Whose Business Is To Live
by
Stanton Davies and Jim Wemple ceased from their talk to listen to an increase of uproar in the street. A volley of stones thrummed and boomed the wire mosquito nettings that protected the windows. It was a hot night, and the sweat of the heat stood on their faces as they listened. Arose the incoherent clamor of the mob, punctuated by individual cries in Mexican-Spanish. Least terrible among the obscene threats were: “Death to the Gringos!” “Kill the American pigs!” “Drown the American dogs in the sea!”
Stanton Davies and Jim Wemple shrugged their shoulders patiently to each other, and resumed their conversation, talking louder in order to make themselves heard above the uproar.
“The question is how,” Wemple said. “It’s forty-seven miles to Panuco, by river—-“
“And the land’s impossible, with Zaragoza’s and Villa’s men on the loot and maybe fraternizing,” Davies agreed.
Wemple nodded and continued: “And she’s at the East Coast Magnolia, two miles beyond, if she isn’t back at the hunting camp. We’ve got to get her—-“
“We’ve played pretty square in this matter, Wemple,” Davies said. “And we might as well speak up and acknowledge what each of us knows the other knows. You want her. I want her.”
Wemple lighted a cigarette and nodded.
“And now’s the time when it’s up to us to make a show as if we didn’t want her and that all we want is just to save her and get her down here.”
“And a truce until we do save her–I get you,” Wempel affirmed.
“A truce until we get her safe and sound back here in Tampico, or aboard a battleship. After that? …”
Both men shrugged shoulders and beamed on each other as their hands met in ratification.
Fresh volleys of stones thrummed against the wire-screened windows; a boy’s voice rose shrilly above the clamor, proclaiming death to the Gringos; and the house reverberated to the heavy crash of some battering ram against the street-door downstairs. Both men, snatching up automatic rifles, ran down to where their fire could command the threatened door.
“If they break in we’ve got to let them have it,” Wemple said.
Davies nodded quiet agreement, then inconsistently burst out with a lurid string of oaths.
“To think of it!” he explained his wrath. “One out of three of those curs outside has worked for you or me–lean-bellied, barefooted, poverty-stricken, glad for ten centavos a day if they could only get work. And we’ve given them steady jobs and a hundred and fifty centavos a a day, and here they are yelling for our blood.”
“Only the half breeds,” Davies corrected.
“You know what I mean,” Wemple replied. “The only peons we’ve lost are those that have been run off or shot.”
The attack on the door ceasing, they returned upstairs. Half a dozen scattered shots from farther along the street seemed to draw away the mob, for the neighborhood became comparatively quiet.
A whistle came to them through the open windows, and a man’s voice calling:
“Wemple! Open the door! It’s Habert! Want to talk to you!”
Wemple went down, returning in several minutes with a tidily-paunched, well-built, gray-haired American of fifty. He shook hands with Davies and flung himself into a chair, breathing heavily. He did not relinquish his clutch on the Colt’s 44 automatic pistol, although he immediately addressed himself to the task of fishing a filled clip of cartridges from the pocket of his linen coat. He had arrived hatless and breathless, and the blood from a stone-cut on the cheek oozed down his face. He, too, in a fit of anger, springing to his feet when he had changed clips in his pistol, burst out with mouth-filling profanity.
“They had an American flag in the dirt, stamping and spitting on it. And they told me to spit on it.”
Wemple and Davies regarded him with silent interrogation.
“Oh, I know what you’re wondering!” he flared out. “Would I a-spit on it in the pinch? That’s what’s eating you. I’ll answer. Straight out, brass tacks, I WOULD. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”