“And you immediately turned about to tattle this to me?”
He merely smiled under her bright scorn. “To see you home.”
“Where you will proceed to make my mother eternally miserable, and uncle—”
“—Infernally angry? On the contrary, I am prepared to back up with pistol and knife the tale of Maria’s visitation. Why should I wish to bring suffering to the good mother? It was a hap of the trail, and, much as I hate all gringos, it was far better that you should have been in this man’s hands. Someday I may have to kill him, and I shall do it with greater pleasure because of this!”
“If the attempt does not fail as miserably as that which you made on his soul.”
“Put it morals, cousin, just to bring it within the bounds of my comprehension. You know my beliefs as to souls.”
“In any case it was a mean trick.”
“Tricks are tricks only when they fail. Successful, they rise to the dignity of strategems. And he ought not to complain. Did he not come out of the ordeal unscathed, tricked out in the flowers of virtue? He’s really in my debt. But returning to my point, someday I shall kill him; but in the meantime I have asked him to lunch with us. As he looked hungry, I should suggest a little haste.”
“I am ready now.” Going toward him, she spoke, hesitantly: “Let me—thank you. Were you always thus, Sebastien, we should be better friends.”
“Gracias, anything but that.” Bowing, he stood aside to permit her to pass. “The half liking that you deal out to Anton, Javier, and other fat-jowled hacendados, your admirers, would never do for me. I prefer your—fear.”
“But I am not afraid of you.” She looked straight in his eyes passing out.
“You will be—someday.”
XIII
Coming out from luncheon—at which Sebastien had presided with a grave courtesy which lifted the inn’s humble fare of eggs, tortillas, and rice to epicurean heights—Seyd and Francesca came face to face with Tomas, her mozo, who had just ridden into the patio. At sight of his mistress the mozo’s teeth flashed in the golden dusk under his sombrero, but he shook his head when she reached for the letter which he took out of his saddle bags.
“It is for the gringo señor. The jefe did not know of your coming.”
It was, of course, from Don Luis. Couched in terms massively dignified as his own reserve, it apologized for the floods as for some personal fault, and finished by placing hacienda San Nicolás at Seyd’s service.
“So you will ride on with us,” Francesca commented upon its content.
As Sebastien had gone to order fresh horses, there was no one but Seyd to observe her evident pleasure. But if he thrilled, yet he persisted, pleading that he intended to establish headquarters there at the inn and would be head over heels in business, freighting machinery and supplies in from the station.
He smiled at her further objection that he would hardly find the accommodations of the inn to his liking. “They are better than at the mine. If they prove too bad I shall run down to San Nicolás to beg a meal.”
“Very well, señor, we shall expect you.”
Her little backward nod, riding away with Sebastien a few minutes later, reaffirmed it, but while Seyd bowed in acknowledgment his thought ran oppositely. Unaware how quickly circumstances would compel the visit, he formulated a hardy resolution. “Now, young man, no more sentimental fooling. It’s you for work. The first thing is to get across to Billy.”
When, however, he took counsel with his fat brown host concerning the hire of a dugout the latter held up pudgy hands in horror. Santissimo Trinidad! The very idea was madness! With the river running a mile wide at its narrowest? Not a peon would venture upon it! And under the inspiration of his belief that a live customer was to be preferred to even a drowned gringo he worked privately against Seyd’s suicidal intention. So well did he scatter his pessimistic seed that when Seyd succeeded in finding a dugout he had to buy it outright; nor could he persuade a single peon to dare the flood.
It was while returning to the inn late in the day that he obtained his first glimpse of the river from a knoll which lifted him above the drowned jungle. Around wooded islands, which were usually dry hills, a waste of waters, thick and brown as chocolate, swept madly. Along the edge of the jungle it boiled in fat eddies which sucked and licked the trailing greenery. Farther out it was whipped into a yellow cream by the thrashing branches of uprooted trees, ceibas and cedars, huge as a church, which rolled and tumbled as their submerged limbs caught on the bottom. Everywhere it was studded with debris, trees and brush, whole acres of water lilies which here massed like a garden around a floating hut, there wreathed the carcass of some drowned beast.
In all the world there is nothing more melancholy than the voice of a flood. Its resurgent dirge stirs vague forebodings which root in the calamitous experience of the race. Standing there alone, with the call of rushing waters, patter of rain, and sough of a sad wind in his ears, Seyd was able to understand the peons’ superstitious fear. Yet he remained undeterred. The water being far too deep for poling, he made a pair of oars and fitted wooden thole pins in the dugout that evening, and next morning put off by himself on the tangled breast of the flood with such food as he had been able to buy.
Once afloat, he found navigation even more precarious than the direst prophecy of his host. Now backwatering until an opening
