Instantly the other men shot back at him, and the canyon rocked to the echoing wham-bang! of gun shots. Nigel Rorke stiffened convulsively and dropped, dead before he hit. Skipper Rogg doubled over and keeled head-first into the river.
Then DeCourcey himself was slumping face down into the dust again, his body jouncing to the smash of bullets into his back.
Scanlon and the remaining sailor laughed harshly. They didn’t see Gregg, didn’t hear him until he was almost on top of them.
Then Scanlon jerked his head around, saw Gregg, and triggered a bullet that seared along Gregg’s throat like the slash of a jagged knife. Gregg hit the bottom of the slope and fell on hands and knees. Scanlon’s second bullet whipped over his head.
Gregg shot, pointblank. And Scanlon staggered back from the smash of the slug into his chest. His arms dropped, and he swayed. With a terrific effort, he steadied himself, raised his gun—buckled at the knees, and collapsed.
Gregg’s gun had barked again as he whirled toward the sailor, but the bullet missed. The fellow flung up his hands.
“Don’t shoot! I quit, I give up!” the man yelled—and flung his own weapon to the ground in surrender.…
Gregg bent over DeCourcey. Turned the little trader over on his back. DeCourcey groaned, and opened his eyes.
Thank the Lord he’s not dead! Gregg thought. And aloud, he said shakily:
“It’s all over, pal. Look, I’ll carry you to—”
“No, lad. I’m all shot up,” the trader whispered. “Listen. I—you look in my safe. I wrote that—that letter for you. You know. My testimony. About the robbery. The DeGroot theft—you wanted it—”
“Don’t worry about that! I’ll carry you to the beach. We’ll—”
But DeCourcey wasn’t hearing, wasn’t caring. The little trader was slipping beyond reach of voice or aid.
CHAPTER V
THE LAST ACT
Susan’s scalp wound proved minor. Next day, Gregg and Susan and her brother Tom returned to the treasure cache on the flat above the river. With a flashlight, Gregg led the way through the tunnel Scanlon’s men had dug into the old stone house which been covered, for so many years, by a fall of rock.
Part of the structure had fallen in, but some of the rooms were intact. And as Gregg looked around, he had the eerie feeling of stepping through a door of time into the distant past. He played the flashlight beam on furniture that was a century old, on bookcases, on pictures on the walls, on rugs and mirrors.
“Susan,” young Tom Lanphier blurted excitedly. “This must be the house that Captain Lanphier built on Puna-Puka! Gregg, we have a Yankee ancestor who came into the South Seas in 1813 on a United States man-o’-war under Admiral Porter.”
“Susan told me that.”
“Captain Lanphier liked it so well that he returned some years later with a wife, and settled down for keeps.”
“And you two,” Gregg asked, “are his legal heirs?”
“Why, yes—if there’s anything to inherit.”
Gregg flashed his light beam around again, and in his voice was an edge of excitement as he said:
“This place has been hermetically sealed for about three generations, I guess. This Captain Lanphier—was he a cultured man who liked books and pictures and had the money to satisfy his whims?”
“Yes, he was,” Susan said, with a sudden catch of expectancy in her voice, for she was quick of intuition.
Gregg turned his flashlight on a table.
“Look at that. Isn’t it a beauty? And at least a hundred years old! I don’t know the great furniture makers, but these pieces were likely brought from New England—where they had come from England! Chippendale? I bet it is. I bet every one of these pieces is worth a house and lot!
“And look on the wall. Those are engravings by Hogarth. And that portrait over the mantel, of a British naval officer—Come here. So help me, it’s a Joshua Reynolds! And look at the books.”
“He likely got books off every sailing vessel that put in at Puna-Puka,” Tom said, his voice hollow with awe.
“Look at these!” Gregg blurted. “Copies of Chaucer and Beaumont and Fletcher and Goldsmith that were likely old before Captain Lanphier got them.
“And here—a first edition of Confessions of An Opium-Eater, and of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. And, as I live and breathe, a first of Keats’ Lamia!”
Gregg looked at Susan and her brother, his eyes shining.
“You realize that this house has been a sort of vault, keeping these things safe for you for over a century?”
“They’re really valuable?” Susan breathed.
“When Captain Lanphier got ’em, most of them were valuable, but they weren’t heirlooms, they weren’t museum pieces. But now they are! I’m telling you, you’ve got a fortune here!” Gregg laughed shakily. “That rat Scanlon came here to find gold, didn’t find any—and walked out on a fortune right under his nose! These things are worth a damn’ sight more than a satchelful of pirate coin!”
Susan slipped her arm through his. “John, we’ll take these things to Honolulu and sell them. Whatever they bring, you’ll share equally with us.”
Gregg pulled away, his lean face tightening.
“Forget it. I’m not going to Honolulu.”
“You’re not—You mean, you’re staying here?” Susan asked, dismayed. “On the island?”
“You got it,” he said harshly. “I’m staying right here.”
* * * *
Late that afternoon, the villagers buried DeCourcey on a rise near the beach.
Afterward, Gregg and Susan and her brother went to the trading station. Depressed, Gregg puttered around. This trading station was going to be his and he might as well get used to it.
Tom Lanphier walked out after a bit. Susan sat in a chair and watched Gregg. In the morning, the Leeward was sailing away, and leave-taking now was hard.
The lamplight shone with golden sparkles in her bronze-red hair. Gregg was conscious of it, and was conscious of the way she looked at him, concern in her blue eyes. But he made himself turn his back on her. No use storing up any more heartache for himself than he had to.
Looking in the safe, he saw a letter there with his name on it. He remembered, then. DeCourcey had written out his testimony in regard to the DeGroot murder.
“Damned little good it’ll do me,” Gregg muttered to himself. Only by DeCourcey’s appearing in Honolulu in person, being identified and sworn in, could his word that Gregg was innocent of the DeGroot robbery have stood up. Now DeCourcey was dead.
Idly Gregg opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. He read:
* * * *
Dear Gregg,
I’ve felt awfully bad about refusing to go to Honolulu to testify in court that you’re not the man who robbed DeGroot and to identify the man who did do the thievery. I just couldn’t do it. You’ll understand why when I tell you that I, myself, am the thief who robbed DeGroot.
I was a watchmaker for the firm, remember. The robbery was an “inside job,” and my testimony that a thief broke in and chloroformed me after a struggle was just a cover-up.… I chloroformed myself.
I’m writing this letter now, so that if anything happens to me, you’ll have a way of proving your innocence of the theft.
In the “H” Street Branch of the National Trust Bank, in Honolulu, I have a safe deposit box, under my full name of Philip DeCourcey Leroux. The court can order the box opened. The jewels are there. And the bank people know that nobody but myself ever had access to that box.
I think that will clear you once and for all of any suspicion.
DECOURCEY.
* * * *
Thunderstruck with surprise, Gregg read the letter a second time, to make sure—and let out a wild whoop of joy.
Whereupon Susan jumped up, startled. He grabbed her by the elbows, waltzed her around the room, and kissed her resoundingly on the lips.
“J-John!” she gasped. “Why this sudden outburst?”
“Well, maybe,” she said, laughter in her blue eyes. “Do you think you could kiss me like that again?”
Gregg grinned hugely. “Honey,” he said, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
HAG GOLD, by James Francis Dwyer
This morning, reading the latest official statement concerning the enormous amount of gold that the United States is guarding for the terrified governments of Europe, I thought of Macklin, and his fear lest America might incur certain spiritual dangers through acting as keeper for this vast and ever-increasing mass of bullion. He thought that a large percentage of it carried the anathemas of the centuries.
Sitting in the soft Tunisian sunshine, he explained the difference between virgin gold and the metal which he and other seekers sought in the ruined cities of Africa. He termed the latter “hag gold.”
“I know that there is a lot of virgin gold pouring into the United States,” he said. “Clean, newfound metal from the goldfields of Australia and South Africa, brought to London and sold; but there’s also a hell of a lot of stuff that is old. We call it ‘hag gold.’ It has been possessed by men for hundreds of years. It has brought about murders, piracies, rebellions, acts of torture, and deviltry of every description. It’s accursed. It’s blood-splashed and evil. Mostly European and—well, yes, there’s some, as I said, found in the dead cities of Africa. Now all that stuff, carrying the curses of centuries, rides off to find a nice, peaceful resting-place in the United States. Sometimes I’m scared of the evil it might bring to my country. Hellish scared.… Hag gold. Well, it’s dangerous.”
My introduction to Macklin came about in a curious manner. I am really a tramp. Not of the mendicant type that begs food and steals transportation, but a respectable tramp with a wanderlust that I feed by personal thrift and an active typewriter. I travel third- or fourth-class, and I shun grand hotels as I would the plague.
At the end of 1937 I was filled with the desire to visit the oases of southern Tunisia. It was the time of the date harvest at Tozeur. Calculating transportation, lodging and food on the lowest basis, and hoping that I might pare them still lower, I set out. The Guide Bleu of Algérie et Tunisie, put out by the Librairie Hachette, was in my pocket.
Now, on the way back to Tunis, I was thrilled by a few paragraphs in that guidebook. They told of the ruins of Sbeïtla, the ancient Roman city of Sufetula, which some thirteen hundred years ago was a gay spot.
Things hummed in Sufetula ’way back in the six hundreds! There were theaters, hot baths, stadia, and dancing-parlors; and the betting is that one would have to engage one’s table on a night when a theatrical company or a mob of gladiators from Rome had ventured into the African “sticks.”
I decided to get off the train and take a snapshot of the ruins, which lie some three-quarters of a mile from the modern Sbeïtla, a small village of a few hundred French and a scattering of natives. There is hardly a building above one story in the village, so that a visitor approaching the ruins is astonished at the contrast between the ancient and the modern. The huge crumbling temples have a dignity and beauty that is breath-taking.
I was alone. There was no one in sight. It was a still, warm day. The silence was intense. In a sort of tiptoeing manner I moved through the temples of Juno, Minerva, and Jupiter, circled the arc de triomphe, erected by the orders of Diocletian, crossed to the thermes; then, a bit fatigued, I sat myself down on an overthrown column to rest. It was then I saw Macklin.
* * * *
There are throughout northern Africa many ancient underground aqueducts that date from the days of Roman occupation. The underground method was made compulsory by sandstorms and the necessity of keeping the precious water away from the murderous rays of the African sun.
These aqueducts were constructed with immense effort. Water was brought from sources thirty and forty miles distant, to desert cities. Today a large percentage of these canals are not in use. The towns they served are deserted, and sand has filtered in through the vents that were placed at regular distances.
Now as I sat on the fallen column, I saw the head of a man appear at one of these vents in the ancient aqueduct that once served Sufetula. He was about a quarter of a mile away. In the thin sunlight I could see his face clearly. For a few minutes he stared in my direction; then he disappeared, coney-fashion, into the ground.
I waited. There were several manholes in the aqueduct between me and the spot where the fellow had disappeared. I had an idea that his curiosity would prompt him to crawl along the tunnel and make a closer inspection.
My surmise was correct. From the nearest manhole the head appeared again; then a strong voice with a distinct American intonation hailed me.
“You startled me,” came the voice. “I thought you were the damned guardian of this joint.”
“I’m a simple tourist,” I said. “Got off the train to look at the ruins.”
The man took a grip on the crumbling cement around the vent, dragged himself up, and walked toward me. He was a lean, well-built fellow with a smiling, clean-shaven face. I took him to be somewhere in the early thirties. He wore corduroy trousers, high boots, and a leather jacket with a zipper fastener. Pushed back from his forehead was a battered casque colonial.
“What do you think of it?” he asked, waving his hand at the ruins.
“It’s a little frightening,” I answered. “Startled me with its silence and air of absolute desertion.”
He smiled and sat himself down. “Sometimes there’s a mob around here,” he said slowly. “Not tourists. Oh, no. Natives.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, they buzz around all the old ruins of North Africa,” he replied. “Hunting. Like me.”
“Game?” I queried.
He laughed. “No. Gold. Hunting hag gold.”
Now I heard later that there is another reason for that name “hag gold” outside that which the antiquity of the treasure might have conferred on it. In the souks of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, where treasure found in dead cities is sold to dealers, the natives giving a reason for the possession of antique jewelry, lie by saying it belonged to their grandmothers! “C’est l’or de ma vieille grand-’mère,” they mutter; and possibly whites, wishing to make the lie humorous, might have called it “hag gold.”
But to get back to John Macklin. He was, I discovered, a gold-seeker born. His great-grandfather was one of the original founders of Yerba Buena, the baby town that grew up into San Francisco. This ancestor served on the first Committee of Vigilance when the gold boom started. His son made a fortune and lost it. John’s father was a fossicker—a gold-seeker—from the time he could walk till the day when he and his burro were found dead in an arroyo in the San Bernardino mountains.
“He left me his taste for gold, several picks, and a baby donkey,” said Macklin. “Couldn’t have a better legacy.”
Along the top of Africa is a string of dead cities that mark the high tide of the Roman flood. Here the Romans ruled and rioted, then departed, leaving the temples, open-air theaters, thermes, and triumphal arches to decay slowly in the African sunshine: Carthage, Timgad, Tipasa, Lambessa, and five-score others.
Macklin had visited them all. Even the remote and off-the-trail places like Baal Regia—City of the Royal Baal—which at one time was the capital of Numidia and is now the haunt of miserable nomads who camp in its enormous cisterns. He had fossicked in ruined temples, palaces and sand-filled aqueducts for treasure that might have been overlooked in the hurried departure of the long-dead inhabitants. For there is much evidence of swift evacuation in these ruins. Take Timgad, the Roman Thamugas, constructed in the First Century. Timgad had a fine prosperous time for four centuries; then the Berbers swept down from the Aures Mountains and pillaged the city. The Timgadians cried for help to Rome; but Rome was busy with pressing affairs
at its own gates. The people fled northward, and Timgad slid into the has-been class.…
The green lizards ran up and down the fallen columns of the once gay Sufetula as Macklin talked. His was a colorful tale of wandering. It evoked dreams.
“Have you dropped on anything big?” I asked.
He laughed softly. “Well, yes,” he said; then, after a pause, he continued: “I get tips where to search. Of course one doesn’t scream one’s findings to the stars in North Africa. There are laws concerning treasure-trove. It must be reported at once; and the finder, if he is lucky, will get a percentage that might be half and might not be. If he makes the find in any of these old cities, the chances are that he’d get nothing. They are all under the control of the Direction des Antiquités, and a fossicker has no right to search. When I saw you, I was startled. Thought for a moment you were the watchman.
“But you asked about finds. I’ve found a few things that I wish I could have kept in their original state. Couldn’t, you know. Had to drop them into the pot.”
He stretched himself on the warm column and stared upward. After a long silence he spoke. “I doubt if any man alive, outside myself, has handled a double fistful of gold octadrachms with the heads of Ptolemy I and Berenice I. I didn’t know at the time that they were so rare, but I kept a rubbing of one, obverse and reverse, and showed it to a big French numismatist. He nearly went crazy when I told him that I had handled some twenty of them.”
“And did you drop them all into a crucible?” I cried.
“Sure,” he answered. “Couldn’t get rid of them otherwise. The dealer wouldn’t buy them. I sold the chunk of gold in the Souk des Orfèvres at Tunis. Hell of a pity. Who knows whether that chunk is not in the United States now? I mean part of a gold-brick that Uncle Sam is minding for France.”
I gulped at the thought of those coins of Ptolemy the First being dropped one by one into a crucible. It seemed a sacrilege.
“Funny about the natives,” went on Macklin. “You know, you must have a heat of a thousand centigrade to melt gold. That’s difficult to get in desert places, so they hammer gold coins and bits of jewelry into lumps without heating. They caught a few natives the other day in Algiers. Had a beaten-up hunk of gold that showed part of a necklace of Roman filigrane work that brought yelps of delight from the experts. They’ve sent it to Paris. Yes, it’s dirty business to destroy stuff like that, but if you’re an unlicensed chercheur d’or, what are you to do?”
The Adventure Megapack Page 26