bound down stream. And once, a glare of light, near the south bank, as they
passed through the Toreno field, aroused brief debate as to whether it was the
Toreno wells, or the bungalow on Merrick’s banana plantation that flared so
fiercely.
At the end of an hour, Peter slowed down and ran in to the bank.
“I got a cache of gasoline here—ten gallons,” he explained, “and it’s just as well to
know it’s here for the back trip.” Without leaving the boat, fishing arm-deep into
the brush, he announced, “All hunky-dory.” He proceeded to oil the engine.
“Huh!” he soliloquized for their benefit. “I was just readin’ a magazine yarn last
night. ‘Whose Business Is to Die,’ was its title. An’ all I got to say is, ‘The hell it
is.’ A man’s business is to live. Maybe you thought it was our business to die
when the Topila was pepperin’ us. But you was wrong. We’re alive, ain’t we? We
beat her to it. That’s the game. Nobody’s got any business to die. I ain’t never goin’
to die, if I’ve got any say about it.”
He turned over the crank, and the roar and rush of the Chill put an end to speech.
There was no need for Wemple or Davies to speak further in the affair closest to
their hearts. Their truce to love-making had been made as binding as it was brief,
and each rival honored the other with a firm belief that he would commit no
infraction of the truce. Afterward was another matter. In the meantime they were
one in the effort to get Beth Drexel back to the safety of riotous Tampico or of a
war vessel.
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68
It was four o’clock when they passed by Panuco Town. Shouts and songs told
them that the federal detachment holding the place was celebrating its indignation
at the landing of American bluejackets in Vera Cruz. Sentinels challenged the
Chill from the shore and shot at random at the noise of her in the darkness.
A mile beyond, where a lighted river steamer with steam up lay at the north bank,
they ran in at the Apshodel wells. The steamer was small, and the nearly two
hundred Americans—men, women, and children—crowded her capacity.
Blasphemous greetings of pure joy and geniality were exchanged between the
men, and Habert learned that the steamboat was waiting for his Billy Boy, who,
astride a horse, was rounding up isolated drilling gangs who had not yet learned
that the United States had seized Vera Cruz and that all Mexico was boiling.
Habert climbed out to wait and to go down on the steamer, while the three that
remained on the Chill, having learned that Miss Drexel was not with the refugees,
headed for the Dutch Company on the south shore. This was the big gusher,
pinched down from one hundred and eighty-five thousand daily barrels to the
quantity the company was able to handle. Mexico had no quarrel with Holland, so
that the superintendent, while up, with night guards out to prevent drunken
soldiers from firing his vast lakes of oil, was quite unemotional. Yes, the last he
had heard was that Miss Drexel and her brother were back at the hunting lodge.
No; he had not sent any warnings, and he doubted that anybody else had. Not till
ten o’clock the previous evening had he learned of the landing at Vera Cruz. The
Mexicans had turned nasty as soon as they heard of it, and they had killed Miles
Forman at the Empire Wells, run off his labor, and looted the camp. Horses? No;
he didn’t have horse or mule on the place. The federals had commandeered the
last animal weeks back. It was his belief, however, that there were a couple of
plugs at the lodge, too worthless even for the Mexicans to take.
“It’s a hike,” Davies said cheerfully.
“Six miles of it,” Wemple agreed, equally cheerfully. “Let’s beat it.”
A shot from the river, where they had left Peter in the boat, started them on the
run for the bank. A scattering of shots, as from two rifles, followed. And while the
Dutch superintendent, in execrable Spanish, shouted affirmations of Dutch
neutrality into the menacing dark, across the gunwale of Chill II they found the
body of the tow-headed youth whose business it had been not to die.
For the first hour, talking little, Davies and Wemple stumbled along the apology
for a road that led through the jungle to the lodge. They did discuss the glares of
several fires to the east along the south bank of Panuco River, and hoped fervently
that they were dwellings and not wells.
“Two billion dollars worth of oil right here in the Eba&ncedilla;o field alone,”
Davies grumbled.
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69
“And a drunken Mexican, whose whole carcass and immortal soul aren’t worth ten
pesos including hair, hide, and tallow, can start the bonfire with a lighted wad of
cotton waste,” was Wemple’s contribution. “And if ever she starts, she’ll gut the
field of its last barrel.”
Dawn, at five, enabled them to accelerate their pace; and six o’clock found them
routing out the occupants of the lodge.
“Dress for rough travel, and don’t stop for any frills,” Wemple called around the
corner of Miss Drexel’s screened sleeping porch.
“Not a wash, nothing;” Davies supplemented grimly, as he shook hands with
Charley Drexel, who yawned and slippered up to them in pajamas. “Where are
those horses, Charley? Still alive?”
Wemple finished giving orders to the sleepy peons to remain and care for the
place, occupying their spare time with hiding the more valuable things, and was
calling around the corner to Miss Drexel the news of the capture of Vera Cruz,
when Davies returned with the information that the horses consisted of a pair of
moth-eaten skates that could be depended upon to lie down and die in the first
half mile.
Beth Drexel emerged, first protesting that under no circumstances would she be
guilty of riding the creatures, and, next, her brunette skin and dark eyes still
flushed warm with sleep, greeting the two rescuers.
“It would be just as well if you washed your face, Stanton,” she told Davies; and,
to Wemple: “You’re just as bad, Jim. You are a pair of dirty boys.”
“And so will you be,” Wemple assured her, “before you get back to Tampico. Are
you ready?”
“As soon as Juanita packs my hand bag.”
“Heavens, Beth, don’t waste time!” exclaimed Wemple. “Jump in and grab up
what you want.”
“Make a start—make a start,” chanted Davies. “Hustle! Hustle!—Charley, get the
rifle you like best and take it along. Get a couple for us.”
“Is it as serious as that?” Miss Drexel queried.
Both men nodded.
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“The Mexicans are tearing loose,” Davies explained. “How they missed this place
I don’t know.” A movement in the adjoining room startled him. “Who’s that?” he
cried.
“Why, Mrs. Morgan,” Miss Drexel answered.
“Good heavens, Wemple, I’d forgotten her,” groaned Davies. “How will we ever
get her anywhere?”
“Let Beth walk, and relay the lady on the nags.”
“She weighs a hundred and eighty,” Miss Drexel laughed. “Oh, hurry, Martha!
We’re waiting on you to start!”
Muffled speech came through the partition, and then emerged a very short, stout,
much-flustered woman of middle age.
“I simply can’t walk, and you boys needn’t demand it of me,” was her plaint. “It’s
no use. I couldn’t walk half a mile to save my life, and it’s six of the worst miles to
the river.”
They regarded her in despair.
“Then you’ll ride,” said Davies. “Come on, Charley. We’ll get a saddle on each of
the nags.”
Along the road through the tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian
maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while
in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two
decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment
Mrs. Morgan’s burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse.
And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a
mile of Mrs. Morgan.
Miss Drexel laughed and joked and encouraged; and Wemple, in brutal fashion,
compelled Mrs. Morgan to walk every third quarter of a mile. At the end of an
hour the sorrel refused positively to get up, and, so, was abandoned. Thereafter,
Mrs. Morgan rode the roan alternate quarters of miles, and between times
walked—if walk may describe her stumbling progress on two preposterously tiny
feet with a man supporting her on either side.
A mile from the river, the road became more civilized, running along the side of a
thousand acres of banana plantation.
“Parslow’s,” young Drexel said. “He’ll lose a year’s crop now on account of this
mix-up.”
DUTCH COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES