Chapter V: Part TWO (2)

“It would enter into a new plane of being, Mr. Kingsborough, which lies just beyond anything we have going now. I guess the prophets saw it: a new world: gee, I guess it’s worth working to try to bring. All your dividends and worldly cares just dumped where they belong, and all your spiritual being three hundred per cent pure light.”

“It sounds delightful,” Hilary said.

“It would be all it sounds.”

“Yes, I daresay,” Hilary said. “But would it?”

“Perhaps you are not an optimist, Mr. Kingsborough? However, there it is. Meanwhile could you let me know the right time?”

“Two minutes to eight.”

“Is your time correct?”

“Correct by the noon gun.”

“Two minutes to eight. I must be slow. I make it no more than three and a half minutes to eight.” He busied himself with his watch.

Margaret from the kitchen gave a call of “Oh, Hilary!” Hilary opened the door and called back:

“Do you want me, Margarita?”

“Could you come here just a moment?”

Hilary excused himself to Mr. Brown and hurried along the corridor to the kitchen, which was in some confusion. Dark smoke wreathed about the ceiling: the table was still set with some preparations for a meal: there were several broken plates, dishes, sprigs of herbs and limes upon the floor, but the negroes were gone. The place stank of burnt oil; great greasy smuts floated on the air.

“They’ve gone again,” Margaret said. “They have been beyond all bounds. Oh, Hilary, I have had a marvellous time with them. At first they kept going into paroxysms of prayer and giggles, and dropping things on the floor. Then they started behaving like raging lunatics; they upset the oil on to the fire. They almost had the house on fire, but I have managed to beat it out. They danced while I was doing this, so I told them to go out to see their appearance again, which they have done.”

“Are you burnt?”

“No.”

“I wish I had known that you were having this trouble.”

“I’m very glad you didn’t. What does this Mr. Brown want?”

“To drive us into Las Palomas. We had better go. He has a carriage waiting at the gate.”

“What do you make of him?”

“He’s a minister in the Light-Arising Church.”

“Do you think he is?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“What do you think of him?”

“I didn’t like his mouth.”

“I don’t take to his mouth, myself,” Hilary said. “But he isn’t a minister in the sense that a priest is a priest. He’s a commercial traveller in an intellectual light co., with a bonus of thirty cents a soul.”

“Did you meet him at the Club?”

“I can’t remember: I may have: I met so many that night. But I think you may put all suspicion of him out of your mind, Pearl, because he comes, really, from Colonel Mackenzie’s office. That Harker man told me that word had been sent to Colonel Mackenzie, about our being threatened. Well, this fellow Brown was in Mackenzie’s office when the message came. It seems that he knows the Pacos and was coming here to see them anyhow, and so he volunteered to bring us back with him to Las Palomas. He arrived in a buggy (at least he calls it a surrey) while we were down by the creek.”

“I am all ready to start for Las Palomas,” she said. “I ran upstairs, after you had gone into the room with him, to pack a few things for both of us. They are in handbags on the ledge in the hall. The only question is, shall we not get out here and go alone? I don’t quite like this Mr. Brown. I think he’s a bad man. His mouth snaps to just like a trap.”

“Well, he is old and alone, and I think that he must certainly have been at Colonel Mackenzie’s.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is that which weighs with me. I suppose it is all right; but I’m uneasy to-night: so many unusual things are happening. Oh, whatever is that?”

“That” was the running down of the weights in the old English kitchen clock which had been Tia Eusebia’s pride for many years. With a sudden jarring, chirring and dropping noise, these weights dropped themselves, a little door opened, a little man appeared, who jerked himself forward and backward eight times as the bell behind him struck the hour.

“Eight o’clock. What a shock it gave me.”

“We can’t stay here. This place is on our nerves to-night: we had better go. And I should say, go with this man in his surrey buggy, or whatever it is he calls it. It is two or three lonely miles to town: if he will drive us, all the better.”

“I do not feel at ease about it, Hilary. I have misgivings.”

“I haven’t, because I know now that Mackenzie will be looking out for us. It is all right. Come along.”

“Right. Come along.”

“Leave the lamp for Ramón.”

They left the lamp burning, but turned it down: then they went into the corridor and closed the kitchen door behind them.

The first thing which they noticed on coming into the hall was a draught of air (blowing in from the sitting-room) which was causing the lamp to smoke.

“I say,” Hilary said, “I shut the sitting-room door when I came out. Mr. Brown must have opened it. The draught is from there.”

“He must have opened the window too,” Margaret said. “This is the breeze.”

“The window was shut when I left the room.”

“Perhaps it blew open,” Margaret said. “It sometimes does if the catch be not pushed home.”

“The catch was pushed home.”

Hilary picked up the two little handbags from the ledge, thinking that this Mr. Brown had a pretty cool cheek to go opening people’s windows and making their lamps smoke. He walked along to the sitting-room door, carrying the bags; Margaret was just behind him. He pushed the door open and came well into the room. A gush of air blew past him on the instant, for the window opening into the verandah was wide open. “Come in, quick, and close the door, Margarita,” he said. “This window’s wide open.” Margarita closed the door to save the hall lamp; they were thus both within the room.

Hilary saw at a glance that Mr. Brown had not only opened the window, but had moved the lamp to the corner near the fire-place. “He has a pretty cool cheek,” he thought again.

Mr. Brown was standing near the open window, facing them, with his hands behind his back.

“Come in, Mr. Kingsborough,” Mr. Brown said. “I see you have done your packing, so we can start right away.”

Hilary felt quickly that there was something wrong and deadly. There was that rasp in Mr. Brown’s voice and that snap upon his mouth; and besides these things, he stood still, and there was something in his last five words which sounded like a signal, and thirty years seemed to fall from him.

“Yes, sir,” he repeated, “we can start right away.” His hands came up from behind him with a flash and a bang: something very hot struck Hilary in the chest with a pang and a thud which came together: a little, slow bluish smoke twisted out of Mr. Brown’s pistol: Hilary found that he was on the floor. He heard Margarita cry aloud. He tried to rise, but the place rocked so and surged: there was a sort of tight red wave which got into his eyes. Then a lot of people seemed to dance out of the night into the room; they seemed to dance all over him; they seemed to be dancing with Margarita, and there was a smell of a cigar which was pushed red-hot into his cheek. After that, he knew that he climbed to his feet, and that somebody grinned in his face; then the water seemed to fall all off the mill-wheel into a peacelike sleep or death.

Everything seemed to be over when he came to himself again. The dancing was done. Men were going out of the room by the verandah window: they were carrying a great package which moaned and seemed to be moving, much as a fly, trussed up by a spider, will move. He felt a weight in his chest and found it difficult to understand what was happening. Then he realised that the moaning package was Margarita, who was being carried away by all these men.

“All right, Margarita,” he said, “I will set you free.” The words which he spoke did not seem to be these, because the men laughed. He said, “I’ll teach you to laugh,” and tried to rise from the floor, but the floor rocked all round him, so that he had to lie down again. He shut his eyes to make the floor steady, but it did not become steady. He tried to steady it with his hands, then it started spinning.

Presently he managed to sit up. A man was looking down upon him; the man’s hat was cocked on one side, he was smoking the stub of a cigar and staring at him.

“Mr. Bloody Kingsborough,” the man said. “My dear old college pal, dammit. You’ve no memory of me. You haven’t been introduced to me. I’m one of the vulgar lower orders, dammit. Sumecta, my name is. I’m a fellaw, dammit, a rude vulgar low fellaw. And I’m going to cork your eyebrows with my cigar.”

He leaped upon Hilary and rubbed the burning cigar along his eyebrows. Hilary noticed that the man wore earrings and had a wide mouth lacking one tooth. The man straddled across him and slapped his cheeks and puffed cigar-smoke into his face.

“I’m Sumecta,” he said. “And you’ve got no London police force here. You can’t order the horrid man away. Your sister’s going to Mr. Holy B, and nothing that you can do can stop us. You won’t see your sister again, because the Chief wants her. The Chief wants her.”

Another man appeared behind Sumecta: he was a little elderly man with an inflamed face and a dirty rag about his neck, covering a boil.

“Don’t try to stop your sister going,” he said, “or you’ll line an elmwood shell with name engraved. We’ll just tample his dags, Sumecta, and then frolly the dusty.”

They emptied the cigarette-box and took a drink or two. The little man began to sing a song:

“Travelling with the lady,
You’d best pull down the blind,
Make it cosy and shady . . .”

He came round the table close to Hilary and danced a little breakdown, with two of Hilary’s cigarettes in his mouth. “O I’m a lady, a Hottentot lady,” he sang. “One-time-piecee lubly gal, O.”

“I’ll singe my college pal’s lips,” Sumecta said. “Baillon de cigare chaud.” He straddled down over Hilary, sucked his cigar to a glow and prepared to burn his victim’s lips.

“Cut that out, Sumecta,” Mr. Brown said, at the window. “Come on here, the two of you. The train’s just going.” Mr. Brown’s beard was sticking out of his pocket, but his white eyebrows were still in place.

The two men followed Mr. Brown through the window, which they closed behind them. Mr. Brown opened it again an instant later, to take a last look round the room. Mr. Brown seemed to have no further interest in Hilary, he neither spoke to him nor looked at him. Hilary to him had been simply something to shove aside and leave. After they had gone, Hilary heard footsteps and voices; presently the light went out; he was alone in the dark. A bat flew about the room after insects; presently it knocked down a tumbler which dripped water on to the floor for a long, long time.

Tio Ramón and his wife did not see the miraculous appearance again, though they waited in the clearing, near the stone, till after eleven. They then walked to Las Palomas, and heard a midnight office at a monastery, then stayed on praying in side-chapels of the church till after dawn. After some more prayer and the offering of all that was precious in their apparel to the image in a side-chapel, they walked and partly danced to Los Xicales. They did not enter the house even then, for they had to compare notes with Lotta at the lodge.

At eight in the stormy morning, they found Hilary lying in a chair in the sitting-room, in pain and fever. In the wild weather Tio Ramón summoned Paco, who summoned Enrique, who sent Lotta to find Miguel, who shook his head, and thought it better to call Enobbio. Enobbio was an elderly Italian with a clear wit; he at once rode in to Las Palomas and called a doctor and Colonel Mackenzie. By midday Los Xicales was thronged by detectives, who looked mysterious and took a lot of measurements and shook their heads. Their Indian trackers said that there were seven men concerned in the raid and that two were “little Indians”; that five, including the Indians, had come from the beach, while the other two had driven from the north, in a buggy, which had waited at the gate for some time.

After the raid (the trackers said) the men had carried Margarita to this buggy and had driven her away. Lotta, Lotta’s children, Ramón and Eusebia, all admitted that they had seen the buggy go past, full of men, and that they had heard a woman among them crying for help, but they had not known that it was more than a joke. They had not noticed where the buggy went after it passed them; but this the trackers explained. It drove out of the forest by the city road, turned to the left, and crossed the savannah to the beach. Near the beach it stopped, five of the men carried Margarita to the water; there, presumably, they found a boat and put to sea. The two men remaining in the buggy drove off to Las Palomas, where all trace of them disappeared.

The rain was heavy before noon: the tracks were rained out.

No further trace or track was found. No more evidence was forthcoming. Enobbio had seen a stranger looking for a lost bicycle; but this stranger was proven to have been Sard Harker, mate of the _Pathfinder_, which had now sailed. Acting on Enobbio’s evidence, the police recovered Richard Shullocker’s bicycle, but found no trace of Margarita. Hilary’s story of the events was not very clear. He could repeat only what he could remember of Sard’s story, which he had not much wished to hear, and of Abner Brown’s story, which had not told him much. He maintained that the abductors were mixed up with Santa Barbara and with the boxing hall, the Circo Romano.

Ben Hordano was questioned, but his movements on the night of the raid were well known: he had been drunk by six, disorderly by seven, and in jail by eight. One curious thing, which none could explain, was how the man Abner Brown knew that Richard Shullocker had warned Colonel Mackenzie of an intended raid at Los Xicales. The warning had been given privately, in person: no one could possibly have overheard it. Paco and his son Enrique denied having had any dealings (horse-hire or other) with anyone outside their hamlet. This denial was backed by sufficient proof.

Colonel Mackenzie, acting on Richard’s warning, had sent two patrols to Los Xicales during the night of the raid, but as one had gone at midnight and the other at four in the morning, and both had shrunk from the weather, neither had seen anything suspicious.

In those days there was no direct cable to Santa Barbara. A message thither had to be cabled to the Florida station, thence to Punto Poniente, thence to Tres Dientes, and thence on. The Santa Barbara police declared that they knew of no one known as Mr. B. or Sagrado B., and that if the raid had been carried out by one of the liquor gangs, which seemed possible, those liquor gangs were composed of Occidentales, not of men from the State of Santa Barbara.

Hilary had been wounded in the wall of the chest by an American revolver bullet. He was in bed with his wound for thirteen days. On the fourteenth day he heard the final reports of the police, that they did not know where his sister was, and that they had no clue whatsoever to her abductors. The story had by this time reached the American and English newspapers. A question was asked in Parliament, whether it were true that an Englishwoman had been abducted by brigands in Las Palomas, and whether Her Majesty’s Ministers were making such representations, etc., etc., as would, etc. The Ministers replied that they had heard the report, and that they had every confidence in Her Majesty’s representatives on the spot and in the police of Las Palomas.

Colonel Mackenzie, who was newly in charge of that police, had less confidence. He told Hilary privately that many in the Occidental police force were bribed by the liquor gangs, and that in this case they were determined not to help. Hilary asked whether it would be any use to look for Margarita in Santa Barbara. “Do you yourself think that she will be there?” he asked.

“No, I don’t, Mr. Kingsborough.”

“Well,” Hilary said, “we know that the raiders were not Occidentales, and that they took her away by sea. The men at the boxing-match said that the raid was planned by a Santa Barbara leader, who had some grudge against us. My sister said that there was one man with a grudge against her. Why should not an international ruffian of that sort, speaking all tongues, establish himself at Santa Barbara, work with the liquor-smugglers, and use his gangs to gratify his grudge when he heard of our presence here?”

“That is a theory, Mr. Kingsborough; but remember, that it is very unlikely that members of a gang would talk in public of their gang’s headquarters without any disguise whatsoever. If they spoke of Santa Barbara, be sure that they meant some other place. Santa Barbara is a big place, however, with seven hundred miles of coast. However, I had a flimsy from Santa Barbara this morning; here it is.”

“Quite impossible Kingsborough lady landed here during past fortnight. Paris Surete report the magician Hirsch committed suicide Monte Carlo, 1894.”

“Good God! then, what do you suppose?”

“That we may put aside this Santa Barbara theory as untenable. Let us waste no further time on it.”

“What other theory have you? Who would have taken my sister? What motive could anyone have?”

“I do not know who took your sister, Mr. Kingsborough, but I am working and hoping to find out. The motive is obvious to anyone who has had the honour to see your sister: she is a very beautiful woman. That was the motive, as I read the case.”

“And where do you suppose she is?”

“I hope to find out and restore her.”

“You mean that she has been shipped to some damned tolerated house?”

“Mr. Kingsborough, it is no good thinking thoughts like those: that way madness lies. I believe that we shall find your sister wherever she may be.”

“Well,” Hilary said, “I believe that she is in Santa Barbara, in spite of all your beliefs, and I shall go there to look for her. At least, if I go there, I shall be following the only clue there is. And I shall see that mate of the _Pathfinder_ and get descriptions from him of those men at the boxing-match.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Kingsborough, the _Pathfinder_ has not yet arrived at Santa Barbara.”

“What; not in a fortnight, running dead to leeward?”

“No.”

“She’s overdue?”

“No, not yet; but making a bad passage.”

“Has she been met with?”

“No. She has not been reported.”

“Is there a single thing in this,” Hilary cried, “which doesn’t go dead, dead against us? I’ll see whether the Dictator of Santa Barbara is as helpless as a bribed bureaucracy.”

He was unjust to Colonel Mackenzie, but then he was young, very fond of Margarita, shaken by his wound, and new to reality of any kind.

Colonel Mackenzie was sorry for him, but sorrier for a very lovely woman in the hands of ruffians.

* * * * *