“When Buck went back to the house,” said Grier, “Manuel Franca went along; and when he stood at the door, and looked into the emptiness, he smiled.”
“And the roof didn’t fall on him?”
“No-o-o, nothing so inadequate; it was only palm-thatch. What did happen was that he went into the inner room where the rusty beds were as if he knew the way, picked up that little Imitation, fluttered the leaves, and, when he came to the name written inside—‘Bonnie West,’ he smiled again.”
“What has that to do with—?”
“With Buck Brennan? O, a great deal. . . . You ought to have talked to Buck. You see, he’d done nothing but try and think things out, and wonder who Bonnie West was and what had happened to her, until he’d made a sort of picture of it—and her. She must have seemed quite real to him. It was in the jungle, you know, anyway. . . . .”
“Well?”
“Well, when Franca smiled, Buck took a dislike to him. So you see, it was much worse than if the roof had fallen. . . . Thank God. And I never saw Bonnie’s name in a book.”
Now, she begins to come into it.
An excessively strange companionship must have ensued between those two in the empty mission-house; neither asked any questions of the other, in a situation that called for many; a betrayal in itself, if both had not so studiously avoided the veriest shadow of distrust. Certain things Buck never cleared up—for instance, if Franca took him for a bona-fide padre because of the collar! It sounds impossible; but “in there,” as Grier puts it, “the priests are just anything.” Perhaps Franca was too deep in his own affairs to notice Buck much; for it took no more than a day or two for Buck to realize that he also was waiting, watching, searching for something with an intensity that defied pretence. He believed Franca had come back—ah! come back?—to find something.
Brennan also began to look for it, though he was hampered by not knowing what it was! And by the necessity of keeping up appearances. He went on tidying the schoolroom; he told Franca that his porters had deserted on the way up with most of his goods, which was moderately true; he was expecting to get new men, only they seemed to have all run away from the vicinity.