The Daughter of the Hawk Read online

  The Daughter of the Hawk

  By C. S. Forester

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter I

  This book is not going to be written about the Hawk, El Halcón Real—Hawk Royal—but one can hardly help mentioning him without plunging into further detail about him. Perhaps one day when the Encyclopaedia Britannica is again revised it will include two lines about him; not, of course, under the heading “Royle, Francis John”—he is not important enough for that—but he may be mentioned parenthetically under the heading “History” in the article dealing with the Rainless Republic under the equator where he died.

  He was a little man, fierce and frail as a flame, and men loved him. After the war he was Major Royle, late R.E., but he was not a professional soldier. He was a miner, and he had owned and managed a silver mine in the Andean foothills in the Rainless Republic before the war. After the war, and after the death of his young wife, he had left his little daughter in the charge of relatives and had gone back to the Rainless Coast. There he had found that the few vague and unsatisfactory letters he had received from his Spanish-American agent had told part of the truth. Five years is a long time in the life of a South American republic, especially when the grandmotherly supervision of the United States is distracted by a European war. A certain Señor Eguia, who had once been an entirely undistinguished lawyer on the Rainless Coast, had suddenly developed into a politician and then (it is a not unusual transition for a Spanish-American lawyer) into a militant statesman. Unexpectedly, he had proved more cunning, more truculent, more unsparingly bloodthirsty than his rivals, and after quite a small revolution and a few hundred perfectly legal executions he had ascended the presidential chair in the same week that Major Royle had earned the D.S.O. for his determined gallantry in destroying a bridge over the Aisne under heavy fire during the German offensive in 1918.

  Señor Eguia took prompt measures for the replenishment of the public treasury and of his private savings, making the most of the time allotted him during the preoccupation of the Great Powers. By methods entirely constitutional he had killed off the rich men of the Republic, and confiscated their estates. He cast a coverous eye upon Major Royle’s silver mine,—the only mine of any sort throughout the length and breadth of that most distressful country,—and what Eguia covered he obtained. Silver had soared to an amazing price now that gold had disappeared, and the produce of the mine would give Eguia the money he needed to pay his soldiers and to build the little fleet for which he yearned; it would give him part of the constant revenue which all South American potentates find so necessary and unobtainable. A senatorial decree (Eguia governed by means of senatorial decrees, which were legal and readily obtained) announced that the produce of the soil was inherently the property of the government. Another declared that the concession granted to Royle by Eguia’s predecessor’s predecessor, whose throat had long ago been cut by his negro guards, was unconstitutional and void from the first. Eguia quietly gained possession of Royle’s mine.

  Such was the state of affairs which Royle had found when he arrived on the Rainless Coast. The work to which he had devoted so much of his fierce energy, and on which he had steadily lavished all its increasing returns, was reft from him. The roads he had blasted through the Andean rocks, the peons he had trained to labor, the plant he had transported thither on muleback at such appalling cost were all of them in the hands of Eguia and his sallow-skinned henchmen. Royle. was nonchalantly informed of the fact, and his expostulations were pointedly countered by his arrest and deportation as an undesirable alien. Perhaps Eguia thought then that he was rid of him; perhaps he did not reckon on Royle’s reckless pugnacity; perhaps he did not care.

  However it was, no sooner had Royle disembarked in the neighboring republic, two hundred miles down the coast, than he turned back, bent either on regaining his own or on taking revenge. Here and there, almost moneyless though he was, he picked up recruits. (Dawkins, the man about whom this book is to be written, joined him later.) Then, careless of the odds against him, he flung a challenge at Eguia and appeared in the Rainless Republic, a rebel, a filibuster, a disturber of the established order.

  Whether or not the tale of those two bloody years will ever be told is more than man can guess—if by “told” is implied its publication in the civilization of the West. For on the Rainless Coast it is told a thousand times. The Indians of the Cordilleras tell it in the evenings, crouching round their fires in the piercing Andean cold, helping out their limited vocabulary with gesture and pantomime; the lovelorn youths of the cities, wailing their unrequited passions under curtained windows, drag mentions of the Hawk into their limping verses. For Royle became the Hawk, and perhaps by a simple translation of his name, he became El Halcón Real, Hawk Royal. It was his fierce swoops down from his mountain fastnesses which won him his name. The presidential troops wore themselves to rags in desperate marches and countermarches after him, but they could not catch him. Sometimes he had a bare dozen of men with him, sometimes as many as five hundred. With them he set Eguia’s dictatorship at defiance, and kept all the Rainless Republic in a state of turmoil. Anywhere within ten degrees of the equator you can hear tales of his reckless, insane valor. Some of them, as has been hinted, have already made their way into verse, and perhaps a century hence will witness the blossoming of some new Iliad or Odyssey which will represent the blending of these embryo sagas and will recount the bloody history of the rivalry between Hawk Royal and El Presidente Eguia.

  Men thought he was more than human, although they loved him. Eguia’s press said he was mad, and that might perhaps be nearer the truth; for the death of his young wife may have brought him the happy madness of not caring whether he lived or died. Twice he had eluded pursuing regiments, and, pelting into the coastal plain with his shoeless followers, he had borne panic into the streets of Bolivar itself, and the government had tottered almost to destruction before desperate forced marches had brought up sufficient regular troops to bar even his path. He had established a navy of canoes on the long lake between the Cordilleras and had thereby given a most instructive demonstration of the efficiency and the limitations of sea power. His men went unpaid and almost unfed, for the most part, but the magic of his personality and his marvelous energy succeeded in keeping a faithful few round him.

  An early recruit was Henry Dawkins, Englishman and loafer, with the usual doubtful past and more than doubtful future. Dawkins held by him to the end, acting as vice-admiral of the dugout navy and as lieutenant-general of the shoeless army, serving his chief with a steady devotion surprising in a man of his antecedents—although not at all surprising to one who had been in contact with the Hawk’s personality.

  Royle’s success could not last. He had taken every chance Fate offered him. A dozen times he had faced situations wherein the odds against his coming through were at least a hundred to one, and each time he had emerged with his life and with some of his ragged regiment at his back. But Eguia fought him with savage energy, and Eguia had the power of the long purse. The end of the European war and the topsy-turvydom of the European exchanges made i
t possible for him to buy all the arms and ammunition he needed, and to officer his straggling battalions with hard-bitten German infantry majors. A steel motor-boat armed with machine-guns, borne in sections with infinite labor over the foot-hills of the Cordilleras, swept the Hawk’s dugout navy from the lake, and his conscript battalions held furiously on to the Hawk’s trail along the Andean snow-line, while the German officers saw to it that never again could the Hawk have a chance of surprising his pursuers, as he had done so often before, and of driving ten times his strength before him with many invaluable captures of rifles and cartridges. Turn and double as he might, there was always some hard-marching brigade at his heels. His tiny army, with never a chance of plundering for food, fell piecemeal into the pursuer’s hands. At first they were crucified or hanged or burned alive, according to Eguia’s whim at the moment, but later they were not killed out of hand; Eguia had found another use for them.

  The end came after one last spattering skirmish. A bullet pierced the Hawk’s foot, and although the faithful Dawkins got him away the few survivors of the battle dropped away from them during the night. Dawkins and the Hawk, on overdriven mules, eluded pursuit for days, starving in the piercing cold. Gangrene appeared in the Hawk’s wound. He died, a merciful death, in Dawkins’ arms even as the inexorable pursuers came in sight again across the limitless hills. But Dawkins, they spared, because Eguia had issued orders that he wanted prisoners—healthy, able-bodied prisoners.

  Chapter II

  Perhaps Eguia had not really intended to spare the Englishman, Henry Dawkins, for he had been the Hawk’s right hand for eighteen bloody months. Nevertheless, when at last the news reached him that the Hawk was dead and Dawkins a captive, Eguia relented, for his own purposes, and suffered him to live, for Dawkins had inspired no devotion and was the hero of no budding legends. Besides, Dawkins was a man of powerful build, heavy-shouldered and ample-thighed, and Eguia had need of men like that.

  To explain this need of Eguia calls for a further excursion into history, and into geological history as well as political history. Off the Rainless Coast of South America lies a number of little islands, as rainless as the coast they neighbor. The sea that surrounds them is full of fish; there is, and seemingly always has been, an inexhaustible supply of fish in the American Pacific. The islands have in consequence been the resort of uncounted millions of sea-birds during uncounted centuries, uncounted thousands of years, even. In the absence of rain the islands were in consequence coated thick with guano. During the ’fifties and ’sixties and ’seventies of last century, and since then to a less extent the guano was dug off the islands and brought to Europe round the Horn in the big wind-jammers. Fortunes were made from guano, and little wars were fought between South American states to determine possession of some of the guano islands. Previously no one had bothered about who owned these tiny fragments of arid land.

  Birds Island (to this day there is a doubt as to whether there should or should not be an apostrophe in the name; whether it derives from its myriads of sea-birds or from Bird, the Pacific buccaneer) did not quite come into the same category. It was a well-known and charted island, fifty miles from the Rainless Coast, and the guano prospectors had early visited it. But their report was unfavorable—the guano was not thick enough to make its collection profitable. Nevertheless, the prospectors had missed a huge prize, for they had not bothered to examine what lay beneath the guano.

  At some time or other, some centuries ago, a submarine earthquake had sunk Birds Island below the sea, along with its cap of guano, and after just the right interval (the geologists are in doubt as to whether this would be fifty or five hundred years) another disturbance had cast it to the surface again. The guano cap had been converted into one huge chunk of pure phosphate, much more valuable than mere guano, more valuable even than the nitrate fields on the mainland for which Chile and Peru had fought their desperate war in the ’eighties. Since the second upheaval just sufficient guano had been deposited to conceal from casual inspection the value of what lay beneath. Of late more than one of these islands have been proved to be what they are. Birds Island is the most recent of them, and the discovery occurred just when Eguia’s battalions were trampling out the last embers of the rebellion kindled by the Hawk.

  The island was part of the Rainless Republic—her neighbors who had idly let it fall into her hands long ago gnashed their teeth now at the news—and Eguia did in part what was expected of him. He deeded the island, in his presidential capacity, to himself in his private capacity. That was only natural and inevitable, but his next step was more unusual. Any ordinary president would have promptly sold his concession to an American or European syndicate, accepting half its value for a quick sale, but Eguia was of sterner stuff, while money was “tight” in all the markets. Eguia saw himself in possession of endless supplies of unpaid labor, and he proposed to work the island himself. General Aranguren, the least intelligent of his officials, was appointed governor of Birds Island and sent thither with half a battalion. The Navy (two obsolete torpedo-gunboats) brought him cargoes of stores—a distilling plant, for the island was of course waterless, and adobe bricks, and timber in small quantity, and endless supplies of sacking. The general was instructed to build a house for himself, another for his officers, some sort of compound for the men, and another—here Eguia disclosed his plan for the first time—for the convicts. And as soon as this was done (it did not take long) the Navy began to bring over living cargoes. Some two hundred convicts, dragged from the filthy prisons at Bolivar and elsewhere, composed the first batch. Ten of them were women. Eguia’s orders commanded him to set the women to stitching sacks while the men shoveled the island piecemeal into them. President Eguia went on to say what he considered the minimum task for a man or a woman. It was hardly necessary for him to say what would happen to the general if the convicts did not complete their daily quota. Other necessary work, such as building a jetty out on the eastern side of the island, where there was a channel through the coral barrier, was thrown in, in addition. Eguia was using the state prisoners to dig his phosphate for him, the Army to guard it, the Navy to transport it, all without cost to himself; disinterested observers said that Eguia was “on a good thing.”

  And Eguia saw no reason to soften the lot of those he sent to Birds Island. The monstrous task of filling and of carrying down to the jetty nineteen sacks of phosphate a day was imposed upon every male convict; and to each of the ten wretched women, who were penned off in a separate tiny compound, was given the task of daily providing the sacks used by nineteen men—three hundred sixty-one per day, in other words. Eguia did not rob the State unduly. It was put to little expense in the matter of food for the prisoners; and housing, in that climate, cost next to nothing—adobe walls and a few miles of barbed wire housed them satisfactorily enough.

  But prison diet and distilled water and overheavy labor and the monstrous cruelties of the guards combined to create a constant demand for fresh labor. Lucky convicts died after a fortnight on Birds Island; hardy ones survived for almost a year, if they did not develop the dreadful sores which the raw phosphate caused in some subjects. Justice was in consequence administered throughout the Rainless Republic with a strictness hitherto unknown—an all-embracing strictness, in fact. No one was ever tried nowadays without conviction, and conviction always carried with it a sentence of hard labor. Eguia saw to that in his instructions to his judges. But the Rainless Republic is small, and its population scanty. The supply of convicts hardly satisfied the demand. That was why Eguia’s officers’ eyes brightened when they looked at Henry Dawkins’ big shoulders, and the hard-bitten strength of his muscles.

  Chapter III

  The chain-gangs were setting out on their afternoon’s work at the close of the siesta. Fifty shabby soldiers were drawn up in line at the exit to the barbed-wire compound, and the adobe machine-gun tower outside one of its angles was fully manned. When twenty men had passed the first barrier the sergeant in command of the ga
te screamed out an order, and the sluggish tide of sulky prisoners eddied back, while the twenty men were harnessed, with the rapidity of long practise, into their equipment. This consisted of a very long chain, to which at regular intervals were attached twenty pair of shorter chains. One of each short pair was passed round the waist of the prisoner, pulled as tight as might be, and padlocked into position. To the corresponding short chains were permanently attached, alternately, a spade or a pickax. When a gang of twenty had thus been locked together two soldiers took command of it, at whose orders the chain-gang loaded themselves with sacks from a pile at hand, shouldered their tools, and marched clanking out of the second barrier up the slope to begin their work.

  The fourth chain-gang was the usual motley mixture. There were Spanish-Americans of all possible mixtures of blood: European, Indian and negro. One and all were lean and wolfish, and for the most part they were dressed in tattered shirts and drawers although a negro at the tail of the line was completely naked. Through the holes in their clothes could be seen long thick scars, varying in color from red to white, whose origin clearly lay in the látigo, the mule-whip, which trailed in the hand of the corporal in command. A fair proportion displayed the running angry sores which the phosphate caused in some subjects. Heads down, spiritless and starving, their chains beating a dreary time to their step, they marched under the changeless turquoise sky over the tumbled dusty earth.

  For on Birds Island there was not a blade of vegetation. It was just a vast rounded hummock of phosphate-covered rock protruding from the sea. At its westerly side it was cut into a steep cliff by the eternal Pacific swell, which broke in a continual recurrent thunder against it—a thunder which to the newcomers was the most noticeable noise in the island, but which was so steady and monotonous as to strike unheeded the ears of those who had been there for any length of time. Overhead and out over the blue sea wheeled clouds of sea-birds, white gannets and white gulls, black-and-white gulls, gray-and-white gulls, screaming in their high piping voices, with an occasional frigate-bird with his terrible red beak or an albatross soaring on motionless wings. One noticed the cry of the gulls however long one was on Birds Island, perhaps because it was variable, and because it ceased at night.