My rather idle speculations were interrupted by the cessation of Damron’s voice and the opening of the door of Sanderson’s stateroom.
I’d placed myself so I could glance at the two men as they came out without turning my head. Sanderson came first, his wrinkled old face looking a little excited. Damron followed, put out his hand and opened the door of his own stateroom, which was next forward to Sanderson’s. Smiling his peculiar smile, he nodded to Sanderson, shot him what I took to be a cautioning glance and disappeared within.
Sanderson glanced toward me, but my attention was apparently forward. So he stood for a moment hesitant, the salt air whipping color into his rather pallid cheeks and flapping his loosely fitting black suit around his shrunken but still wiry old frame. Then he glanced at the door through which Damron had just passed, and I saw a queer change come over him.
His expression changed completely. Perplexity, distrust, dislike came into his look—and something else, too. Fear, I thought, as if he felt himself being drawn into an abyss. It was the same look I’d caught on his face twice before; I couldn’t understand it.
I turned and spoke—
“Oh—good evening, Mr. Sanderson.”
He started in his nervous fashion.
“Good evening. I was just goin’ in to dinner. Are you?”
He seemed glad to see me. I saw that his eyes, naturally clear blue as the sky under which he’d lived, were slightly bloodshot.
“Presently,” I replied. “Not just now. Let’s enjoy the sunset. Will you smoke?” I handed him the mate to my own cigar, and he put it carefully away.
“After I eat, thank ye,” he smiled. “But the sunset now, with all my heart. Don’t the old boat seem to be enjoyin’ it, too; seems like she’s alive.”
It’s a commentary on poor old human nature that the discovery of that common thought moved me definitely to intervention.
“I don’t believe, Mr. Sanderson, you have my card.”
I usually carry them of several sorts. I fished out the one most frankly descriptive of myself and handed it to him. It read:
JOHN PARTRIDGE
Specialist in the Unusual
He looked at it with puzzled eyes, started to grin uncertainly, and then the idea seemed to slowly dawn upon him that I’d had a purpose in giving it to him. He glanced up at me, more curious than startled.
“Eh? What? A funny business!”
“Well, perhaps,” I agreed. “But, I assure you, one of unlimited possibilities. The unusual is everywhere. Even on board the Antioch,” I concluded significantly.
He seemed to catch that significance, and I believed his eyes quickened.
“What d’ye mean?” he asked receptively.
“Frankness,” I replied bluntly. “Can you trust me or not? Or rather, do you want to? That man, there.” I nodded toward the door of Damron’s cabin. “What’s between you? Why do you pretend what you don’t feel—friendship? And why are you afraid of him?”
It was a frontal attack on reticence, but I’d preceded it by a certain amount of friendly sapping. Sanderson blinked his eyes away from me, considering the confidence. He turned to the rail and studied a bottle-green wave that rose along the side of the Antioch; he looked astern, where the sea was slate-colored under the clouds and where the long smoke wreath trailed after the ship, pressed down by the wind over the waves. Then he gave me another long look and spoke quizzically:
“Well, as to likin’ him, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but as to gettin’ along with him, that’s simple. He was my wife’s brother, and I don’t feel like doin’ anything else. As for bein’ afraid of him, why, I reckon you exaggerate a little there.”
“Oh, very well,” I said with a note of finality.
“But he’s the darnedest talker,” he went on quickly.
“I’ve noticed that,” I encouraged him.
“The darnedest— Did ye ever meet a man who could make ye see plain that two and two make five or that the world’s hollow and we’re on the inside of it or that ye can coin gold out of sea-water or—” with an angry snort—“out of fresh air?”
I caught his emphasis on the last absurdity.
“Out of fresh air,” I mocked. “A sort of p-n-e-u-alchemy, eh?”
“Why, yes, that’s about what it comes to. But, pshaw, I’m forgettin’. It ain’t supposed to be told yet.”
“A family secret, it seems,” I scoffed carelessly. “Well, I suppose you’ve plenty of cash or collateral on board, that your brother-in-law finds it worth his while to teach you high finance?”
NOW, he might have got angry at that question, but I judged that he really wanted to confide in me. Also I rather relied upon his native instinct to make him trust me. I really liked the old man pretty thoroughly, liked his evident unworldliness, his countryman’s habit of quick friendship and the simple candor that spoke from his pale-blue eyes. And I hoped that he sensed that liking.
I suppose he did, for within five minutes he had confessed to the possession on board the Antioch of seventy-five thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds, the total price of his ranch.
He admitted, too, that it had been at his brother-in-law’s urging that he had brought the bonds with him. In fact, that he had gone with his brother-in-law from their hotel room to the safe-deposit vault late the night before the Antioch sailed to get the bonds. Damron had urged it on the ground of a newly discovered chance for a big-paying investment, which he would explain on the Antioch. I couldn’t help but feel, under Sanderson’s half-shamefaced manner while telling of the folly, a touch of utter mystification as to why he had perpetrated it.
That interview with Sanderson had been two days ago. It is plain why it didn’t amaze me that, from being afraid he was going to deal with Damron, he had dealt with him—and in that dealing had lost everything he had. The “feelin’ of wildness” he described, with the accompanying imposition of Damron’s will, had evidently possessed him before. Moreover, in mulling around for an explanation, my mind chanced to revert to the tiny grains of wood I’d observed on the deck before Damron’s door.
“Maybe it’s all right,” Sanderson tried to encourage himself. “But I wish I had it back, all the same. Maybe he’ll trade back.”
We were standing well astern on the promenade-deck. It was a gloomy morning with a leaden sea. A stout wind heeled the ship to starboard, but on the lee side of the deck a dozen or more passengers lounged against the rail or lay in steamer chairs. Two young men, athletically inclined, paced each other at a racing stride around the cabins, but they stayed forward, and Sanderson and I were practically alone.
I didn’t reply for a moment. Instead, I watched astern where the hungry gulls followed the ship, swooping down now and then on either side or behind the churning wake, where the long log-line dragged. Their wild, mournful cries seemed rather in tune with the morning and with Sanderson’s distress.
“I suppose it was a legal enough transaction—papers signed and everything,” I hazarded.
“And witnessed by a man Damron called in from the deck,” replied Sanderson rather bitterly.
He turned to the rail and leaned upon it, looking down into the water and giving me a good chance to study him. His weather-worn old face had gone very haggard, and his eyes were bleary. He had evidently passed a bad night. Had it not been that he had described himself to me as a strict teetotaler and that there was absolutely no smell of liquor on his breath, I might have conceived a very commonplace explanation for both the cheat and his present condition.
As it was, I must look for another explanation and another form of influence. Hypnotism suggested itself to me, but only as a passing thought; things occult have always failed to interest me. Wonders and problems enough there are in the natural world without going beyond it. And it was at that point I thought of the flakes of wood.
Anyway, there was only one present course to pursue.
“You haven’t told me yet just what this precious stock is that he sold you.”
“Well, I ain’t supposed to. But you might know for sure. It’s Consolidated Air Power—five hundred shares of it.”
That told me a lot—placed Damron exactly. I don’t dabble in stocks, but I read the papers, and I knew that a week before the Antioch had sailed a fraud order had been issued against Consolidated Air just too late to catch the promoter, who had disappeared. Doubtless it had been Damron under another name. Resuming his real name, he had attached himself leechlike to his brother-in-law and had succeeded in getting enough out of him to start life again in the Eastern Hemisphere.
But I don’t think any of this was suggested in the start I gave at Sanderson’s information.
“What?” I cried. “Consolidated Air Power! Is that what you’re carping about?”
My tone roused Sanderson from his lethargy; he turned on me in a flash.
“Yes. Why? Do you know—”
“Why, of course. Why didn’t you tell me before? For a man to have fortune thrust upon him and then go weeping over it!”
It was touching how the old man caught at my words.
“What’s that? Don’t be joking, man.”
“It’s you that’s the joke. No wonder Damron wouldn’t let you tell everybody; it’s too good a thing to let everybody in on. Wasn’t that what he told you?”
“Yes, but— On your word of honor,” cried Sanderson, gripping my arm, “is it all right?”
“On my word of honor,” I replied, “your brother-in-law is no more nor less than a pneu-alchemist. You said it yourself; he’s turning air into money. The man who’s selling Consolidated Air Power is the man I want to meet. I haven’t your amount of money, and maybe five thousand is too little for Damron to monkey with, but it’s five thousand spot cash. As a friend of mine, won’t you help manage it?”
Of course, Sanderson’s reaction from despair threw him into a mood that made him willing to promise me anything.
A crook in the company of his dupe rarely encourages other acquaintances; so it was only natural that Damron had so far held aloof from his fellow passengers. That afternoon I met him formally, however, and, though Sanderson would not confess to him that he had told me anything about Consolidated Air Power, he had no objection to telling Damron confidentially that I had five thousand dollars loose cash that I was anxious to invest.
I smiled inwardly as I noticed how Damron’s interest in me quickened after he had that information. Still it was two days before the dénouement came which I planned, notwithstanding that I always did my best in our conversations to play the financial simpleton. Despite that crooked twist in his soul of which his twist-lipped smile was the outward symbol, Damron was a very clever man. It was hard to make him believe that I was the sort of trustful bird for which the Air Power net had been laid.
But I relied upon his cupidity and merely went on playing the simpleton—except for one preparatory step that I took the same day Sanderson told me how he had been fleeced. That afternoon I took a bundle of very useful keys I always carry with me, on the principle that an honest man has the right to all the facilities used by thieves, and with one of them I opened the door of Damron’s stateroom. When I came out, I was quite sure I had left everything behind quite as it should be.
It was the second evening thereafter, in Sanderson’s stateroom, that Damron introduced to me the stock of Consolidated Air Power. We had just had dinner together, a very congenial trio. After we had entered the stateroom, Damron excused himself for a moment, as I had expected he would, and, through the one wall that separated us, we heard him stirring around for a moment in his own cabin.
He began to talk on the subject of investments immediately upon his return.
BREATH of violets! Mingled somewhat with clover, fragrance of the meadow and hillside. Surely there could be nothing in the mild and gentle reminder of Springtime that began to pervade the air of the stateroom to cause Damron, launched in the full flood of eloquence, to hesitate, pale, waver in his speech and show every sign of a man distraught by a sudden and mastering fear.
He had taken his seat on the side of the cabin opposite the wall of his own stateroom. Sanderson sat near the berth; I had brought a camp-stool in from the deck and sat with my back against the door. The ship was running on a very even keel; if it hadn’t been for the vibrations of the screw and the rhythm of the pistons, we might have fancied ourselves back in the big world again instead of on that detached fragment of it known as the Antioch.
And up to a certain point Damron’s talk helped to complete the illusion. Trickery and thieving always seem to me to belong to the mainly good but complicated world of clay, rather than to the sea, which is changeable, sometimes terrible, but always clean, simple and honest.
Damron began by a rather loose discussion of energy in general. From that he passed to the gradual tapping by mankind of various reservoirs of energy, each release meaning a forward step in the march of civilization. And so he came naturally to his major premise, which was, of course, that the greatest and cheapest supply of energy remained as yet untouched—the energy of the air.
It was at that point that the smell of violets in the room began to be distinguishable. That is, by me, who had been expecting it. Damron didn’t get it yet, nor did Sanderson; both were too deeply absorbed in Damron’s talk.
He had the gift of words. He understood the art of moving minds, and he used it. Leaning back in that chair with an inspired face, he brought into that cabin the winds of the world—those winds which are everywhere and come from everywhere, and he set them to work.
He brought into that cabin the industries of the world and showed them revolutionized. And he had started to deal—using sketchy touches that I admired—with the recently perfected air motor that was to turn the trick—a device, I believe, of vast, scientifically shaped funnels for the concentration of power and a new form of battery for its storage—when he first became conscious of that violet breath, which reacted upon him like the breath of doom itself.
He faltered, as I’ve said, grew pale, glanced obliquely at me and seemed from the uneasiness that grew in his eyes to catch for the first time some significance in my position squarely before the door.
I rather felt sorry for the rogue—it’s a weakness I have—but my eyes fell on old man Sanderson, sitting there enthralled again by Damron’s eloquence, and my heart hardened. Unmercifully Damron had fleeced him, and the winds of life are seldom tempered to the shorn old. For not the first time in my life I felt grateful for that sort of ultra-roguery that must needs load its dice as well as unfairly throw them. Had Damron relied entirely upon wordy persuasion, I believe he would still have had his way with Sanderson, and there would have been small chance of recourse.
However, as Damron’s voice trailed away, I put in a word:
“It’s fascinating. Transmutation, air turned into gold—Sanderson, didn’t you tell me you’d purchased some stock in this scheme?”
Sanderson started, looked reproachfully at me and uneasily at Damron.
“I did tell him about it,” he mumbled apologetically to Damron. “He had some money he wanted to invest. I thought you wouldn’t mind—”
“Oh, of course not,” replied Damron, trying to cover his sudden accession of fear with cordiality. “We don’t want publicity now,” turning to me, “for a plain reason; it’s a matter for careful handling and international financing. However, you’re an exception; Sanderson and I both seemed to arrive separately at the same conclusion. I was going to offer to let you in—”
“Thanks,” I replied rather carelessly. “What a peculiar odor, in the middle of the Pacific!” I sniffed the air.
“I was just going to speak of that,” rejoined Damron quickly. “Somehow, I feel ill. The air in this cabin—”
“Will clear presently, I’m sure.” And I shot him a significant glance that checked him in the very act of rising from his chair.
Sanderson, possibly catching my glance, certainly observing the change in Damron’s manner,
glanced from one to the other of us, puzzled.
“It’s a queer smell,” he began, “but I don’t see—”
“There was nothing like this the other night when you bought the stock, was there?” I asked.
“No, there wasn’t. Why?”
“Sanderson told me a peculiar yarn about that night,” I explained to Damron. “The way he felt, you know.”
Carelessly I brought my hand, which was in the side pocket of my coat, forward until it rested upon my thigh. In that position the outline of the revolver I held in it could be seen under the folds of the cloth.
“He spoke,” I said, “of a ‘feelin’ of wildness.’ I suppose he also had a ‘buzzing in the head.’ ‘Ideas swarmed but were hard to grasp.’ In fact, he seemed to have ‘a very close approximation to an alcoholic jag.’ ”
“What do you mean?” asked Damron with a sudden note of savagery.
“Why—I beg your pardon,” I smiled. “I don’t know how I came to do it. But unconsciously I was quoting from a scientific article I was reading in the ship’s library the other day, headed ‘Is Oxygen an Intoxicant?’ There seems to be a doubt. But as to its exciting effects, none at all.”
“How the devil does this concern me?” asked Damron angrily. “Let me—”
“Sit down,” I ordered tensely.
He obeyed. I went on as naturally as I could.
“Nothing, except that it was an interesting article. There seems to be room for quibbling. But in law there’s such a thing as undue influence, and it isn’t usually hard to prove in the case of worthless security. Heavens, how I am wandering. Surely there must be something wrong with the air of this stateroom.”
Without taking my eyes from Damron, I got up, reached back of me over my head and opened the round port-hole.
“This fragrance must come through the wall somewhere,” I said. “There’s nothing in this stateroom to make it. But now—what was I talking about?”
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 6
