The Saint on the Spanish Main (19 page)

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 prom
ised 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, slid
ing
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. “Be
cause 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 Accom
pong, and in case of
his decease to his next brother Cap
tain Johnny; and failing him, Captain
Cuffee shall suc
ceed; 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, there
fore,” 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 prizefighter.

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. Ignor
ing 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. Al
ready 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 any more?
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 ap
pointment 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, Si
mon, 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
laugh
ing 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 dreami
ly. “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 him
self 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 Gov
ernor 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 muredred 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 sober
ly. “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
ex
perience 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 grand
stand
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 pro
cedures, 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.