Morning found him in a mangrove swamp. Walking and slapping had kept the mosquitos from actually flying away with him, but he was bushed and badly swollen when the sun rose. It rose from the jungle over his shoulder and for a moment he was completely turned around in his head and thought he must be on the Pacific side of the isthmus. But then he remembered the funny way Panama crawled across the map. The Atlantic side was closer to the west than the Pacific side. Panama City lay to his southeast, even though he’d have to cross jungle and mountains to reach the Pacific shore. Nothing down here worked the way a Connecticut Yankee expected.
He could smell the sea, though he couldn’t see it. The jungle path he’d followed this far had petered out in a maze of salt-water channels among crazy little trees that walked on stilts. He crossed a slough of knee-deep water. Then as the sun warmed him, he stripped on a grassy hammock, threw his soiled clothes in to soak, and dove in after them.
His skin was still sallow and looked like an army of mice in heavy boots had marched over him. But he was feeling much better. He knew he was still weak, for him. But Captain Gringo was a big, powerful man who, even off his feed, was stronger than most.
He rinsed himself clean, wrung out the shirt and pants, and spread them on the grass to dry. He was hungry as hell. A good sign. He was somewhere in Panama and nobody seemed to be trying to kill him at the moment. It was time to think about eating.
The shotgun shells he’d helped himself to were probably loaded with No. 9 buck. They were meant to put a man down. They’d tear the hell out of a bird or other small game. He’d heard you could eat the fruit of some kinds of mangrove, but there didn’t seem to be any fruit. If those noises he kept hearing were monkeys, that wasn’t hard to figure. He wondered what a monkey tasted like.
A slight movement in the stilling water he’d just left drew his attention. Something was moving his way just below the surface. He knew he was too far from the sea for it to be a shark. He’d been told ‘gators swam in fresh water. What did that leave? Turtles?
He grinned as he remembered the diamond-back terrapin soup he’d had that time in Baltimore. He was aboard the only dry land for a quarter mile each way. If he didn’t give himself away by moving, the turtle might be coming out to sun itself. How the hell did you kill a turtle? Maybe you cut its head off to start. He’d catch the brute first and work the details out while he built a cooking fire. He didn’t move a muscle and the thing kept coming. It was going to crawl out right between his feet. The hungry man tensed to grab it, the shotgun across his thighs.
And then the morning exploded in a hissing shower of salt spray as a ten-foot crocodile suddenly was staring him in the face, tooth-filled jaws agape and still coming!
“Kee-rist!” He gasped as he jerked his head back and the jaws snapped shut where his face had been. The crocodile was halfway out of the water by now and, having seen its mistake, was opening its jaws for a second snap, at Captain Gringo’s left shin. But the startled American was backstroking through the grass on his naked back and had snatched his bare leg away in the nick of time. The crocodile kept coming—a natural-enough mistake on the part of a hungry reptile. As it opened its jaws again, Captain Gringo shoved the muzzle of the Browning down the hissing throat and pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a muffled roar as the big jaws clamped down on the steel barrel. Captain Gringo pumped the action and fired twice more. Then the crocodile’s shattered head fell off as the bloody body of the monster rolled and writhed in the wet grass.
Captain Gringo sprang to his bare feet and danced back, gun in hand, to see what happened next. Considering he’d blown the brute’s head off, it took its own sweet time dying. It defecated, smashed around with its tail, and seemed to be trying to get back to the water while, a few feet closer, the smashed open head kept opening and closing its jaws and one yellow eye. The body slid halfway into the salt water crocodiles could swim in after all, then it stopped and just lay there quivering as a bright stain spread like red ink in the water.
Captain Gringo reloaded the shotgun, bent to grab the rough armored tail, and hauled the crocodile up on the hammock, saying, “No, you don’t. You were aiming to eat me. Turnabout is fair play!”
He took the tin of waterproof matches from the pile of belongings he’d placed on a palmetto log while washing himself and his clothes. He broke dry twigs and fronds, stuffed some dry grass stems in for tinder, and started a small fire while he pondered how one cooked a crocodile without a pot.
He’d think about having been splashing out there innocently in the slough another time, when those blood-flecked teeth in that shattered head were a less visible reminder of how foolish he’d been. He was sure he’d been told or read someplace that ‘gators only swam in fresh water. But maybe crocs were different, or hadn’t read the same natural history.
He’d never heard of piranhas. The vicious little man-eaters wouldn’t be written up in the English-language press before the coming turn of the century. He knew what an anaconda was, but he wasn’t sure he believed in them or in any other kind of sea serpent. The thing he’d just shot was enough to keep him out of the water for now.
He opened his penknife and partly skinned the muscular tail as the first sticks burned to coals. The white flesh was tough and stringy, but he’d heard it was the best part. That didn’t say much for the drumsticks.
He hacked big chunks of tail flesh free and skewered them on a green stick to roast over the coals. It smelled better than it looked as it sizzled on the stick, and he couldn’t remember when he’d last had a real meal.
Squatting naked by his breakfast fire, Captain Gringo suddenly knew he was not alone. He didn’t go for the shotgun laying near at hand. They hadn’t made a hostile move. Maybe he could keep things that way.
Casually, he turned his head. There were two of them. Kids. Brown as saddle leather and naked as he was. One of the Indians was a boy of about twelve. The girl at his side was maybe a little older. Her breasts were budding and she’d shaved her crotch. She was a bit stocky and pot-bellied, but not bad, if you liked them with a bone through the nose.
The boy had a bow in one hand, but he hadn’t drawn the arrow notched to his bowstring. The girl was unarmed and carrying a basket. Captain Gringo smiled and said, “Good morning.”
They didn’t answer.
“¿Hablar Spaniol, muchacho?”
Nothing. They didn’t move. They didn’t smile back. They seemed to be just waiting for something to happen.
Captain Gringo pointed at the dead crocodile and asked, “¿Tener hambre? ¿Desear algun?”
The boy was staring thoughtfully at his shotgun. But the girl was licking her lips now as she stared at the roasting meat in his hand.
Captain Gringo nodded and stuck the empty end of the stick in the ground, meat up. He got to his feet, a little aware of his own nudity, but what the hell, and kept his back to the boy as he picked up the gun. He moved a good ten feet away and put the gun down again before he turned to walk back to the fire. The boy had drawn the arrow to be ready for anything, but as he understood the gesture he released the shaft and let his arrow shoot into the sand at his feet. Still not smiling, he said something to his companion in an odd, birdlike dialect. She ran forward and snatched up the cooked meat.
Captain Gringo nodded and went back to cut some fresh tidbits from the tail. When he returned to his little fire both Indians had vanished, arrow, meat, and all. He shrugged and said, “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” and squatted to roast the fresh batch. He hoped this time he’d get to eat it. Unexpected guests could be a pain in the ass. But they’d had the drop on him and hadn’t been tempted. Why hadn’t they hung around? There was more than enough for everybody. He knew he’d never eat that whole tail, even if he hung around long enough for it to spoil in this damp heat. Maybe they hadn’t been hungry. They might not have liked roast crocodile and were just being polite.
Or maybe they’d gone home to get the bigger boys.
He nodded and left the spit above the coals as he quickly retrieved his hardware and got dressed. The clothes smelled better by far, but were still a bit damp and sticky with salt. Maybe it would rain before the itching got too bad.
He plucked the stick from the coals and kicked sand on the fire. Then he headed into parts unknown, eating the crocodile roast as he walked and keeping the shotgun with a round in the chamber and cradled on his free arm. He kept an eye on the surrounding brush and tried to walk silently. He was feeling himself, once more, and it was time to start making sense. Greystoke had told him his friend Gaston was in Panama City, wherever that was. The folks in this part of Panama seemed to be mad at him if they spoke Spanish and sort of spooky if they didn’t.
He saw little point in walking into the ocean, so he started feeling his way inland, moving east. They apparently hadn’t built the canal everyone had been talking about for years, but there had to be some damned way to get across the country. If his luck held out he should come to a road, a path, or some damned thing. He was sincerely sorry he’d never paid much attention in school to geography. They’d never told him what the point of memorizing all those maps might have been.
Before his court-martial and disgrace, Dick Walker had considered himself a reasonably well-read man. But there was so much to keep up with, these days, and every time you turned around the world had taken another leap into bewildering change. He was still a young man, but he remembered when there’d been no such thing as a telephone, phonograph, or electric light. He’d learned to shoot on his uncle’s farm with a muzzle-loading caplock. Now his services as a machine gunner seemed to be much in demand. In a world where young ladies were just getting the hang of the safety bike, they were seriously discussing new laws to regulate the horseless carriage!
The maps they’d had when he’d been a schoolboy were already out of date. The magenta red of the British Empire now spread across vast African fiefdoms no white man had seen when he’d been learning to read. Von Bismarck had smeared the colors of little Prussia into a blob as big as France. Down here in the tropics, the borders shifted faster and they seemed to have a new revolution every week, weather permitting. Constitutional Britain called itself a monarchy. Little tinhorn tyrants like Diaz of Mexico called their dictatorships democracies. Nobody knew who in hell was running the Ottoman Empire or where the Russian borders were these days. How the hell was he supposed to figure Panama out? He only knew it was a skinny strip somewhere between North and South America and that Panama City was on the Pacific Coast. He couldn’t imagine why.
It was about noon and starting to get really hot again when Captain Gringo stumbled over a dirt path. He followed it, and the jungle began to give way to banana groves. Some of the trees had clumps of bilious green bananas hanging from them, upside down from the way one saw them hanging in a grocery store back home. He was hungry again, but he resisted the temptation. He wasn’t sure what green bananas would do to you, and in any case they had to belong to someone and he already had enough people mad at him.
The path widened to a road as he followed it, walking slowly. If Panama was anything like Mexico it would soon be siesta time. This could be both good and bad. He’d likely find the villages ahead quiet as he came in from the jungle. But a stranger would stand out more should anyone be looking out a window.
He couldn’t help being tall and blond, an obvious gringo. The shot-gun was another matter. He didn’t want to throw a man-stopper like this away, but waving a 12-gauge Browning at people tended to make them very nervous. He’d be buying trouble either way.
Captain Gringo stopped and considered the nearest banana plant. He tried to strip a frond off, and found that the fragile-looking feathery green was tougher than it looked. He dug a thumbnail in and peeled a long wet string out, finding it flexible and strong as butcher’s twine.
He nodded and fished out his penknife to get to work. He wrapped the gun in banana leaves, tying it into a long-green-shapeless package. So much for the gun.
He pulled his shirttails out to hide the pistol tucked in his belt.
He’d still attract attention, but an unarmed stranger might not draw fire on sight.
As long as he had time to kill before he’d be sure of walking in during la siesta, he sat down with some banana strips and experimented, trying to remember the basket weaving he hadn’t tried since kindergarten, and hadn’t been good at then.
It took him two false starts and almost an hour to fashion a very ragged-looking green hat. It smelled like new-mown hay and would probably fall apart when it dried out, but it hid his blond hair and shaded the blue eyes and straw-colored stubble on his unshaven jaw. If he kept his head down and just walked past people without stopping, they might leave him alone.
If they didn’t leave him alone there were five 12-gauge rounds in the magazine and he could get to the trigger and pump through the improvised wrappings.
Satisfied he’d done all he could, Captain Gringo went on. The road was leading inland and slightly uphill. It seemed to be taking its own sweet time getting anywhere. He was now in totally cultivated country, but there wasn’t a sign of human activity or habitation. The fields on either side were mostly planted banana, with occasional clearings of monstrous corn stalks, twice the size of corn in the States. He assumed the locals harvested both crops green, but they figured to ripen on the way to town unless he got to some town soon.
He knew from Mexico that Latin farm folk tended to live in clustered villages rather than on their land the way American farmers did. But he walked at least five miles since coming to the first banana groves. Whoever owned them didn’t mind a long walk to work, or, more than likely, didn’t mind if his peones wasted hours getting to and from the fields.
The sun was past the zenith, now, and still no town. It was hotter than hell and he was sincerely glad he’d thought to weave himself a hat. The birds and monkeys were taking a siesta, too, and the only sound was the crunch of his feet on the dirt road and an occasional whirring noise from the roadside weeds he sincerely hoped was some insect.
Then, in the distance, he heard the low, mournful cry of a railroad locomotive. It sounded like a Baldwin. That made sense. He remembered, now, that some American company had built a rail line across the jungle from ocean to ocean. It saved weeks of travel for passengers bound for the west coast, but the shipping interests hated it. You couldn’t run a clipper or steamer along a railroad, so until a canal was built they simply lost a lot of passenger fares to the owners of the rails. He wondered how the railroad interests felt about the canal. Then he decided there was nothing to wonder. Anyone with a railroad monopoly between the Atlantic and Pacific would welcome a competing canal like terminal cancer! He was beginning to see how Panama could be a cockpit caught between the Great Powers, financial as well as political.
The road cut through some twelve-foot cactus hedges and suddenly opened out on a dusty plaza surrounded by pink stucco houses and an arcaded market, with an old baroque Spanish church on the far side.
The shady side of the square was tempting, but the open doorways of shops and cantinas figured to be open question marks along the arcade. So he lowered his hat brim against the blazing sun and bulled directly across the center of the plaza. Anyone who wanted to ask why he was packing a sheaf of banana leaves would have to cross fifty yards of blazing sunlight to do it.
Apparently nobody was that interested. He made it across and spotted what looked like a railroad platform just beyond the church. He had a few Mexican pesos left in his battered wallet. He wondered what the fare to Panama City might be. It was worth asking, and if he didn’t have enough, at least he could follow the tracks. It couldn’t be more than a hundred miles across the isthmus, could it?
There was some people standing in the shade of the platform’s canopy. This was good and bad. They wouldn’t be there during la siesta unless they were expecting a train. But he didn’t feel like talking to anyone until he’d put more distance between himself and the jail he’d just busted out of.
One of the strangers under the canopy was a priest or monk in a wide flat hat. He was talking with a petite brunette in widow’s weeds and a black lace veil. She had a nice little body, but this was hardly the time and place to flirt with recent widows. Captain Gringo stepped up on the tiled platform and moved down to avoid the others.
He saw no stationmaster or anyone possibly working for the railroad. He would have liked to ask what the fare to Panama City was, but maybe it was better this way. He’d get on and check it out with the conductor. If he didn’t have enough, they could simply drop him off at the next stop and he’d have covered at least a dozen sudden miles. He noticed a telegraph line running beside the track. But he thought and, yeah, there had been no wire from the town he’d escaped from. It was fifty-fifty there was no description of him on the wire. He’d killed the only guard who knew he was well and armed again. The others might think a sick and delirious gringo had run off into the jungle to die. If he was wrong, he’d know soon enough and there was no point staying here.
A man said, gently, “Parlez-vous Francais, m’sieu?” and Captain Gringo saw it was the elderly priest. He shook his head and replied in Spanish, explaining he was an American. He’d learned the hard way not to try to pass for anything else down here. Most Latins had him down pat at first glance.
He saw the widow was listening albeit with her head turned demurely away as the priest said, “Forgive me, but I notice you have a gun under your shirt.”
“You’re very observant, Padre.”
“We live in interesting times. Since you obviously have a rifle hidden in those leaves for reasons that are not my business, I take it you know about Los Indios?”
“I did hear something about Indians,” he lied.
The priest nodded and said, “The San Bias are roving on the mainland again. One never knows what they may be up to. Sometimes I fear the San Bias don’t know, either. They are a most truculent tribe. We have never been able to convert them from their savage ways.”
Captain Gringo remembered the young couple he’d shared a meal with and wondered if they were these San Bias the older man was speaking of. They’d seemed reasonable enough back there in the jungle, but maybe that was because he hadn’t tried to convert them from their savage ways. He’d heard some odd stories about the way the early Spanish had gone about civilizing Indians.
The priest said, “That young lady over there is on her way to Panama City. As you see, she is traveling alone.”
“Right, and these Indians of yours are on the warpath.”
“Alas, the San Bias are not my Indians. They follow strange jungle gods of their own. The Indians might not be the greater danger to a woman traveling alone. The train may be carrying ruffians from the coast. As you see, she is most attractive. I feel it would be better if she boarded the train with an escort.”
“Yeah? How come you picked me, Padre? I need a shave and for all you know I’m a crazy bandito or worse.”
The priest smiled gently and said, “One gets to know about people in my vocation, my son. I know nothing about your past and I care not a fig what you are doing here in Panama. I saw at once you were a gentleman. May I introduce you to the lady and tell her you will see her safely to the end of the line?”
The wanted man hesitated as he ran the new development through his mind for flaws. He didn’t want to be saddled with some weeping widow in a firefight. On the other hand, if they were looking for a single man on the run ... He nodded and said, “Why not?”
The priest led him over to the girl, who he now saw was a stunning beauty under her veil, and introduced her as Madame Marie Chambrun. Captain Gringo gave his name as Dick Richards, hoping he’d remember the name if it came up again. The widow was French, of course, and her Spanish was worse than Captain Gringo’s. He spoke little French, but she fortunately spoke English in a cute little voice with a Breton lilt.
As they waited for the train, the tall American said as little as possible. So the girl, a bit nervous, started telling him the story of her life. It wasn’t a long or complicated story. She’d come from France as the bride of a young French engineer, working on the canal for the Suez Society. He’d died a few months ago of yellow jack. When the American nodded and mentioned he knew about yellow jack, Marie nodded and said, wistfully, “I noticed the fading bruises on m’sieu’s skin. Isn’t it most bizarre how the fever chooses its victims? My own case was most mild, they tell me. My late husband was strong and almost as big as m’sieu, but the doctors could do nothing to save him. What did m’sieu take for it? Quinine or the gin the English swear by?”
“I, ah, just toughed it through. I was out in the jungle without a doctor when it hit me. I guess I was just lucky.”
The priest murmured, “The peones say the fever is caused by the bite of some insect. In God’s truth, no civilized doctor seems to know what causes it or how to cure it. Sooner or later, all of us get it if we stay more than a few months; vomito negro was the cause of the French failure to complete the canal project.”
Marie Chambrun frowned bitterly and said, “Mais non! It was not a failure on the part of my poor Jacques and the other young engineers. It was mismanagement of funds in France. That is why I must go to the city. I have never received my late husband’s bonus. He was to have been given extra pay for completing his section ahead of time. Now they tell me there is no money left. We shall see, in court, non?”
Captain Gringo frowned and asked, “Do you mean you’re broke and stranded in this country, ma’am?”
“Heavens, non! My family is most wealthy and they send me money. But I shall not return to France as .they keep begging me until I have had justice! My husband earned his bonus. He died for their thrice-accursed canal. It is not just that they write him off as wasted effort!”
The priest looked down at his feet and murmured, “The French are most practique where money is involved, I fear. Madame refuses to believe me when I tell her there is no justice in a Colombian court of law. Not down here in the lowlands, at any rate. Bogota sends only its most worthless officials to Panama to get rid of them. What they call government, in Panama City, is a farce. Everyone knows this part of Colombia is administered by thugs and controlled by rich outsiders. Madame would do better pleading with the Vanderbilt Trust or Lloyds of London for her late husband’s bonus. The international cartels at least rob widows and orphans with a certain style. The so-called judges in Panama City are unwashed boors.”
Before they could go into it farther, the ground began to tingle and the train rolled around the bend to slow, hissing, to a halt.
Captain Gringo bent and picked up the small carpet bag the widow had at her feet. The priest walked them to the nearest passenger car of the passenger-freight combine and as the American asked if he knew what the fare was, Marie said, “Don’t be silly, m’sieu. We are traveling on my husband’s railroad pass. It still seems to be good and one must take every advantage of the money changers, non?”
He suddenly decided he liked her a lot better.
It was awkward, but he helped her up the steps, juggling the carpet bag and bundled shotgun as they made their way through a cluttered vestibule to a corridor with separate compartments along one side. The railroad might be American-owned and the locomotive was a Baldwin, but the first-class coach was English.
He elbowed a sliding door open for her. The compartment was nearly empty, but a voice called out, “We have no room in here.”
Captain Gringo stared morosely down at the dapper little white-haired man who’d spoken and said, “You’ll have to make room, friend. The lady needs a seat and I’m bigger than you.”
The couple who’d been there first consisted of the annoyed little man and a voluptuous red-headed woman in a linen traveling duster and mosquito-veiled picture hat. The man stared unwinkingly at the tall American as Marie Chambrun ignored the man and took a seat across from the redhead. Captain Gringo placed her carpet bag on the rack above them and sat down beside her, the bundled shotgun across his knees as he waited to see what the little man was going to say or do about it.
The other man was wearing a rumpled white suit, but his shirt was fresh and you could smell his bay rum across the compartment. His goatlike face was made of Vs. His white hair came to a sharp V above a wrinkled, oily forehead. The bushy black brows formed another V above the V of his hooked nose and the double V of his white mustache and Louis Napoleon beard. He smiled thinly at Captain Gringo and said, “American, eh? I thought you were one of these unwashed peasants at first sight.”
“We’d have sat down anyway, friend.”
“No doubt. I notice the leaves you have around that Browning are drying out a bit. Do you always carry your guns wrapped up like that?”
Captain Gringo started peeling away the leaves and tossing them out the window to his left as the train tooted and started moving again. The V-shaped man waited for an explanation, saw he wasn’t going to get one, and said, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Sir Basil Hakim. The lady to my right is called Jenny. She is my, ah, secretary.”
Captain Gringo didn’t answer. He didn’t like gents who had to let you know right off who they were screwing. The redhead looked hard as nails and was probably used to being treated like a good expensive cigar. He felt a little sorry for her anyway. She was a bit over thirty and the bitterness was starting to show at the corners of her lush lips. Her price would be coming down in a few short years and. she looked like she knew it.
Sir Basil waited again and finally shook his head to remark, “This promises to be a rather awkward journey through the jungle, young man. Would it help if I apologized for my earlier rudeness? I really spoke before I noticed you were gentlefolk.”
Captain Gringo said, “I’m Dick Richards. This is Madame Chambrun. She’s not my secretary. She’s a lady. So watch it.”
Hakim laughed, quite pleasantly, considering the cobra expression in his amber eyes, and said, “You know about the Indians being back on the mainland, I see. Browning makes a good riot gun. What’s it loaded with, No. 9 buck?”
“Yeah. Are you interested in guns, Mr. Hakim?”
Hakim laughed and replied, “You obviously don’t know who I am. That does explain a lot.”
He reached down between his feet and opened a valise as he continued, “I’ve made my own arrangements in case this train is hit by the San Bias. Have you ever seen such lovely machinery?”
Captain Gringo watched as the older man began to assemble an odd-looking little weapon he’d carried stripped down in the valise. Hakim snapped a thin wooden stock to the bulky, rather awkward-looking action, and said, “It’s not on the general market, yet. But I keep abreast of the latest developments. Mauser of Germany will be coming out with this in a year or so.”
“I thought Mauser made bolt-action rifles.”
“Oh, they do. The best military rifle in the world, despite the advertisements of Kragg or Martini. As I said this new toy is an advance model. Few bugs to work out before they can produce it economically.”
“I can see there’s some hand tooling on the action. What the deuce is it? It looks like a miniature machine gun.”
Hakim brightened and agreed, “That’s just what it is, dear boy—9mm full of semi-automatic, with only seven moving parts. Any San Bias attacking this train would be well advised to stay clear of this car, what ho?”
“If that gadget works; What’s this business I keep hearing about the Indians being on the mainland? Where are Indians supposed to be?”
Marie Chambrun spoke up to explain, “My late husband told me about the San Bias. They are sea-roving canoe Indians, like the Caribs. They live on small islands off the north coast of Panama—at least, that is where they are supposed to be. When they are at peace they hunt the mangrove swamps for game, or fish the lagoons for mullet and pearls. As long as they stay out there, the Colombian Army leaves them alone.”
“I see. And if they wander ashore, that’s considered a declaration of war?”
“But it is a declaration of war. The Indians know they have no business on the mainland.”
“I get the picture. The early Spanish settlers gave up on a few pockets of Indians they couldn’t get to wear pants and it’s too much trouble to chase them through a mangrove swamp or coral keys. If they come back to the country they used to own, all bets are off.”
Marie shook her head and said, “Mais non, they really can be most savage. When my late husband and his friends were working in the jungle they had many, how you say, run-ins with the San Bias. They are tres savage. Jacques said they shot a Negro at his side with a poisoned arrow one afternoon. The poor black man had done nothing to offend anyone. Les San Bias are most uncivilized and unpredictable.”
Captain Gringo shrugged and turned his gaze out the window to hide his thoughts as well as to be ready for an unexpected arrow from the passing wall of green.
He thought back to the Indians he’d met back there in the swamp. That boy had been packing a mean-looking bow and could have put an arrow in his back. But he hadn’t. What the hell did it mean, and how could he use it?
If you just say “jungle” without seeing Central America it doesn’t mean that much. Word games like “green hell” are getting there, but even seeing wasn’t believing and the train seemed to be boring its way like a worm through some big half-rotted green apple. Trees leaned at crazy angles, being strangled by elephant-trunk vines that were in turn being attacked by what looked like spinach-green barbed wire. There were palms that crawled on their bellies like reptiles, sprouting big red thorns.
They passed a lake of puke-green water and he spotted a big rusty machine surrounded by water-lily pads big enough to walk on. He muttered, “Hey, that looked like a steam shovel!” and Marie said, “Yes. The Suez Society abandoned tons of equipment in here when they gave up.”
“Was that lake back there part- of the canal?”
“Who knows? They dammed rivers and dredged the mouth of the Gatun deep enough for oceangoing vessels. Jacques told me they kept changing the plans, if indeed they had plans to start with. Old Ferdinand De Lesseps tried to supervise from Paris and as fast as he sent engineers into these malarial swamps, they died. My husband said the best possible route was this one the railroad follows. The American company who owns the tracks did not seem inclined to move them out of Jacques’ way.”
Sir Basil snapped the clip in his machine pistol and said, “In the end, I’m betting on the Yanks to finish the canal. As a British subject, I’d prefer Whitehall to control the route. Rule Britannia and all that, but while we fiddle, Rome burns. I’m afraid the coming century goes to the Americans by default. I had a few shares in the Suez Society, but, fortunately, I owned a block of railway shares, too. I sold short when I caught onto the Yankee manner.”
Captain Gringo shot him a curious look and asked, “The States were behind the failure of the French company, Sir Basil?”
“Oh, not directly. Morgan, Vanderbilt et at hardly brewed up yellow jack in a witch’s cauldron. But they knew De Lesseps would fail. So they play the waiting game.”
“You mean they want to delay the building of the Panama Canal because it would cut into their railroad profits. Right?”
“Wrong. Modern capitalism is hardly that crude. Madame just observed the railroad trust hold the right of way to the only practical route across the isthmus. Whoever builds the perishing ditch will have to pay, and through the nose, for these jolly tracks we’re riding over. No doubt, by now, the wise-money lads are investing in a new canal venture. I’m sure it will be an American company, this time.”
He armed his Mauser, rested it in his lap, and added, “That’s why we’re going to have a few more revolutions in the near future.”
“The American bankers want a revolution in Panama?”
“Oh, they don’t care one way or the other. Once they’re ready to build, they’ll buy out any political hacks in power. Please remember Panama is not a country, yet. It’s a neglected corner of the Republica de Colombia.”
“I stand corrected, Professor. Since you know so much about the local revolutions, how about telling us what they’re fighting about.”
“I thought I just did. The name of the game is power. Whoever wants to build anything down here has to cross the gypsy’s palms with silver.”
“In other words, any bandito who can manage to be El Presidente for the right weekend will be paid off by the bigwigs from outside?”
“Exactly. I’m sure they’ll offer grander excuses than naked peasant greed. They usually do. Since the California Gold Rush made this part of the world more important than it looks, they’ve had over fifty revolutions. The speeches are usually about Bogota’s misrule and neglect, and the peones can get dreadfully worked up over words like libertad. The Colombian Government at Bogota keeps winning, of course. Their army may be shabby by European standards, but a man with a machete really has no business fighting a soldier with a repeating rifle.”
“I see. The rebels would no doubt like to buy. all the automatic weapons they could get, eh?”
Hakim glanced down at the little killing machine in his lap and chuckled. He patted it and said, “You’re right. I am a simple merchant trying to make an honest living. You’ll hear soon enough, in the city, I’m supposed to be a gun runner.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not if you mean mucking about in swamps with a muleload or two of rusty old Springfields or Lebels. I deal in quality merchandise, wholesale. I’d give you my card, but, forgive me, you don’t strike me as a man who’d be in the market for a battery of field guns, or perhaps a few Krupp gunboats.”
“I’m impressed.”
“I hoped you would be. You see, I’m a rather small man, physically. I like to let people know, right off, I can be dangerous when crossed.”
Captain Gringo chuckled and said, “I didn’t know you sold battleships when we barged in on you.”
“Of course you didn’t. That’s why I’ve decided to let you live when we get to Panama City. I’m really a rather gentle type. I only kill people who really annoy me.
He was still smiling, but he sounded like he meant every word.