The little fishing smack behaved bravely when she got out to sea; but even with the help of the oars, stoutly plied by the two young men, they gained no way upon the Crow, for the black speck grew fainter and fainter upon the horizon-line, and at last dropped down behind it altogether.
“We shall never catch her,” one of the men said, helping himself to a cupful of spirit out of the stone-bottle, in a sudden access of despondency. “We shall no more catch t’ Crow than we shall catch t’ day before yesterday, unless t’ wind changes.”
“I doubt t’ wind will change after dark,” answered the other young man, who had applied himself oftener than his companion to the stone-bottle, and took a more hopeful view of things. “I doubt but we shall have a change come dark.”
He was looking out to windward as he spoke. He took the rudder out of Mr. Carter’s hands presently, and that gentleman rolled himself in his new railway rug, and lay down in the bottom of the boat, with one of the men’s overcoats for a blanket and the other for a pillow, and, hushed by the monotonous plashing of the water against the keel of the boat, fell into a pleasant slumber, whose blissfulness was only marred by the gridiron-like sensation of the hard boards upon which he was lying.
He awoke from this slumber to hear that the wind had changed, and that the Pretty Polly — the boat belonging to the two fishermen was called the Pretty Polly — was gaining on the Crow.
“We shall be alongside of her in an hour,” one of the men said.
Mr. Carter shook off the drowsy influence of his long sleep, and scrambled to his feet. It was bright moonlight, and the little boat left a trail of tremulous silver in her wake as she cut through the water. Far away upon the horizon there was a faint speck of shimmering white, to which one of the young men pointed with his brawny finger It was the dirty mainsail of the Crow bleached into silver whiteness under the light of the moon.
“There’s scarcely enough wind to puff out a farthing candle,” one of the young men said. “I think we’re safe to catch her.”
Mr. Carter took a cupful of rum at the instigation of one of his companions, and prepared himself for the business that lay before him.
Of all the hazardous ventures in which the detective had been engaged, this was certainly not the least hazardous. He was about to venture on board a strange vessel, with a captain who bore no good name, and with men who most likely closely resembled their master; he was about to trust himself among such fellows as these, in the hope of capturing a criminal whose chances, if once caught, were so desperate that he would not be likely to hesitate at any measures by which he might avoid a capture. But the detective was not unused to encounters where the odds were against him, and he contemplated the chances of being hurled overboard in a hand-to-hand struggle with Joseph Wilmot as calmly as if death by drowning were the legitimate end of a man’s existence.
Once, while standing in the prow of the boat, with his face turned steadily towards that speck in the horizon, Mr. Carter thrust his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, where there lurked the newest and neatest thing in revolvers; but beyond this action, which was almost involuntary, he made no sign that he was thinking of the danger before him.
The moon grew brighter and brighter in a cloudless sky, as the fishing-smack shot through the water, while the steady dip of the oars seemed to keep time to a wordless tune. In that bright moonlight the sails of the Crow grew whiter and larger with every dip of the oars that were carrying the Pretty Polly so lightly over the blue water.
As the boat gained upon the vessel she was following, Mr. Carter told the two young men his errand, and his authority to capture the runaway.
“I think I may count on your standing by me — eh, my lads?” he asked.
Yes, the young men answered; they would stand by him to the death. Their spirits seemed to rise with the thought of danger, especially as Mr. Carter hinted at a possible reward for each of them if they should assist in the capture of the runaway. They rowed close under the side of the black and wicked-looking vessel, and then Mr. Carter, standing up in the boat gave a “Yo-ho! aboard there!” that resounded over the great expanse of plashing water.
A man with a pipe in his mouth looked over the side.
“Hilloa! what’s the row there?” he demanded fiercely.
“I want to see the captain.”
“What do you want with him?”
“That’s my business.”
Another man, with a dingy face, and another pipe in his mouth, looked over the side, and took his pipe from between his lips, to address the detective.
“What the —— do you mean by coming alongside us?” he cried. “Get out of the way, or we shall run you down.”
“Oh, no, you won’t, Mr. Spelsand,” answered one of the young men from the boat; “you’ll think twice before you turn rusty with us. Don’t you remember the time you tried to get off John Bowman, the clerk that robbed the Yorkshire Union Assurance Office — don’t you remember trying to get him off clear, and gettin’ into trouble yourself about it?”
Mr. Spelsand bawled some order to the man at the helm, and the vessel veered round suddenly; so suddenly, that had the two young men in the boat been anything but first-rate watermen, they and Mr. Carter would have become very intimately acquainted with the briny element around and about them. But the young men were very good watermen, and they were also familiar with the manners and customs of Captain Spelsand, of the Crow; so, as the black-looking schooner veered round, the little boat shot out into the open water, and the two young oarsmen greeted the captain’s manoeuvre with a ringing peal of laughter.
“I’ll trouble you to lay-to while I come on board,” said the detective, while the boat bobbed up and down on the water, close alongside of the schooner. “You’ve got a gentleman on board — a gentleman whom I’ve got a warrant against. It can’t much matter to him whether I take him now, or when he gets to Copenhagen; for take him I surely shall; but it’ll matter a good deal to you, Captain Spelsand, if you resist my authority.”
The captain hesitated for a little, while he gave a few fierce puffs at his dirty pipe.
“Show us your warrant,” he said presently, in a sulky tone.
The detective had started from Scotland Yard in the first instance with an open warrant for the arrest of the supposed murderer. He handed this document up to the captain of the Crow, and that gentleman, who was by no means an adept in the unseamanlike accomplishments of reading and writing, turned it over, and examined it thoughtfully in the vivid moonlight.
He could see that there were a lot of formidable-looking words and flourishes in it, and he felt pretty well convinced that it was a genuine document, and meant mischief.
“You’d better come aboard,” he said; “you don’t want me; that’s certain.”
The captain of the Crow said this with an air of sublime resignation; and in the next minute the detective was scrambling up the side of the vessel, by the aid of a rope flung out by one of the sailors on board the Crow.
Mr. Carter was followed by one of the fishermen; and with that stalwart ally he felt himself equal to any emergency.
“I’ll just throw my eye over your place down below,” he said, “if you’ll hand me a lantern.”
This request was not complied with very willingly; and it was only on a second production of the warrant that Mr. Carter obtained the loan of a wretched spluttering wick, glimmering in a dirty little oil-lamp. With this feeble light he turned his back upon the lovely moonlight, and stumbled down into a low-ceilinged cabin, darksome and dirty, with berths which were as black and dingy, and altogether as uninviting as the shelves made to hold coffins in a noisome underground vault.
There were three men asleep upon these shelves; and Mr. Carter examined these three sleepers as coolly as if they had indeed been the coffined inmates of a vault. Amongst them he found a man whose face was turned towards the cabin-wall, but who wore a blue coat and a traveller’s cap of fur, shaped like a Templar’s helmet, and ti
ed down over his ears.
The detective seized this gentleman by the fur collar of his coat and shook him roughly.
“Come, Mr. Joseph Wilmot,” he said; “get up, my man. You’ve given me a fine chase for it; but you’re nabbed at last.”
The man scrambled up out of his berth, and stood in a stooping attitude, for the cabin was not high enough for him, staring at Mr. Carter.
“What are you talking of, you confounded fool!” he said. “What have I got to do with Joseph Wilmot?”
The detective had never loosed his hand from the fur collar of his prisoner’s coat. The faces of the two men were opposite to each other, but only faintly visible in the dim light of the spluttering oil-lamp. The man in the fur-lined coat showed two rows of wolfish teeth, bared to the gums in a malicious grin.
“What do you mean by waking me out of sleep?” he asked. “What do you mean by assaulting and ballyragging me in this way? I’ll have it out of you for this, my fine gentleman. You’re a detective officer, are you? — a knowing card, of course; and you’ve followed me all the way from Warwickshire, and traced me, step by step, I suppose, and taken no end of trouble, eh? Why didn’t you look after the gentleman who stayed at home? Why didn’t you look after the poor lame gentleman who stayed at Woodbine Cottage, Lisford, and dressed up his pretty daughter as a housemaid, and acted a little play to sell you, you precious clever police-officer in plain clothes. Take me with you, Mr. Detective; stop me in going abroad to improve my mind and manners by foreign travel, do, Mr. Detective; and won’t I have a fine action against you for false imprisonment, — that’s all?”
There was something in the man’s tone of bravado that stamped it genuine. Mr. Carter gnashed his teeth together in a silent fury. Sold by that hazel-eyed housemaid with her face tied up! Sent away on a false trail, while the criminal got off at his leisure! Fooled, duped, and laughed at after twenty years of hard service! It was too bitter.
“Not Joseph Wilmot!” muttered Mr. Carter; “not Joseph Wilmot!”
“No more than you are, my pippin,” answered the traveller, insolently.
The two men were still standing face to face. Something in that insolent tone, something that brought back the memory of half-forgotten times, startled the detective. He lifted the lamp suddenly, still looking in the traveller’s face, still muttering in the same half-absent tone, “Not Joseph Wilmot!” and brought the light on a level with the other man’s eyes.
“No,” he cried, with a sudden tone of triumph, “not Joseph Wilmot, but Stephen Vallance — Blackguard Steeve, the forger — the man who escaped from Norfolk Island, after murdering one of the gaolers — beating his brains out with an iron, if I remember right. We’ve had our eye on you for a long time, Mr. Vallance; but you’ve contrived to give us the slip. Yours is an old case, yours is; but there’s a reward to be got for the taking of you, for all that. So I haven’t had my long journey for nothing.”
The detective tried to fasten his other hand on Mr. Vallance’s shoulder; but Stephen Vallance struck down that uplifted hand with a heavy blow of his fist, and, wresting himself from the detective’s grasp, rushed up the cabin-stairs.
Mr. Carter followed close at his heels.
“Stop that man!” he roared to one of the fishermen; “stop him!”
I suppose the instinct of self-preservation inspired Stephen Vallance to make that frantic rush, though there was no possible means of escape out of the vessel, except into the open boat, or the still more open sea. As he receded from the advancing detective, one of the fishermen sprang towards him from another part of the deck. Thus hemmed in by the two, and dazzled, perhaps, by the sudden brilliancy of the moonlight after the darkness of the place below, he reeled back against an opening in the side of the vessel, lost his balance, and fell with a heavy plunge into the water.
There was a sudden commotion on the deck, a simultaneous shout, as the men rushed to the side.
“Save him!” cried the detective. “He’s got a belt stuffed with diamonds round his waist!”
Mr. Carter said this at a venture, for he did not know which of the men had the diamond belt.
One of the fishermen threw off his shoes, and took a header into the water. The rest of the men stood by breathless, eagerly watching two heads bobbing up and down among the moonlit waves, two pairs of arms buffeting with the water. The force of the current drifted the two men far away from the schooner.
For an interval that seemed a long one, all was uncertainty. The schooner that had made so little way before seemed now to fly in the faint night-wind. At last there was a shout, and a head appeared above the water advancing steadily towards the vessel.
“I’ve got him!” shouted the voice of the fisherman. “I’ve got him by the belt!”
He came nearer to the vessel, striking out vigorously with one arm, and holding some burden with the other.
When he was close under the side, the captain of the Crow flung out a rope; but as the fisherman lifted his hand to grasp it, he uttered a sudden cry, and raised the other hand with a splash out of the water.
“The belt’s broke, and he’s sunk!” he shouted.
The belt had broken. A little ripple of light flashed briefly in the moonlight, and fell like a shower of spray from a fountain. Those glittering drops, that looked like fountain spray, were some of the diamonds bought by Joseph Wilmot; and Stephen Vallance, alias Blackguard Steeve, alias Major Vernon, had gone down to the bottom of the sea, never in this mortal life to rise again.
CHAPTER XLV.
GIVING IT UP.
The Pretty Polly went back to the port of Kingston-upon-Hull in the grey morning light, carrying Mr. Carter, very cold and very down-hearted — not to say humiliated — by his failure. To have been hoodwinked by a girl, whose devotion to the unhappy wretch she called her father had transformed her into a heroine — to have fallen so easily into the trap that had been set for him, being all the while profoundly impressed with the sense of his own cleverness — was, to say the least of it, depressing to the spirits of a first-class detective.
“And that fellow Vallance, too,” mused Mr. Carter, “to think that he should go and chuck himself into the water just to spite me! There’d have been some credit in taking him back with me. I might have made a bit of character out of that. But, no! he goes and tumbles back’ards into the water, rather than let me have any advantage out of him.”
There was nothing for Mr. Carter to do but to go straight back to Lisford, and try his luck again, with everything against him.
“Let me get back as fast as I may, Joseph Wilmot will have had eight-and-forty hours’ start of me,” he thought; “and what can’t he do in that time, if he keeps his wits about him, and don’t go wild and foolish like, as some of ’em do, when they’ve got such a chance as this. Anyhow, I’m after him, and it’ll go hard with me if he gives me the slip after all, for my blood’s up, and my character’s at stake, and I’d think no more of crossing the Atlantic after him than I’d think of going over Waterloo Bridge!”
It was a very chill and miserable time of the morning when the Pretty Polly ground her nose against the granite steps of the quay. It was a chill and dismal hour of the morning, and Mr. Carter felt sloppy and dirty and unshaven, as he stepped out of the boat and staggered up the slimy stairs. He gave the two young fishermen the promised five-pound note, and left them very well contented with their night’s work, inglorious though it had been.
There were no vehicles to be had at that early hour of the morning, so Mr. Carter was fain to walk from the quay to the station, where he expected to find Mr. Tibbles, or to obtain tidings of that gentleman. He was not disappointed; for, although the station wore its dreariest aspect, having only just begun to throb with a little spasmodic life, in the way of an early goods-train, Mr. Carter found his devoted follower prowling in melancholy loneliness amid a wilderness of empty carriages and smokeless engines, with the turnip whiteness of his complexion relieved by a red nose.
Mr.
Thomas Tibbles was by no means in the best possible temper in this chill early morning. He was slapping his long thin arms across his narrow chest, and performing a kind of amateur double-shuffle with his long flat feet, when Mr. Carter approached him; and he kept up the same shuffling and the same slapping while engaged in conversation with his superior, in a disrespectful if not defiant manner.
“A pretty game you’ve played me,” he said, in an injured tone. “You told me to hang about the station and watch the trains, and you’d come back in the course of the day — you would — and we’d dine together comfortable at the Station Hotel; and a deal you come back and dined together comfortable. Oh, yes! I don’t think so; very much indeed,” exclaimed Mr. Tibbles, vaguely, but with the bitterest derision in his voice and manner.
“Come, Sawney, don’t you go to cut up rough about it,” said Mr. Carter, coaxingly.
“I should like to know who’d go and cut up smooth about it?” answered the indignant Tibbles. “Why, if you could have a hangel in the detective business — which luckily you can’t, for the wings would cut out anything as mean as legs, and be the ruin of the purfession — the temper of that hangel would give way under what I’ve gone through. Hanging about this windy station, which the number of criss-cross draughts cuttin’ in from open doors and winders would lead a hignorant person to believe there was seventeen p’ints of the compass at the very least — hangin’ about to watch train after train, till there ain’t anything goin’ in the way of sarce as yen haven’t got to stand from the porters; or sittin’ in the coffee-room of the hotel yonder, watchin’ and listenin’ for the next train, till bein’ there to keep an appointment with your master is the hollerest of mockeries.”
Mr. Carter took his irate subordinate to the coffee-room of the Station Hotel, where Mr. Tibbles had engaged a bed and taken a few hours’ sleep in the dead interval between the starting of the last train at night and the first in the morning. The detective ordered a substantial breakfast, with a couple of glasses of pale brandy, neat, to begin with; and Mr. Tibbles’ equanimity was restored, under the influence of ham, eggs, mutton-cutlet, a broiled sole, and a quart or so of boiling coffee.
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