by Lou Cameron
Captain Gringo called back, “Gracias, amigos. Are you for Granada or Leon?”
“In God’s truth, señor, we are not enthusiastic about either side in this long tedious civil war. We are simple rancheros who only wish for to be left alone. As you just saw, this is not always easy, even out here in the back country.”
Captain Gringo leaned the still-primed Maxim against the fence and told Gaston, “Cover me. I’m going in.”
“I will cover you, but you are trés crazy!”
Captain Gringo wasn’t sure Gaston was wrong as he eased through the fence and started for the ranch house, keeping his hands politely out to his sides as he stepped over a brain-spattered straw sombrero and stopped midway, calling out, “Is it permitted, señores?”
“Mi casa es su casa, amigo, sent by a just God in the nick of time! Do you and your people have ammunition for to sell us? We were almost out of it when you came to answer our prayers just now!”
Captain Gringo went the rest of the way. The oak door opened wider and a dignified-looking old gent stepped out, .45 politely holstered as he held out his hand and said, “I am called Javier Trujillo by white people like yourself. I allow the Indios to call me Don Javier, although in truth I do not own that much. Just the land around for a day’s ride. My vaqueros left a few days ago for Greytown, for to deliver beef to the Royal Navy there. Those ladrónes must have heard there were few of us left here for to defend ourselves, eh?”
Captain Gringo said he’d spotted Don Javier’s trail herd along the way, neglecting to mention that the feeling hadn’t been mutual, as the old man led him inside.
The American had expected to meet the house servants and women in native costume. He was surprised by the couple in the sort of safari gear English wore for some reason in warm parts of the world. As the old rancher introduced them as a Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, who’d arrived one jump ahead of the bandit gang, Captain Gringo saw that the coast was clear for Gaston to come in. If the Latins here made a regular practice of jumping strangers, the Palmers wouldn’t be looking so alive and chipper.
Excusing himself by bluntly telling the old man why, Captain Gringo stepped back outside and called out to Gaston, who broke cover and headed in, packing the Maxim. Palmer, looking over Captain Gringo’s shoulder, said, “Ah, I was right about it being a machine gun you chaps were using. Do you think the ones on the far side of the house took the hint?”
Captain Gringo nodded and said something about most bandits not liking anything like even odds. But when the old man suggested sending his peones out to clean up the mess, Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “They’ll keep in this cool rain an hour or so. Let’s not take chances until we have a chance to do some scouting.”
Palmer said something dumb about getting right to it and all that. The taller American said, “Not yet. Wait until it stops raining and we can see beyond rifle range.”
Palmer said, “Oh, right. You sound like you know this business, ah, Mister …?”
“Walker. Dick Walker. I’m a professional soldier. What’s your line?”
“Engineer. At least, I was. My wife and I just left a construction site down the valley. Had to. The man in charge is a bloody maniac.”
Captain Gringo had learned in the past, the hard way, to play with his cards close to his vest. Gaston, despite his apparent distaste for silence, could keep a few thoughts to himself when he wanted to. So a warning look as they met in the doorway was all it took. Neither soldier of fortune had any intention of discussing their reasons for being in these parts with an engineer of Consolidated Construction, Ltd., before they’d fed him a little more rope.
Don Javier sent a couple of armed ranch hands to gather in the others left upslope in the ravine. Hopefully, by the time they returned with the peones and gossip, more cards would be on the table.
They were. As old Don Javier’s wife and two daughters served refreshments in the main room, before a roaring fire in the baronial fireplace, Edward Palmer, as he turned out to be called, explained how he and his wife, Ruth, had ridden north from the dam site amid considerable curses and threats. Ruth Palmer was a vapidly pretty girl with big innocent blue eyes. Her hair was now a mess, although it probably looked okay pinned up and when given a fresh henna rinse now and again. She just nodded in weary agreement to everything her husband said.
Palmer explained that their horses had given out along the way. Horses did that when one drove them as hard as the English couple apparently had in tropic heat. Captain Gringo waited until they had him up-to-date about making it here to the Trujillo rancho, with bandits chasing them, before he asked mildly, “What was that you said before about the man in charge of building that dam or whatever?”
Gaston added, “Oui, you said he was tits mad. May one assume he made the, ah, pass at madame?”
Ruth Palmer fluttered her lashes and looked down at her cup. Her husband grimaced and said, “Oh, heavens, one expects a bit of that nonsense when one has a reasonable-looking wife. That’s not why we left. I told Chumford, the engineer in charge, that I was resigning in protest of his unprofessional methods. Didn’t mention my wife’s complaints about his uncouth manners at all, as a matter of fact. We naturally meant to leave the site by riverboat. I mean, that’s the way we got there, eh what?”
“How come you wound up here, miles out in the jungle, Palmer?”
“Had to. Chumford refused to accept my resignation. Told me I was confined to quarters till I came to my senses, or some such rot. We could hardly accept that. By Jove, we’re British subjects, not perishing, ah, never mind.”
“You two just grabbed a couple of broncs and rode out blind?”
“Well, I must say we rode rather fast, until the bloody brutes dropped out from under us. But I knew where we were going. We mean to report Chumford to the government in Leon.”
Old Don Javier frowned politely and said, “Forgive me, Señor Palmer. But while I know little of the building of dams, I know my own country, and with all due respect, you never would have made it as far north as Leon. It is well you stumbled over us when you did. There is nothing to the north except very high hills, covered with thick timber and Indios who, alas, have very thick heads when it comes to strangers.”
Palmer shrugged and said, “It’s partly the Indians, and of course yourselves as well, that I have to tell the junta in Leon about. This entire watershed will be flooded, if and when Chumford finishes that bloody dam.”
He sipped his cup, sighed, and added, “That’s if things go well, of course. They’ve already built the coffer dam. So the water’s backing up rapidly, thanks to this being the rainy season. But, as I kept trying to tell that maniac and his underlings, the dam will never hold where they’ve chosen to build it.”
Captain Gringo and Gaston exchanged glances. Gaston asked, “In that case, what is the great danger to anyone in this valley, m’sieur? If the dam gives way, this valley will not be flooded, non?”
Palmer made an impatient gesture and said, “It’s not that simple. If I read my own figures correctly, the dam will hold for a time. Perhaps a year. Maybe even more. By then, of course, this entire valley will have been drowned. The dam’s designed as earth fill, covered with concrete. It will take a few earth tremors before it gives. But, as I kept trying to tell Chumford, sooner or later it will give completely, and when that happens, well, one can only hope the Good Lord has warned people all down the San Juan to build themselves a perishing great fleet or arks!”
Captain Gringo whistled as he got the picture. He said, “Oh boy! There are border villages on either side of the river farther down. Built close to the current water level, too!”
Palmer said, “It gets worse. If you know the lower San Juan, you know the land rises steeply north and south of the main channel. Railroad lines and navigational improvements are all placed neatly, and bloody tightly, between the riverbanks and hillsides. When that big dam goes, a hundred-foot wall of roaring flood will simply sweep everything, and everybody, ou
t to sea!”
He took another sip from his cup and added, “Chumford says I’m too sentimental about a few perishing natives. Perhaps I am. But, dash it all, we are talking about human lives and property, what?”
“Welcome to the human race, Palmer,” said Captain Gringo, smiling thinly. The Hispanics in the room were mercifully too ignorant of English to know how they’d been dismissed by the British dam builders, and even by Palmer to some extent.
Ruth Palmer said something earnest about them having to warn the Nicaraguan government. Captain Gringo said the junta in Leon already knew the danger to this valley and didn’t approve of it. He added that their best bet was a run for the nearer safety of Greytown, and Don Javier said that was no problem, once his vaqueros and their mounts got back.
Captain Gringo still wasn’t ready to put his own cares on the table, just in case. He’d known from the beginning that the dam across the Dorado had to go. Gaston had a more curious nature. He said, “I fail to detect a sensible motive for all this distressing dam building, M’sieur Palmer. Before you had your falling out with this churlish M’sieur Chumford, did he give any sensible reasons at all for building his trés mysterious and, it now seems, temporary structure?”
Palmer shrugged and said, “There were plenty of good reasons, on paper. The plans call for hydroelectric channels, navigational locks, and so on. I knew as soon as I felt Pocopoco tremble under my very feet that the whole idea was insane.”
“Pocopoco?” Captain Gringo frowned.
Don Javier said, “I know the mountain he speaks of, señor. It is a volcano, down at the far end of the valley. Los Indios named it that because that is what it sounds like when it is going poco, poco, poco, poco.”
He chuckled and added, “‘Poco’ may mean ‘little’ in my language, but in truth Pocopoco is a most impressive peak, even when it is not erupting.”
Captain Gringo remembered the unnamed peak on his ordnance map and asked, “Are we talking about an active volcano, with one wing of the earth-filled dam built smack against its slopes?”
Palmer nodded and said, “I see you have heard something about the Dorado Dam. That’s exactly what they’re doing, or trying to. Didn’t take me any time at all to see they were insane. You can feel the bloody ground shake under you eight or ten times a day near that bloody dam site! When I tried to tell Chumford, he just laughed and said it was my job to design the canal locks, as I was being paid to do that until I was blue in the bloody face, and you know the rest.”
They didn’t, really. It now seemed obvious to Captain Gringo that the so-called bandits attacking the house the Palmers had taken shelter in were hired guns, not your run-of-the-mill wandering ladrónes. But he kept that card to his vest, too. He wanted the old man and his people to go on sheltering the harmless runaways, no matter how their last employer felt about them.
Turning to old Don Javier, he asked how often Pocopoco was supposed to really poco seriously.
The courteous old man shrugged and said, “As my young Anglo guest says, it may lay quietly for a year, two years, perhaps three. Then, boom, El Pocopoco clears his throat, kills everyone and everything for kilometers around, and goes back to sleep again—until it goes boom again! No Indios can tell you more. No Indios are stupid enough to live near Pocopoco.”
Palmer said, “It’s a classic strata cone. Built up of layer after layer of lava and cinders, like a bloody textbook example. Told them that when I first laid eyes on what they were anchoring one wing of the dam to. Chumford said it was long extinct. Took a walk up the slope. Bloody noisy and wobbly for an extinct anything. Felt at least three tremors in an hour’s walk. You know, of course, what happens when water pours into hot magma? Told Chumford that if the rising floodwaters ran down some ruddy crevice into the underground lava chambers … well, one reads about what happened to Krakatoa back in the eighties if one takes basic geology, what?”
There was a commotion outside. The two soldiers of fortune followed Don Javier when he went to see what was going on. His ranch hands had come back without anyone. They said that when they got to where Captain Gringo had told his people to wait, nobody had waited. He asked if the deserters had left his supplies. They said there were some boxes of ammo and dynamite they hadn’t seen fit to mess with.
Gaston sighed and said, “I shall never trust a woman again. Teresa said she loved me, too! The least she could have done would have been to take the damn dynamite with her, non?”
Captain Gringo smiled thinly and said in English, “Don’t get your hopes up just yet, you old goat. That talk about one end of the dam being against an active volcano gives me an idea. Remember what Palmer said about cold water and hot lava? If it was possible to blast just a little old crack in the right place.
“Oh, wait for me, Teresa! I am coming, ma chérie! Now the child you left behind is planning to detonate volcanoes in my poor old ears!”
Captain Gringo laughed and said, “Relax. I’m not sure it’ll work. We may still have to do it the hard way.”
Don Javier wouldn’t hear of his honored guests grunting their own gear in off the rainy slopes no matter how noisy some of it might be. He said he prided himself on being a perfect host. He didn’t have to say he was more worried about those bandits hitting again than about the comfort of his peones. He rounded up some muchachos made of sterner stuff, or dumber, anyway, and told them to go get the dynamite and ammo pronto. Gaston thought it only fair to suggest that they do so without smoking and to store it in the outbuilding farthest from the main house.
Things got even nicer when the rain let up before sundown and the sun came out just long enough to dry things a bit without really baking the red earth all around hot enough to fry eggs on. Don Javier sent another work detail out to bury the dead banditos, while Captain Gringo and Gaston took a couple of other peones who knew the area out on patrol.
They found some horse apples southwest of the compound, but the rain had washed away other sign. Gaston observed, “The ones on this side of the house left no brass behind. Ergo, they were a mere distraction, armed only with six-guns. The main force was the one you treated so rudely with the Maxim, my noisy child.”
Captain Gringo nodded and, turning to one of the half-breed mestizos, asked how far the nearest shelter for man and beast might lie from here.
The peon said there were as many dripping trees as one might wish to bed down under, but no nearby settlement. His companion asked what about the Mission San Domingo, and the know-it-all snorted, “Fool. If they went there, the Mosquitos would eat them for supper!”
Captain Gringo remembered something General Portola had said about Dominican missionaries and asked them if the mosquitoes they referred to were mission Indians instead of bugs. They both nodded. One said, “The Dominican padres doubtless mean well. But in God’s truth it is a waste of time for to try and turn a Mosquito into a Cristiano, señores. The padres feed them well and read to them about the wages of sin, but do those naked savages listen? They do not. They are always sneaking off with Don Javier’s beef, and when our vaqueros shoot at them for to teach them proper manners, the padres scold us and say we are rude and selfish!”
Captain Gringo had heard that old familiar bitch from ranchers back home in the States. So he cut it short to ask how far the mission was. The peon who seemed to know everything said the Dominican mission was a day’s ride, at the head of navigation on the Rio Dorado.
“You can travel on the Dorado by boat?” Captain Gringo asked hopefully.
The peon shrugged and said, “By canoe, if one does not mind portage around the many rapids, señor. The padres of course do not have to lift the canoes and supplies they order up the Dorado from the main channel to the south. So they built their mission as far from the San Juan as they saw fit. We, of course, use the trail east to the coast. Cows look most silly riding in canoes, no?”
Captain Gringo chuckled. Gaston asked suspiciously, “How is it we find that English couple this far north if they had to
pass a mission to get here?”
The peon shook his head and said, “They would have missed it by three or four kilometers, riding the north-south Indian trail. Don Javier already asked them the same question. The Anglos have no knowledge of this valley, and had they not stumbled into Rancho Trujillo by sheer accident, they never would have made it anywhere.”
His companion nodded and said, “Even if those ladrónes had not caught them on foot, they would have starved to death. They brought no food with them. They must have thought Leon was just over the horizon, no?”
Captain Gringo headed them all back to the ranch. It was up for grabs whether they’d been chased by those thugs on orders from the mysteriously mad engineer, Chumford, or just gotten lucky with roving guerrillas. Since whoever the bastards had been were gone, it didn’t seem important.
By the time they got back, Captain Gringo’s clothes were dry, thanks to the sun. Thanks to the rain he’d been splashing about in earlier, he felt reasonably clean as well as dry. Anyhow, he doubted if they’d be expected to change to dinner jackets that evening.
They weren’t. Don Javier and his family lived comfortably but rough and ready. Whatever they were ready for, it wasn’t dinner. They kept the snacks and dry sherry coming, and from time to time a peon wandered in to toss another log on the fire. But as the world outside turned deep purple, it was becoming obvious that the Trujillos followed the old Spanish custom of dining late. Captain Gringo nursed his drinks. He knew they could be sitting down to serious eating as late as nine or ten. The fruit, nuts, and tostada dips Señora Trujillo and her daughters kept shoving his way had taken the edge off his hunger, and, in truth, if he hadn’t been too polite, he’d have been asleep by now. He’d spent more than one long day on the trail and the unaccustomed life of ease was knocking him out. He could see that Ed Palmer wasn’t used to the protracted ceremony leading up to a Spanish dinner, either.
The Englishman was drinking too much too fast. He apparently didn’t know that when you emptied a wineglass in these parts, someone was sure to refill it. If you even tried to rest half a glass anywhere, Señora Trujillo or one of her daughters was sure to lope over with that damn jug and top it to the brim.