Hearts of Three

by Jack London

  “Vamos!” Alesandro shouted fiercely at them to be gone.

  But the boy in the pants gravely removed a stone which he had been carrying on top of his bare head, exposing a letter which had been thus carried. Alesandro leaned over, took the letter, and with a glance at the inscription passed it to Leoncia, while the boys began whining for money. Francis, smiling despite himself at the spectacle of them, tossed them a few pieces of small silver, whereupon the shirt and the pants toddled away down the path.

  The letter was from Henry, and Leoncia scanned it hurriedly. It was not precisely in farewell, for he wrote in the tenour of a man who never expected to die save by some inconceivable accident. Nevertheless, on the chance of such inconceivable thing becoming possible, Henry did manage to say good-bye and to include a facetious recommendation to Leoncia not to forget Francis, who was well worth remembering because he was so much like himself, Henry.

  Leoncia’s first impulse was to show the letter to the others, but the portion about Francis withstrained her.

  “It’s from Henry,” she said, tucking the note into her bosom. “There is nothing of importance. He seems to have not the slightest doubt that he will escape somehow.” “We shall see that he does,” Francis declared positively.

  With a grateful smile to him, and with one of interrogation to Torres, Leoncia said:

  “You were speaking of a plan, Senor Torres?”

  Torres smiled, twisted his mustache, and struck an attitude of importance.

  “There is one way, the Gringo, Anglo-Saxon way, and it is simple, straight to the point. That is just what it is, straight to the point. We will go and take Henry out of jail in forthright, brutal and direct Gringo fashion. It is the one thing they will not expect. Therefore, it will succeed. There are enough unhung rascals on the beach with which, to storm the jail. Hire them, pay them well, but only partly in advance, and the thing is accomplished.”

  Leoncia nodded eager agreement. Old Enrico’s eyes flashed and his nostrils distended as if already sniffing gunpowder. The young men were taking fire from his example. And all looked to Francis for his opinion or agreement. He shook his head slowly, and Leoncia uttered a sharp cry of disappointment in him.

  “That way is hopeless,” he said. “Why should all of you risk your necks in a madcap attempt like that, doomed to failure from the start?” As he talked, he strode across from Leoncia’s side to the railing in such way as to be for a moment between Torres and the other men, and at the same time managed a warning look to Enrico and his sons. “As for Henry, it looks as if it were all up with him-”

  “You mean you doubt me?” Torres bristled.

  “Heavens, man,” Francis protested.

  But Torres dashed on: “You mean that I am forbidden by you, a man I have scarcely met, from the councils of the Solanos who are my oldest and most honored friends.”

  Old Enrico, who had not missed the rising wrath against Francis in Leoncia’s face, succeeded in conveying a warning to her, ere, with a courteous gesture, he hushed Torres and began to speak.

  “There are no councils of the Solanos from which you are barred, Senor Torres. You are indeed an old friend of the family. Your late father and I were comrades, almost brothers. But that and you will pardon an old man’s judgment does not prevent Senor Morgan from being right when he says your plan is hopeless. To storm the jail is truly madness. Look at the thickness of the walls. They could stand a siege of weeks. And yet, and I confess it, almost was I tempted when you first broached the idea. Now when I was a young man, fighting the Indians in the high Cordilleras, there was a very case in point. Come, let us all be seated and comfortable, and I will tell you the tale ���”

  But Torres, busy with many things, declined to wait, and with soothed amicable feelings shook hands all around, briefly apologized to Francis, and departed astride his silversaddled and silver-bridled horse for San Antonio. One of the things that busied him was the cable correspondence maintained between him and Thomas Regan’s Wall Street office. Having secret access to the Panamanian government wireless station at San Antonio, he was thus able to relay messages to the cable station at Vera Cruz. Not alone was his relationship with Regan proving lucrative, but it was jibing in with his own personal plans concerning Leoncia and the Morgans.

  “What have you against Senor Torres, that you should reject his plan and anger him?” Leoncia demanded of Francis.

  “Nothing,” was the answer, “except that we do not need him, and that I’m not exactly infatuated with him. He is a fool and would spoil any plan. Look at the way he fell down on testifying at my trial. Maybe he can’t be trusted. I don’t know. Anyway, what’s the good of trusting him when we don’t need him? Now his plan is all right. We’ll go straight to the jail and take Henry out, if all you are game for it. And we don’t need to trust to a mob of unhung rascals and beach-sweepings. If the six men of us can’t do it, we might as well quit.”

  “There must be at least a dozen guards always hanging out at the jail,” Eicardo, Leoncia’s youngest brother, a lad of eighteen, objected.

  Leoncia, her eagerness alive again, frowned at him; but Francis took his part.

  “Well taken,” he agreed. “But we will eliminate the guards.”

  “The fivefoot walls,” said Martinez Solano, twin brother to Alvarado.

  “Go through them,” Francis answered.

  “But how?” Leoncia cried.

  “That’s what I am arriving at. You, Senor Solano, have plenty of saddle horses? Good. And you, Alesandro, does it chance you could procure me a couple of sticks of dynamite from around the plantation? Good, and better than good. And you, Leoncia, as the lady of the hacienda, should know whether you have in your store-room a plentiful supply of that three-star rye whiskey?

  “Ah, the plot thickens,” he laughed, on receiving her assurance. “We’ve all the properties for a Eider Haggard or Eex Beach adventure tale. Now listen. But wait. I want to talk to you, Leoncia, about private theatricals.

  CHAPTER V

  IT was in the mid-afternoon, and Henry, at his barred cell��� window, stared out into the street and wondered if any sort of breeze would ever begin to blow from off Chiriqui Lagoon and cool the stagnant air. The street was dusty and filthy filthy, because the only scavengers it had ever known since the town was founded centuries before were the carrion dogs and obscene buzzards even then prowling and hopping about in the debris. Low, whitewashed buildings of stone and adobe made the street a furnace.

  The white of it all, and the dust, was almost achingly intolerable to the eyes, and Henry would have withdrawn his gaze, had not the several ragged mosos, dozing in a doorway opposite, suddenly aroused and looked interestedly up the street. Henry could not see, but he could hear the rattling spokes of some vehicle coming at speed. Next, it surged into view, a rattletrap light wagon drawn by a runaway horse. In the seat a gray-headed, gray-bearded ancient strove vainly to check the animal.

  Henry smiled and marveled that the rickety wagon could hold together, so prodigious were the bumps imparted to it by the deep ruts. Every wheel, half-dished and threatening to dish, wobbled and revolved out of line with every other wheel. And if the wagon held intact, Henry judged”, it was a miracle that the crazy harness did not fly to pieces. When directly opposite the window, the old man made a last effort, half ��� standing up from the seat as he pulled on the reins. One was rotten, and broke. As the driver fell backward into the seat, his weight on the remaining rein caused the horse to swerve sharply to the right. What happened then whether a wheel dished, or whether a wheel had come off first and dished afterward Henry could not determine. The one incontestable thing was that the wagon was a wreck. The old man, dragging in the dust and stubbornly hanging on to the remaining rein, swung the horse in a circle until it stopped, facing him and snorting at him.

  By the time he gained his feet a crowd of mosos was forming about him. These were roughly shouldered right and left by the gendarmes who erupted from the jail.
Henry remained at the window and, for a man with but a few hours to live, was an amused spectator and listener to what followed.

  Giving his horse to a gendarme to hold, not stopping to brush the filth from his person, the old man limped hurriedly to the wagon and began an examination of the several packing cases, large and small, which composed its load. Of one case he was especially solicitous, even trying to lift it and seeming to listen as he lifted.

  He straightened up, on being addressed by one of the gendarmes, and made voluble reply.

  “Me? Alas senors, I am an old man, and far from home. I am Leopoldo Narvaez. It is true, my mother was German, may the Saints preserve her rest; but my father was Baltazar de Jesus y Cervallos e Narvaez, son of General Narvaez of martial memory, who fought under the great Bolivar himself. And now I am half ruined and far from home.

  Prompted by other questions, interlarded with the courteous expressions of sympathy with which even the humblest mo so is over generously supplied, he managed to be politefully grateful and to run on with his tale.

  “I have driven from Bocas del Toro. It has taken me five days, and business has been poor. My home is in Colon, and I wish I were safely there. But even a noble Narvaez may be a peddler, and even a peddler must live, eh, senors, is it not so? But tell me, is there not a Tomas Eomero who dwells in this pleasant city of San Antonio?”

  “There are any God’s number of Tomas Komeros who dwell everywhere in Panama,” laughed Pedro Zurita, the assistant jailer. “One would need fuller description.”

  “He is the cousin of my second wife,” the ancient answered hopefully, and seemed bewildered by the roar of laughter from the crowd.

  “And a dozen Tomas Komeros live in and about San Antonio,” the assistant jailer went on, “any one of which may be your second wife’s cousin, Senor. There is Tomas Romero, the drunkard. There is Tomas Romero, the thief. There is Tomas Romero but no, he was hanged a month back for murder and robbery. There is the rich Tomas Romero who owns many cattle on the hills. There is���”

  To each suggested one, Leopoldo Narvaez had shaken his head dolefully, until the cattle-owner was mentioned. At this he had become hopeful and broken in:

  “Pardon me, senor, it must be he, or some such a one as he. I shall find him. If my precious stock-in-trade can be safely stored, I shall seek him now. It is well my misfortune came upon me where it did. I shall be able to trust it with you, who are, one can see with half an eye, an honest and an honorable man.” As he talked, he fumbled forth from his pocket two silver pesos and handed them to the jailer. “There, I wish you and your men to have some pleasure of assisting me.”

  Henry grinned to himself as he noted the access of interest in the old man and of consideration for him, on the part of Pedro Zurita and the gendarmes, caused by the present of the coins. They shoved the more curious of the crowd roughly back from the wrecked wagon and began to carry the boxes into the jail.

  “Careful, senors, careful,” the old one pleaded, greatly anxious, as they took hold of the big box. Handle it gently. It is of value, and it is fragile, most fragile.”

  While the contents of the wagon were being carried into the jail, the old man removed and deposited in the wagon all harness from the horse save the bridle.

  Pedro Zurita ordered the harness taken in as well, explaining, with a glare at the miserable crowd: “Not a strap or buckle would remain the second after our backs were turned.”

  Using what was left of the wagon for a stepping block, and ably assisted by the jailer and his crew, the peddler managed to get astride his animal.

  “It is well,” he said, and added gratefully: “A thousand thanks, senors. It has been my good fortune to meet with honest men with whom my goods will be safe only poor goods, peddler’s goods, you understand; but to me, everything, my way upon the road. The pleasure has been mine to meet you. Tomorrow I shall return with my kinsman, whom I certainly shall find, and relieve from you the burden of safeguarding my inconsiderable property.” He doffed his hat. “Adios, senors, adios!”

  He rode away at a careful walk, timid of the animal he bestrode which had caused his catastrophe. He halted and turned his head at a call from Pedro Zurita.

  “Search the graveyard, Senor Narvaez,” the jailer advised. “Full a hundred Tomas Bomeros lie there.”

  “And be vigilant, I beg of you, senor, of the heavy box,” the peddler called back.

  Henry watched the street grow deserted as the gendarmes and the populace fled from, the scorch of the sun. Small wonder, he thought to himself, that the old peddler’s voice had sounded vaguely familiar. It had been because he had possessed only half a Spanish tongue to twisf~around the language the other half being the German tongue of the mother. Even so, he talked like a native, and he would be robbed like a native if there was anything of value in the heavy box deposited with the jailers, Henry concluded, ere dismissing the incident from his mind.

  In the guardroom, a scant fifty feet away from Henry’s cell, Leopoldo Narvaez was being robbed. It had begun by Pedro Zurita making a profound and wistful survey of the large box. He lifted one end of it to sample its weight, and sniffed like a hound at the crack of it as if his nose might give him some message of its contents.

  “Leave it alone, Pedro,” one of the gendarmes laughed at him. “You have been paid two pesos to be honest.”

  The assistant jailer sighed, walked away and sat down, looked back at the box, and sighed again. Conversation languished. Continually the eyes of the men roved to the box. A greasy pack of cards could not divert them. The game languished. The gendarme who had twitted Pedro himself went to the box and sniffed.

  “I smell nothing,” he announced. “Absolutely in the box there is nothing to smell. Now what can it be? The caballero said that it was of value!”

  “Caballero!” sniffed another of the gendarmes. “The old man’s father was more like to have been peddler of rott’en fish on the streets of Colon and his father before him. Every lying beggar claims descent from the conquistadores.”

  “And why not, Eafael?” Pedro Zurita retorted. “Are we not all descended?”

  “Without doubt,” Eafael readily agreed. “The conquistadores slew many���”

  “And were the ancestors of those that survived,” Pedro completed for him and aroused a general laugh. “Just the same, almost would I give one of these pesos to know what is in that box.”

  “There is Ignacio,” Rafael greeted the entrance of a turnkey whose heavy eyes tokened he was just out of his siesta. “He was not paid to be honest. Come, Ignacio, relieve our curiosity by letting us know what is in the box.”

  “How should I know?” Ignacio demanded, blinking at the object of interest. “Only now have I awakened.”

  “You have not been paid to be honest, then?” Eafael asked.

  “Merciful Mother of God, who is the man who would pay me to be honest?” the turnkey demanded.

  “Then take the hatchet there and open the box,” Eafael drove his point home. “We may not, for as surely as Pedro is to share the two pesos with us, that surely have we been paid to be honest. Open the box, Ignacio, or we shall perish of our curiosity.”

  We will look, we will only look,” Pedro muttered nervously, as the turnkey prized off a board with the blade of the hatchet. “Then we will close the box again and Put your hand in, Ignacio. What is it you find?��� eh? what does it feel like? Ah!”

  After pulling and tugging, Ignacio’s hand had reappeared, clutching a cardboard cdrton.

  “Remove it carefully, for it must be replaced,” the jailer cautioned.

  And when the wrappings of paper and tissue paper were removed, all eyes focused on a quart bottle of rye whiskey.

  “How excellently is it composed,” Pedro murmured in tones of awe. “It must be very good that such care be taken of it.”

  “It is Americano whiskey,” sighed a gendarme. “Once, only, have I drunk Americano whiskey. It was wonderful. Such was the courage of it, that I lea
ped into the bull-ring at Santos and faced a wild bull with my hands. It is true, the bull rolled me, but did I not leap into the ring?”

  Pedro took the bottle and prepared to knock its neck off. “Hold!” cried Rafael. “You were paid to be honest.” By a man who was not himself honest,” came the retort. “The stuff is contraband. It has never paid duty. The old man was in possession of smuggled goods. Let us now gratefully and with clear conscience invest ourselves in its possession. We will confiscate it. We will destroy it.”

  Not waiting for the bottle to pass, Ignacio and Rafael unwrapped fresh ones and broke off the necks.

  “Three stars most excellent,” Pedro Zurita orated in a pause, pointing to the trade mark. “You see, all Gringo whiskey is good. One star shows that it is very good; two stars that it is excellent; three stars that it is superb, the best, and better than beyond that. Ah, I know. The Gringos are strong on strong drink. No pulque for them.”

  “And four stars?” queried Ignacio, his voice husky from the liquor, the moisture glistening in his eyes.

  “Four stars? Friend Ignacio, four stars would be either sudden death or translation into paradise.”

  In not many minutes, Eafael, his arm around another gendarme, was calling him brother and proclaiming that it took little to make men happy here below.

  “The old man was a fool, three times a fool, and thrice that,” volunteered Augustino, a sullen-faced gendarme, who for the first time gave tongue to speech.

  “Viva Augustino! “cheered Eafael. “The three stars have worked a miracle. Behold! Have they not unlocked Augustino’s mouth?”

  “‘And thrice times thrice again was the old man a fool!” Augustino bellowed fiercely. “The very drink of the gods was his, all his, and he has been five days alone with it on the road from Bocas del Toro, and never taken one little sip. Such fools as he should be stretched out naked on an ant-heap, say I.”