The Filibusters, Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne [best book clubs .TXT] 📗

greedy water closed round me again, and choking and breathless I was washed away down the torrent. I fancy I must have lost consciousness then, for a little later I found myself on a bank of sand, and found Carew scrambling up beside me. I was just in time to see Father Jupe in his ‘turn take the dive. One moment he was like a fly stuck up against the cliff face; the next he had jerked stiffly out, and was falling downwards like some grotesque jumping-jack, with his wet clothes all hanging out from him in streamers, and his legs and arms clawing and kicking convulsively. He hit the water with a smack that sounded high above the din of the rapids and the cataract, was lost for a moment in an eruption of spouting water, and then reappeared again, floating like a limp, black, helpless rag.

He came within reach of the sand-bank, drifting past with his face under the surface, and like a fool I must needs pull him out of the water and lay him to drain. I knew I was a fool to meddle when there was a clear chance of being rid of the beggar for once and always, but couldn’t help doing it all the same.

Carew watched me and shrugged his shoulders. “Stupid of you,” he said, but did not interfere further.

“You’d have done the same,” I snapped.

“You over flatter my foolishness, or my humanity, or whatever you like to call it. I’m not vindictive, Birch, but I’m intensely practical. I’ve certain business on ahead; you and Jupe for your own reasons want to kill me, and until I’ve got the pair of you out of the way, you’ll always be apt to interfere at awkward moments.”

“There’s a certain ruffianly frankness about you that I like,” said I. ” I’ll have it carved upon your tombstone as your most notable virtue. In the meanwhile, as you and I can’t have our settling time here, let’s get on our way down stream. Jupe’s coming around.”

“Aren’t you tired with your dive and swim? Don’t you want to wait here a bit longer?”

“I am tired, but I’m going to swim no more. If you watch me you’ll pick up a hint.”

The sand-bank tailed out into shallows. Other sand-banks lay beyond up against one of the grim stone walls, and the stream rushed deep at the other side of the canon. Further down, on the side of these shallows, I had spotted a small oasis grown over with osiers not very far up the cliffs, and I walked and waded along till I was underneath it, and then climbed up without much trouble. They were fine osiers when one came to look at them, many running to as much as ten feet high and the thickness of my wrist in girth, and I set to work on them with my machete with a cheerful mind. It warmed one to be amongst vegetation again after that cold bleak wilderness of stone and water.

There was no temptation to loiter over the work. Amongst other things the food question was beginning to obtrude itself unpleasantly. The next meal, if there was going to be one, was somewhere down at the far end of the canon, at the other side of the Tolpec Mountains, in fact, and I wanted badly to get in contact with it. I was as hungry as a stowaway already.

There was no question about making a substantial raft. The other two soon joined me when they saw my game, and put in a claim for their share of the osiers. The supply was not large, and I could have done with all myself; but somehow I couldn’t quite screw up my vindictiveness into leaving either Jupe or Carew unprovided for; and, besides, if it came to a scuffle, Carew with his pistol held the balance of force. So I stuck to the machete and chopped and shredded, and the other two made up the osiers into three bundles and lashed them together with withes. Then we toppled them down to the water’s edge, tossed for choice, set them afloat, and got under weigh.

I’ve done more pleasant navigating. We lay each of us lengthways on his bundle, and steered as best we could with legs and arms. In the smooth reaches our heads and shoulders were nicely out of the water, but these were rare, and in the frequent rapids the bundles were more or less unmanageable, and the navigation for the most part sub-marine. One did not contract a liking for this sort of thing in spite of its frequency, but one grew in a way numbed to it; and tiredness by simple shading merged into exhaustion.

What is the length of the canon I have not a notion, for though I have measured it up on paper since, the existing ordnance maps of Sacaronduca are sufficiently inaccurate to leave the matter quite vague. We, its explorers, passed along our choking way without idea of pace or direction, and indeed we made the latter portions of the passage in a state approaching coma. Our legs and arms it must be supposed performed certain mechanical functions of steering and fending off, or our bodies would have stranded on some rock in one of the rapids and stayed there to rot; but our minds had become quite torpid, as though all volition had been swilled away from them by the water.

It seems the caflon ended almost as abruptly as it had begun; the river led out on to a vast plain that stretched right down to the sea; and on the grassy edge of this plain we and our osier bundles were stranded and left to drain. I suppose we three semi-living creatures must have slept. I know I have a memory of waking with a sense of hunger, and staggering off through the grasses in the vague search for food, and then, presumably, I must have again toppled down in a state of blank unconsciousness. It seems also that this grassy plain was overrun with herds of wild cattle, which were hunted for their hides and tallow by a few half-breed Indians, and a brace of these hunters picked me up, killed a bull for my especial benefit, and coaxed me back to life with freshly squeezed beef juice. But it was long enough before I had the civility to acknowledge their attentions a matter of three weeks, in fact, during which time, except when I was raving with fever, I dozed in quiet unconsciousness; and at the end of that span I got my wits again, and began to review the situation.

I was alone with the hunters. Carew and Father Jupe had gone without a trace, but were both presumably alive, and potential for any amount more mischief, if not then in the actual performance of it. Dolores was distant quite a three weeks’ hard journey. And here was I as weak as a rat, with no possession available except for some ragged clothes and a rusty machete, and already in debt to my entertainers.

Dolores, on first thoughts, certainly seemed the place to aim for; but on second thoughts it began to strike me that my reception might be none of the best. My hand had been forced; I was full of excuses for what had happened; but excuses were a diet for which Briggs had no appetite. He preferred performance. And there was no denying several facts which told badly against me: in the first place, it was I who got the earliest tidings of Carew’s treachery; it was certainly I who had let him leave Dolores; I had certainly failed to kill him afterwards; I had found the missing Donna Delicia in Maxillo’s hands, and left her there; and, lastly, I had let Carew slip away from me without the faintest idea as to his next movements.

Of course, as I say, I was not without my excuses for all this, but the advisableness of carrying them in person to lay before the consideration of General Stephen Briggs was more than doubtful. It was quite on the cards he would stick me up against a wall and give me a platoon as fitting pay for my performances.

However, the matter was in a way decided for me. My excellent hosts, it seems, regarded me as an asset of value, a cheque, so to speak, which could only be cashed in Dolores, and it was hinted to me that if I did not go peaceably I should be ignominiously carried off to that city as a prisoner. They knew I was a member of the Expeditionary Force; indeed, I had admitted as much. And I suppose they argued that if I had reasons for keeping out of Briggs’s way, Briggs would be inclined to pay for my presence. So with an unspoken understanding to this effect between us, we set off on a tedious three weeks’ journey round the base of the Tolpec Mountains.

At the outset of that piece of travel I was like to have been shaken to pieces. Of road there was not a vestige. We zigzagged over rough foothills, wriggled through forests, squirmed through bad morasses, and swam rivers. I was weak still with fever, and the horse they put me on was a rough-gaited brute without a notion of any civilised paces. But somehow I seemed to pull round, and by the time we got to Dolores I was all right again, though very lean and gaunt, and like a scare-crow for rags and hair.

However, there was no opportunity to trim up. My hosts or captors, if you prefer the term insisted on going straightway to the President, and the tale they chose to give overcame all scruples of the guard and the chamberlains.

Briggs I beg his pardon, Don Esteban Puentos was dining in some considerable state, and amongst others at the table were Davis, Coffin, and Fluellen. There was a bit of a hush at our entrance, and a chamberlain was whispering something into the President’s ear.

The answer was spoken aloud: ” Quite right to bring him here. Yes, quite right to bring him now. I am the State’s servant, and always quite ready to attend to the State’s business.”

Then little Coffin recognised me, and jumped up and wrung my hand. ” Faith, it’s Birch! ” he shouted. ” The immaculate Birch not knocked on the head after all, but turned into a woodnymph.”

“Colonel Coffin,” said the President in that quiet, carrying voice of his, ” Mr. Birch is in the employ of Sacaronduca, and will therefore wish to report to me first.”

Coffin shrugged his shoulders and sat down, and I well, I stood there like a fool, not knowing where or how to begin. The President waited till the silence in the room had grown thoroughly chilling, and then, ” Have you come to tell me. Mr. Birch, that you have condoned for your absence without leave by killing Sir William Carew as an enemy to this country?”

“No,” I said, ” I did my best, but he escaped me.”

“And yet my reports say that you were with him several days with arms in your hands.”

“I had no opportunity of killing him honourably.”

“Your duty to this State, sir, comes .first. It lay within your power to have killed both Carew and Father Jupe as active enemies to the Republic. You did not do this. You assisted, moreover, in a sacrilegious marriage which was calculated to further disturb the peace which I have made for Sacaronduca; and I should be giving you only justice, according to the terms of our contract made in London, if I had you taken from this place and forthwith shot. If my interests in this country depended on the like of you, sir,