Outside the grilled door of his room, José squatted on his heels, smoking innumerable cigarettes from the blue packet that is a hall mark of the tropics. His naked machete hung in a rope sling at his side. In the morning José gave surly answers, Captain Navarro had been delirious—weak with fever. José ended this disquieting intelligence by drawing his blunt thumb across his wrinkled neck. Still there was no word from Don Rafael. It seemed there would be none until the fate of his son had been determined beyond doubt. Oddly enough, it was José who forced the hand of his master.
“José!” called Stanley Graydon the next morning. “José! Where is my breakfast?”
The figure curled up on the matting outside did not answer. Stirred by an uneasy premonition, Graydon stepped to the locked grill door and stooped to look at José’s face. It was bluish and livid. The lips were pressed tightly against the yellow teeth. There were great dark circles about the eyes. He stooped lower. The body was taut as a bowstring. The eyes stared at him in the fixity of death. The legs were drawn sharply up against the stomach, where the last agonizing cramp had shot them.
“Cholera!” he muttered. “Poor devil!”
Graydon’s calls for Don Rafael rang insistently. The maid who finally came gave one affrighted look and bolted, shrieking her terror. Then came the old don, who listened, with troubled eyes, to his prisoner’s startling proposal.
“Put me in charge of your men, Don Rafael. I know how to handle men, white or brown. I know how to fight cholera. Learned those tricks in the Philippines, and I’ve never forgot them. Escape?” He laughed tolerantly. “I wouldn’t leave you and your wife to fight this scourge if you threatened to whip me off the place.”
Don Rafael bent his head in grave thought. There was a tribute in the steel-blue eyes when he lifted them.
“I thank you, señor. I need you.”
Day and night, Stanley Graydon carried on his grim fight. Under his unsparing leadership, his peon laborers learned to police their grounds and huts as though the god of kitchen police was their patron saint. They fought the mosquitoes in their breeding spots, as though they were chastising the devil in person. They fought with oil and lime and shovels to drive the plague from their borders. They held to his laws without a murmur.
For a week the hacienda stood isolated from a world that knew nothing of its plight. Then Colonel Henriquez rode debonairly up the scarlet-flanked avenue. He was scornful of the agitated peon at the gates; blind to the sinister yellow flag that hung above the hacienda’s veranda. It was Don Rafael who broke the news to him. Henriquez wheeled his horse, drove his spurs into its flanks, and rode away as though the devil of the old patrician followed his incontinent flight. That night Don Rafael unbosomed himself to his prisoner.