Chapter VIII: A Voyage to Porto Rico

“No, no!” the lieutenant moaned; “I can’t do it; I can’t do it! It’s all up with poor Comacho.”

He put his head down again and burst into another flood of tears. His wife threw her arms around his neck and wept hysterically; and to complete the picture the baby began to cry.

The first warning bell gave notice that in another minute the train would start.

“If you are determined to do nothing for yourself, Comacho,” Dick said, “I will stay behind with you if I can be of any assistance.”

“No,” Comacho moaned, “leave me to my fate; I am past help. If you will go on with my wife and child to the capital, it will be the greatest favor you can do me. Here, take the ulster and cap; they are no use to me now.”

Pulling off the heavy coat and giving a last embrace to his wife and baby, the bold lieutenant stepped out of the compartment and gave himself up to the officer, and at that moment the last bell tapped and the train moved off.

Dick was in anything but a comfortable situation, with an all-night’s ride before him with the hysterical young woman and the crying baby; but he looked upon it as a valuable experience, worth a column or two sometime, perhaps, as a phase of Mexican life.

“It was rather stretching a point,” he reflected, “to try to help the fellow escape. If he had been a criminal, of course I shouldn’t have done it; or even if there had been any regular charge against him; but a mere suspicion of a slight political offence is different. However, there’s no use trying to help such a fellow as that. Why, an American boy ten years old would have more grit.”

The train had not gone far before Dick found himself holding the baby, in an awkward fashion enough; and in an hour or two both mother and child were asleep. He did not know that the darkness was hiding from him some of the grandest scenery on the continent; snow-capped mountain peaks, and vast plains thousands of feet below, with their scores of little cities, with burnished domes and spires on their cathedrals. He did not even know, shut up in the close compartment, that when the train reached the foot of the mountain the ordinary engine was exchanged for a great double-headed locomotive, with two smokestacks and two engineers.

He did know, however, that between midnight and daylight the air was unpleasantly cold; and he was not at all sorry when at eight o’clock in the morning the train drew into the great station in the city of Mexico.

In the midst of her preparations for getting out, the Señora Comacho pressed a little slip of paper into Dick’s hand with something written upon it. It gave him a start, for he did not know what it could mean. Was the lieutenant’s wife trying to begin a flirtation with him? That was so absurd that it almost made Dick laugh; but he had heard that Spanish women are given to that sort of thing.

When he looked at the paper he saw the words, written in a fine Italian hand:--

“Calle Estampa de Jesus Maria, Numero Cinco.”

In his ignorance of the language he could only look at the lady and smile and bow.

“Maybe she’s asking me to call and see her,” he reflected. “Calle may mean ‘call ye’; perhaps it’s an invitation to meet her under the shadow of the cathedral spire at midnight. It’s a pity I’m not more romantic.”

He kept the paper in his hand, not knowing what else to do with it; and when they reached the street and the lady held up her finger to the nearest cabman, and pointed smilingly to the paper, he saw that his suspicions were unfounded. The words were nothing but the address to which the lady desired to be driven--the address of the lieutenant’s father.

“Si, si!” the driver exclaimed when Dick handed him the paper; “Haysoos Mar-eea, Numero Cinco.”

“‘Jesus Maria’ is rather an odd name for a street,” Dick thought; “but it doesn’t sound quite as irreverent when they pronounce it Haysoos Mar-eea, as these Mexicans do.”

Dick kept his eyes wide open, as usual, and he had not gone far before he discovered that almost every street in the city is named after some saint. And, more than that, that every block of every street has a separate name, a method bewildering to most strangers.

He saw his fair charge and her child safely within the doorway of a fine old stone mansion, and ten minutes later he was in his room in the Hotel Iturbide, the vast building that was erected by the Emperor Iturbide for a palace.

To present his letter to the American minister was Dick’s first work; and he went about it so promptly that before dark he was informed that President Diaz would give him an audience in the palace the following morning at eleven o’clock.

The exterior of the palace was a disappointment. With its long range of low, plain walls, it reminded Dick of the old Madison Square Garden. But when the six soldiers at the gate presented arms as he drove in, his opinion of it rose; and he was soon following an orderly through an endless series of handsome apartments, to the throne room in which he was to meet the President.

“I am glad to meet a representative of one of the foremost American newspapers,” the President of Mexico said as he gave Dick’s hand a warm shake.

And Dick was delighted to be so agreeably surprised in the President. The Comacho incident had given him a bad impression of the Mexicans; but here was a Mexican of a very different sort.

“It would be hard to make this man shed tears,” he thought as he looked admiringly at the handsome man by his side. “No nonsense here. Six feet tall, if he’s an inch; straight as an arrow, darker than a copper cent, muscles firm as iron.”

“They call me the Aztec,” the President laughed, when the conversation turned upon his personality. “I thank them for doing me justice, for I am of almost pure Indian blood. Study the people while you are here, Mr. Sumner, and you will find that no man need blush to be called an Aztec. You will hear of me that I have spent seven days in the saddle with no food but a handful of meal. It is true. Yes” (and his rich dark eyes flashed), “and I can do it again, if my country requires the service.”

After a conversation of nearly an hour the President conducted Dick into several of the state apartments, to show him the portraits of famous Mexicans.

“All this is Maximilian!” he exclaimed, waving his hand toward the handsome mirrors, the gilded chairs, the glistening chandeliers. “Poor Maximilian! He did much to ornament our capital.”

That evening Dick received an unexpected call from the minister.

“You are acquainted in the Calle Estampa de Jesus Maria?” the minister asked, smiling; “at numero cinco, number five? You have friends there?”

“I have been there twice,” Dick answered--“once to see Lieutenant Comacho’s wife safely home, and once to make the call of courtesy, inquiring after her welfare.”

“I see,” the minister said; “there is no harm done; but if I were you I should not call there again. There are wheels within wheels in this country. The Comachos are under the displeasure of the government, and it is not safe to have much to do with them. I can only give you a hint.”

“Yet this is a republic!” Dick exclaimed.

The minister smiled.

“Your friend Comacho has been brought up from Vera Cruz,” he said, “and is now in the capital--in the Belen.”

“The Belen?” Dick repeated inquiringly.

“Yes; our famous prison. You remember the poem, ‘Storming the Belen Gate’? It is the same old Belen, still a prison. Comacho is there; and it is a very uncomfortable place, I assure you.”

“And how long will they keep him there?” Dick asked.

“Till the government sees fit to let him out,” the minister said. “The _habeas corpus_ is merely an ornament here. When a man once goes to prison--but I must remember that I am talking to a newspaper man. It does not do for a minister to express himself too freely.”

Two days later Dick and the minister ate luncheon in private with President Diaz; and Dick lost no opportunity to make short excursions to neighboring towns and into the country. He explored the great cathedral, the largest church building on the American continent; he visited the floating gardens, the base of the volcano Popocatapetl, the famous Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadeloupe; he consorted with the pure Indians in the country and walked with the water-carriers as they worked; he delved here and there and everywhere for facts; and no man ever saw more of the Mexican capital in a week than Dick did.

But with all the sight-seeing he did not neglect the writing.

“A hod-carrier could write good letters with such facts as I have,” he said to himself. “I must get them on paper while they are fresh in my mind.”

Night after night he toiled away in his room; and as the letters went home by rail, the early ones were appearing while he was still in the Mexican capital.

“I feel as if I ought to call upon Comacho at the Belen,” he said to the minister when the time had nearly come for his stay to end. “He is a cowardly fellow, but it seems unkind to go off without bidding him good-by.”

“I will take you there,” the minister replied; “you can go safely with me.”

Dick’s work had taken him inside many prisons, but he had never seen anything quite as gloomy and depressing as the interior of the Belen. A guard was sent for Comacho, and he was brought to the stone-paved reception room with manacles on his feet, and coatless, but with a gaudy striped serape or Mexican blanket about his shoulders. There was a beard of many days’ growth upon his face, and altogether he looked wretched and forlorn.

He burst into tears, as usual, as soon as he caught sight of Dick.

“I have no hope of getting out,” he moaned; “none; I am ill-fed, ill-treated, dirty. I should never have come back to this wretched country.”

The scene was too painful to stand long, and Dick cut it as short as possible. He wished the lieutenant a speedy deliverance and bade him good-by; and that was the last he saw of Señor don Manuel de Comacho.

“I have been particularly impressed with one thing in Mexico,” he said to the minister after they had left the prison. “It seems to me that the best people in this country are the Aztecs; the Indians, as we call them, for want of a better term. Where they have not been contaminated by associating with the conquering whites, the Spanish, Portuguese, and people of other nations, they are a remarkably fine race--brave, honest, often handsome; altogether superior to the mixed Spanish people, who form the aristocracy here.”

“It would hardly do for me to express an opinion on the subject,” the minister replied, “but I think your powers of observation do you great credit.”

While Dick was on his way home, toiling away with his pencil even in the cars and on the steamship, he had no idea of the great success he had made of his expedition. He did not see a copy of the Transport while he was away; but many other people saw it and read and enjoyed the letters of the bright young correspondent from Cuba and Mexico. In the Transport office they were considered so good that his name, Richard Sumner, in full was signed to each letter; and other newspapers liked them, too, so well that they were copied all over the country. He was making his name known, and favorably known, all over the land.

“It’s lucky,” he said to himself over and over, “that I made it a rule to write each subject while it was fresh. It makes a perfect jumble in a man’s head, traveling so fast in such strange countries. If I had merely made notes, I’m afraid I should be all mixed up. I hardly feel like Dick Sumner, anyhow, after this strange experience. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to find myself wearing white cotton trowsers rolled above the knee and a white shirt flying outside my waistband, like some of the natives on the coast. But I never shall forget Comacho, whatever happens. Poor old Comacho! He’s an awful baby, but I’m sorry for him.”

It was shortly after noon when the steamer landed Dick in New York, and he determined to run into the office first to shake hands, before going home to enjoy a few hours of rest that he felt he had earned. He imagined that the boys would be glad to see him again, and he was sure that he would be glad to see the boys. He sprang up the stairs two or three steps at a time.

“Hello, Sumner! what are you doing here?” the city editor exclaimed as Dick walked through the big room. “Didn’t you get my cable in Havana?”

It was very different from the greeting he had expected.

“Cable!” Dick repeated; “I’ve had no cable. I haven’t heard a word from the office since I went away.”

“I was afraid it had miscarried since I got no answer,” the editor went on. “You were ordered to go on to Porto Rico. I suppose you don’t know yet that your letters have made a great hit; but that’s the fact. Everybody is copying them, and the old man says you must keep on striking while your iron is hot. You’ve hit off those Spanish countries in grand style, and you’re booked to make a tour of Porto Rico, the only other Spanish island of the West Indies. But Mr. Harding will tell you all about it when he comes down.”

“I’ll run up home and see the folks and be back in time to meet him.”

“Yes, that will do it. He’ll send you down in the first steamer, I’m pretty sure. There’s a direct steamer from here to Porto Rico.”

Dick carried both joy and mourning with him to the flat--joy over his return, mourning over the necessity of his going away again almost immediately.

“Why, that will be another month’s journey!” his mother exclaimed; “and just when you’ve made yourself so famous, too. I’m so glad you signed your name to those beautiful letters, Dick.”

This was the first intimation Dick had that his name had been signed to the letters. His mother had carefully saved the papers that had the letters in, and there, sure enough, was his name at the end of every one--Richard Sumner--in bold capitals. Dick was as much pleased about it as anybody, for he knew the vast difference to the writer between an anonymous article and one with a signature.

He took out a pocketful of letters that had been waiting for him in the office, and almost the first one opened was from the Benedict and Jackson Syndicate, asking him to write them a series of tropical letters. Another was from one of the great illustrated weeklies, asking for a page article on Mexico and the Mexicans. They almost upset Dick for a moment, all these evidences of success, pouring in upon him at once. The publishers’ letters he passed over to his mother and Florrie without a word.

“God bless you, my dear, dear boy!” his mother exclaimed, after she and Florrie had read the letters. She threw her arms around his neck; and when Florrie did the same thing from the other side, they almost smothered him. “It’s no more than you deserve; not a bit. Nobody knows as well as I do how hard you work, nor what a good boy you are.

“Oh, now, listen to me!” she went on, laughing and crying by turns; “calling him a boy! Calling Richard Sumner, the great newspaper correspondent, a boy! But you’ll always be a boy to your old mother, won’t you, Dick?”

“That I will!” Dick exclaimed, “whatever happens. But do you know these tears remind me of a funny thing I saw in the railway car down in Mexico. I’ll tell you about it after a while. I was almost drowned in tears down there--not my own, though. I don’t see how people could think those letters amounted to much, for I had to write them in the most outrageous places; sometimes in my cabin when the ship was rolling; sometimes in the cars; once on one end of a table in a Mexican restaurant while a lot of Spaniards were playing monte on the other end; and one I wrote while sitting on a rock on the side of the volcano Popocatapetl.

“But we’ll make up for all that botheration to-night,” he rattled on. “We’ll have a regular feast after Darling comes home from work; that oyster supper we missed before. Oh, you ought to see the little Mexican oysters!”

“What’s that about an oyster supper!” Darling exclaimed as he entered the room. “I can hear the word oysters through a brick wall.”

“Hello, Darling, old man! Ain’t I glad to see you again, though!”

“And ain’t I glad to have you back!” Darling retorted, wringing Dick’s hand. “And back in such shape, too. Oh, you’ve done yourself proud, Dick. Everybody has read your letters, and everybody likes them. And I’m so glad, Dick,”--he lowered his voice a little and looked toward the door, for Mrs. Sumner and Florrie had stepped out to see after Dick’s trunk,--“I’m so glad the first thing you think of is home. So many of the fellows would think first of having a rousing time with the boys.”

“Pshaw!” Dick interrupted; “if a man can’t have a good time at home, where can he have it?”

“That’s my idea. But some fellows don’t think so. I knew almost from the start that you were a fellow who would follow his ideals, Dick. Just let you get it into your head that the proper thing, the manly thing, was to be fast, to be a good fellow in the little clubs, to play poker and drink cocktails, and you’d have gone into it strong, and it would have run you to the dogs in no time. But your good sense and good principles led you the other way, and you’re just as hearty in your work as you might have been in deviltry. Whatever you set up for your ideal, that you’d follow to the death. You don’t know how much I think of you, old man. There’s no nonsense about you, either; not a bit. Shake again.”

“Well,” Dick laughed, anxious to change the subject, “we were saying something about an oyster supper, I think. We must have it to-night, for Mr. Brown tells me they’re going to send me right off to Porto Rico. That means another month’s journey, I suppose. We’ll have the supper to-night after you come home from the office; just mother and Florrie, you and myself; ‘us four and no more,’ as the rhyme goes.”

“Of course it’s understood that I pay half the expense,” Darling said. “But I’m sorry you’re going right off again--and glad too; when do you start?”

“Not settled yet,” Dick answered. “I’m to see the old man about it this afternoon. But in the first steamer, I suppose.”

The neighbors in the flat had grown accustomed to the late hours kept by the two newspaper men. At first they had been very suspicious. Dick and Darling must be gamblers, they thought, to be out so late every night; or perhaps they were actors; but they learned the truth after a few weeks.

“That old yarn about living in New York for twenty years without knowing your next-door neighbors,” Dick said one day, after some one had been asking a great many questions of Florrie, “may be true to some extent. But I notice our neighbors keep pretty well informed about our affairs.”

At the supper that night, which began at half-past two and lasted for several hours, because there was so much to talk about, Dick made an important discovery. He had had very little to do with any women but his mother and sister; but when he saw Darling watching with admiring eyes every move that Florrie made, and helping her to the choice bits of celery and the fattest oysters, and saw Florrie showing Darling many little attentions, he was shrewd enough to draw a conclusion that pleased him very much.

“You must appreciate me while you have me, mother,” Dick laughed while they were eating; “and you must pet me up as much as you can, sis, for Porto Rico is all settled. This is Tuesday night (or rather it’s Wednesday morning now), and I’m to sail on Thursday morning at eleven o’clock. I’m to go in a freight steamer, too, but she’s said to be a good, safe one; a British steamer called the Smeaton Tower, that’s chartered by the company. The next passenger ship doesn’t sail for ten days, so I engaged passage in the freighter, which goes on Thursday. I’m to share the captain’s cabin with him; and if he turns out to be a good fellow, it ought to be a pleasant voyage.”

Dick insisted that his mother and Florrie and Darling must all go to see him off, because the Smeaton Tower was lying in the upper bay near the Statue of Liberty, and he would be taken off to her with the captain and supercargo in a tug from the foot of Wall Street, and it would give them a pleasant little sail.

“Having a supercargo I think is a good point,” he laughed. “It’s quite a reminder of Robinson Crusoe, isn’t it, to be talking about the supercargo. He’s the man, of course, who has charge of the cargo, and sees that the right stuff is landed at each port. You know the steamer goes all around the island, touching at every port. And there’ll be no chance to send any letters up till I return, because our steamer will be the first one back. But I’ve left eight Mexican letters in the office, so you’ll have the extreme pleasure of seeing my name in the paper two or three times a week while I’m away.”

“And you can’t imagine how kind the old man is, Darling,” he went on. “I asked him for permission to write some letters for Benedict and Jackson’s Syndicate and the Illustrated Weekly, and he told me I should write wherever I chose; that he was glad I had the opportunity.”

“He’s a brick!” Darling exclaimed. “He never forgets that he was a young fellow once himself.”

When Dick climbed aboard the Smeaton Tower he had barely time to wave his handkerchief to his friends, for the tug turned about immediately for the city, and the steamer was put under way.

The vessel was an agreeable surprise. Dick had never seen her before, and as she was a freighter he rather expected to find her a dirty, old tub with tar on her decks. But she was neat as a pin, a strong iron ship of about two thousand five hundred tons, high forward and aft and low amidships, with the coziest of cabins aft, fitted with substantial mahogany furniture, and a little fireplace for use in cold climates.

“Make yourself at home in the stateroom,” said Captain Godfree, a jolly little Englishman from Plymouth. “You’re to sleep in my bunk and I take the broad sofa. I must be on the bridge till we’re out of the harbor, but you’ll find your baggage all in there.”

“Well, if this is a freighter, give me a freighter to travel in every time,” Dick said to himself as he entered the captain’s stateroom. “Why, it’s as big as any four staterooms I ever saw, and here’s a regular library in the bookcase. And here’s the chronometer; and drawers under the bunk that I’m to sleep in, and everything fitted up in grand style with mahogany and marble. I’d no idea they made these freighters so comfortable. Now this will be a real voyage; more like the voyages I’ve read about. The passenger steamers are too much like hotels to suit me.”

Dick was soon on the bridge with the captain and pilot and supercargo, watching once more the receding shores of New York harbor. He was not familiar enough with the ship yet to notice that the two mates were doing nearly all the work on deck, and that only one or two seamen were in sight. When the vessel was well outside of Sandy Hook the pilot was taken off in his boat, and Captain Godfree took command.

“Come and take the bridge, Mr. Turner!” he called to the second mate.

“Now, then, Mr. Gran,” he said to the big first mate, who was on deck just below the bridge, “we’ll go and stir up those lubbers in the foc’s’le.”

“They’re full of bad whiskey, nearly every man before the mast,” Captain Godfree exclaimed, turning to Dick. “Carried on board dead, some of them. It’s always so every time we start out; and it’s not as much their fault, the poor duffers, as it’s the fault of the wretched shipping system in New York. We’ll soon straighten them out, anyway. Come along, Mr. Gran.”

The captain and first mate went up forward and threw open the iron doors of the forecastle, which was flush with the deck. One or two limp men half-crawled and half-fell out when the first door was opened.

“Stand up here, you drunken scoundrels!” the two officers shouted; and each seized his man by the collar and raised him to his feet, shaking him soundly.

They found a flask of liquor in the pocket of each man, which they threw overboard without ceremony. Quickly the others were dragged out and searched. Some of them showed fight, but they were quickly cuffed into submission. In a few moments all were out and set to work but one man. He braced himself full length across the little room in such a way that the united strength of the two officers could not budge him.

“I’ll try the steam winch on him,” said the first mate.

He took a short rope and put a noose around the man’s legs, and made the other end fast to the steam winch.

“Oh! you’ll pull his legs off!” Dick shouted from the bridge as the mate started the winch.

“We’ll see which’ll give way first,” Mr. Gran answered; “the winch, the foc’s’le, or the man.”