Tales of Mysteries & Espionage - John Buchan Edition. Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ of the case Nero was respectable compared to him… And yet I can’t hate him—simply because I can’t hold him responsible. He has no notion what he has done, for, with all his cleverness, there’s an odd, idiotic innocence about him. I nourished a most healthy disgust till I met him. But now, confound it, I rather like him.”

      “So do I,” said the girl emphatically. “Barbara doesn’t but I do. And I believe he rather likes us—even you, Sandy. You see, we are something that he has never quite met before, and we interest him desperately. He is busy summing us up, and that gives his mind something to work on. Now that I know him, I could no more hate him than I could hate a cyclone or an erupting volcano.”

      “You mean he is a sort of impersonal natural force?”

      “No, I don’t. He is a person, but very limited—as limited as a cyclone. His energies and his interests have been constricted into a narrow channel. I think he lacks imagination.”

      Sandy whistled.

      “Good for you, Janet. I should have said that his imagination was the most deadly and colossal thing about him.”

      “Yes—yes. But it is only one kind of imagination. Milton could imagine the scenery of Hell and Heaven, but he hadn’t enough imagination to understand his wife. He is still a little puzzled by us, and that makes him puzzled about himself. Up till now he had been mathematically certain about everything. If we make him uncertain, we may win… Now, I’m going to take him for a walk and continue his education.”

      Presently, into the orderly routine of the plateau came something of the stir of war. Messengers from the lowlands became more frequent, and Sandy had to take his sleep when he could, for he might be called upon at any hour. The wireless operators were kept busy, and at night there was much activity in the ravine which dropped seaward, for unlighted ships groped their way into the secret gulf.

      The aeroplanes, which were still used only for intelligence purposes, and not for combat, brought back more authentic news than the war correspondents cabled to the press of the world, and that they gained it at some risk was proved by more than one that returned with damaged planes and bullets in its fuselage.

      The Gobernador had shown little interest in the wireless messages from the world’s capitals. He had left Olifa with no more than a suit of dress-clothes, and had been fitted out from the wardrobe of Archie, who was much the same height and figure. One morning Sandy came in to breakfast with a new light in his eye.

      “Things are beginning to move, sir,” he told Castor. “The time has come to get into campaigning kit. We shan’t be a dressy staff, but we can’t go about like earth-stoppers any more.”

      Thereafter everyone appeared in simple khaki tunics and breeches. Castor submitted good-humouredly to the change.

      “You look like General Smuts, sir,” Archie told him, “only a little darker and less benevolent.”

      Castor smiled. “That would seem to be in keeping. Like Smuts, I am an intellectual compelled by fate to be a leader of guerrillas. Is it not so?”

      That night Sandy and young Latimer pinned up on the wall of the mess-hut a big map mounted on calico, and proceeded to ornament it with little flags.

      “There is your province, sir,” he said, “a better map than anything the Surveyor-General has in Olifa. The colour-washes represent altitudes. The red flags are our posts, and the green are the Olifa army. I am going to give a staff lecture, for the bell has rung and the curtain gone up.”

      The map showed only the northern half of the republic, from Olifa city to the apex where the great mountains crowded down upon the sea. From the Courts of the Morning the land fell in tiers—first the wooded shelves, then the barrens of the Seco Boreal, and then the broad shallow cup where the Mines and the city lay. From the Gran Seco city the country ran westward for a hundred miles till it ended in the rocky sierras of the coast. Eastward it rose into the savannahs of the Indian reserve and the Tierra Caliente, till it met the main chain of the Cordilleras. The map did not embrace this latter feature, and there was no sign on it of the pass into the Poison Country. The south boundary of the Gran Seco was a ridge of dolomite cliffs, broken apparently only at one place—by the long winding valley up which the railway ran from Santa Ana.

      From the contours it looked to be otherwise unapproachable from that side, save by one or two tortuous and difficult footpaths, at the head of which under Castor’s administration there had been block-houses and patrols. There was no breach at either end, for on the west this southern ridge ran out in the coast sierras, and on the east became a buttress of the main Cordilleras massif. There were red flags in the city and at the Universum, clusters at two points in the Indian Reserve, one of them very close to the mountains, and a chain running up towards the Courts of the Morning. In the plain of Olifa there was a big green concentration at Santa Ana, and a green blob half-way up the railway.

      “Lossberg has got his rolling stock at last,” Sandy explained. “He has his pioneers and one of his machine-gun battalions at the frontier, and his cavalry patrols were last night within five miles of the Gran Seco city.”

      Castor donned a pair of horn spectacles and examined the map closely. He studied especially the Seco Boreal and the eastern frontier. He ran his finger along the southern rim.

      “That was always a troublesome place,” he said. “Practicable for a mountaineer or an Indian, but scarcely more. At least, so our reports said. But we had to watch it. Rosas “—he smiled—”was always very strong about keeping posts there.”

      He took a step backward and surveyed the map.

      “It appears that the military gentlemen who write to the papers are right,” he said. “I seem to be in a very bad strategical position. Olifa can force a passage—it may take a little time and she may have losses, but she can fight her way up the railway to the Gran Seco. After that we are at her mercy, at least so far as the city and the Mines are concerned, for I do not suppose we can hope to win a field action against her.”

      “Not a chance,” said Sandy cheerfully.

      “Then nothing remains but a guerrilla war on our savannahs. I think she will beat us there, for ours is a hard dry soil and tanks and armoured cars can go anywhere. I speak as a civilian, but am I not right, Lord Clanroyden?”

      “Perfectly.”

      “Our troops are mounted?”

      “All of them.”

      “Where on earth did you get the horses? The Indian ponies are a miserable breed.”

      “Not so bad as you think,” Sandy smiled. “But we had other sources of supply. Olifa is a famous horse-breeding country.”

      “But how did you draw on Olifa? How did you get the horses up?”

      “Some day I will tell you—but not now.”

      The Gobernador looked puzzled.

      “I take it we have a certain amount of food and munitions?”

      “Enough to go on with.”

      “But not indefinitely… Then it looks as if before long our present dwelling-place would become a point of some importance. It is now our poste de commandement, and presently it may be our last refuge. We have access of the sea. If we can find ships, we shall have to make a СКАЧАТЬ