“Were I to tell you anything, señor, and were it to become — what you call? — spilled beans, that it was I who told, how long do you think it would be before I would be one angel?”
“Four minutes, perhaps. Maybe five, if you had luck. However, whatever you tell me will be as if sealed in the tomb. I, too, want to live.”
He looked at me a moment, then remarked:
“More things than bread might be found in the brazero of La Mariposa, in Las Pocilgas. To a good listener, few words.”
I thanked him, and said no more about it. The trail was getting hot.
IV
I sat down in the plaza and had a good smoke and think. A brazero, I knew, was a sort of brick bake-oven, usually built behind a native house. Las Pocilgas was the name of a small village about nine kilometers east of San Fulano. And how about La Mariposa? That meant a butterfly, of course, but it might mean also an inn, or a woman. Anyhow. I was going to find out.
First thing I did was write to the chief of police at San Pedro — capital of the country — for a couple of Secret Service men to be sent me immediately. While waiting for them I did nothing but keep busy looking up old mining titles and such matters at the town hall. That very effectively killed any suspicion that I wasn’t a bona fide mining engineer. Anxious days, those! Were any leak to take place, or anybody get wise to me, what then? A shot at night; a dagger in the back; a nameless grave in the jungle!
For once in my life, I confess I felt a bit nervous. But luck stayed with me, and nothing happened. Four days, and the Secret Service men showed up — “mining engineers,” like myself. We got acquainted and I told them what was doing, Next day we all three set out for Las Pocilgas on horseback.
The rest of this case is short but lively. We put up at a wretched little posada in Las Pocilgas, and wandered round looking the place over. If possible, it was ten times filthier than San Fulano. Inside of two hours we’d located a lady by the name of La Mariposa. Some butterfly! Black as a spade flush, and sinister-looking, she lived in a thatched hut down by a swamp at the far end of the village.
It took only a few drinks and a little gossip with the keeper of the posada to discover that La Mariposa was one of the sweethearts of the rural lieutenant, Guataquero, back there in San Fulano. That bad hombre, we learned, had several women scattered round in different villages, and this bouncing black butterfly was his favorite. Better and better!
Next day we closed in on La Mariposa. We found she had a brick oven in her back yard, all right, and that was what we wanted to get into. We waltzed right in on her, showed our badges, and started to excavate. About then the butterfly went into action. Tigress would have been a better name for her. She grabbed a machete and went to it. I never hit a woman before in all my life, but I hit that butterfly plenty — with a wine jug that I threw just in time to save one of my companions from becoming devilled ham. I knocked her for a row of goals.
She went down, squawking, and we tied her up and gagged her. If we hadn’t, she’d have raised the town about our ears, and the rest would have been just war. We weren’t there for war, but to get the money. And we got it, all right!
The way we ripped that brazero to pieces was a caution. What we found was plenty — a pottery olla, or jar, with $185,000 inside it, all in fives, tens and twenties. Reads like fiction, but it’s a fact. I never saw so much cash in such a humble pot in all my born days.
Only $15,000 had been spent, fixing people and paying off, and so on. The charred ones and twos, you see, had all been out of the conspirators’ own pockets, and as they’d counted on recovering most of that, their expenses hadn’t been heavy. The bills had been burned in such a manner that they could be redeemed, all right; and the fact that the postmaster had “found” them all gave us a pretty good line on him.
Leaving the butterfly’s wings still all wound round with a hempen string, we slung the cash into our saddle-bags and beat it, pronto. We didn’t stop for anything, you bet. Adiós! And no return ticket. If the natives had got wise to us, that would certainly have been one mighty unhealthy jungle. With only three of us, and with that bad black hombre and the rest of them thirsting for our gore — not so hot.
To make it brief, we reached San Fulano in record time, paid our bill at the inn, announced that we had important mining business elsewhere, and kept right on going. Didn’t stop — by horse and narrow-gauge railroad — till we reached San Pedro. There we banked the $185,000 safely, and I stepped out of the picture. It wasn’t up to me to make any arrests. I simply had to unravel the case and get the coin.
The national Secret Service people took up the case, from then on. In two days the bad hombre was pinched. He squealed, implicating the postmaster and the telegraph clerk. Between them, they let a still bigger cat out of the bag — no less a cat than a brother of the president of the republic, who had been the brains and instigator of the affair, and was counting on fifty per cent of the loot.
The three lesser artists got ten years apiece; and that, in a country like the Republic of Equis Igriega, is equivalent to a death sentence.
“And the Big Shot?” I queried, as Hartwell’s story came to a close.
“Whitewashed,” said Hartwell. “In view of his close relationship to the president, what could they do about it? Some country!”
“How about the good Padre Ninguno?” I asked.
“Oh, he got his $5,000, all right. I’ve heard, since, that he’s built a classy new church at San Fulano. But I’ve never been back there to see. I don’t think it would be just what you might call healthy!”
Murderer on Board!
by Lieut John Hopper
Three Red-Headed Men on Board, and One a Killer! But One Had Been Murdered, and Another Attacked—
I
Through the muffled, monotonous beat of the engines, the slow strokes of a deep-toned hell sounded faintly. Midnight, at sea. As the U. S. Army transport Shiloh solemnly lifted and dropped in her silent passage through the ebony, tropical waters, silvered and greenish-crested by the high, white moon, three hundred and fifty soldiers slumbered in her hold. Three hundred of them were raw recruits, bound for service in Canal Zone forts. The other fifty were previous service men, soldiers returning to their posts in Panama after having been on leave in the United States.
Aft, where the men were quartered, the heavy, foul air was oppressive with heat. It was, moreover, pitifully stale, having been taken in and out of many lungs. A small, yellow bulb beside an iron ladder, leading through a hole to the main deck above, cast a little area of sickly radiance. Stretching away on all sides from this splotchy patch of illumination were dim, densely shadowed forests of steel. They were the bunks, tier after tier of them, in which the soldiers slept.
The sounds of midnight possessed the place. Aside from the murmurous rumble of the propeller shaft far down next to the keel of the ship, whose constant noise was more felt than heard, there were snores, heavy breathings, and restless creakings of springs as men tossed in their sleep.
Recruit Baxter, on the bottom bunk of a tier deep in the blackness of a corner of the hold, wooed sleep vainly. No matter how much he twisted and turned, he found slumber just as distant as ever, the heat just as intense, the air as suffocating, and the mattress as lumpy.