by John Benteen
Then the day was at hand to kill. What you did in the tropics was to do nothing until night came. You ate a light meal at two o’clock, slept until four, weathering out the worst of the heat, unless you were a construction worker on the Canal. If you were, because you were an American and would not bow to native customs, you sweated through the worst part of the day, in your steam shovel, or running your dragline, or bossing West Indian blacks; and the sweat ran down you in rivers as you labored through the dreadful hours which, the natives had found, would kill an ox if you worked him hard then.
Fargo was not a construction worker; and in the dead, hot, still hours of siesta time, he lay in bed with Consuelo and taught her new and imaginative ways of making love which would stand her in good stead and enable her to command a premium when he, as he knew he must—and very soon—was no longer around to look after her. She was first astonished and then enthusiastic as he made his new demands on her. It was, she said, almost like the days her mother had told her about when the French were here; and that was when Fargo had learned that she was not half-Spanish at all, but a mixture of San Bias Indian and French.
It was, by his lights, a good existence; but he had a job to do. It was about a week before payday that he began to cheat the Americans who came to play poker with him. He began carefully at first, but he became more blatant as the seven days went past. By payday weekend, when the construction workers hit town in full cry, he was pretty obvious. He used strippers and readers and stacked decks and he dealt off the bottom; and once in a while, he was fairly clumsy about it.
The man’s name was Ed Hackett, and he ran a steam shovel out in Culebra Cut. A giant, not very bright, black bearded and sun bronzed, he had a bad habit of calling every bet. Fargo singled him out as the one to play to, because Hackett was a sorehead. Even when he lost legitimately, he whined. It was on a Saturday night, when Hackett had just been paid off, that the thing between himself and Fargo came to a head.
They sat around the poker table, six of them, Fargo, Hackett, and four faceless others. Fargo dealt the cards, and he was not cheating at all, in the first round of this game of draw poker. At least, it did not seem so, as his fingers, too deft for the eye to follow, dealt the cards around and gave Ed Hackett three kings when it took only jacks or better to open the pot.
Hackett sat across the table from Fargo. Two men passed before the bet reached Hackett. Poker-faced, the big man rumbled: “I’ll open.” And he shoved fifty dollars into the pot.
In this no-limit game, it was a strong bet, and one man next to Hackett folded his cards. Fargo kept his lip from curling in contempt; a smaller bet would have kept more men in the game and increased the possible winnings.
But, in addition to Fargo, two others stayed in with Hackett. Fargo dealt the cards around, careful to give neither of the two anything to improve their hands. He gave Hackett the fourth king. He dealt himself, perhaps a bit clumsily, the fourth ace.
Hackett stared at his hand. Then he shoved in half his stake. “Three hundred,” he rumbled.
The other players, one by one, dropped out. Fargo said, “Your three and another three.”
Hackett stared at him. Then he grinned. “All right. That three and three more.”
There was a rasp of indrawn breaths at the table. Over a thousand dollars lay in the center of the table. When Fargo matched the raise, and then raised back, the place was deathly still. Everybody looked at Ed Hackett.
His eyes lanced across the table at Fargo, black and angry. He looked down at the chips piled in front of him, just enough to cover the raise. He growled something deep in his throat. Then he shoved in three hundred dollars more.
“You’re called,” he snapped. “And you’d damned well better have ’em.”
Fargo laid down his hand. “Four aces,” he said calmly, but his body was tense.
Ed Hackett looked at his own cards. “Beats four kings,” he said, almost in a conversational tone. Then he jerked erect, and when he did, he turned over the table, spilling chips, gold pieces, and all. “You goddamn cheating son of a bitch,” he roared, and he took a swing at Fargo. “I saw you deal off the bottom of the deck!”
Fargo jerked his chin back out of range, and Hackett’s swing went by like the rush of a freight train. In the next instant, Fargo had his gun out. He fired once, a carefully aimed shot, and Hackett let out a yell and went down on the floor, a .38—not a dum-dum, for Fargo had loaded the revolver with regular rounds in anticipation of this—through his heavy thigh.
He lay there, staring at Fargo with eyes glazed with shock and cursing under his breath. “You bastard,” he wheezed. “You wait until the military police get hold of you!”
Fargo said something obscene. Then he gestured with the gun to Hackett’s comrades. “Get him out of here!” he rapped.
They dragged the groaning man out into the street. Fargo looked at the few remaining other players, but none was game to continue. Mumbling, they edged out of the room. Coolly, Fargo gathered chips and money, stuffed them all into pants and wallet. Then he went out into the main room of the cantina to wait.
He did not have to wait very long. Within an hour, the military police were there—four of them, armed with pistols—the new Colt automatics—and billy clubs. They marched up to Fargo, a burly sergeant in the lead. Fargo wrapped his hand tightly around the bottle of bourbon he nursed.
“You’re Fargo,” the sergeant said.
“That’s right.” Fargo’s eyes were cold as they met the sergeant’s.
“We want to talk to you. You’re under arrest.”
Fargo rolled his cigar across his mouth. “What for?”
“Complaints,” the sergeant said. “Cheating at poker. Now you done gone and shot somebody.” He had a soft, Georgia accent. He swung the billy club a little in one hand, his other dropped to the Colt. “You got to come along with us before a military court.”
“No,” Fargo said, and he picked up the bottle and swung it in one smooth, hard motion. It smashed on the sergeant’s forehead, just under his cap, and the sergeant sank to the floor, unconscious. In the same instant, Fargo’s left hand jerked inside his coat, came out holding the gun. “Don’t move,” he rasped at the three privates. “You do, I’ll splatter your guts all across this barroom.”
They stared at the gun muzzle. One of them said: “You can’t get away with this, buddy.”
Fargo’s teeth showed in that wolfish grin. “You think not?” He pointed toward the back room, where he usually held his game. “That’s where I want the bunch of you. March—and drag him with you!”
Under the threat of that gun, they did as he ordered. One stooped, caught the unconscious sergeant under the arms, pulled him along. When they were in the room with the poker table, Fargo slammed the door, turned a key in the lock. Grinning, he swung around to confront a tallow-faced Vargas. “Fargo, for God’s sake, they will close me down!”
“No, they won’t,” Fargo laughed. “Give me fifteen minutes head start, then let them out. Tell them you were looking for another key. Adios, Angel!” He threw the key on the bar, then ran out the door. He halted, turned, stuck his head back in. “Tell Consuelo I’ll see her again!”
Then he ran on, down the narrow street.
It had been arranged in advance, at the livery stable two blocks away: everything was ready, the packs, the chlorinated drinking water in the kegs, the mule, the wiry, jungle-trained horse. Fargo was glad to be in the saddle again, after he had unpacked the trunk stored there, rammed the scabbarded Winchester under the fender, slung the double-barreled Fox muzzles down behind his shoulder, and crisscrossed his body with bandoliers of ammunition. “Here, muchacha!” He threw a five-dollar gold piece to the hostler who had helped him pack; then he swung aboard, knocked the horse with his heels, gathered up the mule’s lead rope, and they clattered out of the livery onto the cobblestones of the street. By the time they reached the end of the block, they were going at a dead run, and people leaped aside to escape bein
g trampled.
Fargo rode tall, rump back against the cantle, shoulders straight, legs bent slightly in the cavalry way, as opposed to the straight-legged cowboy way of riding. The mule, carefully chosen, came along willingly, surefooted on the cobbles. Fargo already knew the route; he’d surveyed it in advance, and he headed almost due east, never missing a turn in the winding alleys.
Then he reached the outskirts of town, a muddy road leading through miserable little palm leaf shacks or wooden huts with corrugated iron roofs. A mile of that; he swung hard right, along a narrow, rutted road; and suddenly the jungle closed in upon him.
It sprang up with startling suddenness, a thick green wall on either side of the narrow track, heavy trees entangled with leafy lianas, thick cane, snarled briar. The animals’ hoofs made almost no sound in the soft mud and leafy mould of the track. But Fargo kept them at a high lope for a long time, through that narrow, winding trace; then he thumbed from his pants a gold watch of the kind used by railroad people, conductors, engineers, dispatchers, those to whom the accuracy of seconds was precious, and lit a match. Because he had timed this route at this gait before, he knew precisely how many minutes he was away from the boundary of the Canal Zone: five. Where the track crossed the border, there would be soldiers: Americans on one side, Panamanians on the other.
Fargo reined the horse around, put it at a walk. He knew exactly where the narrow path through the jungle made by wild pigs was; and he rode the horse and led the mule at a sedate pace indeed as they traversed that tiny trail.
Cane brushed against his shoulders; once the mule snorted, as a small boa constrictor dropped off a limb, down the packsaddles, and slid to the ground. Far away in the jungle, Fargo heard the coughing grunt of a jaguar, the tigre of Central American wilderness. From the other hand, there was the booming bellow of alligators in the swamps and marshes.
The horse picked its way delicately, used to this sort of terrain. Its hoofs, and those of the mule, made sucking sounds in the muck. The pig path wandered and meandered; Fargo kept to it faithfully. His sixth sense, a compound of time and distance, told him that in another minute, maybe two, he would be over the boundary. His explorations had told him that usually this path was not guarded, but he was not one to take chances. He unslung the shotgun, flicked off the safety catch, and rode forward with the double-barreled, sawed-off weapon lifted high.
Ahead, the notch in the jungle widened a little, and he knew now that he was at the jumping off place; in a moment more, he would be out of American territory. He reined in the horse, let it go forward very slowly for a few steps. Then, quite abruptly, he kicked and lashed it into a dead run, and the mule came quickly after.
Fargo tore out of the cane, across the boundary. He never knew whether word had traveled or whether it was a vagary of some sergeant of the guard’s imagination. But the track was guarded after all. As the horse came hurtling through, a voice challenged from darkness. Then, suddenly, a gun roared, its flame brilliant in the black jungle night. Fargo swung the shotgun, unloosed one barrel. Nine blue whistlers ripped and tore through the brush, and whoever was firing took cover. Limbs and vines clawed at Fargo as the horse and mule pounded on at a dead run; he heard another gunshot, and, before that, the whistle of lead near his head. He fired the other barrel, as deliberately high as the first, and there was no more shooting.
Then Fargo was deep into the jungles of the Republic of Panama.
There were better places to be.
He had covered a lot of the globe in his career, and he still had no love for the Torrid Zone. But it was a place where there was always something going on, and he had come to know it and had prepared himself for it.
As, safely in the jungle, he reined the horse and mule into a walk again, he fished in saddlebags, brought out gauntlets and a mosquito net. He drew on the heavy gloves and draped the mosquito net over his head and set the cavalry hat jauntily atop it. The Army would have cleaned up Panama perhaps a mile past the end of its jurisdiction; after that, the bugs would eat you alive, if the snakes did not get you, or the piranhas or alligators in the streams.
Then he drew a machete from where it was lashed behind the saddle cantle, and buckled down for the long trip through the jungle.
He rode another eight miles that night. Then he halted in a small clearing, let the animals drink out of a muddy puddle, and hobbled them. After he had hobbled them, he picketed them too, giving them just enough rope to browse on the lush greenery of the jungle along the clearing’s edge. Then he spread soogans, pillowed his head on his saddle, and, despite the heat, drew his blanket up over him and went to sleep.
The blanket was for protection from mosquitoes. They came from everywhere in the night, their high-pitched whine constant in his ears. They were big and ferocious and deadly, carrying yellow fever and malaria, and Fargo sweated under the blanket rather than expose his body to them. The mosquito net kept them off his face, and the gauntlets protected his hands. Nevertheless, their high-pitched singsong kept him awake for some time; he heard the jaguar’s cough, the ocelot’s snarl, the pattering of jungle feet: peccary, brocket deer, and paca, the large rodent that the natives called spotted rabbit. Then, at last, he slept.
He was awakened at dawn by the high-pitched, eerie whoop of howler monkeys, the chatter and shriek of toucans and parrots greeting daylight. The mosquitoes were still there; and he kept the blanket around him like a poncho for a time; later, he donned a canvas brush jacket they could not pierce, just as they could not pierce the heavy brush pants he wore. He never took off the head net, except to lift it while he drank coffee and ate a can of beans. Then he gathered in the horse and mule to pack and saddle them.
They were in pitiable shape: not only the mosquitoes, but all sorts of thirsty, blood-sucking tropical insects had been at them, and their bodies were raw and knotted. Moreover, there was blood all over the withers of the mule and the haunches of the horse: the vampire bats had been at them. The big creatures bit, injecting in their saliva a combination of anesthetic and anti-coagulant, and feasted greedily on the resulting free-flowing blood. Fargo frowned and cursed as he saw what shape his animals were in.
But, as an old hand in the tropics, he had anticipated this, too; and from the pack the mule carried, he took the jug of insect spray with the pump handle that there had been no time to use last night. Carefully and meticulously, he sprayed both animals with it; they kicked as it stung their wounds, but it would keep the bugs away for a day’s journey; and he would spray them again when he camped at night. There was plenty of the spray in the packs. You had to have it when you took animals through the jungle; if you did not protect them from the insects, they finally went mad and ran away.
When the animals had been treated and packed, Fargo sprayed himself and then swung into the saddle. From now on, he would be in new and unexplored territory; and he would have to depend on the sun, his compass, and a few sketchy maps to get him to San Fernando, which was his destination.
He did not see much of the sun, even when he struck north and hit a real road again. That is, it was a real road as such things were judged in these parts: it was a notch through the jungle used often enough so it was passable for horses and rutted with the wheel marks of an occasional ox-cart. But it was hemmed in on either side with giant trees of the tropical rain forest, all draped in hungry, life-sucking parasites and saprophytes, and it was like riding through perpetual twilight. Bands of monkeys occasionally cursed him and chattered through the treetops—howlers and owl monkeys—and the brilliantly colored parrots mocked him obscenely. The insects made a perpetual high-pitched whine around his head, and occasionally he examined his gauntlets, boot tops, and where his belt cinched his waist for the giant ticks of this kind of jungle.
Thus, he rode on through the day. An expert in reading signs, he saw that the last passage ahead of him had been four or five days previously, and that of a bunch of barefooted, long-striding men. He guessed they were the Indians of the interior, likely
the San Bias. Then, late in the afternoon, he frowned. There in the center of the road was one footprint, clear in the mud, that screamed at him that its maker had passed this way only a short time before.
Fargo reined in. He unslung the shotgun and laid it across the saddlebow in front of him. The San Bias Indians were totally primitive and their favorite weapon was the cane blowgun and poisoned darts. He rode forward slowly, cold gray eyes sweeping the underbrush on either side, ready to riddle it with buckshot at any sign of an ambush.
Suddenly the horse snorted. At the same time, the mule jerked up all the slack in its lead rope. Fargo was erect in the saddle, shotgun up, but the jungle, thick and green, betrayed no menace. Then he heard it, louder, the same sound that his animals had sensed before. It was the ferocious, coughing grunt of a charging jaguar.
And it was followed by a totally human scream.
Both sounds came from close at hand, behind a wall of impenetrable brush to the right of the trail.
Before Fargo really knew what he was doing, he’d swung down, the double-barreled Fox ready in his right hand. He looped the horse’s reins around a limb and tied them tightly. The jaguar’s grunt came again, followed by a ferocious snarling and more screaming. The mule’s lead rope was tied to the saddle horn. Fargo made sure the animals were secure, as that terrible mixture of sounds, the animal snarl and the human cry, piercing, inchoate, rang out through the jungle stillness. Then, with the shotgun held high, Fargo plunged through the brush toward the uproar.