“You bet,” quoth Yi Poon. “I got witness. He got good eye-sight. He see man stick knife in the Senor Alfaro’s back in the dark. His name ...”
“Yes, yes,” Enrico breathed his suspense.
“One thousand dollars his name,” said Yi Poon, hesitating to make up his mind to what kind of dollars he could dare to claim. “One thousand dollars gold,” he concluded.
Enrico forgot that he had deputed the transaction to his eldest son.
And Yi Poon, calling softly down the steps into the shrubbery, evoked the pulque-ravaged peon, a real-looking ghost who slowly advanced and tottered up the steps.
At the same time, on the edge of town, twenty mounted men, among whom were the gendarmes Rafael, Ignacio, Augustino, and Vicente, herded a pack train of more than twenty mules and waited the command of the Jefe to depart on they knew not what mysterious adventure into the Cordilleras. What they did know was that, herded carefully apart from all other animals, was a strapping big mule loaded with two hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite. Also, they knew that the delay was due to the Senor Torres, who had ridden away along the beach with the dreaded Caroo murderer, José Mancheno, who, only by the grace of God and of the Jefe Politico, had been kept for years from expiating on the scaffold his various offenses against life and law.
And, while Torres waited on the beach and held the Caroo’s horse and an extra horse, the Caroo ascended on foot the winding road that led to the hacienda of the Solanos. Little did Torres guess that twenty feet away, in the jungle that encroached on the beach, lay a placid-sleeping, pulque-drunken, old peon, with, crouching beside him, a very alert and very sober Chinese with a recently acquired thousand dollars stowed under his belt. Yi Poon had had barely time to drag the peon into hiding when Torres rode along in the sand and stopped almost beside him.
Up at the hacienda, all members of the household were going to bed. Leoncia, just starting to let down her hair, stopped when she heard the rattle of tiny pebbles against her windows. Warning her in low whispers to make no noise, José Mancheno handed her a crumpled note which Torres had written, saying mysteriously:
“From a strange Chinaman who waits not a hundred feet away on the edge of the shrubbery.”