The Pirate of Panama (Musaicum Adventure Classics). William MacLeod Raine
foot moved forward and pinned the paper to the cement walk. Should I pick it up? Of what use? It would turn out to be only some Chinese laundry bill. Already the gong of the street-car was not more than a block away as it swept down the hill.
Was it some faint sound that drew my eyes up? Or was I answering the call of my destiny when my lifted gaze met the figure of a young woman framed in a second-story window? She was leaning far out, with arm stretched down and fingers opened wide.
Behind her stood a man, also out of the window to his waist. One of his hands clutched her wrist, the other reached toward hers. That he had been trying to take from her the paper she had flung away was an easy guess.
I had but the fraction of a second before my car was slowing for the crossing, but it was long enough to read in his dark face a malignant rage, in her fair, flushed one a defiant triumph. Stooping, I gathered the document that lay under my foot, then ran forward and swung to the platform of the car.
If there had been time for second thought I might have stayed to see the drama out, or I might have left the cause of quarrel where it lay. As it was I had done neither one thing nor the other. Having yielded to impulse so far as to pick up the paper, I had then done the conventional thing and ignored the little scene above.
But when I glanced back up the hill I glimpsed a man flying bareheaded from a doorway and pursuing the car with gestures of impotent fury.
All the way down to the business quarter the odd affair challenged my interest. What did it mean? The picture in the window was no laughing romp meant to end in kisses. So much I was willing to swear. There was passion in both the faces.
Out of those two lives I had snatched a vivid moment, perhaps one of many common to them, perhaps the first their intersecting life-lines had developed.
Was the man her husband? I was not willing to think so. More likely a brother, I persuaded myself. For it was already being borne in upon me that freakish chance had swept me into the orbit of the thing we spell Romance.
A petty domestic quarrel suggested itself as the obvious solution, but the buoyant youth in me refused any such tame explanation. For the girl was amazingly pretty.
After a glance at it I put the crumpled paper in my pocketbook. In that crowded car, hanging to a strap, I could make nothing of it. At the office my time belonged to Kester & Wilcox until noon, for I was still in that preliminary stage of my legal career during which I found it convenient to exchange my inexperience for fifteen dollars a week. A clouded real-estate title was presumably engaging my attention, but between my mind and the abstract kept jumping a map with the legend "Doubloon Spit" above it.
Faith, the blood sang in my veins. The scent of adventure was in my nostrils. A fool you may think me, but I was already on the hunt for buried treasure. Half a dozen times I had the paper out furtively, and as soon as my hour of release came I cleared the desk and spread the yellow, tattered document upon it.
The ink had been originally red, but in places it was faded almost to illegibility. The worn edges at the folds showed how often it had been opened and scanned. One lower corner had been torn away, leaving perhaps seven-eighths of the original manuscript. Yet in spite of its imperfect state of preservation I found this relic of a dead and forgotten past pulse-stirring.
Before me lay the map of a peninsula, the upper part sketched in vaguely but the toe marked apparently with the greatest care. The first detail that caught my eye was a sketch of a brig in the bay, beneath which was written:
"Here Santa Theresa went to Hell."
It was plain that the coast line was charted accurately so as to show the precise location of the inlets. It was a contour map, giving the hills, sand reaches, and groves. At the nearest one of these last was jotted down the words: "Umbrela Tree."
A little cross had been drawn near the foot of a hill. From this a long line ran into the bay with a loop at the end in which had been printed neatly: "Where Lobardi croked. Good riddance."
Not far from this were three little circles, beneath which was one word in capitals, "ITTE."
My heart leaped like an unleashed foxhound taking the trail. What could it mean but treasure? What had happened to the Santa Theresa? Had some one helped Lobardi to "croke" by cracking his skull? Could that dim, red ink once have been, the life blood in a man's veins?
Here was food enough to fire the blood of a cool-headed Yankee, let alone that of a mad Irishman. I caught a vision of a boatload of red-turbaned buccaneers swarming up the side of a brig; saw the swish of cutlases and the bellying smoke of pistols; beheld the strangely garbed seadogs gathered around an open chest of yellow gold bars shining in the sun.
For an eyebeat it was all clear to me as day. Then I laughed aloud at myself in returning sanity. I was in the twentieth century, not the eighteenth. An imagination so vivid that it read all this from a scrap of paper picked from the gutter needed curbing. I repocketed the chart and went to lunch.
But I found I could not laugh myself out of my interest. The mystery of it drew me, despite myself. While I waited for my chop I had the map out again, studying it as a schoolboy does a paper-backed novel behind his geography.
Beneath the map were some closely written lines of directions for finding "itte," whatever that might be. As to that my guess never wavered.
Whoever had drawn the map had called the peninsula "Doubloon Spit." Why? Clearly because he and his fellow buccaneers had buried there the ill-gotten treasure they had gained from piracy. No doubt the Santa Theresa was a gold ship they had waylaid and sunk.
At my entrance I had taken a little side table, but the restaurant was filling rapidly. A man stopped beside my table and took off a frogged overcoat with astrakhan trimmings. He hung this and his hat on a rack and sat down in the chair opposite me.
Instinctively I had covered the map with a newspaper. With amazement I now discovered that my vis-à-vis was the villain of the Adventure of the Young Lady and the Chart, as the author of the "New Arabian Nights" would have phrased it.
The man was in a vile humor, so much could be seen at a glance. Without doing me the honor of a single glance he stared moodily in front of him, his heavy black brows knit to a grim frown.
He was a splendid specimen of physical manhood, big and well-muscled, with a broad, flat back and soldierly carriage. That he was a leader of men was an easy deduction, though the thin, straight mouth and the hard glitter in the black eyes made the claim that he would never lead toward altruism.
In quick, short puffs he smoked a cigarette, and as soon as he had finished it he lit a second. Men all around us were waiting their turn, but I observed that the first lift of his finger brought an attendant.
"Tenderloin with mushrooms—asparagus tips—strong black coffee—cognac," he ordered with the curtness of an army officer snapping commands at a trooper. His voice was rich and cultivated, but had a very distinctly foreign quality in spite of the fact that his English was faultless.
I took advantage of the distraction of the waiter's presence to slip the map from the table into my pocket. After this I breathed freer, for it is scarcely necessary to say that in the struggle for the map—and by this time I had quite made up my mind that there would be fought out a campaign for its possession—I was wholly on the side of the young woman.
But as yet I knew none of the facts, and so was not in a position to engage with him to advantage. I called for the check and took my coat and hat from the rack.
Then I made my first mistake. I should have carried my raincoat to the door before putting it on. As I buttoned it recognition began to struggle faintly into his eyes. I waited for no further developments.
But as I went out of the door I could see him hurrying forward. Instantly I turned to the right, dodged into a tobacco shop, ran swiftly through it to the surprise of the proprietor, and found myself in an alley. I took this in double-quick time and presently had lost myself in the hurrying crowds on Kearney Street. Five minutes later I was in the elevator on the way to our office.
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