War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 5
ALMAYNE rapped on the table, ordered more ale and drained the cup to the dregs. He sat silent, glaring at Lachlan, his eyes gleaming under their shaggy brows. The younger man laughed in his face.
"Almayne," he said, "I can read you like a book. This Mam'selle Jolie is beautiful and you would keep me from her because you are afraid that I shall lose my heart. Is it not so, old friend?"
Almayne nodded. "I am thinking of your father," he grumbled, "and what he expects of you."
Lachlan's lips tightened.
"I have told you, Almayne," he said gravely, "that I am going home to Tallasee—to my people. No English girl will make me forget that trust. Now will you tell me of this very lovely lady about whom you seem to know so much?"
"Yes, boy, since you will have it so," the hunter answered slowly, and plunged into his tale.
Mistress Jolie Stanwicke, "he said, had come from England to Charles Town in search of a young gentle man of Hampshire whom she was to marry—one, Gilbert Barradell, who had come to Carolina a year and a half before to seek his fortune in the peltry trade and had disappeared in the interior some months after his arrival. With Jolie had come Richard Barradell, Gilbert's brother, and Richard had engaged Almayne to assist in the search for Gilbert. All this had happened while Lachlan was in Willtown. Now, after three months spent in following false clues, Richard Barradell, convinced that his brother had perished in the wilderness, had decided to return to London immediately, leaving Almayne to continue the search in Jolie's behalf.
So much Lachlan learned quickly. He learned, too, as the old hunter warmed to his theme, that within the past week Almayne had hit upon a clue to which he was inclined to attach some importance—that an Englishman, agreeing in some respects with the description of Gilbert Barradell, had been seen some eleven months before in the country of Concha, chief of the Appalaches, a friend of the Spaniards of St. Augustine and an enemy of the Charles Town English. Almayne had traced the wanderings of this Englishman to within a day's journey of Concha's town, and there he seemed to have vanished.
Two other facts also Lachlan gathered as the hunter talked, and some instinct told him that these were perhaps the most important facts of all: first, that Jolie's father, Edward Stanwicke of Stanwicke Hall, and Captain Lance Falcon, who was constantly at Stanwicke's side and seemed to have much influence over him, had opposed from the beginning the search for Gilbert Barradell, declaring him undoubtedly dead; and, second, that Almayne had conceived a deep distrust of Falcon and believed (although he seemed to have nothing definite upon which to base this belief) that Falcon knew more than he was willing to tell.
"You have it all now," Almayne concluded gruffly. "This man who may have been Gilbert Barradell wandered into Chief Concha's country about eleven months ago, and as like as not they killed him. It would be foolish to go there after him unless we can learn something more. And I can learn nothing. There's something back of it, boy, and I believe it's Falcon."
Lachlan nodded slowly. He was thinking of that moment in the Stanwicke garden when Falcon had kissed Jolie's hand and she had tried to draw it away; and he was thinking, too, of the fear that he had seen in Jolie's face and of certain words of hers which he had overheard as he perched on the garden wall.
"Did Mistress Jolie Stanwicke know Captain Falcon?" he asked, "before her arrival in Charles Town?"
"She had never seen him until she came here," Almayne answered quickly.
Lachlan pursed his lips thoughtfully.
"Well, after all," he muttered, "that proves nothing. She has been here in Stanwicke's town house for three months now and Falcon has seen much of her in that time. He wants her and wants her badly, and that's motive enough."
He frowned as a new thought came to him.
"But Gilbert Barradell disappeared," he said, "before Falcon had met the lady. Falcon had no reason then"
"Aye," Almayne interrupted, "but since then he has met her. If Barradell is alive and Falcon knows where he is, d'ye think he would be likely to tell us? Not for all the gold in Carolina!"
Lachlan shrugged his shoulders.
"You are getting off the path, Almayne," he answered dryly. "You have nothing to show that Falcon knows where Gilbert Barradell is. Probably Barradell is dead. Probably he was dead months before Jolie Stanwicke came to Charles Town—before Falcon ever saw her. As for the Englishman who disappeared in Concha's country, he might have been Barradell or he might have been someone else, but in any case the chances are that Concha's braves have his scalp."
He pushed back his chair.
"I am sleepy, old friend," he said. "My brain is getting weary. When I asked you to tell me about this Jolie, this Lady Sanguilla, I did not foresee such a puzzle as this. We will meet here to-morrow and go further into the matter. Good-bye till then."
If he was sleepy, the cool night air outside in the empty street quickly dispelled his drowsiness. He wanted to think and he could think more clearly alone. He was not as contemptuous as he had seemed regarding Almayne's suspicions of Falcon—he knew the old hunter too well to dismiss lightly any idea of his.
Yet, studying this one carefully, Lachlan could find no tangible foundation for it in the facts that Almayne had made known to him. Plainly Falcon was in love with Jolie—Lachlan had divined this much in the Stanwicke garden when he had seen Falcon kiss the girl's hand. But he could see no reason for believing that Falcon knew anything about Gilbert Barradell's disappearance or present whereabouts, if he were still alive; and it seemed unlikely, on the whole, that the Englishman who had been seen nearly a year before in Concha's country was Gilbert Barradell. Lachlan's thoughts had strayed to other aspects of the problem—aspects concerned chiefly with Jolie Stanwicke herself—when, on his way to his lodgings, he passed by Ramage's tavern where, earlier in the evening, he had seen Falcon rout the pack-horse drivers.
Falcon lodged there when he slept in town instead of on his brig; and as Lachlan walked slowly along the deserted street, he watched curiously a lighted window of an upper room, thinking possibly to catch a glimpse of a man with whom he had already had a somewhat memorable passage and who might become even better known to him in the future.
The man interested him keenly. None seemed to know certainly who Lance Falcon was or whence he came. He had appeared in Charles Town not more than four months before, and Lachlan, having spent most of the intervening time in Willtown, had seen him on only a few occasions and knew him chiefly by repute.
This last was of a mixed quality. Falcon had dined at the Governor's Mansion and was in high favour with His Excellency, and he had made many friends in the town. Yet it was well known that his brig, the Good Fortune, was in reality a ship of war, well armed, well manned, with a crew of cutthroats rather more desperate and decidedly better disciplined than the crews of most ordinary privateersmen. Charles Town had known many ships that were not what they seemed and had found it profitable not to inquire too closely, for such ships were often valuable customers. But some who remembered the pirate wars whispered that Charles Town might find one day another Stede Bonnet on her hands and prophesied a time when Captain Falcon and his men would dance on air at Execution Dock where Bonnet and his crew had danced so grimly.
Lachlan had passed by now some yards beyond Ramage's tavern so that he could see over his shoulder not only the east window fronting the street but also another window in the south wall of the house, facing a small courtyard. Suddenly this second window, which also opened upon the corner room occupied by Falcon, fixed his attention. In the bright moonlight, as he glanced over his shoulder, Lachlan saw a small white object like a little ball shoot upward from the courtyard towards this south window, strike against the wall of the house just below the window sill and drop back into the yard.
Lachlan halted, instantly alert. A high fence separated the courtyard from the street; but his ears were the ears of an Indian hunter, and presently he heard faintly, yet so distinctly that there could be no mistake, the sound of someone moving in the courtyard. He knew then what was coming moments before it happened.
This man, whoever he was, who lurked in the darkness of the inn yard, was searching in the grass that grew there for the little white ball which he had tried to throw into Falcon's window. Presently he would find it; and when he found it, he would throw it a second time.
Some minutes passed. Then upward into the moonlight soared the little white ball again. This time the thrower had evidently stationed himself directly below the window; and this time his aim was better. The white ball soared a little above the window sill, then dropped upon it and rolled inward.
Lachlan, from his watching place in the street, could see what the thrower of that mysterious missile could not see. To the latter, peering straight up at the window above him, it must have appeared that the white ball had dropped from the sill into the room; but Lachlan knew that it had not fallen into the room—that it still rested on the sill some inches from the edge. He could see, moreover, that it quivered slightly in the light breeze as it rested there; and at once a faint hope stirred in him.
His eyes remained fixed on the window, while his hearing groped for each stealthy sound that came from the courtyard beyond the fence. He heard the man who had thrown the little white ball make his way out of the courtyard through a gate that opened on an alley behind the inn. Each moment he expected to see Falcon appear at the window; but the small square of light remained empty, and presently Lachlan knew that fortune favoured him so far—that if the occupant of the room was in it at the time, he remained unaware of the white ball that had been tossed upward out of the darkness and that now rested precariously on the sill of his open window.
Lachlan realized that he could only play a waiting game. He chose to wait, however, in the now empty courtyard instead of in the street where some belated passer-by might interrupt his vigil. Scaling the fence, he dropped to the ground on the other side, and finding a seat behind a holly bush, he remained in that leafy ambush, hoping that some lucky chance might solve his problem for him.
For a long while thunder had been muttering in the distance, and Lachlan knew that sooner or later a squall would break. In this squall, he judged from the direction of the thunder, the wind would blow from the east; and it was for this that he waited, faintly hoping yet not venturing to expect that out of this circumstance he might gain his ends.
At last the squall burst—with a sudden glare of white lightning and a thunderclap like a frigate's broadside; and it was from the eastward that the wind came, a mighty gust too violent to last. Lachlan, peering upward from the shadowy courtyard, saw that the curtains of the lighted window above him were blowing outward in the breeze that swept through the other window into the room. From his post in the courtyard he had not been able to see the little white ball on the sill; but he knew that it was there no longer. He had seen it quiver in the light airs before the squall came. Beyond a doubt that first gust blowing through the room from the east had blown it outward from the window sill.
The next task was to find it, and in the blackness that the squall clouds made this was no easy matter. Yet he figured accurately that it would have dropped almost straight downward, and just as the first volley of rain began to fall he lit upon it in the grass. Stealthily, yet swiftly, he made his way out of the black courtyard through the gate opening on the rear alley and hurried homeward through the rain to examine his prize.
It was far better than he had dared hope for. The white ball was a bit of white cloth tightly rolled and bound with a light cord. Within the ball was a closely folded square of paper. Eagerly he spread this out upon the table in his room and read by the light of his candle the following, in Spanish:
Antonio the Indian will deliver this in the usual way. It will make known to you Don Ruy Ortiz, now my lieutenant, who but recently arrived at St. Augustine from Barcelona. By Don Ruy I send you news of Chief Concha's prisoner, and Don Ruy will request certain information that I would have from you.
His sloop will enter the River of Stono. You will anchor your brig in midstream in the River Ashley off the old Cypress Wharf. At 12 o'clock of the night after this is delivered to you, Don Ruy will come by canoe to your brig. See that you display two lights one above the other, for his guidance.
The letter was signed "J. M."—plainly the initials of Don Joachim de Montiano, the Spanish commandant at St. Augustine. Lachlan noticed that the "12" and the words "display two lights" were underscored.
He read the letter twice, whistled softly and smiled, his black eyes shining.
"So," he murmured, "Captain Falcon is on good terms with the Spaniards and will receive a distinguished visitor from St. Augustine to-morrow night."
He pondered briefly, with pursed lips and narrowed eyes.
"And he is much interested in someone whom Chief Concha holds as a prisoner? A strange coincidence, that, and one that would interest Almayne."
For a while he sat frowning, putting two and two together, going over in his mind the facts that Almayne had made known to him. Suddenly the frown vanished. For some minutes he studied a plan that had leaped full-formed into his brain. Then he went swiftly to work.
Carefully, with a knife-point, he erased the 2 in the numeral 12, then with his quill and ink inserted in its place a cipher, so that the 12 became 10. This accomplished to his satisfaction, he refolded the paper, replaced it in the cloth, rolled the latter again into a ball and bound it with the cord. He then blew out his candle and went down once more into the street.
The squall had passed but the moon had not yet emerged from the clouds. A few minutes' walk along unfrequented ways brought him to the alley behind Ramage's tavern. He entered the courtyard through the small gateway and saw at a glance that the light still shone in Falcon's window. If the latter had closed it against the shower, he had subsequently opened it again.
Lachlan smiled, interpreting this as possibly meaning that Falcon expected a message. With greater skill than the first messenger had shown he threw his little cloth ball and saw it pass through the window; and watching from the cover of a cassena bush, had the added satisfaction of seeing Falcon appear at the window for a moment and wave his hand.
Lachlan, invisible in the blackness below, bowed with mock courtesy.
"Good-night, Captain Lance Falcon," he whispered. "Good-night and good luck until we meet at the Sign of the Two Lights at 10 to-morrow evening."