The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  His oratorical voice was resonant and dynamic, and he handled it with the skill of an actor. But with even greater intellectual skill he chose words of almost puerile simplicity but uttered them with overwhelming earnestness, investing them with vast profundity, never seeming to talk down to his listeners, yet contriving to make sure that the most ignorant and unschooled of them could scarcely fail to grasp his meaning.

  He started harmlessly enough with a short recital of their history, reminding them of how their ancestors had been torn from their African homes and brought to Jamaica like cattle to make a few white capitalists richer, of how they had rebelled against abuse and slavery, of how they had fought for their freedom against the might of the whole British Empire and forced the King of England himself to plead for peace, and of how the Treaty had finally recognized their right to hold the lands they had defended and to be free for ever of any outside domination.

  So far it was not much worse than any nation’s jingoistic version of its own trials and triumphs, although plainly slanted to revive ancient resentments and hint at villains yet to receive their just comeuppance, but Mark Cuffee was still only laying his groundwork.

  “It is a pity,” he said, “that the spirit of our Treaty was soon forgotten by the Government of this island. The English Kings had been made to feel small, and they don’t like that. They couldn’t wipe out the Treaty, but they could try to make it mean less and less. And because some of our fathers were not wide awake, or were deceived by tricks and lies, they let their rights be taken away one by one.”

  He cited an insidiously increasing variety of encroachments. Their lands had never been properly surveyed, and their boundaries had been involved in a continual series of disputes designed to whittle them away acre by acre. Their own administration of their own affairs had been spied on and meddled with by a procession of imperialist agents disguised as missionaries or welfare workers. Their territory had been arrogantly invaded by British policemen with instructions to fabricate evidence that the Maroons were bandits or were harboring bandits; their privilege of self-government was nullified by emissaries of the Colonial Secretariat who presumed to force their way in and ask impertinent questions about their manner of conducting elections and to cast doubt on their validity.

  It was during the development of this theme that Cuffee began to turn pointed glances towards David Farnham, and the last charge was directed straight at him.

  “Nonsense!” Farnham said loudly, but he felt the impact of hostile stares and heard some ugly muttering in the audience.

  Also he had a mostly psychic impression of his two special guards stiffening and hefting their machetes when he spoke, and for the first time felt a real qualm of somewhat incredulous apprehension.

  “Where the devil had the Saint gone?” he wondered.

  He recrossed his legs and moved his pipe to the other side of his mouth with a good show of phlegmatic ennui as Cuffee turned away from him again with calculated contempt and made another smooth shift from second into high gear.

  “But, comrades, we don’t have to let them do this. Now I shall tell you what we can do—what we are going to do.”

  The only thing wrong with the Treaty was that it had not gone far enough. The Maroons had won their freedom, but for many years after that their fellow slaves had been kept in bondage. Even when they were finally set free, they had not been compensated with lands for the initial crime committed against them. They still had no true independence. Even though today they could vote, they could vote only for British governments. They were still subjects of the same flag that had flown over the slave ships.

  “Now I say that it is time for us to set another glorious example. Let us urge our comrades outside to demand the same rights that we have. Let us help them to get their rights. Let us tell any of them who want to fight for their rights, that if the British tyrants want to put them in jail for it, they can come here, where they’ll be safe, because the British police can’t come to our country to arrest them—”

  Farnham could sit still no longer. He jumped to his feet.

  “That’s treason!” he shouted.

  “Also,” said another voice, “it’s against the Treaty.”

  The voice turned every eye, before any move could develop against Farnham. And everyone saw the Saint, with the little group of Johnny and the old men behind him, standing at the other corner of the rostrum.

  The Commander stepped forward and held up the Saint’s hand with his own, so that their two bandages were together in plain sight.

  “Dis man is mi brother!” he roared. “Him is a good Maroon now. A good man. Oono listen to him!”

  The bloodstains on the cloth stood out so clearly that the delicate pink flush of evening that was touching the tops of the clouds looked like a pale reflection from them, and an awed murmur rippled through the crowd and settled into a complete hush.

  “In our Treaty,” said the Saint, “the Maroons promised to help stop rebellions, not start them.”

  The man who carried the cardboard tube held it up symbolically.

  The young Major’s eyes blazed as he saw it. He leaped down from the stand, snatched the tube away, and felled the old man with a brutal blow. In another second he measured more than his own length on the ground, sliding on his back, as Johnny connected with a classic straight left to his chin.

  Simon grabbed the tube as it fell and sprang up on the platform. Johnny was close behind him, and David Farnham had started in the same direction before his guards could recover from their astonishment and stop him. Farnham’s move was made without conscious thought, but it seemed inevitable that all hell would break loose in a moment, and although the end could only be disastrous he felt that he should be at the core of it.

  The swift succession of surprises, however, seemed to have temporarily robbed everyone else of initiative. Even the red-arm-banded squad on the platform were as nonplussed as their colleagues among the crowd: still too new to their role to have developed the reflexes of trained and organized bullies, they waited uncertainly for orders, and for a moment Cuffee himself hesitated before the fateful possibilities of his decision.

  In that breathing spell of confusion, Simon Templar raised and stretched out his arms to the audience, with the tube held aloft in one of them, and said:

  “I shall not stop Colonel Cuffee talking for long—although I should only call him Captain Cuffee, because I see in the Treaty that the Maroons who set you all free were none of them more than Captains, and I don’t know why anyone today should make himself bigger than those men who signed this Treaty. I have it here, and I have read it. All of you should read it. It has not been read enough. For years people have talked about this Treaty, here and in the Government too, but I think very few of them have ever looked at it. If they had, there would not be so many arguments. For instance, about your—our last election, in which Captain Cuffee made himself the chief. You should all know what the Treaty says!”

  He thrust the tube into Farnham’s hands, and said, “Read ’em the last clause—and try not to look shocked yourself.”

  Cuffee started to move then, but in the same instant Johnny pinioned his arms from behind. In the next, Simon had whipped the gun out of Cuffee’s holster and leveled it.

  “Tell your boys to stand back,” he said grimly. “Because if a riot starts now, you’ll be the first casualty.”

  As Johnny released him and stepped warily away, Cuffee made a perfunctory gesture of compliance. It was almost supererogatory, for the sight of the gun had already cooled the ambition of his cohorts.

  Farnham held the unrolled parchment, and read with pedagogic clarity:

  “ ‘That Captain Cudjoe shall during his life be Chief Commander in Trelawny Town, after his decease the command to devolve on his brother Captain Accompong, and in case of his decease to his next brother Captain Johnny, and failing him, Captain Cuffee shall succeed, who is to be succeeded by Captain Quaco, and after all their demises…’ �
�� His voice faltered as his eyes ran ahead of it, but he braced himself and finished strongly and firmly: “ ‘—and after all their demises the Governor or Commander-in-Chief for the time being shall appoint from time to time, whom he thinks fit for that command.’ ”

  There was a silence in which the earth itself seemed to stand still, and then it was as if all the people breathed together in a great sigh.

  Farnham let the scroll curl up again.

  “As the official representative of the Governor, therefore,” he said, “I declare that Cuffee is no longer your Colonel.”

  There was a vague medley of gasps and murmurs in the audience, and several sporadic handclaps.

  Farnham looked at the Saint, and Simon nodded and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. Farnham turned again to the assembly.

  “Instead, I shall appoint another man who has been to school and learned a lot of things that will help you, but who’s also a good Maroon, whose ancestor is named in the Treaty even ahead of Cuffee’s—Captain Johnny!”

  Simon seized Johnny’s hand and hoisted it like the mitt of a victorious prize-fighter.

  The murmurs became more positively approving, the applause louder, and the Commander started a gleeful cheer which was taken up by an increasing number of voices.

  Cuffee’s face was gray under its dusky pigment. Ignoring the gun that the Saint held, in sudden desperation, he forced his way again to the front of the platform, his clenched fist raised.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you!” he howled. “The Treaty cheated you! You’re still slaves—”

  Johnny spun him around by the shoulder and flung him into the arms of the nearest of his own men.

  “Arrest him,” he said.

  It was as if an invisible mantle had fallen on him that had always been waiting for him to find his own stature, the stature that it was made for. The tone of command came without effort to his voice.

  The men glanced nervously about them, and must have heard in the rising babble of the crowd beyond a trend that would not lightly change its course again. Already some of their fraternity in the audience were unobtrusively slipping off their red armlets…They took hold of Cuffee and held him, instinctively obeying the one who seemed to be the stronger leader.

  Johnny turned back to the throng that was crowding up to the dais.

  “That man lied to you about the Treaty!” he shouted. “Why should we listen to him anymore? He lied about the last Colonel, too. Cuffee killed him so that he could make himself Colonel. We found his body near the Peace Cave. The Commander saw it too, an’ Colonel Robertson, an’ Mr Templar.”

  Of course it was not evidence, but to his hearers it carried conviction. An appalled hush settled again.

  “Nobody does himself any good by breakin’ the law,” Johnny said with simple dignity. “The Treaty is our law. An’ it’s a good treaty. Whatever the British Government did once, they want to be our friends now. It isn’t anything like Cuffee tried to make out. If you’ll listen, an’ Mr Farnham will help me, I’ll try to tell you why.”

  8

  Later that evening Farnham said meticulously, “Of course, Johnny, between ourselves, the Governor’ll have to approve my recommendation and confirm your appointment himself. But I don’t think we’ll have any trouble about that. He should be grateful to have such a tidy solution dropped into his lap…As for you, Simon, I think I’d feel better if you went ahead and laughed at me, instead of displaying such hypocritical Christian forbearance.”

  “Because you’d never read the Treaty right to the end yourself?” said the Saint. “No, I did most of my laughing this morning, and not principally at you. Hereafter we’ll keep the joke to ourselves. Besides which, I doubt if anyone else would ever believe it.”

  He lighted a cigarette and shook his head in rapture nevertheless.

  “But what a fabulous little gem it is,” he said dreamily. “For more than two hundred years the legend of the Maroons has gone on. Away back somewhere, some clerk in whatever Government department it would be told some new clerk who was too lazy to look for himself his careless version of what the Treaty said. That clerk repeated it to his successor, who repeated it to the next man. Everyone accepted it and believed it. Each new incoming Governor heard about it from his staff, believed it, and perpetuated it. It was such general knowledge that nobody ever thought of questioning it, any more than they would have questioned the statement that Jamaica is a British colony. Jerry Dugdale, the policeman, believed it, and so did the Governor who bawled him out. You believed it. A copy of the Treaty was in the files all the time, but who ever looks in files? For maybe two centuries, nobody ever read the Treaty. Except probably Cuffee. But why should he blow his hand? It took a nosy bastard like me, sitting on a rock out in the wilderness, to read all through the damn thing and explode the lovely myth.”

  “All right,” Farnham said stolidly. “There’s only one thing that bothers me now. It’s about Cuffee. None of us has any reasonable doubt that he murdered the former Colonel—or if he didn’t do it himself, he instigated it. But the Treaty doesn’t allow you to hang him, Johnny. You have to hand him over to our authorities. And there’s no evidence against him that would stand up in a regular court. I’m very much afraid that he’ll eventually get off scot-free.”

  The Saint stood up.

  “I’ve been thinking about that myself,” he said soberly. “And I have an idea. But if you’ll excuse me, I’d rather tell Johnny alone. If you know nothing about it, you can’t have anything on your conscience.”

  Mr Mark Cuffee had been gradually regaining his confidence as he endlessly paced the confines of the room that had become his cell. The men who guarded him now were half a dozen of the older generation, headed by the Commander, and he knew that it would have been a waste of breath to try to argue or coax them into changing their allegiance. Nor had he been foolish enough to attempt a forcible escape: in spite of their years, they still had the sinews of a lifetime of manual labor, and any two of them would have been an easy match for him. So instead of attempting the impossible, he had been using his head.

  There was no evidence that could possibly convict him in a British court. And with his knowledge and experience as a barrister, he would back himself to make any colonial prosecutor in that little island look like a clown. There were even opportunities for such a grandstand performance that his superiors in the party, of whom he was much more afraid, might not only forgive his local failure but commend the larger achievement. His defense of himself and his struggle to liberate a downtrodden proletariat from imperialist exploiters would make worldwide headlines. He would—

  As the door opened and Johnny and Simon Templar walked in, he swung around as if he himself were the potential prosecutor and they must have come to plead for leniency.

  “What do you want now?” he challenged truculently. “I demand to be properly arraigned before a magistrate. Until you’re ready to conform with civilized legal procedures, be good enough to leave me alone.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said the Saint quietly. Johnny made a sign to the guard, and one by one they silently left the room.

  As the door closed behind the last of them, Cuffee threw himself into a chair.

  “What’s the idea?” he inquired sarcastically. “Were you thinking of trying some American third degree on me? It won’t get you anywhere, and it’ll only make matters worse for you when I get you in court.”

  “Mr Cuffee,” said the Saint, “you aren’t going to any court where you’d probably get acquitted. Johnny has decided that it would be better for him to convict you on a lesser charge, and give you a sentence which he has the right to impose. You remember that the Treaty allows him to inflict any punishment short of death. Therefore his idea is that he should have your hands and feet cut off, your eyes put out, your tongue cut out, castrate you—and let you go.”

  Cuffee stared at them.

  “You must be crazy,” he sneered.
“I shall appeal to the Governor—”

  “The sentence is to be carried out tonight.”

  Cuffee licked his lips. He could not believe his ears, but Johnny’s face was expressionless and implacable. And something in Cuffee’s own cosmogony, harking back to a primitive heritage which at any other time he would have been the first to deride, made him believe that a man of his own race could well be capable of such savagery.

  “You’re off your head, Johnny,” he said in a husky mumble of horror. “England would never let you get away with that, Treaty or no Treaty. You’d pay for it in the end, you and all the Maroons.”

  “That’s what I’ve tried to tell him,” said the Saint. “But he won’t listen. His mind’s made up. And by the time the British Parliament could do anything about it, it’ll be too late to do you any good. The best I’ve been able to do is persuade him to let you take an easier way out for yourself, if you want to.”

  He brought one hand from behind his back, and Cuffee saw that there was a coiled length of rope in it. Cuffee gazed at it numbly as the Saint laid it across his knees.

  “It’s a strong rope,” said the Saint, “and so are the beams over your head. You’ll be left alone for half an hour before they come for you. I’m sorry, but that’s all I could do.”

  He turned and walked out of the room, and Johnny followed him, closing the door after them.

  They stood in front of the house, under the stars, looking at the fires that had been lighted on the parade-ground and hearing the voices of the Maroons who, having been brought together anyway, had decided with typical good spirits to make their convening an excuse for a feast and celebration. Excited chattering voices which, to a guilty man, could easily sound like the ominous hysteria of a sadistic mob…

  “You know, sah,” Johnny said, “I happened to see an old map of Jamaica in Kingston, an’ I saw what they used to call this part of the country. You know what it was? The District of Look Behind. I kept rememberin’ that when we were at the Peace Cave, thinkin’ how they used to ambush the redcoats. Kind of gives you a shudder, doesn’t it?”