Author: George Allan England
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: George Allan England (1873-1936) was a spectacularly prolific short story writer in practically every genre, and occasional novelist, who today is best remembered, if at all, for his post-apocalypse trilogy "Darkness and Deep". This collection of his short stories includes two adventure novelettes. plus humour, horror, and crime. 1: The Thing from Outside 2: Rough Toss 3: Leatherbee’s Luck 4: Blood Brothers (novelette) 5: Maroon Key (novelette) 6: The Longest Side 7: Test Tubes 8: Africa

MAROON KEY
and other stories

Godon Allan England

1873-1936

2020

Contents

1: The Thing from Outside

2: Rough Toss

3: Leatherbee’s Luck

4: Blood Brothers (novelette)

5: Maroon Key (novelette)

6: The Longest Side

7: Test Tubes

8: Africa

________________

1: The Thing from Outside

Amazing Stories, April, 1926

THEY sat about their camp-fire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the on-coming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day’s trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River’s haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.

“I don’t see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock-ledge to make our guides desert,” said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his  whole personality. “Most extraordinary.”

“They knew what it was, all right,” answered Jandron, geologist of the party. “So do I.” He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. I’ve seen prints like that before. That was on the Labrador. And I’ve seen things happen, where they were.”

“Something surely happened to our guides, before they’d got a mile into the bush,” put in the Professor’s wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. “Men don’t shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless—”

“They’re all three dead now, anyhow,” put in Jandron. “So they’re out of harm’s way. While we— well, we’re two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C. P. R. rails.”

“Forget it, Jandy!” said Marr, the journalist. “We’re just suffering from an attack of nerves, that’s all. Give me a fill of ’baccy. Thanks. We’ll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—”

He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction— that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind’s everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.

Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man’s trivial world.

Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles upstream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the women-folk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing the marking seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.

Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright mackinaw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.

“We’d better get along out of this as quick as we can,” said he in an unnatural voice, “You’ve got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I,— well, I’ve got Vivian. And—”

“You have?” nipped Marr. The light of an evil jealously gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. “What you need is an alienist.”

“Really, Jandron,” the Professor admonished, “you mustn’t let your imagination run away with you.”

“I suppose it’s imagination that keeps this print cold!” the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.

“Nothing but a pot-hole,” judged Thorburn, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor’s vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvelous thinking machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock.

“By Jove, but it is cold!” he admitted. “And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone. Extraordinary!”

“Dissolved out, you mean,” corrected the geologist. “By cold.”

The journalist laughed mockingly.

“Wait till I write this up!” he sneered. “‘Noted, Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!’”

Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.

“Ice!” ejaculated the Professor. “Solid ice!”

“Frozen in a second,” added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. “And it’ll never melt, either. I tell you, I’ve seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something burned this ring out of the stone—burned it out with the cold interstellar space. Something that can import cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it.”

“Of course that’s all sheer poppycock,” the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.

“This something, this Thing,” continued Jandron, “is a Thing that can’t be killed by bullets. It’s what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away—poor fools!”

A shadow fell across the print in the rock, Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.

“Nonsense!” she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.

That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging—laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare—they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.

“After all,” said the Professor, when supper was done, “we mustn’t get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains— we aren’t going to let Nature play us any tricks!”

“And of course,” added his wife, her arm about Vivian, “everything in the universe is a natural force. There’s really no super-natural, at all.”

“Admitted,” Jandron replied. “But how about things outside the universe?”

“And they call you a scientist?” gibed Marr; but the Professor leaned forward, his brows knit.

“Hm!” he grunted. A little silence fell.

“You don’t mean, really,” asked Vivian, “that you think there’s life and intelligence—Outside?”

Jandron looked at the girl. Her beauty, haloed with ruddy gold from the firelight, was a pain to him as he answered:

“Yes, I do. And dangerous life, too. I know what I’ve seen, in the North Country. I know what I’ve seen!”

Silence again, save for the crepitation of the flames, the fall of an ember, the murmur of the current. Darkness narrowed the wilderness to just that circle of flickering light ringed by the forest and the river, brooded over by the pale stars.

“Of course you can’t expect a scientific man to take you seriously,” commented the Professor.

“I know what I’ve seen! I tell you there’s Something entirely outside man’s knowledge.”

“Poor fellow!” scoffed the journalist; but even as he spoke his hand pressed his forehead.

“There are Things at work,” Jandron affirmed, with dogged persistence. He lighted his pipe with a blazing twig. Its flame revealed his face drawn, lined. “Things. Things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants. Less, perhaps.”

The flame of the twig died. Night stood closer, watching.

“Suppose there are?” the girl asked. “What’s that got to do with these prints in the rock?”

“They,” answered Jandron, “are marks left by one of those Things. Footprints, maybe. That Thing is near us, here and now!”

Marr’s laugh broke a long stillness.

“And you,” he exclaimed, “with an A. M. and a B. S. to write after your name.”

“If you knew more,” retorted Jandron, “you’d know a devilish sight less. It’s only ignorance that’s cock-sure.”

“But,” dogmatized the Professor, “no scientist of any standing has ever admitted any outside interference with this planet.”

“No, and for thousands of years nobody ever admitted that the world was round, either. What I’ve seen, I know.”

“Well, what have you seen?” asked Mrs. Thorburn, shivering.

“You’ll excuse me, please, for not going into that just now.”

“You mean,” the Professor demanded, dryly, “if the— hm!— this supposition Thing wants to—?”

“It’ll do any infernal thing it takes a fancy to, yes! If it happens to want us—”

“But what could Things like that want of us? Why should They come here, at all?”

“Oh, for various reasons. For inanimate objects, at times, and then again for living beings. They’ve come here lots of times, I tell you,” Jandron asserted with strange irritation, “and got what They wanted, and then gone away to—Somewhere. If one of Them happens to want us, for any reason. It will take us, that’s all. If It doesn’t want us, It will ignore us, as we’d ignore gorillas in Africa if we were looking for gold. But if it was gorilla-fur we wanted, that would be different for the gorillas, wouldn’t it?”

“What in the world,” asked Vivian, “could a— well, a Thing from Outside want of us?”

“What do men want, say, of guinea-pigs? Men experiment with ’em, of course. Superior beings use inferior, for their own ends. To assume that man is the supreme product of evolution is gross self-conceit. Might not some superior Thing want to experiment with human beings?

“But how?” demanded Marr.

“The human brain is the most highly-organized form of matter known to this planet. Suppose, now—”

“Nonsense!” interrupted the Professor. “All hands to the sleeping-bags, and no more of this. I’ve got a wretched headache. Let’s anchor in Blanket Bay!”

He, and both the women, turned in. Jandron and Marr sat a while longer by the fire. They kept plenty of wood piled on it, too, for an unnatural chill transfixed the night-air. The fire burned strangely blue, with greenish flicks of flame.

At length, after vast acerbities of disagreement, the geologist and the newspaperman sought their sleeping-bags. The fire was a comfort. Not that a fire could avail a pin’s weight against a Thing from interstellar space, but subjectively it was a comfort. The instincts of a million years, centering around protection by fire, cannot be obliterated.

After a time— worn out by a day of nerve-strain and of battling with swift currents, of flight from Something invisible, intangible— they all slept.

The depths of space, star-sprinkled, hung above them with vastness immeasurable, cold beyond all understanding of the human mind.

Jandron woke first, in a red dawn.

He blinked at the fire, as he crawled from his sleeping-bag. The fire was dead; and yet it had not burned out. Much wood remained unconsumed, charred over, as if some gigantic extinguisher had in the night been lowered over it.

“Hmmm!” growled Jandron. He glanced about him, on the ledge. “Prints, too. I might have known!”

He aroused Marr. Despite all the journalist’s mocking hostility, Jandron felt more in common with this man of his own age than with the Professor, who was close on sixty.

“Look here, now!” said he. “It has been all around here. See? It put out our fire— maybe the fire annoyed It, some way— and It walked round us, everywhere.” His gray eyes smouldered. “I guess, by gad, you’ve got to admit facts, now!”

The journalist could only shiver and stare.

“Lord, what a head I’ve got on me, this morning!” he chattered. He rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand, and started for the river. Most of his assurance had vanished. He looked badly done up.

“Well, what say?” demanded Jandron. “See these fresh prints?”

“Damn the prints!” retorted Marr, and fell to grumbling some unintelligible thing. He washed unsteadily, and remained crouching at the river’s lip, inert, numbed.

Jandron, despite a gnawing at the base of his brain, carefully examined the ledge. He found prints scattered everywhere, and some even on the river-bottom near the shore. Wherever water had collected in the prints on the rock, it had frozen hard. Each print in the river-bed, too, was white with ice. Ice that the rushing current could not melt.

“Well, by gad!” he exclaimed. He lighted his pipe and tried to think. Horribly afraid— yes, he felt horribly afraid, but determined. Presently, as a little power of concentration came back, he noticed that all the prints were in straight lines, each mark about two feet from the next.

“It was observing us while we slept,” said Jandron.

“What nonsense are you talking, eh?” demanded Marr. His dark, heavy face sagged. “Fire, now, and grub!”

He got up and shuffled unsteadily away from the river. Then he stopped with a jerk, staring.

“Look! Look a’ that axe!” he gulped, pointing.

Jandron picked up the axe, by the handle, taking good care not to touch the steel. The blade was white-furred with frost. And deep into it, punching out part of the edge, one of the prints was stamped.

“This metal,” said he, “is clean gone. It’s been absorbed. The Thing doesn’t recognize any difference in materials. Water and steel and rock are all the same to It.

“You’re crazy!” snarled the journalist. “How could a Thing travel on one leg, hopping along, making marks like that?”

“It could roll, if it was disk-shaped. And—”

A cry from the Professor turned them. Thorburn was stumbling toward them, hands out and tremulous.

“My wife—!” he choked.

Vivian was kneeling beside her sister, frightened, dazed.

“Something’s happened!” stammered the Professor. “Here— come here—!”

Mrs. Thorburn was beyond any power of theirs, to help. She was still breathing; but her respirations were stertorous, and a complete paralysis had stricken her. Her eyes, half-open and expressionless, showed pupils startlingly dilated. No resources of the party’s drug-kit produced the slightest effect on the woman.

The next half-hour was a confused panic, breaking camp, getting Mrs. Thorburn into a canoe, and leaving that accursed place, with a furious energy of terror that could no longer reason. Up-stream, ever up against the swirl of the current the party fought, driven by horror. With no thought of food or drink, paying no heed to landmarks, lashed forward only by the mad desire to be gone, the three men and the girl flung every ounce of their energy into the paddles. Their panting breath mingled with the sound of swirling eddies. A mist-blurred sun brooded over the northern wilds. Unheeded, hosts of black-flies sang high-pitched keenings all about the fugitives. On either hand the forest waited, watched.

Only after two hours of sweating toil had brought exhaustion did they stop, in the shelter of a cove where black waters circled, foam-flecked. There they found the Professor’s wife— she was dead.

Nothing remained to do but bury her. At first Thorburn would not hear of it. Like a madman he insisted that through all hazards he would fetch the body out. But no—impossible. So, after a terrible time, he yielded.

In spite of her grief, Vivian was admirable. She understood what must be done. It was her voice that said the prayers; her hand that— lacking flowers— laid the fir boughs on the cairn. The Professor was dazed past doing anything, saying anything.

Toward mid-afternoon, the party landed again, many miles up-river. Necessity forced them to eat. Fire would not burn. Every time they lighted it, it smouldered and went out with a heavy, greasy smoke. The fugitives ate cold food and drank water, then shoved off in two canoes and once more fled.

In the third canoe, hauled to the edge of the forest, lay all the rock-specimens, data and curios, scientific instruments. The party kept only Marr’s diary, a compass, supplies, fire-arms and medicine-kit.

“We can find the things we’ve left— sometime,” said Jandron, noting the place well. “Sometime— after It has gone.”

“And bring the body out,” added Thorburn. Tears, for the first time, wet his eyes. Vivian said nothing. Marr tried to light his pipe. He seemed to forget that nothing, not even tobacco, would burn now.

Vivian and Jandron occupied one canoe. The other carried the Professor and Marr. Thus the power of the two canoes was about the same. They kept well together, up-stream.

The fugitives paddled and portaged with a dumb, desperate energy. Toward evening they struck into what they believed to be the Mamattawan. A mile up this, as the blurred sun faded beyond a wilderness of ominous silence, they camped. Here they made determined efforts to kindle fire. Not even alcohol from the drug-kit would start it. Cold, they mumbled a little food; cold, they huddled into their sleeping-bags, there to lie with darkness leaden on their fear. After a long time, up over a world void of all sound save the river-flow, slid an amber moon notched by the ragged tops of the conifers. Even the wail of a timber-wolf would have come as welcome relief; but no wolf howled.

Silence and night enfolded them. And everywhere they felt that It was watching.

Foolishly enough, as a man will do foolish things in a crisis, Jandron laid his revolver outside his sleeping-bag, in easy reach. His thought— blurred by a strange, drawing headache— was:

“If It touches Vivian, I’ll shoot!”

He realized the complete absurdity of trying to shoot a visitant from interstellar space; from the Fourth Dimension, maybe. But Jandron’s ideas seemed tangled. Nothing would come right. He lay there, absorbed in a kind of waking nightmare. Now and then, rising on an elbow, he hearkened; all in vain. Nothing so much as stirred.

His thought drifted to better days, when all had been health, sanity, optimism; when nothing except jealousy of Marr, as concerned Vivian, had troubled him. Days when the sizzle of the frying-pan over friendly coals had made friendly wilderness music; when the wind and the northern star, the whirr of the reel, the whispering vortex of the paddle in clear water had all been things of joy. Yes, and when a certain happy moment had, through some word or look of the girl, seemed to promise his heart’s desire. But now—

“Damn it, I’ll save her, anyhow!” he swore with savage intensity, knowing all the while that what was to be, would be, unmitigably. Do ants, by any waving of antenna, stay the down-crushing foot of man?

Next morning, and the next, no sign of the Thing appeared. Hope revived that possibly It might have flitted away elsewhere; back, perhaps, to outer space. Many were the miles the urging paddles spurned behind. The fugitives calculated that a week more would bring them to the railroad. Fire burned again. Hot food and drink helped, wonderfully. But where were the fish?

“Most extraordinary,” all at once said the Professor, at noonday camp. He had become quite rational again. “Do you realize, Jandron, we’ve seen no traces of life in some time?”

The geologist nodded. Only too clearly he had noted just that, but he had been keeping still about it.

“That’s so, too!” chimed in Marr, enjoying the smoke that some incomprehensible turn of events was letting him have. “Not a muskrat or beaver. Not even a squirrel or bird.”

“Not so much as a gnat or black-fly!” the Professor added. Jandron suddenly realized that he would have welcomed even those.

That afternoon, Marr fell into a suddenly vile temper. He mumbled curses against the guides, the current, the portages, everything. The Professor seemed more cheerful. Vivian complained of an oppressive headache. Jandron gave her the last of the aspirin tablets; and as he gave them, took her hand in his.

“I’ll see you through, anyhow,” said he. “I don’t count, now. Nobody counts, only you!”

She gave him a long, silent look. He saw the sudden glint of tears in her eyes; felt the pressure of her hand, and knew they two had never been so near each other as in that moment under the shadow of the Unknown.

Next day— or it may have been two days later, for none of them could be quite sure about the passage of time— they came to a deserted lumber-camp. Even more than two days might have passed; because now their bacon was all gone, and only coffee, tobacco, beef-cubes and pilot-bread remained. The lack of fish and game had cut alarmingly into the duffle-bag. That day—whatever day it may have been— all four of them suffered terribly from headache of an odd, ring-shaped kind, as if something circular were being pressed down about their heads. The Professor said it was the sun that made his head ache. Vivian laid it to the wind and the gleam of the swift water, while Marr claimed it was the heat. Jandron wondered at all this, inasmuch as he plainly saw that the river had almost stopped flowing, and the day had become still and overcast.

They dragged their canoes upon a rotting stage of fir-poles and explored the lumber-camp; a mournful place set back in an old “slash,” now partly overgrown with scrub poplar, maple and birch. The log buildings, covered with tar-paper partly torn from the pole roofs, were of the usual North Country type. Obviously the place had not been used for years. Even the landing-stage where once logs had been rolled into the stream had sagged to decay.

“I don’t quite get the idea of this,” Marr exclaimed. “Where did the logs go to? Downstream, of course. But that would take ’em to Hudson Bay, and there’s no market for spruce timber or pulp-wood at Hudson Bay.” He pointed down the current.

“You’re entirely mistaken,” put in the Professor. “Any fool could see this river runs the other way. A log thrown in here would go down toward the St. Lawrence!”

“But then,” asked the girl, “why can’t we drift back to civilization?” The Professor retorted:

“Just what we have been doing, all along! Extraordinary, that I have to explain the obvious!” He walked away in a huff.

“I don’t know but he’s right, at that,” half admitted the journalist. “I’ve been thinking almost the same thing, myself, the past day or two—that is, ever since the sun shifted.”

“What do you mean, shifted?” from Jandron.

“You haven’t noticed it?”

“But there’s been no sun at all, for at least two days!”

“Hanged if I’ll waste time arguing with a lunatic!” Marr growled. He vouchsafed no explanation of what he meant by the sun’s having “shifted,” but wandered off, grumbling.

“What are we going to do?” the girl appealed to Jandron. The sight of her solemn, frightened eyes, of her palm-outward hands and (at last) her very feminine fear, constricted Jandron’s heart.

“We’re going through, you and I,” he answered simply. “We’ve got to save them from themselves, you and I have.”

Their hands met again, and for a moment held. Despite the dead calm, a fir-tip at the edge of the clearing suddenly flicked aside, shrivelled as if frozen. But neither of them saw it.

The fugitives, badly spent, established themselves in the “bar-room” or sleeping-shack of the camp. They wanted to feel a roof over them again, if only a broken one. The traces of men comforted them: a couple of broken peavies, a pair of snowshoes with the thongs all gnawed off, a cracked bit of mirror, a yellowed almanac dated 1899.

Jandron called the Professor’s attention to this almanac, but the Professor thrust it aside.

“What do I want of a Canadian census-report?” he demanded, and fell to counting the bunks, over and over again. His big bulge of his forehead, that housed the massive brain of him, was oozing sweat. Marr cursed what he claimed was sunshine through the holes in the roof, though Jandron could see none; claimed the sunshine made his head ache.

“But it’s not a bad place,” he added. “We can make a blaze in that fireplace and be comfy. I don’t like that window, though.”

“What window?” asked Jandron. “Where?”

Marr laughed, and ignored him. Jandron turned to Vivian, who had sunk down on the “deacon-seat” and was staring at the stove.

“Is there a window here?” he demanded.

“Don’t ask me,” she whispered. “I— I don’t know.”

With a very thriving fear in his heart, Jandron peered at her a moment. He fell to muttering:

“I’m Wallace Jandron. Wallace Jandron, 37 Ware Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m quite sane. And I’m going to stay so. I’m going to save her! I know perfectly well what I’m doing. And I’m sane. Quite, quite sane!”

After a time of confused and purposeless wrangling, they got a fire going and made coffee. This, and cube bouillon with hardtack, helped considerably. The camp helped, too. A house, even a poor and broken one, is a wonderful barrier against a Thing from— Outside.

Presently darkness folded down. The men smoked, thankful that tobacco still held out. Vivian lay in a bunk that Jandron had piled with spruce boughs for her, and seemed to sleep. The Professor fretted like a child, over the blisters his paddle had made upon his hands. Marr laughed, now and then; though what he might be laughing at was not apparent. Suddenly he broke out:

“After all, what should It want of us?”

“Our brains, of course,” the Professor answered, sharply.

“That lets Jandron out,” the journalist mocked.

“But,” added the Professor, “I can’t imagine a Thing callously destroying human beings. And yet—”

He stopped short, with surging memories of his dead wife.

“What was it,” Jandron asked, “that destroyed all those people in Valladolid, Spain, that time so many of ’em died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible Something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it.”

“Piffle!” yawned Marr.

“I tell you,” insisted Jandron, “there are forms of life as superior to us as we are to ants. We can’t see ’em. No ant ever saw a man. And did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These Things have left thousands of traces, all over the world. If I had my reference-books—”

“Tell that to the marines!”

“Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena,” persisted Jandron, “gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can’t explain, in his ‘Book of the Damned.’ He claims this earth was once a No-Man’s land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody’s warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: ‘In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.”

“Poor fish, to believe that!” mocked the journalist, while the Professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead.

“I do believe it!” insisted Jandron, “The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations, that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.”

“Rubbish!”

“How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places— Peru, Yucatan and so on— which certainly no primitive race ever built?”

“That’s thousands of years ago,” said Marr, “and I’m sleepy. For heaven’s sake, can it!”

“Oh, all right. But how explain things, then!”

“What the devil could one of those Things want of our brains?” suddenly put in the Professor. “After all, what?”

“Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food. Again, some product or other. Or just information. Maybe It is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant-hill. There’s always this to remember, that the human brain-tissue is the most highly-organized form of matter in this world.”

“Yes,” admitted the Professor, “but what—?”

“It might want brain-tissue for food, for experimental purposes, for lubricant— how do I know?”

Jandron fancied he was still explaining things; but all at once he found himself waking up in one of the bunks. He felt terribly cold, stiff, sore. A sift of snow lay here and there on the camp floor, where it had fallen through holes in the roof.

“Vivian!” he croaked hoarsely. “Thorburn! Marr!”

Nobody answered. There was nobody to answer. Jandron crawled with immense pain out of his bunk, and blinked round with bleary eyes. All of a sudden he saw the Professor, and gulped.

The Professor was lying stiff and straight in another bunk, on his back. His waxen face made a mask of horror. The open, staring eyes, with pupils immensely dilated, sent Jandron shuddering back. A livid ring marked the forehead, that now sagged inward as if empty.

“Vivian!” croaked Jandron, staggering away from the body. He fumbled to the bunk where the girl had lain. The bunk was quite deserted.

On the stove, in which lay half-charred wood—; wood smothered out as if by some noxious gas— still stood the coffee-pot. The liquid in it was frozen solid. Of Vivian and the journalist, no trace remained.

Along one of the sagging beams that supported the roof, Jandron’s horror-blasted gaze perceived a straight line of frosted prints, ring-shaped, bitten deep.

“Vivian! Vivian!”

No answer.

Shaking, sick, gray, half-blind with a horror not of this world, Jandron peered slowly around. The duffle-bag and supplies were gone. Nothing was left but that coffee-pot and the revolver at Jandron’s hip.

Jandron turned, then. A-stare, his skull feeling empty as a burst drum, he crept lamely to the door and out— out into the snow.

Snow. It came slanting down. From a gray sky it steadily filtered. The trees showed no leaf. Birches, poplars, rock-maples all stood naked. Only the conifers drooped sickly-green. In a little shallow across the river snow lay white on thin ice.

Ice? Snow? Rapt with terror, Jandron stared. Why, then, he must have been unconscious three or four weeks? But how—?

Suddenly, all along the upper branches of trees that edged the clearing, puffs of snow flicked down. The geologist shuffled after two half-obliterated sets of footprints that wavered toward the landing.

His body was leaden. He wheezed, as he reached the river. The light, dim as it was, hurt his eyes. He blinked in a confusion that could just perceive one canoe was gone. He pressed a hand to his head, where an iron band seemed screwed up tight, tighter.

“Vivian! Marr! Halloooo!”

Not even an echo. Silence clamped the world; silence, and a cold that gnawed. Everything had gone a sinister gray.

After a certain time— though time now possessed neither reality nor duration— Jandron dragged himself back to the camp and stumbled in. Heedless of the staring corpse he crumpled down by the stove and tried to think, but his brain had been emptied of power. Everything blent to a gray blur. Snow kept slithering in through the roof.

“Well, why don’t you come and get me, Thing?” suddenly snarled Jandron. “Here I am. Damn you, come and get me!”

Voices. Suddenly he heard voices. Yes, somebody was outside, there. Singularly aggrieved, he got up and limped to the door. He squinted out into the gray; saw two figures down by the landing. With numb indifference he recognized the girl and Marr.

“Why should they bother me again?” he nebulously wondered. Can’t they go away and leave me alone?” He felt peevish irritation.

Then, a modicum of reason returning, he sensed that they were arguing. Vivian, beside a canoe freshly dragged from thin ice, was pointing; Marr was gesticulating. All at once Marr snarled, turned from her, plodded with bent back toward the camp.

“But listen!” she called, her rough-knit sweater all powdered with snow. “That’s the way!” She gestured downstream.

“I’m not going either way!” Marr retorted. “I’m going to stay right here!” He came on, bareheaded. Snow grayed his stubble of beard; but on his head it melted as it fell, as if some fever there had raised the brain-stuff to improbable temperatures. “I’m going to stay right here, all summer.” His heavy lids sagged. Puffy and evil, his lips showed a glint of teeth. “Let me alone!”

Vivian lagged after him, kicking up the ash-like snow. With indifference, Jandron watched them. Trivial human creatures!

Suddenly Marr saw him in the doorway and stopped short. He drew his gun; he aimed at Jandron.

“You get out!” he mouthed. “Why in— can’t you stay dead?”

“Put that gun down, you idiot!” Jandron managed to retort. The girl stopped and seemed trying to understand. “We can get away yet, if we all stick together.”

“Are you going to get out and leave me alone?” demanded the journalist, holding his gun steadily enough.

Jandron, wholly indifferent, watched the muzzle. Vague curiosity possessed him. Just what, he wondered, did it feel like to be shot?

Marr pulled trigger.

Snap!

The cartridge missed fire. Not even powder would burn.

Marr laughed, horribly, and shambled forward.

“Serves him right!” he mouthed. “He’d better not come back again!”

Jandron understood that Marr had seen him fall. But still he felt himself standing there, alive. He shuffled away from the door. No matter whether he was alive or dead, there was always Vivian to be saved.

The journalist came to the door, paused, looked down, grunted and passed into the camp. He shut the door. Jandron heard the rotten wooden bar of the latch drop. From within echoed a laugh, monstrous in its brutality.

Then quivering, the geologist felt a touch on his arm.

“Why did you desert us like that?” he heard Vivian’s reproach. “Why?”

He turned, hardly able to see her at all,

“Listen,” he said, thickly. “I’ll admit anything. It’s all right. But just forget it, for now. We’ve got to get out o’ here. The Professor is dead, in there, and Marr’s gone mad and barricaded himself in there. So there’s no use staying. There’s a chance for us yet. Come along!”

He took her by the arm and tried to draw her toward the river, but she held back. The hate in her face sickened him. He shook in the grip of a mighty chill.

“Go, with— you?” she demanded.

“Yes, by God!” he retorted, in a swift blaze of anger, “or I’ll kill you where you stand. It shan’t get you, anyhow!”

Swiftly piercing, a greater cold smote to his inner marrows. A long row of the cup-shaped prints had just appeared in the snow beside the camp. And from these marks wafted a faint, bluish vapor of unthinkable cold.

“What are you staring at?” the girl demanded.

“Those prints! In the snow, there— see?” He pointed a shaking finger.

“How can there be snow at this season?”

He could have wept for the pity of her, the love of her. On her red tarn, her tangle of rebel hair, her sweater, the snow came steadily drifting; yet there she stood before him and prated of summer. Jandron heaved himself out of a very slough of down-dragging lassitudes. He whipped himself into action.

“Summer, winter— no matter!” he flung at her. “You’re coming along with me!” He seized her arm with the brutality of desperation that must hurt, to save. And murder, too, lay in his soul. He knew that he would strangle her with his naked hands, If need were, before he would ever leave her there, for It to work Its horrible will upon.

“You come with me,” he mouthed, “or by the Almighty—!”

Marr’s scream in the camp, whirled him toward the door. That scream rose higher, higher, even more and more piercing, just like the screams of the runaway Indian guides in what now appeared the infinitely long ago. It seemed to last hours; and always it rose, rose, as if being wrung out of a human body by some kind of agony not conceivable in this world. Higher, higher—

Then it stopped,

Jandron hurled himself against the plank door. The bar smashed; the door shivered inward.

With a cry, Jandron recoiled. He covered his eyes with a hand that quivered, claw-like.

“Go away, Vivian! Don’t come here— don’t look—”

He stumbled away, babbling.

Out of the door crept something like a man. A queer, broken, bent over thing; a thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined.

This thing— yes, it was still Marr— crouched down at one side, quivering, whimpering. It moved its hands as a crushed ant moves its antenna, jerkily, without significance.

All at once Jandron no longer felt afraid. He walked quite steadily to Marr, who was breathing in little gasps. From the camp issued an odor unlike anything terrestrial. A thin, grayish grease covered the sill.

Jandron caught hold of the crumpling journalist’s arm. Marr’s eyes leered, filmed, unseeing. He gave the impression of a creature whose back has been broken, whose whole essence and energy have been wrenched asunder, yet in which life somehow clings, palpitant. A creature vivisected.

Away through the snow Jandron dragged him. Marr made no resistance; just let himself be led, whining a little, palsied, rickety, shattered. The girl, her face whitely cold as the snow that fell on it, came after.

Thus they reached the landing at the river.

“Come, now, let’s get away!” Jandron made shift to articulate. Marr said nothing. But when Jandron tried to bundle him into a canoe, something in the journalist revived with swift, mad hatefulness. That something lashed him into a spasm of wiry, incredibly venomous resistance. Slavers of blood and foam streaked Marr’s lips. He made horrid noises, like an animal. He howled dismally, and bit, clawed, writhed and grovelled! He tried to sink his teeth into Jandron’s leg. He fought appallingly, as men must have fought in the inconceivably remote days even before the Stone Age. And Vivian helped him. Her fury was a tiger-cat’s.

Between the pair of them, they almost did him in. They almost dragged Jandron down— and themselves, too— into the black river that ran swiftly sucking under the ice. Not till Jandron had quite flung off all vague notions and restraints of gallantry; not until he struck from the shoulder—to kill, if need were—did he best them.

He beat the pair of them unconscious, trussed them hand and foot with the painters of the canoes, rolled them into the larger canoe, and shoved off.

After that, the blankness of a measureless oblivion descended.

Only from what he was told, weeks after, in the Royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal, did Jandron ever learn how and when a field-squad of Dominion Foresters had found them drifting in Lake Moosawamkeag. And that knowledge filtered slowly into his brain during a period inchoate as Iceland fogs.

That Marr was dead and the girl alive—that much, at all events, was solid. He could hold to that; he could climb back, with that, to the real world again.

Jandron climbed back, came back. Time healed him, as it healed the girl. After a long, long while, they had speech together. Cautiously he sounded her wells of memory. He saw that she recalled nothing. So he told her white lies about capsized canoes and the sad death— in realistically-described rapids— of all the party except herself and him.

Vivian believed. Fate, Jandron knew, was being very kind to both of them.

But Vivian could never understand in the least why her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding-ring or any ring whatever.

“Men are so queer!” covers a multitude of psychic agonies.

Life, for Jandron— life, softened by Vivian— knit itself up into some reasonable semblance of a normal pattern. But when, at lengthening intervals, memories even now awake— memories crawling amid the slime of cosmic mysteries that it is madness to approach— or when at certain times Jandron sees a ring of any sort, his heart chills with a cold that reeks of the horrors of Infinity.

And from shadows past the boundaries of our universe seem to beckon Things that, God grant, can never till the end of time be known on earth.

______________________

2: Rough Toss

The Popular Complete Stories May 15, 1932

THE telegram arrived just as Tim Spurling, diver, was at breakfast with his wife in the kitchen. A leisurely, skimpy breakfast. When a fellow's out of work, been out of work for more than six months, why hurry? The wire said:

CAN YOU COME IMMEDIATELY CRYSTAL LAKE RECOVER BODY STOP WIRE DECISION COLLECT URGENT

DR. S. W. OLIVIER

Spurling's lip tightened as he shoved the message over to his wife.

“Well, job at last!” he grunted. “And we need it, somethin' fierce!”

“Yes, but going down after a body ain't—”

“Tain't what I like, Blanche, that's a bet. Allus gives me the crawls, handlin' a stiff. But beggars can't be choosers. And then, too, case like this—”

“Well?” “So much a day. Tain't like a contract job, or salvagin' stuff that the position of it's known. Carcasses drift round on the bottom. Ain't nobody can tell how long it'll take to locate one, and so—”

Blanche Spurling shot him a quick glance. She asked:

“You mean, even if you found a body, you could let on you hadn't and get more pay?”

“Well, why not?” “Wouldn't that be cheating, or stealing, or getting money under false pretenses? Couldn't they jail you for that, if it was found out?”

“Who's to find out anythin', underwater?” he retorted defiantly. “And besides, the way times is— Then, too, what we just found out about Bill—”

The diver's wife sat brooding a moment. Not even the shaft of July sunlight slanting in through the window could make the table and kitchen other than drear and ugly. With an abstracted air the woman smoothed the hair back and away from her forehead, revealing deeper wrinkles than her thirty- six years should have graven there. Her brown eyes, studying the telegram, appeared to see through and beyond it; perhaps even away to the Arizona desert which alone, so their family doctor told them, could yet save the life of Bill, their only son.

“Yes, it's T.B.,” the doctor had bluntly affirmed. “But it's only beginning. Send the boy out West, and you can still save him. But if he stays here—”

“Us, send the kid West?” Spurling had queried. “Where would we get the jack to do that? Us, with our rent three months overdue, and a grocery bill with whiskers on it! Where would we get the dough?”

“Sorry. That part of it is beyond me, Spurling. All I can do is tell you what's wrong with the boy, and recommend the treatment. He's positively got to have a change of climate, or— well—”

And the case had stood right there. T.B. No cash to be had, no job, nothing to borrow on. And Bill, hardly sixteen, and their only child.

“Judas!” Spurling had ejaculated. “What a hell of a rough toss!”

His fist, hard clenched, had seemed knotted against whatever gods there be.

AND now, this job! Incredible, yet true. Things, after all, sometimes happened like that. Tim Spurling and his wife, silent a moment in the untidy dreariness of their little kitchen, eyed each other and felt hope reborn. This new job; did it not mean a chance for Bill?

“There, there, Blanche old kid! Don't cry!”

Spurling went round the table and clumsily patted her shoulder.

“What's there to cry for now, baby? Things is beginnin' to come right for us, now, ain't they? We're beginnin' to get the breaks at last, ain't we?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “But say, Timmy, how'd you happen to get this here job, anyhow, I wonder?”

The diver scratched his unshaven chin; a square chin and a hard one.

“Search me! Reckon maybe it's 'cause I'm the nearest diver to Crystal Lake they could get hold of.”

“Yes, that's prob'ly the reason.” “Here, what you cryin' for, now?”

“I'm not crying, Tim! That's just something that got in my eye.”

Blanche dried her eyes on her apron, then reached for Tim's hand a moment, and held it clasped in both her own hands, roughened by dishwater and the washtub. Her caress was awkward. Lack of practice, in the matter of caresses, had made it so.

Silence fell. Through that silence a muffled cough echoed from the next room— an ominous, deadly sound.

“But we'll soon fix all that now, kid,” Spurling growled. “Job like this will bring a hell of a lot o' dough.”

“How much, Timmy?”

“Hundred a day, at the very least. Maybe more. Depends on how much the stiff's family's got. Even though I got to pay my helper ten or twelve bucks per, there'll be a swell clean-up.”

“Who you going to take along for a helper?”

“Jim McTaggart. He's 'bout the only guy I'll trust to handle the pump and hose for me. When you're down on the bottom and your life depends on another guy bein' steady and reliable, the best ain't none too good!”

“That's right, too,” Blanche agreed. “Oh, if anything was to happen to you— But tell me, how many days'll you need, to find— it?”

“How do I know? Depends on a lot o' things. Size o' the lake, how deep, and the like o' that. This here job— if I have any kind o' luck— might run into thick kale.”

Silence again. Blanche broke in.

“That there telegraph boy, out at the front door. He's waiting.”

“Yeah, that's right. Gotta send an answer, ain't
slip you fer this here job?”

“Well, four, five hundred bucks, maybe, dependin' on how long it takes me to bring up the stiff. They ain't easy to locate.”

“Hell, that ain't a bundle! That's jest chicken feed. S'posin' you seen a way to grab off ten times that— five G's. How 'bout that?”

“Five G's! Holy cripes, man! What're you talkin' about?”

“Pipe down!” the truckman warned. “If he gets wise,” and the truckman nodded backward, “it's all off. This has got to be a man-to-man deal, 'tween me and you. Say, buddy, can I talk cold turkey and be sure you won't blow it?”

“Sure you can—though I ain't agreein' to nothin' till I know what's what.”

“And not to blame, neither. Well, anyhow, it's like this. If you go down and make all the motions of tryin' to find the body, but don't find it, don't let it never be found at—”

“You mean,” cut in Spurling, his heart beginning to pound, “you mean you'll slide me five grand?”

“Yeah. That is, not me, exactly. But somebody'll hand it to me to hand you. It'll be worth that, to 'em, and a good bit more. Git me?”

“No, damn 'f I do!” the diver asserted, careful to keep McTaggart from overhearing. “Why the hell would it be worth thick money to anybody to keep a kid's carcass from bein' brung up?”

“Well, I ain't exactly sayin', buddy. But if I was to tell a fairy story, kind of, I might say as how once upon a time there was a lady, and she had a weak heart and her health was awful poorly. And she had a whale of a lot o' coin. Well, she made a will, leavin' a big wad to a certain relation. But then her son got drownded and she said she was goin' to change that will and leave the money for a memorial library to remember him by. And the fact that she couldn't git the boy's body was drivin' her crazy, or mebbe killin' her. If she got it—”

“If she got it she'd prob'ly pull through and not die or go nuts. And she'd change the will and the relative would lose the dough?”

“Say, you got a headpiece on you, mister, as is a headpiece!” The truckman nodded warm approval. “You don't hafta be told to come in outta the rain. And if you make a good job of it, why, mebbe that five grand might be stretched a bit, too. Savvy? I?”

Tim fished out a pencil from his pocket. Bending over the disordered table, he scrawled on the yellow blank:

Leaving at once. T.H. Spurling.

THREE hours later Tim Spurling and Jim McTaggart stepped onto the platform of the little station at Crystal Lake. He and Jim helped unload the diving gear from the baggage car, also the air pump. Two huge boxes contained this equipment, at which a duly impressed little knot of people gazed with silent wonder.

“Take you out to the lake, four miles,” said a loose-lipped man with a small truck. “Mr. Eccles— him that had his son drownded— told me to git you out there.”

“Oh, all right,” Spurling agreed. “Gimme a hand and we'll load the stuff.”

When he and McTaggart and the truckman had loaded the equipment they got aboard, McTaggart sitting on the boxes in the truck body. Out of the village they jolted and away into the hills.

“Terrible thing to happen, ain't it?” asked Spurling.

“Sure is,” the truckman agreed. “Havin' millions, like old man Eccles, don't pervent trouble. Only kid he's got, too.”

“Yeah, I heard about it on the train. Only sixteen years old, they was tellin' me. Yest'day p.m. They say he was a good swimmer. Quite a champ. He dove off a raft and never come up. Must of got a cramp or somethin'.”

“I reckon so,” assented the truckman. “Say, buddy.” His voice lowered. “I got a few words fer you before we git out to the lake. Can I talk to you confidential-like?”

“Why, sure. What's on your chest?” Spurling's blue eye showed surprise. “What's the idea?”

“This here is just fer you, see? Not him!” The driver's tone was below the hearing of McTaggart, on those boxes in the rear of the jolting, rattling truck. “How'd you like to clean up a nice little bundle o' jack?”

“Jack? What you mean, jack?” “A real bundle, that's what I mean.”

“Sure I'd like it,” Spurling asserted. “That's what I'm here for— big wages.”

“Ah, I don't mean wages!” scornfully said the truckman, as they struck into a pine-arched road through forested hills. “How much they goin' to— Well, what say, buddy?”

“Hunh! Gee, I dunno!” And Spurling scratched his unshaven chin. His hand trembled slightly. In his throat, rapid pulses were beating “Five grand or even a bit more, eh?”

“That's right. Think it over, bo, but think fast. We'll be to the lake now, almost right off. Well?”

Spurling's head swam. His senses blurred. Money! Thick money! It all jumbled up with Blanche, Arizona, Bill and a dry cough, unpaid rent, debts, misery, and despair. And then, out of it all, he heard the voice of Blanche:

“You mean, even if you found a body, you could let on you hadn't and get more pay?”

“Well, why not?” echoed his own answer.

“Wouldn't that be cheating, or stealing, or getting money under false pretenses?”

“Who's to find out anythin', underwater? And besides, the way times is— And then, too, our Bill with the T.B.”

Suddenly he straightened up. His brain cleared. The whirling stopped.

“Nix!” he exclaimed. “Nix what?” asked the driver. “Nix on that stunt. I couldn't do it. Thanks, a heck of a lot, but nothin' doin'.”

“The hell you say! Why not?” “Well—” And Tim seemed studying his fingernails. “It ain't the way us divers does business, that's all. What we're hired to risk our lives to do, we allus does the best we can. Ourn ain't a gyp game, for any diver as is a diver. So thanks, mister, but forget it!”

“Aw, hell, don't be a simp!”

“Never mind about that simp part of it!” And Tim's jaw grew taut. “I said 'No,' didn't I? Well, that means no! N-i-x, no! So— great weather we're havin', ain't it? Reckon it'll rain, to-morrer?”

MANY cars stood parked near the steamboat landing at Crystal Lake. Reporters and photographers had gathered. On the wharf a knot of curiosity-seekers thrilled with pleasurable anticipation as the truck backed up and as two husky men and a very grumpy-looking driver unloaded two huge boxes. The audience tautened, as the stage began to be set for a stirring real-life drama.

Now, with a businesslike air, a gray and thin little wisp of a man came forward.

“You're Spurling, the diver, of course?”

“Yeah, that's me.”

“I'm Doctor Olivier. Coroner, as well as physician to the family of the victim. Glad you're here, Spurling. This is a terrible thing to happen.”

“Sure, I know. I heard all about it, on the train and comin' out from the depot. Young feller named Gordon Eccles, just 'bout sixteen years old.”

“Yes, that's right. He was diving from that float out there.” The doctor pointed a lean finger at a raft with a springboard, some two hundred yards from shore. “I hardly see how it could have happened. He was a first-rate swimmer. Must have had a cramp.”

“Sure, he must.” And Spurling nodded his tousled head. “Happened yest'day p.m.?”

“Yes, about five o'clock. He never came up, at all. And—”

“Been any draggin' for him?” asked Spurling, while morbid folk crowded around.

“Dragging? Yes. Work has been carried on for hours, but no results. And the boy's parents— especially his mother— nearly insane. Their only child. What does all their money mean to them, now?”

“Not much, I reckon.”

“And what,” the doctor asked, “is your charge for this kind of work?”

“Me and my helper,” replied Spurling, his blue eyes narrowing appraisingly, “two hundred a day.”

“Two— Well, I suppose that's quite all right. How long is the work likely to require?”

“That depends. What's the depth, out there?”

“Sixty feet or so. Maybe more.”

“Any currents?”

“So I understand. The lake is fed by springs. The outlet is a mile below here.” Doctor Olivier pointed. “But you can find the body, surely?”

“With any kind o' luck, and if I have what I need to work with.”

“What else do you need besides what you've brought?” the doctor queried, while the spectators absorbed it all with keenest interest. Among them stood the truckman, his face drawn into lines of disappointment and harsh malice.

“What else do I need? Well, I got to have plenty o' rope, and a sixteen-foot ladder weighted at one end, and somethin' to dive off of and hold my equipment— somethin' mighty solid.”

“That's all arranged. We've had a float built.” The doctor pointed where a massive float lay moored at the end of the wharf. “There's a motorboat lashed to it, too. Take you anywhere you want to go, with your equipment and helper.”

“Fine!” Spurling walked to the wharf end, stood and peered down, inspecting the float. He noted the quality of its huge beams. No cost had been spared.

“Hell!” thought he. “Maybe I'd oughta of asked two hundred and fifty!”

A long gray car swung to a stop at the steamer landing. Out of this car, as a chauffeur opened the door, a man came stumbling. This man was fifty-odd, and he looked seventy. His legs shook. Sunken, dead-seeming eyes blinked in the July sun, out of a lined and waxen face.

“Him?” grunted the diver, with a jerk of the head.

The doctor nodded. The drowned boy's father advanced uncertainly. Eager cameras clicked. Pencils danced across notebooks. Not every day could Harrison T. Eccles, financial colossus, be caught in agony for the world's delectation.

“Are you the diver?” he asked, in a perfectly flat voice that seemed to be the voice of some queer mechanism.

“Yes, sir.” “How soon can you get to work? It's very important.”

“Right off.” “And how long—”

“Well, as I was just tellin' the doctor, it all depends. It's all accordin' to depths and currents, and the like o' that.”

“Of course. But you'll do your best—your quickest! I'm not appealing to you for my own sake. It's his mother. She— she's—”

“Sure, I know, mister! Reckon I know what a mother thinks of her son. I'd oughta!”

“You have a son, too?” “Yeah. Just one. And he's— but never mind. I'll do what I can. Can't promise nothin', o' course. It's that uncertain, divin' is. But whatever I can do I will!”

The millionaire's thin hand went out. The diver's massive one enfolded it.

“Reckon I oughta know what an only son means!” repeated Spurling. “And you can count on me, mister, for all I'm worth!”

Under the watchful eyes of the crowd now constantly growing, and the bitter, hostile gaze of the truckman, Spurling and McTaggart unloaded their equipment from the wharf onto the waiting raft. Doctor Olivier meantime sent for a rope and a ladder, weighted as the diver had specified.

Presently Spurling, McTaggart, and the doctor got aboard the raft. With them they took three reliable workmen to help with the air pump and to do other work. The pump and diving gear, when laboriously lowered by ropes to the raft, fascinated the spectators now lining the string-piece. The atmosphere fairly vibrated with electric tensions of excitement. Never had Crystal Lake known so thrilling a day as this.

Presently the motorboat towed the float out to the raft whence young Eccles had taken his fatal plunge. Spurling had the float anchored there with long ropes lashed to heavy grate bars.

The drowned boy's father drove away. Silent and hollow-eyed, he went back to his stricken wife. It lay not in human nature for him to stay there on that wharf, waiting for those deep and cold waters to give up the dead.

But it lay very much in human nature for townsfolk and gentlemen of the press to snatch all the boats available, and hover around the scene. A couple of newsreel scouts set up a movie camera in a boat and began grinding out footage.

“Now then,” Spurling directed McTaggart, “let's get busy and unpack. We got to test the pump. Sixty, seventy foot; that's quite a dive!”

“Think you'll locate the body close by here?” queried the doctor.

“Search me! Might be 'most anywhere, by now. Might even o' drifted out the lake, down the outlet— no tellin'. We got to keep tryin', movin' round till we locate it.”

“When is it likely to rise?” cut in a reporter, from a boat that had edged near.

“Can't say,” the diver answered. “In this here cold water tain't likely to rise, at all. And, by the way, you get out o' there! Think I want to get all balled up with a bunch o' butters-in? Scram!”

He turned to help McTaggart bolt the heavy iron flywheels and handles to the pump shaft, to test the compression on the air gauges, then to unpack the diving suit.

The workmen were meantime lashing the weighted ladder to the edge of the float. A quarter of it rose in air; the rest hung down into the pale- green waters, so cold, so deadly.

UNPACKED, the diving suit sprawled on the float, with oddly turned-in feet, with loose arms tipped by rubber wrists. The suit looked like a fantastic burlesque of a body, a bizarre mockery of humanity.

Then, Spurling laid out the massive metal breastplate and the goggly-eyed helmet, its windows crisscrossed by thick bars. His brain seemed humming, as he worked. Five grand! Five thousand smackers! And Bill with the T.B.! And far below, a dead boy's body— the body of an only son— and somewhere, a mother going mad and dying.

“Hell, I got to buck up!” Spurling bucked up. He forced himself to unroll and to examine the black rubber hose whereon his very life was to depend. Painstakingly he inspected the lifeline, and connected hose to pump, making sure all joints were tight and absolutely perfect.

His mind seemed blurred and queerly confused, but his hands were deft as he oiled the helmet valves. Sitting down on the float he took off his worn shoes, tucked his trousers into his socks, soaped his hands, then struggled into the heavy suit.

Around Tim's neck McTaggart now laced the apron. Tim Spurling had already lost much of his human semblance, had assumed the guise of some extraordinary monster. He lubricated his soaped hands with water, then drew on the rubber bands that were to keep his arms dry.

“All right, the breastplate!” he directed, while reporting went on apace, and townsfolk thrilled. Even Doctor Olivier forgot to feel professional sympathy for the bereaved millionaire and his wife, in the interest of watching this singular procedure of a diver preparing for his work.

Rare sensation, this; a diver descending into fashionable Crystal Lake, for the body of a magnate's only son!

“Gimme a drag, Mac,” ordered Spurling. “I gotta have a drag before I go down!”

Mac lighted a cigarette for him. Puffing deep lungfuls of smoke, Spurling stood up and let his helper fit the breastplate studs into the rubber collar of the dress. McTaggart made the plate fast. Faint tinks of metal sounded, blending with a quiet laplap-lap of water round the float. At a little distance, conversation buzzed, speculation passed from boat to boat. Now or then more cars arrived at the wharf. More, ever more curiosity-seekers gathered there.

Bright sun, cheerful sky, and dazzling clouds all made it gay, all of them mocked the mystery of human grief.

“Now, them shoes!” Spurling commanded. His helper drew on the heavy rubber shoes, buckled them over the clumsy feet of the diving suit.

“Weights, Mac.”

“Goin' to use the foot weights, too?”

“Nope. I'll chance it without 'em. Can get round better with just the belt.”

McTaggart fitted on the leather belt, sagging with more than eighty pounds of leaden pigs. He fastened the buckles that, in case of accident, Spurling could unsnap in a jiffy for quick ascent. Then he tied the lifeline under his chief's arms and secured it to the breastplate stud. After screwing the air hose firmly to the plate, he led it under Spurling's left arm and fastened it in front.

“Ready for the helmet, now?”

“Yep!” And Spurling, with a final eruption of smoke, threw the cigarette away. “Get ready to start the poison, there. Take it easy, boys, but keep goin'. Start twistin', now!”

As the huge round helmet closed over his head, and with a quarter-turn was screwed home and fastened, he became wholly unreal. His eyes peered dimly from those cross-barred windows, as though from another world.

Two men at the handles of the ponderous wheels, began slowly and steadily turning. Mac tapped his “O.K.” on the helmet. Spurling dragged himself to the ladder. Clumsily he wallowed down it.

Now his suit began puffing with air. As the water took him, he moved more easily. Down, down he sagged; then with a crab-like, sidewise motion, slid off the ladder. McTaggart, at the edge of the float, held the lifeline and air hose in careful, experienced hands.

As Spurling sank, the line still partly supported him. Cameras did their best. Pencils leaped. Boats crowded in, despite Mac's snarled warnings to stand clear. With a swirling twist, Spurling wavered down into the lake. His vast eyes of glass and metal blurred away into the cold green deeps. They faded, vanished. A line of bubbles rose and broke, flinging fine spray into the summer air.

Water eddied round the float. Steadily the line and hose, paid out by the watchful Mac, ran away.

Already far below, the diver was sinking down and down, into regions of unreality and dream.

SPURLING felt not the slightest uneasiness, so far as just the diving itself was concerned. Hundreds of times he had been down, often in swift rivers or in the sea itself, far deeper than this. Many a time he had risked his life exploring perilous wrecks where rotten timbers might have fallen and jammed, where octopuses and sharks might have lurked. This job, now, in a sheltered lake was different.

“Cinch!” thought he. “If it wasn't for bein' a stiff that I'm after, it'd be a cinch!”

How he hated diving and groping for stiffs! Oh, yes, he'd recovered not a few, in his time, from wrecks. But they made bad salvage. They were liable to do such singular and gruesome things. Under the compelling urge of water, they sometimes moved so convincingly, in ghastly imitation of life.

Once, he remembered, he had been fairly terrified away from a job by a body that had refused to be salvaged; a body that, three separate times, had jerked itself free from his grasp. Spurling had had to come up, take off his suit, and gulp nearly a pint of raw liquor before he'd been able to go down again and discover that the body— an old sea captain— had been caught in a loose bight of rope.

And Spurling had never forgotten that nerve- tingling experience. It had made him corpse shy. But as for the mere diving, itself—why, nothing to it!

“It's only the damn stiff I don't like,” thought he, as he slid down, ever down into the darkening waters. “That's all, just the stiff. How I hate to handle 'em! But two hundred smackers a day—”

Looking out through the thick glass, he perceived a vague greenish light, still faintly shot through by slanting sun rays. A certain uneasiness had begun to develop in the hinges of his jaw. He opened his mouth, shut it, to loosen the pressure on his eardrums; and constantly he swallowed.

“Oughta have a wad o' gum to chaw,” he reflected. That always helped. Too bad he'd forgotten the gum. But never mind; he'd get by without it. Only the lack of it somehow disconcerted him.

His ears commenced to feel as if he had a cold. But that was nothing. Many a time, diving, he'd suffered real pain, especially on top of his head. When that grew too severe it meant coming up. But as yet, nothing bothered Tim Spurling; nothing but his grim errand.

All sensations of weight were vanishing now; strangely fading away. Gravitation claimed hardly more than thirty pounds, from his hundred and eighty of bone and muscle, from his ponderous gear, lead weights and all. Never did a human being move, atop the earth, as lightly as now Spurling when he set foot on the hard, rock-tossed floor of Crystal Lake.

“Gee! Well, I'm down, anyhow!” he said to himself, as he gave Mac the “on bottom” and the “O.K.” signal. Dimly an unreal, isolated, mysterious world surrounded him. Everything had grown eerie and unnatural.

A sense of utter isolation, of supreme unreality possessed the diver. He was only about seventy feet away from other men, but he might have been a million miles. Far from imaginative though he was, still he sensed this extraordinary unreality which always took place in every dive.

Startled fishes flicked away; or, growing bolder, circled, backed, and nosed waveringly about him. One bumped the glass of his helmet. It sounded like a small volcanic explosion. Regularly, tunk-tunktunk, something pulsated in his crackling ears. That slight noise of the pump was comforting. Yes, after all there must be another world; a world of reality, where men dwelt. A world in which McTaggart was keenly watching; in which the diver's wife was waiting; in which Bill, their son—

Thoughts of the boy stabbed Spurling. For a time he had forgotten the boy, the doctor, the verdict of T.B. Now all this surged back sickeningly. Spurling remembered why he was here, what he had come for.

“Hell of a job!” he growled, inside his goggle- eyed helmet. “But I gotta do it. We need the money, and I gotta go through!”

He stood on the bottom of the lake, peering about him in that unreal and ghostly dimness. Off at his right he could just make out the grate bars that anchored his diving float, and beyond them two immense cubes of concrete with ring bolts, that held the swimming raft. Vague ropes led upward. Muted though all illumination now was, his vision was growing used to it. He perceived this watery world in hues of green gloom. Sinuous plants waved mysteriously beckoning arms. Off at one side lay a jet-black patch— the shadow of his diving float, far above.

“Where the devil an' all, now, is that stiff?” Vainly he looked. Nothing at all in guise of a drowned body was visible. He felt his air pressure rising a bit too high. To lower it, he slightly cracked his pet cock valve. Crowding upward, bubbles chased one another toward the surface.

The job he had to do, Spurling realized, might be long. Had currents drifted the body, the raft would have to be moved. No telling how much time it might take.

“But it's a hundred and eighty-five bucks a day, clear, for me,” he thought. “And we gotta have at least five hundred, to save Bill. Three days'll give us the five, and a little over. I only wisht it would take three days!”

Then, almost before this desire had registered, he saw the object of his search.

Yes, there it lay, hardly twenty feet from one of the big concrete cubes. Dim though the down- filtering light was, none the less that light revealed the son of Eccles, the millionaire, sunk in a hollow amid plant-grown boulders.

The boy lay on his right side, clad in a blue bathing suit. The face was averted; one arm outstretched as if in final, agonized protest against death.

Spurling's first reaction was an exultant: “Found him, by gosh!”

But on the instant a devastating thought surged through his brain:

“One day's work— only a hundred and eighty- five bucks. And— and how about my kid?”

A little dazed, groping more perhaps in mind than in body, he started toward the other man's son. Against smothering resistance at that great depth, he walked with circumspect caution, lest he lose his footing. Once that should happen, quick as a flash he might turn topsy-turvy, hang upside down, helpless and imperiled. His own life— no, he mustn't lose that, now!

Almost weightless, he moved. His heart was pounding thickly as an overtaxed pump.

“Our Bill! What about our Bill, I'd like to know?”

Yes, furiously, Tim Spurling, diver, was thinking about his only son. A sick and quivering sensation gripped and shook him. Only one day's work.

“What the blazes good is one day's work to us, now?”

After all that Blanche and he had hoped and planned on, from this job, just one day's work. What the blazes, indeed?

He thought of Blanche, mother of the boy now doomed to death. Then his mind nickered round to this drowned boy's mother and father.

“They'll suffer, if this kid don't come up. Sure they'll suffer like the flames o' hell, if I don't bring him up. Yeah, but what about us?”

Over him surged the words of the loose-lipped truckman:

“If you make a good job of it, why, mebbe that five grand might be stretched a bit, too.”

Five grand, and then some! Five thousand dollars and more, plus his wages for a few days' work— all of six thousand or better! And for what? Why, for just doing nothing at all. For just seeing nothing, down there where nobody could check up on him. For just finding nothing, bringing up nothing.

Had ever a man in all this world been left so starkly alone with his own conscience? In all of life, could any possibility exist, for Tim Spurling, of so much money being won by so little effort? Money, money that now meant life itself to his boy, life to little family!

Tim felt strangely dizzy and sick. Heart pounding and air pump throbbing hammered his brain with maddening tempo, as he stood there in that green gloom and peered down at the corpse, and tried to think.

Just a dead body, the body of a very rich man's son. That was all— cold flesh and bones. And what on earth good, in bringing that up? Oh, yes, of course, it would give back to a father and a mother the thing they longed for; a lifeless thing, but still passionately desired. Without it, of course they'd agonize.

“But how 'bout us, if our kid dies? How 'bout us, watchin' our Bill die? How many dead boys is one live boy worth?”

Tim Spurling seemed to hear words, echoes of his own speech hardly an hour ago:

“Nix on that stunt. I couldn't do it. Thanks, a heck of a lot, but nothin' doin'!”

And then the truckman: “The hell you say! Why not?”

“Well, it ain't the way us divers does business, that's all. What we're hired to risk our lives for, we allus does the best we can. It ain't a gyp game, for any diver as is a diver. So thanks, mister, but forget it!”

Already he was stooping to pick up the body. It would weigh almost nothing. A signal on the cord, and with the millionaire's son in his arms, Tim Spurling could in less than no time be back up there at the diving float. Already he was reaching for the body.

But there before him, suddenly he beheld— plain as if reality— the pinched, hollow, and suffering face of his own boy. The terror-stricken and hopeless eyes of his wife. Eyes now all too often red with secret weeping.

“What a fool I am!” growled the diver, his brain clearing. “This here kid don't go up, now nor never! I don't locate him, and no other diver don't, neither. And that is that!”

Still stooping, what he picked up was not the body, but a weed-grown rock. Then another, and still another, and many more. Presently the body had vanished under layers of stones which so perfectly masked it that never could any diver locate it, no matter what his skill might be.

“Six thousand bucks!” thought Tim Spurling, as he straightened up from this macabre task. “I'll put in at least three days, and collect both ways. Make a good job of it, while I'm at it. And any man as wouldn't do the same, to save his own boy's life, he'd be a quitter an' a coward, on top o' bein' a poor damn fool!”

All of a sudden very weak and trembling, he wanted to regain the upper air. Then after a while he could go down again, could continue the fictitious search. But for now, he must quit a spell.

Tim twitched the signal rope, felt an upward pull, saw the lake bottom slide down and away. Down, away, with that pile of stones under which lay a secret that only he knew. Only he, in all this world! Light strengthened, pressure steadily diminished. And then quite suddenly he saw the weighted bottom of the ladder. He grappled it, climbed up, emerged monstrous and dripping, his helmet goggling over the edge of the float.

McTaggart and a couple of others gripped and hoisted him. Up and out he came, while cameras were busy and eager eyes watched from boats and from the float. Sitting down on the edge of the float, he motioned for McTaggart to unscrew his helmet and take it off.

“Whew!” he breathed, deep-lunged and glad of air not pumped through a rubber hose. “Gimme a drag!”

“Find anythin'?” Mac eagerly queried. “Not yet.”

Another voice cut in— a trembling voice, a woman's:

“But you will? You will?” Astonished, Spurling turned his head. He blinked in the sunshine that cut his eyes after the vague obscurity of the depths. Beside the float he saw a motor launch, all brass and varnish, with a uniformed mechanician at its gleaming engine. In wicker chairs, aft, a man and a woman were sitting— Eccles and his wife.

“Look a here, mister!” Spurling reproved the millionaire. He felt aggrieved, to have these two hanging round while he was at work. “See here, now. You hadn't oughta be here. This here ain't no place for you two!” His clumsy, rubber-gloved hand sketched a crude gesture. “No place, 'tall!”

“I know it,” the magnate assented, while listeners stretched their ears. Eccles, for all the heat of that July day, was shivering. His body shook as with a palsy. “I know it, but—”

“I had to come. I had to!” put in his wife. “I couldn't stay away and wait—”

Spurling's lip tightened with acid disapproval. An extraordinary and grotesque figure— with his head, seemingly far too small, projecting up out of that vast suit— he looked at the dead boy's mother. And what he saw was human agony, raw and bleeding.

The diver understood. The woman's sunken eyes and pale lips, her deep-lined face, told the whole story. This story was underscored by her quivering fingers that tightly clutched the arms of the wicker chair.

“If you only knew,” the mother half-whispered. “If you could only understand what it means to lose an only son!”

“Reckon I do ma'am,” answered the diver. “Or reckon I will, pretty soon.”

“Why— how—”

“Well, I got a kid o' my own, see? 'Bout the same age as yours was, and he's dyin'. Arizona's all that'll save him. But Arizona ain't for us. Huh! Fat chance we got o' that!”

“Oh!” breathed Mrs. Eccles comprehendingly, while the reporters pounced on a wonderful human-interest story. “You mean you've got a—”

“Tell me,” the millionaire brusquely cut in. “You haven't found anything, yet? No sign, no indication?”

“Nothin', so fur. Not yet.”

“But you will? You're going down again, right away?”

“Yeah, pretty soon. Quick as I rest up, a little, and get this cold out o' my bones.”

“And you'll find my son?” asked the mother. “You will, won't you?”

“Well, gee, I'll try.”

“No, no! Promise you'll find him. Oh, don't you see, you've got to?”

Tim Spurling began to feel very queer and sick again. Something seemed to have hold of his guts and to be twisting them. He blinked as he looked that woman fair in the eyes. Between the float and the motor launch extended a distance of not more than four feet. Between Tim Spurling, workman, and those two millionaires, stretched infinity. But something strove to bridge that infinity.

Under the compulsion of this something, under the fever of that stricken woman's look—that appealing, agonized, crucified look—Spurling felt his plans all riven, cast awry and wrecked.

“Hell!” he tried to rally himself. “Don't be a quitter and a fool!”

But it was no good. For the woman was speaking again.

“Your own boy— you say he's very ill?”

“Yes. T.B.”

“What's his name?”

“William. But o' course we call him just Bill.”

“And how old?”

“Sixteen, ma'am. Your boy— same age?” She nodded. He saw tears gleaming in her faded eyes.

“Please get away from here,” he begged. “I'm goin' down again right away, and when I come up mebbe you better not be here.” He appealed to the millionaire. “See here, Mr. Eccles. Get her out o' here. Won't you take her away, please?”

“He's right, Valerie,” the magnate assented. “We really ought to go.” He gave a word of command to the mechanic at the engine. Then, to Spurling: “You're going down again, right now?”

“Yeah. Just as quick's I have a smoke and a bit of a rest. And you can count on me. I'll do the best I can!”

As the powerful engine started, and the motorboat purred away with those two lonely, sorrowful, rich, death-stricken figures, Tim Spurling gazed after them with tragic eyes.

“The best I can, for you,” he thought. “That means the worst for us!” Aloud: “You there, Mac— light me a tack, can't you? Gee, that water's awful cold, down there. I sure need a smoke. I sure need it worse'n I ever needed one in all my life!”

Tim Spurling, that same evening, stood on the platform of the Crystal Lake station with McTaggart, his helper. Their diving gear, all boxed up again, was waiting to be lifted aboard the baggage car of the 7:17, that had already whistled far up Swiftwater Valley.

“Damn short job, Tim,” Mac was complaining. “Seems like we ain't got no luck at all.”

“Mebbe yes, mebbe no. What's good for one, is bad for another. Everybody can't have all they want.”

“Sure, I know. But—” Down the road swept a long gray car. It slowed, stopped at the station. A chauffeur opened its door. Out stepped Eccles.

The last fading of sunset over the mountains showed his face, which though still grief-ravaged was more at peace. He even managed a wan bit of a smile as he came toward the diver.

“I wanted to thank you again, before you left,” he said, quite simply. “We'll never forget it, my wife and I. Never forget what you've done for us.”

“Oh, that? Well, it's just my job, I reckon.” “Perhaps. But at any rate, we want to send your boy something. You'll take it to him, won't you?”

“Send my boy somethin'?” And Spurling's eyes widened. McTaggart was all curiosity. “Why— what could—”

“It's a memorial. Something in memory of our own lad.”

The envelope from Eccles's pocket passed to Tim Spurling's hand. Amazed, the diver stared at it.

“This here; it's—”

“Call it life, if you will,” smiled Eccles. “It's a check made out to William Spurling. I've signed it. Your boy can fill in the amount. Be sure he makes it enough to get him well and strong. To keep his hold on life— life that, once gone, can never be brought back by all the millions in this world!”

More loudly echoed the train whistle. A glimmering headlight sparkled into view.

“Why, my gosh, I— I been paid, already,” stammered the diver. “I can't take this and—”

“You're not taking it. It's your boy's. Goodbye, Spurling, good luck to you and yours!”

A handclasp. A silent look that passed, not now between workman and millionaire, but from man to man, father to father. Then Eccles, turning, was gone.

The headlight glare strengthened. Brakes began to grind. The train slowed at the station.

“Gee whiz, Tim!” ejaculated McTaggart, as his chief's face was for a moment brilliantly illuminated. “What the devil? Why, you're cryin'!”

“The hell I am!” Spurling indignantly retorted. “It's just a cinder in my eye. This damn soft coal, and all! If you don't know when a feller's got a cinder in his eye— Say, gimme a drag, can't you? I sure need it!”

______________________

3: Leatherbee’s Luck

Blue Book, April 1922

“IT’S no use, Talby,” Geneva Carbury insisted. “I admit I like you awfully I well, but I can’t marry you, and you know why.”

“On account of your business, same as usual?” demanded Talbot Sears as they hiked along the serpentine path round the Reservoir.

“Yes, I’m attached to it, and—”

“So’s a convict attached to his business, when he’s in the chain-gang with an iron ball riveted to his leg. That’s no way to live! You can’t go on this way, Geneva. What’s a can-opener-manufacturing concern, compared to love?”

“Lots!” Her dark-brown eyes, which sometimes danced with laughter, now looked quite tragic and determined. “I’ve got to make a success of my business before I can think of trying to make a success of love. If I let Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, die, how could I ever be a successful wife to you? I just couldn’t!”

“Nonsense!” He slashed at the autumn leaves along the path with the stick in his gloved hand. She tilted up her chin, rather adorably.

“Thank you!” she answered.

“Oh, I— I don’t really mean that, you know,” he hedged. “I didn’t mean to be rude, and all that, but—”

“It’s all right, Talby; but I’ve got to make good, first.”

“Yes, and if you don’t? Hang it all, Geneva, isn’t my profession grinding out enough for two?”

“Oh, yes. But I didn’t take that commercial-efficiency course just to let my father’s business die in less than two years after he died himself. That business is all the memorial he ever wanted. He built it up for me, willed it to me and told me to carry on. And now you want me to drop it?”

“And marry me. Sure thing! And be my partner. Why not?”

She shot at him one of those swift woman-glances that flash into a man’s soul while the man himself is asking himself the color of a woman’s eyes.

“No,” she decided. “You’re making a success of  your game. I’ve got to, of mine. I will, too— when I get that improved machinery and put through those patents. After Carbury Can-Cutters, Incorporated, is on a paying basis and I ve got an independent income of my own, well,”— and she laughed shortly,—“maybe I’ll offer you a partnership. Not till then. Now, let’s talk about the weather.”

"THE whole situation is manifestly absurd,” Talbot complained to Robert Boardman, second, that night at the Circulatory Club. “Geneva’s absurd too.”

“Any man thinks any woman’s absurd when she wont have him,” Boardman affirmed. He slumped down angularly in the deep leather chair by the fireplace. “That’s part of man’s natural egotism. I never knew a fellow yet who ever heard about a man-hater without thinking that if she knew him —”

“None o’ your cynicism! Geneva’s not a man-hater, at all. It’s only that her perverse can-opening bug—”

“Loyalty to one’s father isn’t a bug.”

“Well— if she wasn’t so infernally obstinate!”

“You’re a fool to argue with a woman. Kiss her.”

“Can’t be did.”

“So?” Boardman fitted another cigarette to his amber, holder, and lighted up. “Interesting!”

“Oh, you can afford to be patronizing, all right. But if your girl—”

“Ah, but I married my girl two years ago. I got her by working a little judicious jealousy into her cosmos. That’s good dope, Talby. Stay away from Geneva awhile. Let her miss you.”

“It won't work with her. She’s up to her pretty ears in can-openers, and till she makes ’em succeed— which they never will in a thousand years—”

“By the end of which time neither of you will be much. Make it sooner, old man. Help her succeed, pronto. After that, she’s yours. Simple, eh?” Boardman smiled dryly and blew smoke. “Boost her confounded can-openers. Then annex her. Slip me a few thousand, Talby, and I’ll resuscitate the dry bones of her company’s securities. I’ll make live stock of ’em. Make her company a blooming success. Then you nab her— and there you are!”

Talbot shook a mournful head.

“Your advice is no good, Bob. I don’t want a business woman for my wife, at all.”

“Well, then,” judged Boardman, “knife her company. That’s the only thing left to do. She’ll have to admit defeat, and then she’ll be yours. In a year she’ll have forgotten there was ever such a thing in the world as a can-opener. She wont even have one in your happy kitchenette. Nothing but canned-goods with keys to ’em. Can Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated. That’s the key to all your heartaches. Put the outfit on the blink.”

“There isn’t much of an outfit to put,” said Talbot, his eyes approving. “Only Geneva and old Ezra Litchfield, her inherited factotum.”

“Cinch. Smear ’em!”

“Is it etiquette to smear the lady you’re in love with?”

“Sure!” asserted Boardman. “It’s done in the best circles. All’s fair in love and war on can-openers.”

“It seems kind of a rotten thing to do,” hesitated Talbot, “but the ends justify being mean, and—”

“Being a broker, I’m a practical man. It’s your only chance.”

“How can you work it? Got any idea?”

“I’ve got millions of ideas, Talby. Billions! That’s what I live and move and have my beans on, is ideas. Now, in this particular case, I’ve got one of most particular brilliancy. Well?”

“Spill it!” commanded Talbot.

DOARDMAN smoked contemplatively.

“Did you ever hear of such a thing as a natural, born, invincible hoodoo?”

“No—not seriously, that is. Of course, there’s a lot of jokes about hoodoos, but—”

“I don’t mean any joke-stuff at all. I mean the real, simon-impure article. I mean a hoodoo that crabs everything from cradle to grave. A hoodoo marked with the Black Spot of the Cosmic Swat. Ever know a man like that?”

“No,” replied Talbot. “It’s all foolishness.”

“Not at all. Luck’s a solid fact. Some people turn everything they touch into
cash. Others would queer the City of Gold if they owned a single lot in Angel Avenue. Every broker knows it. They’re marked men. Nobody will have ’em in their business. Most brokers wont even trade with ’em. It means ruin. Fact, old man!”

“By ginger, that’s odd. But admitting it’s a fact, what about it?―”

“Lots. I know a hoodoo.”

“Well?”

“His name’s Leatherbee— Jonah K. Leatherbee. He’s done more failing and messed up more businesses than any living man. As a false alarm, he’s sublime.”

“How does this apply to Geneva and me?”

“I’ll make it apply,” promised Boardman. “Thing is, do you give me the go-ahead signal?”

“Rather— just so I get the girl.”

“You’re on,” smiled the broker. “Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, is as good as dead already. I’ll interview Leatherbee tomorrow.”

“And what have I got to do?”

“Nothing— but order your wedding raiment. Get busy!”..

BOARDMAN interviewed Jonah K. Leatherbee next afternoon. He found him in a shabbily furnished room on Parkland Street, third floor, back.

“Hello, Leatherbee,” said he. “How’s tricks?”

“Hopeful, as usual,” Leatherbee replied. Leatherbee was a tall, asparagus-stalk-built man of forty-five, with mild blue eyes, stooped shoulders and an eyeshade. “I have several hens on. Even one hatching will fix me.”

“That’s good,” smiled the wily broker, sitting down. “I’ve got a fine tip for you. It’ll change your luck.”

“Glad o’ that!” smiled Leatherbee. “It could stand a lot of changing— like a thousand-dollar bill.”

“I know. You never have connected right, have you?”

“Not perceptibly.” Leatherbee folded himself in sections into a chair. “I know I’m a jinx, all right, but I’m long on hope.”

“Is it true,” Boardman asked, “that you’ve put your whole family on the blink?”

“Looks like it,” admitted Leatherbee, who appeared human and liked to talk. “When I was bom, Saturn was in conjunction with the Seven Veils of Jinx and in opposition to everything in my luck-line. My folks were comfortably well off, though not as well off as they had been. My influence went back, you see, and even hit my innocent old grandfather.”

“Retroactive hoodooism, eh?”

“Something like that. Grandfather was worth a lot of money. He lost it in a big smash in the 40’s and in Ohio land-speculation. His son— my father— piled up a bit of property, but missed millions when he was in Chicago right after the big fire and didn’t invest there. Instead, he invested in a couple of Western boom towns. Both booms busted. I figure I’m responsible, even though I hadn’t been born then.”

Leatherbee nodded, and lighted his pipe. Boardman asked:

“What then? I’d like to get your complete story, before I spill the tip I’ve got for you. After you personally arrived in this vale of tears, what happened to Saturn and the Pleiades?”

“Lots. But more happened to me. My father gave up the struggle and died, when I was only a youngster. A few days later our last piece of family property— a big brick block— was wrecked by a tornado. Then my brother and sister had to quit school, and we all struggled through soul-destroying shabby gentility— boarders, and all that. At five, I got a severe injury that made an outsider of me. You know how boys are, with a lame duck. I went in for study, as time passed, and did well. But when I graduated from high school and took a medal, I remember my only pants were patched with black velvet.”

“Well,” commented Boardman, “you can’t say you never had any velvet in your life.”

“Never any in my pocket. The velvet I refer to wasn’t there, but more to the southward. After that, I wanted to go to college, but instead I went to a factory, where I got asthma, a mashed hand and nine dollars a week. Then my sister married a highly prosperous business man. Right away his place burned, and he took to booze and went nutty. For twenty years he hasn’t earned a cent, and he’s kept the family in hot water all that time.”

“Hot water is a luxury, these days.”

“This was boiling. I broke away and into college, did all kinds of work and made the grade. Graduated with an M. A. degree, a Phi Beta Kappa key, a debt of four hundred dollars and nervous prostration from doing my own work and other fellows’ too— tutoring ’em, to help pay expenses. Just about that time my uncle, the only rich one in the family, had a tannery and a big general store. He got his hand chopped off in the tannery and lost his store in a panic. Uncle went in for politics and held a meeting in the tannery. Floor fell through, lot of people got hurt and Uncle had ter pay damages. Besides that, the opposition slogan that, ‘His platform has fallen through,’ defeated him at the polls. Then the tannery burned, and Uncle— he was about sixty— had to hunt a job. Saturn and I finished him, all right.”

“I think you’re going to be just the man I'm looking for,” Boardman approved. “Anything else?”

“Rather!” smiled Leatherbee, through smoke. “My brother, a highly trained man, after twenty years’ hard work for a very big concern, had his salary cut a thousand a year and was buried alive in a small branch office while a relative of the president of the company got his job. Then my Aunt Elvira met an army officer who got engaged to her daughter and sold the old lady about twelve thousand dollars’ worth of gilt-edged securities. The officer turned out to be a fake and the securities all forged. Exit officer and kale. After that—”

“You’ll do, Leatherbee.  Now listen.”

“Wait! I married, and right away after that developed T. B. Had to bury myself in the woods for several years, to save my life. I went through hell with my wife’s relatives, who— well, weren’t the kind of people one cares to know. I wanted a son, to help pull the family together. Of course, Saturn handed me a daughter. After that—”

“I did hear something about your getting a divorce.”

“Yes. Draw the veils, Infidelity, drugs and alcohol don’t make a pleasant story. The divorce cost me every penny I’d scraped together. At thirty-eight I had nothing left but a daughter with extravagant tastes. I continued to hustle, though. Went into an oil-company with good leases. Couple of days before I expected to clean up forty thousand dollars, some crooks wrecked the business. I got nothing. Later, tried oil again, in Oklahoma. Dry holes, every one.”

“Now, the proposition I have in mind—”

“Hold on! I want you to get me right. I scraped up a little cash, bought a place in Cuba and went in for fruit. Hadn’t been a cyclone in that town for seventeen years. The year after I started, a cyclone wrecked the place— backed up a river and flooded it, too. I lost my house and all my personal effects. Saturn and I put Las Palomitas on the eternal blink.”

“You were in politics for a while after that, weren’t you?”

“Yes. They ran me for Governor of a certain New England State, on a third ticket. I was defeated by the largest plurality ever given in the State. Then I undertook to edit a magazine, and the magazine died. I took to writing, but the soar in paper and costs cut down the book-market. I sold four movies; and right away the censorship K. O.’d the business. Organized a movie-company of my own, It went blooey. I think if I’d gone into manufacturing coffins, Saturn would have stopped everybody dying.”

“Why didn’t you try that, Leatherbee, and become a great public benefactor?”

“No. Death’s a sore subject with me, ever since my niece, that I was struggling to put through college, died suddenly.”

“I see. Well— maybe it’s been your own fault, some way. Bad habits, or—”

“I never drank or gambled, Boardman. I belong to no clubs and waste no time. I smoke nothing but this pipe. I’ve made as good a fight as I know how. But Saturn has always knifed me. Every winner I’ve ever picked has become a loser. And I’ve dragged down lots of other people, too— that is, Saturn and I have.”

“You ought to have enlisted on the side of the Germans, in the war,” smiled Boardman.

“I would have, if I could have got to Germany. I’d have done just that, as a patriotic duty. Then the Kaiser would have been licked in three weeks. I can turn my hand to about any old thing, and I can hustle; but I’m always sat on by Saturn. Every time I get to Good Luck Junction, the train's just gone. If I caught that train, it would be wrecked at the first switch. Get me right, Boardman. Before you spill your proposition, let me warn you if it’s anything you’re expecting to succeed, don’t let me in on it.”

“It isn’t,” said the broker. “It’s something I’m expecting to fail. I want you to help me. Now, listen!”

GENEVA CARBURY, the desirable, came into the drab little office on South Exchange Street at ten minutes to nine, hung up her rain-cape and limpsy turban, and sat down at the old-fashioned black-walnut desk her father had once occupied. Old Ezra Litchfield, already puttering with file-boxes, gave her a solicitous good morning. In the gloom of that rainy, chill November day he squinted at her over his misty glasses.

“Well, what’s on for today, Ezra?” the girl queried briskly.

“There’s that Baxter note comin’ due this noon,” the old man mumbled. “An’ Caldwell was in already, this mornin’, to see about that bill. An’ I got a phone-call, just after I swep’ out, from Morrisey & Black. They say if we don’t—”

“I wish you wouldn’t bother me with unimportant details,” interrupted Geneva severely. Old Litchfield was good as gold. Consistent goodness is, at times, extremely trying. This was one of those times. In three weeks Geneva had had no word from Talbot Sears; and indirectly she had heard that he had twice taken Kay Montgomery out in his car.

Geneva looked up from the pile of letters on her desk— an even slimmer pile than usual, which was saying much. She regarded the faithful retainer of the besieged fortress with some irritatigp. His old-fogy ways and his solicitude were thorns in her young, fair and eminently lovely feminine flesh. Her brown eyes narrowed at Litchfield. Very much indeed she wanted to replace him with a hustler, a man of intelligence and pep. But men like that cost money. And old Litch could be —and often had been— hung up for his salary.

“And then too,” thought Geneva, “it’s  my duty to keep him. Father always did.  But, oh!”

When it came to trials, though, Litch wasn’t any more a trial than the out-of- date office equipment— or than the lamentable shares in Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, that nobody ever wanted to buy. And beside— but when Geneva let herself think about trials, why, there never came an end of them. So she only tightened her full lips, red as cinnabar, and turned back to the morning’s mail.

Just the regulation thing, as per usual:

“We are therefore returning the consignment—”

“Sorry to report that—”

“Kindly remit, or—”

“Regret that we cannot file your patent, in spite of its manifest excellence, until some further payment has been made on the bill now due—”

“Account overdrawn. Please deposit to cover, and avoid protest-fees—”

GENEVA laid down the mail, her pretty eyes dejected. A little of the November rain seemed to have got into them; but perhaps that was only an optical illusion. Something very like a sigh, however, made old Litchfield glance up from his puttering. He shook his bald head

“We can’t go on much longer this way, Miss Geneva,” said he. Ezra had known her since she was knee-high to a flounder, known her when she had used to come like a ray of June sunshine into that same shabby old office, and sit at the little side-table and cut out paper-lace with the office shears. So she never could be “Miss Thacher” to him. Nor could he hold back from her the griefs now corroding his withered but supremely loyal heart.

“We can’t go on,” he repeated. “Bank-balance at the Old Colonial is down to $47.86; rent’s overdue; an’ Comerford wont accept any more manufacturin’-orders till we settle that last bill o’ $197.25. Not a stock-sale from McCallum & Rice in three months, an’ how about that printin’ bill for letterheads? I’m not sayin’ a word about my pay, Miss Geneva, not one word! But this here typewriter’s just got to be fixed up some way. It’s all out o’ kilter. Take that there letter e, for instance—”

“I know all about that letter e,” she caught him up. Indeed she did know, only too painfully. She hadn’t used that balky machine for months; she hadn’t for weeks past doctored up that defective e with a pencil on every letter sent out, without knowing all about it. “But,” she concluded, “it wont do any good to the business and the machine to hang crape all over them.”

“That’s so, Miss Geneva, but—”

“There’s no but to it, Ezra. If we can hold on a little longer, and somehow get that patent of mine on the market, I know it’ll turn the tide. Millions of people use can-openers, and with this new multum-in-parvo device applied to ours—”

“You’ve said that so often, Miss Geneva,” answered the old henchman, with resigned incredulity. He hobbled over and stood beside her, his thin, brown-spotted hands clasped over his thin brown waistcoat. Anxiously he observed that Miss Geneva’s cheek had lost a very little of its fair, fresh roundness and color. That wounded Ezra to the heart of hearts. It would have wounded Talbot too, had he been able to see, would have made his enterprise of helping to wreck Carbury Cancutters, Incorporated, all the more imperative.

Now Ezra boldly pleaded:

“Why d’you want to keep up a losin’ fight? It’s only discreditin’ your father’s memory— not helpin’ it a mite; an’ it’s wearin’ you plumb out. I aint speakin’ for myself. What happens to me don’t matter. I can go back to my brother’s, down to Eastham on Cape Cod. I’ll be all right there.”

“Nonsense, Ezra!”

“But you, Miss Geneva—why, you’re growin’ that pickid! I’d ruther, a great sight, see you sell out for what the business an’ good-will might bring— mebbe almost enough to cover liabilities— an’ then marry some nice, good, hustlin’ young fella—”

“That’ll do, Ezra; that’ll do. You’ve got your work. Let me do mine!”

DECISIVELY she went on opening letters. This kind of talk, in her present mood, decidedly wouldn’t do. She swallowed hard, and ripped the disheartening envelopes with an energy quite disproportionate to the task.

At the third one she gasped, turned red, then pale. She sank back in the antique swivel-chair. The letter shook in her hand. A little slip of paper with a perforated end fluttered to the desk.

“Oh!” gasped Geneva.

Ezra turned.

“What now?” he anxiously queried. “Dear Miss Geneva, please listen to an old man, an’—”

Geneva’s eyes closed. Ezra thought she was fainting. But all at once she sat up very straight, and in a quivering voice exclaimed:

“Just listen to this!

R. G. Thacher & Co.,

176 South Exchange St.,

City.

Gentlemen:

Inclosed find check for One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.), covering sale of 200 shares of your Preferred, to Simpson Peters Co., New York.

Very truly yours,

McCallum & Rice.”

Old Litchfield stood there, trembling, staring. He advanced to her, with hands outstretched.

“Miss Geneva! What— what?”

“We’ve done it, Ezra! We’ve pulled through! We— we’ve—”

Ezra turned and hastened toward the faucet over the little sink in the corner.

“I’ll get you a glass o’ water, Miss Geneva! There, there now, don’t cry—  don't cry.”

Between the glass of water that the old man’s shaking hands slopped, and Geneva’s bright brown eyes brimming from a heart too long full, they had rather a moist time of it.

But with R. G. Thacher & Co. saved, what mattered a little moisture, either inside the office or outside? In spite of it all, the sun was shining as it never had, for Miss Geneva.

ANOTHER month, rolling round as months— be they good or bad— always do, brought -Christmas very nigh. But Christmas cheer was about the last thing in this world to fill the heart of Talbot Sears. A very great, consuming bitterness had crowded it all away— that and a heavy anger against Bob Boardman, stockbroker in his business-hours, dicer with Destiny outside of them.

“Nice, healthy dopester you are, you with your infernal hoodoo!” he gibed as, late of a December afternoon, Boardman and he sat together in Talbot’s bachelor diggings. “When you framed that little deal, you certainly pulled a bone. Sure-fire proposition, all right, only it shot the wrong way.”

Boardman looked chopfallen, under the light of the soft-shaded table-lamp.

“Damned sorry, old man,” he answered. “Of course you know I never meant to crab you. But I should have realized Shaw was right when he said it’s always silly to give advice, and fatal to give good advice.”

“Good advice! Yeah, great! But you’re bearing up, all right. Everybody’s got fortitude enough to stand the wallops their friends get. Where do I fit, now?”

“My motives were the best, Talby.”

“Well, you know what speedway’s paved with good intentions. Now see what you’ve gone and done!”

Boardman smoked in moody silence, and shook his head. At last he placated:

“I never knew anything like it, Talby. It looked to me like a positively sure shot. When I had the Simpson Peters Company take your anonymous thousand and buy those two hundred shares from McCallum & Rice, and give ’em to Leatherbee, how could I know his jinx had gone on strike? I never knew it was a union jinx! It had never shown any eight-hour, closed-shop principles, before. It was the most conscientious, open-shop jinx I’d ever known, and—”

“So it is, for me!” cut in Talbot angrily. “This Leatherbee hoodoo of yours has crabbed me just as he’s always crabbed everybody he’s ever had any dealings with, directly or indirectly. Why, you poor fish, see what’s happened now! With that thousand of my money—”

“Yes, I know all about it,” gloomed Boardman. “She’s gone and put her patent through, and got orders enough—”

“So she’ll never need me,” Talbot finished. “That’s a royal cinch. She’s
launched a successful business career for herself with my mute, inglorious kale and a damn’ can-opener. From now on her motto will be: ‘Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, which I with Carbury’s Can-cutter, Incorporated, will open.’ Now you have gone and done it— you and your pet hoodoo!”

Again Boardman shook his head.

“No,” said he, “it doesn’t seem credible. With two hundred shares of Carbury, preferred, in his jeans,— the way it’s soaring now and bound to go,— Leatherbee’ll be fixed for life. It isn’t reasonable, Talby. It isn’t possible! It’s a slip of Saturn, a kink in the cosmos, or something. All his life, Leatherbee’s ruined everything he’s in any way been connected with. This Carbury Can-cutter business just simply can’t succeed, with Leatherbee in on it. The thing’s contrary to all the laws of nature and Einstein. There’s been a slip-up in the universe, somewhere.”

“The slip-up’s in your fool superstition, I tell you!” Talbot retorted. “Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, is going, and Leatherbee’s a made man, and— and Geneva’s ten million miles away from me, now. If you’d only let her plug the losing game a little longer, let her lose out in the natural course of events—”

A brrrrrr of the doorbell interrupted him. He got up and slatted to the door,
in slippers. Boardman, his lean frame sunk far down in an easy-chair, looked after him with eyes of misery.

“The laws of probability were all against it,” he murmured. “Combinations and permutations all indicated—”

At the door, the Jamaica negro elevator-boy grinned and announced:

“Yere’s yo’ paper, Mr. Sears. An’ vere’s a letter jus’ come in, on de las’ mail.”

Talbot returned with letter and paper, to the living-room'. He looked a little pale.

“It’s from Geneva,” said he. “The final wallop! Everything’s all off, now— thanks to you and your meddling with hoodoos!”

Boardman framed no answer. The logic of facts had his theorizings beaten clean through the ropes. Moodily he lighted a cigarette and studied his boot-toes.

Talbot meantime held the letter in an unsteady hand, loath to open it and read his doom.

“Tough luck!” murmured Boardman as Talbot finally ripped the envelope. Through a certain instinct of delicacy, Boardman picked up the newspaper from the table where Talbot had thrown it, and with a face of commiseration began casually looking it over.

A shout, hoarsely and profanely jubilant, made him look up just as his eyes had focused on a paragraph that graced the bottom of page two.

“What’s the matter, old top?” he demanded. “Gone wrong in the bean?”

“She—hang it all, Bob—she’s— accepted me!” vociferated Talbot, with extravagant caperings. “She says— business judgment vindicated— fulfilled father’s wishes and carried on Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, to success— old family name honorably upheld— now merging with Can-opener Combine and selling patents for— independent income assured, and will retire from business— free to follow dictates of her own— and she’s mine, and— oh, joy! Oh, boy!”

“By Jove!” cried Boardman, jumping up. “All she wanted was success, and then you. And this item, here, explains how she could succeed, with Leatherbee in on it, and—”

“Oh, shake! Slap me on the back, Bob!” exulted Talbot. “Do something say something. Tell me it’s real! But how— how the devil can it be, with that hoodoo?”

“See here!” Boardman commanded thrusting the paper at his pal.

Talbot’s dizzied eyes read where Boardman’s finger pointed:

Jonah K. Leatherbee, age 44, of Des Moines, Iowa, was found dead in his room, 198 Parkland St., at to 130 this morning.

He died while reading a morning paper, which he still held in his hand when discovered. He had marked with a pencil a financial item stating that Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, had just kited to 169¾.

Medical Examiner Pencoyd reports that death was due to heart-failure.

_____________________

4: Blood Brothers

Blue Book, March 1934

THE road along Alacran Island reeked abominably of swamps and mud and mangroves, of fish-gurry and old turtleshell. A marvelous place for tdmagofs and other utterly deadly snakes, too, among all those coconut- groves. Pete Sturgis, A.B., wished himself safe aboard the Dos Equis, that red-rusted little Mexican tramp at Puerto Hondo; especially now when night was closing in, and the sun plunging down into clouds that certainly menaced storm.

Pete Sturgis, A.B.: Pause to regard him. The A.B. is not a university degree. No, it signifies Able Bodied Seaman. Just at present, very much out of a job; but also, very able-bodied. If you guess his age at twenty-four, you won’t be far wrong. Fighting-weight, some hundred and seventy pounds. A red-haired young man, and handy with his fists. Too handy, perhaps. If he hadn’t been quite so handy, he might have possibly avoided that scrap aboard the banana-steamer Almendares, when mutiny had threatened; the scrap off the coast of this God-forsaken island, which scrap had ended by his being clouted over the head with a club and dumped into the Gulf.

That would have finished most third mates— such being the position he had occupied when the misunderstanding had taken place. But God loves the Irish; and somehow or other Pete, for all his being dazed, had swum ashore, and missed the sharks, and found his way to Puerto Hondo. And after that he had met and chummed up with good old fat Captain Gonzales, of the Dos Equis.

The Captain had offered to take him along to Vera Cruz, when and if the Dos Equis ever got there. She might start mañana—perhaps. Charming uncertainty, so characteristic of the Land of the Aztec.

Now Pete Sturgis, after having killed a few hours perambulating round this most obnoxious island, started back to town— the town he was destined never to reach. He whistled as he walked, even though he hadn’t much to whistle about. For Pete simply had to have two thousand dollars, P.D.Q., to hold on to that Madre del Oro gold-mine option, which was ninety-nine per cent sure to make him some real money if he could hold it. And Pete needed that real money. Two years ago he had quit college and gone to sea because his father could no longer afford the college, and jobs ashore were mighty scarce. But lately he had received letters from home that weren’t so good— and Pete thought a lot of his folks. Through business treachery on the part of an associate, the old man wa-s going to be on the spot in a month or two unless twenty thousand dollars turned up from somewhere to save him.

Pete’s total capital was now just $28.45, Mex. And the option would be out, in only a little over a month; and with it, all his savings, and his chance to rescue the old man. Not so hot. Nevertheless, Pete whistled as he struck toward Puerto Hondo with that said capital in his pocket, where it jostled the snake-antidote kit that old Captain Gonzales had insisted on his carrying if he went walking on Alacran.

But the whistle died on Sturgis’ lips as— coming along the rocky road that dimmed to a vague ribbon of white among dense-arching groves— he saw a Mexican. Here in such desolation, even a poverty-bitten, limping fellow like this looked good to him. The Mexican could tell him the best road back to Puerto Hondo. Out in these damned coconut-groves, with all these confounded paths, it was pretty hard not to get lost. So Pete Sturgis stood there and waited for the Mexican to come along.

“Buenas!” he greeted the Mexican, now close at hand. “Which is the best way back to town, señor?”

The other said nothing, but came close; and if a man ever had a gallows-face on him, this was certainly the one. A lantern-jawed, saffron-tinted fellow, dressed in fine clothing which had, however, apparently suffered misadventures.

“Americano, eh ?” snarled this hombre.

“Sure! What about it?”

Then the bad hombre’s very dirty left hand snapped back to the bad hombre’s hip, and Pete Sturgis felt a gun poking him moderately hard in the short ribs.

“Arriba las manosl”

Sturgis obeyed by reaching for a cluster of coconuts about sixteen feet overhead.

The stick-up man laughed without merriment.

“It grieves me, señor,” he mocked. “But I am a child of misfortune, and must needs recoup my fortunes. Only yesterday I was wealthy, for I had sold my— a ranch, for one hundred and twenty-five thousand pesos. Last night I was set upon by robbers who stole every penny and left me— as you see. It grieves me indeed, señor, but I am desperate. So— your pocketbook, money and watch—throw them down in the road. And then, Americano, be quickly on your way! ”

Pete hit him— hard.

AS for science, pooh! Very little science. But it was a good wallop just the same. It landed on the bad hombre’s mouth, and did the job. The Mexican crashed. His gun skidded away.

Pete Sturgis, with knuckles bleeding where the Mex’s teeth had gashed them, stood over him, cursing heartily.

Only a groan replied. There the bandit sprawled limply.

Sturgis wanted that gun. He peered about, in the dimming light. Stooping, he groped around for it. Where the devil? Ah! There it lay!

Just as he almost had it, the Mex was on him. Pete felt a rush, a fling. So then, that sprawl had been only a ’possum ruse? Sturgis ducked. Pain slashed his right forearm.

He struck at random, hard. It landed. He felt the jar of it, right back to his spine. Something crunched.

The bad hombre dropped again. Pete heard a sort of choking grunt.

What was all this warm trickle down Sturgis’ fingers? He half-sensed it now, as he stood there in the darkening road and peered down at something motionless, white, vague.

The fellow had knifed him!

Sturgis felt a cold wrath, and longed for a chance to hit him again. He prodded the inert figure with his foot; the Mexican yielded to it with utter relaxation.

“Knocked him for a row of goals, this time,” judged the American. He knelt, touched the highly unsuccessful bandit, shook him. “Hand over that knife! ”

More silence.

The man was out, right enough. Sturgis, bleeding a bit freely, felt about and located the knife. He rammed it into his pocket. Then he scrabbled around in the blood-spotted road, came across the gun, held it ready lest this collapse also be a stratagem.

“Get up, you!”

No groan answered, nor any breath.

“Whew! What the hell?”

Suspicion whispered alarmingly at the back of Pete’s mind. He knelt again and listened closely. The fellow wasn’t even breathing!

Sturgis found one of his wrists and located the place where a pulse ought to be, but where now most certainly one was not.

Bending, he applied his ear to the wastrel’s chest. Heart-beats? Nothing doing.

Pete Sturgis crouched staring, realizing that he had just killed a Mexican, and that it was one devil of a long, hard trek from there back to the U. S. A.

If he were caught now, with a Mexican’s blood on his hands—

Blood still dribbled down his arm from the gash made by the bandit’s knife; it dripped to the roadway, but he gave it no heed. If pain lay in his wounded flesh, he felt none. Nothing. What did that matter? What did anything matter, except just the one supreme effort to save his life?

For perfectly well he understood it meant death now, if he was caught. He knew all about the deep, underlying hate and resentment against Americans in Mexico; down here, especially, in this remote corner of the country. Mexico City might have been different. He’d have had a chance, there. But in this far island at the Back of Beyond—

“Not a chance! Once they get me, I’m done!”

No matter what his story or his plea-self-defense, justifiable homicide— the local court in Puerto Hondo would speedily convict him of murder.

Then the firing-squad awaited him; or if not that, interminable years of torture in some filthy jail. And he had others besides himself to think of too— the folks in trouble back home.

“No carcel for mine!” determined Sturgis, shoving the gun into his pocket, along with the dirk. “No firing-squad, either. Not while there’s all outdoors to get away in!”

Instant flight— here lay his Only hope. First, though, he must check his bleeding. Did he leave a crimson trail, peril would track him. And much further loss of blood might bring collapse.

One of his shirt-sleeves, ripped off and tightly bound, gave him rough first-aid.

He dragged the body off the road, into some bushes, and for a moment more stood peering, listening. What was that sound? Voices of some one plodding along the road? Pete’s heart thumped painfully. But no— only a far-off cur was yapping. Save for this, and a mournful susurration of surf on beaches, the world lay quiet under a purple velvet sky now pricked with faintest stars. Along the west, those stars were blacking out, behind a sullen-drifting band of cloud. Time to be on the move!

Sturgis realized numberless cohorts of mosquitoes were swarming to torment him, but what odds? Nothing mattered now, but just the get-away. But how about all that blood on the path? That certainly would never do. In the morning it would surely raise a hue-and-cry. It must be obliterated.

The American stood a moment, to think. Then he knelt, risked lighting a match— one of those exasperating, weak little wax affairs used by all Mexico. Dimly he saw dark spots. The match died. In that gloom, sultry and oppressive, he scooped dust, scattered it. Another match; more dust; and so on till no visible sign of blood remained.

Then he took off his shoes and socks. Holding them in hand, he walked barefoot many times up and down the road, covering all that place with naked footprints. Splendid alibi, this! What Mexican would ever connect a shoe-wearing gringo with bare footprints?

Now all traces were obliterated as best they might be, and Sturgis once more turned his thoughts actively toward a get-away. A peculiar stinging sensation on his left wrist brought his right hand to it. He shuddered at feeling some soft, pulpy thing that clung there. Another match showed him a gorged tick. He pulled it off with a cry of disgust, and flung it far.

Some country! Which way out ?

Only one solution seemed obvious to this problem, and that was none too promising. It hung on the possibility of stealing a cayuco— a dugout— at a fishing-village, and striking across the lagoon to the mainland, to the Usamacinta River country.

What Sturgis might find over on that coast, he could hardly guess. More swamps, probably; mangroves, venomous reptiles, insects, fever, starvation, probably death. But at all hazards, the chance of life existed, and of freedom.

“Must be some kind of settlements over on the mainland,” he judged. And those settlements, if any, wouldn’t be likely to hear of anything that had happened on the island. “If I can get ashore and hide the boat, or sink it, I can maybe strike a trail that’ll lead me to some village or other. Let’s go.”

He stuffed his socks into a pocket of his not over-clean white drill jacket, and hung his shoes by their lacings round his neck. Barefoot and watchful, he plodded back along the road toward a cluster of fishing-huts he remembered having seen about half a mile to eastward. Mosquito-swarms tormented him. He felt a bit light-headed from loss of blood, but plenty of strength still remained in him. And never had his mind been keener.

Cautiously scouting along, he presently sighted the vague glow of a few lights. Somebody was still awake in the village— worse luck.

“No closer, now,” he judged; and waited, crouching and listening in a bamboo-thicket. Some of the fisher- folk were still out and about. Cooking- fires glowed under open sheds. Sturgis could see dim, barefoot figures— men in flapping loose clothes, women in head-shawls and dresses, like long Mother- Hubbards. Tick and flea-infested bags of bones in canine form wandered and scratched around the huts.

One by one the lights in the village winked out. The tiny settlement of thatched huts grew quiet as the inside of a church on Monday morning.

At last, after three-quarters of eternity, Sturgis decided it was safe to make the try. Cramped, stiff, swollen with insect-bites, he made way down through soft white sand to the beach. He scouted along it, toward the village. Shells bruised and cut his bare feet.

Now he waited awhile, near the surf, to make sure everybody in the village was asleep. A glory of stars loomed overhead; and far beyond the lagoon, the Southern Cross hung tip-tilted against the sky.

Then presently a vast black drive of cloud smeared out all constellations, like a giant hand wiping a slate clean. The breeze flawed, freshened to a wind. The lagoon, all of thirty miles wide, seemed darkly ominous. In those shoal waters, no great gale was needed to kick up hell’s own tumult of sea. A spit of rain pattered. What utter obscurity!

At thought of venturing out into that unknown and perilous dark, the most foolhardy man in the world might have paused for a brace of thoughts. Pete Sturgis gave it three. After all, mightn’t it be better to turn back to Puerto Hondo, slip aboard the Dos Equis and stow away there? She might be out of port and gone, in the morning. Pete could square things with the captain— if indeed any suspicion fell on him, at all.

For a few breaths, he was almost persuaded. But no, no—

“Fat chance a gringo’d have, a wounded gringo on a steamer, with a Mexican killed! Me for the mainland!”

He pushed on along the beach, and all at once stumbled across a boat drawn up safely above high tide. Coconut-palm leaves covered it, as commonly in the tropics, to keep the wood from cracking. Sturgis felt underneath these leaves, grunted with relief and satisfaction as he found a paddle.

Then a sudden, throaty growl swung him round. Something dim, hostile in the black night, confronted him— a dog.

This brute’s intentions were only too clearly homicidal. Sturgis unwisely attempted diplomacy.

“Vert aca, chico!” he tried to cozen it. But the dog, well enough sensing a stranger, burst into savage tumult; surged in at him with bared fangs.

Sturgis reeled back as the animal leaped against his right thigh. He felt flesh tear. Snatching out the dead man’s knife, he drove to the hilt between ribs. A shrill yelp— and the dog lay thrashing there on the sand at his feet, convulsed with agonies of death.

Wiping the blade, Sturgis once more pocketed the knife, and bent to his task of hauling the cayuco down into the surf.

Gleams wavered in a hut. Then a door, opening, cut a vague oblong of illumination in the black. Dim-seen, a man was standing in that doorway.

“Ea, Carlos!” called a voice.

Another voice began mumbling. The man in the doorway vanished. Sturgis sensed that this man was now outside, was coming to investigate.

With a surge of effort he dragged the cayuco down. It grated loudly on loose corals and broken shells. How damnably clumsy and heavy! A second, it stuck. Sturgis tugged till the veins swelled in his neck. Again the dugout started. Already some of the higher surfs were lightening one end. Now, into the tumbling breakers it slid. “Quién va?” the voice shouted. Straight out into the surf, Sturgis hauled the boat. Knee-deep in warm rollers that hissed and crumbled, he waded; waist-deep, then almost to his breast.

Shipping much water, he scrambled aboard. The long, narrow but wonderfully seaworthy craft yawed. It rolled heavily, scooping another load of brine.

Sturgis groped for the paddle, found it. Now up on his toes with keen exertion, if ever in his life, he flung all his muscle into a long, hard stroke.

Logy, but none the less bucking like a terrified bronco, the dugout swerved and reared. Halfway round it slewed. Another wave would have swamped it, rolled it ashore— and with it Sturgis, to his very certain finish.

But before that other wave could batter, he had swung the slim canoe straight out to sea, driven it on, on. Spray-flung, in a succession of fantastic and violent leaps, the cayuco forged ahead.

Now surf diminished. Shouts from the beach impotently faded through that impenetrable dark, black as a stack of the world’s blackest cats. Silently, sweating with blind effort, wounded and dizzy, Peter Sturgis thrust the heavy dugout south, out into the ebon mystery and silence of that lost lagoon.

2: The Guest from God

THE señor Marío Martinez, at gray dawn of a sullen and windy day, came out on the red-tiled porch in front of his ranch-house at the mouth of the Rio Fangoso. He yawned, stretched, and cast a weather-wise eye at the milky shoals beyond the river-mouth, the sullen heavens and low-scudding clouds.

“A bad morning,” he judged, “and today we need a good one. Ill-luck seldom comes alone. It will be hard, a day like this, for my vaqueros to round up those cattle, but it must be done.”

Two hours before, the great ranch horn had blared to rouse the vaqueros out of their hammocks, in their earth- floored, thatched huts; for, “God helps the early riser,” was Don Marío’s favorite proverb. An hour past, after their tortillas, bread and coffee had been gulped, the vaqueros had saddled their broncos and hauled on their huge leather “chaps” that all night long had been soaking in the water-trough.

Then with leather reatas, grub-bags, water-bottles, machetes and rifles— in case of meeting peccaries or jaguars— they had departed in fading darkness for wild regions far up-country.

At the Rancho de San Agustin now only the womenfolk and children remained, with old Tio Pablo, the storekeeper. Don Marío was counting on a quiet day with his wife, Dona Perfecta, and with Lolita their nine-year-old daughter, light of their eyes.

“Ho-hum!” yawned Don Marío. He stretched again, rolled and lighted a cigarette. Erect and wiry, with only a slight grizzle in beard and mustache to show his more than forty years, he looked rather an aristocrat. His white linen shirt, well-scrubbed blue trousers and rawhide sandals, into which bare feet were thrust, made him a figure worth looking at twice; these, and his deep-set black eyes, hawk-nose and firm-set jaw. The slightest coppery tinge imaginable, on high cheek-bones, told that his Spanish blood had somewhere in the past been mingled with a drop of Indian.

As was his custom, now he strolled a bit before his coffee, for a general inspection of his little kingdom. “The eye of the master fattens the cow,” was a firm article of his faith. He cast searching glances into the calf-pens, into the corrals, then through his coconut- grove. All seemed in order.

“It is well,” judged Don Marío, and lighted another cigarette.

In front of his ranch silently flowed the turgid, paint-green current of the Rio Fangoso, out toward the oyster- shell bar that all but closed the river’s mouth. On mud-flats beyond the bar, Don Marío could glimpse rose-pink flamingos, cormorants, snow-white cranes. Still farther he could see the olive lagoon, with here or there the vague dot of a fishing-boat. Nothing unusual.

“Let us see if the river has brought us, perhaps, a few pesos,” thought the Don. He Walked leisurely, blowing smoke, down the long pier built of palm- logs and earth, the pier that etended far out into the river. Perhaps some worthwhile,mahogany or logwood stick, that had got away from the woodcutters far upstream, might during the night have drifted down to the rancho.

At the pierhead, though, Don Marío saw, across a yellow and muddy shoal, something that made him look with close attention.

“Dios mio! What is that?”

A man, motionless, silent, was lying half in the water on a mucky flat composed of mud and oyster-shells.

Don Marío paused for no speculation, but turned and strode up the pier. As he went, he violently clapped his hands together, in Spanish style, summoning old Tio Pablo.

Tio, a privileged character, was just out of his hammock in his yellow- plastered hut with the palm-thatch roof. Out through this thatch, smoke was now drifting as the old man brewed coffee over a tiny fire of driftwood in a sand-filled firebox. Now hearing the master’s summons, he appeared in his doorway, blinking his one good eye. The other was covered with a horn-like cataract, which gave him the nickname of El Tuerto—“The One-eyed.”

“What is it, señor?”

“A man ashore here, Pablo! Drowned, perhaps. Come, launch a boat swiftly!”

“A man, señor? What kind of a man?”

“Thousand devils! No questions, now, but come!”

Back to the river they hurried, launched a dugout, plied round-blad- ed paddles swiftly. In five minutes they had reached the mucky flat. Barefoot and with trousers rolled high, Tio Pablo leaped into the mud.

“An Americano, señor! He must be from far up-river, from the San Rosario chicle-camp! ”

“Never mind! Aboard with him!” Pablo lifting, Don Marío hauling, they boggled the stranger over the tilting gunwale and into the bottom of the dugout.

“Dead, señor?” asked Ti'o Pablo.

“Not yet!”

“Praise to all saints! There is a remedy for all things but death. With a mouthful of tequila we shall bring him back to his senses. But how came he here? We have seen no boat arrive. And surely, he could not have swum down-river or across the laguna, with sharks and barracudas and—”

“Silence, Tuerto! Vamos!”

Back at the long pier, they took the human derelict head-and-heels, carried him sagging and dripping to the guestroom of the ranch-house, laid him in a sisal hammock stretched between whitewashed walls.

Tio Pablo hastily brought tequila from the little ranch store, spilled a stiff shot of the fiery white fluid into the stranger’s mouth, then exclaimed:

“Ay, mi madre! Look, señor, he is wounded!”

“Yes, on the arm. Bandaged with a piece of shirt, eh? And his leg, too, it as been bitten. This man has suffered many things. He may yet die.”

“All saints forbid! ” piously ejaculated the old servitor, crossing himself. “Shall we undress him, care for his wounds, and wrap him in warm ponchos?”

“At once, Tio! And here— open his jaws again. Another swallow of tequila may save him. Ah, so! ”

GRAY glimmerings of consciousness won back to Peter Sturgis. He got vague impressions of white walls with rows of iron rings in them, a window with iron bars,— could it be a prison?— ropes and rough beams, a massive wooden door. Just a glimpse came to him of a tiled floor. He could see row after row of palm-leaf fans overhead, beyond all calculation.

Two, four, eight, sixteen rows—  or were those pulsations of pain he was counting? Something burned inside him. But an arm ached, too; and somewhere down in regions that might have been a thigh, more pain tried to register.

At some indefinite time, long after, he found himself looking at a strip of sunlight now slanting through the barred window. A cock shrilly crowed, outside; and somewhere cattle were bellowing. A fly settled on his forehead. He raised an arm to brush it away, and saw the arm was neatly bandaged. What the devil?

Last thing he could remember was a madness of furious warm whitecaps washing over him, surging, thrusting, battering him down. Before that, what ? Oh, yes— some frantic nightmare—  boat — furious wind, driving rain—luminous combers breaking in pitch-darkness. A roaring, frothing confusion. Frantic efforts to bail, with cupped hands. Muscles that ached, panting breath, the agony of a supreme and hopeless struggle once more with the paddle.

Then, crack!— only a useless pole in hand. Paddle broken. After that, stark confusion—a swamping rush, a short, mad battle with whelming waters that choked and strangled him in inky dark— and then, this!

“Where the hell’s bells am I at, anyhow?” he gulped thickly through swollen lips. “And what’s it all about? Where’s the dugout, and how did I get here, and what the devil—” In the long sweep of the hammock stretched between those walls of plastered whiteness, once more he lapsed, lay senseless and inert.

“Drink this, señor!”

A voice, speaking in Spanish— a vibrant, grave and soothing voice— penetrated fogs of lassitude and confusion. Sturgis felt something hot and spicy, something savory, tempting, at his battered lips. He swallowed, with painful effort. Ah, good!

“A little more― And now, rest.”

“No, no! I’ve rested enough. How did I get here? What place is this?”

“It is your house, señor, as long as you will honor us. We call it El Rancho de San Agustin. You have met with great mischances. But fortune always leaves some open door.”

Sturgis saw a grave and quiet face, with lean cheeks, grizzled mustache and beard; hair black and stiff almost as an Indian’s, and somewhat streaked with gray; eyes deep-set, black but kindly. The voice went on:

“You came ashore here in some manner that I do not know. You are an Americano, señor?”

“Yes, that’s right,” gulped Sturgis. Then giddiness once more took him. He let his eyes droop shut, lay very still, conscious of pain but also of a vast relief. He thought:

“So then, I’m alive, anyhow. This is no pipe-dream. I got across the lagoon, after all.”

For the moment, this seemed quite enough. But presently he was thinking again:

“And I’m spotted as an American, of course. And the way they’ve overhauled me, they’ve never missed my tattooings. They’ve got me as a sailor, okay. What yarn shall I spin ’em? Well, the nearest possible to the truth, the better— so long as that dead bandit doesn’t figure in it, that’s all!”

By noon, everybody at the ranch knew that a Meester Esmith, mate of an American freighter, had been in a fight with some members of a mutinous crew, just outside the lagoon; that one of the mutineers had set a savage dog on him, while another had knifed his right arm; that he had beaten them off, and bandaged his wounded arm, only to have them attack him again and fling him overboard in the dark.

A thrilling story! It gave the ranch more to talk about than anything that had happened in a month of saints’-days.

“And to think,” exclaimed the plump and comely Dona Perfecta, mistress of the ranch, while the family sat at dinner, “to think he clung to a floating beam and was drifted ashore here! Surely, a miracle! ”

“Yes, certainly the hand of the good God was in it,” assented Don Mdrio, while Lolita listened wide-eyed, and the Maya serving-maid almost forgot to pass the black beans, chicken, tortillas and stuffed cheese-cake. “Poor Señor Esmith! He has suffered greatly. But he will take no great harm. No bones are broken, and his wounds are not deep. His clothes are already dry. In a few days he will be well again— si Dios quiere.”

“Surely God will wish it,” the rancher’s wife assented. “But would it not be well to take from his pockets whatever he has in them, and dry those things separately ?”

Don Mdrio shook a negativing head.

“No, my dear one. A man’s house and his pockets are never to be invaded.”

“You are right. But now, I will send him some more broth, also a bit of chicken. These, with some good coffee, will bring back his strength.”

“Send nothing, my wife. I myself will carry him food and drink. No guest, under our roof, can have too much honor shown him. For such a one is sent to us by God.”

3: The Nauyaca

BEFORE a week was out, Peter Sturgis had begun to feel somewhat like himself again. Rest and care, with plenty of good ranch provender— beef and platanos, oysters from long reefs in the lagoon, eggs, pork, chocolate whipped to froth in a wooden jug; and beside all these, odd, high-seasoned things that piqued the appetite— were rapidly putting him back on his feet, once more.

The dog-bite on his thigh amounted to little. As for the knife-slash, that was healing with no complications. If only no news from the island happened to reach San Agustin—

“I’ll be sitting pretty!” judged Peter Sturgis, A.B.

He inventoried his personal effects; found his watch done for; totaled his cash at— as aforesaid— a little over twenty-eight pesos; overhauled the knife and gun. These he cleaned and oiled, laying them away— together with the uninjured snake-bite kit that Captain Gonzales had given him— in an ancient Spanish mahogany chest of drawers in his guest-quarters.

“Some souvenirs, when I get back to the States!”

The knife, eight inches long and razor-keen, had an ebony handle, a blade beautifully inlaid with silver. The gun was a .38, and a good one. Sturgis showed them not even to Don Marío. Just as well, down there in Mexico, to make no display of weapons.

Life became singularly restful, brimmed with a peace such as he had seldom known. Luck, so far, companioned him. Danger stood afar, and all seemed peace.

Sturgis enjoyed the hens and turkeys that roamed about the ranch-house, and the tame peccary that rooted in the strip of land along the river. At times that peccary and those fowls would invade the porch or even the house, all in a most democratic spirit. Dona Perfects would shoo them out, and laugh; or she would bring her embroidery to the bench near Sturgis’ hammock, and talk with him of the incredible things in Nueva-Yor’.

Sturgis presently began to wonder just how long he’d have to stay within those gates. A bit of questioning brought out the information that— unless he wanted to go back to Puerto Hondo in a dugout, which most emphatically he did not—he might be in for a protracted stay.

“You see, señor,” Don Marío told him, “we have no regular communication with the outside world. That is, except once in three months, when a goleta from San Ignacio anchors off the river-mouth, and we swim cattle out to it.”

“When will the next goleta be here?” Sturgis asked anxiously.

“One left, only a fortnight ago. The next will come in two months and a half.”

“About the last of March, then?”

“Yes, amigo,”

“Good night! ” thought Peter. “It’s all off with that option.”

“What is it, my friend?” asked the rancher. “You look disturbed. Is it that you have urgent business, so that you want to hurry away from us ?”

“Oh, no, no— it’s nothing.”

“If you must go, of course it might be arranged. I might send one of my men to borrow some kind of boat at the village of San Ignacio, a few kilometers up the coast, and thus get you over to Puerto Hondo.”

Sturgis shook his head, in negation. The mining-option, he saw, was up the flue. Better let it go, cold, than risk returning to Puerto Hondo. And evidently no other town existed, for a long way up and down the coast, that he could use as an exit back into the world again.

“As I say,” the Don continued, “we are here very much cut off from everything. Except for the goleta every three months, only a chance fishing-boat now or then puts in here, for a bit of fresh meat. I advise against your trying to leave here, otherwise than on the goleta.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right.”

“At this season of the year, a norte is always liable to swoop over the Gulf and the lagoon. Treacherous gales, that strike swiftly as a clenched fist. So, señor, you had best be patient and stay with us a while. We will do our best to make you happy. And here you are in your own house, Señor Esmith.”

And as day drifted into lazy day, the exotic ranch-routine grew familiar. Sturgis liked the Indian women carrying water-jars balanced on their heads, striding along with barefoot ease, and smoking cigarettes. He enjoyed the lowing of cattle, the fat herds grazing on broad vegas amid tall grass; the whish and crack of quirts, pulling up of cinches; the roping and breaking of wild horses in dusty corrals, by yelling and excited vaqueros; the black buzzards perched on tall gates of the enclosures built of vertical palm logs laced together by lianas.

He watched the throwing and branding of cattle, the training of steers. These the vaqueros flung to earth and tied. Then through the long horns they bored holes, to receive iron pegs. Horn to horn they lashed pairs of animals—   now called mancornados so that for many months, the pair lived as one, night and day, lying down together, getting up, eating, sleeping together. And all their lives thereafter, those two creatures would obey as one, till death.

The making of high-horned, wooden saddles interested him; the cutting and finishing of reatas, deftly spiraled out of a single rawhide. The vaqueros would tie one end of such a reata to a horse’s tail, take a turn round a post of grana- dilla-wood, then— keeping the leather well greased with tallow—make the horse pull it smartly away. A few such pulls, and the reata was smooth, tight-twisted, pliant, a marvel of efficiency.

He wondered why some of the men had their faces smeared with blue pigments.

“Ah, this is the carnival season, señor,” Tio Pablo explained, smoking with him in the primitive little store. Tio fixed on him his single eye, that blinked from a parchment face. “And then too, it is the fiesta of the very ancient god, Kukulkaan.”

Greatly Sturgis puzzled over that. Did the ancient Maya faith still hold sway? What were these people, anyhow— Christians? Pagans?

TOWARD mid-afternoon of the ninth day since the American’s coming; there shrilled from the patio a sudden, terrified wailing. A shriek in a child’s voice— the voice of Lolita, the ranchero’s little girl. And the child cried out:

“Ay, mamá, mamá! Ven, ven acá!” Then, in a moment, a scream from the mother:

“Jesus-Maria! Marío, Marío, come quick! A nauyaca— and it has bitten our Lolita— God have mercy! ”

Other voices mingled. Oaths, shouts sounded, in terrified confusion, Don Marío’s voice among them.

Running to the patio, Sturgis saw the rancher— pale to the lips— furiously thrashing with a quirt at something sinuous and black and brown, something deadly, something that from a venomous serpent was now being swiftly reduced to a bleeding, twitching pulp.

Caught up in the mother’s arms, Lolita was moaning, while servants and va queros, crowding into the patio, uttered confused cries and prayers. Some were crossing themselves. Old Tio Pablo shook a furious fist, trampled with blasphemies on the mangled rag of flesh that had been a deadly snake.

On the child’s thin brown ankle, two small but terrible punctures had already grown livid, swollen. The hand of death was swiftly closing on Lolita.

“Into the house with her! ” commanded Don Marío, foam on his lips. “You, Tio, get my razor— quick!”

Sturgis turned, ran for his quarters, flung open the old chest of drawers, snatched his snake-bite kit. When he got back to the bedroom of the ranch- house, though hardly three minutes had passed, Lolita was barely moaning. Tremors ran through her slim little body, as she lay in a hammock beside which her father knelt. Don Marío looked up, haggard-eyed.

“Clear this crowd out of here!” he commanded Tio Pablo. “All out, but the mother and a couple of criadasl” His hand shook, but his waxen face was stolid as an Indian’s, as he tightened a rawhide ligature about the child’s leg, twisted it up with a bit of stick.

“The razor!”

He cut deftly, sucked and spat blood. “Permanganate!” he ordered. “Tio Pablo, bring it from the store-room! Pronto!”

“Hold on!” cried Sturgis. He had assembled the nickel-plated syringe. Now he held it out. “Permanganate  won’t suffice, Don Marío. Here— let me try this!”

“Eh, what?” The father squinted, as with eyes that could not see. Dona Perfecta had slumped into a chair, was praying with white lips, while a couple of maids called on all the saints they knew.  “What is that ?”

“It is an American medicine. It is very powerful! May I use it?”

“Yes— and God give it strength!”

Sturgis shot the antivenin home, under the skin just above the child’s knee.

“If it’s only in time!” he exclaimed.

“Is it not, oh, my friend?”

“Ought to be. Isn’t five minutes since she was bitten! ”

Don Marío said nothing. Now his face was gray. In those few moments a mask as of old age— sunken, deep-lined— seemed to have drawn itself across his features. His lips trembled soundlessly in prayer. Quivering fingers made the sign of the cross.

“Not too tight with that bandage, Don Marío,” warned the American. “And loosen it a bit, now and then.”

The ranchero nodded.

“Yes, I know.”

Fainting, Dona Perfecta collapsed.

The servants carried her to her own hammock. At the door, ranch-folk crowded, murmuring prayers.

“Ay, madré santisima!... Ay, Jesús! . . . Misericordia!”

One of the serving-women lighted a candle.

“Blow out that damned thing!” commanded Don Marío. “That shall be only for a funeral— and by God’s grace there shall be no funeral here! ” Agonized, he hung over his dear treasure, light of his eyes. Lolita now hardly moaned at all. Her pulse was swift and thready, her breathing shallow.

Wrenched with grief and sympathy, the American stood by. In Lolita’s blood, white magic of the American antivenin battled with black magic of that deadly venom— venom of the terrible nauyaca, the yellow-jawed tómagof, scourge of southern Mexico.

4: Oath and Betrayal

LATE that night, with everybody else asleep, Don Marío sat alone with Sturgis in the living-room of the ranch, sat smoking in a silence that had lasted now some minutes.

An old hand-wrought Spanish lamp burning on the table of broad and rough mahogany planks threw vague light over a wine-jug and glasses; on tiles and whitewashed walls with huge hand-hewn beams, on holy pictures, on ponchos and sombreros that hung against the door leading into the store-room. Through the iron window-bars sounded a whispering rustle of palm-fronds, the sleepy mooing of cattle, a vague murmur of dark-sliding waters, as the Rio Fangoso slipped onward to the wide lagoon.

Don Marío’s aquiline nose looked more stern than ever, his beard and mustache more severe, by that dim light. Deeper shadows cut across his hollowed cheeks and touched the salient bones above them. Half-lying in his huge chair covered with the skin of a jaguar,—tigre, they call it in Mexico,— he at last made speech:

“Amigo, my heart is very full. Too full, for me to tell it. What, after all, are words in any tongue, when one man has done for another man what you have done for me? Our old proverb says you must eat a peck of salt with a friend before you really know him, but is it true? Not always. I have eaten not yet half a cupful of salt with you, señor Esmith, but already I know you as a brother. What you have done—”

“You needn’t say anything, Don Marío,” cut in Sturgis, from his chair beside the table. He took another drink of wine. The ranchero did the same. “What less would any man have done? A friend is a friend; and if he’s really such, he’ll go against hell with one bucket of water, for the other fellow. But what I did was little. Mostly luck, that I happened to have the stuff with me.”

“Luck? No. The hand of God! And you, amigo, were the instrument through which that divine hand worked.”

To this, Sturgis made no answer. He was rather hard-boiled about matters theological, but why argue?

“Perhaps I should have said ‘the gods,’ Don Martinez added, after a long and smoky pause punctuated by two more drinks. “When life and death hang in the balance, and life wins,— as now,— something stirs in my blood, not wholly Christian. Something of the old days, something from beyond the white man’s world. Reversion, atavism— qué sé yo? My great-grandfather was a Chimalapa Indian. In my veins still run a few drops of that primitive blood. You may as well look for five feet on a cat, as hope to kill that kind of blood completely. One little drop is enough to give a man thoughts that are— different.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But why speak of this? Lolita will get well. In a few days she will quite recover. Nothing else really matters.”

“Señor, something else does matter!”

“And what?”

Light glinted in the ranchman’s dark eyes. He tugged at his mustache.

“And what ?— the relationship between you, señor, and me! You, an American; and me, a Mexican. Since you have done this thing for me, given me more than life, are we not brothers now?”

“All men are brothers, Don Marío, when it comes to that.”

“Yes, but not in this special sense. Would you accept blood-brotherhood with me?”

Not understanding, a bit surprised, Sturgis knit his brows and looked at the ranchero.

“Eh? How do you mean?” he asked. “Oiga, amigo!” And Don Marío leaned forward, his deep-set eyes steady on the American’s face. “The bond between us, for good or evil, should be stronger than mere words can make it. My life is yours now, to dispose of as you will, should need arise. I pledge it! And that pledge— will you not seal it with the ancient Chimalapa Indian ceremony— a ceremony so very simple, yet more binding than the gates of hell?”

“What— what ceremony do you mean, señor?” Sturgis stammered, astonished.

“The blood-exchange. A drop of your blood for a drop of mine. Then we are brothers, truly, till eternity— and beyond!”

A moment Sturgis pondered this arresting proposal. In his rather ticklish circumstances, what could fall more welcome than some such protection as this? He nodded:

“Muy bien, Don Marío.”

“Ah! And when ?”

“Any time that suits you. Right now, if you like.”

Don Marío got up, strode across the tiled floor, opened the drawer of an old hand-made cabinet. When he turned back, a slim blade gleamed in his hand.

“Give me your left hand, hermano mio!”

Sturgis arose, advanced to him, extended his hand. The ranchman bared his own left arm, brown, sinewy. Sturgis imitated him.

“Think well, now,” warned Don Marío. “This alliance is defensive and offensive. Once this oath is taken, your friends are mine, my friends are yours. Our enemies, the same. Life or death, we must share as one. Are you duly and truly prepared to swear this oath, for life and all its perils ?”

“Yes, Don Marío,” the American made answer, strangely moved. “I pledge my word to it, for life and all its perils.”

“To heaven or hell ?”

“Yes! To heaven or hell! ”

“To all eternity?”

“And beyond!”

Don Marío’s steel drew a drop of blood from the American’s naked arm, one from his own. The arms, close- pressed, mingled those drops.

“Now are we brothers indeed,” he said. “Está acabado! It is finished!”

IT WAS on the third night after Lolita’s narrow escape— again in the lamp- lit living-room of the hacienda— that Sturgis had proof of how deep, how all- comprehensive this new bond really was.

“Listen, my brother,” said the Don. “Words without deeds are poor indeed. A close mouth is good, at times, for no flies enter there. But again, speech is necessary, even to the telling of a great secret.”

“A secret, brother?”

“Yes, and a mighty one. You are a mariner?” The American nodded. “And not rich, I take it?”

Sturgis laughed, but his heart-strings tightened with portents of expectancy.

“Rich, Don Marío? When were sailors ever rich?”

“Never, since my ancestors, the Spanish conquistadores, overran this country.” The ranchero eyed his coiling smoke. “Tell me, brother, what is your dearest wish?”

Peter Sturgis, A.B., felt his heart give a bump or two.

“Just now,” he made answer, “it would be to hold on to a valuable mining-option I’ve got, in Sonora. It’s called the Madre del Oro, and how I happened to get hold of it would take too long to tell. But anyhow, I’m liable to lose it, if I don’t pay something on the option.”

“How much?”

“Well—two thousand, American.”

“Pooh! A mere trifle! ” Don Marío dismissed it. “If this is all that worries you, dismiss it. It is paid. No matter what happen, the option remains in your hands. But,”—and he leaned forward, looked earnestly at Peter,—“but I am speaking of larger things. Of real wealth. Have you never thought of wanting it?”

“Why, of course! Who hasn’t? But what chance has a sailor, at best a mate on a freighter, to—”

“The chance is yours, now, my brother! For I will give it you! ”

“You mean—” Peter began.

“Understand me well, brother. It is not that I am paying you, for anything you have done. Never that! It is rather that one brother, who needs nothing but who knows of much, offers  the other one that which will help him. Do you comprehend?”

“I do. And then?”

“As for me,” contintied Don Mário, drawing at his cigar, “money means little. True, we say that for motley the dog dances, but who needs dancing in this wilderness? I have had much money, lost it, forgotten it.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. Before I came to this lost lagoon, I lived on a vast estate in Tabasco. My father had mote than eight million pesos, in lands and cattle. A revolution finished him. All the cattle were driven off, and killed. The buildings went up in smoke. Many of our people were shot, others drafted into the army of— well, never mind. Those were black days, my brother. We learned the meaning of the old proverb: ‘Trust no one, and you’ll never be deceived! ’ ”

“Lots of truth in that, Don Mário.”

“Not between you and me, though. But as I was telling you, we were ruined. My father— God rest him in peace!— escaped with his life, and little more. But he soon died. The soul was dried, in him. As for me, I was arrested as a rich man’s son. I was condemned to the firing-squad. Two Americans interceded for me. My life was spared. For that, I owe all Americans a debt of gratitude, that sometime I swore to pay.”

“And then?”

“I came here. How I married, built up this rancho and all, matters nothing. But here I am, content. The happy heart makes the unending feast, eh? Money means little, so long as I have health, food and shelter, wife, child. To you, though, money could mean much. And to you I shall give it, as much as you can carry hence!”

He paused, keen eyes on Sturgis. The American felt his head swim. “Lord!” he thought, leaning forward in the lamp-shine, elbow on knee. “Now we are getting down to tacks! Is this a hop-dream, or—”

“Listen, my brother. Far up-country in the swamps and jungles of Chiapas, far t-o the southwest of here, lies the ruined Maya city of Yaloxcaan.”

“Yes?”

“In that city is a subterranean hiding- place, where the last of the sacred Maya books—histories, works on astronomy and mathematics— lie hidden. The Spaniards swept through this country like wolves. I, of their race, admit it. They burned, tortured, slaughtered. They hanged women, with children hanging from those women’s feet. One of the old Maya histories records:

“‘Then began the construction of the church, and great labor was ours. Then began the execution by hanging, and the fire at the ends of our hands. Then also came ropes and cords. Then we passed under the hardship of legal summons, tribute and Christianity.’”

“Why didn’t the Mayas fight?”

“They fought well; but armor and gunpowder were too much for them. Two hundred Spaniards defeated seventy thousand Mayas at Ti’hu, which is now Merida. So the Mayas were enslaved; and even now there is hatred for the name of Spain. Most of the Maya books were destroyed, but the remnant were carried far inland, were hidden at Yaloxcaan. It is the gold for the making of these books that I can give you.”

Sturgis made a gesture of disappointment.

“Books, Don Mário ? But ancient Maya books are of no value to me! ”

“Ah, but these books are different. Books so important that a black curse lies on any Maya who dares touch them. The curse of Kukulkaan! ”

“Kukulkaan? And who is he?”

“A great god of the Mayas.' The Feathered Serpent. Also, the curse of Ah Puch, God of Death, rests on any Maya who takes away those books. Myself, I have no Maya blood, or— even though you are my brother— I would not tell you this. But all the Indian blood I have is Chimalapa. My ancestors were enemies of the Mayas, and had other gods. Despite all that, however, I myself would never touch those books. But I can go with you and show you where they lie—the books, and the blank gold sheets to complete them. None of my men would go, for they all have Maya blood. But with my help, you can find them.”

“And what then, Don Marío? What should I do with Maya books?”

“We shall have to penetrate a formidable wilderness, risk perils from blood- lusting tigres and more blood-lusting wild jungle Mayas with curare-poisoned arrows. Some few Spaniards have tried it, and failed. In our old saying, where they expected to find bacon, they found broken bones. Then too, you will have to face the curses of Ah Puch and of Kukulkaan―”

“Oh, those!” Sturgis shrugged his shoulders. “But suppose I find those books? What good are they to me?”

Don Marío stroked his beard, and his voice lowered: “They are not books such as you know. They are made of solid gold. Each— so I know from Mayas who have seen them— is perhaps an inch thick, two feet long, a foot and a half wide. They are all engraved with ancient hieroglyphs, that no living man these days can read. Each represents a fortune for the gold alone, but of course as records they are priceless. And there are known to be over a hundred blank gold sheets besides— wealth almost beyond calculation. And these blank sheets are of value for their precious metal alone. Now are you interested?”

“Interested? Holy heaven!”

“Ah, I thought you would be,” smiled the ranchero.

“Vamos! How soon can we start?”

“Softly! First you must understand how far it is, and how perilous.”

“Oh, the devil take that!” Sturgis got up, and began pacing the tiled floor. “Only show me the way!”

“That is the voice of youth,” said the elder man. “Perhaps of true wisdom. Good wits jump swiftly, and Fortune gives her hand to the daring. But first, ou must know the great distance. I ave a map that shows the location of Yaloxcaan.”

“A map?”

“Yes. It has come down to me from my grandfather, and beyond. It is very ancient.”

“And where is it?”

Don Marío gestured toward the door on which hung the ponchos and sombreros.

“In a chest in my store-room. Bring the lamp, and you shall see.”

Sturgis’ hand shook with something like “buck fever” as he took the old Spanish lamp and followed the ranchero. Don Marío drew a ring with clumsy iron keys from his pocket, turned the squeaking lock, threw the door wide.

Boxes, sacks and bales, old saddles, bridles, a general confusion cluttered the windowless and dark place. The lamp carved out only a small sphere of light from this dense gloom. Don Marío pointed at a leather-covered chest in the farthest corner; a chest with rusted lock and bands of iron.

“Here is where I keep it, my brother, together with all my valuable documents, the title-deeds to this ranch, everything of that sort. Nobody knows about it. Nobody has ever seen it, these many years. But now you, my blood-brother, nearer than any kin of mine, you shall see it. For its secret is yours, so that you may bring away from Yaloxcaan all the gold that you can carry. It shall be all yours, and yours alone! ”

Don Marío knelt beside the chest, and by the dim light coaxed the lock open. He threw up the lid. Dust floated on that close, dead air. It hung dimly golden in the lamplight.

For a moment Don Marío fumbled in the chest. He peered more closely, uttered a startled word.

“What’s the matter now, Don Marío ?”

“Closer with that lamp! ”

Sturgis held it at the very edge of the open chest. Its rays flooded the interior, revealed packets, books, documents sealed and taped.

Don Marío stared with blank dismay. “But, but,” he stammered, “the big envelope— the big blue envelope—”

“What, in the devil’s name?”

“The map— the title-deeds— Madre de Dios! Gone—all, all gone! ”

5: Into the Jungle

FOR a moment Don Marío remained kneeling there, speechless, staring into the chest. Then, with hands that shook, he fell to scrabbling through the contents.

“The map— deeds— mil diablos!” “Sure you had them here?”

“Sure? Am I sure of my own name?”

“How long since you saw them last?”

“A year, maybe. They have always been fast locked, here. Who, in God’s name, could have robbed me? When?”

“Some enemy, I take it,” suggested the American.

“But I have none, that I know of I” Don Marío exclaimed. “Here in this lonely corner of nowhere, what enemies should I have? And so—the deepest wound comes from the hidden hand!”

“You’ve probably put your papers somewhere else,” suggested Sturgis, “and forgotten about it.”

“No!” Don Marío shook a decisive head. “I have been robbed! God knows what the outcome may be.”

“You’ll find them all right, Don Marío! And even supposing you don’t, could anybody else do anything with that map?”

“The map! It is not the map I am thinking of now!” cried the ranchero, still kneeling. “In my mind I have an outline of the way to Yaloxcaan, clear enough to find the gold. But my title-deeds ! ”

“You can get a copy made. Surely your deeds are recorded in Puerto Hondo. The law—”

Bitterly Don Marío laughed.

“The law! You know only the law as it is in the United States! Here”— his laugh flickered out like a blown candle-flame— “the law is one thing, and what happens is another. Here, when we go to law, we may leap out of the flames and fall into the glowing coals. This is the bitterest blow that could have come upon me, save only the death of my señora or the little one! ”

“Cheer up, Don Mário. It can’t be as bad as all that.”

“It can be very bad, my brother.” The ranchero got up, looked Sturgis in the face. “With these deeds missing, what day am I not afraid some bandido, with forged signatures, may come, may claim this ranch as his own ? May throw me out, in spite of all I can do? May ruin me, annihilate me—”

Sturgis laid a hand on the ranch- ero’s shoulder.

“Patience, and shuffle the cards!” he smiled. “I wager you’ll find your deeds somewhere round the house. And even if you don’t, you have forty or fifty vaqueros, with plenty of guns. I’ve got a gun myself, and—”

“And then?”

“Am I not with you— through all?”

Don Marío extended a hand that trembled. Sturgis took it. Under the lamplight, each man looked silently into the other’s eyes. Their clasp tightened. Then Don Marío said:

“An untried friend is like an uncracked nut. But a blood-brother—”

THOUGH no searching, that night and next day, revealed the slightest trace of map and deeds, and though for a while Don Marío was beaten down to blackest depths of dismay and ugly foreboding, his purpose in regard to the gold plates was by no means destroyed or even weakened. His word once given, he would carry out his promise.

“Despite all, my brother, we will go. And soon! Delay breeds danger. As quickly as we can prepare, we will be on our road. Now that some one else has the map—”

“Yes, Don Marío, the sooner now, the better. How about entering the ruins with me? Changed your mind about that?”

“No. That part of it must be for you alone. A brave man carves out his own fortune. Call it superstition, if you will. Call it the last few drops of Indian blood in my veins, or anything you please. But something tells me not to invade the final stronghold of the priests of Kukulkaan. As for you, though—”

“I’ll take a chance. Gods or men, ghosts or devils, they all look alike to me, provided there’s gold enough at the end of the trail! ”

And he thought again of his father, who was going to be in deep trouble, unless real money came to his rescue....

Dawn of that tomorrow had hardly begun to gray over the Rio Fangoso and the vast lagoon, when the little cavalcade trekked out of the rancho and set a course southwest, toward the formidable jungles, swamps and forests of the interior.

Not even Dona Perfecta knew the truth. For “in this affair the hidden cat must not be seen,” Don Marío had quoted the old proverb. So his señora, like all hands at the ranch, had accepted his word that this was nothing but a hunting-expedition for wild game.

“And may all the saints go with thee, querido mio,” the señora had prayed, hanging a scapulary round her husband’s neck. “I shall say many Paternosters, many Ave Marias for thee, till thy return— and some, too, for the Americano. And come back soon to me, soul of my eyes, for till I see thee again, my heart will be as dust and ashes.”

“It shall be soon, my heart,” Don Marío had promised, kissing her and Lolita. “Soon and sure. Only the mountains never meet again. Remain thou with God!”

The two best horses at the rancho— Mariposa and Bravo—with tails carefully braided, carried the adventurers. A pair of stout burros completed the remuda. Two more animals sufficed to transport their freight, into which Don Marío had managed to smuggle a small pickax and handle, also a short-handled spade.

The equipment was complete as any foresight and reckoning could make it. Grub-bags contained corn, rice, frijoles negros and coffee, tortillas, bacon and jerked beef. These, with perhaps a little game they might pick up— if they dared risk the noise of firearms— would suffice. The señora had also slipped in various packets containing arroz con polio, cheese-fritters and cakes. Two bottles of tequila also went along.

The medical kit included permanganate, iodine, quinine and the antivenin syringe with the second— and last— vial of serum. “God grant you need not use it!” prayed Doña Perfecta.

Ponchos, hammocks, candles, supplemented the layout. Sturgis wore the usual huge chaps, but for work at the ruins had a pair of stout leather leggings. Dan Marío took a small pocket-compass

Armament consisted of two rifles, two shotguns and a pair of revolvers— one of these, the gun that Sturgis had taken from the bandit. Sturgis also had the bandit’s knife; Don Marío carried a hunting-blade of his own. And there was ammunition aplenty. In case of meeting jungle Mayas, it might be sorely needed. Machetes were not forgotten.

More than three hours they followed a fairly well-beaten trail through immense vegas of sour savanna-grass, saw- grass and yerba guinea, now and then plowing through swampy stretches of lush reeds, or winding among patches of thorny cactus.

At Las Pocilgas the party halted to feed and water the animals, as well as to rest the men. Three grass huts with a handful of vaqueros made up this outpost of the rancho, beyond which lay almost unbroken jungle. Coffee, tobacco and a few tortillas— rolled out on broad leaves and baked on an iron plate over three stones— refreshed them.

Well before noon they were once more on their way. Now insects began to grow more pestiferous, as the trail narrowed into forest paths. Sunlight faded, blotted out by a dense and leafy roof where gorgeous macaws screamed. They sighted a few grotesque iguanas, but though Don Marío raised his gun once to shoot, on second thought he refrained; the less noise, the better.

Swamps began to impede them, dismal and tortuous morasses that confused the trail among miasmatic pools which stank abominably, pools where a V-shaped ripple betrayed the presence of a water-moccasin, or where a log that grunted and sank showed a crocodile. Now and then the trail branched; and here Don Marío halted the sweating remuda.

“The curse of Satan on the filthy beast that stole my map!” he growled. “Whoever it was, can never be drowned, for he is destined to be hangman’s meat. With the map, all would have been simple. But now—”

“You can’t find Yaloxcaan?”

“Have I said so, my brother? Ah, no. Even though it is well not to count on the bearskin before having killed the bear, we shall find the ruins. But the way must be much more difficult. To lose one’s path, to retrace it, to seek— it wastes time. And time is precious. For, once any of the jungle Mayas suspect we are bound for Yaloxcaan—”

“It may mean fighting?”

“Yes. And we should try to avoid all hostilities. Even though no curare-poisoned arrows wound us, and we gain the victory, war is not what we seek. And if we kill or even injure a forest Maya, that will be bad business. It might mean fire thrown into the thatch of a rancho building, some dark night—and vayal” “I see. Well—”

“But there will be no fighting, if God wills. So, forward!”

About two o’clock they halted in a green-gloomy clearing where mahogany- cutters had felled giant boles beside a sluggish scum-covered stream. The Rio Pardo, Don Marío named it. Reeking with sweat, swollen with insect-bites and with stings of the xbubul, a poisonous beetle, muddy and splashed, both men had already begun to show the effects of even less than one day in the bush.

Coffee, grub and a brief lie-down on their ponchos somewhat refreshed them. By half-past three they were under way again, through ever more difficult entanglements. Now an almost intolerable stench of stagnant waters assailed them. The heat blurred those jungle depths with steamy haze.

Lianas, dangling from orchid-grown trunks and limbs obstructed the path— if now indeed a path it could be called. Here machetes came into play.

“Nobody has passed through here for some weeks,” judged Don Marío, “And this is good. For if the toad to the ruined city is really abandoned, so much the better. The last animal I want to see now is the human animal.”

Slowly, floundering and with heartbreaking exertions, the caravan forged ever into the southwest. Toward evening Sturgis began to notice that his eyes were smarting, face and hands growing crimson and swollen.

“What kind of damned bug, now?” he wondered. And when the symptoms kept increasing, and he reported them to Don Marío, the Don looked grave.

“Ay, this is far from good! It is guao poisoning.”

“What’s that?”

“When God had made all the good plants and trees, Satan created guao, to balance them. It is the devil’s own work. To touch it, even to pass near it— and behold what happens! ”

“Doesn’t last long, though, does it?” asked the American.

“It may last days and days, my brother. It may grow much worse than this, even to the blinding of a man.”

“How about medicine ? Anything in our kit?”

Don Marío shook his head.

“No. Only the juice from leaves of the gudsima— which God bless I— will cure it. I will watch keenly for a gudsima-tree. There is nothing more I can do. Forward! ”

Already suffering intensely, but more grim-jawed and determined than ever, Sturgis rode along. Ticks had also begun to torment him— and liquid fire has no advantage by way of torture, over Mexican garrapata ticks.

Toward night, with men and animals now tormented almost beyond endurance— many a fat black leech clinging to the animals’ legs— they reached and forded a slimy bayou.

“Not much farther now, to rest,” said Don Marío. “I recognize this place.”

“The ruins are near?”

“Not quite yet. But we shall presently reach Pozo Negro, a chicle-camp, where we can pass the night.”

Just beyond the ford, Don Marío hauled to a stop, and pointed.

“GudsimaI” cried he.

A few machete-slashes, and leafy branches lay across his saddle. “Here, brother! Rub the juice well on hands and face. It will cure you. And an hour from now we should be at Pozo Negroni

The spent and sweating cavalcade slogged onward through thorny thickets, among swamps, past giant termite-nests. Dusk was beginning to threaten, the early-falling gloom of tropical jungles. Two burros now were limping; round the shoulder of one which had been gaslied by a thorn, carrion-flies were clustered.

Then, quite at once, at another fork in the elusive trail where again they paused to reconnoiter, Sturgis beheld a moving creature that crouched, that peered.

He had but an instant’s glimpse at this; but in that instant he had seen— or thought to see— a vague white shirt, blue apron, long thin reed. A blow-gun, maybe ?

“Don Marío! ” called the American.

“Eh, what?”

“A man! There, see?”

At Sturgis’ pointing, the ranchero knit his brows, peered keenly. The figure seemed to melt, to fade and vanish, silent as a wraith.

Don Marío’s mouth grew hard as he exclaimed: “A bravo! I would have given much had he not seen us!”

DUSK had fallen like a thin gray curtain as the spent and weary cavalcade limped into Pozo Negro, where a chicle storehouse was surrounded by half a dozen huts, all grouped beside a dark- flowing stream, the Rio Sucio.

The old Gallegan foreman, Hernandez Bermejo, welcomed them; gave them hot soup and venison. The chicle-gatherers fed and tended the horses and burros, showed themselves friendly; for Don Marío’s fame ran even to these remote regions.

As the Don and Sturgis squatted at supper on the dirt floor, protected from at least part of the mosquitoes and gnats by an eye-stinging smudge, a few dim canoes came poling in over dark waters where stars lay mirrored. In those canoes were chicleros and spearers of fish, eager to hear news of the outside world, to gossip with the guests.

“Hunting, eh?” queried the old Gallego. “Well, take a fool’s advice, señores, and go no further to the southward. For one thing, rains have made the swamps beyond here almost impassible. Even our best men are not slashing the zapote-trees, down yonder. Then too, the ruins of Yaloxcaan lie in that direction, and you know as well as I, it is not safe to approach them too closely.”

Don Marío shrugged indifferently.

“What have we to do with ruins? We, who seek the wondrous rare plumes of the white egret, the feathers of the quetzal, the skins of jaguars?”

“Nothing, of course. But go not near that place, señor. I have been told that on moonlight nights ghost-music is still heard there, and that Ah Puch, the ancient God of Death, has been seen walking there— he, the terrible one, with full- fleshed arms and legs, but with skeleton ribs gleaming in the moon. With strings of skulls rattling on his wrists and ankles! ”

“Is that old nonsense still believed?” laughed the Don, though some of the silent listeners cringed and shuddered. “If so, after all that the padres have tried to teach in this country, I can only say that he who washes a donkey’s head, loses both his labor and his soap.”

“Ah, señor! You may laugh, here in a dwelling with living men. Here, with fire, and tigre-skins to sit on. But in Yaloxcaan it is different. Ghosts still walk there, seeking to touch men who still live. And whatsoever man they touch, that miserable one must die.”

“Thank you, my friend. We shall take care not to go near the ruins. It is not ghosts and death and hell we seek, but rare plumage and pelts for the museums of the Americanos, so have no fear!”

A night under cover greatly restored the two. The gudsima-juice worked miracles with Sturgis’ poisoning. Dawn had hardly begun to glimmer in pale gold through the forest, very loud with bird-song and the harsh cries of whooper- cranes, when the little party was ready to set out again.

The cavalcade had now been reduced by one burro. One limped so badly that Don Marío saw it could not possibly go on. This meant increasing the loads of the other animals, but—

“There is no help for it,” said Don Marío. “Onward! ”

THAT day, guided by the compass, tried their mettle sorely. Sometimes on trails, again floundering through swamps where crabs scuttled in the mud, and swarms of torturing insects droned about them, they pushed forward. Added to these, and clutching, ripping thorns that with diabolical persistence impeded them, was now the peril of charcán snakes— tree-serpents that made the life of the chicle-gatherers a nightmare.

By noon, rain had begun to fall, increasing the muck and stifle. About  to be feared by modern men, from gods of the long ago? If only the jungle Mayas did not attack, and if the jungle spared them, what could happen ?

“How about going up to the ruins with me, Don Mdrio?” asked Sturgis, blowing smoke and scratching some of his flaming tick-bites, there in that mysterious, vague jungle gloom.

The ranchero shook a negative head.

“But it would help a lot, if you only would!”

“No, my brother. Only in the last extremity of peril to you, can I go. If death menaces, fire three revolver-shots, close together, and I will come. Or if you hear me fire thus, come swiftly to me. But otherwise, now we must separate. You alone must take the final steps. There is no bad bread to a good appetite; nor are there any too-great hardships where gold waits. I will trace you a map of the place, as I remember it from the paper that some son of hell stole from me. You can take a burro, more sure-footed than any horse, and bring back what you can. I will await you here.”

“How long ought it to take me to reach the rums, now?”

“An hour, if God wills.”

“In that case, I may be able to make two or three trips up and back, before night.”

Don Marío shrugged.

“Do not seek too much, and perhaps lose all,” he advised. But see— I will draw you the map I spoke of.”

He scraped leaf-mold, detritus, ants and litter from the sodden black earth, which sent up a smell as of ten thousand generations of things that had lived and died there. With his knife-blade he traced outlines.

“Straight ahead now, up this rising ground to the south, you take your way. You cannot miss it, for the land slopes up in all directions, toward, the ruins. At  the top, maybe three or four kilometers from here, you will come upon something like a large clearing.”

“Ah?” queried Sturgis, crouching beside him. “The trees have been cut there?”

“No, it is not that. In centuries, no woodcutter has ventured there. They have been fools, perhaps; but who is not? If every foolish man had to wear a white cap, this world would look like a flock of sheep. So, as I say, Yaloxcaan has never been deforested. The forest has never grown there, at all. For the center of the city was once paved with great limestone slabs. It was a place, long ago, of more than a million people. The jungle has not yet been able to conquer it. Though small bush has sprung up between the paving-stones, no heavy growth has ever rooted there. So you will find only low scrub. You understand?”

“Yes, my brother. Go on!”

Eagerly the American watched, listened as Don Marío sketched more outlines.

“Now then, suppose this to be the great central plaza. It lies at the highest portion of the ruins.”

“And about how big is it ?”

“Some thousand meters long, I have been told, by perhaps half as wide. At the eastern end of it you will come upon a mound of masonry and earth, something like the top of your sombrero, though not quite so pointed.”

“And then?”

“Patience, my brother, till I tell you! You must circle about that mound. On its eastern side— I hear— stone steps descend into its interior. Those steps are probably choked with earth and bushes, but you can clear the way.”

“I go down the steps?”

“Yes. And then— what you find is yours. If you can make it so!”

“Leaye that part to me!” Sturgis exclaimed, with dry lips that trembled a little, spite of all that he could do to hold his nerves in leash. His insides felt as if some giant hand were winding them up tight, like the spring of a mechanism. Three kilometers, four perhaps, and then—

“Muy bien t” he exclaimed. “I understand it all, Don Marío. And the sooner I get started, now—”

“True, my brother. And may you go with God!”

HOW many decades, centuries perhaps, had dissolved into eternity since the dead plaza of that thrice-dead but ever sacred city of Yaloxcaan had seen a sight like this?

No telling! For now the vanished gods, wherever they still dwelt, were beholding invasion by an outlander of alien race, color, speech. Kukulkaan, the Feathered Serpent; Balam, God of the Black Jaguar; Itzimna, the Supreme ; Ah Puch, Lord of Death; and all the others— now they were watching a thing strange to them, and very terrible.

Under a cooking, brain-addling sun this invader forced his way, machete swinging to lop down thickets of thorn bushes, spiky cacti with hooked barbs, wild-grape and palmetto tangles. He looked no very heroic figure; hardly a type or symbol of those Conquistadores who centuries ago ravaged most of this land. Instead of armor, he wore a torn sombrero; ragged shirt; foul and muddy drill trousers; scratched leather leggings. He bestrode no prancing barb, gayly caparisoned; but led a lowly and patient Mexican burro, long-eared, gaunt and plastered with ticks.

Sweat, mud, insect-bites and vegetable poisons made him an object grotesquely repellent. But for all that, under his skin he was of the same breed as Cortez, Pizarro or any of that plundering crew.

A hundred yards or so out into the plaza, Sturgis paused to reconnoiter. Behind him now lay the primitive jungle that ages ago had buried all the unpaved portions of this city. Carefully blazing a path along which to return, he had forced his road among ruined temples, palaces, observatories, glyphs, pyramids of ancient Yaloxcaan.

There, once upon a time, magnificent processions had streamed onward; princes and kings been carried— decked with gold and gems and quetzal plumes — in brightly painted litters. There drums and trumpets had once stirringly sounded, where now only the crested cat-owl mournfully hooted, or vagrant butterflies wafted like bits of living flame.

There smooth-polished roads and streets had once gleamed white in the suns of ages past and gone; there magnificent and tremendous structures of splendid masonry had towered toward the blue. There soft-eyed and graceful women had laughed and jested, bearing their water-jars homeward; slaves had sweat and sunk under grievous burdens; merchants had chaffered for gold and turquoise, copper and pottery, fine fabrics, little bells. The busy din of market places had sounded there; myriads of soft-sandaled feet had trodden the inevitable ways of life, to death; games had been hotly contested and applauded; human sacrifices been bloodily offered for the appeasement of gods never yet insulted and outraged as now, by this intruder.

Life in its fullest measure of numbers, toil, joy, hope, faith, achievement, grief, pride and splendor had been lived here, in long-forgotten times; and now? Save for the dart of that green jewel-eyed lizard up that serpent-like and twisted vine, the web-spinning of a crablike spider on the plinth of a dead king’s palace, the slow and high drift of those watching buzzards, all had vanished.

Oppression weighed on Sturgis.

Not even the golden dream of his errand could dispel an ominous dread. A thing scuttered near his feet— a large red scorpion. He stamped it to creamy pulp, and felt a bit giddy. That sun! What, he vaguely wondered, was sunstroke like? To get a touch of that, all alone here— not so good. Better be on his way. But where ?

A glance at his shadow, then at the compass, gave him his direction plainly enough. “East end of the clearing,” Don Marío had said. That way!

Turning east, dragging the exhausted burro after him, he slashed his path along. A lovely long-feathered blue-green bird winged away— a sacred quetzal, though Sturgis knew it not. Through thick scrub, over heaved-up slabs of limestone and crusty brown ant-hills, among thorny vines he shoved ahead.

Thirst assailed him, and ever more feverishly a giddy oppression swirled and bubbled in his brain. Most terrible of all was the dead silence, which the swish and whack of his machete, the cracking of branches, and the plodding tread of the burro threw into more ominous relief. Then— he saw it— the conical, bush-grown mound!

A wave of surging exultation swept out every cobweb from his brain, left him once more taut, keen, eager.

“There she is l"

But when, with pounding heart and dry mouth he reached its brush- tangled base, it looked hopeless. In that confused and desolate ruin, could there indeed be any entrance?

“Pipe-dream! ” mused Sturgis, as with shaking hands he lighted a cigarette, then stood surveying the tumulus, hoary with age. There could be nothing to the story. And yet— had not Don Marío himself risked everything, even his own life, to guide his blood-brother here?

“Don Marío said the door was on the east side of it,” he recalled. So, round the tumulus to its other side he forced his path. Grass, bushes, lianas yielded to his blade, as— half-drowned in sweat, panting like a blown dog— he cleared the way. Limestone blocks, some showing odd and complex hieroglyphs, lay overgrown with flowering vines. Sickly palms shoved up between them, with three or four clumps of wild pepper and a couple of half-dead breadnut-trees. On the summit, perhaps twenty feet above the plaza level, a nest of black wasps hung to the limb of a half-grown tree. The hum of their busy swarming reached Sturgis’ ears. Where the devil could the entrance be?

He stood at gaze, now with fair coolness and more steady nerves surveying the mound. Earth, he saw, for the most part covered it; but here and there gaunt juts or thrusts of masonry peeped through. All seemed solid, impassable.

“How the blazes, now, am I going to get into that?”

Then all at once Sturgis saw the entrance. Square on the eastern side, blocked by earth and tangled vines, yet clearly visibly he perceived drunkenly leaning uprights of stone, a cracked and sagging lintel made of an immense monolith.

Again his heart tightened. He shivered, as with an ague. Then his machete cleared the thickets right up to the very threshold of this House of Mystery.

“Pick and shovel, now!” he decided. Jamming his machete point-down in the earth, he shoved back to the patient and suffering burro. “Stick with me, old kid, and you’ll soon be on Oat Street, for life! ”

Once more at the blocked doorway he fell to work.

Plog! Deep into the mold of centuries he drove the pick. Again he struck, again. Presently his spade came into play. Sweat burst from every pore. Within his skull, pulses like trip-hammers fell a-pounding. Still he struck and dug, delved, flung the earth spinning away.

Panting and spent, he had to stop for wind. From a block of carven masonry a tiny chameleon unwinkingly stared at him, then vanished. Once more Sturgis threw himself into that inferno of toll; and—

Something slid, caved in, gave way. Amid blinding dust-clouds, an opening yawned, down-sloping. Sturgis felt a waft of dead, sepulchral air, so choking and so foul that he recoiled, a-gasp.

“Got to wait for that to clear out!” he gulped, in a mental blur that dimly grasped at thoughts of poison-gas. “But in a few minutes, now—”

He gave ground, stumbled back to where his machete stuck, jerked it from the earth. The tail of his eye had almost subconsciously caught a glimpse of something sinuous, deadly, repulsive— something gray and fatal.

He swung round, leaped back with a choking cry as an undulating streak of horror launched itself.

Thud!

On his left leg he felt the grisly impact of the serpent. He saw it fall and writhe.

His machete flailed. There at his feet, thrashing halves of the uol-potch flung themselves about, whipping the earth in their death-struggle.

Sick at heart and yellow-faced, Sturgis stared down at his leg. Bitten? Could this be death?

On his legging he perceived two tiny scratches, down from which in the sunlight oozed trickles of a pale, clear, yellow liquid.

Sudden nausea gripped him. Clearing, sky and mound and everything swam into one whirling, darkening blur.

Slumping, he folded together grotesquely as a broken Maríonette; and—  close beside the still-twitching halves of the severed uol-potch— plunged into a swooning blackness of unconsciousness.

7: Gold

FLIES and ants crawling over his face, an intolerable glare of sun on his bare head, heat and oppression—these were Sturgis’ first perceptions as he came back to gray-glimmering consciousness. With racking efforts he heaved himself up to a sitting posture.

There still loomed the treasure-mound. There, almost at his feet, lay the severed snake, about which already a host of carrion-flies had begun to swarm. Sturgis shuddered and turned away.

A shadow skimmed the earth. The American saw a swoop and fold of broad wings. Then, a-top the mound, on a branch of the stunted zapote-tree, he perceived a foul and hunchbacked bird with wattled bill, hooked like a scimitar. The vulture fixed on him a calculating eye. Sturgis quivered.

“God!” he gulped. “I better get out of here.”

Then his thoughts surged to the bitten legging. Had those deadly fangs pierced the leather? Gingerly, with shrinking horror, Sturgis focused his vision on the legging. No, the leather was only scratched.

Faint and giddy, he drew his knife. With infinite care he shaved off poison and leather. Then, plunging the blade time and again in black earth, he made sure no taint remained upon it. “Whew!”

His nerves were steadying. He picked up his sombrero and jammed it once more on his head, which dully ached. Only an idiot would come so far, go through so much hell, to stop now!

In five minutes more, after a welcome cigarette, Sturgis was back again at the entrance. Cautiously he scouted step by step down the declivity. On he pushed, into the cavernous burial-place of the dead gods’ golden books.

A fetid waft of air still rose from below, an odor of decay and death. But Sturgis judged the air was breathable. Foot by foot, machete ready in right hand, he slid and stumbled down. Nothing now seemed to menace. For the moment, silence held. No creature stirred. But suddenly, from depths unknown, a faint chippering noise grew audible. “More snakes?”

He paused, staring, listening. Then he recognized the sound, and laughed hoarsely.

“Only bats. I must be going cuckoo, to let bats worry me! ”

With strengthening nerves he advanced. Underfoot, the detritus of centuries crumbled, filled the air with choking dust. Sliding, now on his feet, now half-sitting, he descended. Overhead, he saw stone slabs that sagged, that might at any shock break loose, bringing down tons of debris. Never mind—  “They’ve lasted God knows how many hundred years. Thousands, maybe. Reckon they’ll hold up, an hour more! ” A sudden slide, a plunge through reeking dust— and down Sturgis catapulted neck-and-crop into a murky gloom. Unhurt, he struggled up and waded out of a muck of loose, granular stuff— bat-guano. Narrowly he squinted round.

“Bottom of fhis dump, anyhow— that’s something! ”

True enough; he had at last come to the floor of this ancient temple, vault, storehouse, tomb or whatsoever it might be. Now, with dilating pupils, he began to gather certain vague impressions of a chamber perhaps thirty feet wide and stretching away into shadows impenetrable; time-blackened walls most curiously carved, with here or there a red hand painted on them; a roof nearly lost in dim obscurity.

From that roof sounded the faint, querulous chippering that told of clustered bats. He felt an odd relief at their presence. Even that queer form of life seemed to companion him.

Lighting one of his candles, he shuffled forward through the accumulated guano of centuries untold. The candle-flame, as he held it aloft, grew spangled with tiny dust-motes. Dim though it was, it half-revealed something that halted him, staring— a thing vague and immense, a thing grotesque and frowning, that seemed to curse and to repel.

An archaeologist would have known it, at a glance; would have called it a “stela.” But Sturgis knew no more of archaeology than a mouse knows of mathematics. So this fifteen foot stela of Ah Puch was just, to him, an “idol.”

For a moment the Lord of Death and the invading pillager, of alien race and color, looked each upon the other. Ah Puch beheld a ragged man, grimy and hollow-cheeked. The invader dimly saw a skull of carven stone, skeleton ribs, grotesque arms and legs, with bracelets and anklets of death’s-heads; and at the sides of this ominous figure, plumed serpents, with rows of intricate carvings.

Now Sturgis’ eyes had fallen to something that lay stretched before this mighty god of stone; something that riveted his attention, there under the feeble yellow candle-gleam. This thing was an object that might be called a table, a stone table, standing about three feet in front of Ah Puch.

A table, indeed, but of such strange form, of workmanship so massive, as to suggest the labor of Titans rather than of human hands. Six rough-chiseled legs supported its ponderous length. And as Sturgis lowered the candle toward it, straining his bloodshot eyes, he saw it was covered with something confused yet regular— something that suggested a series of objects laid in slanting rows.

“The books, by God! The books!” he gasped.

Yes, there they lay, the golden archives of Maya. Now more plainly Sturg is saw them, as with pounding heart he came closer. He perceived plates of some kind; plates arranged in ranks, each rank overlapping the next and resting on it.

Brown, massive, covered with bat-guano, now for the first time in all this world those sacred books were being seen by any white man’s eye.

For a moment complete realization could not win through to Sturgis’ consciousness. His mind seemed split, divided between the commonplace and the fantastic, the real and the incredible. One part of his brain appeared to say: “Here are scores of gold plates. Here are more than five million dollars! And a priceless record of a great civilization.” The other part seemed to assert: “This is just a bunch of junk, lying on an old stone bench. There’s nothing to this. There can’t be anything!”

Hot candle-grease dropping on his hand roused him to something like coherence. Holding the candle down close to some of the objects, he stared open- jawed, motionless and dumb.

Plates, plates, plates— what an incredible number of plates, all square-cornered and oblong! Each plate, he now saw, was pierced at one end by a round hole; and every row was held together by a curved metal bar with a knob at both ends.

The rows all sagged down in a curve, into the concave table-top. Yes, with utmost care and order, all those plates had been laid there— when? By what hands, now dust these centuries gone?

Sturgis held the guttering candle nearer still.

Now he could see the plates were about two feet long, perhaps a foot and a half wide, a half-inch thick. He pried the end one loose and held the candle so that the flame shone along its surface— a surface that gleamed yellow through the dust of ages; a surface covered with strange symbols and hieroglyphics carved into its flat-beaten surface.

“Yeah, those are the books, all right. But— gold?”

8: Terror

BEHIND him, it seemed as if the faint light grew for a second even more tenebrous and dim. Sturgis thought he heard a slight thudding sound. Was it a stone that fell, jarred loose by the echo of his cry?

He shifted his machete to the left hand, drew his gun and swung round. Every nerve taut, he struggled up the crumbling slope.

“Quién va?” he demanded, as once more he reached the sunlit glare. No answer. No sound or sight of anyone. Scrub jungle and ruined plaza stretched away deserted, silent.

His mind inflamed with a suffocating excitement, Sturgis circled the mound. Heavily upon him lay the feeling that somebody hostile and deadly, had now entered this loneliness. Again he challenged :

“Who the hell’s here, now?”

Then he stopped short, gaping. In the saw-grass beside the stunted coco-palm, a dark object was lying. An animal— the burro!

Sturgis crashed through the bush to it, stood for a moment staring. And very well he might; for from the creature’s throat a tiny trickle of blood had clotted down. Unseeingly the burro’s filmed eyes looked up at him with cynical indifference, as if to say— “I’m out of hell, anyhow; and you’re just beginning itl”

“God’s sake! ” choked Sturgis. “What the hell did that— or who?”

No answer. Only the deadly silence of the plaza, ringed by watching jungle, offered its blank and terrible hostility.

Pondering a moment and with crisped nerves, Sturgis remained there on the watch. Presently he began to understand that death might have come to the burro through other means than human. In this land of poisonous creatures, something unknown to him might have bitten the animal, reached a vein, and swiftly killed it. Maybe a snake— He examined the slight wound. Was it double? If so, surely it was a snake-bite. But no— only one tiny puncture showed.

Panic struggled for mastery, a second. Sturgis felt an almost uncontrollable urge to abandon everything, to run.

But this was only a swift-passing quiver of nerves long overwrought. Almost at once, he steadied again.

“Damned if I’ll quit! ” he swore.

Nerved afresh by this decision, he took his reata from the dead burro and went back to the mound. Unmolested, he slid down once more into the dark chamber, relighted his candle that he had dropped near the bottom of the slope, and again approached the table of the books.

With a little hot wax he fastened his candle to the edge of the stone table. And now he saw, piled flat under the table, a dozen or so plates similar in size and shape to those resting in ranks above. He tugged off the top one, stood it on edge. Its surface was flat and plain and dingy yellow. Gold? With his machete he shaved at one edge, and a bright golden sliver curled off.

Gold! Gold indeed! And in ecstasy Sturgis burst forth in a ringing shout: “Gold! Gold!”

Disjointed plans flitted through his brain, plans about sometime coming back, getting up an expedition to clean out the whole temple, rose to mind. He shut them out. Never mind that, now!

With a strong effort Sturgis slid the plate off the severed bar toward the entrance.

“Weighs all of a hundred avoirdupois,” he judged. “But I’ll drag a couple of ’em out of this joss-house, or bust my b’ilers!”

Sweating like rain, in that close stifle, he scraped the bat-guano from the plate. He knotted his rope fast to it, dragged it to the entrance. Grudgingly it slid along, as if held back by ghostly hands.

At the base of the exit slope, he paused to rest and breathe. Then up, and out!

“That’s one of ’em!”

Sturgis smoked a cigarette in the shade of the temple doorway, then untied his rope and went down for another plate. After that, he’d cut poles, rig a travois and be on his back-tracks.

“Couple of hours, at the outside,” he judged, “and I ought to be at camp, with Don Marío.” And then— the rancho! All these fool notions about hostile forces in the jungle, and ghosts among the ruins—

“Just a bunch o’ bull, that’s all. Nothing to ’em— not a thing in the world!”

When he got back to the plaza, though, with the second plate—

“Where the devil’s the first one?” he gasped.

His scalp crawled with a nameless terror. Skin quivered, tightened, with panic. No sign, no trace remained of the first golden plate hauled from the crypt of Ah Puch, God of Death.

Then Peter Sturgis knew fear. To have met and done battle with any visible enemy, to have killed or been killed— that would have been all in the game. But this silent, hostile mystery now closing in on him, clutched his soul with a horror very close to superstition.

Panting heavily, he peered about with smarting and inflamed eyes. Dust was in them, in hair and nose and throat, a dust that stung, that strangled. He spat, hauled up his belt, and cursed again.

It got him nowhere. Insulting the vacancy of a Maya ruin was fruitless as Xerxes’ flogging of the Hellespont with chains. A wonder came upon him— was this all some wild, fantastic dream? How else could a gold plate weighing a hundred pounds or so completely disappear, with no visible, no audible agency?

“Holy Lord, I’m getting out o’ here!” One gold plate would have to do, now — if indeed this plate were real. To look for the first one, or to go down into that crypt for another— never! Perfectly well he knew that, did he leave this plate which he now had, it too would vanish. His only hope now was to hang fast to it and try to make his escape with it.

Whether even that was possible seemed more than doubtful. But still, the bulldog in him would not quit, beaten. When he went, this plate was going too!

Stopping not to cut poles and rig an Indian sledge as planned, he cast the rope over his shoulder, and leaning far forward, dragged the plate away from the mound. It slithered through grass and bush, smeared out the remnants of the dead uol-potch, streaked a long furrow past the carcass of the burro.

Machete penduluming against his leg, un in hand, he toiled like any beast of urden back along the slashed-out path that he had come. Flies, cruelly biting, tortured him. Sweat stung his eyes. Into his shoulder the leather rope gouged deep. Now and again the gold plate wedged and stuck. Bitterly cursing, he had to stop and free it. Still he slogged onward.

Unmolested, he reached the edge of the ancient plaza. He shoved into the forest, ever following the blaze-marks made on his way up. But very soon exhaustion forced a halt. Wheezing, he stopped. He cast off the rope and slumped on a fallen cannonball-tree to have a smoke, to pull himself together for the trek of agony that still remained.

Suddenly he stiffened with dismay.

Very far off there to northward in the jungle, he had heard— faint but incisive —three tiny detonations. Don Marío’s signal-shots, for help!

9: Thunderbolt

STURGIS’ hesitation lasted but a moment, while from the web of immense tree-tops more than a hundred feet in air burst forth the deep and wailing roar of a band of howler-monkeys, startled by the shots.

Then, as those black devils of the jungle started to leap away through clustered vines and creepers of the forest roof, and a chacalaca-bird added its maniacal laughter, Sturgis dragged the golden plate off to one side of the trail under a gigantic ceiba-tree, flung the rope down upon it, and heaped over them an armful of dead leaves and rotten detritus.

Three answering shots from his gun, straight up into the green jungle gloom— then a couple of machete-cuts on the ceiba, to mark it as the hiding-place of the gold, and he ran down the trail.

Freed now from the burden he had been sweating along, he forged onward at his best pace. None too good, at that! Slithering in slimy and leech-infested waters of swamp-holes as he reached the lower ground, then clambering over roots and windfalls, often he was checked; but still he struggled on.

Nearly spent, he paused a moment to breathe and to reload his gun. Eagerly he listened. What tragedy might not already have culminated ? And then, with relief, he heard louder firing.

“That’s the shotgun! ” Its heavy boom distinguished it from rifle or pistol-fire. “Close work now, I reckon. Don Marío must be flat up against the wall.”

Sweating, panting, bleeding from thorn- slashes, he fought his way. Now and again, loud detonations echoed.

He stopped again, to breathe and reconnoiter.

“Ea!” he shouted. “Hermano mio!”

An answering hail, through far, dim aisles of the dark forest! Once more Sturgis drove ahead.

Then he saw the tzubin-tree where he had left Don Marío. Under it he saw a horse and a burro, prostrate. Over the horse’s belly a man’s head peeped out— Don Marío’s.

“What’s happened?” called Sturgis.

The Don reared up, shotgun in hand. He shook an infuriated fist.

“They have killed him!” he roared. “Mariposa, my best horse!”

Panting, Sturgis came running up.

“Where are they?” he demanded.

“The devils— the forest-Mayas! Cowards, sons of bats! Now that you come, they melt away. They will not stand and fight!”

"All right, let ’em go. Farther they go, the better! Where’s the other burro, and Bravo?”

“Back there!” Don Marío jerked a thumb toward a dense thicket of button-trees. “I hid them there.  These devils— they have no guns, like the one that shot me. But they have poisoned arrows and blowguns. They shot Mariposa, and—”

“And you?”

“Untouched. Even in death, Mariposa served me. He made a breastwork for me. I sprayed the jungle with buckshot. May the saints grant that I have killed a few! And you— are you safe?”

“Yes. But they killed my burro.”

“Bad business. These forest demons are not only showing their teeth; they are biting, also. And the gold? You found the gold ?”

“Yes. Much happened, that I cannot tell you now. I started with one gold plate, dragging it by the reata. When heard your three signal-shots, I buried it, and ran. I can find that plate again. I will go for it—”

“No! To other dogs, such bones. Now you and I are like those who went for wool and came back shorn— if indeed we can get back, at all. Luck has turned. The candle now is worth more than the game.”

“You mean, we’re quitting cold?”

“I mean, my brother, that the alarm has been given. By tomorrow the whole jungle may be swarming against us, if we try again. But if we depart in peace, perhaps we shall be allowed to go. Not lightly do these devils kill white men. The fear of the Spaniard still lurks in their hearts. We had best go, at once!”

“Go back with empty hands?”

Don Mário nodded.

“What is gold worth, to dead men? Many a mouth that has watered for gold has been filled with earth.”

“Might, as well be dead, anyhow, as. be a quitter! Whatever you do; Don Marío, I'm going back for that plate. Holy saints, man! More than a hundred pounds of gold— fifty thousand dollars, American! ”

“It is much, much. Where did you hide that plate? In the ruins?”

“No. Outside, under a big ceiba in the forest. And worth a hundred thousand, Mex. Are we going to let that lie around loose in the jungle?”

“It would seem a pity, no? Perhaps, after all—”

“You’ll go back there with me, and help me get it?”

“Yes! For my brother I will risk even life. We will take the two remaining animals, and go. Then, swiftly to the rancho!”

Whether Don Marío’s vigorous gunplay and Sturgis’ arrival had frightened off the forest Mayas, or whether they had only retired for reinforcements and to perfect an annihilating attack, who could tell? At any rate, no further hostilities now for the moment declared themselves. And early afternoon found the blood-brothers back at the tzubin-tree camp, with the gold plate lashed on top of their surviving burro’s basto.

Both men were pretty well at the end of their strength, but fires of spirit sustained the flesh.

“And now indeed we must be gone at once!” warned the ranchero, as they wolfed down such grub as came handiest. “What you have told me of the happenings there among the ruins— well, it shows me these devils will surely kill us now, if they but dare. All that can save us— if anything— is their fear of our weapons. Now— the words are burs, the acts are God’s. Every hour counts. Every minute. Away!”

Delaying not a moment, they girt themselves for the northward trek through jungles and morasses, back toward Pozo Negro, Las Pocilgas and the ranch. By half-past two the now sadly diminished cavalcade was floundering in retreat through that somber and menacing wilderness, with such food as still remained and with the hundredweight of gold. The one horse, Bravo, carried Don Marío and Sturgis, turn and turn about.

Night, dropping a sudden wall of almost solid darkness, found them utterly spent beside a fever-scummed lagoon. They had barely strength to unload the animals and sling the hammocks. Food and tobacco somewhat, revived them; these, and a swallow of tequila. Urgently they needed a fire to dry their sodden clothes, boil coffee, and with its smudge abate the intolerable insect-torment; but fire they dared not light, with the possibility of forest-Mayas lurking near by.

“We must stand watches tonight, brother,” said Don Marío. “While one sleeps, the other wakes— remembering always that if he so much as closes an eye, neither of us may ever see God’s daylight again. I will keep guard till midnight, and after that, you.”

“Let’s make it three-hour watches,” Sturgis amended. “That will be easier. You take the first trick of sleep.”

“No, we will spin a coin for it!”

Don Marío lost. Sturgis thrust his aching and feverish head through the hole of his poncho, fell into his hammock and slept almost before he had found time to draw three breaths. Beside him and the exhausted, sprawled-out animals, Don Marío— also wrapped in his poncho— brooded with the shotgun under is arm.

Near and far, sounds of the jungle drifted; strange inexplicable noises, furtive, shrill, whispering— the antiphony of life and death ever busily at work. And myriads of tiny lights— fireflies, or perhaps the eyes of little, unknown creatures— glimmered in a dark that seemed to quiver.

Then a vague shimmer of moonlight trickled through the jungle roof of giant treetops penetrating the distorted vines and creepers. It etched the shadows with silver filigree. Sounds died away to timorous murmurs, fading to silence. Miasmas and pale, poisonous vapors wreathed themselves above the swamp. Don Marío wrapped his poncho closer.

The three hours he should have kept watch extended to six, but still he kept his vigil.

“He needs sleep more than I,” thought the Don. “How can I have the heart to waken him ?”

And it was well past midnight when at last he shook the American’s arm, roused him from deep pits of unconsciousness. But this he did not tell.

“Your turn, now,” he lied. “Three hours are past. Now three for you, and then I watch again!”

Waking, sleeping, suffering, they passed the hours. An endless night thinned away. Far above the stupendous tufted curtain of jungle, the broad purple floor of star-dusted tropic beauty paled to dawrt. Then up again the blood-brothers  aroused themselves, to a clammy mockery of breakfast—jerked beef, dry gal- letas and a mouthful of tequila. A whiff of sodden tobacco; and so, pack for another day of hell.

Packing the burro’s basto with the heavy slab of gold, Sturgis drew his knife to cut a loose end of cord. And having need of both hands to haul a loop tight, he disposed of that knife a moment by stabbing its point into a twisted rubber-tree.

Don Marío’s eye fell on the knife. Its curious, silver-inlaid steel woke in him a gathering wonder. He leaned closer, narrowly studied it under that mysterious and dim jungle-light. Then he plucked it from the tree.

“This knife!”

“Eh, my brother?”

“Where did you get this knife?”

“Oh, from a Mexican at Puerto Hondo,” Sturgis carelessly made answer.

“You bought it?”

“In a way. Paid for it with quite a lot of blood.”

“Mira! I must understand! What is your meaning?”

Sturgis paused in his work at the knot, faced Don Marío.

“What’s the idea?” he asked. “What’s this all about, anyhow?”

“I demand that you tell me how you got this knife— and do not lie! ”

The American flushed.

“If you weren’t my blood-brother, Don Marío— Well, I got that knife where I got my gun. From a bandido who tried to stick me up and rob me, one dark night!”

“And did he rob you?”

“Not perceptibly. I was just a shade too quick for him. He ended up in a clump of bushes.”

“Bushes? The police got him?”

“No, the buzzards.”

“Madre de Dios! Let me see your gun!”

“My gun?”

“Yes! Give it me! ”

Wondering greatly, Sturgis drew his gun, held it out.

Don Marío took the weapon in a hand that trembled. With tightening jaw, eyes that darkened to black slashes, he examined it. An odd, yellowish tinge overspread his face,

“You mean,” he asked in a wire-taut voice, “this gun, this knife— you took them from the body of a man vou— killed?”

“Well, putting it in plain Castilian, that’s about the size of it.” Amazed, the American stared. “He was going to kill me. He’d have had that knife into my heart, if I hadn’t been a breath too quick for him. As it was, he ripped my arm, and—”

“So that was a lie, that story you told about having been knifed in a mutiny?”

“Only children and fools always speak the truth, Don Marío,” shrugged the American.

“But you will speak it now!” the ranchero flung at him, “What kind of man was it, you filled?”

“Dressed in fine clothes, but torn and muddy. He said he had been robbed himself, of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars that he had been paid for his ranch. So he tried to take it out on me.”

“Never mind that! I mean— did you notice anything about him, not like all other men? Answer me!”

“Well, since you insist, the bandido limped. He was lame.”

“Ay, Dios! And did he hold the knife in his right hand?”

“No! In his left. Why?”

With a furious oath, Don Marío flung the knife down. Eyes bloodshot, teeth like a wolf’s through retracted lips, he leveled the gun.

“These weapons belonged to Eduardo, my own brother!” he snarled. “That lame, left-handed man was the son of my own father and mother. It was my brother Eduardo you murdered! Now I repay!”

As Sturgis swung a fist that caught Don Marío’s bearded jaw, the gun crashed so close to his ear that it deafened him. Powder-grains scorched his flesh. But the bullet struck only swamp-water, jetting up slime and mud.

Another blow dropped the Don. Sturgis leaped on him like a tiger. The jungle echoed to confused cries and curses. Black-sodden muck smeared both men as they rolled, twisted, wrenched in a rage that kills.

Flaring like a fire of dry straw, the combat died as swiftly. For a spraining twist numbed the Don’s gun-hand. The weapon dropped, was smeared into the mud. Sturgis landed a smash back of the ranchero’s ear. Don Marío grunted, kicked a couple of times, lay still. Sturgis staggered to his feet.

“That’ll be— about all for you!” he panted, standing over the unconscious Mexican, with bruised knuckles. He peered down with bitter blue eyes. “Try to shoot me up, eh, because I killed a thug? Get up— get out o’ here!”

The American picked up knife and gun. The knife he thrust into his belt, but he held the gun ready.

“Arriba!”

No answer. The ranchero, knocked stiff, lay in a huddled heap. For a moment Sturgis stared down at him. But swiftly a tinge of anxiety shadowed his eyes. He stooped, shook the Mexican.

“Jumping Jupiter— I hope I haven’t killed him too!”

Half a sombrero of water sluiced over his face brought back a tiny glimmer of consciousness. That glimmer brightened to a waxing flame of hate. He choked and spat, and struggled to sit up.

“Murderer! The blood of my own brother,” gulped the Don, “is on your hands. You must pay! If not now—”

“Look here! I’m not going to argue this thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Judicially he weighed his gun. “Self-defense probably means nothing to you, a case like this. And you don’t believe me now, anyhow. So let it pass. The only question is— what are we going to do about it?”

“Do? Madre de Dios! I shall kill you— or you, me! ”

“That killing stuff is out. I’ve had enough of it. And as for you, you’re under oath to stand by me! ”

“I repudiate that oath! It does not hold, with a murderer.”

“Oh, that’s how you work it, eh? See here, Don Marío, I demand that you go back to the rancho with me, and arrange some way for me to clear out of this country with my gold! Or else you’ve perjured yourself.”

Don Marío, rubbing his ear, looked blacker than sin. Doggedly he shook his head.

“The oath does not cover a man who has murdered my own brother. To the rancho, no. If you try to reach it— if you get there, my vaqueros—”

“Oh, so they’ll finish me? That’s it, eh?”

“No, I shall not let them touch you, otherwise than to deliver you as a prisoner to the soldiers at Puerto Hondo. And then—”

“Then, the presidio or the firing-squad ? Fine! You’re what we Americans call an Indian giver. You give— but you take back again. So a life-sentence or a firing squad— that’s the best you offer the blood-brother that saved Lolita’s life?”

Don Marío winced, painfully dragged himself to his knees, got up, stood bracing himself against the rubber-tree. A moment he pondered. Then—

“Listen, Americano, ” he retorted, scowling from under eyebrows heavy with wrath. “Listen. My oath shall at least give you a chance for life and wealth. It was the Word of an hidalgo, and cannot be wholly broken, you still have one chance.”

“I do, eh? What’s that? You’re generous, in the real old Spanish style! What’s the chance, Don Marío?”

The ranchero gestured toward the east.

“Almost due into the sunrise, from here, is British Honduras. There is Belize. The distance is perhaps four hundred and fifty kilometers— jungles, swamps, Maya ruins, forest Indians, snakes— but the journey has been made. It can be made again.”

“You mean?”

“The gold is yours. I will give you the one remaining horse, the compass, most of the food. Myself, I will keep only a very little of that, with the burro. You may find trails of chicleros. Villages, perhaps. You can perhaps fight your way through to the Gulf of Honduras. If you live, you live. If you die, well— death makes all men the same size.”

“So that’s your program for me, eh?”

“It is my program. It must be yours. Whatever happens, it will sometime end. Every day has its evening. You had best accept, for in a tempest every port is good. What I offer you is at least a fighting chance for life and riches. The road north from here leads you only to prison or the firing-squad. So, choose well, and maybe you will reach safety at Belize— if God wills. This now is my final word, forever. I have finished!”

Silently the American looked at this man, bruised and disheveled, but still with some inherent dignity that nothing could obliterate. That this word was final indeed, Sturgis well understood. The Indian strain in Don Marío had met the European and had conquered it. As well now argue with a Maya pyramid as with this man.

Sturgis nodded.

“Esta bien,” he agreed. “Let us make the division swiftly, for I must be on my way— back to white men once more!”

Don Marío quivered, but said only:

“It shall all be as God wills. Let God, no other, be the judge!”

10: Don Marío Understands

TOWARD night of the next day Don Mdrio rode— on a horse from Las Pocilgas— through the broad vegas to the Rancho de San Agustin.

Torn, lacerated, swollen with insect-bites, gaunt and weary and grim, he reined up at the outer corral gates and stiffly dismounted. He leaned a moment against the gates, hardly able to stand, as welcoming shouts rose from old Tio Pablo.

“The master! The master, home again! Praise all the saints—our master, home! ”

The rancho woke to sudden life. Vaqueros set up a joyous tumult. Dona Perfecta and Lolita came running.

“Eyes of my soul!” the Doña cried, in the shelter of Don Marío’s arms. “Again I see thee, thanks to God! And, ay!— how weary and how spent! But—  the Americano ?”

“Bitten by a charcán. Nothing could be done, to save him. It was God’s will. I buried him as best I could, and set up a little wooden cross.”

“Pobrecito!” The señora crossed herself. “May his soul, even though outside the faith, find rest! But thou, my treasure?”

“I am well. We had many hardships. All the animals were lost but one of the burros, that I left at Las Pocilgas. It matters nothing about them. What God has given, God can take. I rejoice only that I am well, and see thee again, querida mia. In a day or two, I shall be as always. And what has happened in my absence?”

He released her from bis arms. Together they walked toward the ranch- house, while some of his people followed at a respectful distance, others led the horse away.

“Happened? Nothing much. Only, yesterday came two men from Puerto

Hondo, in a little ketch. There, you can see the vessel, just outside the bar.” She pointed toward the lagoon, all a wimple of dying pastel shades. “They came ashore in a cayuco. They are here now.”

“Here? And what seek they?”

The wife shrugged, as they climbed the few brick steps up into the zaguan.

“How should I know, my husband? It is not for women to put their noses into men’s porridge. They told me nothing, except that they wanted speech with thee.”

“Hmmm! And what names did they give?”

“One is a Señor Tacito Montante. The other, thou knowest. Chato Piedra.”

“What— Chato Piedra? The notary, that human buzzard?”

“Hush, mi alma! Remember, they are the guests beneath our roof. And Chato Piedra is a good lawyer.”

“Good lawyer, bad neighbor!” Don Marío growled out the ancient proverb. “A curse on all notaries and men of the law! Where are these men, now?”

“There, down past the calf-pens.” She pointed in the fading light. “Dost thou not see them? They have spent much time looking at our cattle, talking with the vaqueros, asking Tio Pablo about the number bred and branded and sold.”

“So?” And Don Marío frowned. “Now they are coming toward the house.”

“It is maybe that they want to buy the rancho?”

“This rancho is not for sale. I will speak with them, immediately.”

“Wait, my soul, till thou hast rested and eaten.”

“No, it shall be at once. Go in, Perfecta. It may be that what we have to say will not be suitable for thy ears.” He thrust her toward the entrance of the ranch-house. “Now, then,” he muttered, “here is an egg that certainly needs salt. And I will salt it properly, if God wills! ”

With a bow of frigid courtesy Don Marío greeted Chato Piedra’s over- effusive, greeting, and acknowledged the introduction of the other man, señor Tacito Montante.

“And to what,” he asked, “do I owe the very great honor of this visit ?”

“Let us not speak of that, this extremely beautiful evening,” smiled the lawyer. “You have been away, traveling far. You are weary. Is not tomorrow another day?”

By the fading light over the sullen-flowing Rio Fangoso and the vast, dim lagoon where rode the ketch from Puerto Hondo, Don Marío fixed bloodshot severe eyes on the lawyer. A little, fat, greasy fellow was this man of the law, with curled-up mustachios and a very much too heavy gold watch-chain.

Covertly smiling, Montante cast an oblique glance at the lawyer, as who should say: “Here now is a man who can catch even old birds with chaff!” Don Marío did not miss that glance. He bent his gaze on Montante— a gaunt bag of bones, swarthy and pockmarked.

“A Turco,” thought the rancher. “Wolves of the same litter hunt together. There is evil, blowing in this wind!”

Montante indeed bore all earmarks of being what the Mexicans call a “Turk,” which is to say an Armenian. Now Montante spoke up:

“No business tonight, señor. My friend the lawyer well says that tomorrow is always another day.”

“Tomorrow we may all be dead. Pardon me, but I must know the reason for your honoring me with this visit, no later than tonight! ” returned Don Mdrio. He felt a nameless dread constricting his tired heart.

“If you insist,” smiled the lawyer, lighting a cigarette, “I must inform you this gentleman has come to the Rancho San Agustin for the purpose of inspecting and appraising his new property.”

“Ah, so?” the rancher queried, sensing relief. “And where may that property lie? Some mahogany forest or some chicle concession, up the river? Or it may be—”

“No, Don Marío. Let us whip no dogs about the bushes. The property he— my client— has acquired is this same Rancho San Agustin, where we now have the honor of finding ourselves. This very rancho, here, señor!”

For a moment Don Marío remained staring at him, seeming not to have heard. “Eh? You say—”

“He has bought this rancho, Don Marío.”

“No more riddles, please! To drink soup and to whistle at the same time is impossible. You, as a lawyer, are fond of spinning words and embroidering phrases. Now I ask you to speak plainly, Señor Piedra! What is the meaning of all this?”

“But I have already told, you!”, the lawyer affirmed. “This señor, now with me, has bought your rancho. Bought and paid for it, and it is his! ”

“Bought it?”

“Si señor!

“But I have never sold it! I do not understand. My rancho, my property —how can he have bought it, when I have not sold?”

“It is useless to deny, señor,” replied the lawyer. “The papers are in order.”

“Thousand devils! What papers?”

“What should they be, but the deeds?”

“Deeds? But—”

“Everything is properly recorded, Don Marío. First, the sale by you to your brother, Don Eduardo— lands, buildings, cattle, everything. Then, his transfer to my client, here, of all the above. It is all entirely legal, señor. The money has been paid to your brother, and there remains nothing for your family and for you to do but—”

“But what?”

“Need I tell you? To vacate the rancho. My client, the new owner, is taking possession immediately.”

“God above!” choked Don Marío, and burst into a raw gust of execration. A flash of lightninglike comprehension blazed through his mind—understanding of the theft of his title-deeds by his brother Eduardo, forgery, villainy past all belief. “Ladronest Thieves, sons of swine—”

A cry from the patio interrupted him; a shout in Tio Pablo’s cracked voice:

“Bravo is here! The Americano’s horse is here! Come quickly, Don Mário—for behold, Bravo has come!”

Confusion overwhelmed Don Mário. Then his brain cleared. Was he not after all a caballero, and of Spanish blood? Epithets, brawlings— these were for the vulgar. His voice steadied.

“A thousand pardons, señores! You are my guests, under my roof. Forgive what I have just said.”

“There is no need to forgive, Don Marío,” the lawyer answered. “We heard nothing.”

“It is well. Let us proceed in order, and regularly. You say my brother Eduardo sold you this rancho?”

“Si, señor.”

“And on what date?”

“The eighteenth of December, last.”

“I see. Five weeks ago. What price did your client pay him?”

“One hundred and twenty-five thousand pesos.”

“Hmmmm! A bargain. It is worth easily twice that sum. But never mind. And my brother is now where?”

The lawyer gestured vaguely.

“Quién sabe? It is believed he took boat for Vera Cruz, a fortnight past.”

“It is believed? It is not known?”

“No, señor. Your brother’s whereabouts—who can tell? Nothing is known of him, save that he is no longer seen at Puerto Hondo. But the papers, they are regular.”

A moment, Don Marío steadied himself, to think. So his brother’s death was not yet known! This could mean only that the body had not been discovered. But the American must have lied. For why should even the rascally Eduardo have attempted a holdup when he had just completed this much more lucrative villainy?... Unless, of course, this rascally lawyer and his confederate had stolen again the money they had paid Eduardo.... But wait! One hundred and twenty-five thousand pesos! Was that not indeed the precise sum which the American had quoted the holdup man as having been robbed of himself? Now at last the pieces of this puzzle fitted together.... At all events, one chapter of family anguish— that of scandal and publicity— would be spared them.

The Don glanced up.

“I see,” he nodded. “So then, my brother has just disappeared. Probably to Vera Cruz, eh?”

“Si, señor,’ the lawyer agreed.

“And in that case—”

“Master, master!” interrupted Tio Pablo, arriving with sombrero in hand. “Forgive me, if I break in upon your talking, but Bravo is here I ”

“Esta bien, Tio. I will go, in a minute.” Then to the lawyer and the Turco: “Now, señores, I have to tell you very plainly that if you are laughing over your bargain, I shall change that laughter to the merriment of a nut between two stones. I never sold this property to my brother, or to any man. There has been forgery at work, and—”

“Careful, Don Mário! The law is on our side.”

“That is a game two can play at. Even though employing a lawyer to fight another lawyer is like calling a tiger to chase away a dog, it can be done. I shall do it. And I shall get at the bottom of this well, where truth lies.” He turned to Tio Pablo. “Tell me, Pablo, how many vaqueros are now on the pay-list of this rancho?”

“Forty-seven.”

“How many of them would die, defending this home of theirs?”

“Forty-seven, señor. And I make forty-eight! ”

“What?” exclaimed the lawyer. “You threaten us?”

“By no means. You are my guests. Here you are in your own house— till tomorrow noon. After that—”

“After that, we are also in our own house! This property is ours.”

“As you will,” smiled the Don. “I am merely telling you that you are safe here— till tomorrow at midday. After that, I shall answer for nothing. I shall not be here. I have a long journey to make. When I return, let me not find you at the Rancho San Agustin. And should you seek to press this matter in a court of law, I have private knowledge and information which would give you a jail for dwelling instead of this house.... And now, you will excuse me? Señores, adios!”

He turned to Tio Pablo, whose one good eye blinked nervously.

“You say Bravo has come back?”

“Si, señor. He is now in the farther corral. And so torn and wounded! Come, señor; come and see!”

“I go with you, Tio Pablo!”

Together they strode along the tiles, and away through the dusk to the corral where torch-flares were smokily gleaming.

“But, señor,” ventured Pablo, “I thought you told us both horses were dead?”

“The word I used, Tio, was lost. So then—”

An excitedly arguing group of vaqueros were gathered round the exhausted animal. Don Marío thrust half a dozen men aside.

“Here— a torch!”

BY the guttering light he made swift examination. The horse, spent and with drooping head, could barely stand. Mired, covered with ticks, with wounds from leeches, with long and bleeding thorn-gashes, it made a sorry spectacle.

“This is bad, bad,” Don Marío judged. “But Bravo will recover. Nothing fatal here.”

“Ay, pobrecito!”

“Off with saddle and bridle!”

He himself removed the wreckage of the saddle-bag; the bolsters that still contained rifle and shotgun, the machete hanging in its sheath at the saddle-bow.

What had happened, he could mentally sketch with only too terrible clarity. The torn, ripped saddle-bag gave him evi dence. On the side where he had helped Sturgis stow the gold slab, the stitching had ripped. All that side was hanging down loose, eloquently proclaiming what had taken place.

The horse had escaped, either from Sturgis, living; or had trekked home from Sturgis, dead. Somewhere a branch had caught and torn the leather. The weight of the gold had finished that work. Now, God knows where—in some morass, some slimy pool— the golden slab was lying. Even to dream of ever finding it again was madness.

The other side of the saddle-bag, though, gave an even more fatal message. For still untouched in that pocket lay all the weight of food and supplies that Don Marío had left with Sturgis. There too was all the ammunition, everything the American had depended on for salvation, for life itself.

Swift determination gripped Don Marío. His nerves tautened; strength flowed back through vein and muscle.

“Saddle Pepita!” he ordered. “And saddle Chiquita, too. Load them with food, aguardiente, guns and ammunition, with hammocks, machetes. Tio Pablo! ”

“Señor?”

“You are old, but wiry as a tigre. Make ready at once to travel! Your one eye sees more than other men’s two! ”

“Your word, señor, is my law.”

“Hasten, then. You and I ride south again, this night. At once— within the hour!”

“Mi alma, no! ”

Doña Perfecta’s voice broke in on the confused tumult of this astonishing announcement. There she stood now in the dust of the corral. Pale, with clasped hands, she fixed dark eyes on Don Marío.

“Thou canst not go away, again! ” she exclaimed. “To what end, since the Americano is dead and buried? This is madness! ”

“Silence!” he commanded. “Come with me!”

He led her to the ranch-house, into their bedroom; lighted a candle—for now dark had come—then closed the shutters. By the wavering light, a crucifix looked down on the ranchero and his wife, from white-plastered walls.

“What is this mystery, Marío?”

“My heart, come here!” He took her by the hand, led her to the crucifix. “There are certain things thou must know. Secret things, never to be told, till eternity is over— and not even then. If I tell thee, dost thou swear silence?”

“I swear!” She crossed herself.

“It is well. Now, listen to mel” His eyes burned redly. Mud still smeared hiis face, but it was the face once more of a caballero. “Time is short. Every moment is golden. So my words shall be few. Thou dost remember that my brother Eduardo was here, seven months ago?”

“Yes. And then—”

“He robbed me. How he got my keys, I do not know. But he took them, opened the leather-covered chest, stole my title-deeds. The deeds to this, our home, all our property, everything.”

“Impossible 1 ”

“Mb, true. And after all I had done for him!” And Don Marío went on to confide in her the whole story of Eduardo’s treachery—and of his death at the hands of the American he had attempted to rob.

“Mother of God!” exclaimed the se- nora. “And now the American also is dead ? Dead from the bite of a charcán ? Ay, what fatality!”

“That was a lie,” Don Marío replied thickly, with dry lips. “If he be dead or not, I do not know. Heaven send him its protection till I find him! We were far in the jungle. I discovered it was he who, defending his own life, worked justice on Eduardo. Madness came upon me. I would have killed him, but he was stronger than I. The oath of brotherhood between us, I renounced. I sent him eastward, to Belize— if by any miracle he could reach it. And now—”

“Now, almita mia?”

“Now comes his horse with his food, weapons, ammunition, all that could have saved him. Now my blood-brother is either dead there in the swamps, or he is wandering, a madman without hope. And I must—”

“But how wilt thou find him?”

“By returning to the spot where we parted, and then following the track he made. Tio Pablo can follow it. He is a famous tracker. With only one eye, he could trace the footsteps of an ant, across a desert of brass.”

“Go then, Marío. Go with God!”

“And thou, Perfecta, with God remain! Have no fear. This matter of the forgery, of the Turco who is a gambler and a thief, shall all be made right. Our home shall not be taken from us. Remember only, silence!”

“I will remember.”

11: The Greater Bond

TWO frightful-looking scarecrows, bloated, reeking with mud and slime, stumbled up a little knoll under the stewing overheated stifle of a poisonous wilderness. Up through a tangle of chayas— forest-nettles that burn like living flame— they dragged themselves, and with hoarse cries laid hands upon a third and even more ghastly scarecrow that crouched half-blind and gibbering, that laughed with blood-stopping merriment.

Then this merriment suddenly faded out into a desperate and insane terror. Uttering a throaty howl, the third scarecrow writhed out of the others’ clutch, then fought his staggering path into a thorny jungle, fell prone.

“Catch him!” croaked Don Marío— he could not shout— between parched, blackened lips. “Por Dios, quick, before he gets into that swamp!”

Old Tio Pablo, tough as leather and with strength still left in his stringy muscles, crashed after the fugitive. Don Marío’s inflamed and squinting eyes dimly perceived a vague, struggling confusion. It ceased. He heard the old man gasping.

“I have him, señor! Can you— help me?”

Together, their joined forces hardly equal to the task, they dragged Sturgis up the knoll again, and laid him down. Inert, unconscious, he remained there, covered with ticks and red-bugs, bitten by leeches and mosquitoes, plastered with mud. Scratches, cuts and bruises, swellings from poisonous plants, made him hardly recognizable as human.

“Tequila!” gasped Don Marío. “Quick, Tio— my right-hand saddle-bag. Tequila, here! ”

Later, Sturgis lay on a poncho under a royal-palm that crowned the knoll. Several slugs of fiery white liquor had been poured into him, some of the filth smeared from his exterior. He had begun to look again something like a man.

Tied to a tree, the horses uneasily nickered, stung by merciless insects. They too showed signs of fearful going. A gorgeous butterfly lighted on a blade of savanna-grass. Near it a chintún-spider lay in wait— a flat, crablike spider, swift and stealthy, horny-plated with wicked, caliper-like jaws. Its bite meant fever to man, death to any small creature. It crouched to attack the butterfly; but this, indifferent to near fate, wavered off through the deep green aisles and vanished.

“Ah, with wings like that, we should soon be home again,” murmured Tio Pablo, crouching by the little fire they had dared risk. Aromas of coffee and bacon idled up through the tropic heat. “Many a weary league, though—” One-eyed, he blinked.

“Speak not of that, Tio,” the rancher hoarsely reproved him. “These ants travel more slowly, but they at least know where they are going!” He blew cigarette-smoke, and pointed at what seemed a tiny, moving line of green umbrellas. Each umbrella was a neatly cut-out piece of leaf, carried over the head of a marching vivijagua-ant.

Silence a moment, broken only by the strident cry of a blackbird, the hum of a gold and crimson hummingbird as with blurred wings and long- curved needle bill it quested sugary sap.

“Ay, what a life! ” at last the old man muttered. “We weep the day we are born, and every day we live explains why. And the Americano—he will live to weep again ?”

“If God wills. But rather, I hope, to smile.”

“Of course! ” And Tio Pablo’s parchment face wrinkled into something like a grin. He stroked his horsehair-like Indian mustache, chief object of his pride. “But from what you judge, señor, does God will it now?”

“Yes,” Don Marío nodded. “He sleeps. He is young yet, and stronger than a wild boar. These gringos— it is very hard to kill them. What powerful devils of men they be! We have food and drink in plenty. They are good medicine; never forgetting the tequila.”

“Which is the best of all. Then too, the saints will help. I have my scapulary. They must help!”

“It may be.”

Silence again. A black scorpion crept from beneath rotting leaves, approached the sleeper. Don Marío’s boot turned it to custardy pulp, that quivered.

“Lawyer!” he growled. “Turco!” His heel ground the pulp into dank earth.

Suddenly a third voice sounded, weak but perfectly rational:

“Give me a cigarette, eh?”

“Here!”

Don Marío lighted one, passed it to Peter Sturgis, A.B. For a moment the American lay there, smoking. Vapor drifted on the dusky jungle air, that seemed to quiver with green fires.

“Boy! ” murmured Sturgis, in English. “Last thing I remember, I thought I was selling ice-water in hell!”

Don Marío knelt beside him.

“You know me, brother?”

“Of course. What’s all the trouble been about? Where have you been?”

“I have been away— learning wisdom. Only three days have passed, in time, but more than a thousand years in understanding. Great has been our gain.”

“But the gold?”

“Ah, never mind the gold. Dreams come; dreams go. And life remains. Never forgetting, hermano mio, that your mining-option will be all taken care of by funds which I have safely set aside— and may fortune smile on it! And now, will you forgive?”

“Forgive what?”

“The wrong I have done you.”

“What wrong? Brother of mine, what are you talking about?”

Don Marío’s hand, gashed and swollen, sought the American’s. For a moment the two hands of the blood-brothers tightened on each other. Then, with a queer little catch in his throat—

“Oye, chico!” the rancher hailed Tio Pablo.

“Señor?”

“Coffee, here! Bacon— a tortilla!” The words trembled. “Son of a lazy father, make haste!”

“Si, señor! Coffee and all, they shall be ready in one small minute! ”

A little pause. Then—

“Brother,” smiled Don Marío, “what after all is gold, weighed against wisdom of the heart?”

They shook hands again. And Peter Sturgis knew that Don Marío would keep his word about funds for that option. He knew, too, that with the rising price of gold and silver he should have no trouble in selling it, and repaying Don Marío. Better still, he would soon be going home now; and in his pocket would be the money to rescue his dad. Peter Sturgis, A.B., was getting a break at last.

_____________________

5: Maroon Key

Short Stories, Dec 25 1933

1: Amateur Pirate

SECOND MATE JIM WEATHERFORD snapped back to full consciousness, there in the midnight darkness, as the gun-muzzle jammed itself into his kidneys and the business-like voice growled:

"Stick 'em up!”

Weatherford obeyed. Though only twenty-seven and a scrapper, he knew when he was in a jam. The fault— was it all not very much his own? He’d been on watch, responsible for some two million dollars’ worth of yacht, for twenty-odd sleeping officers and crew, above all for the likewise slumbering owner, Henry B. Everington, himself.

And now—!

You might have thought the responsibility of safeguarding a financier rated at rather better than sixty million would have been enough to keep any one broad awake. But the somnolent wizardry of tropical stardust and night-breeze, and of ponderings about a certain girl in Baltimore, can play odd tricksies on a fellow as he leans on the rail and looks ashore—

Second mate Jim Weatherford of the good yacht Mangariva had heard nothing and seen nothing as, silently and darkly, a dinghy had drifted out from Angel Rio’s fish-pier and across the star-wimpled harbor of Cayo Hueso. He had remained utterly oblivious to the approach of that vaguliy moving blur, silently nearing the yacht now empty of all her guests; the yacht which, with her cruise now finished, was anchored there waiting to drydock in the morning.

Second mate Jim, a husky, white-uniformed figure, had continued to brood at the port rail. The dinghy had meantime eased along to the accommodation-ladder on the starboard side. Eight silent, dim men—some of them barefoot—had crept unobserved up that ladder to the holystoned deck. And then—

Then that gun-muzzle jammed into Weatherford’s back; that tense-murmured command, in a voice surprisingly familiar:

"Stick ’em up! And quiet, now, or else—!”

Hands aloft, the second mate growled:

"Say, what the hell’s the big idea?’’

"Never mind! Anybody else awake, aboard here?”

“How the devil do 1 know?”

"I mean, anybody else on watch? Come on, now!” With another jab of the automatic. "Spill it!”

“No, there ain’t.”

"Fine!”

Now Weatherford felt his hands being pulled down behind his back. He sensed the grip of steel on wrists, heard a decisive click. And as he twisted part-way round, he saw vague figures there in the dim light from the pilot-house. One of these figures— the one that had held the gun on him— sketched a gesture of command to the others. Men silently crept to positions that must already have been assigned them. Pistols ready, they stationed themselves in the port and starboard gangways, and on the foredeck, where they could cover all exits from deck-houses, engine-room hatch, and fo’c’sle.

"What the blazes?” Second mate Jim demanded. "A hold-up, or what?”

"No, just a business conference, sweetheart,” gibed the chief of the raiders. "Come along, Weatherford. Now for a little heart-to-heart with the owner of this poverty-stricken scow!”

The pirate—for any one who forcibly seizes a vessel in commission may be rated in that category—seemed to need no guidance in finding the Mangariva's owner. Quite obviously, he well knew his way around the yacht. Followed by only one of his crew, and with his gun-barrel prodding Second mate Jim ahead of him, he silently made for the entrance door leading to Henry B. Everington’s quarters.

Vague in that midnight gloom, with only here or there a shaded incandescent softly glowing, appeared glimpses of the spacious sun-parlor deck with its huge, cushioned wicker chairs and divans, its book-laden tables, and the parrot asleep in an immense brass cage.

Beyond, the automatic elevator gave access to lower decks. The pirate ignored it, and prodded his captive down the dim-lit, curving stair, with hand-wrought iron bannisters that had been ravished from a Venetian palace. And so the trio reached a long corridor, thick-carpeted with Oriental rugs, each worth a fortune.

A LONG this corridor opened some of the many guest-suites, every suite distinctively furnished and tinted. Past several of these, lay the master’s apartment, itself.

"Well, here we are,” remarked the pirate, stopping.

"That’s right, Mr. Brandon,” Second mate Jim assented. With cool, speculative eyes he regarded his captor. Even in that half-light very well he knew him. "And may I ask how you happen to be coming back aboard, like this? After being Mr. Everington’s guest for about six weeks on our cruise, and then saying good-by with all the others, not twelve hours ago?”

"Never mind that, Weatherford!” the pirate interrupted. A tall, shouldery, rather red-headed man of perhaps thirty, who could look mighty dangerous, rather precluded discussion. "The less you say now, the healthier it’ll be for you!”

Brandon—Varney Howell Brandon, head of Brandon & Co., Statistical Reports—drew a key from the pocket of his yachting-trousers and opened the door of his ex-host’s private suite. This key, of the sort known as "skeleton,” had just that afternoon been made for him by an expert locksmith up in the town of Cayo Hueso. Evidently Brandon had overlooked few details in preparation for this raid.

As the door swung open, he gestured for Second mate Jim to enter first; then followed and closed the door, leaving his attendant comrade-in-piracy outside in the corridor, on guard with drawn pistol.

INSIDE the master’s apartment, heavier darkness reigned. No incandescent was burning here. Through silk-curtained windows, only a vague glimmer of light penetrated from a gangway. The invader, seeming to know perfectly well the lay of things, at once switched on lights. A rose- pink illumination flooded the sitting-room. Brandon turned toward the closed bedroom door, through which was audible a faint snoring. He pocketed his gun, opened that door, raised a beckoning finger to the manacled second mate.

“You’re in on this conference, too!” said he.

"Conference, Mr. Brandon? What is the idea? After all these weeks aboard here, with the others, surely you’ve had plenty of time for business conferences—without coming back here like this, and sticking up die place!”

"That’s enough, Weatherford! Come here!”

A moment, Second mate Jim’s eye appraised the invader, who had so recently been a guest. Hard-faced now and with a menacing gleam in his look, Brandon gave back the mate’s scrutiny with interest. Handcuffed, helpless. Weatherford had no choice but to obey. Grim-jawed, he passed into the bedroom. Brandon followed, closed the door, made a light.

This light fell on the brass bed where slept the master of more than sixty millions— a stoutish, ruddy-faced man with white mustache and brows. A man whose age probably counted one year for every million of his rating.

"Now then,” smiled Brandon, "now for the sleeping beauty!”

FOR a moment he stood looking down at ‘Everington, who in the fatuous relaxation of deep slumber looked far other than the commanding figure made familiar to the world by innumerable newspaper portraits.

Deplorable as it seems, a sleeping millionaire may show marked resemblances to a slumbering hobo. Now lying there on his back, somewhat in need of a shave, with his mouth agape and with toothless gums exposed, the snoring Henry B. Everington looked anything but a Captain of Finance.

As the sudden light impinged on his lids, these twitched, opened, blinked. For a moment, a look of utter confusion and non-comprehension enveloped the invaders of Everington’s privacy. But swiftly rationality surged over him. Thoughts reentered his baldish head. With a swift up-rearing, he surged to a sitting position, in rather absurd pink-striped silk pajamas. From his eye flashed a gleam of the hot temper that had made him internationally famous.

“What—what the devil?” he demanded. "Hell of a thing—wake a man up, middle of night! What’s up, Weatherford? And you, Brandon — you back? What—?”

The second mate, hands still padlocked behind him, made reply:

"Mr. Brandon’s just come aboard, sir, with— some friends of his. Seems to have a little business with you, sir, and—”

"Business, eh? By Gad!” snorted Everington. "Fine time for business! What's the matter with your hands, Weatherford? Looks like they were—”

"They are, sir, that’s a fact,” the second mate nodded. "Perhaps Mr. Brandon, here, will be good enough to tell you why he’s stuck me up and handcuffed me this way.”

"I certainly will, with pleasure,” returned the amateur pirate. “The fact is, Everington, he’s captured—like yourself.”

"Captured?” exploded the millionaire. "Captured? What the devil you mean? What’s this all about, eh? Why, damn you, you owe me a thundering apology, and—"

"Listen, Everington! I don’t owe you anything, not even an explanation. But my statistics show you owe me $3,023,972.46.” Brandon approached the bed. His face, under the incandescent glow, looked implacable. "I know now why you took me along on your cruise and why your radio so conveniently went out of order, the last ten days of it.”

"What say? Why, confound your—”

"Easy, easy! After getting ashore here, I got in touch with my New York brokers, by wire. They certainly told me plenty. So you raided me, did you? Sold me out? Thought you could gut me like a herring, and get away with it? Well, Everington, my records show no such game has ever been put over on me. For once you’ve misjudged your victim, and—”

"Hell’s bells!” roared the magnate, purpling. From beneath his white thatch of brows, his optical fires gleamed like twin swords of flame. Swiftly his blood-pressure soared. "Why, damn your impertinence, sir! Get out o’ my rooms! Get out, or—”

THE millionaire blew up completely. Words couldn’t do justice to his rage. Stammering, spluttering, he turned and with a shaking hand reached for a pushbutton near the head of his bed.

"Stop, sir!” exclaimed Second mate Jim. "I wouldn’t do that, if I was you. It might get several of your people killed—to say nothing of yourself.”

"Killed?” the financier gasped.

"Mr. Brandon, here, has seized the Manzariva.”

"He’s—? Holy jumping Moses! Seized

"Yes, sir. And he’s got quite a mob with him. Got armed men posted at all strategic points. So go easy, sir. Go very easy!”

THIS amazing news left Everington limp- jawed and staring. The color drained from his florid cheeks. His baggy eyes peered with a stare that now became fishy and lack-luster. For the first time in his predatory life, he found himself confronted by force majeure; by the raw and naked fact of compulsion, backed with possibilities of annihilation. He swallowed hard.

"So you, Brandon,” he stammered, "you’ve pirated my yacht? Eh, what say?”

"You can call it anything you damned please,” the other retorted. "Piracy, highway-robbery, buccaneering, or any old thing. 1 call it squaring accounts and collecting a bill. Getting myself de-gypped. The real pirate is you —you’ve been one, for years. Well, the tables are turned now. I’ve got you where I want you. And I’m going to square things, if it takes a leg—to the tune of $3,023,972.46, cash. So that’s that!”

With a wheezing oath, old Everington reared up like a madman. He waved absurd and impotent fat fists.

"Holy murdering mackerel! Why—”

"Easy there, Everington,” Brandon grimly smiled. "With your high blood-pressure and all, you really can’t afford to get excited. After all, why should you? What are three paltry million smackers to you, compared to your own life? Tomorrow you can arrange to have the trifle transferred to you here, through the Primer Banco Nacional. Then you hand over the three to me. I depart. Our score is even, and you’re free to go or stay, just as you wish. There needn’t be any publicity about it. Nobody need know. What could be simpler? Cinch!”

"Simpler? Why, you—you—as if I’d be held up by anybody! You’ll hang for this, Brandon! You’ll—”

"Be calm, Everington. You’re in a spot and you know it. Better be good. Come through, and sign on the dotted line.”

"And—if I don’t?”

"If you don’t? Well,” and Brandon smiled again, "well, remember you’re aboard a yacht, and yachts can be made to go places.”

"Not this yacht! I—I’ll get the police out here, the authorities, the—”

"Not while my tidy little army of mercenaries have got all hands covered. They’re all Manzanillian refugees, and would rather fight than—well, even play the lottery or watch a cockfight. If you or anybody tries to start anything, it will be just too bad!”

Into this tense moment broke another voice, a query from the bedroom door:

"Did you call, sir? Anything I can do for you, sir?”

Whipping out his gun, Brandon wheeled round. But at sight of the pajama-clad figure in that door, he only laughed:

"Oh, so it’s you, eh, Edwards? Noble valet, now rushing to master’s rescue! Courageous retainer, entering scene from adjoining bed-chamber where he reposes!" Then, on a change of voice, to one of deadly menace, "Come here to me, Edwards!"

"Oh, Mr. Brandon, sir!” quavered the valet, about as courageous-looking as one of the Seven Tailors of Tooley Street. "Whatever’s the meaning of all this, sir, and—?”

"The meaning is, Edwards, that you’re pinched. And so is Mr. Everington, and all the officers and crew, and the yacht, and the whole works, till a certain bill is paid. Do you feel disposed to die, rather suddenly, so as to help Mr. Everington keep from paying his bill?”

"Oh, no sir—really, I couldn’t, and—”

"You see?” exclaimed Brandon, turning to the distressed financier. "There’s a sample of your personnel. They’ll be all of a piece, when it comes to shedding their blood for you. Why should they, you old Harpy?”

"Get out o’ here, you—you louse!” raged Everington at the trembling valet. His rage could at all events safely vent itself on this humble object. "You’re fired!”

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir!” And Edwards made a quivering exit.

"Well, so much for that,” cheerfully remarked Brandon. "What’s your answer, Everington? Are you going to pay my bill, or do you prefer to go for a ride? Go places, with me?”

"I’ll go any place you will,” the millionaire snarled. "To merry hell, if necessary, before I’ll be held up!”

"Well, it may be to hell, and beyond. But no three million?”

"No, nor three cents! You—you—”

“All right, then. I rather think you and I are going to have a jolly little personally-conducted cruise to such an entertaining spot!” He turned to the handcuffed officer. "I’m keeping Mr. Everington incommunicado here, for a while. The guard at the outer door will attend to that. Now, you come along with me, and we’ll get going. Understand?”

"Yes. I suppose there’s not much choice for me.”

"None whatever, mate. Sorry. You’re a good sort, and I haven’t got a thing in the world against you, personally, but you just happen to be caught between the immovable body and the irresistible force.”

He turned toward the door. "Come on, let’s get the Mangariva under weigh.”

"Hold on!” gasped the magnate, swinging his legs out of bed. "There’s something I haven't told you yet!”

"You’ve told me plenty, Everington.”

"There’s a reason why you can’t seize this yacht and go cruising off to the devil knows where—why you mustn’t!”

"Oh, yes? Well, there’s just a little over three million reasons why I must, and will.”

"But listen!” The magnate, jumping up, waved excited arms. Barefoot and disheveled, he made an astonishing figure. "Listen! My daughter, Diana— she—”

"Tell it to the horse-marines!”

Brandon laughed, motioned Weatherford out of the cabin and followed him; slammed the door and locked it, leaving the magnate apoplectic there in the middle of the luxurious cabin that had now become his floating prison.

"Let him blow off steam, a while,” grimly said the statistician, mightily bucked-up by the plutocrat’s martyrdom. "Let him yelp. It’ll do him good. He’s made plenty others holler, and never ruffled one of his few remaining hairs. Come along, Weatherford—up-anchor and away!”

2: Out-Pirated

M ORNING— a morning such as only the Caribbean Sea can show—flared gold and crimson over long-heaving seas of lapis-lazuli and jade. Gently swaying at rest, the Mangariva lay some quarter-mile from the foam-swirled reef that skirted a long, low and white-gleaming beach of an island here or there fringed with mangroves, yonder tufted with feather-dustery clumps of coco-palms.

Only a few of the yacht’s personnel were visible—Captain McMurdo, on the bridge; Second mate Weatherford in the wheel-house that occupied its center—his hands now at liberty—and three or four white-clad seamen. Grim-faced captors of the yacht, guns in hand, kept watch on them. Most of these captors were of swarthy, Latin- American appearance; most, in fact, were citizens of Manzanilla, exiled in Cayo Hueso by the triumph of the Progresista revolution in that strife-torn little republic.

On the bridge, commanding everything and keeping a very close eye on Captain McMurdo, stood Varney Howell Brandon. In his yachting-togs he looked anything but a pirate. None the less, his right hand gripped an automatic and his glance was hard.

“All right, put the motor-launch down,” he ordered.

Captain McMurdo passed the order to his few liberated seamen. They swung the launch out, on its patent davits, lowered away, hung a Jacob’s-ladder overside. Brandon beckoned the foreman of his gang, a sinister gentleman, barefoot and with the expression of a dyspeptic Machiavelli.

"Aqui estamos,” said Brandon. "We have arrived. Get the Señor Everington.”

"Si, señor,” the Manzanillian replied, and with the most peculiar of smiles departed on that errand.

Brandon picked up a pair of binoculars and carefully surveyed the island. He nodded, as if well pleased.

"Not a bad place we’ve found,” he commented. "Even though it doesn’t seem to be marked on any chart, and is apparently just another island— one of thousands— it looks pretty luxurious. Tired business man could take a nice long rest there, I'm thinking, while determined creditor cruises hither and yon. Especially yon.”

"Yes,” assented Captain McMurdo, "and pirates, when caught, can take a much longer rest in the hoosegow.”

"Very much longer,” Second mate Weatherford added, "though not so nice, by a danged sight!”

"When I want any opinion from either of you gentlemen, I’ll ask for it!” retorted Brandon, laying down the binoculars. "A week or two all alone on this deserted island will materially modify any wish Mr. Everington may now feel, as regards pressing charges. Especially since he’ll be on short rations, very short, and—”

His speech broke off abruptly. His eyes widened at sight of a new figure on the scene; a figure totally unexpected, and just now issuing out upon the foredeck. It was of a brisk and very much alive young woman.

F OR a moment she stood there at the rail, and with the greatest of astonishment looked at the preparations being made with the motor-launch and the ladder; then turned her gaze on the reef and the island. Brandon, staring down at her, felt an amazement equal to her own. What monkey- wrench was this being heaved into his gears?

"Damnation!” growled the amateur, statistical pirate.

For all this, none the less, he could not fail to note that this young person looked exceptionally attractive and debonair, with her ivory sun-tanned complexion, her rebelliously tousled black hair, her slim and straight figure that showed just the right curves in exactly the right places. A moment, Brandon—being only thirty—warmed to this spectacle. But instantly he reacted. His brows contracted to a frown, as he turned to Captain McMurdo and in a low tone demanded:

"Who the devil is that?”

"Sorry,” the Captain dourly returned, "but. I’m not authorized to give out any information. You’ll have to ask Mr. Everington.”

"But—I never saw her, aboard here, She wasn’t along on the cruise. When did she come aboard?”

Brandon’s puzzlement had only a moment to feed itself, before the girl—looking very much at a loss—turned on her heel, came along to the ladder leading to the bridge, and ran up it. Brandon hastily slipped his automatic into his pocket.

"What’s all this mean, Captain?” asked the girl; and Brandon sensed the voice of a young woman accustomed to rule. "I thought we were going into drydock, this morning. But here we are at sea, again, and —and what’s it all about?”

"Mr. Everington has changed his plans,” the captain briefly made reply.

"Oh, he’s always changing his plans,” she laughed. "But how peculiar! Where are we now? What’s that island, and why are we putting down the launch? Who’s going ashore, and why?”

UNMOVED by this barrage of questions, McMurdo only answered:

"There’s been a change of plans, miss. You’ll have to ask Mr. Everington about it. I’m not at liberty to make any statement.”

"Oh, you’re not, eh?” the girl exclaimed. Her vivacious black eyes rested on Brandon. "And this gentleman—?’’

Captain McMurdo kept dense silence. Brandon flushed under his tan. He took the bit in his own teeth:

"May I present myself? My name is Brandon. I’m a—well, a business associate of Mr. Everington’s.”

"Oh, I’ve heard of you!” The girl’s smile disclosed teeth even more dazzling than those of a toothpaste advertisement. "You were on the recent cruise, weren’t you? My father's often spoken of you, and—”

"Your what?”

"My what, what?”

“You mean to say you’ve heard of me, from your—?”

"From my father, yes. Why not? I’m Diana Everington.”

“My—holy—aunt!” stammered the pirate. His blue eyes widened, his jaw dropped.

“Well, Mr. Brandon, is there anything so very astonishing about a girl flying down from Miami to Cayo Hueso to meet her father and do a week’s fishing while the yacht’s being drydocked? Why, you look as if—”

"Great grief!” The exclamation was wrung from deep strata of Brandon’s ego by realizations that new and highly complicating factors had suddenly and most unwelcomely been injected into the picture.

"If I—I’d known this—!”

"DIANA!”

Henry B. Everington’s voice, from the fofedeck, interrupted her. She leaned over the bridge rail, gazing down at her progenitor. Captain McMurdo and Second mate Jim meantime simmered with a vast, inner joy.

“Father!” cried the girl. "What’s all this about? This island! What are we here for? What’s it all mean?”

"Ask him!” the magnate exclaimed, his tone one of pure venom. Everington’s rotund figure was clad in white flannels. He shook an irate fist at Brandon, up there on the bridge. 'That pirate—chief of all these other pirates!”

"Pirates?” gasped Diana.

"Yes, these damned Latins!” He swept a comprehensive gesture at the various armed Manzanillians. "Pirates, the whole infernal kit and b’iling of ’em!”

“Pirates! Are we captured by pirates? Oh, how perfectly thrilling!” A flush stole into the ivory of her perfect cheek. Her black eyes sparkled. She faced round, confronted Brandon with a look of sheer delight. "Are you a pirate, really?”

"Technically, perhaps. But in reality, only―"

“There are pirates and pirates,” the millionaire exclaimed, from where he stood glaring up at the bridge. 'That wolf in sheep’s clothing even called me something of the sort, last night. And he is one! Not only technically, but also in fact. He—”

"Wait, hold on!” called down Brandon, from the bridge rail. He raised a hand for silence. "Of course, under the circumstances, my plans are totally altered.”

"Eh, what?” the magnate demanded.

“I knew nothing of your daughter being aboard. If I had, well, naturally I wouldn’t have taken any such steps. What, after all, are three million dollars, or any other number of million, when a—an only daughter—is involved? If I’d had the least idea—”

"But I tried to tell you, didn’t I?”

"You tried to tell me?”

"Certainly, you idiot!” The financier was growing a deep purple. "I tried to tell you there was a reason why you couldn’t pull this game and you slammed out of my cabin. And now—”

"So that was—? Great guns! Well—only one way to make amends. Only one thing to do now. It’s all off, Everington. What ever you do or don’t owe me, I’m not making war on women!” And Brandon gestured with real eloquence, his eyes a-sparkle with noble resolve in the tropical sunshine. "You win. It’s back to Cayo Hueso!”

"Eh, what?”

"As for the three million, forget it. I’m just out of luck, that’s all. I quit, cold. Tell your captain to turn round and—”

"Un momentito!” sounded a Manzanillian voice, acid-edged, ugly and ominous. "Just one leetle minute, now!”

ON THE scene, down there on the fore-deck, the leader of the mercenaries had suddenly appeared. There he stood, grimy and unshaven, barefoot, in slack whites. He dangled a gun, most unpleasantly. Backing him up, two other Manzanillians also displayed artillery.

"Well, what is it?” sharply demanded Brandon, while the girl looked and listened with delight. "What the devil do you want?”

"Me? I want one leetle moment of the conversation, no? I hear w’at you sayin’, just now, an’ I understan’ it all, pretty good. But I no agreein’, sake?"

"You what?”

"I’m not agreein’ w’at you say. My men, they no agreein’.” The Manzanillian’s eyes gimleted at Brandon. “You say you geeve up these game. The yacht, he go back to Cayo Hueso, verdci? Well, no, señor!” Dramatically he smote his chicken-breast. "That no suit me an’ my compaheros. We have other plan, señor. W’at you say just now, it cut—w’at you call?—cut no ice weeth us, comprende?”

For a moment, not believing his own ears, nor yet grasping the full portent of this amazing announcement, Brandon stared down at the rebel. He clenched passionate fists.

"Why, confound your impertinence!” he shouted. "You’ve got a nerve! You— my employees—!”

"Employees no longer,” retorted the Manzanillian, with a snag-toothed grin. "Pirates, eef you like, but always heroes. You was pirate, you-self, but now you slide-back an’ refuse to be. Olrait! But me an’ my brave men, we continue. So now I tell you where you—w’at you say?—where you get off! I, Pedro Echador del Toro!”

"Were we get off?”

"Si, señor! You, weeth these millionaire an’ these señorita. You all get off, here!”

"Where?”

"On these so deserted leetle island!”

"Never! Not the señorita, too!”

"Ah, si, si. La señorita, she weel not not be keep, by us. We no want her. All we want is these ship. An’ so, right away pronto we sayin’ to you, all three— adios!”

FOR another space of perhaps ten heart- J- beats, Varney Howell Brandon could only gasp and stare—much like the millionaire himself. Amazement likewise gripped the captain and the mate. Diana Everington, lips parted and with wonderful color, leaned over the bridge-rail to miss no syllable of this tense drama. Truth be, she was having the time of her life.

"Marooned!” she cried. "Oh, what a lark! A desert island, and—and everything. Let’s go ashore, right now.”

"Silence,” blared the magnate. "Everybody shut up.” He swung toward the Manzanillian. "Look here, you, a joke’s a joke, but this is going too damn far.” His eyes fairly protruded, as his blood-pressure soared. "What’s your big idea? Going to hold us for ransom, or something? Because, if you are—”

"Ah, no!” disclaimed the Latin, raising a lean brown hand of negation. "Nothin' so every-day like that Americano idea of w’at you call the racket, the keednap. No, señor, it ees one other idea I ’ave. But why make to explain? These ship, she is now mine, by the right of capture. An’ w’at I, Pedro Echador del Toro, do weeth her, is that any business of you?”

"Capture? Holy suffering snakes!"

"You hear me, señor, first time." And the Manzanillian began to roll himself a cigarette, with one hand.

"Look here,” weakened Everington, sensing the deadly determination of these new enemies. "What’s your price, to release us? If you don’t gouge too deep—”

"Forget eet!” smiled the Latin, as a wolf smiles. Airily he struck a match, lighted his fag, blew smoke on the air now beginning to quiver with tropic heat. "Your propose, eet no interest me at all. Dinero! Money! Ees that all you Americanos can imagine? Bah! Suppose eet no ees money at all, w’at we wantin’, eh?”

"You want to smuggle aliens, with my yacht? Uncle Sam’ll raise merry hell with you!”

"Have I say alien-smuggle? Can eet no be possible I have the heroic soul?” Again he thumped his brown bosom, under its ragged shirt.

“Hero, you? How the hell?”

"Might I not weesh to be admiral of a navy?”

“Admiral? For God’s sake! How?”

"Admiral of a navy, to leeberate my patria, from the tyrant! From that Progresista government of serpents, that monster of a usurper. President Trujillo de Fulano de Mengano Zutano de Tal—”

"Hold on! You mean, you want to start a revolution in Manzanilla?”

"Como no? Have that monster not drive out me and my amigos, here? Have he not crrush my country? Have he not—?”

"Forget it!” the millionaire exploded, while all hands—and most particularly the girl—hung on every syllable. "You and your revolution! And making a navy out o’ my yacht! Holy thundering turtles! You’ll only end up in front of a firing-squad, or in a shark’s gullet!”

"That’s right, too,” interjected Brandon, from the bridge rail. " 'Take the cash and let the credit go,’ if you get me. And not Mr. Everington’s cash, either. He’s not going to pay a penny of this, sabe? I’ll ransom this yacht, myself, right now! What’s your figure? Ten thousand pesos? Fifteen? Twenty?”

"No, aeftor, nor one meelion!” retorted the would-be admiral. "Eet ees useless to offer. Not the dinero, these time, but the honor—ah, the gloria! So, I regret, but—how you say?—on your way, at once!” He gestured at the Jacob’s-ladder, the waiting launch. "I geeve you three Americans just ten minutes to pack up. Not one second more. Then, out of here—adios—goodbye!”

3: Marooned

ON A highly desolate beach of an island to them entirely unknown in name, location and possibilities, stood three marooned and abandoned Americans, namely:

Henry Barlow Everington, 62, financier and yachtsman,

Diana Hebe Everington, 24, his daughter,

Varney Howell Brandon, 30, capitalist and statistician. We may also classify the latter as "would-be amateur pirate, but now an involuntary victim of that very profession, very much hoist with his own brand of petard.”

For all luggage they had Everington’s leather suitcase, Diana’s ditto, one water- cask (small), and one gunnysack of provisions. Some equipment, with which to start life from the ground up, on a desert island! But all that the adamantine Manzanillians would permit them to take. Of this slim layout, however, they were not thinking as they stood there in the cutting sunlight on that beach already a-quiver with heat, and watched the Mangariva diminishing toward horizons of the most ineffable azure beauty. No, quite other thoughts possessed them.

"You sons o’ sea-cooks!” execrated Brandon, his red poll fair bristling with rage, as he shook a powerful fist in the direction of the Latin-Americans. "You double-crossing hyenas! The least I wish on you is leprosy!”

''Why, Mr. Brandon!” laughed Diana, hands on hips of her really very effective yachting-trousers, "how vindictive! Here we are on an uninhabited island, just like people in a story, and you’re actually poisonous about it. Marooned! Don’t you love the word?”

"Bosh!”

"I think you're terrible!”

"You’ll think a lot more than me is terrible, before we’re through with this!” retorted Brandon, with emphatic assertion though perhaps with dubious grammar. "You’ll think we’re in the place I hope those infernal pirates reach, P.D.Q.!”

"Maybe not, at that,” commented Everington, as he took out his gold cigarette case, gave a smoke to his daughter but offered none to Brandon. Singularly enough, Everington's temper seemed to have markedly improved. Now he even managed a bit of a smile.

"Maybe not, at that, young man,” he repeated. "I’ve been in lots tighter jams than this, before now. Always got out, O. K. And as for this being a jam, who knows? Maybe nice quiet little place for rest-cure, and—”

"Bah! Rest-cure! We’ll rest enough. Rest till Gabriel comes— which will be quite a while after the buzzards have finished with us.”

"You weren’t bothering about buzzards, when you planned to throw me ashore here, all alone.”

"That’s different! I was coming back for you in a week or two. But those double- blanked Manzanillians—catch them ever heaving in sight again! If ever I get within gun-shot of ’em—!”

"Come, come, snap out of it!” the financier admonished. "Here I’ve just lost a yacht worth at least two million, but am I bellyaching? No, sir, I’m figuring that every day I don’t run her I’m economizing to the tune of several thousand, to say nothing of now having no drydock-bill to pay.

"My holy grandma!” snorted Brandon. "Why—”

"Looka here, you’ve got no kick coming,” the magnate exclaimed. "You started the ball rolling, with your amateur piracy, and now that you’ve got gummed up with it, yourself, why holler? Tit for tat, say I. Buck up, and give us some statistics about this undoubtedly very restful gem of the ocean, and let’s see where we go from here.”

"Oh, all right. We’ll get statistics enough, before we’re done. And as for our first move, I suggest that palm-grove, up the beach. Then we can take inventory of our goods and chattels and our grub. This sun—”

"I love the sun,” put in Diana, raising her strong, slim young arms to it like a priestess of Baal at worship. "And this Caribbean sea-air, and those pelicans, and —and everything!”

BRANDON’S snort of indignation was more eloquent far than any words, as he picked up the water-cask and hove it to his competent shoulder, then grabbed the gunnysack and with no further word began plowing through the loose white coral sand toward the dump of palms about a mile to westward along the curve of silvery-gleaming beach.

Everington took his heavy leather suitcase and came puffing heavily after. Diana, with her case, plodded alongside her plodding father.

Steadily now the sun was growing hotter as it rose; and steadily the Mangariva was dwindling in far, hazy distances. As the castaways trudged onward, tiny ghost-crabs —white and spectral-looking—scuttled for cover down innumerable little burrows. With fresh young interest Diana watched them, noted the bits of coral lying everywhere, the vast variety of lovdy shells, conchs, sea-fans, sponges, the cast-up Portuguese-men-o’-war, and all the curious litter of a tropical beach.

"Oh, isn’t this beautiful?” she exclaimed, panting a little with exertion—for Diana was far from accustomed to carrying her own baggage. "I’m just going to love it, here on—on Maroon Island.”

"It’s really a key, you know,” suggested the millionaire, swabbing his neck. "Maroon Key. Good name, eh? Put that in your little notebook, Brandon. Maroon Key. First bit of classified knowledge, for your statistical—”

"As if who cared whether it’s named or not!” Brandon fired back at him. "I'm more interested to know whether there’s any fresh water here. One small cask for three of us—not so hot!”

"Hot enough, anyhow," judged the financier. "I wouldn’t mind a long cool drink, myself. Ah, well—”

STEADILY they made way. The going seemed to grow harder, as they skirted clumps of bay-cedars and tangled sea-grape-trees. It seemed as if the beckoning shelter of the palm-grove were after all only a mirage, so long did the trek require, to reach it. But at last, pretty much all in, they made the grove. And there, in the grateful shade of thick fronds gently caressed by the sea-breeze, they dropped their now amazingly heavy burdens.

"Whew!” exclaimed Brandon, flexing his muscles to take the kinks out. "Well, here we are— if here is anywhere.”

"I think it’s somewhere, and just lovely,” Diana asserted.

Brandon’s "Hurrumph!” was one of intense disgust as he turned towards the financier.

"Might’s well take inventory of assets, I suppose,” said he. "As we may be here from now on, better find out just what those hell-hounds have allowed us.”

"Right!” cheerfully agreed Everington. "Go ahead and appraise our assets. That’s the kind of job you’re used to. It's all one, to me. I know we can’t starve to death here, anyhow.”

"Can’t eh?” Brandon queried, while Diana listened entranced. "Why can’t we?”

"What? In coconut-grove like this and with all these crabs and probably shellfish, and maybe iguanas and what-not?”

"Yeah, especially the what-not? Whatnot is so very nourishing, especially when washed down with sea-water! Well, anyhow—”

Untying the string that fastened the mouth of the bag, Brandon dumped its content on the sand under the palms, and stood there gloomily surveying the scant lay-out. Old Everington meantime had sat down, and after a little jugglery with his jaws had removed two very handsome sets of teeth, which with a sigh of relief he pocketed. Next he took off his shoes and socks, wiggled his toes, and grunted with satisfaction; after which he lighted another cigarette.

"Boy!” he exclaimed. "By gad, this is the life!”

"Well, of all the egregious idiocy!” growled Brandon. "Here you’ve just gone and lost a yacht worth two million—”

"Two million cares and worries, my dear fellow. So I’m well rid of her. And your being marooned, too— well, that’s a feature I can somehow manage to bear without any too great agony. And then, too,” with a chuckle, "the idea of the head-on collision bound to occur between my crew and those Latins, once my men get their second wind — why, man, that alone is worth the price of admission. And so— well—ho-hum! Excuse me if I take forty winks?”

"Wait, hold on! Our inventory!”

"No, that’s your job. You’re the official statistician.” Lazily Everington blew smoke up into the superheated air. Then he crossed his hands back of his head, shut his eyes and drifted off into the most blissful of slumbers.

"Well, can you beat that?” demanded Brandon, outraged. "Marooned, lost, done for, and yet—”

"Never mind,” said Diana. "You wouldn’t understand. You’re only a mathematician, after all. And for a young man, Mr. Brandon, you’re really an awful pill. Go on with your old inventory— I’m going to hunt for a spring.”

"Go ahead, go ahead! But— say— all these tropical islands are full of snakes, and—”

"Oh, you and your snakes!” On which word she flounced away through the grove, spurning sand and dry-kye with her bare pink heels.

For a moment Brandon glowered after her, feeling himself vastly outraged. Didn’t she violate his every idea of what a girl should do in a crisis like this? Any rational female would be scared, repine, appeal for help, take on, instead of leaping to it as to a picnic. But this one! The problem stumped him. So he only scratched a puzzled ahead, and with another "Humph!” addressed himself to the inventory.

"Item,” said he, squatting down beside the things shaken out of the bag, "one can of coffee. Item, one tin box of hard-bread. Item, one pound of tea. Item, one carton of cigarettes— a brand I particularly loathe. Item, six cans of corned-beef. I detest corned-beef. Item, six boxes of safety-matches. Item— no more items. That’s all there is. Sweet hell, what a layout for three people! What liberality on the part of damned pirates that have just eloped with a two-million dollar yacht! Of all the lousy—”

"You crabbing again?” murmured the millionaire, half-opening one eye. "For heaven’s sake, Brandon, if you must crab, don’t do it around here. Or else make it real, and bring back some honest-to-goodness crabs for dinner. I want to snooze, so shut up or get out!”

"Well, I must say—”

"All right, but say it somewhere else.”

Enraged, Brandon glared at the banker. But there was obviously nothing he could do. Very tight-jawed, he turned and strode away out of the grove. The need for action was strong upon him. If, in that  moment, he had met two or three—or even more— of the Manzanillians, it would have been just too bad for those high-minded patriots.

Which way, now? No sense in retracing his steps along the beach. Nor would he turn west, in the direction the girl had taken. Not for a billion would he have given her even the vaguest impression that he wanted to see her again, now or ever.

The only way remaining seemed to be north, across the island. Brandon therefore struck toward the other shore. He moved with all due caution. The island looked far from dangerous, being just the usual combination of sand-dunes, palms, palmettos, sea-grapes and suchlike. But then, you never can tell. At what moment might he not run across a diamond-back, a cotton-mouth, a coral-snake?

He paused, and with his pocket-knife cut a stout club from a red-barked gumba-limba tree. Emboldened by this weapon, he pressed on, estimating contours and distances. Just what he expected to find, he couldn’t have told. But his urge for activity was feverish, and exploring was its only outlet. Why, damn old Everington, anyhow! And as for that girl—!

Exploring proved far more agreeable. Venomously vicious rompe-ropa bushes caught and tore his flannels with their sharp, hooked horns; inflicted a few nasty scratches, too. Gnats and mosquitoes became formidable. And presently a mangrove-swamp barred the way. Brandon turned westward round the end of this, then north again; and presently emerged on another beach in no wise different from the one he had recently left.

"Devil of a small place to be cooped up on, with—with a couple of nuts like them!” he growled, staring at the warm-creaming surfs that broke far up the shining sands. No reef on this side of the island broke the full sweep of ocean. "I don’t know how long this confounded key is, of course, but anyhow it’s not much more than a mile wide. Mere dot in the Caribbean. Here we are on this wart of a place, with hardly a week’s supplies. And that girl likes it. And so does her bald-headed old idiot of a father! Of all the—”

"Coooo-eee! Cooooo-eeeeee!”

Distant, but clear, a hail interrupted his bitter monologue. He recognized it as a feminine voice.

"Well, what the merry hell does she want now?”

For a moment he was minded to ignore her call; let her cooo-ee her head off, and pretend not to hear her. But after all, one might have to live indefinitely with these people, and a modus vivendi would have to be reached. So he decided he’d have to answer. Filling his capacious lungs, he vigorously shouted:

"Oh-ay Oh-ayyyyyyy!”

Then he immediately started crashing back through the undergrowth, toward the quarter whence Diana’s hail had come.

As he pressed onward, a certain faint anxiety insisted on making itself felt. True, the hail hadn’t sounded like one of distress, but you never can tell.

Part way across the island again, Brandon stopped and once more shouted through cupped hands. Almost at once he heard another cooo-eeee, quite close at hand

"Miss Everington?” he cried.

"Yes! Great news!” her answer echoed. "What news?”

"Come here—I’ll tell you!”

The invitation spurred him. He began to jog-trot through the jungle, sweating and slapping bugs, but no longer thinking about snakes. A bit winded, he stopped to call once more:

"Where are you?”

"Right here, Mr. Brandon!”

And as he once more started onward, almost at once he saw her through the jungle— trim and tidy in close-fitting thin sweater, white yachting-trousers. "Hello, there! What’s the big discovery?”

"Oh, Mr. Brandon, how exciting!”

"What’s exciting?”

"This island," she exclaimed, as they met under a gnarly-rooted banyan. "It’s inhabited.”

"It’s—?”

"Somebody lives here! Smoke— I’ve seen smoke, off to westward.”

"Smoke? How—what—?”

“Way down past a point, there.” She sketched the direction with a wave of her hand, not now free from scratches. "I took a long walk down the beach. Lots of bays and coves. About a mile or two down there, I rounded a point. Saw a smoke, like a campfire or something. In a palm-grove. It wouldn’t be Caribs, would it? Cannibals, or something?”

"Well, it would probably be something, all right. But hardly Caribs or cannibals. They quit anthropophagizing round here several hundred years ago. However, your news is sufficiently big. It may bring on various complications.”

“How thrilling! What complications?”

"Well, anything’s liable to happen, places like this. What’s your father say?”

"Father? Oh, I haven’t told him, yet. He was having such a wonderful sleep. I haven’t seen father so happy in years. No, I let father sleep, and hurried right after you.”

"How’d you know which direction I’d gone?”

"Well, I’ve got eyes, haven’t I?” She certainly had, and snapping black ones, too. "You left a trail like an excited elephant. And now—?”

"Now, I guess we’ve got to do some scouting. See what’s what. Come along. Miss Everington, let’s get going.”

4: Jorrocks of Chetwynd-Scraggs

BACK at the grove, they found Henry B. Everington still profoundly wrapped in the arms of Morpheus, despite the flies and mosquitoes now making whoopee with him. His snores gently wafted on the sultry breeze. Henry B. looked strikingly unlike a multimillionaire, a tremendous power in the world of high finance. Barefoot and carefree as he had not been in many a long, weary year, he presented a picture of almost complete happiness.

"It’s a shame to wake him up,” said Diana, with a look of fond affection. "Doesn’t he look like a nice pink old cherub, or something? But still, it we disturb him, he’s liable to resent it, and bite our heads off.”

"Well, there’ll be some cannibalism, anyhow, for you. And as I seem to have rather lost my head already, it wouldn’t be much loss to me. So go to it. Your funeral, if any.”

Diana knelt beside her parent, shook him by the shoulder.

"Father! Wake up—snap out of it— father!”

"Huh? Uh—holy suffering sharks!— what’s up, now?”

"Listen, father, this island is inhabited. We’re going to find out who by.”

"Inhabited, is it?” the financier gurgled, sitting up in the hot sand, rubbing his eyes and blinking. "Damn the luck! Just when I was getting the best snooze I’ve had in years. Why the merry hell couldn’t you let me—?”

"There now, father, don’t swear! This is more important than sleeping. There’s somebody else already on this desert island, and we’re going to find out who they are.”

"But why? Let ’em be here, for all we care. They live on their end of the island. We live, our end. Island’s big enough for two settlements. Why not?”

"Don’t be absurd, father. Get up, now, and let’s be on our way.”

Half an hour from then, hot and sweating and somewhat footsore, the castaways—bearing their suitcases, water-cask and bag of grub— halted in a sea-grape thicket just round a point from which was plainly visible the smoke of the mysterious inhabitant.

Cautiously peering in silence, they stood watching for some sign of life. But save for a solitary and most melancholy-appearing pelican sitting on a boat anchored close in-shore, no such sign was visible. None, that is, except that one filament of smoke rising beyond a noble stand of coconut-palms which crowded almost to the surf.

"Hell of a thing to happen!" growled the millionaire, as he watched this smoke drift on the gentle morning breeze, thin out and vanish back over the island. Save for that slowly-dissipated thread, nothing seemed to speak of humankind, within a thousand miles. "It sure is one hell of a thing!” And Everington scratched various bug-bites. "First chance I’ve had in all my life to actually rest, and now here we’ve got neighbors. This island’s getting too damned crowded. We’ve got to move to another one.”

"Don’t be absurd, father,” Diana commanded. "Come along, let’s see what’s what!”

"Sorry we’ve got no guns,” said Brandon, as they trudged along the beach, with their burdens that under the ever hotter sun kept growing more and more oppressive.

"Guns, guns?” the banker demanded. "What the devil we need guns for?” And he squinted under bushy white brows.

"Well, you never can tell. A gun’s a pretty good argument— even an unloaded one, like the one I held up your courageous second mate with.”

"What say? Unloaded? You don’t mean to tell me—”

"Sure I do. I wasn’t taking any chances on just accidentally pulling a trigger and having murder on my hands. An empty gun did the trick, all right. But here— well, no telling. Suppose this settlement, here, is a bunch of drug-smugglers, alien-importers—”

"Oh, you don’t suppose they might really be?” the girl exclaimed, delightedly. "I’ve never met any criminals. That is, not socially. Real, savage ones, ruffians and cutthroats!”

"Holy crucified catfish!" groaned the magnate. "Will you cut out those confounded thrills? Neighbors of any kind are calamity enough, without making ’em into murderers!”

And silence fell again, as cautiously the trio of castaways plowed along.

Heavy was the going, and torturesome the insect life. But steadily the marooned party kept going. Now the palm-grove was very near, still revealing no sign
of human life except the smoke. But all at once the explorers heard a sound of furious, excited barking; and out of the grove dashed a small black and white creature that, since Nature probably intended it for a dog, could be called such.

This critter, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, dashed at them like Satan seeking what it might devour; but instantly, when Brandon dropped his water-cask and made a show of picking up a junk of coral, it turned. Tail between legs, and uttering the shrillest of ki-yi-yi’s, at top speed it executed a strategic retreat into the palms.

As it re-entered this sanctuary, something else moved there under the trees; something that took form as a human figure. This figure grew plainer. It issued out into the sunlight, out upon the sand. It halted, and with a hand shielding its eyes, stood peering. Peering through— of all imaginable things— through a monocle.

At sight of this figure, now fully revealed, "Well, I will be damned!” ejaculated the millionaire. And well he might.

For on the barren beach of an islet in far Caribbean seas, no more astonishing figure had ever been discerned.

Tall and thin to the point of emaciation, with a scraggle of unkempt beard and with that gleaming glass in its right eye, this figure would have been quite astonishing enough, even without the amazing garb that clad it. For such things simply couldn’t be. And yet, this was —the man there confronting them, though barefoot, was clad in a dress-suit.

Yes, wrinkled and baggy and green with wear though the suit was, shirtless though it was— its waistcoat revealing only bare, prominent ribs under a sun-baked and tight-drawn skin— none the less, the islander's garb was an indubitable dress-suit. Trousers, waistcoat and all, full evening-dress, quite complete except for the fact that the left- hand coat-tail was torn short off.

"My holy grandpa!” exclaimed Brandon, blinking incredulous eyes. "D’you see what I see, Everington? A beachcomber in glad rags?”

"Precisely that,” the financier replied. "And if I hadn’t been without a drink for more than twelve hours, I’d swear blind I had the D.T.’s, and then some.”

Dropping his burden, he advanced; and with him went Brandon. Diana followed close. All three of them approached the monocled, peering figure.

"Hello, there?” the banker hailed.

"Oh yes, sir?” answered the glad-ragged one. "May I— ah— awsk who you people are, and what you’re doin’ ’ere?”

"And may I ask who you are?” Brandon queried. "We’re castaways. How about you?”

"Ditto, sir. The very syme, I much regret to state!” The beachcomber’s accent was English, Cockney of the most pronounced type. "Permit me to ’ave the honor of awskin’ your nymes?”

Everington gave his, and his daughter’s — Diana meanwhile gazing enraptured at this amazing person. Brandon added his own entitlement.

"Delighted, I’m sure,” murmured the glad-ragged one. "My nyme is Jorrocks; H’andrew H’albert Jorrocks, from H’england.”

"Oh, you’re English, are you?” the financier queried. "I’d never have suspected it, in the world. But how the deuce did you ever manage to land on this godforsaken island?”

"Ah, wot a story that mykes!” the Englishman returned, his long, horselike and melancholy face assuming an even more dejected expression. Length seemed to be his distinguishing characteristic— long nose, long pale lips that twitched like an equine’s, long hands and feet. "Wot a come-down in the world! H’out of the fryin’-pan h’into the fire. Till disaster h’overtook me, I was butler to ’Is Ludship, Sir Percival Sutdiffe-Sutcliff, of Chetwynd-Scraggs Towers, sir. But circumstances— ah— beyond my control, brought me ’ere. And permit me to h’inquire ’ow you arrived?”

"Marooned,” said Brandon.

"Forcibly put ashore by a gang of ruffians that seized my yacht and dumped us here,” Everington added, "for reasons that I needn’t go into.”

"My word! So that was the yacht I saw, eh, wot? I ’ad such ’opes it might rescue me! ’Opes it might see my smoke! But no, off it buzzed, p’yin’ me no h’attention at all, and—”

"Why didn’t you run up the beach and yell?” Brandon queried. "You might have attracted attention before the yacht actually left.”

"Oh, no, sir, re-ally now, I couldn’t do that, you know!” exclaimed the ex-butler of Sir Percival Sutcliffe-Sutcliff, looking greatly shocked. "Not run and yell—oh, really, no, sir!”

"Of course he couldn’t,” Diana murmured. "Not a man who’s occupied the position in life that he has! Been here long?”

"Twelve months and three days, miss. I’ve kept a very h’accurate record of the time, by notches on a palm-tree.”

"And no ship or boat or anything has come?”

"None, miss. This h’island seems to be h’out of sight, h’out of mind, most h’unfortunately. Nobody comes ’ere in donkey's years, miss. Practically never, as you might say. Once you’re ’ere, you jolly well remain. Eh, wot?”

This cheerful bit of news brought a moment’s silence, broken by the banker: "But, man, you’ve got a boat! Why couldn’t anybody get away in that? Why haven’t you got away, long ago?”

“With only oars? And these ’ere seas subjeck to the most devastating ’urricanes, sir? Oh, no! The risk, sir— oh re-ally, now! A bird in the ’and is worth two in the bush, sir. Even a h’island like this is better than venturin’ out to sea in just a yacht’s lifeboat, sir.”

"Yacht’s lifeboat? You mean—?”

"A boat from ’Is Ludship’s yacht Golconda, sir. Which was lost in these parts, during the ’urricane of a year ago, with all ’ands except me.”

"The Golconda!” exclaimed Brandon. "I remember reading about her having disappeared. So you’re the only survivor?"

"As far as I know, yes, sir,” Jorrocks affirmed with some pride. Even to be a survivor of Sir Percival was doubtless a high honor. "Just ’ow I happen to 'ave been saved, I can ’ardly say. The h’events of that storm are rawther confused in my mind. But after great suffering I came ashore on this ruddy h’island. And ’ere I’ve been ever since, livin’ Gawd knows ’ow.”

"All alone?” asked Diana, quite breathless with delight.

"All alone, miss. That is, h'except for Julius Caesar and Napoleon.”

"Except for—?” the financier demanded, his eyes narrowing.

"Yes, sir. Julius Caesar, a stray dog I found ’ere, probably left by some chance sponge-fishermen, ’Eaven knows when. A living skeleton, practically dead of starvation, when I found ’im. And Napoleon, a pelican. A tame pelican, as attached ’imself to me. Very tame, now. In fact, quite too much so. My word, ’ow that pelican eats!"

"And you have to feed it?”

"Oh yes, sir. Both Napoleon and Julius Caesar ’ave become h’entirely dependent on me."

"But what do you give ’em?” Brandon queried.

"Oh, I manage to provide, sir. Where there’s a will there’s a w’y. Slim pickin’s, at times, but we manage. It's been a 'ard life, and that, though. Rawther limited cuisine and all, and a bit lonely too, for a man that’s h’always been used to good living and lots of society— the best. And then too, my not ’aving any shoes or shirt —I ’opes you’ll pardon my apparel. It's just wot I managed to lay ’ands on when I was waked up by the h’alarm that the yacht was sinkin’. The h’electric lights wouldn’t work, so I just ’ustled into wot I could find in the dark. And even then, jumping overboard into the lifeboat, I caught one coat-tyle on something and tore it completely h’off. But luckily I ’ad my glawses on.”

"Glasses?” asked the millionaire. "You mean, your monocle?”

"Quite so, sir,” nodded Jorrocks. “Though it’s not a monocle, sir, re-ally. I wore spectacles, but they got broken in the ’urricane. H’all I saved was one lens. I’ve ’ad to wear it as a monocle, sir. So nearsighted as to be practically blind without it. And I used it to myke a fire on the h’island, which I’ve never h’allowed to go out, since. My resources ’ave been h’extremely limited, sir. I ’aven’t even been able to shave.”

"No, I suppose not,” the banker assented, "though personally, I should think omitting to shave would be something of a luxury. Well, we’re up against it, too. You’ve got a house, or something, in the grove here?”

"Oh, not a proper ’ouse, sir, but at least a shelter. ’Arf a loaf is better than none, though. You’ll all be welcome to such as I ’ave. But— pardon the liberty— could you spare me a cigarette, sir?”

"I’ll say!” Brandon exclaimed, giving Jorrocks a cigarette and a box of matches.

The ex-butler’s hand trembled with eagerness, as he lighted up. Something faintly resembling a smile adorned his pale, equine countenance, as he inhaled deeply. He removed his monocle, so that he might close both eyes, the better to savor this blessed luxury.

"Forward march, to the house!” said Everington, picking up his share of the freight. The others did as much. Jorrocks raised a protesting hand.

"Oh, no, re-ally now, you mustn’t!” he said, almost in horror. "I’ll fetch in h’all the luggage!”

"Very well, Jorrocks,” smiled the millionaire. But Brandon still hung on to his water-cask.

"I can manage this, all right,” he said.

"Oh no, sir. Not necessary at all, sir. Why carry coals to Newcastle, eh? I 'ave a most h’excellent spring of water, sir.

"All right, that’s different.” And Brandon dropped his cask into the sand. "I suppose the barrel will be good for something, though?”

"Quite so, sir. But for the present we can leave it ’ere. And now, if you will do me the honor to h’enter my 'umble h’abode?”

5: Luncheon Is Served

SLITHERING barefoot through the dry coral sand, with the single coat-tail of his wrinkled, shrunken and greenish-faded dress-suit swaying, Jorrocks the Magnificent led them into the palm-grove. Despite his long hair and beard, an air of real distinction still clung about him.

Through the grove they all trudged, the castaways sensing a vast relief at being able to get out of the battering sun, at now once more approaching a human habitation— of sorts. The grove seemed extensive, densely covering perhaps a quarter-mile of beach and hinterland, that here formed a low knoll. Very many of the trees were heavily-laden with clusters of nuts, quantities of which lay on the sand, among dead fronds and dry-kye.

"Not a chance to starve here, anyhow,” judged Everington. "I once read in a story where there were a hundred and eighty-two ways to serve coconuts. There’s some statistics for you, Brandon!”

"How wonderful!” Diana exclaimed. "Now I can try some of my domestic science course, can’t I?"

"Yeah,” assented Brandon. "Maybe you can learn how to sauté iguanas, too, and rissoler rattlesnakes, or what have you.”

"Well, I can do that, too,” she replied with spirit, "if it comes to a pinch. You furnish the reptiles, and I’ll do the—”

"Oh no, miss,” put in Jorrocks, scandalized. "I couldn’t permit it, re-ally now. I shall attend to all that!”

“By the way, Jorrocks,” the millionaire asked, "you don’t happen to know the name of this island, do you?”

"No, sir, I re-ally don’t, sir. I didn’t know it ’ad a name, and that.”

"Well, it has. We’ve just given it one. Maroon Key. How d’you like it?”

"Capital, sir. Jolly well fits it, my word. Maroon Key? H’excellent! Now, sir, right this w’y, please.”

And swinging somewhat more to the right, he led them toward his humble demesne.

Smoke from Jorrocks’ fire now began to drift through the grove, with long sun-ribbons slanting down blue across it through the closely-interwoven palm-leaves. The scent of fire was welcome, seemed to connote security and peace. Presently the castaways began to make out the dim outlines of something like a house— a thing of shreds and patches, indeed, mostly dry coco-leaf thatch, but at all events a shelter.

As the marooned party drew near, this shelter grew clearer in detail. They saw it had been built by lashing horizontally a couple of palm logs between four trees, setting up huge fronds for walls— all interwoven and tied with palm cords— and heaping other fronds into a thick roof. Any tenth-rate savage would have scorned so primitive a dwelling, but for a white man it was fair-to-middling.

No window was visible; nothing but a door, about twenty feet in front of which was burning a camp-fire of driftwood. Nearby lay a considerable woodpile, crooked old sticks, bits of wreck-timbers, and debris. The newcomers also saw some strings of fish hanging to smoke, on a pole over the fire; plenty of coconuts in a heap; three crawfish tucked up on a palm; a few scooped-out coconut-shells cut in half for dishes; and, leaning against the shack, a spear made of a long, slim pole with a double prong of iron. Julius Caesar, now cringing and apologetic, stood by the hut. The wagging tail was ready, at any signal of hostility, to be tucked between the legs, in flight.

"Well, ’ere we are,” announced Jorrocks, putting down the suitcases. " ’Ome, sweet ’ome.”

"Not bad, at all,” the millionaire approved.

"Oh, thank you, sir. ’Chetwynd-Scraggs’ I calls it, sir, after ’Is Ludship’s h’ancestral ’all. Not much to look at, perhaps, but such as it is, you’re welcome to myke it your ’abitation as long as you wish.”

Sensing a very real relief, the castaways surveyed Chetwynd-Scraggs, that might be their dwelling for heaven knew how long. Diana was emphatic in voicing her approval:

"I think it’s just too wonderful! ’Neath the shade of the sheltering palm! How glorious!”

"Made it all yourself, of course?" asked Brandon.

"Oh, certainly, sir!”

"Very ingenious, I must say.”

"And with the most limited equipment, sir," Jorrocks added, his pride more than pardonable. "Nothink, in fact, but a pocket-knife. I’ve ’ad to myke no end of rope, sir, out of palm-fiber. Not like Robinson Crusoe, with a ’ole shipload of tools and provisions, or like the stories in the cinema, where they always ’ave all they need, when they’re cast ashore. No indeed. My word, no!”

Jorrocks shook his hirsute head and smoothed down his tangle of beard, not even which could quite deprive him of his butleresque air.

"You’ve had nothing but your knife?” asked Brandon.

"That’s h’all, sir. And now it’s worn down to ’ardly more than a splinter, sir, wot with sharpening it so much on a slab of coral. You can do lots with coral, when you jolly well ’ave to, and with driftwood, and nails you get out of it by burnin’. That there fish-spear, for h’instance— myde of nails drove h’into a stick, and then ground down pointed.”

"You spear your fish, do you?” the financier queried.

"Yes, sir. With my boat h’out there on the reef, I can alw’ys get plenty of fish and lobsters. No need to myke ’ooks and lines. Spearing is easier. The worst ’ardship is h’openin’ coconuts with a pocket-knife. Did either of you gentlemen ever try to h’open a coconut with a pocket-knife?”

"I never did,” the banker admitted.

"Nor I,” said Brandon. “They look tough, all right.”

"Tough isn’t the word for it! The ’usks would jolly well drive you crazy. But necessity knows no law. 'Owever, step right in and myke yourselves at ’ome.”

Inwardly, Chetwynd-Scraggs was a bit dark, not to say stifling, and far from overburdened with furniture. Its only appointments seemed to be a log that might pass as a table, another smaller log serving as a chair, some hanks of coco-fiber rope, a few shell dippers, a battered Standard Oil tin of water, and—in the far corner— a thick pile of finely-shredded palm-leaves.

"And a capital bed those leaves myke, too,” explained the ex-butler, "when you tyke out all the midriffs. It’s h’astonishing wot a number of things you can myke out of coconut— ’ouses, thatch, cordage, fuel, beds, dishes, wot-not.”

"Especially what-not, that most useful of articles,” Brandon affirmed. The girl clapped slim brown hands, with enthusiasm.

"Splendid! Just like a story! If there were only cannibals on this island, it’d be—ow!— what’s that —?”

She wheeled sharply round, jumped as a sharp, pecking blow descended on one of her bare ankles. Wide-eyed she stared at a huge, ungainly bird with snapping beak, that seemed to regard her as something edible.

"Out! Out of ’ere!” angrily cried Jorrocks, as he shooed the pelican back through the door. Clumsily waddling, flapping wide wings, it lolloped off. "Beg pardon, miss. That’s h’only Napoleon. Proper tame ’e is, too, eh wot? And lazy? My word! ’E won’t even fish for ’imself, now. I ’ave to provide for ’im, as well as for Julius Caesar.”

"Yes,” drily remarked Brandon. "So you’ve said.”

"A job it is, too, sir. But they’re company, h’especially Napoleon. You never know, till you’ve tried, ’ow much real companionship there is in a pelican— nor ’ow much fish they’ll eat. And speaking of that, may I h’ask if you’re ’ungry? If so, I’ll be getting luncheon. And in the meantime, myke yourselves perfectly at ’ome!”

"Thanks, we will,” the financier nodded, while Brandon commenced unpacking the provisions. Ecstatically Jorrocks watched him, as he laid on the log-table the all too scanty supplies. The ex-butler’s professional instincts seemed powerfully aroused, a fact that Everington’s shrewd eye in no wise overlooked.

"You’re unemployed, I take it?” the banker asked.

"Oh yes, sir. Decidedly so, sir.”

"Would you consider accepting a position with me?”

"Position, sir? In wot capacity, may I h’ask?”

"Butler, of course.”

"Delighted, sir!”

"At what wages? Two hundred dollars a month do you?”

"By all means, sir. It’s more than liberal, h’under the circumstances.”

"All right, Jorrocks, you’re on.” And taking a fat wallet from the inside pocket of his white flannel coat, Everington counted out and passed over two hundred bucks. "Mind now, don’t go wasting it. Save all you can.”

"I will, indeed, sir. A penny saved, sir, is a penny h’earned, eh wot?”

"Correct. Now then, any prospects of lunch?”

"Oh yes, sir, h’immediately,” promised the beatified butler, stowing his wages in a pocket of his dress-suit. "I’ll fetch some fresh water, and begin preparations at once.”

"No, you just open this can of coffee, and the one of hard-bread,” said Brandon, "and I’ll get the water. Where’s your spring?”

"Yonder, in the grove, sir,” Jorrocks pointed. "But really, sir, I couldn’t permit you to fetch water. It isn’t done, you know. Permit me!”

And seizing the Standard Oil tin, he hastily departed on his first errand for his new employers.

"Father!” protested Diana, when Jorrocks was safely out of earshot. "What in the world is your idea of trying to degrade that man? Here we are, all four of us, now on an absolute level, and it’s his island, to begin with, and his grove and house and everything, and yet you’re making a menial out of him. How absurd!”

"Making a menial of him?” laughed the magnate. "Not at all, my dear. Just permitting him to function in the only possible way he’d understand at all. Probably wouldn’t even let us live here at Chetwynd-Scraggs, on any other terms. I’m establishing the only feasible modus vivendi, don’t you see?”

"No, I don’t!”

“Well, anyhow, you let me handle him. And no butting in, either with any of your democratic ideas, or asking him to eat with us, or—”

"Father, you’re perfectly horrible. This isn’t England—”

"No, but it’s an island, and— shhhh!” warned the banker. "Here he comes, back again. Remember, you’re now the mistress of Chetwynd-Scraggs, with a butler and all! Pipe down, till lunch. After that, you’ll feel better.”

"Oh, you!’’ she exclaimed. Peeved, she flounced out of Chetwynd-Scraggs and down through the grove to the water’s edge, there with hands in pockets to peer out over the vast, deserted plain of glorious and lustrous blue.

"Luncheon is served!”

The formal announcement came none too soon. Jorrocks, in his one-tailed dress-suit and with his sunburned chest doing duty as a shirt, stood rigidly at attention near the dining-table—which was out on the sand; a table composed of several freshly- cut palm-fronds, laid under the gracefully-curving trees. This table the magnate surveyed with highest satisfaction.

"Splendid!” he approved. "I've sat at no end of banquets, but never one like this. It couldn’t be finer, Jorrocks. You’re a positive genius, to get up a meal like this— broiled mullet and crawfish, hard-bread, coffee, coconut-meat—splendid! Well now, here goes!”

Radiating joy, spurred on by an appetite such as he hadn’t felt in years, Everington sat down— now again barefoot— on the sand. Cross-legged he took his place. The other two imitated him.

"Shoo, there! Shoo!” exclaimed Jorrocks.

“What?” the banker demanded, already making long arms for the grub; hardly waiting for Jorrocks to serve. "You'referring to my feet?”

"Oh no, sir, I was just keeping Julius Caesar away from the table.” And coincidentally he delivered a kick at Napoleon.

"Some pelican!” exclaimed Brandon, with a hunk of mullet in one hand, a piece of hardtack in the other. "Always trying to put in his bill. Eh, Jorrocks?”

" 'Is bill, sir? Ha-ha-ha! Capital, my word! I cawn’t often see H’American jokes, sir, but I get that one, all right. You mean, like a doctor, sir? Jolly good, indeed!”

"Yes, like a doctor or,” with a meaning glance at the financier, "like a statistician that has three million coming to him.

"Three million fiddlesticks!” exclaimed Everington, his mouth already full. "Doctors and bills! Don’t talk about ’em, Brandon. I’ve paid doctors thousands and thousands, to give me an appetite, but I never got one like this.” He licked fishy fingers, and with a sigh of sheer contentment leaned back against the bole of a slanting palm. "Young man,” and he fixed a benevolent eye on Brandon, "ah, what a debt of gratitude I owe you!”

"Glad you feel that way about it, Everington. It’s not the only debt, as I’ve just now intimated.”

"Maybe not, maybe not,” almost conceded the banker.

"Three million coming, you know. Or rather, 3,023,972.46.”

"Not now, Brandon. Deduct two, for the yacht. That leaves only one, or a little better.”

"That’s a contract?”

"Now, now, no business at meals!” cut in Diana, looking extraordinarily fetching in her yachting-trousers, tight sweater snd sandals, with her bright, black, close-bobbed curls and her vivacious eyes. "Oh, you men! Can’t you ever forget business— and just live?”

"Living’s a very expensive business,” remarked Brandon.

"Not here! And business is out!”

Lunch continued, with Napoleon and Julius Caesar in the offing, Jorrocks attentive to every want, and the castaways ever more lulled by the warmth, charm and beauty of their strange situation— the interweaving sun-shafts through the palms, murmur of crystal wavelets on silver sands, boom of high-charging surfs breaking feather-white along the off-shore reef.

6: Eden and a Menace

AFTERNOON passed agreeably, in making arrangements for housing all hands. Everybody set about bringing in fallen palm-fronds, which lay profusely all about the grove. With these they built an inner room in one end of Chetwynd-Scraggs, for the girl, who was to share the main quarters with her father. They also shredded up a great quantity of palm-fiber, for her bed.

This done, they constructed another hut, which Everington named "Hudson Gables,” after his country-place near Cornwall, N. Y. The Gables likewise consisted of two rooms, for Jorrocks and Brandon, furnished with palm-leaf beds. In addition, a sort of communal lean-to was provided to serve as storehouse, kitchen and eating-place in case of rain.

"Though to tell the truth,” Jorrocks explained, "it’s rare indeed, the rain is ’ere. In the ’ole time I’ve been on this h’island, it’s ’ardly rained six times. A h’ideal climate, if it wasn’t for the danger of ’urricanes.”

Busily they all worked, and by sunset the huts were pretty well finished.

Everybody fell to with a will, and enjoyed it— especially the financier, who toiled and sweated with delight. When the huts were finished, Diana and her father unpacked their luggage— or rather, Diana unpacked hers, while Jorrocks insisted on doing it for the millionaire. As for Brandon, he had none to unpack. His departure from the yacht, as sudden as it had been unexpected, had been in just the clothes he wore; a circumstance that now for the first time he began to realize.

"But never mind,” the financier consoled him, as he watched Jorrocks unfolding and hanging up his things, on stubs of palm-fronds that had been left projecting for hooks. "Guess I can fit you out— barring the slight discrepancy in size between you and me. Here’s an extra razor, and a new tooth-brush. I can get along with my old one. Maybe I won’t need any, for damned if I’ll wear teeth on this island! And really, as for clothes, it’ll be mighty few we’ll need. We’ll get by, O. K. Glad I’ve got a couple o’ bathing-suits. When my valet packed, he certainly outfitted me as if he thought I’d be gone, from now on, Jorrocks!”

”Yes, sir?”

"Here’s a shirt, for you.”

"Oh thank you, sir. I’m sure I’ll feel much more at h’ease, sir, serving you with a shirt on.”

"All right, keep it on, whatever happens.”

"I’ll try, sir.”

"Atta Jorrocks! Attaboy! Give me those pipes and that can of tobacco.”

" ’Ere you are, sir.”

"Oh, fine!” the millionaire exulted. "Now we are all set. Here, Brandon— have a pipe?”

"Baby! What luck, eh?” Eagerly he accepted a ripe old briar. "Say, I’d rather
have this, than—”

"Three million?”

“Cut out business, can’t you?”

EVENING, with the sun spectacularly making gold and crimson magic as it sank, found the castaways weary but content, and more than ready for a swim.

"Sharks round here, Jorrocks?” queried Everington. "Ever see any?”

"Well, sir, the truth compels me to say as ’ow I ’ave, sir. Not many, but now or then a blighter pops along. I really would h’advise considerable caution. Better be safe than sorry, sir, you know. Look before you leap, and—”

"Nonsense!” exclaimed the girl. "Who’s afraid?”

Turning, she departed briskly into Chetwynd-Scraggs.

"Might’s well try to stop a volcano from erupting, as undertake to head her off,” remarked the millionaire. "God help the man she marries!”

"Amen to that!” from Brandon.

"Well, let’s be on our way. Afraid my bathing-suit,’ll wrap round you twice, but it’s the best we can do.”

"Right. It won’t be long before yours’ll wrap round you twice, too, on this diet.”

"A consummation devoutly to be wished,” murmured Everington. "I've been trying to get rid of this bay-window, for years, and all in vain. Now maybe I’m really going to, eh? Thanks to you!”

"You’re welcome, I’m sure. That’ll be something more you owe me!”

The plunge of the castaways into the surf was delicious. Diana swam like a heathen goddess. The eyes of Brandon, bilioused though they were by the defeat of his plan for collecting three million, and by this marooning he had so unexpectedly undergone, could not resist noting the girl’s stream-lined perfections. Indeed, Diana would have stirred a heart even more addicted to statistics than Brandon’s.

“Tag, you’re it!” she cried, and smote him on the shoulder, then struck out for the reef. No slouch of a swimmer though he was, he presently discovered himself hopelessly outclassed. Far behind, he labored in vain to overtake her. She laughed at him, mocking him with a flirt and toss of the trim-ringleted head.

"Come on, Tired Business Man! Where’s your steam?”

Then, turning, she slid toward him with a swift crawl, spray flying, mermaid body splitting the waves. Brandon knew that this was one of the moments to mark with a white stone, as they swam back toward the beach, where Everington was paddling about. He sensed a bit of anticlimax, that no shark had put in an appearance. No tropical island experience, he felt, was quite complete without at least one shark and one heroic rescue. But after all, perhaps it was just as well. Exactly how to tackle a man-eater, Brandon didn’t know, and he wasn’t particularly anxious to experiment.

Out on the warm beach, lying at rest, they waited while Jorrocks revived the fire and did his culinary duties. Then, dressed again, they welcomed the announcement of that worthy:

"Dinner is served!"

And after dinner, with pipes and cigarettes around the camp-fire, while ruddy light shone on their faces, and through the palm-branches twinkled soft, ripe stars, they talked a while. But not for long. The solemn suspiration of the waves lulled them to sleep.

"Ho-hum!” yawned Brandon. "I’m going to hit the hay!”

"The palm-fiber, you mean,” laughed Diana.

"Me, too,” Everington added. "No insomnia-medicine for me, tonight. This is the life, by gad!”

Day followed day in that tropical Lotus-land "where it was always afternoon,” Jorrocks kept tabs, with his notches on the calendar-palm; but apart from this record, there was little to mark the passage of time.

It was spent— sometimes accompanied by Julius Caesar— in exploring Maroon Key, which Brandon reckoned as four miles long by about a mile wide and containing 2560 acres; in rowing out with the six-oared lifeboat to the reef, to spear fish and langostas; in now or then knocking down iguanas, which— over the shocked protests of Jorrocks— furnished welcome variations to the menu.

The castaways made themselves fish-spears; collected firewood, coconuts and sea-grapes which turned out to be excellent eating; gathered shellfish; hunted birds, but never got any. No snakes were discovered, but bird-life abounded—trogons, fly-catchers, hummingbirds, judías and palomitas with their fluting, bell-like call. Though they hurled innumerable clubs at birds they hit none; save one day by accident they stunned old Napoleon the pelican.

And thus time passed. They took to living in their bathing-suits; grew brown and hardy and hard-muscled, and slid insensibly into a life so different from their other, former existence that the true world seemed now but the vision of a dream, while Maroon Key became the only tangible reality.

As their supplies gave out, they learned to substitute other things— all save tobacco. The steady diminution of this caused some uneasiness; but for the present enough remained, so they let mañana take care of itself. Tomorrow—was it not another day? Not even the immense sensation they knew must have been occasioned by the disappearance of the yacht, of its owner and of Diana, could greatly stir them.

"Wonder where the Mangariva's gone, and what’s happened to her?” mused Everington, one day. "I’d give a heap, to know.”

"She hasn’t been found yet, that’s a cinch,” Brandon judged. "If she had, we’d have been rescued, P. D. Q.”

"Oh dear, I hope she isn’t found,” put in Diana. "Who wants to be rescued, from a Paradise like this?”

"The fact that she’s a Diesel yacht is all to the advantage of the Manzanillians,” Everington said. "She won’t have to put in at any civilized port for a long time, to refuel. We’re probably here for a regular siege of it. Maybe if the yacht is lost or wrecked anywhere, we’re here for keeps.”

"As if who cared?” laughed the girl, with a flash of white teeth. "Just to get away from bridge and polo and charity- balls and wass hast du —what a heavenly relief!”

"Relief is right,” chuckled the financier, now far trimmer of waist, less baggy- jowled and more dear-eyed than in twenty years; yes, thirty. "No more stock-market reports, panics, depressions, income-taxes, frozen assets, or anything. Nothing but just life! So what the merry hell do I care what happens? Or what the papers say? Up there in New York— swarms of people running round like ants. Let ’em run! What really burns me up,” he added more seriously, "is that we're burning up our nicotine, so fast.”

"Right,” agreed Brandon. "We’ve got to begin rationing the tobacco. Cut it down. Maybe mix it with coconut-fiber, or something.”

"Nothing doing!” the millionaire exclaimed. "I’ll keep on smoking mine straight till the bitter end. If it wasn't for that, I’d stay here forever, and that wouldn’t be half long enough.”

Time passed. Days of languid, golden sunshine were followed by magical nights when even Brandon vaguely wondered whether perhaps he hadn’t missed something— whether possibly there mightn’t be more in life than just statistics, columns of figures, charts and graphs. It looked as if there might be.

Time, and still more time. The castaways explored still farther. They began rowing to various offshore reefs and islets, where they secured an occasional sea-turtle which Jorrocks transmuted into soups and steaks. Turtle-eggs, dug up on lonely beaches, yielded omelettes of the best— if a certain fishy flavor were ignored. Almost every day the marooned party went vagabonding.

From all such excursions, Diana returned more sun-tanned, vital and exuberant than ever. The lipsticks, powders and other mysteries in her vanity-case were all forgotten.

"A devil of a fine job nature’s making of you!” Brandon more than once reflected, in intervals between his data-collectings or his other activities.

True to his professional instincts, Brandon catalogued and tabulated the resources of the Key, as well as drew a map of it. This map, carefully traced on the back of a letter, was adorned by place-names they agreed in conferring. Very deeply this work interested them, added to their sense of owning the island and being at home. Their settlement became "Grove City.”

Now or then, when they found nothing better to do, they discussed the possibility of making their escape in the lifeboat. But what with one objection or another, this project was always deferred. It’s one proposition to theorize about four persons putting to sea in a small boat; quite another, actually to do it, especially when not one of those four persons is a professional sailor. The boat’s small size deterred them. One day—

"She only about twenty feet long,” said Everington.

"Twenty feet, six and one-half inches, to be accurate,” Brandon put in. "I’ve measured her.”

"O. K. Even with that extra six and one- half inches, she’s no Queen. "And except for a bit of decking forward, she’s practically open. Rowing is slow work, too.”

"Why couldn’t we make some sort of mast, and weave a sail of palm-leaves, like they do in the movies?” asked Diana.

"Maybe we could,” her father assented. "But where are we at, now? And where would we steer for? And how about running into storms?”

"That’s a chance we’ve got to take, sooner or later,” judged Brandon, "or else probably stay here forever. We’ll get at it, some of these days. Tomorrow, maybe.”

"All right, tomorrow,” the financier agreed, rubbing his stubble of beard. "Tomorrow we’ll certainly look for a good, likely pole to make a mast of.”

But tomorrow always turned out to be the Spanish mañana, which some philosopher has discerningly called "the busiest day on the calendar."

Old Lady Fate, however, already had a few plans up her sleeve, regarding the departure from Eden.

For one fine day, that Jorrocks’ palm-tree notches showed to be the 17th of September, a certain nearly imperceptible change in the aspect of sea and sky gave vague warning that all might not be meteorologically well.

At first the dwellers on Maroon Key noted only a few streaks of filmy cirrus cloud in the northeast, faintly dimming the morning sun. By afternoon, when their luxurious siesta was over, these clouds had extended pretty much all over the sky.

Paying little heed to this, they went out langosta-spearing on the reef. After all, what did a few clouds amount to? Clouds came and went, didn’t they? What odds? The castaways ignored them.

By the time they got back ashore, though, the heavens had begun to look distinctly threatening.

"Kind of queer, isn’t it?” said Everington. "Think we’re in for a blow?”

"If we are,” laughed Diana, "I hope it won’t be the blow that almost kills father.”

Brandon, squinting aloft, grunted:

"Might be, at that. I don’t like the looks of this, one continental bit.” Bodingly he shook his red head. "I went through the last cyclone they had, down at Grand Cayman, and believe me—!”

"Crepe-hanging, again!” exclaimed the girl, with a tip-lit of her piquant chin. Brandon made no reply.

As night approached, signs of impending trouble could not be ignored. The clouds gradually thickened and the east wind freshened. Julius Caesar skulked into Chetwynd-Scraggs and refused to be coaxed out again. Napoleon grew wild and wary, declining to be caught or handled. Anxiety began to take possession of the islanders,

This increased as the cloud-veils thickened, rolling and piling up into heavy masses in the east—masses from which now or then low wisps of vapor would break loose and come scudding overhead with sudden, violent slatches of rain.

These squalls drove everybody into Chetwynd-Scraggs, its walls and thatch already whipping and rattling, even though well sheltered by the palm-grove. As boisterous evening fell, Jorrocks lighted a cheerful fire, and served dinner there. Before this meal was over, the rain-drive had become almost continuous, and Julius Caesar was quivering with panic.

"Not so hot,” judged Everington, lighting his pipe that now contained almost the last of the tobacco. "But I reckon it’ll all blow over by morning.”

"Something’ll blow over, all right,” Brandon assented, the fireglow ruddy on his face. "I only hope it won’t be the ocean, blowing over Maroon Key.”

Everington looked far from cheerful.

"Jorrocks?” said he.

"Yes, sir?”

"The hurricane you went through, when the yacht was lost— how did it look, to begin with? Anything like this?”

"I ’ardly like to say, sir.”

"You mean, it did look like this?”

"Well, sir—” And Jorrocks bogged down.

"Of course it did!” cut in Brandon. "And so did that Grand Cayman hurricane. Exactly. And the sea could easily break over this little sliver of an island.”

"I don’t believe it!” Diana still insisted.

"Well— not that I want to be an alarmist, but only to face the facts— the ocean busted right across Grand Cayman, at a place where it’s all of four miles wide. It salted all the wells, too. Besides the people the hurricane killed, directly, a lot more damn near died for lack of water, later on. If a proper, honest-to-goodness cyclone hits Maroon Key, we’re going to go good and thirsty, later on— in case we get through it, at all. Our one best bet will be simian.”

"Simian? What’s that?” asked the millionaire.

“Up a tree. And here’s hoping the tree doesn’t blow down, too, and go skyhooting off to sea!”

"You’re certainly the world’s best bet as a jolly little old pessimist,” the girl exclaimed, her voice struggling hard against the increasing whoops of the storm.

"Yeah— that comes from being cooped up on one small island with an optimist!”

And getting up, Brandon tramped out into the rain, down through the grove to the beach, where he stood a while peering off to sea in the rapidly thickening obscurity.

7: Hurricane

THERE presently the financier and the girl joined him, together with the faithful Jorrocks, alarmed but resolute. The prospect of going through another hurricane, and of being blown off the island he had already been blown on to, dismayed his order-loving soul. As for Julius Caesar however, he refused to leave the doubtful shelter of Chetwynd-Scraggs. And Napoleon had completely disappeared.

That trouble of the most serious was now impending, could no longer be denied. A horizonless black threat muffled all the sky, extinguishing the whole world save for a menacing line of vague green light, sinister and pale, off to westward. Ever more viciously now the surfs were booming, frothing over the reef.

"We’re going to catch it, all right!” Brandon affirmed. "Big waves can’t come in over the reef, but if the wind hauls round to the north, there’s nothing on that side to break ’em, and they may sweep right over!” He had to shout, though the others stood close, leaning against the gale and already drenched to the skin. "If our boat busts loose, it’ll be just too bad. We’ve got to haul her up!”

Landing the boat up on the beach proved a terrific job, even though all hands labored with a desperate will. The boat was far heavier than any of them suspected. Their only way of getting her ashore was to wait till waves boosted her, then haul, and wait for another lift. By dint of severe labor, there in the noisy dark, they got her pretty well out of water, and Brandon made her painter fast to a sturdy old palm.

"That’ll have to do,” he called out. "Now we’ll load some stuff aboard, just in case—”

"Stuff?” cried the financier. "What stuff?”

"Grub and water.”

"Why, you don’t expect we'll have to take to the boat, do you? If the island isn’t safe, how safe would a boat be?”

“Damnation! Don’t you savvy? It’s not a case of the boat being safe at all. If the island’s washed out, it’s our only hope, and we can’t stop to load her at the last minute, either. We’ll have to jump, to beat hell!”

"Right, sir,” agreed Jorrocks, who now by reason of having already gone through one cyclone was becoming a person of some importance. "Forwarned is forearmed, sir. I’ll load ’er, sir!”

And hastily he departed for the huts, plowing along head-down into the dark and gale and rain. He vanished in the grove where now the palms were thrashing savagely, and presently struggled back with the water-cask, which he dumped into the boat. Everybody returned to the huts, through that storm-tortured and ferocious battering of the incipient cyclone. Without delay they packed up all their food-supply in the two suitcases. Jorrocks helped Brandon stow these also, on board.

Nothing more now could be done except just await developments, for weal or woe. The orphans of the storm all gathered round their fire in Chetwynd-Scraggs, protecting it with their bodies as they huddled over it, striving desperately to keep this final gleam of comfort alive, wondering how long, how many eons and eternities it would be till morning— whether when morning came, they’d still be there to greet it.

From the reef a loud, continuous roar told of breaking combers, crashing garlands of brine driven by the ungovernable rage of the gale. Everything grew horribly unreal as in a nightmare, the only point of actuality being just that tortured fire-glow picking four human faces from the inky blanket of gloom.

By what might have been midnight, the hurricane had increased to insane ferocity and had begun to shift so that now— as Brandon had dreaded— it was commencing to smash from the northeast. Next it would haul into the north, raking the island on its reef-unprotected side. Suddenly, through the immense and howling blackness a crash sounded.

"There goes Hudson Gables, and a tree or two with it!” shouted the financier. "If this keeps up, it won’t be long now!”

"How exciting!” the girl exulted, her face by the fire-gleam flushed and eager.

Whoosh!

Suddenly they found themselves with no roof whatever above them. All the thatch of Chetwynd-Scraggs had vanished into the gullet of that shouting tempest. Bits of wall still stood, but over the castaways' heads now loomed only blind darkness. And driven on the roaring gale, water as from a battery of firehoses flooded in.

Almost instantly the fire was scattered in a crazy whirl of sparks, swiftly doused by the driving rain. The castaways labored desperately to rake live coals together and preserve the flame, but all in vain.

Everywhere fronds were flying, coconuts being hurled like cannonballs. To be struck by one might mean death. The grove was fast disintegrating; the whole world seemed perishing.

Suddenly— what was this? A rush and swirl of driven waters all about them! Waters that seethed, that surged!

Diana cried out, this time with panic. In the gross darkness, Brandon clutched and held her. He heard Jorrocks trying to articulate, "My word!” The banker shouted something— but what?

Palm-trunks were crashing down; eerie shrieks and moans whirling through that blind ferocity of darkness—whistlings and mad whoopings.

"Ocean—breaking over the island!” cried Brandon. "Out o’ here—we got to— clear out o’ here!”

Another gushing, tumbling welter of brine foamed in mad swirls about them. Brandon dragged the girl up, out of the wreckage of Chetwynd-Scraggs.

"Come on!” he yelled. "The boat!”

"Father!” sounded Diana’s rain-muffled  cry. "Where are you?”

"Here! You O. K.?"

"Yes—! Come along!”

"How deuced unpleasant!” from Jorrocks. "H’everythink’s gone on the loose, and that!”

Together, crawling and dragging themselves along, they fought down toward the surf now frothing, ravening up the drowning beach. Impossible to stand. For the most part they had to creep on hands and knees, through and around jack-straw tangles of fallen palms, feeling their way in velvet dark.

Jorrocks tried to whistle for Julius Caesar, but no whistle could come, in such a madness of hissing uproar. And even if it had, Julius Caesar could not have obeyed. Some roaring clutch of gale had spun him far, to whatsoever dog-heaven there may be.

With agonized, panting effort, the fugitives reached their boat. Off both to right and left, roaring waters boiled. The knoll was now completely isolated by seas, which momentarily with greater volume came spuming over.

Blindly working by just the sense of touch, choked and deafened, they found the boat no longer grounded, but afloat and bucking like a restive stallion, held by her painter only.

"Get in!” shouted Brandon. He boosted the girl, almost flung her into the boat. "Everington— where are you? Here— give us your hand!”

The financier half struggled and was half heaved in. He landed with a flop, in nearly a foot of rain-water and brine surging in the bottom.

"H’in you go, sir!” Brandon heard the faithful Jorrocks’ voice. "Are you there, sir?”

"Get in, Jorrocks! In with you!”

"H’after you, sir!”

"No, you get in, now. Stand by to heave the anchor, as soon as I cut the painter!”

“Right-o, sir!”

Into the tossing boat scrambled Jorrocks. Brandon groped his way to the palm round which the painter was knotted, and cut the tense rope. At once the boat began drifting offshore. Brandon had to run, wade, fight his way through seething tumbles of brine, in order to grip the gunwale. There he desperately clung.

“Gimme a hand, here, somebody!” Somebody caught him. That somebody was Diana. She dragged him up and over, as he struggled. Head-first he flopped, half-stunned, on to the bottom-grating. A dark figure— Jorrocks— swung the anchor, hurled it overside.

"Holy jumping jellyfish!” the banker cried, as the lifeboat drifted off-shore. "If anything busts, now—!”

Farther and farther from the drowned shore, off toward the deadly reef, the boat still floundered, as the anchor dragged. Suddenly, a jerk! The anchor had caught on a coral head.

Holding— yes, but how long? On the answer to that question, life and death might hang. Close under the lee of what still remained of the island, the boat might ride out the hurricane. But if the anchor dragged or broke, or the line parted, what then? Could the boat survive that weltering madness of the reef now lusting to devour it?

More savagely than ever the tempest screamed. Back there in the night, they could hear the crash and thud of still more palms going down. Brandon tried to calculate:

"Wind-velocity probably 150— maybe 170— or more.” But this problem beat him. Without instruments, how could he judge? The cyclone might be blowing 200. It seemed like a thousand. Here at last was one bit of statistical lore that baffled his professional skill.

Weird stridors ululated through the drenched, tormented air. The four refugees, half-drowned with rain and spray, crouched as best they might under the slight shelter of the little cuddy formed by the all-too-inadequate bit of decking at the bow of the thrashing boat. They didn’t even try to say anything. What, indeed, was there to say? But Brandon found the girl’s hand, enfolded it in his own.

He felt it tremble. Somehow, despite all that peril of death, that terror and confusion, he felt a thrill of gladness. At last he knew Diana’s gay, indomitable spirit had been checked; at last he knew she could feel fear— she was not wholly a barbarian dryad, but a woman! And for a moment he forgot to think of wind-velocities, calculate lateral air-pressures, or plot trajectories of gale-hurled coconuts. Instead, he slid an arm around her. As she pressed more closely to him, he whispered in her ear:

"Great stuff, eh? Buck up!”

He felt a tautened pressure of her hand. In that instant, the hurricane became a joy to him, without any statistics whatever.

Still the anchor continued to hold, despite violent pitching and tossing of the lifeboat. Even though the island was now almost totally submerged, it still broke the tremendous combers crashing over from the north. Eons passed, and the four castaways still lived.

All things have an end; even— if Einstein is right— eternity itself. So, after ages measureless to man, a certain grayness began to manifest itself through the gale-screeching dark. Some faint trembling of daylight commenced to penetrate the world, all a scream of tempest, a roar of reef-torn breakers. Still crouching under the cuddy, the wretched castaways held fast, still hoped against what seemed the certainty of death.

Another hour. And now, though if anything the cyclone was more furiously raging, with machine-gun blasts of withering rain, something of the world was at all events becoming visible. Brandon made shift to get his head up over the edge of the cuddy. Sheltering his face with both hands, he managed to peek between his lingers, and could dimly make out something of the environment.

"My holy uncle!” he gulped.

What a change! Nothing seemed recognizable. Even in the half-light, he could see the face of Nature had been radically altered. To eastward, naught of the island remained, save here or there a tangle of mangroves straddling on tangled roots like tormented spiders in a froth of foam. Not even a tropical hurricane can blow away those cross-braced and absurdly tenacious bushes.

Long surges were breaking among them now, where only last night land had been. Of the palm-grove, nothing remained but an occasional stump. Chetwynd- Scraggs and Hudson Gables had vanished. Combers from across the island were wolfing over the site of them. The knoll had been cut down till hardly a foot of it remained above the leaping, snarling sea. And to westward, only tumbling graybacks churned across the lagoon that stretched to the savagely combing crests high-leaping on the reef.

"Oh, Mr. Brandon!’’ the statistician heard Diana’s shout. Now she was kneeling beside him, also peering up over the cuddy's edge.

"Where— where’s our island?”

"Gone to sea, I reckon!’’ he cried, and steadied her with his arm. "Something new, at that— sea-going island!”

"My word, how extrawdin’ry!” exclaimed Jorrocks. "Strike me pink, sir, if the ’ole ruddy h’island isn’t gone!"

"What, no island?” the banker demanded, likewise rousing up. He blinked in the half-light, at this alarming spectacle. No longer debonair and rubicund, but ale and drenched and shivering, bald-feaded but heavily-whiskered.

"Look, look!” cried the girl, pointing through the rain-drive that had plastered her black curly locks flat to her shapely head. Only with great difficulty could she even raise her arm against the screeching fury of the tempest. "A boat— another boat!”

"Boat?” the financier shouted. "Where?”

"Right there— see? In those sort of bushes!”

Dimly now the others also perceived it, just a confused blur half-capsized and rammed into the mangrove thicket perhaps an eighth of a mile distant. All it looked like was a mere blotch of shadow, with a dim gray rag-tag thing lolling from it—a sail, heaving in the tortured surges.

"Boat, O. K.!” Everington bawled out. "But how the blazes did that come ashore — with the wind off-shore?”

"Didn’t come ashore!” answered Brandon, the gale fair snatching the words from his mouth. "Hit the north side of the island — was washed right over— wedged there in those mangroves!”

"Well, I will be damned!” the banker vociferated. "Devil of a place, where boats get wrecked in the lee of it! We’ve got to get that boat!”

"Get it?”

"Salvage it! Maybe grub aboard— and there’s surely a sail! Useful in case we—  have to go to sea. You’ve been adrift at sea, Jorrocks! Sail would have been useful, eh?”

"Jolly useful, sir!” Now the strengthening light showed the butler a pitiable object. Drenched and disheveled, his one-tailed dress-suit a mere green, sodden rag, his monocle gone—making him more than half blind— who could have imagined him once as the sleek and proud retainer of Sir Percival Sutcliffe-Sutclitf? "Useful isn’t the nyme for it, sir. Shall I go get the boat for you, sir?”

"Look! Something more than a sail, to rescue!" the girl cried. "There’s a man aboard there!”

"Man?” the financier shouted. "Where?”

"See that hand, hanging over the side, don’t you?”

They strained their eyes, through the spume-thick air. All at once Brandon saw it, too. Saw a human hand, an arm.

"That’s right, there is a man aboard that wreck! But—alive?”

"Maybe! But he won’t be, long,” bellowed Everington, "the way the waves are breaking over him, if we don’t rescue him. Let’s go!"

8: Over The Reef

IT SEEMED sheerly impossible that those stiff, cramped, exhausted castaways could struggle out of their pitching, anchored lifeboat, down into the foam-slavered and surging breakers, and reach the rag-tag bit of land still remaining. But though half-darkness and drenching horizontal rain-drives nearly blinded them, though the roaring gale battered and shook them with demoniac viciousness, unsteadily they made their way. And Diana was not the last to drag up out of the seething breakers.

"No, no, not you!” roared Brandon, against the tempest’s shouting. He tried to thrust her back to the comparative shelter of the lifeboat. She only laughed:

"Don’t be absurd!”

And onward she plowed with the others, on along the shore that was no longer either land or sea, but a wild, confused mixture of both, only half-visible in that unearthly, terrifying mockery of light. Leaning against the brutal weight of the hurricane, crawling, fighting onward foot by foot, gasping and deafened, toward the wreck they struggled. Brandon, a-reek with mud and brine, was first to reach it. He turned. The others saw by his open mouth that he was shouting something; but what that thing might be, they could not tell. Onward to the boat they toiled.

"Alive, is he?” the financier vociferated, as he clamped exhausted hands to the gunwale of the craft— a broad-beamed thirty-footer, her single mast snapped short. Leaning inboard, he blinked at the limp figure lying there, face down, one arm dangling over the side. "Some kind of a Latin! Is he alive?”

Already, as Diana and Jorrocks came laboring up and gripped the wreck, Brandon had questing fingers on the unconscious man’s wrist.

"Still ticking! We got to get him out o’ here— back to our boat!”

In spite of the dim light they could see he was some sort of dark-skinned, foreign man, dressed in ragged white drill, barefoot and with a well-filled cartridge-belt and a holster containing a pistol, round his waist.

By dint of enormous effort they dragged him up and out of the wreck.

He lay horribly limp in their hands. An ugly gash in his scalp sullenly oozed crimson. But life still dwelt in him. As they hauled him overside, and he flumped leadenly in mud and water, a groan escaped him.

You shall hardly realize how heavy a human creature can be, till you try to wallow through a mangrove swamp with a limp, unconscious one, bucking a hurricane. But the rescuers made good. Diana and her father took a leg apiece; Brandon and Jorrocks toted the shoulders. Stumbling, falling, splashing, they battled out of the swamp, along the submerged beach, back to the lifeboat.

With a supreme effort, pretty far spent but still game, they dumped him in. He sprawled on the bottom, his head in foaming rain-water and brine that had sluiced over the gunwales.

"Holy leaping lizards, he’ll drown there!” the banker hollered. "Get him up out o’ there, quick!”

The men scrambled aboard, dragged him clear of the bilge, and set to work bailing with the coconut-shells that Jorrocks always kept aboard for that use.

"Guess we’d better stow him forward, out o’ the rain,” cried Brandon. And there they laid him, in the best shelter they had. Then, while Everington and Jorrocks continued to bail, Brandon fell to slapping the stranger’s hands, rubbing his face and neck, trying to arouse him. "Snap out of it! Come on, come on, you’re all right now! Snap out!”

He paused, at the banker’s shout:

"Hey, where the devil is Diana?”

Stopping his first-aid work, Brandon peered overside. The girl was not there.

Diana!” he yelled, for the first time using her given name. "Diana— where you gone?”

All at once he saw her— as did her anxious father, too. There she was, half way along the remnant of the beach, coming back from the wreck. She was toiling in her tight-plastered sweater and yachting-trousers, dragging something white and heavy, through the tormented surges. The sail of the wreck! Alone she had salvaged it.

"Damnation, that’s no job for you!” shouted Brandon, as he leaped overside and struggled to her. "Here, gimme!”

Grabbing the canvas, he tugged with her; found it a heavy load. How the devil had she ever managed to cut it free, to haul it through the mangroves and along the ragtag bit of beach?

Together they toiled along, under the machine-gun volleys of screeching rain and gale. But now Jorrocks was out of the lifeboat, too, and wallowing to help. Everington followed, puffing along like a tame walrus— if there has ever been a tame walrus. To change the simile, like four ants hauling a water-logged grasshopper the castaways tugged the sail to the lifeboat and bundled it in.

"Great idea, by gad!” the financier approved. "With a sail now, we’re all set!"

"Just try to raise it in this gale!” exclaimed Brandon. And he rammed and trampled it down as compactly as possible, into the bottom of the boat. Diana and her father helped. The butler, meantime, turned his attention to the wounded man. By the time the canvas was stowed, Jorrocks had the newcomer’s head bandaged.

"Where the devil you get bandages?” demanded the banker, pointing, in the rain and howling tempest.

Sadly Jorrocks gestured at his chest.

"Seems like I’m not destined to 'ave a shirt, sir!” The ghost of a smile twitched long, pale lips.

"Never mind!” Everington shouted. "Shirts enough for you, when we get out of this, and—"

Suddenly catapulted from his feet, he did not finish, but sprawled on the closely-packed canvas. The lifeboat gave a frantic leap and toss, began drifting rapidly offshore.

Diana gripped the gunwale. Jorrocks braced himself against the edge of the cuddy.

"Holy suffering squid!” the banker bellowed, trying to struggle up! "What now?”

"Adrift!” Brandon shouted, staring at the mangrove-bushes already more distant. "Anchor’s busted loose— here goes for the reef!"

A moment, dismayed silence vised them, there in that confusion of flung spray and ravening surfs. Wide-eyed, they regarded the retreating remnants of shore.

That shore, more often under breakers than not, seemed none the less a shelter of sorts. Better, perhaps, than none. Ahead of them, what? Only the gulping and insane turmoils of the reef, beyond which— open sea!

"Good God!” bellowed the financier, his once ruddy face now waxen. "We can’t ride that out there! Back to shore— we can make it, yet. Back, back!”

He grabbed his daughter, tried to haul her overside and away. Brandon smote his hand loose.

"Idiot!” he thundered through the hellish uproar. “Won’t be any shore, in an hour. Shut up, and do what I tell you! All hands— here— break out that canvas! Rope here— quick!” yelled Brandon

Feverishly he fell to work. The others obeyed him. Now it was a case of speed, or swift annihilation. Death trod on their very heels. Blinded by the rain-drive, deafened and confused by that infernal roaring of gale and ever-nearer reef— the reef which, if they struck it abeam, meant the end of everything for them— they labored at high pressure.

They slashed cordage that trailed from the canvas, wrapped the sail round a couple of oars and lashed it tight. A yoke-line at each end of this heavy bulk, leading to a single rope knotted to the broken end of the anchor-rope, finished the contraption.

“Now then!” shouted Brandon. "Overboard with it!”

Straining, they hove the drag over into the weltering smother of those steep-rearing breakers poised in the hills of venomous ferocity.

And what now? Would the sea-anchor really work? Not one of them had ever worked any such device. Perhaps a sea-anchor was just another fallacy.

But no! The miracle took place— some measure of control, in those weltering smothers of foam and spray. Almost at once the boat’s head came up appreciably into the wind. It did not completely straighten out, but at all events enough so that gale and waters took her slanting on the bow. The gray geysers of crests, all a-seethe, no longer broke so heavily aboard.

"Nothink to ’urt in them, now,” affirmed Jorrocks, his ribby bare chest panting. "If we just keep our shirts on, now— I mean— don’t get h’excited, we’ll h’all be right as the mail!”

Respite, though, might be only for a moment. For now the boat was wallowing heavily right on to the reef itself. More ferociously now the cyclone smote them away from the lee of even the tiny tag-end of an island still remaining.

The financier, bald and baggy-faced, waxen with the terror of death, held with numbing fingers to the boat which now had become only a straw in a maelstrom. Brandon, grim-jawed and tense, his teeth set in a kind of ferocious grin, looked like some sort of modern Mazeppa lashed to a wild horse. Jorrocks, shaking as in deadly chill, half-blind and shirtless, managed a:

"My word! Rawther a tightish place, and that!”

As for the girl, pale to the lips and wide-eyed, she made no outcry. A thoroughbred, to her inner marrow, she faced all ultimate possibilities and nearly managed a smile.

Right onto the reef the leaping boat now dragged and tumbled.

"Lucky dog, that Latin!” thought Brandon. For of them all, that unconscious man stowed in the cuddy was the only one who did not suffer.

The boat was bucking now like a mad bronco in a fit. With tremendous jerks she struggled to part the sea-anchor line, pull out the ringbolt. If anything broke now— good-bye all!

Fogs of spindrift drowned and drenched tiie air. Rushing regiments of breakers, hissing like boiled-over cauldrons of milk, sluiced heavy waters aboard. Brandon and Jorrocks made shift to bail, with coconut shells. Blessed relief, even this seemingly fruitless task! Anything, to distract them from the madness of those leaping combers!

His ruling passion, strong even in the face of death, made Brandon try vaguely to calculate their chances. How deep lay the reef at this point? How much water did the lifeboat draw? At what moment might some down-sucking gulf plunge them against sharp coral teeth?

Weltering with tremendous uproars, the boat drove on and over. Spumes of strangling brine engulfed her. Froth furiously whirled. And ever rolled thunders of breakers on sea-barriers, like judgments of inevitable doom.

Even bailing ceased. Impossible to do anything but cower now and cling,  while ever the boat fought like a mad thing to jerk free of her only salvation, the sea-anchor. How long lasted this agony, this life in death? No telling. But far after the ultimate ending of eternity, those wretched castaways thought to perceive less savagery in the leaping breakers.

Though the cyclone still shrieked and
tore with unabated fury, the waves' insanity
was slackening. And Brandon, cupping his palms, yelled at the banker:

"Over the worst of it, by God!”

"Outside the reef?”

"That’s right! Now, all. we’ve got to face is—”

"Only the ocean— only a hurricane in an open boat.”

9: Onward

EONS later, far from any sight or hint of land— a tiny speck of struggle-for-life in an immense and hostile welter of questing death— the lifeboat still was driving on.

Her rudder smashed while catapulting over the reef, but her sea-anchor still holding, she dragged before the hurricane, under a leaden sky where whirling clouds fled ever with vertiginous speed.

Aboard that half-drowned atom of wood still clung five human beings, water-soaked and swollen, exhausted with continual bailing, stark, wan and chilled. But still managing to be alive.

All five of them had taken turns at the exhausting labor of trying to keep the boat from swamping. Yes, even the stranger they had rescued, after he had somewhat revived, had borne a hand. He had said little, and they had asked him nothing. This frantic tumult of sea and sky was no invitation to talk, the more so as the wounded man seemed to have only broken words of English. Never mind that, though! His two arms were useful, pitching brine out a hull that so greedily gulped it over both bows and gunwales.

Hours and still more hours. And now a change of scene, as afternoon drew near. High and dangerous waves still came running, but the gale had dropped to only a stiff blow. And the boat was riding more easily. As no more combers broke over, bailing now had freed her.

The castaways, too, had managed to get a sup and bite. Now only Brandon and Jorrocks remained on watch. Dead to the world, Diana, her father and the wounded man were asleep; the banker and Diana in the little cuddy, the Latin astern.

There was nothing Brandon or the butler could do, but crouch on the thwarts and watch the tossing seas. Though the boat still wildly leaped, she seemed almost calm by contrast with the frenzy recently passed through.

"Storm’s blowing itself out at last,” judged Brandon.

"Right-o, sir, thank 'eavings. Worst of h'all our troubles is h’over, sir. I mourn Napoleon and Caesar, of course, but I’m sure we’ll survive.”

"Hope you’re right. Hope we get somewhere before all the grub and water give out.”

"Oh, we will, sir. We still ’ave supplies for a few days. That’s to be jolly well thankful for. I’ll run you up a meal, sir, when things quiets down a little more.”

"Hope it'll be soon, Jorrocks!”

"You 'aven’t the least h’idea where we are, sir?”

"Not an idea.”

"That foreigner, asleep there, ’e might be able to give us some h’information. Shall I wyke ’im up, sir?”

"No! Let the poor devil snooze,” answered Brandon, shivering in his drenched flannels. "After all, what does it matter? All that matters now is that we’re on our way—somewhere, alive!”

EVENING— n evening that with its clearing sky, its fading glory in the west, mocked the lonely boat still drifting in check of its sea-anchor. Though the pure vault of heaven was now untroubled as if no such madness had but recently tormented it, and though the stiff blow had checked to a moderate breeze, high combers still came tumbling, frothing over. The drag still had to be retained.

The castaways, though, found themselves in better case. Jorrocks had managed to "run up” something to eat, and all hands had even managed a smoke— nearly the last cigarettes in Everington’s metal box.

Now, perched on their wallowing chip, the Anglo-Saxons and the Latin had made some sort of shift to get into communication with one another. The Latin, considerably revived, looked up with his one visible optic, from where he sat carefully cleaning his pistol— which seemed the object of his deepest solicitude. He made answer to Brandon’s question of—

"Your name? Nombre, sabe?" by answering:

"Me? I am the General Rodriguez Manuel Maria Eduardo Gomez de Varona y Roble—”

"Hold on, that’s enough!” Brandon exclaimed. "We’ll just let it go at General, eh? That’s easier. Spanish? Cuban?”

"Manzanillian!” Under the bandage made of Jorrocks’ shirt the General’s eye gleamed with black pride in that sunset glow. He certainly had an air! "I am patriot, me!”

"Oh, so you’re a Manzanillian, are you?” said the banker. "Not so good! I’ve had plenty of trouble with you people.”

"Trou-bel, señor? Qué hay? W’at trou-bel?”

"Holy suffering sunfish! Didn’t a bunch of Manzanillians steal my yacht at Cayo Hueso, and throw us ashore on that island, back there?"

"Yacht? W’at yacht?” The General grew excited. "W’at name?”

"Why, Mangariva, of course.”

"Ay mi madre! Mangariva!" At sound of it, an amazing change of expression flashed over his lean face. His black eye narrowed to focus a living flame of hate. "Are you— you —owner of that Mangariva?”

"Of course I am!” returned the magnate, astonished. "What about it?”

"About it, señor? Caramba! These Mangariva, she wreck, she destroy my country. She come, weeth lousy mans w’at ees named Pedro Echador del Toro, w’at call heemself Admiral of the Manzanillian Navy. He have party of traitors, refugees, weeth heem. He make, at point of pistol, Americano crew do all w’at he command! He—”

"Hold on, wait!” cried Brandon. "Any of those Americanos killed, yet?”

"Not yet, but one, two, wounded. Others, lock up weeth w’at you call esposas, handcuff, in bottom-part of yacht. These traitor, these fake admiral and hees vermin, w’at they do?” Wildly the General gesticulated, while all the others stared at him in blank amazement. "W’at treason they do, eh?”

"Search me!” exclaimed the financier.

"They arrive to Puerto Cerdos an’ there they get rifles, also one machine-gun. Also, moch ammunition. Also, more traitors, of the Conservador Party, w’at ees try to fire my party, Los Progresistas, out of power. Then—”

"Just forget the politics!” Brandon exclaimed. "What happened?”

“What ’appen? Too moch, by damn! These traitor, she go to Las Pocilgas —capital of my country. She attack!” The General sprang up, pointed his gun on high, pulled trigger to illustrate his words. Bang-bang! It certainly added emphasis. "Then—”

"Sit down!” exclaimed Brandon. "Sit down and keep your shirt on, before you and your artillery fall overboard! Now then,” when the General had subsided, "what next?”

"Next, señor? Carár! Next, those son of dogs, they overthrow Progresista government, my party. They capture President Trujillo de Fulano Mengano Zutano de Tal—”

"Whoa! That’s enough for one president! What then?”

"Then they hunt for rest of government, what have heroically make strategic retreatings into interior jungles. In several weeks they capture also me, señor— me, the Secretary of Estate!” The General once more thumped his bony chest. “Also many of the Cabinet, what have take refuge in, how you call, stable. They drive us aboard those yacht, and sail for Bahia Sucia, to put us in exile, they say. But really to murder us all. Those peegs, those—!”

"Pigs and dogs, correct,” nodded the banker. "But never mind that part. What happened?” He seemed deeply rejoiced by the revolutionary adventures of his yacht. Never since he had been burdened by her, had he enjoyed her half so much as now, when he found himself vicariously implicated in a full-blown war. “Go on, General, spill it!”

"W’at more ’appen? Wait till you hearing! While we on our way to Bahia Sucia, come these hurricane. They put all us Ministers and President in small boat w’at they capture, turn us loose in coming storm. Those villain think that-way they keel most all government. They think we all die. Bot they can deny they shoot us. They can say we try to escape, no es verdad?”

"Of course!” exclaimed the girl, tense with the drama of this developing situation. "Oh, how exciting! And― and were you all drowned? All of you?”

"All but me, señorita! Me, I escape death by w’at you call the teeth of your skin. Those hurricane strike. We try to make land. But we are blow to sea. We have hell. We strike that island. All beeg mans but me, she are perish. Our boat, he ees wash over island, to what you call mangrove, eh? And then—”

"All right, we know the rest,” cut in the banker. "Hay, look a’ here! You know where the Mangariva is, now?”

"Now? Of surely, she must be at Bahia Sucia, trying to capture also that city from the legitimate government, the Progresistas— my government, what—”

"Never mind the politics! My yacht’s probably safe at Bahia Sucia? Commanded by that villain, Pedro Echador del Toro?”

"Of a sureness, si, señor!”

"How far from here?”

"One hundred mile, maybe. Leetle more or less, and—”

“Know how to get there?”

"I maybe can, eef I see stars.”

"What d’you mean, if you see stars?”

"He means, if he sees stars in the sky,” explained Brandon. "Hooray!” for once so far forgetting himself as to burst out in real enthusiasm. "Us for Bahia Sucia, P.D.Q.!”

NIGHT found the sea flattened out to only long-crested rollers, the wind fallen to little more than a good sailing-breeze. It also found the lifeboat bucking her way in the direction of the longed-for Bahia Sucia, under an exceedingly fine canvas spread.

As Jorrocks, with his wealth of original observations, might have said, necessity is the mother of invention. This time the offspring had been a jury-mast and a boom rigged from three of the boat’s six oars, lashed and stayed with cordage from the sail and also with strips of the sail itself braided into rough but strong ropes.

With the canvas bent, crudely but effectively, the boat—a fine sailer—was doing seven or eight knots. If she could keep that up all night, she certainly would make good progress toward the coasts of Manzanilla; which, after all, might not be so far distant as the General had estimated.

In the cuddy, Diana now soundly slept. The financier and his faithful Jorrocks huddled amidships. At the stern, Brandon steered with an oar, holding the boat to her proper course as she foamed bravely along with a pleasant murmur of cleft waters at her trim bow.

Beside Brandon sat that distinguished patriot and statesman, General Rodriguez Manuel Maria Eduardo Gomez de Varona y Roble. The General’s martial and patriotic eye was fixed on the beauty of the soft, ripe tropical stars, that seemed to hang almost within reach—celestial plums on heaven’s tree.

"Eet is not far now,” quoth Rodriquez M. M. E. G. de V. y R. "As you say in the Yanqui language, eet won’t be long, now.”

He held up a bit of notched stick, and with his thumb measured the distance of low-hung Polaris from the vague horizon.

"Mañana we maybe sight the coast of my so beloved motherland. And curses on that grrrreatest world’s tyrant, traitor and oppressor of all history, Pedro Echador del Toro, w’at have stole the yacht, make heemself admiral of the Manzanillian navy, and probably by now, President of my unhappy land! W’at have, how you say? throw the bull that he ees one grand patriot!”

"Can’t we do better than curse him?” asked Brandon. "How about a little counterrevolution of our own? And as for Don Pedro Echador del Toro—”

“He shall die!” the ex-Secretary of State declared, teeth gritting, fist clenched. "Like the dog he ees, the bull-thrower!”

"He shall die!” echoed Brandon. “The bull-thrower shall die!”

MORNING found them in sight of a low-lying and mangrove-grown coast, fronted by long, smoking reefs. Cautiously they skirted this formidable barrier. No settlement was visible, no finca or ranch, not even the thatched hut of a peasant. No smoke arose from any fire. Deserted and menacing, that arsenical and poisonous coast extended far, backed by a dim and jagged blue line of mountains— a country malignant in appearance, ominously waiting.

"Know where you are, eh, General?” asked the millionaire, viewing Manzanilla in the golden and strengthening light of dawn. Anything but a millionaire Henry B. Everington now appeared— wan and pale, water-logged, unshaven and disheveled. "Got any idea where we’re at?”

"Como no, señor? Is this not my own country?”

"Yes,” put in, Diana, “but where do we go from here? Where’s the yacht?” Diana would have shocked her Park Avenue friends, had she been able to walk in on any of them in her present array. Sea-water is liable to shrink sweaters, and yachting- trousers, nor does it improve hair and complexions. “What’s the next act?”

"That all depends how soon we locate friend Pedro, Admiral and perhaps President of Manzanilla,” answered Brandon. "Think we can locate him and his gang?”

"The hawk,” queried the General grimly, "can she locate the buzzard?”

"Breakfast is served,” Jorrocks announced, from the bow.

A sketchy meal, that, with odds and ends —very odd and extremely endy—from the suitcase, and with a few coconut-shells of water from the now depleted cask. None the less it refreshed them; and as they subsequently consumed the very last of their cigarettes and settled down to the final stage of their exploration, hope was reborn. Courage welled up again. Martial expressions passed from mouth to mouth.

Hotter and still more hot, the merciless sun blazed down on them. Temperatures grew fantastic. The explorers sought what refuge they could in the shade of their sail, but even this afforded slight relief as they skirted that savage and forbidding shore on their implacable errand which might end— well, God knew how!

Noon, and "Lunch is served!” finished their last lick and crumb of grub. And not much water remained, either, in the now overheated cask. Interminably the torturing hours lagged. The sun seemed riveted, a plaque of red-hot brass, to a blinding dome of blue-hot steel. But all things change, and even that solar disk of torment finally began to sink toward horizons shimmering with incandescence.

"Say, General,” the millionaire demanded, smearing sweat. "Know where you are, now?”

"Perfectly, señor!”

"Sure of it?”

"Of course I am sure!” He stood up in the boat, peered long and earnestly along the coast, uttered a sharp exclamation of joy.

"What now, General?”

"Behold!” he cried, and pointed at a far headland jutting into the azure sea. "You see those cape?”

"Well, what then?”

"Just behind her lay Bahia Sucia. And vengeance soon we have on those tyrant and his wolf-son Conservadores!”

10: War!

EAGERLY they all watched the far, blue headland beyond which lay—who could tell what? Glory or annihilation? Quien sabe? General Rodriguez &c., etc., took the steering-oar. Carefully he directed the lifeboat’s course, setting her in toward the coast. He drove her through a maze of mangrove-grown keys, and traversed a channel with roaring reefs to port and starboard; then headed for a long crescent of beach that glimmered off to sou’-sou’east.

"Snappy work, General,” approved Brandon, calculating currents and distances. "How much farther we got to go now? It’ll be evening, pretty soon.”

"Fifteen kilometros,” the ex-Secretary of State replied. "And the queecker evening come, the better. We no go to Bahia Sucia, in daytime. On those beach we must to await, till dark. But then— ah, then—!”

Presently, at the General’s order, they furled sail, and took down the mast. They reduced mast and boom to the original components— oars. From now on, progress had to be by the power of human muscle.

In a little cove of the beach they came to rest, waiting foodless and smokeless while the sun expired in fantastic glory beyond the headland which concealed Bahia Sucia— the town itself lying, as General Rodriguez explained, up the Rio Podrido which made in from the bay. All hands went ashore, to stretch their legs and also cut stout clubs and a long pole. The General also once more overhauled his pistol― unfortunately their only firearm.

"But weeth this, and our clubs, we shall conquer even the whole navy of traitors!” he declared. "For justice, she ees on our side. So how we can be defeat? It is impossible!”

AS DUSK fell— the brief dusk of the tropics, followed almost immediately  by darkness— the crusaders returned to their boat, but not alone. Ah no; now they had company and to spare. For various legions of jejenes and mosquitoes sallied forth and invited themselves to sup on the supperless crew. Though the beach had yielded no provisions whatever, and though famine was already beginning to assail the adventurers, they had to suffer and bleed for the welfare of insect armies. The first blood of this war had indubitably been drawn by the enemy.

The boat seemed filled with applause, as in a theater, but this apparent approbation was merely the slapping of pests. Accompanied by such, our intrepid warriors discussed the minutiae of their campaign, covering every point at all possible to foresee. As one perhaps might guess, some few details were destined to transpire not quite according to plan. In this imperfect world, what does?

Velvet gloom began to enfold the cosmos, and—

"Now eet is time to commence the attack,” judged General Rodriguez M. M. E. G. de V. y R. "Now begins the glory! Forward to victory, or w’at you call die!”

Armed with one pistol, with clubs and with the strong pole of just the right length— according to Brandon’s calculations— they got under weigh. Four oars propelled the craft. These oars were in the hands of Diana and her father, of Brandon and the devoted Jorrocks.

At the stem. General Rodriguez steered with another oar. Thus the lifeboat, which may now be justly called the Progresista Navy of Manzanilla, moved quietly forward in the vast, warm and star-flecked night.

Without mishap she rounded the headland, which stood up bold and black against the heavens, and soon engaged herself in winding channels that stank of mud and mangroves. On either hand, vague palms seemingly brushed out the low-hung constellations.

"Hey, General,” asked the financier, already with aching back and blistering hands from such unaccustomed labor. "When do we pull into the Rio Podrido?”

"We are now already in those reever. And you see the city of Bahia Sucia muy pronto, now. But silence! If we geeve the alarm to those enemy, if we are discover, all ees lose!”

Brandon felt his heart contract with a sensation that wasn’t exactly fear, but still didn’t partake of any undue optimism. As a statistician, it looked to him as if all were lose, no matter whether the enemy were alarmed or not. The mathematical chiances were altogether too slim, for victory. One pistol and four cudgels going up against heaven alone knew how many revolvers and rifles, to say nothing of a Lewis machine-gun, well—

Another factor—Diana!

A more unromantic young man than

Brandon you shall not meet in several long voyages; but for all that, the thought of Diana helping to let slip the dogs of war rather dismayed him. In the darkness, ballistic accidents might happen. Of course no Conservador would voluntarily reeve a bullet into that young, slim body. But in the heat of battle—

"How thrilling!” he heard her whisper, pulling a long stroke, seated there on the thwart beside him.

"Silencio!" ordered the General, in a carrying whisper. "Already, behold? the city of Bahia Sucia appear! The city now bleedin’ under the iron heel of those oppressor— which we shall soon annihilate weeth glorious victory!”

A wraith in the tropic gloom, the lifeboat noiselessly advanced on oars that hardly purled the Stygian waters of the Rio Podrido.

Far lights glimmered; sparse lights, that
hardly rivalled the smaller stars. These lights waxed slowly brighter as the attackers drew quietly on. Against them a dark mass blotted out a section; this dark mass itself being picked out with a row of tiny gleams— portholes!

"The Mangariva?" breathed Everington tautly.

Si, señor,” General Rodriguez assented. "And I hope, me, those dogs they make one celebration tonight. It weel be their last!”

The moment now grew critical in the extreme. At what instant might not some Conservador aboard descry the on-creeping loom of the lifeboat, and challenge her? At what second might not automatic, rifle or machine-gun fire begin stabbing the night, bullets commence working their direful havoc? No heart aboard the lifeboat but crisped with the tension; no, not even Diana’s!

Fortune, which is said to favor fools, must have entertained a very unflattering opinion of the Progresista Navy, for now Fortune was certainly giving them a wonderful break. No figure moved, aboard the Mangariva. Only one guard could be vaguely distinguished, aboard; a dim, white-clad, slouching figure posted midships in the port gangway, from which a plank communicated with a sagging wharf.

Quite according to plan, the lifeboat came up under the yacht’s bow, on the starboard and off-shore side. Now, right above them loomed the bowsprit. Brandon, standing up, made the lifeboat’s painter fast to the bobstays of the yacht. General Rodriguez was already clambering aboard. Barefoot, lithe as a jaguar of his native land, he scaled those bobstays and the anchor-chains, clung outside the rail, and— vague in the gloom— drew his pistol, ready for battle, murder and sudden death.

Nothing of the sort, however, seemed to be on the immediate program. The General turned and dimly beckoned. Henry B. Everington went next. He puffed a little, but— boosted by Jorrocks and hauled by the General—made the grade. Outside the yacht’s rail he too clung and waited, while Brandon assed him up a couple of cudgels, which he noiselessly stood on deck, leaning against the rail. He held out his hand, for his daughter.

"You’re next!” he whispered down to her. "Come on, Diana!”

As the girl started to climb, Brandon murmured, "No, Diana— you mustn’t! You’d better stay down here, away from the scrap!”

But already she was halfway up. A moment later and she was holding down her hand for a club.

Jorrocks now passed up to Everington the long pole they had cut at the beach, the pole whose length Brandon had carefully reckoned, to serve a very essential purpose.

"Now, Mr. Brandon, h’up you go, sir,” breathed the butler. "And I ’opes well soon be bungin’ pirates all h’over the shop.”

Tensely Brandon climbed. Jorrocks handed up the last of the clubs—weapons how absurd, with which four men and a girl were to attack an indefinite number of well-armed revolutionists! Then Jorrocks himself came up. And for a moment all five of the invaders clung there, listening, spying out the terrain of approaching war.

General Rodriguez beckoned vaguely in the dim half-light seeping along the Manariva's foredeck from the wheelhouse and ridge, and from the open fo’c’sle-companionway. He cast a thin leg over the rail, scrambled fully aboard, dropped barefoot and silent as a cat to the deck. After him the others noiselessly came, unseen as yet and unsuspected.

On deck, no sign of the Conservadores could be distinguished. But Everington noted one significant innovation—the gleam of the machine-gun mounted in the bows.

"Oh-ho, old Mangariva!" he murmured. "So you’re a warship now?”

While the others crouched and waited orders, General Rodriguez—gun in one hand, club in the other— crept to the fo’c’s’le-companion. Light was radiating from it. Sounds of revelry likewise issued— singing, bursts of loud speech and boasting, laughter well-mingled with alcohol. The General’s thin, saturnine face grew wolfish, as with a voice of assured authority he called violently in Spanish, down the companionway:

"Arriba! Two men on deck— pronto!”

A little silence fell, within, as he stood aside by the companionway housing. The others shrank down, blent with shadows— all but Brandon, who according to plan crept up and stationed himself opposite the General, with the door between them.

The silence was broken by a pad-pad-pad of naked feet up the iron stairway. In the vague gleam appeared a couple of loose-hung and white-clad Manzanillians, fuddled with aguardiente.

Crack! went the General’s club, on a close-shaven skull. And echoing it, crack! the Americano’s, on another.

With hardly a groan, both Conservadores fell. The attackers pounced on them, dragged them off behind the housing, stripped them of pistols and cartridge-belts. Brandon armed himself and the millionaire. Once more General Rodriguez called down the hatchway:

"Two more men— look alive!”

Very shortly, these two had joined their sleeping comrades, and Diana and Jorrocks were provided with fighting tools. But though every member of the attacking party now was armed, they all still kept their clubs. On a pinch, in a tight corner or where silence is essential, nothing like a good old hardwood bludgeon!

The next step, already well worked out, took hardly a moment. General Rodriguez very quietly closed the swinging door of the companion-housing— it opened outward — and taking the pole that Jorrocks brought him, dropped it so that one end rested against the door, the other against a winch. Very neatly it fitted, thanks to Brandon’s statistical dope on measurements and dimensions aboard the yacht.

"Damn good thing I knew that distance!” exulted the figure-expert. "That pole beats any padlock in the world. Let ’em try to get out now, and be damned to ’em!”

L OSING no time in unprofitable rejoicings over the sealing-up of at least one batch of Conservador enemies, but following their plan of campaign, the attackers crept silently aft under leadership of the bandaged General.

Ashore in the town, behind the Aduana, jerky and harsh music began to sound from a cantina where some sort of celebration was under way. Lights gleamed there. The come-and-go of dim figures revealed a considerable crowd. Compellently, half-savagely and with subtle African tempo the music throbbed. And more and more thickly now, stiffly-twitching figures moved against the lights, concealing and revealing them as the dancers woodenly gyrated.

"It ees good,” whispered the General. "They make a grand baile, one beeg dance, to celebrate overthrow of my government, killing of all principal mans! But soon they dance to some other tune! As you say in Yanqui language, it weel not be long now. To the attack! Vamos!"

ALONG the port gangway they crept.

General Rodriguez raised a hand for the others to stop. Into the shelter of a dark angle of the deck-house they slid, blending with deeper shadows there. The General alone proceeded.

Assuming an air of boldness, he straightened up and advanced toward the sentinel at the gangplank leading to the rotted wharf.

"Sentinels!”

"Si, mi capitdn?”

The sentry made a safe bet of it by answering this voice of authority with at least the title of captain.

"Up with the hands!”

The order reached him coincidentally with the poke of a pistol-barrel in the short ribs. As the rifle started to fall, Rodriguez gave the sentry what-for with his dub. Grunting, the fellow dropped in the scuppers. His rifle clattered on the once holystoned planks.

The General promptly dragged his victim to the engine-room hatch and bundled him into it, out of sight. Then he ran back, silently barefoot, to the gangplank, snatched up the rifle, and heaving his club overboard, beckoned the others.

Exultantly they swarmed along the gangway all armed and ready for the big party to begin. In a moment they had reached the main cabin entrance.

Within, sounds of talk and laughter made the night merry. Lights glowed from the cabin windows—pink gleams that spoke of luxuries now seeming a million years ago to Brandon, to Diana, to Jorrocks and to the financier, owner of all this stolen property.

A champagne-cork popped. Glasses tinkled. High merry wassail were the Conservadores holding, in the cabin of the good yacht Mangariva!

Slam!

Right in the middle of a toast, the cabin door banged hard against the wall, as General Rodriguez hurled it open. In through that door stormed the attackers, guns waving.

11:  Shirts, Hearts And Glory

TWO dozen Revolutionists stared, gasped, and raised their hands.

Everington caught sight of the swarthy gentleman who had seized his yacht. This gentleman, Pedro Echador del Toro—now President of the Republic—wore an ostrich-plumed helmet, brass-buttoned crimson tunic, silken yellow sash, and huge jack-boots with spurs. For all that, though, he reached high. His champagne-glass, released from a terrified hand, catapulted bubbling nectar down the gold-braided neck of his new Minister of War.

Cabinet members, chiefs and magnificos of the Conservadores yammered as they seemed to grasp for the ceiling of that luxurious apartment.

Brandon got kaleidoscopic glimpses of aigrets in gaudy headgear, of blazing epaulettes and decorations, of belts and immense sabers, of noisy uniforms; of lusty heroes sprawled in easy-chairs and on broad divans.

"Stick ’em up, there!” he bellowed, waving his gun.

"Up!” the millionaire echoed, and aimed at the Comptroller of the Currency. Jorrocks got a bead on the Secretary of the Interior, of a mahogany hue. Brandon covered the green-and-gold-uniformed Naval Minister, while Diana, her pistol aimed at the grand piano, rejoiced:

"Oh, how exciting!”

A moment, victory seemed assured. But suddenly a Conservador revolver cracked. Splinters flew from a panel near General Rodriguez' martial and completely bandaged head.

The General opened fire. President Pedro howled, bent, nursed a big toe and—pitching forward—collapsed all over an especially fine Kurdistan rug.

A scattering fusillade leaped from the Conservador forces. The attackers let drive. Grunting, the coffee-tinted Secretary of Agriculture and Public Works, in a cerulean uniform stiff with gold, slumped his 225 pounds across something splintery that only a second before had been a short-wave radio.

Jets of gunfire, acrid smoke, howls and execrations filled the cabin. General Rodriguez’ rifle snapped up, as he yelled to imaginary hosts, outside:

"All, to victory!”

The rifle crashed. It did frightful execution— to some electric-wiring gadget or other. Glass tinkled. Darkness fell. In that dark, thin flames leaped. Brandon swore. The gun dropped from his hand, numbed as by the impact of a frozen snowball.

"All, forward!” bawled General Rodriguez. "Adelante, todos! Victory— patria— gloria— libertad!”

HOWLS of panic, scramblings for safety made darkness lively. Sightless now, the Conservadores imagined hordes of gore-lusting Progresistas rushing to the slaughter. In the dark they broke and ran.

Leaving President Pedro with only nine and a half toes, and the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs minus one thumb, they bolted.

Screeching, cursing, they jammed at the starboard door, clawed and fought their way out. The cabin vomited heroic Conservadores.

"I die—for la patria!” moaned President Pedro.

"Yo tambien —me too,” the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs echoed, one-thumbed and heroic amid the ruins of the radio. Nobody paid any heed to them. Flight, pursuit— these alone mattered now.

After the routed revolutionists pressed the saviors of the patria—and of the yacht. Guns barking, clubs swinging, they drove home their victory. Crack went a bludgeon on the pate of a Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Minister skidded, went prone over a Director-General of the Mint, with a rear-admiral’s uniform and bare feet encased only in spats.

Out into the gangway and to the rail surged the tides of war. In twos and threes the government dived into the muddy Rio Sucio. Secretaries, Ministers and Directors mingled with Generals, Colonels and Admirals. Below, the waters thrashed, faintly phosphorescent in the starlight as the Conscrvadores established new national records in Manzanilla.

Snarling, at the rail, General Rodriguez leveled his rifle and blazed away. Henry B. Everington struck up the rifle-barrel, with his club.

"None o’ that, now, by gad!”

"W’at—w’at you say?”

"Holy juggling jewfish! They’re on the run, aren’t they? Let the alligators and sharks ’tend to ’em. Don’t shoot a man in the water! It isn’t sporting!”

"Oh no, indeed,” Jorrocks corroborated him, there in the night. “It isn’t done, you know.”

"Esportin? Wat you mean, esportin’?”

"Oh, hell’s hinges!” roared the millionaire. "What’s the use? You wouldn’t understand. But anyhow, cut it out!”

"Olrait, señor, as you weesh. The idea, like all Yanqui ideas, ees w’at you say, crazy. But no matter. I ’ave how you call? other feesh to fry!”

Turning, he ran toward the foredeck and the machine-gun.

ON SHORE, all music had ceased at the cantina. The baile had come to an abrupt end. Already hostile forces were massing. Shouts, yells, commands echoed through the darkling town. Though the Battle of Mangariva was won, another on the instant threatened.

Inside the fo’c’s’le, violent tumults had developed. Howls of rage issued from that barricaded prison, with violent hammerings on the wedged door of steel.

Almost foaming with excitement, General Rodriguez pattered on naked feet to the Lewis gun. The others straggled after him, down the gangway. A dribbling trail of blood followed Brandon, from his shot-through right hand, but he didn’t even know it.

Louder waxed the warlike tumult on shore. More violent the riot inside the fo’c’s’le. Under massed attacks on the steel door, the pole was beginning to twitch, to bend. Did it give way, what then? What, but annihilation for the Battling Five?

"Fuego!” vociferated the General, leaping for the Lewis. He snatched the trigger, swung the slim muzzle toward the door of steel. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! A roaring hail of lead rang on the plates. The interior howls of rage transmuted to shrieks of terror that retreated to lower regions and fell swiftly silent.

"Corchons!” the General bellowed. "That feex those dog-sons!” He snatched his gun round toward the town, leveled it on die cantina. Once more the ear-shattering rat-a-tat smashed echoes from the night.

Shrieks burst from the cantina, which instantly began to spew Manzanillians of low degree and high.

"Ha, they run, they flee!” howled General Rodriguez, stark mad with exultation and victory. "The trrraitors, toe oppressors— they depart!” The Lewis kept on knitting.

Wild yells tore the canopy of night. A wasp’s-nest, smitten, never belched inmates more expeditiously than the cantina. Its lights flicked out.

"Here you, lay off!” ordered the millionaire. "There’s women at that dance! And don’t you see—? Look there—flag of surrender! Cease firing!”

GENERAL RODRIGUEZ ceased firing— but only because his ammunition had run out. Dimly now in the night, faintly illumined by a single wavering street-lamp, those aboard the yacht could see something vague approaching, something that waved to and fro in signal of submission.

Against dim backgrounds, gathering crowds began confusedly to shout:

"Vivatt, vivan los Progresistas! Viva el General Rodriguez!”

The symbol of surrender, brandished at the end of a crawfish-spear by a trembling Conservador generalisimo, could now be made out as a shirt, somewhat ragged but still reasonably white.

"Lor’ lumme,” gulped Jorrocks with longing, "if I jolly well only 'ad that, now!”

"Ha!” General Rodriguez exulted, one hand on the machine-gun, the other Napoleonically in his bosom, as he stood there on the dim-lit deck. "The traitors they geeve up! The government is mine! The country, she ees save by me and by one shirt! And I— Rodriguez Manuel Maria Eduardo Gomez de Varona y Roble, I am one national hero!” His one unbandaged eye blazed brightly with martial fire. "Behold, I save my country!”

"That’s O. K. by me, General,” agreed the financier, "but you can’t save her here. Take all that bunch of Conservadores out o’ the fo’c’s’le, and the wounded ones out o’ my cabin and vamoose! I’m going to release my imprisoned officers and crew. If there’s any Manzanillians on board when my men are turned loose—I don’t give a damn which party—there’ll be blood on the lid o’ this yacht, and it won’t be ours, savvy?”

"You say, señor?” the patriot demanded, blinking. "W’at you say?”

"I say we’re leaving here pronto, bound for all points north. And you’re leaving my yacht, very P. D. Q. So, look alive!”

"Oh, Mr. Brandon— Varney— you’re wounded!” sounded Diana’s voice.

"Me? Nonsense! Forget it. Only a scratch.”

In spite of its being only a scratch, Brandon looked pretty white as he leaned against the rail, with the vague glow from the bridge revealing him as decidedly shaky on his pins.

"You’ve bled a lot. I’m going to bandage you, right away!” She took his hand, examined it. "Right this minute!”

"Oh, keep your shirt on,” advised the millionaire.

"No, take it off!” Diana ordered. She helped him do just that. Then, rip-rip-rip, she tore it up. There in the vague half-light she deftly bandaged his hand, while Everington pegged away to fetch a shot of brandy. "Now then,” the girl commanded. "Into the wheel-house with you!”

"You don’t have to help me. I can make it, all right.”

Nonetheless, though, he was leaning rather heavily on her strong, brown arm, by the time they reached the broad leather divan back of the wheel.

"My holy aunt!” he exclaimed, with pale lips that none the less managed to smile. "This campaign has been pretty damn tough on shirts. Eh, Diana?”

"On yachts and millions, too,” added Henry B. Everington, appearing at the door with a stiff hooker of medicine. "How about the millions, Brandon?”

"Oh, forget the millions! Statistics prove that—”

"Hearts as well as shirts can be affected by tropical adventures,” laughed Diana. "Adventures and piracy and islands and hurricanes and revolutions and battles and everything— oh, Varney, how romantic!”

_________________

6: The Longest Side

People’s Favorite Magazine November 10, 1921

“NOW SEE HERE, BOGAN,” said Cozzens, when his touring car had struck into the long, smooth, beach boulevard. “You’re my confidential right-hand man, and I can talk plainer, perhaps, than I ever have before.”

“You can,” answered Bogan— “Best-policy” Bogan, by nickname. “Must be somethin’ mighty important, or you wouldn’t be drivin’ yourself, an’ you wouldn’t of took me out, this way.”

“It is important,” admitted the politician. “And in an important deal, there’s no place like an auto. No keyholes for people to listen at in an auto. No chance for dictaphones. Give me an auto for absolute privacy, every time.”

“Correct. What’s on your mind?”

“You’ve got to find me a ‘fall guy’ for that Wheat Exchange Bank forgery and the Hinman murder that grew out of it. A good, high-class fall guy. No roughnecks.”

“What’s the idea?”

“I might as well speak right out in meeting. I’ve got to have my daughter Nadine marry Coolidge Brant.”

“Assistant district attorney, you mean?”

“Yes,” assented Cozzens. “The way things are shaping now, I’ve just got to have a string on that young man. He’s directly in line for the district attorney-ship, inside of two or three years, and I want—”

“I see,” smiled Bogan. “Honesty’s the best policy, all right. It’s a case of rip things wide open, after that, an’ get away with it clean, eh?”

“You put it rather crudely.”

“Facts is facts. I get you, the first time. An’ the daughter’s balkin’?”

“I’m afraid she is, a little. She and Brant have been going round together for over a year, but he hasn’t made good. That is, not enough to suit her. She’s got ideas about efficiency, like lots of girls these days. She won’t have him till he’s shown some real pep. The press is slamming him, some. So—”

“I’m wise. If he can land somebody right, for those stunts—”

“What I like about you, Bogan,” said the politician, “is the way you grab an idea. Well, now, can you work the law of supply and demand for me again? You’ve done it before. Can you do it once more, and do it strong?”

“Sure! How much is it worth to a man that’ll stand for the pinch an’ go through?”

“That depends,” judged Cozzens, opening the throttle a notch. His big blue car hit a livelier pace down the summer-sunlit boulevard. “Naturally I’m not looking to throw money away. I want you to put this through as cheap as you can.”

“Bargain rates won’t get a guy to stand a roar for scratch work, knockin’ a bank cashier cold, an’ bumpin’ off a business man. Them’s tall, man-size charges to go against.”

“I know it, Bogan. But, of course, he won’t be running any real risk of anything but a few years in the pen.”

“You mean the frame will be fixed so he’ll be acquitted on the murder charge, an’ will only do time for the forgery an’ assault?”

“Yes, and not much time, at that. Four or five years, and then a quiet little pardon, you know. That’s at the outside. Maybe he won’t draw more than four or five in all. Get me?”

Bogan remained silent, his thin jaws firmly set. He looked out over the bench, the surf, the careless holiday crowd, past which the car was flicking with a burrrrr of knobby tires.

“Well?” demanded the politician, “Can you fix it right?”

“Sure. If you’ll guarantee the acquittal.”

“Oh, that’ll be O. K.”

“Yes, but they never stick a guy with a small charge when there’s a big one on him. F’rinstance, if a man’s robbin’ a hen house, an’ croaks a farmer while he’s doin’ it, you never hear nothin’ o’ the petty larceny.”

“I can fix that, all right. Got to, to square the bank. They’re sorer than boiled pups, and ready to knife Brant. I’ll have him docket it as two separate cases. After the fall guy’s cleared of the murder charge, he’ll be rearrested on the others and put through.”

“I don’t see what good that’ll do,” objected Bogan. “That wouldn’t be such a devil of a big feather in Brant’s Panama.”

“It’ll be enough. I’ll see that the papers play it up right. Nadine will fall for it strong. She likes Brant, all O.K. It’s only that he hasn’t done anything much yet. You get the fall guy, Bogan, and I’ll attend to my end of it. Well, what say?”

“When do you want him?”

“Right now. And when it comes to cash—”

“I’m on!” smiled Bogan. “I know just the fella.”

“Where is he? In town, here?”

“No. New York. An’ he’s some smooth worker, too, I tell you. Show him the coin, an’ he’ll go the limit.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said Cozzens decisively. “Now well get back to the office and fix you up with expense money to take the night boat down.” And Cozzens stepped on the accelerator. “Let’s get to it.”

“Right!” agreed Bogan. “We’ll do this honest an’ square. That’s always the best policy. Let’s go!”

ALBERT VESTINE, Scandinavian by birth, and by profession racetrack follower, gambler, and man of various activities— all of them dubious— was wary as a partridge when Bogan called upon him by appointment. Vestine had traveled in too many cities, States, and lands, spoke too many languages, was too clever with his pen and brain, to mistake the type that Bogan represented. Besides, he knew the man personally, which made him all the more cautious.

He received Bogan in his little apartment on Lyon Avenue, the Bronx, and after a few commonplaces such as old-time acquaintances might exchange, asked him his business.

Bogan looked him over before replying. In his own way, Bogan was just as keen as this cosmopolitan with the high-domed forehead, the tendency toward baldness, the thin cheeks of unnatural pallor. As Bogan appraised him, from gray and conscienceless eyes to slim, dexterous fingers, he realized this was, indeed, the kind of man Cozzens needed.

The price Bogan knew would be high. Vestine was no “greasy-coat stiff,” to be bought for a song. On the contrary, as Bogan observed his correct linen and cravat, his fine blue suit with the almost invisible vertical stripe, his custom-made shoes, he understood that here was just what the politician had meant when he had demanded: “A good, high-class fall guy. No roughnecks.”

He thought, furthermore:

“If I can work this right, there’s promotion in it for me, and maybe a little rake-off on the side. I’ll play it for a wad o’ good, honest graft. Honesty’s the best policy, all right.”

“Well, Mr. Bogan,” inquired Vestine, “what can I do for you?”

“You know me, Al,” Bogan replied. “When I say I got a good thing, I got one.”

“Yes?”

“An’ now, I got a bundle o’ kale for you.”

“That sounds interesting,” smiled the Dane. “Sit down, and tell me all about it.” He gestured toward a chair. “How much, why, when, where, and what?”

Bogan sat down, lighted a cigar to give himself countenance— which is one of the principal uses of cigars in this world— and opened up:

“You know the burg I hail from, don’t you?”

“Somewhat. I’ve done a little business there, off and on.”

“Well, supposin’ some big guy there had to marry his daughter to an assistant district attorney, an’ she wouldn’t fall for him till he’d pulled some stunt to give him a rep, what would you advise?”

“I’d advise having the stunt pulled, by all means,” answered Vestine, likewise sitting down. His eyes were watchful, in his pale, intellectual face.

“Correct,” approved Bogan. “We’ve got to get a fall guy.”

“I see. Well?”

“There’s hefty coin in the job, an’ nothin’ more’n about four years— easy years— in the pen.”

“What’s the case?”

“Some guy forges the name of John C. Wycoff to a check on the Wheat Exchange National, for seven hundred and fifty-five dollars and fifty cents, about three months ago. He’s an A-1 scratch man, an’ the name looks right. He gets a gents’ furnisher named Markwood Hinman to cash it. Hinman’s found two days later, croaked, in a hallway on Oregon Avenue. The bull’s dope it that Hinman got wise to the scratch work, an’ went to see the guy to get him to make good, or somethin’, an’ the guy bumped him off to keep him from tippin’ over the bean pot. That’s all old stuff.”

“Yes, I remember reading something about it in the papers,” agreed Vestine. “The forger cracked Hinman’s skull with brass knuckles, didn’t he? Back of the left ear?”

“That’s the case! Well—”

“What then?”

“The check’s in the bank, see? The murder jazzes the bank up, investigatin’, an’ they get wise the check’s a phony. Henry Kitching, the cashier, takes it an’ heads for the district attorney’s office to raise a roar an’ start things. He gets out of his auto on Kent Street an’ goes in through the rear alley entrance to the courthouse. He’s found slugged there, five minutes later, an’ the check’s gone. Brass knucks, again.”

“Clever!” smiled Vestine. “I suppose the criminal trailed him, and gave him what I believe is called the K. O., from behind.”

“Yes, that’s the way it looks from here. An’ that’s how the story’d be put over. But nobody was ever sloughed in for none of it.”

“I see. You mean, then, you’re looking for a scapegoat in the wilderness?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, a fall guy.”

“Oh, sure. Goat, yes— I get you. I see you’re wise. Well, then—”

“And this hypothetical goat would have to stand for all the charges, so as to establish the assistant district attorney’s reputation for brilliancy?”

“Yes, but the murder charge won’t stick, no more’n a red-hot flapjack to a greased griddle.”

“How can you guarantee that?” insisted the Dane.

“Cinch!” And Bogan, his eyes kindling with enthusiasm, pulled at his cigar. Vestine, by the way, never smoked, nor did he drink. Both things, he knew, worked on the nerves.

“Please explain?”

“Why, it’s this way,” Bogan expounded. “We’ll fix the story right, an’ copper-rivet it, so it can’t do more’n establish a strong suspicion. An’ it’s all circumstantial evidence, too. Nobody seen the guy croak Hinman or sneak up on Kitching. That’s one point. Another is, we’ll have a hand-picked jury. There’ll be at least two on that’ll stick for acquittal till New York approves of Volstead. So that’ll be a disagreement, an’ the fall guy gets away with the murder charge, all right. I’ve been into this thing pretty deep with Cozwith— the man I’m workin’ for, an’ he’ll go through with his end of it.”

“Stop beating round the bush, Bogan, I know Cozzens about as well as you do, and I know you’re asking me, for him, to take this job, I know, too, he’ll go through, if I do take it. I’ve got enough information about him to kill him politically if he tries to renege. You can’t double cross, either, or I’d have both of you on a charge of conspiracy to do an illegal act. There are three of us in on this. It’s a triangle, understand? All go through, or all collapse! I hope I make myself quite clear?”

“Oh, I get you, all right,” answered Bogan, shifting uneasily in his chair. “We’ll play this frame-up honest. That’s the best policy, every time. All you’ll have to go up for will be forgery an’ assault.”

“H’mmmm! That’s enough, I should say,” judged the Dane. He pensively brushed a tiny thread from his sleeve with manicured fingers. “How long a sentence—”

“Four years is the limit. Good conduct would cut that down a few months, too. An’ you gotta remember this, too— nix on the hard-labor stuff. You got brains, you see, an’—”

“Thank you.”

“An’ it’ll only be a job teachin’ arithmetic, or writin’ or French an’ them guinea languages, in the pen school. See?”

“Nice, pleasant little program you’ve got all mapped out for me, isn’t it?” queried Vestine.

“Sure it is! You can figure you’re workin’ on salary. So much time, so much coin. Ain’t much worse’n bein’ a college professor, at that, an’ you’ll pull down a hell of a lot more coin. We’ll have you happy, an’ Cozzens happy, an’ his daughter, an’ Brant, too— he’ll think he dug up the case, himself— an’—”

“Regular little love feast, all round, eh?” commented the gambler. “I shall consider myself quite a philanthropist— if I take the job.”

“Sure you’ll take it!” urged Bogan, with increasing eagerness. This man’s quick intelligence and grasp of the situation far exceeded his hopes. Why, things were surely coming very much his way. “You gotta! Think o’ the good you’ll do! An’ ain’t it always the best policy to be honest an’ do good? You’ll square the bank, land a rich wife for Brant, put Cozzens where he can rip things wide open, an’—”

“How about the man that really did the forgery, killed Hinman, and assaulted Kitching?” put in the Dane. “I suppose he’ll be happy, too? After I’m tried and acquitted for the killing he’ll be safe. And all the time I’m behind bars—”

“Oh, forget him! Just think what you’ll be gettin’ out of it!”

“I am thinking of that, every minute, you can rest assured. And I may as well tell you right now, I’m a high-priced man.”

“That’s the kind we’re after. No cheap stiff, but a ketch that’ll really burn some red fire in Brant’s front yard! Fine!”

“You realize, of course, it’s no joke to be what they call ‘mugged,’ and finger-printed, and sell four years of my life, and—”

“’Twon’t be four. Not over—”

“And then, after it’s all over, have to clear out—”

“You’ve cleared out before now, Vestine, or whatever your name is,” asserted Bogan. “Don’t play none o’ that injured-feelings stuff on me! You got a dozen aliases, an’ you’re as much at home in China as you are on Broadway. So we’ll tie the can to all that ‘no-joke’ stuff, an’ get down to tacks. Will you take the frame?”

“I might, if you pay me my figure.”

“Name it!” said Bogan, hands tightening on knees.

“FIFTY THOUSAND dollars, spot cash.’’

“Oh, hell, no!” Bogan vociferated. “That’s ridic’lous!”

“All right, then. I didn’t ask for the job. You can probably go down on the Bowery and pick up a dozen men that’ll do it for a thousand. Don’t let me detain you.”

“But see here, Vestine—”

“Of course, the fact that after Cozzens gets next to the throne he can clean up a million or two— of course that has no bearing on the case at all. Naturally, such being the prospect, you stick at fifty thousand. That’s quite characteristic of men of your stamp. Well, good evening, Mr. Bogan. Don’t slam the door as you go out.”

“I might go twenty ‘thou,’ you bein’ such a big ketch.”

“Rubles, you mean? Bolshevik money?”

“Twenty thousand good hard seeds!”

“Forty,” answered the gambler. “That’s my rock-bottom.”

“Nothin’ doin’!” declared Bogan. “Be reasonable, can’t you? Make it twenty-five, an’ say no more?”

“Twenty-five?” smiled Vestine. “See here, now. I know Cozzens, all right. He’s a good sport and likes a fair gamble almost as much as I do myself. I’ve got a proposition according to his own heart.”

“What’s that?” demanded Bogan leaning forward.

“Doubles or quits.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Double that twenty-five thousand, or not a sou. Fifty thousand or nothing. We’ll stick the book for it.”

“Gawd!” cried Bogan, and for a moment remained pondering. Into his thin-lidded eyes crept a gleam of craft, exceeding evil. Then he shot back the answer decisive:

“I’ll go you!” Much agitated, he stood up.

Calmly, as though about to pitch pennies, instead of gamble for infamy and nearly four years of his life, Vestine reached for a book on the table— The Arrow of Gold, for in his literary tastes the Dane was unimpeachable. He laid the book in front of Bogan and handed him a sharp steel paper cutter.

“One stick, each,” said he. “Right-hand page, and high last number wins. After you, my clear Alphonse.”

Bogan’s hand trembled as he made the first cut.

“Two hundred and fifty-one,” he spat, with a curse. “I’m done!”

“Never say die,” laughed Vestine. He took the knife and thrust it deep between the leaves.

“Ninety-one,” he announced, without a quiver. He seemed but mildly interested. “Two ones. That’s an even break. Come again, Bogan. Here.” And he handed back the knife.

“One forty-seven,” said Bogan, with an unsteady laugh. “That’s a seven-to-ten shot I’ve got you, or tied. Looks like you’re done!”

“If I am, I’ll go through just the same,” answered the Dane, unmoved. “This is a trifle to some games I’ve gone against, and I’ve never welshed yet.”

Again he knifed the book. Without the quiver of an eye he flung back the page.

“Eighty-nine,” he approved. “That’s good. At four years and some months that makes a safe income of about twelve thousand dollars a year. A thousand a month for conducting some little classes in congenial studies— not too bad. And when am I to arrive in your illustrious city, for what you call the pinch?”

Bogan’s lips were trembling so that he could hardly answer: “You stay right here, see? That’s half the game, lettin’ Brant nail you in New York. About ten days from now there’ll—”

“And when do I get the excellent and desirable fifty thousand?”

“Oh— let’s see— damn it all! Cozzens will raise—”

“That’s immaterial to me, my dear Bogan, so long as he raises the fifty— in legal tender, you understand. When is it to be?”

“It’s Wednesday, today, ain’t it? I’ll be back with the stuff Saturday, sure.”

“That’s perfectly all right for me. Well, then, there’s no more to be said. Must you be going so soon?”

“I— I— yes. I better be gettin’ along.”

“Good night, then. See you Saturday.”

“Good night,” said Bogan, and departed.

On the stairway he kicked himself, groaning.

“What a damn fool I was not to take him up at forty! Why, Cozzens was countin’ on fifty, anyhow. I could of knocked down ten for myself, easy as pie. If I hadn’t tried to grab the whole fifty— My Gawd, when will I learn that honesty’s the best policy, after all?”

THE WEDDING was one of the most brilliant ever held at St. Simon Stylites Church. Brilliant, too, was the future of Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge Brant held to be. He, as the only son-in-law of so prominent a politician as old Dexter Cozzens; she, as the wife of a man destined in short order to erase the word “assistant” from his present title, received innumerable felicitations.

The papers gave the ceremony brilliant write-ups, and mentioned the brilliancy with which young Brant had run down— from very slight clews— the forger responsible for the death of Markwood Hinman, for the assault on Henry Kitching, and for the theft of the forged check in Kitching’s pocket.

The trial, everybody remembered, had been brilliant. Only for the unfortunate “hanging” of the jury, on account of circumstantial evidence, brilliant justice would have been done. The criminal, however— a Norwegian named Aalborg, and rather a brilliant fellow— had got four years. So everybody agreed it had all been very brilliant, especially as the criminal would have remained quite undetected had it not been for young Brant’s exceptional legal ability. The general brilliancy made everybody happy, and the papers all predicted a crushing campaign against the crime wave, a cleanup of municipal politics, and all sorts of lovely and desirable reforms.

Not the least brilliant of all developments from the case were those that before very long began to smile down on the stanch old war horse and reformer, Dexter Cozzens. His fortunes soon began to prosper, rapidly though quietly. For brilliancy of this kind is usually kept hidden under bushels — nay, even under pecks. And this, of course, is all as it should be.

Another brilliant feature of the affair, likewise unknown to the public, was the kind of instruction given at the pen by Aalborg, now known only as No. 45327. He undertook to teach the tough idea not, indeed, to shoot, but to explore mathematics, penmanship, and foreign languages. His services were recognized as exceptionally brilliant. They were willing, too. No. 45327 was never “stood out,” got all kinds of good-conduct marks, became popular with everybody from the warden down— or up, as you choose — and seemed to enjoy his work almost as if he were getting paid a thousand dollars a month for it. So brilliant a teacher he became, and so model a prisoner, that before long special privileges were extended to him; and, though confined, his punishment hung not too onerously upon his gray-clad shoulders.

Thus everything turned out most brilliantly for all hands, save for Best-policy Bogan. He, strangely enough, took scant joy of anything connected with the matter. For some reason unknown, he seemed to be cherishing a secret sorrow. But as his opinion, one way or the other, was not of the slightest importance, nobody cared.

Thus time passed, Cozzens waxed fat, Brant became powerful. Aalborg was forgotten by the world; and presently three years and seven months were gone. Then the prison gates swung open for him and he walked out— a man who had well served his purpose, a free man, with his debt to society all paid.

Society, having long since dismissed him from its mind, gave him no slightest heed. What is deader than dead news?

Another question: Does all this mean our story is completely done? Not in the least, as we shall very presently see.

HALF A YEAR after Aalborg’s release, Aalborg himself sent in his card to District Attorney Coolidge Brant. The card read: “John Carl Enemark.” The visitor requested only a few words in private. Brant, expansive with prosperity and power, bade the clerk usher Mr. Enemark into the private office.

“Mr. Brant,” said the visitor, laying his hat and gloves on the glass-topped desk, “I did you a great favor, just a little more than five years ago. Your conviction of me was the first case that brought you prominently into the public eye. I am not overstating the facts when I say you are now district attorney because of that case. Do you remember me?”

“Perfectly,” answered Brant, which was quite true. Vestine, Aalborg, Enemark— whatever you choose to call him— had not changed appreciably. He had grown a little higher in the forehead, perhaps, where the hair had faded; had taken on a few pounds of flesh, and showed a fresher color, that was all. His clothes still were of the quiet blue with the faint vertical stripe, that he always wore. He looked content and well-to-do. Prosperity seemed to have knocked at his door and found that door open.

“Are you amicably disposed toward me, Mr. Brant?” asked Vestine, for so we shall name him.

“Sit down, please,” invited the district attorney with a smile.

Vestine sat down, crossed one leg over the other, and waited.

“Well?” asked Brant.

“I still have a question before you, Mr. Brant. Are you amicable?”

“Perfectly. To be frank with you, Mr.— er— Enemark, I’m sorry I couldn’t send you to the chair. I did my best to, and failed. That’s all part of the fortunes of war, and I hold no ill will. So long as you go straight, and break no laws, I bear no animus.”

“Neither do I against you. I am planning to go back to Denmark in about a month. ‘My native country, thee,’ and all that sort of thing. Before I start, I have a favor to ask of you.”

“What is it?”

“I want to get married.”

Brant smiled and drummed his fingers on the desk.

“That’s very laudable,” he answered. “Marriage is often an excellent asset to a man’s success and honesty.”

“Quite so. Have I your permission to marry the young lady of my choice, under honorable conditions?”

“Certainly! Why ask me?”

“There’s a very special reason, Mr. Brant.”

“Which is—”

“She happens, at present, to be under indictment for forgery in this city, and out on bail. This forgery she committed without my knowledge or consent, in a kind of moment of inadvertence, so to speak. Her bail is two thousand dollars. I’m her bondsman— indirectly. Well?”

“Well?”

“I want the indictment quashed and the bail bond returned. She could jump bail, easily enough, and I could afford to lose two thousand dollars without serious inconvenience. But that doesn’t suit my purpose. First, because two thousand dollars is really money; and second because forgery’s an extraditable offense, and I don’t intend to have my wife a fugitive from justice. Therefore, I’m asking you to do me this favor.”

“Well, you are a cool one, I must say!” exclaimed the district attorney.

“Very true. Will you arrange the matter for me?”

“I like your nerve!”

“I’m glad of that, Mr. Brant. It’s helped you before now. Please make a note of my fiancée’s case. It’s docketed as No. 327, for the spring term. And—”

“Why, this is preposterous!” cried Brant, reaching for the push button. “Good day, sir!”

“Wait,” smiled Vestine, gently pushing back the other’s hand. “Suppose you refuse me, what then?”

“Why— why—”

“Imagine the disastrous effect on you, if the facts of my trial and conviction— the inside facts— should come out.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean,” answered Vestine, with not a trace of emotion, “that if you refuse me what I ask, I shall positively have to tell you the truth about yourself.”

“What truth?”

“Truth that you won’t want the opposition newspapers to get hold of. Will you quash the indictment?”

“Certainly not!”

Vestine sighed, as if with regret for Brant’s obstinacy.

“Too bad,” said he. “You force me to disclose facts that might so easily have remained hidden. Facts that will forever destroy your peace of mind and your confidence in— well, in certain persons you might prefer to trust. Before I tell you, I ask again whether you will do what—”

“Why, this is insanity! I should say not!”

“It can all be done very quietly. ‘No bill’ is a formula covering a multitude of errors. And I am prepared to make restitution on the check forged by the young lady. Then away we go, back to Denmark, and all is merry as the traditional marriage bell. What do you say, Mr. Brant?”

“I say this interview is ended! And do you realize you’re trying to intimidate me, to suborn justice? Do you know what the consequences of that may be to you?”

“My dear Mr. Brant, pray listen to reason,” persisted Vestine. “I assisted you in your marital program, and brought happiness to your wife and you. Now I am asking a little reciprocation, that’s all. In the name of your excellent wife, I beg you will allow another woman to become mine, free and clear.”

“See here, Enemark, or whoever you are,” rapped out the district attorney, “we’re not going to discuss this any further. My wife’s name isn’t going to be dragged into any matter by a man who—”

“Sh!” smiled the Dane imperturbably. “My good young man, I see you are one of those unfortunate beings who can’t be led, but must be driven. Well, then, on your own head be it. The fact is—”

“I don’t want to hear your ‘facts!’ I’ve heard enough, had enough of you. I advise you to go, now, before—”

“The fact is, Mr. Brant, in that famous case of yours I was what your American slang so picturesquely calls ‘the fall guy,’ that made the corner stone of your success, I was bought and paid for in the market— bought and paid for, like a herring, by your esteemed father-in-law. And the price paid for me was just exactly—”

“THAT’S A damned lie!” cried Brant passionately, starting up.

“The price paid for me was just exactly fifty thousand dollars which I at once very securely invented in Danish securities,” Vestine calmly finished. He, too, stood up. “With accrued interest, and the rates of exchange as they now are, I am comfortably well off ‘in my ain countree.’ I have exchanged a life of chance and insecurity for one of respectability and competence. I no longer need continue any activities that might bring me into conflict with the law.”

“You— you—” choked the district attorney, but could articulate nothing.

“I have purchased a controlling interest in a reform newspaper at Aarhus, Denmark,” smiled Vestine. “My wife-to-be, whom you will release, will help me do uplift work— quite like yours, that is perfectly safe and pays fine dividends, as Mr. Cozzens, the Honorable Mr. Cozzens, well knows. As your humble servant and fall guy, I ask you the one favor in question.”

“Fall guy, nothing! It’s a damned lie!” Brant had grown quite livid with agitation. His hands twitched.

“Please phone the Honorable Cozzens,” requested Vestine. “Ask him to come to this office for a few minutes. And tell him to bring Best-policy Bogan with him. Say Mr. Vestine is here, spilling immense numbers of appalling beans. Go on, Mr. Brant, call your father-in-law, who ‘framed’ you to success.”

Brant gasped, paled, reached for the phone, but did not take it up. Suddenly he sat down, with an oath.

“It’s— it’s all a—”

“Of course,” laughed Vestine. “All a fairy story of mine. Hans Christian Andersen, my esteemed compatriot, isn’t in it with me as a raconteur, is he? By no means! For that reason I am so intimately acquainted with the way the first clue was fed you; with all the details leading up to the arrest; with a score of other factors in the case, as I’ll prove directly. For that reason I am—”

“Hold on!” choked Brant. “What number did you say that case was?” His eyes looked hunted. “That case you— the case of that woman?”

“My fiancée, you mean?”

“Yes, your fiancée.”’

“Ah, that’s better. It is No. 327, on the spring list. I see your memory needs refreshing. I can refresh it to any extent you may need. And you’ll attend to the matter at once?” Brant nodded.

“I’ve had enough of you,” said he hoarsely. “Get out! I wish you were both in hell!”

“On the contrary, we’re leaving it for good. Well, I’ll expect you to take action inside of twenty-four hours. That will square everything. I squared the bank, squared your highly necessitous legal record, squared myself with fifty thousand dollars of your esteemed father-in-law’s money— which really bought you your present success as well as my own— and squared your father-in-law.”

Vestine smiled at Brant, who, disarmed before him, stood there speechless and staring.

“Just one more thing before I go,” said the Dane. “This case represents a very pretty mathematical problem. It is known as the Theorem of Pythagoras. Mr. Cozzens and you and I form a triangle. Perhaps I may state it better by saying we three are the three sides of a right triangle. I insist on being the hypotenuse, or longest side. I’m the hypotenuse, because the square of the hypotenuse equals the squares of the other two sides, added. And I’m going to be squared, now. I’m going square. Hope you and the Honorable Cozzens are, too.”

Speaking, he drew from his pocket a slip of paper, a blue check, and looked at it; and as he looked, he nodded.

“No more prison for mine, thank you,” said he. “Under your law, a man can’t be twice put in jeopardy of his life or liberty for the same crime. Even though guilty, if he’s tried and acquitted, that lets him out. So I’m safe now. Therefore, I don’t mind telling you—”

“What?”

“See this check?”

“What is it?”

“It’s the one that Markwood Hinman cashed. The one that was taken from Henry Kitching, after he had been knocked cold in the alley.”

“The forged check that— that disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“But how did you—”

“Listen, my dear young man,” answered the Dane. “What I got for being the fall guy, and agreeing to be tried by you before a fixed jury— facts that your father-in-law will verify— was a good deal more than fifty thousand dollars. I got—”

“What else? What more?”

“Perpetual immunity. Now you know. But you will never dare tell the world. That would ruin you. But now you understand.”

He struck a match, lighted the check, and held it till it flared. He dropped the ashes into the wastebasket, picked up his hat and gloves, and turned toward the door.

“Here, wait a minute!” gulped Brant “What— what’s the idea? Where did you get that check— and what do you mean by immunity, if— if you aren’t the man that— that killed —”

“Ah, but I am, you see,” smiled Vestine impassively. “Good-by!”

___________________

7: Test Tubes

Short Stories, March, 1921

I HAVE SEEN daisies growing on an ash-dump. I have seen perfumes made of evil chemicals in test tubes. Steel forms itself under slag, in crucibles. Freud tells us we are merely psychologically reacting automata, slaves of external stimuli. But some believe in free will. Does anybody know anything? All things are possible.

The chiming of the clock in Peter Brodbine’s library brought the banker to his feet.

“Midnight,” said he. “Let’s be going.”

Lillian nodded. “All right. It’s time we hit the pike!” She stood up and walked into the front hall.

Peter still delayed a minute. He remained there, looking round the library. On a rainy November night like this, it invited the soul to loaf and be warm. Peter loved his books. When he had been “Tony the Scratcher,” he had always loved to read. He had educated himself behind barred windows. But never until now had he possessed enough books. Much he hated to leave them. In a fugitive motorcar, however, one can’t be loaded with books. Everything would have to be abandoned. That meant pain to the banker. It hurt. In eleven years, a man accumulated so many things!

His eyes traveled in mute farewell round the room where innumerable evenings had been happily passed, where innumerable cigars and pipefuls had been smoked with the men of Rockville. Lots of business deals had been put through there, as well. Now, a smolder of ashes in the fireplace told where many a record of such had perished. Not that any of those deals had ever been crooked. Not one! Honesty had, indeed, been Brodbine’s trump, his joker. But the banker had not wanted to leave any records. Tonight’s deal was to be a cash one. Just cash.

The library seemed, somehow, to have grown into Peter’s heart. That heart wasn’t sentimental. Never had been. And yet—

“Well,” said Peter, and turned off the Wellsbach.

In the hallway, his wife already had her fur coat on, her rubbers, her doeskin gloves. A well-dressed woman. Always had been stylish even in the old days. The house listened to the wind and rain. It seemed so empty! Even the fact that Linda, the maid, had been sent away for a two days’ visit in Weavertown, somehow made it feel deserted. And in a few minutes it really would be deserted. Peter didn’t like the thought.

He fished his rubbers from the base of the hat-rack and drew them on. Rubbers would be necessary, tonight, for more than keeping his feet dry. The banker looked a little curiously at his own face, in the hat-rack mirror. One might have thought he expected the single gaslight in the hall to show him some change in that face. But the light was dim, and revealed nothing. An inconsequential thought crossed the banker’s mind:

“Next month I was going to have the new electric light system extended up here to North Rockville, and have lights in the house. But now it won’t be necessary.” That would save money, of course; and yet Brodbine felt sorry he hadn’t had it done.

By the single gaslight, Brodbine could see Lillian, vaguely. The woman was stouter, better-looking, smoother than she had been all those long years ago, when she had been his “moll” in Kansas City. But she still remained essentially the same woman. Determined. Oh, very.

A woman would have to be determined, to live as she had lived for the last eleven years, and never blow the game. To work into and mingle with Rockville. You know— Ladies’ Aid, Rebeccas, and all that. Lillian had done it. The stakes had been high enough to make it worthwhile. More than high enough. Nevertheless, Rockville had galled her. One can’t eternally smoke cigarettes in the attic and blow the smoke up a stovepipe hole. One can’t eternally put away the lure of the bright places. The old life stretches out such long, insistent tentacles.

“God, Tony!” she laughed, and her eyes danced. “I’m glad our time’s up. If anybody ever did an eleven-year bit, we’ve done it. Well, it’s our turnout, now. Nine hundred thousand isn’t such a much, for what we’ve plugged through. It’s only a little more than eighty-one thousand a year. And Lord! what a time we’ve had!”

“Let’s go,” said Peter Brodbine, putting on his hat and coat.

He glanced about the hallway, as if mentally writing down for the last time all the pleasant, familiar things, from newel post to umbrella stand. His lips looked a little hard. But then, they always looked hard. They had looked hard when he had pulled that final pennyweight stunt in Albany and had vanished from all the world that had known him— vanished, for eleven years.

Brodbine had gray eyes, cold but businesslike; he had a voice that penetrated, that awakened confidence. His handshake made men like him. In the old days, his greatest assets in shoving his “scratch-work” had been just those qualities. They had boosted him, as well, since he had been on the level. His personality and his absolute, unswerving honesty for eleven years, had made his word his bond. Luck had favored him, too. Nobody had ever risen up in his path, from the other days. So he had gone ahead, following the chosen game of honesty as a means to an end. Honesty had been hard. Life habits cannot be easily changed. But his wife and he had made up their minds to it as the quickest way, in the end, to a big smash. When one plays for stakes that mean a set-up for life, only one policy is permissible. The copy-books all tell you what that policy is.

“Well” said Brodbine, as he turned off the gas in the hall, “you see I had it doped right. Those other times when I could have connected would have dragged down a good bundle, but they’d have crabbed the big wallop.” As the old life drew near again, the old speech once more enfolded him like a familiar cloak. “You were trying to wolf it too quick, Lil. We couldn’t have afforded to unhook anything till it was ripe. Only a mutt will grab off a hot cent on the avenue, when there’s a cold dollar waiting in the alley.”

“You can’t pull that stuff on me!” the woman retorted. “It was half my frame. I know as well as you do that if you play it square, long enough, you’ll sometime get to bat.”

“Well, we won’t chew on that pill, now. The game’s a winner, anyhow. And honesty don’t drag too hard, either, after a while,” he added. He could see his wife, now, only as a kind of vague shadow at the front door. “It’s not too bad, after you get your second wind. It gets to be kind of a habit, after a while.”

“Like coke,” she laughed, “or the needle. Only the pipe-dreams, this way, are the real bundle.”

“Yes,” said he. “It’s a kind of a habit.”

“And they get to calling you ‘Honest Pete.’ After they start that ‘Honest Pete’ stuff, it’s all over but the fade.”

Peter Brodbine, banker— alias Tony the Scratcher— nodded, and opened the front door. The November rain gusted raw against his face. It was pitch-black, outside; an ugly night, just the kind they needed. Not a soul would be out, in this straggling suburb. Probably even downtown, they would meet nobody. Brodbine had never done any bank-work, in the old days; but he had dropped phony paper for a good many “box-men,” and he knew their technique. Because of such knowledge he had chosen this night of all nights— a rainy, stormy, Saturday night.

“It looks pretty good to me!” judged Lillian, who once on a time had been Delia the Dip. She too came out. The banker shivered, and buttoned up his ulster under his chin.

“It gets to be kind of a habit— like dope,” he repeated.

He closed the front door. The slight, hollow sound of that closing reverberated in the man’s heart. It seemed like the shutting-up of life. Eleven years in a little town like Rockville, where you know everybody, is a long time.

“Come on!” bade Peter, and led the way toward the garage.

They slid back the door, and got into the machine. Their suitcases already lay in the limousine body. These cases held all they meant to salvage from home. Passengers from a sinking ship take only their best valuables, if anything at all. The Brodbines were taking only theirs— a little clothing, a few toilet-articles, a trinket or two. On a trek like this, planned to carry them half round the world without a stop and to end there in complete disappearance, impedimenta are unwelcome.

Brodbine switched on the lights, stepped on the self-starter and let in the clutch. The car cradled out of the garage and down the graveled way to the street. For a second, the lights touched the rear of the big, comfortable old house, illuminating the summer-kitchen. Above it, the woman caught a glimpse of her bedroom windows— the room now abandoned for unknown adventurings. Brodbine saw, too, and frowned a little, but the woman laughed.

“So long, shack!” she gibed. Brodbine realized her callousness, and shivered. He swung the car south, toward town, toward the bank he was president of. Save for the stab of the headlights, night had everything its own way. The blue light the streetlamps were making against rain and wind seemed only to intensify the blackness. Nobody was stirring. This community was still so old-fashioned that people slept there, o’ nights. Oh, yes, the town had a couple of constables, beside Gilkey, the fat Chief of Police who occupied quarters in the basement under the Post Office, where the lockup was. But the Brodbines, who in their day had outplayed some of the keenest “dicks” in the country, didn’t give the local Law much heed.

“Looks like a cinch, all right,” smiled Lillian. “It’s like taking candy from a kid.”

“Candy is right,” assented the banker. “From— a kid.”

They exchanged nothing more, as the car took them into town. There was really nothing much to say. Everything had been planned, rehearsed, lived over, for weeks. And the whole thing was so childishly easy! Certainly Rockville was not to be feared. Rockville was not expecting or dreading any coup. One doesn’t suspect one’s watchdog of intending to steal the leg of mutton from the icebox.

A watchdog. The watchdog of Rockville. That, in a word, was what “Honest Pete” had become. Eleven years of hard, impeccable work had landed him securely in the watchdog role. Nothing could have been worked up with greater skill, or could promise to be more advantageous.

In the beginning, after the successful getaway from that Albany job, Brodbine had faded out of his old name and haunts; and had emerged, another man, in this remote place. He had found a little employment as telegraph-operator at the depot. After that, he had become stationmaster. Any port in a storm, you know; and beside, he still had a few thousand salted. This work had served only as a convenient blind.

By the time he had got pretty well liked by the business men of the town, for his efficiency re freight-shipments and the handling of express, he had conceived the idea of “going straight” for some years and then of gutting the place. All this time he had kept in touch, by letter, with his “moll.” She had approved the plan. He had, at her advice, made a play for a petty job in the Rockville National Bank, and had got it. Then he had realized he needed her as a partner; though he had ceased to love her, he had gone to the woman, and had married her. A wife is a prime requisite in working a small town. He had brought Delia the Dip back with him, as Lillian Brodbine. And she had proved a helpmeet, indeed. A smooth woman. Very. She had been enthusiastic about church activities, and all that. Before long, no Ladies’ Aid fair, no lawn-supper, had been successful without Mrs. Brodbine. The Brodbines had entertained a little, too, and gradually had become popular.

Brodbine’s efficiency, silence, sobriety, and honesty had got him a dead man’s shoes, and he had become teller at the bank. In less than two years more he was looking through the cashier’s window. The bank had profited. Brodbine had introduced up-to-date methods and machinery; new systems, all kinds of improvements. Bank and town had prospered alike. Then had come that forgery, presented by a Cleveland traveling-man. It had got by all the others at the bank. Even old Dowling, president, had been gulled. Brodbine’s professional skill had spotted the fine scratch-work and had saved the institution ninety thousand. That had been a tremendous feather for Brodbine. Dowling had been quietly “let out”; and bank and town alike had rejoiced to make new rosewood furniture for the newly-finished office of President Honest Pete.

“There’s McElroy’s!” Lil nudged her husband, as the car loped past a wide lawn fenced with ornamental wire. A streetlight vaguely outlined a cast-iron stag. Rockville still clung to wire fences, iron animals and fountains with iron children holding umbrellas. “The Macs’ll sit up and take notice, after this smash, eh? Mrs. Mac won’t hand out any more of her D. A. R. wallops to the little stranger in our midst— not very quick again, will she?”

“Mac’s a good fellow, though,” said the banker.

The woman laughed, evilly, in the gloom.

“They won’t be living in that big house, much longer,” she opined. “There’s lots of others that’ll take a tumble, too!”

Brodbine only grunted.

“The poor fish!” gibed Lillian. “The mutts!”

Her husband did not answer.

IT WAS EASY ENOUGH for Brodbine to enter the bank. From his car, which he left in the safe seclusion of an alley off Congress Street, he and Lillian had only to walk one square, turn into Hanover Place, and thus come to the side door of the bank building. Here, under the doorway of the Commercial Insurance Company, he left the woman. There was nobody at all on the dark, rain-swept streets; but still his old-time caution dictated his posting her as a sentinel.

His bunch of keys held everything requisite for him to reach the bank vault and the safe. Of late there had been some talk about putting a time-lock on the vault. Brodbine had apparently fallen in with this plan, but had managed to postpone it. That, of course, would have ruined everything. Now, his keys and the combination made matters simple indeed. He had the combination as firmly in his mind as his own name— or names.

“Cinch is no word for it,” thought the bank-president. “Anybody could open this ‘gopher’ with a jackknife, if it came to that.” He unlocked the side door, and entered the building, snapping back the catch but closing the door behind him.

As he reached the interior, he paused, listened keenly. His caution, his flair for any possible danger— an instinct dormant for years— had returned, as a tame wolf’s hunting-instinct surges back, when the beast is set free in the wilderness. Brodbine waited a moment, peering, hearkening.

Till now, he felt, all had been safe. Nobody, so far as he knew, had seen him stop his car in that alley where he had left it with extinguished lights and softly-singing engine. Nobody had seen him enter the bank. Of that he was positive.

And now? Yes, everything still seemed quite safe. Old Joe Spracklin, the night watchman— what danger lay in him? And there was nothing else to fear. Spracklin, the banker knew, had literary habits; he did a lot of reading in the little upstairs room where he spent most of his time. Only yesterday, Brodbine had given him a set of ten volumes of “The World’s Masterpieces of Crime.” That would keep Spracklin busy, all right. True, the old man had to come downstairs once an hour, to punch the watchman’s register. But fully forty minutes remained, before he was due to come again. And fifteen minutes would more than suffice for the job Brodbine had in hand.

Still, Brodbine— alias Tony the Scratcher— was taking no chances. His return to the underworld life spread his nostrils to the scent of danger. He had not intended to bear firearms, to run any risks of killing, on this job. But now he discovered that he felt empty, lonesome, without a “canister.”

“Well, there’s one handy,” he realized. “I’ll cop it, just in case!”

He walked noiselessly into his own private office. His rubber soles made no sound. He slid open his desk drawer and took out the revolver he always kept there. It was just the same kind of gun that certain other bank-employees had, among them Spracklin, Thirty-two caliber guns, of considerable penetrative power.

The “gat” in Brodbine’s pocket gave him more assurance. He looked toward the vault, ready for business.

“Damn that light!” he growled.

The single incandescent hanging before the vault constituted, in effect, his chief danger. He had long foreseen this danger, but had never thought out any way to dispense with that light. From the street, a barred window gave full view of the vault door. Any passerby might look in. Still, the chances were against anybody being abroad, such a night. If Brodbine had had to think of only outsiders, he would have extinguished the light and chanced anybody’s noticing it was out and kicking up trouble. But he knew the light shone dimly into the corridor, against the wall. Old Spracklin, from his room, could see that vague reflection. In case the watchman should notice it no longer shining, he would come downstairs at once, to investigate.

The incandescent would have to be left burning. Other dangers, however, were few. The two constables were probably safe at home, and Gilkey was doubtless sleeping. Also, Lillian was serving as “lighthouse” outside. One whistle from her, and Brodbine would vanish into his dark office till the danger should be past.

“Cinch!” he mentally echoed Lillian’s comment. Already a metamorphosis was upon him, like a chemical reaction, an experiment in transmutation of soul-stuff. His mentality seemed slipping back into the sly darkness of the old days. His instincts were retrograding. Honest Pete Brodbine was fading out, growing unreal; and Tony the Scratcher was once more taking shape. Yes, the test tube was boiling nicely now.

“Cinch!” chuckled the man who was now something of both these men, yet who was fully neither one.

Though it was time to be at work, he felt no haste. He desired to stretch himself in this new warmth of lawlessness. To think it all over; to exult. The kill was certain. He wanted to toy with it, a few minutes.

The whole “plant,” from the beginning, had been easy enough for a man with brains and energy. Brodbine had possessed both. He had given them freely to make the Rockville National the sturdiest bank in the county. His bank had become Rockville’s leading institution, just as he himself had grown to be its foremost citizen. His going, annexing close to a million would mean the total derailing of a lot of people.

Brodbine knew this. Somehow, he wasn’t quite enjoying it, now, as he had expected to when he had savored the exploit on the tongue of anticipation. He was thinking about his wife. About how little— outside of this scheme— they really had in common. About how malicious she had become toward Rockville respectability. Men who rob banks should work hard and fast; but Brodbine still kept thinking. He felt so very much at home, in the bank. It all seemed his, in a way.

Wasn’t it his? When he had entered its employ, its capitalization had been only $50,000 and its surplus $65,000. Now it held something like $1,125,000 of Rockville’s and of the county’s money, private and public. Under his administration it had moved from a wooden building on Porter Street, a rented building, to its own three-story brick block, facing Constitution Square. This was the only three-story building in town, and everybody was proud of it and of Brodbine.

He was proud of it, himself. Proud of the way he had boomed the bank. He had absorbed nearly all the town trade, already, and what he didn’t have, was coming. Farmers and traders drove in, these days, from even the far ends of the county, to park their flivvers in Constitution Square, or else to hitch their horses at the iron railings in front of the bank and to do business there. Brodbine had fitted up a room for out-of-towners, where they could trade and gossip. That had brought business to his net. He had got acquainted with everybody. His system had been to know everybody. No funeral or wedding had for a long time been really complete, without Brodbine. Lots of young married couples owed their start in life to him, looked upon him as a kind of godfather. Ever since he had been bank-president, he had always sent a dollar to every newborn child in the county, to start an account with. That scheme had pulled like a porous-plaster. Though not much of a churchgoer— for he knew piety might be dangerous— he had always been “there” when any of the three churches had needed a new organ, repairs to the steeple, or a boost for the Southeast Mozambique Improvement Fund.

As Brodbine had farmed the town into renewed growth, he had likewise made the bank grow. That had made his prospects fatten. All his work had been for himself, in the long run. He had nursed and incubated the county like a hen on eggs. And always, everywhere, he had been just, upright, honest. Not even his political enemies had been able to say otherwise. Some had objected to his having two fingers in every Rockville pie, and to his directorships in so many enterprises; but all had been forced to admit that everything Brodbine touched, flourished.

He had made Rockville flourish. He, too, had flourished. He smiled, as he realized what Rockville would do and say, tomorrow.

Lillian’s voice seemed speaking:

“There’s lots of ’em won’t be living in big houses. Lots of ’em will take a tumble!”

Brodbine brought himself to action, with an effort. How long had he been musing? He could not tell. He only knew he had been hugely enjoying himself. He liked that office, just as he liked his home. The way the desk sat, with the light just so, and the view of the Square, and the swivel-chair with the leather cushion— Comfortable. Safe. Box of cigars always in the drawer, too; and people coming in to confer with him, and people asking loans or advice. Handshakes, and a good deal of publicity in the Rockville Telegram. And then, that talk of him for mayor, next year. And friends. Lots of friends. And that house, that library, up there in North Rockville. Disconnected, disjointed impressions—

Wind, rain and, night, like frightened fugitives, skittered and gusted against the windows. The barred windows. Brodbine shivered.

Brodbine sat down in his swivel-chair, in the black shadow of his office, to think. To ponder, again.

“I hope,” said he to himself, “I’m not going to make a damn fool of myself, one way or the other. Whatever I do, guess I will be a damn fool. Go through, or quit, I’ll always think I was. Which way will be the damndest?”

WHO WAS partly two men and wholly neither one, became aware of a presence in the bank. A draught of raw air struck him. A sound, as of quiet feet, tensed his muscles. His hand slid into his pocket, fingered the gun there.

Then he heard a swish-swish of skirts. A very slight sound that was, but Brodbine understood.

He got up, and in silence went to meet the woman who now was Lillian Brodbine, his wife, and who had been Delia the Dip.

She saw him, vaguely; came toward him. Not even the dim light could mask her anger.

“Got the stuff?” she demanded, whispering.

He shook his head.

“What’s the idea? What’s the matter with you, anyhow, you mutt?” she breathed. “You’ve been in here fifteen minutes.”

“I’ve been in here, in this bank, nearly ten years,” he answered. “It’s a good place to stay in, when you think it over!”

She did not understand, but plucked him by the sleeve.

“Long enough to ha’ done it twice over,” she added. “Get busy, Tony!”

“Lil,” he whispered. “Come, let’s go!”

“Well, grab the kale, then, and—”

“I don’t mean that, Lil. Let’s go— home.”

“Home?”

He nodded. The woman stared at him, not understanding.

“It’s not so bad, at that, Lil. And this job, here—”

“Tony!”

“And then, wrecking the town, and all—”

Had she dared, she would have screamed out against him, struck him, reviled him. But fear kept her voice to a rasp and a rattle. Snake-like— that was how it seemed.

“Home! You— you—! Gone straight on me, have you? Cold feet, an’ double-crossed me an’ gone straight?”

“Call it that. It’s just a matter of commonsense. You see—”

“You won’t, though!” For all her whispering, her tones made Brodbine’s heart sick. This was not Lillian’s voice, but Delia’s. It came to him, from the black past, like cold winds blowing out of a nightmare-tempest. “You ain’t goin’ to get away with that, Tony! Not by a damn sight!”

“I’m going to stay here in Rockville,” he answered evenly. “When it comes to being trailed all over creation, for a little rake-off— or a big one— as against this job, why—”

“You quitter!” Her face looked feline. It only made a dim, white blur in the gloom of the bank, but Brodbine could sense the animality of it. “Quitter! Yellow streak, a foot wide!”

“We’ve got a good home, and everything’s safe. We’d be fools—”

“Eleven years o’ this tank-town, an’ now—”

He laid a hand over her mouth.

“Cut it out!” he growled, stirring to anger. “I’m running this deal. It’s all off!”

Furiously she struck his hand down.

“It ain’t all off! This punk town! Think I’m goin’ to stick in the mud here? All right for you, maybe! All right for a mutt an’ a quitter. But nix on that for mine! I know— I’ve got you! Got you hamstrung, you—!”

“Can it, or—”

Brodbine was afraid, now. Anger had swamped the woman’s caution. Her voice was rising.

“Can nothin’! You ain’t goin’ to put this over on me!” Her speech had reverted to the underworld. Her veneer had stripped clean off. “I know that safe combination as well’s you do, Tony. You’re going to make your get, with me! If you don’t—”

Brodbine felt a quivering at the pit of his stomach. He had as yet never struck a woman, but he wanted to, now. He wanted to kill. His nostrils widened. His lips grew even harder than they had been in the old days.

“That’ll do!” he growled. “Nobody ever threatened me, yet, and got away with it!”

“If you don’t go through,” she retorted, still in that rising whisper, “I’ll blow the game. I’ll wise ’em, who you are. That’ll be stir for both of us. I’ll be done, but so’ll you. You’re through with Rockville, anyhow. Which way? It’s up to you!”

The banker shivered. He felt sick. Delia, his moll— the wife had vanished— was a terribly dangerous woman. He knew her. Knew she would keep her word. In this moment of something almost like his regeneration, motivated though it so largely was by realization of the relative values of the crooked path and the straight, the woman stood squarely across his path. Nobody had ever done that, and succeeded.

The touch of the gun in his fingers thrilled him. He half-drew the weapon from his pocket.

“Hey!” exclaimed a voice in the gloom. “Who’s there? Whatcha doin’?”

They both faced round, tensed to silence. The vague form of old man Spracklin adumbrated itself in the corridor doorway. Brodbine retreated, back into his office.

“Plug him, you fool!” whispered the woman to her husband. “Get that rod in your desk, an’ let him have it!” Bold, defiant, she remained there at the edge of the shadow cast by the vault. Her husband was behind her, at her left side, perhaps twelve feet away.

“Answer, or I’ll shoot!” warned the aged watchman. His voice quavered a little, but Brodbine sensed the courage in it. An irrelevant thought nicked the banker’s brain, as such thoughts will even at life’s crises: “Didn’t know the old man had the backbone to fight. I’ll raise his pay— pension him!”

Brodbine saw the watchman’s gun flick a ray of dim light, as it was leveled. Instinct brought the ex-scratcher’s own canister to bear on Spracklin. No man, least of all one with a master’s degree in the University of Crime, likes to face a muzzle without trying to retaliate. Then Brodbine turned his gun aside.

“Plug him, you damn fool!” exclaimed the woman, this time aloud.

Spracklin’s gun coughed. At the same instant, almost, Brodbine fired. The woman crumpled down, with a curse only half-mouthed.

The watchman’s flash-lamp blinded Brodbine. He slid his gun into his pocket, and hoisted both hands.

“Don’t shoot, Joe!” he exclaimed. “And for God’s sake, put out that light!”

Dazed, the old man shuffled forward. He still held the light on Brodbine.

“Why— God’s sakes alive! Your—?”

“Shut up, and put out that light!” commanded the banker. “I’m boss, here. Do as I tell you!”

The light died. Old Spracklin stood there and shivered with a very cold fear. He understood nothing; and the dark, silent blotch of something that had been human, near the corner of the vault, sickened him. His teeth chattered a little, for all that they were false.

“Keep quiet! Come here!”

The watchman obeyed. Brodbine walked a few steps to his wife, knelt, listened at her heart. He unbuttoned the fur coat, with hands that did not tremble, that silently rejoiced.

Still, he realized, the old man was watching him. There was a role to act. So he started, a little, caught his breath, and tragically looked up.

“She— she’s dead!” he gulped, in the dark. “My wife— my wife— dead!”

“No! No, no! Don’t say that!” The gun shook in the old employee’s hand.

“We can’t have news of this get about, Spracklin!”

“No, no, no! But, Mr. Brodbine, what was you doin’ in the bank, this time o’ night?”

“Came down to get some ledgers, for over Sunday. My wife— poor soul— wanted to come along, too. Always that way, Spracklin!” The banker’s voice wept. “Always trying to help me, and now—”

“They was two shots fired, Mr. Brodbine,” asserted Spracklin, now recovering a little from his daze. “You fired, too!”

“Well?” sparred Brodbine, for time. He sensed the different tone in the old man’s query. He stood up, confronted Spracklin.

“What was you doin’ with a gun, at night, in the bank?”

“When I saw you with yours, I grabbed mine. No man’s going to stand still and see his wife or himself shot at, without doing something!”

“You could of spoke, sir. Told who you was.”

“For God’s sake, Spracklin! You going to stand there and argue with me all night? With my wife lying dead, here? Dead, shot down by you!”

“I was in my rights, sir!” stoutly asserted the old man. By the dim incandescent in front of the vault, Brodbine saw his jaw tauten, his combative powers return. “Anybody comin’ in here, o’ nights, is takin’ a big chanst! They’re right away under s’picion, an’ if they don’t ’count for themselves, I c’n shoot, an’ not be held li’ble for nothin’. Now, comin’ down to cases, what was you here fer?”

“I told you! Help me get my wife out of here!”

“Was you an’ her plannin’ to monkey with the cash? Hey?”

“Only a fool would say such a thing to Peter Brodbine!” The banker confronted old Spracklin, with tense fists.

“Children an’ fools speak the truth. It looks mighty funny to me! If I was to say—”

“Is the vault open, you idiot?”

“No, it ain’t.”

“It’d go hard with you, Spracklin, if this ever came to court! Remember that!” warned the banker. He gripped the old man by his left wrist. “I— we— had a right here, too. You remember that! My wife was killed here. D’you want it known? Aired in court? D’you know what you’d get?”

“I was in my rights!” doggedly repeated the old man. “It looks fishy to me, ’bout your bein’ here. An’ they was two shots fired! They couldn’t prove I done it!”

The banker shook him, savagely.

“Listen, you old fool!” he growled. “I’m trying to save your skin, and you haven’t got sense enough to know it. We’ve got to get her out o’ here, and home. We’ve got to do something, quick, to clear you, and—”

“Clear you, you mean! That’s more likely!”

“I won’t argue with you, Spracklin. You’re an old man, half-broken and not wholly responsible. If this came to court, your word wouldn’t be ace-high, against mine. But it needn’t ever come to court. It mustn’t! It would raise a horrible row in this town, and kick over everybody’s applecart. Everything can be kept quiet. Do as I tell you, that’s all!”

The banker’s voice was crisp, tense. It had become the voice of Tony the Scratcher. Just so had he bossed his “swell mob,” years and years ago. Old Spracklin yielded to the dominant influence.

“I— I don’t understand,” he weakened.

“You don’t have to understand! All you have to do, now, is mind me. I’m boss here, anyhow. You’re my employee. Listen! Clean that gun of yours. Reload it. Keep your fool mouth shut. Shut! Hear me? That’s all!”

“All, sir?”

“No. Here!” He thrust his gun into Spracklin’s pocket. “Here’s mine, too. I’ve got no time to attend to it. Clean mine, too, and reload it, and put it back in my desk. Do it right away! Don’t delay a minute. Understand me? Obey, and it may save you a trip to the chair!”

The old man’s brief flare-up of suspicion and defiance seemed to have been stamped down. Spracklin cringed.

“I’ll do what you say. But you stand back o’ me, won’t you? If anythin’ happens to me—”

“Nothing will happen to you, idiot! That is, if you keep that damned old trap of yours quiet! Now then, help me get my wife out of here. Out, to our car!”

They lifted her, clumsily enough and with a good deal of difficulty, for Lillian Brodbine was even fatter than Delia the Dip had been. Also, she was slippery in her fur coat. The bank door, too, made trouble. And wind, rain, and darkness are not conducive to the easy transportation of the dead.

In spite of all, they got her to the limousine, and into it. Nobody seemed to have seen them. The engine was still singing peacefully to itself, with all eight cylinders. The downpour drenched old Spracklin’s head, pattering rather absurdly on his bald cranium, for he had no hat. Brodbine clambered into the front seat. He felt Spracklin’s hand on his arm.

“I— I fired at the top o’ the safe, sir,” said the old man. “I didn’t shoot to kill. Wouldn’t, the first shot. That bullet must be somewheres in the bank. I’ll find it, an’ make ’way with it.”

“What d’you mean?” demanded the banker. “Mean that I—?”

“Now, now, sir. I’m goin’ to keep my trap shut, like you told me to! But, say— one man to another— it was her as wanted to clean out the bank, wasn’t it now?”

“It’s the chair for you, if anybody even knows she was here! Get back to the bank, now, and clean those guns!”

BRODBINE drove the dead woman home. He felt secure, exultant. “The old man’s safe enough,” thought he. “He’s sharper than I thought, but he won’t dare snitch. He’s sewed up, tight. He couldn’t prove anything, anyhow, I guess a half-cracked old mutt like him wouldn’t have much weight against Honest Pete, if it came to a showdown. But it won’t come to a showdown!”

Then he thought of Dr. Abercrombie, the coroner. Also of fat old Gilkey, the Chief of Police, who must be notified. Hmmm.... Yes, those were certainly obstacles. But what were obstacles made for, except to be overcome?

“I guess I can get away with ’em,” thought Tony the Scratcher. “A little bull goes a long way, in these tank-towns.”

“There ought to be no real difficulty,” decided Brodbine the Banker. “The word of a man in my position carries weight.”

The man who was two men drove back home and into the garage. He was glad of the slashing rain that would very soon blur his tire-tracks where they turned from the street into the driveway. Blur them so that, by morning, nobody would be able to see he had taken the car out, that night. On the gravel driveway, the tracks wouldn’t show, anyway. So far, so good.

As he got within his own purlieus, Tony the Scratcher retreated into the background and Brodbine the Banker assumed dominance. It was mostly Brodbine who carried the dead woman into the house, via the back door. Yet it was the sinuous strength of Tony’s underworld days that hunched the limp body over his shoulder and got it upstairs.

Brodbine laid his dead wife down on the floor, and pulled all the shades in her room and his own. Then he went after the suitcases. He hung his coat and hat on the hall-rack, carried the cases upstairs and unpacked them, working by gas-jets turned low. As he replaced everything, and put the cases back in their respective closets, he hardly glanced at the body. In the long ago, he had seen too many such, for one more to stir his pulses. Beside, what joy was his that Lil was dead!

“Now for the big smash!” said he, at length, and began operations with the murdered woman.

He got her fur coat off, and her hat, and put them where they belonged. The limp neck of the woman, her lax hands, wax-colored face and dully accusing eyes made slight impression on him. He knew now that he hated her; had hated her for a good while. Knew that he had feared her, too, and that this was one of life’s most free and happy hours. He drew down her eyelids, however. That dull vacancy of seeming reproach was unpleasant.

He undressed the body, and examined the wound. This was on the left side, about two inches below the axilla. The woman must have had her arm drawn back, when the shot had been fired.

“Not very much blood,” he noted. “I wish there had been more.”

He gathered up all the clothes, and sorted them. Everything stained with blood he laid in a little heap. The rest of the things he put away, carefully. All at once an idea occurred to him. He went downstairs and examined the woman’s fur coat. Yes, the bullet hole showed. He thrust a finger through it, and pondered. Then he carried the coat into the kitchen, and threw it down the cellar stairs.

He returned to the body, got a nightdress— a used one— from his wife’s closet, punched a hole in it with a pair of scissors at the spot corresponding to the wound on the body, and put the nightdress on the dead woman. He wet a towel, sopped her face and hair, washed the wound and dabbled the nightdress with blood. Then he laid the woman in her bed, which he opened and tossed about a little, to make it seem as if she had slept there that night.

“Not quite enough blood,” he regretted, “but it’ll do. Now we’ll work in a bit of brandy. Mustn’t forget that!”

He dropped the wet and ensanguined towel on the floor, then fetched a bottle of brandy from his little stock in a trunk that only the woman and he had known contained any. He spilled brandy on her lips and neck, and left the uncorked bottle on the bedside table.

“Next,” said Brodbine. “We’ve got to have an alibi!”

This was simple. He locked one of the bedroom windows, that looked out over the roof of the summer kitchen. Taking off his rubbers and shoes, he tossed them into his clothes closet, and— lighting a candle— went up into the attic. Here he found and put on an old pair of hunting-boots, with calked soles. Downstairs again, he blew out the candle and set it back on the shelf where he had got it. He went into the kitchen. From the drawer of the kitchen table he took a broad-bladed chisel.

He left the house by the back door, climbed upon the summer kitchen, and with the chisel— working in dark and rain— “jimmied” the window in good, professional style. He now jumped down into a muddy flowerbed, and made deep tracks across a bit of soft lawn. These tracks led to the graveled driveway. Here he slipped off the hunting-boots, and in stocking-feet returned into the house, via the flagged back walk.

He went down cellar, and opened the door of the furnace where a bright coal fire was glowing redly. He had left all the drafts open to permit of the fire burning out quickly after he and his wife had left, so his wife’s fur coat and the hunting boots which he had rapidly cut into strips, once tossed inside, were quickly consumed.

“There!” he exclaimed. “They’ll have to go some to hook me up to it, now. Oh, damn it— those other clothes!”

Yes, he had forgotten the blood-stained clothes. Another trip to his wife’s room and back to the furnace disposed of all these. He shut the furnace door with the satisfaction of an artist who has done a good, trustworthy piece of work.

“Now,” said the banker, in a very happy frame of mind, “now for Abercrombie and Gilkey!”

He undressed, in his own room, after having carefully washed his hands. He put on pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers, and tossed his own bed quite artfully, taking especial care to dent the pillow. Then, lighter-hearted than he had been in months, he went to the phone and called the doctor.

A sleepy operator bothered him a little, so that by the time he had got Abercrombie out of the Land of Nod his voice really showed a good deal of nervousness.

“You, doctor?” he exclaimed. “This is Brodbine. My wife — she’s been shot! Burglar— and she’s dead! Yes, dead! Eh? In her bedroom. Just now. What? Yes, I’m alone, here. Mustn’t move her? My God, doctor, this is no time for your cold-blooded instructions. My wife— she’s dead, here! And you— all right, I get you! But hurry, hurry! What? Ten minutes? For God’s sake, doctor—!”

Next he called the stuffy little police station, under the post office. Gilkey, of course, was sound asleep. The old man, however, woke up quick enough when he realized that murder— what he would have called “a genu-ine, first-class murder”— had been done in Rockville. Such occasions to shine were rare, for the local police. And Mrs. Brodbine, of all people!

“I’ll be right up!” Gilkey promised. Brodbine could catch the quiver of anticipatory self-importance already puffing the good soul. “Yes, sir, I’ll send my men out— pick up any suspects. Lord, sir, I’m sorry to hear this. But I’ll do everything I can— the murderer, we’ll git him, all right. Be there jest as quick’s I can, sir. My God!”

“Pretty smooth!” judged the banker, as he hung up. “Abercrombie will be here in ten or fifteen minutes. Gilkey can’t make it in less than twenty or maybe twenty-five. He’s ’way downtown, and the doc’s only four blocks from here. That’s all as it should be. Abercrombie is coroner. If I get his O. K. on the evidence, it’s all over but the funeral. And I’ll get it, all right. A country crocus like this one— nothing to it!”

A few minutes now remained before Abercrombie should arrive. Minutes that the banker used for a complete review of the case. He weighed and tested everything, found no flaw. The more carefully he analyzed the evidence, the more iron-bound everything appeared. Only one weak link existed in the chain. That was old Spracklin. And Spracklin, being constrained by a very great fear, would certainly hold his tongue.

“Nothing to it!” judged the banker, again, and felt at peace.

Trrrrrrrrr!

The electric bell in the front hallway startled him a little, in spite of all his assurance. He felt his nerves crisp, as he ran downstairs, flopping along in his slippers. He grew a little sick, and his heart began to cut capers. But this was all right, too. Quite as it should be. He was grateful for this agitation. What could be more natural? “Buck up!” he growled to his soul. “Buck up, and go through!”

He hurried to the front door, and threw it open. The storm wind slapped the bathrobe about his legs.

“Doctor! For God’s sake—!”

“Where is she?” demanded Abercrombie. He came in, shaking the rain off, like a Newfoundland. Brodbine shut out the blackness and the cold. A glimpse of himself, in the hat-rack mirror, showed him his mask of anguish was well-painted. “Where is she? Up there?”

Brodbine nodded.

“She — she’s dead!” he gulped, and caught the doctor’s arm. “Come up, quick!”

Abercrombie shed hat and coat. With his little black bag— how useless now!— he tramped grimly upstairs.

“Police notified?” he demanded, in the upper hall.

“Yes. You’re the coroner, of course.”

“Yes, but the police have got to come, too. What Rockville calls the police.” His tone held contempt.

“Gilkey’ll be here, right away.”

“Good! You haven’t moved her, I hope.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“That’s good! That simplifies matters!” He pulled down the nightdress, studied the wound. “Washed it, eh? No use, Mr. Brodbine. No more than washing her face was, or trying to get brandy into her.” His tone was brutally professional. “Bullet must have penetrated the heart, laterally.” He replaced the nightdress. For a moment he studied the hole in it, thrusting a finger through. “Just what happened, eh?”

“A burglar shot her.”

“How long ago?”

“A little while. Maybe twenty minutes.”

“How do you know it was a burglar?”

“Well, you see — the window’s jimmied. It’s open. Her fur coat, on that chair— I mean it was on that chair— it’s gone.”

Abercrombie walked over to the window, adjusted his spectacles and studied the window. He felt of the marks left by the chisel, and grunted. Then he came back to the bed.

“You called me right away?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Good God, doctor! I didn’t know she was dead! Couldn’t believe it I got brandy — water—! Only when I realized— then I ’phoned you.”

“Yes, yes. Quite so. Very natural. Where were you, when it happened?”

“In bed.”

“Asleep?”

“Yes. I was wakened by a noise. A shot. I sat up in bed, listened, called out. Got no answer. Jumped out of bed, and ran in her.”

“I see. What then?”

“Then I saw her— lying there.”

“Just where?”

“Why, in bed. There.”

“Fallen back, just so?”

“Yes.”

“And she was shot, you say, about twenty minutes ago?”

“Half an hour, maybe.”

“Shot in bed, there, and died there?”

“Yes.”

“By a man at that window?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm! Very odd, Mr. Brodbine!”

“What’s odd?”

“Well, the fact that there’s a little blood on the floor in the middle of the bedroom, for one thing. And then, the fact that the hole in her nightdress was pierced by some instrument, and not caused by a bullet. And thirdly, that the condition of the wound and of the coagulated blood shows she’s been dead certainly three-quarters of an hour or more. And lastly—”

“You’re mistaken, doctor!” put in Brodbine, horribly sick at heart “I was here. I know!”

“Yes, and I know, too!” the old doctor retorted. “Look a’ here, Brodbine! That window, where you claim the burglar stood, is at the right of the bed and somewhat above the head of it. The wound, you will observe, is on the left side of your wife’s chest.”

“But—!”

“Shhh! Don’t you think, just as a matter of common sense and wisdom — don’t you think you’d better give me the whole story? Don’t you think you’d better tell me just what happened?”

THE SILENCE that hung between the two men weighted itself with so ponderable a tension that it fairly sagged. From the library, below-stairs, a single chime of the clock announced the half-hour after one o’ the morning. The ticking of that clock seemed measuring out heartbeats of destiny.

“Old Gilkey,” said the doctor, with the gaslight making his wrinkles deeper, “will be here any time, now. You’ve got just one chance— the truth.”

“The truth? But I’ve told you the—”

“‘Milk for babes and sucklings; strong meat for men!’ Come clean!”

“Eh? What?” The cant phrase sounded strange echoes in the mind of Brodbine the banker; echoes that reached into the soul of Tony the Scratcher. Brodbine’s eyes were strange, as he peered at the doctor.

“I’m coroner,” said Abercrombie.

“Yes?” Brodbine struggled to read the riddle. Was this threat, or was it offer?

“My verdict will close all investigation.”

“Well?” The banker’s heart was leaping.

“Just why and how did this woman die? Just what is the exact truth?”

Brodbine’s hand gripped the doctor’s arm till the flesh gave.

“The— the truth?” he gulped. He felt dizzy. His pallor spread to the lips.

“Yes. I’ve got to have it.”

“I tell you I’ve given you the truth!”

Abercrombie laughed.

“What’s the use of stalling, any longer?” he demanded. “Why did you kill that woman?”

Brodbine swallowed hard. His hands quivered out, to the doctor.

“I— I— damn it all! It’s the truth I’m giving you! A burglar—”

“Kick in, now! Kick in!”

Brodbine stared. Not all his anguish of terror and defeat could stifle his astonishment. A voice seemed echoing to him from the shadows of the black past— a voice that spoke the language of the Underworld.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“I? Oh, just Dr. Abercrombie. Why?”

“Say!” And Brodbine’s eyes grew narrow, keen. “You can’t pull that on me! I know the lingo. What’s your moniker?”

“I’ll swap for yours!”

They eyed each other a tense moment, like wrestlers watching for an advantage, before the grapple.

“I’ve got to know who you are, first,” demanded Brodbine. “I’m wise. You’ve hit the trail, sometime or other. Snap out of the bull, doc, and come through! Who are you?”

“Ah, that,” smiled the doctor, “would be an interesting question for you — and Rockville— to determine. Some men are just one man. Some are two, or even three. I, perhaps, have been even more. Just now, I’m Dr. Edwin F. Abercrombie, a highly-respected citizen of this town.”

“That won’t get across, with me!” exclaimed the banker. “I’m no downy bird. Let’s have it!”

“I perceive quite clearly,” answered the physician, “that the title of downy bird would be a misnomer, in your case. But that doesn’t invalidate my claim to being Dr. Abercrombie. This much, however, I’ll say— perhaps I haven’t always been a doctor. I may have had previous incarnations. Your trail and mine may have crossed, in previous spheres. I may very probably have known or heard of—”

“Of me?” Brodbine demanded.

“All things are possible.”

“And you— you under cover—”

“Why involve me?” asked the doctor. “I’m not under investigation, in this matter!”

“You, under cover the same as I am— you’re going to blow me, after all these years?”

“I didn’t say I was under cover,” Abercrombie smiled. “I don’t admit I am. And I’m quite positive you don’t know me. I’m much older, for one thing. Any—”

“Yes, but—”

“Wait! Any previous incarnation I may have had, may have been when you were only a young fellow. And as for blowing you, to quote your own words, I haven’t made any such threat, either. But I will say this, that I knew a bit about you, prior to 1909. And I haven’t snitched a word of it. So I must be pretty close-mouthed, eh? Perhaps I had my reasons— good ones— for silence. So now, to get back to the main line of investigation and to resume my previous inquiry, why did you kill your wife?”

For a moment, Brodbine could find no answer. Storm beat at the windows; man peered at man, with soul striving to read soul; and on the bed, the murdered woman seemed to listen.

“You’d better be quick,” warned the doctor. “Old Gilkey will be here, any minute now, and I’ve got to report what seems best for all concerned. Are you ready to come through?”

“Yes. I killed her because I had to.”

“To save yourself?”

“Yes, and Rockville. And the county. Everybody!”

“I see. She was forcing your hand, eh?”

The banker nodded. Abercrombie laughed.

“I thought rather she would, in the end,” said he. “It was a very pretty problem in psychology. I knew, or figured, you were making a play for big stakes. I was interested to see how it all would come out.” He tugged his wet beard, and pondered. “A pretty problem in souls. Very, very pretty.”

“You— you don’t mean you knew—?”

“Well,” answered the doctor, dryly, “you’ll notice I never opened an account at your bank. Or rather, after you went to work there, I transferred my account to the Farmers’ Trust Co.”

“What are you? A dick?”

“No. Only an observer of the reactions of human chemistry. A laboratory worker in soul-stuff. Having been in the test tube, myself, I now enjoy seeing other souls under the influence of various reagents. This is very pretty, indeed! I interpret this experiment as one in which the male element reversed its usual role, by becoming conservative, while the female became radical. Correct, eh?”

Brodbine nodded.

“A man hates to accuse his wife,” said he, “especially when she’s dead and can’t defend herself— and when he’s killed her. But I had to do it. She was bound to go through. I got cold feet on cleaning out the bank, that’s all, and she wanted to go through. She put it up to me that if I quit she’d blow the game, anyhow. That was at the bank, tonight, and—”

“And you figured there was only one way?”

“Yes.”

“You figured right, too. As the subject of previous laboratory tests, myself, I certify that your solution of the problem was 100% correct. Ethically wrong, but practically right. What was your motive for quitting?”

“Pure folly, for a man in my line!”

“Folly? When you’ve saved this whole town and county from ruin?”

“The folly of a man who has no real right to a home, and friends, and a legitimate business, trying to keep all those things! The folly of an Ishmael trying to appoint himself a watchman over society— trying to protect what is logically his prey! Motive? There’s no one motive— they’re mixed—”

“Like all chemical reactions,” dryly remarked Abercrombie. “I used to be an expert chemist, in a quiet way, and I know. I’m glad you’ve been so frank, Mr. Brodbine. If you hadn’t made it all quite clear, my experiment would have been spoiled and I always throw spoiled chemicals down the sink. As it is, you’ll have punishment enough without my taking any hand in it. The punishment of this community condoling with you over your wife’s unfortunate taking-off in her prime; and of living along in this same house; and of keeping on at the bank. If you’re wise, you’ll take a month or two’s vacation after you’ve dropped your dutiful tears on the grave. You’ll go away and ponder on the sublime super-morality of ‘the greatest good to the greatest number.’ And now—”

Trrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Again the bell summoned, in the lower hall.

“Gilkey!” cried Brodbine.

“Yes, there’s the power of the law,” smiled Abercrombie. “Well, I don’t imagine either you or I— who’ve been in life’s crucible— feel any great uneasiness about so mild a Bunsen burner as old Gilkey. There’s one thing, though, we must attend to right away.”

“What’s that?” asked Brodbine. His head felt light and strange. His world was spinning, his universe awhirl.

“When’s your maid coming back?”

“Day after tomorrow. We sent her away, so we could—”

“Don’t expound the obvious. The main factor is that she’s gone, and won’t be back for forty-eight hours. Plenty of time to rearrange any furniture we change, now, without exciting comment or suspicion. So take hold here, Mr. Brodbine, and help me lift this bed round.”

“The bed?”

“Yes. That’s the one element necessary, now, to make this experiment a complete success. Remember, your wife was shot here, sitting up in bed. Her wound has got to be on the side toward the window. Help me turn the bed, man— turn the bed!”

Together, one at each end of it, they swung it, lifted it noiselessly around.

“There!” smiled Abercrombie. “Now the mise en scène is perfect. All but that little smear of blood on the floor, I’ll clean that up, while you’re letting Gilkey in.”

He laid a hand on Brodbine’s shoulder.

“Just one word more,” said he. “We, who have been through the test tubes and have emerged, understand more fully than men who haven’t been there, the Socratic method whereby at times an individual wrong becomes a communal right. We’ve got to stand together, in a crisis. But when it’s over, you and I once more know nothing of each other. The laboratory door, reopened for an hour, must close again— eternally. You understand?”

Brodbine nodded, in silence. Their hands met, and clasped.

The electric bell once more called, insistently.

“Go let him in!” bade Abercrombie, with a smile.

_____________________

8: Africa

The Cavalier Nov 1908

“SEE there? That's Africa!”

Dr. Paul Willard gestured far across the night to where, in the vast dark, a spurt of flame glowed like a blood-ruby, died, then trembled forth again.

“Africa?” the girl questioned vaguely. A nameless awe crept round her heart, in presence of that unseen emptiness looming away to the inverted bowl of sky— a fathomless sky, spattered with great refulgent stars, among which, overhead, the funnels of the Sutherland traced smoky patterns. “Africa?”

“A little corner of it, anyway,” the doctor answered, smiling at her tone. “Cape Roxo light. By two bells of the middle watch we'll be off the coast of Guinea, running through Bissagos Islands— a bad place at best. I never liked it, and I've surgeoned on 'old Suth' for more than seven years. Don't like it now, its reefs and cannibal wreckers and all, even with Captain Lockhart on the bridge.”

The girl made no answer, but she leaned her arms across the rail, swaying as the ship rolled, and gazed out into the unknown. Steadily the Strathglass liner clove the fugitive seas, creaming them astern in surges that hissed away into the black.

He risked a side glance at her.

Never had she seemed quite so beautiful to him as under the lantern light which gleamed upon her heavy yellow braids of hair, her frost-white gown. At sight of her delicate, somewhat pale face, his smile waned. No living man— least of all Willard, in the passion which had obsessed him ever since Ethel Armstrong and her crippled uncle had set foot upon the Sutherland's deck— could have felt amusement in presence of that gentle, earnest seriousness.

“Somehow, do you know,” she mused at length, “I feel a bit afraid? It's all so empty! And just to know that Africa is over there.” A gesture rounded out the thought. “I sha'n't quite like it till we're at the quay in Cape Town.”

“When you'll immediately forget the trip, the boat, and— everyone on board?” he led along; but she ignored the opening. Her mood was far from banter. The doctor, too, repented of his speech, the clumsiness of which jarred upon the majesty and wonder of that tropic night. “Oh, well, you'll see things differently tomorrow,” he retrieved himself. “Quite differently, when the big red sun rolls up over the coast and splashes gold across the sea.”

“Perhaps,” she half assented. “But tomorrow is so far away. I think I'll go below. This air stifles me.”

He nodded.

“Yes; I understand. I used to feel it so myself, before I got quite used to it.” His powers of speech had never seemed more pitifully crude.

He helped her down the steep companionway. Then, after a perfunctory good night from her, came up again to the quarterdeck.

“Great guns, what gloom!” he muttered. “Why, India ink is pale beside it. I don't half like the way these offshore swells are running, either— with Bissagos still ahead of us. Can't say I'm used to this particular bit of Africa even now. No wonder that she— Ethel— feels so shuddery.”

A moment he pondered in silence.

“That's an upper-class privilege, anxiety is. A mere proletarian like me has no right to it. No, nor yet to look at an upper-class woman. For such, we aren't real men— just official objects.”

He leaned upon the railing where her arms had lain, and for a long time stared off across the dark where, on Cape Roxo, winked that dim, retreating eye of flame.

THE doctor found no sleep till long past midnight. Even with his cabin window slid far back, the tepid land breeze choked him, and his thoughts were weft of hot rebellion, longings, and misery. He tossed wide-eyed in his berth, heard the ship's bell dole out the eternal hours, then the halves, torturing himself with images of Cape Town and the approaching separation, which (only too well he knew) must be forever. Midnight was long gone, when he lost himself in troublous dreams of distant inaccessible things, never to be reached by him.

Toward early morning something flung him back to consciousness— a grinding, raking craunch that shivered the whole fabric of the ship, and roused him to the knowledge he was struggling on his cabin floor, which slanted dizzily. He clambered up, mazed and wit-struck for a moment, groped for the electric-button, and snapped on the light.

As the glare dazzled him, the Sutherland pitched nauseously again; and far below he heard a hideous gnawing and rasping, as of stony Titan jaws devouring steel. Then came sharp cries, oaths, and orders hoarsely bawled, and heavy feet that ran unsteadily along the decks. The pulsing engines suddenly grew still.

“Bissagos Reef! Ethel!” These were his only thoughts.

He leaped into some clothes, snatched his revolver, jerked open the cabin door, and ran out in his shirt-sleeves to the main saloon. It was already filled with grotesque, excited passengers. A babel swelled tumultuously, with high-pitched questions, curses, and screams.

“Steady!” he shouted. “Steady, now! No danger if you all keep cool!”

Hands clutched at him; he staved them off. “Lord!” thought he. “What cattle human beings in a panic are!”

He heard the purser's voice that reinforced his own— heard other officers—  knew that for a moment his presence might be spared.

“I must go!” he told himself; for in the thickening mob he caught no glimpse of Ethel or the invalid.

“I've got to find them anyway!”

He shoved by main force, along the up-tilted floor, toward their cabins. From behind him, on the aft staircase, Captain Lockhart's mellow Scotch voice boomed out: “We're good for fufteen mennets yet! No danger if ye'll tak' it easy— all han's to th' boats! Weemen fairrst!“

Suddenly he came on Ethel and her palsied uncle. The old man's halting steps had held her back. A flash of potent admiration lightened through Willard's soul at the vision of the girl, pale and afraid, yet not startled or hastened from her duty.

She came onward, helping the pitiful, twisted figure, step by step— a figure doubly grotesque now, in scant, disheveled clothing, with sweat of pain on the knit brow and terror staring from the widened eyes. She looked, the doctor thought, most dignified and noble in her long, loose dressing gown, over which the yellow braids hung to below her girdle. A sort of fine simplicity enshrouded her. And though he had witnessed bold, hard men in peril, he thought that never had he seen so brave a thing as that gently bred girl holding back her steps, timing her pace to the hobbling of the senile creature who now clung to her for safety.

“What is it— tell me! Are we going down?” she cried to him, her voice trembling a little, but quite clear above the uproar of the crowd or the grinding and tearing of the ship. Her look was full of confidence; even in her fear he found no trace of panic. “Are we lost? What's happened, can you tell me?”

“We're on Bissagos— probably no danger.” His body shielded her from the stampeding pack that weltered past them, herded by a dozen of the officers and crew. His nerves were ice. He felt nothing save joy and high elation at this chance to save her life, at this thought that Ethel now was looking up to him, trusting him for guidance and deliverance.

“We mayn't break up— for some time yet!” he shouted, bending toward her. “No danger— lots of boats— the mainland near! Come on, though— there's no time to lose!”

He stooped and gathered the cripple in his arms, then lurched ahead through the wild mob. Ethel followed; he felt the grasp of her hand upon his shoulder, and strange, mad thoughts seethed up in him.

Thus presently, jostling and buffeted, they won through the panic and the uproar of the open lower deck, which shelved off sickeningly to the very water's edge.

The night still gloomed impenetrable round the wounded ship. The wind had risen and whipped furiously the wild, green flares which flung sick shadows over the features of the dead.

Momently the waves boiled in spume-vortices over the sunken reef, sweeping the bulwarks, drenching the mad throng. At every heave and slide of the impaled monster a ghastly discord rose— “She's going! Breaking up!” It mingled with the liner's sirens and exhaust, which were ripping the sky with diapasons of appeal.

A rocket screeched aloft, and by its glare the doctor saw a slashing, clawing frenzy at the rail— saw the davits rock and shudder as the boats were wrenched outboard and the horde swarmed them, bursting all constraint.

“No chance for us there— with your uncle.” Willard made her understand. “They'd crush him in a second. We'll have to wait.”

He saw her nod. “Talk about women being cowards!” flashed the thought through his mind.

Drawing her back into the shelter of a bulk, he put the cripple gently down. The old man, stunned, said nothing, but crouched low, with blinking eyes. Willard and the girl leaned up against the wall, bracing their feet upon the deck, which every moment settled at a steeper pitch.

Now they could look down on the hideous fight. They saw the captain's huge frame overtopping all, dominant as his voice that blared out in command. They caught a gleam of pistol steel in his hand— a spike of flame— and someone pitched across the rail.

“Bairns and th' weemen fairrst!” his brave old sea cry rang. Then, like lightning, a sudden something smote the captain's head, and he was seen no more. Hell burst its bounds; panic reaped its certain due.

“DON'T look! You mustn't!” Willard cried, shielding from her the tragedy of the long-boat as a tackle jammed and spilled two-score clutching, yelling creatures in the swirl. The boat flailed— a giant pendulum— and shaking loose the few that clung to thwarts or gunwales, splintered to fragments on the liner's iron skin.

An instant, black, fighting things were sown broadcast upon the roaring sea— things that shrieked, went down bubbling, rose, then, with crisped fingers, disappeared forever.

“There's been an accident— don't look!”

“I'm not afraid,” he heard her answer, but the hand that grasped his arm trembled. He loved her for the very fear she knew so well to hold in leash.

A shudder ran through the wreck— a roar that boomed above the sirens' bellowing—then, where the bows had been, gaped a vast black emptiness, with death-screams choked by upswirling brine. A third of the whole ship had broken free and, with its fearful toll, had foundered like a plummet.

The Sutherland, eased by this loss, ground back upon the reef more firmly than before, and settled at a safer pitch, but her survivors deemed their end was now upon them, and fought each other starkly at the boats. All but one of the green flares had burned away, and by this ghastly dim virescence Willard saw men trampled and women hurled aside.

“Safer aboard than anywhere with madmen!” he cried in the girl's ear. “Don't move! Stay where you are!”

He drove down into the wolf-pack— his duty called him there— and smote with hard fists that came back reddened from his blows, striving to scatter the crazed brutes. But in the dark and tumult he could compass nothing. A blow clipped his temple; he felt the blood run hot, but he only dashed it from his eyes and struck the harder, striving to wedge through and split the mob.

He saw foul knife-play, heard the first mate grunt and double up, got sights of hands that strangled and glimpsed blind primitive anarchy as a second boat was launched.

It foundered straightway, from gross overcrowding. Amid the drowning wretches, breaking off their hand-grasps, a third boat was got away with only five oars, her gunwales shipping water at each sea. Then went the life-raft. He helped fling it overboard, aided some to jump in safety, and vainly tried to hold back others who leaped out at random— who missed and sank, with never a human hand held out to them for salvage.

“Better stay here! Safer on the ship!” he shouted to the lessening fugitives, but no one heeded him. When at last they all were gone—some to death, some to uncertain struggles with the night and the sea—when all had disappeared save a few limp figures rolling in the scuppers, he climbed back, bleeding, up the slippery deck to Ethel.

He found her in the bulkhead corner, kneeling in the gloom over a prostrate something that neither stirred nor spoke.

“What! Can I help?” he cried.

She shook her head, raising her hand silently, and he forbore. He understood. The old man's heart had lashed itself to bursting with the panic and the stress. Now, out of all the throng, only one woman and one man were left.

The doctor's wisdom kept his lips from platitudes. He turned, and left Ethel to herself a moment, gazing off landward. The ship was utterly dark now, for the last flare had burned to ash, the dynamos had stopped, and all the lights were dead. The steam-pipes' roar had dwindled to a sibilant murmur, drowned by the lash and crumble of the surges on the reef. Under the great passionless stars the wreck lay spent and weary, crushed to death, unmoved by even the heaviest seas.

Quite suddenly the doctor noticed a little speck of light far in the gloom, then another— many specks, that lay where he half guessed the shore must be. Puzzled, he knit his brows.

“It can't be that any have reached land yet. Those can't be fires. Never knew campfires to crawl that way.”

Dully he watched the sparks creep, come together, then separate. They almost seemed to be advancing toward the ship.

Then the truth hit him, and he stumbled back.

“Merciful Heaven! the Guinea blacks— the wreckers of Bissagos!”

HE stooped to Ethel tenderly. “Listen,” said he. “We must get away from here. It's death to stay!”

She clung to him. He drew her up— away. She was only a blur in the night, but intuition told him that her face was wet with tears.

“Death?” she asked. “The wreck won't last till morning?”

“It's not that. There's something—something else. You'd better know at once. See there— off there to shoreward?”

“Those lights, you mean?”

“Lights, yes. They're torches— in canoes. They're coming. They mustn't find us here, or—”

“I understand. But can we go, and leave the— the—”

“Nobody must be left. There couldn't be a finer burial than the sea! I'll take you into the saloon, then come back here and do what must be done.”

She understood, and yielded nobly. He led her off along the steep deck, after a silent moment by her uncle's body. He brought her safely to the main saloon, struck a match and found his bearings.

“All you need do is sit quite still in here. I won't be gone five minutes.” Then he left her.

The work was harder than he had expected, for there was a lantern to be found and lighted, and— there were other difficulties. After a while the task was done.

When he came back to her, his pockets crammed with provisions and cartridges, a bandolier of canvas supporting revolvers and two magazine-rifles, she greeted him with a pale, thin smile. By the lantern light that glimmered sickly through the mocking splendor of the place, he saw her eyes brimming with tears, but she was calm and full of courage.

“We've got to find and launch a boat, or something, right away.”

“Come, then, let's be about it,” she replied. “There can't be many boats left, can there?”

“Hardly two or three. The port-side's stripped. We'll soon find out.”

He helped her up across the saloon floor, which slanted like a house roof, and they issued out upon the larboard side. The wind could not strike here; and the waves, too, thirty-odd feet below, broke with less furious lashings.

Willard held the lantern high with his right hand. His left clutched the rail. Ethel steadied herself on him. Thus they worked their way slowly aft, stumbling over twisted cordage, litter, flotsam and jetsam of the tragedy.

As they neared the first boat Willard's heart died within him. What he might have guessed was true—the careening of the ship had swung the boats far inboard against their davits, so that nothing short of half a dozen men could now have got them over the rail, even had not the falls been twisted into knots and tangles.

He knew at once the prime futility of an attempt. Even to have got a life-raft over they must have rigged tackles, and time was now so short. A real fear shuddered through his veins. Too well he knew what manner of men the Guinea wreckers were. His hand slid, as by instinct, to the butt of his revolver. Before a single black should come nigh her he knew a better way.

“Impossible?” asked Ethel almost coolly. “Perhaps there's something better at the stern.”

They forced a way, sliding, slipping, and clinging to whatever handholds offered. Under the counter they heard the waves run hissing. The wind whipped them as they worked out from the shelter of the after-cabin; it blew the lantern out. And as they stopped, breathing heavily in the dark, they saw once more the dancing fire sparks, heaving and tossing with the waves, and drawing very nigh. They could even see that the sparks were torches, harried by the wind; and once, in a lull, they heard a wild-pitched, minor chant that wailed and mourned across the vacant reaches of the night, with throbbings of many cadent drums.

The woman trembled at this sound, and Willard drew her close to him.

“Don't be afraid,” he soothed her. “They shall never get you.”

“Swear to that.”

“I needn't. You know how true it is.”

“No time, now?”

“No time. We'll have to hold the fort. They probably don't know we're here, so it'll be a fine surprise party. Lots of arms on board. You can shoot?”

“Try me.”

Thus, on the instant, their campaign took form.

“THEY'LL board us midships on the port side,” Willard planned. “They're after loot, and— and—  well— edibles. Now we, I take it—”

“Can barricade the stern here?”

“Yes— rake 'em down by dozens. Except for knives and assegais, they're probably not armed.”

“How many do you make them?”

“A good thousand. See, there must be more than fifty of those big sea-going barracas. But what are a thousand naked blacks against magazine rifles? They can't rush us all at once. Come, though,” he added hastily, “this won't do. We've to get things ready for 'em— quick, at that.”

He dragged up cordage, with her help; piled sail-cloth, debris, chains, anything that fell to hand in the port and starboard gangways. And thus they built a strong, entrenched position, whence they could sweep unmercifully the narrow approaches. By the vague light of the stars they toiled, and saw their work was good.

“We'll lie low now,” panted the doctor. “If they don't see us, well and good. Otherwise a finish fight. In case they drive us, there's the aft companion to the upper deck. We can make a mighty fine killing from up there before they ever get us.”

Without another word he drew from his pockets box on box of cartridges, broke the seals, and poured them out upon the deck. He set to loading all his arsenal, then laid part at the starboard barricade, the rest to port. Then, where some sail- cloth touched the wooden cabin, he drenched the place with lantern oil.

“Now, let the guests arrive,” said he. “Refreshment's ready.”

“They're almost here,” she whispered presently. “See there?”

Cautiously they peeked over the solid iron bulwark, and started with surprise. The Guinea men had loomed up almost in a moment from the night. The bulks of their long canoes were adumbrated by the guttering torches at each prow, surging upward, dipping, sliding over the hungry, lapping tongues of sea. Swarming they came. Everywhere flicked a swash of paddle-blades, everywhere swung innumerable black bodies in rhythm with the crooning plunder-song. The drums were silent, all save one that pulsed incessantly.

With a flesh-tingling wail of dissonance, the Guinea blacks teemed up about the Sutherland. A hum and murmur of barbaric voices filled the night. The acrid smoke from the torches stung the watchers' nostrils as they crouched, gripping their rifles.

“See,” whispered Willard. “They're boarding now.”

A sullen glow blurred up behind the port-rail midships. Then a blotch of flame wounded the shadows, and by this raw, wind-lashed beacon they saw the wreckers scramble in herds across the rail, their black, muscular bodies gleaming with sweat. Lights glinted from steel blades and spearheads.

“Armed for bloody work!” thought Willard, but he held his peace.

They clotted in a shifting mass, with cries like beasts; cracked, wild laughter; gibberish. And still they came, and came, and came.

“Heavens, what an onslaught!” Willard groaned. “It seems a shame to wait.”

“Maybe they'll never think of coming aft?” breathed the girl.

“Heaven knows! They're in the saloon now. Hark! They're plundering— looking for the dead!”

Lights gleamed from the windows; noises rose within. The ship swarmed like a gigantic anthill, with this fetid crew. And now the watchers saw numberless black fellows crowding to the rail with loot, tossing it to waiting canoe-men. The whole scene blent and ran together like a nightmare. Ethel shut her eyes to it, bowed her head and waited.

“Ready!”

The doctor's hissed command aroused her. With sudden paralyzing dread she looked. A mob of the cursed ghouls were scouting toward them up the gangway.

Blear-faced and hideous they came, peering with brandished torches for what they might find. Ethel saw their little evil eyes; their red-dyed teeth as they grinned, jabbering; their shovel-headed spears.

“Now!” yelled the doctor. Night split wide-open with the fire from their rifles; crackling echoes smashed back from the cabin. Ethel looked.

She saw a struggling, screaming ruck that fled, a tangled heap jammed in the gangway— a heap that quivered.

There was no time for looking. Into her hands the doctor thrust another rifle.

“At the thick of 'em!” he shouted, and again death spouted from the barricade. Up to the sky shrilled a chorus of mad fear, so poignant, so unspeakable that they knew the rout was utter.

The wreckers made no stand. They lunged off in ripe clusters from the rail, swam for their dear black lives, and lost full many. Some reached their fellows in the boats; cries, howls, demoniac execrations dwindled as the barracas foamed away.

The doctor wiped his face with a torn sleeve and stood erect.

“They'll be back soon,” said he. “Stay here; I'm going to investigate. If I whistle, look alive for orders.”

He pressed a revolver into her hand, clambered the barricade and was gone. The darkness swallowed him.

She crouched behind the barricade, waiting, wondering, thrilling with the first imperative command which ever, as a woman, had been given her. The mastery of it steadied her, and was sweet. It almost made her forget the aching shoulder where the rifle-butt had plunged, and the dizzy swimming of her head.

The moments lagged eternal. What if some evil chance should fall and he should never come? She trembled at the thought. Suddenly and for the first time in her whole life she realized what manner of thing the comradeship of man may be, how very needful, very dear.

“Come back! Come back!” her lips formed the words there in the night— words which she dared not bring to utterance.

She heard a sudden wild noise on the sea. “They're coming back!” she shuddered.

Then, all at once, sounded a clear, low whistle on the starboard side.

“Drop a line here, and make it fast!” a voice rose up to her.

Not understanding, just obeying with a strange, new happiness in her fear, she tugged a rope from the tangled barricade, cross-looped it firmly on a chock, and flung it overboard. She heard it swish and strike the water—felt it tauten. The voice rose again: “First-rate, so far. I'm coming up!”

She peered across the rail. From the wreckers' fleet a nearing tumult wafted. The torches now were blazing not five hundred fathoms off.

“Hurry!” she cried. “Hurry, or it will be too late!”

Staring down into the dark, she could just see a dim mass toiling up the rope. Then, quite suddenly, the doctor swarmed to the rail— was over it.

“We've got to rush!” he panted. “Found a mighty handy craft banging at the end of a lianacord— obliging of 'em to have left it! By dropping off to starboard, they may never know we're gone; at least, not till we've made a start. You gather up the cartridges. We're apt to need 'em. I'll take the guns.”

She filled her bosom with the leaden deaths, while he, with his knife, slit out a square of tarpaulin, wrapped the guns in it, and lashed them with a cord. He made a loop and slung the bundle over his head.

Then a match r-r-rasped, and eager little flames licked at the barricade, fingering the oil-soaked cabin wall.

“Good-by, old Suth!” the doctor whispered hoarsely to himself.

A moment there was silence—then the doctor faced her.

“Come!” said he. “Come, now! Are you afraid?”

“Afraid— with you?”

AND it befell that, just before the breaking of the day, a man and woman, all disheveled, weary, black with powder-grime, resting on their paddles in a huge, uncouth barraca, turned and gazed back over the heaving ocean-breast to the distant tower of flame that bloodied the horizon.

Neither spoke. There was no need of words as the swift dawn flared up the sky. The sea crimsoned; fantom blues and opals spread abroad; luminous greens rimmed the far crescent of the western heaven as the last few watchful stars faded in the glory of another day.

“See?” said the man, pointing ahead.

The woman from her place in the bow looked far across the painted waters where a thin-drawn blur of smoke trailed slowly landward.

“See there? Two hours more and we'll be with— well, people again. Two hours more, and this will all be over, all be at an end for me— everything. I know how it will be! Just as I said last night, things will seem different to you— by the light of day. It is useless for me to hope otherwise.”

“No, no,” she answered, while her paddle dragged. “Not Africa— not you!”

As the full broad circle of the sun kissed the sea suddenly to gold, a song rose to the man's brave, eager lips. Strongly he plunged his paddle, urging the long barraca northward up the coast of Africa, over the bosom of the morning sea.

End

Table of Contents

- 1: The Thing from Outside
- 2: Rough Toss
- 3: Leatherbee’s Luck
- 4: Blood Brothers (novelette)
- 5: Maroon Key (novelette)
- 6: The Longest Side
- 7: Test Tubes
- 8: Africa