The Saint on the Spanish Main (18 page)

His eyes widened incredulously over the next
three and final lines.

He read them again to make sure.

His pointing forefinger underlined them
slowly, and he looked up to meet the stunned stare of Johnny at his
shoulder.

“You see what I see, don’t you?”
said the Saint.

“Yes, sah. But——”

“Oh, no,” said the Saint, in a low
quavering voice.
“Oh, leaping lizards. Oh, holy Moses in the moun
tains!”

He was rolling the parchment up again with
shaking
fingers, stuffing it back into the protective tube. He
came to
his feet with a shout that brought all the others
around him.

“O blessed bureaucracy,” he yelled.
“O divine dust of
departmental archives. O rollicking ribbons of
red
tape!”

They gaped at him as if he had gone out of
his mind,
which perhaps he temporarily had. The immortal mag
nificence
of that moment was more than flesh and blood
could take with
equanimity. And it was all crystallized in the last few words of the Maroons’
charter, after he
had given up all hope—exactly like a charge of cavalry
pounding to
the rescue of a beleaguered outpost in the
last few feet of the
corniest horse opera ever filmed.

Simon’s ribs ached with laughter. He handed the tube back to the
man who had carried it, and clapped Johnny
and
the Commander ecstatically on the back, one with
each hand.

“Let’s get back to Accompong,” he said. “And some
body better find something we can eat on the way.
This
is going to be a day to remember,
and I don’t want to
starve to death
before I see the end of it.”

7

“I’ve told you till I’m blue in the
face,” David Farnham
said irritably. “I don’t know where Mr.
Templar went,
or why, or anything about it.”

It was late in the afternoon, and he must have re
peated the same statement twenty or thirty times
during
the day. It was unequivocally
true; for Mrs. Robertson,
who had
served him breakfast and a sandwich for lunch,
had been blandly unable to enlighten him on that sub
ject, or on the whereabouts of her husband, or the
Com
mander, or Johnny. Farnham was
considerably per
plexed, but not too
worried, for the attitudes of Cuffee
and
his henchmen clearly proved that they were equally
baffled by the disappearance.

Cuffee scowled. The Major, zealously taking
his cue, scowled even more ferociously. Others of the bodyguard
dutifully
joined in the glowering.

They were in a house at the edge of the
“parade-
ground” where Cuffee was living and making his
official
headquarters. Twenty yards in front of it, men had been
working
all day to build a sort of open bandstand about
fifteen feet square,
with a floor raised two feet above the
ground and stout poles at each corner
supporting a
thatched roof. Now it was
completed; and for the past hour the wide clearing had been gradually filling
with a motley crowd of men, drifting and conglomerating and
separating again uncertainly, with chattering
groups of
women on its outskirts and
small children chasing each
other
like puppies around its fringes. Several of Cuffee’s
elite corps were trying to marshal the mob into a
semblance of audience formation facing the newly
erected platform. They were now distinguished
with
broad red arm bands, which
seemed to give them the
added confidence and bravado of a uniform.

Cuffee looked at his watch. He was restless.
Although
he knew that schedules meant little to the Maroons, he
had set a
time for himself; and even more importantly, he sensed that if the suspense of
the people waiting to
hear him were prolonged beyond a certain
point it might
have the opposite effect from what he wanted.

With an abrupt decisiveness he stood up,
settled his
Sam
Browne belt, and put on his gilded helmet.

“The meeting will begin,” he said,
and looked at
Farnham. “I think you’ll want to listen to
this.”

“I shall be very interested,”
Farnham said calmly.

Cuffee turned and marched out, followed by
his adju
tant and the rest of his bodyguard, except for two who
remained with Farnham.

Farnham strolled out, relighting his pipe,
and the two
followed him. Cuffee had not invited him to join him on
the
rostrum, and Farnham wondered whether he should
take the invitation for granted or the
lack of it as a
diplomatic affront. His two
personal escorts, however, who seemed to have received prior instructions, fell
in
on either side of him and steered
him with suggestive pressures around the reviewing stand to a place close in
front of it and in line with one corner, where he
discov
ered that an empty wooden
crate had been placed on
which it
was indicated that he should sit. Thus he found himself nearer the platform
than the nearest of the other
spectators,
but set aside rather than in the center of a
special front row. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling
of being positioned more like a prisoner on trial,
which
was not relieved by the way
his escorts stationed them
selves just
behind him, one on each side, with their
machetes in hand. But he decided that his best course
was to appear unaware of anything out of the
ordinary
unless and until it was
forced upon him, and he crossed
his
legs composedly and tried to look as if he felt that he
was only being treated with proper deference.

A dozen of the elite guard had ranged
themselves in a
double rank from front to rear of the dais, with the Ma
jor in
the front of one file. At a word from him, they
raised their clenched
fists in a ragged salute, and Cuffee
strode down the human aisle to the
front of the stand,
where he raised his fist in salute to the audience.

There was a spatter of applause, which
Farnham ob
served was led and fomented by a number of the red-
armleted
who still circulated authoritatively through the
assembly.

Cuffee lowered his fist, and his guard of
honor
slouched out of formation and shuffled towards the
front of the stage.

“My friends,” Cuffee said,
“comrades, and brother
Maroons. I am your new Colonel. Colonel
Cuffee. I’ve
brought you here to meet me, and to let me tell you what
I’m going to do
for you, and for all our people, while
I’m
your leader.”

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 earnest
ness, 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 Ja
maica
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 dom
ination.

So far it was not much worse than any nation’s
jingoistic version
of its own trials and triumphs, al
though
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 be
cause 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 encroach
ments. 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 im
perialist 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 ban
dits; 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 im
pact 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 free
dom, 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!”