by Roy J. Snell
CHAPTER V TOTTERING WALLS
It was at an early hour of that same night that Johnny, having wakenedfrom some vaguely remembered dream, found himself rudely shaken by astrange convulsion beneath and about him.
"Ship's pitching something terrible," he told himself. "Must be ahurricane."
"Ship?" something within him seemed to whisper. "Ship? When did youembark upon a ship?"
Vaguely he groped about in his brain for facts. The sensations that cometo one just before he falls asleep are, more often than not, awaiting himwhen he awakes. Johnny's had remained with him. They were earthsensations, solid earth, a place close and stuffy, and stone, solidstone, not shifting sea.
But there was now a strange rocking and shuddering, no mistake aboutthat. There it was again! Zowie! What a lurch!
"Like a ship at sea in a storm," he told himself. "No, not quite. Morelike a ship stuck fast on a coral reef, being beaten to pieces by thewaves."
The thought was startling. Again he attempted to sit up. This time hesucceeded.
Light streamed down upon him, moonlight broken into little squares.
"Bars," he thought. "Prison bars!"
Yes, now he remembered. This bed, not a bed at all, merely a broad ledgeof stone left by the prison masons in lieu of a bed. Strange sort, theseCentral American prisons!
Then, as if to refute all this, there came again that horrible rockingshudder.
Struggling to grasp reality, Johnny's eyes, roving the dark spaces abouthim, arrived at the crisscross iron bars of the window. To his vastastonishment he saw those iron bars, in a solid mass, literally torn fromthe masonry.
"I don't know where I am," he told himself, "but I won't be there verylong."
With one thought uppermost in his mind, that of escape, he leaped for thewindow, gripped the sill, drew himself up, balanced for a second there inthe moonlight, then dropped.
He landed rather solidly, not upon the tossing sea, but upon tossing dryland.
A moving figure loomed before him.
"A guard!" His quickened senses registered the thought.
"Strike first, and talk afterwards." His head buried itself into the softcenter of the moving object. With a grunt the man went down.
He wished the earth would stand still. It made him seasick, that rockingmotion. They hadn't had a reason for putting him in prison--not any realreason. He had done nothing except insist upon buying twenty thousandbunches of bananas. He had tried to do a great service to a splendid oldman and a beautiful girl. He had reason enough for wanting to be out ofprison, plenty of reasons. There was the girl, Madge Kennedy, back therein the orchard of forbidden fruit, and her grandfather, the agedBritisher who was so much of a man and so little of a business man thathis orchards and banana plantations would never make him a cent unlesssome one took a hand. And there was old Jorgensen, good old salt waterskipper, walking his deck night and day and staring gloomily at theCaribbean Sea.
The earth stopped rocking for an instant. An open court lay before him.He was beginning to realize that he was having a new experience. One ofthose frequent Central American earthquakes had broken loose. That waswhy a stone prison had seemed so like a ship on a tossing sea.
"Open places are best," he told himself.
He had taken a dozen steps when there came a shock which sent him downlike a ten-pin. At the same instant he touched an object lying near him.
He found it soft and yielding. It was a weeping child, a beautiful,black-haired, black-eyed girl of seven.
"There now," he said, sitting up and talking quietly to her. "The stormwill pass in a short while. We're not shipping any water. She's a staunchold barge. We'll weather this little blow and never lose a mast or ayardarm."
Since the girl was unquestionably Spanish, it seems probable that sheunderstood not one word that he said. She did understand the steadycomforting tone and the kindly touch of his hand. She stopped crying,cuddled down in his arms and, since it was now well into night, she fellasleep.
As Johnny sat there, a motley throng gathered about him. Like him, theycame to this open spot for safety. Some, like himself, were fullydressed. Some were in pajamas. The mild moonlight was kind to these last.Some carried things in their hands, things they had salvaged from thedoom of their homes. A parrot in a cage, an iron strong box, an alarmclock, a broom; these and many more things, somber, precious, ludicrous,had been brought into the open plaza.
Johnny's mind began to travel back, to gather up the slender thread ofcircumstances that had brought him there. He traced it thread by thread."To-morrow," he told himself, "will bring something quite new."
