BOOK I

THE GRAN SECO

I

The open windows, protected by wire blinds as fine-meshed
as gauze, allowed the cool airs from the sea to slip in from
the dusk. The big restaurant was in a pleasant gloom broken
by patches of candlelight from the few occupied tables. The
Hotel de la Constitución stands on a little promontory above
the harbour of Olifa, so the noise of the streets comes to it
only like the echo of waves from a breakwater. Archie
Roylance, looking into the great square of velvet sky now
beginning to be patterned by stars, felt as if he were still
at sea.

The Vice-Consul interpreted his thoughts.

“You are surprised at the quiet,” he said. “That is only
because we dine early. In a little there will be many lights
and a jigging band and young people dancing. Yet we have
good taste in Olifa and are not garish. If you will be my
guest on another occasion, I will take you to a club as well
equipped as any in Pall Mall, or to a theatre where you will
see better acting than in London, and I will give you a
supper afterwards which Voisin’s could not better. We
have civilisation, you see–for what it is worth.”

The Vice-Consul, whose name was Alejandro Gedd, was
a small man with a neat, dark, clean-shaven face, and high
cheek-bones from which his critics deduced Indian blood.
As a matter of fact they came from another ancestry. His
grandfather, Alexander Geddes, had come out in his youth
from Dundee as a clerk in a merchant’s house, had prospered,
married a pretty Olifera, begotten a son, and founded
a bank which rose in the silver boom to fortune. That son
had married a lady of pure Castilian descent, whose beauty
was not equal to her lineage, so the grandson of old Geddes
had missed both the vigour of the Scot and the suave comeliness
of the Olifera. Don Alejandro was an insignificant
little man, and he was growing fat. The father had sold
his interest in the bank at a high figure, and had thereafter
dabbled in politics and horse-breeding; the son, at his death,
had promptly got rid of the stud and left the government of
his country to get on without him. He had been sent to an
English school, and later to the Sorbonne, and had emerged
from his education a dilettante and a cosmopolitan. He
professed a stout Olifa patriotism, but his private sentiment
was for England, and in confidential moments he would
speak of his life as exile. Already he had asked Archie a
dozen questions about common friends, and had dwelt like
an epicure on the recollections of his last visit–the Park on
a May morning, an English garden in midsummer, the
Solent in August, the October colouring of Scottish hills.
His dinner-jacket had been made in the vicinity of Hanover
Square, and he hoped that his black stock and his black-ribboned
eyeglass were, if not English, at any rate European.

Archie was looking at the windows. “Out there is the
Pacific,” he said, “nothing nearer you than China. What
is it like the other way?”

“The coastal plain for a hundred miles. Then the foothills
and the valleys where the wine is made. A very pretty
light claret, I assure you. Then, for many hundreds of
miles, the great mountains.”

“Have you travelled there much?”

Don Alejandro shook his head. “I do not travel in this
land. What is there to see? In the mountains there are
nothing but Indians and wild animals and bleak forests and
snow. I am content with this city, where, as I have said,
there is civilisation.”

“A man I met on the boat told me about a place called
the Gran Seco. He said it was bound to be soon the greatest
copper area in the world.”

Don Alejandro laughed. “That ill-favoured spot becomes
famous. Five years ago it was scarcely known. To-day
many strangers ask me about it. The name is Indian-Spanish.
You must understand that a hundred miles north
of this city the coastal plain ends, and the Cordilleras swing
round so that there is no room between them and the ocean.
But at the curve the mountains, though high, are not the
great peaks. These are far to the east, and you have for
a big space a kind of tableland. That is what we call the
Gran Seco–the Great Thirst–for it is mostly waterless
and desert. But it is very rich in minerals. For long we
have known that, and before the War there were many
companies at work there. Now there is one great company,
in which our Government has a share, and from which
Olifa derives much of its wealth. The capital employed is
mostly foreign–no, not American–European, but of what
country I do not know. The labourers are the people of
the hills, and the managers are Europeans of many nationalities.
They pass through this city going and coming–through
this hotel often–perhaps we may see some of them
to-night. They are strange folk who do not mix freely
with us of Olifa. I am told they are growing as wealthy
as Rockefeller. There are no English among them, I think–Slavs
mostly, with some Italians and now and then a
German, so I do not come across them in the way of business,
and it would appear that they have no time for
pleasure. . . . May I ask, Sir Archibald, for what purpose
especially you honour us with a visit? I want to know how
best I can serve you.”

Archie wrinkled his brow. “You are very kind, Don
Alejandro. The fact is we’re here mainly for the fun of
it. This is a sort of belated honeymoon trip. Also, I’d
like to know something about the politics of Olifa and South
America generally. You see, I’m a Member of Parliament,
and I’ve an idea that this part of the globe may soon become
rather important. I have brought several introductions.”

Don Alejandro waved his hand deprecatingly.

“That will be readily arranged. Your Minister is on
leave, and the Embassy has left you in my hands. Without
doubt you will be received by our President. I myself will
take you to our Minister for External Affairs, who is my
second cousin. Our Minister of Finance will expound to
you our extravagant prosperity. But of politics in the old
sense you will find little. We are too rich and too busy.
When we were poor we talked government all the day.
And we had revolutions–dictatorships tempered by revolutions.
My father more than once saved his neck by the
good blood of his racing stable. But now we are very tame
and virtuous. Our Government is rich enough to be enlightened,
and our people, being also rich, do not trouble
their heads about theories. Even the peons on the estancias
and the vaqueros in the hills are content. Olifa is–how
do you say?–a plutocratic democracy–a liberal plutocracy.
Once it was a battered little packet-boat, now it is a great
liner careless of weather and tides. It has no problems, this
fortunate country.”

“Jolly place for a holiday,” said Archie. “Well, we mean
to have a good look round. What do you advise?”

Don Alejandro became lyrical. “You can go south for
eight hundred miles in an ever-widening plain. There you
will see such orange groves as the world cannot match, and
nearer the mountains the savannahs which are the richest
pasture on earth. I will write to my cousin at Veiro, and
he will entertain you at the stud farm which was once my
father’s. It will not be like an English Sunday afternoon
in the country, where a fat stud groom with a bunch of
carrots takes the guests round the stables. It is a wild place
between the knees of the hills, but there is some pretty
horseflesh there.”

“Can I get up into the mountains?” Archie put in, but
Don Alejandro was not to be interrupted.

“You must visit our great cities, for Olifa, though the
capital, is not the largest. Cardanio has now four to five
hundred thousand souls. That is the port from which our
fruits and hides and frozen beef are shipped. And there
is Alcorta in the hinterland, which is our little Birmingham.
But madame will weary of these commercial glories. She
will be happier, I think, among the horses at Veiro, or in
some pretty hacienda. . . .”

Janet Roylance had paid little heed to the conversation,
being engaged in studying the slowly increasing number of
diners.

“I would like to go into the mountains,” she said. “I
saw them from far out at sea, and they looked like the battlements
of Paradise.”

“A very savage Paradise you would find it, Lady Roylance.
None of your green Swiss valleys with snow-peaks
rising from meadows. It is all dusty and bare and cruel.
Take my advice and be content with our sunny
estancias—-“

“Look at these chaps, Janet,” said Archie suddenly.
“There’s a queer class of lad for you!”

Don Alejandro fixed his eyeglass and regarded four men
who had taken their seats at a table a little way off. It
was a curious quartet. There was a tall man with hair so
pale that at first sight he looked like an albino; he had a
bony face and skin like old parchment, but from his bearing
it was clear that he was still young. Two were small and
dark and Jewish, and the fourth was a short burly fellow,
with the prognathous jaw of a negro but the luminous eyes
of a Latin. All were dressed in well-cut evening clothes,
and each wore in his buttonhole a yellow flower–to Archie
it looked like a carnation. The notable things about them
were their extreme pallor and their quiet. They sat almost
motionless, speaking very little and showing that they were
alive by only the tiniest gestures. A waiter brought them
caviare, and poured champagne into their glasses, and as
they moved their arms to eat and drink they had an odd
suggestion of automata.

Don Alejandro dropped his eyeglass. “From the Gran
Seco,” he said. “That is the _type Gran Seco_. European,
I think–the tall man might be a Swede–going from or
returning to their place of work. No. I do not know any
one of them. Olifa is full of these birds of passage, who
linger only for a day. They do not mix with our society.
They are civil and inoffensive, but they keep to themselves.
Observe the _chic_ of their clothes, and the yellow buttonholes.
That is the fashion of the copper magnates.”

“They look to me like pretty sick men,” said Archie.

“That, too, is their fashion. Those who go to that uncouth
place speedily lose their complexions. It may be the
copper fumes or some fever of the hills.”

“I should rather like to go there,” said Archie.

Don Alejandro laughed.

“Ah, you are intrigued. That is like an Englishman.
He must be for ever hunting romance. No doubt a visit
to the Gran Seco can be accomplished, but it must first be
arranged. The railway beyond Santa Ana is not for the
public. It is owned by the company, and their permission
is necessary to travel on it. Also there must be a permit
from the Gobernador of the province, who is also the Company’s
president, for the workers in the mines are a brutal
race and the rule of the Gran Seco must be like the rule of
a country in war-time. . . . If you wish, I will put the
matter in train. But I do not think it is quite the place for
a lady. Such cheeks as madame’s are not for the withering
airs of the hills.”

“I will follow the Olifero custom,” said Janet. “Your
ladies, Don Alejandro, are very fond of pearl powder.”

The restaurant was filling up. It appeared that many
Oliferos were dining, for large lustrous women’s eyes looked
out of dead-white faces. At the far end of the room, close
to the band, a noisy party took their seats at a table. They
were all young, and, since they had not troubled to change,
their clothes made a startling blotch of colour among the
sober black and white of the other guests. All looked as
if they had just left a golf-course, the men in knickerbockers
of white flannel and both sexes in outrageous
jumpers.

“Behold our protectors!” said Don Alejandro with a
touch of acid in his tone. “Behold the flower of Yanqui
youth! No. I do not know them–for that you must ask
my colleague, Señor Wilbur. But I know where they come
from. They are from the big Yanqui yacht now in the
harbour. It is called the _Corinna_.”

“Good lord! That was Mike Burminster’s boat. I
didn’t know he had sold it.” Archie regarded the party
with disfavour.

“I do not know who is the present owner, except that
he is a Yanqui. The guests I should judge from their
appearance to have sprung from Hollywood.”

“They were lunching here to-day,” said Janet. “I saw
them when Archie was inquiring about his lost kit-bag. . . .
There was a girl among them that I thought I must have
seen before. . . . I don’t see her here to-night. . . . I
rather like the look of them, Don Alejandro. They are
fresh, and jolly, and young.”

“Believe me, they will not repay further acquaintance,
Lady Roylance.” Don Alejandro was unconsciously imitating
his Castilian mother. “They come here in opulent
yachts and behave as if Olifa were one of their vulgar joy-cities.
That is what they call ‘having a good time.’
Yanqui youth, as I have observed it, is chronically alcoholic
and amorous, and its manners are a brilliant copy of
the parrot-house.”

The three had their coffee in the spacious arcade which
adjoined the restaurant. It was Don Alejandro’s turn to
ask questions, and he became for a little the English exile,
seeking eagerly for news–who had married whom, what
was thought in London of this and that–till Olifa dropped
from him like a mantle and he felt himself once more a
European. Presently their retreat was invaded by other
diners, the band moved thither from the restaurant, and
dancing began in a cleared space. The young Americans
had not lingered over their meal, and had soon annexed the
dancing-floor. Fragments of shrill badinage and endearments
were heard in the pauses of the music.

Don Alejandro advised against liqueurs, and commended
what he called the Olifa Tokay, which proved to be a light
sweet wine of the colour of sloe-gin. Holding his glass
to the corona of light in the centre of the patio, he passed
from reminiscence to philosophy.

“You are unfortunate pilgrims,” he said. “You come
seeking romance and I can only offer the prosaic. No
doubt, Sir Archibald, you have been led to believe that we
Latin Americans are all desperadoes, and our countries a
volcanic territory sputtering with little fires of revolution.
You find instead the typical bourgeois republic, as bourgeois
as the United States. We do not worry about
liberty, for we have learned that wealth is a better and
less troublesome thing. In the old days we were always
quarrelling with our neighbours, and because we conscripted
our youth for our armies there was discontent and presently
revolution. Now we are secure, and do not give occasion
for discontent.”

“Someone told me that you had a pretty effective army.”

“We have a very effective police. As for our army, it
is good, no doubt, but it is small. For what should we use
our army? We have no ambition of conquest, and no
enemy against whom we need defence.”

“Still, you can’t count on perpetual peace, you know.
You are rich, and wealth means rivals.”

“Have we not the League of Nations?” Don Alejandro
cried merrily. “Is not Olifa even now a member of the
Council? And is there not the Monroe Doctrine, invented
by the great-grandfathers of those depraved children who
are dancing yonder?”

“Oh, well, if you like to put it that way—-“

“I do not like to put it that way. I do not believe in the
League of Nations, and I do not love the United States,
and I regard the Monroe Doctrine as an insult to my race.
But what would you have, my dear Sir Archibald? We
have chosen prosperity, and the price we pay for it is our
pride. Olifa is a well-nourished body without a soul.
Life and property are as safe here as in England, and what
more can the heart of man desire? We have a stable
Government because our people have lost interest in being
governed. Therefore I say, do not propose to study our
politics, for there is nothing to study. To you in England,
with a bankrupt Europe at your door and the poison of
Communism trickling into your poverty, politics are life
and death. To us, in our sheltered Hesperides, they are
only a bad dream of the past. There is no mystery left in
Olifa. . . .”

As Don Alejandro spoke, the four men from the Gran
Seco were moving through the arcade. They held themselves
stiffly, but walked as lightly as cats, deftly steering
their way among the tables and at the same time keeping
close together. They looked neither to right nor left, but,
as they passed, Janet and Archie had a good view of their
waxen faces. The eyes of all–the pale eyes of the tall
man, the beady eyes of the Jews, and the fine eyes of the
Latin–had the same look of unnatural composure, as if
the exterior world did not exist for them and they were all
the time looking inward in a profound absorption. They
had something of the eery detachment of sleepwalkers.

Don Alejandro was talking again.

“Be content, my friends, with what we can offer–our
beauty and our civilisation. Think of us as a little enclave
of colour between the glooms of the great sea and the clouds
of the great mountains. Here man has made a paradise for
himself, where during his short day of life he can live
happily without questioning.”

Archie had been looking at Janet.

“I think we both want to go to the Gran Seco,” he
said.

II

Archie left Janet writing letters and started out next morning
to explore the city. The first taste of a foreign town
was always to him an intoxication, and, in the hot aromatic
sunshine of that month which for Olifa is the sweet of the
year, the place seemed a riot of coloured and exultant life.
He descended the broad terraced road which by easy
gradients led from the hotel to the twisted streets of the old
city. Some of the calles were only narrow ravines of shade,
where between high windowless walls country mule-carts
struggled towards the market-place. Others were unhappily
provided with screeching electric tramways, so that the
passer-by on foot or on a horse had to mount high on the
ill-paved side-walk to avoid destruction. Presently he came
into a hot market-place, where around an old Spanish
fountain were massed stalls laden with glowing flowers and
fruit, and strange unwholesome fishes, and coarse pottery,
and garish fabrics, and country-woven straw hats. Through
this medley Archie limped happily, testing his Spanish on
the vendors, or trying with most inadequate knowledge to
disentangle the racial mixture. The town Oliferos were
a small race, in which he thought there must be considerable
negro blood, but the countryfolk were well-made and up-standing,
often with a classic and melancholy dignity in their
faces. There were lean, wild-looking people, too, whose
speech was not any kind of Spanish, with an odd angle to
their foreheads and the shyness of an animal in their small
anxious eyes, who squatted in their dark ponchos beside
their mules and spoke only to each other. An Indian breed,
thought Archie–perhaps from the foothills.

A maze of calles took him to the main Plaza, where a
great baroque cathedral raised its sculptured front above a
medley of beggars and vendors of holy medals. The square
was shamefully paved, the façades of the old Spanish houses
were often in disrepair, but the crumbling plaster and the
blotched paint blended into something beautiful and haunting.
Here it was very quiet, as if the city hushed itself
in the environs of the house of God. To Archie it seemed
that he was looking upon that ancient Olifa, before the
hustling modern world was born, Olifa as it had appeared
to the eyes of Captain Cook’s sailors when they landed, a city
which kept the manners and faith of sixteenth-century Spain.
He entered the church, and found a vast, cavernous darkness
like the inside of a mountain, candles twinkling like distant
glow-worms, echoes of muttered prayers and the heavy
sweetness of incense. After it the Plaza seemed as bright
as a mountain-top.

Another labyrinth brought him into a different world.
The great Avenida de la Paz is a creation of the last twenty
years, and runs straight as a ruler from the villas of the
most fashionable suburb to the old harbour of the city.
In its making it has swallowed up much ancient derelict
architecture, and many nests of squalid huts, but, since it
was built with a clear purpose by a good architect, it is in
itself a splendid thing, in which Olifa takes a fitting pride.
Where Archie struck it, it was still residential, the home of
the rank and fashion of the city, with the white mass of
the Government buildings and the copper dome of the Parliament
House rising beyond it. But as he walked westward
it gradually changed. Soon it was all huge blocks of flats
and shops, with here and there the arrogant palace of a
bank or shipping company.

One of these caught Archie’s attention. It was an immense
square edifice built of the local marble, with a flight
of steps running up to doors like those of the Baptistry in
Florence. Two sentries with fixed bayonets were on guard,
and at first he thought it a Government office. Then his
eye caught a modest inscription above the entrance–_Administración
de Gran Seco_. The name had stuck in his
memory from last night’s talk–linked with the sight of
the four copper magnates and Don Alejandro’s aloofness.
The Gran Seco was a strange and comfortless place, and
it was perched far up in the mountains. This gorgeous
building was at variance with the atmosphere with which the
name was invested for him, and he stared with lively
curiosity at its magnificence.

Suddenly the great doors opened and a man came out,
escorted by two bowing porters. The sentries saluted, a
big limousine drew up, and he was borne away. Archie
had a glimpse of a tall figure in dark grey clothes, and,
what seemed out of keeping with the weather, a bowler hat.
The face was middle-aged and bearded–a trim black beard
like a naval officer’s. As he passed, the man had glanced
at him, and, even in that short second of time, there was
something in those eyes which startled him. They seemed
so furiously alive. There was nothing inquisitive in them,
but they were searching, all-embracing. Archie felt that
this was one who missed nothing and forgot nothing; he
had had an impression of supreme competence which was
as vivid as an electric shock. No wonder the Gran Seco
was a success, he thought, if it had men of that quality in
its management.

The broad pavements, the double line of trams, the shop-windows
as soberly rich as those of the Rue de la Paix,
the high white buildings narrowing in the distance to enfold
a blue gleam of the sea, made an impressive picture of wealth
and enlightenment. There was a curious absence of colour,
for the people he passed seemed all to be wearing dark
clothes; they were a quiet people, too, who spoke without the
southern vehemence. Emancipation had come to the ladies
of Olifa, for there were many abroad, walking delicately
on the pavement, or showing their powdered prettiness in
motor-cars. Here was none of the riotous life of the old
quarter, and Archie had an impression of the city as
elaborately civilised and of its richer inhabitants as decorous
to the point of inanity. There were no peasants to be seen,
nor a single beggar; the Avenida de la Paz seemed to be
kept as a promenade for big business and cultivated leisure.
Archie grinned when he remembered the picture he had
formed of Olifa, as a decadent blend of ancient Spain and
second-rate modern Europe, with a vast wild hinterland
pressing in upon its streets. The reality was as polished
and secure as Paris–a reticent Paris, with a dash of Wall
Street.

One splash of colour caught his eye. It came from a big
touring car, which had drawn up at the pavement’s edge
and had disgorged its occupants. The driver was a young
man strangely clad in starched linen knickerbockers, a golf-jumper
designed in a willow-plate pattern of blue and white,
pale blue stockings, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He
sat negligently at the wheel, and as Archie stared at him he
tilted his hat over his brow. Presently there emerged from
the shop two girls and a second youth–the youth in snowy
white flannels with a scarlet sash, and the girls in clothes
the like of which Archie had never seen, but which in his
own mind he classed as the kind of thing for a tropical
garden-party. He noticed, since the extreme shortness of their
skirts made their legs their most notable feature, that they
had black patent-leather shoes with silver buckles, and
wonderful shot-silver stockings.

“You all right, honey?” one of them addressed the
driver.

“Fine. Got the candy you want?”

Then an argument arose between the two girls and the
other youth, an argument conducted in a dialect unintelligible
to Archie, and in voices which forcibly reminded him
of the converse of a basket of kittens. The four in that
discreet monochrome place were indecently conspicuous, but
they were without modesty, and among the stares and
whispers of the crowded pavement conducted their private
dispute with the freedom of children. The driver at last
grew bored.

“Aw, come on, Baby,” he cried. “Get off the side-walk
and come aboard. We got to hustle.”

They obeyed him, and the car presently slid into the
traffic, the driver’s hat still tilted over his brows. Archie
believed that he recognised one of the young women as a
member of the party from the American yacht who had
been dining in the hotel restaurant the night before. He
rather resented their presence in Olifa. These half-witted
children of pleasure were out of the picture which he had
made for himself; they even conflicted with Olifa’s conception
of herself. “The United States,” he told himself,
“won’t be too popular in Latin America if it unlooses on
it much goods of that type.”

At last the Avenida passed from shops and offices into a
broad belt of garden, flanked on one side by the Customs
House and on the other by the building which housed the
Port authorities. Beyond them lay the green waters of
the old harbour, and the very spot where the first Conquistadors
had landed. The new harbour, where the copper
from the Gran Seco was shipped, lay farther south, close
to the railway-stations; the old one was now almost unused
except for fishing-boats, and as a landing-place for the
yachts which berthed in the outer basin behind the great
breakwater. To the north was a little plaza which was
all that remained of the first port of Olifa. It was a picturesque
half-moon of crumbling stone, and seemed to be
mainly composed of cafés and cinema houses.

Archie sniffed the salt breeze from the west, and limped
cheerfully along the water-front, for he loved to be near
the sea. In the outer basin he saw the funnels and top-gear
of the yacht _Corinna_, on which he had aforetime enjoyed
the Duke of Burminster’s hospitality. It annoyed him that
his friend should have sold or chartered it to the kind of
people he had seen in the motor-car.

A launch from the yacht was even then approaching
the landing-stage. Archie could read the name on a sailor’s
jersey. Two men were landed, one who looked like a
steward, and the other a thick-set fellow in an engineer’s
overalls. They separated at once, and the second of the
two walked in Archie’s direction. Archie had a bad memory
for faces, but there was something in this figure which woke
recollection. As they came abreast and their eyes met, both
came half unconsciously to a halt. The man seemed to
stiffen and his right hand to rise in a salute which he
promptly checked. He had a rugged face which might have
been hewn out of mahogany, and honest, sullen, blue eyes.

“Hullo,” said Archie, “I’ve seen you before. Now,
where on earth . . . ?”

The man gave him no assistance, but stood regarding him
in a sulky embarrassment. He sniffed, and in lieu of a
handkerchief drew his hand across his nose, and the movement
stirred some chord in Archie’s memory.

“I’ve got it. You were with General Hannay. I remember
you in that black time before Amiens. Hamilton’s
your name, isn’t it? Corporal Hamilton?”

Like an automaton the figure stiffened. “Sirr, that’s my
name.” Then it relaxed. It was as if Archie’s words had
recalled it for a moment to a military discipline which it
hastened to repudiate.

“Do you remember me?”

“Ay. Ye’re Captain Sir Erchibald Roylance.” There
was no “sirr” this time.

“Well, this is a queer place to foregather. I think the
occasion demands a drink. Let’s try one of these cafés.”

The man seemed unwilling. “I’m a wee bit pressed for
time.”

“Nonsense, Hamilton, you can spare five minutes. I want
to hear how you’ve been getting on and what landed you
here. Hang it, you and I and the General went through
some pretty stiff times together. We can’t part on this
foreign strand with a how-d’ye-do.”

Archie led the way to a café in the crescent of old houses
which looked a little cleaner than the rest.

“What’ll you have, Hamilton?” he asked when they had
found a table. “You probably don’t fancy the native wine.
Bottled beer? Or rum? Or can you face aguardiente,
which is the local whisky?”

“I’m a teetotaller. I’ll hae a glass o’ syrup.”

“Well, I’m dashed. . . . Certainly–I never drink
myself in the morning. Now, about yourself? You’re a
Glasgow man, aren’t you? Pretty warm place, Glasgow.
Are you and the other soldier-lads keeping the Bolshies
in order?”

Hamilton’s mahogany face moved convulsively, and his
blue eyes wandered embarrassedly to the door.

“My opinions has underwent a change. I’m thinkin’ of
anither kind of war nowadays. I’m for the prolytawriat.”

“The devil you are!” Archie gasped. “So am I, but
my opinions are still the same. What exactly do you
mean?”

The man’s embarrassment increased. “I’m for the proly–prolytawriat.
Us worrkers maun stick thegither and brek
our chains. I’ve been fechtin’ for the rights o’ man.”

“Fighting with what?”

“Wi’ the pollis. That’s the reason I’m out here. I made
Govan a wee thing ower het for me.”

Archie regarded him with a mystified face, which slowly
broke into a smile.

“I’m sorry to say that you’re a liar, Hamilton.”

“I’m tellin’ ye God’s truth,” was the reply without heat.
Embarrassment had gone, and the man seemed to be speaking
a part which he had already rehearsed.

“No. You’re lying. Very likely you had trouble with
the police, but I bet it wasn’t over politics. More likely a
public-house scrap, or a girl. Why on earth you should
want to make yourself out a Bolshie . . . ?”

“My opinions has underwent a change,” the man chanted.

“Oh, drat your opinions! You got into some kind of row
and cleared out. That’s intelligible enough, though I’m
sorry to hear it. What’s your present job? Are you in
the _Corinna_?”

“Ay, I cam out in her. I’m in the engine-room.”

“But you know nothing about ships?”

“I ken something aboot ship’s engines. Afore the war
I wrocht at Clydebank. . . . And now, if ye’ll excuse me,
I maun be off, for I’ve a heap o’ jobs ashore. Thank ye
for your kindness.”

“I call this a perfectly rotten affair,” said Archie. “You
won’t stay, you won’t drink, and you keep on talking like a
parrot about the proletariat. What am I to say to General
Hannay when I meet him? That you have become a blithering
foreign communist?”

“Na, na. Ye maunna say that.” The man’s sullenness
had gone, and there was humour in his eye. “Say that
Geordie Hamilton is still obeyin’ orders, and daein’ his duty
up to his lights.”

“Whose orders?” Archie asked, but the corporal was
already making for the door.

The young man walked back to the hotel in a reflective
mood, and at luncheon gave Janet a summary of the events
of the morning. He had been storing up his impressions of
Olifa for her, and had meant to descant upon the old city
and the market and the Cathedral Square, but he found
these pictures obscured by his later experiences. “Most
extraordinary thing. I ran up against a fellow who used
to be Dick Hannay’s batman–regular chunky Scots Fusilier
and brave as a badger–Hamilton they call him. Well, he
had the cheek to tell me that he had changed his views and
become a Bolshie and had consequently had to clear out of
Glasgow. I swear the chap was lying–could see it in his
face–but I’m puzzled why he should want to lie to me. . . .
He says he has some kind of engineer’s job on the _Corinna_.
. . . More by token, I saw a selection of the _Corinna_
party in a motor-car in the Avenida. Dressed up like
nothing on earth, and chattering like jays!”

“We had them here this morning,” said Janet. “Pretty
little savages with heads like mops. I’ve christened them
the Moplahs.”

“Was there a fellow in starched linen bags? He was
the prize donkey.”

Janet shook her head. “There was only one man with
them and he wore white flannels. I can’t quite make them
out. They behave like demented trippers, and are always
pawing and ragging each other, but I came on the young
man suddenly when I went to the bureau to ask about
postage, and when the clerk couldn’t tell me he answered
my question. His whole voice and manner seemed to
change, and he became startlingly well-bred. . . . I want
to explore the Moplahs. And I would rather like to see
again the tall girl I had a glimpse of yesterday. I can’t
get it out of my head that I’ve seen her before.”

III

On the following evening Janet and Archie dined as Don
Alejandro’s guests at the Club de Residentes Extranjeros.
The club, situated in one of the squares to the north of
the Avenida, was a proof of Olifa’s wealth and her cosmopolitanism.
In the broad cool patio a fountain tinkled,
and between it and the adjoining arcades tropical plants in
green tubs made the air fragrant. The building was for the
most part a copy of an old Spanish town house, but the
billiard-room was panelled in oak with a Tudor ceiling, the
card-room was Flemish, and the big dining-room Italian
Renaissance. The night was freshly warm, with light airs
stirring the oleanders, and, from the table which Don
Alejandro had selected, the patio was a velvet dusk shot
with gold and silver gleams like tiny searchlights.

The only other guest was the American Consul. Mr
Roderick Wilbur was a heavy man, with the smooth pale
face of eupeptic but sedentary middle-age. His years in
Olifa had not mellowed his dry, high-pitched New England
voice, or endowed him with a single Latin grace. He
looked upon the other diners with the disapproving air of
a Scots elder of the kirk surveying a travelling theatrical
company, and the humour which now and then entered his
eye was like the frosty twinkle of a very distant star.

Don Alejandro was in a vivacious mood. He was the
showman of his beloved city, but he was no less a representative
of his beloved Europe; he wished the strangers
to praise Olifa but to recognise him as a cosmopolitan.
Archie and Janet satisfied his patriotism, for, having hired
a car that afternoon and driven round the city, they overflowed
in admiration.

“You were right,” Janet told him. “There is no mystery
in Olifa. It is all as smooth and polished as a cabochon
emerald, and, like a cabochon, you can’t see far inside it.
Your people have the satisfied look of London suburbanites
on a Sunday up the river.”

“Your police are too good,” said Archie. “One doesn’t
see a single ragamuffin in the main streets. Janet and I
prefer the old quarter. Some day, Don Alejandro, we want
you to take us round it and tell us who the people are.
They look like samples of every South American brand since
the Aztecs.”

“The Aztecs lived in Mexico,” Janet corrected.

“Well, I mean the chaps that were downed by the
Conquistadors.”

Don Alejandro laughed. “Our old quarter is only a
tourist spectacle, like the native city in Tangier. For the
true country life you must go to the estancias and the
savannahs. I have arranged by telegraph for your visit
to my cousin at Veiro.”

“And the Gran Seco?”

“That also is in train. But it is more difficult and will
take time.”

“I said there was no mystery in Olifa,” Janet observed,
“but I rather think I was wrong. There is the Gran Seco.
It seems to be as difficult to get into it as into a munition
factory. Have you been there, Mr. Wilbur?”

The American Consul had been devoting serious attention
to his food, stopping now and then to regard Janet with
benevolent attention.

“Why, yes, Lady Roylance,” he said. “I’ve been up to
the Gran Seco just the once since it blossomed out. I’ve
no great call to go there, for Americans don’t frequent it
to any considerable extent.”

“Wilbur hates the place,” said Don Alejandro. “He
thinks that every commercial undertaking on the globe
should belong to his countrymen, and it vexes him that the
Gran Seco capital should be European.”

“Don’t you pay any attention to Mr Gedd,” said the big
man placidly. “He’s always picking on my poor little
country. But I can’t say I care for that salubrious plateau.
I don’t like being shepherded at every turn as if I was a
crook, and I reckon the Montana sage-brush is more picturesque.
Also they haven’t much notion up there of laying
out a township. They’d be the better of some honest-to-God
Americans to look after the plumbing.”

“See! He is all for standardising life. What a dull
world the United States would make of it!”

“That’s so. We prefer dullness to microbes. All the
same, there’s things about the Gran Seco which you can see
with half an eye aren’t right. I didn’t like the look of the
miners. You never in your days saw such a hang-dog,
miserable bunch, just like some of our old Indian reservations,
where big chief Wet Blanket and his wives used to
drink themselves silly on cheap bourbon. And how in
thunder does Castor get his labour? He’s got a mighty
graft somewhere, but when I first came here the Gran
Seco Indians were a difficult folk to drive. I’ve heard that
in old times the Olifa Government had trouble with them
over the conscription.”

“They were savages,” said Don Alejandro, “and they
are savages still. Castor has doubtless the art of dealing
with them, for he himself is on the grand scale a savage.”

Archie pricked up his ears.

“Castor? Who is he?”

“The Gobernador of the province. Also the President
of the company.”

“I saw a fellow coming out of the Gran Seco head office–a
fellow with a black beard, who didn’t look as if he
missed much.”

“That was Señor Castor. You are fortunate, Sir
Archibald, for you, a new arrival, have already seen Olifa’s
great man, and that is a privilege but rarely granted to us
Oliferos. He descends upon us and vanishes as suddenly
as a river mist.”

“Tell me about him,” said Janet. “Where does he come
from? What is his nationality?”

Don Alejandro shook his head. “I do not know. Mr
Wilbur, who is a man of hasty judgments, will say that he
is a Jew. He is certainly a European, but not a Spaniard,
though he speaks our tongue. I can only say that he
emerged out of nothing five years ago, and became at once
a prince. He rules the Gran Seco, and its officials are
altogether his creation. And since he rules the Gran Seco
he rules Olifa. He has, as Mr Wilbur would say, this
country of mine by the short hairs.”

“He don’t meddle with politics,” said the American, and
Janet noticed that as he spoke he cast a quick glance around
him, as if he did not wish to be overheard. Don Alejandro,
too, had lowered his voice.

“What nonsense!” said the latter. “He is money, and
money is our politics to-day. Once we Latins of America
were a great race. We were Europeans, with minds enlarged
and spirits braced by a new continent. You are a
soldier, Sir Archibald, and will remember that the bloodiest
battles of last century were fought in La Plata and on the
Uruguay. Our plains were the nursery of the liberties of
Italy. But now we have but the one goddess. We are
rich and nothing more. Soon we shall be richer, and then,
my dear Wilbur, we shall be the devotees of your great
country, which is the high-priest of riches.”

“I can’t say that you’re showing any special devotion
just at present,” said the other dryly. “My nationals–thank
God there aren’t many–are about the most unpopular
in this State. But quit talking about politics. We’re out
to give you a good time, Lady Roylance, and we want to
know just how you’d like us to set about it.”

Janet was of a patient and philosophical temper, but
Archie liked to take his sensations in gulps. So far Olifa,
he admitted to himself, had been a little boring. The place,
for all its beauty, had a deadly commonplaceness–it was
the typical bourgeois State, as Don Alejandro had declared
the first night. And yet he was conscious that this judgment
did not exhaust the matter. There were moments when he
felt that Olifa was a strange woman in a mask of cheap
silk, a volcano overspread with suburban gardens. Behind
even the decorousness of the Avenida he savoured a mystery.
Into the pleasant monotony of the days had come wafts of
air from some other sphere–a peasant’s face in the market,
the bearded Gobernador, the pallid men in the hotel, even
the preposterous figure of Dick Hannay’s former batman.
These things had stirred in him an irrational interest. . . .
Perhaps if he went into the hinterland he would find the
glamour of Olifa, of whose existence he was convinced, but
which had hitherto contrived to evade him.

The club dining-room was full, and when they left it for
coffee on the terrace beside the patio they had difficulty
in finding chairs. It was apparently the practice to dine
elsewhere and come to the club to dance, for a band was
pounding out ragtime, and a dozen couples were on the floor.

“The Moplahs,” Janet sighed happily.

It was beyond doubt the American party from the yacht,
and in that place they were as exotic as a tuberose in a bed
of wallflowers. They had conformed to convention in their
dress, for the four men wore dinner-jackets, and the four
girls bright, short-skirted, silk-taffeta gowns and long pearl
necklaces. Among the powdered Olifero ladies and the
sallow Olifero cavaliers their fresh skins made a startling
contrast, and not less startling were their shrill, toneless
voices. They chattered incessantly, crying badinage to each
other and to the band, as they danced the half-savage dances
with an abandon which now suggested wild children and now
the lunatic waltzing of hares in an April moonlight. Janet
laughed aloud, the picture was so crazily fantastic. A
Spanish girl, in a frock with wide flounces and with blue-black
hair dressed high and surmounted by a gold comb,
was suddenly cannoned into by a fluffy-headed minx, who
apologised in a voice like a vindictive kitten’s, and was
rewarded by a stony stare. Just so, Janet remembered, she
had seen a greyhound repel the impudence of a Skye terrier.

“I don’t see my tall girl,” she said.

“The fellow with the starched linen knickerbockers isn’t
here,” said Archie. “I didn’t see his face, but I think I
would know him again. Who are they, Mr Wilbur?”

The American’s eyes were hard with disapproval. “I
can’t tell you their names, but they’re off the _Corinna_.
They’re in Burton Rawlinson’s party. Mr Rawlinson isn’t
on board himself, and there can’t be much of a restraining
hand to shepherd the bunch. Some of them have been to
my office, and I judge I’m going to hear of trouble with
them before they quit these shores. They want this city
to stop still and take notice of them.”

Archie inquired concerning Mr Rawlinson.

“He’s a fine man and a big man, one of the biggest on
the Pacific coast. I’ve nothing against Burton. He’s rich,
and he’s public-spirited, and he’s gotten a mighty fine collection
of pictures. I can’t say I take to his offspring and
their friends. There’s more dollars than sense in that
outfit.”

“I like the Moplahs,” said Janet. “I want to know
them.”

Archie, who was a connoisseur of dancing, observed that
the men danced better than the women, a thing he had
noticed before with Americans. “Did a fellow with
starched linen bags ever come to your office?” he asked
the Consul. “Slightly built fellow, a little shorter than
me?”

Mr Wilbur shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t remember
him. All their garments struck me as curious.
Heaven knows what’s going to become of our youth, Sir
Archibald. They’ve quit behaving like ladies and gentlemen–running
wild like bronchos, and their parents can’t do the
lassooing. They’re hard cases at seventeen.”

“There’s an appalling innocence about them,” said Janet
and looked up smiling, for two of the dancers had left the
floor and were approaching them.

The girl was small, and a little too plump, but very pretty,
with a mop of golden curls like a mediæval page’s. The
young man was thin and beaky, and his longish hair was
parted in the middle.

“Say, what about dancing?” he said. “Won’t you cut
in?” He looked at Janet, while the girl smiled pleasantly
on Archie.

“Most awfully sorry,” said Archie. “I’d love to, but
I’ve got a game leg.”

“Pardon?”

“I mean I’m a bit lame.”

Janet rose smiling and took the young man’s arm.

“I don’t know your name,” said Mr Wilbur, who was a
stickler for the conventions, “but I reckon you’re with
the _Corinna_ party. This lady is Lady Roylance.”

The youth regarded him solemnly. “You’ve said it,
Grandpa,” was his reply. “Come on, lady.”

The girl was still partnerless, and Don Alejandro offered
himself for the breach. He sprang to his feet and bowed
deeply from the waist. “If I may have the honour,” he
said. Archie and the Consul were left alone to their cigars.

The dancing-place was soon crowded, and Janet and
Don Alejandro seemed to have been completely absorbed into
the whirl. Glimpses could be caught of Janet’s porcelain
elegance, and of an unwontedly energetic Don Alejandro
in the grip of various corybantic maidens. The two men
in the lounge-chairs presently ceased to be spectators and
fell into talk.

Mr Wilbur, as if the absence of his colleague had unsealed
his tongue, expanded and became almost confidential. He
asked Archie for his impressions of Olifa, and when he
was told “tidy and contented and opulent,” nodded an
acquiescent head.

“You’re about right, sir. That’s Olifa first and last–the
Olifa of to-day. Better policed than New York, and
just about as clean as Philadelphia. Manicured, you might
say. But it wasn’t always like that. When I first came
here Olifa was the ordinary South American republic,
always on the edge of bankruptcy and revolution, and this
city had one of the worst names on the coast. The waterfront
was a perfect rat-hole for every criminal in the Pacific–every
brand of roughneck and dope-smuggler and crook–dagos
with knives and niggers with razors and the scum
of the U-nited States with guns. To-day you could take your
wife along it in perfect safety any hour of the night. The
Treasury was empty, for politics were simply who could get
their hands first and deepest into it. There was bad trouble
up-country, and there was always a war going on in the
mountains, which the little under-fed and never-paid soldiers
couldn’t win. Now we’ve got a big balance in the budget
and the peace of God over the land. It’s a kind of miracle.
It’s almost against nature, Sir Archibald.”

“Why, it’s principally the Gran Seco,” he continued, in
response to Archie’s request for an explanation. “That,
as you know, is the richest copper proposition on the globe,
and the Government has a big share in it. There’s money
to burn for everybody nowadays. But there’s more than
money. Olifa’s gotten a first-class brain to help her along.”

“The President?”

Wilbur laughed.

“The Excelentisimo is a worthy gentleman, and he has
gotten some respectable folks to help him, but it isn’t the
President of this republic that has made the desert blossom
like the rose. There’s a bigger brain behind him.”

“You mean the Gran Seco fellow–what’s his name?”

“I mean Mr Castor. At least I reckon it must be Mr
Castor, for there isn’t anybody else. You see, I can size
up the members of the Government, because I know them,
so it must be the man I don’t know.”

“I see. Well, it’s clear that I must get alongside of this
Castor if I’m to learn much about Olifa. What’s the best
way to work it?”

“Through the President, I reckon. I’d like to help you,
but I haven’t much of a pull in Olifa just at the moment.
You see, the U-nited States is going through one of its
periodical fits of unpopularity. Olifa has waxed fat, like
the man in the Bible, and she’s kicking, and when a South
American nation kicks it’s generally against the U-nited
States. Don Alejandro will fix an interview with the
President for you, and he’ll arrange your trip to the Gran
Seco. He’s a good little man, though he don’t like my
country.”

Thereafter Mr Wilbur discoursed of his nation–its
strength and its weakness, its active intelligence, imperfect
manners, and great heart. He was a critic, but he was also
an enthusiast. To this man, grown old in foreign lands
in his country’s service, America was still the America of
his youth. Her recent developments he knew only from
the newspapers, and he loyally strove to reconcile them with
his old ideal. America only needed to be understood to be
loved, but it was hard to get her true worth across the
footlights. “You English,” he said, “have got a neat,
hard-shell national character, with a high gloss on it.
Foreigners may not like it, but they can’t mistake it. It
hits them in the eye every time. But we’re young and
growing and have a lot of loose edges, and it’s mighty hard
to make people understand that often when we talk foolishness
we mean wisdom, and that when we act high and
mighty and rile our neighbours it’s because we’re that busy
trying to get a deal through we haven’t time to think of
susceptibilities. You’ve got to forget our untidy fringes.”

“Like the crowd from the yacht,” said Archie. “They
don’t rile me a bit, I assure you. . . . Just look at the
way that lad dances. He might be David capering before
the Lord.”

“That’s because you’ve seen a lot of the world, Sir
Archibald. I reckon you’ve met enough Americans to know
the real thing.”

“No, I’ve met very few. You see, I’ve never crossed the
Atlantic before. But I knew one American, and for his
sake I’m ready to back your country against all comers. He
was about the wisest and bravest and kindest old fellow
I ever came across.”

Mr Wilbur asked his name.

“He’s dead, poor chap. Died a few months ago. I
daresay you’ve heard of him. His name was Blenkiron–John
S. Blenkiron.”

Archie had his eye on the Hebraic dancer or he might have
noticed a sudden change in his companion’s face. When
Mr Wilbur spoke again–and that was after a considerable
pause–it was in a voice from which all feeling had gone,
the voice in which he conducted his consular duties.

“Yes. I’ve heard of Mr Blenkiron. Mighty fine man,
they tell me. Just how well did you know him, Sir Archibald?”

“I only saw him for a week or two in the Amiens business
of March ’18. But they were pretty solemn weeks,
and you get to know a man reasonably well if you’re
fighting for your life beside him. He was with a great pal
of mine, General Hannay, and the two of them put up a
famous show at Gavrelle. I can see old Blenkiron’s face
yet, getting cheerier the more things went to the devil, and
fairly beaming when the ultimate hell was reached. I
wouldn’t ask for a better partner in a scrap. I’m most
awfully sorry he died. I always hoped to see him again.”

“Too bad,” said Mr Wilbur, and he seemed to be
absorbed in some calculation, for his brows were knitted.

A flushed Janet joined them, attended by two cavaliers
who insisted on plundering the pot plants to give her flowers.
Presently Don Alejandro also extricated himself from the
dancers, with his black-corded eyeglass hanging over his
left shoulder.

“These innocents are going to the Gran Seco,” Janet
announced. “They seem to think it is a sort of country
club, but if your account is true, Mr Wilbur, they’ll be like
humming-birds in a dustbin.”

“They surely will,” said the Consul. “When do you
expect your own permits, Lady Roylance?”

“They should be ready to-morrow,” said Don Alejandro.

Archie and Janet left their caleche at the hotel gates, and
walked up the steep avenue to enjoy the coolness of the
night wind. At the esplanade on the top they halted to
marvel at the view. Below them lay the old town with
the cathedral towers white in the moonlight–a blur of
shadows in which things like glow-worms twinkled at rare
intervals, and from which came confused echoes of some
secret nocturnal life. Beyond lay the shining belt of the
Avenida, and the Ciudad Nueva mounting its little hills in
concentric circles of light. On the other side the old
harbour was starred with the riding lights of ships, and the
lamps of the water-front made a double line, reflection and
reality. To the south at the new harbour there was a glow
of fires and the clamour of an industry which did not cease
at sunset. To the west, beyond the great breakwater, sea
and sky melted under the moon into a pale infinity.

Suddenly Archie’s spirits awoke. He seemed to see
Olifa as what he had hoped–not a decorous city of
careerists, but a frontier post on the edge of mysteries.
The unknown was there, crowding in upon the pert little
pride of man. In the golden brume to the east were mountains–he
could almost see them–running up to icefields
and splintered pinnacles, and beyond them swamps and
forests as little travelled as in the days of Cortes. Between
the desert of the ocean and the desert of the hills lay this
trivial slip of modernity, but a step would take him beyond
it into an antique land. The whiff of a tropical blossom
from the shrubberies and the faint odour of wood smoke
unloosed a flood of memories–hot days in the African
bush, long marches in scented Kashmir glens, shivering
camps on Himalayan spurs. The War had overlaid that
first youth of his, when he had gone east to see the world,
but the rapture and magic were now returning. He felt
curiously expectant and happy.

“I’ve a notion that we’re going to have the time of our
lives here,” he told his wife.

But Janet did not reply. For three days she had been
busy chasing a clue through her memory and now she had
grasped it. She had suddenly remembered who was the
tall girl she had seen with the party from the _Corinna_ on
the day of their arrival.

All night Archie dreamed of the Gran Seco. As he saw
it, it was a desolate plateau culminating in a volcano. The
volcano was erupting, and amid the smoke and fire a colossal
human figure sat at its ease. Then the dream became
a nightmare–for the figure revealed itself as having the
face and beard of the man he had seen leaving the office
in the Avenida, but the starched white linen knickerbockers
of the preposterous young American.

IV

Archie set out on his exploration of Olifa with his nose in
the air, like a dog looking for game. The spell of a new
country had fallen on him, as had happened fifteen years
before when he left school. The burden of the War and
all it had brought, the cares of politics, the preoccupations
of home had slipped from his shoulders, and he felt himself
again an adventurer, as when he had first studied maps
and listened hungrily to travellers’ tales. But now he had
one supreme advantage–he had a companion; and Janet,
who had never before been out of Europe, was as eager as
he was to squeeze the last drop out of new experience.

He left over his more important letters for the moment
and used those introductions which had been given him by
the friends he had made during his time at the Madrid
Embassy. The result was that the pair were taken to the
heart of a pleasant, rigid little society–as remote from interest
in the Government of Olifa as an unreconstructed
Southern planter is from a Republican White House, or a
Royalist Breton from the Elysée. Archie was made a
member of the Polo Club and played with agreeable young
men, who had their clothes and saddlery from London and
their manners from the eighteenth century. A ball was
given in their honour, where the most popular dance, to
Janet’s amazement, was a form of Lancers. They met composed
maidens who were still in bondage to their duennas:
and young married women, languishing and voluble, or
discreet and domesticated, among whose emphatic complexions
Janet’s delicate colouring was like a wood-anemone
among gardenias: and witty grandmothers running terribly
to fat: and ancient hidalgos with beaks like birds of prey.
It was a comfortable society, with the secure good manners
of a tiny aristocracy, but it knew of no world beyond its
pale, and was profoundly uninterested in its neighbours.

They went a little, too, into business circles, both Olifero
and alien, the representatives of shipping and trading companies
and the big foreign banks. This, too, was a pleasant
world, good-tempered and prosperous. Here they heard
much of politics, but it was business politics. The existing
Government was spoken of with respect, but not with intimate
knowledge; it functioned well, kept the country
solvent, and left trade in peace. Politicians were a class by
themselves, a dubious class, though it was believed that the
present lot were honest. But they met none of the Copper
people. These seemed to form an oligarchy apart, and were
mentioned respectfully but distantly. When Archie asked
about the Gran Seco he was only given statistics of output
and an encomium on its efficiency. Of its President the
commercial world of Olifa spoke as an ordinary
automobile-manufacturer might speak of Henry Ford, as one
who was a law to himself, an object to admire, but not to
emulate.

“This is a queer place,” Archie told Janet. “It seems
to have two Governors–the Castor fellow and the President–and
the ordinary man don’t seem to know or care
much about either. It’s about time we started out for the
Gran Seco.”

But when Don Alejandro was approached on the matter
he had to explain with many apologies that their permits
had not arrived. There was some inconceivably foolish hitch,
which he had not yet tracked down.

“But the American troupe got through straight away,”
Archie complained. “They left a week ago.”

“I know. That is a way Americans have. Perhaps in
your case the difficulty is Mr Wilbur. Officiously and quite
unnecessarily he interested himself in getting your passes,
so he said–and he may have exhausted his purchase in
franking his countrymen through and raised a prejudice.
As I have told you, his nation is not loved by our Government.”

Don Alejandro went on to explain that the delay could
only be a matter of days. “Meantime, why not visit my
cousin at Veiro? There you must go some time, and this
hiatus gives you the chance.”

So to Veiro they went–fifty miles by train and twenty
by motor-car along a superb concrete highway, which suddenly
gave out four miles from the house, so that the
journey was completed by a sandy track over primeval
prairie. They arrived just at sunset, when the place swam in
a clear coppery gold. The house was low and white and
seemed to cover acres, with its adobe outbuildings, its
great corrals for the cattle, and its trim red-roofed stables
built on the English model. The palms of the coast had
been left behind, and at this elevation the tropics had faded
from the landscape. The garden was ablaze with coverts of
hibiscus and plots of scarlet zinnias among the rough lawns,
and the wind-breaks which flanked it were of acacias and
walnuts. A big irrigation dam to the right caught the last
rays of the sun, and beyond it the tender green of the
alfalfa fields seemed a continuation of its waters. Far to
the east, above the lifting savannahs, was a saw-like edge of
tenuous white mountains which seemed to hang in the central
heavens. There was a succession of thin spires now
picked out with gold and rose. Archie asked their name.

“Los Doce Apóstolas–the Twelve Apostles,” said the
driver, and rattled off a list of uncouth syllables.

Don Mario Sanfuentes, the cousin of Don Alejandro,
was small, spare, and blue-jowled, with the figure of a
groom and the profound solemnity of the man who lives
with horses. His wife was dead and his ranch and stables
were to him both family and profession. He greeted his
visitors with the grave courtesy of manner which needs no
words to emphasise it. Their rooms were wide chambers
with scrubbed wooden floors and windows looking across
a broad verandah to a hundred miles of space, as bare and
fresh as a convent dormitory. They had their meals in a
dining-room which contained the remnants of the Sanfuentes
heirlooms–cabinets of lacquer and tortoiseshell, a Murillo
which had been an altar-piece in one of the forgotten
churches of the Conquistadors, fantastic tapestries now
faded into a mellow confusion, an Italian triptych of carved
ivory, and a great galleon of tarnished silver. But they
sat mostly in Don Mario’s own room, where in the evenings
a wood fire was lit in the wide fireplace–a room where
every table was littered with books and papers and cigar-boxes
and quirts and crops and spurs, and from the walls
looked down the delicate heads of those descendants of the
Darley Arab, the Byerley Turk, and the Godolphin Barb
whose fame has gone abroad wherever men love horses.

By day Archie and Janet rode with their host about his
estate, examined his young stock, and tried out promising
colts on the gallops, where by assiduous care a better turf
had been got than in the ordinary savannah. At every meal
the talk was of horses, but at night, when the fire was lit,
Don Mario from the depths of his well-rubbed armchair
would speak at large of the land. In modern Olifa he had
little interest, but he told of the diversions of his youth–his
pack of foxhounds which had to be so constantly renewed
from England that he gave up the game in despair,
tiger hunting in the forest country, punitive expeditions
against Indian horse-thieves from the hills. The time
passed in a delicious calm: a combination, said Janet, of
Newmarket and Scotland. And then on the last day of
their stay came another visitor.

“I cannot tell you about this country,” Don Mario said,
“for I am an old horse-breeder who lives apart. But I
have bidden young Luis de Marzaniga to sleep the night.
His mother was cousin to the husband of my great-aunt’s
niece. Luis has travelled abroad and seen the world, but
especially he has travelled in Olifa. No. He is no politician,
nor is he engaged in business. He is like me–what
you call a country gentleman. But he has youth and inquisitiveness,
both of which I have long since lost.”

So, when the Roylances, having bathed and changed
after a long ride in the sun, came down to dinner, they
found a strange young man awaiting them. Don Mario’s
evening garb had been a little like that of a deaf-mute at a
funeral, but this young man wore the trimmest of dinner-jackets
and the neatest of patent-leather shoes. His hair
was as fair as Archie’s; but some colouring in his skin had
made him sunburn not to Archie’s brick-red but to a rich
golden-brown. His eyes were brown, and the large expanse
of white in them was the only foreign thing in his appearance.
Otherwise he looked like a young English cavalry
subaltern, whose duties permitted him to hunt three days
a week.

Dinner that evening was a cheerful meal. Don Luis
chaffed his distant kinsman, with whom he was obviously
in high favour, and Don Mario expanded in silent laughter.
All spoke English–Don Mario very correct and stilted, Don
Luis nobly ungrammatical but notably idiomatic. To Janet’s
questions he replied that his education had been chiefly in
Olifa, but that he had visited Europe seven times, and
during the last six months of the War had had a commission
in the French Air Force. He had only just returned
from Paris.

The mention of flying woke up Archie, and for a little
the room hummed with technicalities. Archie inquired concerning
the Olifa Air Force, and was told that it was efficient
but small–not more than five squadrons. The Olifero
did not take readily to the air, and the pilots were mostly
foreigners–Germans who had found their career cut short
at home, and, Don Luis thought, one or two Russians. “It
is like all our army,” he said, “a little force of expert
mercenaries. Olifa needs no army. In the future she will
fight her battles with gold.”

Don Luis was very ready to talk. He answered Archie’s
many questions on sport with enthusiasm, and drew sketch-maps
to illustrate the lie of the land. As to politics, he had
not Don Mario’s apathy. He was ready with amusing
portraits of Olifa’s statesmen and with cogent summaries of
policy. He was also a humorist, and had a repertoire of
tales. But he was a discreet young man, and ventured no
opinion of his own. He was neither reactionary nor progressive,
only an interested spectator.

On the Gran Seco he was highly informing. He described
the nature of the copper deposits, and the new
processes which had reduced costs and made it the Golconda
of Olifa. Castor he knew only by sight. “We of Olifa
do not meet him, but we worship him from afar. He is
the god who dwells in the sanctuary.”

“The American Consul thought there might be trouble
some day. The mine-labourers are rather a savage lot,
aren’t they?”

Don Luis laughed.

“I think the wish may be–how you say?–mother to the
thought. Señor Wilbur does not love the Gran Seco. No
doubt it is a difficult place, but Señor Castor is beyond doubt
a Napoleon and flourishes on difficulties. It will be all
right.”

“Why does he keep the place so tightly shut? We have
been waiting a fortnight for a permit to enter.”

“So! Then there must be some foolish mistake of clerks.
Señor Castor is not likely to be uncivil–least of all to a
charming lady and to a member of the English Parliament.
He is a lover of Europe.”

Don Luis had many questions to ask in turn, and it slowly
dawned upon one of his hearers that this candid and friendly
young man was taking in more than he gave out. Archie
was drawn to speak of his own past–his eastern travels,
his experiences in the War, even of his friends, who could
mean nothing to a South American who had only once been
in England. He found himself quoting Sandy Arbuthnot
by name, as if he had been in his club at home.

“I beg your pardon,” he said confusedly. “You can’t be
interested in my yarning about people you never heard of.”

“But I am deeply interested. Your friend is a wise man.
How do you call him–Arbuttnot?”

“He was Sandy Arbuthnot, but his father is dead and
he is Lord Clanroyden now.”

“A lord! Clan-roy-den. Por dios! That is a strange
name.”

“Scotch,” said Archie.

“Ah yes–Scotch. That is your Highlands? Your Gran
Seco? This Lord Clay-roy-den, he is in Scotland?”

“I’m blessed if I know where he is at the moment. He’s
never long off the road.”

Janet, too, to her surprise found herself talking to this
stranger as if she had known him from childhood. She
described vivaciously her encounter with the Moplahs.

“They are common as lentils in Olifa at certain seasons,”
said Don Luis, “those noisy, emancipated American children.
They have gone, you say, to the Gran Seco, where
Americans are not loved. There may be work then for
Señor Wilbur.”

“They are really rather nice,” said Janet. “I think I
have met one of them before. . . . Archie, I didn’t tell you,
but I believe the tall girl who was with the Moplahs the first
day and whom we never saw again was the Miss Dasent
who came to Strathlarrig. She was some sort of relation
of Mr Blenkiron.”

“Not really?” exclaimed the interested Archie. “That’s
curious. Did you ever hear of Blenkiron, Don Luis? He
died the other day–American, rather a great man–he was
the chap I was telling you about in the Shark-Gladas affair.”

The other shook his head. “I do not think so. But
American names are so difficult that it is hard to remember.
They are worse than Clan-roy-den.”

Don Mario made it his habit to retire to rest at ten o’clock,
and Janet, being very sleepy, followed soon after. Archie
and Don Luis lit a final cigar, and in the smoking of it
strolled into the moonlit verandah. On this side of the house
the view was not broken by outbuildings, and beyond a
string of paddocks the eye passed to an endless sweep of
yellow savannah which faded in the distance into a golden
haze. The air was fresh, and, though the night was still,
cool wafts seemed to drift soundlessly down from the hidden
mountains.

“My countrymen and yours fought each other for three
hundred years,” said Don Luis, “but a Spaniard and an
Englishman, when they meet, usually understand each other.
I presume, with your permission, on that old sympathy, and
I ask you boldly what are you doing here?”

The young man’s manner had changed from the debonair
ease which had marked it at dinner. It had become at once
confidential and authoritative.

“Fact is, I don’t know,” was Archie’s reply. “Principally,
Janet and I are on a postponed honeymoon. I had
a notion to pick up something about South American politics,
which might be useful to me in Parliament.”

“And you find Olifa rather barren ground?”

“I did at first. . . . Now, I am not so sure.”

“Will you let me advise you? We are both young men
and have served in war. Stay a little in Olifa if you have
not yet exhausted the charm of the capital, and then take
your delightful lady on board the first ship and go straight
home.”

“Home? Why in the world?” Archie stared at the
speaker.

“You can go to Valparaiso and Buenos Ayres if they
amuse you. But get out of Olifa.”

“But why?”

“I cannot tell you why. I am your friend, and a friend
may venture to advise without reasons.”

“But what’s the trouble? Olifa is a great deal more
peaceful than Europe. You don’t mean to say that there’s
danger. . . .”

“Olifa is a mask–you have not seen her face. Look
in front of you. You see nothing but flat pastures. But
beyond you know that there are wild mountains. So I tell
you that behind the flatness of Olifa there are wild things.”

“Well, I’m blessed! D’you know, Don Luis, you are
making Olifa rather attractive. You are giving me a very
good reason why I should stay.”

“But madame . . .”

“I don’t know. For heaven’s sake, don’t tell her what
you’re telling me, for if she gets a notion that there’s
mystery abroad she won’t stop till she is up to the neck
in it. But of course I can’t let her run any risks. . . .”

“I do not think that you will be able to help yourself–if
you stay. You may be caught up in a tide which will carry
you to things very different from your respectable English
politics. . . . And these things will not be a honeymoon.”

Archie stared at his companion’s face. The moon was
very bright and the face which it revealed was grave and
set.

“You are talking in riddles,” said Archie. “I wish you
would be more explicit. You tell me to get out of the
country, because if I stay I may have trouble. You can
hardly leave it at that, you know. What kind of trouble?
Perhaps it’s the kind that Janet and I might rather fancy.”

“That is why I warn you. You are a young man with
a wife. It is easy to see that you are not the type which
avoids danger. But a wife makes a difference–especially
such a lady as yours. You would not wish to involve her,
and yet you may unwittingly, if you do not leave Olifa.”

“Supposing I were a bachelor, what would you say?”

Don Luis laughed. “Ah, then, I should speak otherwise.
I should make of you a confidant–perhaps an ally.
You wish to visit the Gran Seco, but your passports are
unaccountably delayed. I might offer to take you to the
Gran Seco, but not by Santa Ana and the Company’s
railway.”

Archie pondered. “Everything in this country seems to
turn on the Gran Seco,” he said, “and we don’t seem to be
able to get there.”

“It may be that that blunder of officialdom is doing you
a service,” said Don Luis solemnly.

“Well, I’ve no desire to go there and get tangled up in a
local shindy, which I take it is what you are hinting at. I
remember Mr Wilbur said that the miners seemed to be an
ugly crowd. I’m very much obliged to you, Don Luis.”

“You will not tell anyone that I have warned you.”

“Certainly not. . . . I’m rather inclined to take your
advice, and tell Gedd to drop the passport business. I didn’t
come here looking for trouble–and, besides, there’s my
wife.”

But in this Archie was not wholly candid. He told himself
that what he called a “dago revolution” had no charms
for him, especially with Janet to take care of. But he
realised that this phrase did not exhaust the mystery in
Olifa, which had been slowly accumulating in his mind
till the sense of it was like an atmosphere about him. Also
he had taken a strong liking to Don Luis. The young man
had a curious appeal in his alternate gaiety and gravity.
There was that in him which seemed to beckon to wild and
delightful things; he was such a companion as Archie a
dozen years ago would have welcomed to ride with over
the edge of the world. But Archie–_rangé_, married, lame
of one leg–decided with a half-sigh that such visions and
such comrades were no longer for him.

V

On their return to the city they were met by an incensed
Don Alejandro. Not only had the permits for the Gran
Seco not arrived, they had been definitely refused. It
was not the work of the Government–this he had ascertained
from his second cousin, the Minister for External
Affairs. The refusal came from the Company itself, and
Don Alejandro was positive that it was due to the interference
of the American Consul. No doubt Wilbur had
meant well, but apparently he had pressed the request so
that the Company had assumed that he was its principal
sponsor, and had naturally refused, since they thought they
had done enough for his unpopular country by permitting
the entrance of the party from the _Corinna_. There was no
doubt about it. Don Alejandro had heard from a friend
who was deep in the Company’s affairs that Wilbur was
the cause of the refusal.

To Janet’s surprise Archie seemed rather relieved than
otherwise. “Just as well, perhaps,” he said. “We should
probably have got fever or something, and we didn’t come
six thousand miles to look at a mining district. We have
plenty of them at home.”

He had not told Janet of Don Luis’s warning, but he
had brooded over it, and with his separation from the giver
its good sense seemed to grow more convincing. Why on
earth should Janet and he waste time in visiting a dusty
plateau, even though it was the source of Olifa’s prosperity
and might have importance in Olifa’s future politics? He
would learn little in a hurried tour, and it wasn’t his line
to pick up gossip and go home and raise a racket in Parliament
about Gran Seco atrocities. . . . They would go
south to Cardanio and Alcorta, and might make a short trip
into the mountains. The Twelve Apostles would bear inspection
from closer quarters. . . . After that they would
go home by Panama, and perhaps visit Jamaica. His
mother’s family had once owned big plantations there, established
by an ancestor who had left the country hurriedly
after Culloden.

So they fell back upon Olifa society, and Archie played
polo daily at the club, and they gave a dinner at the hotel;
and were just preparing to set out for Cardanio, when they
were bidden to luncheon by no less a person than the President.
A superb card of invitation, surmounted by the Olifa
arms in gold, gave Archie the title of “Right Honourable,”
and designed Janet as the “Honourable Lady A. Roylance.”
Archie consulted Don Alejandro as to his garments, and
was informed that the manners of Olifa were English and
that they might both wear what they pleased. So Janet and
he appeared at the President’s mansion in their ordinary
clothes, to find most of the men in evening dress with ribands
and stars, and all the women in Paris hats and what looked
like wedding gowns. Janet promptly had a fit of giggles,
and it was a flushed and embarrassed pair who made their
bow to the heavy, sallow, bull-necked Excelentisimo.

The day was hot, the place where they sat was as heavily
upholstered as a Victorian dining-room, and the conversation
had the languor of a ceremonial banquet. Janet, as
the guest of honour, sat on the President’s right hand, while
Archie at the other end was sandwiched between a voluminous
elderly woman who was the President’s wife and a
sleepy Frenchwoman whose husband was Don Alejandro’s
kinsman. His head had been confused by many introductions,
but he had made out that kinsman, a Sanfuentes of the
younger branch, and a tall man with a forked beard who
was Aribia, the Minister of Finance. There was a vacant
chair on Janet’s right side.

The meal seemed interminable. The food was pretentiously
good, and the guests seemed to have been starved for
days, for they refused none of the dishes. Sweet champagne
was served, and the Olifa Tokay, but when Archie, greatly
daring, asked for a whisky-and-soda, it was brought him,
and to his surprise was pre-War whisky. There seemed to
be about twenty footmen, all in knee-breeches, mestizos who
in their gaudy liveries had an air of comic opera. Archie
tried his bad Spanish on his two ladies, and, having exhausted
the beauties and greatness of Olifa, the distress of
Europe, their families, and his visit to Veiro, was hard
put to it for topics. Señora Sanfuentes received every
mention of Don Alejandro with a shrug and a giggle,
Madame la Présidente did not appear to have heard of him.

Suddenly there was a movement in the company. Someone
had entered and taken the vacant chair by Janet’s side.
The light in the room was very dim, and Archie saw only
a tall figure, to greet whom the President and the other
men rose and bowed. The man, whoever he was, was not
in evening dress. Later, he saw Janet’s fair head inclined
towards him, and from the vivacity of her manner she
seemed to be finding interest in the new guest.

At last, with a marvellous course of fruits and sweetmeats,
the meal came to an end. The hostess rose
heavily and led the ladies from the room, and the men
moved up to a semi-circle round their host. Room was
made for Archie next to the President, and beyond that
impressive figure sat the late arrival. With a thrill he
recognised the man he had seen the first day leaving the
office in the Avenida, the great Señor Castor, the Gobernador
of the province of the Gran Seco and the head of the
Company.

Huge cigars had been provided, but the Gobernador had
refused them, and, after asking his host’s permission, had
lit a short briar pipe. It was some minutes before the
President formally introduced them, being himself engaged
in a whispered conversation, so Archie had the opportunity
to study the great man’s features. Seen at close quarters
they were not less impressive than in the fleeting view
in the Avenida. The brow was broad and high, and had the
heavy frontal development above the eyebrows which
Archie had been told betokened mathematical genius.
The complexion was pale, but clear and healthy; the
nose short and finely formed, and springing from the
forehead like the prow of a ship. The mouth was hidden
by the beard, but it might be guessed that the lips were
full. The eyes were the compelling feature. They were
large and grey and set rather wide apart, and, though
narrow-lidded, gave their possessor an air of steady, competent
watchfulness. There was thought in them, and
masterfulness, but no hint of passion, only a calm, all-embracing
intelligence. Among the beady opaque eyes
around him, this man’s were like pools of living light contrasted
with scummed morasses. The face was grave and
composed, but when Archie’s name was spoken it broke into
a curiously pleasant smile.

The Gobernador of the Gran Seco addressed him in
flawless English. He inquired after his journey, spoke
of the pleasure with which he had made Janet’s acquaintance,
and, on being informed by the President that Archie
was a member of the British Legislature, asked one or
two shrewd questions about current British politics. In
five minutes’ talk across the table he seemed to take soundings
of Archie’s mind, and elicited his special interests.
He even detected his love of birds, and had something to
say of the need for a sound ornithologist to investigate
certain of the mountain areas. Archie had a feeling that
this astonishing man, if he had been told that his hobby
was marine zoology or Coptic antiquities, would have talked
about it with the same intimate intelligence.

“You will visit us, I hope, in our little mountain kingdom.
Perhaps you have heard of our Gran Seco?”

“I’ve heard about nothing else. But there’s a hitch
somewhere, and I’ve been told that we can’t get passports
for the present.”

The Gobernador frowned.

“What incomprehensible folly! That is a matter which
shall at once be set right. I cannot think how the mistake
has arisen. Your hotel? The Constitución? Permits shall
be sent round to you this afternoon, and you have only
to fix the day of your journey and we shall make all
arrangements. What must you think of us, Sir Archibald?
Believe me, we are not accustomed to treat distinguished
strangers with impoliteness.”

The manner of the Gobernador was so open and
friendly that Archie’s distaste for the Gran Seco and his
memory of Don Luis’s talk straightway vanished. The
President observed that in old days the Gran Seco had
been a closed country, and that, as Sir Archibald would
realise, it could not be thrown open in a day.

“I am positive Sir Archibald will understand,” said the
Gobernador. “We have established, as it were, a Sheffield
and a Birmingham in a rude hill-country, and we must limit
our administrative problems. The sixteenth century and
the twentieth can co-exist only if the latter is given in small
doses. Slowly they will harmonise–but slowly. You
have the same problem in your India. I understand that
you do not permit tourists, however well accredited, even
to enter some of the hill-states.”

“That’s true,” said Archie. “When I was there, they
wouldn’t let me put a foot across the Nepaul border.”

“Also we are a big business, with our secrets, and we
cannot have agents of our rivals prowling about the place,
which is, so to speak, all one workshop. But we welcome
visitors who recognise our difficulties and submit to our
modest rules.”

“It is the Yanquis who give trouble,” said the President
darkly.

The Gobernador laughed. “Some Yanquis. I do not
share his Excellency’s distrust of the whole of that great
nation. The bright special correspondent on the lookout
for a ‘scoop’ is the most dangerous of created
things. But we welcome the reasonable journalist. You may
have read a series of articles on Olifa in the _Saturday
Evening Post_. There you had the Gran Seco accurately
portrayed with our full assent. Yet on the whole it is not
the journalist who perplexes us most. It is the Yanqui
tripper on a circular tour. We cannot have them making
drunken fools of themselves in a place where the prestige
of the white man is his only security.”

“There was an American party at the hotel,” said
Archie. “Noisy young devils from a yacht. I think they
went up to the Gran Seco a week ago.”

The Gobernador shrugged his shoulders.

“We do not antagonise the great, we who are business
men. But those young people will not be given the
privileges which await you, Sir Archibald.”

Archie felt as if he were being treated with especial
frankness and friendliness, and his susceptible soul was in
a pleasant glow. Then the conversation became general,
and he had leisure to observe the company. The Gobernador
said little, the Olifero statesmen much, but it seemed to
Archie that they all talked under his eye and for his approbation.
After an argument there came a hush, as if they
deferred to him for the ultimate word. But he scarcely
spoke. He sat silent, watchful, now and then smiling
tolerantly. Once only he intervened. The Minister of
Finance was discoursing on some aspect of the policy of the
United States, and his comments were caustic. The
Gobernador looked across at Archie and spoke in English.

“Yanquis are unpopular in England?” he asked.

“No. I shouldn’t say that. Americans are popular with
us, as they always have been. You see, we get the best
of them. But the abstract thing, America, is unpopular.
She always seems to have a rather left-handed Government.”

A spark seemed to kindle in the other’s eye.

“That is right. No section of humanity deserves blame.
It is governments, not peoples, that offend.”

Then the spark died out.

As Janet and Archie walked back to the hotel they spoke
of the luncheon party. They had taken the road through
the old town, and were in the market-place among the
stalls.

“That man Castor doesn’t belong here,” said Archie.
“He has nothing in common with those bland Oliferos.
He’s nearer to that lot,” and he pointed to a group of Indians
in shaggy ponchos squatted by the fountain.

“He is one of the most extraordinary people I ever met,”
said Janet. “Can you guess what he talked to me about?
Ossian–Papa’s _bête noire_, you know–Lord Balfour, and
Marcel Proust! And I believe he could have talked just as
well about clothes and Paris models.”

“I never in my life got so strong an impression of all-round
competence. . . . I like him, too. I think he’s a
good fellow. Don’t you?”

“I’m not so sure,” said Janet. “I should like to see him
clean-shaven. I’ve an idea that the mouth under that beard
of his might be horribly cruel.”

VI

The Gran Seco has not often appeared in the world’s literature.
Francisco de Toledo first entered it in the sixteenth
century, but after that there is no mention of it till Calamity
Brown wandered thither from the coast in the late years of
the eighteenth. That luckless and probably mendacious
mariner has little good to say of it; it was the abode of
devilish insects and devilish men, and, if we are to believe
him, he barely escaped with his life. In the nineteenth
century it was partially explored by the Spanish naturalist,
Mendoza, and a Smithsonian expedition investigated its
peculiar geology. Its later history is written in the reports
of its copper companies, but Sylvester Perry visited it in his
celebrated journey round the globe, and it has a short and
comminatory chapter in his _Seeing Eyes_. Mr Perry did
not like the place, and in his characteristic way has likened
it to a half-healed abscess, sloughed over with unwholesome
skin.

Mr Perry was partially right. The Gran Seco is not
built to the scale of man and it has no care for his comforts.
But it has its own magnificence. Its gate is the town of
Santa Ana, in whose market-place stands the colossal figure
of the crucified Christ, first erected by Pizarro, many times
destroyed by earthquakes, and always replaced, since it is
the defiance of the plains to the mountains. But the gate is
far from the citadel, for the avenue is a hundred miles
long. The Gran Seco railway, now a double line most
skilfully engineered, and wholly controlled by the Company,
runs first up a long valley where only in mid-winter a river
flows. Then it passes over tiers of high desert, sinks into
hollows where sometimes there are waters and forests,
climbs again in tortuous gullies, till at length it emerges
upon the great plateau; and always beside it can be traced the
old highroad where once rode Toledo’s men-at-arms, and
only the other day the ore from the mines jolted down-country
on mule-back. But there are still many miles to go
before the city of Gran Seco is reached, sunk in a shallow
trough among its barren and blistered hills.

At first sight Sylvester Perry’s phrase seems to have a
certain justice. Twenty years ago in the hollow there was
only a wretched Indian puebla roosting among the ruins of
an old city, for the copper from the distant mines was
exported in its crude form. It was chiefly what is called
virgin copper, with a certain amount of malachite and
azurite ores. Ten years ago a new city began to rise, when
the sulphuretted ores were first mined, and smelting was
started. There was a furious rivalry among the companies
till they were united in a great combine, and the whole
mineral wealth gathered under a single direction. Process
succeeded process, furnaces were multiplied till they covered
many acres, wells were sunk and pumping-stations erected,
great dams were built in the hills to catch the winter rains,
and street after street rose in the dust. The Castor methods
of calcination and electrolytic refining soon quadrupled its
size. To one looking down from the surrounding ridges the
place seems a hive of ugly activity: on one side a wilderness
of furnaces and converters, with beyond them the compounds
where the workmen are housed; on the other a modern city
with high buildings and clanking electric trams. By day
it is an inferno of noise and dust and vapours, with a dull
metallic green the prevailing tint; by night a bivouac of
devils warmed by angry fires. Mr Perry is right. The
place has the look of a gangrening sore, with for the surrounding
skin the pale shaley hills. And the climate is in
itself a disease. In winter the hollow is scourged and
frozen, and in summer the sun’s heat, refracted from
naked stone, strikes the face like a blow.

In the streets the first impression is of extreme orderliness.
The traffic is methodically conducted by vigilant police
in spruce uniforms–for the most part of the Indian
or mestizo type, with European superintendents. They are
a fine body of men; too good, the spectator decides, for such
an environment. The main street, the Avenida Bolivar, is
broad and paved with concrete, and along it rise structures
which would not disgrace New York. The Regina Hotel
is larger than the Ritz, and there are others; the offices of
the Company’s administration form a block scarcely smaller
than Carlton House Terrace; there are clubs and many
apartment houses, all built of the white local stone. But
the shops are few and poor, and there are no villas in the
environs, so that the impression grows that the Gran Seco
is a camp, which its inhabitants regard as no continuing
city. Hourly the sense of the bivouac expands in the
traveller’s mind. The place is one great caravanserai for
pilgrims. These busy, preoccupied people are here for the
day only and to-morrow will be gone.

Other things will soon strike him. There seem to be no
peasants. No neighbouring countryside obtrudes itself into
this monastic industry. Every man–there are few women–is
regimented by the Company. If the traveller is escorted
to the area of the smelting and refining plant (and his
passports must be very high-powered to ensure this privilege),
he will see the unskilled work done by Indians and
mestizos–men with faces like mechanical automata–but
the skilled foremen are all European. He will puzzle over
these Europeans, for however wide his racial knowledge, he
will find it hard to guess their nationality, since their occupation
seems to have smoothed out all differences into one
common type with a preoccupation so intense as to be almost
furtive. In the streets, too, in the clubs and hotels, he will
be struck by the waxwork look of some of the well-dressed
employees. They are inhumanly pale, and so concentrated
upon some single purpose that their faces are expressionless
and their eyes unseeing.

He will be much shepherded and supervised, and, though
his _permission de séjour_ is for only a few days, he will be
apt to find these days pass heavily. If he is a mining expert,
he will not be allowed to indulge his curiosity, for the Castor
processes are jealously guarded. If he is the ordinary
tourist, he will find no sights to repay him, and for the only
amusement an occasional concert of austerely classical music,
given by the Administration staff. He will probably leave
the place with relief, glad to have seen the marvel, but
thankful that his lines are cast among ordinary humanity.
At the station, on his departure, he will be presented with
a wonderful booklet, containing an eloquent speech of the
Gobernador, and extracts (with illustrations) from the
recent articles on the Gran Seco in the _Saturday Evening
Post_.

The young party from the _Corinna_ did not appear to find
the time hang heavy on their hands. There were ten of
them, five of each sex, with no older person to look after
them, though a very moderate chaperonage seemed to be
exercised by a tall girl with fine eyes and a pleasant Southern
voice. That their purchase was considerable was shown by
their entertainment, for they were shown everything and
went everywhere; that they were unwelcome visitors, unwillingly
privileged, was proved by their close oversight.
Indeed they were uncomfortable guests, for they made a
patch of garish colour in the drab of the Gran Seco and a
discord in its orderly rhythm. The mere sight of them in
the streets was enough to send the ordinary policeman to
the Commissary to ask for instructions.

They were patently harmless, but deplorably silly. The
Regina was turned by them into a cabaret. They danced
every night in the restaurant to the disquiet of the diners,
and they chaffed mercilessly an unsmiling staff. Bedroom
riots seemed to be their speciality, and it was an unlucky
official of the Company who had his quarters in their
corridor. When they were entertained to luncheon by the
Administration they asked questions so sublimely idiotic that
the Vice-President, a heavy sallow man, called Rosas, of
Mexican extraction, actually coloured, thinking that he was
being made a fool of; and their visit to the smelting plant
was attended by the same exasperating buffoonery.
Presently it appeared that their idiocy was congenital and
not a pose. Their jazz chatter and jazz manners were the
natural expression of jazz minds, and must be endured
because of the prestige of Mr Burton Rawlinson. So
“Baby” and “Bawby” and “Honey” and “Gerry” went
their preposterous way, and the Gran Seco shrugged outraged
shoulders and spat.

Nevertheless there were signs, had there been eyes to note
them, that the yacht party was not quite what it seemed.
In unguarded moments, as Janet had already observed, they
could be betrayed into sanity and good breeding. At
nights, too, when their ragging was over, there were odd
discussions in the privacy of bedrooms. At least one of
the young men would sit far into the dawn working at notes
and plans.

Presently, as if they had had enough of the city, they
extended their revels into the surrounding country. They
procured two touring cars, and, after some trouble with
the Commissary of Police, embarked on long excursions.
The mines lie in three main groups–the San Tomé, the
Alhuema, and the Universum–and they visited all three.
There they seemed to find much to interest them, and the
managers feverishly telephoned to headquarters for instructions.
These children were imbeciles doubtless, they reported,
but they were poking their noses into forbidden
places. So on their return the troupe had to interview the
Commissary of Police, who politely cautioned them against
breaches of the regulations of the province.

Their next escapade was more serious. They packed
luncheon-baskets and departed, as they said, for a visit to
the caves of Marequito–a permitted excursion. Then for
three days they disappeared, the police were furious and
anxious, and a posse was sent out in motor-cars to discover
their whereabouts. Six of the party–five girls and a man–and
one of the cars were found two hundred miles off in
a valley under the high peaks called the Spanish Ladies.
They told a pitiful story; they had lost their road, exhausted
their food, and had had to spend chilly nights on the ground.
The other car had gone off the day before to find supplies,
and had not returned.

The inspector of police wrung his hands. “Do you not
know that in these parts the natives are dangerous? You
have narrowly escaped throat-cutting.” The party was
sent back to the city in disgrace, but they did not seem
to feel their position. They were inordinately cheerful,
and scarcely looked as if they had suffered a three
days’ fast.

In spite of the police activity no word came of the other
car, till two days later it returned brazenly of its own accord.
The occupants told the same story–a lost road, a breakdown,
semi-starvation, a lucky meeting in the end with an intelligent
vaquero who put them on the way to the San Tomé
mine. This party did indeed show some signs of privation,
and one of the four men had his arm in a sling, the result,
he said, of a fall from a rock when he was trying to get a
prospect.

There was a stern inquiry at the office of the Commissary,
and the four were closely cross-examined about their
journey. But they proved to be bewildered and obtuse.
Their accounts conflicted, and when maps were placed before
them they were quite unable to point out their route.
“Can’t you realise that we were lost?” they repeated,
“lost like a tick in a wood-pile? What d’you keep worrying
about? It’s no good quoting lists of your darned hills.
We can’t locate them.”

After this episode the American party showed better
behaviour. For the last days of their stay they confined
themselves to the city, and got up a fancy-dress ball in the
Regina, into which they dragged some of the unwilling
residents. The young man with his arm in a sling did not
appear at this function; indeed he did not leave his room,
being a little fevered–so he told the hotel servants–by his
accident, though he refused to see a doctor. This was
perhaps natural, for in the small hours after his return
there had been some rough surgery in his bedroom. One
of his companions had cut out a pistol bullet from above
his left elbow, and the tall girl, who had once nursed in a
hospital, had done the bandaging.

Archie and Janet were very different visitors. It almost
appeared as if they were welcome ones. A special coach
was attached for them to the Santa Ana train, and this
was shunted on to the Gran Seco line. It contained two
compartments, in one of which they were given excellent
meals, while the other was on the lines of an observation
car, so filled with bridal flowers that Archie looked anxiously
about for rice and slippers. They were also given a guide,
a well-mannered young Olifero who unobtrusively offered
information. He pointed out the objects of interest on the
way to Santa Ana, and during the hour of waiting there
conducted them over the cathedral, which has a famous
altar-piece, and, under the great crucifix, told with pride the
tale of the first Conquistadors. The long climb into the
Gran Seco was enlivened by his anecdotes. He showed them
the valley where Toledo’s men had been ambushed by
Indians, the corner where the copper convoy had once been
destroyed by a landslide, the gully which had long defied the
railway engineers. At the frontier station he had managed
their passes for them, and as the train crawled on to the
plateau had sketched for them vivaciously the history of the
mining industry.

“We can’t tip this fellow,” Archie whispered to Janet.
“He’s a gentleman.” And his wife had agreed.

He saw them to their hotel, where rooms had been secured
for them by the Administration. On parting, Archie and
Janet warmly thanked him, and asked him his name. The
young man smiled pleasantly. “That is nice of you, for I
think we shall meet again. They call me Carlos Rivero.”
He added, “I am a friend of Luis de Marzaniga,” and it
seemed to Archie that his eyes said something confidential
which he could not fathom.

The Moplahs were in the hotel, but in a somewhat
chastened mood. The tall girl, whom Janet believed she
had recognised, did not appear, nor did the young man in
the starched linen knickerbockers, though Archie looked for
him longingly. But the corybants of the Club de Residentes
Extranjeros were there and greeted them with boisterous
friendliness, though, somewhat to Janet’s surprise, they did
not invite them to join their party.

In any case that would have been impossible, for
the newcomers found a complex programme provided
for their entertainment. They had no occasion to
hire a car: the Administration provided one, a neat
Daimler limousine which at all hours waited on their
convenience. They were shown every phase of the great
industry, and the day after their arrival they lunched with
the Administration. The Gobernador himself appeared at
the meal, an honour which, it was hinted, was almost unexampled.
He apologised for the absence of the Vice-President,
the same who had been made to blush by the
Moplahs. “My colleague,” he said, “sends his profound
apologies, but at the moment he is suffering from a slight
attack of jaundice. He deeply regrets that he cannot be
here to welcome you, for he has many friends in your
country and in Europe. He is of Mexico, and a Mexican
is like a Russian–his country is so remote from the life
of the world that he must needs adopt all countries. He
is the true international.”

The meal was a Spartan one compared to the banquet at
the President’s mansion, but the food was perfectly cooked,
and, for a place in the heart of wild hills, extraordinarily
varied. The company were all grave, pallid, perfectly
mannered, with expressionless eyes and no gestures–what
Don Alejandro had called the _type Gran Seco_. There was
nothing of the hustling liveliness which Archie associated
with a luncheon of commercial magnates. Also all seemed
to be in awe of their President, and hung on his lips. Castor
talked indeed, brilliantly and continuously, but it was a
monologue, and he went through a series of subjects, adorning
each and then dropping it. There was none of the
give-and-take of good conversation. Yet the time passed
pleasantly, and when they rose from table Castor offered
to show them his office.

It was on the first floor of the main building, lit by four
large windows, into which travellers on the top of the
tram-cars could look and see the great man at his work.
Here there was no seclusion or mystery. The big bright
chambers gave its occupant no more privacy than an aviary
gives a bird, for not only could it be looked into from the
street, but at one end was a glass partition separating it
inadequately from a room full of busy secretaries. There
were maps and plans of the Gran Seco on the walls, a
complicated mechanism of desk telephones, a bookcase full
of mining reports, an immense safe, a cigar cabinet–and
that was all. It might have been the office of a real-estate
agent in a provincial town in the United States or Canada.
The contrast between Castor’s personality and his modest
habitation was so startling that Janet laughed.

The Gobernador seemed to understand her feelings. “I
have other lairs,” he said, smiling. “One, much grander,
is in Olifa, and I have my rooms too in Paris and London.
But this is my true workshop.”

He opened a door, which revealed a tiny bedroom and
bathroom.

“Compact, is it not?” he said. “I need no more. I
am a simple man.”

That night Archie and Janet dined in the hotel with the
Financial Secretary, and afterwards went to hear Beethoven
performed by a string quartet in the music-room of the
Gran Seco Club. When they returned to their apartments,
Archie was loud in his praises of his hosts.

“Odd, isn’t it? to find Castilian manners in business
grandees! We didn’t find them at Veiro, for old Sanfuentes
was just like the ordinary country gentleman at home. But
these fellows here are all hidalgos. I feel noisy and rather
vulgar among them. And, good Lord! what must they
think of the Moplahs?

“Castor too!” he went on. “What rot it was Gedd
and Wilbur making him out a mystery man! He’s an extraordinarily
clever fellow, but as open as the day. A mystery
man couldn’t live in a place like a cricket pavilion!”

“Did you ever read a poem called ‘How it strikes a
Contemporary’? Browning, you know.”

“No,” said Archie.

“Well, the poem is all about a tremendous mystery man–the
Corregidor, Browning calls him–and he lived in just
such a way as Mr Castor. How does it go?–

_’Poor man, he lived another kind of life_
_In that new stuccoed third house by the bridge,_
_Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise!_
_The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat_
_Leg crossing leg–and—-‘_

I can’t remember it all, but anyhow he played cribbage
every night with his housekeeper and went to bed punctually
at ten.”

Their permit for the Gran Seco had specified no time-limit.
For two days they explored the details of the industry, were
conducted through vast laboratories, studied the latest type
of furnace and converter, pored over blue prints in offices,
and gave themselves vile headaches. Archie declared that
the smelting works were like the Ypres Salient after a gas
attack. He tried to be intelligent, but found himself gravely
handicapped by his lack of all scientific knowledge. “I have
had the meaning of a reverberatory furnace explained to me
a dozen times,” he complained, “but I’m hanged if I can
keep it in my head. And what Bessemerising is remains for
me one of Allah’s secrets. It’s no good, Janet, this isn’t
my pidgin. Thank God, we’re going to the Mines
to-morrow. I think that should be more in my line.”

They were taken to the Mines through a sad grey country,
a desert of shale and rock. “Calcined,” Archie called it,
having just acquired that word, and Janet said that she
supposed it must be like the landscapes in the moon. Every
stream-course was bone-dry, and the big dams they passed,
with the green water very low in their beds, only accentuated
the desiccation. Yet, where wells had been sunk, the soil
was not without fertility, and the thin grasses seemed to
give a living to considerable flocks of sheep and goats.
They passed many ruins–not only old mine workings, but
the remains of Indian villages, which suggested that at one
time the Gran Seco had been a more habitable country.

At the Mines they were shown little, for there was little
time. Managers were ready with sheafs of statistics, and
at the Universum they lunched luxuriously. But of the
miners at work they saw nothing. They returned invigorated
by the keen air of the steppes, and Archie, who had
caught from a ridge a glimpse of the snowy peaks of the
Spanish Ladies, had had his appetite whetted for further
travel. But the Administration was not encouraging. That
was all Indian country–policed, it was true, for it was the
chief recruiting-ground of labour, but not open to ordinary
travel. “We could send you there,” said an urbane secretary,
“but you would have to take an escort, and you would
have to submit to be treated like a schoolboy. You will
understand, Sir Archibald, that this Gran Seco of ours is
in parts a delicate machine, and the presence of ever so
little extraneous matter might do harm.”

That evening after dinner Janet and Archie were in their
sitting-room. The Regina was full of the preparations for
departure of the Moplahs, who were going down-country
by the night train, and their shrill cries could be heard in the
corridor, since their rooms were on the same floor.

“We’re extraneous matter here,” said Archie. “What
about it, Janet? They’ve given us a very good show, but
I’m disillusioned about the Gran Seco. Wilbur must have
been pulling my leg. The place is as humdrum as the
Potteries, and just about as ugly. I should have liked to
have had a shot at the high mountains, but I can see their
reason for not encouraging visitors in their labour reserve.
I rather like the crowd–they behave well and they must
be the last word in efficiency. . . . Confound those
Moplahs! This is like living beside a hen-coop!”

Janet looked serious, and, as was her way in such a
mood, she sat with her hands idle in her lap.

“Let’s get away from this place,” she said. “I hate it!”

“Why in the world . . . ?”

“I hate it. Those soft-spoken, solemn men have got on
my nerves. I think there’s something inhuman about them.
Most of the faces of the people at the smelting works and
at the Mines were like masks. . . . And at that awful
luncheon! . . . I believe that sometimes I saw the devil
grinning out from behind them. . . . And in the streets.
I saw one or two villainous ruffians, who should have been
in rags, but were as spruce as bagmen. I felt as if I
were in an orderly and well-policed Hell. . . . Why did
they shepherd us away from the Mines, for remember we
saw nothing there? Why won’t they let us go into the
back country? I believe it is because they are concealing
something, something so bad that the world must never
know of it.”

Archie stared.

“I must say you’ve got a lively imagination,” he began,
but Janet was not listening.

“Let us go away–at once–to-morrow morning. I
should like to be going to-night. . . . Ring up the Administration
and say we must get home in a hurry. . . . I think
there’s something infernal about this big, noiseless machine.
I want to be back at Veiro, where there are human beings.
I want to be with the honest silly little Moplahs. I want
something more peaceful. . . .”

“I should have thought that the Gran Seco was more
peaceful than the Moplahs.”

“No, it isn’t, for there is death here and death is unsettling.”

“Well, we’ll go off to-morrow, if you wish it. We’re
not likely to want for peace in the next few weeks. The
thing is how to avoid boredom. . . . By the way, oughtn’t
we to go downstairs and say good-bye to the Americans?
They’re friendly souls.”

But Janet was in a strange mood. “You go. I don’t
think I’ll come.” She still sat with her hands in her lap,
looking straight before her.

But the Americans were already packed into the station
omnibus, and Archie could only shout to them from the
doorway, and receive in return blown kisses from the ladies
and hand-waves from the men. They seemed to be waiting
for a member of their party, and as Archie turned into the
hall he met the laggard charging through the crowd of
waiters and porters. It was the one who had not yet shown
himself, and Archie realised that it must be the driver of the
car in the Avenida de la Paz, the youth in the linen knickerbockers.
What his present clothes were could not be
guessed, since he wore a tweed ulster, but he had the same
preposterous, broad-brimmed hat on his head.

To his surprise the young man, whom he had never met,
made straight for him, and gave him his hand. Something
passed from it, and Archie’s fist held a crumpled paper.

The next second he was gone, but not before Archie had
had another shock. For this was not the youth of the
Avenida de la Paz. It was Don Luis de Marzaniga, and
in their moment of contact his eyes had looked into his and
they had commanded silence.

Deeply mystified, Archie went upstairs with the paper
pellet tight in his fingers. When his door closed behind him,
he opened it. The scrap contained a scrawl in pencil in a
large, irregular hand. It read: “_Please be both in your
sitting-room at eleven o’clock_.”

He showed it to Janet.

“I said there was no mystery in the Gran Seco, but it
seems I spoke too soon. I’m hanged if I can make it out.
It was Luis that gave me this paper, but it was Luis pretending
to be that American lad in the linen knickerbockers.
You remember he was the one of the Moplahs we never saw.”

“We never saw the tall girl either. I am positive that she
was Miss Dasent.” Janet looked at her wrist-watch.
“Eleven, the note said. A quarter of an hour to wait.”

That quarter of an hour was spent by Janet in the same
contemplative immobility, while Archie tried to read, smoked
two cigarettes feverishly, and occupied a few minutes in
washing his hands. The bedroom opened from the sitting-room,
and beyond it was the bathroom which he used as a
dressing-room. He was just about to begin a third cigarette
when he saw that the hands of the sham ormolu clock on
the mantelpiece pointed to eleven. After that he kept his
eyes on the door which led to the corridor.

But that door did not open. It was an exclamation from
Janet that made him turn his head.

A waiter had appeared suddenly, entering from the bedroom.
He carried a tray with three cups of maté, which
he placed on the table at Janet’s elbow.

“Look here, you’ve made a mistake,” Archie said in his
halting Spanish. “We gave no orders.”

The man replied in English.

“Didn’t you? All the same, you’d be the better for a
cup. I’m going to have one myself. You might lock that
door, Archie, and give me a cigarette.”

While Archie stared thunderstruck, Janet laughed–a
laugh which began as a low gurgle and ended in riotous
merriment. She rose from her chair and stood before the
waiter, her shoulders shaking, while she dabbed her small
handkerchief on her eyes. Then, suddenly, she became
grave. “You have been having a rough time, Sandy,” she
said, and she laid a hand on his shoulder. He winced, and
drew back.

“So-so,” he said. “That arm is still tender. . . . What
malign fate brought the pair of you here?”

The waiter was to all appearance an ordinary mestizo,
sallow-skinned, with shaggy dark hair, handsome after a
fashion because of his pleasant eyes. He wore ill-fitting
dress trousers, a shirt not too clean, a short alpaca jacket,
and slippers rather down at heel. He smiled on Janet as
he poured out the maté, and then from Archie’s case he
took a cigarette.

“Yes. I want to know just how you managed it,” he
continued. “Wilbur did his best to prevent you, and Luis
told me he thought he had dissuaded you, and in spite of
everything you bubble up. You’re an incorrigible pair!”

“But why shouldn’t we come here if we want?” Janet
asked.

“Because it’s deadly danger–for yourselves and for
others. You go to lunch with the Administration, and the
Vice-President hears of it just in time to have a touch
of jaundice. You blunder into this hotel, and I can only
save myself by making this assignation. You two innocents
have been complicating my life.”

Enlightenment broke in on Archie. “You were the
bounder in the linen bags–the fellow that drove the car.”

“I was. You were within an ace of recognising me, if I
hadn’t tilted my hat.”

“Then what was Luis doing, got up in your rig?”

“He took my passport. This is a country of passports,
you know, much more efficient than anything we had in the
war zone in France. He came into the Gran Seco by a
back door, and so didn’t require one. But it was essential
that mine should be used and that I should be believed to
be out of the place. It was equally essential that I should
remain here.”

“How did you manage your present camouflage?”

The waiter looked down with pride at his spotty shirt.
“Rather successful, isn’t it? I have a bit of a graft in
this line. My weeks in the Café de l’Enfer were not altogether
wasted.”

He finished his maté and lit a cigarette. He looked at
the two before him, Janet with her girlish wind-blown
grace, Archie with his puzzled honesty, and he suddenly
ceased to be a waiter. His brows bent, and his voice from
friendly banter became the voice of authority.

“You must clear out at once,” he said. “To-morrow
morning. Do you know that you are walking gaily on a
road which is mined in every yard?”

“I knew it,” said Janet. “I felt in my bones that this
place was accursed.”

“You don’t know it. You cannot know just how accursed
it is, and I have no time to explain. What I have to tell
you is that you must go down to Olifa to-morrow morning.
You will be encouraged to stay longer, but you must
refuse.”

“But look here, Sandy”–it was Archie who spoke–“they
have nothing against us. Janet and I can’t be in
any danger.”

“No, but you are a source of danger to others. Myself,
for example, and the Vice-President, Señor Rosas.”

“Rosas–I never heard of him.”

“A very pleasant Mexican gentleman. You once knew
him as Mr Blenkiron.”

“Good Lord! But he’s dead!”

“He is officially dead. That is why it won’t do for him
to meet old friends.”

“Sandy dear,” said Janet, “you mustn’t treat us like
this. We’re not babies. We’ll do what you tell us, but we
deserve more confidence.”

The waiter compared his Ingersoll watch with the sham
ormolu clock.

“Indeed, you do, but the story would take hours, and I
have only three minutes left. But I will tell you one thing.
Do you remember my showing you at Laverlaw the passage
in the chronicle about the Old Man of the Mountain, the
King of the Assassins, who lived in the Lebanon, and doped
his followers with hashish and sent them about the world
to do his errands? Well, that story has a counterpart
to-day.”

“Mr Castor!” Janet exclaimed. “Archie liked him, but
I felt that he might be a devil.”

“A devil! Perhaps. He is also a kind of saint, and he
is beyond doubt a genius. You will know more about him
some day.”

“But you are sending us away. . . . Sandy, I won’t
have it. We are too old friends to be bundled off like
stray dogs from a racecourse. You are in some awful
pickle and we must help.”

“I am sending you away,” said the waiter gravely,
“because I want your help–when the time comes. There’s
another woman in this business, Janet, and I want you to
be with her. I want you both. I pay you the compliment
of saying that I can’t do without you. You will go back
to Olifa to the Hotel de la Constitución, and you will make
friends with an American girl there. She is expecting you
and she will give you your instructions.”

“I know,” said Janet. “She is Mr Blenkiron’s niece–a
Miss Dasent. What is her Christian name?”

The waiter looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t know.
I never asked her.”

VII

The waiter at the Regina was an exemplary servant. He
dispensed the morning meal of fruit and coffee with soft-footed
alacrity. At the mid-day déjeuner, when it was
the custom of the Company’s officials, including some of
the greatest, to patronise the hotel, he had the big round
table in the north window, and in a day or two had earned
the approval of his fastidious clients. Miguel was his
name, and presently he was addressed by it as if he had
been an old feature of the establishment. Those solemn
gentlemen talked little, and at their meals they did not
ransack the wine-list or summon the cook, but each had
his little peculiarities of taste which Miguel made it his
business to remember. He was always at their elbow,
smiling gravely, to anticipate their wants. In the evening
the restaurant was less full, only the guests living in the
hotel and a few junior officials, for it was the custom of the
magnates to dine at the club. In the evening Miguel was
frequently off duty in the restaurant, engaged in other
branches of hotel work, and twice a week he had his time
after 7 p.m. to himself.

The waiter did not spend his leisure hours in his attic
bedroom, which was like an oven after the sun had beat all
day on the slatted roof. Once or twice he joined his fellow-employees
in a visit to the cinema or to a shabby little
gaming-room where one drank cheap aguardiente and
played a languid kind of poker. But generally he seemed
to have business of his own, and the negro porter at the
back entrance grew familiar with his figure arriving punctually
on the stroke of midnight, and chaffed him heavily
about an imaginary girl. It was no one’s business to keep
a watch on this humble half-caste, whose blood showed so
clearly in his shadowy finger-nails and dull yellow skin.
But if he had been followed, curious things might have
been noted. . . .

He generally made for a new block of flats on the edge
of the dry hollow which separated the smelting works from
the city, and he frequently varied his route thither. The
place, with its concrete stairs and white-washed walls, was
not unlike a penitentiary, but it housed many of the works
engineers and foremen. He would stop at a door on the
third landing, consult his watch as to the hour, wait a minute
or two, and then knock, and he was instantly admitted.
Thence he would emerge in half an hour, generally accompanied
by someone, and always in a new guise. Sometimes
he was a dapper Olifero clerk with a spruce collar and an
attaché case; sometimes in rough clothes with big spectacles,
so that his former half-caste air disappeared, and he
might have been an engineer from Europe; sometimes a
workman indistinguishable from an ordinary hand in the
furnaces. He always returned to the same door about
half past eleven, and issued from it once more the waiter
at the Regina.

Between the hours of 7.30 and 11 p.m. the waiter
seemed to have a surprising variety of duties. Occasionally
he would pass the evening in one of the flats, or in a room
in another block which adjoined the costing department.
There he would meet silent people who slipped in one by
one, and the conversation would be in low tones. Maps and
papers would lie on the table, and there would be much talk
of the names on certain lists, and notes would be pencilled
alongside them. Sometimes there would be a colloquy of
one or two, and then the waiter would do most of the
talking–but not in Spanish. Sometimes the meeting would
be at a café in a back street, which could only be entered
by devious ways, and there, over glasses of indifferent beer,
the waiter would make new acquaintances. His manners
were odd, for he would regard these newcomers as a
sergeant regards recruits, questioning them with an air of
authority. There were strange ceremonies on these occasions,
so that the spectator might have thought them meetings
of some demented Masonic lodge. Sometimes, too,
the waiter in one of the rooms of the big block of flats
would meet a figure with the scorched face of a countryman
and the dust of the hills on his clothes–often in the uniform
of the Mines Police and once or twice dressed like a
mestizo farmer. Then the talk would be hard to follow–strings
of uncouth names, torrents of excited description,
and a perpetual recourse to maps.

But the waiter’s most curious visits–and they happened
only twice during his time at the Regina–were to a big
house behind the Administration Headquarters, which stood
in what for the Gran Seco was a respectable garden. At
such times the waiter became the conventional clerk, very
dapper in a brown flannel suit, yellow boots, and a green
satin tie with a garnet pin. He was evidently expected, for,
on giving his name, he was admitted without question, and
taken to a little room on the first floor which looked like
the owner’s study. “Señor Garcia from the Universum”–thus
he was ushered in, and the occupant greeted him
gruffly with “Come along, Garcia. Say, you’re late. Have
you brought the figures I asked for?”–followed by the
injunction to the servant, “I can’t be disturbed for the
next two hours, so I guess you’d better disconnect the telephone.
If anyone calls, say I’m mighty busy.”

Then the occupant of the room would lock the door and
pay some attention to the windows, after which he would
greet the waiter like a long-lost brother. He was a big
man, with a sallow face but a clear healthy eye–a man who
looked as if he would have put on flesh but for some specially
arduous work which kept him thin. He would catch the
so-called Garcia by the shoulder as if he would hug him,
then he would pat his back, and produce such refreshments
as are not usually offered to a junior clerk. Strangely
enough, there would be no mention of the awaited figures
from the Universum.

“How much longer can you stick it?” he asked on the
second occasion. “You’re looking peaked.”

“I’ve another week here. Then I break for the open.
I doubt if I could keep it up for more than a week, for
people are asking questions. Have you squared it with old
Josephs and notified the Universum people?”

The big man nodded. “But after that you’re beyond my
jurisdiction. Peters in the Police is prepared for you, but
it’s up to you to slip over to him without exciting comment.
The cook-boy at the Universum has got to perish. Can you
manage that neatly?”

“I’ll try. I’ll have to do a lot of perishing in the next
fortnight, before Luis picks me up. I’m terrified of going
sick, you know. The Regina hasn’t done me any good, and
the Tierra Caliente isn’t exactly a health-resort.”

The other looked at him with affectionate anxiety.

“That’s too bad. . . . I haven’t an easy row to hoe,
but yours is hell with the lid off, and the almighty vexation
is that I can’t do much to help you. Just at present
the game’s with you. For the love of Mike keep on your
feet, sonnie. You don’t mean to go far into the Poison
Country?”

“Not a yard farther than I can help. But Luis says I
must be at least a couple of days there. Don’t worry. I’ll
take care of myself.”

After that the conversation was conducted in low tones, as
if even the locked door and the guarded window might have
ears. But had that talk been overheard, one phrase would
have puzzled the eavesdropper, a phrase which constantly
recurred and was spoken by both with a certain hesitation,
even in that secret room. It was “Los Patios de la
Mañana,” which, being translated, means “The Courts of
the Morning.” It might have been a mere password, or
the name of some authority to which the speaker was subject,
or a poetic description of a place. Most likely the last,
for a map was produced–an amateur map neatly drawn and
coloured, inscribed not with names but with letters. It
showed steep gradients, so it must have referred to some
mountain district.

At their parting the Roylances were mentioned. “They’re
back in Olifa,” said the big man, “and Babs is looking
after them good and sure. I’m mighty relieved that Babs
has got a wise lady to keep her company. You’re certain
you can make use of Sir Archibald?”

“I can use him right enough,” was the answer, “if he’ll
stay quiet on the ice till I want him.”

A week later the waiter Miguel was seen no more at
the Regina. When the occupants of the big table in the
north window inquired of M. Josephs, the proprietor, as
to his absence, they were told that he had been lent to the
mess at the Universum Mine.

Miguel was four days at the Universum. He had a
variety of tasks, for not only did he wait at table in the big
adobe mess-room, but he lent a hand in the kitchen, for he
was the soul of friendliness. Indeed he carried his willingness
too far, for he was found in the kitchens of the compounds,
where the Indian miners were fed like pigs at
troughs, and was peremptorily ordered back. He had little
leisure these days, but he managed to do various things not
quite within the sphere of his duties. For one thing, he
became intimate with the engineering staff, which contained
two Scots, one American, and three Italians, and he used
to gossip with them at their table when the room emptied at
the end of meals. Also he was found sometimes in their
office among blue prints and specimens of ore, and on these
occasions the door happened to be locked. If he was not
permitted inside the compounds, he used to fossick about
the mines themselves, when the shifts of sallow, hollow-eyed
labourers were going up or down. Occasionally he
talked to them when no overseer was at hand, and he
seemed to know something of their _patois_, for they replied,
furtively, and once or twice volubly, when no one was
looking.

The cheerful inquisitiveness of the mess waiter was his
undoing. For on the evening of the fourth day there was
a sad accident. Through a mysterious blunder a small
packet of lentonite was detonated, and a corner of the compound
wall was blown down and a great crater made in the
earth. For some inexplicable reason Miguel seemed to have
been in the neighbourhood at the time and he was the only
casualty. Fragments of his clothing were found, and a bit
of a hat which he was known to be wearing, and it was
assumed that his remains were dispersed among the two
acres of debris. The fatality was duly reported to the
Administration and to M. Josephs, and the agreeable half-caste
waiter ceased to be on the register of the Gran Seco.

Next morning a certain Featherstone Peters, a captain of
the Mines Police, whose station was ten miles or so from
the Universum, introduced at breakfast to his troopers a
new recruit, who had just arrived to report. Peters was a
tough, grizzled fellow of fifty, who had fought for the
Boers in the South African War, had been in the old
Macedonian gendarmerie, and was believed by his friends
to have done a good deal of gun-running in Morocco. The
new recruit, whose name was Black, was a sallow youngish
man, who looked as if he had fever in his blood. He spoke
English fluently but ungrammatically, and gave out that his
father had been in the Italian Consulate at Alexandria. He
was good company, and entertained the men with yarns
which enthralled even that collection of hard citizens.

For the next week Black was engaged on patrols far up
into the Indian country. The map[*] shows that east of the
city of Gran Seco lies the land of rolling desert hills where
the copper is mined, but beyond that the traveller enters
a region of deep-cut desiccated valleys–a plateau, but with
the contours of highlands. It is the Indian territory, whence
the Mines’ labourers are drawn, a place of sparse tillage
but much pasturage, a place, too, which in recent centuries
has been drying up, since the wretched pueblas are often on
the site of what, from the ruins, must once have been considerable
cities. It is called the Tierra Caliente, for there
is little shade from a merciless sun, and the stages are long
from water to water. The midday heat falls like a suffocating
curtain, and does not lift till night arrives with the
speed of a wind from the far snows.

[*] See map on end-papers.

It was patrol not escort duty, but the new recruit saw
many of his fellow-policemen engaged in the latter task.
The processions of labourers had the melancholy of a
funeral cortège, and Black, who was well-read for one in
his position, was reminded of the pictures of the Zanzibar
slave-caravans in old books of African travel. It was a
sight which visitors to the Gran Seco were not allowed to
see, for there were no permits for the Indian country. The
gangs bound for the Mines were not shackled, but they
were closely shepherded by armed police escorts, and the
faces of the men showed every degree of sullen and hopeless
ferocity. But the gangs returning from the Mines to
the villages were a spectacle to send a man to his prayers.
“Returned empties,” Peters called them. Young men
crawled and tottered like dotards, all were terribly emaciated,
their eyes had lost every human quality and had the blank
impassiveness of beasts. Yet the Mines were a business
concern, famed for feeding their workers well and for
utilising the latest scientific conclusions on hygiene and industrial
fatigue. Had not the intelligent press of America
and Europe borne testimony to their progressiveness?

As Black and Peters watched one gang pass, the latter
spat vigorously and observed: “I’ve never taken stock in
all that meeting-house stuff about individual liberty and the
rights of man. But I guess there may be something in it.
That outfit kind of makes one think.”

Black said nothing, but his bright feverish eyes seemed
to miss little. He was obviously on good terms with his
officer, for he was constantly going off on little journeys of
his own, which could scarcely be interpreted as police duty.
These journeys took him generally into the Indian pueblas,
and on two occasions he did not return to the police bivouac
till the following day. He was obviously a sick man, and
when the patrol reached the limit of its journey, Peters was
heard to complain loudly that the new recruit should be
in hospital. By this time they were nearing the eastern
edge of the Indian country, with the peaks of the Cordilleras
within a day’s march. The land was changing, for they
had come to a watershed. The line of the great mountains
was not the watershed, for, as in the case of the Nepaul
Himalaya, they stood a little beyond it. It was a country of
running waters, and the streams flowed east, cutting a path
through the range in deep gorges on their way to the distant
Orazon.

They arrived at a ruined village of mud where a couple
of Indians had made their camp–hunters they seemed, tall
active fellows of a different stamp from the broken men
of the pueblas. Peters appeared to know them, for he called
them by their names, and addressed them in pidgin Spanish
which they understood. That night he told his troopers
that the patrol was ended. He had been instructed to
report on this eastern frontier of the Gran Seco, and next
morning they would turn back. All to the east, he told them,
was a God-forgotten country, which nature and man had
combined to make unhealthy for Christians. He asked questions
of the Indians and expounded their replies. There
was fever there, and much poison, and very bad men, and
valleys so deep that from the bottom one could see by day
the stars and the moon. The troopers were impressed, and
looked anxiously at the menacing mountain wall, with its
coronal of snowfields now rosy in the after-glow.

But next morning Black was in no state to travel. Peters
condemned the cussedness of things and declared that he
could not afford to wait another hour. He was not unkind,
and he did his best to ease the sufferer, but duty was duty
and his called him back to headquarters. Black must be
made as comfortable as possible, and the two Indians, whom
he knew to be trustworthy, would look after him till the
bout of fever had passed, and put him on his way home.
After breakfast the patrol jingled off up the slope, and left
Black wrapped in a foxskin kaross, drowsing in a corner
of the ruins, while the Indians twenty yards off sat hunched
and meditative beside their brushwood fire.

Black was really sick, but not with malaria. His vitality
had run down like a clock, since too much had been demanded
of it, and his trouble was partly a low nervous
fever, and partly a deep fatigue. When the police had been
gone an hour, the two Indians held a consultation on his
case. Then they proceeded to strange remedies. They
seemed to be friends of his, for he grinned when they bent
over him and submitted readily to their ministrations. The
country was volcanic, and close at hand, hidden in a crinkle
of the hills, a hot sulphur spring bubbled from the rocks.
They undressed him, and carried him, wrapped in the kaross,
to the pool, where they plunged him into the most violent
bath which he had ever encountered. Then they dried him
roughly with a fine leather poncho, and rubbed the skin of
his back and chest with an aromatic ointment. After that
one of them massaged him for the space of an hour, a cunning
massage which seemed to remould flaccid muscles and
adjust disordered nerves and put him into a state of delicious
stupor. Lastly, he was given a bitter brew to drink,
and then permitted to sleep. This he proceeded to do for
eighteen hours, and when he awoke in broad daylight the
following morning his head was cool and his eye was
clear, though he was still shaky on his feet. Peters had
left enough provisions, and he ate the first enjoyable meal
he had known for weeks.

There was another figure at breakfast, a fair young man
with a golden-brown skin, who, judging by the dust on his
boots and breeches, had ridden far that morning.

“My felicitations, Señor,” the newcomer said. “I
do not think you have taken any hurt in the last weeks, and
that is a miracle. But where we are now going we must go
on our feet, and for that you are not yet able. I am in command
for the moment, and my orders are that to-day you
rest.”

So Black slept again and awoke in the afternoon with a
most healthy hunger. The newcomer sat by him and
rolled and smoked many cigarettes, but he would not permit
the patient to talk. “Time enough, my friend. We do not
part company for a little while. But I will show you this
to cheer you.”

He exhibited a small tinsel medal, such as humble
pilgrims purchase at some famous shrine. On one side it
bore a face which was clearly that of the Gobernador of the
Gran Seco.

Black puzzled over it, for he was still dazed, and asked
whose was the head.

“It is that of our noble leader,” the young man laughed.
“Yours and mine–he who is to lead this unhappy people
to freedom.”

Black seemed to see the obscure joke, for he too laughed.

“Jesucristo!” said the young man, “but that is a chief
to fight for!”

VIII

Black slept soundly all night, and next morning rose renewed
in body and mind. The party set out down the glen
of the stream, one of the Indians carrying food and blankets,
while the other remained behind with the horses. Black had
his pistol, but he had left his police carbine at the bivouac,
while the newcomer had no weapon at all. “What do I
want with a gun?” he had said lightly in reply to his companion’s
question. “We are going into the Poison Country–El
País de Venenos–where lead and powder are trivial
things. A gun is of as little use as a single lifebelt would
be to a man proposing to cross the Atlantic in a skiff. We
are now in the hands of the older gods.”

It was a strange land which they entered, when the stream
which they were descending plunged into the shadow of the
high peaks. It was fed by many affluents, and presently
became a considerable river, running in a broad grassy vale
on which the dew lay like hoar-frost. Suddenly the hills
closed in like a wall, and the stream leaped in a great spout
into a profound ravine, where in pot-holes and cascades it
poured its way from shelf to shelf of the mountain ribs.
The sides of the glen were cloaked with bush, which in the
lower levels became tall timber trees. In the woody recesses
the freshness went out of the air, mosses and creepers
muffled the tree-trunks, gaudy birds and butterflies flitted
through the branches, and a hot, headachy languor seemed
to well out of the sodden ground.

The party, guided by the Indian, kept high above the
stream, following paths no wider than a fox’s track. As
they advanced they descended, the ravine opened, and from
a promontory they looked into a great cup among the cliffs,
brimming with forest, with above on the periphery the hard
bright line of the snows. Black, who was apparently something
of a scholar, quoted Latin. It was a sight which
held the two men breathless for a moment. Then Luis shook
his head. “It is beautiful, but devilish,” he said. “The
malevolence rises like a fog,” and Black nodded assent.

They found themselves in an eery world, as if they were
sunk deep in a hot sea. Moisture streamed from every twig
and blade and tendril, and a sickening sweetness, like the
decaying vegetation of a marsh, rose from whatever their
feet crushed. Black remarked that it was like some infernal
chemist’s shop. Under the Indian’s direction they took
curious precautions. Each man drew on leather gauntlets
which strapped tight on the wrist. Each shrouded his face
and neck with what looked like a fine-meshed mosquito-curtain.
Also they advanced with extreme caution. The
Indian would scout ahead, while the other two waited in
the sweltering vapour-bath. Then he would return and lead
them by minute tracks, now climbing, now descending, and
they followed blindly, for in that steaming maze there was
neither prospect nor landmark.

That there was need for caution was shown by one
incident. The Indian hurriedly drew them off the trail into
the cover of what looked like a monstrous cactus, and from
their hiding-place they watched four men pass with the
softness of deer. Three were Indians, not of the pueblas
in the Tierra Caliente, for they were tall and lean as the
Shilluks of the Upper Nile. The fourth was a white man
in shirt and breeches, gauntleted and hooded, and his
breeches were the type worn by the Mines Police. But
he was not an ordinary policeman, for, as seen under the
veil, his face had the pallor and his eyes the unseeing concentration
of the magnates of the Gran Seco.

Black looked inquiringly at Luis, who grinned behind his
mosquito-mask. “One of the Conquistadors,” he whispered,
and the other seemed to understand.

In that long, torrid day the party neither ate nor drank.
Just before nightfall they descended almost to the floor of
the cup, where they were within hearing of the noise of the
river. Here they moved with redoubled caution. Once
they came out on the stream bank, and Black thought that
he had never seen stranger waters. They were clear, but
with purple glooms in them, and the foam in the eddies was
not the spume of beaten water, but more like the bubbling
of molten lead. Then they struck inland, climbed a tortuous
gully, and came into a clearing where they had a glimpse of
a cone of snow flaming like a lamp in the sunset.

The place was cunningly hidden, being a little mantel-piece
between two precipitous ravines–on the eyebrow of
a cliff, so that from below it was not suspected–and protected
above by a screen of jungle. An empty hut stood
there, and the Indian proceeded to make camp. A fire was
lit in a corner, and water from the nearest rivulet put on
to boil. It might have been a Jewish feast, for all three
went through elaborate purification ceremonies. Food had
been brought with them, but no morsel of it was touched
till the hands of each had been washed with a chemical solution.
The food-box was then sealed up again as carefully
as if it were to be cached for months. The hut floor was
swept, and before the bedding was laid down it was sprayed
with a disinfectant. There was no window, and the door
was kept tightly shut, all but a grating in it over which
Luis fastened a square of thick gauze netting. The place
would have been abominably stuffy but for the fact that
with nightfall a chill like death had crept over the land, as if
with the darkness the high snows had asserted their dominion.

Later in the night men came to the hut, silently as ghosts,
brought by the Indian, who, though not of their tribe,
seemed to know them and speak their tongue. They were
of the same race as the three whom the travellers had encountered
in the forest that afternoon and had stepped aside
to avoid. Strange figures they were, lean and tall, and in
the lantern light their cheek-bones stood out so sharp that
their faces looked like skulls. Their eyes were not dull, like
those of the Gran Seco magnates, but unnaturally bright, and
their voices had so low a pitch that their slow, soft speech
sounded like the purring of cats. Luis spoke to them in
their own language and translated for Black’s benefit. When
they had gone, he turned to his companion.

“You have seen the people of the País de Venenos. An
interesting case of adaptation to environment? What would
the scientists of Europe not give to investigate this
curiosity? These men during long generations have become
immune to the rankest poison in the world.”

“They terrify me,” said Black. “I have seen men very
near to the brutes, but these fellows are uncannier than any
beast. They are not inhuman, they are unnatural. How
on earth did you get a graft here?”

“They have their virtues,” said Luis, “and one of them
is faithfulness. My graft is ancestral. Centuries ago one
of my family came here and did them a service, and the
memory is handed down so that only a Marzaniga can go
among them. Indeed, I think that my blood has something
of their immunity. I take precautions, as you see, but I
do not know if in my case they are so needful.”

Black asked about the poison.

“They are many,” he was told. “There is poison here
in earth and water, in a hundred plants, in a thousand insects,
in the very air we breathe. But the chief is what they
call _astura_–the drug of our friends the Conquistadors.
Once this country was guarded like a leper-settlement, so
that nothing came out of it. Now, as you know, its chief
product is being exploited. The Gran Seco has brought it
within its beneficent civilisation.”

The Indian was already asleep, and, as the two white men
adjusted their blankets, Black commented on the utter stillness.
“We might be buried deep under the ground,” he
said.

“There is no animal life in the forest,” was the answer,
“except insects. There are no birds or deer or even reptiles.
The poison is too strong. But there is one exception.
Listen!”

He held up his hand, and from somewhere in the thickets
came a harsh bark, which in the silence had a horrid
savagery.

“Jackal?” Black asked.

“No. That is one of our foxes. They are immune, like
the men, and they hunt on the uplands above the forest
where there is plenty of animal life. I think they are the
chief horror of the place. Picture your English fox, with
his sharp muzzle and prick ears, but picture him as big as
a wolf, and a cannibal, who will rend and eat his own kind.”

As Black fell asleep, he heard again the snarling bark and
he shivered. It was as if the devilishness of the Poison
Country had found its appropriate voice.

They stayed there for four days, and in all that time they
did not move from the little mantelpiece. Every night
ghosts which were men slipped out of the jungle and talked
with them in the hut. Black fell ill again, with his old
fever, and Luis looked grave and took the Indian aside.
The result was that on the third night, when the men came
and Black lay tossing on his couch, there was a consultation,
and one of the visitors rolled in his hands a small pellet.
It began by being a greyish paste, but when rolled it became
translucent like a flawed pearl. Black was made to swallow
it, and presently fell into a torpor so deep that all the night
Luis anxiously felt his heart-beats. But in the morning the
sickness had gone. Black woke with a clear eye and a clean
tongue, and announced that he felt years younger, and in
the best of spirits.

“You have tasted _astura_,” said Luis, “and that is more
than I have ever done, for I am afraid. You will have
no more, my friend. It cures fever, but it makes too soon
its own diseases.”

The four days were cloudless and very warm. The
forest reeked in the sunshine, and wafts of odours drifted
up to the mantelpiece, odours such as Black had never
before known in nature. The place seemed a crucible in
some infernal laboratory, where through the ages Natura
Maligna had been distilling her dreadful potions. His
dreams were bad, and they were often broken by the yelp
of the cannibal foxes. Horror of this abyss came on him,
and even Luis, who had been there before and had grown
up with the knowledge of it, became uneasy as the hours
passed. These days were not idle. Information was collected,
and presently they had a fairly complete knowledge of
the methods by which those whom they called the Conquistadors
worked. Then on the last night came a deluge of
rain, and Luis looked grave. “If this continues,” he said,
“we may be trapped; and if we are trapped here, we shall
die. Then it will be farewell to the Courts of the Morning,
my friend.”

But in the night the rain stopped, and at dawn they
hooded and gauntleted themselves and started back. It was
a nightmare journey, for the track had become slime, and
the queer smells had increased to a miasma. Their feet
slipped, and they made shrinking contact with fœtid mud
and obscene plants whose pallid leaves seemed like limbs of
the dead. The heat was intense, and the place was loud
with the noise of swollen rivulets and the buzz of maleficent
insects. Black grew very weary, but Luis would permit of
no halt, and even the Indians seemed eager to get the
journey over.

They did not reach their old camp till the darkness had
long fallen, but the last hour was for Black like an awakening
from a bad dream. For he smelt clean earth and herbage
and pure water again, and he could have buried his face
in the cool grass.

The next day they left the Indians behind and rode over
the mountains by intricate passes farther to the south, which
brought them to a long valley inclining to the south-west.
Three nights later they slept in an upland meadow, and by
the following evening had crossed a further pass and
reached a grassy vale which looked westward to the plains.
Luis pointed out a blue scarp to the north.

“That is the Gran Seco frontier,” he said. “It is
guarded by patrols and blockhouses, but we have outflanked
them. I have brought you by a way which the Gobernador
does not know–only those of my family and perhaps two
others. We may relax now, for our immediate troubles
are over.”

They slept at a camp of vaqueros, and in the morning
Black had several surprises. The first was an ancient Ford
car which stood under a tarpaulin in the corner of one of
the cattle-pens. The second was the change in his garb
upon which Luis insisted. The uniform of the Mines Police
was carefully packed in the car, and in its place he was given
the cotton trousers and dark-blue shirt of an ordinary peon
on the estancias. Luis drove the Ford all day through rolling
savannah, with beside him a lean mestizo servant, to
whom he talked earnestly, except when they halted for food
at an inn or met other travellers. In the evening they came
to a big hacienda, low and white, with wide corrals
for cattle, and red-roofed stables which suggested Newmarket.

Half a mile from the place a girl, who had seen them
approaching, cantered up to them on a young Arab mare.
The car slowed down, and driver and peon took off their
hats.

“You are a day behind time,” she said.

“Well, what about it, Miss Dasent?” It was the peon
who spoke, and there was anxiety in his tone.

“Only that you have missed his Excellency the Gobernador,”
said the girl in her pleasant Southern voice. “He
paid us a visit of ceremony yesterday, to talk about horses.
Curious that he should have chosen the day you were
expected. Don Mario thinks that Lord Clanroyden had
better not sleep in the house. If he will get out at the gate
of the cattle-yard, I will show him the way to the overseer’s
quarters.”

IX

When Archie and Janet came down to dinner that evening
at Veiro they found Don Luis de Marzaniga, a little thinner
and browner than before, but spruce and composed as if he
were about to dine at his Olifa club. He kissed Janet’s
hand, and asked Archie if he had enjoyed the weeks since
his return from the Gran Seco.

“I’ve been obeying orders,” was the answer. “There’s
my commander-in-chief. She’ll tell you how docile I’ve
been, and how I’ve never bothered her with questions, though
Janet and I are sick with curiosity.”

The tall girl, whose name was Barbara Dasent, smiled.
“I’ll testify that he has been a good boy.”

She was very slim, and at first sight the delicate lines of
her neck and her small head gave her an air of fragility–an
impression presently corrected by the vigour and grace
of her movements. Her face was a classic oval, but without
the classic sculptural heaviness, her dark hair clustered about
her head in childish curls, her clear skin had a healthy pallor
which intensified the colouring of lips and eyes. These eyes
were a miracle–deep and dark, at once brooding and
kindling, as full of changes as a pool in the sunlight, and
yet holding, like a pool, some elemental profundity. The
lashes were long and the eyebrows a slender crescent. Janet
had crossed the room and stood beside her, and each was to
the other a perfect foil. Yet, though they had no feature
in common, there was an odd kinship, due perhaps to the
young freedom of each, their candid _regard_ and a certain
boyish gallantry of bearing.

At dinner, under the Sanfuentes Murillo, Luis cross-examined
Archie about his recent doings. It appeared that,
on Miss Dasent’s instructions, he had been travelling widely
in the coastal flats of Olifa. He had been given introductions
from the Minister of Defence, and had been the guest
of several regiments, attended an infantry camp of instruction,
and taken part in cavalry manœuvres. Also he had
visited various flying-stations, and had made several flights.
The result was unqualified admiration.

“I can’t claim to be a military pundit,” he said, “but I
know a first-class thing when I meet it. All I have to say
is that Olifa has got the most completely professional outfit
I have ever seen. There isn’t one lesson of the Great War
she hasn’t learned. Her infantry tactics are the sort of
thing we were feeling our way to before the Armistice.
Her tanks are the latest pattern, better than anything I’ve
seen in England, and, by Jove, she knows how to use them.
Her army is mechanised to the full, but not too far, for she
has the sense to see that cavalry rightly handled will never
be out of date. And she has an amazing good staff, picked
from up and down the earth, all as keen as mustard–like
what we used to imagine the German staff to be, but less
hidebound. Of course I don’t know what strength she has
in the way of reserves, and I can’t speak of the fighting
spirit, but there’s no doubt she has a most efficient standing
army for a nucleus. What puzzles me is why she should
want anything so good when she’s so secure.”

Luis asked about the Air Force.

“That was the only thing with which I was a little
disappointed,” Archie replied. “It’s extraordinarily good
in the scientific way–the last word in machines and engines
and all that sort of thing–but just a little lacking in life.
Those chaps don’t spend enough hours in the air. They’ve
got all the theory and expert knowledge they can carry,
but they haven’t got as much devil as we have. Too
serious, I should say. Keener about the theory than the
game.”

Luis had been listening closely. “You are very near the
truth, Señor Roylance,” he said. “We in Olifa have all
that science and money can give us, but we have not enough
soul. What is your English word–_guts_?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that.”

“But _I_ will say it. And it is perhaps fortunate. I do
not blame my nation, for our army is not national, since
its leaders are mercenaries.”

“I’m still puzzled. What do you want it for? I never
got any figures of man-power and reserves, but if you’ve
an adequate shaft behind this spear-head, you’ve a superb
fighting-machine. What do you mean to use it against?”

Luis laughed. “It is the conventional insurance premium
which our rich Olifa pays. Pays carelessly and without
conviction. That is why, as you truly say, our army is
made up chiefly of mercenaries. We have collected the best
soldiers of Europe who were out of a job. It is a police,
if you choose. If a little political war came with a neighbour,
Olifa would use her pretty toy and ask only that she
got her money’s worth. . . . Unless, of course, it was a
war which touched her heart, and then she would fight in
the old way–with her people.”

They sat late at table, Archie answering Luis’s questions
and illustrating his views by diagrams on the backs of
envelopes. Presently Miss Dasent left the room, and on
her return said something to Don Mario. He rose and led
the way to his sitting-room, where, according to custom,
a wood fire crackled on the wide hearth. The curtains,
usually left untouched to reveal the luminous night, were
now closely drawn. A man in a flannel suit stood with his
back to the fireplace.

Janet blinked at him for a moment, and then ran up to
him with both hands outstretched.

“Oh, Sandy dear, I have been miserable about you. Thank
God, you’re safely back. You’re desperately thin. You’re
not ill?”

“I’m perfectly well, thank you. But I’ve been pushed
up to the limit of my strength. It’s all right. I’ve done
it often before, you know. I only want to lie fallow for
a bit. It’s good to see you and Archie. . . . I feel as if
I had come home.”

“Are you safe here?” Janet asked anxiously.

Luis answered. “Perfectly–at present. The Gobernador
must suspect something or he would not have been here
yesterday. But he can know nothing. We have pickets
out, and at the worst we shall get ample warning. To-night,
at any rate, we can sleep sound.”

“We have asked no questions,” said Janet. “For the
past week Archie has been behaving like the intelligent
tourist, and I have been sketching in water-colours. We
want to be enlightened, Sandy dear.”

The man addressed–he looked very young in the dim light,
for his hair had grown long and was tousled like a boy’s
over his forehead–flung himself into an armchair and
stretched his lean shanks to the blaze. He slowly filled an
old pipe and looked round at the audience–Don Mario
erect and prim, Luis sprawling on a couch, Archie swinging
his long legs from a corner of the table, Miss Dasent very
quiet in the shadow, Janet standing on the tiger-skin rug,
an incarnate note of interrogation. He looked round and
laughed.

“You ask a good deal. Luis knows everything, and
Miss Dasent. Don Mario knows as much as he wants to.
But you two are newcomers, so I must begin from the
beginning. Sit down on that stool, Janet, and, Archie, get
off the table. I’m going to make a second-reading speech,
as they say in your little Parliament. After that the House
can go into committee. . . .

“First of all, I need hardly tell you that the world to-day
is stuffed with megalomania. Megalomania in politics,
megalomania in business, megalomania in art–there are
a dozen kinds. You have the man who wants to be a
dictator in his own country, you have the man who wants
to corner a dozen great businesses and control the finance
of half the world, you have the man who wants to break
down the historic rules of art and be a law to himself. The
motive is the same in every case–rootlessness, an unbalanced
consciousness of ability, and an overweening pride.
They want to rule the world, but they do not see that by
their methods they must first deprive the world of its soul,
and that what would be left for their dictatorship would
be an inanimate corpse. You see, for all their splendid gifts
they have no humour.”

“What is Mr Castor’s nationality?” Janet asked
irrelevantly.

“He has none. He was born in Austria, and I think
he has a Spanish strain in him. Blenkiron has a notion
that he has English blood, too, but he cannot prove it. The
man is like Melchizedek, without apparent origin. He’s
what you call a _weltkind_, the true international.”

“_He_ has no humour,” said Janet with emphasis.

“I agree. But he has most other things, and one is a
clear and searching mind. His strength, and also his weakness,
is that he has no illusions. For one thing, he does not
possess the illusion which ordinary people call a creed. He
does not want to re-make the world on some new fantastic
pattern, like the Communists. He has none of Mussolini’s
arbitrary patriotism. He wants to root out various things,
but I doubt if he has a preference for what should take their
place. I don’t profess to understand more than bits of him.
He is an egotist, but in the colossal sense, for he has no
vanity. He considers that he has been called on to do
certain things, and that he is the only man living who can.
The world, as he sees it, is suffocating from the debris of
democracy, and he wants to clear it away. He does not
hate it, he despises it. He is the scientist and philosopher,
who would introduce the reign of reason and the rule of
law, but first some decaying refuse called popular liberties
must be destroyed. Therefore he is against Britain, but only
half-heartedly, for he thinks that with us democracy is
tempered by more rational instincts, and that in any case our
number is up. But for America he has the unfaltering
contempt which a trained athlete might have for a great,
overgrown, noisy, slobbering, untrained hobbledehoy. With
America it is war to the death.”

“I’ve known other people take that view,” Archie put in.

“With him it is not a view, it is a crusading passion.
In Castor you have the normally passionless, scientific
mind kindled to a white heat. The mischief is that he is
inhuman–not cruel, but inhuman. He will use the ordinary
stuff of humanity to further his ends as ruthlessly as a
furnace swallows coke. He will do any evil in order that
what he considers good may come.”

“That is the definition of a devil,” said Janet.

“Not quite. Castor is just as near being a saint. If
he had a different religion he might deserve to be beatified,
for he is scrupulously loyal to what he believes to be the
right. He’s not evil–he just happens to have missed the
human touch. He knows nothing of friendship–nor, of
course, of any kind of love. His world is a narrow cell
with the big dynamo of his brain purring in it. He is cruel,
simply because he cannot conceive the feelings of anybody
but himself, and is not interested in them. He is a master
over _things_, and over men so long as he can treat them as
things. If he were Emperor of the world I have no doubt
he would be a just ruler. As it is–well, I have been seeing
too much of his methods these last days to be in love
with him.”

He paused for a second to shake out the ashes from his
pipe.

“Well, I’ve given you what Blenkiron would call the
‘general Castor proposition.’ Now, how would a man,
obsessed by this idea, set about realising it? First of all, he
would want money, money on a gigantic scale. He has got
it in the Gran Seco. Remember, he is a very great practical
engineer and chemist–Blenkiron, who should know, says
the greatest in the world–and he is a first-class man of
business. Second, he would want a base, and a well-camouflaged
base. He has got that in the republic of Olifa.
You have seen for yourselves how completely Olifa is in
his power. He has changed in a few years the whole
character of her governing class. He has made her Government
rich and supine, and got it under his thumb. The
thing is a miracle of tact and diplomacy. The Olifa
ministers do not share in his secrets, they know very little
of his schemes, but he has organised them as he wanted,
and they do his bidding without a question. Up in the
Gran Seco he has his laboratory and factory, and in the
State of Olifa he has his outer barrage, the decorous,
bourgeois republic which keeps watch at his door.

“Thirdly, he had to have his staff and his army to operate
for him throughout the globe. He has got that, too–slaves
who mechanically obey him. You have seen some of them
in your Olifa hotel and in the Gran Seco. You have
lunched with them, and Janet says that they made her flesh
creep.”

“The _type Gran Seco_,” said Archie.

“The _type Gran Seco_. Have you any notion who they
are? They look like robots, with their pallid faces and soft
voices and small, precise gestures. All their individuality
seems to have been smoothed away, so that they conform
to one pattern. Nevertheless, they were once men of brains
and character. Their brains they have kept, but their
characters have been stereotyped, and they have surrendered
their wills into the hand of their master. They have been
most carefully selected from every nation. One or two you
have known before, Archie.”

“I swear I haven’t.”

“But you have. The Gran Seco is the port for missing
ships. Men who have foundered somehow in life–respectable
careerists who suddenly crash on some private vice–fellows
who show the white feather–soldiers without regiments,
financiers without credit–they are all there. Do you
remember Lariarty, Archie? He was about your time at
Eton. There was a bad scandal about him in 1915.”

“Good God! Of course I do. I heard he was dead.”

“He sat opposite you a few weeks ago when you lunched
with the Administration. You couldn’t recognise him.
Everything that once was Lariarty has gone out of
him, except his brain. You remember he was a clever
fellow. And Romanes–the man who was in the 23rd–people
said he was with the Touaregs in the Sahara. He
is one of them, but I believe at the moment he is in
Europe. And Freddy Larbert, who was once a rising man
in the Diplomatic Service. He did not hang himself at
Bucharest, as they said he did, for to-day he is in the Gran
Seco. I could mention others, and they come from every
country–Russian aristocrats who were beggared and
Russian revolutionists who were too clever, broken soldiers
and blown-on politicians and speculators who missed their
market. The Gran Seco is the true Foreign Legion, and it
needs no discipline. Castor asks only for two things, brains
and submission to his will, and once a man enters his service
he can never leave it.”

“Why?” Archie asked.

“Because he does not want to. Because the Gran Seco
is his only home and away from it he is lost. I told you
that Castor was like the Old Man of the Mountain in the
chronicle I showed you at Laverlaw. There is nothing new
under the sun. Castor rules his initiates as the old ruffian
in the Lebanon ruled his Assassins. You remember he gave
them hashish, so that their one desire was to get their job
in the outer world finished and return to the Lebanon to
dream. Castor has the same secret. As I have told you, he is
a mighty chemist, and this continent is the home of drugs.
One in particular is called _astura_ and is found in what they
call the País de Venenos, the Poison Country in the eastern
mountains. The secret of it was lost for ages till he revived
it, and, except as a legend in the Marzaniga family, it was
unknown in Olifa. This _astura_ is deadly poison, but it can
be used in two ways as a drug. In one preparation it takes
the heart out of a man, but gives him increased physical
strength, till suddenly he cracks and becomes doddering.
That preparation Castor uses to turn out docile labourers
for the mines. He gets marvellous results in output, and
the reports say that it is due to his scientific management
and his study of industrial fatigue, but we know better.
The other preparation does not apparently weaken the bodily
strength, though it alters the colour of the skin and the look
in the eyes. But it is a most potent mental stimulant, and its
addicts tend to live for the next dose. It kills in the end,
but only after a considerable period, and during that period
it gives increased intellectual vitality and an almost insane
power of absorption, varied by languors like the opium-eater’s.
Those who once take to it can never free themselves,
and they are the slaves of him who can supply it.
Willing slaves, competent slaves, even happy slaves, but only
the shadows of what once were men. Lariarty and Romanes
and Larbert and others are among the initiates. They go
about the world on Gran Seco business and they do Castor’s
will as little wheels obey a master-wheel. They have a
name for their brotherhood. They call themselves the new
Conquistadors–conquerors, you see, over all the old standards
and decencies of human nature.”

Archie inquired what precisely they did in their journeys
about the world. He had rumpled his hair, and his eyes
looked as if he were painfully adjusting a manifold of
experience in the light of a new idea.

“First of all, they make money. They are the most
efficient bagmen alive. For the rest, they break down things
and loosen screws, and they have unlimited funds at their
disposal, for Castor spends nearly as fast as he earns. . . .
No, no. Not Bolshevism. The donkeys in Moscow have
in a sense played Castor’s game, but they were far too crude
for him, and to-day I fancy he finds them rather a nuisance.
By their folly they are creating a reaction in favour of that
democracy which he hates. . . . Remember, I don’t know
him. I’ve seen him, but have never spoken to him. I can
only speak at second-hand of his methods, but I’ll give you
Blenkiron’s summary. Blenkiron says that half a century
ago Abraham Lincoln fought a great war to prevent democracy
making a fool of itself. He says that Castor’s object
is just the opposite–he wants to encourage democracy to
make a fool of itself, to inflate the bladder till it bursts.
. . . His instruments? The press, for one thing. He
has a mighty grip on that. The politicians, too, and every
kind of fool organisation for boost and uplift. You’d be
amazed to learn how many gushing societies, that look like
spontaneous ebullitions of popular folly, have his patient
direction behind them. He is the greatest _agent provocateur_
in history.”

“But the thing is impossible,” Archie exclaimed. “He
can’t bring it to a head, and I take it that he knows he is
not immortal and wants some sort of result in his lifetime.”

Sandy nodded. “He has a general ultimate purpose, but
he has also a very clear, practical, immediate purpose. He
wants to make trouble for America–before she can set her
house in order. The United States, Blenkiron says, have
reached the biggest crisis in their history. They have got
wealth and power, but they have lost the close national
integration they had when they were poorer. Their best
men are labouring like galley-slaves to discipline their
country. They have to give it an adequate law, and a
proper public service, and modernise its antediluvian constitution.
Castor wants to catch them at the moment of
transition, when they haven’t found their balance. He
believes that bad foreign trouble, which they couldn’t afford
to neglect, would split the unwieldy fabric. Democracy, of
which America is the incoherent champion, would become
a laughing-stock, and he and his kind would have the reordering
of the fragments.”

“I think,” said Janet, “that he has taken on too big a job.
Does he imagine that any alliance of Latin republics would
have any effect on America? I have heard you say yourself
that she couldn’t be conquered.”

“True.” The speaker’s eyes were on the other girl who
was sitting in the shadow outside the circle of firelight.
“No Power or alliance of Powers could conquer America.
But assume that she is compelled to quarrel with a group of
Olifas, and that with her genius for misrepresenting herself
she appears to have a bad cause. Has she many friends on
the globe except Britain? Most countries will flatter her
and kowtow to her and borrow money of her, but they
hate her like hell. Trust them not to help matters by interpreting
her case sympathetically. Inside her borders she
has half a dozen nations instead of one, and that is where
Castor comes in. A situation like that, when she was forced
to act and yet didn’t want to and didn’t know how to, might,
if properly manipulated, split her from top to bottom.
Look what happened in the Civil War, and she was an
integrated nation then compared to what she is now.
Twenty years ago the danger would not have been there;
ten years hence, if all goes well, it may be past; but
to-day, Blenkiron says, there is precisely as big a risk of a
blow-up as there was in Europe in June 1914. The men
who count in America know it, even without Blenkiron
telling them.”

“Mr Blenkiron discovered Castor?” Janet asked.

“Yes. He came on the track of some of Castor’s agents,
and in his slow, patient way worked backwards to the source.
Then he succeeded in laying himself alongside of Castor.
How he managed it, I can’t tell. You see, he’s a big
engineering swell, and I daresay he made himself useful
over the actual copper business. Not as John Scantlebury
Blenkiron, of course–as Señor Rosas, the agreeable
denationalised Mexican, who has lived long enough in the
States to have a healthy hatred for them. He must have
had a pretty delicate time, and I don’t suppose he was ever
free from anxiety till he managed to arrange for his opportune
decease. He was never in Castor’s full confidence, for
he didn’t belong to the Conquistadors and never touched
_astura_–gave out that he had to be careful in his habits
because of his duodenum. His graft was that he understood
the mining business like nobody else except Castor. But
he had to be very cautious and had to stick like a limpet to
his rock. Till he got in touch with Luis, he was next door
to a prisoner.”

Janet asked how that had been contrived, and Luis replied.

“Through Wilbur. I am afraid you underrated that drawling
New England Consul! Wilbur is a great man. He
was a friend of mine, and enlisted me, and then we enlisted
others. After a time–after a long time–we got in touch
with Lord Clanroyden.”

Archie drew a deep breath. “I think I see the layout,”
he said. “That is to say, I see what Castor is driving at.
But I can’t for the life of me see what we can do to stop
him. . . . Unless we got America to chip in first.”

“That was Blenkiron’s original plan,” said Sandy. “But
it was too difficult–might have precipitated what we wanted
to avoid. So we decided to do the job ourselves.”

Archie stared at the speaker, and then whistled long and
low. “You haven’t lost your nerve, old man,” he said at
last. “I’m on for anything you propose–likewise Janet–but
what precisely are the odds? About a million to one?”

Sandy laughed and hoisted himself out of the chair.
“Not quite so bad! Stiffish, I agree, but not farcical. You
see, we hold certain cards.”

“I should like to know about them,” said Archie. “You
seem to me to have taken on one of the toughest propositions
in history. A species of Napoleon–unlimited cash–a
big, docile, and highly competent staff–a graft everywhere–and
at his back the republic of Olifa with the latest
thing in armies. I assure you, it won’t do to underrate the
Olifa field force. And to set against all that you’ve Blenkiron,
more or less a prisoner–yourself–Miss Dasent and
her friends–with Janet and me as camp-followers. It’s a
sporting proposition.”

“Nevertheless, we hold certain cards. There’s a fair
amount of explosive stuff in the Gran Seco and we have
been organising it.”

“The Indians?”

“The Indians. Castor has bled them white with his
accursed forced labour, but there’s still a reserve of manhood
to be used–very desperate and vindictive manhood. Also,
there is an element among the white employees. You have
the Conquistadors at the top and the Indians at the bottom,
and between them the foremen and the engineers. They
are the weak point of Castor’s scheme, for they are not
under his spell and know nothing of _astura_. He had to have
skilled men and men whose interest lay in asking no questions,
but he could never count upon their loyalty. He
recruited every kind of scallywag and paid them lavishly,
for he wanted people whose interest lay in sticking to the
Gran Seco. But he has always had his troubles with them,
and he and his Conquistadors in self-protection had to have
their bodyguard. What sort of bodyguard? Oh, the usual
bad-man type, the killer, the gunman. . . . You must have
noticed them in the Gran Seco, quiet, steady-eyed, frozen-faced
fellows–the Town Police is full of them, and so was
the Mines Police till Blenkiron began to weed them out.
. . . Well, Blenkiron has had a lot to do for the past
year with recruiting both the foremen and engineers and
the Mines Police, and we have managed to get them pretty
well staffed with our own men. Hard cases, most of them,
but a different kind of hard case. Blackguards often, but a
more wholesome brand of blackguard. The Gran Seco at
this moment is a sort of chess-board of black and white, and
we know pretty exactly which are the white squares. If a
row begins, we calculate that we have rather the balance
of strength on that cheerful plateau. But I hope there will
be no row. I don’t like that crude way of doing things.”

Archie passed a hand over his forehead.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said plaintively.
“There must be a row, a most unholy row. You
want to raise the Indians, assisted by your friends in the
Police and in the Mines, against the Administration. The
Gobernador, if he is what you say he is, will resist like a
tiger, and he has his gunmen behind him, and Olifa at the
back of all. You will have to fight Castor. . . .”

Sandy smiled. “Oh, no. We will not fight Castor. We
mean to fight _for_ him. Castor will be our leader. The
Indians in the back-country are wearing medals with his
face on them, and look to him as their deliverer. That’s the
advantage of being a mystery man. No one knows him,
except the Conquistadors, who don’t count. He is going
to be the Bolivar of the Gran Seco, the pioneer of liberty.”

“Good God! Do you mean to say you are working in
with him?”

“No. I won’t go as far as that. But we hope to make
him work for us. He won’t like it, but it’s the obvious move
in the game. It will not be a rising of the oppressed
against the Administration, but a revolt of the whole Gran
Seco, oppressed and oppressors, against the tyrannical
government of Olifa. And in the forefront of the battle
will be Castor, like a new Uriah the Hittite.”

Janet, who had been listening with a strained face,
suddenly broke into one of her fits of helpless laughter.
“That was your idea, Sandy. Mr Blenkiron never thought
of anything so wild.”

“It is not wild. It is common sense. It’s ju-jitsu, where
you use the strength of your opponent to defeat him.”

“It is not common sense,” Archie declared vehemently.
“It is insanity. If Dick Hannay were here, he’d say the
same thing. Supposing you unite the Gran Seco, with
Castor at your head, what better off are you? You’re up
against Olifa with an army that will crumple you as easy
as winking. You are cut off from the sea. You have no
base and no communications. Where are you to get your
munitions? Olifa will smash you in a week–or, better still,
starve you out in a month.”

“May be,” said Sandy calmly. “That’s the risk we run.
But it isn’t quite as bad as you think. We have a base, and
presently you’ll hear all about it. Also, I rather think it
will be a new kind of war. I always had a notion of a
new kind of war–an economical war–and I’m going to
have a shot at it, even though we take a good many chances.
You’ve been doing useful work, old man, in sticking your
nose into Olifa’s army system, and you naturally have a
high regard for it. So have I. But it’s an old-fashioned
system.”

“You’re wrong. It’s the most up-to-date thing on the
globe.”

“It has learned all the lessons of our little scrap in France
and Flanders, and I daresay it would make a very good
showing in that sort of business. But it won’t be allowed
to, for it’s going to be a different kind of business. We’re
the challengers, and will decide the form of the combat. The
Olifa army is as rigid in its up-to-dateness as the old British
army was rigid in its antiquarianism. Castor is going to
puzzle it.”

Archie called fervently upon his Maker.

“You’re as mad as a hatter,” he cried, “but it’s a madness
I’ve got to have a hand in. You promised to let me in,
Sandy. I’ll do anything I’m told. . . .”

“I gave you a promise. But now you know what we
propose, do you still hold me to it? What do you say,
Janet? I can’t put the odds better than three to one. We
may all be blotted out. Worse still, we may end in a fiasco
with our reputation gone for good. This is not your quarrel.
I’ve no business to implicate you, and if you both slip down
to Olifa and take the next steamer home, I admit I’ll be
happier in my mind.”

“You want us to go home?” Janet asked. Her slight
figure in the firelight had stiffened like a soldier on parade.

“I should be easier if you went.”

Miss Dasent rose and came out of the shadows.

“You say it is not Sir Archibald’s quarrel,” she said.
The clear sweet pallor of her skin was coloured by the glow
from the hearth, and her dark eyes had the depth of a
tragic muse. “But is it _your_ quarrel, Lord Clanroyden?
Why are you doing this? Only out of friendship for my
uncle? If you say that, I cannot believe you. I could
understand you taking any risk to get my uncle out of
the Gran Seco–that would be your loyalty–but this is
more than that. It cannot be for America’s sake, for I
have heard you say harsh things about my country. What
is your reason? You can’t expect Lady Roylance to answer
till she has heard it.”

Sandy flushed under the gaze of the dark eyes.

“I don’t know. I never analyse my motives. But I think–I
think I would go on with this affair, even if your uncle
were out of it. You see, down at the bottom of my heart
I hate the things that Castor stands for. I hate cruelty.
I hate using human beings as pawns in a game of egotism.
I hate all rotten, machine-made, scientific creeds. I loathe
and detest all that super-man cant, which is worse nonsense
than the stuff it tries to replace. I really believe in
liberty, though it’s out of fashion. . . . And because
America in her queer way is on the same side, I’m for
America.”

“Thank you,” the girl said quietly.

Janet held out her hand.

“_We_ shan’t stay out, Sandy. I wouldn’t let Archie go
home if he wanted to. We’re both too young to miss this
party. It’s what I used to dream about as a child at Glenraden.
. . . Is there anything to drink? We ought to have
a toast.”

“I said I would be happier if you went home,” said
Sandy, “but I lied.”

Luis jumped to his feet. A whistle had blown faintly
out-of-doors, and a second later there was another low
whistle in the corridor.

“Quick,” he said to Sandy. “That is José. The outer
pickets have seen something, and passed the word back.”

The two men slipped through the curtained window into
the darkness. Don Mario rang a bell and bade a servant
bring maté and other drinks, and no more than five glasses.
Earlier in the evening the company had numbered six. Then
Luis re-entered by the window, drew the curtains, and
dropped into an armchair with a cigarette.

Presently there was the sound of a motor-car on the hard
earth of the courtyard, and the bustle of arrival in the hall.
The door of Don Mario’s room was thrown open, and the
butler ushered in three men in the uniform of the Olifa
police. Two were junior officers, but the third was no less
than Colonel Lindburg, the commissioner of the province
in which Veiro lay.

The Colonel was a tall Swede, with a quick blue eye, close-cropped
hair, and a small jaw like a terrier’s. He greeted
Don Mario heartily, announcing that he was on his way to
Bonaventura, and had called to beg an additional tin of
petrol. Luis he already knew, and he was introduced to
the others–Sir Archie who limped about to get him a chair,
Janet who was turning over an American picture paper,
Miss Dasent who was busy with a small piece of needlework.
The group made a pleasant picture of a family
party, just about to retire to bed. The Colonel noted the
five glasses, and when the servants brought mint juleps the
three officers toasted Don Mario and the ladies. The
newcomers talked of horses, of the visit of the Gobernador
on the previous day, of the cool air of Veiro as compared
with the Olifa heats. “You were not here yesterday, Señor
de Marzaniga,” the Colonel said, and Luis explained that
he had only arrived from his ranch that afternoon.

They stayed for twenty minutes, finished their juleps,
and, at a nod from the Colonel, rose to go. Don Mario
and Luis accompanied them to the door. One of the peons
made himself useful in filling the tank of the car, and was
rewarded with a twenty-peseta piece.

When the sound of the car had died away, the two men
returned to the ladies. Luis was laughing. “They are
clumsy fellows, the police. There were four of them, not
three. The fourth was young Azar. He asked permission
to wash his hands, and, since he knows the house, for he
has been to see the yearlings, he took the opportunity of
inspecting all the bedrooms. Pedro heard him tramping
about upstairs. Also that story of too little petrol was
stupidly contrived. They had four full tins.”

The curtains opened and the peon entered, he who had
been so useful with the car. He held up the twenty-peseta
piece.

“I have got my stake,” he said. “Janet, you shall keep
it. This little coin against Castor’s millions.”

With his rough clothes and dark skin he seemed to have
shrunken to the leanest of lean scarecrows. He swayed a
little, and caught Janet’s shoulder.

“Sandy, you are worn out,” she cried in alarm.

“I’m rather done up. Luis, you must put me in a place
where I can sleep for a round of the clock. I must say
good-bye, for it won’t do for us to be together. . . . Luis
will look after you.”

He took the whisky-and-soda which Don Mario brought
him, and, in the toast he gave, Janet heard for the first time
a name which was to haunt her dreams.

“I drink,” he said, “to our meeting in the Courts of the
Morning.”

X

Mr Sylvester Perry in his _Seeing Eyes_ asked a question
which has often been asked by travellers, why the Gran
Seco had no other route to the sea except by the three-hundred-mile
journey south to the port of Olifa. Its city
is not more than a hundred miles as the crow flies from
the Pacific. The answer which Mr Perry gives is
that which he had from one of the transient managers
of the struggling copper companies, that on the western
side of the plateau the mountains simply cascade into
the sea. Archie, who had asked himself the question,
reached the same conclusion from a study of a map prepared
long ago by the British Admiralty. The close lines
of the hatching, though they must have been largely a
matter of guesswork, showed that the sailors who had surveyed
the coast had no doubt about its precipitous character,
and up in the northern apex, where the great peak of
Choharua overhung the ocean, the contours made the drop
as sheer as the side of a house.

Oddly enough, about this time the same question occurred
to the Gobernador. That northern angle had been left
alone in his careful organisation of his province, for up
there was neither wealth to be got nor men to get it. He
called for the reports of those who had penetrated its
recesses and all spoke with the same voice. The plateau
rose in sharp tiers to meet the curve of the mountains, and
these tiers were waterless desert. Higher up there were
forests, which might some day be used for mine timber, and
it might be possible to divert the streams from the snows,
which now flowed seaward in sheer ravines, to the Gran
Seco watershed. These things, however, were for the
future. The Gobernador closed the reports and rolled up
the maps, with a mental note that some day soon he must
undertake a complete scientific survey of his province.

It had become necessary for him to pay one of his hurried
visits to Europe. The Gobernador led a life as arduous as
Napoleon’s during the early years of his Consulate. Like
Napoleon, he had made himself the master of every detail
in every department, and, like Napoleon, he had instituted
a zealous inquest for capacity, and, having found it, used
it to the full. But, unlike the First Consul, he did not need
to keep a close eye on his subordinates; they had become
automata, minor replicas of himself, whose minds worked
in accurate conformity with his. Of this loyalty there could
be no doubt; they had lost the capacity for treason, since
treason implies initiative.

But on certain matters he kept his own counsel. There
were letters from Europe and the United States, specially
marked, which he opened himself, and which were never
answered or filed by his most efficient secretaries. There
were visits to various South American cities of which no
report existed in the Gran Seco offices, though at the other
end, in various secret Government bureaus, there may have
been some record. In recent months these curious activities
had increased. Messages in the Gobernador’s most private
cypher had been more frequent; He had begun to take a
minute interest in the policing of his province, in
the matter of passports, in the safeguarding of every mile
of the frontier. Distant police officials had been badgered
with questions, and the special bodyguard of the Administration
had been increased. Also the Sanfuentes of the
younger branch, who was Olifa’s Minister for External
Affairs, had twice journeyed to the Gran Seco–an unheard-of
affair–and had been closeted for hours with the
Gobernador, and on the second visit he had been accompanied
by Señor Aribia, the Minister of Finance. New
business, it appeared, was on the carpet, and for a fortnight
the Gobernador did not appear at the Administration
luncheons.

There was an air of tension, too, in the province, which,
like an electric current, made itself felt in more distant
quarters. It affected Olifa, where there was an unwonted
bustle in various departments, and high officials went about
with laden brows and preoccupied eyes. It affected the
foreign consulates and embassies of various South American
States. It was felt in certain rooms in Washington, London,
Paris, Berlin, and Rome, large rooms decorated and furnished
in the deplorable style of Government offices, where
behind locked doors anxious men talked far into the night.
There was even a little extra stir in the dovecotes of Moscow,
where a pale young man, who spoke bad French, had an interview
with five others whose power was so great that even
the governing caste knew them only by numbers, and
thereafter a dozen insignificant-looking people crossed the
Russian frontier with passports for various remote lands.
It especially affected Mr Roderick Wilbur, the American
Consul in Olifa. That heavy man spent two energetic days,
and a still more energetic night, which was largely occupied
in burning papers. Then, leaving his office in the charge
of his assistant and under the general care of Don Alejandro
Gedd, he announced that he was about to take a holiday,
and departed for the capital of an adjacent republic. There
his holiday consisted in sitting in the office of the British
Consul, and, being permitted to use his cypher, in sending,
by way of the British Embassy in Washington, a series
of messages which brought two of his Ministers out of
bed at one in the morning.

Yet in the midst of this activity the Gobernador must go
journeying. His mission was, he said, to Europe, and in
two months he would return. To Señor Rosas, the Vice-President
of the Company, he committed the temporary
charge. As the two sat in the big bright room on the first
floor of the great Administration Headquarters, into which
travellers on the top of the tramcars could stare, while the
clack of typewriters around them was like the noise of
frogs in a pond at night, they made an interesting contrast.
Both were big men, but while the Gobernador was hard and
trim and spare, the Mexican looked sallow and flabby, as if
he had been meant for a fat man but was kept lean by
overwork and anxiety. Nevertheless his eye was clear and
healthy. There was no intimacy between the two, but there
was obviously respect. For Señor Rosas had under his
special charge the most difficult element in the community,
the white foremen and engineers, who did not belong to
the close brotherhood of the Conquistadors or the Bodyguard,
and were not subject to the harsh discipline of
the mine labourers. They were the nearest approach
in the Gran Seco to a free society, and needed careful
handling.

Instructions were given, minute instructions, reports were
referred to, diagrams consulted, calculations made, and the
Mexican took many notes. Then the Gobernador pushed
the papers aside, and his penetrating eyes dwelt on the
other’s face. There was no cordiality between these two,
only the confidence of a business partnership. They
addressed each other formally, as was the custom in the
Gran Seco.

“I am not satisfied with the Police, Señor,” he said. “I
have information that there is a leakage somewhere. It is
certain that in recent months unlicensed persons have been
inside our border. They may still be here. If they have
gone, what have they gone to do? I have given instructions
to make the mesh closer. That is not your province, I
know, but as my substitute I look to you to see that the
work is done.”

The Mexican met the steady gaze of the other with an
almost childlike candour. The hard lines of the jaw and
cheek-bones made his large ruminant eyes at once innocent
and unfathomable. English was being talked, and he replied
in the drawl which he had learned in the States.

“I reckon you can trust me, Excellency, to hand over this
territory to you a little bit more healthy than when you left
it. I’m to expect you back in two months’ time?”

The other smiled. “That is my official leave. I may
return earlier. . . . I have much to do, but it may take
less time than I expect. Perhaps in a month . . . or
less . . .”

“Then you’ve got to fly to Europe.”

“Europe is for the public, Señor. My business may be
done nearer home. As yet I cannot tell.”

“Say, you’re taking precautions? You’re not going
alone? You’re a lot too valuable a commodity to be touring
about like an ordinary citizen. There’s heaps of folk that
are keeping something for us. You got to take precautions.”

The Gobernador frowned. “It has never been my custom,
as you know, Señor. A man who goes in fear of his life
is a fool–he had better be dead.”

“That’s sound as a general principle. But I guess this
is a special emergency, and I can’t have you running risks.
You got to take the three men you had when you last went
north. You know the bunch–Carreras, and Dan Judson,
and Biretti. I’ll have them washed and tidied up so as
to do you credit. They won’t obtrude themselves, and they’ll
do as they’re bid, but they’ll be at hand in case of dirty
work. If there’s any shooting, I’ll say they shoot first.
You aren’t justified in taking risks, Excellency. There’s
a darned lot too much depends on you. I reckon you’re
too big a man and too brave a man to be afraid of having
some fool say you take mighty good care of your skin.”

The frown relaxed. “I suppose that is common sense.
I will take the men with me.”

In Olifa the Gobernador did not go to a hotel. He had
his rooms in the great Gran Seco building in the Avenida
de la Paz. He did not leave the building much–at any rate
by day; but he was a magnet to draw the eminent thither.
Señor Vicente Sanfuentes and Señor Aribia visited him
there, and on two occasions the President himself, modestly
on foot, and not accompanied by the tossing plumes and
bright harness of the Presidential Guard. Also General
Bianca, the Minister of War, who had been in a dozen of
the old wars of Olifa, came to pay his respects, and with
him came the departmental heads, the Chief of Staff, the
Director-General of Transport, the officer commanding the
Olifa district, all youngish men, who had found in Olifa a
market for professional talents which were no longer valued
in Europe.

Among the callers was Colonel Lindburg, the commissioner
of police of one of the provinces. He had a report
to make. “Acting upon your instructions, Excellency, we
have inquired into the doings of our friend Don Luis de
Marzaniga. He spends his time between the country house,
where he lives alone with his widowed mother, and his
cattle-ranch in the Vulpas valley. In an ancient car he
is at all times bumping over the roads between the two.
Also he is often at Veiro, for he advises the old Don
Mario about his young stock. I am satisfied that every
movement of Don Luis for the past month can be amply
explained.”

“And Veiro?”

“You yourself have seen, Excellency. Don Mario has
entertained the young English baronet and his wife, and
the American girl, Señorita Dasent. They were sent to him
by his foolish cousin, Don Alejandro Gedd. I have had
the place watched, and, except for Don Luis, no one else
has visited there.”

The Gobernador appeared to be satisfied, and, after
compliments, Colonel Lindburg withdrew. But when the
policeman had gone the great man opened a dispatch-box
and took from it a small memoranda book. He re-read in
it a message which he had received from Paris a month
earlier, warning him that there was reason to believe that
one X—- (the name was obviously in code) had left
Europe and was probably in Olifa. At the same time he
turned up certain reports handed to him by the most
trusted member of the Administration’s special police.
These recorded various odd actions on the part of several
members of the Mines engineering staff, on whom the
Administration had chosen to keep a special eye. There
seemed, said one report, to be a good deal of private meeting
and talking among them, as if some agent had arrived to
stir them up. A mysterious visitor had been seen, but the
trail of him had been lost before he could be identified; his
physical appearance had suggested Señor de Marzaniga, with
whom, as a member of an ancient and intransigent Olifa
family, the secret service was well acquainted. The
Gobernador brooded over these notes. There was nothing
of special importance in them; weekly, daily, he was in the
habit of receiving similar communications; but some instinct
had led him to single these out, and he had diverted the Olifa
police to what had proved to be a wild-goose chase. . . .
He was not satisfied, but he dismissed the thing from his
mind. He had too many hard certainties before him to
waste time on speculations.

It was surprising during these days how much time the
great man gave to the study of the press. Not the Olifa
press, but that of every other South American country, and
of the United States. His sitting-room was often like the
reading-room in a public library, for he seemed to have
an insatiable appetite for the journalism of the New World.
Often he studied it in conjunction with the Olifa Ministers,
and the study appeared to give them pleasure. There was
at the moment an awkward situation in Mexico, and a more
awkward one in connection with the little republic of
Costemala, where Washington was upholding with several
warships and a considerable force of marines an administration
which apparently was not desired by the Costemalans.
There was also trouble in the Canal Zone, where a certain
State, hitherto most amenable to America’s persuasion, had
displayed a sudden recalcitrancy. The American people
seemed to be in a bad temper over these pin-pricks, an
influential Senator had made a truculent speech, various
patriotic societies had held monster demonstrations, and the
press was inclined to be flamboyant. There was a great deal
of talk about America’s manifest destiny; responsible newspapers
discoursed upon the difficulty of a high civilisation
co-existing side by side with a lower, and of the duty of
the imperfect democracies of the South to accept the guidance
of the mature democracy of the North. The popular press
waved the flag vigorously, published half-tone pictures of
stalwart American marines among the debased citizens of
Costemala, and graphs showing how trivial was the wealth
and how trumpery the armed forces of Latin America as
compared with their own. The rest of the New World, it
said, had got to learn to be democratic or take its medicine.
These heroics did not go unchallenged, for on the
Gobernador’s table were clippings from high-toned American
weeklies, and addresses by University professors, and
speeches of cross-bench public men, who, also in the name
of democracy, denounced what they called a policy of
imperial brigandage. The Gobernador read both sides with
an approving eye. “This thing has been well managed,”
he told Señor Sanfuentes. “Holloway has not disappointed
me.”

The press of the Latin South had a quieter tone, but it
was notable for its curious unanimity, which extended even
to the phrasing. The United States, it announced, was
forsaking democracy for imperialism, the white robes of
liberty for the purple of the tyrant. Very carefully and
learnedly and urbanely, with many references to past history,
it stated the case for the sacrosanctity of nationalities. It
did not refer to the League of Nations, but professed to
base its arguments on America’s past professions, and the
great republican cause to which the continent was dedicated.
There was an admirable good temper in its tone, and a
modest but complete defiance. It could not believe that the
great hearts and the wise heads of Washington would be
betrayed into this dictatorial folly. The sounder elements
in the United States would prevent it. It appealed from
Philip drunk to Philip sober.

The Gobernador studied the journalism of the Latin
republics with special attention, and his visitors shared his
satisfaction. “There is not a word wrong or a word too
much,” observed Señor Aribia, who was himself a newspaper-owner.
“This will make havoc among the
mugwumps.”

“What a fortunate chance,” exclaimed the Minister for
External Affairs, “that the trouble with Costemala and
Panama has arisen just at this moment!” His prominent
eyes twinkled.

“It is indeed a fortunate chance,” said the Gobernador
gravely.

XI

On the third day of the Gobernador’s stay visitors of a
different type came to the building in the Avenida. Archie,
in a new suit of flannels, limped up the steps, and had his
card sent up to the great man. While he waited, Janet
appeared, in a summer costume of pale blue linen, with a
cornflower-blue hat which brought out delightfully the colour
of her eyes and hair. They were admitted at once, for they
had evidently come by appointment. The tall porter who
conducted them to the lift looked approvingly at the lady,
and the three men who were lounging in the corridor outside
the Gobernador’s private room made audible and appreciative
comments. The three were dressed like the ordinary
Olifero clerk, but they bulged a little at the hips; their names
were Carreras, a Spaniard, Biretti, an Italian, and Daniel
Judson, who passed as an Australian.

The Gobernador seemed to welcome the Roylances’
intrusion. He had many questions to ask–about their
impressions of the Gran Seco, about Veiro and Don Mario,
what class of polo Olifa afforded in Archie’s view, the date
of their return home. His manner towards them was
paternal, as to two attractive children who had strayed
into a dusty office.

“The heats are beginning,” he said, “and Olifa loses
its pleasant visitors. The Americans have fled, I understand–the
noisy young people, I mean, who were in the
Gran Seco when you were there.”

“All but one,” said Janet. “Barbara Dasent, whom
you met at Veiro, is still here. The _Corinna_ is back in the
Old Harbour, and she will give us a lift to Panama. . . .
Excellency, I am going to be very bold. We want you to
come and dine with us one night before we go.”

The Gobernador looked at the girl, flushed, laughing, like
a child who is in doubt as to how its audacity will be
taken; he looked at Archie, very cool and sunburnt; and
then he looked at Janet again. He was a student of human
nature, but he had never in his varied experience met such
a type before. Here was beauty without egotism, one who
seemed to him to look out upon life in a mood of mingled
innocence, mirth, and adventure, a woman without those
feminine arts which had always wearied him, but with a
charm the stronger for its unconsciousness. The Gobernador
did not allow himself holidays, but, like all mortals, he
needed change, and Janet seemed to offer a new atmosphere.

“I thank you, but, alas! I do not go into society,” he
said. “There are difficulties, you see. You are at the
Hotel de la Constitutión? Well, if I dined with you at
the hotel, there would be something of a scene. That is not
vanity on my part, Lady Roylance, but there are so many
people who wish me to do things for them or to ask me
questions that I cannot safely go into public places.”

His face showed that he wished to accept, and Janet was
emboldened.

“We quite see that. Besides, the hotel is a noisy place.
What we propose is that you come and dine with us on
the _Corinna_. It will be deliciously cool on the water, and
only Barbara Dasent will be there. Then we can have a
proper talk, and Archie and I will sit at your feet.”

The Gobernador smiled. “Your invitation is very
seductive. I think I can arrange to-morrow night. I will
be on the quay at the Old Harbour at half past seven–the
_Corinna_, I think, lies in the outer basin. . . . By the
way, I have to take certain precautions–the Government
insist on it. There are three men who always attend
me . . .”

“That’s all right,” said Archie. “We’ll send the big
launch. I say, this is topping. I only wish you were coming
on with us to Panama!”

The three men, Carreras, Biretti, and Judson, took their
duties seriously. As soon as they heard that the Gobernador
was to dine on board the American yacht, they set about
preparing for emergencies. They were supreme ruffians,
each with a string of murders to his credit, but they were
loyal to their immediate paymaster. They arranged with
the Port authorities–for the Gobernador’s bodyguard had
considerable purchase in Olifa and often acted without
consulting their master–that a harbour patrol boat should
be lying adjacent to the _Corinna_ between the hours of seven
and eleven on the following night. In response to an agreed
signal it should close the yacht. They also took counsel
with one of the _Corinna’s_ engineers, for in their profession
they left nothing to chance. This was a rough, sulky-looking
fellow who spoke with a strong Glasgow accent.
He must have had a past uncommon among the hands of
a well-appointed yacht, for on his arrival in Olifa he had
been welcomed into a life of which the authorities of that
respectable capital knew little. He seemed to have ample
leisure, and spent it for the most part in shadowy back
streets. In small wine-shops, in rooms remote from the
public eye, he drank and gambled and talked with queer
customers. They were not the ordinary riff-raff of the port,
but some of them men of good presence and manners, with
pale faces and absorbed eyes and a great gift of silence.
It was a furtive company, which dispersed always one by
one, and did not talk till it was certain of secrecy.

Carreras, Biretti, and Judson had joined this group on
their arrival, and the Scotsman had become their special
intimate. To the others he was Señor Jorge, but Judson,
who seemed to have known him before, called him Red
Geordie. The massive set of his jaw and his sullen blue
eyes seemed to have earned him respect, for, when he spoke,
he was always listened to. There was some bond between
him and the Gobernador’s three, for they told him of the
approaching visit to the _Corinna_ and the precautions they
had taken. The consequence was that on the following
morning he, too, became active. He put on his engineer’s
uniform and visited the Port authorities, where he interviewed
a variety of polite officials. After that he descended
into the harbourside quarters, and had speech with others
who were not polite. It is probable that he returned from
his round of interviews a little poorer than when he started.

The early tropic dusk had fallen when the Gobernador’s
car deposited him at the quay of the Old Harbour, and
from a taxi in his wake descended his three attendants.
Archie Roylance was waiting on the steps, and conducted his
guest to the trim launch, manned by two of the yacht’s
hands and the sulky Scottish engineer. The three trusties
bestowed themselves forward, and a look of intelligence
passed between them and the engineer. Archie fussed about
to make the Gobernador comfortable in the stern, and
wrapped a rug round his knees to avert the evening chill
from the water.

The launch threaded its way through the shipping of the
Old Harbour and came into the outer basin where the
_Corinna_ lay alone, except for a patrol boat a quarter of a
mile off. In the dusk the water-front was a half-moon
of twinkling lights, while beyond them the Avenida de la
Paz ran in a great double belt of radiance to the starry
cone of the Ciudad Nueva. Against the mulberry sky a
thin fluff of smoke stood out from the _Corinna’s_ funnels.

“Getting up steam, sir,” Archie observed. “We’ve said
good-bye to Olifa and we start in the small hours. A place
always looks its jolliest when you are leaving it.”

The dining-room of the yacht was already cool with the
land breeze drifting through its open port-holes. The little
table, bright with linen and glass and silver, was only large
enough for the party of four. The Gobernador, sitting
between Janet and Barbara Dasent, was in good spirits,
and looked appreciatively at the soft harmony of colours.
Some sunset gleam had caught the water and the reflection
of it brought a delicate glow into the room. Even Barbara’s
paleness was rosy.

They talked of many things–of Europe, of politics, of
books, of the future of mankind (these were some chaotic
speculations of Archie, who seemed to be nervous and had
the air of a lower boy breakfasting with the headmaster),
of England a little, and much of America. The Gobernador
was the soul of courtesy, and was accustomed to respect
the prejudices of others. But Barbara was in a mood of
candour about her countrymen and she occasionally forced
him into a polite agreement. Something had happened to
Barbara, for she talked fast and brilliantly, and her eyes
had an unaccustomed vivacity.

“We are overrun with silly women,” she said. “The
United States is a woman’s country, Excellency, and we
let them paint the picture which we show to the world. I
do not think it is an attractive picture–a mixture of shallow
_schwärmerei_ and comfortless luxury–a life of plumbing, and
dentistry, and bi-focal glasses, and facial and mental uplift,
and snobbery about mushroom families, and a hard, brittle
sweetness stuck on with pins. No wonder you do not
like us!”

“I did not say that, Miss Dasent. I am not sure that
I assent to any of your complaints, except the _schwärmerei_;
and that I think is not confined to your ladies.”

“I was making a catalogue of the details of the picture
we present to the world. It is an ugly picture, and I know
you hate it. So do I. . . . All the same it is a false
picture, for we are the worst publicity agents on earth.
The trouble is that we have had no second Columbus.
Nobody from outside has ever discovered the true America.”

The Gobernador dissented.

“You are hard on yourselves. If I want acrid criticism
of the United States, I pick up an American novel. Or I
take the saying of one of your own Presidents that the
modern American millionaire has usually a daughter who
is a foreign princess and a son who is in a lunatic asylum.
I do not take that sort of thing at its face value. You are
a great people which has not yet found itself.”

“You do not like us.”

“As a student of humanity I am deeply interested in
you.”

“You are tolerant, because you do not like America. I
am intolerant because I love it.”

The Gobernador raised his glass and bowed. “A very
honourable confession of faith. If all her daughters were
like you, Miss Dasent, it would be right that America
should remain a woman’s country.”

The talk drifted to lighter matters–to music which
Barbara and the Gobernador discussed with a technical
profundity appalling to Archie; to a German novel which
had set the world talking; to European personalities in art
and politics. Presently they left the dining-room, and
ascended to a shelter on the upper deck from which the
harbour was seen like a gulf of blackness rimmed by fiery
particles. The Gobernador, who noticed everything, observed
that the patrol boat was no longer there and that the _Corinna_
swam alone in an inky solitude. He saw no signs of his
bodyguard; no doubt, he decided, they were ensconced in
the shadows beyond, where the lifeboats swung from their
davits.

But the three trusties were not there. They had spent a
turbulent evening, and were now in a less comfortable state
than their master. They had insisted on having their meal
in close proximity to the dining-room, and the surly Scotch
engineer had shared it with them. Between them these
convivial souls had consumed a good deal of liquor, which
appeared to go rapidly to the heads of the visitors.
The engineer had then proposed an adjournment to his own
quarters for further refreshment, and had shepherded them
down a narrow alley-way, he himself going last. There was
a heavy iron door, and as each of the three passed through
it, on the other side he was caught round the middle by
powerful arms which prevented him getting at his hip-pocket.
Other hands swiftly gagged him, and still others
removed his gun. The thing was done in almost complete
silence. Only one of the three managed to put up
a fight, and he was promptly laid low by a terrific
upper-cut from a seaman who had once been known as
Battling Hubby, the pride of Jersey City. In something
under three minutes the three heroes were gagged and
trussed, and reposing, in a somewhat unreposeful state of
mind, on a pile of awnings.

“That’s a tidy bit of work, Geordie,” the pugilistic seaman
observed to the morose engineer, and the answer was,
“I’ve seen waur.”

Then the engineer did a curious thing. He went aft, and
with a lantern signalled to the patrol boat which lay a
quarter of a mile off. The signal was observed, and
presently the boat moved quietly away, leaving the _Corinna_
solitary in the outer basin.

Coffee was served to the party on the upper deck, and
the guest filled his ancient briar. The steward, as he left,
gave a message to Archie: “Hamilton’s compliments, sir,
and the men has finished the job forward”–at which
Archie nodded. He was sitting in an alcove, with a small
electric bell behind his arm. The Gobernador sat in a
wicker chair, with a lamp on his left side, so that, by the
configuration of the deck, his splendid head was silhouetted
against the opaque velvet of the harbour waters. Janet
and Barbara on lower chairs were sitting literally at his feet.

The guest seemed to have fallen under the spell of the
night which was drawing round them as close as a mantle.
The shore lights did not speak of human habitation; rather
they seemed as remote as a star, an extension of the infinite
stellar system which faintly patterned the darkness.
The stillness, the brooding canopy of the night, silenced the
others, but with the Gobernador it acted as a stimulus to
talk. He seemed to sit above them like an impersonal mind,
his profile growing clearer as the light went out of the
background of the sea.

“You are a soldier?” he asked Archie.

“I was. Keen, but undistinguished. The Air Force
wasn’t a place for high strategy. But I’ve always lived
among soldiers and heard their chat.”

“It has been a great profession, but it is closed now, Sir
Archibald. Science has reduced war to an everlasting stalemate.
It was always on the edge of stalemate. Consider
how few moves any general had to his hand. He could
break a line or he could outflank it, and he could do either
only by superior force or by surprise. But science has now
created a norm of weapon and munitionment, which is
substantially the same for all armies. It has eliminated the
human factor of superiority both in general and troops. It
has established, too, a norm of intelligence which makes
surprise impossible. Therefore there is no room to-day for
a military Napoleon. The Napoleon of the future must win
by other methods than war. Do you agree?”

“No,” said Archie; “I respectfully disagree. I
can’t argue properly, but I know what I think. First, I
don’t believe you can ever get rid of the human factor.
Science has to be applied by mortal men, and the efficiency
of its application will depend upon those who use it. You
can never create what you call a norm either of character
or of brains. Second, I agree that the old rules of war are
a back number. A modern army can conquer savages, but in
the old style of warfare it can’t conquer another modern
army. But I believe that one modern nation can still conquer
another. You need a wider definition of war, sir. It’s far
more than marching and counter-marching, and frontal and
flank attacks, and number of men and weight of guns and
speed of transport. It’s the effort of one people to smash
the _moral_ of another, and there are a thousand ways of
doing that.”

“I assent. But not in the field.”

“Yes, in the field. We’ve been frozen into convention
for two thousand years. The autumn of 1918 saw the end
of that regime. Now mankind is going to discover new
ways of exercising superiority–in the field, but not by the
old field tactics. Conquest is always a spiritual conquest,
and means will be found for making spirit act directly on
spirit.”

“You are quoting. Whom?” The voice from above had
a sudden interest.

“A friend of mine who thinks a lot about these things.
You wouldn’t know him.”

“I differ from him absolutely. You are still clinging to
the old notion of something incalculable and mystic which
can defeat reason. You are wrong, for reason is the only
power. Every day we are rationalising life, and what we
cannot rationalise we can isolate and nullify. You young
people are relics of the Middle Ages.”

“But so is human nature.” It was Barbara who spoke.

“Do not misunderstand me. We allow for the spasmodic
impulses of human nature. But we analyse them and
evaluate them, and by understanding them we can use
them. Liberty, for example. That ancient instinct can be
worked out to four places of decimals, and can consequently
be used by reason. Is the human intelligence to submit
docilely to be governed and thwarted by blind reactions
which mankind shares with the brutes?”

“You are very clever, Excellency, but I think that there
is always an unknown _x_ which will defeat you. You are
too clever, for you would make science and reason rule over
a dimension to which they don’t apply. Humility may be
more scientific than arrogance.”

The guest laughed pleasantly. “I think you also are
quoting. Whom, may I ask?”

“A friend. Sir Archie’s friend.”

Had anyone been observing Archie closely, he would have
noticed that he had looked at his watch, and then made a
movement towards the electric button behind his elbow. The
act seemed to afford him some satisfaction, for he gave a
sigh of relief and lit a cigarette.

The Gobernador had turned to catch Barbara’s reply.

“I should like to meet your friend,” he said, and then
suddenly he flung his head back and listened. The throb
of the propeller was felt through the vessel, and the ear
caught the swish of moving water.

“You will soon have that pleasure,” said Barbara, “for
we are taking you to him.”

In an instant the guest was on his feet. “What nonsense
is this?” he asked sharply. His tall figure towered menacingly
above the others, who remained seated in their
chairs.

“It is all right, sir,” said Archie. A change had come
over the young man, for the diffidence, the lower-boy shyness,
which had been noticeable all the evening, had gone.
Now he seemed to be at his ease and to be enjoying himself.
“I know it is a bit of a liberty, and we apologise and all
that sort of thing, but it had to be done. You see, we greatly
admire you and we want you to be our leader. . . . It is
no use shouting for your bodyguard. I’m afraid we had to
handle them a little roughly, and at this moment they are
trussed up and adrift in a boat. The tide’s all right and
they’ll be picked up to-morrow morning in the harbour. . . .
Please don’t do anything rash, sir. Our men are all about,
and they carry guns. You see, we really mean business.”

The Gobernador had his face averted so the other three
could not see his change of mood. But a change there was,
for he flung himself down in his chair and refilled his pipe.

“I’m a busy man,” he said, “and you are doing more
harm than you can realise. Also I am afraid you are
making serious trouble for yourselves. But I suppose I
must submit to this prank. I was right when I said you
were still in the Middle Ages. You are a set of melodramatic
children. . . . I hope you don’t mean it to last
long. By the way, where are you taking me?”

Janet clapped her hands. “I have won my bet. I knew
you would take it well. I told you when we asked you to
dinner that we were going to sit at your feet. That is true,
you know. We want you to lead us.”

“We are going to help you to discover America,” said
Barbara. “You will be our new Columbus.”

“You will meet the friend,” said Archie, “whom Miss
Dasent and I have been quoting.”

“Perhaps you will now tell me his name,” said the
Gobernador.

“We call him Sandy,” Archie said casually. “His name
used to be Arbuthnot. Now it’s Clanroyden.”

The recovered urbanity of the Gobernador was suddenly
broken. A cry escaped him, and he turned his face away
to the racing seas, but not before Janet had seen his brows
knit in a mood so dark that she unconsciously reached for
Archie’s hand.

XII

When the _Corinna_ was beginning to move out of the dusky
harbour of Olifa, a wireless message was sent from it to an
address in the Gran Seco. That message consisted of two
words: _Francis First_. There had been various schemes
agreed upon for the handling of the Gobernador, and the
numeral was intended to signify the one which had been
adopted. By a happy chance, the first and simplest had
succeeded.

The receipt of this brief message was like a spark to
powder. The events of the next few days in the Gran Seco
cannot be told in orderly history. They had the speed
and apparent inconsequence of moving pictures, and can
only be set forth as flashes of light in a fog of confusion.

At the Universum Mine the manager woke as usual,
breakfasted on his veranda, read his mail, and was a little
surprised that certain telephone calls, which he had expected,
had not come through from Headquarters. He was about
to ring for his secretary and bid him call up the Gran
Seco city, when the chief engineer, a Texan named Varnay,
appeared on the scene and accepted a cup of coffee and a
cigar. The manager was a newcomer who had been specially
chosen by the Gobernador, a highly efficient machine whose
pragmatic soul dwelt mainly in graphs and statistics. The
Texan was a lean, lanky, hollow-eyed man, whose ordinary
costume was dirty duck trousers and shirt-sleeves. To-day
he wore breeches and boots and a drill jacket, and in his
belt was an ostentatious revolver. The manager opened his
eyes at this magnificence and waited for Varnay to speak.
He was itching to get at his secretary and start the day’s
routine.

The Texan was in no hurry. He poured himself out a
cup of coffee with extreme deliberation, lit his cigar, and
blew smoke-rings.

“The new draft will be in by midday,” said the manager.
It was the day in the month when a batch of fresh labour
arrived, and what Peters had called the “returned empties”
began their melancholy journey to the pueblas.

“Yep,” said the Texan. “The outgoing batch went last
night, and the new outfit arrived an hour ago.”

The manager jumped to his feet. “Who altered the
schedule?” he cried angrily. “Who the hell has been
monkeying with my plans? I’ve had the schedule fixed this
last month, and the Universum Mine has got to be run
according to it. I’ll flay the man that stuck his clumsy hoof
into it.”

He was about to cross the veranda to the bell which
would have brought his secretary when the quiet drawl of
the other detained him. The Texan had stuck out his long
legs, and was regarding with abstracted eyes a butterfly
which had perched on his coffee-cup.

“Sit down, mister,” he said. “Things have been happening
this morning in this outfit, and I got to put you
wise about them. The Universum is closed down till further
notice.”

“By whose order?” the manager barked.

“By the Gobernador’s.”

The manager cursed with vehemence and point. He was
the boss, and any instructions from Headquarters came
through him. What misbegotten son of a yellow dog had
dared to usurp his authority? If this was a hold-up—–

“Say, this love-talk don’t cut no ice,” said the Texan
without heat. “You haven’t been let in on this scheme,
because you’re a newcomer and wouldn’t have got the hang
of it. Say, listen. Things have been going crooked in this
little old country, and his Excellency is going to straighten
them out. Those dagos in Olifa are giving us a dirty deal,
and we reckon it’s time a white man took charge. It
ain’t sense. We’re using up these poor goldarned Indians
and chucking them aside like old boots. That’s bad business,
mister, and the pueblas won’t stand for it.”

“You fool! What can the Indians do?”

“You’d be surprised,” said Varnay gently. “But it ain’t
the Indians only. There’s the Police, and there’s all of us
white men who think the time has come for a clean-up.”

“Man, that’s rebellion,” the manager cried, his orderly
soul shocked to its roots.

“Why, yes. I guess it’s rebellion. But you’ve no cause
to get scared, for we’re not rebelling against the boss. It’s
our boss rebelling against Olifa.”

“You’re a liar. Headquarters would never be such Godforgotten
idiots. They’re business men and know where
their profit lies.”

“I don’t say there mayn’t be some pikers at Headquarters
and a bit of trouble, but I reckon that his Excellency Señor
Castor is a mighty clever man, and it’s him we follow.
Why, the vaqueros are all wearing medals with his face on
them, and they look up to him as a God Almighty.”

The shaken manager at last turned to the telephone. But
there was no answer from Headquarters and the bell failed
to bring his secretary.

“The lines were cut last night,” said Varnay, “after our
orders came through. . . . But see here, mister. We want
to treat you on the square. You’ve not been let in on this
deal, and you’ve no cause to mix yourself up in it if you
don’t want to. We’re going to town presently, but there’s
no reason why you shouldn’t get on ahead and judge things
for yourself. There’s an automobile at your disposal whenever
you like to start.”

The manager took the hint, and departed with a box full
of confidential papers and the balances left in the pay-chest.
He was loyal to his employers, but it remained for him to
find out who these employers were.

At the Alhuema Mine things went with equal smoothness,
for the manager there was in the plot. But at the San
Tomé there was some unpleasantness and for an hour or
two a difficult situation. The San Tomé manager had only
just come, having been before in the Administration at
Headquarters. He was a young American from Montana,
who had had experience of copper-mining in half a dozen
quarters of the globe, and had earned a reputation as a go-getter
and a firm handler of coloured human material. He
was set on making good, for there was a girl waiting for
him at home, and he had the contempt of the youth of his
country, scientifically trained and furiously ambitious, for all
things which cannot be set out in graphs and figures. Also,
having just come from the city and having heard for months
the intimate talk of Headquarters, he was not easy to bluff.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the white
technical staff of the mine were not unanimous. Three of
the engineers had refused to join in the plot, and had only
refrained from prematurely exposing it on being assured
that the thing had failed and had been abandoned. Moreover,
when the ringleader, a Scotsman called Melville, received
the message which was to fire the train, it was found
impossible to cut the telephone line to Headquarters. The
outgoing draft of labour was too slow in starting, and the
incoming draft, which was to give the rebels their armed
force, was unaccountably delayed. The night was spent
anxiously by Melville and his colleagues in a vain attempt to
get into touch with Peters and the police. But Peters had
his own troubles, for his squadron also had its doubtful
elements. Headquarters had taken alarm and had just
drafted into it some of the more desperate characters in
the Mines guard. The consequence was that there was
shooting, and at daybreak, when Peters had his force ready
for the road, two dead men and three trussed-up prisoners
were left behind.

Early in the morning, when Melville played his hand,
the young manager was beforehand with him. The manifesto
of the malcontents infuriated him, and their use of
Castor’s name did not convince, for he rang up Headquarters
and thereby precipitated trouble in the city two hours before
it was due. Believing that he had to deal with a piece of
common brigandage, and having been promised immediate
reinforcements, he resolved to hold the fort. He had the
three malcontent engineers, his staff of Olifero clerks, his
half-caste servants, and his own stout heart. He put his
house into a state of defence, and he had one conspicuous
asset, for in the same building was the magazine of explosives,
and, with such perilous stuff about, his assailants
must go circumspectly.

About 10 a.m. Peters arrived with his police. The manager
took them for his reinforcements, and Peters might
have entered his house and taken peaceful possession, but
for the fact that his greeting by Melville was observed from
an upper window. A parley was attempted, and Peters and
the manager sat opposite each other in chairs on the veranda,
each with a revolver on his knee. The policeman was no
diplomatist. His temper had been soured by his difficulties
in the night watches, and he talked to the manager like a
sergeant to a recruit, and was met by a stiff defiance. Did
he imagine that a rising of Indians and a few mutinous
police would worry the Gran Seco, much less the republic
of Olifa with its potent army? The thing was moonshine.
That the Gobernador was a party to it was an impudent lie.
The manager knew the mind of the Administration better
than any bush policeman. He would hold the place till succour
arrived, and if there was any attempt to rush his
defences, they would all go to glory–and he nodded towards
the magazine. Peters retired discomfited, for he read in
the stiff chin and the frosty eyes that this man would be as
good as his word.

The _impasse_ continued till noon, while Peters and Melville
consulted anxiously, for this delay was dislocating the
whole programme. Then at long last the incoming Indian
draft arrived, and with it a young man, the Olifero called
Carlos Rivero, who had chaperoned Janet and Archie on
their journey to the Gran Seco. When he heard of the
trouble he proposed to interview the manager a second time,
and under a flag of truce the two sat again on the veranda.
But Rivero had no revolver on his knee.

What he said can only be guessed. But as an Olifero of
an ancient stock he must have spoken with an authority
denied to Peters. It is probable that he told the manager
quite frankly certain things of which Peters had no knowledge.
At any rate, he seems to have impressed him, and to
have shaken his obstinacy. But the faithful servant demanded
proof. If he were to act without superior instruction,
he must be convinced that he yielded to the strongest
of all arguments.

“Right,” said Rivero. “You shall have your proof,
Señor. You are familiar with the sight of an incoming draft–sullen,
wolfish men herded by the police? Come and see
what I have brought you. You have my word of honour
that, if you are not convinced, you can return to this place to
continue your defiance. More, Señor Melville shall be
brought here and remain as a hostage.”

The manager accompanied Rivero to the compound behind
the Mines buildings which was reserved for the Indian
labourers. And this is what he saw. A compact body of
five hundred men, mounted on small wiry horses and each
carrying a rifle at his saddle-bow. These lithe figures were
very unlike the weary, hopeless automata that had been
accustomed to stumble into the compound. They held themselves
erect, and, if their faces were sullen, it was the sullenness
of a grim purpose. There were white officers and
sergeants among them in the uniform of the Police, but the
impressiveness of the spectacle was not in them, but in the
solid, disciplined ranks of fighting men sprung out of an
older age.

“These,” said Rivero, “are the labourers whom the
Gobernador is now calling to his side.”

The manager stared, rubbed his eyes, and laughed.

“I reckon the game’s with you,” he said at last. “I climb
down. This is sure a business proposition.”

The daily meeting of the heads of departments was held
as usual in the Administration Headquarters at ten o’clock,
with the Vice-President, the Mexican Rosas, in the chair.
The members met in a large room on the same floor as
the Gobernador’s private office, but at the side of the building
away from the main street. The Vice-President said a word
to his private secretary, who sat in a little office behind the
chair, and when the meeting began the doors were quietly
locked, so that the only entrance lay through the secretary’s
room. There was a vast amount of detail on the agenda that
morning, to which the meeting duly bent its mind.

During the night there had been odd happenings at the
railway-station. The daily freight train, which should have
left at 9 p.m., did not start; instead the freight train of the
day before, which on its up-journey should have passed the
other at the frontier station of Gabones, was ordered by telegraph
to proceed without delay to the Gran Seco. Also the
up-coming passenger train, which was not due to leave Santa
Ana till noon, had been expedited, so that it arrived almost
empty about daybreak, and intending travellers that day
found themselves stranded at Santa Ana without a
connection. The down-going train was due to leave at
10 a.m., but it did not start. Those who meant to travel by
it found the station closed and under guard, and the yards
full of rolling stock. By 10 a.m. on that morning the whole
of the rolling stock of the Gran Seco line, with the exception
of a few trucks delayed at Santa Ana, was concentrated
at the Gran Seco terminus.

If the doings at the railway-station were curious, still
more remarkable was what took place elsewhere in the city.
In the area of the smelting and refining works there had
been since the early morning a great peace. Walkers in the
Avenida Bolivar suddenly awoke to the fact that the hum
of industry, which day and night sounded like breakers on
a beach, had ceased. The previous night had been a busy
time for a certain section of the white employers, perhaps
three-fourths of the total. They had begun by isolating
the works area from the city and guarding the approaches.
Then they had set about the compulsory conversion of the
remaining fourth, a rapid business, and not unattended by
violence. Three men attempted to break away, and were
shot before they crossed the barrier. After that came the
dealing with the Indian and mestizo labourers. Some were
sent back to their pueblas under escort of a file of Mines
Police, a few picked men were added to the white strength,
but most remained in their compounds, which were put under
guard. The furnaces were damped down, and by 6 a.m. the
whole of the great works area was shuddering into quiet.
The white employees, armed and disciplined, were waiting on
the next stage.

An hour later mutiny broke out in the barracks of the
Town Police. It had been skilfully prepared, for many of
the chief officers were implicated, and at first it moved
swiftly and surely. The armoury was captured, those known
to be recalcitrant were made prisoners in their beds, and in
less than half an hour the mutineers held the barracks and
had at any rate immobilised the opposition. But a certain
part of the police was on duty in the city, and beside these
was that special force, the Mines Bodyguard, which was
responsible not to the Commissary of Police but directly to
the Administration, and which was not concentrated in one
place but scattered in many quarters.

It was now that the ill-effect was felt of the failure to cut
the line at the San Tomé Mine. For the manager of the
San Tomé had rung up the Administration secretariat
about eight o’clock, and, since he babbled of rebellion, had
been put through to the officer in charge of the Bodyguard.
This man, Kubek by name, had long been uneasy and alert–indeed
he had been the cause of the Gobernador’s suspicions.
The appeal from San Tomé put him on his mettle, and he
at once mobilised his force. He could rely on the fifty
members of the Bodyguard who had not been tampered with,
and, as soon as he found out what was happening at the
barracks, he turned his attention to the members of the
Town Police on outside duty. He informed the Administration
of what was happening, a message received but not circulated
by Señor Rosas’s private secretary.

The consequence was that by 10 a.m. the situation was
as follows: The works area was held by a force of foremen
and engineers, who had cut it off from the city and were
waiting for the arrival of the Mines Police. The Town
Police were in the main on the side of the rebels and waited
in barracks, but some of their members were with Kubek,
who had about two hundred men under him and was holding
what he regarded as the key positions–a house at the corner
of the Avenida Bolivar and the Calle of the Virgin, the
Regina Hotel, and the house in the garden behind the Administration
building which was the residence of the Vice-President.
He believed that he had to deal only with the
mutinous Town Police and with trouble at the Mines, and
had no notion that the Mines Police were in the rising.
The city as a whole knew nothing of what was happening.
Promenaders in the Avenida Bolivar noted only the curious
quiet and the absence of policemen on point duty.

Meantime the meeting presided over by Señor Rosas pursued
its decorous way. There were marketing reports from
Europe which had to be discussed, and certain difficulties
which had arisen with the shipping companies. Mr. Lariarty
presented a report on the latter subject which required close
consideration.

At 11 a.m. the first contingent of the Mines Police under
Peters arrived. They went straight to the works, where
they found everything satisfactory, and gave directions to
the forces assembled there. The latter had sent out scouts,
who reported what had happened at the barracks of the
Town Police. Peters was a cautious man, and, before effecting
a junction, sent out patrols to discover if all was quiet
in the city. His intention was to round up the Bodyguard
man by man, for he knew all their lairs; but his patrols
brought the disquieting news that the Bodyguard were forewarned
and mobilised, and that they held the Regina Hotel
and the corner house in the Calle of the Virgin. The third
concentration, at the Vice-President’s residence, they had
not discovered. Their news meant that the approaches to
the Administration Building were blocked and must be
cleared. Peters accordingly got in touch with the Town
Police and made his plans.

Just after noon, when the Board meeting had reached the
question of a contract with Guggenheims, the noise of dropping
fire began to be heard. A confused murmur penetrated
too into the back chamber from the Avenida Bolivar. The
Vice-President, who was frequently interrupted by the
advent of his secretary with messages from the inner office,
pushed his spectacles up on his brow and smiled benignly.
“There’s a little trouble, gentlemen,” he observed. “Some
foreign matter has gotten into our machine, and the police
are digging it out.”

Before 1 p.m. there was fighting at three points in the
city, for the garrison in the Vice-President’s house had revealed
itself by sniping one of Peters’s contingents. The
Bodyguard were all desperadoes, and very quick with their
guns, but they were hopelessly outnumbered, and, for the
matter of that, outgeneralled. The Regina fell about 2.30,
for it had not been difficult to force a way in from the
back and take the defence in the rear. Nine of the defenders
were killed, and the Police had seven dead and
fifteen wounded. The house in the Calle of the Virgin resisted
longer, for, being a corner house with fronts on two
streets, it was less open to attack from behind. Yet that
nest was smoked out before 4 p.m. and Peters could concentrate
all his forces on the Vice-President’s residence.

The Board meeting after three o’clock sat to a continuous
accompaniment of rifle fire. But Señor Rosas with
a Roman fortitude held the attention of his colleagues to the
business of the agenda. The members seemed sunk in bewilderment,
and it is difficult to believe that their minds
worked competently on their business. The Vice-President
did most of the talking. “It is all right, gentlemen,” he
would say, on receiving a message from his secretary: “the
Police are managing this little affair very well.”

At half past five the last defences of the Bodyguard fell.
It was a bloody business, for Kubek, who had learned the
art of street-fighting in Eastern Europe, put up a stout resistance
till he got a bullet in his windpipe. Peters ruefully
calculated that that day the Police had over sixty men dead
and nearly a hundred wounded, but he consoled himself with
the reflection that the Bodyguard could not have a dozen
survivors. He himself was bleeding from two wounds, but
they must go untended, for he had still much to do. He
hastened to confer with a slight youngish man, who wore
civilian clothes–an old tweed jacket and riding breeches of
the English cut–and who had joined him at the smelting
works on his arrival that morning.

About 6 p.m. the Vice-President at last brought the Board
meeting to an end. His secretary had just handed him a
written message which seemed to give him satisfaction.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “our labours are over for the day.
I thank you for the attention you have given to the Company’s
business under somewhat trying conditions. And
now, I judge, we are all going to have a bit of a holiday.
I ought to tell you that important events have just taken
place in this city, and our activities have got to close down
for a spell. There has been a revolution, gentlemen. The
workers of the Gran Seco have risen against the Government
of Olifa, and they are counting on our President being
their leader. I have no authority to speak for his Excellency,
but I guess it’s more than likely that he will consent.
What I have got to say is that you gentlemen are free to
do what you please. You can’t oppose the revolution in this
township, for it has already succeeded, but there’s no call
for you to take a part in it unless you like. You can stay
on here, and”–here there was a significant pause–“I will
make it my business to see that your comforts are attended
to.”

The members, hypnotised by the long tension of the afternoon,
stared blankly at the speaker. Then slowly life seemed
to waken in their opaque eyes. The man called Lariarty
became their spokesman. He rose and bowed to the chair.

“I think we will go down to Olifa,” he said.

At that moment there came the sound of explosions one
after another in a chain, which set the windows rattling.

The Vice-President shook his head.

“I reckon that’s impossible, gentlemen. What you hear
is the blowing up of the rolling stock at the railway-station.
There will be no facilities for travel to Olifa, till Olifa makes
them afresh.”

XIII

About 8 p.m., when the dark had fallen, two men
groped their way into a room in the oldest quarter of the
city, just above the dusty hollow which separated it from
the works area. It was a hut in a yard, reached by a circuitous
passage among sheds and the back premises of low-class
taverns. The place was very quiet, for the inhabitants
were out in the main streets, eager to catch what they could
in the troubled waters. It was also very dark, till one of
the men struck a light and revealed a dirty little cubby-hole
which had once been an Indian cabin. Then he put his
back to the door and listened, as if he were expecting others
to join him.

The man at the door bore the marks of hard usage. He
was dirty and dishevelled, there was a long shallow cut on
his left cheek, and he limped as if from a wound in the
leg. His face was white, his air was weary and dejected,
but his eyes were as quick and ugly as a mad hound’s. The
other, who had seated himself on a barrel, was of a different
type. He was neatly dressed in a dark suit, with a blue linen
collar, a black tie, and a pearl pin. His face likewise was
white, but it was with the pallor of settled habit and not of
strain, and his eyes, opaque and expressionless, gave him an
air of calm and self-possession.

“How many’s left?” said the man at the door, as if in
answer to a question. “God knows, and He won’t tell.
Mollison got away from the last bloody show, and Snell was
on the Regina roof and presumably escaped the round-up.
Bechstein was never in the scrap at all, for he was in bed
this morning with a touch of fever. Radin got off, I hear,
and no one saw Molinoff after midday. Let’s put our
salvage at half a dozen. Enough to do the job, say I, if
there’s any luck left to us.”

The man on the barrel said something in a low voice, and
the other laughed angrily.

“That blasted Mexican was at the bottom of it. Of
course I know that, but how in hell can we touch him? He
has gotten five thousand men to protect his fat carcase.
Poor old Kubek! He never spotted that Rosas was in the
game or there would have been one dago less in the world.
It’s the other we’re laying for, the man that Kubek got on
the trail of but couldn’t get up with. I don’t know his
name, curse him, but I know the cut of his jib. If I can put
it across him, I’ll die happy. He’s been up here off and
on for months, slipping about in the dark like a skunk, and
leaving no trace but a stink.”

“He will not come here,” said the man on the barrel.

“I say he will. Mollison knew where to find him, for
they used to drink together. Pete is the stricken penitent
now, anxious to stand well with the new authorities, and
that God-darned mystery man is the brain of the business.
He wants to round up the remnant of us, and Pete’s going
to help him. He’s coming here at half past eight to be put
wise by Pete about certain little things that concern the
public peace. I reckon he’ll find the peace of God.”

There were steps in the alley, and the doorkeeper, looking
through a chink in the boarding, was satisfied. He opened,
and a man entered. It was a squat fellow with a muffler
round his throat and the bright eyes of fever. “Snell’s
dead,” he gasped as he dropped wearily on a heap of straw.

A moment later there came the sound of double footsteps,
and two men were admitted, one a tall man with high cheek-bones
and the other a handsome youth with a neat fair
moustache. Both wore bandages, one on his left arm and
one across the forehead. But they seemed less weary than
the others, and they remained standing, each with a hand
in a side-pocket and their eyes fixed on the doorway.

Once again came double footsteps and the little party fell
as silent as the grave. A hat was put over the lantern.
The man at the door held up a warning hand and did not
open it, but stood back a pace. There was a sound of
fumbling with the latch, and the door opened slowly. Two
men entered, one a bearded giant whose coat had been rent
so that the left side flapped over his shoulder and whose
lips were bleeding, the other a slim, youngish man in an
old tweed jacket and breeches of an English cut.

No sooner were they inside than the covering was removed
from the lamp. The doorkeeper had his back to
the door, the man on the straw got to his feet, and the
giant caught his companion from behind and held his arms.
Four pistol barrels glimmered in the scanty light.

“Hullo,” said the newcomer. “There are more friends
here than I expected. You have done me proud, Mollison.”

It was a strange and macabre scene. The man with the
dark suit and the pearl pin sat unmoved on the barrel, his
opaque eyes stolidly regarding him who seemed to be a
prisoner. Bechstein, the man with the fever, had his
revolver laid over one arm, as if he were uncertain of his
shaking limbs. The doorkeeper lolled against the door-post
grinning, Radin and Molinoff stood on each side like executioners,
and the giant Mollison spat blood from his mouth,
while his great face hung like a monstrous gargoyle over
the slim figure of his captive.

That captive seemed very little perturbed.

“I owe you a good turn for this, Mollison,” he said
pleasantly. “Hullo, Bechstein! I heard you were ill in
bed. I’m afraid you are taking liberties with your health.
. . . I can’t see very well, but can it be Radin, and, by Jove,
Molinoff, too? The Devil has looked after his own to-day.”

“He hasn’t looked after _you_, my friend,” said Mollison.
“Your number’s up all right. You’re going to be a quiet
little corpse within sixty seconds, as soon as we have
tossed for who is to have the pleasure of sending you to
hell.”

“Well, let go my arm and let me draw my last breath in
comfort. I haven’t a gun.”

The giant ran one hand down the prisoner’s figure.
“True enough,” he said, and relaxed his grip. “But don’t
move, or you won’t have sixty seconds.”

“It’s my right to kill the swine,” said the doorkeeper.
“I was Kubek’s second-in-command and I owe him one
for the chief.”

The plea seemed to meet with general acceptance, and
the prisoner saw his time of probation shortened by this
unanimity. For a moment he seemed at a loss, and then he
laughed with a fair pretence of merriment.

“By the way, you haven’t told me what you have against
me. Isn’t it right that I should hear the charge?”

“Damn you, there’s no time to waste,” said the doorkeeper.
“You have been the mainspring of this tomfool
revolution, which has already done in our best pals and
will make life a bloody hell for the rest of us. We
are going to give ourselves the satisfaction of shooting you
like a dog before we scatter.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“We know your game and that’s enough for us.”

The prisoner seemed to be anxious to continue the talk.
He spoke slowly, and in a pleasant, soft voice. It might
have been noticed that he held his head in the attitude
of a man listening intently, as if he expected to hear more
steps on the cobbles of the yard.

“There’s one here who knows me,” he said. “Tim–Tim
Lariarty,” and he addressed the sphinx-like figure on
the barrel. “You remember Arbuthnot. I was at Brodie’s
when you were at Ridgeway’s. We got our twenty-two
together, and we were elected to Pop the same day. You
were a bit of a sap and got into the Sixth, while I never
got beyond the First Hundred. You remember Sandy
Arbuthnot?”

The face of the man on the barrel did not change
perceptibly, but there was a trifle more life in his voice
when he spoke. “You are Arbuthnot? Of course you
would be Arbuthnot. I might have guessed it.”

“Then for God’s sake, Timmy, tell that blighter behind
me to put down his gun. I’ll take my medicine when it
comes, but I’d like to tell _you_ something. You’re a clever
chap with a future, and I’ve got something to say to you
about the Gran Seco which you ought to hear. Give me
five minutes.”

There was a protest, but the sphinx nodded. “Give him
five minutes,” he said and took out his watch.

The prisoner began to talk in his compelling way, and
unconsciously the interest of his executioners awakened.
Being on the edge of death, he had no reticences. He
divulged the whole tale of the revolution, and he made a
good story of it. He told of Blenkiron’s coming to the
Gran Seco, of the slow sapping of the loyalty of the Mines
Police, of the successful propaganda among the technical
staff, of the organising of the Indian pueblas, in which he
claimed a modest share. The others dropped their pistol-hands
and poked forward their heads to listen. The five
minutes lengthened to six, to eight, to ten, and he still
held his audience. He addressed himself to the man on the
barrel, and sometimes he lowered his voice till the doorkeeper
took a step nearer.

Then he became more confidential, and his voice dropped
further. “How do you think it was managed? A miracle?
No, a very simple secret which none of you clever folk discovered.
We had a base and you never knew it. Go into
the pueblas and the old men will speak of a place which
they call Uasini Maconoa. That means the Courts of the
Morning–Los Patios de la Mañana. Where do you think
it is? Listen, and I will tell you.”

They listened, but only for his words, while the speaker
was listening for another sound which he seemed at last
to have detected. He suddenly caught two of the heads
bent forward, those of Radin and Molinoff, and brought
them crashing together. The doorkeeper could not shoot,
because Mollison was in his way, and in an instant the
chance was gone, for a blow on the head felled him to the
ground. Mollison with a shout swung the dazed Radin
and Molinoff aside and had his pistol in the air, when a
report rang out and he toppled like a great tree, shot through
the brain. The hut had filled with men, and the two whose
heads had crashed and the fever-stricken Bechstein were
throttled from behind and promptly pinioned.

Then the prisoner showed what the strain had been by
fainting at the feet of the man on the barrel.

He came to himself, and found Peters holding a brandy-flask
to his mouth. Peters had a whitish face.

“My God, sir,” he stammered, “you will never be nearer
death.”

The young man seemed to have recovered, for he had
strength enough to laugh.

“I cut it pretty fine, but there was no other way. I had
to make myself ground-bait if we were to catch these pike.
We’ve got them all now. . . . I think I could have held
them for another five minutes, but I chose to precipitate
things. You see, I saw by the flicker of the lantern that
the door was opening, and that meant you. If I hadn’t
thought of that head-crashing dodge, I think I might have
stopped a bullet.”

The man on the barrel had risen and was looking sombrely
on. The policeman jerked his head towards him. “What
about that fellow?” he asked.

“Oh, let him alone,” was the answer. “He is free to go
where he likes. He was at school with me, and I owe
him a good turn for this evening.”