The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (19 page)

Bell hauled the engine inboard and got out the oars from under the seats. He got the little boat out to mid-stream, and they floated down until a village of squalid huts appeared on the eastern bank. He landed, there, and with much bargaining and a haughty demeanor disposed of the boat to the skipper of a
batelao
in exchange for passage down-river as far as Corumba. The rate was outrageously high. But he had little currency with him and dared go no farther on a vessel which carried a boat of The Master’s ownership conspicuously towed behind.

At Corumba he purchased clothes less obviously of
os gentes
, both for himself and for Paula, and that same afternoon was able to arrange for their passage to Asunción as deck passengers on a river steamer going downstream.

It was as two peasants, then, that they rode in sweltering heat amid a swarming and odorous mass of fellow humanity downstream. But it was a curious relief, in some ways. The people about them were gross and unwashed and stupid, but they were human. There was none of that diabolical feeling of terror all about. There were no strained, fear haunted faces upon the deck reserved for deck passengers and other cattle. The talk was ungrammatical and literal and of the earth. The women were stolid-faced and reserved. But when the long rows of hammocks were slung out in the open air, in the casual fashion of sleeping arrangements in the back-country of all South America, it was blessedly peaceful to realize that the folk who snored so lustily were merely human; human animals, it might be, with no thought above their
farinha
and
feijos
on the morrow, but human.

And the second day they passed the old fort at Coimbra, and went on. The passage into Paraguayan territory was signalized by an elaborate customs inspection, and three days later Asunción itself displayed its red-tiled roofs and adobe walls upon the shore.

Bell had felt some confidence in his ability to pass muster with his Spanish, though his Portuguese was limited, and it was a shock when the captain of the steamer summoned him to his cabin with a gesture, before the steamer docked. Bell left Paula among the other deck passengers and went with the peasant’s air of suspicious humility into the captain’s quarters. But the captain’s pose of grandeur vanished at once when the door closed.

“Señor,” said the steamer captain humbly, “I have not spoken to you before. I knew you would not wish it. But tell me, señor! Have you any news of what The Master plans?”

Bell’s eyes flickered, at the same time that a cold apprehension filled him.

“Why do you speak to me of The Master?” he demanded sharply.

The steamer captain stammered. The man was plainly frightened at Bell’s tone. Bell relaxed, his flash of panic for Paula gone.

“I know,” said the captain imploringly, “that the great
fazenda
has been deserted. On my last trip, down, señor, I brought many of the high deputies who had been there. They warned me not to speak, señor, but I saw that you were not what you seemed, and I thought you might be going about to see who obeyed The Master’s orders.…”

Bell nodded.

“That is my mission,” he said curtly. “Do not speak of it further—not even to the deputy in Asunción.”

The captain stammered again.

“But I must see the Señor Francia,” he said humbly. “I report to him after every trip, and if he thought that I did not report all that I learn.…”

“It is my order,” snapped Bell angrily. “If he reproaches you, say that one who has orders from The Master himself gave them to you. And do not speak of the destruction of the
fazenda
. I am searching especially for the man who caused it. And—wait! I will take your name, and you shall give me—say—a thousand pesos. I had need of money to bribe a fool I could not waste time on, up-country. It will be returned to you.”

And again the captain stammered, but Bell stared at him haughtily, and he knelt abjectly before the ship’s safe.

Asunción, as everybody knows, is a city of sixty thousand people, and the capital of a republic which enjoyed the rule of a family of hereditary dictators for sixty years; which rule ended in a war wherein four-fifths of the population was wiped out. And since that beginning it has averaged eight revolutions to Mexico’s three, has had the joy of knowing seven separate presidents in five years—none of them elected—and now boasts a population approximately two-thirds illegitimate and full of pride in its intellectual and artistic tastes.

Bell and Paula made their way along the cobbled streets away from the river, surrounded by other similarly peasant-seeming folk. Bell told her curtly what had happened with the steamer captain.

“It’s the devil,” he said coldly, “because this whole republic is under The Master’s thumb. Except among the peasants we can count on nearly everybody being on the lookout for us, if they so much as suspect we’re alive. And they may because I burned their damned
fazenda
. So.…”

Paula smiled at him, rather wanly.

“What are you going to do, Charles?”

“Get a boat,” said Bell curtly. “One with three or four men, if I can. If I can buy it with the skipper’s money, I will. But I can’t take you to go bargaining. It would look suspicious.”

They had reached the central plaza of the town. The market swarmed with brown skinned folk and seemed to overflow with fruits. A man was unconcernedly shoveling oranges out of a cart with a shovel, as if they had been so much coal. A market woman as unconcernedly dropped some of the same golden fruit within a small pen where a piglet awaited a purchaser. To the left, there were rows of unshaded stalls where the infinitely delicate handmade Paraguayan lace was exposed for sale.

“I—think,” said Paula, “I think I will go in the cathedral. I will be very devout, Charles, and you will find me there when you return. I will be safe there, certainly.”

He walked with her across the crowded plaza. He should have known that your peasant does not stride with head up, but regarding the ground. That a man who works heavily droops his shoulders with weariness at the end of a day. And especially he should have realized that Paraguay is not, strictly speaking, a Latin-American nation. It is Latin-Indian, in which the population graduates very definitely from a sub-stratum of nearly or quite pure Indian race to an aristocracy of nearly or quite pure Spanish descent, and that the color of a man’s skin fixes his place in society. Both Bell and Paula were too light of skin for the peasant’s clothes they wore. They aroused curiosity at once. If it was not an active curiosity, it was nevertheless curiosity of a sort.

But Bell left her in the shadowy, cool interior of the cathedral which seems so pitifully small to be the center of religion for a nation. He saw her move toward one of the little candle-lit niches in the wall and fall quite simply on her knees there.

And he moved off, to wander aimlessly down to the river shore and stare about and presently begin a desultory conversation with sleepy boatmen.

* * * *

It was three hours and more before he returned to the Cathedral, and Paula was talking to someone. More, talking to a woman in the most discreet of mantilla’d church-going costumes. Paula saw him in the doorway, and uttered a little cry of relief. She came hurrying to him.

“Charles! I have found a friend! Isabella Ybarra. We were schoolmates in the United States and she has just come back from Paris! So you see, she cannot—”

“I see,” said Bell very quietly.

Paula was speaking swiftly and very softly.

“We went to school together, Charles. I trust her. You must trust her also. There is no danger, this time. Isabella has never even heard of The Master. So you see.…”

“I see that you need someone you can trust,” said Bell grimly. “
I
found that the captain of the steamer had gone to The Master’s deputy here. While I was talking to some boatmen a warning was given to look out for a man and woman, together, who may try to buy a boat. We’re described, and only the fact that I was alone kept me from being suspected. Police, soldiers—everybody is looking out for us. Paraguay’s under The Master’s thumb more completely than any other nation on the continent.”

The figure to which Paula had been talking was moving slowly toward them. A smiling, brown-eyed face twinkled at them.

“You must be Charles!” said a warm and cluckling voice. “Paula has raved, Señor. Now I am going to take her off in my carriage. She is my maid. And you will follow the carriage on foot and I will have the major-domo let you in the servants’ entrance, and the three of us will conspire.”

It was incongruous to hear the English of a girl’s finishing school from the mantilla’d young woman who beamed mischievously at him. She had the delighted air of one aiding a romance. It was doubly incongruous because of the dark and shadowy Cathedral in which they were, and the raucous noises of the market in the plaza without. Bell had a sense of utter unreality as Isabella’s good humored voice went on:

“Do you remember, Paula, the time the French teacher caught us in the pantry? I shall feel just like that time.”

“This is dangerous,” said Bell, steadily, “and it is very serious indeed.”

“Pooh!” said Isabella comfortably. “Paula, you didn’t even know I was married! A whole year and a half! And he’s a darling, really. I’m the Señora Isabella Ybarra de Zuloaga, if you please! Bow gracefully!” She chuckled. “Jaime came all the way to Rio to meet me last month. I’m wild about him, Paula.… But come on! Follow me humbly, like a nice little
mestizo
girl who wants to be my maid, and I’ll let you ride with the
cochero
and Charles shall follow behind us.”

She swept out of the Cathedral with the air of a grande dame suppressing a giggle, and Paula went humbly behind her.

And Bell trudged through the dust and the blistering sun while the highly polished carriage jolted over cobble stones and the youthful Señora Isabella Ybarra de Zuloaga beamed blissfully at the universe which did not realize that she was a conspirator, and Paula sat modestly beside the brown skinned
cochero
.

It was not a long ride nor a long walk, though the sun was insufferable. The capital of Paraguay is not large. It is a sleepy, somnolent little town in which the most pretentious building was begun as the Presidential Palace and wound up as the home of a bank. But there are bullet marks on the façade of the
Museo Nacionál
, and there is still an empty pedestal here and there throughout the city where the heroes of last year’s revolution, in bronze, have been pulled down and the heroes of this year’s uprising of the people have not yet been set up. Red tiled roofs give the city color, and the varying shades of its populace give it variety, and the fact that below the whiter class of inhabitants
Guarani
is spoken instead of Spanish adds to the individuality of its effect.

But the house into which the carriage turned could have been built in Rio or Buenos Aires without comment on its architecture. It had the outer bleakness of most private homes of South America, but if it was huge and its windows were barred, the patio into which Bell was ushered by a bewildered and suspicious major-domo made up in color and in charm for all that the exterior lacked.

A fountain played amid flowers, and macaws and parrots and myriad other caged birds hung in their cages about the colonnade around the court, and Bell found Paula being introduced to a pale young man in the stiff collar and unspeakably formal morning clothes of the South American who is of the upper class.

“Jaime,” said Isabella, beaming. “And this is Charles, whom Paula is to marry! It is romantic! It is fascinating! And I depend on you to give him clothes so that all our servants won’t stare goggle-eyed at him, and I am going to take Paula off at once and dress her! They are our guests! And, Jaime, you must threaten all the servants terribly so they will keep it very secret—that we have two such terrible people with us.”

Paula smiled at Bell, and he saw that she felt utterly safe and wholly at peace. Something was hammering at Bell’s brain, warning him, and he could not understand what it was. But he exchanged the decorous limp handshake which is conventional south of Panama, and followed his unsmiling host to rooms where a servant laid out a bewildering assortment of garments. They were all rather formal, the sort of clothing that is held to be fitting for a man of position where Spanish is the official if not the common tongue.

His host retired, without words, and Bell came out later to find him sipping moodily at a drink, waiting for him. He wiped his forehead.

“Be seated, Señor,” he said heavily, “until the ladies join us.”

He wiped his forehead again and watched somberly while Bell poured out a drink.

“Isabella.…” He seemed to find it difficult to speak. “She has told me a little, but there has been no time for more than a little: I do not wish to have her tell me too much. She does not understand. She was educated in North America, where customs are different. She demands that I assist you and the señorita—it is the señorita?”

Bell stiffened. In all Spanish America the conventions are strict. For a man and woman to travel together, even perforce and for a short distance, automatically damns the woman.