CHAPTER VIII

UPON THE CITY WALL

The prison of Cartagena consisted of a long row of arched, tomb-like apartments built against the inside of the city wall. Two centuries earlier, this series of stone caverns had been the barracks of the Spanish troops who had defended this treasure port against one furious assault after another. Here was a prison likely to hold the most desperate malefactor. Only an earthquake could have weakened such masonry as this.

Upon a cot in one of these gloomy rooms lay stretched the body of a young man of heroic proportions. He was not a native. The fair skin and yellow hair were alien to the coasts of the Caribbean. His hairy chest was bare. Around it was bound a strip of cloth as a hasty bandage. His head was half-swathed in other folds of cloth. It was perplexing to know whether he was alive or dead.

The door faced a small open yard in which was a rude shelter from the sun, a shack knocked together of poles and boards. It had a covered porch in which hammocks were slung. A Colombian soldier lolled in one of them. Two others squatted on the floor and languidly shook a leather dice-box. They were small, coffee-colored men wearing coarse straw hats and uniforms of blue cotton drilling much faded. Their rifles leaned against a plank table littered with dirty dishes and black with flies.

The soldier in the hammock was a corporal. He aroused himself to scuffle to an iron door and peer in at the silent figure upon the cot. It had not moved. A waste of time to have washed and bandaged this murderous prisoner. Now these poor soldiers would be put to the trouble of digging a grave, and such a devil of a big grave! The two privates, Francisco and Manuel, were shaking the dice to see who should wield the accursed shovel.

The corporal yawned and loafed back to the hammock to rest. The journey of a few yards to the iron door had fatigued him. The trio chewed sugar-cane and lazily discussed the huge Americano, a most uncommon fish to be landed in their net. Alive and vigorous, he would be most dangerous. It would be as much as a man’s life was worth to enter his cell. Fortunately he had been hit on the head and stabbed in the back when discovered in a street not far from the little plaza of the Church of San Pedro Clavér.

He had run amuck, loco with rum, not much doubt of that. He had attacked as many as five young men of Cartagena, a serenading party innocently singing and playing the guitar. He had broken the necks of two and smashed the shoulder of another. Like a flail he had swung an iron bar actually plucked from a window with the strength of a giant and the fury of a madman.