jungle that encroached on the beach, lay a placid-sleeping, pulquedrunken, old peon, with, crouching beside him, a very alert and very sober Chinese with a recently acquired thousand dollars stowed under his belt. Yi Poon had had barely time to drag the peon into hiding when Torres rode along in the sand and stopped almost beside him.
Up at the hacienda, all members of the household were going to bed. Leoncia, just starting to let down her hair, stopped when she heard the rattle of tiny pebbles against her windows. Warning her in low. whispers to make no noise, Jose' Mancheno handed her a crumpled note which Torres had written, saying mysteriously:
'From a strange Chinaman who waits not a hundred feet away on the edge of the shrubbery.'
And Leoncia read, in execrable Spanish:
'First time, I tell you secret about Henry Morgan. This time I have secret about Francis. You come along and talk with me now.'
Leoncia's heart leaped at mention of Francis, and as she slipped on a mantle and accompanied the Caroo it never entered her head to doubt that Yi Poon was waiting for her.
And Yi Poon, down on the beach and spying upon Torres, had no doubts when he saw the Caroo murderer appear with the Solano senorita, bound and gagged, slung across his shoulder like a sack of meal. Nor did Yi Poon have any doubts about his next action, when he saw Leoncia tied into the saddle of the spare horse and taken away down the beach at a gallop, with Torres and the Caroo riding on either side of her. Leaving the pulque-sodden peon to sleep, the fat Chinaman took the road up the hill at so stiff a pace that he arrived breathless at the hacienda. Not content with knocking at the door, he beat upon it with his fists and feet and prayed to his Chinese gods that no peevish Solano should take a shot at him before he could explain the urgency of his errand.
'O go to hell,' Alesandro said, when he had opened the door and flashed a light on the face of the importunate caller.
'I have big secret,' Yi Poon panted. 'Very big brand new secret.' 'Come around to-morrow in business hours,' Alesandro growled as he prepared to kick the Chinaman off the premises.
'I don't sell secret,' Yi Poon stammered and gasped. 'I make you present. I give secret now. The Senorita, your sister, she is stolen. She is tied upon a horse that runs fast down the beach.'
But Alesandro, who had said good night to Leoncia, not half an hour before, laughed loudly his unbelief, and prepared again to boot off the trafficker in secrets. Yi Poon was desperate. He drew forth the thousand dollars and placed it in Alesandro's hand, saying:
'You go look quick. If the Senorita stop in this house now, you keep all that money. If the Senorita no stop, then you give money back…'
And Alesandro was convinced. A minute later he was rousing the house. Five minutes later the horse-peons, their eyes hardly open from sound sleep, were roping and saddling horses and pack-mules in the corrals, while the Solano tribe was pulling on riding gear and equipping itself with weapons.
Up and down the coast, and on the various paths leading back to the Cordilleras, the Solanos scattered, questing blindly in the blind dark for the trail of the abductors. As chance would have it, thirty hours afterward, Henry alone caught the scent and followed it, so that, camped in the very Footstep of God where first the old Maya priest had sighted the eyes of Chia, he found the entire party of twenty men and Leoncia cooking and eating breakfast. Twenty to one, never fair and always impossible, did not appeal to Henry Morgan's Anglo-Saxon mind. What did appeal to him was the dynamite-loaded mule, tethered apart from the off-saddl-ed forty-odd animals and left to stand by the careless peons with its load still on its back. Instead of attempting the patently impossible rescue of Leoncia, and recognising that in numbers her woman's safety lay^ he stole the dynamite — mule.
Not far did he take it. In the shelter of the low woods, he opened the pack and filled all his pockets with sticks of dynamite, a box of detonators, and a short coil of fuse. With a regretful look at the rest of the dynamite which he would have liked to explode but dared not, he busied himself along the line of retreat he would have to take if he succeeded in stealing Leoncia from her captors. As Francis, on a previous occasion at Juchitan, had sown the retreat with silver dollars, so, this time, did Henry sow the retreat with dynamite the sticks in small bundles and the fuses, no longer than the length of a detonator, and with detonators fast to each end.
Three hours Henry devoted to lurking around the camp in the Footstep of God, ere he got his opportunity to signal his presence to Leoncia; and another precious two hours were wasted ere she found her opportunity to steal away to him. Which would not have been so bad, had not her escape almost immediately been discovered and had not the gendarmes and the rest of Torres' party, mounted, been able swiftly to overtake them on foot.
When Henry drew Leoncia down to hide beside him in the shelter of a rock, and at the same time brought his rifle into action ready for play, she protested.
'We haven't a chance, Henry,' she said. 'They are too many. If you fight you will be killed. And then what will become of me? Better that you make your own escape, and bring help, leaving me to be retaken, than that you die and let me be retaken anyway.'
But he shook his head.
'We are not going to be taken, dearest sister. Put your trust in me and watch. Here they come now. You just watch.'
Variously mounted, on horses and pack mules whichever had come handiest in their haste Torres, the Jefe, and their men clattered into sight. Henry drew a sight, not on them, but on the point somewhat nearer where he had made his first plant of dynamite. When he pulled trigger, the intervening distance rose up in a cloud of smoke and earth dust that obscured them. As the cloud slowly dissipated, they could be seen, half of them, animals and men, overthrown, and all of them dazed and shocked by the explosion.
Henry seized Leoncia's hand, jerked her to her feet, and ran on side by side with her. Conveniently beyond his second planting, he drew her down beside him to rest and catch breath.
'They won't come on so fast this time,' he hissed exultantly. ' And the longer they pursue us the slower they'll come on.'
True to his forecast, when the pursuit appeared, it moved very cautiously and very slowly.
'They ought to be 'killed,' Henry said. 'But they have no chance, and I haven't the heart to do it. But I'll surely shake them up some.'
Again he fired into his planted dynamite, and again, turning his back on the confusion, he fled to his third planting.
After he had fired off the third explosion, he raced Leoncia to his tethered horse, put her in the saddle, and ran on beside her, hanging on to her stirrup.
CHAPTER XXVI
FRANCIS had left orders for Parker to call him at eight o'clock, and when Parker softly entered he found his master still asleep. Turning on the water in the bathroom and preparing the shaving gear, the valet re-entered the bedroom. Still moving softly about so that his master would have the advantage of the last possible second of sleep, Parker's eyes lighted on the strange dagger that stood upright, its point pinning through a note and a photograph and into the hard wood of the dresser-top. For a long time he gazed at the strange array, then, without hesitation, carefully opened the door to Mrs. Morgan's room and peeped in. Next, he firmly shook Francis by the shoulder.
The latter's eyes opened, for a second betraying the incomprehension of the sleeper suddenly awakened, then lighting with recognition and memory of the waking order he had left the previous night.
'Time to get up, sir,' the valet murmured.
'Which is ever an ill time,' Francis yawned with a smile. He closed his eyes with a, 'Let me lie a minute, Parker. If I doze, shake me.'
But Parker shook him immediately.
'You must get up right away, sir. I think something has happened to Mrs. Morgan. She is not in her room, and there is a queer note and a knife here that may explain. I don't know, sir…'
Francis was out of bed in a bound, staring one moment at the dagger, and next, drawing it out, reading the note over and over as if its simple meaning, contained in two simple words, were too abstruse for his comprehension.
'Adios forever,' said the note.
What shocked him even more, was the dagger thrust between Leoncia's eyes, and, as he stared at the
