Money to Burn/Chapter 6

WO hot hours later, Villeta and his party were aboard the slipshod train that—when so inclined and hurricanes permit—strolls, now and then, between Sanchez and Concepción de la Vega, the mantilla-hidden girl, package-laden Don Ramon, and Dan suitably clothed and restored to some semblance of his proper self. Dan's eyes had swept the Sanchez station for a renewed glimpse of Hoagland, and he breathed a sigh of relief when they could not find him. Nor had the passenger been anywhere in sight when Villeta and his niece returned to José's coffeehouse, and, since the planter had seemingly chanced to elude his unsuspected stalker, Stone maintained silence concerning him.

“Don Ramon,” Dan finally reasoned, “appears to have arguments of his own for avoiding investigations. If I tell him his association with me has been observed and has resulted in an attempt to follow him, he may think better of his bargain and decide to leave me behind,”

That is what Stone's conscious self contended; but there is in every man a self more subtle. Dan's subconsciousness remained unsatisfied regarding the very genial Santo Domingan.

Some qualms, at all events, Villeta, on his part, must have had. When the train was delayed by an upturned switch just east of the terminus of La Vega, he ordered a premature descent lest—so he said—telegrams had advised the police there to be on the lookout for Dan's arrival, and the speed with which he conducted the exit of his party was worthy of admiration.

Here the air was bracing. Though La Vega lay on a flat savanna, mountains rose not far away, and one especially beautiful peak held the American's gaze.

“Ah, yes”—his guide was instantly aware of his preoccupation—“our beautiful Yaqui of the Cordilleras del Cibao. Myself, I prefer the Sierra de Monte Cristi and the dead volcanic north.” He made a wide gesture. “Alas, it is in the opposite direction that our path lies. We must leave this exquisite city—though it has, for its beauty, been called the love city of Santo Domingo. We must go tediously through the Dark Country. That striking acclivity yonder is the Cerro Santo, on which Señor Christopher Columbus, some four hundred and thirty years ago, placed one of his first great crosses in the New World. Now, turn to the left!”

But Dan fastened his fascinated gaze on the magnificent cathedral that shared with the “Holy Hill” dominion over the little city. There was a picture of this in the volume that Goldthwaite had destroyed; among the bitter recollections such thought awakened, Stone hardly noticed that once more they were threading by-streets—Villeta's knowledge of these towns seemed inexhaustible and that they were proceeding to an inn, where mules awaited them, a broken-nosed Carib in charge.

“Señor Medico,” said Don Ramon, “this is my faithful and devoted Luis.” In Spanish he added to the Indian: “Is there any news?”

The tone was suspiciously altered for the last words, which received a negative reply from the Indian; but before Dan could weigh this distinction, an inquisitive landlord, who did not appear to know Villeta by sight, began to question him. Don Ramon, after a moment's survey of the man, became effusive in explanation:

“We are bound for Santo Cerro, to be sure, for the sugar plantation of the illustrious Señor Guanito. Come, Luis, let us start. We must arrive at our destination before sundown.”

They mounted, the girl evidently friendly to her side saddle, and with elaborate adieus trotted off. Santo Cerro lay, as a matter of fact, toward the Sierras. The landlord watched the caravan set out in that direction; it seemed doubtful to Dan, however, if he saw them sharply turn at the next street to the left and proceed rapidly into a road to the southwest.

It was market day. La Vega was gay with farmers and their families from the uplands, men, women and children, creoles and mulattoes, in blue denim, silk sashes and brilliant bodices, high sombreros and crimson turbans. Any party leaving the town was a party after their own hearts; the elders waved brown palms, the youngsters toddled up and offered each a cheek for kissing. Dan saw the señorita's lithe shoulders heave, saw her bend to pat the curly head of a laughing boy. He pressed his mount forward, he knew not why, and, as her hand returned, it brushed his.

“Now,” said Don Ramon, immediately pushing between, “now you shall see the true Santo Domingo.”

They made first for the plains and among the sources of the Yaqui del Norte, with its miraculous waterfalls, its rapids boiling over rocks of every brilliant shade. Luis headed the line, the girl followed, and Villeta and Dan, where it was possible, went abreast to bring up the rear.

The spirited planter never ceased a continual flow of conversation. The rich tones of it, warning roadside rodents and other minute animal life of the wilderness, caused strange rustling escapes beside them, the flapping retreats of brilliantly winged birds camouflaged until they were nearly within a hand's reach, and contrasted oddly with the silence of the guide and the girl. Dan was suddenly aware that he had not yet heard the Señorita Gertruda's voice. He discovered himself wondering what it would be like.

Once only was the order of march shifted, and the shift revealed that the Indian lived in mortal terror of his master.

Ramon interrupted some jovial description of local customs to urge his mount ahead with certain instructions for the guide. The trail was overgrown, and Luis intent on picking it; a bamboo stalk slipped from his protective grasp and brushed the Castilian's swarthy cheek. As if it were a thunderbolt, that stalk slew Villeta's smile.

“Quita alla!” he cried, and added a thumping oath. “Es possible?”

A moment ago, Luis had looked anything but a coward. Now, as he turned in his saddle, stark terror stared from his eyes. Don Ramon, with a single blow, knocked him clear of his mule and a yard into the thicket.

As quickly as it had come, however, the storm passed. Luis returned, his face a tangle of thorn scratches, to his ever-advancing post, and Villeta, resuming his smile as a man might pick up his hat, came back to Dan and continued his anecdote.

The girl rode on with bowed head, and the American marveled at her stoicism no less than at his own self-control. He was sure that the former arose from some mysterious fear of her uncle rather than from a tropical callousness; the latter he dared not trace to its source. He vowed that if Villeta were in any way half so cruel to the girl as to the servant, he—Dan—would forcibly take up her cause. Then he laughed bitterly for his impulsiveness, and youthfully swore to himself he would never be impulsive again.

Nor, with the passing of his brief shower of anger, did the planter exhibit the faintest need for further mistrust. His smile was open, and his luminous eyes kept turning toward Stone in frank good nature. Within five minutes more, it was next to impossible to believe him guilty of what all eyes had seen.

The pilgrims reached roads of sorts and, before these ceased, climbed along their dusty and uneven tracks. Now heavy vegetation steamed all about; again appeared open spaces dotted by thatched and whitewashed huts and broken by tiny farms. The first valleys were fragrant with the perfume of coffee blossoms grown in the shade of trees designed for the aromatic plants' protection; higher up, these surrendered to maize and sweet potatoes, and, as the very heights approached, to fields of millet.

Finally the travelers dipped to the edge of the great jungle of the interior. Straight into this Luis nosed an invisible way for more than two miles. Then, out of an unexpected clearing rose the ruins of a forgotten castle, its fallen masonry overgrown by rank weeds, among which lizards darted to their holes; and here the sudden sun flashed a farewell and sank. The party was in total darkness and must so remain until moon and stars should achieve nocturnal brilliancy.

Luis, with the aid of a flash lamp, made their preparations for the night. Out of miraculous saddlebags he produced a score of necessities. He slung hammocks from tree to tree, he canopied them with nettings; he built a fire and soon produced a supper.

The girl ate scantily, alone and in the shadows. Don Ramon proved a mighty trencherman and laughed through the meal, commending its cook as if nothing but kindness and respect had ever passed between them. Dan decided he was puzzled simply because he was in the presence of customs entirely new to his thoroughly North American mind.

“No bread,” Don Ramon smiled to Dan. “We prefer millet in Domingo. But see these yams. You do not have green plantain in the United States, nor yet cassava roots.” He raised his eyes ecstatically. “Think of Christmas dinner without cassava pudding! And our coffee—your people possess no such coffee as ours.” His eyes answered the gleam of the camp fire, and he rubbed his hands. “So,” he breathed over a deftly rolled cigarette, “you will cure my friend Tucker?”

“If we are in time,” Stone reminded him.

“Of course—if we are in time. And who knows?” Ramon genially continued. “We may even acquire on my plantation a little of what you call yellow jack to keep you amused. We have many interesting diseases in Domingo—elephantiasis, fevers, the sleeping sickness, which I think is mostly feigned. Oh, you should have experience and to spare, when you leave us!” He rubbed his plump hands again. “When you leave us,” he repeated, then added as if reflectively: “A thousand nice, clean dollars a month—yes, yes. And accidents, too. There are unfortunately occasionally little accidents where there is machinery.”

He paused. Something sinister ran through all his joviality even as, with one fat palm upraised and its outspread fingers bright with jewels, he mirthfully requested better attention.

“You hear that? No?”

Dan nodded. From far away there came the monotonous beating of a drum.

“The papalois of blacks whose fathers crossed the hills from Haiti,” Villeta explained. “That is the first call to their rites of voodoo.”

To the sound of this vesper summons, the travelers sought their hammocks; but sleep was tardy in its approach toward Dan. He thought over all the events that had led him to this dark resting place. Incidents of his earliest boyhood encroached on his consciousness, hand-in-hand walks with his father years ago. Pictures of school days and college days. His pursuit, along a narrow, straight path, of respected success among his fellow townsmen. He reviewed the horrors aboard the Hawk with their ultimate and fatal climax and asked himself how he could have curbed his anger, even if he had taken time to reflect. He lay again on the damp sands, rode again in the dangerously careening surrey, was once more in Don José's coffeehouse looking down through the blinds at Don Ramon and his niece, and the stealthily trailing figure of Hoagland, the Hawk's passenger.

He shuddered, but the shudder fled. Stone turned to the memory of a fallen mantilla and the soft gaze of frightened black eyes. The tropic moon rose, washing trees and vines in liquid emerald, and with it rose all the night sounds of the West Indian forest: the whistling frogs, barking as of wild dogs, the buzz of insects and a guttural chorus which reminded the tossing Stone of nothing so much as the cries of baboons heard on his single visit to the Bronx Zoo.

When he did sleep, it was to waken with a start. Cold sweat was rolling into his wide eyes. He brushed it away. The bright moon was reënforced by the last glow of the fire. Directly above his head the mosquito netting bulged downward; something that had not been there before—something like a tree limb from one of the trunks supporting his hammock. The limb swayed.

It fell. Clammy and slimy and heavy it fell and, circling canopy and hammock, the thick coils of the snake wrapped Dan around and squeezed.

A shriek rang out. Not his own; he saw, in a green streak of moonlight, the beautiful face of the girl distorted by terror. Dan had no chance to cry; he was struggling with all his imprisoned strength at the horror that encircled him.

“Coming!”

That was Ramon's voice. The huge man flung himself upon the monster. The thing's flat head darted up and gaped at him. With an exultant laugh, Villeta ripped that head from its bloody body.

Dan slept no more, and all next day his unrefreshed physique was taxed by the party's continued penetration into the jungle. It was one long push through trees and bushes bound together by wiry creepers under arches of lofty green. Orchids, now lovely and now repulsive, bloomed about them, jasmine odors fanned their sweating cheeks, stinging insects beclouded them and land crabs scuttled underfoot. Only the never-resting trade winds made it possible to endure.

Not until the latest afternoon did they reach their journey's end. They came upon a slatternly pueblo of adobe huts, toiled wearily along a more or less modern road and halted before a high stone wall covered with cracking cement. It was yellow and weedy, and it stretched to right and left until it disappeared in the renewed jungle.

Ramon rode up to a thick, nail-studded door and jangled a hell. The door swung wide. Six half-clothed peons stood there, waiting to welcome their master.

“We are home at last,” said Villeta. “Señor Medico, consider all on my poor estate your own.”

A strange arrival. No shouts from the servants; the only smile that upon Don Ramon's round face. The half-savage peons drew aside while the cavalcade rode up a mile of neglected avenue.

The great palacio appeared beyond a curve, on a hillock. It was a double balconied, rambling building of stone, partly new, but mostly very aged and colored a deep pink. It rose before them from behind a semicircular clearing, sprinkled, none too artistically, with sago palms, hedges of hibiscus, century plants and aloes. In a mar&h to their left, a grove of mangroves steeped their roots in dank water where mosquitoes bred, and, between these and the house, Dan noticed, with strange interest, a deserted graveyard, its flat tombs askew and broken, its stones moss-covered and half hidden among rubber trees and melancholy vines.

Something else, however, straightway caught his eyes. It was a crumbling chapel that leaned against one side of the older portion of the palacio, attached to the east wing and seeming, on second glance, to form part of the dwelling. He could see that it was, or had been, a perfect example of the ecclesiastical architecture of New Spain. Enthusiasm fired his voice.

“That's a fine thing. I must look that over one of these days.”

Don Ramon turned sharply and then, under the fixed but noncommittal gaze of his niece, as sharply turned away.

“Only an old chapel,” he said. For the first time he addressed Dan brusquely. “Interesting only to me, and to me only because my late wife's ancestors lie buried in it or about it.” He glanced rapidly toward the girl and inclined his great head slightly. “My wife's and, to be sure, my dear niece's. Toussaint's soldiers wrecked it when they drove the Spaniards out of all the island, and after the return, it was never repaired. The stone roof is dangerous. A pair of my inquisitive peons—my servants,” he quickly corrected, “were killed in the place as late as February. Therefore I have locked it up.”

He eyed Dan again; he was smiling now, but now his smile was different. “Those prying servants; their death was one of the things I thought of when I spoke to you of accidents. You remember that I spoke to you of accidents last night?”

Dan met that smile wonderingly. “Why, yes.”

“Very good. I must ask you not to venture near the old chapel, Señor Medico.”

And then into Dan's mind there readvanced a question that had troubled him all the while he waited for Don Ramon at the coffeehouse of José Logronó in Sanchez—a question that only the difficulties and dangers of the subsequent journey had banished.

“Why did this man offer such a salary to a third-year medical student, turned beach comber and wanted by the police? For a thousand a month I'll bet he could have hired any two regular physicians in all Haiti and Santo Domingo!”