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Whose Business Is To Live
by
“Huh?–I can see myself,” Peter retorted, wiping his greasy nose on a wad of greasy cotton waste. “I got some cold. Besides, this night-drivin’ ain’t good for my complexion.”
“My boy’s up there,” Habert said.
“Well, he’s bigger’n I am, and I reckon he can take care of himself.”
“And there’s a woman there–Miss Drexel,” Davies said quietly.
“Who? Miss Drexel? Why didn’t you say so at first!” Peter demanded grievedly. He sighed and added, “Well, climb in an’ make a start. Better get your Dutch friends to donate me about twenty gallons of gasoline if you want to get anywhere.”
* * * * *
“Won’t do you no good to lay low,” Peter Tonsburg remarked, as, at full speed, headed up river, the Topila’s searchlight stabbed them. “High or low, if one of them shells hits in the vicinity–good night!”
Immediately thereafter the Topila erupted. The roar of the Chill’s exhaust nearly drowned the roar of the guns, but the fragile hull of the craft was shaken and rocked by the bursting shells. An occasional bullet thudded into or pinged off the Chill, and, despite Peter’s warning that, high or low, they were bound to get it if it came to them, every man on board, including Peter, crouched, with chest contracted by drawn-in shoulders, in an instinctive and purely unconscious effort to lessen the area of body he presented as a target or receptacle for flying fragments of steel.
The Topila was a federal gunboat. To complicate the affair, the constitutionalists, gathered on the north shore in the siege of Tampico, opened up on the speedboat with many rifles and a machine gun.
“Lord, I’m glad they’re Mexicans, and not Americans,” Habert observed, after five mad minutes in which no damage had been received. “Mexicans are born with guns in their hands, and they never learn to use them.”
Nor was the Chill or any man aboard damaged when at last she rounded the bend of river that shielded her from the searchlight.
“I’ll have you in Panuco town in less’n three hours, … if we don’t hit a log,” Peter leaned back and shouted in Wemple’s ear. “And if we do hit driftwood, I’ll have you in the swim quicker than that.”
Chill II tore her way through the darkness, steered by the tow-headed youth who knew every foot of the river and who guided his course by the loom of the banks in the dim starlight. A smart breeze, kicking up spiteful wavelets on the wider reaches, splashed them with sheeted water as well as fine-flung spray. And, in the face of the warmth of the tropic night, the wind, added to the speed of the boat, chilled them through their wet clothes.
“Now I know why she was named the Chill,” Habert observed betwixt chattering teeth.
But conversation languished during the nearly three hours of drive through the darkness. Once, by the exhaust, they knew that they passed an unlighted launch bound down stream. And once, a glare of light, near the south bank, as they passed through the Toreno field, aroused brief debate as to whether it was the Toreno wells, or the bungalow on Merrick’s banana plantation that flared so fiercely.
At the end of an hour, Peter slowed down and ran in to the bank.
“I got a cache of gasoline here–ten gallons,” he explained, “and it’s just as well to know it’s here for the back trip.” Without leaving the boat, fishing arm-deep into the brush, he announced, “All hunky-dory.” He proceeded to oil the engine. “Huh!” he soliloquized for their benefit. “I was just readin’ a magazine yarn last night. ‘Whose Business Is to Die,’ was its title. An’ all I got to say is, ‘The hell it is.’ A man’s business is to live. Maybe you thought it was our business to die when the Topila was pepper-in’ us. But you was wrong. We’re alive, ain’t we? We beat her to it. That’s the game. Nobody’s got any business to die. I ain’t never goin’ to die, if I’ve got any say about it.”