When I got down to my new cabin I found that the captain had made the steward shift my gear in already, so that I had nothing to do but turn in, which I did after a good look round and locking the door.
I left the lamp turned about half up, and meant to lie awake a while listening; but I was asleep before I knew, and only waked to hear the ’prentice knocking on my door to tell me it was one bell.
For three nights I slept thus in comfort, and jested once or twice with the captain that I was getting the best of the bargain.
Then, just as you might expect, on the fourth night something happened. I had gone below for the middle watch, and had fallen asleep as usual, almost so soon as my head was on the pillow. I was wakened suddenly by some curious sound apparently quite near me. I lay there without moving and listened, my heart beating a little rapidly; but otherwise I was cool and alert. Then I heard the thing quite plainly with my waking senses—a vague, uncertain whispering, seeming to me as if someone or something bent over me from behind, and whispered some unintelligible thing close to my ear. I rolled over, and stared around the cabin; but the whole place was empty.
Then I sat still, and listened again. For several minutes there was an absolute silence, and then abruptly I heard the vague, uncomfortable whispering again, seeming to come from the middle of the cabin. I sat there, feeling distinctly nervous; then I jumped quietly from my bunk, and slipped silently to the door. I stopped, and listened at the keyhole, but there was no one there. I ran across then to the ventilators, and shut them; also I made sure that the ports were screwed up, so that there was now absolutely no place through which anyone could send his voice, even supposing that anyone was idiot enough to want to play such an unmeaning trick.
For a while after I had taken these precautions I stood silent; and twice I heard the whispering, going vaguely now in this and now in that part of the air of the cabin, as if some unseen spirit wandered about, trying to make itself heard.
As you may suppose, this was getting more than I cared to tackle, for I had searched the cabin every watch, and it seemed to me that there was truly something unnatural in the thing I heard. I began to get my clothes and dress, for, after this, I felt inclined to adopt the captain’s suggestion of the saloon table for a bunk. You see, I had got to have my sleep, but I could not fancy lying unconscious in that cabin, with that strange sound wandering about; though awake, I think I can say truthfully I should not really have feared it. But to lie defenceless in sleep with that uncanniness near me was more than I could bear.
And then, you know, a sudden thought came blinding through my brain. The bullion! We were bringing some thirty thousand ounces of gold in sealed bullion chests, and these were in a specially erected wooden compartment, standing all by itself in the centre of the lazarette, just below the captain’s cabin. What if some attempt were being made secretly on the treasure, and we all the time idiotically thinking of ghosts, when perhaps the vague sounds we had heard were conducted in some way from below! You can conceive how the thought set me tingling, so that I did not stop to realise how improbable it was, but took my lamp and went immediately to the captain.
He woke in a moment, and when he had heard my suggestion he told me that the thing was practically impossible; yet the very idea made him sufficiently uneasy to determine him on going down with me into the lazarette, to look at the seals on the door of the temporary bullion-room.
He did not stop to dress, but, reaching the lamp from me, led the way. The entrance to the lazarette was through a trapdoor under the saloon table, and this was kept locked. When this was opened the captain went down with the lamp, and I followed noiselessly. At the bottom of the ladder the captain held the lamp high, and looked round. Then he went over to where the square bulk of the bullion-room stood alone in the centre of the place, and together we examined the seals on the door; but of course they were untouched, and I began to realise now that my idea had been nothing more than unreasoned suggestion. And then, you know, as we stood there silent, amid the various creaks and groans of the working bulkheads, we both heard the sound—a whispering somewhere near to us, that came and went oddly, being lost in the noise of the creaking woodwork, and again coming plain, seeming now to be in this place, and now in that.
I had an extraordinary feeling of superstitious fear; but the captain was unaffected. He muttered in a low voice that there was someone inside the bullion-room, and began quickly and coolly to break the sealed tapes. Then telling me to hold the lamp high, he threw the door wide open. But the place was empty, save for the neat range of bullion-boxes, bound sealed, and numbered, that occupied half the floor.
‘Nothing here!’ said the captain, and took the lamp from my hand. He held it low down over the rows of little chests.
‘The thirteenth!’ he said, with a little gasp. ‘Where’s the thirteenth—No. 13?’
He was right. The bullion-chest which should have stood between No. 12 and No. 14 was gone. We set to and counted every chest, verifying the numbers. They were all there, numbered up to 60, except for the gap of the thirteenth. Somehow, in some way, a thousand ounces of gold had been removed from out of the sealed room. In a very agitated but thorough manner the captain and I made a close examination of the room; but it was plain that any entry that had been made could only have been through the sealed doorway. Then he led the way out, and having tried the lock several times, and found it showed no signs of having been tampered with, he locked and sealed up the door again, sealing the tape also right across the keyhole. Then, as a thought came to him, he told me to stay by the door whilst he went up into the saloon.
In a few minutes he returned with the purser, both armed and carrying lamps. They came very quietly, and paused with me outside the door, and examined the old seals and the door itself. Then, at the purser’s request, the captain removed the new seals, and unlocked the door.
As he opened it the purser turned suddenly and looked behind him. I heard it also—a vague whispering, seeming to be in the air, then it was drowned and lost in the creaking of the timbers. The captain had heard the sound, and was standing in the doorway holding his lamp high and looking in, pistol ready in his right hand, for to him it had seemed to come from within the bullion-room. Yet the place was as empty as we had left it but a few minutes before—as, indeed, it was bound to be—of any living creature. The captain went to where the bullion-chest was missing, and stooped to point out the gap to the purser.
A queer exclamation came from him, and he remained stooping, whilst the purser and I pressed forward to find what new thing had happened now. When I saw what the captain was staring at, you will understand that I felt simply dazed, for there right before his face, in its proper place, was the thirteenth bullion-chest, as, indeed, it must have been all the while.
‘You’ve been dreaming,’ said the purser, with a burst of relieved laughter. ‘My goodness, but you did give me a fright!’
The captain and I stared at the rematerialised treasure-chest, and then at one another.
‘That chest was not there a few minutes ago!’ the captain said at length. Then he brushed the hair off his forehead, and looked again at the chest. ‘Are we dreaming?’ he said at last, and looked at me. He touched the chest with his foot, and I did the same with my hand; but it was no illusion, and we could only suppose that we had made some extraordinary mistake.
I turned to the purser.
‘But the whispering!’ I said. ‘You heard the whispering!’
‘Yes,’ said the captain. ‘What was that? I tell you there’s something queer knocking about, or else we’re all mad.’
The purser stared, puzzled and nodding his head.
‘I heard something,’ he said. ‘The chief thing is, the stuff is there all right. I suppose you’ll put a watch over it?’
‘By Moses! Yes!’ said the captain. ‘The mates and I’ll sleep with that blessed gold until we hand it ashore in Lond
on!’
And so it was arranged. We three officers took it in turn to sleep actually inside the bullion-room itself, being sealed and locked in with the treasure. In addition to this, the captain made the petty officers keep watch and watch with him and the purser, through the whole of each twenty-four hours, trapesing round and round that wretched bullion-room until not a mouse could have gone in or out without being seen. In addition, he had the deck above and below thoroughly examined by the carpenter once in every twenty-four hours, so that never was a treasure so scrupulously guarded.
For our part, we officers began to grow pretty sick of the job, once the touch of excitement connected with the thought of robbery had worn off. And when, as sometimes happened, we were aware of that extraordinary whispering, it was only the captain’s determination and authority which made us submit to the constant discomfort and breaking of our sleep; for every hour the watchman on the outside of the bullion-room would knock twice on the boards of the room, and the sleeping officer within would have to rouse, take a look round and knock back twice, to signify that all was well.
Sometimes I could almost think that we got into the way of doing this in our sleep, for I have been roused to my watch on deck, with no memory of having answered the watchman’s knock, though a cautious inquiry showed me that I had done so.
Then, one night when I was sleeping in the bullion-room, a rather queer thing happened. Something must have roused me between the times of the watchman’s knocks, for I wakened suddenly and half sat up, with a feeling that something was wrong somewhere. As in a dream, I looked round, and all the time fighting against my sleepiness. Everything seemed normal; but when I looked at the tiers of bullion-chests I saw that there was a gap among them. Some of the chests had surely gone.
I stared in a stupid, nerveless way, as a man full of sleep sometimes will do, without rousing himself to realise the actuality of the things he looks at. And even as I stared I dozed over and fell back, but seemed to waken almost immediately and look again at the chests. Yet it was plain that I must have seen dazedly and half-dreaming, for not a bullion-chest was missing, and I sank back again thankfully to my slumber.
Yet when at the end of my ‘treasure watch’ (as we had grown to call our watch below) I reported my queer half-dream to the captain, he came down himself and made a thorough examination of the bullion-room, also questioning the sail-maker, who had been the watchman outside. But he said there had been nothing unusual, only that once he had thought he heard the curious whispering going about in the air of the lazarette.
And so that queer voyage went on, with over us all the time a sense of peculiar mystery, vague and indefinable; so that one thought a thousand strange weird thoughts which one lacked the courage to put into words. And the other times there was only a sense of utter weariness of it all, and the one desire to get to port and be shut of it and go back to a normal life in some other vessel. Even the passengers—many of whom were returning diggers—were infected by the strange atmosphere and of uncertainty that prompted our constant guarding of the bullion, for it had got known among them that a special guard was being kept, and that certain inexplicable things had happened. But the captain refused their offers of help, preferring to keep his own men about the gold, as you may suppose.
At last we reached London and docked; and now occurred the strangest thing of all. When the bank officials came aboard to take over the gold, the captain took them down to the bullion-room, where the carpenter was walking round as outside watchman, and the first mate was sealed inside, as usual.
The captain explained that we were taking unusual precautions, and broke the seals. When, however, they unlocked and opened the door, the mate did not answer to the captain’s call, but was seen to be lying quiet beside the gold. Examination showed that he was quite dead; but there was nowhere any mark or sign to show that his death was unnatural. As the captain said to me afterwards, ‘Another case of “just sickening and going off.” I wouldn’t sail again in this packet for anything the owners liked to offer me!’
The officials examined the boxes, and, finding all in order had them taken ashore up to the bank, and very thankful I was to see the last of it. Yet this is where I was mistaken, for about an hour later, as I was superintending the slinging out of some heavy cargo, there came a message from the bank to the effect that every one of the bullion-chests was a dummy filled with lead, and that no one be allowed to leave the ship until an inquiry and search had been made.
This was carried out rigorously, so that not a cabin or a scrap of personal luggage was left unexamined, and afterwards the ship herself was searched, but nowhere was there any signs of the gold; yet as there must have been something like a ton of it, it was not a thing that could have been easily hidden.
Permission was now given to all that they might go ashore, and I proceeded once more to supervise the slinging out of heavy stuff that I had been ‘bossing’ when the order came from the bank. And all the time, as I gave my orders, I felt in a daze. How could nearly seventeen hundredweight of gold have been removed out of that guarded bullion-room? I remembered all the curious things that had been heard and seen and half-felt. Was there something queer about the ship? But my reason objected: there was surely some explanation of the mystery.
Abruptly I came out of my thoughts, for the man on the shore-gear had just let a heavy case down rather roughly, and a dandy-looking person was cursing him for his clumsiness. It was then that a possible explanation of the mystery came to me, and I determined to take the risk of testing it. I jumped ashore and swore at the man who was handling the gear, telling him to slack away more carefully, to which he replied, ‘Ay, ay, sir.’ Then, under my breath, I said:
‘Take no notice of the hard talk, Jimmy. Let the next one come down good and solid. I’ll take the responsibility if it smashes.’
Then I stood back and let Jimmy have his chance. The next case went well up to the block before Jimmy took a turn and signalled to the winch to vast heaving.
‘Slack away handsome!’ yelled Jimmy and he let his own rope smoke round the bollard. The case came down, crashing from a height of thirty feet, and burst on the quay. As the dust cleared I heard the dandy cursing at the top of his voice.
I did not bother about him. What was attracting my attention was the fact that among the heavy timbers of the big case was a number of the missing bullion-chests. I seized my whistle and blew it for one of the ’prentices. When he came I told him to run up the quay for a policeman. Then I turned to the captain and the third mate, who had come running ashore, and explained. They ran to the lorry on which the other cases had been placed, and with the help of some of the men pulled them down again on to the quay. But when they came to search for the swell stranger, who had been looking after the unloading of the stolen gold, he was nowhere to be found; so that, after all, the policeman had nothing to do when he arrived but mount guard over the recovered bullion, of which, I am glad to say, not a case was missing.
Later, a more intelligent examination into things revealed how the robbery had been effected. When we took down the temporary bullion-room we found that a very cleverly concealed sliding panel had been fitted into the end opposite to the door. This gave us the idea to examine a wooden ventilator which came up through the deck near by from the lower hold. And now we held the key to the whole mystery.
Evidently there had been quite a gang of thieves aboard the ship. They had built the cases ashore, and packed them with loaded dummy bullion-chests, sealed and banded exactly like the originals. These had been placed in the hold at Melbourne as freight, under the name of ‘specimens.’ In the meanwhile some of the band must have got our carpenter, who had built the bullion-room, and promised him a share of the gold if he would build the secret panel into one end. Then, when we got to sea, the thieves got down into the lower hold through one of the forrard hatches, and, having opened one of the cases, began to exchange the dummies for the
real chests, by climbing up inside the wooden ventilator shaft, which the carpenter had managed to fit with a couple of boards that slid to one side, just opposite to the secret panel in the wooden bullion-room.
It must have been very slow work, and their whispering to one another had been carried up the ventilator shaft, which passed right through the captain’s cabin, under the appearance of a large ornamental strut, or upright, supporting the arm-racks. It was this unexpected carrying of the sound which had brought the captain and me down unexpectedly, and nearly discovered them; so that they had not even had time to replace the thirteenth chest with its prepared dummy.
I don’t think there is much more to explain. There is very little doubt in my mind that the captain’s extraordinary precautions must have made things difficult for the robbers, and that they could only get to work then when the carpenter happened to be the outside watchman. It is also obvious to me that some drug which threw off narcotic fumes must have been injected into the bullion-room, to ensure the officer not waking at inconvenient moments, so that the time that I did waken, and felt so muddled I must have been in a half-stupefied condition, and did really see that some of the chests were gone; but these were replaced so soon as I fell back asleep. The first mate must have died from an over-prolonged inhalation of the drug.
I think that is all that has to do with this incident. Perhaps, though, you may be pleased to hear that I was handsomely rewarded for having solved the mystery. So that, altogether, I was very well satisfied.
The Echo of a Mutiny
R. Austin Freeman
Like Doyle and Eustace, Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943) qualified as a doctor before establishing himself as an author of detective stories. Buying a practice was beyond his financial means, and he joined the Colonial Service, sailing to Accra on Africa’s Gold Coast in 1887 to take up a post as Assistant Colonial Surgeon. After contracting blackwater fever, he returned to Britain and during the long process of recovery, he started writing as a means of supplementing his income. His first book, Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman, appeared in 1898, and was well reviewed, but sales were modest. Undaunted, he published articles and stories in magazines, and wrote a series of detective stories about the rogue Romney Pringle in collaboration with another doctor, Dr John James Pitcairn, under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown.
Deep Waters Page 9