Money to Burn/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
FLAME
DAN, dear, but I assure you” said the Señorita Gertruda; “and you can yourself see my feet, that they have not been cut off. I can walk perfectly.”
He had found her in her own room, after wildly searching a dozen others, deserted by the appointed guards who had run off in answer to Don Ramon's summons of assistance. Having once lifted her in his arms, he was now carrying her through the door that, from the ground-floor hall, opened to the patio.
“I don't care,” said Dan. “I don't want ever to let you go.”
“Only,” she persisted, “I have not been at all harmed, I assure you!”
“And you never shall be, thank God!”
“Because doubtless,” the girl laughed, “these officers and men here will aid you to defend me.”
This took his eyes from her, and he realized that he was now facing a crowded compound in which stood not a few of his uniformed fellow country men. She blushed as he put her down; he blushed, too, as an officer of the constabulary came up to them.
“Mr. Hoagland asked me to tell you, sir, that the house is now safely surrounded. Most of the peons are already in custody.”
“You—you're really American?” stammered Dan. “United States American?”
“Oh, altogether, sir!”
“In Santo Domingo?”
The questioned man frowned slightly. “I'm afraid,” he said, “that you're like most of the people back home. Hardly any of them know that United States citizens have been officering the constabulary just about ever since Mr. Roosevelt took over the customs for us.”
He was right. Dan was like most Americans. He contritely admitted having heard of the historic change and then forthwith forgetting it. He recollected that Don Ramon had, for the most part, carefully kept him to the back streets of both San Lorenzo and Sanchez. Of course he had seen no sign of the new order.
“And Hoagland sent for you?”
“Yesterday—a wireless to Puerto Plata—from the only wireless station within twenty miles of here.”
Dan sniffed at the still air. There was the scent of something burning.
“Where's he now—Hoagland?”
“He's looking for the owner of this hacienda. What is his name? Villeta? It seems the fellow came down the main stairs, but he never showed up here, so he must have got out back, or else he's gone up again by some other way.”
Dan shouted. “Why, good heavens, he's in the chapel, of course!”
The officer smiled. Was this interlocutor crazy? “Saying his prayers?” he asked.
“No, no! You don't understand, and I hadn't time to tell Hoagland that part, of it. I only told him I knew what their game was.” Dan all but forgot Gertruda. He seized the officer's shoulders. “Why, it's all there in the chapel, the presses, the fake money and”
A sweating Hoagland rushed up to them. Something of what Stone said he had caught; in his turn, he began to shake Dan. “Where's the chapel? Where is the chapel?”
Dan surrendered the señorita to the officer's care and, followed by the secret-service agent and a score of men, led the way at a run. As they advanced, the scent of things burning grew more pungent.
“He's burning up the money!” cried Stone.
“I don't give a whoop about the money!” panted Hoagland. “What I've got to get is the plates. In a counterfeiting case, as long as the plates exist”
His breath nearly stopped, and his words stopped altogether. Dan, running well ahead, remembered that, during his visit to the chapel, he had not once thought about the plates.
The heavy door was unlocked. Whoever was inside had wasted no time in securing it behind his entrance. Stone tore it open. A cloud of smoke rushed out and on it flapped a squawking bird.
“Muerte al traidor!”
Don Ramon, in his extremity, had not forgotten his pet; but now Pedro deserted him for the less stifling atmosphere of the hot afternoon. The parrot flew, still squawking, into the jungle.
The attackers rushed inside. A slow smoke was filling the transept from the rickety confessional box. Originating in the counterfeit hundred-dollar bills, the fire had already spread outward. The woodwork was crackling close to the body of the peon, who was stretched there, staring at the vaulted roof and seeing nothing—the only disinterested figure among them all.
Hoagland tore away a handful of the charring paper and stuffed it into a coat pocket. As he did so, three shots out of an automatic pistol flashed from behind the altar and spattered against the west wall above the raiders' heads.
Dan looked back toward the way by which he had entered.
“The plates!” shrieked Hoagland, divining his purpose while it was yet but half formed. “Never mind the man! The plates are worth more'n their maker. Why”
But Stone, with quick decision, zigzagged a path among his new-found allies. He had a score of his own to pay. He ran across the patio and into the now deserted house.
He tore upstairs. He rushed light-footed along a gallery and so came, with quick stealth, upon the balcony over which he had thrown the peon who now lay dead there on the chapel floor.
Dan looked down over the rail. In spite of the rising smoke, he could now see Don Ramon quite clearly. Behind the altar and through its marble tracery, the pseudo-planter was taking careful aim at the constabulary. He had probably made his way to the chapel by a roundabout course after passing through a back door of the palacio; he never dreamed of looking up.
From the east end of the balcony it was a long diagonal leap to the shoulders of Villeta below. Dan measured the distance with precision. Could he make it? He climbed upon the rail and poised there; into his mind flashed the memory of how he had poised before his plunge from the Hawk. Below, the eyes of the armed men were raised to him, but Hoagland gestured them to silence, and the embattled counterfeiter—the man who had kept Gertruda from her inheritance—peeped only at those of his enemies who were on his own level.
Balanced as if for a dive into some quiet swimming pool, Dan counted the number of yards and the angle he must cover if he hoped for anything but death or maiming on the chapel pavement. Ramon's huge, forward-bent back presented a clear but perilously far-away landing place, a landing place only just possible of achievement.
Stone made the dive. The wind of his passage whistled in his ears. His heart seemed to stop beating.
But he had not calculated erroneously. Like a missile from a skillful sling, he struck his goal, safely between the sharpshooter's shoulders. The impact was tremendous. Both the human bullet and its human mark rolled, dazed, upon the tiles.
When Dan sat up, the invulnerable giant, Ramon was surrounded by the raiders and was shrugging his recognition of the fact that the time was overripe for surrender.
“You appear to have captured me,” said he to the most zealous of his guardians. “Don't point your revolver like that. It might go off. Never fear, I shall accompany you quietly.”
Through the gathering smoke, Hoagland was anxiously examining the machinery in the center aisle while the one group of constabulary who were not busy watching Don Ramon set themselves to putting out the fire.
“Where are the plates?” the secret-service agent again demanded. “I've got to have those counterfeit plates, Mr. Villeta.”
Don Ramon only smiled.
The plates were not inside the burning confessional box. That was soon evident. Looking on detachedly at the fevered search, Villeta bit his nails and shook his head as if he were in no position to offer enlightenment.
Hoagland ran up to Don Ramon. He shoved forward an enraged fist.
“Will you tell me where you've hidden those plates? You know we'll have our troubles with a jury unless we find 'em, and you know they're more dangerous at large than you are! Where have you hidden them?”
Villeta fairly beamed. “Señor, I have no idea of what it is that you are talking.”
“Shall I kill you, or will you tell me?”
Ramon knew that for a bluff, and he displayed his knowledge laughingly. “You shall kill me.”
The bluff was fairly called. Hoagland tossed his thin-thatched head and turned away. Throughout Dan's dash to the balcony he had, under the hampered sharpshooter's fruitless fire, ransacked half the chapel. Now the second half had been vainly scoured. Yet the operative was decided that these imperatively important pieces of metal were somewhere under this groined roof.
They must be. All the work had been accomplished here, and the place had been kept more securely locked than the chief counterfeiter's own bedroom could have been.
Hoagland wheeled on Dan. “You're a lot of help, you are!” he vociferated. He had to expend his chagrin on somebody. “You've made a lot of use of your opportunities, I don't think. Found out everything that I'd guessed beforehand. Turned up a lot of junk that I didn't half need.” One would have thought that he had especially commissioned Dan to come here. “Oh, I wired home for your record and got it all right. Studied medicine and played with church architecture. If you had to play with something, why didn't you pick a thing that could be of some use now?”
It was the old taunt. It was, in effect, the gibe against Dan's father that the Pennsylvania-Dutch lawyer had launched at the boy when the elder Stone's estate was settled: “Your pop was the kindest-hearted man as effer lived, but he hadn't an eye fer money yet. If you want to git along, boy, keep your fingers off'n print.”
And it stung his father's son to action. Marvelously, he remembered that single detail of the old books on ecclesiastical architecture which solved the pressing problem of his government's present quest.
“I've got it!” he said.
Hoagland fairly shook him. “Got what? Where?”
“The plates. Don't! You're hurting my shoulder where Peña bit it! I mean I know where they are. Listen! In every Catholic altar there is a piece of metal or a thin mortared stone—the altar stone that covers a cavity. They put relics of a saint in it. This chapel's not used now, but the altar stone—that hole—that must be here; it's just the place. Look in it!”