4,245 words
A
Double-Dyed Deceiver
The trouble
began in Laredo. It was the Llano Kid's fault, for he should have
confined his habit of manslaughter to Mexicans. But the Kid was past twenty; and to have only Mexicans to one's credit at
twenty is to blush unseen on the Rio Grande border.
It happened in
old Justo Valdos's gambling house. There was a poker game at which sat players who were not all friends, as
happens often where men ride in from
afar to shoot Folly as she gallops. There was a
row over so small a matter as a pair of queens; and when the smoke had
cleared away it was found that the Kid had committed an
indiscretion, and his adversary had been guilty of a blunder. For,
the unfortunate combatant, instead of
being a Greaser, was a high-blooded youth from the cow ranches, of
about the Kid's own age and posessed of friends and
champions. His blunder in missing the Kid's right ear only a sixteenth of an inch when he pulled his gun did
not lessen the indiscretion of the better marksman.
The Kid, not being equipped with a retinue, nor bountifully
supplied with personal admirers and supporters -- on account of a
rather
umbrageous reputation, even for the border -- considered it
not
incompatible with his indisputable gameness to perform that
judicious traditional act known as
"pulling his freight."
Quickly the
avengers gathered and sought him. Three of them
overtook him within a rod of the station. The Kid turned and showed
his teeth in that brilliant but mirthless smile that usually preceded his
deeds
of insolence and violence, and his pursuers fell back without
making it necessary for him even to reach for his weapon.
But in this affair the Kid had not felt the grim thirst
for encounter that usually urged him on to battle. It had been a purely
chance row, born of of the cards and certain epithets impossible for a
gentleman to brook that had passed between the two. The Kid had rather liked the slim,
haughty, brown-faced young chap whom his bullet had cut off in the first
pride of manhood. And now he
wanted no more blood. He
wanted to get away and have a good
long sleep somewhere in the sun on the mesquite grass with his
handkerchief over his face.
Even a Mexican might have crossed his path in safety
while he was in this mood.
The Kid openly boarded the north-bound passenger train that
departed five minutes later. But at Webb, a few miles out, where it was
flagged to take on a traveler, he
abandoned that manner of escape.
There were telegraph stations ahead; and the Kid looked askance at
electricity and steam. Saddle and spur were his rocks of safety.
The man
whom he had shot was a stranger to him. But the Kid knew that he
was of the Coralitos outfit from Hidalgo; and that the punchers
from that ranch were more relentless and vengeful than Kentucky feudists
when wrong or harm was done to one of them.
So, with
the wisdom that has characterized many great fighters, the Kid
decided to pile up as many leagues as possible of chaparral and
pear between himself and the retaliation of the Coralitos bunch.
Near the station
was a store; and near the store, scattered among the
mesquite and elms, stood the saddled horses of the customers.
Most of
them waited, half asleep, with sagging limbs and drooping heads.
But one, a long-legged roan with a curved neck, snorted and pawed
the turf. Him the Kid
mounted, gripped with his knees, and slapped gently with the
owner's own quirt.
If the slaying of the temerarious card-player had
cast a cloud over the Kid's standing as a good and true citizen, this last
act of his veiled his figure in the darkest shadows of disrepute. On the
Rio Grande border if you take a man's
life you sometimes take trash; but if you take his horse, you take
a thing the loss of which
renders him poor, indeed, and which enriches you not -- if you are caught.
For the Kid there was no turning back now.
With the springing roan under him he felt little care or
uneasiness. After a five-mile
gallop he drew into the plainsman's jogging trot, and rode north-eastward
toward the Nucces River bottoms. He knew the country well -- its
most tortuous and obscure
trails through the great wilderness of brush and pear, and its camps and
lonesome ranches where one might find safe entertainment. Always he bore
to the east; for the Kid had never seen the ocean, and he had a fancy to lay his hand upon the mane of the great Gulf, the
gamesome colt of the greater waters..
So after three days he stood on the shore at Corpus
Christi, and looked out across the gentle ripples of a quiet sea.
Captain Boone, of the schooner Flyaway, stood near his
skiff, which one of his crew was guarding in the surf. When ready to sail
he had discovered that one of the necessaries of life, in the
parallelogrammatic shape of plug tobacco, had been forgotten. A sailor had
been dispatched for the missing cargo. Meanwhile the captain paced the
sands, chewing profanely at his pocket store.
A slim, wiry youth in high-heeled boots
came down to the water's edge. His
face was boyish, but with a premature severity that hinted at a
man's experience. His complexion was naturally dark; and the sun and wind
of an outdoor life had burned it to a coffee-brown. His hair was as black
and straight as an Indian's; his face had not yet been upturned to the
humiliation of a razor; his eyes were a cold and steady blue. He carried
his left arm somewhat away from his body, for pearl handled .45s are frowned
upon by town marshals, and are a little bulky when packed in the left
armhole of one's vest. He looked beyond Captain Boone at the gulf with the
impersonal and expressionless dignity of a Chinese emperor.
"Thinkin' of buyin' that 'ar gulf, buddy?" asked
the captain, made sarcastic by his narrow escape from the
tobaccoless voyage.
"Why,
no, " said the Kid gently, "I reckon not. I never saw it before.
I was just looking at it. Not thinking of selling it, are
you?"
"Not this trip," said the captain.
"I'll send it to you C.O.D. when I get back to Buenas Tierras. Here
comes that capstan-footed lubber with the chewin'. I ought to've weighed
anchor an hour ago."
“Is that your ship out there?" asked the
Kid.
"Why, yes," answered the captain,
"if you want to call a schooner a ship, and I don't mind Iyin'. But
you better say Miller and Gonzales, owners, and ordinary plain,
Billy-be-damned old Samuel K. Boone, skipper."
"Where are you going to?" asked the refugee.
"Buenas
Tierras, coast of South America -- I forget what they called the
country the last time I was there. Cargo -- lumber, corrugated
iron, and machet
"What kind of a country is it?" asked the Kid
– “hot or cold?"
"Warmish, buddy," said the captain. "But
a regular Paradise Lost for elegance
of scenery and be-yooty of geography. Ye're wakened every morning
by the sweet singin' of red
birds with seven purple tails, and the sighin' of breezes in the posies and roses. And the inhabitants never work, for they can
reach out and pick steamer baskets of the choicest hothouse fruit without
gettin' out of bed. And there's no Sunday and no
ice and no rent and no troubles and no use and no nothin'. It's a great
country for a man to go to sleep with, and wait for somethin' to turn up.
The bananys and oranges and hurricanes and pineapples that ye eat comes
from there."
"That sounds all right to me!" said the Kid,
at last betraying interest. "What'll
the expressage be to take me out there with you?"
"Twenty-four dollars," said Captain Boone;
"grub and transportation. Second cabin. I haven't got a first
cabin."
"You've got my company," said the Kid, pulling out
a buckskin bag.
With three hundred dollars he had gone to Laredo for
his regular "blowout. "
The duel in Valdos's had cut short his season of hilarity, but it
had left him with nearly $200 for aid in the flight that it had made
necessary.
"All right, buddy," said the captain. "I
hope your ma won't blame me for this little
childish escapade of yours." He beckoned to one of the boat's crew.
"Let Sanchez lift you out to the skiff so you won't get your feet
wet."
=============================
Thacker,
the United States consul at Buenas Tierras, was not yet drunk. It was only
eleven o'clock; and he never arrived at his desired state of beatitude --
a state where he sang ancient maudlin vaudeville songs and pelted
his screaming parrot with banana peels -- until the middle of the
afternoon. So, when he looked up from his hammock at the sound of a slight
cough, and saw the Kid standing in the door of the consulate, he was still
in a condition to extend the hospitality and courtesy due from the
representative of a great nation. "Don't disturb yourself," said
the Kid easily. "I just dropped in. They told me it was customary to
light at your camp before starting in to round up the town. I just came in
on a ship from Texas. "
"Glad to see you, Mr. -----------------
," said the consul. The Kid laughed.
"Sprague Dalton," he said. "It sounds
funny to me to hear it. I'm called the Llano Kid in the Rio Grande
country."
"I'm Thacker, " said the consul. "Take that
cane-bottom chair. Now if you've come to invest, you want somebody to
advise you. These dingies will cheat you out of the gold in your teeth if
you don't understand their ways. Try a cigar?"
"Much obliged, " said the Kid, "but if
it wasn't for my corn shucks and the little bag in my back pocket I
couldn't live a minute." He took out his "makings," and
rolled a cigarette.
"They speak Spanish here," said the
consul. "You'll need an interpreter. If there's anything I can do,
why, I'd be delighted. If you're buying fruit lands or looking for a
concession of any sort, you'll want somebody who knows the ropes
to look out for you."
"I speak Spanish," said the Kid,
"about nine times better than I do English. Everybody speaks it on
the range where I come from. And
I'm not in the market for anything."
" You speak Spanish?" said Thacker,
thoughtfully. He regarded the Kid absorbedly.
"You look like a Spaniard, too," he
continued. "And you're from Texas. And you can't be more than twenty
or twenty-one. I wonder if you've got any nerve."
"You got a deal of some kind to put
through?" asked the Texan with unexpected shrewdness.
"Are you open to a proposition?" said
Thacker.
"What's the use to deny it?" said the Kid.
"I got into a little gun frolic down
in Laredo, and plugged a white man. There wasn't any Mexican handy.
And I
come down to your parrot-and-monkey range just for to smell
the morning-glories and marigolds. Now, do you sabe?"
Thacker got up and closed the door.
"Let me see your hand," he said.
He took the Kid's left hand, and examined the
back of it closely.
"I can do it," he said, excitedly.
"Your flesh is as hard as wood and as healthy as a baby's. It will heal in a week."
"If it's a fist fight you want to back me
for," said the Kid, "don't put your money
up yet. Make it gun work, and I'll keep you company.
But no bare-handed scrapping, like ladies at a tea-party, for
me."
"It's easier than that," said Thacker.
"Just step here, will you?"
Through the window he pointed to a two-story
white-stuccoed Righouse with wide galleries rising amid the deep-green
tropical foliage on a wooded hill that sloped gently from the sea.
"In that house," said Thacker, "a fine
old Castilian gentleman and his wife are yearning to gather you into their
arms and fill your pockets with money. Old
Santos Urique lives there. He owns half the gold-mines in the
country."
"You haven't been eating loco weed, have
you?" asked the Kid.
"Sit down again," said Thacker, "and
I'll tell you. Twelve years ago they lost a
kid. No, he didn't die --
although most of 'em here do from drinking the surface
water. He was a wild little devil, even if he wasn't but eight
years old. Everybody knows about it. Some Americans who were through here
prospecting for gold had letters to Senor Urique, and the boy who was a
favorite with them. They filled his head with big stories about the
States; and about a month after they left, the kid disappeared, too. He
was supposed to have stowed himself away among the banana bunches on a
fruit steamer, and gone to New Orleans. He was seen
once afterward in Texas, it was thought, but they never heard
anything more of him. Old Urique has spent thousands of dollars having him
looked for. The madam was broken up worst of all. The kid was her life.
She wears mourning yet. But they say she believes he'll come back to her
some day, and never gives up hope. On the back of the boy's left hand was
tattooed a flying eagle carrying a spear in his claws. That's old Urique's coat of arms
or something that he inherited in Spain."
The Kid raised his left hand slowly and gazed at it
curiously.
"That's it," said Thacker, reaching behind
the official desk for his bottle of smuggled brandy. "You're not so
slow. I can do it. What was I
consul at Sandakan for? I never knew till now. In a week I'll have the
eagle bird with the frog-sticker blended in so you'd think you were born
with it. I brought a set of the needles and ink just because I was sure
you'd drop in some day, Mr. Dalton."
“Oh, hell," said the Kid. "I thought I told you
my name!"
"All right, 'Kid,' then. I won't be that long. How does
'Senorito Urique' sound, for a
change?"
“I never played son any that I remember
of," said the Kid. "If I had any parents to mention they went
over the divide about the time I gave my first bleat. What is the plan of
your round-up?"
Thacker leaned back against the wall and held his
glass up to the light.
"We've come now," said he, "to the
question of how far you're willing to go in a little matter of the
sort."
"I told you why I came down here," said
the Kid simply.
”A good answer," said the consul.
"But you won't have to go that far. Here's
the scheme. After I get the trade-mark tattooed on your hand I'll
notify old Urique. In the meantime I'll furnish you with all of your
family history I can find out, so you can be studying up points to talk
about. You've got the looks, you speak the Spanish, you know the facts,
you can tell about Texas, you've got the tattoo mark. When I notify them
that the rightful heir has returned and is waiting to
know whether he will be received and pardoned what will happen?
They'll simply rush down here and fall on your neck, and the curtain goes
down for refreshments and a stroll in the lobby."
"I'm waiting," said the Kid.
"I haven't had my saddle off in your camp long, pardner, and I never
met you before; but if you intend to let it go at a parental blessing,
why, I'm mistaken in my man, that's all."
"Thanks," said the consul. "I haven't
met anybody in a long time that keeps up
with an argument as well as you do. The rest of it is simple. If
they take you in only for a while it's long enough. Don't give 'em time to
hunt up the strawberry mark on your left shoulder. Old Urique keeps
anywhere from $50,000 to X100,000 in his house all the time in a little
safe that you could open with a shoe buttoner. Get it. My skill as a tattooer is worth half the boodle. We
go halves and catch a tramp
steamer for Rio Janeiro. Let the United States go to pieces if it can't
get along without my services. Que
dice, senor?"
"It sounds good to me!" said the Kid, nodding
his head. "I'm out for the dust."
"All right, then," said Thacker. "You'll have
to keep close until we get the bird on
you. You can live in the back room here. I do my own cooking, and I'll
make you as comfortable as a
parsimonious government will allow me."
Thacker had set the time at a week, but it
was two weeks before the design that he patiently
tattooed upon the Kid's hand was to his notion. And then Thacker called a muchacho,
and dispatched this note to the intended victim:
=============================
El Senor Don Santos Urique,
Las Casa Blanca,
My Dear Sir:
I beg permission to
inform you that there is in my house as a temporary guest a young man who arrived in Buenas
Tierras from the United States some days ago. Without wishing to excite any
hopes that may not be realized, I think there is a possibility of his
being your long-absent son. It might be well for you to call and see him. If he is, it is my opinion that his intention was to return to his home, but upon arriving here, his courage failed him
from doubts as to how he would be received.
Your true servant,
Thompson Thacker
======================================
Half an hour afterward
-- quick time for Buenas Tierras –Senor Urique's ancient landau
drove to the consul's door, with the bare-footed coachman beating and
shouting at the team of fat, awkward horses.
A tall man with a white moustache alighted, and
assisted to the ground a lady who was dressed and veiled in unrelieved
black.
The two hastened inside, and were met by Thacker with his best
diplomatic bow. By his desk stood a slender young man with clear-cut,
sunbrowned features and smoothly brushed black hair.
Senora Urique threw back her heavy veil with a
quick gesture. She was past middle age, and her hair was beginning to
silver, but her full, proud figure and
clear olive skin retained traces of the beauty peculiar to the
Basque province.
But, once
you had seen her eyes, and comprehended the great sadness that was
revealed in their deep shadows and hopeless expression, you saw that the
woman lived only in some memory.
She bent upon the young man a long look of the most
agonized questioning. Then her great black eyes turned, and her gaze.
Rested upon his left hand. And then with a sob, not loud, but seeming to
shake the room, she cried "Hijo
mio!" and caught the Llano Kid to her heart.
A month afterward the Kid came to the consulate
in response to a message sent by Thacker.
He looked the young Spanish caballero. His clothes were
imported, and the wiles of the jewelers had not been spent upon him in
vain. A more than respectable
diamond shone on his finger as he rolled a shuck cigarette.
"What's doing?" asked Thacker.
"Nothing much, " said the Kid calmly.
"I eat my first iguana steak to-day.
They're them big lizards, you sabe?
I reckon, though, that frijoles and side bacon would do me about
as well. Do you care for iguanas, Thacker?"
"No, nor for some other kinds of
reptiles," said Thacker.
It was three in the afternoon, and in
another hour he would be in his state of beatitude.
"It's time you were making good,
sonny," he went on, with an ugly look on
his reddened face. "You're not playing up to me square.
You've been the prodigal son for four weeks now, and you could
have had veal for every meal on a gold dish if you'd wanted it.
Now, Mr. Kid, do you think it's right to leave me out so
long on a husk diet? What's the trouble? Don't you get your filial
eyes on anything that looks like cash in
the Casa Blanca? Don't tell me you don't. Everybody knows where old Urique
keeps his stuff. It's U. S. currency, too; he don't accept anything else.
What's doing? Don't say 'nothing' this time."
"Why, sure," said the Kid,
admiring his diamond, "there's plenty of money up there. I'm no judge
of collateral in bunches, but I will undertake for to say that I've seen
the rise of $50,000 at a time in that tin grub box that my adopted father
calls his safe. And he lets me carry the key sometimes just to show me
that he knows I'm the real little Francisco that strayed from the herd a
long time ago."
“Well, what are you waiting for?" asked
Thacker angrily. "Don't you forget that I can upset your apple-cart
any day I want to. If old Urique
knew you were an impostor, what sort of things would happen to you? Oh,
you don't know this country, Mr. Texas Kid. The laws here have got mustard
spread between 'em. These people here'd
stretch you out like a frog that had been stepped on, and give you
about fifty sticks at every corner of the plaza. And they'd wear every stick out, too. What was left of you they'd feed to
alligators."
"I might as well tell you now,
pardner," said the Kid, sliding down low on his steamer chair,
"that things are going to stay just as they
are. They're about right now."
“What do you mean?" asked Thacker,
rattling the bottom of his glass on his desk.
"The scheme's off," said the Kid.
"And whenever you have the pleasure of speaking to me address me as
Don Francisco Urique. I'll guarantee I'll answer to
it. We'll let Colonel Urique keep his money. His little tin safe is
as good as the time-locker in the First National Bank of Laredo as far as
you and me are concerned."
"You're going to throw me down, then,
are you?" said the consul.
"Sure," said the Kid, cheerfully.
"Throw you down. That's it. And now I'll tell you why. The first
night I was up at the colonel's house they introduced me to a bedroom. No
blankets on the floor -- a real room, with a bed and things in it. And
before I was asleep, in comes this artificial mother of mine and tucks in
the covers. 'Panchito,' she says, 'my little lost one, God has brought you
back to me. I bless His name forever.' It was that, or some truck like that, she
said. And down comes a drop or two of rain and hits me on the nose. And
all that stuck by me, Mr. Thacker. And it's been that way ever since.
And it's got to stay that way. Don't you think that it's for what's
in it for me, either, that I say so. If you have any such ideas keep 'em
to yourself. I haven't had much truck with women in my life, and no
mothers to speak of, but here's a lady that we've got to keep fooled. Once
she stood it; twice she won't. I'm a low-down wolf, and the devil may have
sent me on this trail instead of God, but I'll travel it to the end. And
now, don't forget that I'm Don Francisco Urique whenever you happen to
mention my name."
"I'll expose you to-day, you -- you
double-dyed traitor," stammered Thacker.
The Kid arose and, without violence, took Thacker by
the throat with a hand of steel, and shoved him slowly into a corner. Then
he drew from under his left arm his pearl-handled .45 and poked the cold
muzzle of it against the consul's mouth.
"I told you why I come here," he said,
with his old freezing smile. "If I leave here, you'll be the reason.
Never forget it, pardner. Now, what is my name?"
"Er -- Don Francisco Urique," gasped
Thacker.
From outside came a sound of wheels, and the
shouting of someone, and the sharper thwacks of a wooden whipstock upon
the backs of fat horses.
The Kid put up his gun, and walked toward the
door. But he turned again and came back to the trembling Thacker, and held
up his left hand with its back toward the consul.
There's one more reason," he said, slowly, "why
things have got to stand as they are. The fellow I killed in Laredo had
one of them same pictures on his left hand."
Outside, the ancient landau of Don Santos Urique
rattled to the door. The coachman ceased his bellowing. Senora Urique, in
a voluminous gay gown of white lace and flying ribbons, leaned forward
with a happy look in her great soft eyes.
"Are you within, dear son?" she called, in the
rippling Castilian.
"Madre mia,
yo vengo [mother, I come]," answered the young Don Francisco
Urique.
===========================
:
|