"I'll tell you the gist of it later," said Farrell. "It started over politics."

"So? . . . We've a way with that trouble over here," said Renton.

"Now you mention it, I'd read in the London _Times_ that you were running for munic.i.p.al government, and then somehow you seemed to fade out. . . . I wondered why. . . . Is that part of the story?"

Farrell answered that it was. They were seated in Renton's private office, and Renton picked up a small square block of wood from his desk. It looked like a paper-weight.

"I've a certain amount of--well, we'll call it influence--hereabouts, if any man happens to be troubling you," he suggested musingly, and glanced at Farrell. "But you're not taking it that way, I see."

Farrell nodded.

"You just want to be cleared out. . . . That's all right. You shall tell me all about it later, boss--any time that suits you."

He handed the paperweight across to Farrell. "Ever come across that kind of wood?" he asked.

Farrell examined it. "Never," he answered. "It looks like mahogany--if 'tweren't for the colour. Dyed, is it?"

"Not a bit. I could show you with a chisel in two minutes. . . . But you're right. Mahogany it is, and cuts like mahogany. . . . I keep a high-cla.s.s warehouse of stuff lower down-town, and there I'll show you a log of it, seven-by-four. It's from Costa Rica. Would you care to prospect? . . . I don't mind sharing secrets with the old firm, as you always dealt with me honourably and we're both growing old enough to remember old kindness."

"I'd make a holiday of it," said Farrell heartily, fingering the wood. "Comes from Costa Rica, eh?"

"There's not much of it going, even there," said Renton.

"Not enough, I'm afraid, to start a fashionable craze. It was brought to me, as a sample, by an enterprising skipper from Puerto Limon, and I was going to send back a man with him, to prospect.

. . . But it's not detracting from his character to say that he can't tell mahogany from walnut with his finger-tips in the dark--as _you_ could, boss. If it's a holiday you want, with a trifle of high cabinet-science thrown in, what about taking his place?"

"It's the loveliest stuff," said Farrell, rapt, fingering the wood delicately.

"Well, now, that makes me feel good, having my old master's word for it, that taught me all I know. Look at it sideways and catch the tints under the light. 'Opaline mahogany' we'll call it.

Come down-town with me, and I'll show you the baulk of it. It don't grow big. . . . What about cash?"

"I've a plenty for the present," Farrell a.s.sured him. "Clearing's my only difficulty."

"You trust to me, and I'll oblige," said his old employee.

Farrell went back to his hotel that evening, paid his bill and walked out with his grip. At Renton's warehouse in the lower town he changed his dress for a workman's; was conveyed to the Quay by Renton, who shipped him aboard the lime-tramp. She carried him down to Puerto Limon; where the skipper took a holiday, and the pair struck farther down the coast on mule-back for a hundred miles or so, and then inland for the Mosquito village hard by which they were to find the grove of this mysterious purple hardwood. They found it--as Farrell had agreed with Renton in expecting--to be no forest, scarcely even a grove, but a mere patch, and the timber a "sport"

though an exceedingly beautiful one. On their return to Limon Farrell wrote out a careful report. The wood was priceless.

It deserved a new genius to design a new style of inlay for it.

Given that, with the very pink of artists among cabinet-makers and a knowledgeable man to put the furniture on the market, a reasonable fortune was to be made. With skill it could be propagated: but for two generations and longer it must depend on its rarity. He added some suggestions for propagating it and wound up, "Turn these over, for what they are worth, to someone who understands this climate and is botanist as well as nurseryman. It won't profit you or me, Ned; and we've no children. Mr. Weekes has, though"--Weekes was the skipper--"and his grandchildren ought to have something to inherit.

I'd hate to die and think that such stuff was being lost to the trade. But for the standing timber, anyway, there's only one word.

_Buy_. Yours gratefully, P. Farrell."

When his report was written and signed, he handed it to Weekes.

"We can mail this, if you approve," he said.

Weekes read it over and approved the doc.u.ment. "But I don't approve mailing it," he a.s.sured Farrell. "No, sirree: your boss has a name for playing straight, but we won't give him all that time and temptation. We'll go back and hand him this together--for you come into it, I guess, on some floor or other."

"No," said Farrell. "The report's as good as it promises; but I'm out of this job. The only favour you can do me is to help me shift down this coast--as far as Colon, for instance. And I owe it to Renton, of course, to mail this letter. With your knowledge of the boats and trains, you can get to New York along with it or even ahead of it."

"That's all very well, so far as it goes," said Weekes, thoughtfully; "and I see your point. But again, what about _you_?"

"Ah, to be sure," answered Farrell, pondering in his turn.

"There's the risk of leaving me behind to chip in on you both.

Well . . . You don't run any whalers from this port, do you?"

"Whalers?" Captain Weekes opened his eyes.

"I understand," Farrell explained, "that they keep out at sea for a considerable time. . . . No, and it wouldn't help your confidence if I told you that there's a man in New York--an Englishman like myself--hunting me for my life. . . . But see here. Of your knowledge find me a southward bound vessel that, once out, certainly won't make port for a fortnight. We'll mail this report from the Quay, and you can put me on board at the last moment, watch me waving farewells from the offing, and then hurry north as soon as you please."

Well, this, or something like it, was agreed upon; and here Farrell sails out of the story for ten months, a pa.s.senger on the schooner _Garcia_, bound for Colon.

BOOK III.

THE RETRIEVE.

NIGHT THE FOURTEENTH.

SAN RAMON.

I have never set eyes on the village of San Ramon, but I have heard it described by two men--by one of them in great detail--and their descriptions tally.

It is a village or townlet of two hundred houses or so. It lies about a third of the way down the coast of Peru, close over the sea.

It has no harbour: a population of half-breeds--mestizos? Is that the word?--sprinkled with whitish cosmopolitans, and here and there a real white man. But these last, though they wear shoes and keep up among themselves a pretence to be the aristocracy of the place, have really resigned life for this antic.i.p.atory Paradise where they grow grey on remittance money, eating the lotus, drinking smoked Scotch in the hotel veranda, swapping stories, and--since they know one another all too well in this drowsy decline of their day--feebly and falsely pretending to one another what gallant knowing fellows they had been in its morning. As for their shoes, token of their caste, they usually wear them unlaced by day and not infrequently sleep in them at night. With the exception of Engelbaum, who keeps the hotel, the white citizens are unmarried. With the exception of Frau Engelbaum-- aged sixty and stout at that--there are no white ladies in San Ramon.

And yet San Ramon is a Paradise. A tall mountain backs it. The Pacific kisses its feet. A spring bursting from the mountain, about four thousand feet up, has cut a gorge down which it tumbles in cascades to the beach and the salt water. Where the source leaps from the rock the vegetation begins, as you would expect. It widens and grows more luxuriant all the way down. The stream comes to a forty-foot waterfall between sheer rock curtained with creepers; whence it hurries down through plantations of banana, past San Ramon, which perches where it can, house by house, on shelves hidden in greenery. There it takes another great leap into a basin it has hollowed for itself in the steep-to beach.

We have come down by nature's route. Now we'll climb back by man's.

A sort of stairway, broad-stepped, made of pebbles and pounded earth, mounts in fairly well engineered zigzags to the plateau above the lower fall, and in a straighter flight beside the gorge to the hotel which is the topmost building of San Ramon. Above that it becomes a gully curved by torrential rains; above that, zigzags again as a mule-track up to a pa.s.s in the mountains--and thereafter G.o.d knows whither. Connecting the lower zigzags (I need scarcely say) are short-cuts or slides made by the brown-footed children, who plunge down almost as steeply and quickly as the stream itself when the fortnightly fruit-steamer blows her siren beyond the point.

There is no harbour, you understand. The small steamer--by name the _P.M. Diaz_--drops anchor a short mile out in a half-protected roadstead, and discharges what she has to discharge, or lades what she has to lade, by boats. Her ladings during the banana-harvest are feverish, tumultuous, vociferous. Her ladings during the sleepy remainder of the year comprise canned meats, Scotch whisky, ill.u.s.trated magazines, and plantation inspectors.

It was almost twelve months to a day--I am trying to tell the story to-night as a novelist would tell it, but without going beyond the material supplied to me--It was almost twelve months from the day Foe left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he stepped ash.o.r.e on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share up the shreds. They took him, as a matter of course, for a plantation inspector, arrived in the off-season. He was the only pa.s.senger landed from the _P.M. Diaz_, which had dropped anchor comfortably, in perfect weather, but would sail in the morning.

A light land-breeze blew off the mountains: but it pa.s.sed over a mile of water before rippling the sea, which, insh.o.r.e, lay as gla.s.s.

The sunset from the Pacific lit up San Ramon above him, all terraced and embowered.

Halted there, gazing up and taking stock of this Paradise before scaling it, Foe could not be aware, though he might have guessed, that half a hundred embrasures in the climbing foliage hid field-gla.s.ses and telescopes of which he was the one and common focus. Up at the hotel, one idler said to another, "Will it be Morgansen this time, d'you think?" The other pa.s.sed on the question to Engelbaum, who was so far the master of his guests that he had lazily commandeered the large telescope on the _galeria_, and without gainsay. "If it's old Morgansen," the second man added, "we might trot some way down the hill to wish him well. The day's cooling in."

"It's not Morgansen," announced Engelbaum. "A new man--thinnish--Oh, yes, but an inspector. You can tell these scientific men by their cut."

"Hope they haven't sacked old Morgansen," said the first idler.

"He's been a bit of a scandal, these three years. But he knows about bananas more'n a banana would own to, even with a blush."