by Jack Boyle
“Thanks,” replied Nina. “You have clarified the atmosphere for both of us, I think. Anyway, in seventy-two hours we will be in Seattle, and then—’” Mary without replying threw herself on her berth and switched off the lights to save herself the ordeal of parrying Nina Francisco’s coldly analyzing eyes. In seventy-two hours the Humboldt would be in Seattle, she had said pointedly—in Seattle, with detectives waiting at the dock, she meant, and a prison, looming large and certainly in the background. Mary’s clenched fingers bit into her palms at the thought. Her fears were not for herself but for the man she loved. With the robbery still uncommitted,—for in the light of the information she had given him she had no thought that Blackie would persevere in his attempt to secure the gold,—Mary knew there would be little or nothing on the Humboldt that would justify a prison term; but she knew, too, that with a man of Boston Blackie’s crookworld prestige in their toils, the police would find or invent something for which he could be imprisoned.
Without realizing that she had slept, Mary was suddenly awakened to full consciousness by a stealthy movement near her in the pitch-dark cabin. She listened with every sense keyed to superlative alertness. The sound, a soft, slippered step, was repeated, and she felt a faint fresh breeze stir her hair. Instantly she realized its significance. The door of the stateroom, locked when she retired, now was ajar. Silently she raised herself and stared into ,the darkness. Her eyes detected a blacker blotch just within the cabin door, crouching furtively like an animal ready to spring. Now and then in the faint light that filtered in through the open porthole she caught a reflected glint of bright metal near the figure at the doorway. She recognized that changing, intermittent flash. A person within the cabin, watching the companionway—down which twenty steps distant was the door of the treasure-room—held a revolver.
Noiselessly as an Indian, Mary drew herself over the side of the berth till her feet touched the floor. She slipped into her dark-colored dressing-gown and with eyes still fixed on the figure in the doorway, felt beneath her pillow till her fingers grasped the butt of a revolver.
As she rose with slow caution, a faint sound reached her from the companionway—the gentle creak of a heavy door moving on little-used hinges. As if that were an awaited signal, the form in the doorway straightened and glided silently as a shadow out of the cabin into the pitch dark companionway. Mary, a second silent shadow, followed.
With eyes accustomed now to the darkness, Mary detected two forms in the narrow passageway which branched at right angles just beyond the treasure room. One—the one that had been within the door of her cabin—was slinking inch by inch along the wall with the stealth of a jungle cat stalking its prey. The other was bent over the lock of the treasure room door. In the absolute silence Mary heard the man’s fingers gently moving over the steel plate.
A faint ejaculation of astonishment came from the man before the strong-room. Then a tiny ray of light illumined the door for a fraction of a second. By its flash Mary saw that the massive padlock that should have guarded the gold was gone.
As the light winked out into absolute blackness, the figure stalking the man by the door moved quickly forward. Mary followed close behind.
Then a dozen amazing things happened at once:
From the cross companionway beyond the strong room, a third figure rose apparently from the floor and seized the man before the door. There was a fierce struggle, followed by a deafening splintering of wood as they crashed against the cabin partitions and fell to the floor. From between the struggling forms the sharp crack of a revolver followed a brilliant flash of flame which for a second lighted the faces of the fighting men. By the flash Mary saw them clearly.
The attacker, who had risen from the floor beyond the strong-room, wore a crook’s mask. The man who had fired the revolver for which both were now struggling desperately was Sir Arthur Cumberland.
As the shot reverberated down the narrow passageway, the figure that had stolen from the doorway of Mary’s cabin, leaped to the center of the melee with clubbed gun held high as if to end the battle with a single deadly blow. Mary sprang forward to intercept that blow in midair—but with her gun upraised to strike, she shrank back against the shattered woodwork in dazed perplexity. The one whose upraised arm she would have crushed had struck—but not at the masked man. Instead Nina Francisco’s gun butt—Mary recognized her now—struck the revolver from Sir Arthur Cumberland’s hand. Instantly his opponent seized it and crashed it solidly against the Englishman’s temple. Cumberland fell back, limp and senseless.
CHAPTER XIV
THE MYSTERY OF THE S. S. HUMBOLDT
What followed seemed a nightmare of unreality. A fourth form, appearing apparently from nowhere, passed swiftly down the companionway and vanished. The masked victor staggered to his feet and seemingly intent on making more noise and confusion, raised the unconscious Englishman and dashed him against the door of the purser’s cabin, which burst open.
Screams and shouts came from behind stateroom doors. Mary darted back to her own cabin, slipped her revolver beneath her pillow and switched on the lights just as the door was thrown open and Miss Nina Francisco entered, her clubbed revolver still in her hand. The girl shot the bolt in the door while the uproar in the companionway increased and running men poured down from the upper deck.
Without a glance toward Mary, Nina opened a grip, dropped the revolver into it and locked it. Then she drew on a pair of stockings, slipped her feet into shoes and with a calm, quick glance round the room as if to make sure she had forgotten nothing essential, threw open the door of the cabin and began to scream hysterically.
The companionway was lighted now, and ship’s officers and seamen, aided by the shaken and white-faced secretary, were raising the senseless form of Sir Arthur Cumberland.
Mary, peering over Nina’s shoulders, saw that the door of the strong-room was open. Blood splotches were everywhere, and Purser Jessen was loudly calling for the ship’s surgeon. The doctor and the Captain arrived together.
“What’s happened here, Mr. Jessen?” demanded McNaughton, gazing dumbfounded at the bloody, unconscious passenger, the open door of the strong room, the splintered woodwork.
“Blamed if I know, sir!” gasped his subordinate. “I was asleep when I heard a crash in the companionway. There was a shot, then another crash. Then this man came through the door of my cabin, tearing away the hinges.”
The Captain turned to his first officer.
“Put a guard before every stateroom on the steamer,” he commanded. “Let no one leave a cabin until I give permission. Move this crowd back, each to his stateroom,”—motioning to the half-dressed passengers who were pouring out of a dozen doors. “Doctor, take the injured man into Mr. Jessen’s cabin and attend him, while I find out what’s happening on this ship.”
As the passageway was cleared, the Captain picked up from the floor the padlock that had hung on the treasure-room door. It had been opened without leaving even a mutilating scratch.
“The strong-room padlock unlocked!” he gasped.
“Look,” cried Jessen, pointing to an object that lay beneath a fragment of splintered wood. The Captain picked it up, turning it over and over in his hand. It was the exact duplicate of the strong-room lock. Near by lay a revolver with blood-stained v handle.
“Follow me, Mr. Jessen,” McNaughton commanded.
Together they entered the strong-room, piled high with the treasure-chests, and studied it—walls, ceiling and floor. Nothing appeared amiss. One by one they examined the seals on the chests. All were intact.
“They must have been interrupted by Sir Arthur as they were entering,” suggested the purser.
“Not as they were entering, but after they had entered,” corrected the Captain, sniffing the air.
“Why, sir?” inquired Jessen.
“Cigarette smoke inside,” explained McNaughton, still sniffing. “They’ve broken into the Humboldt’s strong-room, though it ca
n’t be done. And they even dared to keep their cigarettes going while they did it! Thank heavens, Cumberland heard them, for it is evident he must have interrupted the thieves or they would not have struck him down.”
McNaughton pushed his way into Jessen’s room, where the surgeon was dressing an ugly wound over Cumberland’s temple, with the secretary aiding him.
“Is he badly hurt, Doctor?” McNaughton demanded.
The surgeon shook his head doubtfully.
“I can’t say yet,” he replied. “He took a hard blow. He may come around all right shortly, and he may have a fractured skull—which, from a blow just there, might mean cerebral hemorrhage.”
“He may be unconscious for hours?”
“Or even days,” said the doctor.
“What do you know of this?” McNaughton asked, turning to McDonald.
“I was asleep,” the little Scotchman answered readily. “I heard nothing till a shot awakened me. When I got the lights on and the door open, Sir Arthur was in the purser’s arms, wounded. I didn’t hear him leave our cabin, and I don’t know who struck him, though it is plain he interrupted a robbery of your strong-room.”
One by one the Captain visited the nearby cabins, questioning the passengers. None gave information of real value. All had been awakened by the noise in the companionway or the subsequent shot. As they rushed from their staterooms, they had seen the purser raising the injured man within the wrecked cabin door. No one else was in sight except the injured man’s secretary, who appeared from his cabin after the trouble was over.
McNaughton came finally to the stateroom of Miss Francisco and Mary.
“What did you ladies see of this?” he inquired courteously. “You first, Miss Whitney.”
“I saw more than she did, Captain, for I was first at the door,” interrupted Miss Francisco quickly. “I was awake when I heard the crash in the passageway. Then there was a shot. I jumped from my berth and turned on our lights. I heard a stateroom door near ours bang shut as I threw open our door. I saw the purser with the injured man in his arms. I’m afraid that’s all I know. Is poor Sir Arthur badly hurt, Captain?” She spoke with such well-feigned solicitude that Mary, remembering the blow struck in the dark, wondered at the perfection of her duplicity.
“Was the door you heard close to the left or the right of yours?” asked the Captain, seizing the one important bit of information in the girl’s story.
“I don’t know. I only know it was very close—almost adjoining ours, I judge.”
“Can you add anything to what Miss Francisco has told?” asked McNaughton of Mary.
“I heard the shot and the noise; and I think, as Miss Francisco told you, that I heard a cabin door near by close immediately afterward,” Mary said, following the other’s story with exactness. “That’s all I can tell you.”
As she heard Nina Francisco’s glib invention, Mary, knowing that Blackie’s stateroom was far away and around the turn in the companionway, decided instantly to corroborate it. Wittingly or unwittingly, that untruth furnished an alibi for the man whose safety mattered to her. Why Nina Francisco had struck the blow that ended the battle, Mary could not guess. Why she now imperiled herself by a bold fabrication was an even deeper mystery.
“Thank you, ladies. I’ve work before me that can’t wait,” said the Captain, bowing himself out hurriedly.
As the door closed behind him, Nina and Mary looked at each other with silent lips but questioning eyes.
“Well, that’s over, thank goodness!” said Nina at last, sighing with relief.
She turned to the dressing-table and dabbed her powder-puff over her nose.
“You’re not a bad sport, after all, Miss Whitney,” she continued after a long silence. “I beg your pardon for what I’ve been thinking about you.”
“And you’re—I don’t know what,” said Mary.
“Just a woman, my dear,” said Nina with softened voice. “A woman willing to dare anything for the man for whom she can’t help caring.”
They smiled across the table at each other, and though neither asked a question or offered further explanation, the strange events of the night dissipated, for the first time, the hostility that had divided them.
Morning found Captain McNaughton sitting in his cabin, perplexed furrows wrinkling his brow. The steamer had been searched from hurricane-deck to keel, without result. Not the slightest additional wisp of evidence came to light to justify even suspicion. The duplicate padlock, the revolver with one empty chamber, and the injured passenger, were the only bits of evidence left by those who had attempted the daring raid on the treasure.
Investigation showed the electric-alarm wires leading into the strong-room had been cut, and the wainscoting that hid them replaced without leaving even a betraying speck of sawdust. The lead offered by the closing cabin door heard by Miss Francisco proved absolutely barren, for the most minute search of all cabins on the treasure-room companionway revealed absolutely nothing. The duplicate padlock was a duplicate in outward appearance only. It could be opened with the simplest of master-keys.
At daylight a seaman found a pocket flash-lamp rolling on the upper deck with the movement of the ship. It might have been tossed from any one of a dozen cabins. McNaughton locked it away with the padlock and the gun and ascended to the wireless room, where he dictated a message to his company managers telling all that had happened. Until Sir Arthur Cumberland recovered his senses,—the injured man’s condition was unchanged,—the Captain had done all that seemed possible. One thought comforted him. The treasure-room gold had not been disturbed, for in the search of the Humboldt which had included the personal baggage of passengers, officers and members of the crew, no possible hiding-place for great yellow bars two feet long and weighing thirty or more pounds each had been overlooked. In addition, the chest seals were all intact.
The Humboldt was backing slowly from the dock at Victoria—a special stop necessitated by a shipment of British Columbian freight—and had begun the short run down the Sound to Seattle when Mary received a message that brought color back to her white face. A man passed behind her as she sat in the deck-chair and deftly dropped a slip of paper into her lap. Turning as she hid the note with her hand, she recognized Blackie’s pal, K. Y. Lewes. Concealing the note in her book, she read at a glance its five words—words that lifted the load that burdened her heart.
“Follow original instructions. Don’t worry,” was written; and the writing was Boston Blackie’s.
Somehow—inconceivably but surely—she knew he had solved the problem of escape at the Seattle wharf. She sprang to her feet, and unutterably content, tossed the now twisted bit of paper overboard and watched it float away on the waters of the Sound as she gayly joined the throng on the decks.
During that last day at sea Purser Dave Jessen watched in vain for an opportunity to speak alone with “Miss Marie Whitney,” to tell her he loved her, to ask her to be his wife. Though he admitted to himself his presumption in hoping that she might feel for him even a tithe of the great tenderness in his heart, he did hope, for he was a man and in love.
But never for an instant during the day was Miss Whitney alone. Among the score of vacation trippers who boarded the Humboldt at Victoria for the return trip to Seattle was a party of five—four modestly dressed girls chaperoned by an agreeable, white haired mother—one of whom proved to be a former schoolmate of Miss Whitney’s. All day the newfound friends monopolized her attention, and it was not until the nearing lights of Seattle threw their glare against the southern sky that Jessen found the opportunity he sought.
He was distributing the passengers’ baggage, which had been intrusted to the safety of the strong room—baggage that was removed from the stronghold under the personal supervision of Captain McNaughton. Accompanied by subordinates carrying her trunk, he knocked at the girl’s door and found her alone. The men deposited the trunk and departed, but Jessen lingered in the open doorway. Mary looked up
interrogatively.
“Marie,” he said, stepping to her side with a longing, half-fearful look into the face upturned to his. “I love you. Forgive me, only a poor sailor, for daring to tell you, for even daring to hope you would listen. But because I love you, and you are leaving the Humboldt to-night, I must speak now. Marie, can you—will you—be my wife?”
There was simple sincerity and great love in the words, the voice and the frank eyes that looked into hers as she slowly shook her head.
“Don’t, Mr. Jessen,” Mary said gently. “I like you; I admire you; but what you ask—it can’t be.”
The bronzed face paled under its tan, and the blue eyes contracted under the numbing pain of a precious hope suddenly uprooted.
“There is someone else?” he asked unsteadily.
“Yes,” said Mary, truly sorry she must so wound the love offered her. “Forgive me, Mr. Jessen,” she added, laying a small hand on the man’s arm.
Jessen caught and pressed it and hurried with averted face from the cabin as women’s voices sounded in the companionway.
CHAPTER XV
MISSING GOLD
With a final whining of taut hawsers and a gentle jolt against the long Seattle pier the Humboldt had reached the end of her voyage. The gangplank was raised to the deck, and the eager passengers thronged there shoulder to shoulder, pressed backward to let a stretcher precede them to the dock. By the stretcher walked McDonald, grave and silent. On it lay Sir Arthur Cumberland, his head swathed in bandages. He had neither spoken nor given a sign of returning consciousness since the night of the attempted robbery. On the wharf an ambulance summoned by wireless waited to hurry him to a hospital.
The injured man was carried down the gangplank and along the passageway to the Custom House shed. Just inside the entrance four men—two on each side of the doorway—were waiting, keen-eyed and vigilant. Mary, following the stretcher in the van of the crowding passengers, recognized them at once as police detectives. With an apprehensive glance she looked back over her shoulder. Near by, pushing forward, and chatting together as imperturbably as though danger were miles removed from them instead of at arm’s length, came Boston Blackie and Lewes.
