Money to Burn/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
THE WILD CAT
DAN had to go. He owed that much to Tucker as his patient and as a fellow American to whom—whatever the sick man's crimes—he had promised more than professional help. Moreover, this, indeed, was not a propitious moment for renewing Peña's suspicions. Stone followed Fernando.
No chance to talk—to ask questions concerning what had happened—before their destination was reached, on this occasion in no roundabout way. Peña went ahead of the doctor and went at such a pace that the latter had all he could do to maintain that distance which, at the start, the guide placed between them. Small time elapsed before they entered the New Englander's room.
Tucker lay there, silent and motionless. His face was purple; his eyes stared. Dan bent over him. A look was enough.
“He is dead,” said Stone.
The brief words showed nothing of the shock that the surviving American had sustained. His brain reeled, but he gazed over his shoulder, with quick intensity, at Peña.
Fernando shrugged.
“Just when,” persisted Dan, “was Tucker seized with this—'spasm?'”
The hunchback's face was rarely communicative; it was now a perfect veil. Nevertheless, his mouth answered glibly enough: “But now, Señor Medico. It is three minutes—less. I go at once for doctor. Señor Tucker throw himself; he talk loud—and about nothing. He look black—he look red. I run at once for doctor.”
A lie, of course; yet it would not be well to remind Fernando that he must have left his patient with nobody to care for him while the chapel was sought and a knife stuck into the helpless peon on the floor. Time pressed, and a renewal of open hostilities must wait until plans of escape had been perfected.
Peña peered up close to the dead man, too, as if fearful lest he might still be able to speak. “Tucker talks! Tucker talks! Tucker talks!” Dan almost heard again the servant's protest to Don Ramon. Well, this solved one riddle that had begun to trouble him, the riddle of how to keep his promise to rescue his fellow American.
Something more immediately pertinent prompted the physician's actions. He drew gradually away, continuing to put questions about the case, and, as he did so, a course toward liberty for the girl and for himself was revealed to him. It was a desperate course. But what course would be otherwise? What other, indeed, existed? Still making formal professional queries, he maneuvered so that he stood between Peña and the open door, and close to the table on which still rested the dead man's breakfast tray. Then he spoke.
“Your master,” said he, “will not be pleased. He wished Mr. Tucker to live so that he might go on with his work.”
Behind Dan, Fernando Peña's dull eyes gleamed a flash of triumphant defiance.
“The good God,” he said, “take Señor Tucker because maybe the Señor Tucker he finish his work already.”
There had been the marks of clutching fingers about the dead American's throat. Dan, in his swift examination, had not missed them.
“The good God,” he declared, with a clarity that could not be misunderstood, “did not cause this spasm. That was the devil's work.” He looked full at the hunchback and shot out his concluding words: “This man was strangled; he was murdered!”
On the instant, as if the statement were a signal, Fernando's right hand flashed to his knife, prepared to throw it, but this time Dan knew what to expect. It was with just such a contingency in view that he had backed to his present position.
With a single movement he seized and flung the breakfast tray straight into the hunchback's face, and he flung himself after it. He was too well aware of his antagonist's strength to concern himself with the ethics of the prize ring.
Peña, however, was quick to recover. He leaped into mid-air. The pair literally flew into each other's arms, and from the impact were dashed to the floor. The knife shot away at a tangent and rattled under the bed.
Over and over they rolled, nearly crossing the room in the fury of their battle. They knocked down chairs and upset tables. Nearly everything that was within the apartment seemed to be in noisy motion. Only the dead man lay unmoved, his open eyes staring upward.
“The devil's work,” Dan had called Tucker's murder, and certainly with a demoniac ferocity and a demoniac power Peña fought his accuser. Their previous battle had been nothing to this. In Fernando's diminutive and malformed body resided a frightful energy. His muscles were iron, his nerves steel. Seen at his ordinary occupations, he appeared a creature that the average man could break across his thigh; fired by his frenzy for blood, he was all but incapable of defeat, all but irresistible in murder. It was in contest against this hellish force that Stone had rashly staked the señorita's chances of safety. The dwarf fought in the full fury of a jungle beast; his wide nostrils fanned Dan's cheeks with the flame of their breath; his yellow teeth shone in his twisted mouth.
Stone, powerful as he was, felt upon him the absolute horror of contact with deformity and knew himself to be struggling against a wild cat. Peña bit into his coat and through it till he drew blood from the shoulder. Losing his hold there, his teeth snapped in air until they fastened on the tow-colored bristle that surmounted Dan's round head. They pulled. At the same time, the hunchback kicked ruthlessly. With his long, thick, curved nails he clawed; he beat his own arms and head and chest indifferently against his enemy. He shrieked rage and exultation.
Suddenly he began to jab, with two rigid fingers, straight at the American's eyes. It was the ultimate tactic of the thug the world over. Dan was to be blinded! He tried to shout out
Just then the entire weight of the hunchback miraculously lifted. The voice of Luis shouted encouragement. The Indian, no longer able to stand the din of the struggle, had got out of bed in the next room and rushed hither, had seen the last few seconds of the battle, realized its import, and now tore the madman from his victim.
Stone reeled against the nearest wall. He wiped the sweat from his eyes. A shiver of nausea shook him.
“Luis” He stammered thanks.
From the rear the Carib held squirming Peña in a wiry grip. The prisoner's feet banged back and forth angrily against Luis' shins, with a ferocity that brought a gray pallor to the Indian's battered face; but he did not loosen his clutch.
“Déprisa!” he called.
That appeal restored Dan. He sprang again into action.
There must be no delay. Jerking the towels from the washstand, he tied up their captive, whose piercing cries they speedily silenced with a pillow slip for a gag. They trussed him securely and fastened him tight to the footboard of the bed on which dead Tucker lay. Peña's gaze glared vengeance, but he could neither speak nor move.
“Behold him!” said Luis in his Spanish patois and with savage satisfaction. “He cannot harm us, and only his eyes can speak.”
Dan answered with significance, and no longer hesitating to use the language of the hacienda in Peña's presence: “Señor Tucker's eyes speak also!”
Luis made the sign of the cross. He tiptoed to the farther end of the room and took two candles from a mantelshelf. He stood the fallen bed table upright and on this placed one of the pair; he moved a chair to the head of the bed on the other side and put the second candle there. With steady fingers he lighted them both.
“Now,” said he, “Señor Tucker will rest more quietly.”
Dan watched the procedure, gathering his wits as it went on. Miraculously he had come through his two fights with no injury save that slight wound on the shoulder, but his aching brain rested itself for a moment among trivial things. He wondered how the dead man would relish Luis' attentions. Tucker had probably been reared a Congregationalist! Then he ground out cinematographically enough of the story of what had occurred in the chapel and of the Señorita Gertruda's subsequent appeal for release.
“So,” he concluded, “now that we've got Peña safe and sound, we must get the lady and ourselves out of here. But every door is guarded. How are we to do it?”
The Indian nodded toward their captive. “First of all, we must kill him.”
Peña writhed.
Dan gaped at his rescuer. “We can't do that.”
“Señor, he has heard your plans!”
“He's safe enough.”
“Until he's found—no longer.” Luis spread out his hands. “You asked me what to do, and I tell you. Come, señor; it will waste not one little minute.”
Stone looked at the deformed wretch trussed against the footboard. If ever terror dwelt in human eyes, it dwelt in Fernando's now. The man was loathsome, but he was helpless.
Luis mistakenly read hesitation in Dan's face.
“He would have killed you,” said the Carib.
“That was in a fight.”
“He would kill you anyway, at any time, if he dared.”
“Well, I won't kill him in cold blood. Get all ideas of murder out of your head and keep them out.” Dan's tone was final.
Luis cast his resigned eyes heavenward.
Again Stone looked at Peña, crouched before him. The bonds were quite secure. Dan nodded to his companion to precede him from the death chamber.
“You guarded Señor Tucker alive,” said Luis to the glowering Fernando; “you shall stay and guard him dead.”
He stalked out of the room. Dan followed and closed the door. He locked it on the outside. There Luis again attempted an answer to the American's question.
“Señor, I do not know how we are to escape.”
Said Dan: “That servant of Don Ramon's who followed me from the front door where he was watching! He is dead—as I told you—by this hunchback's hand, in the chapel. Did he leave his post deserted? There is a bare chance that he did.”
Though Luis' dark eyes were full of a doglike devotion to his project, he shook his head doubtfully.
“He may have been missed. They may have found him in the chapel,” the Carib answered in a hopeless helplessness. “This is not a house where secrets are kept—except by Don Ramon and Fernando Peña.”
“Well,” Dan responded cheerfully enough, “that's our only chance and. we've got to take it!”