Lang had had an idea that his troubles would be mostly ended when he reached Valparaiso. The first thing was to locate Morrison, who must surely be there; he could take no steps before that. The explorer was well known in the city, he knew, and between the hotels, the American consulate and the Anglo-Saxon population it should be easy to get on his traces.
It was still early in the day. He had drawn bad luck with his hotel, which turned out to be an establishment likely to provide a minimum of comfort at a maximum expense. However, it would do for a few days, and he did not want to waste time in finding better quarters.
He had a list of the chief hotels, and he had thought of telephoning to them all, but his first struggles with a Spanish central dissuaded him from this plan. He went out and hired a horse-drawn cab by the hour, and started through the rainy streets on his round of the hotels.
He went first to the American houses, the Hotel New York and the Great Western; then to the Prince of Wales and the Savoy, the English hotels; and finally to the Berliner and the Santiago and the Imperiale and the Kosmos. He drove from place to place as the day passed, and his hopes darkened. Morrison was not known to be in the city. Several of the hotel managers knew him, but did not remember having seen him for at least six months.
He had great hopes of the American consulate, however. He found indeed that the consul knew the explorer well, but had no idea that he might be in Valparaiso. Sooner or later, however, Morrison would be sure to call at the consulate, and the consul gave Lang a list of American residents and foreign boarding houses where something might be learned.
Lang spent the rest of that day in searching these out, and drew a blank every time. He finished on the heights east of the city, where he had ascended by one of the escalidores, having been forced to abandon the cab. The sun had gone down; dusk was falling, and the wet weather had cleared. Below him lay Valparaiso, a crescent of white lights on the bay, with the red stars of riding ships farther out, and beyond them again, vaguely perceived, the immensity of the Pacific.
He had come into temperate latitudes again, and a chill wind pierced his thin tropical clothing. He had a sudden lonely sense of being homeless and lost and in danger. He had broken into his last thousand dollars. A little more and he would be “on the beach,” penniless in a foreign land.
It was a sort of peril he had never had to face before, and the most paralyzing to a man who has not been trained to meet the rough face of the world. Lang felt his courage collapsing, and it was a medical training that suggested the practical remedy of plenty of food and drink. He returned to the lower town, located the best restaurant and ate a good dinner, regardless of expense. Considerably cheered by this, he went to bed early, with a pint of hot lemonade laced with rum as a preventive of chill, and this treatment temporarily stunned his discouragement and assured him a night of the sleep he needed.
Next morning he felt once more capable of grasping the situation by its thorniest end. He called again at the consulate, and then circled the business section by the water front, making inquiries at the American warehouses and importing agencies, and passed the whole day in these researches. He exhausted the field; he could think of nowhere else to look. He began to doubt whether Morrison had ever come to Valparaiso. And time was important.
He felt intensely worried, harassed, working in the dark. At a loss what to do, he wandered the whole length of the long curving water front. There were all sorts of vessels, and a tremendous rush and noise. A big freighter from Australia was unloading; the squat, sullen Indian roustabouts sweated and toiled. The mail boat he had come on was still in the harbor, and he looked at her, wondering when he would take that northward road again.
The end of the harbor shaded off into shacks, fishing boats, rotten little wharves, and he turned back again. He was walking slowly when his eye was caught by a gasoline cruiser moored beside a pier. He thought he had seen it before, but it had been deserted then, and now seemed to be making ready to go somewhere.
Lang knew a little of motor boats, and once had nearly bought one. This craft must have been an elaborate and expensive cruiser at one time, but was growing old and unkempt and paintless, as if she had fallen on evil ways. She was named the Chita, must have been some forty feet long, slim and shapely in lines, with a comfortable cabin and a glassed pilot house, and it occurred to Lang that she would be a most comfortable vessel for the expedition south, provided her engines were in good order.
A man was working over them then, stooping over some adjustment. A second man was stowing away boxes and small crates which a couple of stevedores were unloading from a truck. He too was stooping, but he straightened up and Lang met his eyes full.
It was rather intuition than recognition. The man had a full inch of stubby black beard all over his chin and jaws; he wore a green jersey, rough trousers and boots, and he looked every inch a Chilean sailor. He met Lang’s eye stolidly; but some subconscious shock startled a cry from Lang’s lips.
“What—Carroll?” he almost shouted.
The man at the engine looked up quickly—instantly bowed his head again; but not before Lang had had a glimpse of a thin, sullen young face that he knew for certain. Louie’s face was deeply browned and his rather light hair dyed black, but he was a type hard to disguise. Lang looked back at the deck hand, positive now.
“I’ve caught up with you, Carroll,” he said. “What are you doing here? Where’s Morrison?”
He was astonished at his own coolness, for this was the crisis; the collision that he had anticipated.
The man continued to stare unblinkingly.
“No hablo ingles,” he growled at last.
His assurance was so extreme that Lang would have doubted, but for surely having recognized the young gunman.
“You can’t bluff it out, Carroll,” he insisted. “Louie the Lope, too. I’ve got to have that money back now that you took off me in Panama. What are you going to do about it? Are you ready to talk?”
The man spread out his hands with a furious, characteristic Chilean gesture.
“Malediction!” he snarled, broke into a gust of unintelligible Spanish, spat violently over the side, and turned again to the freight he was handling.
Lang gazed, really almost staggered for a moment; then turned and slowly walked away. He was no longer in the dark; he could see his way now, and he wanted to think. He heard a step behind him, and a triumphant voice spoke quickly in his ear.
“I’ve got ’em right with me. The old professor’s eating out of my hand. Nothing doing, so far’s you are concerned, doc. They’ve got your number. They know how you tried to double cross ’em, and they’ve got no further use for you. You can go back to the States.”
It was all shot out almost before Lang could turn. Carroll turned back to the cruiser with a malicious grin under his black beard, and in that instant Lang believed his words implicitly.
They had the sound of truth; it was a revelation. For the first time he grasped that the Morrisons must really think that he had tried to forestall them, to beat them to the south. What else could they think?
His excited mind instantly reconstructed what must have happened. Morrison and Eva had hurried to Valparaiso. Carroll, already on the spot, had met them, induced them to hire this power boat, was preparing, along with Louie, to go south with them. Their disguise was reliable. Lang, knowing them well, had barely penetrated it.
The emeralds would be mined out of the ice. And then—— What he knew for certain was that neither Morrison nor Eva would ever see Valparaiso again.
That was if the ingenious plan worked. But Lang felt that he had the checkmate now in his power. He vowed never to lose sight of that boat. Sooner or later, before sailing, Morrison must come down to inspect its readiness. A chance to speak to the explorer was all he wanted.
He walked away without glancing back, circled a block, came back and established himself at a sidewalk café where he had a fair view of the Chita, distant a hundred yards. Here he sat, sipping inferior Chilean beer, intently spying.
A continual stream of boxes and crates and gasoline tins came down to the boat. Carroll and his confederate were working hard; they appeared and disappeared in and out the cabins, but no other visitor came near the cruiser. Comparative quiet settled on the water front at nightfall, and in the dusk Carroll and Louie departed, heading through the business district.
Lang kept to his post, however, till nearly ten o’clock. He was very hungry by this time and nauseated with beer, and he went back to his hotel, pondering whether he could not lay a charge of assault and robbery against his pair of enemies and have them extradited back to Panama. He was afraid of taking any steps less he frighten them off, for the important matter now was to keep them where he could see them.
He was back at his post of observation at eight the next morning, and it was not until an hour later that Louie appeared, slouching lazily down the quay, smoking the invariable cigarette. Carroll arrived a little later; they took in no more cargo, but were busy about the craft till noon, when they once more disappeared.
It was late in the afternoon before they returned, and they did not stay long. They were gone again before six, but Lang perseveringly remained at his café seat till late in the evening. Morrison had not appeared. It might be that the boat would not sail for days. Indeed, it seemed likely that the explorer would take as long a time for rest and recovery as possible.
But, resolved to take no chances, Lang was at the wharf at eight the next morning. Even as he approached afar off there seemed something empty about the wharf. Startled, he quickened his pace, almost breaking into a run. The slip was empty indeed. The cruiser was gone.
She might have been moved to another berth. He looked wildly up and down. Desperately he snatched at an Indian dockman, pointing to the empty place and struggling for Spanish.
“Donde esta la—la gasolena-bota?”
The roto stared blankly, then waved an arm wide, and rasped out something about “el mar.”
Providentially just then a young fellow passed whom Lang knew, one of the clerks from an American agency on the water front, where he had already inquired concerning Morrison.
“The boat’s sailed,” he interpreted, after a few words with the stevedore. “Went out just about daylight, the fellow says. Oh, yes, I know the Chita well. She used to be a yacht, but was sold; she’s been hired lately, and I heard that some American had her. Were you trying to catch her?” he asked, looking curiously at Lang’s perturbed face. “Not likely she’ll be gone far. I don’t know, though,” he added, after another exchange with the dockman. “He says she took aboard a hundred tins of petrol. Maybe the port officers will know where she sailed for.”
“Ask him if he knows who were in her—how many people?” said Lang.
The stevedore did not know. He had not seen her sailing. Lang turned away blindly, forgetting to tip the man or to thank the interpreter, his mind a boiling blackness of rage and disappointment.
Carroll had tricked him again. It was his own fault. He should have enlisted the police, the consul, some authority; or he should have had a watch kept on the boat day and night. Once more his own insane carelessness had ruined all.
There was only one chance now, and one fact stood out strongly from his defeat. He would have to throw his last stakes on the board where already the dearest lives to him on earth were risked. Far more than treasure was at stake now, and to win he would have to reach the glacier gate before the Chita.