Money to Burn/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE BEACH COMBER
STONE was a good swimmer. On this night of his plunge from the Hawk, he needed all his strength and all his art.
It was with the speed of a St. Moritz toboggan that he struck the water a few yards beyond the ship's side. Down he went among the cool recesses—and still down. His ears roared, his chest collapsed, yet there kept ringing in his consciousness those words which spurred his every muscle to escape:
“You'll swing for this! By God, you'll swing for it!”
Still down!
He remembered having heard that, somewhere off Porto Rico, Mount Everest itself could be all but submerged. He seemed to be plumbing a scarcely minor abyss. Nevertheless, there is a level at which sea water refuses the unprotected body of a human diver. He reached that at last, and from it was catapulted upward.
Lights overhead—stars. Lights directly in front of him—a town. He struck out for it.
Blue parrot fish swam with him; he could not see them. Striped “sergeant majors” fled his approach. A cub shark followed him—and then turned tail.
It turned tail because Dan found himself among breakers. He fought. He was tossed high. He believed he was lost, but the tide was with him, and the underpull light. One great wave flung him landward; he lowered his feet. Waist deep in the water, he stood on comfortingly firm sands.
He was penniless; the threat of the disgraceful gallows, or of an almost equally disgraceful prison term for manslaughter overpowered him. The chances of capture were a hundred to one, and if he went free for the present, he might never show himself in his chosen profession. To do so would be to court attention. He thought of that even now. The career he had struggled so hard to make possible must be abandoned. As for any immediate course, he dared not enter the town, and yet he was too near exhaustion to go beyond it.
He staggered down the damp darkness of the beach. Here, though the sky was illumined over head, the night was impenetrable. His right foot struck something that moved with a groan; he bounded aside, and his left kicked a body that swore cordially. The sands were full of derelict men, seeking sleep. With a resignation that made him one of them, Dan sank down, at last more desirous of rest than of escape.
The town's water-front street was not a hundred yards away, and under its rare lamps he could see barefoot citizens parading with umbrellas raised against the supposedly evil effects of starshine. The heat of the day was gone, the air was chilly, and he was wet through. He burrowed into the sand.
“Look out there! Don't crowd.”
Dan gasped an apology to the invisible neighbor whom he had discommoded.
The fellow was evidently an American. “There's plenty of room on San Lorenzo sands,” he grumbled.
San Lorenzo! Dan had assumed that, during his interview in the cabin, the Hawk had progressed toward her announced destination:
“This isn't Santo Domingo?”
The voice of his fellow beach comber cackled a feeble laugh: “What sort o' rum do you drink? Course it's Santo Domingo, but San Domingo City's clear across the island, an' if you've just come to Española, why, take it from me, you've come to the nearest thing to hell this side of the real place.
He dropped into a low monologue of anathemas. This was a land of fever and sudden death; the towns were barbarous, the jungle savage. In the interior, human sacrifices established the reign of the worshiped snake; San Lorenzo's saloons were outnumbered by the hounforts of sorcerers. Neither Dan's silence nor the livid objections of other sleepy loafers discouraged the diatribe.
“If you don't take your hat off and say 'Good day' before you ask a nigger for a job, he'll tell you he'll cut your heart out and drink your blood; and if you turn your back, he'll make good, too. And don't you get sick here. If you do, they'll call in a witch doctor. I had the jimjams last week. They took me to the municipal hospital. The cots are dirty mattresses on the floor, and the chickens walk over you. All they do for you's give you one mess o' red beans and then let you die.”
He rumbled on. The oaths of the surrounding company ended in discouragement. Even Dan ceased to listen.
Where was the pursuit? And what, if it failed, was he to do?
It was barely conceivable that Johnson counted him drowned; but even if he was not sought, his plight was desperate. Small opportunity for a medical student in this isle of witchcraft—and for a medical student who, if recognized, would be arrested as a murderer. Ecclesiastical architecture? Dan smiled grimly at the darkness. In the little town where he had been brought up, that Pennsylvania-Dutch lawyer who administered the elder Stone's estate—comprising, as he thought, nothing save valueless books—had cautioned the heir:
“Your pop was the kindest-hearted man as effer lived, but he hadn't an eye for money yet. If you want to git along, boy, keep your eyes off'n print.”
And now, because of a printed book, Dan had incurred a capital charge! Despair propped wide his eyelids.
He thought of his father, and his father's high sense of honor—his father, who had had such hopes for his boy, such faith in his son's future, his father who, though not himself successful in any worldly way, had given so much more than the worldly to young Dan. He could have wished that that book had never been given!
Dawn came at last, or rather full morning. Would capture accompany it?
One minute, the waters were dark as midnight, the next, and with the smell of seaweed at low tide, the silver gulls and “longtails” in silver spray flew above a sea of dancing gold. Dan's neighbors sat up, stretching and scratching, in every concluding stage of rascally vagabondage, negroes from Haiti and Martinique, Frenchmen from Marseilles, outcast Britons dismissed by the Bahamas, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Levantines, and the New York wharf rat who had cursed Santo Domingo—the sweepings of fifty ports from Glasgow and Varna to Demerara and the Chagres. Over on the water-front street gaudily dressed mulatto women appeared, hands on swaying hips, baskets of green and yellow mangoes balanced on their turbaned heads.
Through these a tall, fat man in spotless white pushed his easy way. He led by the arm a shy and graceful girl, and walked with magnificent unconcern straight among the riffraff of the beach.
In those surroundings the mere physical cleanliness of the newcomers shone like ice. The man's broad Panama was the largest Dan had ever seen. It surmounted a wide, dark face with eyes distinctly Latin, very bright and quick. Full lips smiled urbanely under a sweeping mustache, when not hidden by a plump hand, the nails of which strong teeth bit now and then, as by some habit acquired in childhood and never overcome. To the wrist of this hand a leather thong secured a Malacca cane, and, when the fingers were not at the mouth, the stick was swung with utter carelessness of its frequent descent upon the backs of beach combers scuttling like beetles before it.
Dan had lounged away. He addressed a fellow who might hail from Caracas: “Quién está el rico señor?”
The South American shrugged. He didn't know who the rich gentleman might be. Besides, what difference could it make? The rich were rich because they hung on to their money, not because they peppered the sands with dominicanos!
“It were better to inquire about the woman,” the derelict concluded with a look in reply to which Dan's kick sent him sprawling.
The girl was a picture of dusky loveliness, pure, and pure Spanish. She slightly turned her ankle in the sands and the lace covering fell from her head and frightened face—a face that one would say was merely peeping in at life's door and not liking what it saw there well enough to enter. Her glance met Dan's; she blushed and hurriedly replaced the mantilla.
An opening tea rose blown upon an ash heap. Stone felt the dust upon him; he turned aside.
As he did so his eyes swept the bay. San Lorenzo boasted no docks; the men of ships must come ashore in boats. Well, there was the Hawk and a longboat putting off from her! The medical student wheeled again and found himself closely face to face with the man in white.
“Can you give me a job?”
The startled question rose to his tongue at the thought that here might be a planter from the interior about to return thither, and it proved well grounded. It came instinctively in English, but in English the large man at once smilingly replied:
“This is a strange question, and you do not look as if you belonged”—the speaker smiled down at the denizens of the foreshore—“as if you belonged here. What sort of work do you want?”
Out of the corner of an eye Dan studied the harbor. He saw the Hawk's boat hurrying to shore like a water spider.
“Any kind,” said he.
The Panama shook a soft negative. “Any kind is no kind. I fear”
“I can do 'most all sorts of unskilled labor.” Stone extended a detaining hand. “I'm a third-year medical student, but”
He stopped short. He could have bitten out his tongue. Medical student! If he was to be sought by the police, that would be one of the first terms used to describe him. It should therefore be the last for him to employ, and yet it was this very word of betrayal that caught the big man's attention. At mention of medicine his smile passed. He was all interest.
“A doctor?”
The error had been made now. Dan might as well tell a part of the truth. “Not quite,” said he.
“But almost? Yes? Why, then, perhaps—listen, señor. On my sugar plantation the one man invaluable who truly understands the machinery is too ill to move. I am but now arrived, waiting that a doctor's office should open, but despairing that a medico should leave his practice for me. If you could prove yourself what you say, it would be worth to me anything—anything.” The bright black eyes appraised the American rapidly. “It would be worth to me one thousand dollars monthly. Besides, these two San Lorenzo doctors of course speak Spanish. I prefer a foreigner. There has been talk of peonage—groundless, most assuredly, but still—you do not know Spanish?”
The tone of the question plainly asked for a negative answer. Two hundred yards away, the boat was landing.
“No,” said Dan desperately.
“Ah, then if you could prove that you have sufficient knowledge of medicine—you have papers that no doubt will substantiate”
The young American ran his hands through his unruly hair. He spoke so fast that his words fell over one another's heels.
“Señor,” said he, “I can't. I've no papers. But didn't I tell you I was a third-year student—tell you before I could guess what you wanted? Only get me away from here—get me away from here quick!” He saw Johnson stepping ashore. Evidently a hurried and fruitless search of the previous night was now to be renewed by day. It must be made fruitless to the end! “I was ship's doctor on that tramp out there. I killed a man in a fight. I give you my word it was an accident, but it looked bad, and they're after me.” He put the stranger directly between him and the search party. He appealed to the girl: “Señorita, you”
The girl was watching him with wide-eyed fascination, but, at his appeal to her, she seemed to draw back, and her hand made a gesture as if of dissent.
The planter interrupted quickly: “My niece does not speak English. Nevertheless, you did indeed call yourself a medical student before I had spoken of a physician.” He looked over his shoulder and observed and understood the hustle at the boat. “Walk slowly,” he concluded, “but ahead of us and in this direction, opposite to your pursuers. I think that I may be persuaded to engage your professional services.”