"First time, I tell you secret about Henry Morgan. This time I have secret about Francis. You come along and talk with me now."
Leoncia's heart leaped at mention of Francis, and as she slipped on a mantle and accompanied the Caroo it never entered her head to doubt that Yi Poon was waiting for her.
And Yi Poon, down on the beach and spying upon Torres, had no doubts when he saw the Caroo murderer appear with the Solano senorita, bound and gagged, slung across his shoulder like a sack of meal. Nor did Yi Poon have any doubts about his next action, when he saw Leoncia tied into the saddle of the spare horse and taken away down the beach at a gallop, with Torres and the Caroo riding on either side of her. Leaving the pulque-sodden peon to sleep, the fat Chinaman took the road up the hill at so stiff a pace that he arrived breathless at the hacienda. Not content with knocking at the door, he beat upon it with his fists and feet and prayed to his Chinese gods that no peevish Solano should take a shot at him before he could explain the urgency of his errand.
"O go to hell," Alesandro said, when he had opened the door and flashed a light on the face of the importunate caller.
"I have big secret," Yi Poon panted. "Very big brand new secret." "Come around to-morrow in business hours," Alesandro growled as he prepared to kick the Chinaman off the premises.
"I don't sell secret," Yi Poon stammered and gasped. "I make you present. I give secret now. The Senorita, your sister, she is stolen. She is tied upon a horse that runs fast down the beach."
But Alesandro, who had said good night to Leoncia, not half an hour before, laughed loudly his unbelief, and prepared again to boot off the trafficker in secrets. Yi Poon was desperate. He drew forth the thousand dollars and placed it in Alesandro's hand, saying:
"You go look quick. If the Senorita stop in this house now, you keep all that money. If the Senorita no stop, then you give money back…"
And Alesandro was convinced. A minute later he was rousing the house. Five minutes later the horse-peons, their eyes hardly open from sound sleep, were roping and saddling horses and pack-mules in the corrals, while the Solano tribe was pulling on riding gear and equipping itself with weapons.
Up and down the coast, and on the various paths leading back to the Cordilleras, the Solanos scattered, questing blindly in the blind dark for the trail of the abductors. As chance would have it, thirty hours afterward, Henry alone caught the scent and followed it, so that, camped in the very Footstep of God where first the old Maya priest had sighted the eyes of Chia, he found the entire party of twenty men and Leoncia cooking and eating breakfast. Twenty to one, never fair and always impossible, did not appeal to Henry Morgan's Anglo-Saxon mind. What did appeal to him was the dynamite-loaded mule, tethered apart from the off-saddl-ed forty-odd animals and left to stand by the careless peons with its load still on its back. Instead of attempting the patently impossible rescue of Leoncia, and recognising that in numbers her woman's safety lay^ he stole the dynamite — mule.