The Saint on the Spanish Main

1

The white crescent of Montego Bay was under their wings, and most of the passengers on the Pan-American clipper who were disembarking at Kingston could be identified by a certain purposeful stirring as they straightened and reassembled themselves and their impedimenta in preparation for the landing a few minutes ahead. Simon Templar, who saw no reason for not traveling from one vacation spot to another in vacation clothes, was ready for Jamaica without further preparation, wearing nothing more troublesome than sandals, slacks, and a sport shirt tastefully decorated with a pattern of rainbow-hued tropical fish circulating through a forest of graceful corals and vivid submarine flora, but he calculated that he had time for one more cigarette before the “no smoking” sign went on, and lighted it without haste.

The woman who had been sitting next to him, a cold-eyed and stoutly corseted dowager of the type which travel agencies so skillfully keep out of the pictures in their romantically illustrated brochures, had temporarily left her seat, presumably for basic adjustments in the privacy of the ladies’ room, and Simon thought it was only she returning when he felt someone loom over him and settle in the adjoining chair. He continued to gaze idly at the scenery below his window until a voice brought his head around — rather abruptly, because not only had that forbidding female maintained a majestic silence throughout the trip, but the voice was much deeper than even she could plausibly have possessed, and moreover it addressed him by name.

“Excuse me, Mr Saint, sah.”

Simon looked into a grinning ebony face that was puzzlingly familiar, but which he somehow couldn’t associate at all with the spotless white shirt, port-wine shantung jacket, hand-painted tie, and smartly creased dove-gray trousers which the young negro wore.

“Bet you don’t recognize me, sah.”

Simon felt a little embarrassed, more so than if a white man had posed him the same challenge, but he smiled amiably.

“Yes, I know I’ve seen you before. But where?”

“Johnny, sah. I was a sparrin’ partner with Steve Nelson, up in New York, the time you and he had that go with the Masked Angel. Remember now, Mr Saint?”

“Of course.” Now it all came back. “But go easy with that name, will you? I’m trying to live a quiet and peaceful Life for a while.”

“I’m sorry, sah.”

“I don’t think anyone else is... Well, I’ve certainly got an excuse for not recognizing you. I don’t think I ever saw you before with anything but trunks on. What are you doing now, and where are you going?”

“Home, sah.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows with pleasant interest, but he could not escape a faint flicker of guilt that touched him at a deeper level. Of course he remembered Johnny: a nice, well-mannered, good-natured, hard-working colored boy around the gym, a willing but not gifted fighter... and that was all. As a being of a different race and color, his background, his past, his personal private present, and his unpredictable future, had seemed as remote and insignificant, except as they might affect any immediate contact with him, as the private life of a mounted policeman’s horse. It was strange how incurious one could be about any fellow human, especially one whose complexion made him an everlasting stranger.

“Home?” said the Saint. “Where’s that?”

“Jamaica, sah. I was born here.” The man added, with an odd touch of pride, “I’m a Maroon.”

Perhaps hardly one listener in ten thousand would have had any answer but the equivalent of “What?” or “So what?” to such a statement, but Simon Templar was that one. It was one of those coincidences that were almost commonplace in his life that he not only knew what a Maroon was, but even had some elements of an immediate interest in that little-known political survival of the old wild history of the West Indies.

Johnny, however, had already interpreted the Saint’s minuscule stiffening of surprise as a normal reaction of perplexity, and was hastening to explain, “The original Maroons were slaves who ran away, back at the beginnin’ of the eighteenth century, an’ took to the hills. When there was enough of ’em, they kept fightin’ the British troops who tried to round ’em up, till it was just like a war. They done so well that finally the British Empire had to give up an’ make a peace treaty with ’em.”

“I’ve heard about them,” said the Saint. “They got their freedom, and a piece of the island set aside for them and their descendants for ever, sort of like an Indian reservation in the States. Only I was told that they make their own laws and appoint their own rulers and nobody can interfere with them in any way, just as if they were an independent little country of their own.”

“That’s right,” Johnny said. “And that’s our country, right underneath you now.”

Simon looked down through the window. Below them was a welter of steeply rounded hills, reminiscent in shape of a mass of old-fashioned beehives jam-packed together. Over almost every foot of surface the jungle grew like a coat of curly green wool above which only the tops of the tallest trees raised little knots like the mounds in a pebble-weave fabric. Only here and there was the denseness broken by a smoother slope that seemed to be open grass, a tiny brown patch of cultivation, the shiny specks of a banana patch, or the silver thread of a stream exposed on an outcropping of bare boulders, but most of it looked as wild and impenetrable as any terrain that the Saint had ever seen.

“They call it the Cockpit,” Johnny said. “I dunno why, ’cept that it’s sure seen a lot of fightin’. Doesn’t look like it’s changed much, though I was only twelve when my dad took me away to the States.”

“What makes you want to go back?” Simon asked.

“Well, sah, he died soon after that, so I didn’t get to go to school much more. I was too busy hustlin’ for a livin’. Bein’ a sparrin’ partner was just another job. When I found I didn’t have what it takes to be a top fighter, I gave that up. I done all kinds of things, from shoeshine boy to cook an’ butler. But by the time I met you, I’d decided I wanted to be something better, an’ I started savin’ my money an’ goin’ to night school. Presently I learned enough an’ saved up enough to pass the entrance exam to Tuskegee an’ afford to go there. Got me a degree a year ago. I know I’ll never talk like a college man, that’s a bad habit I’ve had too long, but I sure learned all I could.”

“You’ve got enough to be proud of,” said the Saint. “But that still doesn’t tell me why you aren’t going on from there to something better in the States.”

“Well, sah, you know as well as I do how it is up there. There’s a limit to what a colored man can do.” Johnny spoke with devastating candor, without inferiority or rancor. “Some of the fellows at college always think they’re goin’ to change the world. I never felt big enough for that, but I done plenty of thinkin’. After I got out an’ tried it, I knew I was always goin’ to have to just be the best I could among colored people. So then I began thinkin’, well, if that’s how it is, why don’t I go back an’ do that with my own colored people, the Maroons, where I came from? Maybe I’m needed more down here, where some negroes go to English universities, but others are more illiterate even than the poorest share-cropper in Mississippi... I dunno, I thought, maybe I can help more of ’em to be ready when that change in the world comes.”

The sincerity in his brown eyes was so cloudless and complete that Simon found himself hopelessly assaying a medley of assorted answers, afraid to utter any of them spontaneously lest he sound smug and patronizing.

In that paralysis of fumbling sensitivity, the Deadly Dowager herself came to his rescue. Both Simon and Johnny simultaneously became aware of her, freshly girdled and painted, lowering over her usurped seat, and transfixing them alternately with the daggers of her arctic eyes.

Even before the Saint himself could adjust to that unexpected additional problem, Johnny was scrambling out of the chair with the ingrained quick defensive humility that not even a degree from Tuskegee had eradicated, that was somehow a subtle humiliation to both races.

“Excuse me, ma’am. And thank you for listenin’, sah.”

There was little that the Saint could do, the world not yet having changed. The illuminated sign on the forward bulkhead was on, and the stewardess was already intoning, “Will you fasten your seat belts, please. And no smoking, please.” But little as it was, Simon did it.

He put out his hand, directly across the entering matriarch’s mid-section.

“It was nice seeing you again, Johnny. Maybe I’ll run into you again — in the Cockpit.”

Then the dame surged like a tidal wave into her seat.

“Well!” she said, condensing innumerable volumes into a single syllable.

The Saint’s only consolation was that for the remaining few minutes of the flight she stayed as far away from him as if he had been labeled the carrier of a contagious disease, which gave him a comfortable excess over the normally limited amount of elbow room.

2

David Farnham was at the airport, a sturdy and unmistakably British figure in open-necked shirt and khaki walking shorts, pipe in mouth, bright eyes and bald head shining. Under his benevolent aegis the formalities of immigration and customs passed Simon through as if on a fast-rolling conveyor belt, and in a matter of mere minutes they were in Farnham’s little English car, circling around the harbor and edging into the crowded clattering streets of the town.

“I hope my wire wasn’t too much of a shock to you,” said the Saint. “When you talked to me at that cocktail party in Nassau, you probably never thought I’d take you up on your invitation.”

“On the contrary, I’m delighted that you finally did. I always believed you would, and it’s nice of you to prove I was right.”

“I didn’t expect you to meet me, though. Won’t the Government mind you taking this time off?”

“Government has nothing to say about it,” Farnham told him sedately. “I’ve managed to retire at last. They wanted me to carry on, but having reached the age of sixty they couldn’t prevent me getting out. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

Simon regarded him speculatively. He knew, although David by no means told everyone, that his host had been a schoolteacher before he had been practically drafted into the service of the Colonial Secretariat, on an indefinite leave of absence from his blackboard which had been extended for so long that his original calling was often forgotten. Placed in charge of almost every activity which could be classified under the broad heading of General Progress, he had brought so much honest enthusiasm and kindly wisdom to his job that the temporary appointment had drifted into a de facto permanency.

“I still don’t see you wearing a cap and gown,” Simon remarked.

“Not that, either. I’m too old to start that all over again. I think I did my job just the same, even without a classroom. No, I’m retired. Some years ago we were able to pick up quite a bargain in a small farm out in the hills. We rise at six and retire well before nine, and our one excitement is a weekly trip to town for shopping, golf, supper, and cinema. It’s a simple life, and we enjoy it very much... However, I can still take you to visit the Maroons, as I promised.”

“I’m still very interested,” Simon said.

The western outskirts of Kingston merged into picturesque Spanish Town, and then they were through that and out on the rambling highway.

“In fact,” said the Saint, lighting a cigarette, “I seem to keep on being reminded of the Maroons, as if Fate was determined to keep prodding me into something. Even on the plane coming in here, a few minutes before we landed, a colored fellow spoke to me, whom I’d met years ago in New York, when he was earning his way towards college by working as sparring partner with a pugilist friend of mine, and it turns out he’s on his way home, which is here — and damn if he didn’t tell me he was a Maroon.”

“What was his name?”

“Johnny... You know, I’m ashamed to say it, but that’s still all I know. Just Johnny.”

“It could be his last name,” Farnham said. “One of the leaders of the original Maroons was named Johnny.”

Simon shrugged.

“But long before that, soon after I met you, and before I left Nassau, I ran into another bloke from Jamaica. Name of Jerry Dugdale.”

“I remember him. He was in the police here.”

“That’s the guy. He repeated just what you’d told me, almost in the very same words, about how the Maroons had an ancient Treaty which gave them the right to make their own laws and set up their own government. Furthermore, he told me that once upon a time he was wanting to chat with a couple of natives about a slight case of murder, and he got word that they’d taken off for the Maroon country, so he went in to look for them, and the Maroon boss man complained to the Governor, and the Governor had Jerry on the carpet and chewed him out for violating their Treaty rights and almost making an international incident.”

“It’s quite possible,” Farnham said. “The Maroons are very touchy about their privileges.”

“Right then,” said the Saint, “I guess I knew that this was something I had to see. A little independent state left over for a couple of centuries, right inside the island of Jamaica — that’s something I could top any tourist story with.”

“It certainly is unique, at least in the West Indies. But,” Farnham said, without taking his eyes off the road, “I hardly thought you’d be so interested in topping tourist stories. You wouldn’t perhaps have been specially intrigued by the fact that Dugdale wasn’t allowed to chase his criminals in there, would you?”

“It does give it a sort of piquant slant,” Simon admitted cheerfully.

He looked at his companion again and said, “But from the point of view of your Government, a situation like that could have problems, couldn’t it?”

“It could,” Farnham said steadily. “And before you’re much older I’ll tell you about one.”

It had taken rather a long time, so long that the Saint felt no electrifying change, only a deepening and enriched fulfillment of his faith in coincidences and the sure guiding hand of destiny.

But David Farnham seemed to feel as unhurried as destiny itself, and Simon did not press him. Now that he knew for certain that he had something to look forward to, the Saint could wait for it as long as anyone.

Presently they were in the hills, winding upwards, and Farnham was pointing out the landmarks of his demesne with unalloyed exuberance as they came into view. The house itself stood on its own hilltop, an old Jamaican planter’s house, solidly welded to the earth and mellowed in its setting with graceful age, exposed and welcoming to the four winds. As Simon unwound himself from the car and stretched his long legs, the air he breathed in was sweet and cool.

“We’re twenty-five hundred feet up,” Farnham said practically. “The ideal altitude for these latitudes.”

He kissed his wife as she came out to greet them, and she said, “I remembered that you drank Dry Sack, Simon. And I hope you’ll excuse us having dinner at sundown, but that’s how we farmers live. Anyway, we’re having codfish and ackee, which you told me you wanted to try.”

“You make me feel like a prodigal son,” said the Saint.

And after dinner, when he had cleaned his plate of ackee, that hazardous fruit which cooks up to look exactly like a dish of richly scrambled eggs, but which is deathly poison if it is plucked prematurely from the tree, he said, “And now you could sell me anywhere as a fatted calf.”

They had coffee on the verandah, and made pleasant small talk for only a short while before Ellen Farnham quietly excused herself. David filled another pipe, sitting forward with his forearms on his thighs and his head bent in complete concentration on the neat performance of the job. Simon knew that now it was coming, and let him take his time.

“Well,” Farnham said at last, “it just happens that you’re not the only chap with a coincidence. Only a few days ago the Governor asked me to go and see the Maroons. I’d have been there already, only your wire came immediately afterwards, so I put it off till you got here.”

Simon slanted a quizzical eyebrow.

“I thought you said you were all through with Government.”

“I am. But the Maroons know me, and trust me, and I can talk to them. His Excellency asked me to do it as a personal favor, and I couldn’t refuse.”

“So I gather this trip has to be made right away.”

“Tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”

Simon drew on his cigarette, and watched smoke drift out into the velvet night.

“I’m free and willing. And it’s nice of you to put off this important visit until I got here. I feel quite guilty about having kept the Maroons waiting for a cozy chat with you about the weather and the banana crop.”

Farnham extinguished a match and leaned back in aromatic comfort.

“I’m sure you know the big thing we’re all trying to cope with,” he said soberly. “In the United States, it seems to be mainly a matter of spies and fifth columnists in high places. In what’s left of our poor old Empire, we have special complications. We were imperialists before the word became an international insult, and we did a pretty good job of it, but whether or not we were ever drunk with power, we’re certainly getting the hangovers today. Among other things, we were left with a lot of subject people that we just jolly well conquered and took over in the days when that was a respectable thing for the white man to do. I don’t think we did too badly by them, as colonialism goes, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they’re a ready-made audience for the new propaganda against us. Well, we had to let India go. We’re losing Africa piece by piece, and in the part that we really thought we could hang on to, I’m sure you’ve read about all that Mau Mau business. The terrorists may be natives, but you know the encouragement is Russian. And the opportunity here isn’t so different.”

“You don’t mean you’re afraid of a kind of Mau Mau outbreak in Jamaica?”

“It’s already started. There have been three brutal, motiveless, barbarous killings of white people in the last six weeks.”

Simon stared, frowning.

“But your colored people aren’t naked savages like the Kikuyu. They’re as civilized as the negroes in the United States.”

“You’d have said that about Guiana — and it wasn’t so long ago, if you remember, that I’ve had to send a warship there to nip a Communist coup in the bud. No, actually there’s a lot of difference. In some ways, our colored people are a lot better off than they are in America. There’s no segregation, some of them are in big business and make a lot of money, their children go to our best schools, and they can go into any club or restaurant on the island. They not only have the vote, they hold the political power, and they’re very active with it. Unfortunately, some of their leaders are pretty radical. And even more unfortunately, in spite of a lot of good Government intentions, there are still an enormous number who are desperately poor, totally illiterate, completely ignorant — and therefore the perfect chumps for the Communists to stir up. And that Maroon settlement makes a rather ideal focal point for it.”

“I’m beginning to see a few ways that it could be used,” Simon admitted slowly. “Do you know anything more about the brains of the act? — I’d hate to succumb to the obvious cliché of ‘the nigger in the woodpile.’ ”

“A little,” Farnham said. “It may have started several years ago, when an English writer who’s since become a rather notorious apologist for the Reds came over here and paid the Maroons a visit. Then, after a while, there were a couple of so-called artists with foreign accents who moved in with the Maroons, allegedly to paint a lot of pictures of their life and customs. I never saw the pictures, but I heard rumors that they were talking a lot of party-line poppycock to anyone who’d listen to them. But presently they went away. And then a few months ago, it seems, we got a chap we could really worry about. One of their own people.”

“You mean a Russian?”

“No. A Maroon.”

The Saint’s brows drew lower over his quietly intent eyes.

“I see. And of course you’re not supposed to touch him. But he’d naturally have more influence than any outsider. And if he’s an upper-echelon hammer-and-sickle boy—”

“I believe he is. Our Secret Service knows a bit about him — we aren’t quite such hopeless fuddy-duddies as some people think. There’s no doubt that he’s a real Maroon, but he’s spent most of his life away from here. He’s had a good education — and a thoroughly bad one, too. But he’s got plenty of brains, and, I’m told, a terrific personality. He may be quite a problem.”

Farnham got up and walked across to gaze out briefly at the stars, his old briar firmly gripped between his teeth and puffing stolidly, hands deep in his pockets, seemingly unaware of any enormity of understatement.

He said, “I don’t expect you to be too concerned with our wretched colonial headaches, but a Communist base in the Caribbean would be rather nasty for all of us. Frankly, I don’t quite know how I’m going to handle this blighter, and I thought if you came along you might have an idea or two.”

“I’ll be along, for whatever it’s worth,” said the Saint. Something more personal was troubling him: it was absurd, impossible within the established limits of chronology and space, but... “Do you know the name of this black commissar?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Farnham said. “His background is a bit different from your Johnny’s. You probably know his name. It’s Mark Cuffee.”

3

Mr Mark Cuffee’s career, in many respects, could have been cited as a shining example of the achievement possible to the emancipated negro, and Mr Cuffee himself had scathing epithets with which to describe those who did not regard it with unqualified admiration. His father had left the Maroon country to work in a rum distillery soon after Mark was born, and in due course worked himself up to the rank of foreman. With visions of still higher employment in mind for his son, he sent the boy to school in Kingston, where he proved to be such a brilliant student that at seventeen he won a scholarship to Oxford. With a benevolent Sugar Industries Association supplying the necessary extra funds, he went to England, where he not only won his degree in Law with first-class honors, but also had time to represent his University both as an oarsman and a cricketer, and to give a performance in the title role of an OUDS production of Othello which earned such critical acclaim that he continued it professionally for a six-weeks run in London.

After this brief triumph, knowing full well the narrow limit to the number of starring parts available to a colored actor, no matter how talented, Mr Cuffee with apparent good philosophy turned his histrionic talents back to the Bar. He was a clever lawyer and a born virtuoso in court, and since for a while he continued to play cricket for an exclusive amateur club, he had a social entrée which in England opens all doors to distinguished adepts of the national game, provided they do not play it for money.

Thus far, his record was entirely praiseworthy, and all the auspices pointed to a successful and illustrious future.

It is not known at exactly what moment Mr Cuffee decided to turn his back on his good omens and seek other goals. One obvious milestone is the occasion when he became a Socialist candidate for Parliament in the first post-war election, and was soundly defeated in spite of the general Conservative debacle. Others would date it from the time when a notoriously unconventional peeress, with whom the gossips had frequently linked his name, quite gracefully declined to marry him. At any rate, within a short space of both these events, he resigned from his cricket club, dropped most of his society friends, and soon afterwards went on a visit to Moscow, where he stayed for more than a year.

When he returned he wrote some articles in praise of the Soviet system for one of the pinker weeklies, and became a vitriolic public speaker against anything he could call reactionary, bourgeois, capitalist, warmongering, or, as a convenient synonym for all sins, American. Few of his former legal clients came back to him, but he was regularly retained for the defense of Communist spies and agitators, and in many other cases which could be disguised as humanitarian and used as sounding-boards for diatribes against anything that contravened the current interests of the Politburo. Although he by no means starved, he did the dirty work of his new masters and endured the inevitable public obloquy for several years, with the strange uncomplaining patience of a dedicated party member, until at last the infinitely elaborate card files in the Kremlin brought forth his name as the perfect instrument for a certain task, and he found himself back in the wild hills of Jamaica where he had spent his boyhood.

He stood near the gate of the village of Accompong, watching a jeep bumping up the winding rocky road which the Government has built from the nearest market town to the Maroon territory, a town with the magnificent name of Maggotty. He had been watching it ever since it came in sight, having been warned of its approach by signals relayed between a chain of outposts stationed down to where the farthest sentry commanded the turn-off from the main road.

Drawn up in loose formation around him were two dozen of his senior followers, whom he had been able to pick a few hours after his arrival from information supplied by previous emissaries. By now he was even more sure of them, for they were linked by what was literally a bond of blood. Most of them were clad in faded rags of incredible age, and all of these carried machetes, the all-purpose knives of the Jamaican laborer, which are as long and heavy as a cutlass and just as handy a weapon.

“Dey only two in de car,” said the man nearest to him.

This was one of the few who wore presentable shirts and trousers and shoes, and in addition he had on a bandolier and a military-style peaked cap with the insigne of a gold crown fastened above the brim. Instead of a machete, he carried a large cardboard mailing tube like a staff of office.

“You didn’t expect a platoon of soldiers, did you?” Cuffee said scornfully. “It’ll be a long time before they dare to go that far.”

He himself was dressed in riding breeches and boots, a khaki shirt with brass buttons, a Sam Browne belt, and a sun helmet painted gold and topped with a red plume. He felt slightly ridiculous in the costume, but it was traditional for the Maroon chieftain to wear some imaginative uniform, and the inspirational effect on at least a majority of his disciples was too valuable to ignore. The pistol in the holster on his hip, however, was strictly practical and it was loaded.

The road went only as far as the gate of the settlement, and there the jeep stopped. The two men who climbed out did not look very formidable, and Cuffee could feel the rising confidence of his bodyguard as they got a closer look at them. The round-faced one with the pipe, although sturdy, was quite short, and his tall companion in the rainbow-patterned shirt was obviously a tourist. They were certainly unarmed, and even Farnham did not look at all official.

“Hullo there,” the short one called out as they approached. “May we come in?”

Cuffee stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, aware that his ragamuffin elite guard was watching him and that much depended on his first showing.

“You’re Farnham, I believe,” he said.

“That’s right,” Farnham said, ignoring the insolent tone of the address and returning the form of it with imperturbable good humor. “And I suppose you’re Cuffee.”

“I’m Colonel Cuffee,” was the cold reply.

In commemoration of the warrior prowess of their founding fathers, the Maroon leaders have always graded themselves by military titles, and their supreme head is “The Colonel.” Farnham received the implied confirmation of his fears with hardly a flicker of his eyebrows.

“I’d heard rumors to that effect,” he said. “Congratulations. Well, may we still come in?”

“Are you here on Government business?”

“Just a friendly visitor,” Farnham said cheerfully. “Mr Templar here is my guest on the island, and I thought he ought to have a look at the Cockpit.”

“We don’t want to be gaped at by tourists,” Cuffee said. “And for that matter, we don’t want any more uninvited visitors. There have been too many violations of our Treaty rights, and now that I’m Colonel I’m putting a stop to it.”

Farnham sucked his pipe.

“Well, if that’s the way you want it,” he said equably. “I’ll have to make it formal.”

He took an envelope from his pocket and offered it across the gate. Cuffee almost put out a hand to accept it, but checked himself in time and gave a sign to his chief subordinate. The young man in the peaked cap and bandolier stepped forward and took the envelope.

“Read it aloud, Major,” Cuffee said.

The letter said:

“It doesn’t mean much,” Farnham had confided to the Saint, on the way up, “and His Excellency knows it, but it may help a bit.”

The young Major read it, haltingly and with a strong native accent, with the result that some sense was clear both to the ragged men with machetes and to the Oxford-accented Colonel Cuffee.

Mr Cuffee felt reasonably confident that he could make mincemeat of any such credentials in a court of law, but he saw a pretext on which to keep face with his followers and satisfy his curiosity at the same time.

“On that basis, the free and independent Maroons will receive the Ambassador of Her Britannic Majesty — and his friend,” he said. “Let them in.”

Farnham ambled through the gate as it opened, looking about him with benevolent interest.

“You seem to be quite mobilized,” he observed guilelessly. “I hope you aren’t expecting any trouble.”

“What makes you think that?” Cuffee demanded.

“I don’t see any women and kids around. And the Maroons aren’t usually armed.”

“They’ve always carried machetes, Farnham. You know that perfectly well. It’s just like a stockbroker with his umbrella.”

“I was referring,” Farnham said, “to your gun.”

Cuffee’s right hand touched the holster at his waist, and he laughed.

“This? Just a part of the costume. I think a sword would look better, but I couldn’t find a good one on short notice.”

They walked some distance up a steep rutted trail, with houses multiplying around them. A few of these could have been classed as very modest frame cottages with tarpaper roofs, more were box-like unpainted wooden huts, and many could only be called tumbledown thatch-topped shacks. From several dark open doorways, women and children and some men looked out, but none came out or moved to join the cortege. Walking beside Farnham, as the Major walked on the far side of Cuffee, Simon could sense the unnatural tension and watchfulness that surrounded them like a dark cloud.

Presently they reached a broad grassy clearing with the habitations set back to its perimeter, which gave it something of the air of a parade ground. There Cuffee raised his hand in an imperious gesture to halt their straggling escort, and the four of them moved on a few steps and stopped again.

“All right, Farnham,” Cuffee said bluntly. “What’s really on your mind?”

“Well,” Farnham said mildly, “the Governor thinks he should be officially informed about who is the responsible head of the Maroons.”

“You know now. I’m the Colonel.”

“But quite recently, we heard, they elected another Colonel. What happened to him?”

“He’s gone. As soon as the community Treasury was turned over to him, he took off and hasn’t been seen since.”

“Dear me,” Farnham said. “And nobody knows where he went?”

Cuffee shrugged.

“I don’t think anyone cares very much now. The money was only a few pounds, as you can imagine, and he’s probably spent it by this time. The man himself was obviously unfit for office, and we’re well rid of him. There was another election, and I was elected.”

“You must have made an impression very quickly,” Farnham remarked. “You haven’t been here long, have you?”

“I was born here. And in case you don’t recognize my name, I happen to be a direct descendant of one of the first Maroon leaders, Captain Cuffee. His name is on the Treaty which still protects us.”

“I know. But you’re really almost a Londoner.”

“It may have taken me a long time to see my duty, Farnham. But I know it now. Whatever talents I have, I inherited from my people. And the education I’ve gained should be used in their service.”

“That’s very commendable, of course.”

“It’s going to make a great difference, I assure you. Your Government has had everything its own way for too long. I know the policy. Keep what your Empire poet called the ‘lesser breeds’ in their place. Keep them downtrodden and half starved, so that they can be exploited. Keep them ignorant, so that they can be bamboozled and put upon. But you couldn’t get away with it for ever. You’re going to find that this is just one more place where they’ve got a leader at last who knows all the tricks and all the rules too. I’m going to see that every right and privilege of the Maroons is respected, in court and out of it.”

Farnham nodded, pursing his lips.

“Now, about this election,” he said imperturbably. “Just how was it conducted?”

“In the normal way.”

“A secret ballot? With all the Maroons notified in plenty of time to assemble, and all of them casting their votes?”

Cuffee’s face turned ugly and thunderous.

“That’s an insulting suggestion. But I don’t have to answer it, because as you’re quite well aware it isn’t even any of your business.”

“Nevertheless, I have to ask it,” Farnham persisted quietly. “And I could only put one interpretation on your refusal to answer.”

Cuffee’s big fist clenched and lifted a little from his side, and the Saint balanced himself imperceptibly on the balls of his feet and triggered his muscles for lightning movement, but Farnham stared up at the Colonel unblinkingly. The fist slowly lowered again, but the congestion remained in Cuffee’s contorted features.

“You go too far,” he said harshly. “This is exactly the kind of meddling I intend to put a stop to. I am obliged to declare you persona non grata. Do you know what that means?”

“In diplomatic circles, it would mean I was to be kicked out of the country.”

“Precisely.”

“Do you mean immediately?”

Cuffee hesitated for a second, and it was as if a mask slid over his face, smoothing out the grimace of fury and leaving only a glint of cunning in his eyes.

“No. It’s late now for you to be starting back. Stay the night, if you can find a place to sleep. Let your friend look around, and make the most of it. He’s the last visitor we shall admit for a long time. Since you’re here, I shall give you a formal reply to take back to your Governor tomorrow. And I may also give you proof that the Maroons are behind me.”

He turned on his heel and strode back towards his elite guard, his adjutant following him, leaving the Saint and David Farnham standing alone under the darkening sky.

4

“Well,” Farnham said stoically, “at least I think I know where we can get a bed.”

The house that he led them to was one of the better ones, as evidenced by the white paint that gleamed through the dusk as they approached. Yellow lights glowed behind the windows, but the porch was dark, and on it the figure of a black man in dark clothes, standing motionless, was almost invisible until they were within speaking distance.

Farnham said affably, “Good evening, Robertson.”

The man said, without moving, “Good evenin’, sah.”

“Aren’t you going to invite us in?”

The man’s shoes creaked as he shifted his weight. He said, after a pause, “No, sah. Better you go back dung de hill, sah. I’ gettin’ late.”

“That’s all right, we’re not going back till tomorrow.”

“Better you go tonight, sah. De Colonel don’ wan’ nobody from outside comin’ ’ere.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Farnham said impatiently. “You were Colonel yourself once, the first time I came here. You know the Colonel can’t stop anyone seeing his friends. And I want you to meet a friend of mine — Mr Templar.”

“Yes, sah. How you do, Mr Templar, sah. But is bes’ you go dung de hill—”

The door behind him was flung open, and the shape of another man was framed in it.

“Did someone say ‘Mr Templar?’ Is that you, sah — the Saint?”

“Yes, Johnny,” Simon said.

The man who had stood on the porch was almost bowled over in the rush as Johnny plunged past him, grabbed Simon’s hand, and hustled him and Farnham into the house. Robertson followed them rather quickly, shutting the door behind them. As the lamplight revealed him, he was a very old man, and he twisted his thin gnarled fingers together feverishly.

“I don’ wan’ no trouble here,” he mumbled.

“I don’t want to make any,” said the Saint. “But Johnny’s the lad from New York I was telling you about, Dave.”

“Pleased to meet you, Johnny,” Farnham said, putting out his hand. “I’ve heard a lot of nice things about you.”

“Colonel Robertson is a great-uncle of mine,” Johnny explained. He turned to another white-haired old negro who sat in a rocking chair in the corner. “And this is a sort of older cousin, Commander Reid.”

“I’ve met the Commander,” Farnham said, with another cordial handshake.

He sat down at the bare oilcloth-covered table and tapped the dottle from his burned-out pipe into a saucer which served as ashtray.

“And now, for heaven’s sake,” he said, “will one of you tell me what’s got into everybody around here?”

“We don’ wan’ no trouble,” Robertson repeated, wringing his hands mechanically.

“Goin’ be lotsa change roun’ here,” said the Commander.

“Things are real bad, Mr Templar,” Johnny said. “I found that out already. And ever since I found out, I’ve been wondering whether I could find you on the island, or if you’d really come here like you said you might on the plane.”

“Dis Missah Templar is a fren’ o’ yours, Johnny?” asked the Commander, rocking busily.

Johnny looked at both the two older negroes.

“He’s a wonderful guy. In America, almost everyone knows him. He does things about people like Cuffee. If anyone can help us, he can.”

“I’m just a visitor,” Simon said tactfully. “Mr Farnham’s the Government man.”

A stout elderly woman came out of the partly screened-off kitchen and began to distribute plates laden with steaming rice and what looked like a sort of brown stew around the table. Farnham greeted her cordially as Mrs Robertson, and she smiled politely and went back for more plates, without speaking, for in the councils of the older Maroons a woman’s views are not asked for.

“Please, you must both eat with us,” Johnny said. “And we’d be honored to have you sleep here.”

Robertson shuffled to the table and sat down, looking helpless and lonely, but the Commander pushed back his rocker and stepped across with decisive vigor.

“Okay, Johnny,” he said heartily. “You’ fren’, and Missah Farnham is my fren’. All o’ we is fren’ly here. Dem help us, all okay.”

The dollop of stew on the rice was made from goat, Simon decided, strongly seasoned and flavored in part with curry. There were tough elements in it, but it was very tasty, and he discovered that his appetite had developed uncritical proportions while his mind was occupied with other things.

“You’re an intelligent young man, Johnny,” Farnham said across the table. “What’s your version of all this nonsense?”

“It isn’t nonsense, Mr Farnham, sah. This fellow Cuffee’s a Communist organizer. I know. I’ve heard fellows up in the States who talked just like him. From what I could find out, he got himself a following pretty quick. It seems there’s been some others like him here before, only white people, but talkin’ the same way, so he didn’t have to start out cold. But being a Maroon himself, he got a lot more attention. He had plenty of material to work with. I don’t want to say anything against the Government myself, sah, I’m sure they’ve tried to do what they can for us, but it’s a pretty hard life up here, just for a man to scratch enough from the ground to feed himself and his family. The people go down to the market an’ talk to other people workin’ outside, an’ the young men go to Kingston an’ see how there are other people no different, colored people I mean, who are livin’ so much better, an’ they talk to ones who have joined the unions, an’ they all come back an’ talk.”

“The wave of the future,” Farnham said heavily. “And they want it all at once.”

“Yes, sah. It takes education to be patient, an’ patience to get education. An’ it takes a lot of both to know why Cuffee’s way won’t really solve anything.”

Cuffee, they learned, had organized the cadre of malcontents with swift efficiency. The disappearance of the most recently installed Colonel had provided such a fortunate vacancy that it was obviously suspect, but Johnny could only quote some of the dark rumors that had been muttered around the village of Accompong. About the handling of the latest election, however, his account was confirmed by Robertson and the Commander. Cuffee had made an inflammatory speech proposing his own leadership, while his bravos shouted down the arguments of the older conservative group. Two of the most stubborn skeptics had been beaten up. Cuffee’s young bullies operated the polls and announced the result.

“But they aren’t an army,” Farnham said. “At least, not what I saw. Can those two dozen ruffians really terrorize the whole community?”

“Hasn’t the same thing happened in bigger countries, but in a not very different proportion?” Simon reminded him.

“Besides,” Johnny said, “there’s more than what you saw. Cuffee’s got them out now, roundin’ up Maroons from all over for a big meeting tomorrow, where he’s goin’ to tell ’em what the new system’s goin’ to be.”

There was evidently some connection between this and Cuffee’s sudden decision to let them stay overnight, and Farnham and the Saint exchanged glances.

“Just what is his platform?” Farnham asked.

“I dunno, sah. But from what I hear, I think it’s something about how all the colored people in Jamaica should have the same rights as the Maroons, an’ we should let all of ’em join us who want to, and enlarge our boundaries till there’s room for all of ’em.”

“And eventually they end up with the whole island,” Farnham said grimly. “Yes, that’s clear enough.” He looked suddenly very tired. “I’m afraid this turns out to be a bit out of my department. I suppose I’ll just have to report it all to the Governor, and let Government decide what to do.”

“Government should be able to take care of it,” Simon remarked. “A few soldiers, or even policemen—”

“You’re forgetting the Treaty.”

The Saint had finished his plate. He lighted a cigarette thoughtfully.

“Well, where do I stand?” he inquired. “I don’t like Mr Cuffee on principle, and I didn’t sign any treaty.”

He was aware of a transient spark in Robertson’s dull eyes, and that for a moment the Commander paused in his energetic chomping, but most of all of the intent eagerness of Johnny.

“No,” Farnham said firmly. “You’re only a visitor. I know your methods, and they just won’t go here. This situation is ticklish enough already. Don’t make it any more complicated.”

“You’re the boss,” said the Saint, but he knew that Johnny was still looking at him.

David Farnham could not responsibly have taken any other attitude, but his enforced correctness cast an inevitable dampener over the discussion. They went to bed not long afterwards, after much repetition and no progress, and Simon sympathetically refrained from further argument when they were alone. The iron bedsteads were not luxurious, but the rough-dried sheets were fresh and clean, and the Saint never allowed vain extrapolations to interfere with his rest. A few seconds after his head settled on the pillow, he was in a dreamless sleep.

He awoke to a light touch on his shoulder, instantly, without a movement or even a perceptible change in his breathing. Relaxing one eyelid just enough to give him a minimum slit to peek through, he saw Johnny’s face bending over him in the first grayness of dawn, and opened both eyes.

Johnny put a finger to his lips and made a beckoning sign.

The Saint nodded, and slithered over the edge of the bed as silently as the uncooperative springs would let him. The hearty rhythm of Farnham’s snoring did not change, and Johnny was already a shadow gliding through the door. A few moments later the Saint, in shirt and trousers and carrying his sandals, joined him outside.

A little way up the path from the house, in shadows made darker by the paling sky, a group of five men stood waiting. As Johnny and Simon joined them, Simon saw that Robertson and the Commander were two of them. The other three were of similar age. There were no introductions. Johnny seemed to have been appointed spokesman.

“We talked for a long time after you went to bed,” he said. “I told them a lot about you. They think you might be able to help us. They want to show you the Peace Cave. That’s where the Treaty is supposed to have been signed. I haven’t even seen it myself. But they seem to think it’s important, I don’t know why. Will you go?”

“Of course,” said the Saint, with a strange sensation in his spine.

5

They set off at once.

Nobody talked, and before long the Saint himself was grateful to be spared the effort of conversation. Even in such good condition as he always was, he was glad to save his breath for locomotion. The trail wound up innumerable steep hills and down an identical number of declivities, through arching forest and over the slippery rocks and muck of little streams. The sun came up, scorching in the open, brewing invisible steam in the deceptive shade. Simon had to marvel at the driving pace set by the Commander in the lead and uncomplainingly maintained by the other old men.

In the full light, he saw that one of them carried a bottle of rum, one carried an old oil lantern, and one had a cardboard mailing tube which was the twin of the tube that Cuffee’s aide had carried. The significance of that last item puzzled him profoundly, but he managed to restrain himself from asking questions. The first rule of the whole mysterious expedition seemed to be that he should place himself blindly in their hands, and he had decided to do nothing that might upset the procedure.

They made one stop, in a grove of coconut palms. The Commander picked up a couple of fallen nuts from the ground, shook them, and threw them away. He looked up at the clusters of nuts overhead and pointed with the machete which he had carried all the way.

“Go get we some water coconut, Johnny,” he said. “See if you still a good Maroon.”

Johnny grinned, took off his shoes and socks, and scrambled up a tree with what Simon would have rated as remarkable agility, but which convulsed the rest of the party with good-natured laughter. The Commander deftly whacked off the tops of the nuts which Johnny threw down and passed the first one to Simon.

They sat in the shade and sipped the cool mild-tasting water from the nuts, and bummed cigarettes from the Saint, but the bottle of rum was not touched. Presently the Commander stood up, flourished his machete like a cavalry officer, and led them on.

It was nearing noon when the trail turned down around a small valley and twisted past a shoulder of exposed rock and more or less massive boulders. Later Simon was to learn that they were actually only about two miles from the village, and that the long hike had only been contrived as a kind of preliminary ordeal to test him. He could see the path winding up again beyond, and wondered if it was ever going to reach a destination, but the Commander halted at the rocky point and the rest of the safari gathered around him.

“Now we reach de Peace Cave,” said the Commander, and waved his machete. “Open de door!”

The first men to scramble up rolled aside one of the smaller stones, disclosing an opening little more than two feet square. The man with the lantern lighted it and crawled in first, on his hands and knees. Others followed. The Commander urged Simon upwards.

“Okay, Gaston,” said the Saint philosophically.

The tunnel was barely large enough for him to wriggle through on all fours, but he was glad to find it only about four yards long. He squirmed out into a low vaulted cave where the lantern revealed the men who had gone ahead perched on any seats they could find on the unevenly bouldered floor. The roof was too low for him to stand up without stooping, and after Johnny and the Commander had followed him in it seemed as if the number in the party had been calculated by an instinctive sardine-packer, for it would have been almost impossible to squeeze one more adult in.

“Dis de Peace Cave,” said the Commander, standing in the center with his shoulders seeming to hold up the rock over them. “Here de Maroon dem shoot de soldiers dat come after dem. Look.”

He pointed back through the tunnel, and Simon saw the trail that had brought them down into the valley framed like a brilliantly lighted picture at the end of it.

“Now look down here,” said the Commander.

He turned the Saint around with strong bony fingers, guiding him between two men who made way and pushing him down into a crevice at the back of the cave. There was just enough room there for a man to lie down, and at the end was a natural embrasure that looked straight up another fifty yards of the trail where it went on to climb the slope behind.

And as if he had lain there himself all those generations ago, Simon could see the soldiers in their red coats and bright equipment, probably with flags flying and bugles playing, marching in brave formation down the open path according to the manuals of gentlemanly manoeuvre of their day, sitting ducks for desperate guerrillas with an instinct for taking cover and no absurd inhibitions about chivalrous warfare.

“From dere dem shoot de soldiers dat come dat way,” said the Commander, as Simon clambered back out of the shallow hole. “Bang, bang!”

He made shooting pantomime, holding his machete like an imaginary musket, and roared with laughter.

“I can see why your people were never beaten,” Simon said to Johnny, who had been down into the hole for a look himself.

The Commander squinted at him with shrewd bright eyes.

“You proud to be a Maroon?”

“I certainly would be. Your fathers won their freedom the hard way.”

The Commander pressed him down on to a rock with a hand on his shoulder.

“Sit down,” he said, and sat beside him. “Where de rum?”

The bottle was produced and opened.

“Hold out yo’ hands,” said the Commander.

Simon did so, awkwardly, not knowing what they should be positioned for. The Commander turned them palm upwards for him and poured rum into the palms.

“Wash yo’ face.”

The Commander set the example, pouring rum into his own hands and rubbing it over his face and around his neck and up into his hair.

“Very good,” said the Commander, beaming. “Nice, cold.”

Following suit, the Saint found that it was indeed a cooling and refreshing, if somewhat odorous, substitute for cologne. The bottle passed around the circle for everyone to enjoy a similar external application. Then the Commander grabbed it and handed it to the Saint.

“Now drink.”

“Skoal,” said the Saint.

He took a modest sip from the bottle and passed it on. Everyone else now took an internal medication. The bottle came last to the Commander, who took a commander’s swallow and firmly corked it again.

“All right,” he said. “Out de light.”

The cavern was suddenly plunged into blackness.

“Gimme yo’ han’,” said the Commander.

Simon felt fingers groping down his arm in the inky dark until they closed tightly on his wrist.

The Commander said, “Who got de knife?”

Now at last the Saint understood, and for an instant felt only the reflex drumming of his heart. It was fantastic and unreal, but he was awake and this was happening to him. He wondered fleetingly if it was only a test, a primitive elementary ordeal in darkness, and if perhaps in other days a man who flinched might have found the knife turned summarily into his heart. Intuition held him motionless, his arm relaxed. The Commander’s ghoulish laugh vibrated in the cramped space.

“You have de nerve? You don’ frighten?”

“Go ahead,” said the Saint steadily.

“You all right,” said the Commander, with respect. “Good man.”

There was a tiny flick of pain at the base of the Saint’s little finger, and then his hand was grasped and held as in a firm handshake and his wrist was released.

“Light de lamp,” ordered the Commander.

A match flared and dimmed, and then the brighter flame of the lantern took over. The Commander still held Simon’s hand, and in the renewed light the Saint saw a little trickle of blood run from between their clasped palms and drip down on the floor of the cave.

Five other entranced black faces leaned forward to observe the same phenomenon, and from four of them came a murmurous exhalation of approval. Johnny said, “Well, for gosh sakes.”

“My blood mix wid yours,” said the Commander gravely. “So A mek you mi brother. Now you is a Maroon too!” Delighted laughter shook him again as he released his grip. “Whe’ de rum?”

He opened the bottle again and poured a few drops on his own wound, then on the Saint’s. Then they drank again. Each of the other men solemnly shook the Saint’s bloody hand, and drank from the bottle. After that the bottle was empty.

The Commander pulled out a clean handkerchief and tore it in half. He gave one half to Simon and bound the other half around his own hand.

“All right,” he said. “We go back outside.”

He motioned Simon to go first.

The return to sunlight was briefly blinding. While the others were climbing down from the tunnel and replacing the stone across the entrance, Simon wiped his hand and inspected the cut in it. It was reassuringly small and had already almost stopped bleeding. He fastened the cloth around it again and forgot it. Considering various aspects of the rite he had been through, a hypochondriac would undoubtedly have been screaming for mouth-wash, penicillin, and tetanus antitoxin, but the Saint had a sublime contempt for germs which may have given nervous breakdowns to innumerable hapless microbes.

He looked up and saw the Commander standing before him, with Johnny a little behind.

“Now you is a Maroon, and you is mi brother. What you goin’ do ’bout Cuffee?”

“Well,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “first of all, is there any chance of finding the other Colonel? If we produced him, at least Cuffee’s election might be washed out, and we could have another.”

The Commander gazed at him, with bright searching eyes, and put an arm around his shoulders.

“Come.”

He led the Saint only a little way off the trail, where the fast-growing jungle had already almost obliterated the traces of something heavy being dragged through it. The Saint guessed even then what he was going to see, before the sickly-sweet stench and the buzzing of disturbed flies made it a certainty, before the final pathetic travesty of swollen glistening flesh confirmed it without need of the words which were still inevitably spoken.

“Das de Colonel,” the Commander said.

6

It was the Commander who had found the body, Simon learned — driven by rebellious unsatisfied curiosity, guided by atavistic senses that no civilized white man could hope to understand even if the Commander had been able to discourse professorially about them. The other elders represented there had been informed, but had been helpless to decide what should be done with the information, and afraid even to reveal their knowledge outside their own circle. The recent Colonel had been murdered, but they had no evidence to point from his body to the killer. The Commander might just as easily have been accused himself. And if the real killer had felt himself in serious jeopardy, anyone who appeared to threaten him might well be found in the same condition as the luckless ex-Colonel.

All this took some time to establish, much less concisely, and Simon could probably have deduced as much by himself more quickly, but courtesy obliged him to listen.

“It sounds just like in the States, when the gangsters knock someone off,” Johnny said.

Simon nodded.

“Only here the gangster is also the Chief of Police and the Mayor too. But he can’t be the Judge as well. Or is he? Don’t you have any Constitution?”

They looked at him blankly, and he tried again slowly and simply.

“Is he a dictator? Can the Colonel do anything he likes?”

“De Colonel is de head man,” Robertson said.

“What does the Treaty say?”

One of the others stepped forward, the man who carried the cardboard mailing tube which had puzzled the Saint intermittently since the day before. He held it out.

“See de Treaty yah, sah.”

The Saint took it and stared at it. It gave him a strange feeling to be holding that much-discussed document at last, after all he had heard about it. It seemed extraordinary, now, that this moment had been so long delayed, and yet he had not realized before what an essential element had been lacking.

“Well I’m damned,” he said, and then another thought rebounded. “Where did you get this copy?”

“De new Major is mi gran’son, sah. Him is a very wil’ bwoy. Him keep it fe Cuffee. A tek it las’ night while him was sleepin’.”

Simon carried it to a convenient rock and sat down. He lighted a cigarette, and then carefully extracted the scroll from the tube and as carefully unrolled it. Johnny had followed him, and was peering over his shoulder.

The parchment was yellowed and stained with age and the antique angular script often hard to decipher. But the following is an exact transcription, and if there are any skeptics who still doubt the authenticity of these chronicles, I should like to say that they can see the original in Kingston whenever they care to go there. I make no apology for quoting it at such length, for it is a real historical curiosity.

“King of France too?” said the Saint. “That’s a new one on me.”

There followed paragraphs defining the rights of farming, marketing, and hunting, and binding the Maroons to join the Governor in suppressing other rebels or repelling foreign invaders. Then:

“That seems to settle Cuffee’s idea of taking all the other colored people in Jamaica into the Maroons,” Simon remarked.

“But they aren’t slaves any longer,” Johnny said. “So how could they be returned?”

“It’ll give the lawyers something to haggle with, anyway,” said the Saint. “But Cuffee’s a lawyer himself. I’m looking for some law we can use now.”

“And that’s a big help.”

“God burn it,” said the Saint in disgust, “it just starts to get somewhere and then it veers off again. And there are only a few lines left.”

“That’s an item that somebody seems to have overlooked,” Simon observed. “It might be some help, but it isn’t exactly a lightning solution.”

The excitement with which he had started reading was beginning to drag its tail. The lift of a couple of false hopes had only made the subsequent let-downs more discouraging. The Treaty, although its simplicity and straightforwardness could have been studied with advantage by the architects of more modern pacts, left vast areas untouched. The only regulation it set up for the internal affairs of the Maroons was that they should not execute each other. How otherwise they should organize their freedom seemed to have been wholly outside the scope of the agenda.

There was only one clause left, and the Saint’s heart sank as the first words foreshadowed its stately irrelevance.

His eyes widened incredulously over the next three and final lines.

He read them again to make sure.

His pointing forefinger underlined them slowly, and he looked up to meet the stunned stare of Johnny at his shoulder.

“You see what I see, don’t you?” said the Saint.

“Yes, sah. But—”

“Oh, no,” said the Saint, in a low quavering voice. “Oh, leaping lizards. Oh, holy Moses in the mountains!”

He was rolling the parchment up again with shaking fingers, stuffing it back into the protective tube. He came to his feet with a shout that brought all the others around him.

“O blessed bureaucracy,” he yelled. “O divine dust of departmental archives. O rollicking ribbons of red tape!”

They gaped at him as if he had gone out of his mind, which perhaps he temporarily had. The immortal magnificence of that moment was more than flesh and blood could take with equanimity. And it was all crystallized in the last few words of the Maroons’ charter, after he had given up all hope — exactly like a charge of cavalry pounding to the rescue of a beleaguered outpost in the last few feet of the corniest horse opera ever filmed.

Simon’s ribs ached with laughter. He handed the tube back to the man who had carried it, and clapped Johnny and the Commander ecstatically on the back, one with each hand.

“Let’s get back to Accompong,” he said. “And somebody better find something we can eat on the way. This is going to be a day to remember, and I don’t want to starve to death before I see the end of it.”

7

“I’ve told you till I’m blue in the face,” David Farnham said irritably. “I don’t know where Mr Templar went, or why, or anything about it.”

It was late in the afternoon, and he must have repeated the same statement twenty or thirty times during the day. It was unequivocally true, for Mrs Robertson, who had served him breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, had been blandly unable to enlighten him on that subject, or on the whereabouts of her husband, or the Commander, or Johnny. Farnham was considerably perplexed, but not too worried, for the attitudes of Cuffee and his henchmen clearly proved that they were equally baffled by the disappearance.

Cuffee scowled. The Major, zealously taking his cue, scowled even more ferociously. Others of the bodyguard dutifully joined in the glowering.

They were in a house at the edge of the “parade-ground” where Cuffee was living and making his official headquarters. Twenty yards in front of it, men had been working all day to build a sort of open bandstand about fifteen feet square, with a floor raised two feet above the ground and stout poles at each corner supporting a thatched roof. Now it was completed, and for the past hour the wide clearing had been gradually filling with a motley crowd of men, drifting and conglomerating and separating again uncertainly, with chattering groups of women on its outskirts and small children chasing each other like puppies around its fringes. Several of Cuffee’s elite corps were trying to marshal the mob into a semblance of audience formation facing the newly erected platform. They were now distinguished with broad red arm bands, which seemed to give them the added confidence and bravado of a uniform.

Cuffee looked at his watch. He was restless. Although he knew that schedules meant little to the Maroons, he had set a time for himself, and even more importantly, he sensed that if the suspense of the people waiting to hear him were prolonged beyond a certain point it might have the opposite effect from what he wanted.

With an abrupt decisiveness he stood up, settled his Sam Browne belt, and put on his gilded helmet.

The meeting will begin,” he said, and looked at Farnham. “I think you’ll want to listen to this.”

“I shall be very interested,” Farnham said calmly.

Cuffee turned and marched out, followed by his adjutant and the rest of his bodyguard, except for two who remained with Farnham.

Farnham strolled out, relighting his pipe, and the two followed him. Cuffee had not invited him to join him on the rostrum, and Farnham wondered whether he should take the invitation for granted or the lack of it as a diplomatic affront. His two personal escorts, however, who seemed to have received prior instructions, fell in on either side of him and steered him with suggestive pressures around the reviewing stand to a place close in front of it and in line with one corner, where he discovered that an empty wooden crate had been placed on which it was indicated that he should sit. Thus he found himself nearer the platform than the nearest of the other spectators, but set aside rather than in the center of a special front row. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling of being positioned more like a prisoner on trial, which was not relieved by the way his escorts stationed themselves just behind him, one on each side, with their machetes in hand. But he decided that his best course was to appear unaware of anything out of the ordinary unless and until it was forced upon him, and he crossed his legs composedly and tried to look as if he felt that he was only being treated with proper deference.

A dozen of the elite guard had ranged themselves in a double rank from front to rear of the dais, with the Major in the front of one file. At a word from him, they raised their clenched fists in a ragged salute, and Cuffee strode down the human aisle to the front of the stand, where he raised his fist in salute to the audience.

There was a splatter of applause, which Farnham observed was led and fomented by a number of the red-armleted who still circulated authoritatively through the assembly.

Cuffee lowered his fist, and his guard of honor slouched out of formation and shuffled towards the front of the stage.

“My friends,” Cuffee said, “comrades, and brother Maroons. I am your new Colonel. Colonel Cuffee. I’ve brought you here to meet me, and to let me tell you what I’m going to do for you, and for all our people, while I’m your leader.”

His oratorical voice was resonant and dynamic, and he handled it with the skill of an actor. But with even greater intellectual skill he chose words of almost puerile simplicity but uttered them with overwhelming earnestness, investing them with vast profundity, never seeming to talk down to his listeners, yet contriving to make sure that the most ignorant and unschooled of them could scarcely fail to grasp his meaning.

He started harmlessly enough with a short recital of their history, reminding them of how their ancestors had been torn from their African homes and brought to Jamaica like cattle to make a few white capitalists richer, of how they had rebelled against abuse and slavery, of how they had fought for their freedom against the might of the whole British Empire and forced the King of England himself to plead for peace, and of how the Treaty had finally recognized their right to hold the lands they had defended and to be free for ever of any outside domination.

So far it was not much worse than any nation’s jingoistic version of its own trials and triumphs, although plainly slanted to revive ancient resentments and hint at villains yet to receive their just comeuppance, but Mark Cuffee was still only laying his groundwork.

“It is a pity,” he said, “that the spirit of our Treaty was soon forgotten by the Government of this island. The English Kings had been made to feel small, and they don’t like that. They couldn’t wipe out the Treaty, but they could try to make it mean less and less. And because some of our fathers were not wide awake, or were deceived by tricks and lies, they let their rights be taken away one by one.”

He cited an insidiously increasing variety of encroachments. Their lands had never been properly surveyed, and their boundaries had been involved in a continual series of disputes designed to whittle them away acre by acre. Their own administration of their own affairs had been spied on and meddled with by a procession of imperialist agents disguised as missionaries or welfare workers. Their territory had been arrogantly invaded by British policemen with instructions to fabricate evidence that the Maroons were bandits or were harboring bandits; their privilege of self-government was nullified by emissaries of the Colonial Secretariat who presumed to force their way in and ask impertinent questions about their manner of conducting elections and to cast doubt on their validity.

It was during the development of this theme that Cuffee began to turn pointed glances towards David Farnham, and the last charge was directed straight at him.

“Nonsense!” Farnham said loudly, but he felt the impact of hostile stares and heard some ugly muttering in the audience.

Also he had a mostly psychic impression of his two special guards stiffening and hefting their machetes when he spoke, and for the first time felt a real qualm of somewhat incredulous apprehension.

“Where the devil had the Saint gone?” he wondered.

He recrossed his legs and moved his pipe to the other side of his mouth with a good show of phlegmatic ennui as Cuffee turned away from him again with calculated contempt and made another smooth shift from second into high gear.

“But, comrades, we don’t have to let them do this. Now I shall tell you what we can do — what we are going to do.”

The only thing wrong with the Treaty was that it had not gone far enough. The Maroons had won their freedom, but for many years after that their fellow slaves had been kept in bondage. Even when they were finally set free, they had not been compensated with lands for the initial crime committed against them. They still had no true independence. Even though today they could vote, they could vote only for British governments. They were still subjects of the same flag that had flown over the slave ships.

“Now I say that it is time for us to set another glorious example. Let us urge our comrades outside to demand the same rights that we have. Let us help them to get their rights. Let us tell any of them who want to fight for their rights, that if the British tyrants want to put them in jail for it, they can come here, where they’ll be safe, because the British police can’t come to our country to arrest them—”

Farnham could sit still no longer. He jumped to his feet.

“That’s treason!” he shouted.

“Also,” said another voice, “it’s against the Treaty.”

The voice turned every eye, before any move could develop against Farnham. And everyone saw the Saint, with the little group of Johnny and the old men behind him, standing at the other corner of the rostrum.

The Commander stepped forward and held up the Saint’s hand with his own, so that their two bandages were together in plain sight. “Dis man is mi brother!” he roared. “Him is a good Maroon now. A good man. Oono listen to him!”

The bloodstains on the cloth stood out so clearly that the delicate pink flush of evening that was touching the tops of the clouds looked like a pale reflection from them, and an awed murmur rippled through the crowd and settled into a complete hush.

“In our Treaty,” said the Saint, “the Maroons promised to help stop rebellions, not start them.”

The man who carried the cardboard tube held it up symbolically.

The young Major’s eyes blazed as he saw it. He leaped down from the stand, snatched the tube away, and felled the old man with a brutal blow. In another second he measured more than his own length on the ground, sliding on his back, as Johnny connected with a classic straight left to his chin.

Simon grabbed the tube as it fell and sprang up on the platform. Johnny was close behind him, and David Farnham had started in the same direction before his guards could recover from their astonishment and stop him. Farnham’s move was made without conscious thought, but it seemed inevitable that all hell would break loose in a moment, and although the end could only be disastrous he felt that he should be at the core of it.

The swift succession of surprises, however, seemed to have temporarily robbed everyone else of initiative. Even the red-arm-banded squad on the platform were as nonplussed as their colleagues among the crowd: still too new to their role to have developed the reflexes of trained and organized bullies, they waited uncertainly for orders, and for a moment Cuffee himself hesitated before the fateful possibilities of his decision.

In that breathing spell of confusion, Simon Templar raised and stretched out his arms to the audience, with the tube held aloft in one of them, and said:

“I shall not stop Colonel Cuffee talking for long — although I should only call him Captain Cuffee, because I see in the Treaty that the Maroons who set you all free were none of them more than Captains, and I don’t know why anyone today should make himself bigger than those men who signed this Treaty. I have it here, and I have read it. All of you should read it. It has not been read enough. For years people have talked about this Treaty, here and in the Government too, but I think very few of them have ever looked at it. If they had, there would not be so many arguments. For instance, about your — our last election, in which Captain Cuffee made himself the chief. You should all know what the Treaty says!”

He thrust the tube into Farnham’s hands, and said, “Read ’em the last clause — and try not to look shocked yourself.”

Cuffee started to move then, but in the same instant Johnny pinioned his arms from behind. In the next, Simon had whipped the gun out of Cuffee’s holster and leveled it.

“Tell your boys to stand back,” he said grimly. “Because if a riot starts now, you’ll be the first casualty.”

As Johnny released him and stepped warily away, Cuffee made a perfunctory gesture of compliance. It was almost supererogatory, for the sight of the gun had already cooled the ambition of his cohorts.

Farnham held the unrolled parchment, and read with pedagogic clarity:

“ ‘That Captain Cudjoe shall during his life be Chief Commander in Trelawny Town, after his decease the command to devolve on his brother Captain Accompong, and in case of his decease to his next brother Captain Johnny, and failing him, Captain Cuffee shall succeed, who is to be succeeded by Captain Quaco, and after all their demises...’ ” His voice faltered as his eyes ran ahead of it, but he braced himself and finished strongly and firmly: “ ‘—and after all their demises the Governor or Commander-in-Chief for the time being shall appoint from time to time, whom he thinks fit for that command.’ ”

There was a silence in which the earth itself seemed to stand still, and then it was as if all the people breathed together in a great sigh.

Farnham let the scroll curl up again.

“As the official representative of the Governor, therefore,” he said, “I declare that Cuffee is no longer your Colonel.”

There was a vague medley of gasps and murmurs in the audience, and several sporadic handclaps.

Farnham looked at the Saint, and Simon nodded and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. Farnham turned again to the assembly.

“Instead, I shall appoint another man who has been to school and learned a lot of things that will help you, but who’s also a good Maroon, whose ancestor is named in the Treaty even ahead of Cuffee’s — Captain Johnny!”

Simon seized Johnny’s hand and hoisted it like the mitt of a victorious prize-fighter.

The murmurs became more positively approving, the applause louder, and the Commander started a gleeful cheer which was taken up by an increasing number of voices.

Cuffee’s face was gray under its dusky pigment. Ignoring the gun that the Saint held, in sudden desperation, he forced his way again to the front of the platform, his clenched fist raised.

“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” he howled. “The Treaty cheated you! You’re still slaves—”

Johnny spun him around by the shoulder and flung him into the arms of the nearest of his own men.

“Arrest him,” he said.

It was as if an invisible mantle had fallen on him that had always been waiting for him to find his own stature, the stature that it was made for. The tone of command came without effort to his voice.

The men glanced nervously about them, and must have heard in the rising babble of the crowd beyond a trend that would not lightly change its course again. Already some of their fraternity in the audience were unobtrusively slipping off their red armlets... They took hold of Cuffee and held him, instinctively obeying the one who seemed to be the stronger leader.

Johnny turned back to the throng that was crowding up to the dais.

“That man lied to you about the Treaty!” he shouted. “Why should we listen to him anymore? He lied about the last Colonel, too. Cuffee killed him so that he could make himself Colonel. We found his body near the Peace Cave. The Commander saw it too, an’ Colonel Robertson, an’ Mr Templar.”

Of course it was not evidence, but to his hearers it carried conviction. An appalled hush settled again.

“Nobody does himself any good by breakin’ the law,” Johnny said with simple dignity. “The Treaty is our law. An’ it’s a good treaty. Whatever the British Government did once, they want to be our friends now. It isn’t anything like Cuffee tried to make out. If you’ll listen, an’ Mr Farnham will help me, I’ll try to tell you why.”

8

Later that evening Farnham said meticulously, “Of course, Johnny, between ourselves, the Governor’ll have to approve my recommendation and confirm your appointment himself. But I don’t think we’ll have any trouble about that. He should be grateful to have such a tidy solution dropped into his lap... As for you, Simon, I think I’d feel better if you went ahead and laughed at me, instead of displaying such hypocritical Christian forbearance.”

“Because you’d never read the Treaty right to the end yourself?” said the Saint. “No, I did most of my laughing this morning, and not principally at you. Hereafter we’ll keep the joke to ourselves. Besides which, I doubt if anyone else would ever believe it.”

He lighted a cigarette and shook his head in rapture nevertheless.

“But what a fabulous little gem it is,” he said dreamily. “For more than two hundred years the legend of the Maroons has gone on. Away back somewhere, some clerk in whatever Government department it would be told some new clerk who was too lazy to look for himself his careless version of what the Treaty said. That clerk repeated it to his successor, who repeated it to the next man. Everyone accepted it and believed it. Each new incoming Governor heard about it from his staff, believed it, and perpetuated it. It was such general knowledge that nobody ever thought of questioning it, any more than they would have questioned the statement that Jamaica is a British colony. Jerry Dugdale, the policeman, believed it, and so did the Governor who bawled him out. You believed it. A copy of the Treaty was in the files all the time, but who ever looks in files? For maybe two centuries, nobody ever read the Treaty. Except probably Cuffee. But why should he blow his hand? It took a nosy bastard like me, sitting on a rock out in the wilderness, to read all through the damn thing and explode the lovely myth.”

“All right,” Farnham said stolidly. “There’s only one thing that bothers me now. It’s about Cuffee. None of us has any reasonable doubt that he murdered the former Colonel — or if he didn’t do it himself, he instigated it. But the Treaty doesn’t allow you to hang him, Johnny. You have to hand him over to our authorities. And there’s no evidence against him that would stand up in a regular court. I’m very much afraid that he’ll eventually get off scot-free.”

The Saint stood up.

“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” he said soberly. “And I have an idea. But if you’ll excuse me, I’d rather tell Johnny alone. If you know nothing about it, you can’t have anything on your conscience.”

Mr Mark Cuffee had been gradually regaining his confidence as he endlessly paced the confines of the room that had become his cell. The men who guarded him now were half a dozen of the older generation, headed by the Commander, and he knew that it would have been a waste of breath to try to argue or coax them into changing their allegiance. Nor had he been foolish enough to attempt a forcible escape: in spite of their years, they still had the sinews of a lifetime of manual labor, and any two of them would have been an easy match for him. So instead of attempting the impossible, he had been using his head.

There was no evidence that could possibly convict him in a British court. And with his knowledge and experience as a barrister, he would back himself to make any colonial prosecutor in that little island look like a clown. There were even opportunities for such a grandstand performance that his superiors in the party, of whom he was much more afraid, might not only forgive his local failure but commend the larger achievement. His defense of himself and his struggle to liberate a downtrodden proletariat from imperialist exploiters would make worldwide headlines. He would—

As the door opened and Johnny and Simon Templar walked in, he swung around as if he himself were the potential prosecutor and they must have come to plead for leniency.

“What do you want now?” he challenged truculently. “I demand to be properly arraigned before a magistrate. Until you’re ready to conform with civilized legal procedures, be good enough to leave me alone.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said the Saint quietly. Johnny made a sign to the guard, and one by one they silently left the room.

As the door closed behind the last of them, Cuffee threw himself into a chair.

“What’s the idea?” he inquired sarcastically. “Were you thinking of trying some American third degree on me? It won’t get you anywhere, and it’ll only make matters worse for you when I get you in court.”

“Mr Cuffee,” said the Saint, “you aren’t going to any court where you’d probably get acquitted. Johnny has decided that it would be better for him to convict you on a lesser charge, and give you a sentence which he has the right to impose. You remember that the Treaty allows him to inflict any punishment short of death. Therefore his idea is that he should have your hands and feet cut off, your eyes put out, your tongue cut out, castrate you — and let you go.”

Cuffee stared at them.

“You must be crazy,” he sneered. “I shall appeal to the Governor—”

“The sentence is to be carried out tonight.”

Cuffee licked his lips. He could not believe his ears, but Johnny’s face was expressionless and implacable. And something in Cuffee’s own cosmogony, harking back to a primitive heritage which at any other time he would have been the first to deride, made him believe that a man of his own race could well be capable of such savagery.

“You’re off your head, Johnny,” he said in a husky mumble of horror. “England would never let you get away with that, Treaty or no Treaty. You’d pay for it in the end, you and all the Maroons.”

“That’s what I’ve tried to tell him,” said the Saint. “But he won’t listen. His mind’s made up. And by the time the British Parliament could do anything about it, it’ll be too late to do you any good. The best I’ve been able to do is persuade him to let you take an easier way out for yourself, if you want to.”

He brought one hand from behind his back, and Cuffee saw that there was a coiled length of rope in it. Cuffee gazed at it numbly as the Saint laid it across his knees.

“It’s a strong rope,” said the Saint, “and so are the beams over your head. You’ll be left alone for half an hour before they come for you. I’m sorry, but that’s all I could do.”

He turned and walked out of the room, and Johnny followed him, closing the door after them.

They stood in front of the house, under the stars, looking at the fires that had been lighted on the parade-ground and hearing the voices of the Maroons who, having been brought together anyway, had decided with typical good spirits to make their convening an excuse for a feast and celebration. Excited chattering voices which, to a guilty man, could easily sound like the ominous hysteria of a sadistic mob...

“You know, sah,” Johnny said, “I happened to see an old map of Jamaica in Kingston, an’ I saw what they used to call this part of the country. You know what it was? The District of Look Behind. I kept rememberin’ that when we were at the Peace Cave, thinkin’ how they used to ambush the redcoats. Kind of gives you a shudder, doesn’t it?”

“My God, what a wonderful name,” said the Saint, with the pure delight of a poet. Then his hand lay on Johnny’s shoulder, and he said, “But now it’s your job to make it the District of Look Ahead.”

Then they both looked back at the house, and listened.