free hand and bowed to the strange woman with the
imperturbableness of a Morgan, New York trained and disciplined to be
surprised at nothing, and received another surprise, or several surprises
compounded. Not alone was it her semi-brunette beauty that impacted
upon him with the weight of a blow, but it was her gaze, driven into
him, that was all of sternness. Almost it seemed to him that he must
know her. Strangers, in his experience, never so looked at one another.
The double grip on his arm became a draw, as she muttered tensely:
"Quick! Follow me!"
A moment he resisted. She shook him in the fervor of her desire, and
strove to pull him toward her and after her. With the feeling that it was
some unusual game, such as one might meet up with on the coast of
Central America, he yielded, smilingly, scarcely knowing whether he
followed voluntarily or was being dragged into the jungle by her
impetuosity.
"Do as I do," she shot back at him over her shoulder, by this time
leading him with one hand of hers in his.
He smiled and obeyed, crouching when she crouched, doubling over
when she doubled, while memories of John Smith and Pocahontas
glimmered up in his fancy.
Abruptly she checked him and sat down, her hand directing him to sit
beside her ere she released him, and pressed it to her heart while she
panted:
"Thank God! Oh, merciful Virgin!"
In imitation, such having been her will of him, and such seeming to be
the cue of the game, he smilingly pressed his own hand to his heart,
although he called neither on God nor the Virgin.
"Won't you ever be serious?" she flashed at him, noting his action.
And Francis was immediately and profoundly, as well as naturally,
serious.
"My dear lady..." he began.
But an abrupt gesture checked him; and, with growing wonder, he
watched her bend and listen, and heard the movement of bodies
padding down some runway several yards away.
With a soft warm palm pressed commandingly to his to be silent, she
left him with the abruptness that he had already come to consider as
customary with her, and slipped away down the runway. Almost he
whistled with astonishment. He might have whistled it, had he not
heard her voice, not distant, in Spanish, sharply interrogate men whose
Spanish voices, half-humbly, half-insistently and half-rebelliously,
answered her.
He heard them move on, still talking, and, after five minutes of dead
silence, heard her call for him peremptorily to come out.
"Gee! I wonder what Regan would do under such circumstances!" he
smiled to himself as he obeyed.
He followed her, no longer hand in hand, through the jungle to the
beach. When she paused, he came beside her and faced her, still under
the impress of the fantasy which possessed him that it was a game.
"Tag!" he laughed, touching her on the shoulder. "Tag!" he reiterated.
"You're It!"
The anger of her blazing dark eyes scorched him.
"You fool!" she cried, lifting her finger with what he considered, undue
intimacy to his toothbrush moustache. "As if that could disguise you!"
"But my dear lady ..." he began to protest his certain unacquaintance
with her.
Her retort, which broke off his speech, was as unreal and bizarre as
everything else which had gone before. So quick was it, that he failed
to see whence the tiny silver revolver had been drawn, the muzzle of
which was not presented merely toward his abdomen, but pressed
closely against it.
"My dear lady..." he tried again.
"I won't talk with you," she shut him off. "Go back to your schooner,
and go away..." He guessed the inaudible sob of the pause, ere she
concluded, "Forever."
This time his mouth opened to speech that was aborted on his lips by
the stiff thrust of the muzzle of the weapon into his abdomen.
"If you ever come back the Madonna forgive me I shall shoot myself."
"Guess I'd better go, then," he uttered airily, as he turned to the skiff,
toward which he walked in stately embarrassment, half-filled with
laughter for himself and for the ridiculous and incomprehensible figure
he was cutting.
Endeavoring to retain a last shred of dignity, he took no notice that she
had followed him. As he lifted the skiff's nose from the sand, he was
aware that a faint wind was rustling the palm fronds. A long breeze was
darkening the water close at hand, while, far out across the mirrored
water the outlying keys of Chiriqui Lagoon shimmered like a mirage
above the dark-crisping water.
A sob compelled him to desist from stepping into the skiff, and to turn
his head. The strange young woman, revolver dropped to her side, was
crying. His step
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