The Key to Yesterday

Steele saw Duska’s smile grow wistful as the last car rounded the curve.

“I can’t quite accustom myself to it,” he said, slowly: “this new girl who has taken the place of the other, of the girl who did not know how to love.”

“I know more about it,” she declared, “than anybody else that ever lived. And I’ve only one life to give to it.”

Saxon’s first mistake was born of the precipitate haste of love. He wrote the letter to Duska that same evening on the train. It was a difficult letter to write. He had to explain, and explain convincingly, that he was disobeying her expressed command only because his love was not the sort that could lull itself into false security. If fate held any chance for him, he would bring back victory. If he laid the ghost of Carter, he would question his sphinx no further.

The writing was premature, because he had to stop in Washington and seek Ribero. He had some questions to ask. But, at Washington, he learned that Ribero had been recalled by government. Then, hurrying through his business in New York, Saxon took the first steamer sailing. It happened to be by a slow line, necessitating several transfers.

It was characteristic of Duska that, when she received the letter hardly a day after Saxon’s departure, she did not at once open it, but, slipping it, dispatch-like, into her belt, she called the terrier, and together they went into the woods. Here, sitting among the ferns with the blackberry thicket at her back and the creek laughing below, she read and reread the pages.

For a while, she sat stunned, her brow drawn; then, she said to the terrier in a voice as nearly plaintive as she ever allowed it to be:

“I don’t like it. I don’t want him ever to go away – and yet – ” she tossed her head upward – “yet, I guess I shouldn’t have much use for him if he didn’t do just such things.”

The terrier evidently approved the sentiment, for he cocked his head gravely to the side, and slowly wagged his stumpy tail.

But the girl did not remain long in idleness. For a time, her forehead was delicately corrugated under the stress of rapid thinking as she sat, her fingers clasped about her updrawn knees, then she rose and hurried to Horton House. There were things to be done and done at once, and it was her fashion, once reaching resolution, to act quickly.

It was necessary to take Mrs. Horton into her full confidence, because it was necessary that Mrs. Horton should be ready to go with her, as fast as trains and steamers could carry them, to a town called Puerto Frio in South America, and South America was quite a long way off. Mrs. Horton had known for weeks that something more was transpiring than showed on the surface. She had even inferred that there was “an understanding” between her niece and the painter, and this inference she had not found displeasing. The story that Duska told did astonish her, but under her composure of manner Mrs. Horton had the ability to act with prompt decision. Mr. Horton knew only part, but was complacent, and saw no reason why a trip planned for a later date should not be “advanced on the docket,” and it was so ordered.

Steele, of course, already knew most of the story, and it was he who kept the telephone busy between the house and the city ticket-offices. While the ladies packed, he was acquiring vast information as to schedules and connections. He learned that they could catch an outgoing steamer from New Orleans, which would probably put them at their destination only a day or two behind Saxon. Incidentally, in making these arrangements, Steele reserved accommodations for himself as well as Mrs. Horton and her niece.

With the American coast left behind, Saxon’s journey through the Caribbean, even with the palliation of the trade-winds, was insufferably hot. The slenderly filled passenger-list gave the slight alleviation of an uncrowded ship. Those few travelers whose misfortunes doomed them to such a cruise at such a time, lay listlessly under the awnings, and watched the face of the water grow bluer, bluer, bluer to the hot indigo of the twentieth parallel, where nothing seemed cool enough for energy or motion except the flying fish and the pursuing gull.

There were several days of this to be endured, and the painter, thinking of matters further north and further south, found no delight in its beauty. He would stand, deep in thought, at the bow when day died and night was born without benefit of twilight, watching the disk of the sun plunge into the sea like a diver. It seemed that Nature herself was here sudden and passionate in matters of life and death. He saw the stars come out, low-hanging and large, and the water blaze with phosphorescence wherever a wave broke, brilliantly luminous where the propeller churned the wake. It was to him an ominous beauty, fraught with crowding portents of ill omen.

The entering and leaving of ports became monotonous. Each was a steaming village of hot adobe walls, corrugated-iron custom houses and sweltering, ragged palms. At last, at a town no more or less appealing than the others, just as the ear-splitting whistle screeched its last warning of departure, a belated passenger came over the side from a frantically-driven row-boat. The painter was looking listlessly out at the green coast line, and did not notice the new arrival.

The newcomer followed his luggage up the gangway to the deck, his forehead streaming perspiration, his none-too-fresh gray flannels splashed with salt water. At the top, he shook the hand of the second officer, with the manner of an old acquaintance.

“I guess that was close!” he announced, as he mopped his face with a large handkerchief, and began fanning himself with a stained Panama hat. “Did the – the stuff get aboard all right at New York?”

The officer looked up, with a quick, cautious glance about him.

“The machinery is stowed away in the hold,” he announced.

“Good,” replied the newcomer, energetically. “That machinery must be safeguarded. It is required in the development of a country that needs developin’. Do I draw my usual stateroom? See the purser? Good!”

The tardy passenger was tall, a bit under six feet, but thin almost to emaciation. His face was keen, and might have been handsome except that the alertness was suggestive of the fox or the weasel – furtive rather than intelligent. The eyes were quick-seeing and roving; the nose, aquiline; the lips, thin. On them sat habitually a half-satirical smile. The man had black hair sprinkled with gray, yet he could not have been more than thirty-six or seven.

“I’ll just run in and see the purser,” he announced, with his tireless energy. Saxon, turning from the hatch, caught only a vanishing glimpse of a tall, flannel-clad figure disappearing into the doorway of the main saloon, as he himself went to his stateroom to freshen himself up for dinner.

As the painter emerged from his cabin a few minutes before the call of the dinner-bugle, the thin man was lounging against the rail further aft.

Saxon stood for a moment drinking in the grateful coolness that was creeping into the air with the freshening of the evening breeze.

The stranger saw him, and started. Then, he looked again, with the swift comprehensiveness that belonged to his keen eyes, and stepped modestly back into the protecting angle where he could himself be sheltered from view by the bulk of a tarpaulined life-boat. When Saxon turned and strolled aft, the man closely followed these movements, then went into his own cabin.

That evening, at dinner, the new passenger did not appear. He dined in his stateroom, but later, as Saxon lounged with his own thoughts on the deck, the tall American was never far away, though he kept always in the blackest shadow thrown by boats or superstructure on the moonlit deck. If Saxon turned suddenly, the other would flatten himself furtively and in evident alarm back into the blackness. He had the manner of a man who is hunted, and who has recognized a pursuer.

Saxon, ignorant even of the other’s presence, had no knowledge of the interest he was himself exciting. Had his curiosity been aroused to inquiry, he might have learned that the man who had recently come aboard was one Howard Stanley Rodman. It is highly improbable, however, that he would have discovered the additional fact that the “stuff” Rodman had asked after as he came aboard was not the agricultural implements described in its billing, but revolutionary muskets to be smuggled off at sunrise to-morrow to the coast village La Punta, five miles above Puerto Frio.

Not knowing that a conspirator was hiding away in a cabin through fear of him, Saxon was of course equally unconscious of having as shipmate a man as dangerous as the cornered wolf to one who stands between itself and freedom.

La Punta is hardly a port. The shipping for this section of the east coast goes to Puerto Frio, and Saxon had not come out of his cabin the next morning when Rodman left. The creaking of crane chains disturbed his sleep, but he detected nothing prophetic in the sound. To have done so, he must have understood that the customs officer at this ocean flag station was up to his neck in a revolutionary plot which was soon to burst; that the steamship line, because of interests of its own which a change of government would advance, had agreed to regard the rifles in the hold as agricultural implements, and that Mr. Rodman was among the most expert of traveling salesmen for revolutions and organizers of juntas. To all that knowledge, he must then have added the quality of prophecy. It is certain, however, that, had he noted the other’s interest in himself and coupled with that interest the coincidence that the initials of the furtive gentleman’s name on the purser’s list were “H. S. R.,” he would have slept still more brokenly.

If he had not looked Mr. Rodman up on the list, Mr. Rodman had not been equally delinquent. The name Robert A. Saxon had by no means escaped his attention.

CHAPTER IX

Puerto Frio sits back of its harbor, a medley of corrugated iron roofs, adobe walls and square-towered churches. Along the water front is a fringe of ragged palms. At one end of the semicircle that breaks the straight coast line, a few steamers come to anchorage; at the other rise jugged groups of water-eaten rocks, where the surf runs with a cannonading of breakers, and tosses back a perpetual lather of infuriated spray. From the mole, Saxon had his first near view of the city. He drew a long inhalation of the hot air, and looked anxiously about him.

He had been asking himself during the length of his journey whether a reminder would be borne in on his senses, and awaken them to a throb of familiarity. He had climbed the slippery landing stairs with the oppressing consciousness that he might step at their top into a new world – or an old and forgotten world. Now, he drew to one side, and swept his eyes questioningly about.

Before him stretched a broad open space, through which the dust swirled hot and indolent. Beyond lay the Plaza of Santo Domingo, and on the twin towers of its church two crosses leaned dismally askew. A few barefooted natives slouched across the sun-refracting square, their shadows blue against the yellow heat. Saxon’s gaze swung steadily about the radius of sight, but his brain, like a paralyzed nerve, touched with the testing-electrode, gave no reflex – no response.

There was a leap at his heart which became hope as his cab jolted on to the Hotel Frances y Ingles over streets that awoke no convicting memories. He set out almost cheerfully for the American Legation to present the letters of introduction he had brought from New York and to tell his story. Thus supplied with credentials and facts, the official might be prepared to assist him.

His second step – the test upon which he mainly depended – involved a search for a yellow cathedral wall, surrounded with red flowers and facing an open area. There, Saxon wanted to stand, for a moment, against the masonry, with the sounds of the street in his ears and the rank fragrance of the vine in his nostrils. There he would ask his memory, under the influence of these reminders, the question the water-front had failed to answer.

That wandering, however, should be reserved for the less conspicuous time of night. He would spend the greater part of the day, since his status was so dubious, in the protection of his room at the hotel.

If night did not answer the question, he would go again at sunrise, and await the early glare on the wall, since that would exactly duplicate former conditions. The night influences would be softer, less cruel – and less exact, but he would go first by darkness and reconnoiter the ground – unless his riddle were solved before.

The American Legation, he was informed, stood as did his hostelry, on the main Plaza, only a few doors distant and directly opposite the palace of the President.

He was met by Mr. Partridge, the secretary of legation. The minister was spending several days at Miravista, but was expected back that evening, or to-morrow morning at the latest. In the meantime, if the secretary could be of service to a countryman, he would be glad. The secretary was a likable young fellow with frank American eyes. He fancied Saxon’s face, and was accordingly cordial.

“There is quite a decent club here for Anglo-Saxon exiles,” announced Mr. Partridge. “Possibly, you’d like to look in? I’m occupied for the day, but I’ll drop around for you this evening, and make you out a card.”

Saxon left his letters with the secretary to be given to the chief on arrival, and returned to the “Frances y Ingles.”

He did not again emerge from his room until evening, and, as he left the patio of the hotel for his journey to the old cathedral, the moon was shining brightly between the shadows of the adobe walls and the balconies that hung above the pavements. As he went out through the street-door, Mr. Howard Stanley Rodman glanced furtively up from a corner table, and tossed away a half-smoked cigarette.

The old cathedral takes up a square. In the niches of its outer wall stand the stone effigies of many saints. Before its triple, iron-studded doors stretches a tiled terrace. At its right runs a side-street, and, attracted by a patch of clambering vine on the time-stained walls, where the moon fell full upon them, Saxon turned into the byway. At the far end, the façade rose blankly, fronting a bare drill-ground, and there he halted. The painter had not counted on the moon. Now, as he took his place against the wall, it bathed him in an almost effulgent whiteness. The shadows of the abutments were inky in contrast, and the disused and ancient cannon, planted at the curb for a corner post, stood out boldly in relief. But the street was silent and, except for himself, absolutely deserted.

For a time, he stood looking outward. From somewhere at his back, in the vaultlike recesses of the building, drifted the heavy pungency of incense burning at a shrine.

His ears were alert for the sounds that might, in their drifting inconsequence, mean everything. Then, as no reminder came, he closed his eyes, and wracked his imagination in concentrated thought as a monitor to memory. He groped after some detail of the other time, if the other time had been an actual fragment of his life. He strove to recall the features of the officer who commanded the death squad, some face that had stood there before him on that morning; the style of uniforms they wore. He kept his eyes closed, not only for seconds, but for minutes, and, when in answer to his focused self-hypnotism and prodding suggestion no answer came, there came in its stead a torrent of joyous relief.

Then, he heard something like a subdued ejaculation, and opened his eyes upon a startling spectacle.

Leaning out from the shadow of an abutment stood a thin man, whose face in the moon showed a strange mingling of savagery and terror. It was a face Saxon did not remember to have seen before. The eyes glittered, and the teeth showed as the thin lips were drawn back over them in a snarling sort of smile. But the most startling phase of the tableau, to the man who opened his eyes upon it without warning, was the circumstance of the unknown’s pressing an automatic pistol against his breast. Saxon’s first impression was that he had fallen prey to a robber, but he knew instinctively that this expression was not that of a man bent on mere thievery. It had more depth and evil satisfaction. It was the look of a man who turns a trick in an important game.

As the painter gazed at the face and figure bending forward from the abutment’s sooty shadow like some chimera or gargoyle fashioned in the wall, his first sentiment was less one of immediate peril than of argument with himself. Surely, so startling a dénouement should serve to revive his memory, if he had faced other muzzles there!

When the man with the pistol spoke, it was in words that were illuminating. The voice was tremulous with emotion, probably nervous terror, yet the tone was intended to convey irony, and was partly successful.

“I presume,” it said icily, “you wished to enjoy the sensation of standing at that point – this time with the certainty of walking away alive. It must be a pleasant reminiscence, but one never can tell.” The thin man paused, and then began afresh, his voice charged with a bravado that somehow seemed to lack genuineness.

“Last time, you expected to be carried away dead – and went away living. This time, you expected to walk away in safety, and, instead, you’ve got to die. Your execution was only delayed.” He gave a short, nervous laugh, then his voice came near breaking as he went on almost wildly: “I’ve got to kill you, Carter. God knows I don’t want to do it, but I must have security! This knowledge that you are watching me to drop on me like a hawk on a rat, will drive me mad. They’ve told me up and down both these God-forsaken coasts, from Ancon to Buenos Ayres, from La Boca to Concepcion, that you would get me, and now it’s sheer self-defense with me. I know you never forgave a wrong – and God knows that I never did you the wrong you are trying to revenge. God knows I am innocent.”

Rodman halted breathless, and stood with his flat chest rising and falling almost hysterically. He was in the state when men are most irresponsible and dangerous.

Meanwhile, a pistol held in an unsteady hand, its trigger under an uncertain finger, emphasized a situation that called for electrical thinking. To assert a mistake in identity would be ludicrous. Saxon was not in a position to claim that. The other man seemed to have knowledge that he himself lacked. Moreover, that knowledge was the information which Saxon, as self-prosecutor, must have. The only course was to meet the other’s bravado with a counter show of bravado, and keep him talking. Perhaps, some one would pass in the empty street.

“Well,” demanded Rodman between gasping breaths, “why in hell don’t you say something?”

Saxon began to feel the mastery of the stronger man over the weaker, despite the fact that the weaker supplemented his inferiority with a weapon.

“It appears to me,” came the answer, and it was the first time Rodman had heard the voice, now almost velvety, “it appears to me that there isn’t very much for me to say. You seem to be in the best position to do the talking.”

“Yes, damn you!” accused the other, excitedly. “You are always the same – always making the big pyrotechnic display! You have grandstanded and posed as the debonair adventurer, until it’s come to be second nature. That won’t help now!” The thin man’s braggadocio changed suddenly to something like a whine.

“You know I’m frightened, and you’re throwing a bluff. You’re a fool not to realize that it’s because I’m so frightened that I am capable of killing you. I’ve craned my neck around every corner, and jumped at every shadow since that day – always watching for you. Now, I’m going to end it. I see your plan as if it were printed on a glass pane. You’ve discovered my doings, and, if you left here alive, you’d inform the government.”

Here, at least, Saxon could speak, and speak truthfully.

“I don’t know anything, or care anything, about your plans,” he retorted, curtly.

“That’s a damned lie!” almost shrieked the other man. “It’s just your style. It’s just your infernal chicanery. I wrote you that letter in good faith, and you tracked me. You found out where I was and what I was doing. How you learned it, God knows, but I suppose it’s still easy for you to get into the confidence of the juntas. The moment I saw you on the boat, the whole thing flashed on me. It was your fine Italian brand of work to come down on the very steamer that carried my guns – to come ashore just at the psychological moment, and turn me over to the authorities on the exact verge of my success! Your brand of humor saw irony in that – in giving me the same sort of death you escaped. But it’s too late. Vegas has the guns in spite of you! There’ll be a new president in the palace within three days.” The man’s voice became almost triumphant. He was breathing more normally once again, as his courage gained its second wind.

Saxon was fencing for time. Incidentally, he was learning profusely about the revolution of to-morrow, but nothing of the revolution of yesterday.

“I neither know, nor want to know, anything about your dirty work,” he said, shortly. “Moreover, if you think I’m bent on vengeance, you are a damned fool to tell me.”

Rodman laughed satirically.

“Oh, I’m not so easy as you give me credit for being. You are trying to ‘kiss your way out,’ as the thieves put it. You’re trying to talk me out of killing you, but do you know why I’m willing to tell you all this?” He halted, then went on tempestuously. “I’ll tell you why. In the first place, you know it already, and, in the second place, you’ll never repeat any information after to-night. It’s idiotic perhaps, but my reason for not killing you right at the start is that I’ve got a fancy for telling you the true facts, whether you choose to believe them or not. It will ease my conscience afterward.”

Saxon stood waiting for the next move, bracing himself for an opportunity that might present itself, the pistol muzzle still pointed at his chest.

“I’m not timid,” went on the other. “You know me. Howard Rodman, speakin’ in general, takes his chances. But I am afraid of you, more afraid than I am of the devil in hell. I know I can’t bluff you. I saw you stand against this wall with the soldiers out there in front, and, since you can’t be frightened off, you must be killed.” The man’s voice gathered vehemence as he talked, and his face showed growing agitation. “And the horrible part is that it’s all a mistake, that I’d rather be friends with you, if you’d let me. I never was informant against you.”

He paused, exhausted by his panic and his flow of words. Saxon, with a strong effort, collected his staggered senses.

“Why do you think I come for vengeance?” he asked.

“Why do I think it?” The thin man laughed bitterly. “Why, indeed? What except necessity or implacable vengeance could drive a man to this God-forsaken strip of coast? And you – you with money enough to live richly in God’s country, you whose very face in these boundaries invites imprisonment or death! What else could bring you? But I knew you’d come – and, so help me God, I’m innocent.”

A sudden idea struck Saxon. This might be the cue to draw on the frightened talker without self-revelation.

“What do you want me to believe were the real facts?” he demanded, with an assumption of the cold incredulity that seemed expected of him.

The other spoke eagerly.

“That morning when General Ojedas’ forces entered Puerto Frio, and the government seized me, you were free. Then, I was released, and you arrested. You drew your conclusions. Oh, they were natural enough. But, before heaven, they were wrong!”

Saxon felt that, until he had learned the full story, he must remain the actor. Accordingly, he allowed himself a skeptical laugh. Rodman, stung by the implied disbelief, took up his argument again:

“You think I’m lying. It sounds too fishy! Of course, it was my enterprise. It was a revolution of my making. You were called in as the small lawyer calls in the great one. I concede all that. For me to have sacrificed you would have been infamous, but I didn’t do it. I had been little seen in Puerto Frio. I was not well known. I had arranged it all from the outside while you had been in the city. You were less responsible, but more suspected. You remember how carefully we planned – how we kept apart. You know that even you and I met only twice, and that I never even saw your man, Williams.”