“Hourra, the Evil One is circumvented! Regardez-vous.
Holding the letter to the study desk-lamp, he tapped its bottom margin with his finger. Invisible except against the light, a series of light stratches, as though from a pin-point or dry pen, showed on the paper:
“You can read him?” he asked anxiously “Me, I understand the international, but this is in American Morse, and—”
“Of course I can,” young Davisson broke in. “‘Jones’ Mill,’ it says. Good Lord, why didn’t I think of that?”
“Ah? And this mill of Monsieur Jones—”
“Is an old ruin several miles from Boonesburg. No one’s occupied it since I can remember, but it can’t be more than three miles from the place where we met the wolves, and—”
“Eh bien, if that be so, why do we sit here like five sculptured figures on the Arc de Triomphe? Come, let us go at once, my friends. Trowbridge, Renouard, Friend Hiji, and you, Friend Jean, prepare yourselves for service in the cold. Me, I shall telephone the good Costello for the necessary implements.
“Oui-da, Messieurs les Loups, I think that we shall give you the party of surprise—we shall feed you that which will make your bellies ache most villainously!”
IT WAS SOMETHING LIKE a half-hour later when the police car halted at the door. “It’s kind o’ irreg’lar, sor,” Sergeant Costello announced as he lugged several heavy satchels up the steps with the aid of two patrolmen, “but I got permission fer th’ loan. Seems like you got a good stand-in down to headquarters.”
The valises opened, he drew forth three submachine guns, each with an extra drum of cartridges, and two riot guns, weapons similar to the automatic shotgun, but heavier in construction and firing shells loaded with much heavier shot.
“You and Friend Jean will use the shotguns, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin told me. “Renouard, Ingraham and I will handle the quick-firers. Come, prepare yourselves at once. Heavy clothing, but no long coats; we shall need leg-room before the evening ends.”
I fished a set of ancient hunting-togs out of my wardrobe—thick trousers of stout corduroy, a pair of high lace boots, a heavy sweater and suede jerkin, finally a leather cap with folds that buckled underneath the chin. A few minutes’ search unearthed another set for Davisson, and we joined the others in the hallway. De Grandin was resplendent in a leather aviation suit; Renouard had slipped three sweaters on above his waistcoat and bound the bottoms of his trousers tight about his ankles with stout linen twine; Ingraham was arrayed in a suit of corduroys which had seen much better days, though not recently.
“Are we prepared?” de Grandin asked. “Très bon. Let us go.”
The bitter cold of the afternoon had given way to slightly warmer weather, but before we had traversed half a mile the big, full, yellow moon was totally obscured by clouds, and shortly afterward the air was filled with flying snowflakes and tiny, cutting grains of hail which rattled on the windshield and stung like whips when they blew into our faces.
About three-quarters of a mile from the old mill I had to stop my motor for the road was heavy with new-fallen snow and several ancient trees had blown across the trail, making further progress impossible.
“Eh bien, it must be on foot from now on, it seems,” de Grandin murmured as he clambered from the car. “Very well; one consents when one must. Let us go; there is no time to lose.”
The road wound on, growing narrower and more uneven with each step. Thick ranks of waving, black-boughed pines marched right to the border of the trail on either side, and through their swaying limbs the storm-wind soughed eerily, while the very air seemed colder with a sharper, harder chill, and the wan and ghastly light which sometimes shines on moonless, snow-filled winter nights, seemed filled with creeping, shifting phantom-shapes which stalked us as a wolf-pack stalks a stag.
“Morbleu, I so not like this place, me,” Renouard declared. “It has an evil smell.”
“I think so, too, mon vieux,” de Grandin answered. “Three times already I have all but fired at nothing. My nerves are not so steady as I thought.”
“Oh, keep your tails up,” Ingraham comforted. “It’s creepy as a Scottish funeral here, but I don’t see anything—”
“Ha, do you say it? Then look yonder, if you will, and tell me what it is you do not see, my friend,” de Grandin interrupted.
Loping silently across the snow, themselves a mere shade darker than the fleecy covering of the ground, came a pack of great, white wolves, green-yellow eyes a-glint with savagery, red tongues lolling from their mouths as they drew nearer through the pines, then suddenly deployed like soldiers at command, and, their cordon formed, sank to the snow and sat there motionless.
“Cher Dieu,” Renouard said softly. “It is the pack of beasts which made away with Mademoiselle Alice, and—”
A movement stirred within the pack. A brute rose from its haunches, took a tentative step forward, then sank down again, belly to the snow, and lay there panting, its glaring eyes fixed hungrily upon us.
And as the leader moved, so moved the pack. A score of wolves were three feet nearer us, for every member of the deadly circle had advanced in concert with the leader.
I stole a quick glance at de Grandin. His little round blue eyes were glaring fiercely as those of any of the wolves; beneath his little blond mustache his lips were drawn back savagely, showing his small, white, even teeth in a snarl of hate and fury.
Another rippling movement in the wolf-pack, and now the silence crashed, and from the circle there went up such pandemonium of hellish howls as I had never heard; not even in the worst of nightmares. I had a momentary vision of red mouths and gleaming teeth and shaggy, gray-white fur advancing toward me in a whirlwind rush, then:
“Give fire!” de Grandin shouted.
And now the wolf-pack’s savage battle-cry was drowned out by another roar as de Grandin, Ingraham and Renouard, back touching back, turned loose the venom of their submachine guns. Young Davisson and I, too, opened fire with our shotguns, not taking aim, but pumping the mechanisms frenziedly and firing point-blank into the faces of the charging wolves.
How long the battle lasted I have no idea, but I remember that at last I felt de Grandin’s hand upon my arm and heard him shouting in my ear: “Cease firing, Friend Trowbridge, there is no longer anything to shoot. Parbleu, if wolves have souls, I damn think hell is full with them tonight!”
22. The Crimson Clue
HE TURNED ABRUPTLY TO Renouard: “Allez au feu, mon brave,” he cried, “pour la partie!”
We charged across the intervening patch of snow-filled clearing, and more than once de Grandin or Renouard or Ingraham paused in his stride to spray the windows of the tumbledown old house with a stream of lead. But not a shot replied, nor was there any sign of life as we approached the doorless doorway.
“Easy on,” Ingraham counseled. “They may be lyin’ doggo, waitin’ for a chance—”
“But no,” de Grandin interrupted. “Had that been so, they surely would not have missed the chance to shoot us to death a moment ago—we were a perfectly defined target against the snow, and they had the advantage of cover. Still, a milligram of caution is worth a double quintal of remorse; so let us step warily.
“Renouard and I will take the lead. Friend Trowbridge, you and Friend Jean walk behind us and flash your searchlights forward, and well above our heads. That way, if we are ambushed, they will shoot high and give us opportunity to return their fire. Friend Hiji, do you bring up the rear and keep your eyes upon the ground which we have traversed. Should you see aught which looks suspicious, shoot first and make investigation afterward, I do not wish that we should die tonight.”
Accordingly, in this close formation, we searched the old house from its musty cellar to its drafty attic, but nowhere was there any hint of life or recent occupancy until, as we forced back the sagging door which barred the entrance to the old grain bins, we noted the faint, half-tangible aroma of narcisse noir.
“Alice!” John
Davisson exclaimed. “She’s been here—I recognize the scent!”
“U’m?” de Grandin murmured thoughtfully. “Advance your light a trifle nearer, if you please, Friend Trowbridge.”
I played the flashlight on the age-bleached casing of the door. There, fresh against the wood’s flat surface were three small pits, arranged triangularly. A second group of holes, similarly spaced, were in the handhewn planking of the door, exactly opposite those which scarred the jamb.
“Screw-holes,” de Grandin commented, “and on the outer side. You were correct, Friend Jean; your nose and heart spoke truly. This place has been the prison of your love—here are the marks where they made fast the lock and hasp to hold her prisoner—but hélas, the bird is flown; the cage deserted.”
Painstakingly as a paleographer might scan a palimpsest, he searched the little, wood-walled cubicle, flashing his search-light’s darting ray on each square inch of aged planking. “Ah-ha?” he asked of no one in particular as the flashlight struck into a corner, revealing several tiny smears of scarlet on the floor.
“Morbleu! Blood?” Renouard exclaimed. “Can it be that—”
De Grandin threw himself full length upon the floor, his little, round blue eyes a scant three inches from the row of crimson stains. “Blood? Non!” he answered as he finished his examination. “It is the mark of pomade pour les levres, and unless I do mistake—”
“You mean lipstick?” I interrupted. “What in the world—”
“Zut!” he cut me short. “You speak too much, my friend.” To Davisson:
“See here, Friend Jean, is not some system of design in this? Is it not—”
“Of course it is!” the young man answered sharply. “It’s another telegraphic message, like the one she sent us in the letter. Can’t you see? ‘Dash, dash; dot, dash; dot, dot, dot; dot, dash; dash, dot—’ He read the code through quickly.
De Grandin looked at him with upraised brows. “Exactement,” he nodded, “and that means—”
“M-a-c-a-n-d-r-e-w-s s-i-e—” Davisson spelled the message out, then paused, shook his head in puzzlement, and once again essayed the task.
“I can’t get any sense from it,” he finally confessed. “That’s what it spells, no doubt of it, but what the devil—”
“I say, old chap, go over it once more,” asked Ingraham. “I may be blotto, but—”
Crash! The thunderous detonation shook the floor beneath us and a heavy beam came hurtling from the ceiling, followed by a cataract of splintered planks and rubble.
Crash! A second fulmination smashed the wooded wall upon our right and a mass of shattered brick and timber poured into the room.
“Bombes d’air!” Renouard cried wildly. “Down—down, my friends; it is the only way to—” His warning ended in a choking grunt as a third explosion ripped the cover off our hiding place and a blinding pompom of live flame flashed in our eyes.
I felt myself hurled bodily against the farther wall, felt the crushing impact as I struck the mortised planks, and then I felt no more.
“TROWBRIDGE, MY FRIEND, MY good, brave comrade; do you survive, have you been killed to death? Mordieu, say that you live, my old one!” I heard de Grandin’s voice calling from immeasurable distance, and slowly realized he held my head upon his shoulder while with frantic hands he rubbed snow on my brow.
“Oh, I’m all right, I guess,” I answered weakly, then sank again in comforting oblivion.
When next I struggled back to consciousness, I found myself on my own surgery table, de Grandin busy with a phial of smelling salts, a glass of aromatic spirit on the table, and a half-filled tumbler of cognac next to it. “Thanks be to God you are yourself once more!” he exclaimed fervently, handed me the water and ammonia and drained the brandy glass himself. “Pardieu, my friend, I thought that we should surely lose you!” he continued as he helped me to a chair.
“You had a close squeak no doubt of it,” Ingraham agreed.
“What happened?” I demanded weakly.
De Grandin fairly ground his teeth in rage. “They made a foolishness of us,” he told me. “While we were busy with their sacré wolves they must have been escaping, and the thunder of our guns drowned out the whirring of their motors. Then, when we were all safe and helpless in the house, they circled back and dropped the hand grenades upon us. Luckily for us they had no aerial torpedoes, or we should now be practising upon the harp. As it is—” he raised his shoulders in a shrug.
“B—but, you mean they had a plane?” I asked amazed.
“Ha, I shall say as much!” he answered. “Nor did they stop to say a ‘by-your-leave’ when they obtained it. This very night, an hour or so before we journeyed to that thirty-thousand-times-accursed mill of Monsieur Jones, two men descended suddenly upon the hangars at New Bristol. A splendid new amphibian lay in the bay, all ready to be drawn into her shed. The people at the airport are much surprised to see her suddenly take flight, but—aviators are all crazy, else they would remain on land, and who shall say what form their latest madness takes? It was some little time before the truth was learned. Then it was too late.
“Stretched cold upon the runway of the hangar they found the pilot and his mechanician. Both were shot dead, yet not a shot was heard. The miscreants had used silencers upon their guns, no doubt.
“Tiens, at any rate, they had not stopped at murder, and they had made off with the plane, had landed it upon the frozen millpond, then sailed away, almost—but not quite, thank God!—leaving us as dead as we had left their guardian wolves.”
“Hélas, and we shall never overtake them!” Renouard said mournfully. “It is too obvious. They chose the amphibian plane that they might put to sea and be picked up by some ship which waited; and where they may be gone we can not say. There is no way of telling, for—”
“Hold hard, old thing; I think perhaps there is!” the Englishman broke in. “When Trowbridge toppled over it knocked the thought out of my head, but I’ve an idea we may trace ’em. I’ll pop off to the cable office and send a little tracer out. We ought to get some solid information by tomorrow.”
WE WERE STILL AT breakfast the next morning when the young man from the cable office came. “Mr. In-gra-ham here?” he asked.
“Don’t say it like that, young feller, me lad, it’s Ingraham—‘In’ as in ‘inside,’ and ‘graham’ as in biscuit, you know,” returned the Englishman with a grin as he held out his hand for the message.
Hastily he read it to himself, then aloud to us:
No strangers seeking access to the bush through here but French report a hundred turned back from Konakri stop unprecedented number of arrivals at Monrovia stop investigation underway
Symmes
Supt
“Très Bon,” de Grandin nodded. “Now, if you will have the goodness to translate—” he paused with brows raised interrogatively.
“Nothin’ simpler, old thing,” the Englishman responded. “You see, it was like this:
“‘Way up in the back country of Sierra Leone, so near the boundary line of French Guinea that the French think it’s British territory and the British think it’s French, an old goop named MacAndrews got permission to go diggin’ some twenty years ago. He was a dour old Scotsman, mad as a dingo dog, they say, but a first-rate archeologist. There were some old Roman ruins near the border, and this Johnny had the idea he’d turn up something never in the books if he kept at it long enough. So he built a pukka camp and settled down to clear the jungle off; but fever beat his schedule and they planted the old cove in one of his own trenches.
“That ended old Mac’s diggin’, but his camp’s still there. I passed it less than five years ago, and stopped there overnight. The natives say the old man’s ghost hangs around the place, and shun it like the plague—haven’t even stolen anything.”
“Ah?” de Grandin murmured. “And—”
“Oh, quite, old dear. A big ‘and’. That’s what got the massive intellect workin’, don’t you know. There’s a big
natural clearin’ near MacAndrews and a pretty fair-sized river. The place is so far inland nobody ever goes there unless he has to, and news—white man’s news, I mean is blessed slow gettin’ to the coast. Could anything be sweeter for our Russian friends’ jamboree?
“Irak is under British rule today, and any nonsense in that neighborhood would bring the police sniffin’ round. The Frenchmen in Arabia don’t stand much foolishness, so any convocation of the Devil-Worshippers is vetoed in advance so far as that locality’s concerned. But what about MacAndrew’s? They could plant and harvest the finest crop of merry young hell you ever saw out there and no one be the wiser. But they’ve got to get there. That’s the blighted difficulty, me lad. Look here—”
He drew a pencil and notebook from his pocket and blocked out a rough map: “Here’s Sierra Leone; here’s French Guinea; here’s Liberia. Get it? Our people in Freetown have to be convinced there’s some good reason why before they’ll pass a stranger to the bush country; so do the French. But Liberia—any man, black, white, yellow or mixed, who lands there with real money in his hand can get unlimited concessions to go hunting in the back country, and no questions asked.
“There you are, old bean. When Davisson decoded that message on the floor last night it hit me like a brick. The gal had told us where she was in the letter; now, she takes a chance we’ll go to Jones’ Mill and starts to write a message on the floor. They’ve talked before her, and she takes her lipstick and starts to write her destination down—‘MacAndrews, Sierra Leone’—but only gets ‘MacAndrews’ and the first three letters of ‘Sierra’ down when they come for her and she has to stop. That’s the way I’ve figured it—it’s great to have a brain like mine!
“Now, if they’ve really picked MacAndrews’ old camp for their party, there’ll be a gatherin’ of the clans out there. And the visitors will have to come overland, or enter through Freetown, one of the French ports or Liberia. That’s reasonin’, old top.
The Dark Angel Page 35