“And in the name of original sin and of all lovely lizards, who might you be?” “He is the honorable Senor Mariano Vercara è Hijos, Jefe Politico of San Antonio,” Torres replied. “Good night,” Francis laughed, remembering the man’s description as given to him by Henry. “I suppose you think I’ve broken some harbor rule or sanitary regulation by anchoring here. But you must settle such things with my captain, Captain Trefethen, a very estimable gentleman. I am only the charterer of the schooner—just a passenger. You will find Captain Trefethen right up in maritime law and custom.” “You are wanted for the murder of Alfaro Solano,” was Torres’ answer. “You didn’t fool me, Henry Morgan, with your talk up at the hacienda that you were some one else. I know that some one else. His name is Francis Morgan, and I do not hesitate to add that he is not a murderer, but a gentleman.” “Ye gods and little fishes!” Francis exclaimed. “And yet you shook hands with me, Senor Torres.” “I was fooled,” Torres admitted sadly. “But only for a moment. Will you come peaceably?” “As if——” Francis shrugged his shoulders eloquently at the six rifles. “I suppose you’ll give me a pronto trial and hang me at daybreak.” “Justice is swift in Panama,” the Jefe Politico replied, his English queerly accented but understandable. “But not so quick as that. We will not hang you at daybreak. Ten o’clock in the morning is more comfortable all around, don’t you think?” “Oh, by all means,” Francis retorted. “Make it eleven, or twelve noon—I won’t mind.” “You will kindly come with us, Senor,” Mariano Vercara è Hijos, said, the suavity of his diction not masking the iron of its intention. “Juan! Ignacio!” he ordered in Spanish. “Dismount! Take his weapons. No, it will not be necessary to tie his hands. Put him on the horse behind Gregorio.” * * * * * Francis, in a venerably whitewashed adobe cell with walls five feet thick, its earth floor carpeted with the forms of half a dozen sleeping peon prisoners, listened to a dim hammering not very distant, remembered the trial from which he had just emerged, and whistled long and low. The hour was half-past eight in the evening. The trial had begun at eight. The hammering was the hammering together of the scaffold beams, from which place of eminence he was scheduled at ten next morning to swing off into space supported from the ground by a rope around his neck. The trial had lasted half an hour by his watch. Twenty minutes would have covered it had Leoncia not burst in and prolonged it by the ten minutes courteously accorded her as the great lady of the Solano family. “The Jefe was right,” Francis acknowledged to himself in a matter of soliloquy. “Panama justice does move swiftly.”