The Saint on the Spanish Main (20 page)

As the door closed behind the last of them,
Cuffee
threw himself into a chair.

“What’s the idea?” he inquired
sarcastically. “Were
you thinking of trying some American third
degree on
me? It won’t get you anywhere, and it’ll only make mat
ters worse
for you when I get you in court.”

“Mr. Cuffee,” said the Saint,
“you aren’t going to any
court where you’d probably get acquitted.
Johnny has
decided that it would be better for him to convict you on
a lesser charge, and give you a sentence which he has the
right to impose. You remember
that the Treaty allows
him to inflict any
punishment short of death. Therefore
his
idea is that he should have your hands and feet cut
off, your eyes put out, your tongue cut out,
castrate you
—and let you go.”

Cuffee stared at them.

“You must be crazy,” he sneered. “I shall appeal to
the Governor——
”

“The sentence is to be carried out
tonight.”

Cuffee licked his lips. He could not believe
his ears,
but Johnny’s face was expressionless and implacable.
And
something in Cuffee’s own cosmogony, harking
back to a primitive
heritage which at any other time he
would have been the first to deride,
made him believe
that a man of his own race could well be capable of such
savagery.

“You’re off your head, Johnny,” he
said in a husky
mumble of horror. “England would never let you get
away with
that, Treaty or no Treaty. You’d pay for it in
the end, you and all
the Maroons.”

“That’s what I’ve tried to tell
him,” said the Saint.
“But he won’t listen. His mind’s made
up. And by the time the British Parliament could do anything about it, it’ll be
too late to do you any good. The best I’ve been
able to do is
persuade him to let you take an easier way
out for yourself, if
you want to.”

He brought one hand from behind his back,
and Cuf
fee saw that there was a coiled length of rope in it. Cuf
fee gazed at it numbly as the
Saint laid it across his
knees.

“It’s a strong rope,” said the
Saint, “and so are the
beams over your head. You’ll be left alone
for half an
hour
before they come for you. I’m sorry, but that’s all
I could do.”

He turned and walked out of the room; and
Johnny
followed him, closing the door after them.

They stood in front of the house, under the
stars,
looking at the fires that had been lighted on the parade-
ground
and hearing the voices of the Maroons who, hav
ing been brought
together anyway, had decided with typical good spirits to make their convening
an excuse for a feast and celebration. Excited chattering voices
which, to a guilty man, could
easily sound like the
ominous hysteria of a
sadistic mob.…

“You know, sah,” Johnny said,
“I happened to see an
old map of Jamaica in Kingston, an’ I saw what they
used to call this part of the Country. You know
what it was? The
District of Look Behind .
I kept rememberin’
that when we were at the Peace Cave, thinkin’ how
they
used to ambush the redcoats.
Kind of gives you a shud
der, doesn’t it?”

“My God, what a wonderful name,”
said the Saint,
with the pure delight of a poet. Then his hand lay on
Johnny’s shoulder, and he said:
“But now it’s your job
to make it the
District of Look Ahead.”

Then they both looked back at the house, and lis
tened.

PUERTO RICO:

The Unkind Philanthropist

129

“One of these days,” said Simon
Templar lazily, “when
I decide to become Dictator of the Universe,
I shall issue
a law for the protection of men’s names. This modern
fad of
giving them to girls has got to be stopped somewhere. It was bad enough when
women broke out in a rash of semi-masculine diminutives, occasionally with
and just
as often without some connection with the
monickers they got
baptized with, of which I have
known for instance Bobbie, Billie, Jo,
Charlie, Marty,
Jackie, Jerry, Freddie, Tommy, Dickie, Stevie, Teddy,
Tony—-“

“Braggart,” said Tristan Brown.

“After which,” Simon continued
inexorably, “I have
seen the movie marquees blossom with
actresses calling
themselves, with or without baptismal authority, by
such
traditionally male labels as Toby, Dale, Gene, Jeff,
Robin, Gregg, Terry,
Alexis, and heaven knows what
next. In my own limited acquaintance of
females, I can
vouch for dolls who were actually christened Franklin,
Craig,
Cameron, Christopher, and even George.”

“How about the men I’ve known,”
Tristan inquired,
“who were called Jess, Evelyn, and Shirley?”

“I think a little research would show
that they had the
prior claim. Only they lost it sooner. Like that guy who
keeps on writing about me. He’s always getting circulars from mail-order
lingerie merchants addressed to Miss
Leslie Charteris. It’s getting so
that about the only name
you could give your son today, with
reasonable certainty that no woman would be wearing it tomorrow, would be
something
like Gladys.”

“I think Tristan is a nice name,”
she said tartly. “So
did my father. Brown is dull enough for a
surname, so
he tried to liven it up. I like it.”

Simon squeezed the car past a crawling truck
top-
heavy with sugar cane.

“I’m the oldfashioned type,” he said
gloomily. “I
think girls should have girls’ names. If you ever
suffered
through the opera, you’d remember that Tristan was a
man.”

“What does the name of Morgan make you
think of?”
she asked.

“J. P. Morgan. A big business man. Or before him,
Sir Henry Morgan—another very male go-getter,
in his
way.”

“But in the same legend that Tristan came
from,
wasn’t Morgan le Fay a woman?”

Just for a moment Simon was stopped.

“Well, as I recall it, she was the
queen of the fairies,”
he said, and the girl had to laugh.

It was merely an idle conversation to lighten
the drive
from San
Juan up into the mountains of Puerto Rico,
and
the Saint had no idea at the time of the significance that the thought behind
it would have in his always un
predictable
odyssey.

Tristan Brown had entered his life during
his first
morning on the island, on a tour of the historic fortress
of El Morro, which dominates the narrow entrance of
the spacious harbor which
Christopher Columbus dis
covered, and whence
later Ponce de Leon, then Gov
ernor
of the colony, sailed on his famous quest for the
Fountain of Youth which took him only to Florida
and
his death. And because she was
very noticeably
feminine, in spite of the name which he had yet to find
out, with urchin-cut mahogany hair and eager brown
eyes and a figure that molded exactly the right
curves
into a thin cotton dress, and
in fact would have been an
exciting person to see even in a much less
nondescript
crowd, Simon automatically
maneuvered himself next to
her as the party moved along and thoughtfully
contrived
to stay there.

The guide was explaining with the aid of a map how
Puerto Rico’s strategic position had once made it
the
natural rendezvous for the Spanish
treasure convoys
that fanned out on
their golden quests all up and down
the
coasts of Central and South America, and how for
the same reason it was coveted by the privateers who cruised the
Caribbean to loot the looters on their home
ward voyage; and she saw the Saint and could not help
thinking how much like the idealized conception of
a
pirate he looked, with the trade
wind ruffling his dark
hair and the
sun on his keen tanned face and a half-smile
on his strong reckless mouth. Against those battlements
the tall swordsman’s grace of his body and the
merry
insolence of his blue eyes
seemed to span the centuries as
easily
as the weathered stone, so that with the slightest imagined change of costume
she could see him as the
living prototype of what the heroes of
innumerable technicolor movies tried ineffectually to re-create; but with
him she had a strange disturbing feeling that the
resem
blance was real…. And she
awoke to the awareness that she was still staring at him, and that he knew it.

Farther along, someone asked: “Was this
fort ever
captured?”

“Not until the Spanish-American
War,” said the cond
ctor, with some pride. “And then it was
mostly by
invitation. The English and the Dutch tried to take it
for
a couple of hundred years, but they weren’t good
enough. In
1595, it even gave the great Sir Francis
Drake a
licking.”

“And I bet you won’t find that in an
English history
book,” Simon murmured to the girl.

By that time she had recovered from her
confusion.

“Who was it said that histories are
always written by
the winning side?” she responded easily.

“I don’t know, but it’s probably true.
Drake must
have
been pretty young then, and he did get his own
back on the Armada. But he’d be a still bigger man if
they didn’t try to make him look like a winner all
the
time.”

After that, when the tour was over and she
asked di
rections back from the castle, it was easy to offer his
personal
guiding service, and he walked her by way of
the Fortaleza up
into the narrow streets of the old town.
Then it was time for
lunch, and the restaurant El Meson
was conveniently near by.

Over glasses of Dry Sack they exchanged
names, and
she recognized his at once.

“I just knew it would have to be
something like that
when I first saw you,” she said, but she declined to
ex
plain what she
meant.

“To answer the routine question you’re
dying to ask,”
he said, “I’m not in the midst of any felonious
business.
I’m just island-hopping and amusing myself.”

“Spending your ill-gotten gains?”

“Maybe.”

“And I’m spending somebody
else’s,” she said bright
ly.

“Does he know about it?”

“Oh, no. He’s dead.” She laughed
at the restrained lift
of his brows, and said: “Have you heard
of the Ogden
H. Kiel Foundation?”

“Of course.”

For the benefit of any unlikely person who
may not
have heard of him, it may be recalled that Mr. Ogden H. Kiel was a
shining example of free enterprise who, start
ing away back with a
bottle of snake oil and a medicine
show, parlayed himself into a patent
medicine empire that loaded the drugstore shelves of the nation with an
assortment
of salves, lotions, potions, physics, and vita
min compounds which,
if all their various claims could
be believed, should have banished
every human ailment
from the face of this planet. The face that this millen
nium did
not supervene must have spurred him to con
tinually more
frenzied efforts of distribution, through the media of printed advertising,
radio, and television,
so that the sale of his nostrums brought him
a flood of
wealth which not even modern taxes could reduce to a
stream of a size that even a lavish liver could spend.
Wherefore he had
created the Ogden H. Kiel Foundation, dedicated (to do him justice) to giving
suffering
humanity more substantial forms of relief than gaily col
ored pills—an institution
which, upon probate of his
will, found
itself with more than eighty million dollars in
the kitty and at least another million in royalties accru
ing every year.