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

It was a comfortable society, with the secure good manners of a tiny aristocracy, but it knew of no world beyond its pale, and was profoundly uninterested in its neighbours.

      They went a little, too, into business circles, both Olifero and alien, the representatives of shipping and trading companies and the big foreign banks. This, too, was a pleasant world, good-tempered and prosperous. Here they heard much of politics, but it was business politics. The existing Government was spoken of with respect, but not with intimate knowledge; it functioned well, kept the country solvent, and left trade in peace. Politicians were a class by themselves, a dubious class, though it was believed that the present lot were honest. But they met none of the Copper people. These seemed to form an oligarchy apart, and were mentioned respectfully but distantly. When Archie asked about the Gran Seco he was only given statistics of output and an encomium on its efficiency. Of its President the commercial world of Olifa spoke as an ordinary automobile-manufacturer might speak of Henry Ford, as one who was a law to himself, an object to admire, but not to emulate.

      “This is a queer place,” Archie told Janet. “It seems to have two Governors—the Castor fellow and the President—and the ordinary man don’t seem to know or care much about either. It’s about time we started out for the Gran Seco.”

      But when Don Alejandro was approached on the matter he had to explain with many apologies that their permits had not arrived. There was some inconceivably foolish hitch, which he had not yet tracked down.

      “But the American troupe got through straight away,” Archie complained. “They left a week ago.”

      “I know. That is a way Americans have. Perhaps in your case the difficulty is Mr Wilbur. Officiously and quite unnecessarily he interested himself in getting your passes, so he said—and he may have exhausted his purchase in franking his countrymen through and raised a prejudice. As I have told you, his nation is not loved by our Government.”

      Don Alejandro went on to explain that the delay could only be a matter of days. “Meantime, why not visit my cousin at Veiro? There you must go some time, and this hiatus gives you the chance.”

      So to Veiro they went—fifty miles by train and twenty by motor-car along a superb concrete highway, which suddenly gave out four miles from the house, so that the journey was completed by a sandy track over primeval prairie. They arrived just at sunset, when the place swam in a clear coppery gold. The house was low and white and seemed to cover acres, with its adobe outbuildings, its great corrals for the cattle, and its trim red-roofed stables built on the English model. The palms of the coast had been left behind, and at this elevation the tropics had faded from the landscape. The garden was ablaze with coverts of hibiscus and plots of scarlet zinnias among the rough lawns, and the wind-breaks which flanked it were of acacias and walnuts. A big irrigation dam to the right caught the last rays of the sun, and beyond it the tender green of the alfalfa fields seemed a continuation of its waters. Far to the east, above the lifting savannahs, was a saw-like edge of tenuous white mountains which seemed to hang in the central heavens. There was a succession of thin spires now picked out with gold and rose. Archie asked their name.

      “Los Doce Apostolas—the Twelve Apostles,” said the driver, and rattled off a list of uncouth syllables.

      Don Mario Sanfuentes, the cousin of Don Alejandro, was small, spare, and blue-jowled, with the figure of a groom and the profound solemnity of the man who lives with horses. His wife was dead and his ranch and stables were to him both family and profession. He greeted his visitors with the grave courtesy of manner which needs no words to emphasise it. Their rooms were wide chambers with scrubbed wooden floors and windows looking across a broad verandah to a hundred miles of space, as bare and fresh as a convent dormitory. They had their meals in a dining-room which contained the remnants of the Sanfuentes heirlooms—cabinets of lacquer and tortoiseshell, a Murillo which had been an altar-piece in one of the forgotten churches of the Conquistadors, fantastic tapestries now faded into a mellow confusion, an Italian triptych of carved ivory, and a great galleon of tarnished silver. But they sat mostly in Don Mario’s own room, where in the evenings a wood fire was lit in the wide fireplace—a room where every table was littered with books and papers and cigar-boxes and quirts and crops and spurs, and from the walls looked down the delicate heads of those descendants of the Darley Arab, the Byerley Turk, and the Godolphin Barb whose fame has gone abroad wherever men love horses.

      By day Archie and Janet rode with their host about his state, examined his young stock, and tried out promising colts on the gallops, where by assiduous care a better turf lad been got than in the ordinary savannah. At every meal he talk was of horses, but at night, when the fire was lit, Don Mario from the depths of his well-rubbed armchair would speak at large of the land. In modern Olifa he had little interest, but he told of the diversions of his youth—his pack of foxhounds which had to be so constantly renewed from England that he gave up the game in despair, tiger hunting in the forest country, punitive expeditions against Indian horse-thieves from the hills. The time passed in a delicious calm: a combination, said Janet, of Newmarket and Scotland. And then on the last day of their stay came another visitor.

      “I cannot tell you about this country,” Don Mario said, “for I am an old horse-breeder who lives apart. But I have bidden young Luis de Marzaniga to sleep the night. His mother was cousin to the husband of my great-aunt’s niece. Luis has travelled abroad and seen the world, but specially he has travelled in Olifa. No. He is no politician, nor is he engaged in business. He is like me—what you call a country gentleman. But he has youth and inquisitiveness, both of which I have long since lost.”

      So, when the Roylances, having bathed and changed after a long ride in the sun, came down to dinner, they found a strange young man awaiting them. Don Mario’s evening garb had been a little like that of a deaf-mute at a funeral, but this young man wore the trimmest of dinner-jackets and the neatest of patent-leather shoes. His hair was as fair as Archie’s; but some colouring in his skin had made him sunburn not to Archie’s brick-red but to a rich golden brown. His eyes were brown, and the large expanse of white in them was the only foreign thing in his appearance. Otherwise he looked like a young English cavalry subaltern, whose duties permitted him to hunt three days a week.

      Dinner that evening was a cheerful meal. Don Luis chaffed his distant kinsman, with whom he was obviously in high favour, and Don Mario expanded in silent laughter. All spoke English—Don Mario very correct and stilted, Don Luis nobly ungrammatical but notably idiomatic. To Janet’s questions he replied that his education had been chiefly in Olifa, but that he had visited Europe seven times, and during the last six months of the War had had a commission in the French Air Force. He had only just returned from Paris. The mention of flying woke up Archie, and for a little the room hummed with technicalities. Archie inquired concerning the Olifa Air Force, and was told that it was efficient but small—not more than five squadrons. The Olifero did not take readily to the air, and the pilots were mostly foreigners—Germans who had found their career cut short at home, and, Don Luis thought, one or two Russians. “It is like all our army,” he said, “a little force of expert mercenaries. Olifa needs no army. In the future she will fight her battles with gold.”

      Don Luis was very ready to talk. He answered Archie’s many questions on sport with enthusiasm, and drew sketch-maps to illustrate the lie of the land. As to politics, he had not Don Mario’s apathy. He was ready with amusing portraits of Olifa’s statesmen and with cogent summaries of policy. He was also a humorist, and had a repertoire of tales. But he was a discreet young man, and ventured no opinion of his own. He was neither reactionary nor progressive, only an interested spectator.

      On the Gran Seco he was highly informing. He described the nature of the copper deposits, and the new processes which had reduced costs and made it the Golconda of Olifa. Castor he knew only by sight, “We of Olifa do not meet him, but we worship him from afar. He is the god who dwells in the sanctuary.”

      “The American Consul thought there might be trouble some day. The mine-labourers are rather a savage lot, aren’t they?”

      Don Luis laughed. “I think the wish may be—how you say?—mother to the thought. Senor Wilbur does not love the Gran Seco. No doubt it is a difficult place, but Senor Castor is beyond doubt a Napoleon and flourishes on difficulties. It