Captain Macklin: His Memoirs Part 5

"That is not war," she had said to me, "that is speculation!" She surely had said that to me, but how could she have known, or was hers only a random guess? And if she had guessed correctly what would she wish me to do now? Would she wish me to turn back, or, if my own motives were good, would she tell me to go on? She had called me her knight-errant, and I owed it to her to do nothing of which she would disapprove. As I thought of her I felt a great loneliness and a longing to see her once again.

I thought of how greatly she would have delighted in those days at sea, and how wonderful it would have been if I could have seen this hot, feverish country with her at my side. I pictured her at the inn at Sagua smiling on the priest and the fat little landlord; and their admiration of her. I imagined us riding together in the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne with the crimson flowers meeting overhead, and the palms bowing to her and paying her homage. I lifted the locket she had wound around my wrist, and kissed it. As I did so, my doubts and questionings seemed to fall away.

I stood up confident and determined. It was not my business to worry over the motives of other men, but to look to my own. I would go ahead and fight Alvarez, who Aiken himself declared was a thief and a tyrant.

If anyone asked me my politics I would tell him I was for the side that would obtain the money the Isthmian Line had stolen, and give it to the people; that I was for Garcia and Liberty, Laguerre and the Foreign Legion. This platform of principles seemed to me so satisfactory that I stretched my feet to the fire and went to sleep.

I was awakened by the most delicious odor of coffee, and when I rolled out of my blanket I found Jose standing over me with a cup of it in his hand, and Aiken buckling the straps of my saddle-girth. We took a plunge in the stream, and after a breakfast of coffee and cold tortillas climbed into the saddle and again picked up the trail.

After riding for an hour Aiken warned me that at any moment we were likely to come upon either Laguerre or the soldiers of Alvarez. "So you keep your eyes and ears open," he said, "and when they challenge throw up your hands quick. The challenge is 'Halt, who lives,'" he explained.

"If it is a government soldier you must answer, 'The government.' But if it's one of Laguerre's or Garcia's pickets you must say 'The revolution lives.' And whatever else you do, _hold up your hands._"

I rehea.r.s.ed this at once, challenging myself several times, and giving the appropriate answers. The performance seemed to afford Aiken much amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Isn't that right?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "but the joke is that you won't be able to tell which is the government soldier and which is the revolutionist, and you'll give the wrong answer, and we'll both get shot."

"I can tell by our uniform," I answered.

"Uniform!" exclaimed Aiken, and burst into the most uproarious laughter.

"Rags and tatters," he said.

I was considerably annoyed to learn by this that the revolutionary party had no distinctive uniform. The one worn by the government troops which I had seen at the coast I had thought bad enough, but it was a great disappointment to hear that we had none at all. Ever since I had started from Dobbs Ferry I had been wondering what was the Honduranian uniform. I had promised myself to have my photograph taken in it. I had antic.i.p.ated the pride I should have in sending the picture back to Beatrice. So I was considerably chagrined, until I decided to invent a uniform of my own, which I would wear whether anyone else wore it or not. This was even better than having to accept one which someone else had selected. As I had thought much on the subject of uniforms, I began at once to design a becoming one.

We had reached a most difficult pa.s.s in the mountain, where the trail stumbled over broken ma.s.ses of rock and through a thick tangle of laurel. The walls of the pa.s.s were high and the trees at the top shut out the sunlight. It was damp and cold and dark.

"We're sure to strike something here," Aiken whispered over his shoulder. It did not seem at all unlikely. The place was the most excellent man-trap, but as to that, the whole length of the trail had lain through what nature had obviously arranged for a succession of ambushes.

Aiken turned in his saddle and said, in an anxious tone: "Do you know, the nearer I get to the old man, the more I think I was a fool to come.

As long as I've got nothing but bad news, I'd better have stayed away.

Do you remember Pharaoh and the messengers of ill tidings?"

I nodded, but I kept my eyes busy with the rocks and motionless laurel.

My mule was slipping and kicking down pebbles, and making as much noise as a gun battery. I knew, if there were any pickets about, they could hear us coming for a quarter of a mile.

"Garcia may think he's Pharaoh," Aiken went on, "and take it into his head it's my fault the guns didn't come. Laguerre may say I sold the secret to the Isthmian Line."

"Oh, he couldn't think you'd do that!" I protested.

"Well, I've known it done," Aiken said. "Quay certainly sold us out at New Orleans. And Laguerre may think I went shares with him."

I began to wonder if Aiken was not probably the very worst person I could have selected to introduce me to General Laguerre. It seemed as though it certainly would have been better had I found my way to him alone. I grew so uneasy concerning my possible reception that I said, irritably: "Doesn't the General know you well enough to trust you?"

"No, he doesn't!" Aiken snapped back, quite as irritably. "And he's dead right, too. You take it from me, that the fewer people in this country you trust, the better for you. Why, the rottenness of this country is a proverb. 'It's a place where the birds have no song, where the flowers have no odor, where the women are without virtue, and the men without honor.' That's what a gringo said of Honduras many years ago, and he knew the country and the people in it."

It was not a comforting picture, but in my discouragement I remembered Laguerre.

"General Laguerre does not belong to this country," I said, hopefully.

"No," Aiken answered, with a laugh. "He's an Irish-Frenchman and belongs to a dozen countries. He's fought for every flag that floats, and he's no better off to-day than when he began."

He turned toward me and stared with an amused and tolerant grin. "He's a bit like you," he said.

I saw he did not consider what he said as a compliment, but I was vain enough to want to know what he did think of me, so I asked: "And in what way am I like General Laguerre?"

The idea of our similarity seemed to amuse Aiken, for he continued to grin.

"Oh, you'll see when we meet him," he said. "I can't explain it. You two are just different from other people--that's all. He's old-fas.h.i.+oned like you, if you know what I mean, and young--"

"Why, he's an old man," I corrected.

"He's old enough to be your grandfather," Aiken laughed, "but I say he's young--like you, the way you are."

Aiken knew that it annoyed me when he pretended I was so much younger than himself, and I had started on some angry reply, when I was abruptly interrupted.

A tall, ragged man rose suddenly from behind a rock, and presented a rifle. He was so close to Aiken that the rifle almost struck him in the face. Aiken threw up his hands, and fell back with such a jerk that he lost his balance, and would have fallen had he not pitched forward and clasped the mule around the neck. I pulled my mule to a halt, and held my hands as high as I could raise them. The man moved his rifle from side to side so as to cover each of us in turn, and cried in English, "Halt! Who goes there?"

Aiken had not told me the answer to that challenge, so I kept silent. I could hear Jose behind me interrupting his prayers with little sobs of fright.

Aiken scrambled back into an upright position, held up his hands, and cried: "Confound you, we are travellers, going to the capital on business. Who the devil are you?"

"Qui vive?" the man demanded over the barrel of his gun.

"What does that mean?" Aiken cried, petulantly. "Talk English, can't you, and put down that gun."

The man ceased moving the rifle between us, and settled it on Aiken.

"Cry 'Long live the government,'" he commanded, sharply.

Aiken gave a sudden start of surprise, and I saw his eyelids drop and rise again. Later when I grew to know him intimately, I could always tell when he was lying, or making the winning move in some bit of knavery, by that nervous trick of the eyelids. He knew that I knew about it, and he once confided to me that, had he been able to overcome it, he would have saved himself some thousands of dollars which it had cost him at cards.

But except for this drooping of the eyelids he gave no sign.

"No, I won't cry 'Long live the government,'" he answered. "That is," he added hastily, "I won't cry long live anything. I'm the American Consul, and I'm up here on business. So's my friend."

The man did not move his gun by so much as a straw's breadth.

"You will cry 'Long live Alvarez' or I will shoot you," said the man.

I had more leisure to observe the man than had Aiken, for it is difficult to study the features of anyone when he is looking at you down a gun-barrel, and it seemed to me that the muscles of the man's mouth as he pressed it against the stock were twitching with a smile. As the side of his face toward me was the one farther from the gun, I was able to see this, but Aiken could not, and he answered, still more angrily: "I tell you, I'm the American Consul. Anyway, it's not going to do you any good to shoot me. You take me to your colonel alive, and I'll give you two hundred dollars. You shoot me and you won't get a cent."

The moment was serious enough, and I was thoroughly concerned both for Aiken and myself, but when he made this offer, my nervousness, or my sense of humor, got the upper hand of me, and I laughed.

Having laughed I made the best of it, and said:

"Offer him five hundred for the two of us. Hang the expense."

The rifle wavered in the man's hands, he steadied it, scowled at me, bit his lips, and then burst into shouts of laughter. He sank back against one of the rocks, and pointed at Aiken mockingly.

"I knew it was you all the time," he cried, "for certain I did. I knew it was you all the time."