pointed at her bare knee, where two tiny drops of blood oozed forth side by side from two scarcely perceptible lacerations.
“It was a viperine,” she said. “A deadly viperine. I shall be a dead woman in five minutes, and I am glad, glad, for then my heart will be tormented no more by you.”
She leveled an accusing finger at him, gasped the beginning of denunciation she could not utter, and sank down in a faint.
Francis knew about the snakes of Central America merely by hearsay, but the hearsay was terrible enough. Men talked of even mules and dogs dying in horrible agony five to ten minutes after being struck by tiny reptiles fifteen to twenty inches long. Small wonder she had fainted, was his thought, with so terribly rapid a poison doubtlessly beginning to work. His knowledge of the treatment of snake-bite was likewise hearsay, but flashed through his mind the recollection of the need of a tourniquet to shut off the circulation above the wound and prevent the poison from reaching the heart.
He pulled out his handkerchief and tied it loosely around her leg above the knee, thrust in a short piece of driftwood stick, and twisted the handkerchief to savage tightness. Next, and all by hearsay, working swiftly, he opened the small blade of his pocket-knife, burned it with several matches to make sure against germs, and cut carefully but remorsely into the two lacerations made by the snake’s fangs.
He was in a fright himself, working with feverish deftness and apprehending at any moment that the pangs of dissolution would begin to set in on the beautiful form before him. From all he had heard, the bodies of snake-victims began to swell quickly and prodigiously. Even as he finished excoriating the fang-wounds, his mind was made up to his next two acts. First, he would suck out all poison he possibly could; and, next, light a cigarette and with its live end proceed to cauterize the flesh.
But while he was still making light, criss-cross cuts with the point of his knife-blade, she began to move restlessly.
“Lie down,” he commanded, as she sat up, and just when he was bending his lips to the task.
In response, he received a resounding slap alongside of his face from her little hand. At the same instant the Indian lad danced out of the jungle, swinging a small dead snake by the tail and crying exultingly:
“Labarri! Labarri!”
At which Francis assumed the worst.
“Lie down, and be quiet!” he repeated harshly. “You haven’t a second to lose.”
But she had eyes only for the dead snake. Her relief was patent; but Francis was no witness to it, for he was bending again to perform the classic treatment of snake-bite.
“You dare!” she threatened him. “It’s only a baby labarri, and its bite is harmless. I thought it was a viperine. They look alike when the labarri is small.”
The constriction of the circulation by the tourniquet pained her, and she glanced down and discovered his handkerchief knotted around her leg.
“Oh, what have you done?”
A warm blush began to suffuse her face.
“But it was only a baby labarri,” she reproached him.
“You told me it was a viperine,” he retorted.
She hid her face in her hands, although the pink of flush burned furiously in her ears. Yet he could have sworn, unless it were hysteria, that she was laughing; and he knew for the first time how really hard was the task he had undertaken to put the ring of another man on her finger. So he deliberately hardened his heart against the beauty and fascination of her, and said bitterly:
“And now, I suppose some of your gentry will shoot me full of holes because I don’t know a labarri from a viperine. You might call some of the farm hands down to do it. Or maybe you’d like to take a shot at me yourself.”
But she seemed not to have heard, for she had arisen with the quick litheness to be expected of so gloriously fashioned a creature, and was stamping her foot on the sand.
“It’s asleep – my foot,” she explained with laughter unhidden this time by her hands.
“You’re acting perfectly disgracefully,” he assured her wickedly, “when you consider that I am the murderer of your uncle.”
Thus reminded, the laughter ceased and the color receded from her face. She made no reply, but bending, with fingers that trembled with anger she strove to unknot the handkerchief as if it were some loathsome thing.
“Better let me help,” he suggested pleasantly.
“You beast!” she flamed at him. “Step aside. Your shadow falls upon me.”
“Now you are delicious, charming,” he girded, belying the desire that stirred compellingly within him to clasp her in his arms. “You quite revive my last recollection of you here on the beach, one second reproaching me for not kissing you, the next second kissing me – yes, you did, too – and the third second threatening to destroy my digestion forever with that little tin toy pistol of yours. No; you haven’t changed an iota from last time. You’re the same spitfire of a Leoncia. You’d better let me untie that for you. Don’t you see the knot is jammed? Your little fingers can never manage it.”
She stamped her foot in sheer inarticulateness of rage.
“Lucky for me you don’t make a practice of taking your tin toy pistol in swimming with you,” he teased on, “or else there’d be a funeral right here on the beach pretty pronto of a perfectly nice young man whose intentions are never less than the best.”
The Indian boy returned at this moment running with her bathing wrap, which she snatched from him and put on hastily. Next, with the boy’s help, she attacked the knot again. When the handkerchief came off she flung it from her as if in truth it were a viperine.
“It was contamination,” she flashed, for his benefit.
But Francis, still engaged in hardening his heart against her, shook his head slowly and said:
“It doesn’t save you, Leoncia. I’ve left my mark on you that never will come off.”
He pointed to the excoriations he had made on her knee and laughed.
“The mark of the beast,” she came back, turning to go. “I warn you to take yourself off, Mr. Henry Morgan.”
But he stepped in her way.
“And now we’ll talk business, Miss Solano,” he said in changed tones. “And you will listen. Let your eyes flash all they please, but don’t interrupt me.” He stooped and picked up the note he had been engaged in writing. “I was just sending that to you by the boy when you screamed. Take it. Read it. It won’t bite you. It isn’t a viperine.”
Though she refused to receive it, her eyes involuntarily scanned the opening line:
I am the man whom you mistook for Henry Morgan…
She looked at him with startled eyes that could not comprehend much but which were guessing many vague things.
“On my honor,” he said gravely.
“You … are … not … Henry?” she gasped.
“No, I am not. Won’t you please take it and read.”
This time she complied, while he gazed with all his eyes upon the golden pallor of the sun on her tropic-touched blonde face which colored the blood beneath, or which was touched by the blood beneath, to the amazingly beautiful golden pallor.
Almost in a dream he discovered himself looking into her startled, questioning eyes of velvet brown.
“And who should have signed this?” she repeated.
He came to himself and bowed.
“But the name? – your name?”
“Morgan, Francis Morgan. As I explained there, Henry and I are some sort of distant relatives – forty-fifth cousins, or something like that.”
To his bewilderment, a great doubt suddenly dawned in her eyes, and the old