27 Biggles - Charter Pilot

by Captain W E Johns

  bang. You've never heard such a frightful shriek in your life, but there was no sign of any spook. It made my blood run cold.

  Biggles put two more cartridges in the gun and set off towards the village. " I'll get to the bottom of this," he said, in that hard, tight voice he uses when he gets angry. •

  We went on, me keeping close to Biggles, and all the time the most doleful voices, and sighs, and moans, could be heard, some near, some far, some moving, as though the creatures that made them were floating in space. However, we went on till we came to a building. It was a big barn. Biggles opened the door and took a look inside with his torch, but we couldn't see anything except rats, cobwebs and spiders' eyes.

  "Let's go in and wait," says Biggles quietly, and we all went in and stood in a corner. We put the light out and waited. I don't mind telling you that I wished myself at home. For a time nothing happened. I suppose we'd been there about five minutes when there came, from over our heads, a noise that I can only describe as a ghoulish chuckle, followed by a harsh, rustling sound. Biggles switched on the light—but he was too late. We just got a brief glimpse of a dark shadow disappearing through a hole in the roof. Biggles took a snapshot at it, but again nothing happened except a lot of ghastly screams and cries from all round us. It was as though the spooks were mocking us.

  "I've had about enough of this," says Algy—and I agreed with him.

  Okay," says Biggles, "go by all means, but I'm staying here till I get my hands on one of these melancholy mutterers."

  We went out. All this time Donald had said practically nothing. All he did was whisper to himself, "Extraordinary, really extraordinary.' Presently we came to the house with the piano. Biggles, who had followed us, had a look up and down the street; then he handed me the torch. " Take a look inside that house," he said.

  Well, as you can imagine, I didn't exactly chortle with delight at the prospect, but Biggles has a way of telling you to do a thing that makes you do it, whether you want to or not. I switched on the light outside the door and took a step to the threshold. Before I could even think, much less look, something like a ton of bricks hit me smack in the face. I went over backwards and the torch flew out of my hand. Biggles picked it up and turned the beam on me. "What was it ? " he asked.

  "Don't ask me," I managed to get out, and then felt my face, which seemed to be wet.

  Algy said something about me falling over with fright.

  "Nothing of the sort," said Biggles. "Even if he did, there was no reason why he should scratch his face." He came closer, and we discovered that the wet stuff on my face was blood. The funny part of it was we couldn't find a wound; when I'd wiped it there wasn't a mark on my face. Then Biggles went into the room and the mystery was solved—at least, we discovered where the blood had come from, for there, on the piano, was a gory mess which we made out to be half a rat.

  "Do spooks eat rats, Doctor ? " asks Biggles, apparently quite seriously.

  "Not that I'm aware of," answers Donald. "Frankly, I've had very little experience of ghosts."

  "In that case I shall have the pleasure of showing you one in a minute," says Biggles ; and from the way he said the words I knew he had the solution of the mystery in his pocket. He picked up the mutilated rat by the tail and flung it through the doorway on to the road. "Now, Ginger," he says, "you take the torch. When I say the word, switch the light on that rat. Try to shine the beam on it first go, or we may be too late." I took the torch.

  Then came another spell of waiting. 'This time we must have waited nearly half an hour.

  Once or twice we heard voices in the distance, but nothing very close. Then suddenly, there was a kind of swish.

  "Now," snaps Biggles. I switched on the light. Bang went the gun.

  We dashed out, and there beside the rat lay—a raven.

  Algy started laughing. "That's a good one," he chuckled. "We lay a trap for a spook and get the birdha—ha."

  Biggles says," I beg your pardon, but when I shoot at a spook I hit a spook.'

  What do you mean?" says Algy, abruptly.

  "That's the spook," answers Biggles, pointing at the raven. " Have you never heard of ravens talking? They talk as clearly as parrots—some people say better."

  Well, you can imagine how that cleared the atmosphere. We laughed ourselves sick, for what, a minute before, had been tragedy, was now pure farce. We were still laughing when we went back to the machine and made a cup of tea to wash down a few biscuits.

  The only one of the party who wasn't relieved was Donald. He was fed up because what had promised to be a first class mystery had turned out to be a simple prosaic event.

  There was, however, one odd aspect to the affair. We were under the impression that the raven was normally a day bird; but there, for some reason or other, it had developed nocturnal habits, after the manner of the owl. No doubt there was a reason for that, had we cared to prolong our stay to investigate the matter. The next morning we found plenty of ravens, sitting in dark corners.

  It was easy enough to work out how they had developed the habit of talking, although this, of course, is entirely surmise. Either there were ravens in the district when the settlers arrived, or they were brought with them. No matter how they came, ravens were there, and one or more of them must have been caught and kept as a pet. Being great imitators, like parrots, they would learn to copy the sounds made by the people. Certain phrases may have been taught to them deliberately. Others they would pick up; and as towards the end of the colony such words as water, Cooper's coming, or Cooper's dead, or, they're all dead—referring to the cattle—must have been in common use, they would naturally be picked up. When the last settler had gone, and the birds had been left behind, they must have gone on croaking these words. The birds had bred, and the young ones had picked up the same sounds, and passed them from one to the other. That, I think, would be only natural. And so, eventually, we find a curious state of affairs where a colony of mimicking birds retain their tricks and habits after the people have gone.

  Obviously, they made these sounds simply as sounds, without meaning, but one can well imagine what the effect must have been on the first ignorant native who heard them—or white men, for that matter. I was scared to death myself; in fact, we all were. Nine people

  out of ten would have bolted at the first sound, without troubling to investigate. Had it not been for Donald's inquisitive nature, which took him there, and Biggles's obstinate determination to see the thing through, the voices might have remained a mystery for years. Anything might have happened. The birds might have gone to other districts and alarmed the people there; or they might have died, or forgotten the sounds they had picked up, in which case the mystery never would have been solved. The spot would have been put on the list of haunted places—all of which have a perfectly natural solution if only it could be discovered.

  Ginger glanced at the clock, then at the visitor from Australia. "Well, that's all there was to it," he concluded. "If you like I'll walk along with you to see how our lads are getting on with your machine."

  XII

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN

  SHIRTS

  UNDER half a dozen pairs of curious eyes, Flying-Officer " Ginger " Hebblethwaite, with a pair of nail scissors, carefully cut a small paragraph from a newspaper that lay open in front of him and put it in his wallet.

  What's the idea ? " inquired Angus Mackail, looking up at Ginger's face. "What are you collecting—gardening hints or cooking recipes ? "

  Neither," returned Ginger evenly. "Ever since I had the pleasure of travelling with Dr.

  Duck I go through the papers every day looking for odd items of news that might be useful at some future date. If clippings are carefully filed, and cross-indexed, you'd be surprised how often they link up. Disjointed, they may mean nothing, but considered collectively they may provide the answer to a problem that has puzzled a lot of people for a long time. Donald used to do that, and going through his notebooks was a fascinati
ng pastime. On more than one occasion they produced a useful harvest. I could give you an example. Did I ever tell you about the Golden Shirts? "

  "They must have been awkward garments—what?" murmured Flight-Lieutenant Lord Bertie Lissie.

  "I never wore one, so I don't know," answered Ginger.

  "How about giving us the low-down ? " suggested Tex O'Hara. "We've got an hour to kill before dinner."

  "Okay. Since it bears out my assertion about clippings, and shows what a little concentrated thought will do, I will." Ginger tossed the mutilated newspaper into the waste-paper basket, and this is the story he told : About ten years ago, long before I knew Dr. Duck, a small item appeared in the press. In effect, it was this. A man-eating shark had been found dead on the north-west coast of Australia. In its stomach was found a very queer object. The stomach of a man-eating shark usually does contain various hardware, and even jewellery, once the property of the unfortunate human beings on whom the brute had dined. But, as I have said, in the belly of this monster was found a very odd thing. Nobody could say for certain what it was, but it was thought by experts to be a piece of ancient armour. It was about eighteen inches long by twelve inches wide, and was composed of a number of thin, round metal plates laced together with fish sinews. The metal was gold—pure, fine, gold. It was just possible to make out that there had been, on these thin round plates, a device of some sort, but the plates had been worn so smooth that it was hard to say what this device was.

  The thing presented a pretty problem. To start with, i pure gold s rarely used nowadays. Being soft, it is hardened with other metals. This implied that the metal plates were of considerable age. I don't suppose anyone can say precisely how long a shark lives, but the gold was certainly older than the shark. Then again a clue was provided by the fish sinews which joined the plates together. It was claimed, reasonably, that the object couldn't have been in the shark's stomach very long, otherwise the gastric juices would have rotted the sinews, allowing the plates to fall apart. So much for the shark episode. The thing was soon forgotten, and it seemed unlikely that the mystery would ever be solved.

  Five years later, a British destroyer operating in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from land, came across a native canoe floating on the water. In it was the body of a man, a white man. He had been tanned brown by the sun, but it was certainly a white man. He had been dead about a week. He was wearing, over a cotton garment, a gold shirt composed of thin metal discs joined together with fish sinews. In short, it was precisely the same material as that found in the stomach of the shark. But this garment was intact.

  In other words, the piece in the shark's stomach had not been torn off it, which proved that there must have been at least two such shirts.

  It is unlikely that anyone connected the two events—except Donald. His filing system brought the two news items together, when it at once became apparent that they formed part of the same story.

  Now Donald, when he got his teeth into anything in the nature of a mystery, was a methodical old bird. He went his own way about things, but his methods were sound ; and in this case he did a lot of research work before he brought the problem to us. His only data were the position where the canoe had been found and Admiralty charts. As you all know, the main ocean currents are constant, or fairly so, and over a period of many years, by means of sealed bottles thrown overboard from ships, the naval authorities have got these currents pretty well taped, both i in direction and speed. Thus it s possible to ascertain, within reasonable limits, where a bottle thrown into the sea at a given point will be washed up, and when.

  By means of this data the Doctor had been able to work out the general direction from which the canoe had come, and it stood to reason that an aircraft following that line—

  that is the backtrail of the canoe—would pass somewhere near the place from which the canoe had started. This line passed near a good many islands—too many, in fact. There could be no indication from which of these islands the canoe had started—even if it had started from one of them. The fact that the man in the canoe had been dead for a week provided no clue, because we had no means of knowing how long he had been adrift before he classed out. Nor was the shark any help, because it might have been travelling round the world's oceans for years before it died and was washed up.

  You might think, as I did when the subject was first broached, that by making a tour of all the islands in the Indian Ocean we should sooner or later be certain to strike the right one; but when Biggles pointed out that there are in the order of ten thousand uninhabited islands alone in the Indian Ocean that bright idea was knocked on the head. One way and another, although we had the general line of ocean currents to work on, it seemed a pretty hopeless quest. But still, gold is a powerful magnet, and we decided to have a stab at this peculiar treasure-hunt. I should say that Donald was attracted, not by the intrinsic value of any gold we might find, but by the white race that had access to such quantities of gold that they could make shirts out of it. The final arrangement was that we should spend three months on the quest. If at the end of that time we hadn't discovered anything we would give up.

  And the day came when it looked as though we should have to give, up. We made our first base at Rangoon and spent a month flying over thousands of miles of ocean. There were plenty of islands, and we landed at a good many, but we saw no sign of what we were looking for. I didn't like to say so, but I was by no means sure what we were looking for—beyond a race of white men who wore golden shirts; and I, for one, didn't expect to see them lounging on a beach.

  We made our second base at Penang and stayed there for five weeks, but we didn't have any better fortune there. Then we had a bit of luck, but it wasn't altogether luck. We should have missed the boat had it not been for Bizzles getting a brain-wave. We had got as far

  south as Surabaya in Batavia, and as this is a proper air- port on the Australia run Biggles took the opportunity to give the engine a top overhaul and scrape some of the barnacles off our keel. One evening he went for a stroll in a bazaar, and he came back with that thoughtful expression on his face that usually means he's on the track of something. It seems that he had got chatting to a Chinese trader, and from him he had bought something. It was a coin, a gold coin, and an old one at that. On it was stamped the letters V.O.C., and the date, 1717. Naturally, I asked what these letters meant, and Biggles answered that they were the mark of the old Dutch East India Company.

  We still didn't get the hang of what he was driving at, not even when he made Donald get out his photograph of the gold shirt, which had, inset, an enlargement of one of the actual plates.

  "I still don't see the connection," said Donald. Biggles didn't answer. He fetched a hammer, put the coin on a fiat stone, and beat it out to a disc the size of those that made up the golden shirt. We let out a yell, for now we were getting somewhere. The resemblance was too strong to be accidental. The gold shirts were made of coins, once the property of the old East India Company. That was a step forward. Algy remarked that he still couldn't see how this was going to help us, because there must have been hundreds of such coins scattered throughout the islands in the old days. But Biggles had another card up his sleeve. From the Chinese trader he had learned the name of the island where this coin had been picked up. By an odd coincidence its name was Gelden Island ; nobody knew why, but the association of Gelden and gold—which mean the same thing—was too significant to be overlooked. The island was a fair sized one, rocky and uninhabited—or supposedly so. The Chinaman had landed there in his junk for water, and he found the coin on the beach.

  The next day Biggles sprang another surprise on us. He disappeared until lunchtime, and when he came back there was a twinkle in his eye. We asked him why. It turned out that he had been to the Dutch record office. There, with the help of officials, he had discovered that in the year 1718 an East Indiaman named the Van Husen had left Holland bound for the Far East. In its hold it carried the pay of the Dutch East India garrison
s.

  This consisted of eleven barrels of freshly minted gold pieces, dated 1717. There were several women passengers on board. The ship had touched at Java and was never seen again.

  We were now getting hot on the trail, for the date, 1717, was, you remember, the date on our gold piece. It seemed a safe wager that the Van Husen had been driven off its course by a gale and thrown on to Gelden Island, or else the crew had mutinied with the idea of bolting with the gold, and then wrecked the ship on Gelden Island. Obviously, our plan was to follow the course to Gelden. We went the next day.

  Actually, there are eleven islands in this group. Nine of them are so small that we wasted no time on them. Of the other two, one was a fair size, and the other one much larger.

  We passed straight over the smaller of these two, but it didn't look very promising, so we went straight on to the big fellow. This was Gelden Island. It was about nine miles long, shaped like a crescent moon, and perhaps five miles wide at the thickest part. It was obviously of volcanic origin, and rose in the centre to a height of several thousand feet.

  The summit of this peak was a mass of black rock.

  I should say that all these islands are uninhabited, being well away from the track of big ships. A Chinese junk or a native trader might call there for water once in a blue moon, otherwise nobody goes near them. We spotted several .promising anchorages, so we landed in a tidy little palm-girt bay, and dropping our wheels, taxied up on the beach. It was all nice and quiet and very pretty—in fact, it was such a traditional South Sea island that I felt there simply had to be a treasure.

  The sea was as fiat as a skating rink, and the water crystal clear. Naturally, I had to have a swim, and I was standing on a rock, just about to dive in, when I saw something on the bottom. It seemed a funny shape so I went down to have a look at it. It didn't take me long to make out what it was. It was an old cannon—all barnacle-encrusted, and seaweedy, but undoubtedly a cannon. I called the others and they had a look at it. We had no means of raising it even if we had wanted it—which we didn't.