The Unspeakable Perk Part 6

"I'm looking."

"Do you see anything?"

"Yes; a sort of little smudge."

"That's why."

"It's a very shadowy sort of why."

"There's substance enough under it."

"A riddle? I'll give it up."

"No; a bet. I'll bet you the treasures of my mountain-side. Orchids of gold and white and purple and pink, b.u.t.terflies that dart on wings of fire opal--"

"Beetles, to know which is to love them, and love but them forever," she laughed. "And my side of the wager--what is that to be?"

"That you will come to the rock day after to-morrow at this hour and stand on the top and be a voice again and talk to me."

"Done! Send your treasures to the pier, for you'll surely lose. And now take me to the road."

It was a single-file trail, and he walked in advance, silent as an Indian. As they emerged from a thicket into the highway, above the red-tiled city in its setting of emerald fields strung on the silver thread of the Santa Clara River, she turned and gave him her hand.

"Be at your rock to-morrow, and when you see the yacht steam out, you'll know I'll be saying good-bye, and thank you for your mountain treasures.

Send them to Miss Brewster, care of the yacht Polly. She's named after me. Is there anything the matter with my shoes?" she broke off to inquire solicitously.

"Er--what? No." He lifted his eyes, startled, and looked out across the quaint old city.

"Then is there anything the matter with my face?"

"Yes."

"Yes? Well, what?"

"It's going to be hard to forget," complained he of the goggles.

"Then look away before it's too late," she cried merrily; but her color deepened a little. "Good-bye, O friend of the lowly scarab!"

At the dip of the road down into the bridged arroyo, she turned, and was surprised--or at least she told herself so--to find him still looking after her.

II

AT THE KAST

One dines at the Gran Hotel Kast after the fas.h.i.+on of a champignon sous cloche. The top of the cloche is of fluted gla.s.s, with a wide aperture between it and the sides, to admit the rain in the wet season and the flies in the dry. Three balconies run up from the dining-room well to this roof, and upon these, as near to the railings as they choose, the rather conglomerate patronage of the place sleeps, takes baths, dresses, gossips, makes love, quarrels, and exchanges prophecies as to next Sunday's bullfight, while the diners below strive to select from the bill of fare special morsels upon which they will stake their internal peace for the day. No cabaret can hold a candle to it for variety of interest. When the sudden torrential storms sweep down the mountains at meal times, the little human champignons, beneath their insufficient cloche, rush about wildly seeking spots where the drippage will not wash their food away. Commercial travelers of the tropics have a saying: "There are worse hotels in the world than the Kast--but why take the trouble?" And, year upon year, they return there for reasons connected with the other hostelries of Caracuna, which I forbear to specify.

To Miss Polly Brewster, the Kast was a place of romance. Five miles away, as the buzzard flies, she could have dined well, even elegantly, on the Brewster yacht. Would she have done it? Not for worlds! Miss Brewster was entranced by the courtly manners of her waiter, who had lost one ear and no small part of the countenance adjacent thereto, only too obviously through the agency of some edged instrument not wielded in the arts of peace. She was further delightedly intrigued by the abrupt appearance of a romantic-hued gentleman, who thrust out over the void from the second balcony an anguished face, one side of which was profusely lathered, and addressed to all the hierarchy of heaven above, and the peoples of the earth beneath, a pa.s.sionate protest upon the subject of a cherished and vanished shaving brush; what time, below, the head waiter was hastily removing from sight, though not from memory, a soup tureen whose agitated surface bore a creamy froth not of a lacteal origin. One may not with impunity balance personal implements upon the too tremulous rails of the ancient Kast.

With an appreciative and glowing eye, Miss Brewster read from her mimeographed bill of fare such legends as "ropa con carne," "bacalao seco," "enchiladas," and meantime devoured chechenaca, which, had it been translated into its just and simple English of "hash," she would not have given to her cat.

Nor did her visual and prandial preoccupations inhibit her from a lively interest in the surrounding Babel of speech in mingled Spanish, Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch, for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice gained any heed in that contest. Even after the bells paused, the habit of effort kept the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table to the right of her. The remark that first fixed her attention was in English, of the super-British patois.

"Can't tell wot the blighter might look like behind those bloomin' brown gla.s.ses."

"But he's not bothersome to any one," suggested a second speaker, in a slightly foreign accent. "He regards his own affairs."

"Right you are, bo!" approved a tall, deeply browned man of thirty, all sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested nothing so much as a club with a gnarled k.n.o.b on the end of it, a tough, reliable, hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in an honest cause. "If he deals in conversation, he must SELL it. I don't notice him giving any of it away."

"He gave some to Kast the last time he dined here," observed a languid and rather elegant elderly man, who occupied the fourth side of the table. "Mine host didn't like it."

"I should suppose Senior Kast would be hardened," remarked the young Caracunan who had defended the absent.

"Our eyegla.s.sed friend scored for once, though. They had just served him the usual table-d'hote salad--you know, two leaves of lettuce with a caterpillar on one. Kast happened to be pa.s.sing. Our friend beckoned him over. 'A little less of the fauna and more of the flora, Senior Kast,'

said he in that gritty, scientific voice of his. I really thought Kast was going to forget his Swiss blood, and chase a whole peso of custom right out of the place."

"If you ask me, I think the blighter is barmy," a.s.serted the Briton.

"Well, I'll ask you," proffered the elegant one kindly. "Why do you consider him 'barmy,' as you put it?"

"When I first saw him here and heard him speak to the waiter, I knew him for an American Johnny at once, and I went, directly I'd finished my soup, and sat down at his table. The friendly touch, y' know. 'I say,'

I said to him, 'I don't know you, but I heard you speak, and I knew at once you were one of these Americans--tell you at once by the beastly queer accent, you know. You are an American, ay--wot?' Wot d' you suppose the blighter said? He said, 'No, I'm an ichthyo'--somethin' or other--"

"Ichthyosaurus, perhaps," supplied the Caracunuan, smiling.

"That's it, whatever it may be. 'I'm an ichthyosaurus,' he says. 'It's a very old family, but most of the b.u.t.tons are off. Were you ever bitten by one in the fossil state? Very exhilaratin', but poisonous,' he says.

'So don't let me keep you any longer from your dinner.' Of course, I saw then that he was a wrong un, so I cut him dead, and walked away."

"Served him right," declared the elderly American, with a solemn twinkle directed at the tall brown man, who, having opened his mouth, now thought better of it, and closed it again, with a grin.

"But he is very kind," said the native. "When my brother fell and broke his arm on the mountain, this gentleman found him, took care of him, and brought him in on muleback."

"Lives up there somewhere, doesn't he, Mr. Raimonda?" asked the big man.

"In the quinta of a deserted plantation," replied the Caracunan.

"Wot's he do?" asked the Englishman.

"Ah, THAT one does not know, unless Senor Sherwen can tell us."

"Not I," said the elderly man. "Some sort of scientific investigation, according to the guess of the men at the club."

"You never can tell down here," observed the Englishman darkly. "Might be a blind, you know. Calls himself Perkins. Dare say it isn't his name at all."

"Daughter," said Mr. Thatcher Brewster at this juncture, in a patient and plaintive voice, "for the fifth and last time, I implore you to pa.s.s me the b.u.t.ter, or that which purports to be b.u.t.ter, in the dish at your elbow."