Webster—Man's Man. Peter B. KyneЧитать онлайн книгу.
the night barkeeper read it and phoned the contents to Neddy Jerome, who promptly telephoned his reply to the telegraph office, and then sat on the edge of his bed, scratching his toes and meditating.
“That's a remarkable young woman,” he decided, “and business to her finger-tips. Like the majority of her sex, she's out for the dough. Well, I've done my part, and it's now up to Jack Webster to protect himself in the clinches and breakaways.”
About daylight a black hand passed Neddy Jerome's reply through the berth-curtains to Dolores Ruey. She read:
Accept. When you deliver the goods, communicate with me and get your money.
Jerome.
She snuggled back among the pillows and considered the various aspects of this amazing contract which she had undertaken with a perfect stranger. Hour after hour she lay there, thinking over this.
As she passed, John Stuart Webster looked fairly into her face, v started as if bee-stung, and hastily lifted his hat preposterous situation, and the more she weighed it, the more interesting and attractive the proposition appeared. But one consideration troubled her. How would the unknown knight manage an introduction? Or, if he failed to manage it, how was she to overcome that obstacle?
“Oh, dear,” she murmured, “I do hope he's brave.”
She need not have worried. Hours before, the object of her thought had settled all that to his own complete satisfaction, and as a consequence was sleeping peacefully and gaining strength for whatever of fortune, good or ill, the morrow might bring forth.
CHAPTER VI
DAY was dawning in Buenaventura, republic of Sobrante, as invariably it dawns in the tropics—without extended preliminary symptoms. The soft, silvery light of a full moon that had stayed out scandalously late had merged imperceptibly into gray; the gray was swiftly yielding place to a faint crimson that was spreading and deepening upward athwart the east.
In the Calle Nueva a game cock, pride of an adoring family of Sobrante's lower class, crowed defiance to a neighbouring bird. A dog barked. From the patch of vivid green at the head of the Calle San Rosario a troupe of howling monkeys raised a sun-up cheer that marked the finish of a night of roystering; from wattled hut and adobe casa brunette women in red calico wrappers came forth, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled; and presently from a thousand little adobe fireplaces in a thousand backyards thin blue spirals of smoke mounted—incense to the household gods of Sobrante—Tortilla and Frijoles. Brown men, black men, lemon-tinted men, and white men whose fingernails showed blue instead of white at the base, came to the doors of their respective habitations, leaned against them, lighted post-breakfast cigarettes, and waited for somebody to start something.
To these indolent watchers of the dawn was vouchsafed presently the sight of Senora Concepcion Josefina Morelos on her way to early mass at the Catedral de la Vera Cruz. Men called to each other, when she passed, that Senora Morelos shortly would seek, in a Carmelite convent, surcease from the grief caused by the premature demise of her husband, General Pablo Morelos, at the hands of a firing-squad in the cuartel yard, as a warning to others of similar kidney to forbear and cease to tamper with the machinery of politics. And when Senora Morelos had passed, came Alberto Guzman with two smart mules hitched to a dilapidated street-car; came Don Juan Cafetéro, peseta-less, still slightly befuddled from his potations of the night before, and raising the echoes in the calle with a song singularly alien to his surroundings:
Green were the fields where my forefathers dwelt—
O, Erin, mavourneen, slan laght go bragh!
At the theatre we sit patiently waiting for the stage electrician to switch on the footlights and warn us that the drama is about to begin. Let us, in a broader sense, appropriate that cue to mark the beginning of the drama with which this story deals; instead of a stage, however, we have the republic of Sobrante; in lieu of footlights we have the sun popping up out of the Caribbean Sea.
Those actors whose acquaintance we have so briefly made thus far must be presumed to be supers crossing the stage and loitering thereon while the curtain is down. Now, therefore, let us drive them into the wings while the curtain rises on a tropical scene.
In the patio of Mother Jenks's establishment in the Çalle de Concordia, No. 19, the first shafts of morning light were filtering obliquely through the orange trees and creeping in under the deep, Gothic-arched veranda flanking the western side of the patio, to reveal a dusky maiden of more or less polyglot antecedents, asleep upon a bright, parti-coloured blanket spread over a wicker couch.
Presently, through the silent reaches of the Calle de Concordia, the sound of a prodigious knocking and thumping echoed, as of some fretful individual seeking admission at the street door of El Buen Amigo, by which euphonious designation Mother Jenks's caravansary was known to the public of Buenaventura. In the second story, front, a window slid back and a woman's voice, husky with that huskiness that speaks so accusingly of cigarettes and alcohol, demanded:
“Quien es? Who is it? Que quiere usted? Wot do yer want?”
“Ye might dispinse wit' that paraqueet conversation whin addhressin' the likes av me,” a voice replied. “'Tis me—Cafferty. I have a cablegram Leber give me to deliver——”
“Gawd's truth! Would yer wake the 'ole 'ouse with yer'ammering?”
“All right. I'll not say another worrd!”
A minute passed; then the same husky voice, the owner of which had evidently descended from her sleeping chamber above, spoke in a steadily rising crescendo from a room just off the veranda:
“Car-may-lee-ta-a-a!”
We can serve no useful purpose by endeavouring to conceal from the reader, even temporarily, the information that Carmelita was the sleeping naiad on the couch; also that she continued to sleep, for hers was that quality of slumber which is the heritage of dark blood and defies any commotion short of that incident to a three-alarm fire. Three times the husky voice addressed Carmelita with cumulative vehemence; but Carmelita slept on, and presently the husky voice ceased to cry aloud for her. Followed the sound of bare feet thudding across the floor.
Forth from the house came Mother Jenks, a redfaced, coarse-jowled, slightly bearded lady of undoubted years and indiscretion, in curl-papers and nightgown, barefoot and carrying a bucket. One scornful glance at the sleeping Carmelita, and mother Jenks crossed to the fountain plashing in the centre of the patio, filled her bucket, stepped to the veranda and dashed three gallons of tepid water into Carme-lita's face.
That awakened Carmelita—Mother Jenks's raucous “Git up, yer bloody wench! Out, yer 'ussy, an' cook almuerzo. Gawd strike me pink, if I don't give yer the sack for this—an' sleepin' on my best new blenkit!” being in the nature of a totally unnecessary exordium.
Carmelita shrieked and fled, while Mother Jenks scuttled along in pursuit like a belligerent old duck, the while she heaped opprobrium upon Carmelita and all her tribe, the republic of Sobrante, its capital, its government officials, and the cable company: Finally she disappeared into El Buen Amigo with a hearty Cockney oath at her own lack of foresight in ever permitting her sainted 'Enery to set foot on a foreign shore.
Once inside, Mother Jenks proceeded down a tiled hallway to the cantina of her hostelry and opened the street door a few inches. Without the portal stood Don Juan Cafetéro, of whom a word or two before proceeding.
To begin, Don Juan Cafetéro was not his real name, but rather a free Spanish translation of the Gaelic, John Cafferty. As would be indicated by the song he was singing when first we made his acquaintance, coupled with the unstable condition of his legs, Mr. Cafferty was an exile of Erin with a horrible thirst. He had first arrived in Sobrante some five