41 Stories (56 page)

“ ‘Railroader,' says I again. ‘On the hog. No good. Been livin' for three days on stolen bananas. Look at him. Ain't that enough?'

“Twenty-five dollars or sixty days, was what the recorder gave the general. He didn't have a cent, so he took the time. They let me go, as I knew they would, for I had money to show, and O‘Hara spoke for me. Yes; sixty days he got. 'Twas just so long that I slung a pick for the great country of Kam—Guatemala.”

Clancy paused. The bright starlight showed a reminiscent look of happy content on his seasoned features. Keogh leaned in his chair and gave his partner a slap on his thinly-clad back that sounded like the crack of the surf on the sands.

“Tell 'em, you divil,” he chuckled, ‘how you got even with the tropical general in the way of agricultural maneuvrings.”

“Havin' no money,” concluded Clancy, with unction, “they set him to work his fine out with a gang from the parish prison clearing Ursulines Street. Around the corner was a saloon decorated genially with electric fans and cool merchandise. I made that me headquarters, and every fifteen minutes I'd walk around and take a look at the little man filibusterin' with a rake and shovel. ‘Twas just such a hot broth of a day as this has been. And I'd call at him ‘Hey, monseer!' and he'd look at me black, with the damp showin' through his shirt in places.

“ ‘Fat, strong mans,' says I to General De Vega, ‘is needed in New Orleans. Yes. To carry on the good work. Carrambos! Erin go bragh!' ”

Shoes

John de Graffenreid Atwood ate of the lotus, root, stem, and flower. The tropics gobbled him up. He plunged enthusiastically into his work, which was to try to forget Rosine.

Now, they who dine on the lotus rarely consume it plain. There is a sauce au
diable
that goes with it; and the distillers are the chefs who prepare it. And on Johnny's menu card it read “brandy.” With a bottle between them, he and Billy Keogh would sit on the porch of the little consulate at night and roar out great, indecorous songs, until the natives, slipping hastily past, would shrug a shoulder and mutter things to themselves about the “Americanos diablos.”

One day Johnny's mozo brought the mail and dumped it on the table. Johnny leaned from his hammock, and fingered the four or five letters dejectedly. Keogh was sitting on the edge of the table chopping lazily with a paper knife at the legs of a centipede that was crawling among the stationery. Johnny was in that phase of lotus-eating when all the world tastes bitter in one's mouth.

“Same old thing!” he complained. “Fool people writing for information about the country. They want to know all about raising fruit, and how to make a fortune without work. Half of ‘em don't even send stamps for a reply. They think a consul hasn't anything to do but write letters. Slit those envelopes for me, old man, and see what they want. I'm feeling too rocky to move.”

Keogh, acclimated beyond all possibility of ill-humor, drew his chair to the table with smiling compliance on his rose-pink countenance, and began to slit open the letters. Four of them were from citizens in various parts of the United States who seemed to regard the consul at Coralio as a cyclopædia of information. They asked long lists of questions, numerically arranged, about the climate, products, possibilities, laws, business chances, and statistics of the country in which the consul had the honor of representing his own government.

“Write ‘em, please, Billy,” said that inert official, “just a line, referring them to the latest consular report. Tell 'em the State Department will be delighted to furnish the literary gems. Sign my name. Don't let your pen scratch, Billy; it'll keep me awake.”

“Don't snore,” said Keogh, amiably, “and I'll do your work for you. You need a corps of assistants, anyhow. Don't see how you ever get out a report. Wake up a minute! —here's one more letter—it's from your own town, too—Dalesburg.”

“That so?” murmured Johnny, showing a mild obligatory interest. “What's it about?”

“Postmaster writes,” explained Keogh. “Says a citizen of the town wants some facts and advice from you. Says the citizen has an idea in his head of coming down where you are and opening a shoe store. Wants to know if you think the business would pay. Says he's heard of the boom along this coast, and wants to get in on the ground floor.”

In spite of the heat and his bad temper, Johnny's hammock swayed with his laughter. Keogh laughed too; and the pet monkey on the top shelf of the bookcase chattered in shrill sympathy with the ironical reception of the letter from Dalesburg.

“Great bunions!” exclaimed the consul. “Shoe store! What'll they ask about next, I wonder? Overcoat factory, I reckon. Say, Billy—of our 3,000 citizens, how many do you suppose ever had on a pair of shoes?”

Keogh reflected judicially.

“Let's see—there's you and me and—”

“Not me,” said Johnny, promptly and incorrectly, holding up a foot encased in a disreputable deerskin
zapato.
“I haven't been a victim to shoes in months.”

“But you've got ‘em, though,” went on Keogh. “And there's Goodwin and Blanchard and Geddie and old Lutz and Doc Gregg and that Italian that's agent for the banana company, and there's old Delgado—no; he wears sandals. And, oh, yes; there's Madama Ortiz, ‘what kapes the hotel'—she had on a pair of red slippers at the
baile
the other night. And Miss Pasa, her daughter, that went to school in the States—she brought back some civilized notions in the way of footgear. And there's the comandante's sister that dresses up her feet on feast-days—and Mrs. Geddie, who wears a two with a Castilian instep—and that's about all the ladies. Let's see—don't some of the soldiers at the
cuartel
—no that's so; they're allowed shoes only when on the march. In barracks they turn their little toeses out to grass.”

“ ‘Bout right,” agreed the consul. “Not over twenty out of the three thousand ever felt leather on their walking arrangements. Oh, yes; Coralio is just the town for an enterprising shoe store—that doesn't want to part with its goods. Wonder if old Patterson is trying to jolly me! He always was full of things he called jokes. Write him a letter, Billy. I'll dictate it. We'll jolly him back a few.”

Keogh dipped his pen, and wrote at Johnny's dictation. With many pauses, filled in with smoke and sundry travel lings of the bottle and glasses, the following reply to the Dalesburg communication was perpetrated:

“I throw in that postscript,” explained the consul, “so Uncle Obadiah won't take offence at the official tone of the letter! Now, Billy, you get that correspondence fixed up, and send Pancho to the post-office with it. The
Ariadne
takes the mail out to-morrow if they make up that load of fruit to-day.”

The night programme in Coralio never varied. The recreations of the people were soporific and flat. They wandered about, barefoot and aimless, speaking lowly and smoking cigar or cigarette. Looking down on the dimly lighted ways one seemed to see a threading maze of brunette ghosts tangled with a procession of insane fire-flies. In some houses the thrumming of lugubrious guitars added to the depression of the triste night. Giant tree-frogs rattled in the foliage as loudly as the end man's “bones” in a minstrel troupe. By nine o‘clock the streets were almost deserted.

Not at the consulate was there often a change of bill. Keogh would come there nightly, for Coralio's one cool place with the little seaward porch of that official residence.

The brandy would be kept moving; and before midnight sentiment would begin to stir in the heart of the self-exiled consul. Then he would relate to Keogh the story of his ended romance. Each night Keogh would listen patiently to the tale, and be ready with untiring sympathy.

“But don't you think for a minute”—thus Johnny would always conclude his woeful narrative—“that I'm grieving about that girl, Billy. I've forgotten her. She never enters my mind. If she were to enter that door right now, my pulse wouldn't gain a beat. That's all over long ago.”

“Don't I know it?” Keogh would answer. “Of course you've forgotten her. Proper thing to do. Wasn't quite O.K. of her to listen to the knocks that—er—Dink Pawson kept giving you.”

“Pink Dawson!”—a world of contempt would be in Johnny's tones—“Poor white trash! That's what he was. Had five hundred acres of farming land, though; and that counted. Maybe I'll have a chance to get back at him some day. The Dawsons weren't anybody. Everybody in Alabama knows the Atwoods. Say, Billy—did you know my mother was a De Graffenreid?”

“Why, no,” Keogh would say; “is that so?” He had heard it some three hundred times.

“Fact. The De Graffenreids of Hancock County. But I never think of that girl any more, do I, Billy?”

“Not for a minute, my boy,” would be the last sounds heard by the conqueror of Cupid.

At this point Johnny would fall into a gentle slumber, and Keogh would saunter out to his own shack under the calabash tree at the edge of the plaza.

In a day or two the letter from the Dalesburg postmaster and its answer had been forgotten by the Coralio exiles. But on the 26th day of July the fruit of the reply appeared upon the tree of events.

The Andador, a fruit steamer that visited Coralio regularly, drew into the offing and anchored. The beach was lined with spectators while the quarantine doctor and the custom-house crew rowed out to attend to their duties.

An hour later Bill Keogh lounged into the consulate, clean and cool in his linen clothes, and grinning like a pleased shark.

“Guess what?” he said to Johnny, lounging in his hammock.

“Too hot to guess,” said Johnny, lazily.

“Your shoe-store man's come,” said Keogh, rolling the sweet morsel on his tongue, “with a stock of goods big enough to supply the continent as far down as Terra del Fuego. They're carting his cases over to the custom-house now. Six barges full they brought ashore and have paddled back for the rest. Oh, ye saints in glory! won't there be regalements in the air when he gets onto the joke and has an interview with Mr. Consul? It'll be worth nine years in the tropics just to witness that one joyful moment.”

Keogh loved to take his mirth easily. He selected a clean place on the matting and lay upon the floor. The walls shook with his enjoyment. Johnny turned half over and blinked.

“Don't tell me,” he said, “that anybody was fool enough to take that letter seriously.”

“Four-thousand-dollar stock of goods!” gasped Keogh, in ecstasy. “Talk about coals to Newcastle! Why didn't he take a ship-load of palm-leaf fans to Spitzbergen while he was about it? Saw the old codger on the beach. You ought to have been there when he put on his specs and squinted at the five hundred or so barefooted citizens standing around.”

“Are you telling the truth, Billy?” asked the consul, weakly.

“Am I? You ought to see the buncoed gentleman's daughter he brought along. Looks! She makes the brick-dust senoritas here look like tar-babies.”

“Go on,” said Johnny, “if you can stop that asinine giggling. I hate to see a grown man make a laughing hyena of himself.”

“Name is Hemstetter,” went on Keogh. “He's a—Hello! what's the matter now?”

Johnny's moccasined feet struck the floor with a thud as he wriggled out of his hammock.

“Get up, you idiot,” he said, sternly, “or I'll brain you with this inkstand. That's Rosine and her father. Gad! what a drivelling idiot old Patterson is! Get up, here, Billy Keogh, and help me. What the devil are we going to do? Has all the world gone crazy?”

Keogh rose and dusted himself. He managed to regain a decorous demeanor.

“Situation has got to be met, Johnny,” he said, with some success at seriousness. “I didn't think about its being your girl until you spoke. First thing to do is to get them comfortable quarters. You go down and face the music, and I'll trot out to Goodwin's and see if Mrs. Goodwin won't take them in. They've got the decentest house in town.”

“Bless you, Billy!” said the consul. “I knew you wouldn't desert me. The world's bound to come to an end, but maybe we can stave it off for a day or two.”

Keogh hoisted his umbrella and set out for Goodwin's house. Johnny put on his coat and hat. He picked up the brandy bottle, but set it down again without drinking, and marched bravely down to the beach.

In the shade of the custom-house walls he found Mr. Hemstetter and Rosine surrounded by a mass of gaping citizens. The customs officers were ducking and scraping, while the captain of the Andador interpreted the business of the new arrivals. Rosine looked healthy and very much alive. She was gazing at the strange scenes around her with amused interest. There was a faint blush upon her round cheek as she greeted her old admirer. Mr. Hemstetter shook hands with Johnny in a very friendly way. He was an oldish, impractical man—one of that numerous class of erratic business men who are forever dissatisfied, and seeking a change.