The White Mice Part 2

Much time had pa.s.sed since the two friends had been able to insult each other face to face.

"Roddy," coldly declared Peter, "if I thought _you_ had charted that channel I'd go home on foot, by land."

"Do you mean you think I can't plant deep-sea buoys?" demanded Roddy.

"You can't plant potatoes!" said Peter. "If you had to set up lamp-posts, with the street names on them, along Broadway, you would put the ones marked Union Square in Columbus Circle."

"I want you to know," shouted Roddy, "that my buoys are the talk of this port. These people are just crazy about my buoys--especially the red buoys. If you didn't come to Venezuela to see my buoys, why did you come? I will plant a buoy for you to-morrow!" challenged Roddy. "I will show you!"

"You will _have_ to show me," said Peter.

Peter had been a week in Porto Cabello, and, in keeping Roddy at work, had immensely enjoyed himself. Each morning, in the company's gasoline launch, the two friends went put-put-putting outside the harbor, where Roddy made soundings for his buoys, and Peter lolled in the stern and fished. His special pleasure was in trying to haul man-eating sharks into the launch at the moment Roddy was leaning over the gunwale, taking a sounding.

One evening at sunset, on their return trip, as they were under the shadow of the fortress, the engine of the launch broke down. While the black man from Trinidad was diagnosing the trouble, Peter was endeavoring to interest Roddy in the quaint little Dutch Island of Curacao that lay one hundred miles to the east of them. He chose to talk of Curacao because the s.h.i.+p that carried him from the States had touched there, while the s.h.i.+p that brought Roddy south had not. This fact irritated Roddy, so Peter naturally selected the moment when the launch had broken down and Roddy was both hungry and peevish to talk of Curacao.

"Think of your never having seen Curacao!" he sighed. "Some day you certainly must visit it. With a sea as flat as this is to-night you could make the run in the launch in twelve hours. It is a place you should see."

"That is so like you," exclaimed Roddy indignantly. "I have been here four months, and you have been here a week, and you try to tell _me_ about Curacao! It is the place where curacao and revolutionists come from. All the exiles from Venezuela wait over there until there is a revolution over here, and then they come across. You can't tell _me_ anything about Curacao. _I_ don't have to _go_ to a place to know about it."

"I'll bet," challenged Peter, "you don't know about the mother and the two daughters who were exiled from Venezuela and live in Curacao, and who look over here every night at sunset?"

Roddy laughed scornfully. "Why, that is the first thing they tell you," he cried; "the purser points them out from the s.h.i.+p, and tells you----"

"Tells _you_, yes," cried Peter triumphantly, "but I _saw_ them. As we left the harbor they were standing on the cliff--three women in white--looking toward Venezuela. They told me the father of the two girls is in prison here. He was----"

"_Told_ you, yes," mimicked Roddy, "told you he was in prison. I have _seen_ him in prison. There is the prison."

Roddy pointed at the flat, yellow fortress that rose above them.

Behind the tiny promontory on which the fortress crouched was the town, separated from it by a stretch of water so narrow that a golf-player, using the quay of the custom-house for a tee, could have driven a ball against the prison wall.

Daily, from the town, Peter had looked across the narrow harbor toward the level stretch of limestone rock that led to the prison gates, and had seen the petty criminals, in chains, splash through the pools left by the falling tide, had watched each pick up a cask of fresh water, and, guarded by the barefooted, red-capped soldiers, drag his chains back to the prison. Now, only the boat's-length from them, he saw the sheer face of the fortress, where it slipped to depths unknown into the sea. It impressed him most unpleasantly. It had the look less of a fortress than of a neglected tomb. Its front was broken by wind and waves, its surface, blotched and mildewed, white with crusted salt, hideous with an eruption of dead barnacles. As each wave lifted and retreated, leaving the porous wall dripping like a sponge, it disturbed countless crabs, rock scorpions and creeping, leech-like things that ran blindly into the holes in the limestone; and, at the water-line, the sea-weed, licking hungrily at the wall, rose and fell, the great arms twisting and coiling like the tentacles of many devilfish.

Distaste at what he saw, or the fever that at sunset drives wise Venezuelans behind closed shutters, caused Peter to s.h.i.+ver slightly.

For some moments, with grave faces and in silence, the two young men sat motionless, the mind of each trying to conceive what life must be behind those rusted bars and moss-grown walls.

"Somewhere, buried in there," said Roddy, "is General Rojas, the Lion of Valencia, a man," he added sententiously, "beloved by the people.

He has held all the cabinet positions, and been amba.s.sador in Europe, and Alvarez is more afraid of him than of any other man in Venezuela.

And why? For the simple reason that he is good. When the people found out what a blackguard Alvarez is they begged Rojas to run for President against him, and Rojas promised that if, at the next election, the people still desired it, he would do as they wished.

That night Alvarez hauled him out of bed and put him in there. He has been there two years. There _are_ healthy prisons, but Alvarez put Rojas in this one, hoping it would kill him. He is afraid to murder him openly, because the people love him. When I first came here I went through the fortress with Vicenti, the prison doctor, on a sort of Seeing-Porto-Cabello trip. He pointed out Rojas to me through the bars, same as you would point out a monument to a dead man. Rojas was sitting at a table, writing, wrapped in a shawl. The cell was lit by a candle, and I give you my word, although it was blazing hot outside, the place was as damp as a refrigerator. When we raised our lanterns he stood up, and I got a good look at him. He is a thin, frail little man with white hair and big, sad eyes, with a terribly lonely look in them. At least I thought so; and I felt so ashamed at staring at him that I bowed and salaamed to him through the bars, and he gave me the most splendid bow, just as though he were still an amba.s.sador and I a visiting prince. The doctor had studied medicine in New York, so probably he talked to me a little more freely than he should. He says he warned the commandant of the fortress that unless Rojas is moved to the upper tier of cells, above the water-line, he will die in six months. And the commandant told him not to meddle in affairs of state, that his orders from the President were that Rojas 'must never again feel the heat of the sun.'"

Peter de Peyster exclaimed profanely. "Are there no men in this country?" he growled. "Why don't his friends get him out?"

"They'd have to get themselves out first," explained Roddy. "Alvarez made a clean sweep of it, even of his wife and his two daughters, the women you saw. He exiled them, and they went to Curacao. They have plenty of money, and they _could_ have lived in Paris or London. He has been minister in both places, and has many friends over there, but even though they cannot see him or communicate with him, they settled down in Curacao so that they might be near him.

"The night his wife was ordered out of the country she was allowed to say good-by to him in the fortress, and there she arranged that every night at sunset she and her daughters would look toward Port Cabello, and he would look toward Curacao. The women bought a villa on the cliff, to the left of the harbor of Willemstad as you enter, and the people, the Dutch and the Spaniards and negroes, all know the story, and when they see the three women on the cliff at sunset it is like the Angelus ringing, and, they say, the people pray that the women may see him again."

For a long time Peter de Peyster sat scowling at the prison, and Roddy did not speak, for it is not possible to room with another man through two years of college life and not know something of his moods.

Then Peter leaned toward Roddy and stared into his face. His voice carried the suggestion of a challenge.

"I hear something!" he whispered.

Whether his friend spoke in metaphor or stated a fact, Roddy could not determine. He looked at him questioningly, and raised his head to listen. Save for the whisper of the waves against the base of the fortress, there was no sound.

"What?" asked Roddy.

"I hear the call of the White Mice," said Peter de Peyster.

There was a long silence. Then Roddy laughed softly, his eyes half closed; the muscles around the lower jaw drew tight.

Often before Peter had seen the look in his face, notably on a memorable afternoon when Roddy went to the bat, with three men on base, two runs needed to win the champions.h.i.+p and twenty thousand shrieking people trying to break his nerve.

"I will go as far as you like," said Roddy.

Porto Cabello is laid out within the four boundaries of a square.

The boundary on the east and the boundary on the north of the square meet at a point that juts into the harbor. The wharves and the custom-house, looking toward the promontory on which stands the fortress prison, form the eastern side of the square, and along the northern edge are the Aquatic Club, with its veranda over the water, the hotel, with its bath-rooms underneath the water, and farther along the harbor front houses set in gardens. As his work was in the harbor, Roddy had rented one of these houses. It was discreetly hidden by mango-trees and palmetto, and in the rear of the garden, steps cut in the living rock led down into the water. In a semicircle beyond these steps was a fence of bamboo stout enough to protect a bather from the harbor sharks and to serve as a breakwater for the launch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I hear the call of the White Mice," said Peter de Peyster.]

"When I rented this house," said Roddy, "I thought I took it because I could eat mangoes while I was in bathing and up to my ears in water, which is the only way you can eat a mango and keep your self-respect.

But I see now that Providence sent me here because we can steal away in the launch without any one knowing it."

"If you can move that launch its own length without the whole town knowing it," commented Peter, "you will have to chloroform it. It barks like a machine gun."

"My idea was," explained Roddy, "that we would row to the fortress.

After we get the General on board, the more it sounds like a machine gun the better."

Since their return in the launch, and during dinner, which had been served in the tiny _patio_ under the stars, the White Mice had been discussing ways and means. A hundred plans had been proposed, criticised, rejected; but by one in the morning, when the candles were guttering in the harbor breeze and the Scotch whiskey had shrunk several inches, the conspirators found themselves agreed. They had decided they could do nothing until they knew in which cell the General was imprisoned, and especially the position of his window in that cell that looked out upon the harbor; that, with the aid of the launch, the rescue must be made from the water, and that the rescuers must work from the outside. To get at Rojas from the inside it would be necessary to take into their confidence some one of the prison officials, and there was no one they dared to trust. Had it been a question of money, Roddy pointed out, the friends of Rojas would already have set him free. That they had failed to do so proved, not that the prison officials were incorruptible, but that their fear of the wrath of Alvarez was greater than their cupidity.

"There are several reasons why we should not attempt to bribe any one," said Roddy, "and the best one is the same reason the man gave for not playing poker. To-morrow I will introduce you to Vicenti, the prison doctor, and we'll ask him to take us over the prison, and count the cells, and try to mark the one in which we see Rojas. Perhaps we'd better have the doctor in to dinner. He likes to tell you what a devil of a fellow he was in New York, and you must pretend to believe he was. We might also have the captain of the port, and get him to give us permission to take the launch out at night. This port is still under martial law, and after the sunset gun no boat may move about the harbor. Then we must have some harpoons made and get out that headlight, and spear eels."

"You couldn't spear an eel," objected Peter, "and if you could I wouldn't eat it."

"You don't have to eat it!" explained Roddy; "the eels are only an excuse. We want to get the sentries used to seeing us flas.h.i.+ng around the harbor at night. If we went out there without some excuse, and without permission, exploding like a barrel of fire-crackers, they'd sink us. So we must say we are out spearing eels."

The next morning Roddy showed a blacksmith how to hammer out tridents for spearing eels, and that night those people who lived along the harbor front were kept awake by quick-fire explosions, and the glare in their windows of a s.h.i.+fting search-light. But at the end of the week the launch of the Gringos, as it darted noisily in and out of the harbor, and carelessly flashed its search-light on the walls of the fortress, came to be regarded less as a nuisance than a blessing. For with n.o.ble self-sacrifice the harbor eels lent themselves to the deception. By hundreds they swarmed in front of the dazzling headlight; by dozens they impaled themselves upon the tines of the pitchforks. So expert did Roddy and Peter become in harpooning, that soon they were able each morning to send to the captain of the port, to the commandant, to the prison doctor, to every citizen who objected to having his sleep punctuated, a basket of eels. It was noticed that at intervals the engine of the launch would not act properly, and the gringos were seen propelling the boat with oars. Also, the light often went out, leaving them in darkness. They spoke freely of these accidents with bitter annoyance, and people sympathized with them.

One night, when they were seated plotting in the _patio_, Roddy was overwhelmed with sudden misgivings.

"Wouldn't it be awful," he cried, "if, after we have cut the bars and shown him the rope ladder and the launch, he refuses to come with us!"

"Is that _all_ that's worrying you?" asked Peter.