“I could curse the race that bore me,” was the impatient observation of the Jefe.
“I have already cursed it,” said Torres.
“Haul away!” shouted Guillermo. “I have everything in my pockets save the stench; and I am suffocating. Haul quick, or I shall perish, and the three hundred pesos will perish with me. And there are more than three hundred. He must have emptied his bag.”
Ahead, on the trail, where the way grew steep and the horses without stamina rested and panted, Francis overtook his party.
“Never again shall I travel without minted coin of the realm,” he exulted, as he described what he had remained behind to see from the edge of the deserted plantation. “Henry, when I die and go to heaven, I shall have a stout bag of cash along with me. Even there could it redeem me from heaven alone knows what scrapes. Listen! They fought like cats and dogs about the mouth of the well. Nobody would trust anybody to descend into the well unless he deposited what he had previously picked up with those that remained at the top. They were out of hand. The Jefe, at the point of his gun, had to force the littlest and leanest of them to go down. And when he was down he blackmailed them before he would come up. And when he came up they broke their promises and gave him a beating. They were still beating him when I left.”
“But now your sack is empty,” said Henry.
“Which is our present and most pressing trouble,” Francis agreed. “Had I sufficient pesos I could keep the pursuit well behind us forever. I’m afraid I was too generous. I did not know how cheap the poor devils were. But I’ll tell you something that will make your hair stand up. Torres, Senor Torres, Senor Alvarez Torres, the elegant gentleman and old-time friend of you Solanos, is leading the pursuit along with the Jefe. He is furious at the delay. They almost had a rupture because the Jefe couldn’t keep his men in hand. Yes, sir, and he told the Jefe to go to hell. I distinctly heard him tell the Jefe to go to hell.”
Five miles farther on, the horses of Leoncia and her father in collapse, where the trail plunged into and ascended a dark ravine, Francis urged the others on and dropped behind. Giving them a few minutes’ start, he followed on behind, a self-constituted rearguard. Part way along, in an open space where grew only a thick sod of grass, he was dismayed to find the hoof-prints of the two horses staring at him as large as dinner plates from out of the sod. Into the hoof-prints had welled a dark, slimy fluid that his eye told him was crude oil. This was but the beginning, a sort of seepage from a side stream above off from the main flow. A hundred yards beyond he came upon the flow itself, a river of oil that on such a slope would have been a cataract had it been water. But being crude oil, as thick as molasses, it oozed slowly down the hill like so much molasses. And here, preferring to make his stand rather than to wade through the sticky mess, Francis sat down on a rock, laid his rifle on one side of him, his automatic pistol on the other side, rolled a cigarette, and kept his ears pricked for the first sounds of the pursuit.
And the beaten peon, threatened with more beatings and belaboring his over-ridden mare, rode across the top of the ravine above Francis, and, at the oil-well itself, had his exhausted animal collapse under him. With his heels he kicked her back to her feet, and with a stick belabored her to stagger away from him and on and into the jungle. And the first day of his adventures, although he did not know it, was not yet over. He, too, squatted on a stone, his feet out of the oil, rolled a cigarette, and, as he smoked it, contemplated the flowing oil-well. The noise of approaching men startled him, and he fled into the immediately adjacent jungle, from which he peered forth and saw two strange men appear. They came directly to the well, and, by an iron wheel turning the valve, choked down the flow still further.
“No more,” commanded the one who seemed to be leader. “Another turn, and the pressure will blow out the pipes – for so the Gringo engineer has warned me most carefully.”
And a slight flow, beyond the limited safety, continued to run from the mouth of the gusher down the mountain side. Scarcely had the two men accomplished this, when a body of horsemen rode up, whom the peon in hiding recognized as the haciendado who owned him and the overseers and haciendados of neighboring plantations who delighted in running down a fugitive laborer in much the same way that the English delight in chasing the fox.
No, the two oil-men had seen nobody. But the haciendado who led saw the footprints of the mare, and spurred his horse to follow, his crowd at his heels.
The peon waited, smoked his cigarette quite to the finish, and cogitated. When all was clear, he ventured forth, turned the mechanism controlling the well wide open, watched the oil fountaining upward under the subterranean pressure and flowing down the mountain in a veritable river. Also, he listened to and noted the sobbing, and gasping, and bubbling of the escaping gas. This he did not comprehend, and all that saved him for his further adventures was the fact that he had used his last match to light his cigarette. In vain he searched his rags, his ears, and his hair. He was out of matches.
So, chuckling at the river of oil he was wantonly running to waste, and, remembering the canyon trail below, he plunged down the mountainside and upon Francis, who received him with extended automatic. Down went the peon on his frayed and frazzled knees in terror and supplication to the man he had twice betrayed that day. Francis studied him, at first without recognition, because of the bruised and lacerated face and head on which the blood had dried like a mask.
“Amigo, amigo,” chattered the peon.
But at that moment, from below on the ravine trail, Francis heard the clatter of a stone dislodged by some man’s foot. The next moment he identified what was left of the peon as the pitiable creature to whom he had given half the contents of his whiskey flask.
“Well, amigo,” Francis said in the native language, “it looks as if they are after you.”
“They will kill me, they will beat me to death, they are very angry,” the wretch quavered. “You are my only friend, my father and my mother, save me.”
“Can you shoot?” Francis demanded.
“I was a hunter in the Cordilleras before I was sold into slavery, Senor,” was the reply.
Francis passed him the automatic, motioned him to take shelter, and told him not to fire until sure of a hit. And to himself he mused: The golfers are out on the links right now at Tarrytown. And Mrs. Bellingham is on the clubhouse veranda wondering how she is going to pay the three thousand points she’s behind and praying for a change of luck. And – here am I, – Lord! Lord – backed up to a river of oil…
His musing ceased as abruptly as appeared the Jefe, Torres, and the gendarmes down the trail. As abruptly he fired his rifle, and as abruptly they fell back out of sight. He could not tell whether he had hit one, or whether the man had merely fallen in precipitate retreat. The pursuers did not care to make a rush of it, contenting themselves with bushwhacking. Francis and the peon did the same, sheltering behind rocks and bushes and frequently changing their positions.
At the end of an hour, the last cartridge in Francis’ rifle was all that remained. The peon, under his warnings and threats, still retained two cartridges in the automatic. But the hour had been an hour saved for Leoncia and her people, and Francis was contentedly aware that at any moment he could turn and escape by wading across the river of oil. So all was well, and would have been well, had not, from above, come an eruption of another body of men, who, from behind trees, fired as they descended. This was the haciendado and his fellow haciendados, in chase of the fugitive peon – although Francis did not know it. His conclusion was that it was another posse that was after him. The shots they fired at him were strongly confirmative.
The peon crawled to his side, showed him that two shots remained in the automatic he was returning to him, and impressively begged from him his box of matches. Next, the peon motioned him to cross the bottom of the canyon and climb the other side. With half a guess of the creature’s intention, Francis complied, from his new position of vantage emptying his last rifle cartridge at the advancing posse and sending it back into shelter down the ravine.
The next moment, the river of oil flared into flame from where the peon had touched a match to it. In the following moment, clear up the mountainside, the well itself sent a fountain of ignited gas a hundred feet into the air. And, in the moment after, the ravine itself poured a torrent of flame down upon the posse of Torres and the Jefe.
Scorched by the heat of the conflagration, Francis and the peon clawed up the opposite side of the ravine, circled around and past the blazing trail, and, at a dog-trot, raced up the recovered trail.
CHAPTER X
While Francis and the peon hurried up the ravine-trail in safety, the ravine itself, below where the oil flowed in, had become a river of flame, which drove the Jefe, Torres, and the gendarmes to scale the steep wall of the ravine. At the same time the party of haciendados in pursuit of the peon was compelled to claw back and up to escape out of the roaring canyon.
Ever the peon glanced back over his shoulder, until, with a cry of joy, he indicated a second black-smoke pillar rising in the air beyond the first burning well.
“More,” he chuckled. “There are more wells. They will all burn. And so shall they and all their race pay for the many blows they have beaten on me. And there is a lake of oil there, like the sea, like Juchitan Inlet it is so big.”
And Francis recollected the lake of oil about which the haciendado had told him – that, containing at least five million barrels which could not yet be piped to sea transport, lay open to the sky, merely in a natural depression in the ground and contained by an earth dam.
“How much are you worth?” he demanded of the peon with apparent irrelevance.
But the peon could not understand.
“How much are your clothes worth – all you’ve got on?”
“Half a peso, nay, half of a half peso,” the peon admitted ruefully, surveying what was left of his tattered rags.
“And other property?”
The wretched creature shrugged his shoulders in token of his utter destitution, then added bitterly:
“I possess nothing but a debt. I owe two hundred and fifty pesos. I am tied to it for life, damned with it for life like a man with a cancer. That is why I am a slave to the haciendado.”
“Huh!” Francis could not forbear to grin. “Worth two hundred and fifty pesos less than nothing, not even a cipher, a sheer abstraction of a minus quantity without existence save in the mathematical imagination of man, and yet here you are burning up not less than millions of pesos’ worth of oil. And if the strata is loose and erratic and the oil leaks up outside the tubing, the chances are that the oil-body of the entire field is ignited – say a billion dollars’ worth. Say, for an abstraction enjoying two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of non-existence, you are some hombre, believe me.”
Nothing of which the peon understood save the word “hombre.”
“I am a man,” he proclaimed, thrusting out his chest and straightening up his bruised head. “I am a hombre and I am a Maya.”
“Maya Indian – you?” Francis scoffed.
“Half Maya,” was the reluctant admission. “My father is pure Maya. But the Maya women of the Cordilleras did not satisfy him. He must love a mixed-breed woman of the tierra caliente. I was so born; but she afterward betrayed him for a Barbadoes nigger, and he went back to the Cordilleras to live. And, like my father, I was born to love a mixed breed of the tierra caliente. She wanted money, and my head was fevered with want of her, and I sold myself to be a peon for two hundred pesos. And I saw never her nor the money again. For five years I have been a peon. For five years I have slaved and been beaten, and behold, at the end of five years my debt is not two hundred but two hundred and fifty pesos.”
And while Francis Morgan and the long-suffering Maya half-breed plodded on deeper into the Cordilleras to overtake their party, and while the oil fields of Juchitan continued to go up in increasing smoke, still farther on, in the heart of the Cordilleras, were preparing other events destined to bring together all pursuers and all pursued – Francis and Henry and Leoncia and their party; the peon; the party of the haciendados; and the gendarmes of the Jefe, and, along with them, Alvarez Torres, eager to win for himself not only the promised reward of Thomas Regan but the possession of Leoncia Solano.
In a cave sat a man and a woman. Pretty the latter was, and young, a mestiza, or half-caste woman. By the light of a cheap kerosene lamp she read aloud from a calf-bound tome which was a Spanish translation of Blackstone. Both were barefooted and bare-armed, clad in hooded gabardines of sackcloth. Her hood lay back on her shoulders, exposing her black and generous head of hair. But the old man’s hood was cowled about his head after the fashion of a monk. The face, lofty and ascetic, beaked with power, was pure Spanish. Don Quixote might have worn precisely a similar face. But there was a difference. The eyes of this old man were closed in the perpetual dark of the blind. Never could he behold a windmill at which to tilt.
He sat, while the pretty mestiza read to him, listening and brooding, for all the world in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.” Nor was he a dreamer, nor a tilter of windmills, like Don Quixote. Despite his blindness, that ever veiled the apparent face of the world in invisibility, he was a man of action, and his soul was anything but blind, penetrating unerringly beneath the show of things to the heart and the soul of the world and reading its inmost sins and rapacities and noblenesses and virtues.
He lifted his hand and put a pause in the reading, while he thought aloud from the context of the reading.
“The law of man,” he said with slow certitude, “is to-day a game of wits. Not equity, but wit, is the game of law to-day. The law in its inception was good; but the way of the law, the practice of it, has led men off into false pursuits. They have mistaken the way for the goal, the means for the end. Yet is law law, and necessary, and good. Only, law, in its practice to-day, has gone astray. Judges and lawyers engage in competitions and affrays of wit and learning, quite forgetting the plaintiffs and defendants, before them and paying them, who are seeking equity and justice and not wit and learning.
“Yet is old Blackstone right. Under it all, at the bottom of it all, at the beginning of the building of the edifice of the law, is the quest, the earnest and sincere quest of righteous men, for justice and equity. But what is it that the Preacher said? ‘They made themselves many inventions.’ And the law, good in its beginning, has been invented out of all its intent, so that it serves neither litigants nor injured ones, but merely the fatted judges and the lean and hungry lawyers who achieve names and paunches if they prove themselves cleverer than their opponents and than the judges who render decision.”
He paused, still posed as Rodin’s “Thinker,” and meditated, while the mestiza woman waited his customary signal to resume the reading. At last, as out of a profound of thought in which universes had been weighed in the balance, he spoke:
“But we have law, here in the Cordilleras of Panama, that is just and right and all of equity. We work for no man and serve not even paunches. Sack-cloth and not broadcloth conduces to the equity of judicial decision. Read on, Mercedes. Blackstone is always right if always rightly read – which is what is called a paradox, and is what modern law ordinarily is, a paradox. Read on. Blackstone is the very foundation of human law – but, oh, how many wrongs are cleverly committed by clever men in his name!”
Ten minutes later, the blind thinker raised his head, sniffed the air, and gestured the girl to pause. Taking her cue from him, she, too, sniffed:
“Perhaps it is the lamp, O Just One,” she suggested.
“It is burning oil,” he said. “But it is not the lamp. It is from far away. Also, have I heard shooting in the canyons.”
“I heard nothing – ” she began.
“Daughter, you who see have not the need to hear that I have. There have been many shots fired in the canyons. Order my children to investigate and make report.”
Bowing reverently to the old man who could not see but who, by keen-trained hearing and conscious timing of her every muscular action, knew that she had bowed, the young woman lifted the curtain of blankets and passed out into the day. At either side the cave-mouth sat a man of the peon class. Each was armed with rifle and machete, while through their girdles were thrust naked-bladed knives. At the girl’s order, both arose and bowed, not to her, but to the command and the invisible source of the command. One of them tapped with the back of his machete against the stone upon which he had been sitting, then laid his ear to the stone and listened. In truth, the stone was but the out-jut of a vein of metalliferous ore that extended across and through the heart of the mountain. And beyond, on the opposite slope, in an eyrie commanding the magnificent panorama of the descending slopes of the Cordilleras, sat another peon who first listened with his ear pressed to similar metalliferous quartz, and next tapped response with his machete. After that, he stepped half a dozen paces to a tall tree, half-dead, reached into the hollow heart of it, and pulled on the rope within as a man might pull who was ringing a steeple bell.
But no sound was evoked. Instead, a lofty branch, fifty feet above his head, sticking out from the main-trunk like a semaphore arm, moved up and down like the semaphore arm it was. Two miles away, on a mountain crest, the branch of a similar semaphore tree replied. Still beyond that, and farther down the slopes, the flashing of a hand-mirror in the sun heliographed the relaying of the blind man’s message from the cave. And all that portion of the Cordilleras became voluble with coded speech of vibrating ore-veins, sun-flashings, and waving tree-branches.
While Enrico Solano, slenderly erect on his horse as an Indian youth and convoyed on either side by his sons, Alesandro and Ricardo, hanging to his saddle trappings, made the best of the time afforded them by Francis’ rearguard battle with the gendarmes, Leoncia, on her mount, and Henry Morgan, lagged behind. One or the other was continually glancing back for the sight of Francis overtaking them. Watching his opportunity, Henry took the back-trail. Five minutes afterward, Leoncia, no less anxious than he for Francis’ safety, tried to turn her horse about. But the animal, eager for the companionship of its mate ahead, refused to obey the rein, cut up and pranced, and then deliberately settled into a balk. Dismounting and throwing her reins on the ground in the Panamanian method of tethering a saddle horse, Leoncia took the back-trail on foot. So rapidly did she follow Henry, that she was almost treading on his heels when he encountered Francis and the peon. The next moment, both Henry and Francis were chiding her for her conduct; but in both their voices was the involuntary tenderness of love, which pleased neither to hear the other uttering.
Their hearts more active than their heads, they were caught in total surprise by the party of haciendados that dashed out upon them with covering rifles from the surrounding jungle. Despite the fact that they had thus captured the runaway peon, whom they proceeded to kick and cuff, all would have been well with Leoncia and the two Morgans had the owner of the peon, the old-time friend of the Solano family, been present. But an attack of the malarial fever, which was his due every third day, had stretched him out in a chill near the burning oilfield.
Nevertheless, though by their blows they reduced the peon to weepings and pleadings on his knees, the haciendados were courteously gentle to Leoncia and quite decent to Francis and Henry, even though they tied the hands of the latter two behind them in preparation for the march up the ravine slope to where the horses had been left. But upon the peon, with Latin-American cruelty, they continued to reiterate their rage.
Yet were they destined to arrive nowhere, by themselves, with their captives. Shouts of joy heralded the debouchment upon the scene of the Jefe’s gendarmes and of the Jefe and Alvarez Torres. Arose at once the rapid-fire, staccato, bastard-Latin of all men of both parties of pursuers, trying to explain and demanding explanation at one and the same time. And while the farrago of all talking simultaneously and of no one winning anywhere in understanding, made anarchy of speech, Torres, with a nod to Francis and a sneer of triumph to Henry, ranged before Leoncia and bowed low to her in true and deep hidalgo courtesy and respect.
“Listen!” he said, low-voiced, as she rebuffed him with an arm movement of repulsion. “Do not misunderstand me. Do not mistake me. I am here to save you, and, no matter what may happen, to protect you. You are the lady of my dreams. I will die for you – yes, and gladly, though far more gladly would I live for you.”
“I do not understand,” she replied curtly. “I do not see life or death in the issue. We have done no wrong. I have done no wrong, nor has my father. Nor has Francis Morgan, nor has Henry Morgan. Therefore, sir, the matter is not a question of life or death.”
Henry and Francis, shouldering close to Leoncia, on either side, listened and caught through the hubble-bubble of many voices the conversation of Leoncia and Torres.
“It is a question absolute of certain death by execution for Henry Morgan,” Torres persisted. “Proven beyond doubt is his conviction for the murder of Alfaro Solano, who was your own full-blood uncle and your father’s own full-blood brother. There is no chance to save Henry Morgan. But Francis Morgan can I save in all surety, if – ”
“If?” Leoncia queried, with almost the snap of jaws of a she-leopard.
“If … you prove kind to me, and marry me,” Torres said with magnificent steadiness, although two Gringos, helpless, their hands tied behind their backs, glared at him through their eyes their common desire for his immediate extinction.
Torres, in a genuine outburst of his passion, though his rapid glances had assured him of the helplessness of the two Morgans, seized her hands in his and urged:
“Leoncia, as your husband I might be able to do something for Henry. Even may it be possible for me to save his life and his neck, if he will yield to leaving Panama immediately.”
“You Spanish dog!” Henry snarled at him, struggling with his tied hands behind his back in an effort to free them.
“Gringo cur!” Torres retorted, as, with an open backhanded blow, he struck Henry on the mouth.
On the instant Henry’s foot shot out, and the kick in Torres’ side drove him staggering in the direction of Francis, who was no less quick with a kick of his own. Back and forth like a shuttlecock between the battledores, Torres was kicked from one man to the other, until the gendarmes seized the two Gringos and began to beat them in their helplessness. Torres not only urged the gendarmes on, but himself drew a knife; and a red tragedy might have happened with offended Latin-American blood up and raging, had not a score or more of armed men silently appeared and silently taken charge of the situation. Some of the mysterious newcomers were clad in cotton singlets and trousers, and others were in cowled gabardines of sackcloth.
The gendarmes and haciendados recoiled in fear, crossing themselves, muttering prayers and ejaculating: “The Blind Brigand!” “The Cruel Just One!” “They are his people!” “We are lost.”
But the much-beaten peon sprang forward and fell on his bleeding knees before a stern-faced man who appeared to be the leader of the Blind Brigand’s men. From the mouth of the peon poured forth a stream of loud lamentation and outcry for justice.
“You know that justice to which you appeal?” the leader spoke gutturally.
“Yes, the Cruel Justice,” the peon replied. “I know what it means to appeal to the Cruel Justice, yet do I appeal, for I seek justice and my cause is just.”
“I, too, demand the Cruel Justice!” Leoncia cried with flashing eyes, although she added in an undertone to Francis and Henry: “Whatever the Cruel Justice is.”
“It will have to go some to be unfairer than the justice we can expect from Torres and the Jefe,” Henry replied in similar undertones, then stepped forward boldly before the cowled leader and said loudly: “And I demand the Cruel Justice.”
The leader nodded.
“Me, too,” Francis murmured low, and then made loud demand.
The gendarmes did not seem to count in the matter, while the haciendados signified their willingness to abide by whatever justice the Blind Brigand might mete out to them. Only the Jefe objected.
“Maybe you don’t know who I am,” he blustered. “I am Mariano Vercara è Hijos, of long illustrious name and long and honorable career. I am Jefe Politico of San Antonio, the highest friend of the governor, and high in the confidence of the government of the Republic of Panama. I am the law. There is but one law and one justice, which is of Panama and not the Cordilleras. I protest against this mountain law you call the Cruel Justice. I shall send an army against your Blind Brigand, and the buzzards will peck his bones in San Juan.”
“Remember,” Torres sarcastically warned the irate Jefe, “that this is not San Antonio, but the bush of Juchitan. Also, you have no army.”
“Have these two men been unjust to any one who has appealed to the Cruel Justice?” the leader asked abruptly.
“Yes,” asseverated the peon. “They have beaten me. Everybody has beaten me. They, too, have beaten me and without cause. My hand is bloody. My body is bruised and torn. Again I appeal to the Cruel Justice, and I charge these two men with injustice.”
The leader nodded and to his own men indicated the disarming of the prisoners and the order of the march.
“Justice! – I demand equal justice!” Henry cried out. “My hands are tied behind my back. All hands should be so tied, or no hands be so tied. Besides, it is very difficult to walk when one is so tied.”
The shadow of a smile drifted the lips of the leader as he directed his men to cut the lashings that invidiously advertised the inequality complained of.
“Huh!” Francis grinned to Leoncia and Henry. “I have a vague memory that somewhere around a million years ago I used to live in a quiet little old burg called New York, where we foolishly thought we were the wildest and wickedest that ever cracked at a golf ball, electrocuted an Inspector of Police, battled with Tammany, or bid four nullos with five sure tricks in one’s own hand.”
“Huh!” Henry vouchsafed half an hour later, as the trail, from a lesser crest, afforded a view of higher crests beyond. “Huh! and hell’s bells! These gunny-sack chaps are not animals of savages. Look, Henry! They are semaphoring! See that near tree there, and that big one across the canyon. Watch the branches wave.”
Blindfold for a number of miles at the last, the prisoners, still blindfolded, were led into the cave where the Cruel Justice reigned. When the bandages were removed, they found themselves in a vast and lofty cavern, lighted by many torches, and, confronting them, a blind and white-haired man in sackcloth seated on a rock-hewn throne, with, beneath him, her shoulder at his knees, a pretty mestiza woman.
The blind man spoke, and in his voice was the thin and bell-like silver of age and weary wisdom.
“The Cruel Justice has been invoked. Speak! Who demands decision and equity?”
All held back, and not even the Jefe could summon heart of courage to protest against Cordilleras law.
“There is a woman present,” continued the Blind Brigand. “Let her speak first. All mortal men and women are guilty of something or else are charged by their fellows with some guilt.”
Henry and Francis were for with-straining her, but with an equal smile to them she addressed the Cruel Just One in clear and ringing tones:
“I only have aided the man I am engaged to marry to escape from death for a murder he did not commit.”
“You have spoken,” said the Blind Brigand. “Come forward to me.”
Piloted by sackcloth men, while the two Morgans who loved her were restless and perturbed, she was made to kneel at the blind man’s knees. The mestiza girl placed his hand on Leoncia’s head. For a full and solemn minute silence obtained, while the steady fingers of the Blind One rested about her forehead and registered the pulse-beats of her temples. Then he removed his hand and leaned back to decision.
“Arise, Senorita,” he pronounced. “Your heart is clean of evil. You go free. – Who else appeals to the Cruel Justice?”
Francis immediately stepped forward.
“I likewise helped the man to escape from an undeserved death. The man and I are of the same name, and, distantly, of the same blood.”
He, too, knelt, and felt the soft finger-lobes play delicately over his brows and temples and come to rest finally on the pulse of his wrist.
“It is not all clear to me,” said the Blind One. “You are not at rest nor at peace with your soul. There is trouble within you that vexes you.”
Suddenly the peon stepped forth and spoke unbidden, his voice evoking a thrill as of the shock of blasphemy from the sackcloth men.
“Oh, Just One, let this man go,” said the peon passionately. “Twice was I weak and betrayed him to his enemy this day, and twice this day has he protected me from my enemy and saved me.”
And the peon, once again on his knees, but this time at the knees of justice, thrilled and shivered with superstitious awe, as he felt wander over him the light but firm finger-touches of the strangest judge man ever knelt before. Bruises and lacerations were swiftly explored even to the shoulders and down the back.