“What does it say?”
“Cutting out all the gobbledegook, and the Castilian whereases and heretofores, it simply says that I have this prospecting concession for the district you showed me, for ten days starting tomorrow. You see, to try and prevent anyone hogging a concession and doing nothing about it, they put the hell of a price on them, a hundred dollars a day, and the longest you can take ’em for is three months. Then, if you make a strike, you can renew ’em by the year, but then naturally you don’t mind the price. That’s why the area we’re interested in wasn’t tied up: nobody would pay that much rent for a prospecting licence except for the time he’d be using it. This fancy scroll cost me a thousand bucks — from what you told me, I figured ten days should be plenty. But it gives us the right to keep all the golden frogs we can find in that time.”
The release from all her apprehensions was such a let-down that she felt slightly hysterical. It took a titanic effort at that moment to gaze at him with the awed and eager appreciation which she knew was called for, but somehow she achieved it.
“You’re wonderful,” she said. “I can see now why you must be a very successful speculator. You don’t miss anything. But we shouldn’t need anything like ten days. I’ve already arranged for the boat, and we could leave tomorrow morning if you like.”
“I like,” said the Saint.
4
The departure of Loro on his intrepid mission to contact the head-hunters was in itself almost worth the price of admission. Stripped down to a leopard-skin breechclout, his hair bound in a fillet of brocade that supported a couple of brightly hued parrot feathers, with slashes and curlicues of paint on his face and chest, he would have satisfied any Hollywood studio wardrobe department.
Professor Nestor had had to work hard to persuade Loro that it was necessary to go to these theatrical extremes. It had been comparatively easy to convince him that when the sucker paid over his money, Loro should not simply disappear with all of it, for Loro could never hope to steal that kind of money again on his own, but by working loyally with the Professor and Alice he could expect to share in such killings at frequent intervals for an unlimited future. So, having shown the Saint a stack of oilcloth-wrapped bundles piled in one of the cabins of the boat, with Alice vouching that she had personally inspected and helped to wrap the guns, and having received a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills as promised, he had taken it docilely to the hired car in which Professor Nestor was waiting to leave for Santa Clara, receiving in return only $3,000 for himself and $3,500 in an envelope to be taken back to Alice.
But after the first of such divisions, Loro had taken it for granted that they would all three disappear. The Professor had explained that the victim would then complain to the police, which would be a severe handicap to any future activities. In that case, Loro had suggested cheerfully, it would perhaps be better to take the boat some distance out into the Gulf of Panama, tie the victim to some of the weighted bundles, and drop him over the side. The Professor had explained patiently that the mysterious disappearance of an American, especially a wealthy one, could hardly fail to cause an investigation which would be very likely to come embarrassingly close to them.
“The very best confidence jobs, my dear Loro,” the Professor had pontificated, “don’t even let the sucker know that he’s been taken. Isn’t it worth a little time and trouble to give our customers a real show for their money, and know that we’ll never have to worry about them hollering for the cops?”
He had eventually secured Loro’s co-operation, but had reason to doubt if he would ever completely make his point.
Even on this occasion, at the first opportunity Loro had, when the Saint was at the other end of the boat, he said to Alice, “All this waste plenty time. Much better tonight I—”
He drew an expressive forefinger across his throat. He was half serious and half teasing her, she could tell from his malicious grin, but she was surprised to feel herself shudder.
“Stop it, Loro... Anyway,” she said, in an attempt to cover up the sharpness of her reaction, “this one is a perfect example of what we’ve tried to explain to you. He’s actually taken out a prospecting licence from the Government, and he must have told a dozen people where he’s going. If he disappeared, we’d have too many tough questions to answer.”
It was only after she had said it that the fantastic thought crossed her mind that Sebastian Tombs might have done all that, and taken pains to tell her about it, as an elaborate precaution against the very thing that Loro was advocating, and a subtle warning that if perchance that was what they had in mind they had better forget it. But the implications that followed were so far-fetched that she had made herself brush the idea aside.
Now bundles of alleged rifles and ammunition had been unloaded from the boat and cached at the edge of the jungle, and Loro was ready to play out the last sequence of Professor Nestor’s ingenious script.
“You go back down river a little,” he said. “One mile, plenty, only so head-hunters no see. Mañana, this time, you come back, you find me with gold frogs.”
“Be careful, Loro,” Alice said anxiously.
“Me always careful,” Loro said, with his jolly bandit’s grin. “No worry. Hasta luego, diosa.”
He spoke in rapid dialect to the boat captain, an uncle of his who had been a fairly honest fisherman before he was conscripted into the team, who was not very bright, but who had a non-speaking part which was almost foolproof since he understood no English and hardly any Spanish. Loro cast off the lines which had held the boat to the bank, and the captain started the engine as it began to drift downstream. Loro stood and waved until it vanished around the nearest bend, and then picked up one of the oilcloth packages which had been providently ballasted with a case of rum and plodded towards the next turn upstream, where there was a village of utterly harmless Indians who were always glad to see him and whose daughters were especially hospitable. He would stay there, very pleasantly, until the boat came back for him in a week or two.
Simon stood beside Alice on the narrow deck, gazing silently at the wall of tangled greenery that slid past them until the captain turned the boat in mid-stream, aimed the bow diagonally up towards the bank, cut the engine, and shuffled forward to throw a line over a leaning tree and snub the boat to a berth as nonchalantly as any airline pilot ever made a landing.
The Saint was frowning.
“I seem to be a bit confused,” he said. “I thought when you came here before you had a lot of native bearers, who got massacred. Then you fought a rearguard action for two days down the river. And yet we came here all the way from Panama in two days, and Loro is going to make a deal with the head-hunters and be back with the golden frogs tomorrow.”
Again she was barely touched by a fleeting uneasiness, but she was ready with the answer.
“Last time, we were exploring. We went off on big swings through the jungle, covering as much ground as we could. We were on one of those hikes when we found the cave. We’d left the boat way down near the mouth of the river. When we fought our way back to it, it was along these banks, only we were on foot. We followed the river because it was the only thing that saved us from getting lost, but you can see what rough going it was.”
(“There’s a limit to how far we can go with this,” the Professor had said, when he taught her the speech. “If we gave ’em a full two-week safari, for that kind of money, we’d be almost legitimate.”)