Money to Burn/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII
UNDER THE HOOFS
STAY there! I will myself kill this fellow!”
Villeta flung the words over one massive shoulder to the guard in the hall, kicked the door shut, and then, with the added force of momentum, rushed upon Dan.
It was the charge of a rhinoceros. Falling before it, Dan was caught and enveloped in a mighty grasp that crushed him against Don Ramon's broad breast, while one of the hands that had torn the jungle serpent's head from its body gripped both of Stone's wrists and bent his arms straight backward from the shoulders. Victim and attacker struck against the bed.
Then the invalid Hoagland suffered a sudden convulsion. The sheet that partially covered him sailed four-square into space; it rode the air of battle and, descending, enmeshed both the combatants. A third combatant hurtled after it; the patient threw himself upon Villeta's shoulders.
But Ramon's weight had deceived the detective. Both here and in Sanchez it had seemed to Hoagland to be nothing more than the flabby fat of the heavy eater. Now he was to discover that underneath this soft outer layer worked, unretarded, muscles like the muscles of a crossroads blacksmith.
Try as he would, strain as he did, the secret-service operative, himself no weakling and always in trim, could not rend the planter's titanic hold from the nearly snapping arms of Dan. Had it not been for the confusion of the suffocating sheet, from which both Stone and Villeta struggled to free themselves, Don Ramon would not have let go at all; but the entangling folds of linen choked him, and, as Hoagland guessed this advantage, the secret-service man decided to use it to the utmost capacity. He pulled the sheet tighter about the tossing head of the taller of the two concealed men.
Ramon, half gagged and half smothered, could not call out, and, in order to breathe adequately, he must loose his hold on Dan. He fought the alternative bitterly, but at last let go and dropped to his knees. He pushed his great body first to the right and then far to the left, knocking over both his assailants. Fuming and sweating, he sprang upright and twisted the sheet into a ball, which he tossed to the bed.
After all, he had been too quick for Hoagland. Jhe alteration of position was a thing accomplished in the merest flash of time. Before the two Americans could realize the speed with which his maneuver was enacted, they were being dragged by the backs of their necks toward the hall, the door of which was reopened in answer to a kick from Don Ramon's heavy riding boots. With a contemptuous snort at the dazed guard, his master bellowed for better help in the removal of his prisoners.
“Socorro! Socorro!”
His bawl echoed through the palacio. From the floor below, running footsteps sounded. They sounded nearer. They were ascending the narrow stairs. The sentry at the door, whose noninterference had once been commanded, showed signs of convalescing intelligence. Villeta, Dan, and Hoagland were just around the turn of the door when Dan, falling forward, managed to grasp one of his captor's ankles. Don Ramon was caught in mid-stride; he tumbled with a resounding bump.
Heavy men are hard to throw, but, if they are thrown, it is heavily. For one instant Villeta lay so still that the sentry's whole mind was given to him, and during that broken moment, the Americans scrambled to their feet and stared at each other. To run forward now would be to run into that oncoming help which was clamberng up the stairs. Dan, quicker in this crisis than Hoagland, dragged at the latter's sleeve and pointed within the room.
When Don Ramon had last kicked that door, its key dropped from the lock; it lay now a yard beyond the sill. Dan pulled the detective to it. They slammed the door just as a recovered Villeta flung himself against the barrier. Pressing with all their strength upon their side of the oaken panel, they managed to hold until Dan had turned the key. It was a strong key set in a strong lock. Once, perhaps, it had secured other prisoners in that room. The present prisoners were thankful for its temporary protection.
Hoagland produced a pair of automatics and put one into Dan's hands.
“I oughtn't to have given myself away,” he muttered; “but I thought that dago was going to kill you, my friend.” He pointed to the proffered weapon. “I didn't want you to have this down there in the jungle,” he said with the vacant stare that Dan had noted on the Hawk. “But—oh, boy—I want you to have it now!”
“Why didn't you—didn't you use it—on him?” Stone panted. He nodded toward the door and indicated the invisible but more than audible planter who was hammering at its farther side.
“The first rule of our service,” Hoagland smilingly explained, “is never to shoot while there's any chance without it.” Villeta's blows redoubled; the treasury agent grew serious again. “And now,” he concluded, “I think you and I are getting to the last chance.”
Again and again Ramon pounded on the door; more and more steps thumped up the stairs and came nearer and nearer along the hall. Villeta cursed the guard, then roared incisive orders. He called for guns, machetes, for all his adherents, and for Fernando—above all, for Fernando.
Over the turmoil the hunchback's shrill voice sounded finally in answer, from far below. “At once, Don Ramon! At once!”
Dan drew Hoagland to the window. “You're right,” said he. “Look!” And he pointed meaningly straight down the precipitous outer wall. “We can't make it that way; never in the world! And we can't escape by the door—and the door can't hold forever. We're trapped. It's only a question of time!”
The secret-service man, one eye on the reverberating portal, tapped Dan's shoulder:
“A question of time; that's just it. We must hold out as long as we can. But even then”
A roar and a smash interrupted him. Don Ramon's peons had arrived in force. Their machetes hacked at the door; their pistols shot through it.
“A minute or two—not more. Listen to that!” Dan spoke between the noise of the blows. “And, if they can't work fast enough this way, they'll rig up some sort of battering-ram.”
The wood was already splintering. Through the thinnest of the paneling the flash of a peon's evil blade gleamed among the splinters.
After that there was no more talking against the pandemonium. Hoagland gestured to Dan to stand close to the doorpost on one side. He posted himself on the other. He released the safety catch of his own weapon and held it cocked for the tumultuous moment of the enemy's entrance. Dan sedulously and resolutely imitated his companion's grim prepartions.
Crash! The wood seemed breaking at all points, and yet somehow the door as a whole still held firm. Hoagland lifted his left arm and examined the watch that he wore upon his wrist.
“We must keep them back as long as we can!” he shouted; but, through the din of the battering, the younger man was forced to guess at what he said.
Then came the end. With a rending lunge the door fell inward and, after it, pell-mell, pitched the vanguard of the dark attackers.
The first two dropped at the first two shots from either side of the doorway; but what followed was wholly indiscriminate. Instantly the room was full of men and gray smoke, pierced by the dull red of explosions. Don Ramon climbed over a pair of bodies and, seeing Hoagland first, hurled himself at the secret-service operative, seizing his wrist and trying to wrench his opponent's pistol free. A couple of other men shouldered after him and fell on Dan, who shot one, but missed the other; he did not greatly care so long as Villeta and Peña remained alive to threaten Gertruda—and Peña had not yet so much as appeared.
The doorway was narrow. The attackers, crowding hard and without order, had to come in only three at a time. An ugly fellow with lopped ears postured at the threshold and flourished his machete. Hoagland saw him and, raising his wrist despite the pressure Don Ramon had on it, fired; one earhole became a slash of blood; the man howled and fell, and so held back for a moment those behind him.
Thus matters stood when from outside the room, outside the house itself, a sound that was new beat through the noise of assault—the galloping of horses. There rose a shriek below stairs, which Dan knew must be Fernando's. Peña, perhaps delaying to rally all the peons, had inexplicably not yet come up in answer to his master's command!
Ramon, amid the turmoil of the fight, stood at pause and listened.
“I knew they wouldn't be a minute late!” Hoagland's shout broke the second's lull. “It's the constabulary.
To all save three of the crowd those English words meant nothing, but to Dan and Don Ramon they came, though so differently, as the magic words that break a spell. Suddenly no longer restrained, Stone burst free with a yell of triumph and battered his way toward the door, his sole thought the rescue of Gertruda.
Villeta's eyes started as if they would roll from his head. He backed rapidly, cursed a peon who was trying to aid, and, roaring “Vaya!” he flung the living obstacle aside, kicked his way over the blockade of bodies, and dashed from the room and down the staircase.
By now Dan also had vanished. The leaderless peons stopped, turned, and stared after Villeta, open-mouthed. Then, with a babel of cries and a savage disregard of their dead and wounded, they fled in their master's wake and followed him down the stairs.
Hoagland had rushed to the window. He had been right. The patio was full of armed men, and more were galloping up—helmeted natives, officered by Americans. He threw his arms high over his head and addressed the universe:
“Didn't I tell you it was only a question of time!”
Then horror trod upon the heels of exultation. He shuddered.
For down in the patio an ugly thing happened. Having scented trouble ahead of his master, and not wishing to share it, the hunchback had all too tardily attempted an escape. Unsightly as he was, he had—as Don Ramon had told Stone in the course of his extenuation of the hunchback's actions—a wife in the neighborhood of the village, and, wicked as he had abundantly proved himself to all the rest of the world, her, in his crooked way, Peña loved. He understood the significance of the approaching hoofs; he guessed flight imperative, but without this woman he would not try it. He might have cut across to the farther side of the plantation and made alone for the Haitian interior; instead, he thought to slip between the raiders and secure his wife before any escape proper could be begun. Terror, however, poisons acumen. Fernando, in his panic, miscalculated the distance of the charging constabulary.
As he reached the patio's edge, the first four horses galoped in. Their hoofs just missed his diminutive figure. He ducked this way and that. He swerved; he slipped. He fell to his knees. The next four animals crushed his shrieking form in the dust of the avenue.