THEFORBIDDENGARDEN

by The Forbidden Garden(Lit)

  A bellboy's suit was easily "lifted" from the dressing room of the male employees of the inn. Miss Tappan had her passkey, and she knew the habits of every employee of the inn better than they themselves. By 3:30 of the fateful morning she was dressed in the bellboy's clothes, and silently slipping her key into the lock of Shane's door. Miss Tappan was in one of the most versatile of Scotland Yard's attachees.

  Her first move in the room was to close the door after her. Her second was to let her eyes become accustomed to the dim light filtering through the east window, which was just graying against purple black in the first faint hint of the coming dawn. Then, cautiously as a cat, she felt her way to the table where Shane's specimens stood. From the chambermaid she had learned the exact disposition of every object on the table.

  All would have gone well had Shane not coughed in his sleep. He was sleeping lightly, as his mind was still subconsciously at work on the previous day's knotty problems. Miss Tappan's stealthy tread over the carpet ceased instantly. Shane's nerves as instantly registered the abrupt, barely perceptible change. That, and his own cough, awoke him abruptly and fully.

  "Who's there?" he demanded.

  "The bellboy, sir. You called as I was passing down the hall. Are you ill, sir?"

  "Not that I know of. Turn on the light, will you?"

  Miss Tappan retreated toward the door.

  "I can't find the button in the dark," she muttered.

  "Never mind," Shane replied, "I'll switch on the reading lamp."

  Before she could reach the door, the room was flooded with light. He saw her face. For a moment he thought he was dreaming. In that moment, she bolted out of the door, closed it instantaneously and noiselessly, and locked it. Before Shane could collect his senses, she was half way down the back stairs.

  "Miss West!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. "Miss West!" Forgetting his ankles, he leaped from the bed, only. to collapse with a groan. "Stop her," he shouted. "She stole my slides!"

  By the time the night clerk and the genuine bellboy had entered the room, Miss Tappan was leaning back in the cosy seat of the closed car, swathed luxuriously in her warm fur-lined coat, and telling the driver to hurry so as to catch the sunrise.

  Shane's incoherent story succeeded only in convincing the clerk that the sick man had suffered a bad relapse. He ordered the bellboy to telephone for Doctor Wemyss. Shane swore.

  "I tell you I saw her in this room, dressed as a bellboy. Miss West. She's wanted in London by Scotland Yard. Cable Charles Brassey if you don't believe me. Oh, you utter idiot! I'm not out of my head. Miss West – Miss Annetta West – was in this room less than five minutes ago. She cleaned me out in London, and she was just about to clean me again here. Stop her! Don't stand gaping there – oh, what the hell's the use? I can't walk, and you're as dumb as a doorknob."

  By the time Wemyss arrived, Shane had almost decided to hold his tongue, and assent to the clerk's nightmare theory. The doctor took the patient's temperature and asked a few simple questions. Wemyss was no fool. He rang for the clerk, and met him in the hall.

  "Mr. Shane is rational," he said. "I advise you to check up on your guests."

  "But no one by the name of West is staying here, Dr. Wemyss."

  "Is it possible?" the doctor mused.

  "Of course it is, because it is the fact."

  "I didn't mean that," the doctor explained patiently. "If one of your guests is a crook, would she register by her own name?"

  The clerk began to be impressed.

  "Has anyone left the inn since Mr. Shane called out?"

  "I don't know. Miss Tappan planned to make an early trip to see the sunrise."

  Wemyss withered him where he stood.

  "Why didn't she wait till this evening? Call the police all along the road and have her stopped."

  He hurried back to Shane's room.

  "Who is this Miss West?"

  "Damned if I know. I've decided not to remember. Know what that means?"

  "Fairly well. I have instructed the clerk to warn the police and have her stopped. Is that all right?"

  "As far as it goes. She'll go a long way farther. Police? Boneheads."

  "You wish this to be hushed up?"

  "Yes. Tell the guests that I had a bad nightmare. Poison that fool of a clerk as you go out. By the way, doctor, will you send a cable for me to Brassey, and keep it under your hat?"

  "Certainly. Here's pencil and paper. Write out your message and I'll take it to the office at once."

  Shane spared no words to explain the situation to Brassey. He handed the voluminous message to the doctor.

  "There's plenty of money in my clothes. Take what you need, and for heaven's sake never breathe a word of this to anyone."

  "I won't," the doctor promised, and hurried out.

  * * *

  Miss Tappan – West was not apprehended, because, being herself a police officer of a higher kind, she had anticipated every move of the inefficient police. By the time Charles Brassey had absorbed Shane's thunderbolt and was on his way to Ransome's house, Miss Tappan was comfortably seated in a first class compartment of an express train. Her destination was not Bombay, but a seaport on the other coast of India.

  Brassey's interview with Ransome was somewhat stormy. A number of unpleasant facts were duly spread on the table, discussed in detail, and digested. For the first time Brassey learned that his former secretary, Miss West, whom he suspected of being an accomplice of John Arbold's – the factotum – in the theft of Shane's priceless slides from Brassey House, was in fact an employee of Scotland Yard, planted in Brassey House without its proprietor's knowledge, to preserve the honor of the House. Brassey didn't like it. He almost quarrelled with his old friend, John Ransome.

  "But I did it to protect you," Ransome protested. "Miss Tappan – your Miss West – is one of our best detectives. How could I tell you she was one of our people without hampering her?"

  "I don't know," Brassey exploded. "That is your work, John. But what I do want to know is this. If Miss West – or Tappan – did not steal Shane's slides, as he suspects – who did?"

  "That," Ransome confessed, "is exactly what I am trying to find out. And," he continued, "I have every reason to believe that I have the solution in my hand. But it will take time to work out. My sending Miss Tappan to Srinagar was part of my plan for trapping the thief."

  "You know who the thief is?"

  "Not until I catch him. But I am morally certain that I do."

  "Is it John Arbold?" Brassey demanded. "He disappeared with Miss West."

  "Possibly," Ransome admitted. "I shall not say until I lay my hands on the man."

  Brassey paced the floor, tormented by a new suspicion. For the first time in their long friendship, he doubted whether John Ransome was as shrewd a detective as he seemed still to think himself.

  "You admit," he said, confronting his friend, "that your impeccable Miss Tappan has precipitated a mess? She can no longer observe at Srinagar."

  "Obviously not," Ransome replied, somewhat nettled.

  "Then you will recall her?"

  "Not necessarily. She can still do her work in India. And I protest," he continued with some heat, "at your insinuations against Miss Tappan's efficiency. From Shane's cable, I infer that she was the victim of an unforseeable accident."

  "Unforeseeable accidents happen only to dolts," Brassey blurted out, before he knew that he had spoken. "I beg your pardon, John," he continued contritely, "You know I didn't mean that."

  "That is what makes it so devilishly true," Ransome replied quietly. "If we never spoke until we lost our tempers, liars would become extinct in one generation. To tell you the humiliating truth, I am sorely disappointed in Miss Tappan."

  "Yet you will retain her?"

  "Why not? Hereafter she shall only watch and wait. Anything more delicate will be entrusted to experienced men – our very best."

  "Jamieson, for instance?" Brassey hinted.

  "Possibly. As I told
you weeks ago, he is already assigned to the case. Now, Charles, have patience, and don't let your suspicions run away with you. I'll tell you something I have hardly dared to confess to myself: this time I've got my man. But I must play safe till I can make him prove me right legally. You get my drift?"

  Brassey felt ashamed of himself. Silently wringing his friend's hand, he turned away and left without a word. Ransome hurried off to Scotland Yard, confidently expecting to find a cabled report from Miss Tappan awaiting him. He was disappointed, and silently damned the inefficiency of the cable service.

  Hours passed, and still no message came from Miss Tappan. Ransome began to fear the worst. By midnight he was convinced that the worst had happened, and that Brassey's enemies and his own had eliminated Miss Tappan from the field of action. At last, after forty-eight sleepless hours, the tension was relieved. From an obscure station in the Punjab, where there would be no possible means of tracing her, Miss Tappan had cabled one word to her chief. It was perhaps a rash, girlish thing to do, but she felt perfectly safe, and could not deny herself the exquisite luxury of that last word. It was "Fathead".

  Ransome crumpled the white slip and collapsed into a chair.

  "My God," he groaned, "sunk from the inside."

  He sat up with a jerk.

  "I'll get them yet!" he cried, bringing his fist down on the mahogany table. "Jamieson shall hang Tappan with the other one. I've got them!"

  He began pacing his office like a trapped tiger. It was not the first time the enemy had routed him. But this time he felt that the enemy had over-reached himself, to deliver all of his forces, in one rash sortie, into his own ready hand. For the present he could only wait and be ready to strike when the enemy exposed a flank.

  While Ransome waited, an old man in Constantinople slowly decoded a cipher cable.

  "It makes no difference now," he sighed, setting a match to the paper. "Shane's black ice is not the key, although it resembles it. I have solved it completely, without his help." For a moment he brooded in bitter silence. "What does it all matter, after all? I'm nearly dead." Annibale Zanetti reached for his hat, and crawled from the hotel to keep an appointment with his masters.

  CHAPTER 13

  VARTAN'S DISCOVERY

  With but brief halts once every hour and a half, Vartan and his two companions had marched steadily all night over the frozen snow. Having fairly started on what they all realized was a desperate undertaking, they became strangely silent, and all night long the only words that passed were the necessary orders to halt or resume the march. Ali revealed himself as a resolute pacemaker, and for most of the night he led. Marjorie, although she had slept but little during the past forty hours, carried her heavy pack without a murmur, and kept close behind Ali. Vartan brought up the rear. He was more heavily loaded than the others, as in addition to his pack, he carried an icepick and about a hundred feet of coiled rope. For a part at least of the journey ahead of them he anticipated stiff climbing, and he wished to take no chances now that they were cut off completely from civilization.

  Dawn broke, cheerlessly, and they found themselves entering a narrow defile between stupendous black precipices. The valley had narrowed to a huge chasm in the sheer rock barrier, as if in ages past the earthquakes and the gradual subsidence of the whole range had split the last rampart of the mountains asunder. As they progressed they encountered first a cold mist, which rapidly thickened to a dense fog, and then they found themselves groping their way over bare black slabs in rolling clouds of chilled steam. The temperature of the air was now several degrees above the freezing point and before they actually encountered the out gush, Ali and Marjorie guessed that here at last was the main outlet of the subterranean river which sank under the snow at the hot springs. Vartan called a halt. The cold mist had cleared somewhat, permitting them to see for a radius of fifty feet.

  "Both of you have marched like veterans," he said warmly. "Sorry I had to rush you, but we can't afford to dawdle on a trip like this. Shall we have breakfast? We can warm something by holding a tin in this water."

  "Not for me, thank you," Marjorie answered decisively. "I prefer mine cold."

  "Afraid of the water? Well, I hardly blame you, although there is absolutely no danger if you don't drink it or wash in it. I'd keep away from those slimes, if I were you." His warning was addressed to Ali. The old chap evidently did not hear, for he was bending down to scoop up some of the scarlet scum on his finger, when Vartan sharply ordered him to stop. "Ali! Keep away from that stuff. Poison."

  "Is it?" Marjorie asked.

  "Don't know for certain. But the green variety of those alga made you pretty sick yesterday when you merely lay in them."

  The rock slabs where the still warm water gushed up were crusted with a thick pelt of alga of all colors of the rainbow, from violent blue to tawny orange and fiery red. They were beautiful enough, if taken at a glance; on closer inspection they looked unutterably foul, like the living essence of all disease.

  Grateful for the rest, the three ate slowly and in silence. They had barely finished their breakfast when a muffled rumble, like a peal of distant thunder, rolled into the rocky chasm. Vartan held up his hand.

  "Listen," he said. "The full cannonade will come in a moment. That is, if it performs as it did the day before yesterday."

  He was not disappointed. The echo of the first shot buffeted itself dead against the black walls, only to be succeeded by a stupendous crescendo of knelling crashes that shook the very rock on which the three were seated.

  "Ice," said Ali Baba. when he could make himself heard.

  "You guessed it," Vartan replied. "Come on. Pack up and trek. It is only a ten minute walk from here to the end. When we get there you can sleep all day, if you like, as we can't go on till tomorrow in our exhausted condition. I've changed my mind about trying it today as I had intended."

  They had followed him over the slimy rocks, skirting the brink of the evil black torrent that boiled up out of the rocks, and again they plunged into a wall of steam. Presently Vartan turned to the right, and began to ascend. A short, steep climb brought them once more up onto the snow, and into the blinding glare of the full sunlight. Glancing back they saw the long curtain of steam rolling up in the dead still air to the cloudless sky. As it rose higher and higher it gradually thinned, finally dissolving completely in the perfect blue above.

  "It's just a step or two more," Vartan encouraged. "Then we shall see round the end of that white curtain."

  They followed him expectantly, but quite unprepared for the spectacle which suddenly burst upon their vision as they scaled an outcrop of black rock and faced north. Vartan had seen it before. He said nothing. Marjorie uttered a breathless cry, and even old Ali, who knew the mountains, permitted a grunt of astonishment to escape him.

  A full fourteen thousand feet below them, glowing like an azure opal in the clear morning sunlight, lay the vast expanse of an almost circular valley, fifty miles or more broad, surrounded by a sheer wall of snow-crowned precipices of glistening rock, orange and umber, cobalt blue and turquoise green, coral pink and delicate lavender, vivid in the sunshine. From that great height but little detail of the valley floor could be made out. Only a broad silver band, gleaming and flashing in the sunlight, roughly along the major axis of the round ellipse which was the valley, marked the course of a noble river. Following that band of silver instinctively with their eyes, the two who had not seen it before sought the cleft in the opposite wall which should be its natural outlet, and found none. The river seemed to plunge into the very roots of the mountains.

  As their eyes swept slowly round the sublime sweep of the titanic precipices, a snowcapped amphitheatre of rock nearly three hundred miles in circumference, they learned what fed the mysterious river. From scores of clefts in the massive wall, distant torrents burst flashing into the sunlight, to plunge down to the valley floor ten thousand feet or more in sheer falls or cataracts of dazzling silver. Above most of these falls clouds of
steamy mist streamed up, iridescent with changing rainbow hues to the line of perpetual snow, where they vanished. Innumerable tributaries meandered from the bases of the falls to feed the main river, spreading their mazy courses over the azure floor in a tracery of silver.

  Their contemplation of the wonder was broken by a sudden, shattering thunder that seemed to rise from the ground beneath their feet. Following Vartan's arm, they saw what they had not yet observed in their enchantment, as their eyes had not yet travelled completely round the sweep of the precipices. Less than a quarter of a mile from where they stood, a huge, festooned spear of green ice jutted far out over the valley fourteen thousand feet below. Following with their eyes down the precipitous face of the rock beneath the spear, they saw a succession of massive pinnacles and grotesque cathedrals of ice hanging precariously to the precipices, one above the other in dizzy equilibrium, for a sheer five thousand feet. Even as they looked, a deafening crash announced that one colossal mass of ice, its unwieldy bulk grown beyond the limit of balance during the iron cold of night, had snapped at last as the sun warmed it ever so slightly, and was about to take the plunge nearly three miles to the valley floor.