Money to Burn/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
FOLLOWED!
LUIS!”
The Indian still lay in a huddled heap, but his breathing was now steady. In answer to Dan's cry his eyelids fluttered. He tried to smile—failed—lay silent. There was an ugly gash, not dangerously deep, just above his right temple.
Dan's swiftly questing fingers revealed no broken bone. He saw that a drawer of the buffet stood open. It contained fine table linens. Heedless of consequences, he tore several of the napkins into bandages, cleaned the wound with water from a carafe, and bound up the sufferer's head.
Evidently a man of iron, this tall, broken-nosed Carib; in an hour, perhaps, he would be about again, yet some rest he must have. Dan thought first of taking him to his own room; then recalled that, next to Tucker, was a small and apparently empty bedchamber to which he had himself hoped to be assigned. Well—he smiled sternly—it would be more convenient to have his patients close together.
Fernando's precautions had at first muddled his sense of the plan of the house, but he knew a road well enough now, however circuitous it might be. The moment Luis showed definite signs of returning consciousness, Dan put one of the Indian's arms about his neck, supported him by the waist, and half led, half carried him to the chosen room at the top of the palacio.
They passed no one. Tucker's door was closed. In the neighboring bedchamber stood a bed bearing an uncovered mattress. On this Dan, with practical skill, made Luis as comfortable as possible. Having fastened the door softly against any eaves dropper, he returned to the wounded man, who lay now with his eyes open and intelligent.
“Many—many thanks,” murmured the Indian, and Dan for the first time noted that, in spite of its broken nose, the face was pleasant, even fine of its sort.
“Oh, there's nothing to thank me for,” he said in Spanish. “There is something else of far more consequence. What I want you to do is to tell me honestly what is wrong about this hacienda.”
The islander started. He rolled terrified eyes and crossed himself.
“The Señor Medico speaks Spanish!”
“Yes,” said Dan, and added: “But, for Heaven's sake, don't tell that!”
“If I do,” Luis simply answered, “they will kill you. They do not dream that you understand Spanish.”
“I'm by no means sure they won't kill me anyhow, my friend, but before they do it I don't want to die of curiosity. Come, let me know what's going on here.”
Luis shook his bandaged head. “I have no idea.”
“You must have! Look here; you can't like this master of yours, or that infernal Fernando, either. I know you hate them both. Speak up.”
The Carib could only stupidly repeat that he had no idea. His protest was so solemn—he swore by all the saints—that Dan had at last to believe him.
“Well, then,” said the American, taking another tack, “help me to get that wretched fellow. Tucker, safely out of this hole, anyhow.”
Luis clasped his thin hands in distress. He looked toward the closed door with a fright that was all but palpable.
“No, no! They find out everything! Besides,” he added, as if to justify himself, “what is Señor Tucker to me? He is no such wonderful man, Señor Medico, and when the machinery stops, he calls out loud words that shake the earth; and he does not hesitate to shake any of us poor servants, too, who block his way. No, no! I cannot risk my life for him.”
Dan ran perturbed fingers through his upright hair. He could not guess how young his intense straight figure and anxious blue eyes looked, how foolhardy his proposition of rescue sounded to his hearer, who nevertheless wanted to oblige him if the cost were not too great. All he thought was that there was need for haste and, if he were to count on this man's help, he must have the promise of it soon. Yet here lie was forced to use up precious time in argument.
“What if he has not always been kind?” Dan pleaded. “Would you have him die? He is a human being.”
“So are we all.” The gaunt Carib smiled grimly and made an impulsive sign of the cross as if to secure for himself a continuance of that state.
Dan took a few turns of the room. Then, stopping abruptly before Luis, he snapped out: “So you still love Don Ramon?”
The copper face took on a deeper shade. Luis' teeth set. “He is very cruel to a faithful servant. He will kill me one day. But what can I do? I am helpless! Still, I am grateful to the Señor Medico for his kindness. If I can safely show that I am grateful, I will gladly do so.”
“And that hunchback. You love him?”
The swathed head on the pillow writhed. “I hate him! Always he has the better place and all because he was born with a little more intelligence than poor Luis. But no more fidelity! It is not my fault that I know no English, that I cannot intrigue cleverly about the paper”
Paper again! Dan thought that he had found a clew. “The what?”
But on that topic Luis would say no more. “I will aid you all I can, Señor Medico, but this Indian can help very little.” He beat his thin chest. “He must keep his own life if that is possible!”
Dan pursued the paper theme in vain. It became clear that Luis either could not or would not enlighten him, and his doctor's instinct told him that he must not be too insistent until the Indian had rested a bit. With a submissive sigh, he at last put a hand on the Carib's shoulder.
“Well, then,” said he not unkindly, “we'll let that pass. But there is another thing, and I guess you can tell me this without risking your life. In what room does the señorita lodge?”
At once Luis' whole manner changed. He sat up in bed. A mixture of eagerness and caution illuminated his face. There was no look of the savage about him now; he was the loyal, if frightened, slave.
“The Señor Medico swears he means her no harm?”
Dan vowed that he did not.
“What apartment is now hers,” said the Indian in a tone that was lower than a whisper, “indeed I do not know. Of old, when I was servant to her esteemed father and her honorable mother—honorable truly, though own sister-in-law to Don Ramon—then I was privileged; but now I do not know what, beyond my commanded duties, goes on inside this palacio. One of these hundred rooms she must have; more than that I know not.”
Dan frowned. “You say that Villeta was her mother's brother?”
“Of a surety; her mother's brother by marriage. His first wife was my dead master's sister.”
“I gathered that from something he told me the other day. What I don't understand is why he, instead of the señorita, is the owner of all this.”
“Nor I. I do not know. Who am I that I should understand the law? I am only a Christian! But this”—and he looked hard into Dan's eyes—“of this I am sure: Don Ramon calls himself the proprietor of this hacienda, and it is him we must obey; but before God he has no right to these lands. That is why the Señorita Gertruda ran away and why, overtaking her, he brought her back from San Lorenzo. In San Domingo he may not marry the daughter of his wife's brother, but if he keeps her hidden, he may use—perhaps he may at last acquire—her lands.”
The Carib's eyes blazed. He was, after all, a wounded man, and he had told, in broad strokes, all he knew. Dan remembered his own profession and wondered if, in any case, Luis might not yet ease the situation. Meanwhile, however, the fellow must certainly have some rest.
“There—there,” he said, patting Luis' shoulder, “I'll help her and I'll help you, too. Try to sleep and forget your troubles for a little while. When you wake up. I'll have planned something. Then we'll talk. Just remember this,” he concluded: “If you are at all my friend, don't speak to me when others can possibly listen. Don't even look at me as if there were any understanding between us. And, understanding Spanish, I'll know whatever you say to them before me.”
His new patient lay in an agony of terror as the doctor left him. Dan was aware of that, but he was aware, also, and with a sense of gratification, that, in spite of Luis' fear of open alliance, he had at last a friend in this house of mystery. His spirits rising, he went toward the next room. He wondered how Tucker fared. He pushed open the door softly, so as not to waken the sick man should he sleep. Crouched on the floor near the bed, his long arms folded across his flat chest, the crooked-mouthed hunchback was rocking to and fro. At sight of him now, the American's patience came to an end.
“You get out of here!” he ordered. “Don Ramon told you to keep away from this room. Go!”
The hunchback continued to rock. His lips twisted yet more stringently. He looked up at Dan with an impudent leer: “Don Ramon rides, Señor Medico. I am lord of this hacienda when he is absent. I stay!”
He began to hum softly the same tune his master had hummed in the café in that Street of the Pink Turtledoves in Sanchez:
“My mistress is a lady—a lady—his lady;
She smiles, her lord not looking, and throws a rose to me”
Dan hesitated. Patience had snapped, but, fortunately, his leash of caution has not yet broken. Should he use force? His strong young hands tightened in his desire to do so. He wanted to wring the dwarfs neck. Then he glanced toward Tucker. The New Englander's tired eyes conveyed a plain plea against interference.
Hot blood deluged Dan's cheeks, but he left the room with no further word. Peña's derisive laughter rang after his footsteps down the stairs.
He decided to walk about the estate and think things over. He must bring some sort of order to his mind; he must decide on some straight course of action. Stopping only for the pith helmet that Don Ramon had brought him at their point of departure, he strode to the front door and was about to pass it when he paused at sight of an armed peon, around his waist the Domingan cattleman's machete-bearing lariat. The sight called an instant halt to his thoughts; the man was apparently on guard.
Dan, however, was not long halted. He descended the stone steps. The guard made no attempt to hinder his movements, but Dan had gone a distance of perhaps only fifty yards into the patio toward the deserted graveyard when he realized that, not many feet behind him, the peon followed with a carelessness that was nevertheless deliberate enough.
He reversed his course. This would never do! He returned to the house. Within the palacio, he made his way to another exit. A second man, similarly armed and lariated, stood there, expressionless, unforbidding, but obviously prepared to follow.
Again the American retreated. Here was a situation that he had in nowise anticipated. He remembered that he had determined to meet guile with guile. Very well; he shaped his lips to a nonchalant whistle and stuck his hands into his trousers pockets quite as if he had noticed nothing extraordinary. He walked from hall to empty room, from room to empty corridor. Every window was shuttered and fastened; he was unable to open one of them. Could these precautions have been taken only against the fierceness of the tropical sun?
His heart beat none too evenly. What, after all, was to be done? Peña was doubtless still with Tucker; the armed peons, under obvious orders from the master of the house, were on watch, but seemed to confine themselves to guarding the doors of exit.
He could hardly believe that this excessive precaution was directed only against himself. Was there not some danger from without? He suddenly wondered if the glib story of evading the customs were not largely a fiction on Don Ramon's part. Inaction became beyond endurance; if he was not to explore the outside of the house, he determined to explore its interior.
An inexplicable impulse sent him back to the table at which he had breakfasted. Sitting there for a moment, he thought of Don Ramon's abrupt excursion of only an hour earlier, and to make sure of its reality he felt in his pockets for the roll of ten bills given him then. They crinkled at his touch. Oh, they were there right enough, ten one-hundred-dollar bills!
To the left—up the stairs—ten steps—a door. Why, Villeta must have gone at least part of the way to the forbidden chapel—perhaps the whole way! Forbidden only because it was crumbling?
Dan must find the Señorita Gertruda, but he must also discover Don Ramon's secret. He would, therefore, try to repeat Don Ramon's walk.
He entered a narrower corridor than the main one, to the right. He found the staircase; brief, of worn stone, curving still more to the right. In the short hallway above he took ten steps, approximating the length he thought Villeta's legs would consume in a stride. At the tenth pace he found himself opposite a narrow oak door, pointed at the top.
For an instant, he stood still and surveyed the position. A pace farther along, on the other side of the little passageway, was a second door. He might not have measured the steps correctly. He was still hesitating when the faintest glimmer from that second door made his glance fasten there. He wondered if it were hallucination, or if it actually did move ever so slightly and flash a thin streak of light along its opening.
If so, it moved back to place before he could blink. Nevertheless, his heart throbbed, and he had to force his mind to sane reasoning. The eyes of this dreadful house seemed everywhere watching him. It must sometimes be his own imagination, he told himself.
He meant to go on in any case. With the master away and Peña in the distant sick chamber, here seemed his sole chance to discover—whatever was to be discovered. First, he would open the pointed oak door.
He tried the handle and pushed gently. The door creaked inward, and he followed it through.
Closing it after him, he went along the inner corridor on which it opened. He realized that he must be heading straight toward the ruined chapel, and yet the chapel was level with the ground, whereas this was an upstairs corridor.
He almost ran into a second portal, very ancient, very small, the top fastened into an equilaterally pointed architrave of stone, gray from centuries of erosion. It was locked.
Dan knew what it was. That knowledge of ecclesiastical archæology against which the Pennsylvania-Dutch lawyer of his home town had inferentially warned him—it was at last of real use. This door would lead to a compartment or gallery overlooking the chancel of the ruined chapel. Medieval noblemen in Europe had built their castles in just such a manner so that they and their families could, unseen by the more matutinal and soberly garbed serfs, attend early mass in their dressing gowns.
Quite apart from his desire to solve the mystery of the hacienda, rose now, with revived insistence, Dan's interest in a glimpse of the architectural beauties that he knew existed, in whatever ruin, beyond that barrier. The lock was old, but too firm to he shaken loose. Nevertheless, it was not rusted from disusage. The American grasped the door by its protruding hinges and lifted it with all his strength.
He was thinking fast, but his mind no longer concerned itself with suspicions of the second door in the outer corridor. During the night, when he had heard the metallic rhythm of machinery, it had come from this direction.
He pushed upward with rigid muscles. The hinges were stiff. Fruitless though the immense effort promised to he, he strained on and up. There came at last a quiver. The door yielded. He let it swing creakingly wide.
His architectural knowledge had stood him in good stead. He stepped upon a stone balcony, just such as he had imagined, and looked down at the very picture that his fancy had drawn.
The place no longer bore much of the air of a sanctuary. Weeds had invaded it; from between the tiles of the floor, purple wild flowers edged their way. The font was broken. Halfway up the apse an unusually large and very rickety confessional box leaned crazily. Sunlight made crooked dusty streaks through a small and partly broken rose window opposite the high altar, which itself was hare and deserted. But what, regardless of all his architectural interest, caught and held Dan's gaze was a two-peaked hulk of steel that towered in the aisle and seemed, in spite of the general desertion and de cay, a living sacrilege on what was once a piece of holy ground. He bent far over the stone rail to look at it.
Before he could examine it, he drew up short. He was sure that he had heard a call, muffled by distance, but nevertheless a call.
It did not sound like a cry for help. Rather it reminded him of the señorita's scream of warning when, in his hammock in the jungle, the great snake was about to strangle him. Could this now be she? He had caught the phrase:
“Look out!”
In that he felt he must be mistaken. Surely no one at present in the palacio, except Peña and the sick man, could speak English—and Peña would be slow to give Dan a warning.
The American glanced behind him—nothing. He listened intently—no further sound. Again he bent over the rail.
Here, assuredly, was the machinery that he had heard at work, and here, he now knew, was that which had taken Villeta from the breakfast room. Don Ramon had given the impression of seeking money for Stone's fee; in reality, the planter had had that with him from the first; he left his guest—Dan saw it as with the eyes of a seer—to satisfy himself before quitting the hacienda that all was well with this desecrator of a chapel.
So much revelation vouchsafed—no more. Desecrator? There were two instruments. As Stone looked, they became less indistinct, but no less mysterious. Well oiled they seemed, and perfectly conditioned. What were they that they should so obsess Villeta?
Dan was nothing of a mechanic. He did not know the nature of the hulking things, but he was looking at those shining objects trying to elucidate their meaning, when something hissed beside him.
A rope! A lariat!
It just missed him.
He wheeled.
In the corridor beyond the little door that Dan had lifted from its hinges, in the act of loosing his hold of the failed lasso, stood that first armed peon, who had followed Dan from the palacio's front door into the open.