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Page 63
Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had
reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary's
head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying
there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--
Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to
establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?
The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who
changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a
small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American
republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had
engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic
fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of
Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I
craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by
the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than
to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and
there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous
relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the
death of colonial governors.
When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the
doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house. She was polishing a
silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against
black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a
wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light
song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.
Small wonder: for Dr. Stamford (the most disreputable professional
man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the
turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of Auld Lang Syne to the
air of Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon. We had come from the ice
factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been
playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that we
dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.
I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the verger of a
cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast
before a pearl.
"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing. And the other half is
the fault of this cursed country. I'd better have gone back to
Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to
have had this happen."
Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.
"You too!" he cried. "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.
Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don't
burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the
man.
"We will see about that," said I. "And, perhaps, whether he is a man
as well as the man."
I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished,
for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they
gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they
managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and
civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my
pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of
war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the
strength of the enemy.
A sort of cold dismay-something akin to fear-filled me when I had
estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so
deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and
hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless,
haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in
turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for
him to have. But I left him whole-I had to make bitter acknowledgment
to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows;
and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country,
a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously
appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high
culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his
house.
In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head
was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a
thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners
were a pattern.
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