I was near enough to see that the windows were ablaze with lights, sometimes even I saw people passing behind the blinds of those windows--once I saw my brother's figure and that excited me again to madness. If she were dead I swore that then, too, he should become childless. Her child should become mine, not his. I would have that satisfaction at least.
"Still I drew nearer to the house, so near that I could hear people calling to each other. Once I thought--for now I was quite close--that I could hear the wailing of the negro women-servants--I saw a half-breed dash past me on a mustang, riding as for dear life, and I knew, I divined as surely as if I had been told, that he was gone for the doctor, that she was dying--or was dead. Your father's chance was past."
"Heaven help him!" said Julian Ritherdon. "Heaven help him. It was an awful revenge, taken at an awful moment. Well! You succeeded?"
"Yes, I succeeded. She was dead--I saw that when, an hour later, I crept into the room, and when I took you from out of the arms of the sleeping negro nurse--when, God forgive me, I stole you!"
CHAPTER III.
"THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN SUN."
The mustang halted on a little knoll up which the patient beast had been toiling for some quarter of an hour, because upon that knoll there grew a clump of gros-gros and moriche palms which threw a grateful shade over the white, glaring, and dusty track, and Julian Ritherdon, dropping the reins on its drenched and sweltering neck, drew out his cigar-case and struck a light. Also, the negro "boy"--a man thirty years old--who had been toiling along by its side, flung himself down, crushing crimson poinsettias and purple dracæna beneath his body, and grunted with satisfaction at the pause.
"So, Snowball," Julian said to this descendant of African kings, "this ends your journey, eh? I am in the right road now and we have got to say 'Good-bye.' I suppose you don't happen to be thirsty, do you, Pompey?"
"Hoop! Hoop!" grunted the negro, showing a set of ivories that a London belle would have been proud to possess, "always thirsty. Always hungry. Always want tobaccy. Money, too."
"Do you!" exclaimed Julian. "By Jove! you'd make a living as a London johnny. That's what they always want. Pity you don't live in London, Hannibal. Well, let's see."
Whereon he threw his leg over the great saddle, reached the ground, and began opening a haversack, from which he took a bottle, a packet, and a horn cup.
"Luncheon time," he said. "Sun's over the foremast! Come on, Julius Cæsar, we'll begin."
After which he opened the packet, in which was a considerable quantity of rather thickly cut sandwiches, divided it equally, and then filled the horn cup with the liquid from the bottle, which, after draining, he refilled and handed to his companion.
"I'm sorry it isn't iced, my lily-white friend," he said; "it does seem rather warm from continual contact with the mustang's back, but I daresay you can manage it. Eh?"
"Manage anything," the negro replied firmly, his mouth full of sandwich, "anything. Always----"
"Yes, I know. 'Thirsty, hungry, want tobacco and money.' I tell you, old chap, you're lost in this place. London's the spot for you. You're fitted for a more advanced state of civilization than this."
"Hoop. Hoop," again grunted the negro, and again giving the huge smile--"want----"
"This is getting monotonous, Sambo," Julian exclaimed. "Come, let's settle up;" whereon he again replenished the guide's cup, and then drew forth from his pocket two American dollars, which are by now the standard coin of the colony. "One dollar was the sum arranged for," Julian said, "but because you are a merry soul, and also because a dollar extra isn't ruinous, you shall have two. And in years to come, my daisy, you can bless the name of Mr. Ritherdon as that of a man both just and generous. Remember those words, 'just and generous.'"
The negro of many sobriquets--at each of which he had laughed like a child, as in absolute fact the negro is when not (which is extremely rare!) a vicious brute--seemed, however, to be struck more forcibly by some other words than those approving ones suggested by Julian as suitable for recollection, and, after shaking his woolly head a good deal, muttered: "Ritherdon, Ritherdon," adding afterwards, "Desolada." Then he continued: "Hard man, Massa Ritherdon. Hard man, Massa Ritherdon. Hard man. Cruel man. Beat Blacky. Beat Whity, too, sometimes. Hard man. Cruel man."
"Sambo," said Julian, feeling (even as he spoke still jocularly to the creature--a pleasant way being the only one in which to converse with the African) that he would sooner not have heard these remarks in connection with his father, "Sambo, you should not say these things to people about their relatives. That would not do for London;" while at the same time he reflected that it would be little use telling his guide of the old Latin proverb suggesting that one should say nothing but good of the dead.
"You relative of Massa Ritherdon!" the other grunted now, though still with the unfailing display of ivories. "You relative. Oh! I know not that. Now," he said, thinking perhaps it was time he departed, and before existing amicable arrangements should be disturbed, "now, I go. Back to Belize. Good afternoon to you, sir. Good-bye. I hope you like Desolada. Fifteen miles further on;" and making a kind of shambling bow, he departed back upon the road they had come. Yet not without turning at every other three or four steps he took, and waving his hand gracefully as well as cordially to his late employer.
"A simple creature is the honest black!" especially when no longer a dweller in his original equatorial savagery.
"Like it," murmured Julian to himself, "Yes, I hope so. Since it is undoubtedly my chief inheritance, I hope I shall!"
He had left Belize that morning, by following a route which the negro knew of, had arrived in the neighbourhood of a place called Commerce Bight--a spot given up to the cultivation of the cocoanut-tree. And having proceeded thus far, he knew that by nightfall he would be at Desolada--the dreary hacienda from which, twenty-six years before, his uncle had ruthlessly kidnapped him from his father--the father who, he had learnt since he arrived in the colony, had been dead three months. Also he knew that this property called Desolada lay some dozen miles or so beyond a village named All Pines, and on the other side of a river termed the Sittee, and, as he still sat beneath the palm-trees on the knoll where they had halted for the midday meal, he wondered what he would find when he arrived there.
"It is strange," he mused to himself now, as from out of that cool, refreshing shade he gazed across groves upon groves of mangroves at his feet, to where, sparkling in the brilliant cobalt-coloured Caribbean Sea, countless little reefs and islets--as well as one large reef--dotted the surface of the ocean, "strange that, at Belize, I could gather no information of my late father. No! not even when I told the man who kept the inn that I was come on a visit to Desolada. Why, I wonder, why was it so? My appearance seemed to freeze them into silence, almost to startle them. Why? Why--this reticence on their part? Can it be that he was so hated all about here that none will mention him? Is that it? Remembering what the negro said of him, of his brutality to black and white, can that be it? Yet my uncle hinted at nothing of the kind."
Still thinking of this, still musing on what lay before him, he adjusted the saddle (which he had previously loosened to ease the mustang) once more upon the animal's back. Then, as his foot was in the stirrup there came, swift as a flash of lightning, an idea into his mind.
"I must be like him," he almost whispered to himself, "so like him, must bear such a resemblance to him, that they are thunderstruck. And, if any who saw me can recollect that, twenty-six years ago, his newborn
