Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You feel the fire behind?” he sneered. The brute wasn’t even out of breath.

  “You are going down into it backwards! But we will wait just a minute or two and let the flames take hold, because there is a door leading from that cellar to the garden, and you seem to have a gift for breaking doors!”

  He thrust his great, dark face still closer to mine, so that his enormous shoulders rose higher than his neck. I guessed him at fifty inches around the chest, with every other detail in proportion, but he may have been bigger than that.

  “I am curious about you!” he went on. “You are not of the police. Are you one of those poor fools who discovered a treasure that they could not keep? You are too unwise for Providence — I suppose you would call it Providence? — to leave it in your hands! You would not know how to use it. I do. I shall use it! I shall leave you roasting here, and take it away with me! You’re not talkative! It’s your last chance to talk, you know, until you come into the world reincarnated as a beetle or a rat! You don’t like the prospect of being burned to death? It terrifies you? Too bad! You would prefer the butt of Malmsey wine selected by the Duke of Clarence?”

  Even the least astute of us become one-horse philosophers as we grow older. When any man starts boasting in my face I take courage. Boasting is the inevitable prelude of disaster. I’m convinced of that, and an ounce of conviction is worth a ton of any body’s argument. I knew that minute that he might hurl me down into the fire, but if so he was coming with me, and I guessed I could face those flames as well as he could.

  Maybe he read the determination in my face. He started there and then to force me backward, and I tried to throw him with a trick of the heel. He saved himself from that, but lost his balance; and I got my left fist free, gaining a good two yards away from the flames and sending my left home three times, once into his wind and twice into the region of his jaw. He had to let go my right wrist to protect himself, and I got my right home into his left eye before he closed.

  Then, gripping like a bear, he began to force me backward once more, lifting me as my ribs cracked under his pressure. He had me under the arms, which left both fists free; and I rained blows on his mouth and eyes that would have taken some of the fight out of a Spanish bull. I guess I blinded him for the moment. I could feel the sickening scorch of the flames behind me as the floor-beams and door-posts caught; but I caught him by the neck and swung clear, and if I hadn’t been in too much of a hurry he would have gone down into the cellar instead of me, for I drove for the region of his ear with my right fist, and the blow went wild. Then I thought of my own revolver in my right hip-pocket, and he thought of all outdoors. The smoke and flame were blinding; the back of my jacket was smoldering, and I think his coat was too. At any rate, with his eyes half-shut and with the floor-beams beginning to crack under our combined weight, he lowered his head and charged me like a bull. Instead of meeting him with my knee, as I should have done, I stepped aside, took a shot at him, and missed! Missed him at fifteen inches! So much for smoke in the face.

  We both went out of the house like rabbits running from a grass fire, he straight by way of that nodding lantern for the motorboat, and I after him, with the flames behind us lighting up all the windows now as they caught the draft from the open front door. It was only a matter of seconds before the whole house was a raging furnace.

  I was out of breath, for he had crushed my ribs in badly, and on top of that I had swallowed a lungful of acrid smoke. What was worse, I am built rather for heavy work than running races; and for a man of his prodigious weight and strength he was fleetfooted. But he ran with his hands to his eyes. I had done him harm enough to equalize the odds.

  Moreover, he wasted energy. His shortest course to the motorboat was not by way of the lantern. In order to take the lantern en route he had to cover two sides of a broad-based triangle, giving him at least an extra hundred yards to run. Yet he did that, and I took the shorter route to cut him off, wondering what strange frenzy possessed him and supposing that his eyes might be so badly hurt that he was running half-blindly for whatever he could see.

  Yet he didn’t pick up the lantern. He paused there for half-a-second, tugging at something else that shook the lantern to the ground as it came loose from the tree, and carried whatever it was away with him. He was still in the lead by a dozen yards, and I tried a shot as I ran, with no result except apparently to increase his speed; and of course I had to slow down for a second in order to take aim, which gave him a few more yards of advantage.

  I had now four shots left, and no spare cartridges. On the other hand, in spite of the pace, I was beginning to feel better as the smoke got pumped out of my lungs. Moreover, the fire by now was enough to alarm the countryside; they would turn out to save the forest trees if nothing else, and it was likely I would have help any minute.

  Yet he was gaining on me — careering like a hippopotamus for his own element, covering an ell to my yard as he crashed through and over everything. I never saw any man take such enormous strides as he did, and all the way with his hands before his face, as if I had done his eyes real damage.

  He was easily fifty yards ahead when he reached the water’s edge and hesitated before jumping to the beach below. In that uncertain moonlight, and with my hand no doubt trembling from the run, it seemed like a fool’s chance to take another shot; yet I took it — stopped dead, aimed carefully, and fired. I hit him. He dropped something that was hanging from his arm, clapped his hand to his side, and toppled sidewise over the bank.

  I did that last fifty yards in record time — my record at all events. I figured on jumping on him from the top of the bank and finishing the business. But when I reached the bank he was clambering off a short plank pier into the boat and snatching feverishly at the lines to cast loose. He had made the boat fast in two places, which was in my favor; but he got both lines free; and the instant he had thrown the clutch into gear and opened up the gas, he crouched below the boat’s side.

  I remembered then that there is such a thing under heaven as horse sense. I could have easily wasted my three remaining shots in an effort to plug him but the boat was a considerably larger target. I fired all three deliberately, plunk into the boat, and one of them damaged the engine.

  It doesn’t take much to stop one of those single-cylinder affairs. I hadn’t done much harm to the engine, for he got it going again in less than a minute; but during that minute the water must have made headway through two bullet-holes, and by the time he began to pay attention to it the water was swishing all over the bottom. What with the state of his eyes and the darkness he couldn’t find the trouble. For a minute or two after that he seemed to be lifting off the seat-covers and looking for a pump, but there was none, for he began bailing with a small tin can. Then the engine gave a final cough and quit for good.

  I lit a cigar. I’m willing to take oath that if there had been a boat within reach I would have put off and tried to save him for the hangman. But there wasn’t any boat. I dare say he had taken care there shouldn’t be. And as for swimming — he might swim in that nearly ice-cold water if so minded; I tested it with my hand and knew that I for one couldn’t stay afloat in it for two minutes.

  One of my bullets must have done much more than bore a hole in the hull, for he could have bailed against two or even against three bullet-holes. But though he worked like fury the water gained on him, and I could see the hull submerging inch by inch. He lost his courage in the end completely. The chill of that rising water around his legs gave him too definite a foretaste of what was coming. He began to scream for help and to call on some Deity I never heard of. I tore two planks off the pier and hurled them as far as I could out into the lake, but he was a quarter of a mile away, and I doubt even if he saw me throw them. He could never have reached them anyhow.

  He went down screaming, and the cold calm water closed over him with a ring of ripples that danced in the moonlight until the last, ever-widening circle nearly reached the shore. Then I turn
ed to examine whatever it was that he had dropped when my bullet touched him, and clambering up the bank discovered nothing less than Allison’s leather satchel.

  * * * * *

  YOU’LL be right if you suppose that I unbuckled the flap with trembling fingers. Maybe I shouted — I don’t know — when I discovered the gold plate safe inside. But it was badly damaged. My bullet had struck it near one corner, ploughed through the soft gold for several inches, itself expanding as it went, and finally had gone clear through to expand its last momentum on the ribs of Bhopal Gosh. The plate had been further damaged when he dropped it, for it was bent out of shape, and I think he must have stepped on it, because a good deal of the scripture was obliterated. Nevertheless, it was the plate, and I had at least something to return to poor old Allison.

  There was no more chance of recovering the other plates than of gleaning snow on the plains in midsummer. We had left the outer safe-door open, and the whole house was a roaring furnace. It might be possible, when the ashes should cool off, to recover a shapeless mass of nearly pure gold; but it was far more likely that the safe had tilted forward as the beams gave way underneath it and the stuff as it melted had run out and got lost so thoroughly that its recovery would cost more than the game was worth.

  I tried to get some of the fellows who came racing to the fire to help find a boat and look for Bhopal Gosh, hut when I told them sufficient of the circumstances they laughed at the idea.

  “Never dragged a corpse out o’ that lake yet, unless in the shallows inshore. The cold sets them solid. The body don’t form no gas, and they stay down there a mile deep. No; Lake Tahoe don’t give up her dead, and never will till Judgment Day.”

  So I borrowed a big car instead, and got two of them to come back along the road and help me with the sheriff, Terence Casey, and the deputy. Less than an hour later, as we drove dead-slow around a bend, I heard the sheriff’s voice —

  “I notice you got your man!” he called out.

  Now I don’t know how he knew that, nor would he tell me how he knew; but he swore that he knew it from the moment that our headlights came in sight around the corner.

  I asked the deputy about it, who was not much the worse for his experience by that time, and he laughed.

  “Shore he knew!” he answered. “He weren’t guessing. He told us two that you’d got your man ‘fore ever he spoke to you at all. Didn’t he, Casey?”

  “He did that,” said Casey. “It all comes o’ running over that black cat. Any man in his senses knew that somebody was going to get the gate tonight. Well, Lord be praised it wasn’t me! I’m due for me pension. Hey, steady! Lift me easy — easy, you! I’m not the inimy, Ramsden! Ye’re after pulling me to bits!”

  * * * * *

  SO if you should have the good luck to visit London one of these days, and should have the sound horse sense and taste to pass a portion of your time in the British Museum, turn first into the Egyptian Gallery. And if you see there in a glass case by itself a battered gold plate with a great trough plowed across it so as to obliterate the head and shoulders of what was once the portrait of a man, you’ll understand how it came there. They have marked it,

  “Very ancient; probably period of Israelitish occupation; mostly illegible; purpose unknown.”

  For they are cautious men who conduct that institution.

  But there’s a middle-aged Scotsman attached with no very definite duties to that department. They say he is rather a mental wreck, and has been more or less pensioned in that way. He’ll tell you the whole story of that gold plate, and better by far than I have done. But better not mention my name to him, for he vows, and will vow to his dying day, that I know quite well where the rest of the plates are, and that I mean to unbury them some day and offer them for sale when I suppose the game is safe.

  “But just ye watch!” he’ll tell you, in case you should mention me. “I’ll balk him! I’ll expose the chiel! I’ll bring him to his downfall yet!”

  Brice, on the other hand, is still digging for antiquities in Egypt; and he and I are great friends.

  And if you should happen to meet Terence Casey — he’ll be guarding a President, or tracking down a forger, or some such child’s play — you might remember me to him; and if he says to you, as he surely will the minute that you mention me —

  “My friend Ramsden is a well-meanin’ man, I’ll have ye know, and a good man of his inches. He knows a lot about ilyphints, and if he had his rights he’d be with a circus, or curatin’ at the Bronx Park Zoo. But he’s gone into the amachoor daytective business, and that’s not a fit subjec’ for conversation — not with prohibition running wild!”

  If he says that to you, as he will, you might remind him that he owes me a round of drinks — a point that he unaccountably forgot when he came out of hospital. And you might add, that as good drinks are hard to come by these days, I’d be grateful if he’d come across.

  And as for what became of Mrs. Aintree, and of the foreign entanglements of the P.O.P., most of which we had to straighten out before our job was done, let me remind you all once more of those Indian story-tellers, who invariably pause and pass the hat when it would seem that their audience has had its money’s worth.

  “Kull khadami tilzam. Allah yihfazak;” and may all your ways be peace!

  THE END

  HER REPUTATION

  OR, THE BUBBLE REPUTATION

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1.

  CHAPTER 2.

  CHAPTER 3.

  CHAPTER 4.

  CHAPTER 5.

  CHAPTER 6.

  CHAPTER 7.

  CHAPTER 8.

  CHAPTER 9.

  CHAPTER 10.

  CHAPTER 11.

  CHAPTER 12.

  CHAPTER 13.

  CHAPTER 14.

  CHAPTER 15.

  CHAPTER 16.

  CHAPTER 17.

  CHAPTER 18.

  CHAPTER 19.

  CHAPTER 20.

  CHAPTER 21.

  CHAPTER 22.

  CHAPTER 23.

  CHAPTER 24.

  CHAPTER 25.

  CHAPTER 26.

  CHAPTER 27.

  CHAPTER 28.

  CHAPTER 29.

  CHAPTER 30.

  CHAPTER 31.

  CHAPTER 32.

  CHAPTER 33.

  INTRODUCTION

  It has happened, times out of number, that in mid-Africa, in India, in the deserts of Transjordan* — on an ant-heap in the drought, or in the mud of the tropical rain — I have felt a yearning for white lights, a dress suit and a tall silk hat, that corresponds, I suppose, in some degree to the longing a city man feels for those open spaces and far countries which it has been my destiny to wander in and to write about. A traveler, if he is wise, comes home at intervals to meet old friends and to remind himself that a gentler, more conventional world exists, in which events occur and problems arise, and in which delightful people live and move and have their being.

  Writing books is only another phase of living life — reliving it, perhaps, in which the appeal of the stiff white shirt transforms itself into a desire to write “civilized” stories. So this story, which is in an entirely different field from my usual haunts in Africa and India, may be said to represent a home-coming, between long journeys; and I hope the public, which has followed me with such encouraging persistence to comparatively unknown places, will concede that I still know how to behave myself in a civilized setting.

  But this story is no more mine than is the life of the big cities into which I plunge at long, uncertain intervals. To Bradley King, chief of the Thomas H. Ince staff of editors, belongs the credit for the plot; her genius, art and imagination, and the creative vision of my friend Thomas Ince combined to produce a plan of narrative, now lavishly offered to the eye in a motion picture, which appealed me so strongly that the impulse to transform it into a written book was irresistible. The writing has been a delight to me, and I trust it may prove as
entertaining to the public.

  Bradley King detected, tracked, ran down and caught the idea for the story — a much more difficult thing to do than those who have never hunted such elusive game will ever guess. She trained it to perform; I wrote this book; and Mr. Ince has made the picture. We hope the book will be accepted by the reader, as it was written, purely to entertain; and that fellow newspaper men will recognize the friendly and entirely sympathetic illustration of the way in which the mighty and far-reaching power of the Press occasionally is abused by individuals.

  — T.M.

  CHAPTER 1.

  “A scene — a scandal — at church — on Easter Sunday of all days in the year — with nearly everybody in the county looking on!”

  There is an hour of promise, and a zero hour; the promise first; and promises are sometimes even sweeter than fulfillment. Jacqueline Lanier was unconscious of her hour of blossoming, and so the outlines of young loveliness had not been hardened by habitual self-assertion. Since she came under Desmio’s care her lot had been cast in very pleasant places, and she was aware of it, wondering a little now and then, between the thrills of appreciation; but at seventeen we are not much given to philosophy, which comes later in life when we are forced to try to explain away mistakes.

  She had come into the world a stormy petrel, but Consuelo and Donna Isabella were the only ones who remembered anything of that, and Consuelo took as much pains to obscure the memory as Donna Isabella did in trying to revive it. Both women were acceptable because everything whatever that belonged to Desmio was perfect — must be. Jacqueline used to wonder what under heaven Desmio could have to confess to on the occasions when he went into the private chapel to kneel beside Father Doutreleau. She herself had no such difficulties; there were always thoughts she had allowed herself to think regarding Donna Isabella. It had cost Jacqueline as much as fifty pater nosters on occasion for dallying with the thought of the resemblance between Donna Isabella and the silver-and-enamel vinegar cruet on the dining-room sideboard. And there was always Consuelo, fruitful of confessions; for you accepted Consuelo, listened to her comments, and obeyed sometimes — exactly as might happen.