Read Online The Three Sentinels by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page B

simple. He stopped in his compact stride and
flung out the palm of his hand.
    ‘If he wishes to fight, I told him there!’
    The gesture was for himself—an affirmation of faith. He saw that it was so undeniably true that he could safely feel pity for his victim if nothing more.
    ‘Suppose he does not wish to fight and offers guarantees for the future?’
    ‘What future? We will not forget the dead.’
    ‘Who says I forgot them?’
    ‘I take it back, brother. A little frankness between friends—that is all.’
    Gil pressed his arm.
    ‘Believe me, Rafael, after you and Chepe no one loved Catalina more than I. But Cabo Desierto—one must remember that there is a world outside it.’
    Rafael went on alone to his house, one of a casual unregimented cluster which stood close under the hillside beneath the first hairpin of the road. His son was in the yard, heartily flooding the
cans, tubs and troughs of flowers which Catalina had watered daily. Few of them seemed likely to recover from neglect.
    ‘Have you had a good day?’ he asked.
    It was Catalina’s invariable question when Rafael returned. To hear it again from Chepe reminded him how keenly he would have missed the repetition had she once omitted it.
    ‘So, so.’
    ‘The committee, papacito?’
    From one so small the word sounded overlarge; but that was natural enough. The committee was a great, vague unknown which swallowed up his father.
    ‘No, not the committee. I have been talking to the General Manager.’
    Rafael, as any other man, was bound to show his pride when speaking to wife or son. In public he would have affected an air of unconcern.
    ‘He is kind. I told you so.’
    ‘Well, now I believe all you said.’
    ‘Didn’t you then?’
    ‘When one is young, one does not always know the difference between play and truth.’
    ‘I do. I tell the truth.’
    ‘Yes? As when you speared the whale and it died?’
    ‘It was a whale and I stabbed it hard and my stick went in,’ the boy answered boldly.
    No getting out of that! And indeed it was a whale, a very small whale, and Chepe had been the first to find it stranded on the foreshore. Whether it died because he poked it with his stick was,
Catalina had said, beside the point.
    ‘And so you really spoke to Don Mateo on the night he arrived? What did he say?’
    ‘He said I must not go home past the police at the gate.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘He stayed a little longer. He played with the fish, too, and went to bed.’
    ‘But why did you go there?’
    The boy hesitated.
    ‘I thought he might kill people like the other.’
    ‘You walked all the way up to his house?’
    ‘I only meant to go up the hill. You said you would be late. So I jumped a truck on the bend. I go up and down as I like. But the truck went all the way to the old field. When it stopped,
the driver got out. I did not know him, so I got out too and followed him.’
    ‘Chepe, that is not right. I have told you that you are not to watch grown-up people secretly.’
    ‘Not with girls, you said. I saw him lift up some boards and then he went back to the truck and started to unload boxes and carry them away.’
    ‘What was in the boxes?’ Rafael asked, knowing his son.
    ‘Like in the box you told me not to touch. So while he was away at the boards I took one and climbed into Don Mateo’s garden.’
    ‘A cartridge?’
    ‘No. The sort you light and throw at policemen.’
    Rafael was startled by so plain a statement. When and from what conversation had the boy picked that up? He was as full of curiosity as a mouse in a tool shed, unsuspected until one caught a
glimpse of sensitive whiskers and one bright eye. His father fell back on a feeble excuse that killing policemen was wrong and one didn’t light it.
    ‘That was what Don Mateo said,’ Chepe answered, as if his opinion of the General Manager had now been confirmed by superior authority.
    Rafael’s passionate respect for his son stopped him from exclaiming what he thought