It was impossible to shake them off. On board the schooner they could see the sloop through their glasses under the tropical starlight far too clearly for Fleming to make any attempt at a split tack. The wind was brisk, inclined to blow hard, and the seas were snappy and crisp with foam. Fleming dragged a balloon jib out of the forepeak and set it, sparring it out to port with a boat hook. He swayed out the main boom to starboard and prevented it with a line forward. The Lelemotu squatted like a duck and scudded her fastest. Somehow the schooner did not seem to gain as she ought. Fleming fancied she was foul. But the chase couldn’t last long. Little by little, the red and the green lights sneaked up and spits of fire showed at the schooner’s bows where they were wasting lead.
Fleming gave the wheel to Ngiki and lit the cabin lamp, digging among his charts. He found what he wanted and then turned the pages of an astronomical almanac. Coming on deck, he found that the schooner was overhauling them slowly but surely. He had brought up a lantern which he bent on to his flag halyards with marlin and hoisted, running it on the halyards to the starboard spreader and down again as if in defiance. The next time they fired from the schooner Fleming shot off his automatic three times, trusting it might be seen, though it could not be heard up-wind. Ngiki stared at him curiously but said nothing. He had learned long ago not to interfere with his white chief in emergencies. If Falemingi wanted to show exactly where they were, that was his business. Besides, he might be signaling. But he ventured a remark when Fleming came aft, leaving the lantern half-mast high:
“They got one-two reef along that schooner.”
The schooner was close enough now for Fleming to see, with the night-glasses that Ngiki’s savage eyes did not need, that the gaffs of both fore and main were low. Evidently the natives, when they furled, had not taken out the reef last used; and so far Harper did not bother to shake it. He very well knew the wide expanse that Fleming would have to cross before he made a landfall. With something of the cat-and-mouse attitude he deferred his certain victory and regain of the pearls. As for Ngiki and himself, Fleming never doubted what would be their probable ending if they were overhauled. Killed—at long or short distance—and sunk with the sloop! The five white men on the schooner would have committed a dozen murders apiece for the twenty thousand dollars that was their anticipated share, half of which was now in Fleming’s possession.
“If he doesn’t shake out those reefs in half an hour,” said Fleming more to himself than Ngiki, “we’ve got him. Sea’s rising nicely. I’m going to fix up some dynamite with short throwing fuses, Ngiki. They can’t sink us by rifle-fire and if we can keep alive until they board us well scratch ’em a bit.”
Ngiki nodded. He didn’t think much of their chances. He knew nothing of Fleming’s mission, only that their pursuers were in deadly earnest. But he puffed away at his pipe complacently, conserving for the final rally.
Twenty minutes went by with waves mounting and the wind beginning to howl through the rigging. The main boom of the sloop began to skim the crests and Fleming took it up with the topping lift, shifting his peak and throat halyards. A mishap would be fatal. The schooner was less than half a mile away and every now and then a missile would go whup through the canvas. Under starlight, in such a sea, at such a distance, close work was not possible. Only a lucky—or unlucky—chance could score a hit. The sound of the shots came down the wind.
Fleming studied his stars as he humored the sloop, head-heavy of canvas, inclined to swerve like a shying horse as she swept down the valley of the seas or struggled up the opposing slopes. Every yard might count, and he got the best out of her.
“They shake out reef,” announced Ngiki.
Harper, tired of fooling, had issued the order at last before it was too late to risk it, for all signs and the barometer clearly indicated now that there was going to be a gale. But Fleming only chuckled.
“I think, Ngiki, I’ll bet five to one on it, that they’re going to be too late. Take the wheel. I’m going for’ard.”
Ngiki, uncomprehending, watched him go into the bows with the night-glasses. Imperturbable, the native did not flinch when the bullets began to buzz like bees above his head or land with a chuck in the taffrail and the head of the companionway. Once he turned his head as a shout came from the schooner, a taunting order to come into the wind. A sniping bullet hit the bowl of his pipe and tore it from his teeth. Ngiki snarled and rubbed his aching jaw with one hand. Then Fleming came aft again, a grin on his face.
“Five minutes more, Ngiki, and we shall see what we shall see. They’re coming up fast, but—” He staggered back. A bullet had clipped him in the left forearm. He slapped his hand over the wound and the blood came through the sleeve of his coat.
“No bones broken, I fancy,” he muttered between set teeth. “Well, it’s going to be cheap at that, if—”
The schooner was little more than two hundred yards away and coming on like a cup-winner. Her sails, out wing-and-wing, caught the faint star-shine on the rounded curves of the canvas. She seemed to soar as she lifted over the top of a wave, to come seething down its slope in a smother of spray that was thick with phosphorescence. Shot after shot came from her bows. Fleming shook his sound fist at her.
“I’ll pack a rifle aboard after this,” he said. “Planter or not, I’ll take no chances. Wait till you get a little closer. Wait!”
But the automatic was no good for anything over fifty yards. Each wave saw the distance a little diminished. The schooner appeared bent upon running down the sloop, so true did she keep in its course, now actually entering the tail of its wake.
The color of the water alongside changed. It had been deepest blue, almost black, streaked with sea-fire. Now it became suddenly greener and every pint of it was aflame with phosphor. Also there was twice as much foam. The seas were yeasty with it and they seemed to run more tempestuously.
A megaphoned roar came from the schooner. “Heave to, Fleming, or I’ll sink you!”
Fleming jumped for his own megaphone and yelled back against the wind.
“Come on and try it! Come on!”
The sloop suddenly swung off its course, threatening to jibe as Fleming’s warning shout and hasty hand to the spokes showed Ngiki the danger of losing the mast. Ngiki was staring aft.
“Look, saka, look. By Goddamighty, she go ashore!”
Right in their course the schooner reared as if mounting on a giant sea. But her bowsprit remained pointing skyward; her sails shivered, and then the foremast snapped and the canvas wrinkled and bellied in a confusion of stays and halyards. She tilted slowly to one side and began to slew round with the waves breaking over her.
“She’s fairly on,” said Fleming. “Harper hasn’t charted these seas as I have. She draws sixteen foot to our ten and she’s on fair and fast. He’ll be there this time tomorrow unless he tries for land in his whaleboats. We’ll stick around a bit and see. Better get a watch-tackle on that mainsheet against the time we tack, Ngiki; I’ve only got one arm.”
It was hard work to get in the balloon jib but Ngiki accomplished it and flattened the mainsail. The sloop shot off on a reaching tack and back again, saved by reason of her lesser draft and Fleming’s soundings of the island-to-be, whose coral builders were still well below the surface. Fleming had led the schooner deliberately into the trap and stranded her.
As they came close they saw her hard on the reef, the wreck of her foremast dragging overside and pounding at her hull, spume flying over her. And, rowing hard against head-seas and headwind on a painful progress, two whale-boats made slow laborious work of it/bearing Harper and his discomfited comrades.
* * * *
“It is a good thing,” Fleming said later to Helen Starkey, “that I’ve made a success of the vanilla proposition. Otherwise, now that these pearls have turned up, they might be saying that I wanted to marry you for your money.”
The widow gasped a little.
>
“You’re not very complimentary,” she said.
“I never am, somehow, when I mean to be,” said Fleming.
“You haven’t said you did, you know,” she said.
“Did what?”
“Wanted to marry me. Why?”
Fleming turned fiery red and fussed with the bandage of his wounded arm, but he got it out at last.
“Because I love you.”
“If you had said that a long time ago.” she said, “it would have saved a lot of time and trouble.”
“But,” she added the next time she spoke, which was after a considerable period during which Fleming silently lamented the luck that had deprived him of the use of one arm at a time when he most needed two, “if you had, I wouldn’t have got my pearls.”
Fleming had lost the connection and looked at her lovingly but blankly.
“If I had what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she answered smilingly.
“Instead of which,” declared Fleming, using his one arm to the best advantage, “I have everything.”
THE MID-WATCH TRAGEDY, by Vincent Starrett
The military-looking gentleman produced a thin, expensive watch from his waistcoat pocket, and put it away again.
“The bar,” said he sagely, “will be open in half an hour.”
I acquiesced with a smile. He flicked the end of his cigarette overboard, and idly watched its descent until a wave took it. Then, as if the action had removed a weight from his mind, he turned briskly and continued. “Do you play bridge, Mr. Gilruth?”
“No,” I said thankfully, “I don’t.”
Where the devil, I wondered, had he got my name? We had been hardly an hour at sea. He was excessively friendly—much as, I understood, were the professional gamblers against whom the company had thoughtfully warned its passengers.
“My wife will be disappointed,” said he. “You and your friend are about the only eligibles she and her sister have discovered, to date. I can play—but I won’t.”
I resented his easy assumptions. My acquaintance with Jimmie Lavender had not been without its practical value, and I had learned to distrust plausible strangers.
“That, I believe, is my friend’s situation, also,” I replied stiffly. “However, he must answer for himself.”
“Of course,” said he with a courteous nod. “My respects to him, please. His reputation is well-known to me. My name is Rittenhouse,” he added, handing me his card. “And now I must run along and see what has become of my women.”
He turned away, and I watched him for a moment as he threaded the crowded deck before I, too, turned and went in search of Lavender. It was Lavender’s vacation, I mused, and I was in a sense his nurse—at any rate, his companion—and I did not intend that he should be bothered, if I could prevent. Not that Lavender was ill, but certainly he was tired; and even if the plausible Mr. Rittenhouse were not a professional gambler, bridge was no game for a man who needed rest.
I circled the promenade deck in my search, and at length climbed to the boat deck, just in time to see Lavender appear at the top of the aft companionway, closely followed by a deck steward dragging a couple of chairs. The detective indicated a spot amidships, somewhat sheltered, and balanced on either side by a giant air funnel.
“Dump ’em down here,” he ordered. “Hullo, Gilly! This looks like as good a place as any. A quiet spot on the aft boat deck is always to be preferred to the chatter and publicity of the promenade. I’m sick of crowds!”
“See anybody you know?” I asked casually.
“Nary a soul,” said he, “and don’t want to. I’ve seen the purser, however, and the dining-room steward. We’re to sit at the purser’s table—all men. It’s rough on you, Gilly, but I haven’t enough small talk to be good company for the women.”
“There are two of them looking for you,” I said grimly, and told him of my meeting with Rittenhouse, at whose card until that moment I had not troubled to look. It revealed that the military- looking man’s name was Joseph, and that he was a Major, retired, in the United States Marine Corps.
Lavender snatched the card, as if to verify my assertions, then chuckled delightedly.
“By George!” he cried. “It’s Rit!”
“You know him, then?” I asked, somewhat taken aback.
“Know him! Why we’ve hunted men together! He served two terms as police commissioner of Los Angeles, where I met him. A better man never held office. And you thought he was a crook!” He chuckled again with great happiness. “Where is he?”
“Looking for his wife and her sister, I believe.”
“I must hunt him up. I hope you weren’t rude, Gilly! Anybody else of interest on board?”
“I’ve looked over the passenger list,” I replied airily. “There’s a British lord—Denbigh, I think; a Sir John Rutherford; Betty Cosgrave, the screen actress; an Italian baroness whose name I forget, and the Rev. Henry Murchison of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”
“Good!” laughed Lavender. “You have them pat. The baroness, I fancy, is the dark woman who looked me over carefully as I came on board. She was standing at the rail, and I thought she looked as if she knew me, or believed she did. She looked Italian, anyway, and she was romantic enough looking to be a baroness. I thought for a moment that she was going to speak to me, but if she was she thought better of it.”
“Confound it, Jimmie,” I said, “I hope you’re not going to be bothered by baronesses or Majors, or Majors’ wives, on this trip; or Majors’ wives’ sisters, either. Your nerves are all shot to pieces.”
“And you are an idiot,” was the amused reply. “However, I’ll promise not to play bridge.”
“It would be just our luck to blunder onto trouble of some sort,” I went on morosely. “Jimmie, if anybody robs the ship’s safe, you are not to interfere. Let the Major run down the thief, since he’s such a good man.”
He laughed again. “All right,” said he, “I’ll go and see him about it now.” And off he went, to hunt up his erstwhile crony, the retired Major and man-hunter, whom, I suspect, he discovered in the smoking-room (which was also the drinking-room), for the bar had been open for several minutes.
And that is the way it all started, the memorable voyage of the trans-Atlantic liner, Dianthus, which added laurels to the reputation of my friend Lavender, and began his vacation in a manner—from Lavender’s point of view—highly satisfying and successful.
Actually, it was the evening of the second day at sea that the first whisper of the trouble I had predicted reached our ears. My sardonic prophecy, however, was not accurate in its detail. The ship’s safe—if it carried one—remained unmolested.
* * * *
The day had been warm enough, but the evening called for wraps. The promenade deck was a scene of some activity, what with the hustling stewards and the eternally tramping Britons, who toiled around the oval like athletes training on a track. An Englishman is never happy unless he is walking or sitting before his fireplace; and the ship had no fireplaces. The boat deck, however, was comparatively deserted; and Lavender and I, wrapped in our rugs, looked out into the windy darkness and smoked contentedly. Our nearest companions were a spooning couple some yards away, half hidden by funnels, and wrapped in blankets and their own emotions. Major Rittenhouse, a likable fellow, as I had rapidly discovered, had surrendered at discretion, and was playing the amiable martyr in the card room.
An occasional steward drifted past, and once the second officer of the ship stopped for a word and a cigarette, but for the most part we were left to ourselves.
“Indeed,” said I, “I believe we have the choice of locations, Lavender.” And at that instant the Italian baroness hove into view.
Her name, we had discovered, was Borsolini—the Baroness Borsolini. She came forward uncertainly, wavered in passing, passed on, and in a few moments came back. She was quite alone, and
obviously she wished to speak to us. On the third trip she had made up her mind, and came swiftly to our side.
“You are Mr. Lavender?” she murmured. “I must speak with you. May I sit down?”
“Of course,” said my friend, and rose to his feet to assist her. “Something is worrying you, I fear.”
“You are right,” said the baroness. “I am very much afraid.”
Her English was perfect. Her manner was pretty and appealing.
“Something has frightened you?” asked Lavender encouragingly.
She bent forward and studied his face closely in the darkness.
“You are a good man,” she said at length. “I can tell. I think you are a poet.”
Lavender squirmed and feebly gesticulated. Before he could deny the amazing charge, she had hurried on.
“Yes, I am afraid. Last night—after I had retired—someone was in my cabin!”
“A thief?”
The words came eagerly from the detective’s lips. In his interest, he forgot her preposterous notion about his profession.
“I think so. But nothing was taken away. He did not find what he sought.”
Lavender’s interest deepened. “What did he seek?” he asked.
“My jewels,” said the baroness. “What else?”
“They are valuable then?”
“They are very valuable, my friend. They are valuable because it would cost a fortune to replace them; but they are priceless because they are my family jewels. I speak of replacing them, but believe me, they could not be replaced.”
My friend’s cap came off to the breeze. “Tell me how you know there was someone in your cabin,” he said.
“I awoke suddenly—I don’t know why I awoke. I suppose I felt someone there. There were little sounds in the room—soft, brushing sounds—and breathing. Light, so light, I could scarcely catch it. It was only for an instant, then the man was gone. I must have made some little sound myself that alarmed him. As he went, I almost saw him—you understand? He seemed to glide through the door, which he had to open to escape. He made no sound, and what I saw was just black against gray as the door opened. I only half saw him—the other half I felt. You understand?”
Adventure Tales, Volume 5 Page 7
