Hearts of Three | Page 8

us
is very serious."
"He can join afterward, and straighten you out if you've missed the
scent," Regan assured Francis. "And, before it slips your mind, it might
be just as well to arrange with Senor Torres some division of the loot ...
if you ever find it."
"What would you say?" Francis asked.
"Equal division, fifty-fifty," Regan answered, magnificently arranging
the apportionment between the two men of something he was certain
did not exist.
"And you will follow after as soon as you can?" Francis asked the Latin
American. "Regan, take hold of his little law affair yourself and
expedite it, won't you?"
"Sure, boy," was the answer. "And, if it's needed, shall I advance cash
to Senor Alvarez?"
"Fine!" Francis shook their hands in both of his. "It will save me bother.
And I've got to rush to pack and break engagements and catch that train.

So long, Regan. Good-bye, Senor Torres, until we meet somewhere
around Bocas del Toro, or in a little hole in the ground on the Bull or
the Calf you say you think it's the Calf? Well, until then adios!"
And Senor Alvarez Torres remained with Regan some time longer,
receiving explicit instructions for the part he was to play, beginning
with retardation and delay of Francis' expedition, and culminating in
similar retardation and delay always to be continued.
"In short," Regan concluded, "I don't almost care if he never comes
back if you can keep him down there for the good of his health that
long and longer."
CHAPTER II
MONEY, like youth, will not be denied, and Francis Morgan, who was
the man-legal and nature-certain representative of both youth and
money, found himself one afternoon, three weeks after he had said
good-bye to Regan, becalmed close under the land on board his
schooner, the Angelique. The water was glassy, the smooth roll
scarcely perceptible, and, in sheer ennui and overplus of energy that
likewise declined to be denied, he asked the captain, a breed, half
Jamaica negro and half Indian, to order a small skiff over the side.
"Looks like I might shoot a parrot or a monkey or something," he
explained, searching the jungle-clad shore, half a mile away, through a
twelve-power Zeiss glass.
"Most problematic, sir, that you are bitten by a labarri, which is deadly
viper in these parts," grinned the breed skipper and owner of the
Angelique, who, from his Jamaica father had inherited the gift of
tongues.
But Francis was not to be deterred; for at the moment, through his glass,
he had picked out, first, in the middle ground, a white hacienda, and
second, on the beach, a white-clad woman's form, and further, had seen
that she was scrutinising him and the schooner through a pair of
binoculars.

"Put the skiff over, skipper," he ordered. "Who lives around here?
white folks?"
"The Enrico Solano family, sir," was the answer. "My word, they are
important gentlefolk, old Spanish, and they own the entire general
landscape from the sea to the Cordilleras and half of the Chiriqui
Lagoon as well. They are very poor, most powerful rich ... in landscape
and they are pridef ul and fiery as cayenne pepper."
As Francis, in the tiny skiff, rowed shoreward, the skipper's alert eye
noted that he had neglected to take along either rifle or shotgun for the
contemplated parrot or monkey. And, next, the skipper's eye picked up
the whiteclad woman's figure against the dark edge of the jungle.
Straight to the white beach of coral sand Francis rowed, not trusting
himself to look over his shoulder to see if the woman remained or had
vanished. In his mind was merely a young man's healthy idea of
encountering a bucolic young lady, or a half-wild white woman for that
matter, or at the best a very provincial one, with whom he could fool
and fun away a few minutes of the calm that fettered the Ang clique to
immobility. When the skifl grounded, he stepped out, and with one
sturdy arm lifted its nose high enough up the sand to fasten it by its
own weight. Then he turned around. The beach to the jungle was bare.
He strode forward confidently. Any traveller, on so strange a shore, had
a right to seek inhabitants for information on his way was the idea he
was acting out.
And he, who had anticipated a few moments of diversion merely, was
diverted beyond his fondest expectations. Like a jack-in-the-box, the
woman, who, in the flash of vision vouchsafed him demonstrated that
she was a girl-woman, ripely mature and yet mostly girl, sprang out of
the green wall of jungle and with both hands seized his arm. The hearty
weight of grip in the seizure surprised him. He fumbled his hat off with
his