PHOEBE
"You are a man of many novel adventures and varied enterprises," I said to Captain Patricio Malone."Do you believe that the possible element of good luck or bad luck--if there is such a thing as luck--has influenced your career or persisted for or against you to such an extent that you were forced to attribute results to the operation of the aforesaid good luck or bad luck?"
This question (of almost the dull insolence of legal phraseology) was put while we sat in Rousselin's little red-tiled cafe near Congo Square in New Orleans.
Brown-faced, white-hatted, finger-ringed captains of adventure came often to Rousselin's for the cognac.They came from sea and land, and were chary of relating the things they had seen--not because they were more wonderful than the fantasies of the Ananiases of print, but because they were so different.And I was a perpetual wedding-guest, always striving to cast my buttonhole over the finger of one of these mariners of fortune.This Captain Malone was a Hiberno-Iberian creole who had gone to and fro in the earth and walked up and down in it.He looked like any other well-dressed man of thirty-five whom you might meet, except that he was hopelessly weather-tanned, and wore on his chain an ancient ivory-and-gold Peruvian charm against evil, which has nothing at all to do with this story.
"My answer to your question," said the captain, smiling, "will be to tell you the story of Bad-Luck Kearny.That is, if you don't mind hearing it."
My reply was to pound on the table for Rousselin.
"Strolling along Tchoupitoulas Street one night," began Captain Malone, "I noticed, without especially taxing my interest, a small man walking rapidly toward me.He stepped upon a wooden cellar door, crashed through it, and disappeared.I rescued him from a heap of soft coal below.He dusted himself briskly, swearing fluently in a mechanical tone, as an underpaid actor recites the gypsy's curse.
Gratitude and the dust in his throat seemed to call for fluids to clear them away.His desire for liquidation was expressed so heartily that I went with him to a cafe down the street where we had some vile vermouth and bitters.
"Looking across that little table I had my first clear sight of Francis Kearny.He was about five feet seven, but as tough as a cypress knee.His hair was darkest red, his mouth such a mere slit that you wondered how the flood of his words came rushing from it.His eyes were the brightest and lightest blue and the hopefulest that I ever saw.He gave the double impression that he was at bay and that you had better not crowd him further.
"'Just in from a gold-hunting expedition on the coast of Costa Rica,'
he explained.'Second mate of a banana steamer told me the natives were panning out enough from the beach sands to buy all the rum, red calico, and parlour melodeons in the world.The day I got there a syndicate named Incorporated Jones gets a government concession to all minerals from a given point.For a next choice I take coast fever and count green and blue lizards for six weeks in a grass hut.I had to be notified when I was well, for the reptiles were actually there.Then I shipped back as third cook on a Norwegian tramp that blew up her boiler two miles below Quarantine.I was due to bust through that cellar door here to-night, so I hurried the rest of the way up the river, roustabouting on a lower coast packet that made up a landing for every fisherman that wanted a plug of tobacco.And now I'm here for what comes next.And it'll be along, it'll be along,' said this queer Mr.Kearny; 'it'll be along on the beams of my bright but not very particular star.'
"From the first the personality of Kearny charmed me.I saw in him the bold heart, the restless nature, and the valiant front against the buffets of fate that make his countrymen such valuable comrades in risk and adventure.And just then I was wanting such men.Moored at a fruit company's pier I had a 500-ton steamer ready to sail the next day with a cargo of sugar, lumber, and corrugated iron for a port in--well, let us call the country Esperando--it has not been long ago, and the name of Patricio Malone is still spoken there when its unsettled politics are discussed.Beneath the sugar and iron were packed a thousand Winchester rifles.In Aguas Frias, the capital, Don Rafael Valdevia, Minister of War, Esperando's greatest-hearted and most able patriot, awaited my coming.No doubt you have heard, with a smile, of the insignificant wars and uprisings in those little tropic republics.They make but a faint clamour against the din of great nations' battles; but down there, under all the ridiculous uniforms and petty diplomacy and senseless countermarching and intrigue, are to be found statesmen and patriots.Don Rafael Valdevia was one.His great ambition was to raise Esperando into peace and honest prosperity and the respect of the serious nations.So he waited for my rifles in Aguas Frias.But one would think I am trying to win a recruit in you!
No; it was Francis Kearny I wanted.And so I told him, speaking long over our execrable vermouth, breathing the stifling odour from garlic and tarpaulins, which, as you know, is the distinctive flavour of cafes in the lower slant of our city.I spoke of the tyrant President Cruz and the burdens that his green and insolent cruelty laid upon the people.And at that Kearny's tears flowed.And then I dried them with a picture of the fat rewards that would be ours when the oppressor should be overthrown and the wise and generous Valdevia in his seat.
Then Kearny leaped to his feet and wrung my hand with the strength of a roustabout.He was mine, he said, till the last minion of the hated despot was hurled from the highest peaks of the Cordilleras into the sea.
"I paid the score, and we went out.Near the door Kearny's elbow overturned an upright glass showcase, smashing it into little bits.I paid the storekeeper the price he asked.
"'Come to my hotel for the night,' I said to Kearny.'We sail to-morrow at noon.'
