Chapter VII: Dick Lands in Mexico with a Family

Dr. Goode took pains to have a talk with Dick a few nights after his unexpected increase of salary.

“I’m not going to congratulate you on your good fortune, Sumner,” he said, “till I see whether it is a good thing for you or the opposite. It may prove to be the worst thing that ever happened you, though I hope not. It all depends upon yourself. You have made a brilliant beginning, and I think you are sure to hold out if you keep yourself in check.

“Above all things, don’t let the size of your head increase; don’t ‘get a swelled head,’ as the boys say. Your falling into favor with the old man is more accident than anything else.”

Dick had often heard that expression used before. The editor-in-chief is generally called “the old man,” even when he happens to be one of the youngest men in the office.

“It’s not because you are such a tremendous fellow that you have been advanced in this way,” the doctor went on. “You have done good work, but other men do good work too. Your refusing to take a bribe in Saratoga I take no account of at all; that was a matter of course. I should be sorry to think you could have done anything else. In the ordinary course of events, after the good work you have done, you would have been raised in a few months to perhaps twenty-five dollars a week, and then a little higher after a year or so. But the old man has taken a fancy to you and your work, and pushed you ahead with a jump. That thing happens sometimes, and I am glad that it has happened to you. But don’t take too much of the credit to yourself. It is luck, chance, fate, providence, whatever you choose to call it; your own merit has precious little to do with it.

“Though it has something, I’ll admit,” he continued, laying his hand, as he had done before, on Dick’s knee. “The old man must have been pleased with some of your articles, as we all were. But be careful of yourself; more careful now than ever. You know what the prince’s smile means to the courtier. Your position in the office is better than it has been, for the prince is known to have smiled upon you. But hold your horses.”

It did not take long for Dick to find that to be in favor with “the old man” was to be in favor with everybody in the office. The office boys kept fresh mucilage constantly in the bottle on his desk, and there are few stronger signs of good standing in a newspaper office than that. He was often given special work that was not scheduled on the assignment list at all, with orders to report to the managing editor or the editor-in-chief; and as this work seldom kept him late at night, he had more time to enjoy the delights of the new flat. His clothes were as good now as any reporter could desire, he carried a watch, the last of his debt to Randall was paid, and he had a small bank account. Dick was happy, not only because of these things, but because he was thoroughly in love with his work, as every successful reporter must be.

“You don’t have to go out again to-night, do you, Dick?” his mother asked as he lay comfortably stretched out on a sofa after the meal that was the family’s supper, but Dick’s dinner.

“Yes, I must go back to the office,” he answered; “but I don’t know of anything to keep me late to-night.”

“You’re working too hard, Dick,” his mother went on; “too hard and too much at night. You’ve grown taller since you came to New York, but you’re much thinner and paler. Where are those beautiful roses you used to have in your cheeks?”

“Oh, bother the roses, mother,” Dick laughed; “they’ve washed off, I suppose, like the printer’s ink I used to have on my hands. And I don’t see why night work should hurt me. You know what Dr. Goode says: ‘It’s not working at night that hurts a man, but playing at night.’ I don’t do much playing by day or night. I get my pleasure out of my work, and that pays better. I’ll run down to the office, and I’m pretty sure I can be home by ten o’clock. Then I’ll have just the best night’s sleep you ever saw, for I do feel a little tired.”

With this idea in his mind Dick went down to the office, and the city editor’s greeting upset all his plans not only for that evening, but for many evenings to come.

“Sumner,” Mr. Brown asked, “how soon can you be ready to sail for Mexico?”

It was a blow to Dick in some respects and a pleasant surprise in others; but he promptly answered:--

“I’m ready now, sir.”

“Well,” Mr. Brown said, smiling at Dick’s readiness to start for anywhere at a moment’s notice, “there isn’t any steamer going just at this minute; but there’s one at noon to-morrow that you can take. It is one of Mr. Harding’s jobs, and he will give you instructions when he comes in at nine o’clock. You are to interview President Diaz for him; and we prefer to have you go by steamer rather than by rail, because that will give you a chance to touch at Cuba and some other points and write us some descriptive letters.”

“I will give you an order for money to cover your expenses,” Mr. Brown continued, “and we can send your salary to your family while you are away, if you like. You will be able to give us some good letters from Cuba and Mexico.”

Dick was sure of that. Summer had changed to fall, and fall was rapidly turning into winter; and to visit the tropics in winter, to go out of the cold and slush of New York into a region of eternal summer, was something that he had dreamed of, but hardly hoped ever to realize.

“President Diaz speaks English fluently,” Mr. Harding told him when he arrived, “so you will have no trouble on that score. Of course the language of the country is Spanish. Here is a letter of introduction to the American minister in Mexico that will open the way for you.”

The good night’s sleep that Dick had arranged to have did not come. A large part of the night was spent in packing and making ready, and when at length he got to bed he had too many things to think of to fall asleep.

“Remember that you are all we have, Dick,” his mother sobbed when she bade him good-by in the morning; “don’t be rash, for I do not see what we should do if anything should happen to you.”

“It’s hardly more than a picnic, mother,” he replied as gayly as he could. “In four or five weeks I’ll be with you again; and won’t I have great stories to tell you about what I’ve seen!”

Florrie and Darling went to the wharf with him, and their waving handkerchiefs were the last impression that Dick had of New York as the steamship Alameda drew out from her pier and crept down the Hudson River.

The upper and lower bays, the Narrows, the Quarantine islands, the forts, and big summer hotels along shore were all familiar sights to him, but life aboard ship was like being in a new world. It was his first ocean voyage, and he was prepared to enjoy every novelty and make the most of it.

It was a surprise to him that the ship was more Spanish than English. The officers all spoke English and so did four or five of the passengers; but the waiters spoke Spanish, the bills of fare were printed in both Spanish and English, the cooking was Spanish, and in the cabins and staterooms were posted notices from which he learned his first Spanish sentence:--

_Aquí no se permite fumar_--“Smoking is not permitted here.”

It was a necessary warning, for nine tenths of the passengers were Cubans, dark-skinned little fellows with cigarettes forever between their lips.

All these things Dick noticed before the ship passed Sandy Hook, for after that there was an unpleasant period of two days when he lay in his berth seasick and forlorn. When he appeared on deck again the steamer was below Hatteras, and a school of porpoises were playing antics in front of the bow.

“Going to Havana, señor?” he was asked as he stood leaning over the forward rail watching the graceful movements of the fish; and looking up he saw that the speaker was a tall young Spaniard, perhaps two or three years older than himself, handsomely dressed, but with a look in his face that Dick did not particularly like.

“Yes,” he replied; “to Havana first, then on to Vera Cruz and Mexico.”

“Good!” the Spaniard exclaimed. “I too am going to Mexico; we shall be friends. It is my native city--Mexico--and I am going home.”

Dick brought his interviewing powers to bear, and in five minutes he learned that the Mexican was Señor don Manuel de Comacho, a lieutenant in the Mexican navy, who had been spending a year in Paris, and who was now going home with his young wife and an infant two or three months old.

“But we are not in favor there now,” Comacho laughed; “my father was Secretary of the Treasury before Diaz became President, but now he is out. Perhaps I may get into trouble by going back.”

“You are very free in telling your affairs to a stranger,” Dick thought; but he answered pleasantly, glad to have some English-speaking person to talk to. At the dinner table he was surprised to find the lieutenant’s wife as fair as a lily; a pretty young woman enough but proud, particularly of her complexion, for in Mexico a white skin is thought the perfection of beauty. She spoke nothing but Spanish, however, so Dick could only bow when he was introduced.

“To-morrow we shall be in Havana,” Comacho said. “We might go about the city together. I shall be a useful guide,” he added, laughing, “for you speak no Spanish, and you would lose yourself.”

Dick ridiculed the idea of his losing himself anywhere, but it suited him very well to go ashore with some one who knew the place. Forty-eight hours the Alameda was to lie there before continuing her voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Vera Cruz.

It was just as the sun was rising that the vessel steamed into Havana harbor, saluting with her brass cannon as she passed the Morro Castle. The scene filled Dick with rapture, as it does every one who is not too familiar with it. The pink and blue and yellow houses of the city, the fleet of vessels at anchor, the church bells ringing with a tone so different from the bells at home; the fort on one side of the entrance and the oldtime castle on the other; and better than all, to Dick’s mind, a man on the opposite shore leading a flock of sheep down to the water to bathe, with a long crook in his hand, just like the biblical shepherds. It was fairyland under a hot sun; and by the time that he and Comacho had visited neighboring sugar estates and tobacco plantations, and had seen the great Tacon Theatre, and eaten cooling ices in the Café da Louvre, and driven through the Prado, Dick declared that he had enough to write about for six months.

“But I do not see you taking any notes,” said Comacho; for Dick had told him that he was a newspaper man.

“No,” Dick answered, “I never take notes. They only bother me. Sometimes a name or a date I put down, but nothing more. A thing that makes an impression upon me I never forget; a thing that makes no impression is not worth writing about.”

Comacho’s affairs were soon to make an impression upon Dick that he little suspected. The Alameda dropped anchor several days later in the roadstead of Vera Cruz, a mile or more from shore and just to the south of the great Castle of San Juan de Ulloa, and the health officer of the port came out with several assistants in a handsome boat. The officer made his inspection and was rowed away, and five minutes later Dick found Comacho seated upon the grating at the stern, his face buried in his hands weeping bitterly.

It was new to Dick to see a man shed tears, though he remembered that in Saratoga his throat had become rather lumpy while he was talking to Mr. Clair. But he had traveled with the young Mexican and eaten with him and met his wife, so he felt that he owed him some allegiance.

“Why, what’s the matter, old fellow?” he asked, laying his hand kindly on Comacho’s shoulder. “What are you crying for?”

“Oh, I’m in great trouble, Sumner,” the lieutenant answered. “A friend of mine who came out in the doctor’s boat tells me that I am suspected of carrying dispatches from my father to enemies of the government who have gone abroad, and that I am to be arrested as soon as I go ashore.”

“Is that all!” Dick exclaimed. “Why, that’s nothing to cry over, man. If they can’t prove anything against you, they’ll have to let you go again.”

“Ah, it is not here as it is in your country!” the lieutenant sobbed. “If they get me in jail once, they may keep me there for years. Oh! oh! oh!”

“Say, now you stop this!” Dick commanded; he was becoming disgusted at the spectacle. “You are an officer in the navy, and you have a family aboard the ship to take care of, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself to sit down and cry. If you brace up and act like a man, I’ll try to help you out of the scrape.”

“Oh, you can’t, you can’t!” Comacho replied; “you are only a stranger here, and you can do nothing.” But he took out his handkerchief and tried to dry his eyes.

“Can’t I?” Dick asked. “Well, here’s the first thing. If you have any contraband papers with you, go down to your stateroom and read them and burn them.”

“I have none--not one,” Comacho answered.

“Very well. Now where will they arrest you?”

“At the Custom House mole. We all have to take small boats from the ship to the shore and land at the Custom House mole, and the minute I land there they will arrest me.”

“Then don’t land at the Custom House mole!” Dick exclaimed. “Pay one of the boatmen to land you up or down the coast; anywhere but at the mole.”

“They wouldn’t dare do it,” Comacho answered. “It would be as much as their heads were worth.”

Dick took a turn across the deck with his hands in his pockets, deep in thought.

“How long have you been out of the country?” he asked a moment later.

“More than a year and a half.”

“Then you must have changed in appearance!” Dick exclaimed; “you can’t look just the same as you did. Why not disguise yourself as much as you can, and you go ashore alone and try to pass the officers undetected; and I will follow later with your wife and baggage.”

“I believe I could do that!” Comacho answered, his face brightening. “I have raised a little beard since I went away and I am stouter. I think I can slip past the officers into the city, and in the city my father’s friends will help me.”

“You can take my big ulster and steamer cap; they will nearly cover you up,” Dick said. “Besides, they will expect to see you with a wife and child; your going alone will help to fool them.”

“And you will bring my wife and baby ashore? and the baggage, the six trunks? O señor, señor, you know not how much you do for me! Take them to the Hotel Veracruzana, and this evening bring them to the railway station. The train starts for Mexico city at nine, and I will meet you in the station--unless, indeed, I am in prison.”

Under the influence of Dick’s energy the Mexican was becoming quite bold. The tears were gone now, and in the big ulster and peaked steamer cap his own mother would hardly have recognized him.

“You must explain everything to your wife,” Dick cautioned him, “for you know she cannot understand me. And impress it upon her that she is not to say one word to anybody till I have her safely landed in the hotel.”

In a minute more Comacho was in one of the small boats, under a curved canvas awning like the cover of a prairie wagon, on his way to the mole. Anxiously Dick watched and saw him land, saw him ascend the stone steps, and saw him go under the big stone arch that leads from the Custom House into the city. He had passed the officers without recognition, and was safely landed in Vera Cruz.

Up to this time Dick had thought very little about himself in the matter. Comacho had been his companion for ten or eleven days, and when he was in trouble Dick was glad to help him. But the comical position in which he had put himself began to make itself evident when the Mexican’s trunks were hoisted out of the hold.

“It’s one of the funniest things I ever saw--this part of it,” he said to himself, while the baggage was coming up. “Here’s a young reporter leaves New York a single man, and remains single all the way to Vera Cruz, with just the one trunk he started with. Then he lands at Vera Cruz with rather a pretty wife to whom he can’t say a word because he doesn’t understand her language, and a dear, sweet, little baby that he doesn’t even know the name of, and six more strapping big trunks. I wonder whether I’m going to have adventures like this all through Mexico? I’m beginning well, at any rate.

“There’s a more serious side to it, too; but I am going into that with my eyes open. I am going ashore with the wife and child of a man who is wanted by the government, and I may easily be mistaken for him and be arrested. But that would be too good to be true. Wouldn’t the New York boys be jealous if I should walk right into a Mexican prison the minute I landed? The story of the arrest would be worth at least two columns, and the court proceedings ought to make at least two fine articles. Then there might be some English-speaking prisoners in the jail who could tell me a lot of capital stories, and after a few days the American minister would have me out with great éclat, and my liberation would make another article. But that’s too good luck even to think about.”

It required the largest of the rowboats to carry Dick’s party and their trunks ashore, and when they landed at the mole the boatmen shouldered the trunks and took them to the open gallery in which they were to be examined by the Custom House officers.

Dick opened his own trunk first to give Señora Comacho time to get out her keys, and the inspector gave its contents hardly more than a glance. But the Mexican lady did not understand, and Dick explained to her, by holding up the key of his own trunk, that he must have her keys. He began to unlock her trunks when she produced them, but the inspector stopped him.

“Oh, it’s all right, is it?” Dick said. What the inspector said was all Greek to him, but he understood the meaning of the motions the man made toward the big gate. “Don’t care to look at them, don’t you? That’s because they belong to a good-looking young lady. You Custom House fellows are all alike, whether you speak English or Spanish.”

They were at liberty now to take their trunks to the hotel, but how to get them there was more than Dick could see. He wanted a dray; but he could see the street through the broad arch, and there was no wheeled vehicle in sight. He did not know, of course, that all such carrying is done on porters’ shoulders in Vera Cruz. When he stepped through the arch to look up and down the street a dozen porters followed him back to the trunks.

“These porters will carry your trunks to the hotel,” said the inspector, not in so many words, but by pointing first to the porters, then to the trunks.

Those little porters! Some of them looked like boys of twelve or fourteen. All were bare-headed and bare-legged, and their tawny little legs did not look strong enough to carry much of a load.

“Si! si!” said Dick. He had learned that much Spanish on the steamer. “Hotel Veracruzana.”

The undersized porters shouldered the heavy trunks with ease and filed out into the street, seven of them, one after another, Dick and Señora Comacho, the latter with the baby in her arms, bringing up the rear.

“This _is_ rich!” Dick exclaimed as they marched solemnly up the hot street. “What wouldn’t I give to have Dr. Goode and Jack Randall see this procession; and mother and Florrie, too. But I think some of them would be wanting to know where I got this wife and baby.

“This the hotel?” he wondered, when the porters turned into a sombre stone building with a display of canned goods on the shelves inside. “Why, this is a grocery store.”

But a moment later he took it to be a cigar store, then a barroom, then a restaurant. It was the hotel office nevertheless, and the lady with the baby remained standing by the door while Dick went up to the clerk to negotiate.

Such a hotel office he had never seen before. It was a large room, certainly fifty or sixty feet square, with a counter running partly across near the front, and shelves back of the counter filled with cans and bottles, and all the rear part of the room occupied with chairs and marble-topped tables.

The clerk was full of smiles, as a matter of course. No words were needed to tell him what was wanted. Here was a family just arrived by the steamer, and they desired accommodations. He summoned a copper-colored boy to show them to their room, and bowed profoundly.

“Yes, but hold on here!” Dick exclaimed as the truth flashed upon him. “This is not a family, you know; this is parts of two families. We’ve come in sections. The lady wants a room, and so do I; but we want them separate.”

The clerk raised his eyebrows in astonishment at Dick’s rapid English.

“Two rooms,” said Dick; “two--two;” and he held up two fingers.

“Dos?” said the clerk. He understood the word two, and repeated it in Spanish.

“Wait till I bring the lady,” Dick answered. “I can’t tell her what I want to say,” he added under his breath; “but she ought to see for herself, and explain it.”

And so she did. A few rapid sentences exchanged between the lady and the clerk, with many gesticulations, set everything straight. Señora Comacho and her child were led away in one direction, and Dick was escorted in another to a room scarcely smaller than his flat in New York.

“They’re determined to make a family man of me,” he said as he glanced about the room; “and it would take a good-sized family to occupy this room properly. Four big beds, four washstands, four rocking-chairs, brick floor, and enough windows for a whole house.”

By the middle of the afternoon he had seen most of the sights of Vera Cruz, including the great hospitals that once were monasteries, and the Alameda, the Trianon, and the ugly black buzzards that clean the streets, and was sure that he had material for one or two good articles. He must, he knew, escort his fair charge down to dinner; and he had returned to the hotel for that purpose and was trying to devise a way of sending a message to her, when the lady herself appeared.

She seemed to be much excited about something, and the moment she saw Dick she gave an exclamation of surprise and beckoned him to follow her up the stairs.

Dick stood for a moment undecided.

“This is awkward,” he thought. “Next wife I have shall speak English, sure; then I’ll know what I’m about.”

But the lady continued to beckon, and there was nothing Dick could do but follow. He followed her to the door of her room; and there in the room, placidly smoking cigarettes, sat the lieutenant, Señor don Manuel de Comacho.

“O Comacho, this is very reckless!” Dick exclaimed, stepping in and hastily closing the door.

“Oh, no,” Comacho replied with a look of the most intense cunning in his face; “I fooled them nicely. I came in the back way.”

Dick hardly knew whether to laugh or be angry. After all his trouble in the morning, all his well-laid plans, the Mexican had deliberately walked into the hotel and flattered himself for his shrewdness because he came in by the backdoor.

“You are too brave,” Dick said, certain that the lieutenant could not appreciate the sarcasm; “you Mexicans do not seem to know what fear is. If your whole navy is officered by men like you, Comacho, it is invincible.”

“A Mexican knows no fear, Sumner,” the lieutenant answered proudly; and as Dick made a mental picture of this particular Mexican sitting on the grating shedding seas of tears because he was in fear of being arrested, he found it necessary to step to the window to admire the scenery.

Brave as he was, the lieutenant would not run the risk of going down the public room to dinner; he meekly held the baby, while Dick and the señora dined, and food was afterward sent up to him.

By a quarter before nine in the evening Dick and his companions were in the railway station, Comacho still disguised in the big ulster and the steamer cap. The railroad is operated on the English plan, with compartment cars, each compartment large enough to hold eight persons, with a door on each side. The train stood beside a platform, with the station lights burning brightly on one side and nothing but intense darkness on the other. The party seated themselves in their compartment, and in three minutes more the train would have been under way and Comacho out of present danger, when they heard the tramp, tramp, tramp! of a squad of men marching down the platform.

“I’m gone!” Comacho exclaimed; and instantly buried his face in his hands and began to weep.

Before Dick could reply, the squad of six men, with an officer at their head, halted near the compartment door, and the officer stepped up to the door, and seeing a lady inside, removed his hat.

He pressed a paper, an official-looking document, into Comacho’s hands, said something in Spanish, and politely stepped aside to give his prisoner an opportunity to speak to his wife.

“Oh, I’m arrested! I’m arrested!” Comacho wailed; and he frantically wrung his hands, while great tears coursed down his cheeks.

“You ought to be!” Dick declared, thoroughly disgusted at the fellow’s cowardice. “You blubbering baby, you ought to be hanged! But you’re not gone yet, if you have the heart of a mouse. Do you see that door on the opposite side of the car? I don’t know where it leads to, but you do. Open that door, if you’re a man, and disappear in the darkness.”