Читать книгу The Courts of the Morning - John Buchan - Страница 13

The Gran Seco has not often appeared in the world's literature. Francisco de Toledo first entered it in the sixteenth century, but after that there is no mention of it till Calamity Brown wandered thither from the coast in the late years of the eighteenth. That luckless and probably mendacious mariner has little good to say of it; it was the abode of devilish insects and devilish men, and, if we are to believe him, he barely escaped with his life. In the nineteenth century it was partially explored by the Spanish naturalist, Mendoza, and a Smithsonian expedition investigated its peculiar geology. Its later history is written in the reports of its copper companies, but Sylvester Perry visited it in his celebrated journey round the globe, and it has a short and comminatory chapter in his Seeing Eyes. Mr Perry did not like the place, and in his characteristic way has likened it to a half-healed abscess, sloughed over with unwholesome skin.

Mr Perry was partially right. The Gran Seco is not built to the scale of man and it has no care for his comforts. But it has its own magnificence. Its gate is the town of Santa Ana, in whose market-place stands the colossal figure of the crucified Christ, first erected by Pizarro, many times destroyed by earthquakes, and always replaced, since it is the defiance of the plains to the mountains. But the gate is far from the citadel, for the avenue is a hundred miles long. The Gran Seco railway, now a double line most skilfully engineered, and wholly controlled by the Company, runs first up a long valley where only in mid-winter a river flows. Then it passes over tiers of high desert, sinks into hollows where sometimes there are waters and forests, climbs again in tortuous gullies, till at length it emerges upon the great plateau; and always beside it can be traced the old highroad where once rode Toledo's men-at-arms, and only the other day the ore from the mines jolted down-country on mule-back. But there are still many miles to go before the city of Gran Seco is reached, sunk in a shallow trough among its barren and blistered hills.

At first sight Sylvester Perry's phrase seems to have a certain justice. Twenty years ago in the hollow there was only a wretched Indian puebla roosting among the ruins of an old city, for the copper from the distant mines was exported in its crude form. It was chiefly what is called virgin copper, with a certain amount of malachite and azurite ores. Ten years ago a new city began to rise, when the sulphuretted ores were first mined, and smelting was started. There was a furious rivalry among the companies till they were united in a great combine, and the whole mineral wealth gathered under a single direction. Process succeeded process, furnaces were multiplied till they covered many acres, wells were sunk and pumping-stations erected, great dams were built in the hills to catch the winter rains, and street after street rose in the dust. The Castor methods of calcination and electrolytic refining soon quadrupled its size. To one looking down from the surrounding ridges the place seems a hive of ugly activity: on one side a wilderness of furnaces and converters, with beyond them the compounds where the workmen are housed; on the other a modern city with high buildings and clanking electric trams. By day it is an inferno of noise and dust and vapours, with a dull metallic green the prevailing tint; by night a bivouac of devils warmed by angry fires. Mr Perry is right. The place has the look of a gangrening sore, with for the surrounding skin the pale shaley hills. And the climate is in itself a disease. In winter the hollow is scourged and frozen, and in summer the sun's heat, refracted from naked stone, strikes the face like a blow.

In the streets the first impression is of extreme orderliness. The traffic is methodically conducted by vigilant police in spruce uniforms--for the most part of the Indian or mestizo type, with European superintendents. They are a fine body of men; too good, the spectator decides, for such an environment. The main street, the Avenida Bolivar, is broad and paved with concrete, and along it rise structures which would not disgrace New York. The Regina Hotel is larger than the Ritz, and there are others; the offices of the Company's administration form a block scarcely smaller than Carlton House Terrace; there are clubs and many apartment houses, all built of the white local stone. But the shops are few and poor, and there are no villas in the environs, so that the impression grows that the Gran Seco is a camp, which its inhabitants regard as no continuing city. Hourly the sense of the bivouac expands in the traveller's mind. The place is one great caravanserai for pilgrims. These busy, preoccupied people are here for the day only and to-morrow will be gone.

Other things will soon strike him. There seem to be no peasants. No neighbouring countryside obtrudes itself into this monastic industry. Every man--there are few women--is regimented by the Company. If the traveller is escorted to the area of the smelting and refining plant (and his passports must be very high-powered to ensure this privilege), he will see the unskilled work done by Indians and mestizos--men with faces like mechanical automata--but the skilled foremen are all European. He will puzzle over these Europeans, for however wide his racial knowledge, he will find it hard to guess their nationality, since their occupation seems to have smoothed out all differences into one common type with a preoccupation so intense as to be almost furtive. In the streets, too, in the clubs and hotels, he will be struck by the waxwork look of some of the well-dressed employees. They are inhumanly pale, and so concentrated upon some single purpose that their faces are expressionless and their eyes unseeing.

He will be much shepherded and supervised, and, though his permission de séjour is for only a few days, he will be apt to find these days pass heavily. If he is a mining expert, he will not be allowed to indulge his curiosity, for the Castor processes are jealously guarded. If he is the ordinary tourist, he will find no sights to repay him, and for the only amusement an occasional concert of austerely classical music, given by the Administration staff. He will probably leave the place with relief, glad to have seen the marvel, but thankful that his lines are cast among ordinary humanity. At the station, on his departure, he will be presented with a wonderful booklet, containing an eloquent speech of the Gobernador, and extracts (with illustrations) from the recent articles on the Gran Seco in the Saturday Evening Post.

The young party from the Corinna did not appear to find the time hang heavy on their hands. There were ten of them, five of each sex, with no older person to look after them, though a very moderate chaperonage seemed to be exercised by a tall girl with fine eyes and a pleasant Southern voice. That their purchase was considerable was shown by their entertainment, for they were shown everything and went everywhere; that they were unwelcome visitors, unwillingly privileged, was proved by their close oversight. Indeed they were uncomfortable guests, for they made a patch of garish colour in the drab of the Gran Seco and a discord in its orderly rhythm. The mere sight of them in the streets was enough to send the ordinary policeman to the Commissary to ask for instructions.

They were patently harmless, but deplorably silly. The Regina was turned by them into a cabaret. They danced every night in the restaurant to the disquiet of the diners, and they chaffed mercilessly an unsmiling staff. Bedroom riots seemed to be their speciality, and it was an unlucky official of the Company who had his quarters in their corridor. When they were entertained to luncheon by the Administration they asked questions so sublimely idiotic that the Vice-President, a heavy sallow man, called Rosas, of Mexican extraction, actually coloured, thinking that he was being made a fool of; and their visit to the smelting plant was attended by the same exasperating buffoonery. Presently it appeared that their idiocy was congenital and not a pose. Their jazz chatter and jazz manners were the natural expression of jazz minds, and must be endured because of the prestige of Mr Burton Rawlinson. So "Baby" and "Bawby" and "Honey" and "Gerry" went their preposterous way, and the Gran Seco shrugged outraged shoulders and spat.

Nevertheless there were signs, had there been eyes to note them, that the yacht party was not quite what it seemed. In unguarded moments, as Janet had already observed, they could be betrayed into sanity and good breeding. At nights, too, when their ragging was over, there were odd discussions in the privacy of bedrooms. At least one of the young men would sit far into the dawn working at notes and plans.

Presently, as if they had had enough of the city, they extended their revels into the surrounding country. They procured two touring cars, and, after some trouble with the Commissary of Police, embarked on long excursions. The mines lie in three main groups--the San Tomé, the Alhuema, and the Universum--and they visited all three. There they seemed to find much to interest them, and the managers feverishly telephoned to headquarters for instructions. These children were imbeciles doubtless, they reported, but they were poking their noses into forbidden places. So on their return the troupe had to interview the Commissary of Police, who politely cautioned them against breaches of the regulations of the province.

Their next escapade was more serious. They packed luncheon-baskets and departed, as they said, for a visit to the caves of Marequito--a permitted excursion. Then for three days they disappeared, the police were furious and anxious, and a posse was sent out in motor-cars to discover their whereabouts. Six of the party--five girls and a man--and one of the cars were found two hundred miles off in a valley under the high peaks called the Spanish Ladies. They told a pitiful story; they had lost their road, exhausted their food, and had had to spend chilly nights on the ground. The other car had gone off the day before to find supplies, and had not returned.

The inspector of police wrung his hands. "Do you not know that in these parts the natives are dangerous? You have narrowly escaped throat-cutting." The party was sent back to the city in disgrace, but they did not seem to feel their position. They were inordinately cheerful, and scarcely looked as if they had suffered a three days' fast.

In spite of the police activity no word came of the other car, till two days later it returned brazenly of its own accord. The occupants told the same story--a lost road, a breakdown, semi-starvation, a lucky meeting in the end with an intelligent vaquero who put them on the way to the San Tomé mine. This party did indeed show some signs of privation, and one of the four men had his arm in a sling, the result, he said, of a fall from a rock when he was trying to get a prospect.

There was a stern inquiry at the office of the Commissary, and the four were closely cross-examined about their journey. But they proved to be bewildered and obtuse. Their accounts conflicted, and when maps were placed before them they were quite unable to point out their route. "Can't you realise that we were lost?" they repeated, "lost like a tick in a wood-pile? What d'you keep worrying about? It's no good quoting lists of your darned hills. We can't locate them."

After this episode the American party showed better behaviour. For the last days of their stay they confined themselves to the city, and got up a fancy-dress ball in the Regina, into which they dragged some of the unwilling residents. The young man with his arm in a sling did not appear at this function; indeed he did not leave his room, being a little fevered--so he told the hotel servants--by his accident, though he refused to see a doctor. This was perhaps natural, for in the small hours after his return there had been some rough surgery in his bedroom. One of his companions had cut out a pistol bullet from above his left elbow, and the tall girl, who had once nursed in a hospital, had done the bandaging.

Archie and Janet were very different visitors. It almost appeared as if they were welcome ones. A special coach was attached for them to the Santa Ana train, and this was shunted on to the Gran Seco line. It contained two compartments, in one of which they were given excellent meals, while the other was on the lines of an observation car, so filled with bridal flowers that Archie looked anxiously about for rice and slippers. They were also given a guide, a well-mannered young Olifero who unobtrusively offered information. He pointed out the objects of interest on the way to Santa Ana, and during the hour of waiting there conducted them over the cathedral, which has a famous altar-piece, and, under the great crucifix, told with pride the tale of the first Conquistadors. The long climb into the Gran Seco was enlivened by his anecdotes. He showed them the valley where Toledo's men had been ambushed by Indians, the corner where the copper convoy had once been destroyed by a landslide, the gully which had long defied the railway engineers. At the frontier station he had managed their passes for them, and as the train crawled on to the plateau had sketched for them vivaciously the history of the mining industry.

"We can't tip this fellow," Archie whispered to Janet. "He's a gentleman." And his wife had agreed.

He saw them to their hotel, where rooms had been secured for them by the Administration. On parting, Archie and Janet warmly thanked him, and asked him his name. The young man smiled pleasantly. "That is nice of you, for I think we shall meet again. They call me Carlos Rivero." He added, "I am a friend of Luis de Marzaniga," and it seemed to Archie that his eyes said something confidential which he could not fathom.

The Moplahs were in the hotel, but in a somewhat chastened mood. The tall girl, whom Janet believed she had recognised, did not appear, nor did the young man in the starched linen knickerbockers, though Archie looked for him longingly. But the corybants of the Club de Residentes Extranjeros were there and greeted them with boisterous friendliness, though, somewhat to Janet's surprise, they did not invite them to join their party.

In any case that would have been impossible, for the newcomers found a complex programme provided for their entertainment. They had no occasion to hire a car: the Administration provided one, a neat Daimler limousine which at all hours waited on their convenience. They were shown every phase of the great industry, and the day after their arrival they lunched with the Administration. The Gobernador himself appeared at the meal, an honour which, it was hinted, was almost unexampled. He apologised for the absence of the Vice-President, the same who had been made to blush by the Moplahs. "My colleague," he said, "sends his profound apologies, but at the moment he is suffering from a slight attack of jaundice. He deeply regrets that he cannot be here to welcome you, for he has many friends in your country and in Europe. He is of Mexico, and a Mexican is like a Russian--his country is so remote from the life of the world that he must needs adopt all countries. He is the true international."

The meal was a Spartan one compared to the banquet at the President's mansion, but the food was perfectly cooked, and, for a place in the heart of wild hills, extraordinarily varied. The company were all grave, pallid, perfectly mannered, with expressionless eyes and no gestures--what Don Alejandro had called the type Gran Seco. There was nothing of the hustling liveliness which Archie associated with a luncheon of commercial magnates. Also all seemed to be in awe of their President, and hung on his lips. Castor talked indeed, brilliantly and continuously, but it was a monologue, and he went through a series of subjects, adorning each and then dropping it. There was none of the give-and-take of good conversation. Yet the time passed pleasantly, and when they rose from table Castor offered to show them his office.

It was on the first floor of the main building, lit by four large windows, into which travellers on the top of the tram-cars could look and see the great man at his work. Here there was no seclusion or mystery. The big bright chambers gave its occupant no more privacy than an aviary gives a bird, for not only could it be looked into from the street, but at one end was a glass partition separating it inadequately from a room full of busy secretaries. There were maps and plans of the Gran Seco on the walls, a complicated mechanism of desk telephones, a bookcase full of mining reports, an immense safe, a cigar cabinet--and that was all. It might have been the office of a real-estate agent in a provincial town in the United States or Canada. The contrast between Castor's personality and his modest habitation was so startling that Janet laughed.

The Gobernador seemed to understand her feelings. "I have other lairs," he said, smiling. "One, much grander, is in Olifa, and I have my rooms too in Paris and London. But this is my true workshop."

He opened a door, which revealed a tiny bedroom and bathroom.

"Compact, is it not?" he said. "I need no more. I am a simple man."

That night Archie and Janet dined in the hotel with the Financial Secretary, and afterwards went to hear Beethoven performed by a string quartet in the music-room of the Gran Seco Club. When they returned to their apartments, Archie was loud in his praises of his hosts.

"Odd, isn't it? to find Castilian manners in business grandees! We didn't find them at Veiro, for old Sanfuentes was just like the ordinary country gentleman at home. But these fellows here are all hidalgos. I feel noisy and rather vulgar among them. And, good Lord! what must they think of the Moplahs?

"Castor too!" he went on. "What rot it was Gedd and Wilbur making him out a mystery man! He's an extraordinarily clever fellow, but as open as the day. A mystery man couldn't live in a place like a cricket pavilion!"

"Did you ever read a poem called 'How it strikes a Contemporary'? Browning, you know."

"No," said Archie.

"Well, the poem is all about a tremendous mystery man--the Corregidor, Browning calls him--and he lived in just such a way as Mr Castor. How does it go?--

'Poor man, he lived another kind of life

In that new stuccoed third house by the bridge,

Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise!

The whole street might o'erlook him as he sat

Leg crossing leg--and----'

I can't remember it all, but anyhow he played cribbage every night with his housekeeper and went to bed punctually at ten."

Their permit for the Gran Seco had specified no time-limit. For two days they explored the details of the industry, were conducted through vast laboratories, studied the latest type of furnace and converter, pored over blue prints in offices, and gave themselves vile headaches. Archie declared that the smelting works were like the Ypres Salient after a gas attack. He tried to be intelligent, but found himself gravely handicapped by his lack of all scientific knowledge. "I have had the meaning of a reverberatory furnace explained to me a dozen times," he complained, "but I'm hanged if I can keep it in my head. And what Bessemerising is remains for me one of Allah's secrets. It's no good, Janet, this isn't my pidgin. Thank God, we're going to the Mines to-morrow. I think that should be more in my line."

They were taken to the Mines through a sad grey country, a desert of shale and rock. "Calcined," Archie called it, having just acquired that word, and Janet said that she supposed it must be like the landscapes in the moon. Every stream-course was bone-dry, and the big dams they passed, with the green water very low in their beds, only accentuated the desiccation. Yet, where wells had been sunk, the soil was not without fertility, and the thin grasses seemed to give a living to considerable flocks of sheep and goats. They passed many ruins--not only old mine workings, but the remains of Indian villages, which suggested that at one time the Gran Seco had been a more habitable country.

At the Mines they were shown little, for there was little time. Managers were ready with sheafs of statistics, and at the Universum they lunched luxuriously. But of the miners at work they saw nothing. They returned invigorated by the keen air of the steppes, and Archie, who had caught from a ridge a glimpse of the snowy peaks of the Spanish Ladies, had had his appetite whetted for further travel. But the Administration was not encouraging. That was all Indian country--policed, it was true, for it was the chief recruiting-ground of labour, but not open to ordinary travel. "We could send you there," said an urbane secretary, "but you would have to take an escort, and you would have to submit to be treated like a schoolboy. You will understand, Sir Archibald, that this Gran Seco of ours is in parts a delicate machine, and the presence of ever so little extraneous matter might do harm."

That evening after dinner Janet and Archie were in their sitting-room. The Regina was full of the preparations for departure of the Moplahs, who were going down-country by the night train, and their shrill cries could be heard in the corridor, since their rooms were on the same floor.

"We're extraneous matter here," said Archie. "What about it, Janet? They've given us a very good show, but I'm disillusioned about the Gran Seco. Wilbur must have been pulling my leg. The place is as humdrum as the Potteries, and just about as ugly. I should have liked to have had a shot at the high mountains, but I can see their reason for not encouraging visitors in their labour reserve. I rather like the crowd--they behave well and they must be the last word in efficiency.... Confound those Moplahs! This is like living beside a hen-coop!"

Janet looked serious, and, as was her way in such a mood, she sat with her hands idle in her lap.

"Let's get away from this place," she said. "I hate it!"

"Why in the world...?"

"I hate it. Those soft-spoken, solemn men have got on my nerves. I think there's something inhuman about them. Most of the faces of the people at the smelting works and at the Mines were like masks.... And at that awful luncheon! ... I believe that sometimes I saw the devil grinning out from behind them.... And in the streets. I saw one or two villainous ruffians, who should have been in rags, but were as spruce as bagmen. I felt as if I were in an orderly and well-policed Hell.... Why did they shepherd us away from the Mines, for remember we saw nothing there? Why won't they let us go into the back country? I believe it is because they are concealing something, something so bad that the world must never know of it."

Archie stared.

"I must say you've got a lively imagination," he began, but Janet was not listening.

"Let us go away--at once--to-morrow morning. I should like to be going to-night.... Ring up the Administration and say we must get home in a hurry.... I think there's something infernal about this big, noiseless machine. I want to be back at Veiro, where there are human beings. I want to be with the honest silly little Moplahs. I want something more peaceful...."

"I should have thought that the Gran Seco was more peaceful than the Moplahs."

"No, it isn't, for there is death here and death is unsettling."

"Well, we'll go off to-morrow, if you wish it. We're not likely to want for peace in the next few weeks. The thing is how to avoid boredom.... By the way, oughtn't we to go downstairs and say good-bye to the Americans? They're friendly souls."

But Janet was in a strange mood. "You go. I don't think I'll come." She still sat with her hands in her lap, looking straight before her.

But the Americans were already packed into the station omnibus, and Archie could only shout to them from the doorway, and receive in return blown kisses from the ladies and hand-waves from the men. They seemed to be waiting for a member of their party, and as Archie turned into the hall he met the laggard charging through the crowd of waiters and porters. It was the one who had not yet shown himself, and Archie realised that it must be the driver of the car in the Avenida de la Paz, the youth in the linen knickerbockers. What his present clothes were could not be guessed, since he wore a tweed ulster, but he had the same preposterous, broad-brimmed hat on his head.

To his surprise the young man, whom he had never met, made straight for him, and gave him his hand. Something passed from it, and Archie's fist held a crumpled paper.

The next second he was gone, but not before Archie had had another shock. For this was not the youth of the Avenida de la Paz. It was Don Luis de Marzaniga, and in their moment of contact his eyes had looked into his and they had commanded silence.

Deeply mystified, Archie went upstairs with the paper pellet tight in his fingers. When his door closed behind him, he opened it. The scrap contained a scrawl in pencil in a large, irregular hand. It read: "Please be both in your sitting-room at eleven o'clock."

He showed it to Janet.

"I said there was no mystery in the Gran Seco, but it seems I spoke too soon. I'm hanged if I can make it out. It was Luis that gave me this paper, but it was Luis pretending to be that American lad in the linen knickerbockers. You remember he was the one of the Moplahs we never saw."

"We never saw the tall girl either. I am positive that she was Miss Dasent." Janet looked at her wrist-watch. "Eleven, the note said. A quarter of an hour to wait."

That quarter of an hour was spent by Janet in the same contemplative immobility, while Archie tried to read, smoked two cigarettes feverishly, and occupied a few minutes in washing his hands. The bedroom opened from the sitting-room, and beyond it was the bathroom which he used as a dressing-room. He was just about to begin a third cigarette when he saw that the hands of the sham ormolu clock on the mantelpiece pointed to eleven. After that he kept his eyes on the door which led to the corridor.

But that door did not open. It was an exclamation from Janet that made him turn his head.

A waiter had appeared suddenly, entering from the bedroom. He carried a tray with three cups of maté, which he placed on the table at Janet's elbow.

"Look here, you've made a mistake," Archie said in his halting Spanish. "We gave no orders."

The man replied in English.

"Didn't you? All the same, you'd be the better for a cup. I'm going to have one myself. You might lock that door, Archie, and give me a cigarette."

While Archie stared thunderstruck, Janet laughed--a laugh which began as a low gurgle and ended in riotous merriment. She rose from her chair and stood before the waiter, her shoulders shaking, while she dabbed her small handkerchief on her eyes. Then, suddenly, she became grave. "You have been having a rough time, Sandy," she said, and she laid a hand on his shoulder. He winced, and drew back.

"So-so," he said. "That arm is still tender.... What malign fate brought the pair of you here?"

The waiter was to all appearance an ordinary mestizo, sallow-skinned, with shaggy dark hair, handsome after a fashion because of his pleasant eyes. He wore ill-fitting dress trousers, a shirt not too clean, a short alpaca jacket, and slippers rather down at heel. He smiled on Janet as he poured out the maté, and then from Archie's case he took a cigarette.

"Yes. I want to know just how you managed it," he continued. "Wilbur did his best to prevent you, and Luis told me he thought he had dissuaded you, and in spite of everything you bubble up. You're an incorrigible pair!"

"But why shouldn't we come here if we want?" Janet asked.

"Because it's deadly danger--for yourselves and for others. You go to lunch with the Administration, and the Vice-President hears of it just in time to have a touch of jaundice. You blunder into this hotel, and I can only save myself by making this assignation. You two innocents have been complicating my life."

Enlightenment broke in on Archie. "You were the bounder in the linen bags--the fellow that drove the car."

"I was. You were within an ace of recognising me, if I hadn't tilted my hat."

"Then what was Luis doing, got up in your rig?"

"He took my passport. This is a country of passports, you know, much more efficient than anything we had in the war zone in France. He came into the Gran Seco by a back door, and so didn't require one. But it was essential that mine should be used and that I should be believed to be out of the place. It was equally essential that I should remain here."

"How did you manage your present camouflage?"

The waiter looked down with pride at his spotty shirt. "Rather successful, isn't it? I have a bit of a graft in this line. My weeks in the Café de l'Enfer were not altogether wasted."

He finished his maté and lit a cigarette. He looked at the two before him, Janet with her girlish wind-blown grace, Archie with his puzzled honesty, and he suddenly ceased to be a waiter. His brows bent, and his voice from friendly banter became the voice of authority.

"You must clear out at once," he said. "To-morrow morning. Do you know that you are walking gaily on a road which is mined in every yard?"

"I knew it," said Janet. "I felt in my bones that this place was accursed."

"You don't know it. You cannot know just how accursed it is, and I have no time to explain. What I have to tell you is that you must go down to Olifa to-morrow morning. You will be encouraged to stay longer, but you must refuse."

"But look here, Sandy"--it was Archie who spoke--"they have nothing against us. Janet and I can't be in any danger."

"No, but you are a source of danger to others. Myself, for example, and the Vice-President, Señor Rosas."

"Rosas--I never heard of him."

"A very pleasant Mexican gentleman. You once knew him as Mr Blenkiron."

"Good Lord! But he's dead!"

"He is officially dead. That is why it won't do for him to meet old friends."

"Sandy dear," said Janet, "you mustn't treat us like this. We're not babies. We'll do what you tell us, but we deserve more confidence."

The waiter compared his Ingersoll watch with the sham ormolu clock.

"Indeed, you do, but the story would take hours, and I have only three minutes left. But I will tell you one thing. Do you remember my showing you at Laverlaw the passage in the chronicle about the Old Man of the Mountain, the King of the Assassins, who lived in the Lebanon, and doped his followers with hashish and sent them about the world to do his errands? Well, that story has a counterpart to-day."

"Mr Castor!" Janet exclaimed. "Archie liked him, but I felt that he might be a devil."

"A devil! Perhaps. He is also a kind of saint, and he is beyond doubt a genius. You will know more about him some day."

"But you are sending us away.... Sandy, I won't have it. We are too old friends to be bundled off like stray dogs from a racecourse. You are in some awful pickle and we must help."

"I am sending you away," said the waiter gravely, "because I want your help--when the time comes. There's another woman in this business, Janet, and I want you to be with her. I want you both. I pay you the compliment of saying that I can't do without you. You will go back to Olifa to the Hotel de la Constitución, and you will make friends with an American girl there. She is expecting you and she will give you your instructions."

"I know," said Janet. "She is Mr Blenkiron's niece--a Miss Dasent. What is her Christian name?"

The waiter looked puzzled. "I'm afraid I don't know. I never asked her."