A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Clever, These Americans

Frisco was holding down the thirty-foot bar of the cantina single-handed with a bottle of mescál on one side of him, a chaser on the other, and a stack of cartwheel silver half-pesos in front of him. The half-pesos and the mescál kept going down, the chaser didn’t. It was just for decorative purposes, the Chinese bartender’s idea more than his own. Frisco could not only hold down any bar single-handed, he could hold down any amount of mescál — straight. But he didn’t, he always quit this side of too much. He always wanted to know just what he was doing. And he always did. Clever lad, Frisco. The Chief of Police of the town he came from thought so, too. So did the chiefs of police of Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, San Diego — you could make a train despatch out of stringing them all together. They’d said so, in print and on the short waves, not once but many times, beginning Wanted for...

The night breeze, at eighty degrees a throw, rustled the fringe of paper streamers that served the cantina for a door-screen, dyed from left to right in the national colors, red, white and green, blurred now by the rain. Gold moonlight spilled in through the barred windows. A guitar plinked mournfully somewhere down one of the crooked streets.

Frisco slapped viciously at the back of his neck, said a couple of short and pointed Anglo Saxon words. The Chinese barman picked up a palm-leaf fan, and industriously air-conditioned his customer with it. “Moskleeto like white meat,” he grinned, waving vigorously.

Frisco said for the third time that evening, with growing irritation, “And you mean to say there aren’t any banks at all in this dump, Charlie?”

“No bank.” The Chinaman shrugged. “Wha’ fo’?”

“Well, ain’t this supposed to be the capital of this layout? Where do they keep their money? Where do you keep yours, for instance?”

“I keep by.” The Chinaman pulled a cord around his neck, brought up an oil-silk packet through his white bar-jacket. Paper money in here, slilva money in dlaw.” He pointed farther down the bar.

Frisco looked slightly interested for the first time. “How much you take in, on the average, a night?”

“Fi’ peso, mebbe ten.”

Frisco looked disgusted. “You’re safe,” he muttered somewhat enigmatically. “I would pick a hole-in-the-wall like this to pull over my head!” He hadn’t had much choice in the matter; he’d had to jump ship in a big, hurry. The next stop down had been Panama, which was uncomfortably close to American territory; and Frisco didn’t have to be told that a wireless message could beat a slow banana boat any day in the week. The fruiter hadn’t had any radio, and this penny-ante country had no extradition laws. Both were modern improvements which Frisco was heartily against. He approved of banks, though. In fact, he felt lost without them. If he’d known this place was going to be like this, he’d have stayed on the boat and taken his chances. Now he was good and stuck. No way to get out again. No trains to anywhere — just a narrow-gauge railroad leading back to the banana and coffee country. Both those industries were in the hands of American companies, and he wanted to give them a wide berth. There was another boat in two weeks, but going back to the Golden Gate. No, thanks. The next one out wouldn’t touch here for a month.

Bad as all that was, he wouldn’t have minded so much, but he’d been caught short this time. His departure had been so hurried, for reasons that needn’t be gone into here, that the dwindling stack of half-pesos on the bar before him represented his total worldly capital. This would not at any other time have mattered so much to Frisco, for he carried his “financier” around with him. It was a flat object shaped like a T-square, packed under his left arm, and it removed money from banks with the greatest of ease. But in a place where there were no banks, what good was it to him?

He still couldn’t believe his ears. “These, f’rinstance.” He snapped a fingernail at the stack of half-pesos and the top one fell off with a musical clink. “Where do they come from?”

“They make up in Frisco, send down hea’. When get all wo’out, send mo’. Last long time, though.”

“So they don’t even mint their own money!” He picked one of the coins up, gazed at it moodily. “Are you from Frisco? ’Cause I’m from Frisco too.” He flipped it to within a foot of the low ceiling, stuck his hand out behind his back palm up, caught it without moving a muscle when it came down. “Don’t they use any gold here?”

“Only wan, too lich people got gold. Melican dolla. Keepum in house fo’ rainy day.”

“Ain’t they afraid of it being swiped?”

“Got no t’ief, no lobba. No place lobba can hide. Qot no lobba hea’ in twenty-fi’ year.”

“Something tells me,” murmured Frisco softly to himself, “that record is about to be busted.”

Nine o’clock tolled dismally from the: belfry of the three-hundred-year-okl cathedral across the plaza. “Business get better bimeby,” promised the barman, and tucked his hands comfortably inside his own sleeves just like China men do in comic strips.

“It couldn’t,” growled Frisco, “b any worse.” And he added under his breath: “For either of us.”

Carriage wheels sounded on the cobbles outside, springs creaked dismally, the paper streamers parted with a hiss, and a perspiring, balloonlike figure came waddling in, followed by a group of more physical proportions. The balloon was evidently a person of influence; the others, his hangers-on. Possibly a local politico. The chirp of staccato Spanish filled the air. Most of the others were just saying “Si!” enthusiastically.

Frisco had never seen anyone with such a bay-window before. It had touched the bar already while its owner was still way out at the three-mile-limit. Nothing daunted, the fat man turned sidewise and managed to get one foot within planting distance of the brass rail. His blimplike form was encased in dazzling linen, his shoes were white canvas, his hat was a bleached panama — everything about him was white but his mahogany face.

He took out a wallet the thickness of a tile, peeled off two or three bills, slapped them down with a lordly air that made Frisco’s stack of half-pesos shrink to dimes. “Refrescos! Musical” he commanded. The Chinaman nearly went haywire, setting out five glasses in a row, slicing limes, spooning sugar, measuring gin, slapping a 1920 record on the victrola, and bowing every time he turned around, both to his customers and to his reflection in the mirror.

Frisco took it all in. He took in the wallet; he took in the walnut-sized diamond on his pinkie and the bean-sized one in his tie. He didn’t miss the “Keep-the change” gesture that turned over to the Chinaman more of a kitty than he himself had before him.

“Who,” he asked when the Celestial had waited on them and come back to him, “is the kewpie?”

“Him velly lich lubba-man.”

“Rubber-man, eh? He looks like he’d bounce.”

“His name Senlo Zacata. He own whole town, he plesident’s light-hand man. Evly time gubbament go bloke, he lend plenty money.”

“Gold?”

“Sure, gold. Paper money no good. Gubbament no want its own money, they too sma’t.”

“But if there are no banks, where does he keep all this gold of his?”

“Evlybody know. He keep in stlong-loom in house long wheah he live.”

“And I suppose he’s got a lot of guards posted around it day and night?”

“He got two, thlee mozo, that all.” Frisco lurched at the bar as though the mescál had finally gone to his head, steadied himself with both hands. “Them Indian runts in pajamas?”

“Sure, mozo, houseboy.”

Frisco reached down surreptitiously and pinched himself on the thigh. “Wake up, kid,” he murmured, “you’re dreaming.”

He reviewed his, wanderings of that afternoon, while he’d been killing time waiting to lose his boat. “That big house out on the edge of town, with a wall around it and busted bottles stuck in the mortar along the top of it?”

“You ketch.”

Frisco took a good long look at Señor Zacata. A long fond look. He poured himself another dose of mescál, and, as he hoisted it, jacked his elbow up briefly in the fat man’s direction, in a sort of silent toast.

Midnight tolled lugubriously from the cathedral belfry, the only thing in town that seemed to have stayed awake that long. Señor Zacata, or rather a mound that represented him, belched fitfully from within a triple-ply howdah of mosquito-netting, hanging from a hook in the ceiling. His shape was roughly that of the dome of the National Capitol at Washington. The mound shifted, began turning slowly on its axis, and an arm thrust out, parted the mosquito netting, groped toward a night-stand nearby on which stood a water jug and bicarbonate of soda. The stand was within easy reach, but the arm never made it; it remained poised in a sort of fascist salute out over it.

The faint sound came again; the muffled tread of a hard leather sole on tiling, in the adjacent room. Señor Zacata was the only one in the house who wore shoes, his mozos were shod in noiseless hemp sandals.

More ominous still, a thread of silver radiance shone under the door-seam of the strong-room, so called because unlike the rest of the room, it had a door, and Señor Zacata kept the key to it. There was no electricity in Señor Zacata’s house, and the kerosene and oil lamps gave yellow light, not this icy-white kind, hard as nails. And it wasn’t the moon, because that had already gone down. The government’s financial wizard, the country’s one-man brain trust, with a flash of inspiration that was almost miraculous, came to the conclusion that something was going on in his house that shouldn’t be.

His outstretched arm finally descended on the nightstand, but no longer in quest of bicarb.

With tick-tack-toe motions, he felt for the key to the strong-room door, on top of the marble slab where he always left it. His mound of change was there, removed from his pockets at night. His diamond ring was there. His stickpin was there. Even the spoon was there for measuring bicarb. But no key to the strong-room. Stealthy footfalls came from inside it while he was still looking for the key to it.

Señor Zacata was unused to emergencies. He did all sorts of wrong things at once. He struggled up to a sitting position, a slow maneuver that took from three to five minutes even when he was at his best — and he was too full of fright and Shanghai Charlie’s gin-rickeys tonight to be anywhere near top form. The bed snapped, grunted, barked under him while he labored. The light under the door still fluffed out instantly. But the only way out was through Zacata’s bedroom.

Zacata had begun to jerk the bell pull beside his bed frantically up and down. Way over on the other side of the patio a clamorous ding-dong started up. And meanwhile Señor Zacata was bellowing his lungs out. “Miguel! Esteban! There is a thief in my strongroom! Bring machetes, pronto!” Finally the bell cord snapped in two.

There was a Heavy shifting sound across the tiled flooring, as though someone were dragging a weighted valise after him. The door opened and a figure in dark clothing blurred against the pale walls. It was too dark in the room to be able to distinguish it clearly.

A muffled voice, in a language unknown to Señor Zacata, said dryly: “You’ll never make it, Fatso. Better lie down again or I’ll deflate you!”

The slap-slap of sandaled feet were coming on the run from across the patio. The feeble glint of an oil lamp burst through the open doorway, held shakily by a frightened moso with a deadly but ineffectual machete in his other hand. The dull rays of wavering light, while they lasted, showed the terrified Zacata, goggling out through three layers of fine netting, and a motionless figure across the room from him, with one of Zacata’s own valises at his feet One white hand showed, holding something almost casually. An inch of white forehead and a pair of eye-slits showed between a turned-down hat brim and a handkerchief stretched from ear to ear.

There was an almost immediate orange squirt from the negligent white hand, a thunder-clap that sent Zacata flat on his back and brought all the mosquito netting down on top of him. The lamp hit the floor and went out and the mozo landed on top of it. The machete fell with a clash beside him.

“Leave it dark,” commanded the muffled voice, “I like it that way!”

The dragging sound passed out into the front garden of the house; moments later there was a distant thud from the street outside, as though something had been tossed over a wall.

Zacata was writhing there helplessly, like something all wrapped up in gauze bandages, by the time the second mozo arrived, carefully timing himself to miss the fireworks. “A thief! A thief has stolen some of my gold! After him, quick!” sputtered his master in a strangled voice. The man went out into the garden at a run, waving his machete, as soon as he was sure the intruder had vanished.

He came back again minutes later. “He is gone, señor,” he reported relievedly.

“He left behind him a folded blanket spread across the glass on top of the wall, that is all.”

The mozo lying on the floor of Señor Zacata’s bedroom must have been a good Indian, if the old saying is to be believed. He was a dead one if there ever was one.

Frisco woke up at noon the next day to find a reception committee two rows deep around his bed at the Gran Hotel del Universo. There were an army corporal and two privates — armed — and in the second row, the hotel-keeper and assorted mozos stood looking apprehensively on. The Gran Hotel hadn’t had a paying guest since the last boat before Frisco’s had touched port, and now that it had one, he seemed to be in trouble. In the background, a third private was going through Frisco’s pants and coat, already having hunted futilely for Frisco’s non-existent baggage. He hadn’t come ashore with any.

Frisco was not an easily disconcerted person. He opened one eye. “Where is the fire?” he drawled languidly. No one in the first row, it seemed, spoke English; he had never been in such a benighted country before. The hotelkeeper, who fondly imagined he did, stepped forward offering himself as interpreter. He got the corporal’s comeback on Frisco’s question.

“No fire — espeench.”

“What, no brass band?” Frisco flipped a derisive fin at them, turned over on his other side. “Tell ’em to see my secretary. I’m too busy.”

The ubiquitous mosquito netting was rudely wrenched aside and he was dragged out backward onto the chill tiled floor in his track clothes. “Señor,” explained the manager to his threshing, buckling guest, “they say you have rob the gold of the Señor Zacata and have keel one of his mozo daid with a gun.”

Frisco was propped up by eight assorted copper-color hands. “All right, where is it then, if I took it?” he snarled. “Where’s the gat, too, while they’re at it?”

The corporal rolled up an edge of the mattress, looked under it, disappointedly let it flop back again.

Frisco’s face darkened at the injustice. “I wasn’t outa this room from the time I got back from Shanghai Charlie’s until you busted in on me just now. Ask the mozos — go ahead, ask them!”

They asked. One of the mozos nodded. “It is true. The wind blew the señor’s door open twice and woke me up. Each time I closed it he was sleeping under the net.”

Mosquito netting plus truncated pillows plus no electricity is a fairly reliable combination.

The corporal shrugged. “I have my orders, Vamos!” He motioned to the door. The three buck privates, or whatever they were, started to haul Frisco out with them as he was.

“Hey, wait!” the captive brayed. “Don’t they even let you put on your pants when they haul you in in this country?”

The corporal looked surprised at such niceties, but thumbed permission for the delay. Frisco, as they started out with him a second time, sartorially complete, grabbed the hotel-keeper by the arm and hung on. “You’re coming with me,” he said grimly. “It’s my pinch and I wanta know what goes on at it!”

He rolled up a sizable following as he was escorted through the blinding, blazing-hot streets. By the time they got to the crumbling pink-plaster building labeled Comandancia across its face, half the juvenile population and all the stray dogs in town were at his heels. Shopkeepers came out to their store fronts, shading their eyes and gawking. Tawny girls peeped down across balcony rails. It was the first time in anyone’s recollection that a white man was being arrested.

The object of all the excitement walked along cockily. He had a perky air about him, that plainly expressed his knowledge that anyone could beat a rap like this with one hand tied behind his back. No gold, no gun, no chance for positive identification. He gave Shanghai Charlie the high sign as he was led past his place. “Start stirring me up a rickey,” he called out. “I’ll be in tonight at my usual time!”

The Gran Hotel had another guest at the time. The non-paying one was in his usual morning position, sleeping it off, face down, arms out, across the little table in his room, when the manager came in three days later. An empty whisky bottle lay lengthwise on the floor at his feet. Jumbled up in a corner lay a pile of about twenty others with a rumpled sack thrown over them. The heap increased at about the rate of one-quart bottle a day. Once a month, when it had run up to thirty, the room’s owner dumped the whole batch into the sack and sold it to native masons to be broken up and studded into the tops of walls, the local panacea against trespassing. The pin money thus acquired went into the purchase and emptying of additional bottles; a sort of virtuous circle that never got anywhere, but was a lot of fun — except to the hotel-keeper, who hadn’t been paid now in eighteen months. But since the Gran Hotel had twelve rooms, and the other eleven were vacant except when a boat was in, the proprietor didn’t do much about it. Up until a year ago he had had this permanent guest thrown out regularly once a week, but since the guy always came right back in again as soon as his back was turned, he’d given that up too. The tropics make any man a philosopher.

He took the somnolent one by the scruff of the neck, tilted his head back, wobbled it a little bit. “ ’Ey, no-good!” he said, “I got something for to tell you!”

The face that came up off the table top was Nordic, bleary, and glinted with a fine platinum stubble, from ear to ear. The eyes wouldn’t open and the mouth stayed all out of shape, like a hole punched in unbaked dough.

The manager reached down to the floor, picked up the discarded bottle, and with wisdom born of long experience, wafted its odorous mouth to and fro under the sensitized nose a couple times. The nose twitched longingly, the eyes opened, and the subject came to thirstily. Then when he saw who it was, he pushed the bottle away. “Scram!” he said. “No money. I’ll pay you when my ship comes in—”

“What sheep?” said the hotel-keeper, “You no got sheep!”

“How’d you guess?” jeered the beachcomber. “You been readin’ my mail!”

“You no got mail idder.”

“Skip it,” said Gillman wearily. “Take your mitt off my neck, it’s hot enough as it is. And if you throw me out, I’ll come back in again and haunt you.”

This was all such an oft-told story to the hotel-keeper that he didn’t bother discussing it. He drew up a chair for himself, sat down, lit a villainous native cigarette. Gillman reached haphazardly for the paper package, and he snatched it away from him.

“Listen, no make monkey business, I got something for to tell you. You know that American falla come here three nights ago — the one they took to jail?”

“Naw,” said Gillman, holding his head up on one hand.

“He was tri’ yesterday, and foun’ guilty. They gonna take heem out and shoot heem, mebbe tomorrow, mebbe next day. He keel one of Zacata’s men, rob hees gold, and you know how Zacata stand with El President.”

“Whadda I care?” said Gillman, swatting lazily at a gnat that danced in front of him.

The hotel-keeper gabbled on, undeterred. “I seet with heem through trial, he no can spik Spanish. He no even know when eet start. You know how queeck they do anytheeng eef Zacata say so. When he ask me when eet going begin, and I tell heem eet all over already, he going to get fusilado, he start to yell and holler something tarrible. They no can make him tell where gold is, so I think he’s still got. Now, escucka. He say to me, ‘You get me American lawyer, I pay good money. There must be wan in country somewhere,’ he say. ‘I don’t care who he ees, how no-good he ees, you find and bring. Two-year-old keed, he say, can get me out of this feex, but I must have someone who spik my language.’ ”

“Why doesn’t he appeal to the nearest American consul? There’s one at San Jose, Costa Rica.”

“He don’t want nothing to do with no consul. Banana company nidder. I think maybe heem wanted for something.”

Gillman showed a slight flicker of interest. “Well, where do I come in? Why teil me about it?”

“You use to be lawyer in State, no? Well, holl right. He say he give good money, mebbe two, t’ree thousand dollar.”

The hotel-keeper sliced the flat of his hand stingingly against Gillman’s unfiexed arm. “For two year now you don’t pay me a centavo! You go see thees man. Maybe you can halp him. He pay you, then you pay me what you owe, get out!”

“Eye to the main chance, eh, amigo?” Gillman said with a weary grin.

The hotel-keeper was not to be trifled with. He got up, went to the door, bawled: “Joaquin! Agua frio!”

A mozo brought a bucket of cold well-water and sloshed it unceremoniously over Gillman from head to foot He leaped up spasmodically, drowning and half blinded.

“There, you awake now,” said his host complacently. “Now you go over to jail, ask for to see thees man, and don’t come back until you get money for wheech to pay me. The sun dry your clothes on street; don’t worry.” The mozo and he, between them, hustled the dripping Gillman out through the door and gave him a parting shove that sent him stumbling.

Frisco’s first impression of the legal talent that had been sent him wasn’t flattering. “The rain’s bringin’ things up outa the ground,” he muttered, as the guard banged the cell door and departed.

“Who’d you expect to see, William J. Fallon?” Gillman growled dropping down next to him on the pallet.

“You any good?” was the next skeptical question.

“I was disbarred up home years ago, that’s why I drifted down here.” Frisco seemed to find this good news. “You guys usually make the best mouths going, at that!” he remarked, perking up. “Think you can do anything for me?”

“Did you do it?” An air of understanding was beginning to grow between them. Birds of a feather.

“Sure I did it!” bragged Frisco unhesitatingly. “I got out twenty thousand bucks’ worth in twenty-dollar gold eagles! Made three round-trips before he woke up. And half of it’s yours if you’ll get me out of this soup.”

“You sure you did it, and got it?” queried Gillman sharply. “I mustn’t work for nothing.”

“I got it. Ask me a question.”

“What’d Zacata have next to his bed?”

“Bicarb of soda and a teaspoon.”

“You were there, all right,” said Gillman. “Now, how’d they pin it on you? Where’d you slip up”

“They got Shanghai Charlie to tell ’em I was asking him all kinds of questions the night before about where and how Zacata kept his dough. That was one thing.”

“That’s only a Chinaman’s word against yours. What else?”

“Zacata himself. Get this. He comes and puts the finger on me because I got shoes on like the guy who was in the room that night! J’ever hear of such a thing? He couldn’t see my face, when the guy dropped the lamp, but I’m white, and I’m about the same height and weight, and wearing a dark suit instead of linen! And that’s enough for them — they gimme the works! They never found the gold, they never found the gun, they wasn’t able to prove I was out of my room — why, up home I woulda been turned loose before you could bat an eye!”

“But we aren’t up home,” Gillman reminded him. “They have what they call martial law down here. The president is a dictator, and Zacata is his right-hand man. The constitution and all civil guarantees were suspended five years ago; if you hadn’t been white, they probably wouldn’t have even bothered trying you at all.” He scratched his silvery hair luxuriantly. “Zacata’s the answer. A word from him put you here. And a word from him is enough to spring you. And nothing else will. They don’t have superior courts in this country to appeal to. You prove to him he was mistaken, that it wasn’t you he saw that night.”

“Yeah, I thought of that myself already,” said Frisco cuttingly. “Try and do it!”

“You could talk to him from now until you’re blue in the face and he wouldn’t believe you—”

“I couldn’t even do that. He don’t talk my language and I don’t talk his!”

“And he wouldn’t listen to you if you could. Anyone in your spot would say they didn’t do it. There’s only one answer: You gotta let him see that he was wrong, with his own eyes — that’s the only way I can dope out. You’ve gotta give him another look at you, doing the same thing over, after you’re already supposed to be locked up here safe and sound. Then he’ll say to himself—”

“Go back and do it over!” Frisco edged nervously away along the pallet. “Hooch has rotted your brains away!”

“It has preserved them, amigo. When Zacata sees the same white man, same height, same build, same handkerchief over his face, he’ll say to himself: ‘This is the same guy as the first time, but it couldn’t be the man I identified because he is in jail now. So it wasn’t him the first time either! L&s most fat men, he’s not naturally vindictive; he has nothing against you personally. He comes here to report the second burglary. You’re still here safe and sound, as though you never stepped out—” He snapped his fingers airily. “You’ll be out of here so fast you won’t know what bounced you. And you’ll still have your haul. And you’ll even have a second haul. And out of remorse at the mistake he made and the disgrace he put you through, he might even come through with a little contribution to salve your lacerated feelings.”

Frisco got up and went over to the barred window, so narrow there was only room for one bar to bisect it. Outside a slice of blue sky showed and part of a roof cornice. On this perched a buzzard — probably one of many, but the only one Frisco could see. It was one too many; he’d heard about them — hanging around waiting for check-outs. This one cocked its head quizzically at him — or seemed to — and gave a slight flip of its wings. Frisco turned away in a hurry.

“If I got out of here,” he said wrathfully, “you think I’d be fool enough to come back in again, sit twiddling my thumbs?”

“You’d be a fool not to!” snapped Gillman drily. “Where would you go? You think a white man could hide out anywhere in this town more than thirty minutes? You think the banana company wouldn’t turn you over in a jiffy if you tried riding their railroad? It pays them to stay in good with the government. Did you ever try one of these jungles on your own? Snakes and fever and thirst and poisoned arrows...”

Frisco took another look at that buzzard, which stayed there as though it; had put the Indian sign on him, “I’ll give your way a whirl,” he said nervously. “Looks like I gotta.”

“You’re practically acquitted,” Gillman said, confidently. “These tropical clinks are worse than the ones we got up home in every way but one — they’re a darned sight easier to get out of. They don’t have any system at all. Now if I was to send you over a present of a bottle of spiked mescál tonight, for instance, the chances are that it would get sidetracked on its way and right where it would do the most good. The two guards would become very sleepy. They would even snore, I think.”

“But that wouldn’t be getting the key to this cage off them,” Frisco pointed out. “They’d be down in the guardroom just off where you come in from the street. And if you was to try to help things along, you’d have to rouse them to be let in yourself, and then we’d be right back where we started.”

Gillman pondered, brightened. “I’ll bring the bottle over myself, good and late, after the officers are off duty, and join them over the bottle. That way I’ll be on the inside when the curtains go down. I’m known all over town as a souse; they wouldn’t think anything of it. Then I can let you out, let you back in again, and replace the key.”

“What’s to keep you from fading out with them?”

“Frisco,” the master-mind said, “the shell crater where my stomach used to be wouldn’t know the difference between knockout drops and a cup o’ weak tea. I’ll guarantee you I’ll outlast any gunzo going, between Vancouver and Valparaiso.” He got up and shook the bars to bring the jailer back.

“Now don’t cross me up,” Frisco warned him. “I’ve come clean to you, but you try spilling to them, yiz’ll all be still looking for it a hundred years from now!”

“Say, don’t y’ suppose I’m sick of this hole myself? I want to get out of here before I’m carried out. We’ll lam together on the next boat.”

“We’ve both got each other dead to rights,” admitted Frisco, “so maybe for the first time in our lives we’ll each play square.”

Gillman gave him the office with one eyelid, followed the jailer down the moldy flagged corridor.

Frisco turned his head to the window slit. That same buzzard was parked out there, with a knowing air. Frisco put his thumb to his nose and wigwagged it vigorously.

The cathedral chime broadcast twelve o’clock, but the night seemed already to have lasted a week.

Down in the guard room a guitar plinked and voices were raised in snatches of song. The jail wasn’t doing much business. There was practically no one to be disturbed, only Frisco. A jailer and a guitar, in a tropical Latin country, is not such a freak combination as it sounds.

The repertoire was strictly limited — La Cucaracha and La Paloma. The guitar kept getting more and more languid until finally it dropped out altogether and the vocal harmony wavered on unaccompanied. Then that kept getting more and more off key. Finally it went all to pieces, and droned snores started creeping in.

“Something tells me,” Frisco said to himself, “Gillman is down there with them.” He just sat tight, but he wasn’t as calm and collected as he looked. There wasn’t a sound from below now.

A soft tread wavered along the corridor and he heard Gillman’s whisper. “Which one are you in? It’s dark as the devil out here!”

Frisco stuck his arm through the bars and sliced it up and down, as if he were flagging a train. After Gillman got the right cell, he couldn’t locate the keyhole in the gloom. “I’m full of dope,” he breathed, “I got some kind of ground weed they use, from one of the China-boys—”

“Gimme the key, I’ll do it from here!” Frisco ordered. “If you drop it out there in the dark, it’ll take you all night to find it again—”

They felt their way back toward the ground-floor tier. Gillman nearly came down on top of Frisco on the stairs, but recovered neatly.

Feeble rays of light gleamed from the guard-room. Both jailers were spraddled in chairs, mouths open like fish.

“What are you going to do for a gun?”

“I’ll take one of theirs and bring it back with me. I put my own in with the haul when I cached it. If you pass out, how’m I gonna get in again?”

“Leave the front gates open on a crack. There’s no one on the streets of this town after twelve.”

They got the ponderous gates open with the guards’ key. Gillman stuck his head out, pulled it in again. “Okay! If you have any trouble with me when you get back — remember, the smell of an empty bottle always brings me to. Don’t show without a handkerchief, you aren’t supposed to be twins, you know!” He lurched back inside the guard-room, closed the door, and Frisco heard a chair creak as he bounced into it.

He eased through the gate, narrowed it after him without closing it altogether, and slipped away hugging the shady side of the moon-bleached streets and lanes. There wasn’t a single man-made light showing anywhere in town, not even from Shanghai Charlie’s.

The mound that was Señor Zacata blinked and popped its eyes open. Somebody had just stamped a hard-soled shoe on the tiled floor nearby, as though to attract attention. “It is my imagination,” said Señor Zacata to himself. “It is the after effects of that terrible experience I had the other night. The man is safely in jail and—” His eyelids drooped closed again; he started to roll over on his foundation to go back to sleep.

The stamp came again, a double one this time, like a soldier marking time or a tap dancer about to go into a routine. Señor Zacata’s eyes flew open for keeps; he stiffened, if any one of his general flabbiness could be said to stiffen. Then he noticed something he’d been too sleepy to catch the first time. His bedroom oil lamp had been lit. The wick was turned very low, but it was gleaming there on his dresser. It just gave enough light to show the door to his strong-room standing wide open.

Señor Zacata had learned a little about emergencies by this time — not much, but a little. He didn’t bother groping for the key to see if it was there or not. He went straight into the bellrope-pulling and hollering stages of the emergency. “Esteban! Por dios! Again they rob me! Help, help!”

The figure that came out of the strong-room moved languidly. The man even stood still for a minute, his back to the wall, looking square over at Zacata. Again he had a weighted valise; again a pair of eyes from a white face looked amusedly over the top of a handkerchief mask; again one white hand held something negligently out at wishbone-level. It posed there motionless in the dim lamplight for a full sixty seconds — that must have seemed a lifetime to the hapless Zacata — as though waiting for Esteban. But Esteban, evidently, was remembering what had happened to Miguel the last time. There were distant shouts of “Si, señor! Si, señor! Right away!” but the rushing patter of sandals was cagily delayed. Only throaty gurgles were emanating from Zacata. by this time.

The masked figure finally said something indistinct that sounded like, “Can’t wait all night—” There was another of those terrifying squirts of orange from its cupped hand, a boom, a tinkle of glass from the dresser, and the room went black.

“Now you see it, now you don’t, Fatty,” commented a matter-of-fact voice, and the laden valise and the hard-soled shoes moved slowly toward the front garden and the glass-barbed wall.

The bell-arrangement, meanwhile, had broken at the other end this time, in the mozos’ quarters. There was a distant clunk and only silence rewarded Zacata’s tugs after that. By the time the long-delayed Esteban finally arrived his master was reduced to spasmodic hand-flappings, and was black in the face from yelling.

Frisco was sleeping peacefully as a baby when his cell gate ground inward the next morning. His old friend the corporal was standing there-with a couple of soldiers. Frisco could have done with a little more sleep, even if he was to be released. He had been up late last night. He rubbed his eyes, stretched, sat up. He glanced at the window-slit, and that same buzzard was out there big as life, preening itself.

“Haven’t you got a home?” he grinned crookedly at it.

The corporal parked in front of him, unfolded a long paper, and started to read out loud. It didn’t mean a thing to Frisco.

“Sure, sure, I know,” he said impatiently, “You found out you had the wrong guy. All right, skip it — just turn me loose and never mind the graduation speech!”

He started to go to sleep again sitting on the edge of his pallet; Spanish is a very musical, lulling language.

The corporal finally got through and they were standing him up. They led him out and down the stairs. He whistled a couple bars of La Cucaracha and he saw them all look at him admiringly. When they got down to the ground floor, they started toward the rear courtyard with him instead of the street entrance. A guy in a black skirt homed-in on them and started to walk along next to Frisco, talking to himself. Frisco didn’t pay any attention.

“Hey!” he said to the corporal. “What are you taking me out the back way for? Are you ashamed to let any one know you pulled a boner?”

They came out into the early morning sunlight of the prison courtyard. A high wall ran around three sides of it, and the prison building was on the fourth. There was a very low little wooden gate set in one of the walls, and the side opposite that was all pitted and pockmarked, as if from buckshot. Five droopy soldiers were lounging in a row on their upright rifles. They led Frisco out in front of them and left him there alone facing them.

The hotel-keeper was peeping out nervously from the jail entrance. The corporal went over to him and borrowed a handkerchief. He came back to Frisco pleating it, and offered him a cigarette. The corporal had a peculiar look on his face — a very peculiar look. That buzzard had followed them over from, the other side of the jail and was perched interestedly on the wall. Frisco beckoned violently to the hotel-keeper, and the corporal nodded permission to him to come over.

“Hey!” the pride of the Pacific Coast crooked. “What — what are they doin’ all this for?”

The hotel-keeper offered him a light for his cigarette, sighed sympathetically. “It is too bad for you — now what happen’ to Zacata las’ night?”

“Too bad? Why too bad? Tha’ oughta prove—”

“You see, he was no sure he accuses right man. Hees conscience bodde heem. I meet him on street yesterday an’ he say to me, ‘First theeng tomorrow morning I going over to jail and as they’ — how you say eet? — commute that man to rubber-gang instead of shoot heem. Ees better they no keel him, in case I find out later I make mistake. An now, before he have a chance to te’ them that—” He shrugged mournfully.

“Now, what?” squawked Frisco. “What’s to keep him from—?”

“Oh, you don’t have heard what happen’ last night? He have bad dream, or he think he see a ghost or something — he very fat, you know, and he get very bad fright and drop dead from hearts-attack. Now he no can tell them not to shoot you. Eet ees too bad for you, no?”

The corporal had finished whipping the handkerchief into a neat little bandage; he came toward Frisco holding it.

And just as the daylight was shut out from Frisco’s eyes, he wondered bitterly how long it would be before Gillman opened the steamer case under his bed and discovered the fruits of Frisco’s robbery, placed there hastily, with the gun, on that very first night, just a matter of precaution. Gillman had been promised half to save him and now—

A very loud sound introduced the complete blackness that turned off Frisco’s power to think of anything at all...”