The second of my Argonauts was of quite another sort. Whatever graces of body and mind Nature has to give, she had given him—and he had wasted them. With his invincible and dauntless youth he might have been a companion for Cortez and stout Bernal Diaz, a Crusader, almost anything he chose, and he was—I borrow the phrase of a better man than I—a Camp-Follower of Fortune, a wasted man. The outskirts of the world are full of them. That such things can be, that men can be born so strong, so lovable, and then be wasted, seems to me the most inexplicable of the caprices of that Fortune which puzzled Dante Alighieri long ago.
Mid-heaven high, the morning sun blazed above the forlorn little lumber-port, calling the inhabitants thereof to arise and make hay diligently during the few weeks it still had to shine before the change of monsoons and the rainy season blotted the world in mist. The call seemed to arouse little enthusiasm. Over the channel, where the Rio Bagalayag winds out by the bar, a pair of gulls wheeled aimlessly, plunging into the yellow water now and then, and rising with harsh cries. Out beyond them in the distance, where Point Bagalayag wavered in the heat, a lorcha drifted with limp sails, becalmed in the lee of Mount Bagalayag. In the one street of Bagalayag itself, the grassy lane which follows the curve of the shore, two Chinamen with a long whip-saw were gnawing a plank from a four-foot log of molave, sawing steadily with the patient endurance of their race, brown arms swinging in and out, brown bodies swaying. At the end of each stroke, they grunted rhythmically, and the music of their industry—Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh!—was the only sound in Bagalayag that morning, save the raucous complaint of the distant gulls.
As a matter of fact, Bagalayag was waiting in hushed expectancy for something inevitable to happen. On the shady side of the nipa church, which still manages to rear its rickety walls at the corner of the brown and weedy plaza, the populace was gathered—forty-one men, fifty-two women, fifty-two babes in arms, and seventy-three children of varying sex and age, speechless for once, with the smoke of their cigarettes dissolving above them like unfragrant incense. And the gaze of all that multitude was fixed unwinkingly on a tin-roofed house—the only one in town—which stands on the other side of the street, close to the water's edge.
In that pretentious dwelling an unprecedented event seemed likely to happen, for in its upper chamber one of the lords of the earth lay deathly sick of a fever. Bagalayag as yet recorded no death of a white man in its simple annals, therefore it sat and smoked and waited, all except its stolid, alien Chinamen, who cared nothing for life or death or anything but planks.
Occasionally a voice floated out from the Tin-Roofed House, weak and thin but full of helpless rage, and at the sound the inhabitants of Bagalayag wagged their heads and spoke softly. "The Se?or Ess-soffti is not dead—yet," they murmured.
In Hamburg, far enough from Bagalayag in miles, there is a house which sells anything, from elephants to orchids. Every product of the animal or vegetable kingdom from one pole to the other, 'round with the equator and back again, is included in the complete line which the Hamburgische Gesellschaft carries, for this body is a true body whose busy nerve-ends net the round world. Men on grimy ships whose battered fore feet are set across uncharted leagues of sea, men who rot in unheard-of towns—yet continue to live and trade in defiance of every hygienic law—men who plod untracked continents and unknown, sleeping islands with savage followers, are the organs by which it acts.
Set above all these is the good Right Eye of the Company, the man who, by virtue of wild-wood lore and craftsmanship, and first-hand knowledge of the far nooks and byways of the earth, by right of energy and perseverance, outranks the army of traders and collectors and stands next the Brain. Herr Felix Schrofft is his name, always spoken with respect and envy by his associates and rivals in his strong man's calling. And now, become the Se?or Ess-soffti on liquid Malay tongues, he lay alone at bay in the Tin-Roofed House, and held the breathless attention of the populace of Bagalayag in Mindoro.
The arena where he fought, that small, bare, upper chamber, was very simply furnished with a round table, a couple of chairs, a camphor-wood chest, a bamboo cage imprisoning a parrot, and a folding cot upholstered in the severest taste with dingy gray canvas. The table held the fly- and lizard-bitten remnants of a meal, the chairs were draped with the muddy garments their owner had flung there hastily three days before, a litter of other clothing sprawled from beneath the lid of the chest, and on the cot, which stood before a seaward-facing window, was stretched the redoubtable Se?or Ess-soffti himself, not at all in the mental attitude which our Christian convention prescribes for those in articulo mortis. Despite the pallor of the cheeks beneath the smut of the newly sprouted beard and the yellow gleam of the eyeballs and the leaden inertness of the shrunken limbs which barely hollowed the taut canvas where they lay, the shaggy, wizened monkey of a man was plainly beset by the very worst of tempers, which only his extreme weakness kept from violent expression.
So he lay chafing there that morning, just as he had lain for days. Occasionally his restless eyes met the beady ones of the parrot, and the imprisoned bird shrieked with silly laughter. On such occasions the Se?or Ess-soffti shook his fist, a menace which showed mostly in the convulsions of his face, and muttered weakly, "Sing, you deffel, sing!" falling thereafter into a murmured torrent of words, as he consigned the Philippine Islands and all things in them to everlasting torment.
Even a hidebound moralist, knowing all the circumstances, might have found some palliation for Herr Schrofft's unspiritual estate. Fever had stricken him at an inopportune season, and, for the first time in his life, he faced a possibility of failure with which he could not cope. Even now the freighter Sarstoon had turned her stubby nose Mindoro-ward at Schrofft's suggestion. In ten days she would be lying off Bagalayag, waiting for the cargo he had promised her, and even when one has no fever, ten days are little time in which to fell and trim a hundred cubic meters of a wood so dense that it eats an axe like granulated metal, and float it down the miles of oozing mud they call the Rio Bagalayag, and load it before the northeast monsoon—already threatening in the clouds—comes to lash the open roadstead into a fury of spume and breaking rollers.
He could foresee it all, the excessive sympathy of the Sarstoon's skipper, the meek explanation of the House to the impatient customer, the commiseration and sly elation of his acquaintances and rivals that he had failed at last, the universal grunt of "Hard luck, Schrofft"—hard luck in a trade whose frankly brutal creed discredits a man for one adverse stroke of fortune as for any other sign of personal weakness and unfitness. All that must come, unless he could find some means of thwarting Dame Fate. And so, not finding the means, he cursed the officious beldame heartily.
Suddenly he noticed that the drone of the saw had ceased. Doubtless the coolies had stopped to wipe their streaming faces, but Schrofft was in no mood to seek excuses for them. "Loaf, you deffels, loaf!" he shouted venomously.
As if in response to his taunt, the music of the saw began again, but mingled with it came the chatter of many voices and the soft flop, flop of many padding feet. Raising his head a wearisome half-inch to peer from his window, Herr Schrofft saw, with supreme disgust, the sprung masts and frowsy rigging of the monthly packet from Batangas in the river. Somehow or other the hours had dragged by uncounted; it was afternoon, and the crazy lorcha had drifted to her haven in spite of calm and childish seamanship; while he, Herr Schrofft the indomitable, had one day less in which to do his work. For the first time in his illness, the hard-pressed little man groaned for sympathy, and pitying, sentimental, Teutonic tears burned his eyes. "If I only had just one white man with me," he muttered.
The confusion without came nearer, drawing down the street, and presently the stairs of the Tin-Roofed House clattered under booted feet and its fabric trembled slightly. The invalid's face brightened with curiosity. No native of the Philippines has the combined weight and energy necessary to make a house shake when he walks. Deus ex Machina! That was a favorite phrase of Schrofft's, almost the only Latin of Gymnasium days that had stuck. Perhaps the Man had come with the Hour. Schrofft watched the door with feverish intentness.
It opened and a white man entered, white at least in fundamental coloring, although his skin was a raw, beefy red from newly acquired sunburn, tall, broad-shouldered, clad serviceably in sombrero, the relic of an army shirt, the ruins of khaki riding-breeches and, most incongruously, a pair of handsome riding-boots, whose russet leather was cleaned and polished till it glittered. So far all was well, but the face—the hollowed cheeks, the dark puffy rims beneath the eyes, the wavering glance of the bright blue eyes themselves, the nervous twitching of the full red lips, set in a smile of deprecating impudence, the keen, high-bred features blunted and battered by dissipation, all spoke of one thing. Schrofft sized up his visitor with narrowed lids, and spoke his opinion briefly. "I haf no use for bums," he said.
Like a mask, the wheedling smirk dropped from the newcomer's face. "Hock the Kaiser, a wandering Dutchman!" he cried airily, advancing to the cot.
Schrofft's little eyes burned red. "I am Herr Felix Schrofft, Explorer for the Hamburgische Gesellschaft," he said with dignity, "and I haf no use for bums. Get out."
"'Tis a certain matter of delayed remittances," the stranger explained, as he unceremoniously dumped the encumbering garments from a chair, and sat down by the table. "I must identify myself, Herr Softy. I am Richard Roe, Esquire, ward of the famous John Doe, of whom you may have heard. While the remittances delay, I wander, seeking whom and what I may devour." Mr. Richard Roe gazed ruefully at the dusty viands before him. "As usual, I seem to have come to the wrong shop," he murmured. "But here at least are cigarettes. I will not stand on ceremony."
While the match flared, Schrofft stared at his tormentor with at least as much of bewilderment as of wrath. "If I could hold my revolver," he said at last, "I think I would shoot you. I haf no use for bums."
Through a cloud of smoke, Mr. Richard Roe gazed whimsically at the invalid. "The question seems to be," he suggested mildly, "whether the bum has a use for you. And I rather think he has." He crossed one leg over the other and became pleasantly didactic. "I am not always what you see me now, Herr Softy. One short week ago I sat in Don Miguel Rafferty's establishment in Batangas, wooing fickle Fortune at the wheel. The jade stripped me, I was sold out, up against it; so I became a thorough bum, in manners, morals, and in dress. The boots," he digressed, glancing complacently at his well-shod feet, "are somewhat out of character, I admit. Otherwise I am a bum pure and simple, as you have three times observed, but a bum of a quality of which you never dreamed, a masterless man reduced to his primal elements, three appetites and a sense of humor. Herr Softy, beware of me. I am a dangerous character, I warn you frankly at the start."
Mr. Richard Roe approached the cot once more. "Speaking of revolvers," he remarked, "reminds me that I left my own in Batangas, in care of Uncle Monte de Piedad." He drew Schrofft's weapon from beneath the pillow, and inspected it rapidly. "A poor thing, but a Colt's," he muttered. "Calibre 41, of course. How European!"
Herr Schrofft, his eyes still closed, groaned weakly. It was hard that his respectable and well-ordered brain should conjure up a nightmare of vagabondage like this, and supply fitting words for the figure.
"I came southward to Mindoro," the drawling voice went on, "and at the first stroke I am half a man again. I have a gun. Here is a Tin-Roofed House in which to sleep; here is tobacco to smoke; through the chinks in the floor I perceive sleeping chickens which promise food. Best of all, I find here a companion for my solitude. Herr Softy, you may need an heir before long. Behold him here in me."
"Herr Gott!" Schrofft groaned again, "I am going crazier every minute." Suddenly he opened his eyes, for the door swung on its hinges and a head surmounted by a shock of coarse black hair was thrust within. At the sight of it, all his aggressiveness returned. "Son of fifty fathers!" he screamed. "Because you think I am dying you run away, and now you have the shamelessness to come back! Go and be a muchacho for the deffel! I shall not die; in two days I shall be strong enough to kill you."
"It was only his canny Filipino way," Mr. Richard Roe broke in, coming to the rescue of the unfaithful servant. "He wanted an alibi for the inquest. Slave," he announced sternly, "I have saved your life. Fetch more cigarettes and a bottle of whatever burning water the market offers. Then kill three chickens and cook them with plenty rice—and no grease. The Se?or Softy and I will have a mucho grande chow-chow to celebrate my home-coming. I am his heir. Sigue! Pronto! Madili!"
Schrofft glared hopelessly at Mr. Richard Roe. "Then you are real!" he cried. "That boy, he sees you also, he hears you, he obeys! Mein Gott! You are a bum. You haf no home, you haf no money, you haf no grub, you haf no chob. And I would gif a hundert dollars for just one man!"
"Alas," said Mr. Richard Roe hollowly, "I am not a man, and the hundred is unclaimed. I am the stuff that dreams are made of, bad dreams. But I have my better impulses, and I feel them stirring at the prospect of food. I will be a ministering angel to you, an airy, fairy, army nurse, pressing my cool hand softly on your fevered brow." He suited the action to the word, save that the hand was hot and gritty. "Herr Softy, your pulse is rapid, your temperature is rising, you tremble on the verge of a paroxysm of fever. Where is the quinine?"
The recurrent hot stage of his disease had indeed seized the patient, and as it grew upon him he lost more and more his grip of reality under the mad contradictions of Mr. Richard Roe's speech and conduct, and the potent spell of the drug which he administered with a lavish hand. Dimly, as in a dream, the room stretched wider and higher about him, and as the pulse boomed and roared in his ears, he saw in the distance a phantasm which he knew was called Mr. Richard Roe, sitting at a table and going through the motions of a real man. It drank thirstily from a bottle which a frightened muchacho brought; it smoked endless cigarettes; it dismembered a steaming chicken with its fingers, and ate it daintily, ate another, stretched back in its chair and grunted with content. Phantom or reality, Mr. Richard Roe began to be a comfort, he made himself so much at home. Schrofft closed his eyes and dozed.
Suddenly through his slumber cut a well-remembered sound: Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh! He woke to a moment of clear-headedness and the sense of his predicament. It was almost sunset; only eight days were left. "My trees, my trees!" he quavered, trying weakly to sit up. "I must go and get them."
Instantly the "cool hand" rested on his forehead and, not unkindly, he was shoved back on his pillows. "You've been dozing," the voice of Mr. Richard Roe explained soothingly. "What's the matter?"
Brokenly, still as in a dream, Schrofft heard his own voice go croaking on, speaking ramblingly of trees, always of trees. The clump of iron-woods that grow at the corner where the mangroves are thickest on the bank, thirty miles up-stream. The twelve huge trees that stand up so high and have their tops pleached together. Those were the ones; they must be cut without delay. He must start at once, because, you see, the Sarstoon would be in on the 18th, and, if she didn't get the trees, the monsoon would change. And then her voyage would be wasted, and the customer would not have for six more months the wood of unique density which he wanted for non-magnetic gears, and the House would have to bear the blame, when it was all the fault of a fool named Schrofft, who lay around with fever when there was work to do.
At a great distance he saw Mr. Richard Roe sitting with crossed legs, smoking in long, meditative purr's, and inspecting him narrowly with keen, unwavering blue eyes.
"You're a rather game little man," said Mr. Richard Roe approvingly. After a long time he spoke again. "Thirty miles up, you say. Is there any one around who knows an iron-wood when he sees one?"
There was a new, a compelling quality in the voice, which Schrofft had not heard before. "That coward muchacho, that Juan, he knows. He has been there with me," said Schrofft.
"And the tools, where are they?" asked the compelling tones.
"In the canoes, all ready," Schrofft answered obediently.
"I can't understand his getting so excited about a few trees," Mr. Richard Roe muttered. "I never could. But he's a game little man, and if he wants his trees as bad as all this, by Jove, he's got to have 'em." He rose lazily, and stood towering above the cot. "It's all right, Schrofft. Go to sleep. I'll have your trees here by the eighteenth."
"You can't," Schrofft objected sleepily, with the unmalicious frankness of one who states a well-established fact. "You're nothing but a bum."
"Go to sleep," Mr. Richard Roe repeated soothingly. "Perhaps, since there's so much hurry, I'd better start to-night. There's a lovely moon now, like a Swiss cheese. Last night it made me think of beer."
"Those trees on the right bank," Schrofft muttered, trying to rise once more.
Strong hands pressed him back and held him there. "Schrofft," Mr. Richard Roe said slowly and impressively, "pay attention just one minute, and then you can go to sleep. When I want anything I go and get it, sabe? Same as I came here and got grub. Same as I'd go to the devil for a drink, when I want that. I never happened to want trees, but I'll get some for you. Now go to sleep."
Under the spell of the assuring voice and the comforting grip of the strong hands on his shoulders, Schrofft's eyelids drooped lower and lower, till even the clatter of energetic feet descending the stairs did not cause them to flutter.
He must have dreamed still more then, for strange things happened. Outside in the village, even in peaceful Bagalayag, a riot rose, voices of men angry and protesting, voices of women tearful and imploring, voices of children shrill with excitement, and, dominating all, a languid, vibrant voice speaking sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in crude but vigorous Bisayan, threatening, cajoling, domineering. Gradually all the others died away into a murmur of resignation, and then, suddenly, the song of the saw stopped with a spluttering drawl not unlike the squawk of a frightened hen. "Come along, you chaps," said the masterful voice. "Got a job for you other place, sabe?"
The response slid in falsetto semitones from a Mongolian tongue. "Got plenty worl-luk this side," it said sullenly. "No can do."
"Sure can do," said the master. "Got to do, sabe? Come along, you beggars, before I tie your pigtails together."
Then gradually all the tumult ceased, and restful quiet enveloped the Tin-Roofed House and endured so long that Schrofft craftily opened his eyes a crack, and gazed about his chamber. It was quite empty. The heavy lids drooped once more, and he fell into a deep, untroubled sleep. And as he slept, the cooling sweat bathed his worn body. Together, the quinine and the excitement of the day had conquered his disease; the fever was broken.
The first impression borne in on Schrofft's consciousness when he woke next morning, sufficiently clear in mind, but weak beyond belief in body, was that Bagalayag was uncommonly quiet, even for Bagalayag. The droning saw was silent; there was no rustle of bare feet on the grassy ways, no low murmur of gossip from sleepy tongues, no straw-muffled booming of rice mortars, no whine of carabao or shriek of wooden axle-boxes as the tuba was brought in from the palm-grove. For a moment he lay with an empty mind. Then Memory returned. "Himmel!" he muttered. "I did not dream it all!"
At the sound, a doddering old man rose from the corner and approached the cot. "Does the se?or want anything?" he asked.
"Where is everybody?" Schrofft demanded. "Where is Juan?"
"They are all gone," the old man replied. "Only I am left behind. The Se?or Duque took them all."
"The Se?or Duque took them all!" Schrofft echoed. Dukes are rare in Mindoro.
"Si, se?-o-or. El Duque de la Calle Milochentaitres in America. He took them all, the men, the boys, the Chinese pigs who saw; all Bagalayag but me—because I am very old. Only I am left, and the women and children who hide in the houses to pray. They go to cut down trees, all the trees in Mindoro, I think. It is an order from Ouashingtone. The Se?or Duque says so."
The Duke of 1083rd Street in America! Decidedly, if Schrofft had been delirious, all Bagalayag now outdid him in delusion.
"Does the se?or want anything?" the old man repeated. "If we had guessed that the se?or had el Duque de la Calle Milochentaitres for a friend, we would not have left him alone to be sick. It was very wicked, but the Duque says he will forgive us if we get the trees."
At the mention of trees, Schrofft's lips had contracted. But his mind, as unstrung as his body, was at the mercy of every emotional catspaw that ruffled it, and the childlike awe and faith in the voice of the old man brought a long-forgotten sensation clutching at his diaphragm. "We have been very wicked; but the Duke says he will forgive us if we get the trees." For all his weakness, Schrofft chuckled a little at the audacity of it. An unwonted feeling of dependence took hold of the self-reliant little man. He combated it feebly. "He cannot do it; he is only a bum," Reason urged. But the protest of Reason was purely formal, and triumphant Cheerfulness retorted, "He can do anything—when he wishes to."
"What would the se?or like for breakfast?" the old man's voice broke in. "He may have six little oysters, or two eggs passed through water, or a cup of milk with one egg in it, or a very small fish not fried—the Duque says to fry is not good for sick ones—but cooked on a sharp stick, as He Himself taught me."
Once more Schrofft relaxed in the new and comfortable sense of utter dependence. "Oysters," he murmured unctuously, and gave himself up to the anticipation of the plump, brassy-flavored morsels which were soon to cool his throat. Deus ex Machina! A God from the Machine of Things had taken his affairs in hand.
As the days wore on, the words became more than a mere phrase. In the long, lazy, roseate hours which a convalescent knows, Schrofft thought much, and the well-timed arrival of the mysterious Mr. Richard Roe at the crisis of his illness and his fortunes, the unbelievable eccentricity of the man, the nonchalant confidence with which he had undertaken a task in which he had no part either by interest or training, all combined to rouse in Schrofft's mind that superstition which is so fundamental an element in all us Aryans. The manifestation took the guise of Hero-Worship. An unreasoning faith in Mr. Richard Roe got hold of him.
The atmosphere in which he lived strengthened the conviction. Mr. Roe was absent only in the body; the power of his masterful personality still moulded life and thought in Bagalayag. The blear-eyed, tottering attendant he had left for Schrofft, anxious, fussy, mentally helpless, had one warrant for all his load of troublesome attentions: "The Se?or Duque told me to do it."
As Schrofft grew stronger, and strolled out into the village, he found its people under the same spell. Women and children had gradually stolen out from the shacks; one by one they took up their daily occupation; the patter of their anxious prayers was no longer one of the street-sounds of Bagalayag; they asked Schrofft trustingly, "When will the Duque bring our husbands back?"
And Schrofft answered just as trustingly, "On the eighteenth."
Dimly he felt the thrill of the contrast, saw primeval Nature and the lean, sardonic American face each other, and felt no doubt of the outcome. Many times, as the slow days passed, he looked away to the black mantle of forest which clothed all the land to the south, close-fitting and unbroken up to the rough crest of Mount Bagalayag itself. "He'll do it," he repeated continually.
And Mr. Richard Roe did do it. On the evening of the seventeenth, a shrill clamor of women's voices ran through the town, and their owners gathered on the river bank to meet an unwieldy raft that was warping in on the brown and sluggish current. The huge sullen logs seemed bound to sink, in spite of the bulk of chambered bamboo which buoyed them, but standing springily erect on their backs, Mr. Richard Roe dominated the raft as he did all things else. When it grounded, he swung himself to the shoulders of two of his men and was borne triumphantly ashore.
"By Jove, Schrofft," was his greeting, "glad to see you looking that way." He flipped a hand behind him, and added casually, "There are your trees," and that was all of the little epic of the forest which Schrofft ever heard from his lips, except for fragments which he tossed out to laugh at. But from the tales which the restored husbands and fathers of Bagalayag chattered to their families, he gathered a picture of heart-breaking toil and endurance, and cheerful, laughing resourcefulness which filled him with a yearning admiration for its central figure.
That night, had Mr. Richard Roe so chosen, he might have become hereditary lord of Bagalayag in Mindoro, and laughed at the law, the Constitution and the flag, schoolhouses, benevolent assimilation, and human progress. Like a travel-worn, unshaven monarch, he sat in Schrofft's long cane chair, puffing contentedly at Schrofft's cherished china pipe, while the unfaithful servant Juan knelt at his feet and revived the tarnished glories of the shining boots, and his primitive worshippers poured in a stream of tribute, herbs of the field and fruits, fish and flesh and fowl, indigestible sweets and death-dealing drinks of home manufacture. On all alike he smiled kindly yet wearily, with the affable condescension of one who by divine right might be severe, yet chooses to be kind. But once his smile broadened into feeling.
"You won't find Lame Duck and Gouty Hen bringing me any thanks for stringing 'em that way," he remarked to Schrofft, who sat in the background, as proud as the mother of one chicken.
"Lame Duck and Gouty Hen?" Schrofft echoed, puzzled.
"My untamed Chinks," the Duke of 1083rd Street explained. "That was a stroke of genius, taking them. They did the work, while the Filipinos did the kicking. We sawed the trees down, you know—may not be the way to do it, but we did it—and we three took turns—"
"Lame Duck and Gouty Hen!" Schrofft spluttered with delight. "Himmel! Such names!" Then he became serious. "How can I pay you! When you come I say to you, 'I would gif a hundert dollars for a man,' and you are a man, the finest I efer—"
"That's all right," said Mr. Richard Roe benevolently. "It was good sport. I wouldn't work that hard for money."
"Of course there's the—the other side too—" Schrofft stumbled over his words, bashful as a maiden with her lover. "I cannot thank you. You save my life, you save my reputation, you—"
"Cut out the thanks, Schrofft," Mr. Roe interrupted, with a touch of smiling haughtiness. "I don't like 'em. You'd better be clearing out now," the weary monarch added to his thronging admirers. "You're nice little brown men enough, but I'm sleepy. Sigue Dagupan, the whole bunch."
Two mornings later, after breakfast, Herr Schrofft again brought up the subject of Mr. Richard Roe's reward. In the intervening day the Sarstoon had come and gone with her hard-won load, and Schrofft's admiration for his miraculous helper had grown exceedingly. With the passion for work still on him, Mr. Richard Roe had been everywhere, and everywhere had been effective, on the beach, in the canoes, on the Sarstoon's deck and in her hold, even on her bridge.
Mingled with the boundless admiration, was another feeling which filled Schrofft with confusion, while it opened a vista to the sky-line of his lonely life. Since young Erich Schmidt was killed before his eyes, twenty years gone in Africa, he had wanted no friend, no bunkie, kein Kamerad. But now—Mr. Richard Roe sat across his table irresistibly reminiscent of some wandering, roué god, who needed but a whiff of Olympian air to refreshen his eternal youth. Sun and wind and work had erased the signs of dissipated strength, sleep had rubbed out the aging lines of work, and now he sat in the sala of the Tin-Roofed House lean, brown, and hard, with his rumpled yellow hair and trace of yellow beard, and sparkling eyes half smiling at Life and Fate—not defiantly or deprecatingly, but with the faint amusement one may find in the vagaries of equals one knows well.
Mingled emotions made expression difficult for Schrofft, and he gave speech its most practical form. "Here is the hundert," he said gruffly, and pushed a chunky little bag across. "It don't pay you, nothin' efer can—"
"The hundred?" Mr. Richard Roe stared at the bag as if surprised, but he drew it to him. "Oh, yes. I'll take it if you like, Schrofft, of course. Much obliged." As he weighed it in his hand, his eyes darkened suddenly, and the under lids drew tight, as if he were gazing at something far away over the blue water which lay before him. Almost unconsciously he untied the cord that bound it, and a little stream of gold ran chinking out. "Yellow ones," Mr. Roe muttered.
"It's not much," Schrofft said apologetically, "but— What are you going to do now?"
Still unconsciously, Mr. Roe's long supple fingers had arranged the heap into four little orderly piles, and he was shoving them back and forth, like counters in some game. "Four stacks of blue ones," he muttered.
"What will you do now?" Schrofft repeated.
"Eh?" said Mr. Richard Roe. "Oh, yes. What'll I do? Well, Schrofft, I never bother to plan that out far ahead."
"I'll tell you," said Schrofft, gathering head for a flood of speech, "you stay with me. I—I called you a bum once. I take it back. You're all right. The quickness to decide, the way to make everything do what you want, the good luck, you have it all!"
"If I did have luck," Mr. Roe muttered thoughtfully, "that'd be enough to clean out Rafferty's bank. By Jove, I'll do it. I'll play the twelve."
"You come with me," Schrofft urged. "You are young, you have had your fling; now it's time to settle down. I'll help you, I'll be—what-you-call?—the balance w'eel. I teach you all I know, and in two three year you'll be the boss of us all. You'll have a chob better'n mine."
He hesitated, for Mr. Roe was gazing at him with a whimsical smile. "Go ahead, Schrofft," he said. "What kind of a job is yours? What do you get out of it?"
"Ten thousand mark a year, und expenses," said Schrofft, uneasy for some mockery to come.
"Ten thousand marks! That's twenty-five hundred dollars," Mr. Roe commented. "And expenses. That's a lot of money, Schrofft. But I live simply; my expenses wouldn't be high enough to make it pay. So I'll just go back to Batangas and play the twelve. Twelve trees, you know."
Desperately, imploringly, Schrofft argued with him, dangled larger and juicier bait before his eyes. "You might be a partner in the House!" he cried. But Mr. Roe remained unmoved, even at that dazzling prospect, and at last Schrofft lost his temper.
"You are a bum," he shouted angrily. "It's chust what I say before. You haf no home, no food, no chob, no money, and—" he finished helplessly, "Mein Gott! You do not care!"
"Money could not buy the glorious uncertainty I enjoy," Mr. Roe replied pleasantly. "Calm down, Schrofft. I'm going out to tell 'em to get a canoe ready for me."
Late that afternoon he left, with his tattered clothing and his shining boots and his little bag of gold, and his smile, which he shed benignantly on the worshippers who thronged the beach. Only three residents of all Bagalayag were missing. Down the street Lame Duck and Gouty Hen stolidly made up lost time—Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh! And up in the sala of the Tin-Roofed House a shaggy little man, his back resolutely turned to the window and the leave-taking, puffed savagely at a big china pipe, and exploded every now and then: "Chust a bum! A good-for-nothin' bum!" But when the sun was gone and all the shadows on the mountain had thickened into one, he laid down the pipe and went to the window and gazed out long over the darkening sea. "My poor little bum god from the machine," he said wistfully. "Now I must forget him."
It was not so easy to forget Mr. Richard Roe. The memory of him clung to Schrofft even after his work was done in Mindoro, and he had bidden Bagalayag an everlasting farewell. In Manila, Mr. Richard Roe's image dogged his busy footsteps, and when at last he climbed the side of the Rosetta Maru, bound for Hongkong and home, Mr. Roe was at the surface of his thoughts. "Mein Gott!" Schrofft mused, as he leaned on the rail that first night out and saw Bolinao looming faintly in the gulf of blackness, far to leeward, "he saved my life, and now I leave him in the Philippines."
He leaned there, absorbed in a vision of the companionship which could never be, till the last shadow of the islands had faded in the night. Then brusquely, as if he awakened himself, he turned forward to the smoking-room and the nightcap of rum and lime-juice which was his concession to the luxury of rest. "My poor little bum god," he muttered, "if he was here, I'd buy him a drink. He's had too many drinks already, though, poor deffel."
At the door of the smoking-room he stopped abruptly. "Butterflies," he grunted in disgust, and turned aside to a settee which stood near in the shadow, to wait for his drink till they were done. And then, suddenly, he leaned forward and gazed into the brightly lighted room, for a voice there had set all his nerves aquiver. "So?" he muttered incredulously. "Kann nicht sein!"
Inside the room three men were sitting at a little table with a bottle between them, all dressed alike in spotless and unrumpled linen. Their likeness ended with their dress. One was a boy, the down still soft on his chin, but his cheeks were pasty and he had the dead eyes of an evil old man. The second was a flabby man of middle age, whose red face was an expressionless mask, from behind which he looked out watchfully. And the third, brilliant, flashing, shedding a glow of life and strength around him, was Mr. Richard Roe in a new guise.
"How'd you clean up over here this time, Billy?" asked the boy in a dry, professional tone.
"Well enough," Mr. Richard Roe answered. "Went on my uppers once, down in Mindoro."
"I travel on 'em all the time," said the wan youth. "Never saw such luck as I have."
"Get a mascot, Mike," Mr. Richard Roe advised mockingly. "That's what I did. Finest little mannikin of a mascot the Luck Machine ever ground out. Found a little Dutchman down there—down on his luck, sick, almost crying for some trees he'd got to cut or lose his job or his reputation or something. I got 'em for him. The little beggar was so glad he gave me a hundred, and I played it on the twelve at Rafferty's—there were twelve trees—and the twelve came. They wouldn't let me bet again, so I came up to Manila."
"Hell," said the aged young man apathetically, "what's thirty-six hundred? I could cash up that myself."
"And," said the other man, speaking through motionless lips, "the lucky devil struck Manila just when that tin-horn Haines had sold a mine down Mindanao way. Haines got to working his bellows out to the Country Club, wanting to back the wheel, no limit, and Billy took him up and played the twelve, and the twelve came up—twice running. That's all."
The aged young man stared at Mr. Richard Roe with dropped jaw. "Good Lord!"—his voice was an awe-struck whisper—"that's over a million!"
"Considerably over, theoretically," Mr. Richard Roe agreed, smiling coolly at the disconcerted young man. "Unfortunately, Mr. Haines couldn't cash it all, so I took his notes for everything but a goodly number of thou's. You may have the notes if you'd like 'em, Mike. I've got all I want. And get a mascot."
The aged young man went off into a stream of oaths. "Where are you goin' now, Billy?" he asked at last. "Goin'—home?" His voice dropped as he spoke the tabooed word, and for a moment, through the lines with which greed and cunning and indulgence had marked him, the face of a wistful, heart-sick youngster came out dimly.
"And a wife, and a baby?" said Mr. Roe, smiling whimsically. "No, thank you, Mike. I'm going over to Siam and buy a small tin-mine. It's a thing I've always wanted. I may breed a line of white elephants on the side." Abruptly, as if a sudden thought had come to him, he rose and filled the glasses, emptying the bottle. "Gentlemen," he cried, holding his glass aloft, "I ask for bottoms up. To the Se?or Ess-soffti, the prince of mascots. May he live long and die busy." The glasses clinked and were emptied. Mr. Roe set his on the table. "Good night, gentlemen," he said, and departed.
But his progress was soon interrupted. Blinded by the sudden darkness of the deck, he lost his way, and was nearly sent sprawling by the legs of a man who sat huddled on a settee, a shabby little man, even in the dark. "What the devil," Mr. Roe began, with lofty displeasure. He checked himself. "I beg your pardon, I'm sure," he said with the elaborate courtesy of one who, having the divine right to be insolent, yet chooses to be kind.
Shrinking as at a blow, the shabby little man drew in his legs. Even in the gloom the movement had an appealing humbleness about it that went to the ready sympathy of Mr. Richard Roe. "It's all right, old chap," he said. "No harm done. Good night."
The shabby little man mumbled something inarticulate, and Mr. Roe, immaculate, self-sufficient, free from care, strode on and left his mascot staring blindly out at the dim, jumbled waters flashing by. "What luck!" the mascot mumbled to the waters, after a long time. And then again, "What luck!"