Soldiers of Fortune Part 14

"This ought to be safe enough," Clay murmured to himself. "It's just the place for plotting. I hope there are no snakes." He seated himself on the steps of the pedestal, and lighting a cigar, remained smoking and peering into the shadows about him, until a shadow blacker than the darkness rose at his feet, and a voice said, sternly, "Put out that light. I saw it half a mile away."

Clay rose and crushed his cigar under his foot. "Now then, old man,"

he demanded briskly, "what's up? It's nearly daylight and we must hurry."

Stuart seated himself heavily on the stone steps, like a man tired in mind and body, and unfolded a printed piece of paper. Its blank side was damp and sticky with paste.

"It is too dark for you to see this," he began, in a strained voice, "so I will translate it to you. It is an attack on Madame Alvarez and myself. They put them up during the ball, when they knew my men would be at the Palace. I have had them scouring the streets for the last two hours tearing them down, but they are all over the place, in the cafes and clubs. They have done what they were meant to do."

Clay took another cigar from his pocket and rolled it between his lips.

"What does it say?" he asked.

"It goes over the old ground first. It says Alvarez has given the richest birthright of his country to aliens--that means the mines and Langham--and has put an alien in command of the army--that is meant for me. I've no more to do with the army than you have--I only wish I had!

And then it says that the boundary aggressions of Ecuador and Venezuela have not been resented in consequence. It asks what can be expected of a President who is as blind to the dishonor of his country as he is to the dishonor of his own home?"

Clay muttered under his breath, "Well, go on. Is it explicit? More explicit than that?"

"Yes," said Stuart, grimly. "I can't repeat it. It is quite clear what they mean."

"Have you got any of them?" Clay asked. "Can you fix it on some one that you can fight?"

"Mendoza did it, of course," Stuart answered, "but we cannot prove it.

And if we could, we are not strong enough to take him. He has the city full of his men now, and the troops are pouring in every hour."

"Well, Alvarez can stop that, can't he?"

"They are coming in for the annual review. He can't show the people that he is afraid of his own army."

"What are you going to do?"

"What am I going to do?" Stuart repeated, dully. "That is what I want you to tell me. There is nothing I can do now. I've brought trouble and insult on people who have been kinder to me than my own blood have been. Who took me in when I was naked and clothed me, when I hadn't a friend or a sixpence to my name. You remember--I came here from that row in Colombia with my wound, and I was down with the fever when they found me, and Alvarez gave me the appointment. And this is how I reward them. If I stay I do more harm. If I go away I leave them surrounded by enemies, and not enemies who fight fair, but d.a.m.ned thieves and scoundrels, who stab at women and who fight in the dark. I wouldn't have had it happen, old man, for my right arm! They--they have been so kind to me, and I have been so happy here--and now!" The boy bowed his face in his hands and sat breathing brokenly while Clay turned his unlit cigar between his teeth and peered at him curiously through the darkness. "Now I have made them both unhappy, and they hate me, and I hate myself, and I have brought nothing but trouble to every one. First I made my own people miserable, and now I make my best friends miserable, and I had better be dead. I wish I were dead.

I wish I had never been born."

Clay laid his hand on the other's bowed shoulder and shook him gently.

"Don't talk like that," he said; "it does no good. Why do you hate yourself?"

"What?" asked Stuart, wearily, without looking up. "What did you say?"

"You said you had made them hate you, and you added that you hated yourself. Well, I can see why they naturally would be angry for the time, at least. But why do you hate yourself? Have you reason to?"

"I don't understand," said Stuart.

"Well, I can't make it any plainer," Clay replied. "It isn't a question I will ask. But you say you want my advice. Well, my advice to my friend and to a man who is not my friend, differ. And in this case it depends on whether what that thing--" Clay kicked the paper which had fallen on the ground--"what that thing says is true."

The younger man looked at the paper below him and then back at Clay, and sprang to his feet.

"Why, d.a.m.n you," he cried, "what do you mean?"

He stood above Clay with both arms rigid at his side and his head bent forward. The dawn had just broken, and the two men saw each other in the ghastly gray light of the morning. "If any man," cried Stuart thickly, "dares to say that that blackguardly lie is true I'll kill him. You or any one else. Is that what you mean, d.a.m.n you? If it is, say so, and I'll break every bone of your body."

"Well, that's much better," growled Clay, sullenly. "The way you went on wis.h.i.+ng you were dead and hating yourself made me almost lose faith in mankind. Now you go make that speech to the President, and then find the man who put up those placards, and if you can't find the right man, take any man you meet and make him eat it, paste and all, and beat him to death if he doesn't. Why, this is no time to whimper--because the world is full of liars. Go out and fight them and show them you are not afraid. Confound you, you had me so scared there that I almost thrashed you myself. Forgive me, won't you?" he begged earnestly. He rose and held out his hand and the other took it, doubtfully. "It was your own fault, you young idiot," protested Clay. "You told your story the wrong way. Now go home and get some sleep and I'll be back in a few hours to help you. Look!" he said. He pointed through the trees to the sun that shot up like a red hot disk of heat above the cool green of the mountains. "See," said Clay, "G.o.d has given us another day. Seven battles were fought in seven days once in my country.

Let's be thankful, old man, that we're NOT dead, but alive to fight our own and other people's battles."

The younger man sighed and pressed Clay's hand again before he dropped it.

"You are very good to me," he said. "I'm not just quite myself this morning. I'm a bit nervous, I think. You'll surely come, won't you?"

"By noon," Clay promised. "And if it does come," he added, "don't forget my fifteen hundred men at the mines."

"Good! I won't," Stuart replied. "I'll call on you if I need them."

He raised his fingers mechanically to his helmet in salute, and catching up his sword turned and strode away erect and soldierly through the debris and weeds of the deserted plaza.

Clay remained motionless on the steps of the pedestal and followed the younger man with his eyes. He drew a long breath and began a leisurely search through his pockets for his match-box, gazing about him as he did so, as though looking for some one to whom he could speak his feelings. He lifted his eyes to the stern, smooth-shaven face of the bronze statue above him that seemed to be watching Stuart's departing figure.

"General Bolivar," Clay said, as he lit his cigar, "observe that young man. He is a soldier and a gallant gentleman. You, sir, were a great soldier--the greatest this G.o.d-forsaken country will ever know--and you were, sir, an ardent lover. I ask you to salute that young man as I do, and to wish him well." Clay lifted his high hat to the back of the young officer as it was hidden in the hanging vines, and once again, with grave respect to the grim features of the great general above him, and then smiling at his own conceit, he ran lightly down the steps and disappeared among the trees of the plaza.

IX

Clay slept for three hours. He had left a note on the floor instructing MacWilliams and young Langham not to go to the mines, but to waken him at ten o'clock, and by eleven the three men were galloping off to the city. As they left the Palms they met Hope returning from a morning ride on the Alameda, and Clay begged her, with much concern, not to ride abroad again. There was a difference in his tone toward her. There was more anxiety in it than the occasion seemed to justify, and he put his request in the form of a favor to himself, while the day previous he would simply have told her that she must not go riding alone.

"Why?" asked Hope, eagerly. "Is there going to be trouble?"

"I hope not," Clay said, "but the soldiers are coming in from the provinces for the review, and the roads are not safe."

"I'd be safe with you, though," said Hope, smiling persuasively upon the three men. "Won't you take me with you, please?"

"Hope," said young Langham in the tone of the elder brother's brief authority, "you must go home at once."

Hope smiled wickedly. "I don't want to," she said.

"I'll bet you a box of cigars I can beat you to the veranda by fifty yards," said MacWilliams, turning his horse's head.

Hope clasped her sailor hat in one hand and swung her whip with the other. "I think not," she cried, and disappeared with a flutter of skirts and a scurry of flying pebbles.

"At times," said Clay, "MacWilliams shows an unexpected knowledge of human nature."

"Yes, he did quite right," a.s.sented Langham, nodding his head mysteriously. "We've no time for girls at present, have we?"

"No, indeed," said Clay, hiding any sign of a smile.

Langham breathed deeply at the thought of the part he was to play in this coming struggle, and remained respectfully silent as they trotted toward the city. He did not wish to disturb the plots and counterplots that he was confident were forming in Clay's brain, and his devotion would have been severely tried had he known that his hero's mind was filled with a picture of a young girl in a blue s.h.i.+rt-waist and a whipcord riding-skirt.

Clay sent for Stuart to join them at the restaurant, and MacWilliams arriving at the same time, the four men seated themselves conspicuously in the centre of the cafe and sipped their chocolate as though unconscious of any imminent danger, and in apparent freedom from all responsibilities and care. While MacWilliams and Langham laughed and disputed over a game of dominoes, the older men exchanged, under cover of their chatter, the few words which they had met to speak.

The manifestoes, Stuart said, had failed of their purpose. He had already called upon the President, and had offered to resign his position and leave the country, or to stay and fight his maligners, and take up arms at once against Mendoza's party. Alvarez had treated him like a son, and bade him be patient. He held that Caesar's wife was above suspicion because she was Caesar's wife, and that no canards posted at midnight could affect his faith in his wife or in his friend.

He refused to believe that any coup d'etat was imminent, save the one which he himself meditated when he was ready to proclaim the country in a state of revolution, and to a.s.sume a military dictators.h.i.+p.

"What nonsense!" exclaimed Clay. "What is a military dictators.h.i.+p without soldiers? Can't he see that the army is with Mendoza?"