“It's been framed with Sarros to let you spend your money on that concession and get the mine in running order; then a fake suit, alleging an error in the government survey, will be filed. It will be claimed that the concession given your friend Geary is, by virtue of erroneous government surveys, the property of a citizen of Sobrante. The courts here do as Sarros tells them. You are to be kicked out, busted, and despairing, and your nicely equipped little mine will be taken over as a government monopoly and run for the benefit of the government, to wit, Sarros and his satellites. We had to cook up a dirty deal like that to save your life. Of course, now that I have warned you in time, you are safe. We schemed a proposition, however, that worked both ways. It enabled us to save you and to save us, by permitting the shipment, free of suspicion, of arms for the rebels that are to attack the city from within. Naturally I had to cache their arms within the city—and that was a hard problem until you happened along. Thank you, fairy godfather.”
“My thanks are due you, Ricardo. I'm for you, first, last, and all the time, and against this Sarros outfit. By the way, how do you purpose moving your machine-guns?”
“We'll have to carry them, I guess.”
“Well, I'll have a small auto-truck delivered in Buenaventura by that time. You might arrange to armour it with sheet steel; and with a couple of machine-guns mounted in it, and a crew of resolute Americans behind the machine-guns, you could caper from one end of the city to the other and clear a path for your infantry.”
“Thank you, my friend. I'll borrow the motor truck and arrange to armour it. That's a bully idea. Are you bound for Buenaventura now?” Webster nodded. “Then,” Ricardo suggested, “I'll meet you in my room at El Buen Amigo next Wednesday night at eleven and explain the details of my plans to you if you care to hear them. I think they're air-tight myself, but somehow I think I'd feel more certain of them if you approve them.”
“I'll be there, Rick, and the day you run that outlaw Sarros off the grass you'll know why I am for you.”
“Good-bye, old man. You will never know how grateful you have made me.”
Ruey shook hands with Webster and rode off through the timber, leaving John Stuart Webster to pursue the even tenor of his way, until at length he arrived once more in Buenaventura and sought accommodations at the Hotel Mateo. And there, as he entered the lobby and gazed through a glass door across the patio and into the veranda, he saw that which disturbed him greatly. In a big wicker rocker Dolores Ruey sat, rocking gently and busily stitching on a piece of fancy work!
Billy Geary gone back to the United States, and Dolores was still in Buenaventura! Amazing! Why, what the devil did Billy mean by letting her have her own way like that? Of course they hadn't been married, or she would not now be out there on the veranda, and of course they hadn't quarrelled, because that was an impossibility, and of course Billy had departed alone for the U. S. A., else he would have returned to their camp in the hills back of San Miguel de Padua.
“Well, I know what I'm going to do,” Webster decided. “I'm not going to be led into temptation while Billy's not on the job—so I'll not put up at the Hotel Mateo after all. I'll just sneak around to El Buen Amigo and fix it with that old Mother Jenks not to tip off my presence in town to Dolores Ruey until I can get the lay of the land and see what the devil has happened to all my well-laid plans.”