strange look came into the other’s face. He regarded Sandy with a bewilderment in his stern eyes which seemed not altogether unfriendly.
“I cannot quite understand,” he said, as he rose, “why you and your friends did not take the simple course. Since your quarrel is principally with me, a bullet in my head strikes me as the most satisfactory solution.”
Sandy stood before him, a head shorter, a stone or two lighter, looking at the moment half his age. There was a dancing light in his eyes which answered the flickering spark in the other’s. He laid a hand on the Gobernador’s sleeve, as if the great man were a coeval.
“Nonsense!” he said. “We leave murder to your Conquistadors. We think so highly of you that we’re going to have a try at saving your soul.”
II
The wireless station on the plateau received its punctual bulletins of news from the outer world, copies of which were posted up in the mess-hut. From them it appeared that the republic of Olifa was already in the throes of a campaign. War had begun when on the 14th day of June. The city of the Gran Seco had been seized by the rebels, and the whole province was in revolt. The whereabouts of Castor were not known; his lieutenants held the city, but he was reputed to be with the main force of the revolt, somewhere in the hinterland. Olifa had replied to the challenge. Her army was mobilised, and a Gran Seco Expeditionary Force was in being. The aged General Bianca, the Minister of War, did not take command; for that post the President had selected a younger man, General Lossberg, who had been military governor of the city of Olifa, and had come there after the European War with a high reputation from the Eastern Front, where he had been one of Mackensen’s corps commanders. The Expeditionary Force was said to contain four divisions of infantry, a cavalry brigade, and four of the new machine-gun battalions.
The comments of the world’s press on the outbreak were curiously restrained. Some influence must have been at work, for the current story represented the revolt as that of the leaders of the copper industry against an oppressive Government, which confiscated their profits and by inhuman laws was ruining their reservoir of native labour. Thus stated, humanity and sound business seemed to be on the side of the rebels. Strange tales were printed of the barbarities of conscripted labour, of men worn to husks and sent back to their villages to die. The picture presented was of enlightened magnates forced unwillingly into harshness by the greed of Olifa, until finally decency and common sense forced them to make a stand. A spontaneous labour revolt had been sponsored by the masters themselves, and at the head stood Castor, the Gobernador. It seemed a clear issue, on which the conscience of the world could not be divided. There were papers in England, France, and America which hailed Castor as a second Lincoln.
Yet the more responsible section of the press walked warily, which seemed to point to conflicting versions of the facts among those likely to know best. Such papers were guarded in their comments on the merits of the dispute, and treated it as a domestic Olifa question on which exact information was lacking. Patently the Gran Seco agents throughout the world were puzzled and were holding their hand. Their chief was playing a game on which they had not been instructed. The news columns of such papers were filled with sensational accounts of Gran Seco wealth and luxury and of Indian pueblas full of the broken and diseased, but the leading articles steered a discreet course.
Castor was no doubt a great man, possibly a man of destiny, but the end was not yet—and Olifa had been of late a particularly docile and well-conducted republic. The world seemed to agree to make a ring round the combatants.
Only the scallywags and the restless youth of all nations were prepared to take sides, and consulates and passport-offices were plagued by those who wished to reach the seat of war. There were perpetual queues at the door of the Gran Seco offices in London, New York, and Paris.
One body of men alone had decided views—the military critics. Among these there was a remarkable unanimity. The revolt, in their opinion, could not sustain itself for more than a few weeks. The details of the Olifa army were well known. It was officered by able professional soldiers, it had been a pioneer in mechanisation, and The Times had published from a contributor some striking articles on its efficiency; it had behind it a wealthy Government, and should the need arise, a big population to conscript; above all, it had an open door to the sea. The rebels must be and the best a rabble of Indian labourers and European miners with a sprinkling, no doubt, of soldiers of fortune. They might be armed after a fashion, but they could not compete with the armoury of Olifa. They had no communication open with the outer world. Assuming that they had laid in a store of ammunition, they could not supply wastage. The Gran Seco, which was largely a desert, could not feed itself and the rebels would be starved out long before they wen defeated. It was like a fugitive who had climbed a tree; the pursuit had only to wait below till he was forced by hunger to come down. General Weyland in the London Times, and Mr Winter Spokes in the New York Herald Tribune reached the same conclusion.
The campaign had begun; according to the wireless Olifa was an armed camp, and everything was in train for and advance on the Gran Seco; but in the Courts of the Morning there was peace. There was activity enough. Daily aeroplanes left the shelf for long flights beyond the foot-hills and over the arid steppes of the Gran Seco to the savannah and forests of Olifa, now sweltering under the first deluge of the rainy season. Strings of convoys ascended by the rough paths and departed with their stores. Horsemen arrived hourly with messages, and every yard of the settlement was busy. Yet it seemed a peaceful busyness. The workers met at meals and in the evenings with the cheerfulness of weary but equable folk. There was no tension in the atmosphere. Castor for the most part had his meals in his own room, but he invariably appeared at dinner, and he seemed to be in good health and spirits. Though under constant surveillance, he had the illusion of liberty, and could walk abroad with Janet and Barbara as if he were a guest in a country-house. There was nothing about him of the feverish prisoner, and this disquieted Sandy.
“I haven’t begun to understand him,” he told Janet. “You see, all I know about him I know at second-hand from Blenkiron, and by deduction from his public career. I met him for the first time a week ago. Our only talk was just an exchange of polite challenges. We might have been shouting at each other from adjacent mountaintops… I don’t like that calm of his. Here you have a man whose brain has never stopped working, and who has the ambition of a fallen angel. He sees us trying to play havoc with his life’s work, and he makes no sign of impatience. What has his mind got to bite on? It can’t be idle.”
“He writes a great deal,” said Janet. “He has told me about it. I don’t think I quite understood, but isn’t there an Italian called Croce? Well, he thinks Croce all wrong about something, and is trying to explain how.”
“O Lord!” Sandy groaned. “The fellow is bigger than we thought. I didn’t reckon on this superhuman detachment. He must be very sure he is going to win.”
“Yes,” said Janet thoughtfully. “But not for the reasons that the wireless gives. He told me that he thought hat those military experts talked nonsense. I think he knows that he will win because he is bigger than we are. He has been studying us all most carefully. You especially, Sandy. Do you notice how he looks at you? I believe he was afraid of you before he met you.”
“But not now?”
“No. I’m sorry, but I don’t think he is so afraid of you now. I fancy he is always a little uneasy about anything he does not understand. But he thinks he is getting to the bottom of you.”
“I daresay he is. But I’m nowhere near the bottom of him. None of the formulas fit him. It’s no good saying that he is pure intellect. He’s that,
