As a matter of fact, Crust was using him to very materially advance his own ends. The big Portuguese had a very definite purpose in mind. He had no more intention of making Landover the chief man of the island than he had of flying to the moon. He,—Manuel Crust,—was to have that distinction! He despised Landover and all that he represented. He hated him because he was rich, educated, favoured by fortune,—and given to washing himself with unnecessary frequency and thoroughness. Manuel was foul of body as well as foul at heart. He bitterly resented the sanitary rules set up and enforced by the Council because those rules interfered with what he was pleased to call his personal liberty. Why should he be required to wash himself if he didn't want to do so? And why should he do a great many silly things that Dr. Cullen ordered, just because a lot of aristocrats were in the habit of doing them?
His hatred of Landover, however, was impersonal. The banker merely represented a class. On the other hand, he hated Percival as an individual; he hated him with every drop of blood in his black, venomous heart. He had a certain grudging regard,—it might even be called respect,—for the class to which Landover belonged; he was sometimes conscious of a strange but quite positive sense of his own inferiority. But he did not for an instant put Percival in the class with Landover. He looked upon the young American as being no better than himself, and yet the people from the Doraine had showered honours upon him, had made him their chief, had suffered him,—a vagabond without a penny to his name,—to marry the fairest and rarest woman of them all. What right had this interloper to everything that was worth having, while he, an honest fellow who always had paid his way, was denied even the smallest place in the councils of the land? What right had he, a tramp, to sit upon a throne?
Landover was an unwitting, but thoroughly self-satisfied dupe. He fitted in very nicely with Manuel's plan to gain control of the island. There were certain people who regarded the great banker as an apostle, a man to follow, to be imitated,—such men as Block, Nicklestick and a few others. Was he not one of the great financial geniuses of the day? Was he not a power, a tremendous power, in the banking world? Was he not a man who understood how to transform a dollar into a business block almost over-night? For a time, sentiment had played tricks with their boasted astuteness. Swept along by the current, they had failed to appreciate the true conditions. They began to realize that it had been a mistake to keep such men as Percival in power; behind the hand they went about convincing each other that it was high time to rectify the original error. These, in addition to the ignorant, easily persuaded rabble from the steerage,—who, by the way, could give ample testimony as to Percival's ability to “bluff,”—provided Crust with a decidedly formidable following. The steerage people had but to be reminded of the time when Percival tricked them so successfully.
Crust contended that if the American could fool them once, he would do so again,—in fact, he went so far as to say that he had been doing it all the time.
There was nothing open and above board about the methods of Manuel Crust. He proceeded about the business of fomenting dissatisfaction and strife with an artfulness surprising in one of his type. At no time did he openly denounce the “government.” He was very careful about that. A jesting word here, a derisive smile there, a shrug of the shoulders,—and in good time others less politic than himself began to do the talking. Others began to complain of the high-handed, dictatorial manner in which Percival and his friends ruled the community.
The secret, stealthy opposition grew apace; it assumed sinister proportions,—all the more sinister because it was masked by every outward sign of submission. Crust had won friends right and left among the very people who would have killed him not so many months before but for the very man he was planning to destroy.
Outwardly he had changed,—not subtly, it is true,—from a sullen, threatening bully into a hearty, smiling, sympathetic comrade who laid himself out to be obliging. Even Percival was puzzled, if not deceived, by this surprising transformation.
CHAPTER III.
It was Olga Obosky who discovered and exposed the plot. A young Spaniard had fallen hopelessly, madly in love with her. He was a good-looking, hard-eyed boy from the pampas,—a herder who was on his way to visit his mother in from Rio. He was a “gun-slinger” bearing close relationship to the type of cowboy that existed in the old days of the Far West but who is now extinct save for pictorial perpetuation on the moving-picture screens.