Money to Burn/Chapter 10

ILENT and doubtful, Dan concluded his early-morning duties to his patient, and was conducted back to his vast bedchamber. He prepared for breakfast. Fernando kept disconcertingly close while he finished dressing.

“Hot water, Señor Medico? Your socks here, Señor Medico! Here Señor Medico coat; Peña too small to help on.”

The creature tried Stone's nerves almost beyond endurance. If Dan did not see him directly, he was forever catching his distorted reflection in a long mirror at the end of the room.

Mystery breathed through the entire hacienda. The forsaken graveyard, half buried in marsh, seemed alive with it, the very stones of the chapel whispered of it. There had been danger and to spare on the water front of San Lorenzo, but the danger of the gallows seemed, because it was more tangible, almost less ominous than the secret perils of this house of empty passageways, set within the strange walled estate and guarded by peons—that was the right name for them!—who were equally terrified and terrifying.

And then there was that girl. Was it merely shyness, as he had at first supposed, that made her footsteps lag on the sands where he originally saw her? What had she been doing in San Lorenzo with an uncle who did not let her share his table when strangers were about, and who held her arm securely when she walked in public? Was he protecting her against invisible harms, and did she live in some impending danger that made her prefer this protection? Dan wished he had managed to talk with her and find out her trouble. Perhaps when Don Ramon came to trust him more, the planter would confide in him. Perhaps the trouble hung over the pair of them, and Villeta only simulated his cheerfulness.

And the sick man, Tucker. Save a fellow American? Of course. But from what? From the same danger, it was to be guessed, that threatened the others. If so, Stone could find out just what it was—find out from his patient—on his next professional visit. After that, rescue—rescue if possible, for who was Dan, himself a fugitive, to be of any genuine help to anybody desirous of escape?

He descended to the ground floor gloomily, yet there the bright morning sunlight temporarily, at least, dispersed some portion of his dejection. Don Ramon, resplendent in fresh white, was waiting here, his vivid parrot, Pedro, seated on his shoulder and, reaching a gray bill forward, pecking at the full lips under his master's mustache.

The breakfast table was laden with bowls of gay flowers and torrid-zone fruits. Steaming coffee was brewing in a brass alcohol-heated percolator, and Don Ramon—who was dressed for a journey in spite of the color of his raiment—at once hurried forward to greet his guest.

His manner was the most radiant in the world. It gave every appearance of being spontaneous and inherent. He scattered good health and good nature, and waved Dan, with a genial smile and the flash of his never-absent rings, to his seat at the table.

“You slept soundly? Yes?”

“Thank you,” said Dan. He thought again of the machinery heard at night; then, glancing at his host, wondered if his own doubts were not the morbid results of his experiences aboard the Hawk. “And you?” he asked.

“I never sleep badly. That is what it is,” said Don Ramon, “to have the clear conscience of a babe.”

“And the”—Dan hesitated ever so little and knew that he blushed a great deal, but he brought it out with a sort of dogged determination—“and the señorita, your niece? She enjoyed a good rest, too?”

“My good friend, what could there be upon the conscience of a properly brought-up young girl? Tell me of your patient.”

Dan had something to say about that, but the moment when Peña reached up a plate to him seemed not particularly auspicious. He reported in general terms.

Excused from the sick room, Luis assisted the hunchback this morning, the doctor anxiously wondering if his patient now had any attendant at all. Nevertheless, Dan settled himself with no outward sign of protest—and with a thoroughly normal appetite—to eating. The breakfast was, unlike the breakfast of most Continentals and those of Continental origin, an elaborate affair. Rashers of bacon, broiled fish, eggs baked with green and red peppers, heaps of sweet tortillas as on the night before. There was nothing wrong with the appetite of the master of the house. Don Ramon's mouth was always open for more, though, between tossings of food to the greedy parrot swaying on the table beside his plate, he talked as volubly as ever.

“I regret excessively that I must leave you to your own devices to-day,” he said in his soft voice, with a polite bow and a smile that lighted his big round face.

“''Socorro! Socorro!”'' squawked Pedro, and Dan looked up as the bird interrupted, with startled blue eyes.

“But,” continued his master, stroking the parrot, “when you are not completing the cure of our unfortunate Señor Tucker, you may look about the estate or read. I have quantities of books—English; among the collection many American novels of the sort that one of your several societies formed to suppress something or other, has succeeded in suppressing, so that you may not have seen them. You would like to look them over? Mostly, they are very stupid and mostly they are poorly written. When a hook is stupid and poorly written, those quaint societies seem to think it is also evil, and I am inclined to believe they are right.”

Dan was not sure that he cared for these volumes.

“Well, amuse yourself, at any rate. It is some distance I must go to meet some freight that I expect to be conveyed from San Lorenzo. I must meet it part way, at a transfer. Regresáre à las siete—I beg your pardon. I shall return at seven or thereabouts. I shall he happy to receive a good report of Señor Tucker this evening.”

Dan, his patient heavily on his mind, tried to find a moment unsupervised by Peña, but, time pressing and the master of the palacio being on the very point of leaving, he was finally forced to speak, if at all, before the hunchback.

“Don Ramon,” said he, “there's a favor I want you to do for me.”

Whether from something in Dan's tone or for reasons better known to himself alone, Villeta's eyes narrowed, but his smile was in his final answer.

“A favor? Whatever it may be, rest assured that it is granted!”

Dan was by no means sure of that. “I had hoped,” he said, “to have a chance to speak of it to you in private”

“Well? Well?”

Villeta seemed restless for elucidation. His already closely bitten finger nails were being impatiently nibbled toward the quick. Dan, who had previously observed this only as a sort of mark of identification, found himself now codifying the habit as a nervous affection subtly correlative of the mystery of the house.

“You want Tucker back at his work as soon as possible, don't you?” he nevertheless continued.

“Of a truth, yes!”

Peña hovered over them. He was unconcealedly listening.

“Well, my patient,” Dan continued, “is being retarded in his recovery by a sick man's hallucination. He has a foolish fear of Fernando, this servant of young man's arm. “My dear fellow,” said he, “I [sic]relieved of that attendance, I frankly can't guarantee recovery.”

Stone felt rather than saw the dark look that swept over the dwarf's features, but Don Ramon burst into a great boisterous laugh and, while the parrot raucously echoed him, tapped Stone's arm with his fat jeweled fingers.

“My dear Señor Medico, this is very foolish! You as a physician, however immature—I beg your pardon—should not hold my poor servant's misfortune against him.”

“I don't! I am speaking for my patient.” The American felt his face unaccountably flushing.

“But Señor Tucker understands the temperament of my innocent Fernando.”

“Sick men have violent fancies, Don Ramon,” Dan insisted.

“Then,” said Ramon with a sudden sharpness, “when they are nonsense they should be overcome, or they may grow to mania. There is altogether too much of this yielding to sick men's sick fancies by silly, abnormally sympathetic physicians. Pah! One would think their medical training would harden them, but I believe they're all as soft as Peña's wife or as this overripe mango.” He carelessly spat the yellow pulp from his mouth. Then he leaned confidentially toward Dan and jogged the young man's arm. “My dear fellow,” said he, “I really had more faith in an American doctor—even in one of your record. Why, ask Senora Peña—she will tell you that Fernando is as harmless as a lamb.”

“Perhaps.” Dan was determined not to let his own personal predicament influence his professional obligations. “But I myself don't like his constant companionship. It's quite unnecessary, and it's got nothing to do with his misfortune. I simply can't have anybody—anybody—dogging my heels the way this man does. I've never had a valet de chambre to wash my face and brush my teeth for me, and I don't need one now. What's more, I won't stand for it.”

His tone was incisive, his purpose firm. After the peon's impudence in the sick chamber and Tucker's appeal for rescue, he was resolved to be rid of Fernando at all hazards. Villeta's swift glance read the decision, and the planter shrugged and submitted. Out of one corner of his mouth, “De nada, no es nada,” he whispered to Peña, but the next instant he addressed Dan:

“Of course if the matter is personal to you, why, you are my guest and you shall have your wish. Did I not tell you, before you expressed it, that your wish should be granted?” He turned back to the brooding Peña, but now he spoke in English and no longer in a whisper:

“You hear the Señor Medico! If Señor Tucker cannot recover with you in attendance, you must completely surrender your position to Luis. Luis will therefore attend to both the sick American and the well American, and will do no more duties in the dining room for the present. “But”—and he faced Dan again—“you will have to transmit all orders through Fernando, because Luis knows no English.” Over his shoulder, Don Ramon ascertained that the broken-nosed Carib had left the room. He added softly to Fernando, with a leer that Dan's sharpened eyes did not miss: “No durarâ mucho.”

There was nothing much in that of itself: “It will not last long.” But Peña's reply was more explicit and seemed to involve his master as well as himself in its implications.

He, too, made certain that Luis was still absent. Then he burst forth in a torrent of Spanish that he never dreamed the American would understand:

“This is all a trick, my master. Watch these Americanos. We have enough! Why go to so much pains to get him well for a week? Muerte al traidor! Let me kill the sick man now!”

“Plenty of time for that!” said the planter placatingly. His smile never deserted him, and his voice was as soft as if he were speaking to a querulous child.

Dan bent his head low above his plate in order to hide the growing horror of his face. He could not believe what he heard. But Ramon added emphatically and still in Spanish to the dwarf: “The extra paper comes to-day. Why stop short of our two million dollars?”

The parrot Pedro had hopped to one of the planter's shoulders, its bright-green head impudently on one side.

“''Muerte al traidor! Muerte al traidor!”'' it shrieked and, shrieking, glared with horrible innuendo at the young American.