Сердца трех / Hearts of Three

Not more than ten years of age, by their size, they seemed much older when judged by the shrewdness of their eyes and faces. Each wore a single marvelous garment, so that between them it could be said they shared a shirt and pants. But such a shirt! And such pants! The latter, man-size, of ancient duck, were buttoned around the lad’s neck, the waistband reefed with knotted twine so as not to slip down over his shoulders. His arms were thrust through the holes where the side-pockets had been. The legs of the pants had been hacked off with a knife to suit his own diminutive length of limb.

The tails of the man’s shirt on the other boy dragged on the ground.

�Vamos!’ Alesandro shouted fiercely at them to be gone.

But the boy in the pants gravely removed a stone which he had been carrying on top of his bare head, exposing a letter which had been thus carried. Alesandro leaned over, took the letter, and with a glance at the inscription passed it to Leoncia, while the boys began whining for money.

Francis, smiling despite himself at the spectacle of them, tossed them a few pieces of small silver, whereupon the shirt and the pants toddled away down the path.

The letter was from Henry, and Leoncia scanned it hurriedly. It was not precisely in farewell, for he wrote in the tenour of a man who never expected to die save by some inconceivable accident. Nevertheless, on the chance of such inconceivable thing becoming possible, Henry did manage to say good-bye and to include a facetious recommendation to Leoncia not to forget Francis, who was well worth remembering because he was so much like himself, Henry.

Leoncia’s first impulse was to show the letter to the others, but the portion about Francis withstrained her.

�It’s from Henry,’ she said, tucking the note into her bosom. �There is nothing of importance. He seems to have not the slightest doubt that he will escape somehow.’ �We shall see that he does,’ Francis declared positively.

With a grateful smile to him, and with one of interrogation to Torres, Leoncia said:

�You were speaking of a plan, Señor Torres?’

Torres smiled, twisted his mustache, and struck an attitude of importance.

�There is one way, the Gringo, Anglo-Saxon way, and it is simple, straight to the point. That is just what it is, straight to the point. We will go and take Henry out of jail in forthright, brutal and direct Gringo fashion. It is the one thing they will not expect.