Джек Лондон - Hearts of Three [С англо-русским словарем]

The night, while the Jefe Politico and Torres organized their expedition under cover of the dark, was destined to be a momentous one in the Solano hacienda. Things began to happen early. Dinner over, drinking their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, the family, of which Henry was accounted one by virtue of his brotherhood to Leoncia, sat on the wide front veranda. Through the moonlight, up the steps, they saw a strange figure approach.

‘It is like a ghost,’ said Alvarado Solano.

‘A fat ghost,’ Martinez, his twin brother, amended.

‘A Chink ghost you couldn’t poke your finger through,’ Bicardo laughed.

‘The very Chink who saved Leoncia and me from marrying,’ said Henry Morgan, with recognition.

‘The seller of secrets,’ Leoncia gurgled. ‘And if he hasn’t brought a new secret, I shall be disappointed.’

‘What do you want, Chinaman?’ Alesandro, the eldest of the Solano brothers, demanded sharply.

‘Nice new secret, very nice new secret maybe you buy,’ Yi Poon murmured proudly.

‘Your secrets are too expensive, Chinaman,’ said Enrico discouragingly.

‘This nice new secret very expensive,’ Yi Poon assured complacently.

‘Go away,’ old Enrico ordered. ‘I shall live a long time, yet to the day of my death I care to hear no more secrets.’

But Yi Poon was suavely certain of himself.

‘One time you have very fine brother,’ he said. ‘One time your very fine brother, the Señor Alfaro Solano, die with knife in his back. Very well. Some secret, eh?’

But Enrico was on his feet quivering.

‘You know?’ he almost screamed his eager interrogation.

‘How much?’ said Yi Poon.

‘All I possess!’ Enrico cried, ere turning to Alesandro to add: ‘You deal with him, son. Pay him well if he can prove by witness of the eye.’

‘You bet,’ quote Yi Poon. ‘I got witness. He got good eye-sight. He see man stick knife in the Señor Alfaro’s back in the dark. His name…’

‘Yes, yes,’ Enrico breathed his suspense.

‘One thousand dollars his name,’ said Yi Poon, hesitating to make up his mind to what kind of dollars he could dare to claim. ‘One thousand dollars gold,’ he concluded.

Enrico forgot that he had deputed the transaction to his eldest son.

‘Where is your witness?’ he shouted.

And Yi Poon, calling softly down the steps into the shrubbery, evoked the pulque-ravaged peón, a real-looking ghost who slowly advanced and tottered up the steps.

At the same time, on the edge of town, twenty mounted men, among whom were the gendarmes Rafael, Ignacio, Augustine, and Vicente, herded a pack train of more than twenty mules and waited the command of the Jefe to depart on they knew not what mysterious adventure into the Cordilleras. What they did know was that, herded carefully apart from all other animals, was a strapping big mule loaded with two hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite. Also, they knew that the delay was due to the Señor Torres, who had ridden away along the beach with the dreaded Caroo murderer, José Mancheno, who, only by the grace of God and of the Jefe Politico, had been kept for years from expiating on the scaffold his various offenses against life and law.

And, while Torres waited on the beach and held the Caroo’s horse and an extra horse, the Caroo ascended on foot the winding road that led to the hacienda of the Solanos. Little did Torres guess that twenty feet away, in the jungle that encroached on the beach, lay a placid-sleeping, pulque drunken, old peón, with, crouching beside him, a very alert and very sober Chinese with a recently acquired thousand dollars stowed under his belt. Yi Poon had had barely time to drag the peón into hiding when Torres rode along in the sand and stopped almost beside him.

Up at the hacienda, all members of the household were going to bed. Leoncia, just starting to let down her hair, stopped when she heard the rattle of tiny pebbles against her windows. Warning her in low whispers to make no noise, José Mancheno handed her a crumpled note which Torres had written, saying mysteriously:

‘From a strange Chinaman who waits not a hundred feet away on the edge of the shrubbery.’

And Leoncia read, in execrable Spanish:

‘First time, I tell you secret about Henry Morgan. This time I have secret about Francis. You come along and talk with me now.’

Leoncia’s heart leaped at mention of Francis, and as she slipped on a mantle and accompanied the Caroo it never entered her head to doubt that Yi Poon was waiting for her.

And Yi Poon, down on the beach and spying upon Torres, had no doubts when he saw the Caroo murderer appear with the Solano señorita, bound and gagged, slung across his shoulder like a sack of meal. Nor did Yi Poon have any doubts about his next action, when he saw Leoncia tied into the saddle of the spare horse and taken away down the beach at a gallop, with Torres and the Caroo riding on either side of her. Leaving the pulque-sodden peón to sleep, the fat Chinaman took the road up the hill at so stiff a pace that he arrived breathless at the hacienda. Not content with knocking at the door, he beat upon it with his fists and feet and prayed to his Chinese gods that no peevish Solano should take a shot at him before he could explain the urgency of his errand.

‘O go to hell,’ Alesandro said, when he had opened the door and flashed a light on the face of the importunate caller.

‘I have big secret,’ Yi Poon panted. ‘Very big brand new secret.’

‘Come around to-morrow in business hours,’ Alesandro growled as he prepared to kick the Chinaman off the premises.

‘I don’t sell secret,’ Yi Poon stammered and gasped. ‘I make you present. I give secret now. The Señorita, your sister, she is stolen. She is tied upon a horse that runs fast down the beach.’

But Alesandro, who had said good night to Leoncia, not half an hour before, laughed loudly his unbelief, and prepared again to boot off the trafficker in secrets. Yi Poon was desperate. He drew forth the thousand dollars and placed it in Alesandro’s hand, saying:

‘You go look quick. If the Señorita stop in this house now, you keep all that money. If the Señorita no stop, then you give money back…’

And Alesandro was convinced. A minute later he was rousing the house. Five minutes later the horse-peóns, their eyes hardly open from sound sleep, were roping and saddling horses and pack-mules in the corrals, while the Solano tribe was pulling on riding gear and equipping itself with weapons.

Up and down the coast, and on the various paths leading back to the Cordilleras, the Solanos scattered, questing blindly in the blind dark for the trail of the abductors. As chance would have it, thirty hours afterward, Henry alone caught the scent and followed it, so that, camped in the very Footstep of God where first the old Maya priest had sighted the eyes of Chia, he found the entire party of twenty men and Leoncia cooking and eating breakfast. Twenty to one, never fair and always impossible, did not appeal to Henry Morgan’s Anglo-Saxon mind. What did appeal to him was the dynamite-loaded mule, tethered apart from the off-saddled forty-odd animals and left to stand by the careless peóns with its load still on its back. Instead of attempting the patently impossible rescue of Leoncia, and recognizing that in numbers her woman’s safety lay he stole the dynamite-mule.

Not far did he take it. In the shelter of the low woods, he opened the pack and filled all his pockets with sticks of dynamite, a box of detonators, and a short coil of fuse. With a regretful look at the rest of the dynamite which he would have liked to explode but dared not, he busied himself along the line of retreat he would have to take if he succeeded in stealing Leoncia from her captors. As Francis, on a previous occasion at Juchitan, had sown the retreat with silver dollars, so, this time, did Henry sow the retreat with dynamite the sticks in small bundles and the fuses, no longer than the length of a detonator, and with detonators fast to each end.