The White Mice/Chapter 1
THE WHITE MICE
I
ONCE upon a time a lion dropped his paw upon a mouse.
“Please let me live!” begged the mouse, “and some day I will do as much for you.”
“That is so funny,” roared the king of beasts, “that we will release you. We had no idea mice had a sense of humor.”
And then, as you remember, the lion was caught in the net of the hunter, and struggled, and fought, and struck blindly, until his spirit and strength were broken, and he lay helpless and dying.
And the mouse, happening to pass that way, gnawed and nibbled at the net, and gave the lion his life.
The morals are: that an appreciation of humor is a precious thing; that God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform, and that you never can tell.
In regard to this fable it is urged that, according to the doctrine of chances, it is extremely unlikely that at the very moment the lion lay bound and helpless the very same mouse should pass by. But the explanation is very simple and bromidic.
It is this—that this is a small world.
People who are stay-at-home bodies come to believe the whole world is the village in which they live. People who are rolling-stones claim that if you travel far enough and long enough the whole world becomes as one village; that sooner or later you make friends with every one in it; that the only difference between the stay-at-homes and the gadabouts is that while the former answer local telephone calls, the others receive picture postal-cards. There is a story that seems to illustrate how small this world is. In fact, this is the story.
General Don Miguel Rojas, who as a young man was called the Lion of Valencia, and who later had honorably served Venezuela as Minister of Foreign Affairs, as Secretary of War, as Minister to the Court of St. James and to the Republic of France, having reached the age of sixty found himself in a dungeon-cell underneath the fortress in the harbor of Porto Cabello. He had been there two years. The dungeon was dark and very damp, and at high-tide the waters of the harbor oozed through the pores of the limestone walls. The air was the air of a receiving-vault, and held the odor of a fisherman’s creel.
General Rojas sat huddled upon a canvas cot, with a blanket about his throat and a blanket about his knees, reading by the light of a candle the story of Don Quixote. Sometimes a drop of water fell upon the candle and it sputtered, and its light was nearly lost in the darkness. Sometimes so many drops gathered upon the white head of the Lion of Valencia that he sputtered, too, and coughed so violently that, in agony, he beat with feeble hands upon his breast. And his light, also, nearly escaped into the darkness.
On the other side of the world, four young Americans, with legs crossed and without their shoes, sat on the mats of the tea-house of the Hundred and One Steps. On their sun-tanned faces was the glare of Yokohama Bay, in their eyes the light of youth, of intelligent interest, of adventure. In the hand of each was a tiny cup of acrid tea. Three of them were under thirty, and each wore the suit of silk pongee that in eighteen hours C. Tom, or Little Ah Sing, the Chinese King, fits to any figure, and which in the Far East is the badge of the tourist tribe. Of the three, one was Rodman Forrester. His father, besides being pointed out as the parent of “Roddy” Forrester, the one-time celebrated Yale pitcher, was himself not unfavorably known to many governments as a constructor of sky-scrapers, breakwaters, bridges, wharves and light-houses, which latter he planted on slippery rocks along inaccessible coast-lines. Among his fellow Captains of Industry he was known as the Forrester Construction Company, or, for short, the “F. C. C.” Under that alias Mr. Forrester was now trying to sell to the Japanese three light-houses, to illuminate the Inner Sea between Kobe and Shimoneseki. To hasten the sale he had shipped “Roddy” straight from the machine-shops to Yokohama.
Three years before, when Roddy left Yale, his father ordered him abroad to improve his mind by travel, and to inspect certain light-houses and breakwaters on both shores of the English Channel. While crossing from Dover to Calais on his way to Paris, Roddy made a very superficial survey of the light-houses and reported that, so far as he could see by daylight, they still were on the job. His father, who had his own breezy sense of humor, cancelled Roddy’s letter of credit, cabled him home, and put him to work in the machine-shop. There the manager reported that, except that he had shown himself a good “mixer,” and had organized picnics for the benefit societies, and a base-ball team, he had not earned his fifteen dollars a week.
When Roddy was called before him, his father said:
“It is wrong that your rare talents as a ‘mixer’ should be wasted in front of a turning-lathe. Callahan tells me you can talk your way through boiler-plate, so I am going to give you a chance to talk the Japs into giving us a contract. But, remember this, Roddy,” his father continued sententiously, “the Japs are the Jews of the present. Be polite, but don’t appear too anxious. If you do, they will beat you down in the price.”
Perhaps this parting injunction explains why, from the time Roddy first burst upon the Land of the Rising Sun, he had devoted himself entirely to the Yokohama tea-houses and the base-ball grounds of the American Naval Hospital. He was trying, he said, not to appear too anxious. He hoped father would be pleased.
With Roddy to Japan, as a companion, friend and fellow-tourist, came Peter de Peyster, who hailed from the banks of the Hudson, and of what Roddy called “one of our ancient poltroon families.” At Yale, although he had been two classes in advance of Roddy, the two had been roommates, and such firm friends that they contradicted each other without ceasing. Having quarrelled through two years of college life, they were on terms of such perfect understanding as to be inseparable.
The third youth was the “Orchid Hunter.” His father manufactured the beer that, so Roddy said, had made his home town bilious. He was not really an orchid hunter, but on his journeyings around the globe he had become so ashamed of telling people he had no other business than to spend his father’s money that he had decided to say he was collecting orchids.
“It shows imagination,” he explained, “and I have spent enough money on orchids on Fifth Avenue to make good.”
The fourth youth in the group wore the uniform and insignia of a Lieutenant of the United States Navy. His name was Perry, and, looking down from the toy balcony of the tea-house, clinging like a bird’s-nest to the face of the rock, they could see his battle-ship on the berth. It was Perry who had convoyed them to O Kin San and her delectable tea-house, and it was Perry who was talking shop.
“But the most important member of the ship’s company on a submarine,” said the sailor-man, “doesn’t draw any pay at all, and he has no rating. He is a mouse.”
“He’s a what?” demanded the Orchid Hunter. He had been patriotically celebrating the arrival of the American Squadron. During tiffin, the sight of the white uniforms in the hotel dining-room had increased his patriotism; and after tiffin the departure of the Pacific Mail, carrying to the Golden Gate so many “good fellows,” further aroused it. Until the night before, in the billiard-room, he had never met any of the good fellows; but the thought that he might never see them again now depressed him. And the tea he was drinking neither cheered nor inebriated. So when the Orchid Hunter spoke he showed a touch of temper.
“Don’t talk sea slang to me,” he commanded; “when you say he is a mouse, what do you mean by a mouse?”
“I mean a mouse,” said the Lieutenant, “a white mouse with pink eyes. He bunks in the engine-room, and when he smells sulphuric gas escaping anywhere he squeals; and the chief finds the leak, and the ship isn’t blown up. Sometimes, one little, white mouse will save the lives of a dozen bluejackets.”
Roddy and Peter de Peyster nodded appreciatively.
“Mos’ extr’d’n’ry!” said the Orchid Hunter. “Mos’ sad, too. I will now drink to the mouse. The moral of the story is,” he pointed out, “that everybody, no matter how impecunious, can help; even you fellows could help. So could I.”
His voice rose in sudden excitement. “I will now,” he cried, “organize the Society of the Order of the White Mice. The object of the society is to save everybody’s life. Don’t tell me,” he objected scornfully, “that you fellows will let a little white mice save twelve hundred bluejackets, an’ you sit there an’ grin. You mus’ all be a White Mice. You mus’ all save somebody’s life. An’—then—then we give ourself a dinner.”
“And medals!” suggested Peter de Peyster.
The Orchid Hunter frowned. He regarded the amendment with suspicion.
“Is’t th’ intention of the Hon’ble Member from N’York,” he asked, “that each of us gets a medal, or just th’ one that does th’ saving?”
“Just one,” said Peter de Peyster.
“No, we all get ’em,” protested Roddy. “Each time!”
“Th’ ’men’ment to th’ ’men’ment is carried,” announced the Orchid Hunter. He untwisted his legs and clapped his hands. The paper walls slid apart, the little Nezans, giggling, bowing, ironing out their knees with open palms, came tripping and stumbling to obey.
“Take away the tea!” shouted the Orchid Hunter. “It makes me nervous. Bring us fizzy-water, in larges’ size, cold, expensive bottles. And now, you fellows,” proclaimed the Orchid Hunter, “I’m goin’ into secret session and initiate you into Yokohama Chapter, Secret Order of White Mice. And—I will be Mos’ Exalted Secret White Mouse.”
When he returned to the ship Perry told the wardroom about it and laughed, and the wardroom laughed, and that night at the Grand Hotel, while the Japanese band played “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which Peter de Peyster told them was the American national anthem, the White Mice gave their first annual dinner. For, as the Orchid Hunter pointed out, in order to save life, one must sustain it.
And Louis Eppinger himself designed that dinner, and the Paymaster, and Perry’s brother-officers, who were honored guests, still speak of it with awe; and the next week’s Box of Curios said of it editorially: “And while our little Yokohama police know much of ju-jitsu, they found that they had still something to learn of the short jab to the jaw and the quick getaway.”
Indeed, throughout, it was a most successful dinner.
And just to show how small this world is, and that “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,” at three o’clock that morning, when the dinner-party in rickshaws were rolling down the Bund, singing “We’re Little White Mice Who Have Gone Astray,” their voices carried across the Pacific, across the Cordilleras and the Caribbean Sea; and an old man in his cell, tossing and shivering with fever, smiled and sank to sleep; for in his dreams he had heard the scampering feet of the White Mice, and he had seen the gates of his prison-cell roll open.
The Forrester Construction Company did not get the contract to build the three light-houses. The Japanese preferred a light-house made by an English firm. They said it was cheaper. It was cheaper, because they bought the working plans from a draughtsman the English firm had discharged for drunkenness, and, by causing the revolving light to wink once instead of twice, dodged their own patent laws.
Mr. Forrester agreed with the English firm that the Japanese were “a wonderful little people,” and then looked about for some one individual he could blame. Finding no one else, he blamed Roddy. The interview took place on the twenty-seventh story of the Forrester Building, in a room that overlooked the Brooklyn Bridge.
“You didn’t fall down on the job,” the fond parent was carefully explaining, “because you never were on the job. You didn’t even start. It was thoughtful of you to bring back kimonos to mother and the girls. But the one you brought me does not entirely compensate me for the ninety thousand dollars you didn’t bring back. I would like my friends to see me in a kimono with silk storks and purple wistarias down the front, but I feel I cannot afford to pay ninety thousand dollars for a bathrobe.
“Nor do I find,” continued the irate parent coldly, “that the honor you did the company by disguising yourself as a stoker and helping the base-ball team of the Louisiana to win the pennant of the Asiatic Squadron, altogether reconciles us to the loss of a government contract. I have paid a good deal to have you taught mechanical engineering, and I should like to know how soon you expect to give me the interest on my money.”
Roddy grinned sheepishly, and said he would begin at once, by taking his father out to lunch.
“Good!” said Forrester, Senior. “But before we go, Roddy, I want you to look over there to the Brooklyn side. Do you see pier number eleven—just south of the bridge? Yes? Then do you see a white steamer taking on supplies?”
Roddy, delighted at the change of subject, nodded.
“That ship,” continued his father, “is sailing to Venezuela, where we have a concession from the government to build breakwaters and buoy the harbors and put up light-houses. We have been working there for two years and we’ve spent about two million dollars. And some day we hope to get our money. Sometimes,” continued Mr. Forrester, “it is necessary to throw good money after bad. That is what we are doing in Venezuela.”
“I don’t understand,” interrupted Roddy with polite interest.
“You are not expected to,” said his father. “If you will kindly condescend to hold down the jobs I give you, you can safely leave the high finance of the company to your father.”
“Quite so,” said Roddy hastily. “Where shall we go to lunch?”
As though he had not heard him, Forrester, Senior, continued relentlessly: “To-morrow,” he said, “you are sailing on that ship for Porto Cabello; we have just started a light-house at Porto Cabello, and are buoying the harbor. You are going for the F. C. C. You are an inspector.”
Roddy groaned and sank into a chair.
“Go on,” he commanded, “break it to me quick! What do I inspect?”
“You sit in the sun,” said Mr. Forrester, “with a pencil, and every time our men empty a bag of cement into the ocean you make a mark. At the same time, if you are not an utter idiot and completely blind, you can’t help but see how a light-house is set up. The company is having trouble in Venezuela, trouble in collecting its money. You might as well know that, because everybody in Venezuela will tell you so. But that’s all you need to know. The other men working for the company down there will think, because you are my son, that you know more about what I’m doing in Venezuela than they do. Now, understand, you don’t know anything, and I want you to say so. I want you to stick to your own job, and not mix up in anything that doesn’t concern you. There will be nothing to distract you. McKildrick writes me that in Porto Cabello there are no tea-houses, no roads for automobiles, and, except for the fire-flies, all the white lights go out at nine o’clock.
“Now, Roddy,” concluded Mr. Forrester warningly, “this is your chance, and it is the last chance for dinner in the dining-car, for you. If you fail the company, and by the company I mean myself, this time, you can ask Fred Sterry for a job on the waiters’ nine at Palm Beach.”
Like all the other great captains, Mr. Forrester succeeded through the work of his lieutenants. For him, in every part of the world, more especially in those parts of it in which the white man was but just feeling his way, they were at work.
In Siberia, in British East Africa, in Upper Burmah, engineers of the Forrester Construction Company had tamed, shackled and bridged great rivers. In the Soudan they had thrown up ramparts against the Nile. Along the coasts of South America they had cast the rays of the Forrester revolving light upon the face of the waters of both the South Atlantic and the Pacific.
They were of all ages, from the boys who had never before looked through a transit except across the college campus, to sun-tanned, fever-haunted veterans who, for many years, had fought Nature where she was most stubborn, petulant and cruel. They had seen a tidal-wave crumple up a breakwater which had cost them a half-year of labor, and slide it into the ocean. They had seen swollen rivers, drunk with the rains, trip bridges by the ankles and toss them on the banks, twisted and sprawling; they had seen a tropical hurricane overturn a half-finished light-house as gayly as a summer breeze upsets a rocking-chair; they had fought with wild beasts, they had fought with wild men, with Soudanese of the Desert, with Federated Sons of Labor, with Yaqui Indians, and they had seen cholera, sleeping-sickness and the white man’s gin turn their compounds into pest-camps and crematories.
Of these things Mr. Forrester, in the twenty-seven-story Forrester sky-scraper, where gray-coated special policemen and elevator-starters touched their caps to him, had seen nothing. He regarded these misadventures by flood and field only as obstacles to his carrying out in the time stipulated a business contract. He accepted them patiently as he would a strike of the workmen on the apartment-house his firm was building on Fifty-ninth Street.
Sometimes, in order to better show the progress they were making, his engineers sent him from strange lands photographs of their work. At these, for a moment, he would glance curiously, at the pictures of naked, dark-skinned coolies in turbans, of elephants dragging iron girders, his iron girders; and perhaps he would wonder if the man in the muddy boots and the heavy sun hat was McKenzie. His interest went no further than that; his imagination was not stirred.
Sometimes McKenzie returned and, in evening dress, dined with him at his up-town club, or at a fashionable restaurant, where the senses of the engineer were stifled by the steam heat, the music and the scent of flowers; where, through a joyous mist of red candle-shades and golden champagne, he once more looked upon women of his own color. It was not under such conditions that Mr. Forrester could expect to know the real McKenzie. This was not the McKenzie who, two months before, was fighting death on a diet of fruit salts, and who, against the sun, wore a bath-towel down his spinal column. On such occasions Mr. Forrester wanted to know if, with native labor costing but a few yards of cotton and a bowl of rice, the new mechanical rivet-drivers were not an extravagance. How, he would ask, did salt water and a sweating temperature of one hundred and five degrees act upon the new anti-rust paint? That was what he wanted to know.
Once one of his young lieutenants, inspired by a marvellous dinner, called to him across the table: “You remember, sir, that light-house we put up in the Persian Gulf? The Consul at Aden told me, this last trip, that before that light was there the wrecks on the coast averaged fifteen a year and the deaths from drowning over a hundred. You will be glad to hear that since your light went up, three years ago, there have been only two wrecks and no deaths.”
Mr. Forrester nodded gravely.
“I remember,” he said. “That was the time we made the mistake of sending cement through the Canal instead of around the Cape, and the tolls cost us five thousand dollars.”
It was not that Mr. Forrester weighed the loss of the five thousand dollars against a credit of lives saved. It was rather that he was not in the life-saving business. Like all his brother captains, he was, in a magnificent way, mechanically charitable. For institutions that did make it a business to save life he wrote large checks. But he never mixed charity and business. In what he was doing in the world he either was unable to see, or was not interested in seeing, what was human, dramatic, picturesque. When he forced himself to rest from his labor, his relaxation was the reading of novels of romance, of adventure—novels that told of strange places and strange peoples. Between the after-dinner hour and bedtime, or while his yacht picked her way up the Sound, these tales filled him with surprise. Often he would exclaim admiringly: “I don’t see how these fellows think up such things.”
He did not know that, in his own business, there were melodramas, romances which made those of the fiction-writers ridiculous.
And so, when young Sam Caldwell, the third vice-president, told Mr. Forrester that if the company hoped to obtain the money it had sunk in Venezuela it must finance a revolution, Mr. Forrester, without question, consented to the expense, and put it down under “Political.” Had Sam Caldwell shown him that what was needed was a construction-raft or a half-dozen giant steam-shovels, he would have furnished the money as readily and with as little curiosity.
Sam Caldwell, the third vice-president, was a very smart young man. Every one, even men much older than he, said as much, and no one was more sure of it than was Sam Caldwell himself. His vanity on that point was, indeed, his most prepossessing human quality.
He was very proud of his freedom from those weak scruples that prevented rival business men from underbidding the F. C. C. He congratulated himself on the fact that at thirty-four he was much more of a cynic than men of sixty. He held no illusions, and he rejoiced in a sense of superiority over those of his own class in college, who, in matters of business, were still hampered by old-time traditions.
If in any foreign country the work of the F. C. C. was halted by politicians, it was always Sam Caldwell who was sent across the sea to confer with them. He could quote you the market-price on a Russian grand-duke, or a Portuguese colonial governor, as accurately as he could that of a Tammany sachem. His was the non-publicity department. People who did not like him called him Mr. Forrester’s jackal. When the lawyers of the company had studied how they could evade the law on corporations, and had shown how the officers of the F. C. C. could do a certain thing and still keep out of jail, Sam Caldwell was the man who did that thing.
He had been to Venezuela “to look over the ground,” and he had reported that President Alvarez must go, and that some one who would be friendly to the F. C. C. must be put in his place. That was all Mr. Forrester knew, or cared to know. With the delay in Venezuela he was impatient. He wanted to close up that business and move his fleet of tenders, dredges and rafts to another coast. So, as was the official routine, he turned over the matter to Sam Caldwell, to settle it in Sam Caldwell’s own way.
Two weeks after his talk with his father, Roddy, ignorant of Mr. Caldwell’s intentions, was in Venezuela, sitting on the edge of a construction-raft, dangling his rubber boots in the ocean, and watching a steel skeleton creep up from a coral reef into a blazing, burning sky. At intervals he would wake to remove his cigarette, and shout fiercely: “O-i-i-ga, you Moso! Get a move on! Pronto! If you don’t I’ll do that myself.”
Every ten minutes El Señor Roddy had made the same threat, and the workmen, once hopeful that he would carry it into effect, had grown despondent.
“O-i-i-ga, you Moso! Get a move on! Pronto! If you don’t I’ll do that myself.”
In the mind of Peter de Peyster there was no doubt that, unless something was done, and at once, the Order of the White Mice would cease to exist. The call of Gain, of Duty, of Pleasure had scattered the charter members to distant corners of the world. Their dues were unpaid, the pages of the Golden Book of Record were blank. Without the necessary quorum of two there could be no meetings, without meetings there could be no dinners, and, incidentally, over all the world people continued to die, and the White Mice were doing nothing to prevent it. Peter de Peyster, mindful of his oath, of his duty as the Most Secret Secretary and High Historian of the Order, shot arrows in the air in the form of irate postal-cards. He charged all White Mice to instantly report to the Historian the names of those persons whom, up to date, they had saved from death.
From the battle-ship Louisiana, Perry wrote briefly:
- “Beg to report during gale off Finisterre, went to rescue of man overboard. Man overboard proved to be Reagan, gunner’s mate, first class, holding long-distance championship for swimming and two medals for saving life. After I sank the third time, Reagan got me by the hair and towed me to the ship. Who gets the assist?”
From Raffles’ Hotel, Singapore, the Orchid Hunter cabled:
- “Have saved own valuable life by refusing any longer to drink Father’s beer. Give everybody medal.”
From Porto Cabello, Venezuela, Roddy wrote:
- “I have saved lives of fifty Jamaica coolies daily by not carrying an axe. If you want to save my life from suicide, sunstroke and sleeping-sickness—which attacks me with special virulence immediately after lunch—come by next steamer.”
A week later, Peter de Peyster took the Red D boat south, and after touching at Porto Rico and at the Island of Curaçao, swept into Porto Cabello and into the arms of his friend.
On the wharf, after the shouts of welcome had died away, Roddy inquired anxiously: “As you made the harbor, Peter, did you notice any red and black buoys? Those are my buoys. I put them there—myself. And I laid out that entire channel you came in by, all by myself, too!”
Much time had passed since the two friends had been able to insult each other face to face.
“Roddy,” coldly declared Peter, “if I thought you had charted that channel I’d go home on foot, by land.”
“Do you mean you think I can’t plant deep-sea buoys?” demanded Roddy.
“You can’t plant potatoes!” said Peter. “If you had to set up lamp-posts, with the street names on them, along Broadway, you would put the ones marked Union Square in Columbus Circle.”
“I want you to know,” shouted Roddy, “that my buoys are the talk of this port. These people are just crazy about my buoys—especially the red buoys. If you didn’t come to Venezuela to see my buoys, why did you come? I will plant a buoy for you to-morrow!” challenged Roddy. “I will show you!”
“You will have to show me,” said Peter.
Peter had been a week in Porto Cabello, and, in keeping Roddy at work, had immensely enjoyed himself. Each morning, in the company’s gasoline launch, the two friends went put-put-putting outside the harbor, where Roddy made soundings for his buoys, and Peter lolled in the stern and fished. His special pleasure was in trying to haul man-eating sharks into the launch at the moment Roddy was leaning over the gunwale, taking a sounding.
One evening at sunset, on their return trip, as they were under the shadow of the fortress, the engine of the launch broke down. While the black man from Trinidad was diagnosing the trouble, Peter was endeavoring to interest Roddy in the quaint little Dutch Island of Curaçao that lay one hundred miles to the east of them. He chose to talk of Curaçao because the ship that carried him from the States had touched there, while the ship that brought Roddy south had not. This fact irritated Roddy, so Peter naturally selected the moment when the launch had broken down and Roddy was both hungry and peevish to talk of Curaçao.
“Think of your never having seen Curaçao!” he sighed. “Some day you certainly must visit it. With a sea as flat as this is to-night you could make the run in the launch in twelve hours. It is a place you should see.”
“That is so like you,” exclaimed Roddy indignantly. “I have been here four months, and you have been here a week, and you try to tell me about Curaçao! It is the place where curaçao and revolutionists come from. All the exiles from Venezuela wait over there until there is a revolution over here, and then they come across. You can’t tell me anything about Curaçao. I don’t have to go to a place to know about it.”
“I’ll bet,” challenged Peter, “you don’t know about the mother and the two daughters who were exiled from Venezuela and live in Curaçao, and who look over here every night at sunset?”
Roddy laughed scornfully. “Why, that is the first thing they tell you,” he cried; “the purser points them out from the ship, and tells you”
“Tells you, yes,” cried Peter triumphantly, “but I saw them. As we left the harbor they were standing on the cliff—three women in white—looking toward Venezuela. They told me the father of the two girls is in prison here. He was”
“Told you, yes,” mimicked Roddy, “told you he was in prison. I have seen him in prison. There is the prison.”
Roddy pointed at the flat, yellow fortress that rose above them. Behind the tiny promontory on which the fortress crouched was the town, separated from it by a stretch of water so narrow that a golf-player, using the quay of the custom-house for a tee, could have driven a ball against the prison wall.
Daily, from the town, Peter had looked across the narrow harbor toward the level stretch of limestone rock that led to the prison gates, and had seen the petty criminals, in chains, splash through the pools left by the falling tide, had watched each pick up a cask of fresh water, and, guarded by the barefooted, red-capped soldiers, drag his chains back to the prison. Now, only the boat’s-length from them, he saw the sheer face of the fortress, where it slipped to depths unknown into the sea. It impressed him most unpleasantly. It had the look less of a fortress than of a neglected tomb. Its front was broken by wind and waves, its surface, blotched and mildewed, white with crusted salt, hideous with an eruption of dead barnacles. As each wave lifted and retreated, leaving the porous wall dripping like a sponge, it disturbed countless crabs, rock scorpions and creeping, leech-like things that ran blindly into the holes in the limestone; and, at the water-line, the sea-weed, licking hungrily at the wall, rose and fell, the great arms twisting and coiling like the tentacles of many devilfish.
Distaste at what he saw, or the fever that at sunset drives wise Venezuelans behind closed shutters, caused Peter to shiver slightly.
For some moments, with grave faces and in silence, the two young men sat motionless, the mind of each trying to conceive what life must be behind those rusted bars and moss-grown walls.
“Somewhere, buried in there,” said Roddy, “is General Rojas, the Lion of Valencia, a man,” he added sententiously, “beloved by the people. He has held all the cabinet positions, and been ambassador in Europe, and Alvarez is more afraid of him than of any other man in Venezuela. And why? For the simple reason that he is good. When the people found out what a blackguard Alvarez is they begged Rojas to run for President against him, and Rojas promised that if, at the next election, the people still desired it, he would do as they wished. That night Alvarez hauled him out of bed and put him in there. He has been there two years. There are healthy prisons, but Alvarez put Rojas in this one, hoping it would kill him. He is afraid to murder him openly, because the people love him. When I first came here I went through the fortress with Vicenti, the prison doctor, on a sort of Seeing-Porto-Cabello trip. He pointed out Rojas to me through the bars, same as you would point out a monument to a dead man. Rojas was sitting at a table, writing, wrapped in a shawl. The cell was lit by a candle, and I give you my word, although it was blazing hot outside, the place was as damp as a refrigerator. When we raised our lanterns he stood up, and I got a good look at him. He is a thin, frail little man with white hair and big, sad eyes, with a terribly lonely look in them. At least I thought so; and I felt so ashamed at staring at him that I bowed and salaamed to him through the bars, and he gave me the most splendid bow, just as though he were still an ambassador and I a visiting prince. The doctor had studied medicine in New York, so probably he talked to me a little more freely than he should. He says he warned the commandant of the fortress that unless Rojas is moved to the upper tier of cells, above the water-line, he will die in six months. And the commandant told him not to meddle in affairs of state, that his orders from the President were that Rojas ‘must never again feel the heat of the sun.’”
Peter de Peyster exclaimed profanely. “Are there no men in this country?” he growled. “Why don’t his friends get him out?”
“They’d have to get themselves out first,” explained Roddy. “Alvarez made a clean sweep of it, even of his wife and his two daughters, the women you saw. He exiled them, and they went to Curaçao. They have plenty of money, and they could have lived in Paris or London. He has been minister in both places, and has many friends over there, but even though they cannot see him or communicate with him, they settled down in Curaçao so that they might be near him.
“The night his wife was ordered out of the country she was allowed to say good-by to him in the fortress, and there she arranged that every night at sunset she and her daughters would look toward Port Cabello, and he would look toward Curaçao. The women bought a villa on the cliff, to the left of the harbor of Willemstad as you enter, and the people, the Dutch and the Spaniards and negroes, all know the story, and when they see the three women on the cliff at sunset it is like the Angelus ringing, and, they say, the people pray that the women may see him again.”
For a long time Peter de Peyster sat scowling at the prison, and Roddy did not speak, for it is not possible to room with another man through two years of college life and not know something of his moods.
Then Peter leaned toward Roddy and stared into his face. His voice carried the suggestion of a challenge.
“I hear something!” he whispered.
Whether his friend spoke in metaphor or stated a fact, Roddy could not determine. He looked at him questioningly, and raised his head to listen. Save for the whisper of the waves against the base of the fortress, there was no sound.
“What?” asked Roddy.
“I hear the call of the White Mice,” said Peter de Peyster.
There was a long silence. Then Roddy laughed softly, his eyes half closed; the muscles around the lower jaw drew tight.
Often before Peter had seen the look in his face, notably on a memorable afternoon when Roddy went to the bat, with three men on base, two runs needed to win the championship and twenty thousand shrieking people trying to break his nerve.
“I will go as far as you like,” said Roddy.
Porto Cabello is laid out within the four boundaries of a square. The boundary on the east and the boundary on the north of the square meet at a point that juts into the harbor. The wharves and the custom-house, looking toward the promontory on which stands the fortress prison, form the eastern side of the square, and along the northern edge are the Aquatic Club, with its veranda over the water, the hotel, with its bath-rooms underneath the water, and farther along the harbor front houses set in gardens. As his work was in the harbor, Roddy had rented one of these houses. It was discreetly hidden by mango-trees and palmetto, and in the rear of the garden, steps cut in the living rock led down into the water. In a semicircle beyond these steps was a fence of bamboo stout enough to protect a bather from the harbor sharks and to serve as a breakwater for the launch.
“I hear the call of the White Mice,” said Peter de Peyster.
“When I rented this house,” said Roddy, “I thought I took it because I could eat mangoes while I was in bathing and up to my ears in water, which is the only way you can eat a mango and keep your self-respect. But I see now that Providence sent me here because we can steal away in the launch without any one knowing it.”
“If you can move that launch its own length without the whole town knowing it,” commented Peter, “you will have to chloroform it. It barks like a machine gun.”
“My idea was,” explained Roddy, “that we would row to the fortress. After we get the General on board, the more it sounds like a machine gun the better.”
Since their return in the launch, and during dinner, which had been served in the tiny patio under the stars, the White Mice had been discussing ways and means. A hundred plans had been proposed, criticised, rejected; but by one in the morning, when the candles were guttering in the harbor breeze and the Scotch whiskey had shrunk several inches, the conspirators found themselves agreed. They had decided they could do nothing until they knew in which cell the General was imprisoned, and especially the position of his window in that cell that looked out upon the harbor; that, with the aid of the launch, the rescue must be made from the water, and that the rescuers must work from the outside. To get at Rojas from the inside it would be necessary to take into their confidence some one of the prison officials, and there was no one they dared to trust. Had it been a question of money, Roddy pointed out, the friends of Rojas would already have set him free. That they had failed to do so proved, not that the prison officials were incorruptible, but that their fear of the wrath of Alvarez was greater than their cupidity.
“There are several reasons why we should not attempt to bribe any one,” said Roddy, “and the best one is the same reason the man gave for not playing poker. To-morrow I will introduce you to Vicenti, the prison doctor, and we’ll ask him to take us over the prison, and count the cells, and try to mark the one in which we see Rojas. Perhaps we’d better have the doctor in to dinner. He likes to tell you what a devil of a fellow he was in New York, and you must pretend to believe he was. We might also have the captain of the port, and get him to give us permission to take the launch out at night. This port is still under martial law, and after the sunset gun no boat may move about the harbor. Then we must have some harpoons made and get out that headlight, and spear eels.”
“You couldn’t spear an eel,” objected Peter, “and if you could I wouldn’t eat it.”
“You don’t have to eat it!” explained Roddy; “the eels are only an excuse. We want to get the sentries used to seeing us flashing around the harbor at night. If we went out there without some excuse, and without permission, exploding like a barrel of fire-crackers, they’d sink us. So we must say we are out spearing eels.”
The next morning Roddy showed a blacksmith how to hammer out tridents for spearing eels, and that night those people who lived along the harbor front were kept awake by quick-fire explosions, and the glare in their windows of a shifting search-light. But at the end of the week the launch of the Gringos, as it darted noisily in and out of the harbor, and carelessly flashed its search-light on the walls of the fortress, came to be regarded less as a nuisance than a blessing. For with noble self-sacrifice the harbor eels lent themselves to the deception. By hundreds they swarmed in front of the dazzling headlight; by dozens they impaled themselves upon the tines of the pitchforks. So expert did Roddy and Peter become in harpooning, that soon they were able each morning to send to the captain of the port, to the commandant, to the prison doctor, to every citizen who objected to having his sleep punctuated, a basket of eels. It was noticed that at intervals the engine of the launch would not act properly, and the gringos were seen propelling the boat with oars. Also, the light often went out, leaving them in darkness. They spoke freely of these accidents with bitter annoyance, and people sympathized with them.
One night, when they were seated plotting in the patio, Roddy was overwhelmed with sudden misgivings.
“Wouldn’t it be awful,” he cried, “if, after we have cut the bars and shown him the rope ladder and the launch, he refuses to come with us!”
“Is that all that’s worrying you?” asked Peter.
“How is he to know?” persisted Roddy, “that we are not paid by Alvarez, that we aren’t leading him on to escape so that the sentries can have an excuse to shoot him. That has been done before. It is an old trick, like killing a man in his cell and giving out that he committed suicide. The first thing Rojas will ask us is, who sends us, and where are our credentials.”
“I guess he will take his chance,” said Peter. “He’ll see we are not Venezuelans.”
“That is the very thing that will make him refuse,” protested Roddy. “Why should he trust himself to strangers—to gringos? No, I tell you, we can’t go on without credentials.” He lowered his voice and glanced suspiciously into the dark corners of the patio. “And the only people who can give them to us,” he added, tapping impressively upon the table, “live in Curaçao.”
With sudden enthusiasm Peter de Peyster sat upright.
“I am on in that scene,” he protested.
“I thought of it first,” said Roddy.
“We will toss,” compromised Peter. “The head of Bolivar, you go. The arms of Venezuela, I go, and you stay here and catch eels.”
The silver peso rang upon the table, and Roddy exclaimed jubilantly:
“Heads! I go!” he cried. But the effort of Peter to show he was not disappointed was so unconvincing that Roddy instantly relented.
“We had better both go!” he amended. “Your headwork is better than mine, so you come, too. And if you give me the right signals, I’ll try to put the ball where you can reach it.”
As though in his eagerness he would set forth on the instant, Roddy sprang to his feet and stood smiling down at Peter, his face lit with pleasurable excitement. Then suddenly his expression grew thoughtful.
“Peter,” he inquired, “how old do you think the daughters are?”