The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

8

Later that evening Farnham said meticulously, “Of course, Johnny, between ourselves, the Governor’ll have to approve my recommendation and confirm your appointment himself. But I don’t think we’ll have any trouble about that. He should be grateful to have such a tidy solution dropped into his lap…As for you, Simon, I think I’d feel better if you went ahead and laughed at me, instead of displaying such hypocritical Christian forbearance.”

“Because you’d never read the Treaty right to the end yourself?” said the Saint. “No, I did most of my laughing this morning, and not principally at you. Hereafter we’ll keep the joke to ourselves. Besides which, I doubt if anyone else would ever believe it.”

He lighted a cigarette and shook his head in rapture nevertheless.

“But what a fabulous little gem it is,” he said dreamily. “For more than two hundred years the legend of the Maroons has gone on. Away back somewhere, some clerk in whatever Government department it would be told some new clerk who was too lazy to look for himself his careless version of what the Treaty said. That clerk repeated it to his successor, who repeated it to the next man. Everyone accepted it and believed it. Each new incoming Governor heard about it from his staff, believed it, and perpetuated it. It was such general knowledge that nobody ever thought of questioning it, any more than they would have questioned the statement that Jamaica is a British colony. Jerry Dugdale, the policeman, believed it, and so did the Governor who bawled him out. You believed it. A copy of the Treaty was in the files all the time, but who ever looks in files? For maybe two centuries, nobody ever read the Treaty. Except probably Cuffee. But why should he blow his hand? It took a nosy bastard like me, sitting on a rock out in the wilderness, to read all through the damn thing and explode the lovely myth.”

“All right,” Farnham said stolidly. “There’s only one thing that bothers me now. It’s about Cuffee. None of us has any reasonable doubt that he murdered the former Colonel—or if he didn’t do it himself, he instigated it. But the Treaty doesn’t allow you to hang him, Johnny. You have to hand him over to our authorities. And there’s no evidence against him that would stand up in a regular court. I’m very much afraid that he’ll eventually get off scot-free.”

The Saint stood up.

“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” he said soberly. “And I have an idea. But if you’ll excuse me, I’d rather tell Johnny alone. If you know nothing about it, you can’t have anything on your conscience.”

Mr Mark Cuffee had been gradually regaining his confidence as he endlessly paced the confines of the room that had become his cell. The men who guarded him now were half a dozen of the older generation, headed by the Commander, and he knew that it would have been a waste of breath to try to argue or coax them into changing their allegiance.

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