Strange Yesterday (18 page)

But his face was attractive—there was a certain fascinating quality to it, though after a while it inevitably suggested a skull with too little flesh. It was a face to drive one to do its will, a face not to be crossed, a face to inspire confidence—of a sort. It was feline, too, the cheeks sloping to a very narrow chin.

3

P
ERHAPS
he heard whatever he listened for then, standing with his head tilted to one side, his hands clenching the crisp package of notes. People passing saw, paused in his stride, a large, lean man; there was something in his shaded eyes.

And then he went on to his hotel, the bundle of money still tight in his grasp. Going to his room, he removed his jacket and shirt, revealing a money-belt strapped to his small waist. Unwrapping the notes, he counted them once again and distributed them along the length of his belt, making sure that each was secure. After that, he dressed himself, took up his bag, walked down the steps, handed the landlord a bill, and left the place. All this he did as though he had thought of it and decided upon it long in advance; he did not hesitate.

Through the city he walked, a competent gleam in his eyes, until at last he came to one of the docks where a small schooner was tied. Four days ago, when he had been to Charleston on business of his own, he had seen her come in and had spoken with her captain. Now he returned within an hour of her sailing time. She would slip her anchor at two in the morning; it was already past midnight.

Confidently, as if he well knew what he was about, he went along the dock, crossed over her gangplank and stood upon her main-deck, the bag in his hand, glancing about him through the night for the captain. A seaman approached, but he shook him away. “The captain,” he said, “my fellow, the captain. Tell him—Mr. Preswick.”

And because his attitude went far beyond the sailor's assurance, the man returned with his captain. But the captain was impatient, harassed, and worried about another visit from the port inspector, whom he would have to pay half of what he got from each of the extra passengers he overburdened his hold with. He was already far above his quota, the captain, and he desired to be off. Even money had come to be unattractive in the madness that was growing upon the waterfront.

“Well?” he demanded of John Preswick, making out his features in the long, faint light of a lantern hung upon the rail.

“You sail to-night—for Chagres?”

“Yes! Oh, it is you, Mr. Preswick. I didn't catch your name at first. Yes, in an hour. I thought it was that damned inspector!”

“I should like passage.”

“Sorry,” the captain replied hurriedly, shaking his head. “We're full up and foundering. I couldn't accommodate another for love of heaven or hell. Look along the deck there!”

John Preswick looked and shrugged his shoulders. Men were rolling in blankets and settling themselves in snug positions against the rails. Or else they sat with their knees drawn up, hands about them. He could count more than a dozen men under the forward boom. “But I should like a cabin,” he decided. “I really couldn't be persuaded to spend my trip on deck.”

“Six in a cabin already,” the captain laughed shortly. “I am sorry, but I can't help you. The
Albatross
sails day after tomorrow.”

“The
Albatross
is a scow, and I can't wait. What do you take for cabin passage?”

“Eighty dollars.”

“Thievery!”

“As you look at it. I am full at that price. Find a man on the waterfront who'll better it.”

With a slight smile John Preswick took a wallet from his pocket and counted out five hundred dollars. “I'll have the cabin,” he said softly. “As for the others—”

The captain hesitated, looked at the money, and then nodded. “They'll sleep on deck. Of course, they'll kick up a rumpus, but—” He glanced again at the money. “Come with me.”

They kicked up a rumpus, but that was only to be expected; at last John Preswick found himself sole occupant of a small, hot, untidy cabin, a bunk to one side of it, a lamp hanging in the center, and a square table beneath the lamp. As his eyes traveled over it, he shook his head, thinking to himself that the year before, the same passage might have been had for forty dollars. When the situation required it, John Preswick never hesitated to spend, but even then the spending was not without a pang. More than anything else, money represented substance to him; he was not niggardly, but he treasured the one thing he valued. And, coming to the bottom of the matter, the one thing he set any store at all by was money. That was how, in his twenty-nine years, he had managed to amass out of an inn without patronage almost six thousand dollars. Now, upon his person, he had more than forty thousand dollars. That, he had, and a bag with a suit of clothes and a shirt—and a dream of a place where, so the rumor ran, gold might be had for the taking.

And John Preswick could no more have resisted that call of California than water the pull of the moon.

So he was off—in a five-hundred-dollar cabin that measured six feet by eight. Before he crawled into his narrow bunk that night, he took out a small revolver he had purchased—one of the first revolvers—and he twirled the chambers, saw that the caps were set, and laid it by his side. Then, unemotionally, he closed his eyes and slept.

4

W
HEN
he had arrived at Chagres, he found passage in a canoe almost immediately, although he made no further lavish display of his money. It was a long, crowded canoe, more than twenty feet from stern to high prow, propelled at a deathly slow pace by six naked Indians who swung themselves on slim poles, moving so unhurriedly as to make the entire action illusory. They would lift their poles, dip, find the mud bottom, and swish through the water; and for hour upon hour the thing would be repeated, taking them in all about ten miles a day. Beside the six Indians, there were twelve other white men crowded together upon the narrow seats. With John Preswick, the number was brought to thirteen. But that was alleviated the first night out, one of the men being bitten on the wrist by a snake as he lay, and dying shortly afterwards. All in all, that was considered hopeful, for thirteen had been a source of worry.

In ways, the other men resembled John Preswick. Eight of them were Yankees; two were Mexican; one was French; one was British. The Englishman, it was, who had died the first night out.

The Mexicans said aves for his soul, while the Yankees played cards, while the Indians slept. John Preswick sat at the edge of the fire and stared at the still, uncovered form, raising his eyes now and then to observe the others of the party. Some fate had thrown him with them, but except to show them common courtesy, he did not speak to them. He was not a quick man to make friendships unless he would be “benefited by them in a material manner. And these men he did not consider as prospective benefits.

He wondered to himself whether, a month back, alive with the heat for gold and life, the Englishman on the other side of the blaze had ever thought of this—had ever anticipated that anything but fortune awaited him. John Preswick wondered where he himself would be in a month; unconsciously his hand crept to the revolver in his belt. The fire flamed up.

A crowd of insects buzzed, danced and spun about the fire, hurling themselves desperately and conscientiously into the blaze, nor being a warning to those other suicides who came after. There were so many insects! All of himself except his face he had covered, and yet they stung him until his lean, bone-stretched countenance was puffed to a dismal chubbiness.

The night wore through; he neither slept nor rested; and in the morning he found it in him to envy the corpse that lay so still and peacefully, unmindful of the insects that fed upon it. For breakfast, he ate some dried fruits and drank of the flat river-water. Then they were off, the canoe sliding upon the interminable poles, the Indians calling out a soft chant as they moved. Peculiarly unattractive were these Indians, naked, with great bulging paunches, with skinny legs and bloated cheeks, with little dark eyes and stringy hair. And on either side of the Chagres, a flat, winding river, were piled walls of such tangled and impenetrable jungle as he had never known existed. The jungle was laced and intertwisted with vines and creepers, like a wild, haphazard woof. And there was the rain, the eternal, dripping rain, that was like no rain the north had seen, and the fever that came on them during the voyage. Before the mountains were gained, two more died. But his weathered leanness wore through, and though he was swollen from mosquito bites, and sick from the water, and loose of bowel, he was well when they reached the great lakes and able to take up passage after that to the coast. The two died while crossing the lakes, and over the mountains the remaining ten separated. With two of the Americans, John Preswick managed to obtain a mule, and the three of them kept together to Panama.

That was the last John Preswick saw of them, for while they were able to find passage upon a small, single-masted scow—which he later heard went down in a storm just outside the harbor of San José—he was laid to bed with malaria.

But Panama was a city overrun with humanity, swarming with the increasing stream that poured down out of the hills, throbbing with life it had never before known. It was not a place where one could be decently sick.

For an entire day he attempted to obtain lodgings, not daring to make any display of his wealth, but even the new mushroom hotels were bursting with life. So sick that he hardly knew where or why he was going, he stumbled onto a certain Michael Brian, who took him to his room, gave him his own bed, and nursed him as he would a brother. For many days Michael Brian tended him, and there grew up between the two men a friendship that was to last for thirty years. For Michael Brian was to be the only man—perhaps the only thing—that John Preswick could love.

He was hardly more than five feet, Michael Brian, bald and with merry blue eyes, and possessing a preposterous store of strength in his wiry form. He was a strange little man, of strange thoughts and strange ideals, with the brow of a dreamer and a narrow, jutting chin. Where he had come from, John Preswick never learnt, but it seemed that no part of the world but had seen his feet and heard his careful stream of curses. And, as he often stated, and truthfully, he was an honorable man, although his honor was often wont to take weird forms. But John Preswick loved him—for full thirty years; and, in his way, he loved John Preswick.

When John Preswick came from the fever and found himself in a tiny room, walls filthy and water-stained, he looked about and discovered a gargoyle seated beside his bed. “Who are you,” John Preswick asked weakly, “and where am I?”

“I,” said the imp, “am Michael O'Flareghty Brian, and for many days now I have been tending you as your mother might have, were she of my disposition. You are in a hole of hell called Panama, and worse I could not be wishing you.”

“Yes. I remember. But why—?”

Michael Brian turned, opened a chest, and produced a money belt, which he threw upon the bed. “That is why. I am neither a fool nor a Christian, but there is your money. There is forty thousand, two hundred and twenty dollars. Three times I have counted it.”

Fumbling for it, John Preswick opened it and spilt forth the notes upon his bed. To the last dollar, it was all there. When he had finished counting it, he turned an amazed face to Michael Brian. He said: “I don't understand. You might have had it all. Any one would.”

“Any one but Michael Brian,” the little man snapped; “but when you have known me longer, you will find that I am an honest man, and that if there is a thing I detest, it is a thief. Your money is there. No, don't offer me any; I could have it all. I am a bit deeper than that, my friend. Forty thousand dollars is a great deal of money. Perhaps you can use me. Perhaps I can use you.”

“How do you mean?” John Preswick inquired, staring into those bristling blue eyes.

“Where are you bound for—when you are again on your feet?”

“The gold fields.”

“With forty thousand dollars?”

“And why not?”

“Because you are a fool,” Michael Brian stated decisively. “They will strip you as you have never been stripped before. In the east you were a canny man; there you will be a child. I know. And gold. Gold comes. Gold goes.”

“They will not strip me,” said John Preswick, a slow smile spreading over his thin face.

Then they were alike, though one was small, and round, and bald, and the other was lean, and long, and more hollow of face than ever. They were very much alike, a fact which Michael Brian recognized as he began to speak:

“Gold is not wealth. It comes, and it goes. And those who scrabble in the muck for it are fools. They make seven, or eight, or twenty dollars a day; but what is that? They drink it away—or it slips into the hands of harlots. They gamble it away, or some one beats in their heads and filches it from them. They suffer, and strain, and work like devils—for some one else. In the end they have nothing. Do I not know? Have I never been to gold fields? Am I one of these green louts?” Pausing, he glanced over to John Preswick, who was holding in his hands the pile of money he had gathered together. He went on:

“My friend, here we will take an oath, the two of us, to avoid two things: drink and women; and then, my friend, I shall make your fortune, and you shall make mine—”

5

L
ATE
that night, two guttering candles between them, they were still talking, John Preswick's dried face lit by a glow that seemed reflected from the moonish, shiny countenance of Michael Brian. He lay in his bed; the other crouched close to him; and between them the words rolled on in an endless stream that builded itself into pictures which whirled about the thoughts of John Preswick. But John Preswick was no dreamer, the money between his fingers.

Upon the coverlet of the bed, with a stubby, creased finger, Michael Brian was tracing a map; and as he traced, he spoke: “It is all because I have been here before, years ago, when there was no gold to rattle men's brains. Now I will show you.”