O D T A A

A NOVEL

By

JOHN MASEFIELD

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

1926

First Published February, 1926.

New Impression April, 1926.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, ST. GILES’ WORKS, NORWICH

TO

MY WIFE

ODTAA

I

Santa Barbara, being the most leeward of the Sugar States, is at the angle of the Continent, with two coasts, one facing north, the other east. The city of Santa Barbara is in a bay at the angle where these two coasts trend from each other.

Those who will look at the map of the State will see that it contains, in all, ten provinces: three eastern, four central, three western, each of which must be briefly described. The visitor sees the land as low-lying coast, growing sugar, with immense ranges of scrub, wild land and pasture behind the sugar country, then foothills above and behind the ranges, and behind the foothills, as the southern boundary of the State, the Sierras of the Three Kings, all forest to the snowline.

The easternmost province of the State is that of Santa Barbara, which contains the capital city. This, Meruel and Redemption, are the three eastern provinces.

Meruel, to the south of Santa Barbara, has a more temperate climate than the western provinces, owing to the cold Southern Drift which follows the prevalent southerly along the coast. Meruel, the capital of the province, stands on a rise of iron outcrop which gives the earth a reddish look. The people of Santa Barbara nicknamed the Meruel land “the Red Country” and the Meruel people “the Reds.”

Redemption, the coal country, lies to the south and west of Meruel. It was formerly a small independent Republic. It was seized by Santa Barbara in 1865, in the war of aggression known as the Redemption War, when a young man, Lopez Zubiaga, the son of a Meruel landowner, “wedded” (as they put it) “the Meruel iron to the Redemption coal.”

The four central provinces are Pituba, near the sea, San Jacinto, in the heart of the State, and the two mountain masses, Gaspar and Melchior.

Pituba, once the home of the warlike Carib race, the Pitubas, is now one of the richest sugar countries in the world. It stretches along the northern coast for nearly two hundred miles, no mile of which is without its plantation, either of sugar or of coffee.

San Jacinto, which lies to the south of Pituba, is the most barren of the provinces; most of it is of that poor soil known as scrubs or burnt land: it is mainly thorny waste, with patches of pasture. In spite of its barrenness, it is most beautiful, because of its expanses. Its chief town, the Mission city of San Jacinto, stands on a peninsula rock above the river of San Jacinto, which rises in the Sierras and comes down in force there, in a raddled and dangerous stream (now controlled so as to be navigable).

Gaspar and Melchior, to the south of San Jacinto, are vast, wild, forested mountain masses.

The three western provinces are Baltazar, Encinitas and Matoche.

Baltazar, to the south, is a mountain mass, forested to the snowline: it is part of the Sierra, like Gaspar and Melchior.

Encinitas, to the north of Baltazar, lies between the San Jacinto River and the Western Bay. Of all the provinces, Encinitas is the most delightful to an English mind. It is mainly an expanse of grass, marvellous to see. It rises from the river into a range of downs or gentle hills, called the Encarnacion Hills, which are crowned with a little walled town, called Encinitas, because the Conquistador, who founded it, came from the village of that name in Spain.

To the north of Encinitas there is a narrow, hilly strip which thrusts out a snout into the ocean. The strip is the western province of Matoche: the snout is the northernmost point of the State, Cape Caliente. The copper found in the hills is smelted and exported at Port Matoche, on the western coast of the snout, in the deep water at the mouth of the Western Bay, the State’s western boundary.

The bay is a deep, dangerous expanse dotted with volcanic islets.

At the time of this story, and for many years afterwards, only seven of the ten provinces ranked as inhabited. The mass of the Sierras, forest to the snowline, were hardly visited by white men: the three forest provinces of Gaspar, Melchior and Baltazar had not been explored. Seasonal rains made the forest unendurable from November until April: the forest fever, to which the Indians burnt copal in copper bowls, was fatal to man and beast from April till November.

At the time of the Spanish Conquest the lowlands were inhabited by small warlike tribes of Caribs who lived in stockaded settlements near the coasts. Of these tribes, the Araguayas, of Meruel, and the Pitubas, of Pituba, were the most important. When the Spaniards landed, Don Manuel of Encinitas, the Conquistador of the State, allied himself to the Pitubas by marrying the daughter of their chief. With the help of his allies he exterminated the Araguayas and drove the survivors of all other tribes into the forests of the south, where a few of their descendants still exist, as forest-Indians; that is, as the shadows of what they were.

After the conquest, vast tracks of land in Encinitas were granted to Don Manuel: other tracts in San Jacinto were granted to a Castilian noble, from whom they passed to a branch of the de Leyvas.

The colony or province of Santa Barbara was administered like all other Spanish possessions in the New World for a little more than three centuries. Jesuit missionaries converted the Indians; the owners of haciendas imported negroes. In the course of the three centuries the northward provinces became sparsely inhabited by horse and cattle breeders, sugar-growers, rum-makers and copper-miners, governed (if it can be called government) by a Viceroy in Santa Barbara city.

In the year 1817, the inhabitants, following the example of other Spanish colonists, broke the link with Spain, by declaring the land to be the Republic of Santa Barbara, with a Constitution partly modelled upon that of the United States. At the time of the foundation of the Republic the State contained, perhaps, one hundred thousand souls, of whom not more than one-third were white.

It happened that a retired English naval lieutenant named William Higgs-Rixon took a prominent part in the capture of Santa Barbara from the Spanish garrison. For this reason, and from the fact that English merchants were the only traders to and from the country, English was taught in the schools, and English people were (as they still are) popular throughout the State. After the War of Independence a good many Englishmen came (and were welcomed) as settlers in the land about Santa Barbara city. In the ’fifties and ’sixties the copper boom brought others, mostly Cornishmen, to Matoche. After the Redemption War a good many more (mostly from the northern Midlands) came to Meruel, to mine iron or coal. In the ’seventies others, from all parts of England, settled as sugar-planters along the northern sea coast in the Pituba country. These men, though they were but a sprinkling, helped profound changes in the land, which in three generations of men multiplied the population tenfold.

It is well, now, to talk of these changes.

Soon after the establishment of the Republic the two political parties in the land became defined as Feudalist and Modernist. In Encinitas and in western San Jacinto, the will of the great landowners was still law: in Santa Barbara City, Pituba and in Meruel a new and vigorous race was demanding freedom from the feudal lords and wider teaching than the priests gave. As the feeling between the two parties ran highest upon the point of Church teaching, the Church party, which was that of the great landlords, came to be known as the Surplices or Whites. For a while, as the Reds were without a leader, the governments of the Republic were White.

Mention was made of one Lopez Zubiaga, who seized the coal country of Redemption in 1865. This Lopez, born in 1840, was the first leader of the Red or forward party to count in affairs. At the time of the Redemption raid, he was a tall, strongly built, masterful and very handsome young man, with a contemptuous manner and savage courage. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, which made some think that he was not the son of the landowner, but of an Englishman, named variously Corbet, Corphitt or Cardiff, about whom there had been talk.

After his success in seizing Redemption, Lopez was elected President of the Republic in place of old General Chavez, the White. As President he rallied the Reds, and carried through what was called “the Liberal Struggle,” which made all Meruel and Redemption places of mines and factories, and took the schools from the control of the Church. After four years of his Presidency, the Whites returned to office, under the hidalgo, Miguel de Leyva, of San Jacinto, a man of burning faith, more ardent than wise, who provoked the forward party almost to the point of civil war. At the next election, the Whites were turned out of office and the Reds put in, with such unanimity that Lopez could rule as he chose. After the election of 1878, which repeated his triumph, Lopez declared himself Dictator, “while his country had need of him.”

Miguel de Leyva, disgusted, retired from politics: the Whites had no other leader, save young General Luis Chavez, who was indolent, and Hermengildo Bazan, who was only a speaker.

The Dictatorship of Lopez was marked outwardly by a great increase in the foreign trade of the eastern provinces, the threefold growth of the city of Santa Barbara, and an improvement of all the ports, harbours and coastwise railways. After 1884, those who studied the land’s politics felt that the real Dictator was no longer Lopez, but old Mordred Weycock, the manager of the United Sugar Company, an unscrupulous business man.

It was at this time that the oddness and brusqueness in Lopez’ character changed to a madness not likely to be forgotten.

The madness began to show itself in a passion for building big and costly public works. He rebuilt the cathedral (a Colonial Renaissance building) on the lines of the temple at Hloatl. He built himself a palace of glass, having heard, though wrongly, that the Queen of England lived in one. He then built himself a summerhouse, roofed with silver plates, and added to it an ivory room inlaid with gold. Being a Red, he caused all the bread used in his palace to be coloured red. He frequented shambles in order to see, as he said, “the divine colour.”

He had two favourites. Livio and Zarzas; two negro servants, Green Feather and the Knife; and one son, the child of his youth, Don José, born in 1860, a depraved youth of sickly beauty, who headed a clique of vicious lads at the court.

Late in the year 1886, the Dictator’s madness began to take other forms, of hatred and suspicion of the Whites, fear of assassination, and the belief that he was god. All these obsessions were fostered by Mordred Weycock, who contrived to win, from each of them, advantages for himself or his firm.

In all his schemes, Mordred was helped by his nephew, Roger Weycock, twenty-seven years of age, who had been in Santa Barbara since 1883, after having failed for the Diplomatic Service. Roger was a tall, polite, brown-haired, fair-bearded man, with a pleasant manner and a pale, inscrutable face. He was the channel through which Englishmen knew Santa Barbara. It was through his able weekly letters to the English press that English opinion was in favour of Lopez for so long. He knew Lopez to be mad; but the Red party favoured his firm and he had no pity for the Whites: old Miguel de Leyva had once kept him waiting in the hall, and had then brushed by to lunch.

Miguel de Leyva was now dead, leaving many children, including his youngest, the girl Carlotta, born in 1868, who even in infancy impressed people as a creature from another world. She comes into this story (as into many others) as a rare thing, whose passing made all things not quite the same. She was of a delicate, exquisite, unearthly charm, which swayed men, women and children: the Indians of San Jacinto used to kneel as she passed: some have said that animals and birds would come to her: at the least she had a beauty and grace not usual.

Nearly all the province of Encinitas was owned by the last descendant of the Conquistador, Don Manuel of Encinitas, who lived at his palace in his town, or in his hacienda below it, with his old mother, whom they called the Queen Dowager.

Don Manuel was born in 1857. He has been so often described, that it need only be said of him that he was a very glorious young man, noble in beauty and in intellect. In the days of this story he was an unmarried man of not quite thirty. In his youth, before his father died, he had had his wild time in the city with other young men. He had been a friend of Don José, Don Lopez’ son, and had practised black magic with Rafael Hirsch. All this ceased when his father died in 1879. Since then he had lived at Encarnacion, breeding horses, for the men of his State, who are among the great horsemen of the world. He took his stature, beauty and masterful fierce eyes from his mother, the Queen Dowager, who had been a Peralta from Matoche.

In October, 1886, Don Manuel met Carlotta de Leyva for the first time: they became betrothed that same month, to the great joy of the Queen Dowager, who had longed to see her son married.

Miguel de Leyva had a sister Emilia, who married a Piranha of Santa Barbara city, and lived there, after her husband’s death, in a house too big for her fortune. She had been much in England with her husband, either for pleasure or the marketing of copper. She spoke English well. She caused her daughter Rosa, who had been for some years a convent friend of her cousin Carlotta, to spend a year in an English household. Rosa returned to Santa Barbara from England some months before this tale begins.

Rosa Piranha was then nearly twenty, being a few months older than Carlotta. She was slight in build and not very strong, but had a mannish spirit, with courage and dash enough for anything. She had no looks: she was very short-sighted: she always wore tinted spectacles, even when indoors. Yet she was amusing, and very attractive: several Englishmen proposed to her during her stay in England; but she would not marry into their Church.

She was brown-haired, not dark like most of her country women. In herself she had that mixture of boyish cheek with feminine grace which one loves in Viola, in “Twelfth Night.”

On New Year’s Day, 1887, Carlotta and Manuel planned to be married at Easter, in the cathedral church of Santa Barbara.

On that same New Year’s Day, Don Lopez, the Dictator, in his palace of Plaza Verde, in Santa Barbara city, gave a lunch to some of the great of the State, the Red ministers, his son Don José, his creatures Don Livio and Don Zarzas, some merchants and English speculators and the Archbishop of Santa Barbara. At this lunch he publicly accused the prelate of using the power of the Church against the Red party. “I have my eyes everywhere, like the Almighty,” he said. “Nor can there be two supreme authorities, here or in heaven.”

To this the Archbishop replied: “There is but one supreme authority: Lucifer has always found that.”

To this Don Lopez answered: “A greater than Lucifer prepares his wings.” Having said this, in tones of threat, he rose from the banquet, told Pluma Verde to call the prelate’s carriage, and invited his other guests to come within, to watch some dancers.

Roger Weycock, who was present at this lunch, has left an account of it in his history, The Last of the Dictators, where he says that, “It made him feel that some explosion within the State was about to occur.” He wrote that evening to the English newspapers that Don Lopez had received information of a White conspiracy against him: “No names were mentioned; but all the great White families, as well as the Church, are said to be involved. It is possible that Don Lopez will be forced to take extreme measures, to end for ever the menace of White reprisals. The Whites have never forgiven and never will forgive his part in ‘the Liberal struggle’ and in the remaking of the land. The Church hates him for his establishment of secular schools: the great landowners hate him for his establishment of a commercial class which out-manœuvres them in Senate and out-votes them in Congress. This must not seem to suggest that either Church or hidalgos would go so far as to employ an assassin; but both parties of the White side control large numbers of violent, ignorant, passionate fanatics, to whom the killing of Lopez would be an act pleasing to God. What Don Lopez seems to expect is a soulèvement générale of the Whites against his government at the time of the Easter celebrations.

“Undoubtedly, with such a ruler as Don Lopez, forewarned is forearmed: we need not doubt that he has the situation well in hand.”

As it happens, another Englishman, without any bias of party or interest, saw Don Lopez on this New Year’s Day, and described him thus: “I watched Don Lopez, while I was with him, very carefully, because of the strange tales I had heard of his extravagance in building, in cedarwood, ivory and silver, etc. I had thought that these were lies or exaggerations, but I am now convinced that they are true. He has built or begun to build such buildings, but not finished them: he never finishes: he begins, then begins something grander, and then begins something new.

“All the time that I was with him some unseen musicians made music upon some Indian instruments, seemingly of some kind of strings and a rattle. It was irritating at first, then perplexing, then troublesome and exciting. I was told that he has this music always in his palace. He listened to what I had to say with attention, and said that what I wished should be done. Then, to my surprise, he said, ‘They are seeking my life. One of them was behind the gateway this afternoon. See there, you see that man passing beyond the gates? He is a murderer, paid by those Whites to kill me. My mission here is not accomplished. It is but begun. What did Jove do in heaven? He forged thunderbolts. He crushed them. But Jove was all-seeing. I, too, am becoming all-seeing. This palace may seem stone to your eyes, but it is not stone. It is all eyes, and this city is all eyes, and I see into their hearts, into their councils, into the pretence of their God. But a little while longer and the world will see that a ruler can be godlike, as in Rome.’

“I was made a little uneasy by his words and by the restless, queer manner in which he uttered them. I had seen him some years before, when I had been much struck by his air of overbearing masterfulness. That air was still on him. He looked masterful and overbearing, but there was something about him now which did not look well. His hair seemed thin and somewhat staring, his skin seemed dry and his eyes both dry and bright. Then his mouth, which had always shown an expression between a snarl and a sneer, seemed permanently caught up at one side, so as to show the teeth. Possibly it was some malformation, possibly some play of muscle, which had become habitual or fixed, but it gave the effect of a state of nerves, never (as I should imagine) quite human, that had become those of a tiger about to bite. I was suddenly reminded of one of the late busts of Nero.

“Seeing me looking through the window at the marble tank surrounding the palace fountain, he said to me, ‘What colour is the water in the fountain?’

“ ‘It looks whiteish.’

“ ‘So has my mercy to the Whites been,’ he said. ‘But let them beware or I will fill that fountain with their blood and their daughters shall come to see it play. If they call too much upon God to help them, God shall reveal Himself. If you have any White friend, tell him that. I am as patient as God. But tell them that.’

“All the time that he spoke his two great negroes stood behind his throne, each holding his sword. They were naked to the waist. People mistook them sometimes for bronzes. That disgusting creature, his son, Don José, stood at another window, killing flies. He was a languid-looking youth, sickly and vicious, with a face of exquisite features, showing neither intellect nor will, nothing but depravity. He turned to me as his father ceased speaking.

“ ‘There will be a baptism of blood,’ he said, ‘to the sound of flutes.’

“It was time at that moment for the Dictator to ride abroad. His Indians entered with his riding costume, a golden head-dress and a tunic of gold chain-mail all set about with the plumes of the scarlet-crested dill-birds.

“ ‘See,’ he said, ‘this is what they force me to wear. I, who am God, the father of this land, have to wear gold mail, lest I be assassinated. Let them see to it.’

“When he had put this on, he looked, as he always did, magnificent beyond description. I understood how it was that his Indians worshipped him as God. They decked him with a scarlet serape and led him out to his horse. It was a white stallion, which he was afterwards said to have fed with human flesh. He and his bodyguard of Indians set out at a gallop. They always galloped at this time from this fear of assassination, which had become an obsession to him. I must say that I was glad when he had gone.

“One of his two negroes, the one with the knife, said, ‘He ride the White horse; that show the Whites he ride them. He ride with spur, too: you see.’ ”

Bill Ridden was an English gentleman who comes a little into this story. In his youth he spent some years in Santa Barbara, where he made a good deal of money in the copper boom at Matoche. He was a very good friend to the Piranhas at this time (and later in the copper crisis). He was a man of strong affections; he kept in touch with his friends in Santa Barbara long after he had returned to England and settled down. He married in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ocle, a loud, fresh-coloured, robust mare of a woman, by whom, as he put it, he “sired some colts and fillies, as well as a darned pup I might have drowned.” This “pup” was his youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, born in 1869, who was not quite eighteen when this tale begins. It was at Bill Ridden’s house that Rosa Piranha spent her year in England.

This house was the Foliats, in Berkshire, where Bill’s mother’s people, the Foliats, had lived. It was a small, red-brick Queen Anne house, with a racing stable at the back and the Downs behind the racing stable. Here Bill bred steeplechasers and rode much to hounds. Bill was an ugly devil, foul-mouthed and rude, something between a publican and a horse-coper in appearance, yet strangely gentle with women and horses. He had a Judge Jeffreys manner on the bench of magistrates. He loved his daughter Bell and hated his youngest son. “If he had been a pup,” he used to say, “I could have drowned him; if he had been a trout, I could have put him back; but being this, by God, there is nothing that I can do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he’s got guts enough not to sink.”

His wife, Sarah Ridden, was fond of this son, but wished that he would be like others boys, “not always messing about with cog-wheels.” Her children had gone from her into the world, with the exception of her daughter Bell, a year older than the boy. She found life easier with the boy out of the house, “not putting my old man’s back up.” Quiet life, the Liverpool Spring Meeting and asparagus were the things she loved best; but she was a fine rider and understood horses.

Bell Ridden, the daughter, was a lovely, shy girl, worshipped by her father and mother. As she lived at home, she helped her father in the stable: she was clever with horses; the stable boys loved her: she got more out of them than Bill could. It was her instinct that sent the Lilybud to Mandarin, by which Bill got Chinese White, the horse which won him his glory.

The five older children were scattered: Polly and Sally married, Harold in a line regiment, Chilcote and Rowton in the city, in copper.

This brings us to the youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, the Hi of these pages, the lad who had not yet found what he could do. He was of the middling height and build, with brown hair, and a pleasant, freckled face, somewhat puckered at the eyes from his habit of not wearing a hat. His eyes were grey-blue, under eyebrows darker than one would expect from the eyes: his nose was a small pug nose, neatly made and set. His ears were well made and placed. His mouth was wide, pleasant, thin-lipped and firm. He was a nice-looking lad, who would have done well enough under other parents, or with none.

Being the last of the seven, he came at a time when both his parents had had enough of children, but wanted, as they said, “a filly to finish up with.” As Hi turned out to be a colt, or as Bill put it, “another of these buck pups to have about,” he was a disappointment to them from the first.

He went to the school where the other Riddens had been, he got his second eleven colours in his last summer term; but learned nothing; he was “always messing about with cog-wheels.”

In the Christmas holidays Bill called him into his “study,” where he kept two hunting horns, six long hunting-pictures by Henry Alken, seven foxes’ masks (one of them almost white, killed in the winter of the great frost), eleven crops on a rack, three small oil portraits of Moonbird, Sirocco and Peter, much tobacco of all sorts, and many bottles of liqueur, made by himself.

“Now, Highworth,” he said, “you’ve come to an age now when you’ve got to decide what to do. You’ve had a first-rate education; at least, if you haven’t, it’s your own fault, I know it’s cost enough. Now what are you going to be? What do you want to do?”

“Well, sir, as you know, I’ve always wanted to be an engineer.”

“I’ve already gone into that, boy. I thought you knew my mind on that point once for all. But it’s the kind of answer I expected from this last report of yours. You waste your time at an expensive public school messing with toy engines with that young maniac you persuaded us to invite here, and then say you want to be an engineer. A nice thing it would be for your mother and sister to see you a . . . mechanic doing the drains with a spanner. By God, boy, you’ve got a fine sense of pride, I don’t think.”

Hi said that engineering was a fine profession and that lots of people went in for it.

“What do you know about its being a fine profession?”

“Because it gives men all sorts of power, sir.”

“Power be damned, boy. Power to stink of paraffin whenever they go out to dinner; though that must be seldom, even now, I’m glad to think.”

“Sir James Russel was a fine man, sir; and so was William Horrocks, who made the Gartishan Dam.”

“Sir James Russel may have been God Almighty, for all I know or care; I never heard of him; but William Horrocks I do know, or at least know of, for his uncle was old John Horrocks, the mealman down at Kill Hill, and a dirtier, old, snuffy scoundrel I never saw out of an almshouse.”

“I don’t know what his uncle was, sir.”

“No, boy, but if you will let me say so, the point is, that I do.”

“Yes, sir, but I am talking of William Horrocks.”

“I think I understand as much. I am merely pointing out to you, in the teeth of a great deal of interruption, that your hero was a man whom no one here would touch with a barge-pole or have inside his house.”

“Sir, a man ought not to be judged by what his uncle is, but by what he is in himself.”

“A man is judged by what his uncle is. In this country, thank God, having respectable relations counts for a good deal, and so it should. You’re a Ridden and a Foliat, and I’m not going to have you messing an honoured name with wheel-grease because you’ve read some damned subversive rag which you’ve neither the sense to drop nor the wit to judge. There are some things which a man can do and keep his self-respect and be asked out to dinner, but going round with a spanner isn’t one of them.”

“I don’t ask to go round with a spanner, sir, nor to be asked out to dinner.”

“What do you ask, then?”

“I would like to learn engineering, sir, because I’ve always enjoyed engines and the application of power, and that sort of thing.”

“What do you call that but going round with a spanner? And how do you propose to learn engineering?”

“I hoped, sir, that you would let me go to an engineering works.”

“Engineering works be damned.”

“I don’t see it, sir. It’s the thing I should do best.”

“Well, I do see it, sir, and it’s the thing I won’t have.”

“But why not, sir? I should work at it. I shouldn’t disgrace you.”

“Your notions of disgrace aren’t mine. Your notions of disgrace are the sort of damned sentiment that will wreck this country and all that’s in it.”

“I don’t see why, sir. I don’t want to argue with you, sir; but it is important to me: what I am to do all my life.”

“It is equally important to me that my son should not make a mistaken choice.”

“But what a man most wants to do, sir, can’t be a mistaken choice.”

“You’re not a man; but a damned young ass. That being so, and it is so, it’s for me to decide. I’ve got to supply the money whatever you do; I suppose you won’t deny that.”

“I was wondering, sir, whether you would advance to me Aunt Melloney’s money, that I’m to have when I’m of age, and let me pay for myself.”

“Pay what for yourself?”

“The fees or premiums, sir, for going through the shops.”

“So that’s what the fellow meant, was it? Now I know. ‘The shops,’ he said. There was a drunken engineer at Newmarket, who said, ‘Let the gentleman keep clear of the shops.’ He was drunk when he said it; but that’s what he meant; now I know; and he showed a fine sense of the situation.”

“Would you advance me the money, sir?”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort. These engineers and fellows are a gang I will not tolerate. They defile God’s country. They’ve already spoiled the hunting, and the racing’s following as fast as it can go. If you’d been a boy with any guts, instead of clockwork, you’d have been glad, I should have thought, to have been at home here, and borne a hand in the stable. Breeding is about the last thing this poor country’s got in these damned days. We’ve still got horses, thank God. We don’t depend on a traction-engine gang, doing a tenth of the work for double the money. Why don’t you take off your coat and come into the stable? It’s a needed job; a pleasant job; and a gentleman’s job, what’s more. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, sir; but I’m not very good at horses. Besides, you’ve got Bell in the stables. I should only be in the way.”

“Ashamed of working with your sister, are you?”

“No, sir; but Bell wouldn’t want me there, and you’d always be swearing at me.”

“Damme,” Bill said, “there are things in you boys that would make any father swear. You go to a prep. school for three years, then to a public school for five years, then you ask to be kept for another seven while you learn a profession, and by God, when you’ve learnt it, you can’t make a living at it. I’ve been talking to your mother about this, as well as to Rosa Piranha before she sailed. You’ll not go back to school, that I’m resolved on, after this last report. You’ll stay here a week or two to get some clothes, and then you’ll do what I did. You’ll go to Santa Barbara and see if you can keep your head above water by your own hands. If you can, well and good. You will have letters to people; a lot better people than I ever had; and you will have time given you to look about you. You ought to be able to make good; I don’t say in copper, that is over, but in a new land there are new things and new opportunities. There are always sugar, tobacco and ranching; there should be timber, cocoa, piacaba, countless things. As I said, you ought to be able to make good. If you can’t, it will be your own lookout. You’ve got to paddle your own canoe, like any other youngest son. Now I’m not going to have any argument about the superior beauties of cog-wheels. I’ve written to people and written about your ticket. Since you won’t work in the stable here and have no choice of your own, except a damned dirty falallery which I won’t have, you’ll go to Santa Barbara. You may count yourself more than lucky to have the chance. Very few youngest sons ever get into the sun at all, but stink in a rotten town, by God, where even the horses puke at the air they breathe.

“You turn up your nose, do you? I wish I was going to Santa Barbara to have my time again. You can turn up your nose as much as you like, but that’s what you’ll do, so make up your mind to it. When you’ve seen the place you’ll thank me for having sent you there. When you’ve been there a few days you’ll thank your stars for your luck.”

Hi did not answer his father, knowing that thumbs were down. His heart sank at the thought of the foreign country, yet leaped again at the thought of liberty from school and life beginning. He had still one little ray of hope, which his mother extinguished.

“Your father’s got his back up,” she said. “Between you and me, Hi, he has had a bad year. Newmarket was nearly a finisher. So be a good old sport and go; there’s a dear. There’s far more scope there than here; everybody says so. Besides, your Aunt Melloney’s money went into Hicks’s. I don’t know that you could get it out, even if your father agreed.”

* * * * * * *

There was a brief delay, in spite of Bill’s speed, because the first letter from Rosa Piranha brought the news that Santa Barbara politics were somewhat unsettled. Bill had to pause to make some enquiries, through his sons in the copper business and his friends in the United Sugar Company. “It’s probably nothing much,” he said, when he had heard the reports. “These Reds and Whites are always at each other, in the way these foreigners always are. It won’t concern the boy, if he’s got the sense to keep out of it. Let him go and learn sense in the only school for it.” After this, there was a second brief delay for farewell visits to relations. When Hi returned from these, his clothes, of drill and flannel, were ready in their ant-proof tin trunks. Towards the end of February, he sailed for Santa Barbara city in the Recalde.

During the week in which he left home, Don José, the son of the Dictator, caused his favourite, Lucas Zanja, to be beheaded in the ivory room, “so that he might enjoy,” as he said, “the beauty of the blood upon the ivory.” Don Lopez’ papers called this a

DASTARDLY ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE

OUR PRESIDENT’S SON

and added in smaller type

ASSASSIN PERISHES IN THE ATTEMPT.

The Whites did nothing. Zanja was infamous, even for a Red of the palace set.

II

Hi had planned to learn “enough Spanish to rub along with” on the voyage out, but fate disposed of this plan. He was seasick till after Lisbon; then they started cricket; then, by chance, he met the third engineer, who was as fond of cog-wheels as himself. After this, he passed most of his time either in the third engineer’s cabin or in the engine-room. He learned no Spanish whatever. “You’ll not need it,” the third engineer said, “they’re very intelligent people: they’ll make out what you want.”

Ten mornings later Hi was roused from sleep by his cabin steward.

“The dawn is just breaking, Mr. Ridden,” he said. “We are just entering the outer harbour now.”

Hi turned out on deck in his pyjamas; he saw before him the promised land of Santa Barbara about which he had thought so much. It was still dim, close in shore. A big light was near at hand to his right; a small revolving light blinked far away to the left. In between, in the arc of the bay, were the lights of the city and of the ships at anchor. The city itself was little more than a smudge against a darkness. Far beyond the city, in a line like an army, were the high Sierras of the Three Kings. Their peaks rose up out of the clouds like mountains in another world. As they were now catching the dawn they seemed made of jewels. Mount Gaspar was golden. Mount Baltazar was like a bubble of blood, and Mount Melchior a blue and evil finger glistening. As Hi watched, amazed by the beauty of the scene, colour began to come upon the bay. He saw away to his left an enormous expanse of shallow water, over which strange birds, such as he had never seen, were now passing from their night ashore.

“You see those birds?” said the fourth officer of the Recalde beside him. “They’re bobacherry birds. You always see them working their lower jaws as though to get the cherry in. It’s a pretty place, Santa Barb, of a morning like this.”

He passed away to get the watch to the washing of the decks; Hi remained staring at the shore.

“I had never thought that it was to be like this,” he thought. “It’s like an earthly paradise. I might have been stewing in London like Rowton; or being frozen up six months of the year in British Columbia. I shall be as happy here as the day is long.”

As the Recalde passed the dead-slow limit Hi saw some lighters bearing down upon her from both sides, urged by the sweeps of such men as he had never seen nor dreamed of. They were wild-looking men of enormous stature. All were almost naked; all shone as though the life in them made them radiant. All were of a rich red-golden colour like new pennies. Even the smallest of them looked a match for two strong Europeans. Even the most benign of them looked like the devil he was and the cannibal he could be. All wore gold, ivory or copper placques, shaped like new moons, which hung from their noses and covered their mouths. They looked curiously like the lids of letter-boxes.

“See those fellows, Mr. Ridden?” said the captain on the bridge. “They’re Pitubas from up-country and they’re cannibals to a man. You’d better put a coat over those pyjamas of yours, or the sight of you may be more than they can stand. They like their meat white, and they like it young.”

Some of the lighters swept alongside and made fast, the winches at once began at all three hatches; baggage and mails were hove out before the Recalde reached her moorings. At breakfast the tables were covered with flowers and fruits, of kinds new to Hi. Clinging to the flowers were insects, coloured like jewels, shaped like sticks, or leaves or blades of grass.

“This is your first taste of the new world, Mr. Ridden,” said the captain, “what d’you think of it?”

“I think it’s amazing, sir,” Hi said.

“Well, it’s all that,” said the captain, “but after a few years of it, you’ll curse these blue skies and give a year’s pay to be able to see your breath.”

“I don’t think I shall ever tire of this, sir,” Hi said. “It’s the kind of place I have dreamed of all my life.”

“Pretty scenery,” the captain said. “But give me Sefton Park.”

* * * * * * *

After breakfast, Hi was rowed ashore from the Recalde, to begin his new life. He saw the Recalde, which linked him with home (for his mother had walked her deck and leaned over her rail), now drop away into the past. In front of him was a new world, to which he had at present three keys, his friendship with the Piranhas, a letter to Mr. Roger Weycock of the Sugar Company, and a letter to Mr. Allan Winter, a sugar-planter (not far from the city) whom Bill had known in the past. These were his keys, but his father had told him not to trust to them. “The thing you’ve got to trust to, and the only thing, is just you yourself. That’s the only key that will open doors to a man, of any kind worth getting open.”

With some distrust of this key and some anxiety about his boatman’s fare, he drew near to the landing stairs, where pirates of five colours, in turbans and kerchiefs of every colour, showed their teeth at him and offered him all things, from brothels to the new cathedral. As the boat sidled up to the steps, he heard his name shouted: “Mr. Highworth. Mr. Ridden. Mr. Highworth.” He caught sight of a little man diving down the stairs at him and crying, “Dammy, dammy, dammy, I’ll get drunk to-night.”

“O, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Ridden,” he cried. “Don’t ’ee know me? I knew you, sir; the minute I seen ’ee.” Here he turned on the other pirates who were laying hold of Hi’s baggage. “Get out of this,” he said, in the seaport language made up of the oaths of all civilised lands. “Get out of this, heekoes de pooters. I take all the Señor’s gear. Don’t ’ee know me, Mr. Highworth? I know thee, soon’s I seen ’ee.” He was weeping like a child and sucking his tears into his mouth with twitches of his face: he had all Hi’s baggage in his hands. “Pay the boatman, sir,” he said. “One of the big ones and a small one. This sort is sharks. You’d ought to have took a licensed boat, which would have been only one peseta.” He led the way up the stairs and shoved through the crowd on the Mole. “O, dammy, dammy,” he kept saying, “I’ll break into my burial money, but I’ll get drunk to-night.” He was dressed in an old pair of English riding breeches, a black velvet coat, much too tight at the shoulders and elbows, a tall black sombrero, and part of a yellow serape. Hi didn’t like the look of the man, nor his display of emotion.

“Look at me, Master Highworth,” he said. “Don’t ’ee know me?”

“No, I don’t,” Hi said. “Who are you?”

“Don’t ’ee know ’Zekiel Rust?” the man said. “I did use to beat for Squire William Ridden, many’s the time, till I had to run for it. I knowed you and your father and Mr. Rowton and Miss Mary. But you were young, Mr. Highworth. You might never have heard tell. They may have kept it from you, the deed of gore I done. I’m not an ordinary man, you understand. I had to run for it; I’m Rust, the murderer. It was I killed old Keeper Jackson. I’d a-been hung, if they’d a-took me. Now you remember me? You remember how I killed Keeper Jackson?”

“Good Lord,” Hi said. “Yes; now I remember. And you have been here ever since.”

“Dammy, dammy, bless you for remembering,” the man said. “Now, but Master Highworth, I don’t want to presume; but I’ve been all these years, seven years now, in this unchristian land, and I never see a word of anyone come from the old part. Anyhow I’ll see to thy baggage, Master Ridden. Now you want to go to a good hotel. The Santiago is the one for you. I’ll see you to there, Master Highworth, and I’ll look after you, and don’t you turn from me, Master Highworth, for anyone would have killed Keeper Jackson, the way he spoke.

“I was out on a moony night, and I’ll tell ’ee just where I were. I were up there by the valley, where the water comes out; and it wasn’t murder really. I’d gone out with my old pin-fire. It was a lovely moony night, and I got a hare. Well then, a hare’s a rebel, ain’t he, and game? So I got a hare and put ’un in my pocket and I was going on away along up, when I see another hare. He was on a bank just above the road. So ‘I’ll have ’ee, my master,’ I says, and I up after him and I give him my pin-fire and he went over the bank, and I went over the bank; and he wasn’t a hare, not really, he was a fox. I see him when I got up the bank. And there was Keeper Jackson and he says, ‘I’ve got you, my man,’ he says, ‘you best come quiet.’ And I says, ‘That wasn’t a hare,’ I says, ‘that was a fox, and a fox is a rebel and he isn’t game.’ And he says, ‘You come quiet. I’ve had my eye on you a long time,’ he says, and he lets fly at me with his gun. And one of the pellets went through my gaiters, and so I give him pin-fire. And when I see I killed him, I go along up the downs and there I come upon a man driving sheep. I put old pin-fire in a ditch and cover him over. I goes along with the man driving the sheep, until we come to Salisbury. But I’ll tell you all about that. We’ll go along to the Santiago.”

Hi remembered the man very well now as a poacher, who did odd jobs for Squire Bill in the dog-breaking and ferret business. It was perfectly true that he had murdered Keeper Jackson and had been searched and advertised for as a murderer, but had escaped.

Hi had been only ten at the time; but the thing had made a stir in that quiet place.

By this time Ezekiel had hailed a carriage, partly by signs and partly by noises, which the signs explained. For a moment he showed Hi plainly that he meant to run after the carriage until it reached the hotel, but this Hi would not allow. He made him sit with him inside.

“You’re the first ever I’ve seen from anywhere near those parts, Mr. Highworth,” Ezekiel said. “You see, after I got to Salisbury, they read in a paper how the body was found and it was me, so I thought I’d best not stay there, so I out of the pub, and, as I come out of the pub, there come up thirteen policemen and they were looking for me. And they walked straight by me and never took me. So I thought the best thing I could do is to follow these men now they’ve passed me, so I followed them along a bit, and then they separated, and I thought, ‘This won’t do,’ so I went along the road a bit and there was a man driving some cows, so I said to him, ‘I’m going along the road a bit. Shall I help thee drive?’ So I drive them along a bit, and he said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ And I thought, ‘Well, it won’t do to tell anybody where I’m going,’ so I said, ‘I’ll just turn back and go into the town now.’ And so I turned back, because I thought, ‘Well, he’ll notice me,’ and he must have been suspicious or he wouldn’t have asked where I was going to. And I thought, ‘Now, I’ll diddle him like I diddled the policemen. I’ll go right across this town and out the other side. No one would think of looking for me there.’

“Well, I went across and, as I was going across, I passed like an inn yard, and just at that inn yard door, like a gateway, there was Black George Rylands that used to drive Mr. Hanshaw. If I’d a-took another step I’d a-been right into him, and so I thought, ‘Now, Ezekiel Rust, you’re doomed. They all knows that you’re here. They’re all on the scent.’ So then I don’t know what to do, and presently I see Black George turn away into the inn, so then I made one dart.

“So then I got out of Salisbury, and I come up out on a place, like it was downs, and there were some gipsy fellows there. I’d known some of them come round with baskets, but they didn’t know me, and I asked them which way I’d better go to get out of England, and they said they’d set me on the road, part of the way, and so we set off next day and we come to a town. I thought I was safe when I was with them, but, coming through that town, my blood run cold.”

“Why?” said Hi. “Were there more police?”

“No, Mr. Ridden, there was not more police, there was soldiers—soldiers after me, hundreds of ’em. I come into the town, and there was all they soldiers in red coats, looking for me. But I got past ’em and I come to a town, and there was a man wanting another man to help him take charge of a bull. He was coming out to these parts and there was to have been another man in charge of the bull, but the other man, if you understand me, Mr. Ridden, he didn’t want, when the time come, to live up to his bargain. And I didn’t want to let it be known, not at once, that I was eager to get out of the country, because that wouldn’t have done. They’d all have known that I was a murderer, if I let ’em think that. Naturally that was the first thing they’d have thought. So I pretended first I was afraid of bulls, and then I said I didn’t like to leave my old mother, and then I said I didn’t much like these foreign parts by what I’d heard of them. I let them think the wrong thing, you see, Mr. Highworth. But in the end I said I’d help take the bull. So then they said they didn’t want to run any risks, and said, ‘You’d better come on board straightaway.’ So they took me along and we passed through a gate where there was a lot of notices and there I read what made my blood run cold. Now I had always been against they photographs. Often people said to me, ‘Now you stand there and let me take your picture.’ But I knew better. ‘No,’ I always used to say. My golly, Mr. Highworth, I tell ’ee, there they’d got me all described and wrote out. ‘Wanted, for murder, suffering from a crushed left thumbnail,’ it said. It must have been Mrs. Thompson told them that.

“You may talk what you like, Mr. Ridden, about there not being a God, but there is a God. And how do I know that there is a God? Because, when I read that, there was a policeman there and I got my left thumb in my pocket at the moment, and, if I’d not had my left thumb in my pocket at that moment, why, he’d have seen it, wouldn’t he?

“There, that shows you whether there’s a God or not. So the other fellows that wanted me to take the bull, they didn’t want me to be reading there; they wanted me to come along. But it wouldn’t have done to come along, not with that policeman there. No, because he’d have thought at once, ‘There’s something funny,’ if I’d have gone along. There was fifty pounds reward, too, for me.

“And the policeman says to one of the chaps that was with me, ‘Seen anything of this chap?’ he says.

“ ‘No,’ they says, ‘worse luck, because we could do with fifty pounds.’

“ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘he’s pretty sure to be coming around here. Who’s this you’ve got?’

“ ‘Why,’ they says, ‘he’s a drover coming to look after the old Astounder, that big bull they’ve got on board.’

“ ‘Well, I wish him joy of his job, then,’ the policeman said, ‘for a bull is a fair coughdrop, when he’s seasick.’

“Well then, we got on board the ship. That’ll show you whether there’s a God or not.

“Well, I hope your troubles were at an end then,” said Hi.

“No, Mr. Highworth, they were not. And why were they not? Why, use is second nature, as we say. Soon as I got on board that old ship, they said the captain wanted to see me and so I thought, ‘Well, now they’ve caught me; now what am I to do?’ Then I thought I’d better go, I might brazen it out. And I went up to a place all shining, and there was all the chief detectives of London town come to look for me. And the captain, he says, ‘Now, my man, what’s your name?’ Now what would you have answered? Use is second nature, isn’t it? So I plumped out straightaway ‘Ezekiel Rust,’ I said. Then, directly I said that, I see what I done. And he said, ‘Well, you put your name on that paper there.’ And then I know what to do. I said, ‘Please, sir, I can’t write.’ And so he says, ‘Well, you must put your mark.’ And there was a man writing on a paper and he wrote my name, only he hadn’t wrote it right. He wrote it wrong, because he hadn’t followed what I said. He put ‘Jack Crust.’ And so I put my mark and the detectives they looked at me and they didn’t recognise me and I thought, ‘My boys, there’s the worth of fifty pounds in me and I never been worth more than eleven and a penny at one time before, and that they cheated me of, coming back from the races.’ And so he said, ‘Now, my man, go down to that bull and mind he don’t toss you. They call him the Wrekin’s Astounder,’ he said, ‘and he’ll astound you, if you don’t be careful.’

“And I went down and had a look at the bull and I thought ‘This ’ere creature will be a friend to me. They won’t come looking for me, not down with this old Astounder.’ But they did come looking for me, and a policeman come and they come with the captain and he says, ‘Who’ve we got here,’ he says.

“ ‘Oh, that’s the prize bull and his keeper,’ they says, ‘what you read about in the papers.’

“ ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘now I’m safe. There won’t be any more policemen come along for me.’ Then the steward come down. He calls me, ‘Crust, Crust. Where’s this man, Crust?’ he says. It make my blood run cold to hear my name called like that. So he says, ‘Come along and get your tea, man. Get your tea while you can eat it. We shall be gone in another hour and you’d best have something to be sick on, if you’re going to be sick.’

“Well, I sat down to supper with a lot of others, and be darned if one of them didn’t say, ‘Your name Crust? You any relation of the murderer?’

“ ‘No,’ I said, ‘thank God.’

“And another said, ‘What murderer’s that, Bert?’

“ ‘Why,’ he says, ‘a man called Crust shot a gamekeeper and there’s fifty pounds reward for him.’

“So then I saw that they suspected me and I said, ‘There’s only one way to deal with murderers and it’s what they call the old way. They used to get a great big tin of paraffin and they put the murderer into that and then they boil him. Wherever that’s been tried,’ I said, ‘people know enough not to do any more, because they know what they’ll get.’

“And then one of them said, ‘Yes, but they’re not always caught. They know that.’

“And I said, ‘No, they’re not always caught at once, but in the end they’re always caught.’

“Now you’d think that I’d run dare-devil escapes enough by that time. That very evening the ship began to go and I thought, ‘Now I’m free.’ And then I wake up in the night and the ship were groaning awful. She gave great creaking groans like right down and I thought, ‘I know how it’s going to be. There’s going to be a storm, because it knows that I’m on board and there’ll be a storm until they find out who it is.’ And then some men came by with a lantern and I was in the stall, if you understand me, next to my bull, and I lay down in the straw and they went past. They didn’t see me. And the next morning, when I got up, I thought, ‘I’ll see whether we’re away from England or not.’ So I went up, and the first thing I see you could have knocked me down. There was a lot of men-of-war’s men. Some of them was here and some of them was there, if you understand what I mean. They made my blood run cold. ‘I see what it is,’ I said, ‘They know I’ve come this way, but they don’t know which I am and so they’re stopping and watching every place. My only chance is to keep down just by the bull.’ So I went down to him and he knew I had shot old Jackson, and he rammed at me with his great horns and I stayed there all day. I stayed down there two weeks. Proper lot of whiskers I grew while I was down there. At the end of that time the captain said, ‘I’ve never had a man,’ he said, ‘look after a beast like you’ve looked after that old bull. Now I’ll give you five pounds,’ he said, those were his words, ‘I’ll give you five pounds,’ that’ll show you what he thought of me, ‘if you’ll stay and take the other bulls that we have, like you took this. He eats out of your hand just like a tame canary.’

“So I said, ‘No, thank you, sir, I’m sure. I’d like to go with my bull.’

“So you’d think my troubles were at an end then. We come to the foreign place where the bull was to go ashore. It wasn’t here, it was somewhere further down from here. I heard one of the men say, ‘The police-boat’s come alongside,’ and then my blood run cold. I thought, ‘They know that I’m on board here, because why, they’ll have sent the description and that. It would have gone quicker by post than we could have come.’ So I stayed down by my bull and presently, when we got the bull ashore, there was a policeman, at least he didn’t look like what we should call a policeman. He stopped me, but luckily for me there was the captain there and he knew me and he said, ‘He’s come with the bull.’ And so I went with that bull; oh, a matter of five hundred miles, I should think. I don’t know where we didn’t get to. I come to a very nice place. I never see more rabbits than were in that place, though they weren’t rabbits neither, come to think of it: I thought, ‘If I had got old pin-fire and my two ferrets, I’d have some of you fine chaps.’

“Well, that’s seven years ago, and I’ve been up and down since, and I’m married to one of these foreigners now. Isabella her name is. I don’t understand what she says half the time, because she don’t talk any Christian language. And we live in Medinas Close, Cercado as they call it, but it means close, three floors up, number 41; where we’ve got a room, and, if ever you want me, Mr. Highworth, it’s the middle room of three, and there’s no job I can’t turn my hand to; or if you want an English body-servant, it wouldn’t matter my having a wife, because I knowed your father, Mr. Highworth, Squire William, and I know all about this land, in case you wish to know. There’s goings on and there’s goings on, but what I once say a white man is a white man, isn’t he? You can’t get away from that. Isn’t he a white man? And why did the Lord make him a white man, do you suppose? Why, so that he shouldn’t be a black man, I suppose. Very well then, there’s fine goings on. I don’t say a word against black men. There’s very good ones here, very cheerful sort of people, the black men here. Only their feet—they don’t have feet like we do. The leg-bone comes down in the middle of the boot, not at the end, like with us. But, when you get used to that, they’re very nice, cheerful people; they wouldn’t do you any harm. You trust the black people and they’ll trust you. No, it’s these yellow fellows, those are the ones, and there’s queer goings on. Now, look there, look there, Master Highworth Foliat Ridden, there’s what I don’t like to see, those yellows.”

At that moment the carriage had to draw to the pavement. There came a noise of a barbaric music of rattles, drums and gongs, to which cavalry were marching. A column in twos came slouching by the carriage. They were led by an almost naked yellow savage who wore scarlet plumes in his hair. The music followed him, swaying from side to side or giving little leaps in their seats from the excitement of the rhythm. After the music came the troop of perhaps fifty savages, carrying red pennoned lances. They wore nothing which could be called uniform, except the metal moons over their mouths. Some wore linen coats or drawers, some had ponchos or serapes. They were smoking, singing and calling out to the passers-by.

“There,” Ezekiel said, “they’re the yellows. Tents of Shem, I call it. They all got lids to their mouths. Government’s made those yellow soldiers; and they come in, hundreds of them. Now, Government doesn’t see them in the way we see them; they don’t live with Government the way they live with us. But these yellow fellows, they’ve been brought into this here city, and they don’t look Christians do they, and they aren’t Christians. And why aren’t they Christians? Because they’re cannibals. And they’ve been billeted down Medina Close, and what do you think they say they’ve come here for? They’re going to eat baked Christians, they say, baked Christians!”

He said all this in a broad English country dialect, mixed up with scraps of Spanish and emphasised by a lot of signs, which no doubt could be understood by Isabella. Hi thought that the man was as mad as a hatter as well as being a murderer.

He did not quite like being with a mad murderer, even though it was seeing life, but it smote him to the heart to see the poor old fellow weeping at the sight of him, and swearing to be drunk that night, even if it took the burial money: his heart warmed to him.

They drove through a square where a squadron of Pituba lancers, newly arrived in town, were forming a bivouac. These men looked as though they had been on a foray. Some of them had newly-slaughtered sheep slung across their horses in front of them, others had big round loaves of army bread or, in some cases, chickens, on their lance-points. They rode uncared-for, wiry, evil little horses of a pale sorrel colour. They rode with a leather thong instead of reins. Most of them had no stirrups, but knotted leather thongs, hanging from the saddles, which they clutched between their toes.

“Now, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I don’t expect anything from you, neither now nor any time. You’re a great gentleman and you don’t want to come and speak with a murderer; not that he was a murderer. And why wasn’t it a murder? Because old Jackson, he was a rebel, and he fired at me, didn’t he, and he’d got a better gun than me, didn’t he, and he shot me through the gaiters, didn’t he, and besides it wasn’t a hare I was after, it was a fox, and he knew that as well as I, and I didn’t know, not really, when old pin-fire would go and when he wouldn’t, for the matter of that. But Number 41 Medinas Close, three floors up. Don Crust they calls me and my wife Señora Crust. Anybody knows me. I could tell you of queer goings on, very queer; things you’d want to know, so as you could watch out, Master Ridden. But there’s another thing, Master Highworth; you wouldn’t want to come to Medinas Close not after dark, not in your good things. It’s always safer to wear a poncho—because why? Why then, if they come at you, you’ve got something to stop it with. It isn’t like these ordinary tight things. You can’t really tell where a man ends inside a blanket.

“Besides, there’s another thing, Master Highworth, which I wouldn’t tell to everyone; but old Keeper Jackson’s forgiven me. He didn’t at first, not he. In the night, he used to come to me, ‘Darn ’ee,’ he said, ‘I’ll have ’ee yet,’ he said. He used to come all sideways at me with his blue teeth at first; not quite at first, you understand, Master Highworth; for he must have been a bit confused at first, from old pin-fire and being in the moon, but it was when I was with the bull he began to come. Many a shiny night he come at me. ‘You come back,’ he said, ‘you best come quiet, or darn ’ee I’ll make ’ee come.’ And he done his best to make me come; there were temptations come to make me go back, but I saw through them. But he lost track of me among this new religion. He didn’t know the lingo or something, or else their tiddlewinks upset him.

“Then one night he come again; be blest if he didn’t come again. But he didn’t come like he ever come afore. He come in sort of shiny, not what you would call an angel, Mr. Ridden and sir, but he hadn’t so many teeth as the other times, if you understand what I mean. ‘Darn ’ee, Rust,’ he says to me, ‘you’ve given me a bad go in Tencombe graveyard, along of all them damned and women. But I’m out of sitting there,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mind about it now, like I did. It’s a darned poor snipe,’ he said, ‘could sit on a grave seven years and bear malice at the end. Besides,’ he said, ‘I’m going; they’ve given me a horse, and I’m off in the morning.’

“He wouldn’t tell me where he was off to. He was always one of they artful ones. ‘I thought I’d tell ’ee I was going,’ he said, ‘there’s a whole lot of us got horses.’

“But 41 Medinas Close is where you’ll find me, Master Hi; it isn’t a nosegay, nor anything to please the eye. It’s back of the cathedral, not dead back of it, for that’s the Bishop’s, but keep to the right of that, and then there’s a gate, but you mustn’t take that, for it don’t lead anywhere, but bear round, and then you’ll come to a place stinks like chemicals, for it is chemicals; only you don’t go in there, but more round, if you understand, till you come into Two Brothers Fountain Lane. Well, it isn’t far from there. Two naked brothers in a fountain; you’d think they’d a-been ashamed; but these foreigners don’t know the value of clothes the same way that we do.”

“How did you know me?” Hi asked. “I was only ten or eleven when you saw me last.”

“Master Highworth, I’ve known all your family since I don’t know when. I know your blessed great-grandfather, when he wore his pigtail. But use is second nature, as we say; they all wore pigtails, come to think of it. Then I know old Mr. William and Master Rowton, not your brother Master Rowton, but your father’s, the squire’s, older brother that was. Lord, he was a proper one, Master Rowton. ‘A horse can jump anything,’ he used to say, ‘if you want him to.’ Well, he wouldn’t take warnings; not once, nor twice, so the third time they bring him home on a door. That was jumping into that pit at Beggar’s Ash. Old Mr. William didn’t say much about his son, but he took on about the six-year-old, for he’d backed him in a race.

“So when I seen ’ee, I said, ‘That’s a Ridden out of the Foliats,’ I said; ‘don’t tell me, because it can’t be anybody else. And it won’t be Mr. Chilcote, for Mr. Chilcote keeps his lip cocked up, and besides, this is too young for Mr. Chilcote. And Mr. Rowton’s got a swelled mouth, like old Mr. William had the same, almost as though he’d had a smack on it, so it won’t be him. It’s young Mr. Highworth.”

Hi promised to see him within a few days. He did not like to offer the old man money, but contrived to make him a present, partly as a wedding present, partly to celebrate his meeting with a Tencombe man. He found himself in an upper room of the hotel, looking out on an array of roofs from which washing was hanging. Somehow, the washing looked more romantic in that bright light than it had ever looked in England. He was cheered at being at last an independent man of the world. He had had a lovely voyage, and at the end of it there had been this welcome, from one who knew all his people and the land from which he came.

His room had a scarlet carpet and a red plush rocking-chair, which seemed out of place in that climate, already as hot as an English May. The walls, which had been white, were marked with dirty fingers. Somebody, who had occupied the room earlier that morning, had smoked cigars in it. Bitten ends of cigar were in a flower-pot near the window. The place seemed frowsy, untidy and feckless. The mosquito-curtains over his bed were smeared with the bloody corpses of old mosquitoes. All round the room, wherever the carpet failed to reach the wall, little pale yellow ants came and went. He sat down upon his bed, feeling suddenly homesick; then, realising that there were three electric fans in the room, he set them all going, knelt down and began to unpack. He had not knelt for thirty seconds when something bit him viciously in the leg; glancing down, he saw a small black thing flying at great speed along the floor. He looked at the place bitten, which had swollen and was itching. He scratched the place and went back to his unpacking, but was bitten again and then again. This time, having learned to be very swift, he slew his attacker, who smelt, when dead, worse than he liked. Feeling indignant at being placed in such a room, he went down to the hotel bar to see the proprietor.

“Yes, Mr. Ridden,” said the proprietor, “what is it? What can I do for you?”

“Look here,” Hi said, “you’ve put me in a room all full of bugs and things.”

“I haven’t got a bug in the house,” the man said. “Them ain’t bugs, them’s bichos. What you want to take is this bottle here, called Blenkiron’s Bicho Blaster. No bicho nor skeeto will come where Blenkiron blasts. Squirt Blaster freely round in floor and bed, the skeetos will be downed, the bichos dead.”

After unpacking, Hi walked out into the city to see the sights of the new world all shining in the sun. On the water-front, negroes and Caribs were loading a lighter with what looked like bunches of rusty wire: they were nearly naked: they shone and sang. Old negresses in scarlet turbans kept time for them by clinking bottles together. At the south end, were the gates of what had been the Viceroy’s garden in the old days. They stood ajar, yet still bore the device of the horse and globe. In the garden were flowers, butterflies like flying flowers, and birds like jewels and flowers. Beyond the flowers was the old white Spanish fortress, from which floated a blood-red banner, with a golden star for each province.

“I am glad I’ve come to this place,” Hi thought, “if only I can find something to do, I shall be as happy as the day is long.”

In his saunterings upon the water-front, he paused to look into the window of a picture-dealer’s shop, which was decked with three sketches in oil of scenes in a bull-ring. The picture-dealer, a man with a strangely broad face, was smoking a cigarette at his door. Hi asked him if the scenes had been sketched in Santa Barbara. The man replied, “You’d better inform yourself, sir.” The unusual rudeness of the answer made Hi wonder if the man were sane: he noted the name over the shop, and passed on, less happy than before.

Yet in spite of this one man’s rudeness, the morning proved to be a long adventure of delight.

The narrow, busy, crowded streets, so full of life, colour, strangeness and beauty, all lit as never in England, excited him. There were fruits and flowers, and costumes like fruits and flowers, men from the west, Indians from the plains and from the forest; negroes, Caribs; women in mantillas, women with roses in their ears; men in serapes, men hung with silver, like images in chapels; peones in black and silver driving ox-teams; church processions intoning Latin; all were marvellous. Yet an impression formed in his mind that all was not well; the Indian lancers and certain parties of foot soldiers, who looked as though they had been rolled in brickdust, seemed to be there for no good.

At the cathedral parvise, some workmen were sinking scarlet flag-poles into sockets in the gutters. Inside the cathedral, men were hanging scarlet draperies all round the sanctuary; Hi supposed that they were making ready for the Easter festivals. “They’re beginning early,” he thought.

Near the cathedral was the green in which the palace stood. “Palacio,” a guide, explained to him. “This is the palace of President Lopez.” He had never seen a palace before; he stopped to stare at it. The guards at the gate wore scarlet serapes; they rode white horses so bitted with heavy silver that Hi longed to protest. The palace was a big, squat, yellow building; at one end of it was a glittering pinnacle still surrounded by scaffolding. “I’ve heard of that,” Hi thought, “that’s his silver building. I’ll bet it isn’t silver, though; but quicksilver. I suppose the President is inside there somewhere, because the flag is flying.”

It was now drawing towards noon. Men in evening dress, wearing scarlet rosettes or sashes, were driving to the gates, dismounting from their carriages, and entering the palace precincts, either for a cabinet meeting or for lunch. Some of these people were cheered by the onlookers, especially one man, who had the look of a “spoiled priest.”

At noon, some gunners in red fired a noon-gun in front of the palace; instantly throughout the city there came a change in the noise of the day as though everyone had ceased suddenly from work and pattered out to dinner. Hi returned to his hotel, to lunch upon foods which were strange to him: okra, manati, water-melon and a sangaree of limes.

After lunch, he wrote to his mother and to Señora Piranha, to say that he had arrived. Having posted these letters, he set out to the offices of the Sugar Company, to present his letter to Mr. Roger Weycock, who received him very kindly and asked him to dine that night at the Club.

“Do you know any other Englishman here?” he asked.

“I’ve a letter to Mr. Allan Winter.”

“That’s lucky. He’s in town. He was here a few minutes ago; we’ll get him to dine with us. Oh, all the English here belong to the Club; we must see about making you a temporary member. But we’ll go into that to-night, shall we, at the Club?”

At dinner at the Club that night, Mr. Weycock introduced Hi to Mr. Allan Winter, who was a grizzled and rugged soul, of long standing as a sugar-planter.

“I’ll call for you at eight to-morrow,” he said, “and drive you out to my place, where you will see the sort of place it is.” Seeing that Hi was perplexed, he added, “But perhaps you’re doing something else to-morrow.”

“No, thanks, sir,” Hi said, “but I’ve written to a friend to say that I shall be here all day to-morrow.”

“Oh, have you friends in Santa Barbara?” Mr. Weycock asked.

“I know a girl,” Hi said. “Miss Rosa Piranha, sir. Perhaps if you know her you can tell me if she’s in town?”

“Oh, you know Miss Piranha, do you?” Mr. Weycock said. “I suppose you met her in England?”

“Yes, sir.”

A change came on Mr. Weycock’s face, as though the subject were unpleasant to him. “I have met her,” he said, “but I do not know whether she’s in town or not. You see, Ridden, my work brings me into touch with the dynamic party, the Reds, now in power here. I am not well in favour with people like the Piranhas. You can always call on the Piranhas. I would go with Winter to-morrow, if I were you.”

“I’d love to,” Hi said, “but I don’t feel quite free.”

“No, I see your point,” Mr. Winter said. “You aren’t quite free. So don’t decide now. I’ll call at eight to-morrow and you can come if you can. You may have had an answer by then. Leave it like that.”

Hi asked why so many soldiers were in the city.

“Precaution,” Mr. Weycock said; “the Reds, the present Government, are being threatened by the Whites. The feeling is running very high.”

“I should think it ought to run high,” Mr. Winter said, “when these gangs of cannibals are imported to keep order. I never saw such a set of ruffians in my life. ‘I will not ask what the disease be, the cure being what it is.’ ”

“They are surely as civilised,” Mr. Weycock said, “as some of these Whites, who would burn heretics here to-morrow if they had their will. Besides, you must know, Winter, that the Pitubas have always been allies here. They helped the Spaniards in the Conquest.”

“I’ve nothing against that,” Winter said. “But whatever my politics were, if I were a white citizen here, seeing those yellow cannibals brought in to keep me in order, would make me want to shoot someone. But I don’t meddle with politics here and, I hope, never will.”

“I do not meddle in them,” Mr. Weycock said, “but I’m bound to watch them for the sake of the firm. I only hope that the measures taken will be sufficient. It would be a disaster to this Republic if Don Lopez were to be killed now.”

“Killed,” Mr. Winter said, “killed and disaster? Rats.”

“Well, I’m glad you take that cheery view.”

After this, they put away all thought of Red and White, but dined and were merry. Hi was introduced to several very good fellows; he was nominated for election at the next ballot and admitted to the Club privileges pending election. He passed a very pleasant evening. As he walked back to his hotel, he thought that he had never passed so wonderful a day.

“And I may spend my life here,” he thought. “It may not have the charm of engineering; but it must be wonderful to pass one’s days in a place so beautiful.”

Yet as he walked, he saw three Pituba lancers dragging a white man to a divisional gaol, which had its entrance on the water-front. The sight angered him strangely; and again he had the feeling that things were wrong in the land. “There are strange goings on,” old Rust had said; “they’re going to eat baked Christians.” He noticed the looks of citizens who watched the dragging, and the looks of other citizens watching for looks of disapproval. “I’ll ask Rosa about all this,” he thought. “There ought to be a letter from her in the morning.”

There was no letter from her in the morning, but Mr. Winter called and drove him out to his plantation at Quezon.

III

During the drive, he asked Winter if he feared any civil trouble.

“Yes and no,” he said. “The Whites and Reds always bicker a bit at Easter; they go out of their way to do it. They’ll do it this year. But it will be nothing. And my advice to you is to pay no attention to politics here, unless you’re naturalised. I’m not a citizen, and don’t intend to be, so I keep clear of both parties. What you want to steer clear of in this country are foreigners with axes to grind, like Weycock’s old uncle. I say nothing against young Weycock; he’s friendly and decent, and all that, but when I hear him boosting the Reds I wonder how much his uncle’s had to make him sing.”

“But he said that Lopez was in fear of being murdered by the Whites.”

“Rats. The Whites won’t murder Lopez; they’ve got no one to put in his place, and they know it. Besides, they know that it isn’t Lopez who is running this land, but the foreign firms who’ve put money into it and mean to get it back. As for Lopez being afraid of being murdered, I say, rats again. He’s afraid of nothing, from hell-fire up; never has been.”

Hi spent a happy day at Quezon, slept there, and was driven back to his hotel the next morning. “You go in and see your friends,” Mr. Winter said, “then come out here again and spend a week or two. Everything’s hard work here, like everywhere else. A lot of these young bloods come out here thinking life’s going to dances and belonging to the Cocktail Club. You’re too wise for that foolishness; you’ve got some sense.

“And now just let me say this, I stand in loco parentis here, mind. Don’t accept a job from the United Sugar people without just coming and talking it over with me. They may have nothing for you, of course. They’re in with a very queer set, who aren’t out for sugar or any other kind of sweetness, but just both hands in the till. I see their workings, and I know. The matter with Lopez is not that he’s afraid, but that he’s too darned indolent to watch their steps a little.”

* * * * * * *

When he returned to the hotel, Hi found no letter from the Piranhas. “No answer,” he thought. “She’s had time enough for a dozen answers. It means that she’s out of town. Yet Rosa, in her last letter, said that she would be in town now.”

He wandered out into the streets, where the work and beauty of a seaport filled every yard with wonder. He felt that he could never tire of a life so varied, so full of colour, passed in such light. Yet again the people gave him the impression that all was not well. He was a newcomer, who saw the game from outside, with fresh eyes. He felt that the Whites and Reds were certainly going out of their ways to bicker at this coming Easter. On his way back to the hotel, he saw some Red officials sacking (as it seemed) a little newspaper office. A young American, who seemed amused at his want of grasp of the case, explained that the cops were pulling the joint and pinching the editor.

“What for?”

“I dunno. He’s one of these White guys. I guess he wrote something some big bug didn’t quite stand for.”

He watched the sack to its completion. He could tell from the looks on people’s faces what their politics were, and his heart went out to the under dogs, the Whites, who were outnumbered there, and dared not show all that they felt. “Rosa is a White,” he thought, “I’ll get her to tell me what is going on.”

* * * * * * *

He was just about to lunch at his hotel, when a negro waiter, who seemed impressed by something, came to tell him, chiefly by signs, that he was wanted in the foyer. Wondering what he could have done wrong, or what could cause the negro’s manner, he went out to the foyer, where a footman, in a green and white livery, very politely told him, in Spanish and pantomime, that there was something very important for him, seemingly outside the doors. Looking as the footman’s signs directed, he saw an old carriage, in which two ladies sat, beneath green parasols. “Rosa,” he thought, “Rosa and her mother.”

One of the ladies was old, with white hair; she sat upright with an absorbed look as though she were praying. The other was Rosa, but changed indeed from the Rosa of the Foliats; this creature was painted into a kind of purple mask with high lights of white powder on her nose. Over her eyes, arches of plainly false eyebrows had been put in with the brow-stick. Great gold ear-rings, enclosing green stones, hung from her ears, her mouth was scarlet. He had never seen a more raddled-looking baggage, yet this was the Rosa of four months before, who had galloped hatless astraddle before breakfast with him. Both ladies turned to him at once with an air which made him feel ashamed that he had no hat to take off to them and very thankful that he hadn’t. The old lady was more subtly made up than her daughter, but even she seemed to wear a mask or glaze of enamel. “I suppose it’s the fashion here,” he thought.

Glaze or not, they were plainly great ladies here, conferring incredible honour upon the hotel. Half the staff was there to attend their pleasure already. The Señora held her hand for Hi to kiss (his good angel guarded him from shaking it), she bade him welcome in English. He had not seen her since he was a little child, but he remembered her clearly, as Donna Emilia, a lady who held herself very straight and was always praying. “She needed not to have made up,” Hi thought. “There is something very beautiful in her face.”

“Welcome,” she said; “your father has been a good friend to us. You and yours have been good friends to Rosa. I hope that all your household was well when you left England. Let me see you, Highworth. You are liker your mother than your father. But my eyes are failing, I cannot be sure of this. Come now, with us, will you, to spend some hours at our house?”

“I should love to,” Hi said.

“Go and get your hat, then, and put it on,” Rosa said. “Never, never come out without a hat again. Put it on at once, or this sun will skin you. It doesn’t come through a watery envelope as it does in England. That is your vanity, wanting to look brown. You wouldn’t look brown, you’d crack, and all your poor little brains would pop.”

They drove down the water-front, past the Viceroy’s garden, to the gate. Several houses on the water-front were displaying the scarlet banners, starred with gold, which Lopez had declared to be the national flag.

“Is there to be some sort of celebration?” Hi asked.

“A display, I understand,” Donna Emilia said.

“How wonderful the bay looks with the shipping,” Rosa said quickly. “Do you see, Hi, the shallows beyond the bay? All that southern bay is only about six feet deep.”

“Good bathing, I should think,” Hi said. “Is one allowed to bathe there?”

“I believe that some of the Indians sometimes bathe there,” Rosa said, “but there are swarms of sharks. If you go out in a boat, they’ll come all round you, and rub along the side and try to tip you out.”

“What do you do then?” Hi asked. “Sing them to sleep?”

“The best way is to hit them a bat with the flat of an oar-blade.”

“I wonder you don’t stare at them,” Hi said. “No shark can resist the power of the human eye.”

“Women’s eyes excite them,” Rosa said.

“I should have thought a haughty look would shrivel them. The books are full of it: ‘She darted a freezing glance at him.’ ”

At this moment they were passing through the gate of the city. On their right was a park of palms, flowers and busts, on their left, beyond the fortress, was the approach to the market pier, where the boats landed fish, fruit and other produce at dawn each morning. A party of men and women were coming from this pier with donkey carts laden with fruits, eggs and vegetables. “They’re the second market,” Rosa said, “they buy up the leavings from the boats and hawk them through the closes.”

The men of the second market recognised the liveries of the Piranhas. They stopped their carts, stood still, uncovered and cried, “Long live the Whites. Long live the Whites. Let the Reds perish.” To Hi’s astonishment neither woman took the slightest notice. They stared ahead as though they neither saw nor heard. Hi thought it odd that they did not bow; Rosa turned to him.

“Do you see the boats, Hi?” she asked. “Those are some of the coast boats which bring the produce. There are many market gardens along this great shallow bay, especially at La Boca, ten miles down. The gardeners send their things in the boats, which are just as fast as boats can be. They often race both ways. We can see them from our windows.”

Out in the bay there was enough wind to ruffle the water. About a dozen boats of queer rigs were rushing home under all the sail they could set. Some were lateen-rigged with striped sails of blue and white; most were polacca schooners with steeved bowsprits setting a sprit beneath upon a yard. The sails of these were of a bright orange colour. All had high curved whaler’s bows topped with gilt emblems. All were fast boats; even Hi was surprised at the way they travelled. A rounded white gleam at their sides showed their speed and the cleanness of their thrust.

“Aren’t they like dolphins?” Rosa said. “Don’t they seem to enjoy it?”

Less than half a mile from the gate of the city they entered the gates of the Piranhas’ estate, which lay to the left, between the road and the sea. In the niches of the masonry of the gates were figures of painted terra-cotta, representing Friendship and Affection, one on each side. They had been labelled when new, but time had destroyed the plaster on which the labels were painted. “We can’t tell t’other from which now,” Rosa said. “People think they’re both the Virgin, and lay little bunches of flowers before them on their way to work.”

The gates were old masterpieces of wrought iron, now frail from rust, their palm leaves were snapping, some of their bars had worn through. All within the gates showed the same marks of decay. It had once been an Italian garden, but time, poverty and the sea winds had helped to bring it to ruin. Marble busts of poets and nymphs were fallen, or overgrown with trailers. The great red clay or terra-cotta urns had been split by the roots of their flowers, so that they looked like fountains of flowers falling under the living glitter of the humming birds. The shingle of the walk, though marked with wheels and horse-hoofs, was almost overgrown with a thick green-leaved trailer, full of minute blue flowers. The house was a biggish, oblong, yellow building, with decorative panels of scarlet plaster in the recesses of the masonry. The scarlet had faded to pale red, it was scaley and mildewed; altogether, the house looked out of fashion. There had been a device between supporters over the door. The supporters were now nothing but legs, two hairy, with paws, two human, with feet. The device was wholly gone. Part of a label bore the legend:

non sufficit.

Hi wondered what it was that did not suffice.

As the carriage stopped below the perron an old negro with powdered hair, wearing the uniform of the Piranhas, white with green splashes on the shoulders, came down the steps to welcome them. He carried a long ebony cane with a gold pineapple at the end. Hi helped Donna Emilia up the steps. Outside the house, all things gave evidence of a great family coming down in the world. Inside, it was all as it had been in the time of its splendour, except that colours had faded.

“Come into my room, Highworth,” Donna Emilia said.

She led him into a pleasant room hung with portraits of her own and her husband’s families. She took her seat in a great brocaded chair that was like a throne. Hi was only a boy, but he was impressed by her bearing. She gave him the impression of being a work of art held together by nothing but will, and a sense of style.

Hi closed the door at her bidding. Rosa was gone.

“It is thirty years, Highworth,” she said, “since your father in this room brought news to my husband and myself that our fortunes were secured in the days of the copper crisis. My husband promised then that this house should be a home to any of your race. There to your right you will see a drawing of your father as he was then. It is a pleasure to me to see you stand where your father stood.”

She rang a little bell which stood on a table beside her; the negro with the ebony cane appeared. “This is my old retainer, Pablo,” she said, “faithful as one of the old age. Pablo,” she said, “this is Mr. Highworth, whose father you will remember. In all ways and at all times you are to consider him as one of this household.”

After Pablo had gone she turned again to Hi.

“This is talking beneath the surface,” she said, “which the English do not do. Now tell me. What are your plans for your life in this country? Your father says that you have letters and that we are not to help you till we see that you have helped yourself.”

“I have only just landed,” Hi said. “I have letters to Mr. Weycock and Mr. Winter.”

“To Mr. Mordred Weycock?” she asked.

“No, his nephew.”

“Did either Mr. Winter or Mr. Weycock tell you of troubles impending in this country.”

“They seemed to think that things were not perfectly settled,” Hi said.

“And what do you yourself think, now that you have seen them?”

“They don’t seem quite happy somehow,” Hi said.

“How can they be happy,” she said, “with Antichrist upon the throne? I am a woman and meddle little with politics, but very much with religion, which is a force that your Mr. Weycocks do not admit to exist. He and his friends, Highworth, are rousing up in this country something which they cannot understand, the very depths of the soul of this people. But come, Highworth, take this flower. Give me your arm. Open that door for me. This is the chapel of the Piranhas; this tomb is where my husband lies. He loved your father, who was more than a friend to us in a time of calamity. Lay the flower upon his tomb. He will be glad to know that your father’s son is in this house in this time of calamity.”

“Surely Señora,” he said, “the calamity is not so great.”

She looked at him and could not answer.

“Leave me here a little, Highworth,” she said. “There is a Greco over the altar. But you will not care for these things. You will find Rosa in the garden room.”

It was dim in the chapel. It was built of white Otorin marble in barrel vaulting, with one piercing in the sanctuary. Hi saw a blackness with bronze gleams where he laid his flower. He knew that Donna Emilia was crying.

“O Señora,” he said. He felt that he could not stay there: he went quickly back to the light.

Pablo led the way to a room full of sunlight: it opened upon the garden, but was itself more full of flowers than the garden, from a bank of white cuencas near the French windows. The light poured upon these, so that every white trumpet of the cuencas seemed to quiver with life. Little yellow butterflies poised above the flowers. A crested humming bird with a dazzling throat hovered in the light near the door.

“Well, Hi,” Rosa said, “how are you liking Santa Barbara?”

“Oh, I love it.”

“You came in the Recalde, of course. When did you write to mother; do you remember?”

“Yes, the day before yesterday; a few hours after I landed.”

“I thought so,” she said. “I suppose you wondered why we didn’t answer.”

“I thought you were out of town.”

“We did not receive your letter till this morning,” she said. “The censorship is on again.”

“What censorship?”

“The Government’s. You see, we are a White family. All our people are Whites, or Surplices even, the sort of purest of the pure. The Reds have been planning something unusual for some time. They have been talking about a conspiracy to kill Don Lopez and evidence of a White rebellion. They always talk like that before a devilry. Then they say that they were provoked to measures of safeguard.

“Latterly there has been no censorship of letters; but I was afraid that one had begun two or three days ago. Now I am sure of it.”

“What do they do?”

“Take all the letters addressed to eminent Whites to some Red officer in the fortress; then he steams them, I suppose, and reads them and has them photographed or copied before they are delivered.”

“I wonder they take the pains,” Hi said. “If they’re dirty enough skunks to read other people’s letters, they’re dirty enough skunks to forge false ones.”

“Oh, they are; but they like to know what is going on, as well as what they imagine. Don’t speak of these things to mother, or before her, Hi, if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I rather shut you up when you asked about the celebrations. But mother hasn’t been well for some time. She thinks that something terrible is happening; or soon going to happen. Any allusion to the Reds just now upsets her.”

“Right,” Hi said, “I’ll be silent. But I say, Rosa; I wish you’d tell me why you didn’t bow or smile or anything when those market people cheered you.”

“Did it seem very bad manners?”

“It struck me as a little odd.”

“We’re Whites,” she answered. “We’re watched pretty closely. What is to stop the Reds from sending agents to cheer the Whites in our presence, and watching whether we applaud? What would stop them arresting us for fomenting party feeling or ‘encouraging White excesses,’ as they would call it?”

“They couldn’t,”

“Why not? What is to stop them?”

“For smiling and bowing just because people cheer you?”

“Yes, Hi, and for even looking as though you wished to smile and bow. ‘Gestures prejudicial to civil peace,’ is the phrase they use, or ‘conduct deemed to be provocative of civil disturbance,’ that is another.”

“Arrest you and your mother?”

“Yes, rather; like billio.”

“But, good Lord, what are the Whites doing to let these Reds do these things? They must be jugginses.”

“There aren’t many Whites on this side of Santa Barbara: the Whites are all in the west.”

“Yes; but they must know.”

“It isn’t so easy as it sounds. The Whites did a lot of stupid things when they were in power; trying to stop the Schools Acts and other Acts which the Reds had just passed; naturally the Reds were furious.”

“Yes; but hang it all, Rosa, stopping a sort of Act of Parliament is done in a civilised way, by law; but these Reds have brought in all these yellow devils. I can’t see why the Whites allow that.”

“The Pitubas? We’re used to them here. They’re not so bad as they look. They don’t eat all the babies they’re credited with. They may munch a finger here and there. What I mind is the censorship and the spying, and the knowledge that all the time these Red officers are making dossiers against all whom one holds dear: false dossiers, with forged evidence, which they may use.”

“Why should they use them?”

“You haven’t seen the gang who governs us? They are in touch with a set of people who want to ‘open up’ this land, as they call it and will pay for the privilege. Naturally, they would get their money back a hundredfold. Since the Whites stand in the way, naturally the Reds want to get rid of them; and the dirty way is the way the Reds take by nature, being what they are, people without dignity and without belief.”

“I don’t know anything about it, of course,” Hi said, “but I should have thought it would be a good thing to get opened up a bit: have a few more railways and get more of the land under cultivation.”

“If a gang of scoundrels came down on England, to open England up a bit, would you like that, Hi?”

“Father always says that that is what is always happening in England, so I suppose we are used to it.”

“Well, we aren’t. Now I’ve got heaps to do. I’ve got to cut all this linen to pattern for our children’s Easter frocks. So although you may not think it a manly job, I want you to help me at it, will you, like a brick? We’ll open this linen up a bit to make little panties for our bambini.”

Hi was always ready for any job. They set to work.

“By the way, Hi,” Rosa said, “my cousin, Carlotta de Leyva, will be here at lunch. She talks English, so you needn’t be scared.”

“I shan’t be scared, if she’s anything like you,” he said.

“Well, she isn’t, worse luck,” Rosa said. “But I thought I’d have you alone to warn you. Carlotta is a very special person. She’s not like anybody else; but it’s no good your falling in love with her.”

“All right,” he said; “I shan’t fall in love.”

“It won’t be any good if you do,” she said. “Carlotta is to be married from here in less than a month. By the way, you’ll have to come to the wedding, heretic or no.”

“Who is she marrying?” he asked; not that he cared.

“Don Manuel.”

“A sort of local buck?”

“You would call him that.”

“Has he a surname?”

“Yes. Encinitas.”

“I thought that was a province.”

“So it is: he owns most of it.”

“And she owns most of the province next to it?”

“Her brother does.”

“So when the two marry, they will control about half of Santa Barbara between them?”

“Why shouldn’t they, if they are wise and good?”

“It seems rather a lot for two; what sort of a man is Don Manuel; a good sort?” Rosa made a grimace.

“He hasn’t done much good yet. Even if he had, he wouldn’t be good enough for her.”

“That is what women always say before a wedding,” he said, “ ‘. . . of course he isn’t good enough for her.’ ”

“Any man before his wedding will say it’s true.”

“Men in love will agree to anything. I say, Rosa, is there anything I ought not to do at lunch?”

“Any local custom?” she said. “Yes, we don’t eat with our knives and we always cluck as we swallow to show how much we are enjoying it.”

“No; I say Rosa, you’re always ragging. What ought I not to do? You might tell a fellow.”

“I’ve warned you, Hi: not to fall in love with my cousin.”

“Fall in love: rats,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” she said. “Rats.”

Someone in the hall outside was moving to and fro, arranging flowers in the bowls on the tables. At first, Hi thought that this was Donna Emilia; then the unseen woman began to sing in a low voice, as though thinking of something else. It was not Donna Emilia. Hi could not make out the words, but thought the voice and tune pretty.

“What’s the song, Rosa?” he asked.

“That? An old lullaby. It’s about roses going to bed because it’s late.”

“It’s pretty.”

“My dear boy, you’re cutting that thing so that it’ll have neither cut nor hang.”

“Oh, dash it, so I am.”

“You pay attention to what you’re doing and never mind about lullabies.”

Presently, after the song had stopped, something bumped upon the door; the voice of the singer called to them in English to “open the door, please.” Hi opened the door. A woman stood on the threshold, holding a jar full of sprays of white stellas.

“I’ve brought these for you, Rosa,” she said.

“That’s sweet of you,” Rosa said. “You two haven’t met yet. Carlotta, this is Mr. Highworth Ridden, an old flame of mine. He’s helping me to cut panties; men do these things in England. Hi, this is my cousin, Señorita de Leyva.”

“How do you do, Mr. Ridden?” Carlotta said. “Will you take these flowers for me?”

He said something in broken Spanish and took the jar to the table; the stellas were the sweetest flowers he had ever known. In a gush of memory he saw a hedge of honeysuckle at home in June. At the table, he turned to look at Carlotta, who was unlike anyone he had ever seen. “She’s an angel of Paradise,” he thought.

He had not thought of women; until that moment he had never bothered his head about them. He had considered them as a race apart, with ways of their own which, on the whole, he resented. From time to time he had met a girl who had been a jolly good sport: Rosa was rather a good sport; anyhow, they were the exceptions. The rest were in a world of their own, with nerves and standards of their own which he disliked but respected. Now suddenly there stood before him a woman who realised all his dreams of what a woman should be. Yet she was not like any other woman. She was as little like a woman as a humming bird is like a bird. She was a small, perfect, spiritual shape, glowing like a humming bird. He had once heard somebody say that “you only get perfection in small things”; he had thought the man an ass at the time, but remembered it now. This woman was perfect. Her hair was of a most deep, dark brown, very abundant, but caught close to her head by a narrow fillet of gold. This gave her something the look of a boy, enough, perhaps, to establish a sympathy with a boy like Hi. The eyes were darker than the hair. They shone as though the brain behind them were one glow of light. They were not only kind, good eyes, but so very merry. The eyebrows were remarkable. As in most clever faces, the base of her nose, at the brow, was broad, and the space between the eyes not small. The unusual beauty of the eyebrows was their length; they continued the demarcation of the brow to the right and left; they were straight in line over the eyes, and lifted a little at the right and left sides, in a way impossible to describe, though it made the face most vivid and unusual. The nose was straight. The ears, which are seldom beautiful, even in the beautiful, were perfect in her. The cheeks were of a rich colour as though the life within were very intense. The mouth was the great distinction: it was of a faultless beauty. All fun, all thoughtfulness, all generosity, were in those gentle, sensitive, proud curves. She wore white, with a green jacket. Her voice seemed to Hi to be the quality of voice he had always most longed to hear. She spoke English faultlessly.

“So Rosa has put you to cutting out Easter dresses?” she asked.

“Women are always making men slaves,” he said.

“Well, after lunch, you shall be free. Manuel will be here to lunch, Rosa, so if it’s cool enough we might play tennis afterwards. Would you play, Mr. Ridden?”

“I’d love some tennis.”

She picked up some pattern-paper, turned it, folded it, snipped it with scissors, refolded it, snipped it again, and then shook it out as a sort of cape or shawl of lace.

“That is what the negresses wear in San Jacinto,” she said. “They cut the linen and wear it over scarlet; it looks just like lace at a little distance.”

“You are clever,” Hi said, “to cut it all out like that. I wish you’d show me how you did it.”

“Like this,” she said, picking up another piece of paper.

“The English are always wanting to do things,” Rosa said. “They never say, ‘Here’s a perfect day, let’s think about perfection.’ They say, ‘Here, it’s stopped raining, let’s do something.’ ”

“You did your share when you were in England,” he said, “so you needn’t talk.”

“She seems to have been busy this morning,” Carlotta said. “We’ll talk about perfection, if you like.”

“I don’t want to talk, but to listen,” Rosa said. “Suppose you sing.”

Carlotta went to the piano and sang a couple of Spanish songs, one strange, the other grim, both haunting. Hi thought them the most beautiful things he had ever heard, sung by the most marvellous voice. He could not turn his eyes from her face and throat. She was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. He felt himself to be vile and a boor, and unfit to walk the same planet. He wondered whether he could possibly take the pattern-papers which she had cut, or the scissors she had used. He stared and stared. He knew it to be rude, but could not help it. “My God, she is beautiful,” he thought. “She is lovely, lovely. O God, I wish I could fight for her or do something for her.”

He noticed her hands. They were not the thin, pale, very knuckly bundles of skewers which ladies’ hands usually seemed to him, but perfections of form and marks of capacities. There was a ring on one finger. “There it is,” he thought; “she’s engaged to be married, to this devil Manuel, who isn’t good enough for her. This devil Manuel can kiss her. I’d like to call him out.” Glancing suddenly away from the lovely face he saw Rosa watching him with a certain malice tinged just a little, unselfish as she was, with envy. No one had stared at her in quite that way before she had taken any pains to secure it.

Rosa smiled somewhat bitterly; a gong was beaten to call them to lunch.

“Manuel is late,” Carlotta said; “he said he might be.”

Hi hated Manuel for being late, and for being called “Manuel,” and for being at all. He wanted to shine before her, but could think of nothing to say; he seemed to be spurting orange-juice everywhere. Then he was ashamed that three women, living in this lovely room, should all speak good English, in compliment to himself, while he could hardly say, “Thank you” in Spanish.

IV

“Rosa, my daughter,” Donna Emilia said, “I have had such a strange message from Señora Artigas. Her son, Estifanio, has disappeared.”

“We passed him in the cathedral last night, mother, at about six or half-past, as we left the service.”

“He was at home after that. At nearly midnight two young men, in evening dress, called for him to say that Porfirio Rivera, his great friend, had been hurt in a duel, was dying, and had asked for him. Estifanio did not know the young men; but, of course, he went with them, and he has not returned.”

“If his friend were dying, mother, he would stay with him.”

“But the story was false, my dear. Porfirio called for Estifanio this morning; he had fought no duel, is in perfect health, and has sent no message. Estifanio has disappeared. Imagine his mother’s anxiety.”

Hi saw Rosa and Carlotta look at each other with a glance which he could not interpret. He felt that there was trouble and that he had better say something.

“We had a fellow at school,” he said, “who disappeared one summer holidays. He went out in a boat with another fellow. The boat upset, but they were picked up by a steamer. However, the steamer was carrying the mails and could not stop, so these two fellows had to go all the way to New York before they could send a message home. They’d both been buried, or at least had the burial-service read over them by that time.”

“Estifanio will turn up, in the same way, mother,” Rosa said.

“I trust so,” the old lady said. “Suddenness of death is ever a thing I pray God to spare my friends.”

“Estifanio is a great hunter,” Carlotta said. “He rides out to this ‘drag,’ do you call it? which the English have started. Are you fond of hunting, Mr. Ridden?” He thought her an angel of tact to have changed the conversation a little.

“I love riding,” he said, “but of course, my father only lets me ride the old crocks. Still, sometimes he lets me be his second horseman, and then I have had some wonderful times.”

“Rosa said that you are fond of engines.”

“Yes, I love engines.”

“So do I,” she said. “I’m racing my brother with one. He is having an irrigation canal dug by men, and I am doing a little bit of it with machines; but the nature of the ground doesn’t make it quite a fair match. What engines interest you most?”

“No particular engine,” he said, “but more the nature of engines. I’m always thinking of all sorts of little engines which everybody could have. For instance, a little engine to sweep the floor of a room, or dust walls, or clean big glass panes like the windows of shops. Then, I expect you’ll think it very silly, but don’t you think one could have a little engine on a boat?”

“Oh, the engine on a boat,” Rosa said. “Hi is a lovely character, Carlotta. He would die for me or for you at a moment’s notice; but the engine on a boat is his mad streak. Of course it’s nice to have a mad streak; it shows the oldness of your family; but there it is.”

“Why should there not be an engine on a boat?” Carlotta asked. “What sort of little engine do you mean, Mr. Ridden?”

“Oh, call him Hi, Carlotta,” Rosa said. “This is his home here, remember; call him Hi.”

“I don’t know whether he will let me,” Carlotta said.

“I’ll be frightfully proud if you will,” Hi said, and blushed scarlet, and knew that Rosa watched the blush.

“What sort of engine . . . Hi?” Carlotta asked.

“Thank you,” he said, wondering whether he would ever be able to save her life and in reward be asked to call her Carlotta.

“You see,” he said, “Rosa is always ragging. She worked at this engine when she was in England. You see, we live in a part of England which is mostly rolling grass hills. We call them downs, but they are really a sort of ups. Well, we are a good long way from the Thames; too far to go for a day’s boating. Now I’m not much good at rowing, but I do love messing about in a boat. I mean, being in a boat.”

“I do, too,” Carlotta said; “there is a sort of lake at home. I go out in a boat to watch the flamingoes.”

“We’ve not got any lake, alas,” Hi said, “but there is a little sort of brook, or chalk-stream. It’s got plenty of water always, but it isn’t broad enough for oars. So what I’ve always wanted to do is to make a little engine to go in a boat. I don’t mean a steam-engine, but a hand engine, so that one could have the exercise of rowing. A man would sit on the thwart and turn a crank, or pull it to and fro, and that would turn a paddle-wheel; only I don’t want the paddle-wheel to be at the side, but either in front or let into the boat in a sort of well, so as not to take up room. They all say that it couldn’t go, but I say it must go.”

“Of course it would go,” Carlotta said.

“How could it go?” Rosa asked. “It could no more go than if you were to stand in the boat and pull the boat-rope.”

“You’ve not even got enough mechanical sense, Rosa,” Hi said, “to make you keep quiet when mechanics are being talked. If I’d had an old boat or punt to experiment on, instead of a clothes-basket covered with rick-cloth, I’d have proved that my thing would go.”

“If it would go, why hasn’t it been done? All the English are always messing about in boats.”

“My engine is not for ordinary rivers, but for the brooks at home, or even the canals, where you cannot always row, nor even paddle in comfort.”

“There wasn’t much comfort in your clothes-basket, if I remember rightly,” Rosa said.

“There isn’t much comfort in any good thing.”

“I should have thought religion,” Rosa said.

“You try it and see.”

“Manuel is very late,” Donna Emilia said. “We’re almost at an end here. Do you think that he will come, ’Lotta?”

“Yes, I think I hear him.” A horse came at a quick canter up the drive. Carlotta turned to Hi.

“After my marriage,” she said, “you must come out to stay with us, if you will. There are rivers there not unlike what I should imagine yours to be, and rolling hills of grass.”

“I would love that,” he said. He looked at her, and was at once shot through with anguish to think that she was to be married to a man not good enough for her. “He has frightened her,” he thought, “or got some hold upon her, in the way these beasts do.”

Suddenly he realised that Don Manuel was there, kissing Donna Emilia’s hand; he must have come in like a panther.

“I say,” he thought, “what a man.”

All manly strength, beauty and grace moved in that figure; but the face was the extraordinary thing; it won Hi at once, partly by its power, partly by its resemblance to the bust of the young Napoleon on the landing at the Foliats. The man turned to Hi, with eyes most strange, masterful, unbearable and bright as flames. “This is an extraordinary man,” Hi thought. “Either splendid or very queer, perhaps both.” The extraordinary man greeted him in English; then burst out with:

“Ah, I am glad to see you, Mr. Ridden. Your father sixteen years ago sent me two English hunting saddles, because I rode his stallion, what? And how is your father? And how do you like Santa Barbara? Ah, your father; I was proud of those saddles; no gift have I liked so. You shall come to me at Encinitas and ride and ride. That is the life, what?”

He took Hi’s hands in both his own, in his impulsive way, and looked into his eyes, in a way that was both frightening and winning; it entirely won Hi.

“You’re not a bit like your father,” he said, “not a little bit. Your father likes being top-dog; sometimes bully, sometimes blarney. You want to make things. I know your sort.

“Where are you staying?” he continued. “At the Santiago? That’s a vile hole, the Santiago. Yet all our visitors form their first impressions there. Whereabouts have they put you?”

“On the third floor,” Hi said, “Room 67.”

“Looking out on the back, what? Well, looking out on the front wouldn’t have been much more cheerful. The palace, the Santiago and the cathedral. I’d like to raze them all three and start afresh.

“By the way, about your Santiago. I am a night bird. I pass the back of that hotel at night at two in the morning. You can get in at the back through the cellar-grating. The negro waiters run a gambling hell there; fan-tan, what? They also do a private trade in the hotel liquor. And now forgive me everybody for being so late.”

“You are scandalously late, Manuel,” Rosa said. “You deserve no lunch.”

“I want no lunch,” he said, “but coffee and some bread. I am late, because I have been tracking a crime. Estifanio Artigas was murdered in this city last night.”

“Then it was murder?”

“We were talking of him a moment since.”

“That will be death to the poor mother; her only child.”

“There is more than this,” Carlotta said. “The murder was planned. By whom?”

“The Murder Gang of the Palace. A club of young criminals headed by Don José, the son of our Dictator, Mr. Ridden. They murdered the lad in that tunnel or passage where the windmills used to be. I have been with the murderer. Here’s a copy of his confession, made before Chacon, the notary. I’ve sent copies of it to Chavez and Hermengildo, as well as to your brother, Carlotta. Who could want food after this? Now the Whites move again; we have a cause and a case.

“This Murder Club was founded by Don José at the end of last year as a new excitement; he and eight young men are the members; all very select. They have now murdered five men; one a month is their rule, each in a different way.

“Pablo Hinestrosa was chosen to kill Estifanio. Two of the others came to help him; four were posted, to keep guard during the murder; the other two brought Estifanio to the place.

“I learned all this from Pablo’s own lips this morning.”

“Pablo Hinestrosa was always as weak as water,” Rosa said. “Cruel, too; I remember him putting worms under his rocking horse as a little child.”

“I found Pablo in the street, as I came back from my ride this morning,” Don Manuel continued. “He was crying and quaking; so I brought him to my rooms. Bit by bit, I got the story out of him.”

“One moment, Manuel,” Carlotta said; “this Hinestrosa man, who is plainly of weak intelligence, may have imagined all this.”

“Ah, no, alas,” Don Manuel said, “I have proved it to be true. One decoyed the victim to the carriage, one drove the carriage to the tunnel. Then the decoy led him into the tunnel, where Pablo killed him. Don José helped in the killing. There were the tracks and the body, everything corresponded exactly.

“You will think this next a strange thing:

“Don José is very clever as well as very vicious. He and Spallo took Pablo home after the murder, and, as they saw that he was shaken, they feared that he would betray them.

“Now Pablo feared that they feared this, so he contrived to leave them where he could hear them talking. He heard Don José say: ‘I knew that he would be sentimental. He will confess the whole thing to the first priest he can find. Shall we finish him? It would be rather a neat end to the night.’ It must have been an anxious moment for Pablo, waiting for the answer; but Spallo said, ‘Better not. . . . He’ll be all right after a sleep.’

“After that, Spallo and José went away, but now another strange thing happened. When they had gone (so Pablo says) the ghost of Estifanio’s father came in and sat beside him. He never spoke, but whenever Pablo tried to run from the room, this ghost slid in front of him.”

“What happened then?”

“Pablo said that he ‘burned the ghost away, with matches and texts of Scripture.’ When the ghost was gone he ran into the street; but it was worse there, he said, because Estifanio kept looking through the windows at him.

“I got a doctor to give him an opiate; now he’s asleep in Chacon’s house.”

“God give us mercy,” Donna Emilia said. “Is there to be no measure to the wickedness of this time?”

“When will General Chavez know of this?” Carlotta asked.

“Now. He’ll be in town by six. Congress meets at eight. We will arraign the palace on this question.”

“God help this unhappy land,” Donna Emilia said.

“God is helping this land,” Don Manuel said. “He gives us this sword against the Lopez gang; now we shall end them.”

“I am not so sure, Manuel,” Carlotta said. “There is much shrewdness in the men about Lopez. They would be only too glad to get rid of Don José. This case may rid the land of Don José; but I do not think that Lopez will be involved. His hands may even be strengthened.”

Manuel listened to her with much attention.

“Not as ours are strengthened,” he said. “Chavez and Bazan must stir at this. I have the confession and all the evidence. The Reds suspect nothing. We shall have a coup de théâtre in only five hours. This magazine shall explode under their feet.”

“I wonder,” Carlotta said. “General Chavez may think the time inopportune.”

“Inopportune? When the Reds are declaiming about a White conspiracy?”

“If not inopportune, he may find some other excuse for not acting.”

“He must act upon this.”

“He is a very indolent man.”

“If he will not act, we will find who will. I see three here to start with; no, four, for I am sure that Mr. Ridden will be with us.”

“Rather, if you’ll have me, sir,” Hi said.

“It will begin your stay here well, to help in the downfall of a Dictator.”

“Manuel,” Rosa said, “you are not to drag Hi into our party politics.”

“Manuel,” Carlotta said, “I think that you are going beyond the present issue, which is, to denounce the Murder Club. Lopez has sufficient readiness, and bigness, to banish, or even to prosecute, his son; and then face you in a stronger position than ever.”

“I believe that Lopez is mad,” Manuel said. “To-night, when this begins, I shall declare him to be unfit to govern.”

As he spoke, the major-domo entered with a telegram upon a salver.

“For Don Manuel,” he said.

When Don Manuel had read the telegram, he changed countenance; it was plain that he had received a blow.

“Is it ill news from Encarnacion?” Donna Emilia asked.

“Is your mother worse, Manuel?” Carlotta asked.

“Yes,” he said, “my beloved mother is dangerously ill at Encarnacion. I must go at once.”

“There will be no train to San Jacinto till noon to-morrow.”

“No,” he said, “but I can go by the mountain train at four; and ride from Melchior, it is only sixty-seven miles. If I telegraph for horses, I can be at home by dusk to-morrow night. That will save five hours.”

“You must go at once, if you are to catch the four train,” Carlotta said. “I’ll drive you to the station.”

“We will go, then,” Manuel said. “While they bring the chaise, I’ll order horses; you shall send the telegrams when I am gone.”

* * * * * * *

As Don Manuel made his farewells, he took Hi’s hand in both his own hands. “My greetings to your father,” he said. “Tell him I remember the saddles. I shall expect you presently at my home.”

“You will stay with us, will you not?” Carlotta said.

“I would love to,” Hi said. “I would love it more than anything.”

They all went out of doors to see them start. Carlotta was driving two marvellous little horses, full of fire. Hi looking at her as she sat watching her horses, felt that the only possible happiness on earth would be to live and die for her; since everything about her was beautiful and came not from this world. He saw that all there thought as he thought and felt as he felt about her. “You beautiful and gracious and glorious thing,” he thought. “I wish I could die for you.”

The peones stepped from the horses’ heads, the gates opened, the horses strained to the collars and the marvellous girl was gone. Often, afterwards, he thought of that scene.

“I trust that he may find his mother alive,” Donna Emilia said.

“I must be going, too,” Hi said.

“Going! nonsense,” Rosa said. “You’ve come for the day. You’ve had neither tennis nor a swim. Come in.”

When he had come in, Rosa looked at him with malice.

“Isn’t he handsome, Hi?” she asked.

“Handsome? I should think he is,” Hi said. “He is everything and has everything.”

“No; he hasn’t everything,” Rosa said. “I know several things that he has not. But even if he had everything, he wouldn’t be good enough for her.”

Hi did not answer, for the thought of Manuel having the beautiful Carlotta went through him with a pang.

“He wouldn’t be good enough for her; would he?” Rosa repeated.

“I hope so.”

“No, you don’t,” Rosa said. “You know that he wouldn’t. Confess, Hi, he wouldn’t.”

Hi looked at her with a look of pain.

“Isn’t she wonderful?” she said.

“I understand your being fond of her.”

“Fond of her? People aren’t fond of her. They worship her and would die for her. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would,” he said, after a pause. “You know I would. And you would, too.”

“I told you not to,” Rosa said. “I gave you fair warning. You’d better put her out of your mind. Besides,” she added with malice, “he’s frightfully jealous.”

“He’ll have some cause, I should say.”

“Well, come on into the garden. I’ll play you tennis.”

“No, be square, Rosa. You don’t really want me. I must clear out.”

“I’ll tell you when to clear out,” she said. “But stay a little. Carlotta will be back in half an hour. Stay to see her. It will be the last time you’ll see her before she marries.”

“I thought you said that they wouldn’t be married till Easter.”

“Not now,” she said. “She’ll go to him by the noon train to-morrow; you will see. I shall have to go with her. She’ll be married by the Bishop to-morrow midnight, so that the mother may see the son married. Then she’ll be with that man all her life.”

“She chose him, out of all the men in the world,” he said. “And I don’t wonder; he’s a fine fellow.”

“A fine fellow? Only a few years ago he was the friend of this Don José of the Murder Gang.”

“I don’t know about that,” Hi said. “He’s a fine fellow now; and she thinks so.”

“She thinks so now, but in a week, in a month . . . with that man all the time.”

“Here’s Pablo, with a message for you,” Hi said.

“There is someone to see you, Señorita,” Pablo said, “Tomás Chacon, the notary from Santa Barbara.”

“Strange,” Rosa said to Hi. “This is the notary whom Manuel left in charge of the murderer. If you will stay by these roses, to watch the humming birds for a moment, I will speak to him.”

* * * * * * *

He watched the humming birds for ten minutes, while Rosa spoke with the man. He did not think of the humming birds; the love of Carlotta was eating him up, in an agony that was yet sweet.

I did but see her passing by,

But I shall love her till I die.

“She will be married to-morrow midnight,” he thought, “and he will have her till she dies. If she could be chained to a rock by a dragon we could prove who loves her best.”

* * * * * * *

When the visitor had gone, Rosa returned to him. “I knew that there would be trouble,” she said. “Chacon has let the murderer escape. The Reds are warned now and all Manuel’s plan will miscarry. He’ll be furious.”

“How did he let him escape?”

“Somebody betrayed it, and the Reds rescued him. I’ve sent Chacon to tell General Chavez; but nothing will be done now that Manuel is away: Chavez is an idler.

“Of course,” she added, “he may act because Manuel is away. These soldiers and politicians are as jealous of each other as prime donne.”

“Surely,” Hi said, “this isn’t a matter for politicians, but for the police? Surely the police will take the murderer?”

“The police?” she said. “Why, Hi, they’re married men, with families, most of them. Do you think they’d risk their pensions by arresting a Red on a White warrant? They’re not philanthropists.”

“What are they, then?”

“Paid partisans.”

“Golly.”

“Well may you say golly. However, that is a little thing, compared with this marriage. I’m used to the police. I’m not used to the thought of that man with . . .”

She had paused at the little fountain, where she gazed down into the basin and let the fingers of one hand open and close in the water.

“But I’m not going to talk in this beastly way,” she said. “Forget what I said, will you?

“Of course, Hi, you’ll come here whenever you like. Mother told me to tell you that a place will be here for you at lunch on every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; when you can come, we’ll be glad, and when you can’t you needn’t write or send word. You needn’t think it’s decent of us. We’re only too glad. You were all lovely to me at your home, and your father simply saved us from beggary. Besides, it will be a charity to two lorn females.”

“Thank you,” Hi said, “you’re a jolly good friend.”

“There’s my hand on that,” she said. “And when you’re settled out here, we can always put you up. Now would you care to swim? We have a bathing pond here. It was made in the days of our glory, but, being made, it is easy to keep up.”

She led the way through a gap in a rose-hedge to a terrace of white marble, in the midst of which was a swimming pool, full of clear water.

“There you are,” she said, “if ever you want a swim. A plunge now would do us both good; but before we plunge, shall we just walk back to the house, to see if Carlotta has returned?”

“Yes, certainly,” Hi said; “but I haven’t heard her horses.”

“Nor I,” she said. “But she ought to be back. She is the swimmer amongst us. She does all things well, but she swims like a sea-bird.”

They found that Carlotta had not returned.

“She ought to be back by this time,” Rosa said. “But in this country trains are sometimes late in starting, as you will find. Let us walk to the gates, to see if she be on the road.”

They saw no one on the road, save three men with a handcart who were coming slowly from the direction of the city and pausing at intervals to paste handbills on walls and palings. They paused to paste a bill upon a ruinous wall opposite the Piranhas’ gate; Rosa and Hi watched them.

“Bill-stickers,” Hi said. “I did not know that you had them here.”

“Oh, yes,” Rosa said. “We are civilised here; bills, drains and only one wife, just like Europe. But we keep them for great occasions like bull-fights, these bills, I mean.”

“Bull-fights,” Hi said. “Do you still have them?”

“This is the season for them; probably this is an announcement of them.”

“I’d love to see a bull-fight; it must be frightfully exciting. Do let us wait to see what it is.”

The bill-sticker, with a few deft thrusts of his brush, set the poster in its place. It was a yellow poster, printed in blunt black type with a tall red heading:

“Proclamation of the Government.”

“It is only a pronunciamento,” Rosa said; “not bulls after all. Can you read it from here? I cannot see anything without my glasses.”

“Something about religion, as far as I can make it out,” Hi said. “Dios is God, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it is, then; all about religion.”

“There are rather a lot of Dioses,” Hi said after a pause; “but then I suppose it’s Lent.”

“Yes,” Rosa said, a little snappily. “In my Church it is the season for Dioses.”

Donna Emilia met them on their way back through the house to the pond. “Carlotta not yet back?” she said. “She has probably driven to one of the stores. Come in, then, to drink maté. Tea here is never good, Highworth; we drink maté amargo, a bitter drink; not unlike your camomile tea, they tell me; we think it refreshing.”

Hi did not find it refreshing, but drank one little silver pipkin for the experience and a second for politeness.

V

“Is anyone coming here this afternoon?” Rosa asked. “No one, so far as I can tell,” her mother answered. “I am not asking people, because I want you to see Carlotta while you can. Besides, it is Lent; one should be quiet in Lent.”

“They are putting placards in the road,” Rosa said. “We could not read them; but they seemed to be about quiet at Easter.”

“I am glad,” Donna Emilia said. “The last exhibition of disorder disgraced our country.”

The old butler entered. “Señora,” he said, “Don Inocencio desires to speak with you, if it be your pleasure.”

“Let him come in,” she answered. “Don Inocencio, Highworth, is one of the Senators of the White party, to which we belong. He was an old friend of my husband’s.”

“Shall I not go?” Hi asked.

“No, stay, it’s very good for you,” Rosa said.

Don Inocencio was a little pale man with a habit of inflating his cheeks; when he did this, he looked more important than at other times. He held a roll of paper in his left hand; he had very nice manners and spoke in English on finding Hi there. He was in a state of some agitation.

“My dear lady,” he said, “I have come all this way, in a great hurry, because of the importance of the occasion. The man has been permitted and permitted till he has presumed and presumed; but now he has outstepped all bounds; he has, if I may say so, without inelegance, burst, like the frog in the fable.”

“Who has burst without inelegance?” Rosa asked. “Do tell us. Could he do it again, publicly?”

“He has done it publicly,” Don Inocencio said, “It cannot be done twice in a civilised country.”

“Who is this?” Donna Emilia asked. “I do not quite understand? Has there been some accident?”

“I thought that at first,” Don Inocencio answered. “I thought at first, this is not genuine; this is a ruse or trick, designed by an enemy. It would be a skilled thrust, though that of a devil, to lead people to suppose that this came from our enemy. Then I thought, no, this thing is too mad to be anything but genuine; no counterfeit would be so crazy.”

“But what is it, Don Inocencio?”

“Have you not read the proclamation?”

“A proclamation; which; what proclamation?”

“There is at present only one, which will be historical. This is it, this scroll. They started to put this upon the walls at the time of the siesta; it is now everywhere; can it be that you have not seen it?”

“No; no, indeed.”

“Then I am a bringer of news. When I read it, I thought, this, if genuine, will be a landmark in our story. I must have copies of this; so must Donna Emilia; therefore I procured copies from the bill-stickers.

“You know that I am a collector of documents, which will go to my nephew; all things, especially documents, if old enough, have romance; this will have much more than romance, being the cause, if I am not much mistaken, of great events in the near future. We live in stirring times, Miss Rosa. You, Mr. Ridden, will see great events, really great events, as the Blanco party reasserts its ideals. Wait, now; for this big document; I will display my wares upon this chair.”

He pulled a chair towards him so that he could spread the paper upon the back: it was a yellow paper, printed in blunt, black type with a tall red heading:

“PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT.”

He glanced at the faces of his audience for some expression, which he did not find.

“What,” he said, “no comment?”

“None,” Rosa said. “Mother and I cannot read well without our glasses.”

“And I,” Hi said, “cannot read Spanish very fluently yet. In fact, I can only get as far as ‘Government.’ ”

“Perhaps, Inocencio,” Donna Emilia said, “you will be so kind as to read it for us.”

“Certainly,” he said, “I will read it aloud: only I must warn you, that its contents are not such as are usual, I will not say in a proclamation, but in print of any kind. To begin with, it is, I must warn you, from first to last a print of the last blasphemy of madness.”

The listeners did not answer this, but looked and felt uncomfortable.

“Will you not read, then?” Donna Emilia said at last. Don Inocencio began to read aloud. He bent a little over the paper, so that he might read; he beat time with his left hand, in a pumping stroke, to mark his cadence. He began as follows:—

“This,” he said, “is his preludium or exordium.

PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT.

Forasmuch as I, Don Lopez de Meruel, King, Emperor and Dictator of Santa Barbara, am convinced of my divinity and of my oneness with God. Know all men, that henceforth, throughout this my heaven of Santa Barbara, I assume the style and name of God, with the titles of Thrice Holy, Thrice Blessed, Thrice Glorious.

“What do you make of that?” he said, “for a beginning?”

“The man is mad,” Rosa said.

“It is blasphemy unspeakable,” Donna Emilia said. “I tremble lest fire descend on us.”

“This is nothing to what follows,” Don Inocencio said. “I will read on. The rest is incredibly much worse. But the rest, I, for one, rejoice at. It continues thus:

I therefore, thy God, decree, that henceforth my mortals worship and sacrifice to me in all churches, chapels and places of worship whatsoever; that all prayer, praise, worship and adoration, with all hymns, psalms and spiritual ejaculations of whatever kind, be henceforth addressed to me, whether in public or in private, I, thy God Lopez, decree it.

Likewise thy God decrees (and in reading this, Donna Emilia, I ask pardon of my Maker) thy God decrees, that all other Gods, saints and suchlike, hitherto worshipped in this my Heaven, such as (here he writes in a way that cannot be quoted) shall be cast aside, their images defaced, their altars denied and their rituals omitted, upon pain of death.

Furthermore, thy God decrees that my image be placed in all churches and in all chapels of churches, wheresoever there be an altar; and that instead of the services hitherto used at such places, a service to me only shall be used, with the title the Red Mass to God Lopez, the Thrice Holy.

And thy God decrees, that at the mention of thy God, at His passing, at His coming, upon His feast days, as at the passing of His priests and in the presence of His decrees, all My people, without exception, shall cry, Blessed be God Lopez, and shall sign the mark of thy God, a circle and a dot, upon breast and head.

Lopez, Thrice Glorious, Thrice Blessed, Thrice Holy.

All who infringe This My Decree, in Thought or Word or Deed, shall suffer Death.

From My Heaven in Plaza Verde,

⊙ LOPEZ GOD LOPEZ. ⊙

“That,” Don Inocencio said, “is our ruler’s proclamation in this year of grace. What do you think of it?”

Rosa went to the paper to read some printing at the foot.

“It is genuine,” she said. “It is printed at the palace press.”

“I believe it to be genuine,” Don Inocencio said.

Donna Emilia crossed herself for the third time: she spoke with some difficulty.

“Did you say, Inocencio, that you rejoice at this proclamation?”

“I do,” he said, “sincerely, Emilia, I do. We have been for far too long apathetic: now this outrage will rouse us from sleep: it may be our salvation as a nation. We ourselves are in some measure responsible for this madness. We have connived at madness in the palace too long: he takes advantage of our supineness to seize us by the throats. Now there can be but one answer.”

“Surely,” Donna Emilia said, “a vengeance of Heaven will fall upon a man like that.”

“Our Caligula will not long survive his decree,” Don Inocencio said. “Our old days of the Blancos will begin again.”

“What will people do?” Hi asked.

“They will do much,” Don Inocencio said. “For a beginning, the priests are already leading their young men to tear down these placards. In the New Town, a priest known to me was gathering the fraternity of his parish as I passed by on my way here. The week will see Don Lopez out of his palace.”

“I wonder,” Rosa said.

“Wonder what, dear?” her mother asked.

“Whether this follows on what Chacon told me half an hour ago. The Hinestrosa creature escaped in some way. The Reds must know by this time that the Whites are planning something. This is their counter-stroke.”

“Let us at least be thankful that General Chavez must be in the city by this time.”

“I think he must be,” Don Inocencio said. “Perhaps it is too early for General Chavez to be here, or indeed to be already on his way, but preparing to be on his way, that, yes, we might declare with confidence. Undoubtedly, he is preparing to be on his way, to, how shall we put it? to draw the sword of outraged religion.”

“Thank God that we may think that,” Donna Emilia said. “We know, that however indolent Luis may be, he is great enough to overcome his indolence when his country calls.”

“I don’t think so, mother,” Rosa said. “I don’t think he is. His country has called ever since the last election. What has he done? He has been at home distilling liqueurs and trying to grow Pommard grapes.”

“And why not?” Don Inocencio said. “Thus the great Roman patriots were employed when their country cried to them. They were on their farms, pruning their vines, or ‘binding faggots,’ as I think Horace puts it, ‘at the bidding of a Sabine grandmother.’ But when their country called, they arose; exchanging, as someone says, the service of the rustic god, whose name I forget, for that of Mars. Besides, Luis Chavez is a soldier. He needs the opportunities of the soldier, attack or defence, rather than those of the debater and intriguer.”

“I do not think that he is a soldier any more than he is a statesman,” Rosa said. “He is a self-indulgent, indolent country gentleman, who loves his garden and his book.”

“I have known Luis Chavez for a great many years, Rosa,” her mother said. “You are not just to him. He is a good man. If he be not hasty, it is because he is wise. He weighs situations before he decides. He asks God’s direction before he acts. I think that we ought all now to pray that he may be directed to act wisely now.”

“Before we do that, mother,” Rosa said, “we really ought to send into the town for Carlotta. She has not yet returned. There is a good deal of noise in the town; listen to that. There may be rioting or shooting.”

“Let me go,” Hi said.

“I thought I heard the horses,” Donna Emilia said.

“There are no horses.”

“There is a noise though,” Hi said. “There is shouting. Someone is shouting and coming along the road.”

Rosa was sitting beside Hi. She clutched his arm as though she wished to crush it. He felt her tremble or thrill like a taut guy suddenly stricken.

“Hi,” she whispered, “is it rioters in the road, mobbing her?”

“No, no,” Hi said, “it sounds like a man crying news.”

“Listen,” Don Inocencio said.

“It is only one voice,” Hi said.

“Yes, it is only one voice.”

“Have you town-criers here?” Hi asked.

“It is a newspaper seller crying some special edition,” Don Inocencio said. Pablo, the major domo appeared, with maté for Don Inocencio.

“Pablo, is this shouter in the road a newspaper seller?” Donna Emilia asked.

“Yes, Señora. He announces some murder.”

“Cause Felipe to procure a copy of the paper for me, will you, Pablo?” Don Inocencio asked.

“I will, Señor.”

When Pablo had gone, Don Inocencio rose, with a look of great importance.

“It is quite clear to me,” he said. “Judgment has overtaken the blasphemer already. Some deliverer has stricken Lopez in the moment of his blasphemy. I knew that our nation did but sleep.”

“I trust that no such thing as that has happened,” Donna Emilia said. “Of all the terrible things, to be flung suddenly into death is the most terrible; and for one to die in the very utterance of blasphemy is what no enemy could wish.”

“One cannot think of him as a blasphemer, mother,” Rosa said, “but as a poor madman. And if some other poor madman has mak’d him siccar, I don’t think one should examine the ways of Providence too critically.”

“It would be like the slaying of the Philistine,” Don Inocencio said. “Another David has arisen.”

“Carlotta has not returned, mother,” Rosa said. “I think Felipe ought to go to enquire what is happening.”

“May I go?” Hi asked.

“She has Manuel with her,” Donna Emilia said. “It may well be that the trains are stopped. In these crises they often put embargo on the trains. Manuel will have taken her to her brother’s at Medinas.”

“Well, won’t you let me go, to make sure for you?” Hi asked.

Pablo entered with the newspaper, which he gave to Don Inocencio. Hi noticed that Pablo looked much shaken and that he said something in a very low voice as he gave the paper. Plainly something terrible had happened. Don Inocencio opened the paper, with a trembling pair of hands; he looked suddenly deflated. Pablo left the room softly closing the door. Don Inocencio turned very white, sat down hurriedly and dropped the paper.

“What is it, Inocencio?” Emilia said.

“Not Carlotta?”

“No, no, no, no,” Inocencio said. “Chavez. General Chavez has been murdered.”

“My God. Luis? But how?”

“It tells little. ‘We grieve to announce the terrible news, that General Luis Chavez was assassinated by a ruffian, at the station of Aguas Dulces, at half-past two this afternoon, while waiting for the train to Santa Barbara, where he was expected to speak in Congress to-night. The murderer has been arrested.’ ”

“My God.”

“And where is Carlotta?” Rosa cried. “She is in the city all this while. Is she, too, in the hands of the Red murderers?”

“God in Heaven forbid, child.”

“There are her horses,” Hi said. “That is the jingle of their silver; they are almost at the door.”

“Let us come down, then, to meet her.”

They found her chaise and horses at the door: Carlotta was not there.

“Were you in time for the Meruel train?” Donna Emilia asked the driver.

“Yes, Señora, in good time,” the man said. “Afterwards, the train being gone, on hearing of rumours, the Señorita drove to Medinas, whence she sends this letter.”

“Thank you,” Donna Emilia said. “You had better stable your horses, then.” As the man drove to the stables. Donna Emilia opened the letter, and dropped the envelope, which Hi picked up (and kept). “She has gone to Miguel’s,” Donna Emilia said. “Miguel is her brother, Highworth. Miguel thinks she had better stay there for the present.”

“Wisely decided,” Don Inocencio said. “And I will now take my leave, since I must go to the Circle, to see Hermengildo before the House to-night. Let me drive you, Mr. Ridden, since I pass your hotel.”

* * * * * * *

While they waited in the drive for the caleche a party of Pitubas, under a negro who wore a green feather in his hat, rode up to them. He saluted Rosa, and presented a warrant. Rosa read it, called Pablo, and gave him some directions. Pablo led the troops to the stables, from which they removed all the horses, including Carlotta’s team. The Senator’s horse, being old, they left. When they had secured these horses, they rode off with them to another White house further down the bay.

“They’re taking the horses,” Rosa explained. “They always begin by taking our horses. That’s the first danger sign.”

“But good heaven,” Hi said. “Why?”

“ ‘Military reasons,’ they say in their warrant; but they really mean, so that the Whites shall not communicate with each other.”

“Will you get them back?”

“No, probably not. You see, they’ve only gone to the White house down the bay; not to those two Red houses. This may make you understand our local politics a little. It shows you Santa Barbara as she is. It isn’t the Paradise it looks, is it?”

“It’s got angels in it,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m so anxious about her.”

“She is safe at her brother’s, surely?”

“She ought not to have gone there.”

“Why ever not?”

“I don’t know, but she ought not. I knew it when I saw the chaise had not brought her. She has done the wrong thing.”

“I will take a note to her if you like,” Hi said, “and bring her back here, too, if she wishes.”

“She won’t come back here,” Rosa said. “Nor could she, after dark, with these patrols in the streets; but if you will take a letter for me, I shall be grateful. The de Leyvas live outside the West Gate, off the Anselmo Road, in a part called Medinas.”

“Medinas Close is where my old murderer lives,” Hi said.

“There are fearful rookeries close to the palace,” Rosa said. “They are all owned by the de Leyvas.”

She wrote a letter, which she gave to Hi to take.

“If she wants to send any message,” Hi said, “of course, I will bring it back at once.”

“Hi,” she said, “you really are a dear.” She caught him by the neck and kissed his forehead.

“Somewhat rougey,” Hi thought, as he mopped his brow, while he drove with Don Inocencio. “But an awfully good-hearted sort, Rosa.”

* * * * * * *

The drive to the hotel was interesting; Hi had never before seen a city in a state of excitement. The newsboys were crying special editions; parties of men and boys were marching to drums and fifes under Red banners; certain shops, which did not display Red colours, were having their windows broken. On the water-front a guardia warned Don Inocencio and his driver that the Martial Law was proclaimed, and that all carriages were to be off the streets by eight o’clock. “Bad, bad,” Don Inocencio muttered. “I know not which of us will escape such nets.” He left Hi at his hotel.

Here Hi found two envelopes waiting for him. The first contained a printed card from Roger Weycock, asking him to attend a special meeting of the English in Santa Barbara, at the Club, at seven o’clock that evening; the second contained a similar card, with a few words written in pencil by Allan Winter: “Don’t go to this. Keep clear of politics here.—A. W.” The cards had been hurriedly printed, probably as soon as the proclamation had appeared, the ink on them was still moist.

“Winter was right,” Hi thought. “Weycock is in with the Reds, trying to turn English opinion that way, He’s organising this meeting for that end. But Winter’s right; we ought to keep clear of politics here; I won’t go. But all the same, I am jolly well a White in this business, and I’ll help the Whites all I can. By George, I suppose those devils, the Reds, could arrest me for carrying letters.”

* * * * * * *

The sun was setting when he drove off in a caleche for the de Leyva house at Medinas. On his way, he saw scenes between parties of Reds and Whites which made him wonder at the strength of the feelings between them. “Killing Chavez and claiming to be God did not rouse this,” he thought. “This hate has been simmering for years; this is only the boiling over.”

At the West Gate, a Red patrol was stopping the traffic for examination before permitting it to pass; its officer turned back a carriage which had been trundling in front of Hi for some minutes. He then came forward to question Hi, found that he was English and allowed him to proceed. He did this, as Hi thought, grudgingly, in a way which made him wonder, whether the English were as much loved as his father had always said.

Beyond the gate, the Anselmo road was a narrow street from which narrow courts opened. Street and courts swarmed with people, all talking at the tops of their voices, but above all the talking the harsh bellow of public orators in praise of violence sounded. The place stank of mice, sweat, fried fish and damp washing. Hi called to the driver: “Is this Medinas?”

“Medinas, si,” the driver said.

Little boys clambered on to the caleche, asking for “Frencha penny. Ingles penny.” A fat, pale-faced young man hopped on to the step and poised there while he made his proposals.

“You want to see the sights?” he said. “I be your guide. I show you very funny sights. I show you not the usual sort of thing. You like a nice cock-fight, no? You like a quail-fight, no? See now, I take you to a special thing, not many knows about, a good dog-fight. There now, only three dollar. Well, I take you to a special thing to-night; something you never see, perhaps ever again. No? Well, you go to dam prayer-meeting, see? dam prayer-meeting.”

He swung off to seek for a client elsewhere. The caleche passed from the narrows into a broader space, went under an old archway of withering red and yellow plaster and came out into an avenue of palms lit by electric light. Turning from this through an ilex grove it stopped at the de Leyva palace.

Hi was admitted into a great cool hall built of white Otorin marble. All round it and against its columns were the stands of the de Leyva armour, some of which had marched in the Conquest. Carlotta joined him almost at once; he gave her the letter.

“I thought that perhaps you would bring a letter,” she said. “I suppose Rosa wants me to go back to her? My brother is against that.”

“I hope,” Hi said, “I do hope that Don Manuel will not be attacked by these Reds.”

“He is far away by this time.”

Hi felt that he had said a tactless thing, even to suggest that Don Manuel might be attacked, so he added:

“I should pity the man who attacked Don Manuel.”

“It is nice of you to say that, Hi,” she said.

“Did he see the proclamation, or hear of the murder, before he started?” Hi asked.

“No. Rosa tells me that his captive, the Hinestrosa, has been rescued.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think of my country?”

“It’s produced you and Don Manuel and Donna Emilia,” he said. “I think it’s a marvellous country.”

“It may be marvellous, if it turn now.”

“It will turn,” he said. “No nation will stand that proclamation.”

“If a nation be only mad enough, it will stand anything,” she said.

“I hope,” Hi said, “that Don Manuel will find his mother better, when he gets there.”

“I fear that there is little hope of that,” she said. “A telegram came here . . . he can hardly see his mother alive again.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“Others are not so sorry,” she said, in a strange voice. He looked at her with a rush of understanding that she was standing alone, through her love of Don Manuel.

“Oh, but they must be,” he said.

“Sorry?” she said. “Alas, they are thanking God that my lover is out of the way at this time. You do not know the Whites: how broken we are into cliques. My brother, a great man in so many ways, dreads and hates my lover: he thinks him too dangerous: he wants Bazan to lead the party. If Manuel were here now, Bazan would not stand for five minutes. Then, I suppose, my brother would challenge Manuel to a duel. So, if I bring Manuel back, I break with all I have loved in the past.”

“But you will bring him back,” Hi said.

She looked at him in a way which he never forgot; but she did not answer.

“Let me go and bring him back for you,” Hi pleaded. “Of course, I’m only a boy, but I’ll go like a shot. I’ll take any message you like. Do let me. I’ll never be anything again all my life, probably, except just a planter. But just this once let me ride for you. I only saw you for the first time this morning; but you don’t know what you are to me . . . in my life, I mean . . . you I mean, just there being such a person. Of course, you’re sick of men saying this to you. Miss de Leyva, will you let me go?”

“Carlotta will not let you go,” she said, “I’m sure Miss de Leyva won’t. But I cannot bring Manuel here, against my brother’s prayers, even if I would, from his mother’s death-bed. But there is one thing which I wish you would do for me: take a note from me to Rosa.”

“Of course, I’ll gladly take a note,” he said, “and bring back an answer.”

“There will be no answer. You will just have time to leave the note and get back to your hotel before the streets are cleared.”

While she wrote the note, Hi thought of a suggestion.

“I say,” he said. “Quite apart from calling Don Manuel here, there is some point in letting him know the news and telling him not to come. Couldn’t you let me do that for you?”

“You’re very determined, Hi,” she said. “But you must stay in Santa Barbara and keep out of our politics.”

“But why? You will have to send someone.”

“I will not send you, Hi.”

“Why not? Have you anybody better?”

“There could not be anybody better, nor as good; but this is not a thing I could let you attempt. Do you know, that if the Reds were to find you doing this you might be expelled the country, or even shot.”

“For taking a message?”

“That counts as spying in time of war.”

“Who would know that I was taking a message? I should just be an English tourist. That settles it. I’ll go off and get a horse and start at once and find him and tell him.”

“No, no,” she said. “It is impossible.”

“Because I’m a boy and don’t know Spanish?”

“No, no, indeed,” she said, “but because we want you to settle here. Become a citizen later, if you wish, but, until then, you must avoid our troubles. Now here is my note to Rosa, if you will deliver it.”

It was very dim in the hall away from the tapers on the writing table. There were amphoræ full of sweet-smelling shrubs. He could see her face and hands against the darkness of the leaves: her head seemed crowned by white flowers. She switched on some lights so that the hall seemed suddenly full of armed men.

“Will you give me a sprig of those flowers?” he asked.

“Willingly.” She broke a spray for him.

“What is the flower?”

“Hermosita.”

“May I ever see you again?”

“Of course. Come to-morrow to lunch: you must meet my brother.”

“Oh, thank you. I’ll bring back an answer from Rosa, if she sends one. Anything that I can ever do for you will always be absolute happiness; you know that, don’t you?”

“Thank you, Hi.”

She gave him her hand, in the foreign fashion, to kiss: he was grateful for this. A clock chimed for half-past seven. “You must go,” she said, “you haven’t much time.”

* * * * * * *

His caleche jolted him back through Medinas, which was now lit for the night from its many windows. He saw it as a darting of children and a slinking of men, amid a noise of babies squalling, men singing and women screaming. A gas-lamp at a corner of a lane lit the words on a wooden direction post, To Medinas Close; he could just see a lit space surrounded by decaying old black houses, seven or nine storeys high. “So that is where ’Zeke lives,” he thought. “I’ll go to see the old man as I come back to-morrow.”

There was delay in getting through the gates, in spite of his pleading that he was English. He delivered his letter to Rosa, learned that there was to be no answer, and then drove off (his driver in a hurry) to reach the hotel before eight o’clock. On coming to the gate on his way back, he had some trouble with the guard. Unfortunately it was not the guard which had passed him through ten minutes before. The sergeant of this guard was a mulatto (with an Irish accent), who was very rude and smelt of aniseed.

“You damned English,” he said. “What’s stopping ye staying in your homes? I suppose ye’re ate up by your lice, and think ye can scrape them off on us. Well, get through and be damned to ye and obey the proclamation another time.”

The hotel people opened their doors grudgingly to him. They gave him a tasteless supper in the ill-lit, frowsy dining-room, from which all the life had gone; everybody seemed to have gone to bed. He hurried through the meal and then went up to his bedroom.

Here, in bed, he went over the events of the day with a great deal of relish.

“I have had a day,” he thought. “I have never enjoyed a day so much. She is beautiful, she is marvellous, and to-morrow I shall see her again. Oh, my God, she is beautiful.”

He kept repeating this as he thought of her image with praise and blessing: he could not sleep at first because of her. At a little before midnight some rifles were fired in the streets.

“By George, rifles,” he thought. “I say, this is the heart of life.” The firing, whatever it was, stopped after a couple of minutes. In the quiet which followed, perhaps not long after twelve, he fell asleep.

VI

When he had slept for nearly a watch, he was wakened by a ticking as though the wind were shaking a slat in a Venetian blind. As the noise continued, he sat up, thinking, “Here is the breeze. I’ll have to shut my window.”

He realised, then, that the noise was from the door. It was a little light ticking noise, not unlike the gnawing of a mouse, except that it never varied nor grated.

“It’s only a death-watch,” he said. “No, it’s the breeze, rattling the door. I’ll jam it up with a piece of paper.” He turned out of bed and groped in the dark for the cover of his paper-backed novel. “I’ll wedge it up with this,” he thought. He tore off the cover and folded it into a wedge.

“By George,” he thought, suddenly, with a leaping heart. “It isn’t the door rattling, it’s somebody knocking.”

It was no doubt somebody knocking, but with a special secret midnight knock which might awaken him but alarm no other person on the corridor.

“By George,” he thought, “somebody’s tapping with finger-nails. This is romance, by George. I’ll have to be jolly careful now, or very likely I’ll have my throat cut. Who can be knocking?”

He could not think who would be knocking, but he did not for one moment think that it was a woman come for love of him. He was not frightened. The knocking was of a piece with the romance of the day before. It gave him a thrill of delight to think that the knocker might be in peril and the knock a warning to himself.

“Why not?” he thought. “I’m a foreigner here, as well as a heretic. Why shouldn’t there be a sort of Bartholomew massacre beginning?”

He crept to the door. The key was in the keyhole; he could see nothing there but darkness. By the fanlight, he could tell that the corridor beyond was almost pitch dark. The knocker paused, as though he had heard the creak of his approach.

“Who is there?” Hi whispered. “Who is there?”

To his amazement, Rosa answered him.

“It is I, Rosa. Rosa Piranha. Open, Hi; open quick.”

He opened the door swiftly yet silently; Rosa glided in.

“It’s only me, Hi,” she whispered. “I thought I’d never make you hear. Lock the door, lock it, but don’t make a sound. Oh, my God, my God.”

“I’ll strike a light,” he said. “Whatever is the matter? I’ll have a light in a minute.”

“No light,” she said. “Don’t strike a light. We might be seen from outside.”

“I must get you a light,” he whispered, “or you’ll be falling over things, and rousing the house.”

He struck a match: he had a glimpse of Rosa dressed as a peon with a sombrero jammed over her eyes.

“I’ll sit on the bed,” she whispered. “Put the match out, Hi.”

He put out the match; she sat on the bed and began to shudder till the bed quaked. As he did not know what to do, he did nothing. He stood well away from Rosa, waiting for her to speak.

“Good old Rosa,” he said at last.

“Yes, good old Rosa,” she said with a giggle; then she trembled until she began to sob.

“Good Lord, Rosa,” he said, “pull yourself together. Good Lord, what is it? What has happened?”

“Those devils, Hi. They’ve got Carlotta.”

“What devils? The Pitubas?”

“Yes. At least, I don’t know if they were Pitubas. Anyhow the Reds have got her.”

“But I saw her after seven o’clock.”

“They arrested her at ten. They got her brother, too. They’re rounding up all the Whites. A peon of the de Leyvas came to us to tell us. They shot at him, but he got away. Hi, they’ve put her into prison. The Reds have put Carlotta into prison.”

“Good Lord. But, hang it, Rosa, they’ve got no case against her. They’ll certainly let her out in the morning.”

“But Lopez has gone mad, Hi. We don’t know what is happening.”

“But . . . good Lord. It’s four o’clock in the morning; more. How on earth did you get in? Look here, is there anything that I can do?”

“They’ve got her in their prison on a charge of resisting authority, or being deemed to be the associate of those planning to resist authority. The peon heard her deny the first charge. The officer said that he should arrest her on the other. And they may shoot her, Hi.”

“Shoot Carlotta? Never.”

“They may.”

“Oh, hang it, Rosa.”

“This isn’t England, Hi, but a place where we hate; you don’t know how we hate. Mother cannot stand these shocks, but I had to wake her and tell her. She said at once, ‘We must get word through to Manuel.’ ”

Here she stopped at a horrible memory.

“Go ahead,” Hi said.

“This isn’t like England, Hi,” she said. “Twice, even in my life-time, Whites and Reds have made it dangerous for each other. So we make arrangements and codes for messages. We had one of our boys, Estevan Osmeña, sworn to take a message in case of need. We roused him up. Our horses were gone, as you saw; the horses are always the first thing they take, but we sent him off to where he could get a horse. I thought nobody saw him go.”

Here she stopped to tremble till the bed seemed to giggle at her.

“Go on,” Hi said, “cheer up and go on.”

“About two hours ago,” she said, “when we had all gone back to bed, a patrol rode up to the house and summoned mother to open the door. I said that she was too ill, but that I would open. So I lit up and opened. There was the mulatto, Zarzas, with some Pitubas. He said, ‘This is for you.’ He gave me Estevan’s hand, cut off at the wrist, with mother’s letter pinned to it. He said, ‘This is the Dead Letter Post; the White letter comes back Red. I would recommend you send no more.’

“Then I had to serve him and his men with drinks, of course; he called it ‘postage for midnight delivery.’ ”

“Then they had killed your groom?”

“Yes.”

“I say,” Hi said. “But hold on a minute, I’ll just dress, if you’ll excuse me. But tell me, how did you pass the patrols and the gates?”

“Market people can always pass in the early mornings. I brought in a basket of flowers like a gardener’s peon. You remember Manuel said at lunch that there was a way into this hotel at the back. I came in by that. I knew your floor and room. But I nearly died of terror when I heard the negroes at their gambling.”

“I don’t wonder. But I say you have got some pluck.”

“Oh, Hi, forgive me,” she said, “but you’re the only person I can think of. Will you take the news to Manuel?”

“Why, of course I will, Rosa. I wanted to last night but Carlotta wouldn’t let me. I’ll go like a shot.”

She fell upon her knees and kissed his hands, calling upon God and the saints to bless him.

“That’s all right, Rosa,” he said. “That’s all right. We’ll save her.”

“This devil, Lopez, is going to wipe out the Whites,” she said.

“Not he,” Hi said. “Don’t you think it, Rosa.”

“What is to stop him? We’re all in his power.”

“Not you,” Hi said. “He’s done something wicked and stupid, which won’t prosper; you’ll see it won’t. Now about getting to Manuel. I don’t know a word of Spanish, except Dios and si and the oaths those sailors told me. Where can I get a horse, to begin with? I suppose all the livery stables will be closed?”

“You’ll get no horse here.”

“Even though I’m English?”

“No. This city is isolated. No trains, no horses. You’ll have to walk to a place called Anselmo, about fifteen miles from here.”

“You mean, out past the de Leyvas’ place? That Anselmo?”

“Yes. There are two White brothers there, the Elenas, George and William, horse-breeders. They will give you horses and put you in the way to get relays further west. There are two ways of getting to Anselmo; one, by the road, past the de Leyvas’ place, which you’d have to walk; the other is, to take a boat down the bay, nine or ten miles, to the place La Boca, where you could probably hire a horse or trap and ride or drive there.”

“How would I take a boat?”

“At the pier there are scores of market-boats. Ask for Pedro Ruiz and ask him to take you to La Boca. If Pedro isn’t there, dozens of others will be; they’re mostly Italians.”

“I’ll make them understand,” Hi said. “Will they let me down the pier?”

“Yes, if you aren’t stopped beforehand.”

“The boat way seems the quicker,” he said. “I’ll try the boat way. But look here, Rosa, they’ll surely watch the boats for people trying to get away.”

“They may, but that and the road are the only ways to Anselmo.”

“Well, we’d better try both. Why not send my old English murderer from Medinas? He’d go like a shot and you could trust him absolutely.”

“That is an idea, Hi. I suppose he can ride?”

“He was a stable-lad in his youth. He was even a jockey once, of sorts, I think they said, but he was warned off for something or other. I know he sounds awful; so he is, as well as a little mad, but I know that you could trust him.”

“You say that he is mad? Could he remember a message?”

“Yes.”

“All he’ll have to remember is, ‘Reds have seized Carlotta: come at once’; that and the address, ‘Don Manuel, Encinitas.’ ”

“He’ll have to know more than that,” Hi said. “He’ll have to get the horses out of these Elena people, at Anselmo.”

“Our code word, Dorothea, will do that.”

“And suppose the Elenas aren’t there?”

“George or William must be there.”

“Right, then; between us we’ll fix it. I say, this is exciting. You are a brick to come to me for this.”

“If you knew what I think of you for taking it as you do.”

“I suppose,” Hi said, “I suppose there’s no means of telegraphing from Anselmo to Don Manuel.”

“None. We’ve no telegraphs here, except along the railways, and no railway at all across the central provinces. You’ll have to ride.”

“No means of telegraphing to anyone, in code, or something of that sort? It would save so much time.”

“The telegraphs are all under censorship, no message would be sent. There’s no telegraph within seventy miles of Encinitas, anyway.”

“It’ll be a long ride,” Hi said. “I wish I were more in trim for a long ride. It will take three days.”

“Oh, Hi.”

“I might do it in two, with luck.”

“Oh, if you only can,” she said.

“Now how about you.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I’m blest if you will be. I’ll see you home.”

“Oh, Hi; no.”

“Yes, I will.”

“No, no, Hi. I shan’t be stopped with my market basket and in this dress. And by the Farola there is a short cut through the waste to our garden.”

“I’ll see you there, then. I must. I’ve got to ask you scores of things which I must know. When you’re reasonably safe, I’ll get to Medinas, see my murderer off, and then come back to the pier and yell for Pedro Ruiz.”

“Please God, the boats will be late this morning,” she said.

“Why?”

“If they come early, they go early; there may be no boat for you.”

“Golly.”

“There’s a lot to say ‘Golly’ about in this Republic.”

“There’s more in it than meets the eye,” he said. “I suppose you’ve got no map of this city?”

“No. Why?”

“Can I get to Medinas from the pier without going back through the city?”

“Yes, easily. There’s a road from the Farola to Medinas, on the line of the old city ditch.”

“All right, then; that’s a weight off my chest. Our main task is to get out of this hotel to the pier: if we can do that, we shall be fairly clear. Will there be patrols on the roads outside the walls, or people on the watch at La Boca and Anselmo?”

“Probably.”

“All right,” he said, to cheer her. “We’ll fix them. I suppose the Elenas will know some English?”

“Not much; but if you say Dorothea to them, they’ll make your next course clear, even if they have to send a guide with you.”

“Good. I think I’ve got it all pretty straight. All right. I’m ready. We’ll start, then. Oh, but wait one minute. I must get something out of my trunk.”

Some hours before, when he had returned from Carlotta, he had pressed her spray of hermosita between two sheets of the hotel blotting-paper, which he had then laid away in the trunk. He now opened this precious packet, broke off a leaf from the spray, and placed it in his pocket-book; the rest he put back into the trunk. He then wrote a few words to the hotel proprietor.

“I’m ready now,” he said. “I’ll leave this note to say that I’m coming back, and want my room kept.”

“Oh, Hi,” she said, “I’ve brought no money.”

“I have got money enough,” Hi said, “but I have not got a revolver. Father wouldn’t let me take one. I knew he knew nothing about it. Now we had better have a story in case we’re stopped. We had better say that your mother wanted me and that you had come to fetch me. They couldn’t object to that. Where is your market basket? In the cellar?”

“No, in the hall.”

“We had better go out by the hall,” he said. “And I had better take no baggage. Then they would ask no questions. If I were caught going out with a bag, they would think I was shooting the moon. I have got some handkerchiefs. That’s enough.”

“What will they think of my market basket?” she said. “They will think I have come to steal the linen.”

“Leave it here,” Hi said.

“But I must have it to pass the gates.”

“Well, you can show that it’s empty,” he said. “We must chance it. Come on.”

They crept out into the deserted corridor, where all was silent save for a snorer in one of the near-by rooms. They crept to the stairs. All seemed silent on the landing below. On the next floor they heard a child wake up with a whimper. The coarse voice of a nurse from one of the French-speaking islands called “Chocolat” to quiet it. As this failed she made a testy reproof and turned grunting out of bed.

All seemed silent on the floor below. Rosa touched Hi’s arm at the stairs.

“There’s a night porter asleep there,” she said, “on that sofa on the landing.”

“He’s sound asleep,” Hi said. “Come on.”

On the third step from the bottom the porter had left a small tray with glasses and a soda-water bottle. Hi trod upon this, so that both he and it fell. The glasses broke, the soda-water bottle rolled on to the broad uncarpeted steps which led to the ground floor. It fell on to the first step, then on to the second, then on, step by step, making a noise like “Keblonk, Keblonk” at each step. Hi sat on the mat at the stair-foot in fits of laughter. Rosa stood beside him, giggling hysterically.

“Hark at the beastly thing going ‘Keblonk,’ ” he said.

With a little tinkle the bottle rolled itself still. The porter on the sofa sneezed suddenly and sat up.

“Oh, for de Lord,” he said.

“For de Lord,” Hi said.

He and Rosa clutched each other, shaking with laughter.

“Oh, you lovely angels, keep away the flies,” said the porter and settled himself to sleep again.

“Come along,” Hi whispered. “He’s asleep. We must slide down the banisters of this flight. Don’t kick old Keblonk as you pass.”

All was dark on the ground floor, but far away some servant was already sweeping. This was the only sound save the occasional crackle in the wicker chairs, as though some ghost had sat down or arisen. In front of them was the main entrance of the hotel, a glass barrier, broad steps with deserted offices at each side, then the front doors. A light was burning in the office to the left. Hi stole forward upon tip-toe.

“The night porter’s asleep in the office,” he whispered.

He stole through the glass doors and tried the front doors, which were locked and the key not there.

“The key’s gone,” he whispered.

“It’s in the office, I expect,” she said.

He looked, but could not see it on the key hooks nor on the table.

“It must be somewhere here,” she said.

“I expect he’s got it in his pocket,” he whispered.

There came a little flop upon the floor. Rosa had knocked off a time-table from the edge of the table. The man stirred in his sleep but did not wake.

“If he’s got it in his trouser pocket,” Hi whispered, “or even in his side pocket, we’re done.”

“Well, Hi,” she whispered, “come on down the back way through the cellar. Besides, I have got to get my flower basket.”

“Oh, dash, I had forgotten the flower basket.”

“Hi,” Rosa said, “there’s someone coming.”

They edged out into the hall as some of the hall lights went up. A woman with a broom came along the corridor. She took a good look at them, and Hi said, “It’s all right, thanks. I’m English.”

She seemed to think that it was not quite all right. She made a gesture to show Hi that he could rouse the porter.

“Si, si,” Hi said, “but it’s absolutely all right, thanks.”

“Are you looking for the key?” she asked in English. “The key is here on this palm.”

She unhooked a key from one of the stubs of the palm tree, fitted it to the lock and opened the door. She gave a searching glance at Rosa. She closed the door behind them on the instant.

The breeze was coming in from the sea bitterly cold. They looked up and down the deserted street. They saw no sign of life except a cat on the other side of the road.

“Come on,” Hi said, “down to the water-front.”

In the darkness of the cross roads a mounted policeman, drawn into the shadows, watched them approach without making a sign. When they were within a few yards of him he put his horse suddenly across their path.

“It’s all right. I’m English,” Hi said.

The man seemed to have orders not to molest foreigners. He drew his horse back and jerked with his hand for them to pass. Perhaps it was a guilty conscience which made them think that he stared hard at Rosa. Anyhow he let them pass.

On the water-front the tide of life had begun to flow to the quays. Men and women were going to work that had to be done, whatever rebellion came. They saw the bright light at the pier end.

“It’s there,” Rosa whispered, “that the market-boats come.”

Two men who were slouching in front of them paused to light cigarettes. They watched Hi and Rosa as they passed and made remarks evidently very offensive, which made Rosa catch her breath.

“Come on. Don’t stop,” Rosa whispered.

Colour was all over the eastern heaven and touching the upper roofs and spires.

“Hi,” Rosa said, when they had gone a little distance, “we shall never be able to do it. I am seen to be a woman and there is a patrol in the streets stopping people.”

“Where?”

“There in front.”

About a hundred yards in front of them there was an interruption in the flow of people. They could see the gleam of helmets beyond the blackness of the crowd, which grew greater as men and women flocked up to it. Plainly the police or troops were examining all who were going that way.

“Hi,” Rosa said, “I can’t face the police in this dress. It’s very silly, but I shall faint.”

“Hold up,” Hi said. “It will be perfectly all right. We will get down to that barge on the beach there and you can pin your cloak round you for a skirt.”

Within a stone’s throw from the water-front was a green barge, which Hi had noticed on the day of his landing. She was lying on her bilge with the butts of her timbers sticking out like bones. In the shelter of this wreck Rosa pinned her cloak as a skirt and made her hat look less manly. After this they marched into the crowd, which closed up behind them as others arrived. It was a silent crowd of men and women not fully awake. One or two voices asked, “What are they stopping us for?” Some said, “Dogana,” or “Search of suspects,” or “Search of the accursed Whites, the murderers.”

The light grew upon the faces at each instant, the crowd gathered and the delay continued.

“What are they stopping us for?”

“Close up, brothers.”

“Who are you shoving?”

“It’s not me that’s shoving.”

“This way for the harem. Get your money ready.”

“The whistle will be gone. We shall be fined half a peseta.”

“What are they stopping us for?”

No one could answer that question.

Hi could make out that several times a minute one or two people in front were allowed to pass on. At every such passing the crowd surged forward till they were all jammed up together, feeling breathless and inclined to faint. They could hear a kind of catechism going on at the barrier, voices bullying and voices submissive.

“Why can’t they let us pass? What are they asking?”

The crowd was not to know why they were stopped. After they had annoyed some hundreds of people with it, the police suddenly removed the barrier and told the people that they might get along out of it. The crowd slowly surged forward among growls of “Keeping us waiting all this time and in the end they didn’t want us. Now we shall be fined a peseta for being late.”

They passed through the city gates, to the open space where the market folk had cheered the Piranhas the day before.

“There is the pier, Hi,” Rosa said. “I can get home through that waste piece, the old graveyard. You go up that gully to the right, to Medinas.”

“All right. Good luck. I’ll fetch Manuel.”

“God bless you, Hi.”

“You, too. My love to your mother. And good luck. And cheer up.”

She nodded, not having more words; she turned out of the stream of workers into the old graveyard of the town and did not look back.

As Hi set off for Medinas, he looked back several times after her, till she had disappeared.

“She’s got some pluck,” he thought. “I don’t think she’ll be stopped now, going that way.”

His own way led through a road which having once been the city ditch, was still a city dump and refuse pit under the walls. On the left hand of the refuse were shacks and sties of wood, for pigs, cows, horses and fowls; though men lived in them, too. The road was an unpaven track in a kind of gulley between the dump and the sheds. It was in a mucky state at that time from the recent rains and the habits of the market people. It stank, it was littered with tins and stalks, rats were rummaging among the garbage, and pariah dogs with the mange were scraping against the sides of the sties. However, no men were abroad in it nor any sign of a patrol. In about twelve minutes he was in Medinas.

For some minutes he had noticed a glow upon the city buildings, which he had thought to be the dawn. He now found that it came from the red-hot shell of what had been the de Leyva palace, which had been burnt since midnight. A good many Medinas people were grubbing in the embers for what they could find. Others were carrying away what they had already found. A heap of things of all sorts, armour, pictures, marbles, bronzes, furniture, porcelain, curtains, clothes, cushions, musical instruments, antiques, books, and portfolios, which had been looted before the fire took hold, were being sold to all comers by a ruffian with a big voice, who bellowed aloud his bargains, joked, tossed the money received to a guard of Reds, and often gave away what he could not readily sell. He was in the act of selling a bronze female torso when Hi came up. Hi noticed among the crowd the broad-faced picture-dealer who had been rude two days before on the water-front. This man winked at the auctioneer that the bronze should be set aside for him. The auctioneer stopped his obscene remarks and laid it aside.

* * * * * * *

Medinas Close looked marvellous in that light of nearly dawn, helped out by dying lamps. Its well of tall, mean, narrow tenements, built on a slope, about a triangle of grassless earth, needed some murderous half-light to give it its quality. At the entrance to the Close an imbecile woman, with the face of a corpse, held her hand for alms. At the entrance of No. 41, black as the mouth of a cave, two little boys, who talked through their noses as though their throats were rotted away, were sharing what they had stolen from the burning. Most of the Medinas tenants had been picking plums from that same snapdragon. In the well of the Close were some chairs and other furniture which had been pitched down and smashed, because they would not readily go through the narrow doors.

“On the third floor,” Hi said to himself, “the middle room of the three, if I don’t have my throat cut on the way.” He went into that black cave, which stank of rat and mouse; he struck himself a light so that he might see the stairs, and came at once on a woman and a man clasped at the stair-foot. He saw the woman’s eyes, like the eyes in a skull. The man detached himself from her; he stank of wine, she of musk. “You like to see my sister?” he said, thickly to Hi.

“No.”

“Three pesetas.”

“No.”

“Two pesetas.”

“No.”

“You like to buy a nice watch, very cheap, very good?” The woman, who had caught some glimpse of Hi, said something in a low voice, which made the man stand aside to let Hi pass to the next floor, where a man was beating his wife in the intervals of a sermon. The morning light gleamed a little on to this landing from a room which had no door. Up above was the third floor, much darker, being lit only with a taper.

Some weeks before this a man had been murdered at the head of the stairs there. The dwellers of 41, having scruples about the murder, had placed upon the wall a coloured print of the Virgin, to whom they lit a taper each night. This taper now showed Hi the three doors of the landing; he knocked gently on the middle door.

After knocking a second time, he was aware of a tenseness in the room within, though no one answered. At a third knock, he felt, rather than heard, other doors in the tenement softly opened, while unseen eyes took stock of him. Someone inside the room was moving something: “putting something under the bed,” he thought. A board dropped with a clatter, then a chair (so it seemed) was jammed against the door from within, then a woman’s cautious voice asked, “Who is it?”

“Señor Rust,” Hi said, in a low voice, “Señor Rust.”

She did not let him in. He heard her moving about inside, with queer little clicking noises as though she were snapping on some pairs of stays (which indeed she was).

“Señor Rust,” he repeated, “Señor Rust.”

The lamp in the room, which had been turned down, now turned up; the door opened a little; a short, sharp, elderly dwarf of a woman stared at him, and motioned him to come in. He went into a hot little lamp-lit room, where ’Zeke stood stock still, fumbling with his hat, beside the bed. The woman bolted the door carefully behind him. She had a skin like parchment, coloured like old ivory. She looked at him out of sharp, black, beady eyes which missed nothing. Her head trembled a little; her long green ear-rings waggled and clicked. She looked like a gimlet about to pierce. Hi knew, without any telling, that he had come at a ticklish time, when the two were appraising loot from the burning. His knock had been mistaken for the knock of the police. Something had been stuffed under the floor and a mat drawn over the place: ’Zeke was now standing on the mat.

The woman asked him in Spanish about his health, adding that for her own part she asked nothing better from God, since she was ever better after the rains, which, as it was well known, drew away from the air we breathe many most pestilential vapours. Hi replied in English that he was afraid that he came at a very inconvenient time.

“Rust,” he said, “could you take a message for me, and be away, perhaps, for some days?”

“Yes, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I daresay.”

“Starting at once?”