Somewhere in the Caribbean/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
HOW THE LIGHTS WENT OUT.
YOU may say what you please about the joys of outdoor life in a semi-tropical climate, but I was sweating in the Florida Everglades simply and solely because I had gotten in bad with the Carter Construction Company on a dam-building job in the Colorado mountains and for no climatic reason whatever. Not to make a mystery of the Colorado affair, I may say here that I knew the job was as crooked as a dog's hind leg from start to finish; graft in the pay rolls, graft in the purchasing of material, graft in the estimates; the opportunity for all this lying in the fact that our company had farmed out most of the work to irresponsible subcontractors. Hiram Carter, president of our company—a finer, straighter old citizen never lived—knew nothing about the stealings; he wouldn't, naturally, because he took no part in the active management; but Jeffreys, vice president and chief executive, did. And when the thing blew up, I, as supervising engineer for the responsible company, proved to be the most convenient scapegoat.
Parker Jeffreys didn't come to me himself; he sent his son, Wickham, a young rakehell who was a striking example of what loose money can do toward spoiling reasonably decent stock in the second generation. The interview took place in Denver, whither I had been summoned by a curt wire, and the battleground actual, if you could call it such, was the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel.
“I guess it's up to you to do the fade-out, Ainsley,” was the way the deputy executioner put it as he was lighting his third cork-tipped cigarette. “The pater doesn't want to institute criminal action and he will have a good excuse not to if you vanish over the horizon. You've known all about this crookedness on the part of the 'subs'—you admit it; and while I don't say you were standing in with them, you know about how a jury would look at it.”
I did; and I knew that I had had verbal instructions—nothing in writing, of course—to keep hands off in the matter of the subcontractors' estimates and material purchases. Also I knew that I was fighting the fiercest battle of my life to keep from making young Jeffreys pay the price of my humiliation right where he sat lounging easily in the lobby armchair and regarding me half indifferently, half cynically through the rising curls of cigarette smoke. He was what an older generation of Westerners called a “dude;” high-priced clothes of a cut a lap or so ahead of the fashion, immaculate linen, patent leathers, socks and tie a color match, not much jewelry but more than any real man would wear.
“This was all cut and dried before you left New York, I suppose?” I said, holding myself in check as best I could.
“About letting you down easy! Naturally. On account of your acquaintance with the Carters. The pater is willing to go even farther. You have had a better offer from somebody else and you've taken it.”
“Oh, I have, have I?” I snapped. “What might it be?”
“A railroad-building job in Peru; firm of English contractors, Finlay, Holmes & Finlay—you ask for 'em in Lima,” he answered casually. “The next sailing from San Francisco will be on the thirteenth. You'll have just time to catch your steamer if you leave Denver to-night.”
The cold-bloodedness of the thing was enough to plant a vengeful devil in a saint. Like the scapegoat of old I was not only to be turned out of the flock; I was to be driven into the wilderness. I knew well enough why Wickham Jeffreys was so willing to stick the knife into me and turn it around in the wound. Hiram Carter and my father had begun life on adjoining farms in Indiana and Alison Carter and I had been children together. In our pinafore days we had solemnly promised to marry—a bit of childish sentiment we had both laughed over many times since. Not that I had been finding it any laughing matter after I grew up and became man enough to realize what a heartbreaking beauty Alison had developed into. But there were no pins left standing in that alley. The year after my graduation from the engineering school, dad had died a disappointed and broken man; and Alison's father was—well, he was now a millionaire two or three times over. Rumor had it that Wickham Jeffreys meant to marry into the company and because Alison and I still exchanged letters once in a while I guessed that in addition to making me the goat in the dam-building steal he thought it offered a good chance to shove me into a good, deep background.
“It is all arranged then?” I inquired, still holding myself down.
He nodded. “You'll find your passage taken when you get to Frisco. We can hold up this investigation until after you've left the country. It seemed the easiest way out of the mess.”
“Suppose I tell you to go to hell and take my chance on the witness stand?” I suggested.
“You won't do anything like that,” he returned coolly. “I don't say that you mightn't make trouble for the Carter Company; perhaps you could, though you'd have nothing but your unsupported word. But you're not going to drag your father's old neighbor into court to refute a charge of conspiracy and graft. What you are going to do is to take the night train for the Coast.”
I may own frankly that I was a murderer in all but the actual fact at the moment when young Jeffreys got out of his chair and stooped to flick the cigarette ashes from his knee with a handkerchief fine enough to have been a woman's. His rising was the signal that the interview was ended. As he walked away toward the elevators, I had another struggle with the man-killing devil inside of me, and it was only the thought that after all there might possibly be some sort of a future with a comeback that restrained me.
This is enough and more than enough of the condition precedent, as the lawyers say. But to wind it up and tuck the end in I may add that I didn't go to Peru or even to San Francisco. There were two night trains leaving Denver at about the same hour; one for the West and another for the Southeast. I took the latter and within a fortnight had landed a job as assistant engineer on a drainage project in the Florida Everglades—in a region where nobody knew me or had ever heard of me; a grave deep enough in all conscience, but not so deep as an exile's in Peru. I was still in America and on the same continent at least with Alison.
It was not until some five months of a mosquito-bitten existence had been worried out in the Florida littoral that I had my first word from the outside world. There were two other assistants on the drainage job with me but since we were running three gangs there was plenty of isolation. Mail came in only once a week and inasmuch as I had written to nobody since leaving Colorado there were no letters for me. But the spell was broken one day when a negro from the lower camp came up with a monogrammed envelope addressed to me, “Somewhere in Florida.” I knew both the monogram and the handwriting. They were Alison's.
In a maze of wonderment as to how she had contrived to trace me, I read her brief note:
Dear Dick: Just on the hopeful chance that this may reach you in time: If you are not too far away can't you manage to come to dinner with us to-night? We are here at Miami in the yacht and I'll see to it that you get enough to eat. I suppose you haven't any dinner coat, but never mind that; come just as you are.
Alison.P. S. Why haven't you written me in a whole half year?
If the sluggish drainage canal we were cutting through the black, peaty soil had suddenly changed its course to ooze the wrong way I could scarcely have been more astonished. In the first place I hadn't the slightest idea that Alison was in Florida or within a thousand miles of it; and in the second it seemed little less than miraculous that she should have known how to find me. No matter. If she had called me from heaven or hell I think I should have tried to get across to her. In half an hour I had presented myself at the chief's tent two miles down the canal.
“Sure you may go,” was the good-natured permission given after I had asked for overnight leave to go to Miami. “And you needn't cut it to a single night unless you want to. Make it a week-end if you feel like it. Friends from the North?”
“Yes,” I admitted and then adding something about not having much time to waste I hurried away before he should ask other and less easily answered questions.
Alison was right about the dinner coat. I had nothing in my kit remotely resembling one—or the sartorial appurtenances that go with it. But I did have a clean shirt and a change from my working clothes. And the yacht conventions, as I remembered them, were not very rigorous.
As I was borrowing a light rowboat from the dredge equipment, Westcott, our chief, called to me from the canal bank to ask if I didn't want one of the negroes to row me down. If I had accepted his offer things might have turned out differently—though perhaps not. But my lucky—or unlucky—star must have been in the ascendant for I thanked him and said “no” and pulled away, going as straight to my fate as if the painter of the light skiff had been a tow-rope hitched to that same lucky—or unlucky—star.
It was coming on to dusk when I reached Miami by auto from the outlet of the drainage canal and made my way to the bay front. The winter tourist season was on and there were a number of yachts and motor cruisers moored at the landings and others with their riding lights already dis played at anchor in the bay.
Though Alison hadn't mentioned the name of the yacht in her letter I took it for granted that it would be the Waikiki, the seagoing miniature liner upon which her father had lavished the good half of a king's ransom in the building and in which I had once been a guest on a run down the New England coast to Mount Desert. I was not mistaken. The trim little ship, ghostlike in its spotless white paint, was riding at anchor a few hundred yards from the water front and almost at my feet I found her dinghy with a single sailor—a Provincetown Portuguese from his looks—waiting as if for a passenger.
“You are from the Waikiki?” I asked.
“Si, senhor. I wait for wan Meestaire Onslee-e-e.”
It was quite like Alison to send a boat for me; no girl was ever more thoughtful for other people's comfort. So I got aboard, telling the sailor that I was his man; and a few minutes later I had climbed the accommodation ladder to the yacht's deck.
As I hoped she might, Alison herself met me as I set foot on deck, and she was alone.
“Dick!” she exclaimed, giving me both of her hands. “I knew you'd come if the place where you had buried yourself were not more than a thousand miles away! When did you get my letter?”
“A little before noon. It came up in the company launch.”
“And the launch brought you down?”
“No; I came in a skiff—and I've been all afternoon on the job. But never mind about me. Tell me about yourself. Are you feeling as fit as you look?”
This was no empty fill-in on my part. There may have been more beautiful things in a world of beauty than she was, standing there in the softened light of the shaded awning electrics, white-clad in yachting flannels and with a round little white hat devoid of trimmings of any sort crushed down over her masses of red-gold hair—there might have been, I say, but I doubted it. Yet there was a shadow of trouble in the eyes that I used to make her shut and let me kiss when she was four and I was eight.
“Am I well? Physically, yes; so well that it almost hurts. But in another way. Dick, I had to see you and talk with you! There isn't anybody else. We weren't coming here; we were going on. to Havana without stopping. But I insisted. I said I wanted to see how much Miami had grown since we were here two winters ago.”
“You knew I was here or near here?”
“By the merest chance. It was almost a miracle. Wickham said you were in South America; he has always said so. Do you remember, the night you left Denver last summer, you sat in the Pullman smoking room and talked with a nice old gentleman from the East?”
“Not particularly,” I said. “I have talked with a good many men in Pullman smoking rooms, first and last.”
“Well, you did; an elderly man with gray hair and little butlerish side whiskers; a Mr. Carroll from Baltimore. From what you said he gathered that you had been with the Carter Company and were leaving to come down here.”
With these particulars to help, I did remember. The old gentleman had been right fatherly and sympathetic and it had eased my soreness a little to confide in him.
“And with a whole worldful of people to spill it to he had to search you out and tell you?” I marveled.
“It just happened,” she went on hurriedly. “I know his daughter; we were in Wellesley together. And the Carrolls summer on Mount Desert, as daddy and I do. One day we were talking about South America, Mr. Carroll and I, and I said I had a friend there—in Peru—and mentioned your name. He said 'no,' that you were in Florida on a drainage canal near Miami; that you told him you were going there.”
“It's a little world,” I said; the bromidianism slipping out before I could stop it. “I was there and I am here. Are you glad to see me, Allie?”
“Wonderfully glad, Dick—and thankful!”
“Wait a minute,” I interposed; “do you know how I came to leave Colorado?”
“I don't believe a single word of it!” she broke out hotly. “That is one of the things I wanted to talk about; but there are others—much more terrible things. How long can you stay?”
“This evening, you mean?”
“We shall have no chance to talk this evening; there are too many people aboard and—and I think we won't be given a chance to talk. Can you stay over to-morrow and meet me at the hotel?”
“If that is what you want I can't do anything else.”
“You're good, Dick—always good and splendidly reliable. I—daddy and I—need help tremendously and you must tell me what to do. I—there's something awful about to”
That was the end of it. A Jap steward, appearing as if he had materialized out of the deck at our feet, was whispering in Oriental sibilants, “The honorable dinner is served,” and Alison turned and led the way to the cabin companion stair.
After what she had said I was prepared to meet a goodly number of people in the yacht party. The Waikiki could accommodate any number of guests up to a score or so. But including myself there were only eleven to gather about the dinner table in the white-and-gold saloon; five men and six women. With a single exception they were all strangers to me and in the wholesale introduction I didn't even get the names straight. That was partly because of the exception. Wickham Jeffreys was the one person that I knew and his blank astoundment at seeing me was only equaled by mine at finding him posing as the host of the party in the Carter yacht.
At once I realized that Alison had not only failed to give Jeffreys her true reason for wishing to stop at Miami; she had given him no hint that I was to make one at that night's dinner table. And in some way that I didn't understand, or rather for some reason that was not yet made plain, I could see that my presence was just about as welcome to him as a snowstorm in July would be to a grower of oranges. He had evidently been believing his own story—that I was safely backgrounded against the Peruvian Andes. After the first gasping, “Hah! how are you, Ainsley?” he ignored me completely, striving, as it appeared, to convey the impression to the others that I was Alison's guest and none of his.
In the seating I was placed between a man with a hanging lower lip and bibulous eyes—who answered, as I found, to the name of Matthewson and was a New York stockbroker—between this man and a young woman who began on me by saying, “Rotten of Alison not to let me get your name in the introduction. Mine's Sefton—Peggy for short.” And then out of a clear sky: “An old flame of Alison's, I take it? But you're ages too late. Wick's got the field beaten to a frazzle. Shouldn't wonder if there's a wedding in Havana.”
This calm announcement knocked me speechless. Alison the wife of Wickham Jeffreys? It was simply unthinkable! Was that the trouble she was going to confide to me? If so, it certainly deserved all the adjectives she had used in speaking of it.
After I had found my tongue again and was supplying the missing information as to my name I took occasion to measure the Sefton young woman up with the other members of the party. As nearly as I could determine she seemed to be an average sample. The table talk was all of booze and sport, with a very modern disregard for what our fathers and mothers would have called the common decencies. How on earth Alison came to be in this galley I couldn't imagine. I did not need to remark her downcast eyes and rising color at some of the table stories to assure me she was as much out of her proper element as a snow ball would be in Hades. And yet the 'Waikiki' was her father's yacht.
In a very short time I was given to understand plainly what the southern cruise of the yacht meant to the party as a whole. Its destination was Cuba and its object was to escape the restrictions of prohibition. The men and women of the party were not Alison's friends; they were Wickham Jeffreys'. And they were pointing like trained beagles for a land of free gaming and plentiful liquor. More than once the man Matthewson on my right growled out his impatience at the stopover in Biscayne Bay and the delay it was imposing, and the sentiment found ready echoes on all sides.
The black coffee was served on the after deck under the lighted awning,-and in the shift from the saloon I contrived to shake off the young Sefton person—though she maliciously made it difficult for me to accomplish—and to draw Alison a little aside in the outdoor grouping.
“You are quite paralyzed, I know, and you have a perfect right to be,” she began in a low undertone. “I can't explain now; Wickham will see to it that I don't get the chance. But to-morrow”
Jeffreys had sauntered across to where we stood at the rail and he looked me over as he might have looked at a horse he was thinking of buying.
“So you came back from Peru, did you, Ainsley?” he said, flipping his cigarette stub overboard.
“No,” I returned shortly. “I didn't go.”
“Ah; that was a mistake, I think. Good people to work for—those Englishmen. What are you doing in Miami?”
I considered it very pointedly none of his business what I was doing but for Alison's sake I couldn't quarrel openly with him on the deck of her father's yacht. So I told him briefly about the drainage canal project. He left us at that, but before we could resume anything like a confidential talk the little Sefton brute came to us and though we saw nothing more of Jeffreys the young woman stuck to us like a leech; was still sticking an hour later when, despairing of getting a moment's privacy with Alison in that environment, I took my leave.
“To-morrow morning at the Royal Palm,” Alison got a chance to whisper, as I was going over the side; and with this as her last word I took my place in the stern sheets of the dinghy.
As a matter of course I was given no slightest warning of what was lying in wait for me. The Portuguese sailor who had been my boatman in pulling off to the Waikiki was officiating again and I paid no attention to him as he bent to his oars and sent the dinghy shoreward. I had enough to think about to render me oblivious to the surroundings, the bay with its fleet of pleasure craft, the water front of the little city with its twinkling electrics. What was Alison Carter's trouble? And how did it come that her father's yacht had been turned over to Wickham Jeffreys and his party of booze fighters and that she was a member of that party? More than all, what foundation, if any, was there for the Sefton girl's prophecy that there would be a wedding in Havana?
It was the blindest of puzzles and one thing only was clear. Alison had known that I was in Florida and that I could probably be reached from Miami. And in her trouble, whatever it might be, she was turning instinctively to me. Good. I'd help her if I could—and to any length; even to the length of pitching Wickham Jeffreys overboard and taking the Waikiki back to New York, if that were what she wished me to do. Our childhood friendship might stand sponsor for that much, at any rate.
At this point in the determinative reverie I came awake to the fact that the dinghy was no longer headed directly shoreward; that it was bumping up against the bilge of a schooner-rigged vessel that seemed to be drifting seaward on the outgoing tide. Before I could ask the Portuguese what he was about, two men flung themselves over the side of the drifting vessel and dropped into the dinghy. In the starlight I saw the bigger of the pair take a limp object like a sausage from his coat pocket and brandish it over my head. The next instant I had a fleeting impression that one of the masts of the drifting ship had fallen over on me and the twinkling shore lights went out in blank darkness.