THE GOOD HERMIT OF LA POPA
The cloth bound round his tousled head, the torn shirt that bared his chest, the pongee trousers soiled with sweat and dust, the strips of canvas wrapped about his feet, made this wounded fugitive the image of a buccaneer as he sat waiting in the round watch-tower with the machete across his knees. It was not long before the temper of savage defiance yielded to exhaustion. Oblivion enfolded his senses and he relaxed in a stupor that was a counterfeit of sleep. The scowling visage took on the gentler aspect, boyish and engaging, that was familiar to his shipmates. It was an interlude.
He did not stir when the stone barracks inside the city wall were agitated by some loud excitement. There was confused shouting, orders bandied to and fro, the shrill alerte of a bugle, squads of soldiers pattering at the double-quick. All this indicated that the hapless privates, Francisco and Manuel, had found an audience.
The hue-and-cry passed by the broad ramp that led to the top of the wall. It was perhaps assumed that the mad Americano would spread havoc in the city streets or break for the harbor to hide in some boat and escape by sea. It was the first duty of the soldiers to protect the people of Cartagena. Therefore they scattered to warn and search, ready to shoot on sight.
Meanwhile the hunted man’s respite was unbroken. When, at length, he lifted his head and hastily caught up the machete to resume his sullen vigil, the prison area had resumed its wonted quietude. There were no sounds to suggest an alarm. The sun had passed the meridian by an hour or so, as Richard Cary discovered through a slitted window. He was surprised that his hiding-place had not been discovered. He could hope for no such good fortune as concealing himself in the watch-tower until nightfall. And how would that aid him? He was trapped. Death clamored for him in the city. It was certain to overtake him in the swamps and jungle if he should succeed in stealing away. The sea was also impossible. He could never reach it.
The effort of rising to his feet left him all spent and trembling. He could not have walked a score of yards in the deadly heat of the sun. The muscles of his back were so stiffened and inflamed that he was bent like an old man knotted with rheumatism. His head was even more troublesome. After the lull, it was aflame again. One moment he was able to think, the next he was lost in a welter of phantasms. He closed his eyes because the light hurt them. He would hear the Colombian soldiers when they came near the watch-tower.
A little while, however, and the aching brightness of the sky was tempered by clouds that gathered swiftly. They grew black as they rolled toward the zenith, with a flickering play of lightning. The distant mutter of thunder swelled in rolling detonations. At first the rain came in a flurry of drops. Richard Cary mistook the sound for the pit-pat-pat of the hurrying feet of Colombian soldiers. With a groan he lurched out of the watch-tower to finish the thing in the open.
The tropical rain came down like a flood, as though the clouds spilled a solid deluge of water. A whistling squall swept it in sheets. Between the parapets was a gushing river which spouted through the embrasures and rushed down the ramp. It was a torrential downpour unknown to northern climes.
To Richard Cary it was the saving grace of heaven. It beat against him, cooling his parched skin, refreshing him like an elixir. It quenched the fires that had so grievously tormented him. He felt the strength revive in his weary body. He forgot the stiffness, the hurts, the hopelessness of a man in the last ditch. He scooped up the rain in his cupped hand and lapped it like a dog.
The blessed rain did more than this. It offered a chance of extricating himself from the immediate perils besetting him. The squall drove the rain in sheets, obscuring the buildings of the city, veiling the harbor. He gripped the machete blade between his teeth and threw a leg over the outer parapet. It was a thirty-foot drop to the bottom, which was a shallow depression where the moat had been. The stones had been cunningly cut and fitted to build a wall with a smooth facing, but the tooth of time had gnawed deep crevices in which grass had taken root.
Richard Cary’s fingers found rough corners to cling to, and lodgment for his toes. Cautiously groping, he let himself down from one stone to another. It was not a vastly difficult feat, easier than those other Devon seamen of long ago had found it to scale these same walls with ladders. When giddiness halted him, he fastened himself to the stones like a great bat and waited for the spell to pass.
Finally he let go and dropped to the ground. It had been a wrenching ordeal, but when the pain was unendurable he had the machete to bite on. The space outside the wall, which was a populous open-air market and resort for idlers, had been suddenly deserted. The terrific rain had driven every last soul to shelter. The fugitive made a limping détour to reach a strip of beach beyond the quay. Fishermen with their baskets, the vendors of green stuffs, the carts and the burros, had scampered to find dry places.
It was a homing instinct, this endeavor to escape to salt water. There was no plan. In fact there was no clear expectation of getting anywhere. It was enough, for the moment, to be outside the walls of Cartagena. Far better risk drowning than be riddled with bullets by the comrades of Francisco and Manuel.
Between the driving sheets of rain he caught glimpses of the yellow beach. Two or three dugout canoes were drawn up. One of them had a lading of green bananas. The fugitive plodded toward them and no man came to hinder him. The rain was all about him like a misty curtain. He stumbled in the soft sand above high-water mark and fell against the gunwale of an empty canoe. It was a small craft, but heavy. To push it into the water seemed a task altogether beyond him. However, he set his shoulder against the blunt bow and dug his feet into the sand.
Gashed and harried and fevered, it was the inherited bulldog strain in “Big Dick” Cary that sufficed for this final struggle on the sands of Cartagena. The canoe moved, an inch at a time, to the harder surface of the tide-washed beach. Then it slid faster until the surf kicked up by the squall was splashing against it. The stern floated.
Cary stood up and looked out at the foaming, rain-swept lagoon. He could not drive the canoe ahead against the wind, but he remembered a wooded point not far away and a lee beyond it. This he might fetch on a slanting course with the ebbing tide to help.
A last dogged thrust and the canoe floated in the surf. He tumbled over the side and fell face downward in the tepid rainwater that washed over the bottom boards. Righting himself, he caught up a short paddle and swung the bow away from the beach. He crouched amidships and did little more than steer, with a few strokes now and then to hold the course and avoid drifting broadside on. These motions were done mechanically, like an automaton. The canoe safely skirted the shore where it curved an arm out into the lagoon. Behind it was calmer water, a rippling surface on which the canoe floated lazily.
The paddle was idle. The fugitive sat with folded arms, indifferent to the whims of destiny. The tide pulled at the sluggish canoe and it slowly moved abreast of the shore. The rain ceased as suddenly as it had flooded down. The clouds broke and dissolved in ragged fragments until the sky was an inverted bowl of flawless blue. The sun poured its breathless radiance upon a lush landscape that steamed as it dried.
To Richard Cary this was an affliction. An hour of sun would be the finishing stroke. He had not even a straw hat to shield his head. It didn’t very much matter what happened to him. He was beyond caring, but it was peculiarly unpleasant to be grilled alive. He made shift to steer the canoe inshore until it grounded. Just beyond the belt of marsh he saw a densely verdured knoll marked by one tall palm. He filled the baling can with the rainwater in the canoe and carried it with him. The machete served to chop a few bushes and so make room for him to crawl into the thicket and lie down.
In spite of the heat a fit of shivering seized him, the chill that presaged a recurrence of fever. Mosquitoes swarmed to plague him. The afternoon waned and he had not moved from this lair in the thicket. Not until sunset did he go crashing through the brushwood and hold fast to the palm tree while he stupidly glared this way and that, imagining ambushed foes.
Behind this bit of low land was a hill that soared abruptly to a height of several hundred feet. Its crest was stark and rugged, with a sheer cliff that dropped toward the sea. It stood alone, this bold and frowning hill, and was a famous landmark from many miles offshore. La Popa, mariners had always called it because of the resemblance to the castellated poop of a galleon. What made it even more prominent was the massive convent whose walls were like a fortress, a structure which, at a distance, looked as if it had never been despoiled and forsaken. Both Drake and De Pontis the Frenchman had held it for ransom.
It had become a mere shell, a noble relic of the religious zeal of another age. At one end nestled the chapel and this had been preserved, still used for the infrequent advocation to Our Lady of La Popa by priests and pious pilgrims of Cartagena. From the city a rough path led up the sloping ridge of the hill, a path trodden by many generations of nuns and worshipers.
La Popa! The huge white convent looming on the summit of the cliff! A place for a man to hide and scan the Caribbean for sight of a ship. There Drake had posted his sentries to guard against surprise by galleons coming from the north or south. A long, hard climb up the hill, through the jungle at the base, and then a circuit to get clear of the cliff where the defenders had rolled rocks down upon the heads of certain English seamen. It might be done, however, if a man could find the path. A full moon rising early and the convent gleaming above to set his bearings by!
Soon after dawn of the following morning, the caretaker of the Chapel of Our Lady of La Popa came pottering out of a hut built in a corner of the roofless convent. His errand was to tether his two goats on the herbage of the slope. He was a spare man, lame in one leg and feeling the burden of years. Having lived much by himself in this lonely retreat, he had formed the habit of talking to himself in the unkempt gray beard. By way of variety he often talked to the goats whom he fondly addressed by name.
Having tethered them while the air was still cool, this kindly Palacio untied a rusty tin cup from his belt and milked Mercedes who was a docile animal. The cup of warm milk and a tortilla of coarse meal was a breakfast that sufficed him. While munching the sooty tortilla he gazed about him from under shaggy brows and, as always at this time of day, admired the roseate splendor of Cartagena and its everlasting walls. There was nothing in all the world to compare with it, reflected this elderly recluse. The browsing Mercedes waggled her tufted chin in agreement.
Presently Palacio picked up his cane and wandered along the slope to inspect his garden patch of beans and peppers. It was a continual skirmish to save the beans from the forays of the other goat, Lolita, who was a young creature of feminine caprices and often possessed of a devil. Palacio’s rebukes, even the threat of making goat’s-meat of her, left Lolita’s heart untouched.
In the grass beside the garden patch, Palacio was startled to perceive a large object which had not been there before. Cautiously he backed away and leaned on his stick while he scrutinized the phenomenon. It was a man asleep or dead, a man of prodigious bulk and brawn whose clothing was no more than dirty tatters. His skin was criss-crossed with scratches and smeared with dried blood. A stranger to Palacio, and a man so strange to this part of the world that he might have dropped from the skies!
Timidly the caretaker approached the body in the grass and knelt to touch its cheek. The flesh was warm, even hot and angry. Gaining courage, he tugged at the man and rolled him over to discover any serious injuries. He found a knife wound in the back and a lump on the head as big as a tangerine. If the man had climbed the hill of La Popa, it was a miracle. Where had he come from? It was the divine influence of Our Lady, whose shrine was in the chapel, that he should be found alive in this place.
“What a thing to stumble on when I lead my goats out in the morning!” said Palacio, both hands in his beard. “Never has a wonder like this happened to me. I am at the end of my poor wits. If I go down to Cartagena to find a doctor, it is slow walking for me with my lame leg on the rough path—and this enormous man may die in the grass. Soon the sun will be too hot to leave him without a roof over his head.”
In his agitation Palacio limped to and fro. Could he roll this man over and over like a sack of coffee, as far as the threshold of the convent? Then perhaps he might drag him into the hut. It could do him no more damage. As it was, he looked as if he had fallen off the cliff. In spite of his lameness, Palacio was tough and sinewy. When in his prime he had been a laborer on the quay, carrying heavy freight on his back.
The goats had cropped the grass until it was a green sward. Palacio grunted and began to roll the man like a cask. A groan dismayed him. This would not do. It was more merciful to try to drag the body a little way at a time, like a burro hitched to an ox-cart. Nobly Palacio hauled and panted until he had progressed as far as the stake that tethered Mercedes. She trotted over to nuzzle him. It was an expression of sympathy. He felt much encouraged. Lolita, the jade, was waiting to rear on her hind legs and butt her master behind the knees.
“Horned offspring of perdition,” he told her, “do not add to my troubles. Poor Palacio is almost breaking himself in two for the sake of love and charity. Butt me again and the dust shall fly from your speckled hide.”
A back-breaking task it was, but Palacio managed to drag his burden to the hole in the convent wall where a door had been. A bed of straw and a blanket on the floor of his hut was all the comfort he could contrive for the unbidden guest. So fatigued that his legs were like two sticks, the anxious Palacio mixed a little warm goat’s-milk and rum in the tin cup and forced it between the man’s lips. It seemed to trickle down his throat. Then he dosed him with a bitter draught from a bottle, a tincture of quinine and herbs which had assuaged his own spells of fever.
With a singular deftness, Palacio washed the patient and tore up a clean shirt to bandage him. That wound in the back was alarming, so livid and inflamed, but it might heal if kept cleansed and dressed.
“A man like this is very hard to kill,” he said aloud. “To look at him you would say he had already suffered several deaths. The air is cool and healthy up here on La Popa, and there is the sweet presence of Our Lady. I will light a candle at her shrine and a fresh one as soon as that is burned down, poor man though I am. The life of this enormous stranger with the hair like gold belongs to me. It is a gift of God.”
It was a battered, useless gift, the wreckage of Richard Cary. Hard to kill, though, as Palacio had concluded. In his favor were youth, extraordinary vitality, and clean blood untainted by dissipation. Illness was unknown to him. Through two long days and nights the devoted Palacio watched and nursed him, nodding off at intervals. That bitter brew in the bottle was holding the fever in check, and the diet of goat’s-milk and onion broth was efficacious.
The patient babbled while delirious. Palacio understood almost nothing of what he said, but one inference was beyond doubt. The sick man’s voice, the message of his eyes, the restless movements of his hands were easily interpreted. He was afraid of discovery. Enemies were in pursuit of him. It was an issue of life and death. Palacio referred the problem to the responsive Mercedes while milking her.
“What is to be done, little comfort of mine? This man is innocent of crime. You have seen him for yourself. He has won my trust and affection, and he is my guest. Not many visitors come to La Popa from the city. It is an old story to them. But the American tourists from the fruit boats will come early some morning to see the convent. The men will sit on the rocks and say, ‘Zowie! damn-fine-view,’ and the women will poke their noses everywhere. Our guest will make curiosity and be chattered about in Cartagena and down at the ships. He wishes to be hidden away until his health is restored. What do you advise, most intelligent of little goats?”
The most intelligent Mercedes tossed her head and ambled in the direction of the convent wall, as far as her tether permitted. Then she pawed the grass with a sharp hoof. Palacio eyed her gravely. She was trying to assist him. He pondered the matter, twisting his beard tight. Blockhead that he was! To have to be instructed by a goat! She was showing him what to do. He hurried into the hut for a lantern. Into the convent cellar he clambered and then crept into an opening where the stones had been dislodged.
It was the entrance of the ancient tunnel which was said to have led to the foot of the hill and so beneath the walls of Cartagena as a secret passage to be used in time of siege. Such was the tradition. It was possible, however, to explore only a short distance from La Popa because rocks and dirt had filled the tunnel.
“Two or three days more,” said Palacio, “and I can move my guest into this chamber where only God himself will find him. Visitors can be told that the tunnel has caved in since the last heavy rain.”
This was partly the truth. A hole had appeared in the gullied surface of the hill, but it was a dozen yards away from the convent wall and hidden by a clump of small trees. It let the light into the tunnel, and the air drew through it by day and night. Palacio courteously thanked Mercedes for stamping her hoof directly over the underground passage. She had handsomely solved the problem.
He spared no pains to make the secret chamber habitable for his guest. In the chapel was found a disused table and a carved oak chair big enough to hold an archbishop. There was also a strip of carpet and two brass candlesticks. Palacio fashioned a bed of limber poles bound with rawhide thongs, and stretched a piece of old canvas across the frame.
During the labor of love, what of Richard Cary? The stormy stress of mind and body was past. The whirling tumult of emotions, the repeated shocks of perils and escapes, were no more tangible than dreams. Indeed, they seemed to belong with his dreams of the Cartagena of the galleons and the conquistadores. He was in a haven of lucid tranquillity, unvexed by the past, with no thought of the future. Physical weakness constrained him, but Nature was eager to heal and restore, and he felt no great discomfort. It was a state of apathy that brought the anodyne of contentment.
It amused him to listen to the droning monologues of Palacio as he pottered about the hut. They exchanged a few phrases in English and Spanish and became amazingly well acquainted thereby. Between them was the fondness of a father and son. The goats walked in to pay their respects, Mercedes the well-mannered lady at a bedside, Lolita rudely foraging for provender and chewing stray garments until Palacio thumped her with a broken stool.
It was a memorable moment when the guest was helped to lift himself from the pallet of straw. He swayed against the straining Palacio, their arms across each other’s shoulders. In this manner they staggered into the cellar by arduous stages and thence to the chamber inside the tunnel entrance. The guest expected his weight to crush the spare Palacio, but it was do or die. The achievement made them hilarious. Palacio uncorked a treasured bottle of red wine. Later he knelt at the shrine of Nuestra Señora de La Popa and humbly offered thanks for the recovery of his dear friend and guest.
In the underground room the hours passed without impatience. Light filtered through the gullied opening in the roof. The air was never sultry. A roving armadillo tumbled through the hole and consented to stay a while, lured by bits of food. It curled up in its scaly armor and slept under a bench. Its serene attitude toward life was worthy of imitation.
“But I can’t stay here curled up in my shell,” said Señor Cary to the placid armadillo. “For one thing, I am imposing on Palacio’s good nature with no way of repaying him. And the old codger is pretty well worn out. As soon as my legs will hold me up, I must work out some plan of campaign or other. But why fret about it now? Mañana!”
With a steady mind he returned to the situation day after day. To try to smuggle himself aboard a Fruit Company’s steamer was one possibility. It was thrashed out and dismissed. Ignorant that Colonel Fajardo had ceased to be the Comandante of the Port or anything else, he pictured him as venomously vigilant to watch and search every vessel leaving Cartagena. Without friends or money it was out of the question to try to reach some other port by land. The delta of the Magdalena was one vast wilderness of swamp and water-courses.
He was still ensnared, but no longer a frenzied fugitive without a refuge, and he possessed the unquenchable optimism of a strong and competent young man.
Very often his thoughts dwelt with Teresa Fernandez. Her kisses were dearly remembered, her voice echoed in his heart, and the gay fortitude with which she met the buffets of life appealed to his chivalry. She was a woman worth loving forever and a day.
A fortnight more, and the Tarragona would be steaming across the Caribbean, on another southern voyage, to pick up her landfall for Cartagena, sighting the abrupt and lofty hill of La Popa from many miles at sea. Now that his strength was flowing back, Richard Cary could not remain buried like a mole. Inaction would soon become both irksome and cowardly. One thing was certain. He swore to find Teresa Fernandez, returning in the Tarragona, and to hold her in his arms.
There was only one hope of attaining this desire, of making the resolve more than an empty boast. Teresa’s uncle, that “funny old guy” Señor Ramon Bazán, had shown a liking for him during that brief visit in the moonlit patio. “A delicious hit,” Teresa had called it. This might mean nothing at all. A man in his dotage, tricky and whimsical, had been the impression left by the shriveled uncle with the little brown monkey perched upon his shoulder.
What his relations might be with the officials of Cartagena was impossible to surmise. He had been a person of consequence in earlier years, a figure in the political affairs of Colombia. This much Teresa had conveyed in the remark that he had once been sent to Washington by the Government at Bogotá. Would he feel inclined to protect an American refugee whom the authorities were hunting like a dangerous animal? What of the obligations of the hospitality which he had so warmly proffered? A rope of sand, as likely as not. Spanish courtesy in its finest flower had been displayed by the lowly Palacio, but with Señor Ramon Bazán it was a very different situation. Doubtless he knew what Richard Cary had done and why he was branded as a criminal condemned to execution.
Ah, well, what else was life than a gamble on the turn of a card? A proper man ought not to hesitate whenever the stake was worth the hazard. Teresa Fernandez would risk as much for him, of this Richard Cary felt convinced. She was that kind of a woman. Win or lose, he would try to meet her in the house of Uncle Ramon Bazán while the Tarragona was in port.
There was only one way to put the hazard to the touch. This was to send Palacio into Cartagena with a note to the bizarre old gentleman. It meant revealing the hiding-place on the hill of La Popa and inviting capture. The message would have to be an appeal to find some ingenious plan of smuggling the fugitive through the city streets. He was not yet strong enough even to walk down the rocky path to the foot of the hill.
“A rotten poor bet,” said the guest of the good Palacio, “but show me another one. And if I can get into Cartagena, I can get out again. By God, I’m going to kiss my girl.”