“It’s your fancy, young ’un,” said one of the older men. But even as he made the remark, several of the men cried out, “Hush!” In the succeeding silence many of them heard it, very faint and remote, the ghostly tap, tap, tapping, ringing strange and vague to them across the quiet water of the bay. The six men who were lying off in the boat, upon the far side of the hulk, also heard the low sounds in the general stillness of the night, and the man at the tiller suggested that they should row in upon the Glen Doon and give Larry Chaucer a hail, to ask whether he was all right. The rest of the men, however, objected that to do so would be to nullify the conditions of the bet; pointing out also that if Larry needed help he had only to shout, for they were not two hundred yards distant from him. Even as they argued the matter there came the sound of a pistol-shot from aboard the hulk, echoing sharp and startling across the bay.
“Pull, boys!” shouted Jarrett, the man at the tiller. “Something’s wrong with Larry! Get her out of the water now! Make her walk! We should never have left him!” There sounded a rapid succession of shots aboard the old iron hulk—one, two, three, four, five, then a blank silence. This was followed by a loud, horrible—peculiarly horrible—scream, and then again the silence.
“Good heavens! Pull!” yelled the boat-steerer. “That’s Larry!”
They heard a confused shouting from the wharf, where their friends were watching, and the rattle and rolling of oars as the other boats were driven towards the hulk, fully laden. Yet the men in the outward boat were the first to reach the Glen Doon, the boat-steerer shouting out Larry’s name at the top of his voice. But there was no answer, nor any sound of any kind at all from the deserted blackness of the wreck.
The boat was hooked on, and the men shinned up the oars, as Larry had shown them earlier in the night. They reached the decks and turned on their lights, each man reaching for the “gun”, which was wont to repose snugly on such occasions in the convenient but unsightly hippocket. Then they began the search, shouting Larry’s name continually, but he was nowhere to be seen about the decks. The other boats were alongside by this, and the rest of the young men joined in the search.
It was in the main hold that they found something—Larry’s pistol, every chamber emptied; and his dark-lantern, crumpled into a twisted mass of japanned tin. Nothing else of any kind. No sign of a struggle, not even the uncomfortable stain that tells of a wound received. And there were nowhere any marks of struggling feet—nothing.
They were all in the naked hold of the old vessel now, standing about, looking here and there uncomfortably, some of them frankly nervous and frightened of the vague horror of the Unknown that seemed all about them. In the unpleasant silence, someone spoke abruptly. It was Jarrett, the man who had been acting boat-steerer.
“Look here,” he said, “there’s something aboard this ship, and we’re going to find it.”
“We’ve searched everywhere,” replied several voices. As they spoke, a number of the men put up their hands for silence, and everyone was quiet, listening. They all heard it then. Something seemed to go upward in their midst, through the vacant night air that filled the hold. Yet the lanterns showed an utter stillness and emptiness. It was among them, whatever it was, and the light showed them nothing.
“Heavens!” muttered someone; and there was a panic, and a mad, foolish scramble for the deck above.
When they got there, out of the surrounding horror of the hold itself, they got back something of their courage and paused, clumped in a group, listening.
“What was it? What was it?” they questioned; but the black gape of the hatchway sent up no sound.
Presently, as the full significance of the whole affair came upon them, they gathered into a council, keeping their lights all about them, and staring all ways as they talked.
“We can’t leave him here, if he’s here, or until we know something,” said Jarrett, who was acting in this crisis somewhat as a leader. “A boat must go for the police, and we must send for his father.”
This was done, and within a couple of hours a squad of police were alongside in their launch, accompanied by “Billion Chaucer”. The chief of police himself had come with the expedition; for the son of Chaucer, the millionaire, was an important personage; or, at least, his father was, which came to the same thing.
“What does it all mean, anyway?” asked Mr. Chaucer. They told him and the chief together. At the end of the telling, Mr. Chaucer had a conference with the chief, with the result that the launch went off full speed for more help. In the meanwhile the young men were asked to get into the boats and make a cordon round the old ship, after which the chief and his men began to search in a thorough and systematic manner; yet they found nothing.
By the time that the early dawn had come in, the launch had returned, towing a string of boats, with a further squad of police and a large number of semi-official “helpers”—that is to say, labourers—the intention being to empty the hold of every ounce of silt and to strip the wreck to her bare skin. As the chief said, Mr. Larry Chaucer had come aboard, and there were scores of witnesses to prove that he had never left the vessel; therefore, he must be somewhere, and he was going to find out. He had no belief at all in the supernatural. “Ghosts be blowed!” he said. “It’s dirty work somewhere!”
In the course of the day they not only emptied the ship of every particle of the silt, but they stripped and ripped away all the old rotted bulkheads, until there was little more than the mere iron skin of the ship left. Yet, nowhere did they find any sign to tell of the fate of Larry Chaucer. He had gone utterly out of all human knowledge.
The search was abandoned at nightfall; but a squad of six police were left aboard, with instructions to keep a regular watch day and night; also—at Mr. Chaucer’s expense—a patrol-boat was stationed off the hulk, and relieved every six hours. For a fortnight this went on, and at the end of that time the mystery was just as impossible as at first.
At the conclusion of a fortnight the patrol-boat was withdrawn, and the detectives sent ashore, leaving the old iron hulk to brood alone over her mysteries through the dark nights. Yet, for all that the police had apparently deserted her and thrown up the case as hopeless, there was still a continual watch kept upon her officially from several points ashore, both day and night. Moreover, a secret patrol-boat kept in her vicinity at nights. In this way three weeks passed.
Then one night, the police in the patrol-boat heard the faint tap, tapping of hammers aboard the old iron hulk. They ran silently alongside, and put half a dozen armed detectives aboard quietly, with their lanterns. These men located the sounds in the great empty hold, and taking a grip of their courage, as we say, climbed down into the blackness without a sound. Then, at a whispered word of command from the officer in charge, they flashed on their lanterns and swept the rays over the whole of the great empty cavern. But there was not a sign anywhere of anything, beyond the clean-swept iron plates of the ship. And all the time, from some vague, unknowable place in the darkness, sounded the low, constant tap, tap, tapping of the hammers.
They returned to the decks, and switched off their lanterns. Then settled down, still in absolute silence, to watch, taking various stations about the deck of the vessel. Two hours passed, during which a faint mist had cleared away, allowing the moon—which was once again near the full—to make indistinctly clear (as moonlight does) every detail on the poop and down on the maindeck, while the broken masts and parted tangle of gear showed in black silhouettes against the pale light.
It was in the third hour of their watch that the six men saw something come up above the port rail and show plain in the moonlight. It was a man’s head and face, the hair as long as a woman’s, and dripping with sea water, so that the cadaverous face showed white and unwholesome from out of the sopping down-hang of the hair. In a minute there followed the body of the strange man, and the sea water ran from his garments, glistening as the moonbeams caught the drops. He came inboard over the rail, making no more noise t
han a shadow, and paused, swaying with a queer movement full in a patch of moonlight. Then, noiseless, he seemed to glide across the deck in the direction of the dark gape of the open main hatchway.
“Hands up, my son!” shouted the officer in charge, and presented his revolver. His voice and hand were both a little unsteady, as may be imagined. Yet the figure took no heed of him, but dropped noiselessly out of sight into the utter dark of the hold, just as the officer fired. Simultaneously there came a volley of shots from the other police; but the strange man was gone. They made a rush for the hatchway and leaned over the coaming, flashing their lanterns down into the bottom of the ship, and long the ’tweendeck beams; but there was nothing. They climbed hurriedly down into the hold and searched it fore and aft. It was empty.
When they returned once more to the deck the patrol-boat was hailing them. The officer had heard the shooting and had run down to discover what was happening. The detective officer gave a brief account of what had occurred, and sent a note by the patrol-boat to the chief of police, stating the brief facts. An hour later the chief was with them. He instituted a fresh and even more rigorous search, but found nothing of any kind. Yet, as he said, the man had come aboard and gone down into the hold, and in the hold he must still be, seeing that he had not returned.
“It’s where them sailor-men was drownded!” muttered one of the detectives, and several of his companions murmured their agreement with the suggestion of belief that lay at the back of his remark.
“ ’Twas a drowned man, right enough, as come aboard,” one of them said definitely. “A walkin’ corpse!”
“Shut your silly mouth!” said the chief, and he walked up and down for a little, puzzling. Then he wrote a note, which he gave to the officer of the patrol-boat. “Deliver at once, Murgan,” he ordered.
At dawn, in response to the chief’s written order, there came alongside of the hulk a couple of boat-loads of mechanics in their blue dungaree slops. Under the direction of the chief of police, the whole of the interior of the vessel was mapped out and apportioned to the mechanics, who were ordered to drill holes at stated intervals, right through the side of the ship, fore and aft. In this way, it was speedily proved, beyond all doubt, that there was no such thing as double sides to the hulk, for the points of the drills could be seen coming through into the sunlight on the outside of the vessel.
When it had been proved that there was no such thing as a secret recess above water, the chief gave orders to drill holes right through the bottom of the ship. This was done constantly and regularly all along; and each time that a drill bit through, the sea water spurted up into the men’s faces, proving beyond doubt that there was no such thing as a secret double bottom. As each hole was completed, it was “leaded”, that is temporarily plugged with lead, prior to filling it later with a red-hot rivet. In this fashion, very little water was allowed to come into the hulk.
It was now proved as an indisputable fact that the Glen Doon floated there nothing more than an empty iron shell upon the water. There was no place aboard her big enough to have hidden a fair-sized rat and, what was more, there was no possibility of her having any secret hiding-places aboard, for this last drastic test had definitely settled the point. There remained now only the stumps of the hollow, steel lower masts, and that these were empty was soon shown by lowering a lantern into each, on the end of a long cord. The Glen Doon was nothing more than a thin iron shell; yet a living man, and what had passed for a second living man, had gone down into that naked hold and disappeared utterly and entirely.
“She orter be sunk. She’s one of them devil-ships!” remarked one of the mechanics, wiping the sweat from his face. He had heard a full account of the curious happenings from some of the detectives. “I’m goin’ ashore. I don’t like this!”
At that moment there came a loud “Ha!” from the chief of police, who had remained in the hold, walking up and down with a puzzled frown. The others had come up into the sunlight, disliking the uncomfortable sensation that the great gloomy cavern bred in them. Yet now, at the chief’s shout, there was a general scurry to get down to him, to learn what had caused him to shout to them.
They found him standing near the mainmast, staring through a small pocket microscope at something on the mast.
“You’re a lot of beauties, you are!” he called to them as they drew near. “Look at this!”
They found that he was pointing to a few stray hairs that appeared to have got stuck upon the mast, but a more careful scrutiny with the microscope showed that they had really been nipped into the steel itself—in other words, that there was an almost invisible opening in the hollow steel mast.
The chief beckoned to a couple of the mechanics and set them to work with their drills, and presently, with a couple of long jemmy-bars thrust into the holes they bored, they were able to prise open a beautifully fitted curved door of painted iron that exactly matched the colour and curve of the hollow mast. A careful search at the bottom of the interior of the mast showed them a diminutive steel lever which, on being wrenched round, allowed the metal floor of the inside of the mast to drop downwards, discovering a small shaft, about six feet deep, which led straight down into some strange, secret apartment hidden under the bottom of the ship. As the police paused there, they saw the flash of a light and heard men’s voices.
Descending the small shaft, revolvers in hand, the officers found themselves in a curious room, so enormously long that it gave them the impression at first of being a tunnel, just sufficiently high to enable a man to stand upright with comfort. Later, when the mechanics came to examine it, they pronounced it to be formed of a series of old boilers, joined end to end, so as to be watertight, and suspended several feet below the ship’s keel by iron struts; the means of ingress and egress being through the little shaft that led down from the foot of the hollow mainmast. They found, also, that there were similar shafts leading up to the feet of both the fore and mizzen masts, though these were used chiefly for ventilation purposes, being fitted with small electric-motor fans, driven from a dynamo, which was used also in certain illegal processes of silver-plating, and was driven in turn from a small gasoline engine within the long tunnel-like room.
There were six men in this tunnel-shaped apartment. Five of them were skilled workmen, and very badly “wanted” indeed for the identical work at which they were now caught—coin-punching, as an Americanism has it; in other words, coining.
They were taken like so many rats in a trap, and made no attempt to fight, realizing the hopelessness of their position. The sixth man, the detectives recognized as the “drowned sailor”. He, having swum off to the ship to warn the gang that the detectives had crept quietly aboard, and so to get the coin-punchers to stop working the machinery which had so misled everyone—the sound being very faint and far-seeming after having been conducted up from underwater to the ship through the iron stays which supported the long room of boilers in place.
In an account of this kind, I have nothing to do with the sentences that were accorded to the men, but will refer only to those points which are not yet made clear. The fate of Larry Chaucer was never definitely known. It appears that there was a considerable number of men in the gang, and these worked a week at a time in relays of five in the boiler-tunnel room. As it happened, the five men and the scout who were caught were able to prove conclusively that they were up at Crockett on the night on which Larry disappeared. His body was never found, and his end can be only guessed at.
It is evident that he must have been waiting silently down in the hold when the door in the mast was opened, and so discovered too much to be allowed to live. He was probably knocked on the head and lowered into the boiler-room, his body being disposed of later. There is no doubt that, had he not found out something definite, he would not have been molested, for it was no part of the original plan of the coiners to attract attention to the hulk by suggesting that she was haunted. This was, indeed, a very great misfortune for them in every way.
/> The sound which had seemed to pass up through the crowd of young men in the hold had been the slight rustling noise made by one of the gang swarming up inside of the hollow mast to take a peep from aloft, so as to find out what was happening. The mast, of course, passed up through the centre of the hold, and was therefore in their midst, but no one had dreamed that the faint, peculiar noise proceeded from it. Indeed, it is unlikely that any of them really knew that the masts were made of anything but solid, painted wood; though, of course, this is only a conjecture.
The crumpled condition of Larry’s lantern was probably due to its having been trodden on by some of the gang, when they captured him.
I believe that I have now touched upon all the uncleared points. With regard to the scout, he must have noticed, from the shore, the flash of the detective’s lanterns, and swum off, in preference to boating, because it was the way least likely to attract attention. He was a Mexican, and the hairs in the mast were obviously trapped from his plentiful growth, which has been commented upon earlier.
Mr. Jock Danplank
“Mary,” said Mr. Jock Danplank, “we’re going to do thesepeople down one, or die like heroes! What say?”
The speaker, a Britisher who had weathered the States, looked down at his exceedingly pretty and diminutive American wife, and smiled grimly. And she, in return, stared meditatively at him, at the same time “snying” up her nose in a fashion peculiar to herself.
“Of course, we shall level up, J.D.,” she agreed. “If only your uncle had finished what he was saying”—she paused; then, “seventy-seven feet due east—seventy-seven feet due east—” she muttered thoughtfully, and tailed off again into silence and thought.
The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places Page 47