, without extraneous impulsion, go hurtling
+through the air along deserted mountain-sides, to find a resting-place
+far below; another natural-history fact which the young lady
+appreciated without being obliged to consult the literature of the
+subject. Therefore, when, from the top of the appointed rock, she
+observed a carefully composed bunch of mauve Cattleyas describe a
+parabola and finally join two previous clusters upon the spines of a
+prickly-pear patch, she divined some energizing force back of the
+phenomenon. That energizing force she surmised was temper.
+
+“Fie!” said she severely. “Beetle gentlemen should control their little
+feelings. Naughty, naughty!”
+
+From below rose a fervid and startled exclamation.
+
+“Naughtier, naughtier!” deprecated the visitor. “Are these the cold and
+measured terms of science?”
+
+“You haven’t lived up to your bet,” complained the censured one.
+
+“Indeed I have! I always play fair, and pay fair. Here I am, as per
+contract.”
+
+“Nearly half an hour late.”
+
+“Not at all. Four-thirty was the time.”
+
+“And now it is three minutes to five.”
+
+“Making twenty-seven minutes that I’ve been sitting here waiting for a
+welcome.”
+
+“Waiting? Oh, Miss Brewster—”
+
+“I’m not Miss Brewster. I’m a voice in the wilderness.”
+
+“Then, Voice, you haven’t been there more than one minute. A voice
+isn’t a voice until it makes a noise like a voice. Q.E.D.”
+
+“There is something in that argument,” she admitted. “But why didn’t
+you come up and look for me?”
+
+“Does one look for a sound?”
+
+“Please don’t be so logical. It tires my poor little brain. You might
+at least have called.”
+
+“That would have been like holding you up for payment of the bet,
+wouldn’t it? I was waiting for you to speak.”
+
+“Not good form in Caracuña. The señor should always speak first.”
+
+“You began the other time,” he pointed out.
+
+“So I did, but that was under a misapprehension. I hadn’t learned the
+customs of the country then. By the way, is it a local custom for
+hermits of science to climb breakneck precipices for golden-hearted
+orchids to send to casual acquaintances?”
+
+“Is that what you are?” he queried in a slightly depressed tone.
+
+“What on earth else could I be?” she returned, amused.
+
+“Of course. But we all like to pretend that our fairy tales are
+permanent, don’t we?”
+
+“I can readily picture you chasing beetles, but I can’t see you chasing
+fairies at all,” she asserted positively.
+
+“Nor can I. If you chase them, they vanish. Every one knows that.”
+
+“Anyway, your orchids were fit for a fairy queen. I haven’t thanked you
+for them yet.”
+
+“Indeed you have. Much more than they deserve. By coming here to-day.”
+
+“Oh, that was a point of honor. Are you going to let those lovely
+purple ones wither on that prickly plant down there? Think how much
+better they’d look pinned on me—if there were any one here to see and
+appreciate.”
+
+If this were a hint, it failed of its aim, for, as the hermit scuttled
+out from his shelter, looking not unlike some bulky protrusive-eyed
+insect, secured the orchids, and returned, he never once glanced up.
+Safe again in his rock-bound retreat, he spoke:—
+
+“‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’”
+
+“So you do know something of fairies and fairy lore!” she cried.
+
+“Oh, it wasn’t much more than a hundred years ago that I read my Grimm.
+In the story, only one call was necessary.”
+
+“Well, I can’t spare any more of my silken tresses. I brought a string
+this time. Where’s the other hair line?”
+
+“I’ve used it to tether a fairy thought so that it can’t fly away from
+me. Draw up slowly.”
+
+“Thank you so much, and I’m so glad that you are feeling better.”
+
+“Better?”
+
+“Yes. Better than the day before yesterday.”
+
+“Day before yesterday?”
+
+“Bless the poor man! Much anxious waiting hath bemused his wits. He
+thinks he’s an echo.”
+
+“But I was all right the day before yesterday.”
+
+“You weren’t. You were a prey to the most thrilling terrors. You were a
+moving picture of tender masculinity in distress. You let bashfulness
+like a worm i’ th’ bud prey upon your damask cheek. Have you a damask
+cheek? Stand out! I wish to consider you impartially. _You_ needn’t
+look at _me_, you know.”
+
+“I’m not going to,” he assured her, stepping forth obediently.
+
+“Basilisk that I am!” she laughed. “How brown you are! How long did you
+say you’d been here? A year?”
+
+“Fourteen weary Voiceless months. Not on this island, you know, but
+around the tropics.”
+
+“Yet you look vigorous and alert; not like the men I’ve seen come back
+from the hot countries, all languid and worn out. And you do look
+clean.”
+
+“Why shouldn’t I be clean?”
+
+“Of course you should. But people get slack, don’t they, when they live
+off all alone by themselves? Still, I suppose you spruced up a little
+for me?”
+
+“Nothing of the sort,” he denied, with heat.
+
+“No? Oh, my poor little vanity! He wouldn’t dress up for us, Vanity,
+though we did dress up for him, and we’re looking awfully nice—for a
+voice, that is. Do you always keep so soft and pink and smooth, Mr.
+Beetle Man?”
+
+“I own a razor, if that’s what you mean. You’re making fun of me. Well,
+_I_ don’t mind.” He lifted his voice and chanted:—
+
+“Although beyond the pale of law,
+He always kept a polished jaw;
+For he was one of those who saw
+    A saving hope
+    In shaving soap.”
+
+
+“Oh, lovely! What a noble finish. What is it?”
+
+“Extract from ‘Biographical Blurbings.’”
+
+“Autobiographical?”
+
+“Yes. By Me.”
+
+“And are you beyond the pale of law?”
+
+“Poetical license,” he explained airily. “Hold on, though.” He fell
+silent a moment, and out of that silence came a short laugh. “I suppose
+I _am_ beyond the pale of law, now that I come to think of it. But you
+needn’t be alarmed, I’m not a really dangerous criminal.”
+
+Later she was to recall that confession with sore misgivings. Now she
+only inquired lightly:
+
+“Is that why you ran away from the tram car yesterday?”
+
+“Ran away? I didn’t run away,” he said, with dignity. “It just happened
+that there came into my mind an important engagement that I’d
+forgotten. My memory isn’t what it should be. So I just turned over the
+matter in hand to an acquaintance of mine.”
+
+“The matter in hand being me.”
+
+“Why, yes; and the acquaintance being Mr. Cluff. I saw him throw four
+men out of a hotel once for insulting a girl, so I knew that he was
+much better at that sort of thing than I. May I go back now and sit
+down?” “Of course. I don’t know whether I ought to thank you about
+yesterday or be very angry. It was such an extraordinary performance on
+your part—”
+
+“Nothing extraordinary about it.” His voice came up out of the shadow,
+full of judicial confidence. “Merely sound common sense.”
+
+“To leave a woman who has been insulted—”
+
+“In more competent hands than one’s own.”
+
+“Oh, I give it up!” she cried. “I don’t understand you at all. Fitzhugh
+is right; you haven’t a tradition to your name.”
+
+“Tradition,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Why, I don’t know. They’re
+pretty rigid things, traditions. Rusty in the joints and all that sort
+of thing. Life isn’t a process of machinery, exactly. One has to meet
+it with something more supple and adjustable than traditions.”
+
+“Is that your philosophy? Suppose a man struck you. Wouldn’t you hit
+him back?”
+
+“Perhaps. It would depend.”
+
+“Or insulted your country? Don’t you believe that men should be ready
+to die, if necessary, in such a cause?”
+
+“Some men. Soldiers, for instance. They’re paid to.”
+
+“Good Heavens! Is it all a question of pay in your mind? Wouldn’t
+_you_, unless you were paid for it?”
+
+“How can I tell until the occasion arises?”
+
+“Are you afraid?”
+
+“I suppose I might be.”
+
+“Hasn’t the man any blood in his veins?” cried his inquisitor,
+exasperated. “Haven’t you ever been angry clear through?”
+
+“Oh, of course; and sorry for it afterward. One is likely to lose one’s
+temper any time. It might easily happen to me and drive me to make a
+fool of myself, like—like—” His voice trailed off into a silence of
+embarrassment.
+
+“Like Fitzhugh Carroll. Why not say it? Well, I much prefer him and his
+hot-headedness to you and your careful wisdom.”
+
+“Of course,” he acquiesced patiently. “Any girl would. It’s the
+romantic temperament.”
+
+“And yours is the scientific, I suppose. That doesn’t take into account
+little things like patriotism and heroism, does it? Tell me, have you
+actually ever admired—really got a thrill out of—any deed of heroism?”
+
+“Oh, yes,” he replied tranquilly. “I’ve done my bit of hero worship in
+my time. In fact, I’ve never quite recovered from it.”
+
+“No! Really? Do go on. You’re growing more human every minute.”
+
+“Do you happen to know anything about the Havana campaign?”
+
+“Not much. It never seemed to me anything to brag of. Dad says the
+Spanish-American War grew a crop of newspaper-made heroes, manufactured
+by reporters who really took more risks and showed more nerve than the
+men they glorified.”
+
+“Spanish-American War? That isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m speaking
+of Walter Reed and his fellow scientists, who went down there and
+fought the mosquitoes.”
+
+The girl’s lip curled.
+
+“So that’s your idea of heroism! Scrubby peckers into the lives of
+helpless bugs!”
+
+“Have you the faintest idea what you are talking about?”
+
+His voice had abruptly hardened. There was an edge to it; such an edge
+as she had faintly heard on the previous night, when Carroll had
+pressed him too hard. She was startled.
+
+“Perhaps I haven’t,” she admitted.
+
+“Then it’s time you learned. Three American doctors went down into that
+pesthole of a Cuban city to offer their lives for a theory. Not for a
+tangible fact like the flag, or for glory and fame as in battle, but
+for a theory that might or might not be true. There wasn’t a day or a
+night that their lives weren’t at stake. Carroll let himself be bitten
+by infected mosquitoes on a final test, and grazed death by a hair’s
+breadth. Lazear was bitten at his work, and died in the agony of
+yellow-fever convulsions, a martyr and a hero if ever there was one.
+Because of them, Havana is safe and livable now. We were able to build
+the Panama Canal because of their work, their—what did you call
+it?—scrubby peeking into the lives of—”
+
+“Don’t!” cried the girl. “I—I’m ashamed. I didn’t know.”
+
+“How should you?” he said, in a changed tone. “We Americans set up
+monuments to our destroyers, not to our preservers, of life. Nobody
+knows about Walter Reed and James Carroll and Jesse Lazear—not even the
+American Government, which they officially served—except a few doctors
+and dried-up entomologists like myself. Forgive me. I didn’t mean to
+deliver a lecture.”
+
+There was a long pause, which she broke with an effort.
+
+“Mr. Beetle Man?”
+
+“Yes, Voice?”
+
+“I—I’m beginning to think you rather more man than beetle at times.”
+
+“Well, you see, you touched me on a point of fanaticism,” he
+apologized.
+
+“Do you mind standing up again for examination? No,” she decided, as he
+stepped out and stood with his eyes lowered obstinately. “You don’t
+seem changed to outward view. You still remind me,” with a ripple of
+irrepressible laughter, “of a near-sighted frog. It’s those ridiculous
+glasses. Why do you wear them?”
+
+“To keep the sun out of my eyes.”
+
+“And the moon at night, I suppose. They’re not for purposes of
+disguise?”
+
+“Disguise! What makes you say that?” he asked quickly.
+
+“Don’t bark. They’d be most effective. And they certainly give your
+face a truly weird expression, in addition to its other detriments.”
+
+“If you don’t like my face, consider my figure,” he suggested
+optimistically. “What’s the matter with that?”
+
+“Stumpy,” she pronounced. “You’re all in a chunk. It does look like a
+practical sort of a chunk, though.”
+
+“Don’t you like it?” he asked anxiously.
+
+“Oh, well enough of its kind.” She lifted her voice and chanted:—
+
+“He was stubby and square,
+But _she_ didn’t much care.
+
+
+“There’s a verse in return for yours. Mine’s adapted, though.
+Examination’s over. Wait. Don’t sit down. Now, tell me your opinion of
+me.”
+
+“Very musical.”
+
+“I’m not musical at all.”
+
+“Oh, I’m considering you as a _voice_.”
+
+“I’m tired of being just a voice. Look up here. Do,” she pleaded. “Turn
+upon me those lucent goggles.”
+
+When orbs like thine the soul disclose,
+Tee-deedle-deedle-dee.
+
+
+Don’t be afraid. One brief fleeting glance ere we part.”
+
+“No,” he returned positively. “Once is enough.”
+
+“On behalf of my poor traduced features, I thank you humbly. Did they
+prove as bad as you feared?”
+
+“Worse. I’ve hardly forgotten yet what you look like. Your kind of face
+is bad for business.”
+
+“What _is_ business?”
+
+“Haven’t I told you? I’m a scientist.”
+
+“Well, I’m a specimen. No beetle that crawls or creeps or hobbles, or
+does whatever beetles are supposed to do, shows any greater variation
+from type—I heard a man say that in a lecture once—than I do. Can’t I
+interest you in my case, O learned one? The proper study of mankind
+is—”
+
+“Woman. Yes, I know all about that. But I’m a groundling.”
+
+“Mr. Beetle Man,” she said, in a tremulous voice, “the rock is moving.”
+
+“I don’t feel it. Though it might be a touch of earthquake. We have ’em
+often.”
+
+“Not your rock. The tarantula rock, I mean.”
+
+“Nonsense! A hundred tarantulas couldn’t stir it.”
+
+“Well, it seems to be moving, and that’s just as bad. I’m tired and I’m
+lonely. Oh, please, Professor Scarab, have I got to fall on your neck
+again to introduce a little human companionship into this
+conversation?”
+
+“Caesar! No! My shoulder’s still lame. What do you want, anyway?”
+
+“I want to know about you and your work. _All_ about you.”
+
+“Humph! Well, at present I’m making some microscopical studies of
+insects. That’s the reason for these glasses. The light is so harsh in
+these latitudes that it affects the vision a trifle, and every trifle
+counts in microscopy.”
+
+“Does the microscope add charm to the beetle?”
+
+“Some day I’ll show you, if you like. Just now it’s the flea, the
+national bird of Caracuña.”
+
+“The wicked flea?”
+
+“Nobody knows how wicked until he has studied him on his native heath.”
+
+“Doesn’t the flea have something to do with plague? They say there’s
+plague in the city now. You knew all about the Dutch. Do you know
+anything about the plague?”
+
+“You’ve been listening to _bolas_.”
+
+“What’s a _bola?_”
+
+“A _bola_ is information that somebody who is totally ignorant of the
+facts whispers confidentially in your ear with the assurance that he
+knows it to be authentic—in other words, a lie.”
+
+“Then there isn’t any plague down under those quaint, old, red-tiled
+roofs?”
+
+“Who ever knows what’s going on under those quaint, old, red-tiled
+roofs? No foreigner, certainly.”
+
+“Even I can feel the mystery, little as I’ve seen of the place,” said
+the girl.
+
+“Oh, that’s the Indian of it. The tiled roofs are Spanish; the speech
+is Spanish; but just beneath roof and speech, the life and thought are
+profoundly and unfathomably Indian.”
+
+“Not with all the Caracuñans, surely. Take Mr. Raimonda, for instance.”
+
+“Ah, that’s different. Twenty families of the city, perhaps, are
+pure-bloods. There are no finer, cleaner fellows anywhere than the
+well-bred Caracuñans. They are men of the world, European educated,
+good sportsmen, straight, honorable gentlemen. Unfortunately not they,
+but a gang of mongrel grafters control the politics of the country.”
+
+“For a hermit of science, you seem to know a good deal of what goes on.
+By the way, Mr. Raimonda called on me—on us last evening.”
+
+“So he mentioned. Rather serious, that, you know.”
+
+“Far from it. He was very amusing.”
+
+“Doubtless,” commented the other dryly. “But it isn’t fair to play the
+game with one who doesn’t know the rules. Besides, what will Mr.
+Preston Fairfax—”
+
+“For a professedly shy person, you certainly take a rather intimate
+tone.”
+
+“Oh, I’m shy only under the baleful influence of the feminine eye.
+Besides, you set the note of intimacy when you analyzed my personal
+appearance. And finally, I have a warm regard for young Raimonda.”
+
+“So have I,” she returned maliciously. “Aren’t you jealous?”
+
+He laughed.
+
+“Please be a little bit jealous. It would be so flattering.”
+
+“Jealousy is another tradition in which I don’t believe.”
+
+“Then I can’t flirt with you at all?” she sighed. “After taking all
+this long hot walk to see you!”
+
+_Plop!_ The sound punctured the silence sharply, though not loudly.
+Some large fruit pod bursting on a distant tree might have made such a
+report.
+
+“What was that?” asked the girl curiously.
+
+“That? Oh, that was a revolver shot,” he remarked.
+
+“Aren’t you casual! Do revolver shots mean nothing to you?”
+
+“That one shakes my soul’s foundations.” His tone by no means indicated
+an inner cataclysm. “It may mean that I must excuse myself and leave.
+Just a moment, please.”
+
+Passing across the line of her vision, he disappeared to the left. When
+she next heard his voice, it was almost directly above her.
+
+“No,” it said. “There’s no hurry. The flag’s not up.”
+
+“What flag?”
+
+“The flag in my compound.”
+
+“Can you see your home from here?”
+
+“Yes; there’s a ledge on the cliff that gives a direct view.”
+
+“I want to come up and see it.”
+
+“You can’t. It’s much too hard a climb. Besides, there are rock
+devilkins on the way.”
+
+“And when you hear a shot, you go up there for messages?”
+
+“Yes; it’s my telephone system.”
+
+“Who’s at the other end?”
+
+“The peon who pretends to look after the _quinta_ for me.”
+
+“A man! No man can keep a house fit to live in,” she said scornfully.
+
+“I know it; but he’s all I’ve got in the servant line.”
+
+“How far is the house from here?”
+
+“A mile, by air. Seven by trail from town.”
+
+“Isn’t it lonely?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Suddenly she felt very sorry for him. There was such a quiet,
+conclusive acceptance of cheerlessness in the monosyllable.
+
+“How soon must you go back?”
+
+“Oh, not for an hour, at least.”
+
+“If it’s a call, it must be an important one, so far from
+civilization.”
+
+“Not necessarily. Don’t you ever have calls that are not important?”
+
+No answer came.
+
+“Miss Brewster!” he called. “Oh, Voice! You haven’t gone?”
+
+Still no response.
+
+“That isn’t fair,” he complained, making his way swiftly down, and
+satisfying himself by a peep about the angle commanding her point of
+the rock that she had, indeed, vanished. Sadly he descended to his own
+nook—and jumped back with a half-suppressed yell.
+
+“You needn’t jump out of your skin on my account,” said Miss Polly
+Brewster, with a gracious smile. “I’m not a devilkin.”
+
+“You are! That is—I mean—I—I—beg your pardon. I—I—”
+
+“The poor man’s having another bashful fit,” she observed, with
+malicious glee. “Did the bold, bad, forward American minx scare it
+almost out of its poor shy wits?”
+
+“You—you startled me.”
+
+“No!” she exclaimed, in wide-eyed mock surprise. “Who would have
+supposed it? You didn’t expect me down here, did you?”
+
+Thereupon she got a return shock.
+
+“Yes, I did,” he said; “sooner or later.”
+
+“Don’t fib. Don’t pretend that you knew I was here.”
+
+“W-w-well, no. Not just now. B-b-but I knew you’d come if—if—if I
+pretended I didn’t want you to long enough.”
+
+“Young and budding scientist,” said she severely, “you’re a gay
+deceiver. Is it because you have known me in some former existence that
+you are able thus accurately to read my character?”
+
+“Well, I knew you wouldn’t stay up there much longer.”
+
+“I’m angry at you; very angry at you. That is, I would be if it weren’t
+that you really didn’t mean it when you said that you really didn’t
+want to see my face again.”
+
+“Did any one ever see your face once without wanting to see it again?”
+
+“Ah, bravo!” She clapped her hands gayly. “Marvelous improvement under
+my tutelage! Where, oh, where is your timidity now?”
+
+“I—I—I forgot,” he stammered, “As long as I don’t think, I’m all right.
+Now, you—you—you’ve gone and spoiled me.”
+
+“Oh, the pity of it! Let’s find some mild, impersonal topic, then, that
+won’t embarrass you. What do you do under the shadow of this rock, in a
+parched land?”
+
+“Work. Besides, it isn’t a parched land. Look on this side.”
+
+Half a dozen steps brought her around the farther angle, where, hidden
+in a growth of shrubbery, lay a little pool of fairy loveliness,
+
+“That’s my outdoor laboratory.”
+
+“A dreamery, I’d call it. May I sit down? Are there devilkins here?
+There’s an elfkin, anyway,” she added, as a silvered dragon-fly hovered
+above her head inquisitively before darting away on his own concerns.
+
+“One of my friends and specimens. I’m studying his methods of aviation
+with a view to making some practical use of what I learn, eventually.”
+
+“Really? Are you an inventor, too? I’m crazy about aviation.”
+
+“Ah, then you’ll be interested in this,” he said, now quite at his
+ease. “You know that the mosquito is the curse of the tropics.”
+
+“Of other places, as well.”
+
+“But in the tropics it means yellow fever, Chagres fever, and other
+epidemic illness. Now, the mosquito, as you doubtless realize, is a
+monoplane.”
+
+“A monoplane?” repeated the girl, in some puzzlement. “How a
+monoplane?”
+
+“I thought you claimed some knowledge of aviation. Its wings are all on
+one plane. The great natural enemy of the mosquito is the dragon-fly,
+one of which just paid you a visit. Now, modern warfare has taught us
+that the most effective assailant of the monoplane is a biplane. You
+know that.”
+
+“Y-y-yes,” said the girl doubtfully.
+
+“Therefore, if we can breed a biplane dragonfly in sufficient numbers,
+we might solve the mosquito problem at small expense.”
+
+“I don’t know much about science,” she began, “but I should hardly have
+supposed—”
+
+“It’s curious how nature varies the type of aviation,” he continued
+dreamily. “Now, the pigeon is, of course, a Zeppelin; whereas the sea
+urchin is obviously a balloon; and the thistledown an undirigible—”
+
+“You’re making fun of me!” she accused, with sharp enlightenment.
+
+“What else have you done to me ever since we met?” he inquired mildly.
+
+“Now I _am_ angry! I shall go home at once.”
+
+A second far-away _plop!_ set a period to her decision.
+
+“So shall I,” said he briskly.
+
+“Does that signal mean hurry up?” she asked curiously.
+
+“Well, it means that I’m wanted. You go first. When will you come
+again?”
+
+“Not at all.”
+
+“Do you mean that?”
+
+“Of course. I’m angry. Didn’t I tell you that? I don’t permit people to
+make fun of me. Besides, you must come and see me next. You owe me two
+calls. Will you?”
+
+“I—I—don’t know.”
+
+“Afraid?”
+
+“Rather.”
+
+“Then you must surely come and conquer this cowardice. Will you come
+to-morrow?”
+
+“No; I don’t think so.”
+
+Miss Brewster opened wide her eyes upon him. She was little accustomed
+to have her invitations, which she issued rather in the manner of royal
+commands, thus casually received. Had the offender been any other of
+her acquaintance, she would have dropped the matter and the man then
+and there. But this was a different species. Graceful and tactful he
+might not be, but he was honest.
+
+“Why?” she said.
+
+“I’ve got something more important to do.”
+
+“You’re reverting to type sadly. What is it that’s so important?”
+
+“Work.”
+
+“You can work any time.”
+
+“No. Unfortunately I have to eat and sleep sometimes.”
+
+The implication she accepted quite seriously.
+
+“Are you really as busy as all that? I’m quite conscience-stricken over
+the time I’ve wasted for you.”
+
+“Not wasted at all. You’ve cheered me up.”
+
+“That’s something. But you won’t come to the city to be cheered up?”
+
+“Yes, I will. When I get time.”
+
+“Perhaps you won’t find me at home.”
+
+“Then I’ll wait.”
+
+“Good-bye, then,” she laughed, “until your leisure day arrives.”
+
+She climbed the rock, stepping as strongly and surely as a lithe
+animal. At the top, the spirit of roguery, ever on her lips and eyes,
+struck in and possessed her soul.
+
+“O disciple of science!” she called.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Can you see me?”
+
+“Not from here.”
+
+“Good! I’m a Voice again. So don’t be timid. Will you answer a
+question?”
+
+“I’ve answered a hundred already. One more won’t hurt.”
+
+“Have you ever been in love?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Don’t I speak plainly enough? Have—you—ever—been—in—love?”
+
+“With a woman?”
+
+“Why, yes,” she railed. “With a woman, of course. I don’t mean with
+your musty science.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Well, you needn’t be violent. Have you ever been in love with
+_anything?_”
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“Oh, perhaps!” she taunted. “There are no perhapses in that. With
+what?”
+
+“With what every man in the world is in love with once in his life,” he
+replied thoughtfully.
+
+She made a little still step forward and peeped down at him. He stood
+leaning against the face of the rock, gazing out over the hot blue
+Caribbean, his hat pushed back and his absurd goggles firm and high on
+his nose. His words and voice were in preposterous contrast to his
+appearance.
+
+“Riddle me your riddle,” she commanded. “What is every man in love with
+once in his life?”
+
+“An ideal.”
+
+“Ah! And your ideal—where do you keep it safe from the common gaze?”
+
+“I tether it to my heart—with a single hair,” said the man below.
+
+“Oh,” commented Miss Brewster, in a changed tone. And, again, “Oh,”
+just a little blankly. “I wish I hadn’t asked that,” she confessed
+silently to herself, after a moment.
+
+Still, the spirit of reckless experimentalism pressed her onward.
+
+“That’s a peril to the scientific mind, you know,” she warned. “Suppose
+your ideal should come true?”
+
+“It won’t,” said he comfortably.
+
+Miss Brewster’s regrets sensibly mitigated.
+
+“In that case, of course, your career is safe from accident,” she
+remarked.
+
+He moved out into the open.
+
+“Mr. Beetle Man,” she called,
+
+He looked up and saw her with her chin cupped in her hand, regarding
+him thoughtfully.
+
+“I’m _not_ just a casual acquaintance,” she said suddenly. “That is, if
+you don’t want me to be.”
+
+“That’s good,” was his hearty comment. “I’m glad you like me better
+than you did at first.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not so sure that I like you, exactly. But I’m coming to have a
+sort of respectful curiosity about you. What lies under that beetle
+shell of yours, I wonder?” she mused, in a half breath.
+
+Whether or not he heard the final question she could not tell. He
+smiled, waved his hand, and disappeared. Below, she watched the motion
+of the bush-tops where the shrubbery was parted by the progress of his
+sturdy body down the long slope.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+AN UPHOLDER OF TRADITIONS
+
+
+One day passes much like another in Caracuña City. The sun rises
+blandly, grows hot and angry as it climbs the slippery polished vault
+of the heavens, and coasts down to its rest in a pleased and mild glow.
+From the squat cathedral tower the bells clang and jangle defiance to
+the Adversary, temporarily drowning out the street tumult in which the
+yells of the lottery venders, the braying of donkeys, the whoops of the
+cabmen, and the blaring of the little motor cars with big horns,
+combine to render Caracuña the noisiest capital in the world. Through
+the saddle-colored hordes on the moot ground of the narrow sidewalks
+moves an occasional Anglo-Saxon resident, browned and sallowed, on his
+way to the government concession that he manages; a less occasional
+Anglo-Saxoness, browned and marked with the seal that the tropics put
+upon every woman who braves their rigors for more than a brief period;
+and a sprinkling of tourists in groups, flying on cheek, brow, and nose
+the stark red of their newness to the climate.
+
+Not of this sorority Miss Polly Brewster. Having blithe regard to her
+duty as an ornament of this dull world, she had tempered the sun to the
+foreign cuticle with successively diminishing layers of veils, to such
+good purpose that the celestial scorcher had but kissed her graduated
+brownness to a soft glow of color. Not alone in appreciation of her
+external advantages was Miss Brewster. Such as it was,—and it had its
+qualities, albeit somewhat unformulated,—Caracuña society gave her
+prompt welcome. There were teas and rides and tennis at the little
+club; there were agreeable, presentable men and hospitable women; and
+always there was Fitzhugh Carroll, suave, handsome, gentle, a polished
+man of the world among men, a courteous attendant to every woman, but
+always with a first thought for her. Was it sheer perversity of
+character, that elfin perversity so shrewdly divined by the hermit of
+the mountain, that put in her mind, in this far corner of the world,
+among these strange people, the thought:
+
+“All men are alike, and Fitz, for all that he’s so different and the
+best of them, is the _most_ alike.”
+
+Which paradox, being too much for her in the heat of the day, she put
+aside in favor of the insinuating thought of her beetle man. Whatever
+else he might or might not be, he wasn’t alike. She was by no means
+sure that she found this difference either admirable or amiable. But at
+least it was interesting.
+
+Moreover, she was piqued. For four days had passed and the recluse had
+not returned her call. True, there had come to her hotel a wicker full
+of superb wild tree blooms, and, again, a tiny box, cunning in
+workmanship of scented wood, containing what at first glance she had
+taken to be a jewel, until she saw that it was a tiny butterfly with
+opalescent wings, mounted on a silver wire. But with them had come no
+word or token of identification. Perhaps they weren’t from the queer
+and remote person at all. Very likely Mr. Raimonda had sent them; or
+Fitzhugh Carroll was adding secret attention to his open homage; or
+they might even be a further peace offering from the Hochwald
+secretary.
+
+That occasionally too festive diplomat had, indeed, made amends both
+profound and, evidently, sincere. Soliciting the kind offices of both
+Sherwen and Raimonda, he had presented himself, under their escort,
+stiff and perspiring in his full official regalia, before Mr. Brewster;
+then before his daughter, whose solemnity, presently breaking down
+before his painfully rehearsed English, dissolved in fluent French,
+setting him at ease and making him her slave. Poor penitent Von
+Plaanden even apologized to Carroll, fortunately not having heard of
+the American’s threat, and made a most favorable impression upon that
+precisian.
+
+“Intoxicated, he may be a rough, Miss Polly,” Carroll confided to the
+girl. “But sober, the man is a gentleman. He feels very badly about the
+whole affair. Offered to your father to report it all through official
+channels and attach his resignation.”
+
+“Not for worlds!” cried Miss Polly. “The poor man was half asleep. And
+Mr. Bee—Mr. Perkins _did_ jog him rather sharply.”
+
+“Yes. Von Plaanden asked my advice as an American about his attitude
+toward Cluff and Perkins.”
+
+“I hope you told him to let the whole thing drop.”
+
+“Exactly what I did. I explained about Cluff; that he was a very good
+fellow, but of a different class, and probably wouldn’t give the thing
+another thought.”
+
+“And Mr. Perkins?”
+
+“Von Plaanden wanted to challenge him, if he could find him. I
+suggested that he leave me to deal with Mr. Perkins. After some
+discussion, he agreed.”
+
+“Oh! And what are you going to do with him?”
+
+“Find him first, if I can.”
+
+“I can tell you where.” Carroll stared at her, astonished. “But I don’t
+think I will.”
+
+“He announced his intention of keeping out of my way. The man has no
+sense of shame.”
+
+“You probably scared the poor lamb out of his wits, fire-eater that you
+are.”
+
+Carroll would have liked to think so, but an innate sense of justice
+beneath his crust of prejudice forbade him to accept this judgment.
+
+“The strange part of it is that he doesn’t impress me as being afraid.
+But there is certainly something very wrong with the fellow. A man who
+will deliberately desert a woman in distress”—Carroll’s manner expanded
+into the roundly rhetorical—“whatever else he may be, cannot be a
+gentleman.”
+
+“There might have been mitigating circumstances.”
+
+“No circumstances could excuse such an action. And, after that, the
+fellow had the effrontery to send you a message.”
+
+“Me? What was it?” asked Miss Polly quickly.
+
+“I don’t know. I didn’t let him finish. I forbade his even mentioning
+your name.”
+
+“Indeed!” cried the girl, in quick dudgeon. “Don’t you think you are
+taking a great deal upon yourself, Fitz? What do you really know about
+Mr. Perkins, anyway, that you judge him so offhandedly?”
+
+“Very little, but enough, I think. And I hardly think you know more.”
+
+“Then you’re wrong. I do.”
+
+“You _know_ this man?”
+
+“Yes; I do.”
+
+“Does your father approve of—”
+
+“Never mind my father! He has confidence enough in me to let me judge
+of my own friends.”
+
+“Friends?” Carroll’s handsome face clouded and reddened. “If I had
+known that he was a friend of yours, Miss Polly, I never would have
+spoken as I did. I’m most sincerely sorry,” he added, with grave
+courtesy.
+
+The girl’s color deepened under the brown.
+
+“He isn’t exactly a friend,” she admitted. “I’ve just met and talked
+with him a few times. But your judgment seemed so unfair, on such a
+slight basis.”
+
+“I’m sorry I can’t reverse my judgment,” said the Southerner stiffly,
+“But I know of only one standard for those matters.”
+
+“That’s just your trouble.” Her eyes took on a cold gleam as she
+scanned the perfection and finish of the man before her. “Fitzhugh, do
+you wear ready-made clothing?”
+
+“Of course not,” he answered, in surprise at this turn.
+
+“Your suits are all made to order?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Polly.”
+
+“And your shirts?”
+
+“Yes, and shoes, and various other things.” He smiled.
+
+“Why do you have them specially made?”
+
+“Beeause they suit me better, and I can afford it.”
+
+“It’s really because you want them individualized for you, isn’t it?”
+
+“Yes; I suppose so.”
+
+“Then why do you always get your mental clothes ready-made?”
+
+“I don’t think I understand, Miss Polly,” he said gently.
+
+“It seems to me that all your ideas and estimates and standards are of
+stock pattern,” she explained relentlessly. “Inside, you’re as just
+exactly so as a pair of wooden shoes. Can’t you see that you can’t
+judge all men on the same plane?”
+
+“I see that you’re angry with me, and I see that I’m being punished for
+what I said about—about Mr. Perkins. If I’d known that you took any
+interest in him, I’d have bitten my tongue in two before speaking as I
+did. As for the message, if you wish it, I’ll go to him—”
+
+“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she interrupted.
+
+“This much I can say, in honesty,” continued the Southerner, with an
+effort: “I had a talk, almost an encounter, with him in the plaza, and
+I don’t believe he is the coward I thought him.”
+
+His intent to be fair to the object of his scorn was so genuine that
+his critic felt a swift access of compunction.
+
+“Oh, Fitz,” she said sweetly, “you’re not to blame. I should have told
+you. And you’re honest and loyal and a gentleman. Only I wish sometimes
+that you weren’t quite so awfully gentlemanly a gentleman.”
+
+The Southerner made a gesture of despair.
+
+“If I could only understand you, Miss Polly!”
+
+“Don’t hope it. I’ve never yet understood myself. But there’s a
+sympathy in me for the under dog, and this Mr. Perkins seems a sort of
+helpless creature. Yet in another way he doesn’t seem helpless at all.
+Quite the reverse. Oh, dear! I’m tired of Perkins, Perkins, Perkins!
+Let’s talk about something pleasanter—like the plague.”
+
+“What’s that about Perkins?” Galpy had entered the drawing-room where
+the conversation had been carried on, and now crossed over to them.
+“I’ll tell you a good one on the little blighteh. D’ you know what they
+call him at the Club Amicitia since his adventure on the street car,
+Miss Brewster?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“‘The Unspeakable Perk.’ Rippin’, ain’t it? Like ‘The Unspeakable
+Turk,’ you know.”
+
+Despite herself, Polly’s lips twitched; in some ways he _was_
+unspeakable.
+
+“They’ve nicknamed him that because of his trying to help me, and
+then—leaving?” she asked.
+
+“Oh, not entirely. There’s other things. He’s a nahsty, stand-offish
+way with him, you know. Don’t-want-to-know-yeh trick.
+Wouldn’t-speak-to-yeh-if-I-could-help-it twist to his face. ‘The
+Unspeakable Perk.’ Stands him right, I should say. There’s other
+reasons, too.”
+
+“What are they?”
+
+She saw a quick, warning frown on Carroll’s sharply turned face. Galpy
+noted it, too, and was lost in confusion.
+
+“Oh—ah—just gossip—nothing at all. I say, Miss Brewster, the
+railway—I’m in the Ferrocarril-del-Norte office, you know—has offered
+your party a special on an hour’s notice, any time you want it.”
+
+“That’s most kind of your road, Mr. Galpy. But why should we want it?”
+
+“Things might be getting a bit ticklish any day now. I’ve just taken
+the message from the manager to your father.”
+
+The young Englishman took his leave, and Polly Brewster went to her
+room, to freshen up for luncheon, carrying with her the sobriquet she
+had just heard. Certainly, applied to its subject, it had a
+mucilaginous consistency. It stuck.
+
+“‘The Unspeakable Perk,’” she repeated, with a little chuckle. “If I
+had a month to train him in, eh, what a speakable Perk I’d make him!
+I’d make him into a Perk that would sit up and speak when I lifted my
+little finger.” She considered this. “I’m not so sure,” she concluded,
+more doubtfully. “How can one tell through those horrid glasses,
+particularly when one doesn’t see him for days and days?”
+
+Without moving, she might, however, have seen him forthwith, for at
+that precise and particular moment, the Unspeakable Perk was in plain
+sight of her window, on a bench in the corner of the plaza, engaged in
+light conversation with a legless and philosophical beggar whom he had
+just astonished by the presentation of a whole bolivar, of the value of
+twenty cents gold.
+
+After she had finished luncheon and returned to her room, he was still
+there. Not until the mid-heat of the afternoon, however, did she
+observe, first with puzzlement, then with a start of recognition, the
+patiently rounded brown back of the forward-leaning figure in the
+corner. Greatly wroth was Miss Polly Brewster. For some hours—two, at
+least—the man to keep tryst and wager with whom she had tramped up
+miles of mountain road had been in town and hadn’t called upon her!
+Truly was he an Unspeakable Perk!
+
+Wasn’t there possibly a mistake somewhere, though? A second peep at the
+far-away back interpreted into the curve a suggestion of resigned
+waiting. Maybe he had called, after all. Thought being usually with
+Miss Brewster the mother of the twins, Determination and Action, she
+slipped downstairs and inquired of the three guardians of the door, in
+such Spanish as she could muster, whether a Mr. Perkins, wearing large
+glasses—this in the universal sign manual—had been to see her that day.
+
+“Si, Señorita”—he had.
+
+Why, then, hadn’t his name been brought to her?
+
+Extended hands and up-shrugged shoulders that might mean either apology
+or incomprehension.
+
+Straightway Miss Brewster pinned a hat upon her brown head at an
+altogether casual and heart-distracting angle and sallied down into the
+tesselated bowl of the park. Quite unconscious of her approach, until
+she was close upon him, her objective chatted fluently with the legless
+one, until she spoke quietly, almost in his ear. Then it was only by a
+clutch at the bench back that he saved himself from disaster on his
+return to earth.
+
+“Wh—wh—what—wh—where—how did you come here?” he stuttered.
+
+“Now, now, don’t be alarmed,” she admonished. “Shut your eyes, draw a
+deep breath, count three. And, as soon as you are ready I’ll give you a
+talisman against social panic. Are you ready?”
+
+“Y-yes.”
+
+“Very well. Whenever I come upon you suddenly, you mustn’t try to jump
+up into a tree as you did just now—”
+
+“I didn’t!”
+
+“Oh, yes. Or burrow under a rock, as you did the other day—”
+
+“Miss B-B-Brewster—”
+
+“Wait until I’ve finished. You must turn your thoughts firmly upon your
+science, until you’ve recovered equilibrium and the power of human
+speech.”
+
+“But when you jump at me that way, I c-c-can’t think of anything but
+you.”
+
+“That’s where the charm comes in. As soon as you see me or hear me
+approaching, you must repeat, quite slowly, this scientific
+incantation.” She beat time with a pink and rhythmic finger as she
+chanted:—
+
+“Scarab, tarantula, doodle-bug, flea.”
+
+
+The beggar rapidly made the sign that protects one from the influence
+of the malign and supernatural. The scientist scowled.
+
+“Repeat it!” she commanded.
+
+“There is no such insect as a doodle-bug,” he protested feebly.
+
+“Isn’t there? I thought I heard you mention it in your conversation
+with Mr. Carroll the other night.”
+
+“You put that into my head,” he accused.
+
+“Truly? Then life is indeed real and earnest. To have introduced
+something unscientific into that compendium of science—there’s triumph
+enough for any ambition. Besides, see how beautifully it scans.”
+
+Again she beat time, and again the beggar crooked defensive fingers as
+she declaimed:—
+
+“_Scar_-ab, tar-_ant_-u-la, _doo_-dle-bug, _flea!_”
+
+
+Homeric, I call it. Perhaps you think you could improve on it.”
+
+“Would you mind substituting ‘neuropter’ in the third strophe?” he
+ventured. “It would be just as good as ‘doodle-bug,’ and more—more
+accurate.”
+
+“What’s a neuropter? You didn’t make him up for the occasion?”
+
+“Heaven forbid! The dragon-fly is a neuropter. The dragon-fly we’re
+going to breed to a biplane, you know,” he reminded her slyly.
+
+“Indeed! Well, I shall stick to my doodle-bug. He’s more euphonious.
+Now, repeat it.”
+
+“Let me off this time,” he pleaded. “I’m all right—quite recovered.
+It’s only at the start that it’s so bad.”
+
+“Very well,” she agreed. “But you’re not to forget it. And next time we
+meet you’re to be sure and say it over until you’re sane.”
+
+“Sane!” he said resentfully. “I’m as sane as any one you know. It’s the
+job of _keeping_ sane in this madhouse of the tropics that’s almost
+driven me crazy.”
+
+“Lovely!” she approved. “Well, now that you’ve recovered, I’ll tell you
+what I came out to say. I’m sorry that I missed you.”
+
+“Missed me?” he repeated. “Oh, you have missed me, then? That’s nice.
+You see, I’ve been so busy for the last three or four days—”
+
+“No; I haven’t missed you a bit,” she declared indignantly. “The
+conceit of the man!”
+
+“But you said you w-w-were sorry you’d—”
+
+“Don’t be wholly a beetle! I meant I was sorry not to see you when you
+came to call on me this morning.”
+
+“I didn’t come to call on you this morning.”
+
+“No? The boy at the door said he’d seen you, or something answering to
+your description.”
+
+“So he did. I came to see your father. He was out.”
+
+“What time?”
+
+“From eleven on.”
+
+“Father? No, I don’t think so.”
+
+“His secretary came down and told me so, or sent word each time.”
+
+She smiled pityingly at him.
+
+“Of course. That’s what a secretary is for.”
+
+“To tell lies?”
+
+“White lies. You see, dad is a very busy man, and an important man, and
+many people come to see him whom he hasn’t time to see. So, unless he
+knew your business, he would naturally be ‘out’ to you.”
+
+The corners of the young man’s rather sensitive mouth flattened out
+perceptibly.
+
+“Ah, I see. My mistake. Living in countries where, however queer the
+people may be, they at least observe ordinary human courtesies, one
+forgets—if one ever knew.”
+
+“What did you want of dad?”
+
+“Oh, to borrow four dollars of him, of course,” he replied dryly.
+
+“You needn’t be angry at me. You see, dad’s time is valuable.”
+
+“Indeed? To whom?”
+
+“Why, to himself, of course.”
+
+“Oh, well, my time—However, that doesn’t matter. I haven’t wholly
+wasted it.” He glanced toward the beggar, who was profoundly regarding
+the cathedral clock.
+
+“If you like, I’ll get you an interview with dad,” she offered
+magnanimously.
+
+“Me? No, I thank you,” he said crisply. “I’m not patient of unnecessary
+red tape.”
+
+Miss Brewster looked at him in surprise. It was borne in upon her, as
+she looked, that this man was not accustomed to being lightly regarded
+by other men, however busy or important; that his own concerns in life
+were quite as weighty to him, and in his esteem, perhaps, to others, as
+were the interests of any magnate; and that, man to man, there would be
+no shyness or indecision or purposelessness anywhere in his make-up.
+
+“If it was important,” she began hesitantly, “my father would be—”
+
+“It was of no importance to me,” he cut in. “To others—Perhaps I could
+see some one else of your party.”
+
+“Well, here I am.” She smiled. “Why won’t I do?”
+
+Behind the obscuring disks she could feel his glance read her. The
+grimness at the mouth’s corners relaxed.
+
+“I really don’t know why you shouldn’t.”
+
+“Dad says I’d have made a man of affairs,” she remarked.
+
+“Why, it’s just this. You should be planning to leave this country.”
+
+Miss Brewster bewailed her harsh lot with drooping lip.
+
+“Every one wants to drive me away!”
+
+“Who else?”
+
+“That railroad man, Mr. Galpy, was offering us special inducements to
+leave, in the form of special trains any time we liked. It isn’t
+hospitable.”
+
+“A jail is hospitable. But one doesn’t stay in it when one can get
+out.”
+
+“If Caracuña were the jail and I the ‘one,’ one might. I quite love it
+here.”
+
+He made a sharp gesture of annoyance.
+
+“Don’t be childish,” he said.
+
+“Childish? You come down like Freedom from the mountain heights, and
+unfurl your warnings to the air, and complain of lost time and all that
+sort of thing, and what does it all amount to?” she demanded, with
+spirit. “That we should sail away, when you know perfectly well that
+the Dutch won’t let us sail away! Childish, indeed! Don’t you be
+_beetlish!_”
+
+“There’s a way out, without much risk, but some discomfort. You could
+strike south-east to the Bird Reefs, take a small boat, and get over to
+the mainland. As soon as the blockade is off, the yacht can take your
+luggage around. The trip would be rough for you, but not dangerous. Not
+as dangerous as staying here may be.”
+
+“Do you really think it so serious?”
+
+“Most emphatically.”
+
+“Will you come with us and show us the way?” she inquired, gazing with
+exaggerated appeal into his goggles.
+
+“I? No.”
+
+“What shall you do?”
+
+“Stick.”
+
+“Pins through scarabs,” she laughed, “while beneath you Caracuña riots
+and revolutes and massacres foreigners. Nero with his fiddle was
+nothing to you.”
+
+“Miss Brewster, I’m afraid you are suffering from a misplaced sense of
+humor. Will you believe me when I tell you that I have certain sources
+of information in local matters both serviceable and reliable?”
+
+“You seem to have bet on a certainty in the Dutch blockade matter.”
+
+“Well, it’s equally certain that there is bubonic plague here.”
+
+“A _bola_. You told me so yourself.”
+
+“Perhaps there was nothing to be gained then by letting you know, as
+you were bottled up, with no way out. Now, through the good offices of
+a foreign official, who, of course, couldn’t afford to appear, this
+opportunity to reach the mainland is open to you.”
+
+“Had you anything to do with that?” she inquired suspiciously.
+
+“Oh, the official is a friend of mine,” he answered carelessly.
+
+“And you really believe that there is an epidemic of plague here? Don’t
+you think that I’d make a good Red Cross nurse?”
+
+His voice was grave and rather stern.
+
+“You’ve never seen bubonic plague,” he said, “or you wouldn’t joke
+about it.”
+
+“I’m sorry. But it wasn’t wholly a joke. If we were really cooped up
+with an epidemic, I’d volunteer. What else would there be to do?”
+
+“Nothing of the sort,” he cried vehemently. “You don’t know what you’re
+talking about.”
+
+“Anyway, isn’t the wonderful Luther Pruyn on his way to exorcise the
+demon, or something of the sort?”
+
+“What about Luther Pruyn? Who says he’s coming here?”
+
+“It’s the gossip of the diplomatic set and the clubs. He’s the favorite
+mystery of the day.”
+
+“Well, if he does come, it won’t improve matters any, for the first
+case he verifies he’ll clap on a quarantine that a mouse couldn’t creep
+through. I know something of the Pruyn method.”
+
+“And don’t wholly approve it, I judge.”
+
+“It may be efficacious, but it’s extremely inconvenient at times.”
+
+Again the cathedral clock boomed.
+
+“See how I’ve kept you from your own affairs!” cried Miss Polly
+contritely. “What are you going to do now? Go back to your mountains?”
+
+“Yes. As soon as you tell me that your father will go out by the
+reefs.”
+
+“Do you expect him to make up his mind, on five minutes’ notice, to
+abandon his yacht?”
+
+“I thought great magnates were supposed to be men of instant and
+unalterable decisions. I don’t know the type.”
+
+“Anyway, dad has gone out. I saw him drive away. Wouldn’t to-morrow
+do?”
+
+“Why, yes; I suppose so.”
+
+“I’ll tell you. The Voice will report at the rock to-morrow, at four.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“What a very uncompromising ‘no’!”
+
+“I can’t be there at four. Make it five.”
+
+“What a very arbitrary beetle man! Well, as I’ve wasted so much of your
+time to-day, I’ll accept your orders for to-morrow.”
+
+“And please impress your father with the extreme advisability of your
+getting off this island.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” she said meekly. “You’ll be most awfully glad to get rid of
+us, won’t you?”
+
+“Very greatly relieved.”
+
+“And a little bit sorry?”
+
+The begoggled face turned toward her. There was a perceptible tensity
+in the line of the jaw. But the beetle man made no answer.
+
+“Now, if I could see behind those glasses,” said Miss Polly Brewster to
+her wicked little self, “I’d probably _bite_ myself rather than say it
+again. Just the same—And a little bit sorry?” she persisted aloud.
+
+“Does that matter?” said the man quietly.
+
+Miss Polly Brewster forthwith bit herself on her pink and wayward
+tongue.
+
+“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” she employed that chastened member to
+say. “I am, most deeply. So will father be, even if he decides not to
+leave. I’m afraid that’s what he will decide.”
+
+“He mustn’t.”
+
+“Tell him that yourself.”
+
+“I will, if it becomes necessary.”
+
+“Let me be present at the interview. Most people are afraid of dad.
+Perhaps you’d be, too.”
+
+“I could always run away,” he remarked, unsmiling. “You know how well I
+do it.”
+
+“I must do it now myself, and get arrayed for the daily tea sacrifice.
+Au revoir.”
+
+“Hasta mañana,” he said absently.
+
+She had turned to go, but at the word she came slowly back a pace or
+two, smiling.
+
+“What a strange beetle man you are!” she said softly. “I have no other
+friends like you. You _are_ a friend, aren’t you, in your queer way?”
+She did not wait for an answer, but went on: “You don’t come to see me
+when I ask you. You don’t send me any word. You make me feel that,
+compared to your concerns with beetles and flies, I’m quite hopelessly
+unimportant. And yet here I find you giving up your own pursuits and
+wasting your time to plan and watch and think for us.”
+
+“For you,” he corrected.
+
+“For me,” she accepted sweetly. “What an ungrateful little pig you must
+think me! But truly inside I appreciate it and thank you, and I think—I
+feel that perhaps it amounts to a lot more than I know.”
+
+He made a gesture of negation.
+
+“No great thing,” he said. “But it’s the best I can do, anyway. Do you
+remember what the mediæval mummer said, when he came bearing his poor
+homage?”
+
+“No. Tell it to me.”
+
+“It runs like this: ‘Lady, who art nowise bitter to those who serve you
+with a good intent, that which thy servant is, that he is for you.’”
+
+“Polly Brewster,” said the girl to herself, as she walked, slowly and
+musingly, back to her room, “the busy haunts of men are more suited to
+your style than the free-and-untrammeled spaces of nature, and well you
+know it. But you’ll go to-morrow and you’ll keep on going until you
+find out what is behind those brown-green goblin spectacles. If only he
+didn’t look so like a gnome!”
+
+The clause conditional, introduced by the word “if,” does not always
+imply a conclusion, even in the mind of the propounder. Miss Brewster
+would have been hard put to it to round out her subjunctive.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+FORKED TONGUES
+
+
+“Pooh!” said Thatcher Brewster.
+
+Thatcher Brewster’s “Pooh!” is generally recognized in the realm of
+high finance as carrying weight. It is not derisive or contemptuous; it
+is dismissive. The subject of it simply ceases to exist. In the present
+instance, it was so mild as scarcely to stir the smoke from his
+after-dinner cigar, yet it had all the intent, if not the effect, of
+finality. The reason why it hadn’t the effect was that it was directed
+at Thatcher Brewster’s daughter.
+
+“Perhaps not quite so much ‘Pooh!’ as you think,” was that damsel’s
+reception of the pregnant monosyllable.
+
+“A bug-hunter from nowhere! Don’t I know that type?” said the magnate,
+who confounded all scientists with inventors, the capital-seeking
+inventor being the bane and torment of his life.
+
+“He knew about the Dutch blockade.”
+
+“Or pretended he did. I’m afraid my Pollipet has let herself
+romanticize a little.”
+
+“Romanticize!” The girl laughed. “If you could see him, dad! Romance
+and my poor little beetle man don’t live in the same world.”
+
+Out of the realm of memory, where the echoes come and go by no known
+law, sounded his voice in her ear: “‘That which thy servant is, that he
+is for you.’” Dim doubt forthwith began to cloud the bright certainty
+of Miss Brewster’s verdict.
+
+“If he’s gone to all the trouble that I told you of, it must be that he
+has some good reason for wanting to get us safely out,” she argued to
+her father.
+
+“Perhaps he feels that his peace of mind would be more assured if you
+were in some other country,” he teased. “No, my dear, I’m not leaving a
+full-manned yacht in a foreign harbor and smuggling myself out of a
+friendly country on the say-so of an unknown adviser, whose chief
+ability seems to lie in the hundred-yard dash.”
+
+“I think that’s unfair and ungrateful. If a man with a sword—”
+
+“When I begin a row, I stay with it,” said Mr. Brewster grimly.
+“Quitters and I don’t pull well together.”
+
+“Then I’m to tell him ‘No’?”
+
+“Positively.”
+
+“Not so positively at all. I shall say, ‘No, thank you,’ in my very
+nicest way, and say that you’re very grateful and appreciative and not
+at all the growly old bear of a dad that you pretend to be when one
+doesn’t know and love you. And perhaps I’ll invite him to dine here and
+go away on the yacht with us—”
+
+“And graciously accept a couple of hundred thousand dollars bonus, and
+come into the company as first vice-president,” chuckled her father.
+“And then he’ll wake up and find he’s been sitting on a cactus. See
+here,” he added, with a sharpening of tone, “do you suppose he could
+get a cablegram for transmission to Washington over to the mainland for
+us by this mysterious route of his?”
+
+“Very likely.”
+
+“You’re really sure you want to go, Pollipet? This is your cruise, you
+know.”
+
+“Yes, I do.”
+
+Hitherto Miss Polly had been declaring to all and sundry, including the
+beetle man himself, that it was her firm intent and pleasure to stay on
+the island and observe the presumptively interesting events that
+promised. That she had reversed this decision, on the unsolicited
+counsel of an extremely queer stranger, was a phenomenon the
+peculiarity of which did not strike her at the time. All that she felt
+was a settled confidence in the beetle man’s sound reason for his
+advice.
+
+“Very good,” said Mr. Brewster. “If I can get through a message to the
+State Department, they’ll bring pressure to bear on the Dutch, and we
+can take the yacht through the blockade. It’s only a question of
+finding a way to lay the matter before the Dutch authorities, anyway.
+I’ve been making inquiries here, and I find there’s no intention of
+bottling up neutral pleasure craft. I dare say we could get out now.
+Only it’s possible that the Hollanders might shoot first and ask
+questions afterward.”
+
+“It would have to be done quickly, dad. They may quarantine at any
+time.”
+
+“Dr. Pruyn ought to be here any day now. Let’s leave that matter for
+him. There’s a man I have confidence in.”
+
+“Mr. Perkins says that Dr. Pruyn will bottle up the port tighter than
+the Dutch.”
+
+“Let him, so long as we get out first. Now, Polly, you tell this man
+Perkins that I’ll pay all expenses and give him a round hundred for
+himself if he’ll bring me a receipt showing that my cablegram has been
+dispatched to Washington.”
+
+“I don’t think I’d quite like to do that, dad. He isn’t the sort of man
+one offers money to.”
+
+“Every one’s the sort of man one offers money to—if it’s enough,”
+retorted her father. “And a hundred dollars will look pretty big to a
+scientific man. I know something about their salaries. You try him.”
+
+“So far as expenses go, I will. But I won’t hurt his feelings by trying
+to pay him for something that he would do for friendship or not at
+all.”
+
+“Have it your own way. When is he coming in?”
+
+“He isn’t coming in.”
+
+“Then where are you going to see him?”
+
+“Up on the mountain trail, when I ride tomorrow afternoon.”
+
+“With Carroll?”
+
+“No; I’m going alone.”
+
+“I don’t quite like to have you knocking about mountain roads by
+yourself, though Mr. Sherwen says you’re safe anywhere here. Where’s
+that little automatic revolver I gave you?”
+
+“In my trunk. I’ll carry that if it will make you feel any easier.”
+
+“Yes, do. But I can’t see why you can’t send word to Perkins that I
+want to see him here.”
+
+“I can. And I can guess just what his answer would be.”
+
+“Well, guess ahead.”
+
+“He’d tell you to go to the bad place, or its scientific equivalent.”
+She laughed.
+
+“Would he?” Mr. Brewster did not laugh. “And perhaps you’ll be good
+enough to tell me why.”
+
+“Because you sent word that you were out when he called.”
+
+“Humph! I see people when _I_ want to see _them_, not when they want to
+see me.”
+
+“Then Mr. Perkins is likely to prove permanently invisible to you, if
+I’m any judge of character.”
+
+“Well, well,” said Mr. Brewster impatiently, “manage it yourself. Only
+impress on him the necessity of getting the message on the wire. I’ll
+write it out to-night and give it to you with the money to-morrow.”
+
+After luncheon on the following day, Polly, with the cablegram and
+money in her purse and her automatic safely disposed in her belt,
+walked in the plaza with Carroll. The legless beggar whined at them for
+alms. Handing him a _quartillo_, the Southerner would have passed on,
+but his companion stood eyeing the mendicant.
+
+“Now, what can there be in that poor wreck to captivate the scientific
+intellect?” she marveled.
+
+“If you mean Mr. Perkins—” began Carroll.
+
+“I do.”
+
+“Then I think perhaps the reason for some of that gentleman’s
+associations will hardly stand inquiry.”
+
+The girl turned her eyes on him and searched the handsome, serious
+face.
+
+“Fitz, you’re not the man to say that of another man without some good
+reason.”
+
+“I am not, Miss Polly.”
+
+“You think that Mr. Perkins is not the kind of man for me to have
+anything to do with?”
+
+“I—I’m afraid he isn’t.”
+
+“Don’t you think that, having gone so far, you ought to tell me why?”
+
+Carroll flushed.
+
+“I would rather tell your father.”
+
+“Are you implying a scandal in connection with my timid, little
+dried-up scientist?”
+
+“I’m only saying,” said the other doggedly, “that there’s something
+secret and underhanded about that place of his in the mountains. It’s a
+matter of common gossip.”
+
+The girl laughed outright.
+
+“The poor beetle man! Why, he’s so afraid of a woman that he goes all
+to pieces if one speaks to him suddenly. Just to see his expression,
+I’d like to tell him that he’s being scandalized by all Caracuña.”
+
+“You’re going to see him again?”
+
+“Certainly. This afternoon.”
+
+“I don’t think you should, Miss Polly.”
+
+“Have you any actual facts against him? Anything but casual gossip?”
+
+“No; not yet.”
+
+“When you have, I’ll listen to you. But you couldn’t make me believe
+it, anyway. Why, Fitz, look at him!”
+
+“Take me with you,” insisted the other, “and let me ask him a question
+or two that any honorable man could answer. They don’t call him the
+Unspeakable Perk for nothing, Miss Polly.”
+
+“It’s just because they don’t understand his type. Nor do you, Fitz,
+and so you mistrust him.”
+
+“I understand that you’ve shown more interest in him than in any one
+you know,” said the other miserably.
+
+Her laugh rang as free and frank as a child’s.
+
+“Interest? That’s true. But if you mean sentiment, Fitz, after once
+having looked into the depths of those absurd goggles, can you, _could_
+you think of sentiment and the beetle man in the same breath?”
+
+“No, I couldn’t,” he confessed, relieved. “But, then, I never have been
+able to understand you, Miss Polly.”
+
+“Therein lies my fatal charm,” she said saucily. “Now, to the beetle
+man, I’m a specimen. _He_ understands as much as he wants to. Probably
+I shall never see him after to-day, anyway. He’s going to get a message
+through for us that will deliver us from this land of bondage.”
+
+“He can’t do it—too soon for me,” declared Carroll. “And, Miss Polly,
+you don’t think the worse of me for having said behind his back what
+I’m just waiting to say to his face?”
+
+“Not a bit,” said the girl warmly. “Only I know it’s nonsense.”
+
+“I hope so,” said Carroll, quite honestly. “I would hate to think
+anything low-down of a man you’d call your friend.”
+
+Carroll had learned more than he had told, but less than enough to give
+him what he considered proper evidence to lay before Polly’s father.
+After some deliberation as to the point of honor involved, he decided
+to go to Raimonda, who, alone in Caracuña City, seemed to be on
+personal terms with the hermit. He found the young man in his office.
+With entire frankness, Carroll stated his errand and the reason for it.
+The Caracuñan heard him with grave courtesy.
+
+“And now, señor,” concluded the American, “here’s my question, and it’s
+for you to determine whether, under the circumstances, you are
+justified in giving me an answer. Is there a woman living in Mr.
+Perkins’s _quinta_ on the mountains?”
+
+“I cannot answer that question,” said the other, after some
+deliberation.
+
+“I’m sorry,” said Carroll simply.
+
+“I also. The more so in that my attitude may be misconstrued against
+Mr. Perkins. I am bound by confidence.”
+
+“So I infer,” returned his visitor courteously. “Then I have only to
+ask your pardon—”
+
+“One moment, if you please, señor. Perhaps this will serve to make easy
+your mind. On my word, there is nothing in Mr. Perkins’s life on the
+mountain in any manner dishonorable or—or irregular.”
+
+In a flash, the simple solution crossed Carroll’s mind. That a woman
+was there, and a woman not of the servant class, could hardly be
+doubted, in view of almost direct evidence from eyewitnesses. If there
+was nothing irregular about her presence, it was because she was
+Perkins’s wife. In view of Raimonda’s attitude, he did not feel free to
+put the direct query. Another question would serve his purpose.
+
+“Is it advisable, and for the best interests of Miss Brewster, that she
+should associate with him under the circumstances?”
+
+The Caracuñan started and shot a glance at his interlocutor that said,
+as plainly as words, “How much do you know that you are not telling?”
+had the latter not been too intent upon his own theory to interpret it.
+
+“Ah, that,” said Raimonda, after a pause,—“that is another question. If
+it were my sister, or any one dear to me—but”—he shrugged—“views on
+that matter differ.”
+
+“I hardly think that yours and mine differ, señor. I thank you for
+bearing with me with so much patience.”
+
+He went out with his suspicions hardened into certainty.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+“THAT WHICH THY SERVANT IS—”
+
+
+A man that you’d call your friend. Such had been Fitzhugh Carroll’s
+reference to the Unspeakable Perk. With that characterization in her
+mind. Miss Brewster let herself drift, after her suitor had left her,
+into a dreamy consideration of the hermit’s attitude toward her. She
+was not prone lightly to employ the terms of friendship, yet this new
+and casual acquaintance had shown a readiness to serve—not as cavalier,
+but as friend—none too common in the experience of the much-courted and
+a little spoiled beauty. Being, indeed, a “lady nowise bitter to those
+who served her with good intent,” she reflected, with a kindly light in
+her eyes, that it was all part and parcel of the beetle’s man’s amiable
+queerness.
+
+Still musing upon this queerness, she strolled back to find her mount
+waiting at the corner of the plaza. In consideration of the heat she
+let her cream-colored mule choose his own pace, so they proceeded quite
+slowly up the hill road, both absorbed in meditation, which ceased only
+when the mule started an argument about a turn in the trail. He was a
+well-bred trotting mule, worth six hundred dollars in gold of any man’s
+money, and he was self-appreciative in knowledge of the fact. He
+brought a singular firmness of purpose to the support of the negative
+of her proposition, which was that he should swing north from the broad
+into the narrow path. When the debate was over, St. John the
+Baptist—this, I hesitate to state, yet must, it being the truth, was
+the spirited animal’s name—was considerably chastened, and Miss
+Brewster more than a trifle flushed. She left him tied to a ceiba
+branch at the exit from the dried creek bed, with strict instructions
+not to kick, lest a worse thing befall him. Miss Brewster’s fighting
+blood was up, when, ten minutes late, because of the episode, she
+reached the summit of the rock.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Beetle Man, are you there?” she called.
+
+“Yes, Voice. You sound strange. What is it?”
+
+“I’ve been hurrying, and if you tell me I’m late, I’ll—I’ll fall on
+your neck again and break it.”
+
+“Has anything happened?”
+
+“Nothing in particular. I’ve been boxing the compass with a mule. It’s
+tiresome.”
+
+He reflected.
+
+“You’re not, by any chance, speaking figuratively of your respected
+parent?”
+
+“Certainly _not!_” she disclaimed indignantly. “This was a real mule.
+You’re very impertinent.”
+
+“Well, you see, he was impertinent to me, saying he was out when he was
+in. What is his decision—yes or no?”
+
+“No.”
+
+A sharp exclamation came from the nook below.
+
+“Is that the entomological synonym for ‘damn’?” she inquired.
+
+“It’s a lament for time wasted on a—Well, never mind that.”
+
+“But he wants you to carry a message by that secret route of yours.
+Will you do it for him?”
+
+“_No!_”
+
+“That’s not being a very kind or courteous beetle man.”
+
+“I owe Mr. Brewster no courtesy.”
+
+“And you pay only where you owe? Just, but hardly amiable. Well, you
+owe me nothing—but—will you do it for me?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Without even knowing what it is?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“In return you shall have your heart’s desire.”
+
+“Doubted.”
+
+“Isn’t the dearest wish of your soul to drive me out of Caracuña?”
+
+“Hum! Well—er—yes. Yes; of course it is.”
+
+“Very well. If you can get dad’s message on the wire to Washington, he
+thinks the Secretary of State, who is his friend, can reach the Dutch
+and have them open up the blockade for us.”
+
+“Time apparently meaning nothing to him.”
+
+“Would it take much time?”
+
+“About four days to a wire.”
+
+She gazed at him in amazement.
+
+“And you were willing to give up four days to carry my message through,
+‘unsight—unseen,’ as we children used to say?”
+
+“Willing enough, but not able to. I’d have got a messenger through with
+it, if necessary. But in four days, there’ll be other obstacles besides
+the Dutch.”
+
+“Quarantine?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I thought that had to wait for Dr. Pruyn.”
+
+“Pruyn’s here. That’s a secret, Miss Brewster.”
+
+“Do you know _everything?_ Has he found plague?”
+
+“Ah, I don’t say that. But he will find it, for it’s certainly here. I
+satisfied myself of that yesterday.”
+
+“From your beggar friend?”
+
+“What made you think that, O most acute observer?”
+
+“What else would you be talking to him of, with such interest?”
+
+“You’re correct. Bubonic always starts in the poor quarters. To know
+how people die, you have to know how they live. So I cultivated my
+beggar friend and listened to the gossip of quick funerals and
+unexplained disappearances. I’d have had some real arguments to present
+to Mr. Brewster if he had cared to listen.”
+
+“He’ll listen to Dr. Pruyn. They’re old friends.”
+
+“No! Are they?”
+
+“Yes. Since college days. So perhaps the quarantine will be easier to
+get through than the blockade.”
+
+“Do you think so? I’m afraid you’ll find that pull doesn’t work with
+the service that Dr. Pruyn is in.”
+
+“And you think that there will be quarantine within four days?”
+
+“Almost sure to be.”
+
+“Then, of course, I needn’t trouble you with the message.”
+
+“Don’t jump at conclusions. There might be another and quicker way.”
+
+“Wireless?” she asked quickly.
+
+“No wireless on the island. No. This way you’ll just have to trust me
+for.”
+
+“I’ll trust you for anything you say you can do.”
+
+“But I don’t say I can. I say only that I’ll try.”
+
+“That’s enough for me. Ready! Now, brace yourself. I’m coming down.”
+
+“Wh—why—wait! Can’t you send it down?”
+
+“No. Besides, you _know_ you want to see me. No use pretending, after
+last time. Remember your verse now, and I’ll come slowly.”
+
+Solemnly he began:—
+
+“Scarab, tarantula, neurop—”
+
+
+“‘Doodle-bug,’” she prompted severely.
+
+“—doodle-bug, flea,”—
+
+
+he concluded obediently.
+
+“Scarab, tarantula, doodle-bug, flea. Scarab, tarantula, doodle—”
+
+
+“Oof! I—I—didn’t think you’d be here so soon!”
+
+He scrambled to his feet, hardly less palpitating than on the occasion
+of their first encounter.
+
+“Hopeless!” she mourned. “Incurable! Wanted: a miracle of St. Vitus. Do
+stop nibbling your hat, and sit down.”
+
+“I don’t think it’s as bad as it was,” he murmured, obeying. “One gets
+accustomed to you.”
+
+“One gets accustomed to anything in time, even the eccentricities of
+one’s friends.”
+
+“Do you think I’m eccentric?”
+
+“Do I think—Have you ever known any one who didn’t think you
+eccentric?”
+
+Upon this he pondered solemnly.
+
+“It’s so long since I’ve stopped to consider what people think of me.
+One hasn’t time, you know.”
+
+“Then one is unhuman. _I_ have time.”
+
+“Of course. But you haven’t anything else to do.”
+
+As this was quite true, she naturally felt annoyed.
+
+“Knowing as you do all the secrets of my inner life,” she observed
+sarcastically, “of course you are in a position to judge.”
+
+Her own words recalled Carroll’s charge, and though, with the subject
+of them before her, it seemed ridiculously impossible, yet the spirit
+of mischief, ever hovering about her like an attendant sprite,
+descended and took possession of her speech. She assumed a severely
+judicial expression.
+
+“Mr. Beetle Man, will you lay your hand upon your microscope, or
+whatever else scientists make oath upon, and answer fully and truly the
+question about to be put to you?”
+
+“As I hope for a blessed release from this abode of lunacy, I will.”
+
+“Mr. Beetle Man, have you got an awful secret in your life?”
+
+So sharply did he start that the heavy goggles slipped a fraction of an
+inch along his nose, the first time she had ever seen them in any
+degree misplaced. She was herself sensibly discountenanced by his
+perturbation.
+
+“Why do you ask that?” he demanded.
+
+“Natural interest in a friend,” she answered lightly, but with growing
+wonder. “I think you’d be altogether irresistible if you were a pirate
+or a smuggler or a revolutionary. The romantic spirit could lurk so
+securely behind those gloomy soul-screens that you wear. What do you
+keep back of them, O dark and shrouded beetle man?”
+
+“My eyes,” he grunted.
+
+“Basilisk eyes, I’m sure. And what behind the eyes?”
+
+“My thoughts.”
+
+“You certainly keep them securely. No intruders allowed. But you
+haven’t answered my question. Have you ever murdered any one in cold
+blood? Or are you a married man trifling with the affections of poor
+little me?”
+
+“You shall know all,” he began, in the leisurely tone of one who
+commences a long narrative. “My parents were honest, but poor. At the
+age of three years and four months, a maternal uncle, who, having been
+a proofreader of Abyssinian dialect stories for a ladies’ magazine, was
+considered a literary prophet, foretold that I—”
+
+“Help! Wait! Stop!—
+
+“‘Oh, skip your dear uncle!’ the bellman exclaimed,
+And impatiently tinkled his bell.”
+
+
+Her companion promptly capped her verse:—
+
+“‘I skip forty years,’ said the baker in tears,”—
+
+
+“You can’t,” she objected. “If you skipped half that, I don’t believe
+it would leave you much.”
+
+“When one is giving one’s life history by request,” he began, with
+dignity, “interruptions—”
+
+“It isn’t by request,” she protested. “I don’t want your life history.
+I won’t have it! You shan’t treat an unprotected and helpless stranger
+so. Besides, I’m much more interested to know how you came to be
+familiar with Lewis Carroll.”
+
+“Just because I’ve wasted my career on frivolous trifles like science,
+you needn’t think I’ve wholly neglected the true inwardness of life, as
+exemplified in ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’” he said gravely.
+
+“Do you know”—she leaned forward, searching his face—“I believe you
+came out of that book yourself. _Are_ you a Boojum? Will you, unless I
+‘charm you with smiles and soap,’
+
+“‘Softly and silently vanish away,
+And never be heard of again’?”
+
+
+“You’re mixed. _You’d_ be the one to do that if I were a real Boojum.
+And you’ll be doing it soon enough, anyway,” he concluded ruefully.
+
+“So I shall, but don’t be too sure that I’ll ‘never be heard of
+again.’”
+
+He glanced up at the sun, which was edging behind a dark cloud, over
+the gap.
+
+“Is your raging thirst for personal information sufficiently slaked?”
+he asked. “We’ve still fifteen or twenty minutes left.”
+
+“Is that all? And I haven’t yet given you the message!” She drew it
+from the bag and handed it to him.
+
+“Sealed,” he observed.
+
+The girl colored painfully.
+
+“Dad didn’t intend—You mustn’t think—” With a flash of generous wrath
+she tore the envelope open and held out the inclosure. “But I shouldn’t
+have thought you so concerned with formalities,” she commented
+curiously.
+
+“It isn’t that. But in some respects, possibly important, it would be
+better if—” He stopped, looking at her doubtfully.
+
+“Read it,” she nodded.
+
+He ran through the brief document.
+
+“Yes; it’s just as well that I should know. I’ll leave a copy.”
+
+Something in his accent made her scrutinize him.
+
+“You’re going into danger!” she cried.
+
+“Danger? No; I think not. Difficulty, perhaps. But I think it can be
+put through.”
+
+“If it were dangerous, you’d do it just the same,” she said, almost
+accusingly.
+
+“It would be worth some danger now to get you away from greater danger
+later. See here, Miss Brewster”—he rose and stood over her—“there must
+be no mistake or misunderstanding about this.”
+
+“Don’t gloom at me with those awful glasses,” she said fretfully. “I
+feel as if I were being stared at by a hidden person.”
+
+He disregarded the protest.
+
+“If I get this message through, can you guarantee that your father will
+take out the yacht as soon as the Dutch send word to him?”
+
+“Oh, yes. He will do that. How are you going to deliver the message?”
+
+Again her words might as well not have been spoken.
+
+“You’d better have your luggage ready for a quick start.”
+
+“Will it be soon?”
+
+“It may be.”
+
+“How shall we know?”
+
+“I will get word to you.”
+
+“Bring it?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“No; I fear not. This is good-bye.”
+
+“You’re very casual about it,” she said, aggrieved. “At least, it would
+be polite to pretend.”
+
+“What am I to pretend?”
+
+“To be sorry. Aren’t you sorry? Just a little bit?”
+
+“Yes; I’m sorry. Just a little bit—at least.”
+
+“I’m most awfully sorry myself,” she said frankly. “I shall miss you.”
+
+“As a curiosity?” he asked, smiling.
+
+“As a friend. You have been a friend to us—to me,” she amended sweetly.
+“Each time I see you, I have more the feeling that you’ve been more of
+a friend than I know.”
+
+“‘That which thy servant is,’” he quoted lightly. But beneath the
+lightness she divined a pain that she could not wholly fathom. Quite
+aware of her power, Miss Polly Brewster was now, for one of the few
+times in her life, stricken with contrition for her use of it.
+
+“And I—I haven’t been very nice,” she faltered. “I’m afraid sometimes
+I’ve been quite horrid.”
+
+“You? You’ve been ‘the glory and the dream.’ I shall be needing
+memories for a while. And when the glory has gone, at least the dream
+will remain—tethered.”
+
+“But I’m not going to be a dream alone,” she said, with wistful
+lightness. “It’s far too much like being a ghost. I’m going to be a
+friend, if you’ll let me. And I’m going to write to you, if you will
+tell me where. You won’t find it so very easy to make a mere memory of
+me. And when you come home—When _are_ you coming home?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Then you must find out, and let me know. And you must come and visit
+us at our summer place, where there’s a mountain-side that we can sit
+on, and you can pretend that our lake is the Caribbean and hate it to
+your heart’s content—”
+
+“I don’t believe I can ever quite hate the Caribbean again.”
+
+“From this view you mustn’t, anyway. I shouldn’t like that. As for our
+lake, nobody could really help loving it. So you must be sure and come,
+won’t you?”
+
+“Dreams!” he murmured.
+
+“Isn’t there room in the scientific life for dreams?”
+
+“Yes. But not for their fulfillment.”
+
+“But there will be beetles and dragon-flies on our mountain,” she went
+on, conscious of talking against time, of striving to put off the
+moment of departure. “You’ll find plenty of work there. Do you know,
+Mr. Beetle Man, you haven’t told me a thing, really, about your work,
+or a thing, really, about yourself. Is that the way to treat a friend?”
+
+“When I undertook to spread before you the true and veracious history
+of my life,” he began, striving to make his tone light, “you would none
+of it.”
+
+“Are you determined to put me off? Do you think that I wouldn’t find
+the things that are real to you interesting?”
+
+“They’re quite technical,” he said shyly.
+
+“But they are the big things to you, aren’t they? They make life for
+you?”
+
+“Oh, yes; that, of course.” It was as if he were surprised at the need
+of such a question. “I suppose I find the same excitement and adventure
+in research that other men find in politics, or war, or making money.”
+
+“Adventure?” she said, puzzled. “I shouldn’t have supposed research an
+adventurous career, exactly.”
+
+“No; not from the outside.” His hidden gaze shifted to sweep the far
+distances. His voice dropped and softened, and, when he spoke again,
+she felt vaguely and strangely that he was hardly thinking of her or
+her question, except as a part of the great wonder-world surrounding
+and enfolding their companioned remoteness.
+
+“This is my _credo_,” he said, and quoted, half under his breath:—
+
+“‘We have come in search of truth,
+Trying with uncertain key
+Door by door of mystery.
+We are reaching, through His laws,
+To the garment hem of Cause.
+As, with fingers of the blind,
+We are groping here to find
+What the hieroglyphics mean
+Of the Unseen in the seen;
+What the Thought which underlies
+Nature’s masking and disguise;
+What it is that hides beneath
+Blight and bloom and birth and death.’”
+
+
+Other men had poured poetry into Polly Brewster’s ears, and she had
+thought them vapid or priggish or affected, according as they had
+chosen this or that medium. This man was different. For all his outer
+grotesquery, the noble simplicity of the verse matched some veiled and
+hitherto but half-expressed quality within him, and dignified him. Miss
+Brewster suffered the strange but not wholly unpleasant sensation of
+feeling herself dwindle.
+
+“It’s very beautiful,” she said, with an effort. “Is it Matthew
+Arnold?”
+
+“Nearer home. You an American, and don’t know your Whittier? That
+passage from his ‘Agassiz’ comes pretty near to being what life means
+to me. Have I answered your requirements?”
+
+“Fully and finely.”
+
+She rose from the rock upon which she had been seated, and stretched
+out both hands to him. He took and held them without awkwardness or
+embarrassment. By that alone she could have known that he was suffering
+with a pain that submerged consciousness of self.
+
+“Whether I see you again or not, I’ll never forget you,” she said
+softly. “You _have_ been good to me, Mr. Perkins.”
+
+“I like the other name better,” he said.
+
+“Of course. Mr. Beetle Man.” She laughed a little tremulously. Abruptly
+she stamped a determined foot. “I’m _not_ going away without having
+seen my friend for once. Take off your glasses, Mr. Beetle Man.”
+
+“Too much radiance is bad for the microscopical eye.”
+
+“The sun is under a cloud.”
+
+“But you’re here, and you’d glow in the dark.”
+
+“No; I’m not to be put off with pretty speeches. Take them off.
+Please!”
+
+Releasing her hand, he lifted off the heavy and disfiguring apparatus,
+and stood before her, quietly submissive to her wish. She took a quick
+step backward, stumbled, and thrust out a hand against the face of the
+giant rock for support.
+
+“Oh!” she cried, and again, “Oh, I didn’t think you’d look like that!”
+
+“What is it? Is there anything very wrong with me?” he asked seriously,
+blinking a little in the soft light.
+
+“No, no. It isn’t that. I—I hardly know—I expected something different.
+Forgive me for being so—so stupid.”
+
+In truth, Miss Polly Brewster had sustained a shock. She had become
+accustomed to regard her beetle man rather more in the light of a
+beetle than a man. In fact, the human side of him had impressed her
+only as a certain dim appeal to sympathy; the masculine side had simply
+not existed. Now it was as if he had unmasked. The visage, so grotesque
+and gnomish behind its mechanical apparatus, had given place to a
+wholly different and formidably strange face. The change all centered
+in the eyes. They were wide-set eyes of the clearest, steadiest, and
+darkest gray she had ever met; and they looked out at her from sharply
+angled brows with a singular clarity and calmness of regard. In their
+light the man’s face became instinct with character in every line.
+Strength was there, self-control, dignity, a glint of humor in the
+little wrinkles at the corner of the mouth, and, withal a sort of quiet
+and sturdy beauty.
+
+She had half-turned her face from him. Now, as her gaze returned and
+was fixed by his, she felt a wave of blood expand her heart, rush
+upward into her cheeks, and press into her eyes tears of swift regret.
+But now she was sorry, not for him, but for herself, because he had
+become remote and difficult to her.
+
+“Have I startled you?” he asked curiously. “I’ll put them back on
+again.”
+
+“No, no; don’t do that!” She rallied herself to the point of laughing a
+little. “I’m a goose. You see, I’ve pictured you as quite different.
+Have you ever seen yourself in the glass with those dreadful disguises
+on?”
+
+“Why, no; I don’t suppose I have,” he replied, after reflection. “After
+all, they’re meant for use, not for ornament.”
+
+By this time she had mastered her confusion and was able to examine his
+face. Under his eyes were circles of dull gray, defined by deep lines,
+
+“Why, you’re worn out!” she cried pitifully. “Haven’t you been
+sleeping?”
+
+“Not much.”
+
+“You must take something for it.” The mothering instinct sprang to the
+rescue. “How much rest did you get last night?”
+
+“Let me see. Last night I did very well. Fully four hours.”
+
+“And that is more than you average?”
+
+“Well, yes; lately. You see, I’ve been pretty busy.”
+
+“Yet you’ve given up your time to my wretched, unimportant little
+stupid affairs! And what return have I made?”
+
+“You’ve made the sun shine,” he said, “in a rather shaded existence.”
+
+“Promise me that you’ll sleep to-night; that you won’t work a stroke.”
+
+“No; I can’t promise that.”
+
+“You’ll break down. You’ll go to pieces. What have you got to do more
+important than keeping in condition?”
+
+“As to that, I’ll last through. And there’s some business that won’t
+wait.”
+
+Divination came upon her.
+
+“Dad’s message!”
+
+“If it weren’t that, it would be something else.”
+
+Her hand went out to him, and was withdrawn.
+
+“Please put on your glasses,” she said shyly.
+
+Smiling, he did her bidding.
+
+“There! Now you are my beetle man again. No, not quite, though. You’ll
+never be quite the same beetle man again.”
+
+“I shall always be,” he contradicted gently.
+
+“Anyway, it’s better. You’re easier to say things to. Are you really
+the man who ran away from the street car?” she asked doubtfully.
+
+“I really am.”
+
+“Then I’m most surely sure that you had good reason.” She began to
+laugh softly. “As for the stories about you, I’d believe them less than
+ever, now.”
+
+“Are there stories about me?”
+
+“Gossip of the club. They call you ‘The Unspeakable Perk’!”
+
+“Not a bad nickname,” he admitted. “I expect I have been rather
+unspeakable, from their point of view.”
+
+A desire to have the faith that was in her supported by this man’s own
+word overrode her shyness.
+
+“Mr. Beetle Man,” she said, “have you got a sister?”
+
+“I? No. Why?”
+
+“If you had a sister, is there anything—Oh, _darn_ your sister!” broke
+forth the irrepressible Polly. “I’ll be your sister for this. Is there
+anything about you and your life here that you’d be afraid to tell me?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“I knew there wasn’t,” she said contentedly. She hesitated a moment,
+then put a hand on his arm. “Does this _have_ to be good-bye, Mr.
+Beetle Man?” she said wistfully.
+
+“I’m afraid so.”
+
+“No!” She stamped imperiously. “I want to see you again, and I’m going
+to see you again. Won’t you come down to the port and bring me another
+bunch of your mountain orchids when we sail—just for good-bye?”
+
+Through the dull medium of the glasses she could feel his eyes
+questioning hers. And she knew that once more before she sailed away,
+she must look into those eyes, in all their clarity and all their
+strength—and then try to forget them. The swift color ran up into her
+cheeks.
+
+“I—I suppose so,” he said. “Yes.”
+
+“Au revoir, then!” she cried, with a thrill of gladness, and fled up
+the rock.
+
+The Unspeakable Perk strode down his path, broke into a trot, and held
+to it until he reached his house. But Miss Polly, departing in her own
+direction, stopped dead after ten minutes’ going. It had struck her
+forcefully that she had forgotten the matter of the expense of the
+message. How could she reach him? She remembered the cliff above the
+rock, and the signal. If a signal was valid in one direction, it ought
+to work equally well in the other. She had her automatic with her.
+Retracing her steps, she ascended the cliff, a rugged climb. Across the
+deep-fringed chasm she could plainly see the porch of the _quinta_ with
+the little clearing at the side, dim in the clouded light. Drawing the
+revolver, she fired three shots.
+
+“He’ll come,” she thought contentedly.
+
+The sun broke from behind the obscuring cloud and sent a shaft of light
+straight down upon the clearing. It illumined with pitiless
+distinctness the shimmering silk of a woman’s dress, hanging on a line
+and waving in the first draft of the evening breeze. For a moment Polly
+stood transfixed. What did it mean? Was it perhaps a servant’s dress.
+No; he had told her that there was no woman servant.
+
+As she sought the solution, a woman’s figure emerged from the porch of
+the _quinta_, crossed the compound, and dropped upon a bench. Even at
+that distance, the watcher could tell from the woman’s bearing and
+apparel that she was not of the servant class. She seemed to be gazing
+out over the mountains; there was something dreary and forlorn in her
+attitude. What, then, did she do in the beetle man’s house?
+
+Below the rock the shrubbery weaved and thrashed, and the person who
+could best answer that question burst into view at a full lope.
+
+“What is it?” he panted. “Was it you who fired?”
+
+She stared at him mutely. The revolver hung in her hand. In a moment he
+was beside her.
+
+“Has anything happened?” he began again, then turned his head to follow
+the direction of her regard. He saw the figure in the compound.
+
+“Good God in heaven!” he groaned.
+
+He caught the revolver from her hand and fired three slow shots. The
+woman turned. Snatching off his hat, he signalled violently with it.
+The woman rose and, as it seemed to Polly Brewster, moved in humble
+submissiveness back to the shelter.
+
+White consternation was stamped on the Unspeakable Perk’s face as he
+handed the revolver to its owner.
+
+“Do you need me?” he asked quickly. “If not, I must go back at once.”
+
+“I do not need you,” said the girl, in level tones. “You lied to me.”
+
+His expression changed. She read in it the desperation of guilt.
+
+“I can explain,” he said hurriedly, “but not now. There isn’t time.
+Wait here. I’ll be back. I’ll be back the instant I can get away.”
+
+As he spoke, he was halfway down the rock, headed for the lower trail.
+The bushes closed behind him.
+
+Painfully Polly Brewster made her way down the treacherous footing of
+the cliff path to her place on the rock. From her bag she drew one of
+her cards, wrote slowly and carefully a few words, found a dry stick,
+set it between two rocks, and pinned her message to it. Then she ran,
+as helpless humans run from the scourge of their own hearts.
+
+Half an hour later the hermit, sweat-covered and breathless, returned
+to the rock. For a moment he gazed about, bewildered by the silence.
+The white card caught his eye. He read its angular scrawl.
+
+“I wish never to see you again. Never! Never! Never!”
+
+A sulphur-yellow inquisitor, of a more insinuating manner than the
+former participant in their conversation, who had been examining the
+message on his own account, flew to the top of the cliff.
+
+“Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit? Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit?” he demanded.
+
+For the first time in his adult life the beetle man threw a stone at a
+bird.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+LOS YANKIS
+
+
+Luncheon on the day following the kiskadee bird’s narrow squeak for his
+life was a dreary affair for Mr. Fitzhugh Carroll. Business had called
+Mr. Brewster away. This deprivation the Southerner would have borne
+with equanimity. But Miss Brewster had also absented herself, which was
+rather too much for the devoted, but apprehensive, lover. Thus, ample
+time was given him to consider how ill his suit was prospering. The
+longer he stayed, the less he saw of Miss Polly. That she was kinder
+and more gentle, less given to teasing him than of yore, was poor
+compensation. He was shrewd enough to draw no good augury from that.
+Something had altered her, and he was divided between suspicion of the
+last week’s mail, the arrival of which had been about contemporaneous
+with her change of spirit, and some local cause. Was a letter from
+Smith, the millionaire, or Bobby, the friend of her childhood,
+responsible? Or was the cause nearer at hand?
+
+For one preposterous moment he thought of the Unspeakable Perk. A quick
+visualization of that gnomish, froggish face was enough to dispel the
+suspicion. At least the petted and rather fastidious Miss Brewster’s
+fancy would be captured only by a gentleman, not by any such homunculus
+as the mountain dweller. Her interest, perhaps; the man possessed the
+bizarre attraction of the freakish. But anything else was absurd. And
+the knight was inclined to attaint his lady for a certain cruelty in
+the matter; she was being something less than fair to the Unspeakable
+Perk.
+
+The searchlight of his surmise ranged farther. Raimonda! The young
+Caracuñan was handsome, distinguished, manly, with a romantic charm
+that the American did not underestimate. He, at least, was a gentleman,
+and the assiduity of his attentions to the Northern beauty had become
+the joke of the clubs—except when Raimonda was present. By the same
+token, half of the gilded youth of the capital, and most of the young
+diplomats, were the sworn slaves of the girl. It was a confused field,
+indeed. Well, thank Heaven, she would soon be out of it! Word had come
+down from her that she was busy packing her things. Carroll wandered
+about the hotel, waiting for the news that would explain this
+preparation.
+
+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.”
+
+Unthinkingly, as he stretched himself out, the Unspeakable Perk pushed
+his goggles back and presently slipped them off. Thus, when Carroll,
+who had been gazing at the mist-capped peak of the mountain in front,
+turned and met his companion’s eyes, he underwent something of the same
+shock that Polly Brewster had experienced, though the nature of his
+sensation was profoundly different. But his impression of the suddenly
+revealed face was the same. Ribbed-in though his mind was with
+tradition, and distorted with falsely focused ideals and prejudices,
+Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll possessed a sound underlying judgment
+of his fellow man, and was at bottom a frank and honorable gentleman.
+In his belief, the suddenly revealed face of the man beside him came
+near to being its own guaranty of honor and good faith.
+
+“By Heavens, I don’t believe it!” he blurted out, his gaze direct upon
+the Unspeakable Perk.
+
+“What don’t you believe?”
+
+“That rotten club gossip.”
+
+“About me?”
+
+“Yes,” said Carroll, reddening.
+
+The hermit pushed his glasses down, settled into place the white
+gloves, with their soothing contents of emollient greases, and got to
+his feet.
+
+“We’d best be moving. I’ve got much to do,” he said.
+
+“Not yet,” retorted Carroll. “Perkins, is there a woman up there on the
+mountains with you?”
+
+“That is purely my own business.”
+
+“You told Miss Brewster there wasn’t. If you tell me—”
+
+“I never told her any such thing. She misunderstood.”
+
+“Who is the woman?”
+
+“If you want it even more frankly, that is none of your concern.”
+
+“You have been letting Miss Brewster—”
+
+“Are you engaged to marry Miss Brewster?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Then you have no authority to question me. But,” he added wearily, “if
+it will ease your mind, and because of what you’ve done to-day, I’ll
+tell you this—that I do not expect ever to see Miss Brewster again.”
+
+“That isn’t enough,” insisted Carroll, his face darkening. “Her name
+has already been connected with yours, and I intend to follow this
+through. I am going to find out who the woman is at your place.”
+
+“How do you propose to do it?”
+
+“By coming to see.”
+
+“You’ll be welcome,” said the other grimly. “By the way, here’s a map.”
+He made a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. “I’ll be there at
+work most of to-morrow. Au revoir.” He rose and started down the hill.
+“Better keep to yourself this evening,” he warned. “Take a dilute
+carbolic bath. You’ll be all right, I think.”
+
+Slowly and thoughtfully the Southerner made his way back to the hotel.
+After dining in his own room, he found time heavy on his hands; so,
+dispatching a note of excuse to Miss Brewster on the plea of personal
+business, he slipped out into the city. Wandering idly toward the
+hills, he presently found himself in a familiar street, and, impelled
+by human curiosity, proceeded to turn up the hill and stop opposite the
+blank door.
+
+Here he was puzzled. To go in and inquire, even if he cared to and
+could make himself understood, would perhaps involve further risk of
+infection. While he was considering, the door slowly opened, and the
+leather-skinned crone appeared. Her eyes were swollen. In her hand she
+carried a travesty of a wreath, done in whitish metal, which she had
+interwoven with her own black mantilla, the best substitute for crape
+at hand. This she undertook to hang on the door. As Carroll crossed to
+address her, a powerful, sullen-faced man, with a scarred forehead and
+the insignia of some official status, apparently civic, on his coat,
+emerged from a doorway and addressed her harshly. She raised her
+reddened eyes to him and seemed to be pleading for permission to set up
+the little tribute to her dead. There was the exchange of a few more
+words. Then, with an angry exclamation, the official snatched the
+wreath from her. Carroll’s hand fell on his shoulder. The man swung and
+saw a stranger of barely half his bulk, who addressed him in what
+seemed to be politely remonstrant tones. He shook himself loose and
+threw the wreath in the crone’s face. Then he went down like a log
+under the impact of a swinging blow behind the ear. With a roar he
+leaped up and rushed. The foreigner met him with right and left, and
+this time he lay still.
+
+Hanging the tragically unsightly wreath on the door, through which the
+terrified mourner had vanished, Carroll returned to the Gran Hotel
+Kast, his perturbed and confused thoughts and emotions notably relieved
+by that one comforting moment of action.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+THE FOLLY OF PERK
+
+
+Of the comprehensive superiority of the American Legation over the Gran
+Hotel Kast there could be no shadow of a doubt. From the moment of
+their arrival at noon of the day after the British Minister’s warning,
+the refugees found themselves comfortable and content, Miss Brewster
+having quietly and tactfully taken over the management of internal
+affairs and reigning, at Sherwen’s request, as generalissima. No
+disturbance had marked the transfer to their new abode. In fact, so
+wholly lacking was any evidence of hostility to the foreigners on the
+part of the crowds on the streets that the Brewsters rather felt
+themselves to be extorting hospitality on false pretenses. Sherwen,
+however, exhibited signal relief upon seeing them safely housed.
+
+“Please stay that way, too,” he requested.
+
+“But it seems so unnecessary, and I want to market,” protested Miss
+Polly.
+
+“By no means! The market is the last place where any of us should be
+seen. It is in that section that Urgante has been doing his work.”
+
+“Who is he?”
+
+“A wandering demagogue and cheap politician. Abuse of the ‘Yankis’ is
+his stock in trade. Somebody has been furnishing him money lately.
+That’s the sole fuel to his fires of oratory.”
+
+“Bet the bills smelled of sauerkraut when they reached him,” grunted
+Cluff, striding over to the window of the drawing-room, where the
+informal conference was being held.
+
+“They may have had a Hochwaldian origin,” admitted Sherwen. “But it
+would be difficult to prove.”
+
+“At least the Hochwald Legation wouldn’t shed any tears over a
+demonstration against us,” said Carroll.
+
+“Well within the limits of diplomatic truth,” smiled the American
+official.
+
+“Pooh!” Mr. Brewster puffed the whole matter out of consideration. “I
+don’t believe a word of it. Some of my acquaintances at the club, men
+in high governmental positions, assure me that there is no
+anti-American feeling here.”
+
+“Very likely they do. Frankness and plain-speaking being, as you
+doubtless know, the distinguishing mark of the Caracuñan statesman.”
+
+The sarcasm was not lost upon Mr. Brewster, but it failed to shake his
+skepticism.
+
+“There are some business matters that require that I should go to the
+office of the Ferro carril del Norte this afternoon,” he said.
+
+“I beg that you do nothing of the sort,” cried Sherwen sharply.
+
+The magnate hesitated. He glanced out of the window and along the
+street, close bounded by blank-walled houses, each with its eyes closed
+against the sun. A solitary figure strode rapidly across it.
+
+“There’s that bug-hunting fellow again,” said Mr. Brewster. “He’s an
+American, I guess,—God save the mark! Nobody seems to be interfering
+with _him_, and he’s freaky enough looking to start a riot on
+Broadway.”
+
+Further comment was checked by the voice of the scientist at the door,
+asking to see Mr. Sherwen at once. Miss Polly immediately slipped out
+of the room to the _patio_, followed by Carroll and Cluff.
+
+“My business, probably,” remarked Mr. Brewster. “I’ll just stay and
+see.” And he stayed.
+
+So far as the newcomer was concerned, however, he might as well not
+have been there; so he felt, with unwonted injury. The scientist,
+disregarding him wholly, shook hands with Sherwen.
+
+“Have you heard from Wisner yet?”
+
+“Yes. An hour ago.”
+
+“What was his message?”
+
+“All right, any time to-day.”
+
+“Good! Better get them down to-night, then, so they can start to-morrow
+morning.”
+
+“Will Stark pass them?”
+
+“Under restrictions. That’s all been seen to.”
+
+At this point it appeared to Mr. Brewster that he had figured as a
+cipher quite long enough.
+
+“Am I right in assuming that you are talking of my party’s departure?”
+he inquired.
+
+“Yes,” said Sherwen. “The Dutch will let you through the blockade.”
+
+“Then my cablegram reached the proper parties at Washington,” said the
+magnate, with an I-knew-it-would-be-that-way air.
+
+“Thanks to Mr. Perkins.”
+
+“Of course, of course. That will be—er—suitably attended to later.”
+
+The Unspeakable Perk turned and regarded him fixedly; but, owing to the
+goggles, the expression was indeterminable.
+
+“The fact is it would be more convenient for me to go day after
+to-morrow than to-morrow.”
+
+“Then you’d better rent a house,” was the begoggled one’s sharp and
+brief advice.
+
+“Why so?” queried the great man, startled.
+
+“Because if you don’t get out to-morrow, you may not get out for
+months.”
+
+“As I understand the Dutch permit, it specifies _after_ to-day.”
+
+“It isn’t a question of the Dutch. Caracuña City goes under quarantine
+to-night, and Puerto del Norte to-morrow, as soon as proper official
+notification can be given.”
+
+“Then plague has actually been found?”
+
+“Determined by bacteriological test this morning.”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“I was present at the finding.”
+
+“Who did it? Dr. Pruyn?”
+
+The other nodded.
+
+Sherwen whistled.
+
+“Better make ready to move, Mr. Brewster,” he advised. “You can’t get
+out of port after quarantine is on. At least, you couldn’t get into any
+other port, even if you sailed, because your sailing-master wouldn’t
+have clearance papers.”
+
+The magnate smiled.
+
+“I hardly think that any United States Consul, with a due regard for
+his future, would refuse papers to the yacht Polly,” he observed.
+
+“Don’t be a fool!”
+
+Thatcher Brewster all but jumped from his chair. That this adjuration
+should have come from the freakish spectacle-wearer seemed impossible.
+Yet Sherwen, the only other person in the room, was certainly not
+guilty.
+
+“Did you address me, young man?”
+
+“I did.”
+
+“Do you know, sir, that since boyhood no person has dared or would dare
+to call me a fool?”
+
+“Well, I don’t want to set a fashion,” said the other equably. “I’m
+only advising you not to be.”
+
+“Keep your advice until it’s wanted.”
+
+“If it were a question of you alone, I would. But there are others to
+be considered. Now, listen, Mr. Brewster: Wisner and Stark wouldn’t let
+you through that quarantine, after it’s declared, if you were the
+Secretary himself. A point is being stretched in giving you this
+chance. If you’ll agree to ship a doctor,—Stark will find you one,—stay
+out for six full days before touching anywhere, and, if plague
+develops, make at once for any detention station specified by the
+doctor, you can go. Those are Stark’s conditions.”
+
+“Damnable nonsense!” declared Mr. Brewster, jumping to his feet, quite
+red in the face.
+
+“Let me warn you, Mr. Brewster,” put in Sherwen, with quiet force,
+“that you are taking a most unwise course. I am advised that Mr.
+Perkins is acting under instructions from our consulate.”
+
+“You say that Dr. Pruyn is here. I want to see him before—”
+
+“How can you see him? Nobody knows where he is keeping himself. I
+haven’t seen him yet myself. Now, Mr. Brewster, just sit down and talk
+this over reasonably with Mr. Perkins.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said the third conferee positively; “I’ve no time for
+argument. At six o’clock I’ll be back here. Unless you decide by then,
+I’ll telephone the consulate that the whole thing is off.”
+
+“Of all the impudent, conceited, self-important young whippersnappers!”
+fumed Mr. Brewster. But he found that he had no audience, as Sherwen
+had followed the scientist out of the room.
+
+Before the afternoon was over, the American concessionnaire had come to
+realize that the situation was less assured than he had thought. Twice
+the British Minister had come, and there had been calls from the
+representatives of several other nationalities. Von Plaanden, in full
+uniform and girt with the short saber that is the special and
+privileged arm of the crack cavalry regiment to which he belonged at
+home, had dismounted to deliver personally a huge bouquet for Miss
+Brewster, from the garden of the Hochwald Legation, not even asking to
+see the girl, but merely leaving the flowers as a further expression of
+his almost daily apology, and riding on to an official review at the
+military park.
+
+He had spoken vaguely to Sherwen of a restless condition of the local
+mind. Reports, it appeared, had been set afloat among the populace to
+the effect that an American sanitary officer had been bribed by the
+enemies of Caracuña to declare plague prevalent, in order to close the
+ports and strangle commerce. Urgante was going about the lower part of
+the city haranguing on street corners without interference from the
+police. In the arroyo of the slaughter-house, two American employees of
+the street-car company had been stoned and beaten. Much _aguardiente_
+was in process of consumption, it being a half-holiday in honor of some
+saint, and nobody knew what trouble might break out.
+
+“_Bolas_ are rolling around like balls on a billiard table,” said young
+Raimonda, who had come after luncheon to call on Miss Brewster. “In
+this part of the city there will be nothing. You needn’t be alarmed.”
+
+“I’m not afraid,” said Miss Polly.
+
+“I’m sure of it,” declared the Caracuñan, with admiration. “You are
+very wonderful, you American women.”
+
+“Oh, no. It’s only that we love excitement,” she laughed.
+
+“Ah, that is all very well, for a bull-fight or ‘_la boxe_.’ But for
+one of our street _émeutes_—no; too much!”
+
+They were seated on the roof of the half-story of the house, which had
+been made into a trellised porch overlooking the _patio_ in the rear
+and the street in front, an architectural wonder in that city of dead
+walls flush with the sidewalk line all the way up. Leaning over the
+rail, the visitor pointed through the leaves of a small _gallito_ tree
+to a broad-fronted building almost opposite.
+
+“That is my club. You have other friends there who would do anything
+for you, as I would, so gladly,” he added wistfully. “Will you honor me
+by accepting this little whistle? It is my hunting-whistle. And if
+there should be anything—but I think there will not—you will blow it,
+and there will be plenty to answer. If not, you will keep it, please,
+to remember one who will not forget you.”
+
+Handsome and elegant and courtly he was, a true chevalier of
+adventurous pioneering stock, sprung from the old proud Spanish blood,
+but there stole behind the girl’s vision, as she bade him farewell, the
+undesired phantasm of a very different face, weary and lined and
+lighted by steadfast gray eyes—eyes that looked truthful and belonged
+to a liar! Miss Polly Brewster resumed her final packing in a fume of
+rage at herself.
+
+All hands among the visitors passed the afternoon dully. Mr. Brewster,
+who had finally yielded to persuasion and decided not to venture out,
+though still deriding the restriction as the merest nonsense, was in a
+mood of restless silence, which his irrepressible daughter described to
+Fitzhugh Carroll as “the superior sulks.”
+
+Carroll himself kept pretty much aloof. He had the air of a man who
+wrestles with a problem. Cluff fussed and fretted and privately cursed
+the country and all its concessions. Between calls and the telephone,
+Sherwen was kept constantly busy. But a few minutes before six,
+central, in the blandest Spanish, regretted to inform him that Puerto
+del Norte was cut off. When would service be resumed? _Quién sabe?_ It
+was an order. _Hasta mañana_. To-morrow, perhaps. Smoothing a furrow
+from his brow, the sight of which would have done nobody any good, he
+suggested that they all gather on the roof porch for a swizzle. The
+suggestion was hailed with enthusiasm.
+
+Thus, when the Unspeakable Perk came hustling down the street some
+minutes earlier than the appointed time, he was hailed in Sherwen’s
+voice, and bidden to come directly up. No time, on this occasion, for
+Miss Polly to escape. She decided in one breath to ignore the man
+entirely; in the next to bow coldly and walk out; in the next to—He was
+there before the latest wavering decision could be formulated.
+
+“Better all get inside,” he said a little breathlessly. “There may be
+trouble.”
+
+Cluff brightened perceptibly.
+
+“What kind of trouble?”
+
+“Urgante is leading a mob up this way. They’re turning the corner now.”
+
+“I’m going to wait and see them,” cried Miss Polly, with decision.
+
+“Bend over, then, all of you,” ordered Sherwen. “The vines will cover
+you if you keep down.”
+
+Around the corner, up the hill from where they were, streamed a rabble
+of boys, leaping and whooping, and after them a more compact crowd of
+men, shoeless, centering on a tall, broad, heavy-mustached fellow who
+bore on a short staff the Stars and Stripes.
+
+“Where on earth did he get that?” cried Sherwen.
+
+“Looted the Bazaar Americana,” replied Perkins.
+
+“That’s Urgante,” growled Cluff; “that devil with the flag.”
+
+“But he seems to be eulogizing it,” cried the girl.
+
+The orator had set down his bright burden, wedging it in the iron guard
+railing of a tree, and was now apostrophizing it with extravagant bows
+and honeyed accents in which there was an undertone of hiss. For
+confirmation, Miss Polly turned to the others. The first face her eyes
+fell on was that of the ball-player. Every muscle in it was drawn, and
+from the tightened lips streamed such whispered curses as the girl
+never before had heard. Next him stood the hermit, solid and still, but
+with a queer spreading pallor under his tan. In front of them Sherwen
+was crouched, scowlingly alert. The expression of Mr. Brewster and
+Carroll, neither of whom understood Spanish, betokened watchful
+puzzlement.
+
+Enlightenment burst upon them the next minute. From the motley crowd
+below rose a snarl of laughter and savage jeering, the object of which
+was unmistakable.
+
+“By G—d!” cried Mr. Brewster, straightening up and grasping the
+railing. “They’re insulting the flag!”
+
+“I’ve left my pistol!” muttered Carroll, white-lipped. “I’ve left my
+pistol!”
+
+Polly Brewster’s hand flew to her belt.
+
+She drew out the automatic and held it toward the Southerner. But it
+was not Carroll’s hand that met hers; it was the Unspeakable Perk’s.
+
+“No,” said he, and he flung the weapon back of him into the _patio_.
+
+“Oh! Oh!” cried the girl. “You unspeakable coward!”
+
+Carroll jumped forward, but Sherwen was equally quick. He interposed
+his slight frame.
+
+“Perkins is right,” he said decisively. “No shooting. It would be worth
+the life of every one here. We’ve got to stand it. But somebody is
+going to sweat blood for this day’s work!”
+
+The instinct of discipline, characteristic of the professional athlete,
+brought Cluff to his support.
+
+“What Mr. Sherwen says, goes,” he said, almost choking on the words.
+“We’ve got to stand it.”
+
+In the breast of Miss Polly Brewster was no response to this spirit.
+She was lawless with the lawlessness of unconquered youth and beauty.
+
+“Oh!” she breathed “If I had my pistol back, I’d shoot that _beast_
+myself!”
+
+The scientist turned his goggles hesitantly upon her.
+
+“Miss Brewster,” he began, “please don’t think—”
+
+“Don’t speak to me!” she cried.
+
+Another clamor of derision sounded from the street as Urgante resumed
+the standard of his mockery and led his rabble forward. Behind the
+dull-colored mass appeared a spot of splendor. It was Von Plaanden,
+gorgeous in his full regalia, who had turned the corner, returning from
+the public reception. Well back of the mob, he pulled his horse up, and
+sat watching. The coincidence was unfortunate. It seemed to justify
+Sherwen’s bitter words:—
+
+“Come to _visa_ his work. There’s the Hochwaldian for you!”
+
+Forward danced and reeled the “Yanki” baiters below, until they were
+under the balcony where the little group of Americans sheltered and
+raged silently. There the orator again spewed forth his contempt upon
+the alien banner, and again the ranks behind him shrieked their
+approval of the affront. Miss Polly Brewster, American of Americans,
+whose great-grandfathers had fought with Herkimer and
+Steuben,—themselves the sons of women who had stood by the loopholes of
+log houses and caught up the rifles of their fallen pioneer husbands,
+wherewith to return the fire of the besieging Mohawks,—ran forward to
+the railing, snatching her skirt from the detaining grasp of her
+father. In the corner stood a huge bowl of roses. Gathering both hands
+full, she leaned forward and flung them, so that they fell in a shower
+of loveliness upon the insulted flag of her nation.
+
+For an instant silence fell upon the “great unwashed” below. Out of it
+swelled a muttering as the leader made a low, mocking obeisance to the
+girl, following it with a word that brought a jubilant yelp from his
+adherents. Stooping, he ladled up in his cupped hand a quantity of
+gutter filth. Where the flowers had but a moment before fluttered in
+the folds, he splotched it, smearing star, bar, and blue with its
+blackness. At the sight, the girl burst into helpless tears, and so
+stood weeping, openly, bitterly, and unashamed.
+
+No brain is so well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but
+that under sudden pressure—click!—the mechanism slips a cog and runs
+amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk’s
+smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag’s
+desecration and his lady’s grief. To her it seemed that he shot past
+her horizontally like a human dart. The next second he was over the
+railing, had swung from a branch of the neighboring tree to the trunk,
+and leaped to the ground, all in one movement of superhuman agility. To
+the mob his exploit was apparently without immediate significance.
+Perhaps they didn’t notice the descent; or perhaps those few who saw
+were so astonished at the apparition of a chunky tree-man with
+protuberant eyes scrambling down upon them in the manner of an ape,
+that they failed to appreciate what it might portend of trouble.
+
+The hermit landed solidly on his feet a few yards from Urgante, the
+flag bearer. With a berserker yell, he rushed. Taken by surprise, the
+assailed one still had time to lift the heavy staff. As quickly, the
+American lowered his head and dove. It may not have been magnificent;
+it certainly was not war by the rules; but it was eminently effective.
+To say that the leader went down would be absurdly inadequate. He
+simply crumpled. Over and over he rolled on the cobbles, while the
+smirched flag flew clear of his grasp, and fell on the farther
+sidewalk.
+
+“Wow!” yelled Cluff, leaping into the air. “Football! That cost him a
+couple of ribs. Hey, Rube!”
+
+And he rushed for the stairs, followed by Carroll, Sherwen, and, only
+one jump behind, Mr. Thatcher Brewster, cursing in a manner that did
+credit to his patriotism, but would have added no luster to his record
+as an elder of the Pioneer Presbyterian Church, of Utica, New York.
+
+Meantime, the Unspeakable Perk, having rolled free of the fallen enemy,
+staggered to his feet and caught up the flag. Stunned surprise on the
+part of the crowd gave him an instant’s time. He edged along the curb,
+hoping to gain the legation door by a rush. But the foe threw out a
+wing, cutting him off. Several eager followers had lifted Urgante,
+whose groans and curses suggested a sound basis for Cluff’s diagnosis.
+Himself quite _hors de combat_, he spat at the Unspeakable Perk, and
+cried upon his henchmen to kill the “Yanki.” It seemed not improbable
+to the latter that they would do it. Perkins set his back to the wall,
+twirled the flag folds tight around the pole, reversed and clubbed the
+staff, and prepared to make any attempt at killing as uncomfortable and
+unprofitable as possible. The rabble, by no means favorably impressed
+by these businesslike proceedings, stood back, growling.
+
+A hand flew up above the crowd. The Unspeakable Perk ducked sharply and
+just in time, as a knife struck the wall above him and clattered to the
+pavement. Instantly he caught it up, but the blade had snapped off
+short. As he stooped, one bold spirit rushed in. Perkins met him with a
+straight lance-thrust of the staff, which sent him reeling and
+shrieking with pain back to his fellows. But now another knife, and
+another, struck and fell from the wall at his back; badly aimed both,
+but presumably the forerunners of missiles, some of which would show
+better marksmanship. The assailed man cast a swift, desperate look
+about him; the crowd closed in a little. Obviously he must keep “eyes
+front.”
+
+“To your left! To your left!” The voice came to him clear and sweet
+above the swelling growl of the rabble. “The doorway! Get into the
+doorway, Mr. Beetle Man.”
+
+A few paces away, how far Perkins could only guess, was the entrance to
+the house. He surmised that, like many of the better-class houses, it
+had a small set-in door, at right angles to the main entrance, that
+would serve as a shallow shelter. Without raising his eyes, he nodded
+comprehension, and began to edge along the wall, swinging his stout
+weapon. As he went, he wondered what was keeping the others. At that
+moment the others were frantically wrestling with the all-too-adequate
+bars with which Sherwen had reinforced the wide door.
+
+Perkins, feeling with a cautious heel, found himself opposite the entry
+indicated by the voice. Turning, he darted into the narrow embrasure.
+Here he was comparatively safe from the missiles that were now coming
+from all directions. On the other hand, he now lacked room to swing his
+formidable club. The peons, with a shout, closed in to arm’s length.
+Alone on her balcony, the girl turned her head away and cried aloud,
+hopelessly, for help. She wanted to close her ears against the bestial
+shouts of a mob trampling to death a defenseless man, but her arms were
+of lead. She listened and shivered.
+
+Instead of the sound that she dreaded there came the ringing of hoofs
+on stones, followed by yells of alarm. She opened her eyes to see Von
+Plaanden, bent forward in his saddle at the exact angle proper to the
+charge, urging his great horse down upon the mass of people as
+ruthlessly as if they had been so many insects. Through the circle he
+broke, swinging his mount around beside the shallow doorway before
+which three Caracuñans already lay sprawled, attesting the vigor of the
+defender’s final resistance. Back of the horseman lay half a dozen
+other figures. The Hochwaldian jerked out his sword and stood, a
+splendid spectacle. Very possibly he was not wholly unmindful of his
+own pictorial quality or of the lovely American witness thereto.
+
+His intervention gave a few seconds’ respite, one of those checks that
+save battles and make history. Now, in the further making of this
+particular history, sounded a lusty whoop from the opposite direction;
+such a battle slogan as only the Anglo-Saxon gives. It emanated from
+Galpy the bounder, bounding now, indeed, at full speed up the slope,
+followed by two of his fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and still
+perspiring from their afternoon’s cricket. Against bare legs a cricket
+bat is a highly dissuasive argument. The Britons swung low and hard for
+the ancient right of the breed to break into a row wherever white men
+are in the minority against other races. The downhill wing of the mob
+being much the weakest, opened up for them with little resistance,
+leaving them a free path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins, with
+staff ready brandished, had advanced from his shelter.
+
+“Wot’s the merry game?” inquired the cockney cheerfully.
+
+Before them the crowd swayed and parted, and there appeared, lifted by
+many arms, a figure with a dead-white face streaked with blood, running
+from a great gash in the scalp.
+
+“He went down in front of my horse,” explained the Hochwald secretary
+coolly.
+
+At the sight, there rose from the crowd a wailing cry, quite different
+from its former voice. Galpy’s teeth set and his cricket bat went up in
+the air.
+
+“There’ll be killing for this,” he said. “I know these blightehs. That
+yell means blood. We must make a bolt for it. Is this all there is of
+us?”
+
+At the moment of his asking, it was. One half a second later, it
+wasn’t, as the last of the legation’s stubborn bars yielded, the door
+burst open, and the four Americans tumbled out at the charge, Cluff
+yelling insanely, Carroll in deadly quiet, Sherwen alertly scanning the
+adversaries for identifiable faces, and Elder Brewster still imperiling
+his soul by the fervor of his language. Each was armed with such casual
+weapons as he had been able to catch up. Carroll, a leap in advance of
+the rest, encountered an Indian drover, half-dodged a swinging blow
+from his whip, and sent him down with a broken shoulder from a chop
+with a baseball club that he had found in the hallway. A bull-like
+charge had carried Cluff deep among the Caracuñans, where he
+encountered a huge peon, whom he seized and flung bodily over the iron
+guard of a _samon_ tree, where the man hung, yelling dismally. Two
+other peons, who had seized the athlete around the knees, were all but
+brained by a stoneware gin bottle in the hands of Sherwen. Meanwhile,
+Mr. Brewster was performing prodigies with a niblick which he had
+extracted, at full run, from a bag opportunely resting against the
+hat-rack. Almost before they knew it, the rescue party had broken the
+intercepting wing of the mob, and had joined the others.
+
+Cluff threw a gorilla-like arm across the Unspeakable Perk’s shoulder,
+
+“Hurt, boy?” he cried anxiously.
+
+“No, I’m all right. Who’s left with Miss Brewster?”
+
+“Nobody. We must get back.”
+
+Sherwen’s cool voice cut in:—
+
+“Close together, now. Keep well up. Herr von Plaanden, will you cover
+us at the end?”
+
+“It is the post of honor,” said the Hochwaldian.
+
+“You’ve earned it. But for you, they’d have got our colors.”
+
+The foreigner bowed, and swung his horse toward a Caracuñan who had
+pressed forward a little too near. But, for the moment the fight had
+oozed out of the mob.
+
+Without mishap the group got across the street, Perkins still clinging
+to the flag.
+
+Suddenly, from the rear rank, came a shower of stones, followed by the
+final rush. Galpy and Perkins went down. Von Plaanden tottered in his
+saddle, but quickly recovered. Instantly Perkins was up again, the
+blood streaming from the side of his head. He was conscious of brown
+hands clutching at the cricketer, to drag him away. He himself seized
+the cockney’s legs and braced for that absurd and deadly tug of war.
+Then Von Plaanden’s saber descended, and he was able to haul Galpy back
+into safety.
+
+The situation was desperate now. Mr. Brewster was pinned against the
+wall and disarmed, but still fighting with fist and foot. Half a dozen
+peons were struggling with Cluff across the bodies of as many more whom
+he had knocked down. Sherwen, almost under the cavalryman’s mount, was
+protecting his rear with the fallen Galpy’s cricket bat, and the two
+other cricketers were fighting back to back on the other side. Carroll
+was clubbing his way toward Mr. Brewster, but his weapon was now in his
+left hand. Matters looked dark indeed, when there shrilled fiercely
+from above them the whirring peal of a silver whistle.
+
+Polly Brewster had remembered Raimonda. It seemed a futile signal, for
+as she ran to the railing and gazed across at the Club Amicitia, she
+saw all its windows and doors tight closed, as befits an aristocratic
+club that has no concern with the affairs of the rabble. But there is
+no way of closing a _patio_ from the top, and sounds can enter readily
+that way, when all other apertures are shut. Long and loud Miss Polly
+blew the signal on the silver hunting-whistle.
+
+In the club _patio_, Raimonda was chafing and wondering, and a score of
+his friends were drinking and waiting. That signal released their
+activities and terminated the battle of the American Legation most
+ingloriously for the forces of Urgante. For the gilded youth of
+Caracuña bears a heavy cane of fashion, and carries a ready revolver,
+also, although not so admittedly as a matter of fashion. Furthermore,
+he has a profound contempt for the peon class; a contempt extending to
+life and limb. Therefore, when some two dozen young patricians sallied
+abruptly forth with their canes, and the mob caught sight, here and
+there, of a glint of nickel against the black, it gave back promptly.
+Some desultory stones rattled against the walls. There were answering
+reports a few, and sundry yells of pain. The army of Urgante broke and
+fled down the side streets, leaving behind its broken and its wounded.
+Most of the bullet casualties were below the knee. The Caracuñan
+aristocrat always fires low—the first time.
+
+Shortly thereafter, Miss Polly Brewster appeared upon the balcony of
+the American Legation, and performed an illegal act. Upon a day not
+designated as a Caracuñan national holiday, she raised the flag of an
+alien nation and fixed it, and the gilded youth of Caracuña in the
+street below cheered, not the flag, which would have been unpatriotic,
+but the flag-raiser, which was but gallant, until they were hoarse and
+parched of throat.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+PRESTO CHANGE
+
+
+After the battle, Miss Brewster reviewed her troops, and took stock of
+casualties, in the _patio_. None of the allied forces had come off
+scatheless. Galpy, whose injuries had at first seemed the most severe,
+responded to a stiff dose of brandy. A cut across the scientist’s head
+had been hastily bandaged in a towel, giving him, as he observed, the
+appearance of a dissipated Hindu. To Von Plaanden’s indignant disgust,
+his military splendor was seriously impaired by a huge “hickey” over
+his left eye, the memento of a well-aimed rock. Cluff had broken a
+finger and sprained his wrist. Mr. Brewster was anxious to know if any
+one had seen two teeth of his on the pavement or whether he was to look
+for later digestive indications of their whereabouts. Both of the young
+cricketers had been battered and bruised, though it was nothing, they
+gleefully averred, to what they had meted out. And Carroll had a
+nasty-looking knife-thrust in his shoulder.
+
+All of them were disheveled, dilapidated, and grimy to the last degree,
+except the Hochwaldian, who still sat his horse, which he had ridden
+into the _patio_. But Miss Polly said to herself, with a thrill of
+pride, that no woman need wish a more gallant and devoted band of
+defenders. Leaning over them from the inner railing of the balcony, she
+surveyed them with sparkling eyes.
+
+“It was magnificent!” she cried. “Oh, I’m so proud of you all! I could
+hug you, every one!”
+
+“Better come down from there, Polly,” said her father anxiously. “Some
+of those ruffians might come back.”
+
+“Not to-day,” said Sherwen grimly. “They’ve had enough.”
+
+“That is correct,” confirmed Von Plaanden. “Nevertheless, there may be
+disorder later. Would it not be better that you go to the British
+Legation, Fräulein?”
+
+“Not I!” she returned. “I stay by my colors. And now I’m going to
+disband my army.”
+
+Stretching out her hand to a vase near her, she drew out a rose of
+deepest red and held it above Von Plaanden.
+
+“The color of my country,” said Von Plaanden gravely. “May I take it
+for a sign that I am forgiven?”
+
+“Fully, freely, and gladly,” said the girl. “You have put a debt upon
+us all that I—that we can never repay.”
+
+“It is I who pay. You will not think of me too hardly, for my one
+breach?”
+
+“I shall think of you as a hero,” said the girl impetuously. “And I
+shall never forget. Catch, O knight.”
+
+The rose fell, and was caught. Von Plaanden bowed low over it. Then he
+straightened to the military salute, and so rode out of the door and
+out of the girl’s life.
+
+“Men are strange creatures,” mused the philosopher of twenty. “You
+think they are perfectly horrid, and suddenly they show their other
+side to you, and you think they are perfectly splendid. I wish I knew a
+little more about real people.”
+
+She confessed to no more specific thought, but as she descended the
+stairs to bid farewell to the blushing and deprecatory Britons, she was
+eager to have it over with, and to come to speech with her beetle man,
+who had so strangely flamed into action. The Unspeakable Perk! As the
+name formed on her lips, she smiled tenderly. With sad lack of logic,
+she was ready to discard every suspicion of him that she had harbored,
+merely on the strength of his reckless outbreak of patriotism. She
+looked about the _patio_, but he was not there. Sherwen came out of a
+side door, his face puckered with anxiety.
+
+“Where is Mr. Perkins?” she asked.
+
+“In there.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “Your father is with him.
+Perhaps you’d better go in.”
+
+With a chill at her heart, Polly entered the room, where Mr. Brewster
+bent a troubled face over a head swathed in reddened bandages.
+
+Very crumpled and limp looked the Unspeakable Perk, bunched humpily
+upon the little sofa. His goggles had fallen off, and lay on the floor
+beside him, contriving somehow to look momentously solemn and important
+all by themselves. His face was turned half away, and, as Polly’s gaze
+fell upon it, she felt again that queer catch at her heart.
+
+“Wouldn’t know it was the same chap, would you?” whispered Mr.
+Brewster.
+
+The girl picked up the grotesque spectacles, cradling them for an
+instant in her hands before she put them aside and leaned over the
+quiet form.
+
+“Came staggering in, and just collapsed down there,” continued her
+father huskily. “Lord, I wouldn’t lose that boy after this for a
+million dollars!”
+
+“Why do you talk that way?” she demanded sharply. “What has happened?
+Did he faint?”
+
+“Just collapsed. When I tried to rouse him, he kicked me in the chest,”
+replied the magnate, with somber seriousness.
+
+“Oh, you goose of a dad!” There was a tremulous note in Polly’s low
+laughter. “That’s all right, then. Can’t you see he’s dead for sleep,
+poor beetle man?”
+
+“Do you think so?” said Mr. Brewster, vastly relieved. “Hadn’t I better
+go out for a doctor, and make sure?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Let him rest. Hand me that pillow, please, dad.”
+
+With soft little pushes and wedges she worked it under the scientist’s
+head. “What a dreadful botch of bandaging! He looks so pale! I wonder
+if I couldn’t get those cloths off. Lend me your knife, dad.”
+
+Gently as she worked, the head on the pillow began to sway, and the
+lips to move.
+
+“Oh, let me alone!” they muttered querulously.
+
+The eyes opened. The Unspeakable Perk gazed up into the faces above
+him, but saw only one, a face whose tender concern softened it to a
+loveliness greater even than when he had last seen it. He tried to
+rise, but the hands that pressed him back were firm and quick.
+
+“Lie still!” bade their owner.
+
+A thin film of color mounted to his cheeks.
+
+“I—I—beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I—I—d-didn’t know—”
+
+“Don’t be a goose!” she adjured him. “It’s only me.”
+
+“Yes, that’s the trouble.” He closed his eyes again, and began to
+murmur.
+
+“What does he say?” asked Mr. Brewster, lowering his head and almost
+falling over backward as his astonished ears were greeted by the slowly
+intoned rhythm:—
+
+“Scarab, tarantula, doodle-bug, flea.”
+
+
+“Delirious!” exclaimed the magnate. “Clean off his head! How does one
+find a doctor in this town?”
+
+“No need, dad,” his daughter reassured him. “It’s just a—a sort of
+game.”
+
+“Game! Did you hear what he said?”
+
+“Well, a kind of password. It’s all right, Dad. It is, really.”
+
+Still undecided, Mr. Brewster stared at the injured man.
+
+“I don’t know—” he began, when the eyes opened again.
+
+“Feeling better?” inquired Polly briskly.
+
+“Yes. The charm works perfectly.”
+
+“Anything I can do, or get, for you, my boy?” inquired Mr. Brewster,
+stepping forward.
+
+“What’s in the ice-box?” asked the other anxiously.
+
+“Oh!” cried the girl in distress. “He’s starving! When did you eat
+last?”
+
+“I can’t exactly remember. It was about five this morning, I think. A
+banana, and, as I recall it, a small one.”
+
+“Dad!” cried the girl, but that prompt and efficient gentleman was
+already halfway to the cook, dragging Sherwen along as interpreter.
+
+“He’ll get whatever there is in the shortest known time,” the girl
+assured her patient. “Trust dad. Now, you lie back and let me fix up a
+fresh bandage.”
+
+“You’d have made a great trained nurse,” he murmured, as she adjusted
+the clean strips that Sherwen had sent in. “Don’t pin my ear down. It’s
+got to help hold my goggles on.”
+
+“The dear funny goggles!” Picking them up, she patted them with dainty
+fingers, before setting them aside. He watched her uneasily, much in
+the manner of a dog whose bone has been taken away.
+
+“Do you mind giving them back?” he said.
+
+“But you’re not going to wear them here,” she protested.
+
+“I’ve got so used to them,” he explained apologetically, “that I don’t
+feel really dressed without them.”
+
+She handed them back and he adjusted them to the bandages. “For the
+present, rest is prescribed you know,” said she.
+
+“Oh, no!” he declared. “As soon as I’ve had something to eat, I’ll go.
+There are a hundred things to be done. Where are my gloves?”
+
+“What gloves? Oh, those white abominations? Why on earth do you wear
+them?” Her glance fell upon his right hand, which lay half-open beside
+him. “Oh—oh—oh!” she cried in a rising scale of distress. “What have
+you done to your hands?”
+
+He reddened perceptibly.
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“Nothing, indeed! Tell me at once!”
+
+“I’ve been rowing.”
+
+“Where to?”
+
+“Oh, out to a ship.”
+
+“There aren’t any ships, except the Dutch warship. Was it to her?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“To carry our message—_my_ message?”
+
+He squirmed.
+
+“I’m awfully sleepy,” he protested. “It isn’t fair to cross-examine a
+witness—”
+
+“When was it?” his ruthless interrogator broke in.
+
+“Night before last.”
+
+“How far?”
+
+“How can I tell? Not far. A few miles.”
+
+“And back. And it took you all night,” she accused.
+
+“What if it did?” he cried peevishly. “A man’s got to have some relief
+from work, hasn’t he? It was livelier than sitting all night with one’s
+eye glued to a microscope barrel!”
+
+“Oh, beetle man, beetle man! I don’t know about you at all. What kind
+of a strange queer creature are you? Have you wings, Mr. Beetle Man?”
+
+Suddenly she bent over and laid her soft lips upon the scarified palm.
+The Unspeakable Perk sat up, with a half-cry.
+
+“Now the other one,” said the girl. Her face was a mantle of
+rose-color, but her eyes shone.
+
+“I won’t! You shan’t!”
+
+“The other one!” she commanded imperiously.
+
+“Please, Miss Brewster—”
+
+A noise at the door saved him. There stood Thatcher Brewster, magnate,
+multi-millionaire, and master of men, a huge tray in his hands.
+
+“Beefsteak, fried potatoes, alligator pear, fresh bread, _real_ butter,
+coffee, _and_ cake,” he proclaimed jovially. “Not to mention a
+cocktail, which I compounded with my own skilled hands. Are you ready,
+my boy? Go!”
+
+The Unspeakable Perk leaped from his couch.
+
+“Food!” he cried. “Real American food! The perfume of it is a square
+meal.”
+
+“You’re much gladder to see it than you were me,” pouted Miss Polly.
+
+“I’m not half as afraid of it,” he admitted. “Mr. Brewster, your
+health.”
+
+“Here’s to you, my boy. Now I’ll leave you with your nurse, and make my
+final arrangements. We’re off by special in the morning.”
+
+“That’s fine!” said the scientist.
+
+But Miss Polly Brewster caught the turn of his head in her direction,
+and saw that his fork had slackened in his hand. Something tightened
+around her heart.
+
+As he went, her father considered her for a moment, and wondered. Never
+before had he seen such a look in her eyes as that which she had turned
+on the queer, vivid stranger so busily engaged at the tray. Polly, and
+this obscure scientist! After the kind of men whom the girl had known,
+enslaved, and eluded! Absurd! Yet if it were to be—Mr. Brewster
+reviewed the events of the afternoon—well, it might be worse.
+
+“By the Lord Harry, he’s a _man_, anyway!” decided Thatcher Brewster.
+
+Meanwhile, the subject of his musings began to feel like a man once
+more, instead of like a lath. Having wrought havoc among the edibles,
+he rose with a sigh.
+
+“If I could have one hour’s sleep,” he said mournfully, “I’d be fit as
+a cricket.”
+
+“You shall,” said the girl. “Mr. Sherwen says he won’t let you out of
+the house until it’s dark. And that’s fully an hour.”
+
+“I ought to be on my way back now.”
+
+“Back where? To your mountains?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You’d be recognized and attacked before you could get out of the city.
+I won’t let you.”
+
+“That wouldn’t do, for a fact. Perhaps it would be safer to wait. I’ve
+made enough trouble for one day by my blunder-headed thoughtlessness.”
+
+“Is that what you call rescuing the flag?”
+
+“Oh, rescuing!” he said slightingly. “What difference does it make what
+vermin like that mob do? Just for a whim, to endanger all of you.”
+
+She stared at him in amaze and suspicion. But he was quite honest.
+
+“_My_ whim,” she reminded him.
+
+“Yes; I suppose it was,” he admitted thoughtfully. “When I saw you
+crying, I lost my head, and acted like a child.”
+
+“Then it was all my fault?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t say that. Certainly not. I’m master of my own actions. If
+I hadn’t wanted—”
+
+“But it was my fault this much, anyway, that you wouldn’t have done it
+except for me.”
+
+“Yes; it was your fault to that extent,” he said honestly. “I hope you
+don’t mind my saying so.”
+
+“Oh, beetle man, beetle man!” She leaned forward, her eyes deep-lit
+pools of mirth and mockery and some more occult feeling that he could
+not interpret. “Would it scare you quite out of your poor, queer wits
+if I were to _hug_ you? Don’t call for help. I’m not really going to do
+it.”
+
+“I know you’re not,” said he dolefully. “But about that row, I want to
+set myself right. I’m no fool. I know it took a certain amount of nerve
+to go down there. And I was even proud of it, in a way. And when Von
+Plaanden turned and gave me the salute before he went away, I liked it
+quite a good deal.”
+
+“Did he do that? I love him for it!” cried the girl.
+
+“But my point is this, that what I did wasn’t sound common sense. Now
+if Carroll had done it, it would have been all right.”
+
+“Why for him and not for you?”
+
+“Because those are his principles. They’re not mine.”
+
+“I wish you weren’t quite so contemptuous of poor Fitz. It seems hardly
+fair.”
+
+“Contemptuous of him? I’d give half my life to be in his place after
+to-morrow.”
+
+“Why?” There was a flutter in her throat as she put the question.
+
+“Because he’s going with you, isn’t he?”
+
+“So are you, if you will.”
+
+“I can’t.”
+
+“Father won’t go without you, I believe. Won’t you come, if I ask you?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Work, I suppose,” said the girl; “the work that you love better than
+anything in the world.”
+
+“You’re wrong there.” His voice was not quite steady now. “But it’s
+work that has to have my first consideration now. And there is one
+special responsibility that I can’t evade, for the present, anyway.”
+
+“And afterward?” She dared not look at him as she spoke.
+
+“Ah, afterward. There’s too much ‘perhaps’ in the afterward down here.
+We science grubbers on the outposts enlist for the term of the war,” he
+said, smiling wanly.
+
+“How can I—can we go and leave you here?” she demanded obstinately.
+
+“Oh, give me a square meal once in a while, and a night’s rest here and
+there, and I’ll do well enough.”
+
+“Oh, dear! I forgot your sleep. Here I’ve been chattering like a
+magpie. Take off your coat and lie down on that sofa at once.”
+
+“Where shall I find you when I wake up?”
+
+“Right where you leave me when you fall asleep.”
+
+“Oh, no! You mustn’t wear yourself out watching over me.”
+
+“Hush! You’re under orders. Give me the coat.” She hung it on the back
+of a chair. “Not another word now. And I’ll call you when time is up.”
+
+He closed his eyes, and the girl sat studying his face in the dim
+light, graving it deep on her inner vision, seeking to formulate some
+conception of the strange being so still and placid before her. How had
+she ever thought him ridiculous and uncouth? How had she ever dared to
+insult him by distrust? What did it matter what other men, estimating
+him by their own sordid standards, said of him? As if her thought had
+established a connection with his, he opened his eyes and sat up.
+
+“I knew there was something I wanted to ask you,” he said. “What did
+your ‘Never, never, never’ mean?”
+
+“A foolish misunderstanding that I’m ashamed of.”
+
+“Was it that—that woman-gossip business?”
+
+“Yes. I was stupid. Will you forgive me?”
+
+“What is there to forgive? Some time, perhaps, you’ll understand the
+whole thing.”
+
+“Please don’t let’s say anything more about it. I _do_ understand.”
+
+This was not quite true. All that Polly Brewster knew was that, with
+those clear gray eyes meeting hers, she would have believed his honor
+clean and high against the world. The presence of the woman, even that
+dress fluttering in the wind, was susceptible of a hundred simple
+explanations.
+
+“Ah, that’s all right, then.” There was relief in his tone. “Of course,
+in a place like this there is a lot of gossip and criticism. And when
+one runs counter to the general law—”
+
+“Counter to the law?”
+
+“Yes. As a rule, I’m not ‘beyond the pale of law,’” he said, smiling.
+“But down here one isn’t bound by the same conventions as at home.”
+
+The girl’s hand went to her throat in a piteous gesture.
+
+“I—I—don’t understand. I don’t want to understand.”
+
+“There’s got to be a certain broad-mindedness in these matters,” he
+blundered on, with what seemed to her outraged senses an abominable
+jauntiness. “But the risk was small for me, and, of course, for her,
+anything was better than the other life. At that, I don’t see how the
+truth reached you. What is it, Miss Polly?”
+
+Rage, grief, and shame choked the girl’s utterance.
+
+Without a word, she ran from the room, leaving her companion a prey to
+troubled wonder.
+
+In the _patio_, she turned sharply to avoid a group gathered around
+Galpy, who, with a patch over one eye, was trying to impart some news
+between gasps.
+
+“Got it from the bulletin board of _La Liberdad_,” he cried. “Killed;
+body gone; devil to pay all over the place.”
+
+“What’s that?” demanded the Unspeakable Perk, running out, coatless and
+goggleless.
+
+“There’s been another riot, and Dr. Luther Pruyn is killed,” explained
+Sherwen.
+
+“Who says so?”
+
+“Bulletin board—_La Liberdad_—just saw it,” panted Galpy.
+
+“Nonsense! It’s a _bola_.”
+
+“The whole city is ringing with it. They say it was a plot to get him
+out of the way to stop quarantine. The Foreign Office is buzzing with
+inquiries, and Puerto del Norte is burning up the wires.”
+
+“Puerto del Norte! How did they hear?”
+
+“Telephone, of course. I hear Wisner is coming up,” said Sherwen.
+
+“I’ve got to get a wire to the port at once,” cried the scientist. “At
+once!”
+
+“You! What for?”
+
+“To stop off Wisner. To tell him it isn’t so.”
+
+“You’re excited, my boy,” said Mr. Brewster kindly. “Better lie down
+again.”
+
+“It’s true, right enough,” said the Englishman. “Sir Willet’s _cochero_
+saw the mob get him.”
+
+“When? Where?” asked Fitzhugh Carroll.
+
+“Haven’t got any details, but the Government admits it.”
+
+“I don’t care if the President and his whole cabinet swear to it,”
+vociferated the Unspeakable Perk. “It’s a fake. How can I get Puerto
+del Norte, Mr. Sherwen?”
+
+“You can’t get it at all for any such purpose. How do you know it’s a
+fake?”
+
+“How do I know? Oh, dammit! _I’m_ Luther Pruyn!”
+
+He snatched off his glasses and faced them.
+
+The little group stood petrified. Mr. Brewster was first to recover.
+
+“Crazy, poor chap!” he said. “Luther Pruyn was my classmate.”
+
+“That’s my father, Luther L.”
+
+“Proofs,” said Sherwen sharply.
+
+“In my coat pocket. In the room. Can I have your wire, Mr. Sherwen?”
+
+“It’s cut.”
+
+“Come to the railway wire,” offered Galpy. “My eye! Wot a game!”
+
+The two men ran out, the scientist leaving behind coat and goggles.
+
+“It was our little mix-up that started the rumor,” said Carroll
+thoughtfully. “Somebody recognized Perk—Dr. Pruyn.”
+
+“When his glasses fell off,” said CLuff. “They’re some disguise.”
+
+“He’s Luther Pruyn, sure enough!” said Mr. Sherwen, emerging from the
+room. “Here’s the proof.” He held out an official-looking document. “An
+order from the Dutch Naval Office, made out in his name.”
+
+“What does it say?” asked Carroll.
+
+“I’m not much of a hand at Dutch, but it seems to direct the blockading
+warship to receive Dr. Luther Pruyn and wife and convey them to
+Curaçao.”
+
+“And wife!” exclaimed Cluff loudly. He whistled as a vent to his
+amazement. “That explains all the talk about a woman—a lady in his
+_quinta_ on the mountains?”
+
+“Apparently,” said Carroll. “May I see that document, Mr. Sherwen?”
+
+The American representative handed him the paper. As he was studying
+it, Galpy reentered, still scant of breath from excitement and haste.
+“He’s gone back to the mountains,” he announced. “Sent word for you to
+get to the port before dawn, if you have to walk. See Mr. Wisner there.
+He’ll arrange everything.”
+
+“Will Mr. Perk—Dr. Pruyn be there?” asked Mr. Brewster.
+
+“He didn’t say.”
+
+“But he’s gone without his coat!”
+
+“And goggles,” said Cluff.
+
+“And his pass,” added Sherwen.
+
+“Trust him to come back for them when he gets ready. He’s a rum josser
+for doing things his own way. Now, about the train.” And Galpy outlined
+the plan of departure to the men, who, except Carroll, had gathered
+about him. The Southerner, unnoticed, had slipped into the room where
+the scientist’s coat lay. Coming out by the lower door, he was
+intercepted by Miss Polly Brewster. He interpreted the misery in her
+face, and turned sick at heart with the pain of what it told him.
+
+“You heard?” he asked.
+
+She nodded. “Is it true? Did you see the permit yourself?”
+
+“Yes. Here it is.”
+
+“I don’t want to see it. It doesn’t matter,” she said, with utter
+weariness in her voice. “When do we leave? I want to go home. Send
+father to me, please, Fitz.”
+
+Mr. Brewster came to her, bearing the news that the sailing was set for
+the morrow.
+
+“I’m glad to know that Dr. and Mrs. Pruyn are provided for,” she
+remarked, so casually that the troubled father drew a breath of relief,
+concluding that he must have misinterpreted the girl’s interest in the
+man behind the goggles.
+
+On his way to the _patio_, he passed through the room where the
+scientist had lain. He came out looking perturbed.
+
+“Has any one been in that room just now?” he asked Sherwen.
+
+“Not that I’ve seen.”
+
+“The coat and the other things are not there.”
+
+Inquiry and search alike proved unavailing. Not until an hour later did
+they discover that Carroll had also disappeared. Sherwen found a note
+from him on the office desk:—
+
+Please look after my luggage. Will join the others at the yacht
+to-morrow.
+
+
+P. F. F. C.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+THE WOMAN AT THE QUINTA
+
+
+Thanks to his rival’s map, Carroll had little difficulty in finding the
+trail to the mountain _quinta_. A brilliant new moon helped to make
+easy the ascent. What course he would pursue upon his arrival he had
+not clearly defined to himself. That would depend largely upon the
+attitude of the man he was seeking. The flame of battle, still hot from
+the afternoon’s melee, burned high in the Southerner’s soul, for he was
+not of those whose spirit rapidly cools. Bitter resentment on behalf of
+Miss Polly Brewster fanned that flame. On one point he was determined:
+neither he nor the so-called Perkins should leave the mountain until he
+had had from the latter’s own lips a full explanation.
+
+Coming out into the open space, he got his first glimpse of the
+_quinta_. It was dark, except for one low light. From the farther side
+there came faintly to his ear a rhythmical sound, with brief intervals
+of quiet, as if some one hard at labor were stopping from time to time
+for breath. At that distance, Carroll could not interpret the sound,
+but some unidentified quality of it struck chill upon his fancy. Long
+experience in the woods had made him a good trailsman. He proceeded
+cautiously until he reached the edge of the clearing.
+
+The sound had stopped now, but he thought he could hear heavy breathing
+from beyond the house. As he moved toward that side, a small but
+malevolent-looking snake slithered out from beneath a bush near by.
+Involuntarily he leaped aside. As he landed, a round pebble slipped
+under his foot. He flung up his arm. It met the low branch of a tree,
+and saved him a fall. But the thrashing of the leaves made a startling
+noise in the moonlit stillness. The snake went on about its business.
+
+“Hola!” challenged a voice around the angle of the house.
+
+Carroll recognized the voice. He stepped out of the shadows and strode
+across the open space. At the corner of the house he met the muzzle of
+a revolver pointing straight at the pit of his stomach. Back of it were
+the steady and now goggleless eyes of Luther Pruyn.
+
+“I am unarmed,” said Carroll.
+
+“Ah, it’s you!” said the other. He lowered his weapon, carefully
+whirled the cylinder to bring the hammer opposite an empty chamber, and
+dropped it in his pocket. “What do you want?”
+
+“An explanation.”
+
+“Quite so,” said the other coolly. “I’d forgotten that I invited you
+here. How long had you been watching me?”
+
+“I saw you only when you came out from behind the house.”
+
+“And you wish to know about—about my companion in this place?”
+continued the other in an odd tone.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Understand that I don’t admit that you have the smallest right. But to
+clear up a situation which no longer exists, I’m ready to satisfy you.
+Come in.”
+
+He held open the door of the room where the lone light was burning. In
+the middle of the floor was spread a sheet, beneath which a form was
+outlined in grisly significance. Carroll’s host lifted the cover.
+
+The woman was white-haired, frail, and wrinkled. One side of her face
+shone in the lamplight with a strange hue, like tarnished silver. In
+her throat was a small bluish wound; opposite it a gaping hole.
+
+“Shot!” exclaimed Carroll. “Who did it?”
+
+“Some high-minded Caracuñan patriot, I suppose.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Well, I suspect that it was a mistake. From a distance and inside a
+window, she might easily have been taken for some one else.”
+
+Carroll’s mind reverted to his companion’s ready revolver.
+
+“Yourself, for instance?” he suggested.
+
+“Why, yes.”
+
+“Who was she?”
+
+There was left in the Southerner’s manner no trace of the
+cross-examiner. Suspicion had departed from him at the first sight of
+that old and still face, leaving only sympathy and pity.
+
+“My patient.”
+
+“Have you been running a private hospital up here?”
+
+“Oh, no. I took her because there was no other place fit for her to go
+to. And I had to keep her presence secret, because there’s a law
+against harboring lepers here. A pretty cruel brute of a law it is,
+too.”
+
+“Leprosy!” exclaimed Carroll, looking at that strange silvery face with
+a shudder. “Isn’t it fearfully contagious?”
+
+“Not in any ordinary sense. I was trying a new serum on her, and had
+planned to smuggle her across to Curaçao, when this ended it.”
+
+“Curaçao? Then that pass for yourself and wife—By the way, that and
+your coat are over in the thicket, where I dropped them.”
+
+“Thank you. But it doesn’t say ‘wife.’ It says simply ‘a woman.’”
+
+“And you were encumbering yourself with an unknown leper, at a time
+like this, just as an act of human kindness?” There was something
+almost reverential in Carroll’s voice.
+
+“Scientific interest, in part. Besides, she wasn’t wholly unknown.
+She’s a sort of cousin of Raimonda’s.”
+
+Carroll’s mind flew back to his fatally misinterpreted conversation
+with the young Caracuñan.
+
+“What did he mean by letting me think that you shouldn’t associate with
+Miss Polly?”
+
+“Oh, he had the usual erroneous dread of leprosy contagion, I suppose.”
+
+“May I ask you another question, Mr. Per—I beg your pardon, Dr. Pruyn?”
+said the visitor, almost timidly.
+
+“Perkins will do.” The other smiled wanly. “Ask me anything you want
+to.”
+
+“Why did you run away that day on the tram-car?”
+
+“To avoid trouble, of course.”
+
+“You? Why, you go about searching for dangerous and difficult jobs.
+That won’t do!”
+
+“Not at all. It’s only when I can’t get away from them. But I couldn’t
+risk arrest then. Some one would surely have recognized me as Luther
+Pruyn. You see, I’ve been here before.”
+
+“Then I don’t see why they didn’t identify you, anyway.”
+
+“Three years ago I was much heavier, and wore a full beard. Then these
+glasses, besides being invaluable for protection, are a pretty thorough
+disguise.”
+
+“So they are. But the game is up now.”
+
+“Yes.” The scientist drew the sheet back over the dead woman. “I
+suppose the sharp-shooters who did the job will report me safely out of
+the way. It’s only a question of when the burial party will come for
+me.”
+
+“Then, why are we waiting?” cried Carroll.
+
+“I couldn’t leave her lying here,” replied the other simply.
+
+The sound of rhythmical labor came back to Carroll’s memory.
+
+“You were digging her grave?”
+
+The other nodded. Carroll, stiffly, for his knifed arm was painful, got
+out of his coat.
+
+“Where’s an extra spade?” he asked.
+
+When their labor was over, and the leper laid beneath the leveled soil,
+Carroll cut two branches from a near-by tree, trimmed them, bound them
+in the form of a cross, and fixed the symbol firmly in the earth at the
+dead woman’s head.
+
+“That was well thought of,” said the scientist. “I’m afraid that
+wouldn’t have occurred to me.”
+
+“You can get word to Senor Raimonda?” asked Carroll.
+
+His host nodded. A long silence followed. Carroll broke it:—
+
+“Then there is no further secrecy about this?”
+
+“About what?”
+
+“Her identity.” He pointed to the grave.
+
+“No; I suppose not. Why?”
+
+“Because Miss Brewster has a right to know.”
+
+“Do you propose to tell her?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Very well,” agreed the scientist, after a pause for consideration.
+“But not until after the yacht is at sea.”
+
+Carroll did not reply directly to this.
+
+“What shall you do?”
+
+“Get out, if I can. I’m ordered to Curaçao. Wisner left word for me.”
+
+“Come down the mountain with me.”
+
+“Impossible. There are matters here to be attended to.”
+
+“Then when will you come down?”
+
+“Before you sail. I must be sure that you get off.”
+
+“You’ll come to the yacht, then?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“I think you should. There are reasons why—why—Miss Brewster—”
+
+“It isn’t a question that I can argue,” the other cut him off. “I can’t
+do it.” There was so much pain in his voice that Carroll forbore to
+press him. “But I’ll ask you to take a note.”
+
+Carroll nodded, and his host, disappearing within the quinta, returned
+almost at once with an envelope on which the address was written in
+pencil. The Southerner took it and rose from the porch, where he had
+flung himself to rest.
+
+“Perkins,” he said, with some effort, “I’ve thought and said some hard
+things about you.”
+
+“Naturally enough,” murmured the other.
+
+“Do you want me to apologize?”
+
+The scientist stared. “Do you want me to thank you for to-night’s
+work?” he countered.
+
+“No.”
+
+“Well—”
+
+“All right.”
+
+The two men, different in every quality except that of essential
+manhood, smiled at each other with a profound mutual understanding.
+There was a silent handshake, and Carroll set off down the mountain
+toward the sunrise glow.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+LEFT BEHIND
+
+
+Dawn crested, poised, and broke in a surf of splendor upon the great
+mountain-line that overhangs Puerto del Norte. Where, at the
+corporation dock, there had lurked the shadow of a yacht, gray-black
+against blue-black, there now swung a fairy ship of purest silver,
+cradled upon a swaying mirror. Tiny insects, touched to life by the
+radiance, scuttled busily about her decks and swarmed out upon the
+dock. The seagoing yacht Polly had awakened early.
+
+Down the mule path that forms the shortest cut from the railway station
+straggled a group of minute creatures. To one watching from the
+mountain-side with powerful field-glasses—such as, for example, a
+convinced and ardent hater of the Caribbean Sea, curled up with his
+back against a cold and Voiceless rock—it might have appeared that the
+group was carrying an unusual quantity of hand luggage. Yet they were
+not porters; so much, even at a great distance, their apparel
+proclaimed. The pirates of porterdom do not get up to meet
+five-o’clock-in-the-morning specials in Caracuña.
+
+The little group gathered close at the pier, then separated, two going
+aboard, and the others disappearing into sundry streets and reappearing
+presently at the water-front with other figures. The human form cannot
+be distinctly seen, at a distance of three miles, to rub its eyes;
+neither can it be heard to curse; but there was that in the newer
+figures which suggested a sudden and reluctant surrender of sleeping
+privileges. Had our supposititious watcher possessed an intimate and
+contemptuous knowledge of Caracuña officialdom, he would have surmised
+that lavish sums of money had been employed to stir the port and
+customs officials to such untimely activity.
+
+But not money or any other agency is potent to stir Caracuñan
+officialdom to undue speed. Hence the observer from the heights,
+supposing that he had a personal interest in the proceedings, might
+have assured himself of ample time to reach the coast before the
+formalities could be completed and the ship put forth to sea. Had he
+presently humped himself to his feet with a sluggish effort, abandoned
+his field-glasses in favor of a pair of large greenish-brown goggles,
+and set out on a trail straight down the mountains, staggering a bit at
+the start, a second supposititious observer of the first supposititious
+observer—if such cumulative hypothesis be permissible—might have
+divined that the first supposititious observer was the Unspeakable
+Perk, going about other people’s business when he ought to have been in
+bed. And so, not to keep any reader in unendurable suspense, it was.
+
+While the Unspeakable Perk was making his way down the dim and narrow
+trail, another equally weary figure shambled out from the main road
+upon the flats and made for the landing. The apparel of Mr. Preston
+Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll was in a condition that he would have deemed
+quite unfit for one of his station, had he been in a frame of mind to
+consider such matters at all. He was not. Affairs vastly more weighty
+and human occupied his mind. What he most wished was to find Miss Polly
+Brewster and unburden himself of them.
+
+At the entrance to the pier, he was detained by the American Consul.
+Cluff came running down the long structure in great strides.
+
+“Moses, Carroll! I’m glad to see you! Where’ve you been?”
+
+A week earlier, the scion of all the Virginias would have resented this
+familiarity from a professional athlete. But neither Mr. Carroll’s mind
+nor his heart was a sealed inclosure. He had learned much in the last
+few days.
+
+“Up on the mountain,” he said. “For Heaven’s sake, give me a drink,
+Cluff!”
+
+The other produced a flask.
+
+“You do look shot to pieces,” he commented. “Find Perk—Pruyn?”
+
+“Yes. I’ll tell you later. Where’s Miss Brewster?”
+
+“In her stateroom. Asleep, I guess. Said she wanted rest, and nobody
+was to disturb her till we sail.”
+
+“When do we start?”
+
+“Eight o’clock, they say. That means ten. Will Dr. Pruyn get here?”
+
+“He isn’t going with us.”
+
+“Oh, no. I forgot his Dutch permit. Well, he’d better use it quick, or
+he’ll go in a box when he does go. I wouldn’t insure his life for a
+two-cent stamp in this country.”
+
+“You wouldn’t if you’d seen what I saw last night,” said the
+Southerner, very low.
+
+Wisner, the busy, efficient little consul, who had been arranging with
+the officials for Carroll’s embarkation, now returned, bringing with
+him a viking of a man whom he introduced as Dr. Stark, of the United
+States Public Health Service.
+
+“Either of you know anything about Dr. Pruyn?” he inquired anxiously.
+
+“He’s on his way down the mountain now,” said Carroll.
+
+“Good! He’s ordered away, I’m glad to say. Just got the message.”
+
+“Then perhaps he will go out with us,” said Cluff, with obvious relief.
+“I sure did hate to think of leaving that boy here, with the game laws
+for goggle-eyed Americans entirely suspended.”
+
+“No. He’s ordered to Curaçao to stay and watch. We’ve got to get him
+out to the Dutch ship somehow.”
+
+“Couldn’t the yacht take him and transfer him outside?” asked Carroll.
+
+“Mr. Carroll,” said Dr. Stark earnestly, “before this yacht is many
+minutes out from the dock, you’ll see a yellow flag go up from the end
+of the corporation pier. After that, if the yacht turns aside or comes
+back for a package that some one has left, or does anything but hold
+the straightest course on the compass for the blue and open sea—well,
+she’ll be about the foolishest craft that ever ploughed salt water.”
+
+“I suppose so,” admitted Carroll. “Well, I have matters to look after
+on board.”
+
+Into Mr. Carroll’s cabin it is nobody’s business to follow him. A man
+has a right to some privacy of room and of mind, and if the
+Southerner’s struggle with himself was severe, at least it was of brief
+duration. Within half an hour, he was knocking at Polly Brewster’s
+door.
+
+“_Please_ go ’way, whoever it is,” answered a pathetically weary voice.
+
+“Miss Polly, it’s Fitzhugh. I have a note for you.”
+
+“Leave it in the saloon.”
+
+“It’s important that you see it right away.”
+
+“From whom is it?” queried the spent voice.
+
+“From Dr. Pruyn.”
+
+“I—I don’t want to see it.”
+
+“You must!” insisted her suitor.
+
+“Did he say I must?”
+
+“No. I say you must. Forgive me, Miss Polly, but I’m going to wait here
+till you say you’ll read it.”
+
+“Push it under the door,” said the girl resignedly.
+
+He obeyed. Polly took the envelope, summoned up all her spirit, and
+opened it. It contained one penciled line and the signature:—
+
+Good-bye. All my heart goes with you forever.
+
+
+L. P.
+
+
+Something fluttered from the envelope to her feet. She stooped and
+picked it up. It was the tiniest and most delicate of orchids, purple,
+with a glow of gold at its heart. To her inflamed pride, it seemed the
+final insult that he should send such a message and such a reminder,
+without a word of explanation or plea for pardon. Pardon she never
+would have granted, but at least he might have had the grace of shame.
+
+“Have you read it?” asked the patient voice from without.
+
+“Yes. There is no answer.”
+
+“Dr. Pruyn said there wouldn’t be.”
+
+“Then why are you waiting?”
+
+“To see you.”
+
+“Oh, Fitz, I’m too worn out, and I’ve a splitting headache. Won’t it
+wait?”
+
+“No.” The voice was gently inflexible.
+
+“More messages?”
+
+“No; something I must tell you. Will you come out?”
+
+“I suppose so.”
+
+Her tone was utterly listless and limp. Utterly listless and limp, she
+looked, too, as she opened the door and stood waiting.
+
+“Miss Polly, it’s about the woman at Perkins’s—at Dr. Pruyn’s house.”
+
+Her eyes dilated with anger.
+
+“I won’t hear! How dare you come to me—”
+
+“You must! Don’t make it harder for me than it is.”
+
+She looked up, startled, and noted the haggard lines in his face.
+
+“I’ll hear it if you think I should, Fitz.”
+
+“She is dead.”
+
+“Dead? His—his wife?”
+
+“She wasn’t his wife. She was a helpless leper, whom he was trying to
+cure with some new serum. He had to do it secretly because there is a
+law forbidding any one to harbor a leper.”
+
+“Oh, Fitz!” she cried. “And she died of it?”
+
+“No. They killed her. Last night.”
+
+“They? Who?”
+
+“Government agents, probably. They were after Pruyn.”
+
+“How horrible! And—and Mrs. Pruyn. Where was she?”
+
+“There isn’t any Mrs. Pruyn. There never was.”
+
+“But the Dutch permit! It was for Dr. Pruyn and his wife.”
+
+“Sherwen misread the form. So did I. It read for Dr. Pruyn and a woman.
+He hoped to take her to Curaçao and complete his experiment.”
+
+“That’s what he meant when he spoke of being lawless, and I’ve been
+thinking the basest things of him for it!” The girl, dazed by a flash
+of complete enlightenment, caught at Carroll’s arm with beseeching
+hands. “Where is he, Fitz?”
+
+“On his way down the mountain. Perhaps down here by now.”
+
+“He’s coming to the ship?” she asked.
+
+“No; he doesn’t expect to see you again. He was coming down to make
+sure that we got off safely.”
+
+“Fitz, dear Fitz, I must see him!”
+
+“Miss Polly,” he said miserably, “I’ll do anything I can.”
+
+“Oh, poor Fitz!” she cried pityingly, her eyes filling with tears. “I
+wish for your sake it wasn’t so. And you have been so splendid about
+it!”
+
+“I’ve tried to make amends, and play fair. It hasn’t been easy. Shall I
+go back and look for him? It’s a small town, and I can find him.”
+
+“Yes. I’ll write a note. No; I won’t. Never mind. I’ll manage it. Fitz,
+go and rest. You’re worn out,” she said gently.
+
+Back into her stateroom went Miss Polly. From that time forth no man
+saw her nor woman, either, except perhaps her maid, and maids are dark
+and discreet persons on occasion. If this particular one kept her own
+counsel when she saw a trim but tremulous figure drop lightly over the
+starboard rail of the Polly far forward, pick up a small traveling-bag
+from the pier, step behind the opportune screen of a load of coffee on
+a flat car, and reappear to view only as a momentary swish of skirt far
+away at the shore end; if this same maid told Mr. Thatcher Brewster,
+half an hour later, that Miss Polly was asleep in her stateroom, and
+begged that she be disturbed on no account, as she was utterly worn
+out, who shall blame her for her silence on the one occasion or her
+speech on the other? She was but obeying, albeit with tearful
+misgivings, duly constituted authority.
+
+Eight o’clock struck on the bell of the little Protestant mission
+church on the tiny plaza; struck and was welcomed by the echoes, and
+passed along to eventual silence. Within two minutes after, there was a
+special stir and movement on the pier, a corresponding stir and
+movement on board the trim craft, a swishing of great ropes, and a
+tooting of whistles. White foam churned astern of her. A
+comic-supplement-looking pelican on a buoy off to port flapped her a
+fantastic farewell. The blockade-defying yacht Polly was off for blue
+waters and the freedom of the seas.
+
+On the shore, feeling woefully helpless and alone, she who had been the
+jewel and joy of the Polly bit her lips and closed her eyes, in a
+tremulous struggle against the dismal fear:—
+
+“Suppose he doesn’t love me, after all!”
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+THE YELLOW FLAG
+
+
+The departing whistle of the yacht Polly struck sharply to the heart of
+a desolate figure seated on a bench in the blazing, dusty, public
+square of Puerto del Norte, waiting out his first day of pain. A
+kiskadee bird, the only other creature foolish enough to risk the hot
+bleakness of the plaza at that hour, flitted into a dust-coated palm,
+inspected him, put a tentative query or two, decided that he was of no
+possible interest, and left the Unspeakable Perk to his own
+cogitations.
+
+So deep in wretchedness were the cogitations that he did not hear the
+light, hesitant footstep. But he felt in every vein and fiber the
+appealing touch on his shoulder.
+
+“Good God! What are YOU doing here?” he cried, leaping to his feet.
+There was no awkwardness or shyness in his speech now; only
+wonder-stricken joy.
+
+“I came back to see you.”
+
+“But the yacht! Your ship!”
+
+“She has left.”
+
+“No! She mustn’t! Not without you! You can’t stay here. It’s too
+dangerous.”
+
+“I must. They think I’m aboard. I left a note for papa. He won’t get it
+until they’re at sea. And they can’t come back for me, can they?”
+
+“No—yes—they must! I must see Stark and Wisner at once.”
+
+“To send me away?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Without forgiving me?”
+
+“Forgiving? There’s no question of that between you and me.”
+
+“There is. Fitzhugh told me everything—all about the poor dead woman.”
+
+“Ah, he shouldn’t have done that.”
+
+“He should!” She stamped a little willful foot. “What else could he
+do?”
+
+“Why, yes,” he agreed thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s so. After all, a
+man can’t bear the names that Carroll does and go wrong on the big
+inner things. He has met his test, and stood it. For he cares very
+deeply for you.”
+
+“Poor Fitz!” she sighed.
+
+“But here we’re wasting time!” he cried in a panic. “Where can I leave
+you?”
+
+“Do you want to leave me?”
+
+“Want to!” he groaned. “Can’t you understand that I’ve got to get you
+to the yacht!”
+
+“Oh, beetle man, beetle man, don’t you WANT me?” she cried dolorously.
+“Didn’t you mean your note?”
+
+“Mean it? I meant it as I’ve never meant anything in the world. But
+you—what do you mean? Do you mean that you’ll—you’ll let the yacht go
+without you—and—and—and stay here, and m-m-marry me?”
+
+“If you should ask me,” she said, half-laughing, half-crying, “what
+else could I do? I’m alone and deserted. And there’s only you in the
+world.”
+
+“Miss P-P-Polly,” he began, “I—I can’t believe—”
+
+“It’s true!” she cried, and held out two yearning hands to him. “And if
+you stammer and stutter and—and—and act like the Unspeakable Perk
+_now_, I’ll—I’ll howl!”
+
+If she had any such project, the chance was lost on the instant of the
+warning, as he caught her to him and held her close.
+
+“Oh!” she cried, trying to push him away. “Do you know, sir, that this
+is a public square?”
+
+“Well, I didn’t choose it,” he reminded her, laughing in pure joy, with
+a boyish note new to her ear. “Anyway, there are only us two under the
+sun.” And he drew her close again, whispering in her ear.
+
+“Oh—oh, is that the language of medical science?” she reproved.
+
+At this point, generic curiosity overcame the feathered eavesdropper in
+the tree above.
+
+“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”—“What’s he say?”
+
+The girl turned a flushed and adorable face upward.
+
+“I won’t tell you. It’s for me alone,” she declared joyously. “But
+you’ll never stop saying it, will you, dear?”
+
+“Never, as long as we both shall live. And that reminds me,” he said
+soberly. “We must arrange about being married.”
+
+“Oh, that reminds you, does it?” she mocked. “Just incidentally, like
+that.”
+
+Boom! Boom! Boom! The mission clock kept patiently at it until its
+suggestion struck in.
+
+“Of course!” he cried. “Mr. Lake, the missionary, will marry us. And
+we’ll have Stark and Wisner for witnesses. How long does it take a
+bride to get ready? Would half an hour be enough?”
+
+“It’s rather a short engagement,” she remarked demurely. “But if it’s
+all the time we’ve got—”
+
+“It is. But, darling, we’ll have to ride for it afterward, and get
+across to the mainland. I’ve no right to let you in for such a risk,”
+he cried remorsefully.
+
+“You couldn’t help yourself,” she teased saucily. “I ran you down like
+one of your own beetles. Besides, what does that permit for the Dutch
+ship say?”
+
+“That’s for myself and a woman—the leper woman. Not for myself and my
+wife.”
+
+“Well, I’m a woman, aren’t I? And it doesn’t say that the woman
+_mustn’t_ be your wife.” She blushed distractingly.
+
+“Caesar! Of course it doesn’t! What luck! We’ll be in Curaçao
+to-morrow. I must see Wisner about getting us off. But, Polly, dearest
+one, you’re sure? You haven’t let yourself be carried away by that
+foolishness of mine yesterday?”
+
+“Sure? Oh, beetle man!” She put her hands on his shoulders and bent to
+his ear.
+
+The sulphur-colored winged Paul Pry stuck an impertinent head out from
+behind a palm leaf.
+
+“Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit? Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit?”
+
+For the second and last time in his adult life the beetle man threw a
+stone at a bird.
+
+Four hours later six powerful black oarsmen rowed a boat containing two
+passengers and practically no luggage out across the huge lazy swells
+of the Caribbean toward a smudge of black smoke.
+
+“Look!” cried that one of the passengers who wore huge goggles. “There
+goes the flag!”
+
+A square of yellow bunting slid slowly up the pierhead staff of the
+dock corporation, and spread in the light shore breeze.
+
+“That’s the modern flaming sword,” he continued. “The color stirs
+something inside me. Ugly, isn’t it?”
+
+“It is ugly,” she confessed thoughtfully. “Yet it’s the flag we fight
+under, too, isn’t it? And we’d fight for it if we had to, just as we
+fought for the other—our own.”
+
+“I love your ‘we,’” he laughed happily.
+
+She nestled closer to him.
+
+“Are you still hating the Caribbean?”
+
+“I? I’m loving it the second-best thing in the world.”
+
+“But I loved it first,” she reminded him jealously. “Dearest,” she
+added, with one of her swift swoops of thought, “what was that funny
+title the British Secretary of Legation had?”
+
+“What? Oh, Captain the Honorable Carey Knowles?”
+
+“Yes. Well, I shall have a much nicer, more picturesque title than that
+when we come back to Caracuña—dear, dirty, dangerous, queer, riotous,
+plague-stricken old Caracuña!”
+
+“Then my liege ladylove intends to come back?” he asked.
+
+“Of course. Some time. And in Caracuña I shall insist on being Mrs. the
+Unspeakable Perk.”
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNSPEAKABLE PERK ***
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