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

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      “Such as?”

      The girl quoted: “Exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”

      Castor laughed. “That is Wordsworth, isn’t it? It is a good answer, Lady Roylance, from your point of view. I am prepared of admit that Lord Clanroyden has allies—at any rate, he has friends. He need not be lonely.”

      “You are lonely?” she asked with kind eyes.

      “I have always been rather lonely… Perhaps… if I had met someone like you… long ago… I should not be so lonely to-day.”

      It was Archie who brought the first big news. One evening he appeared at dinner with his left arm in a sling. “Not a wound,” he explained. “It was my own dashed silliness in getting too near the business end of a mule. I’ve been having a giddy time and I’m badly short of sleep. How are things going—? Pas si bete, as they say—except for Sandy. Old Sandy has gone stark mad. At present it’s a useful kind of madness, but the question is how long it will be till he goes clean off his rocker. He’s been doing pretty desperate things.”

      Later he explained.

      “Lossberg is making war according to the books. Sandy its down and thinks out very carefully what the books direct and then does the exact opposite. He is trying to draw the enemy deep into the country, and for that purpose he is making a feature of Fort Castor. We’ve a pretty useful intelligence service, and the best part of it is that section which we put at Lossberg’s disposal. You see, having the country on our side, we have a lot of enthusiastic volunteers. Lossberg picks up some Indian or half-starved mestizo who is easily frightened into telling what he knows. The poor devil is obviously speaking the truth, for he is too cared and stupid to lie. Only what he says has been carefully pumped into him by our little lot. The result is that Lossberg has got it into his head that Fort Castor is our big base, and is stretching his claws round it as carefully as a cat stalking a mouse. He has moved up the better part of a division. But there’s nothing in Fort Castor except mounted patrols. We put up a beautiful camouflage and let Lossberg’s flying men have a discreet look at it once in a while. But when he takes the place after some trouble he won’t find a tin of bully beef in it.”

      Somebody asked where Sandy was.

      “He was in Magdalena yesterday. We are organised in two armies. Escrick, with the Army of the North, is now divided between Loa and Magdalena, and he has a covered line of communications between them through the hills behind, just like what Stonewall Jackson had in the Shenandoah valley. The enemy has spotted neither. Peters, with the Army of the South, is playing the same game. Lossberg thinks he is based on the Indian pueblas in the Tierra Caliente from which he can threaten the Mines, and consequently he has a division strung out from the San Tome to the Universum and is building a sort of Great Wall of China in the shape of blockhouses. Peters just does enough to keep the Mines lively, but he isn’t worrying about them. All he wants is to get Lossberg rattled.”

      Archie pointed to the south-east corner of the big map. “There’s a spot there called Pacheco, just under the hills. That’s Peters’ real base. He’s got some nice country west of that for his scallywags to operate in. There should be news from that quarter pretty soon.”

      “Base?” he said in reply to a question of Castor’s. “Why, we haven’t any proper base, and we haven’t any communications to cut. We’re the most lightly equipped force in the world, for we don’t go in for high living. A bit of charqui and a bag of meal will last one of our fellows for a week. Also we know all the wells and water-holes, and Lossberg doesn’t. Water is going to give him a lot of trouble.”

      “Has he no one who knows the country?” Janet asked.

      “Not as we do. He’ll pick up somebody later, for we’re bound to have a traitor or two in our camp. Also there are your gunmen, Excellency. One or two of them have been a bit around. But he hasn’t got anybody yet, and has gone poking about, trusting to bad maps, and the lies we manage to feed him.”

      “What about his Air Force?”

      Bobby Latimer answered. “So far we’ve managed to keep it in order. We’ve nothing on them in the way of flying, for they’re nicely trained, but they can’t just fight in our way. And they haven’t any machines as good as our new Gladas. If this were a regular war, they’d be mighty good at contact work and bombing expeditions. You never saw prettier squadron flying. But we’ve no communications to bomb, and at present they’re wasting their efforts every night on Fort Castor.”

      “But do none of their planes get abroad and discover your real whereabouts? Magdalena, for example—or Loa?”

      “So far we haven’t let them. We can beat anything they’ve got in pace and we seem to have more appetite for a scrap. There’s been one or two very pretty dog-fights. Besides, it don’t signify if they spot Magdalena or Loa or even Pacheco. We could shift somewhere else in a couple of hours.”

      “But you have a base.” It was Castor who spoke. “Where we are sitting now is your base. If they take this, you are lost. If they even bomb it, you are deeply embarrassed.”

      “I think that’s right,” said Latimer. “Therefore it’s up to us to let no enemy planes north of Loa. So far they haven’t shown any inclination in this direction. They’re too much occupied with General Peters.”

      “Yet at any moment they may discover it?”

      “There’s no reason in the nature of things why they shouldn’t,” said Archie. “But it’s one thing for a chance plane to spot us and another thing for Lossberg to exploit his knowledge.”

      Three days later Archie returned in high spirits. He had two pieces of news. The first was that Bobby Latimer had brought down an enemy plane north of Loa. The pilot and observer were alive, and the plane was not too badly damaged, so they had added one to their stock of aircraft—a Seaforth monoplane, in the mechanism of which he discoursed at length. Happily they had the spares for it. He welcomed this new sign of enterprise on the part of Olifa as likely to relieve the tedium of his job. When Janet observed that, if one enemy could get as far as Loa, a second might get farther, Archie was reassuring.

      “The way I look at it is this. They’ve spotted Loa—they were bound to hear of it from spies and such-like. But they’re so darned unenterprising that only one of their planes gets through. If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? Loa is an easy mark, but this place from Lossberg’s lines would be dashed difficult, even for a swell like Bobby.”

      The other news was startling. Peters’s raiders had made the garrisons at the Mines nervous, and, since it was assumed that the guerrillas were based on the villages in the Indian reserve and drew their supplies thence, it was resolved to clear that country and bring the women and children into a huge concentration camp near the city.

      Archie was triumphant. “It’s what Sandy has been playing for, but he scarcely hoped to bring it off… Lossberg thinks the Tierra Caliente is an asset to us. Good Lord! it’s a millstone round our necks. Presently we should have had to feed these villages—a thing we had budgeted for—and this means that we shall now be a thousand per cent. better off for supplies. He’s a humane man, your General Lossberg. The concentrados will be a long sight better off with him than on their own, and if they get pinched a little when he gets pinched, we had made our book for that. Soon we’ll all have to draw in our belts… Sandy has made Lossberg hold the baby for him, which is what you might call strategy.”

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