by Max Brand
On the wall facing the bed, in such a manner that the sailor could see it the last thing at night and the first in the morning, was a picture of a clipper ship. It was apparently an enlarged photograph of old standing; the edges were splintered or furled by much wearing, and there was a visible crease across the center of the picture. Still it was a stirring thing, for it showed the clipper driven before a gale, leaning dangerously in the wind, and yet holding onto a main skysail with a dogged persistence. Such a picture must have been taken from the poop of an ocean liner as it crossed the bows of the sailer, and it showed Sherry the very leap of the waves, the very straining of the cordage.
He admired that picture for a moment only, and saw the inscription under it: TITANIA, OUTWARD BOUND!
Somewhere he had heard of her—a queen of the tea fleet, and afterward a sturdy veteran, lugging merchandise from England to the western coast of America, and always a flyer.
However, he had other things to think of. Perhaps Fennel had sailed on the Titania, but that was only a small bit of information.
He pushed up a window softly and opened the shutter a crack. It was not a great distance to the ground, and for a good athlete there was a drainage pipe running down from the gutter of the roof above, straight past the window to the earth.
So, having established that in case of need the sailor could be reached from the outside of the hotel, Sherry closed the window and shutter and turned back to the room itself.
Everything was in disorder. On the bureau lay a belt containing a large sheath knife, several blackened, cracked pipes that looked as they had been smoked in many a gale at sea, so eaten was the wood by the fire; there was a blue-and-yellow handkerchief, a pocket knife with a roughened horn handle, a tattered newspaper, and several boxes of matches. On the corner table stood two whiskey bottles, one nearly empty and the other quite gone. Beside them was a tumbler. The top of it had been broken off, and the fragments glittered on the floor. All a miserable confusion, but doubtless order enough to please a man who might have spent most of his nights in the forecastle of a ship.
Last of all, Sherry saw a sailor’s chest of strong three-quarter-inch pine, all dovetailed, painted black, with brass drop handles, and a two-inch rising board beneath. It was not locked. He lifted its watertight top and looked in.
Most of the things, he was surprised to see, were new, and of cheap, heavy, coarse stuff, such as a sailor might be expected to take to sea with him. Fumbling through it, Sherry noted a feather pillow, cot blankets, canvas shoes, a pair of knee-boots with pegged soles, plate, basin, quart and pint pots of block tin, a housewife containing needles and thread—heavy and coarse and strong—mending wool, scissors, and tweezers. And all these things were new! However, there was a pair of very battered working boots without any nails in the soles or heels, and these were indeed so extremely battered that Sherry wondered at finding them with the rest of these comparatively new goods. The soles, for instance, had been worn completely through.
There was nothing else to see in the chamber. He left it in haste, and returned to Lang, below.
X
Although it was not late in the morning, Fennel already appeared to have an excellent lead, and, as Sherry entered, he was singing, or attempting to sing, an old chantey of the sea. But fog filled his throat, and his breath came with a wheeze and a sputter. Nevertheless, some rhythm remained.
There’s a saucy wild packet—a packet of fame—
She belongs to New York, and the Dreadnought’s her name,
She is bound to the westward where the strong winds do blow—
Bound away in the Dreadnought to the westward we’ll go.
Now the Dreadnought’s a-sailin’ down the wild Irish Sea,
Her passengers merry, with hearts full of glee;
Her sailors, like lions, walk the decks to and fro—
She’s the Liverpool packet—Oh, Lord, let her go!
Then a health to the Dreadnought and to her brave crew,
To bold Captain Samuels and her officers, too.
Talk about your flash packets, Swallow Tail, and Black Ball,
The Dreadnought’s the flyer that can lick them all.
If the voice of Joe Fennel was almost totally inadequate for the singing of this ballad, still he rendered it with such life, and at the end smashed his hand so heavily upon the table that even the bartender, a sour man, could not help smiling.
“Another shot all around,” said Joe Fennel to the barman, “and smart’s the word. There’s your mate. Come here, kid, and sit down!”
Sherry joined them at the table. The whiskey was brought.
“This round is mine,” said Sherry.
“I say no!” coughed Fennel, spilling a handful of silver on the table. “Take the price out of this, and keep the change. Free and easy is my life, lads. I got no call to go aloft again, like a fly into a spider’s web. Some works by their hands, and some by their heads . . . and some,” he added with a sinister joy, “by the pickin’ up of information. And that’s the ballast that I sail with now. Information, hearties! You couldn’t see my Plimsoll line, I’m so deep with it. Talk has been paid for before now, and silence’ll be paid a long sight better. And if you doubt me, ask the squire that’s got the house on the hill!”
He paused to drink, and then cough and laugh.
“I’m sendin’ up a boy with a message for that skipper that I’m gonna come and call on him. I’m gonna tell him to have his wallet all shipshape and Bristol fashion because I’m gonna review it. He’s been law and lord on blue water. But I’m gonna be law and lord to him on dry land, as sure as ever a ship wore the name of the Princess Marie! Another shot all around! When I speak, run, steward. This ain’t a sailor’s home.”
Sherry stood up. “I’ve had enough,” he said.
Lang rose beside him.
“Are you takin’ in sail at the first squall?” demanded Fennel. “Never take in sail for a squall that you can look through. Ain’t you men enough to see light through a shot of grog?”
They waved their adieux to Fennel in spite of this urgent plea, and, as they left, they heard him ordering two bottles of whiskey that he went off carrying under his arm.
The face of Lang was contorted with disgust and contempt as they got into the open. “It’s enough to turn a longhorn like me into a temperance preacher, kid,” he said. “The low-down skunk! Drinking by himself, paralyzing himself slow and gradual in his room. Think of it, kid. Think of it, Tiny. It’s gonna make me give up red-eye.”
Sherry thought of the broken glass and the bottles he had seen in the sailor’s room, and he nodded his assent. Then Lang asked him what he had found in the room of Fennel. He listened with the keenest attention.
“New clothes, did you say, Tiny?”
“New, cheap stuff.”
“And old boots?”
“The soles were as thin as paper. The leather of them was rotten, if ever I saw rotten leather. They were so old, Pete, that the folds of the leather were hard and brittle. I scarcely can see how a man could put on boots like that”
Lang was so struck by this that he paused and laid a hand on the shoulder of his friend. “As old as that!” he said in wonder.
“As old as that.” Sherry nodded. “What do you make of it, Pete? After all, there’s nothing so very strange about a pair of old boots. I’ve had them myself.”
“In a sea chest. In a sea chest,” insisted Lang. “I tell you, that’s the point, old boy. You never been to sea.”
“Have you?”
“Well,” said Lang, deliberately giving that question his shoulder, “I’ll tell you what . . . it’s a dashed funny thing. Old boots and new clothes to rig up a sea chest.” He shook his head and walked on, so deep in thought that he looked like a man in pain.
At this, Sherry no longer bothered his companion with questions, for he knew that Lang, absorbed in thought, was like a python struggling to assimilate some gigantic meal. A strange fellow was Pete Lang. No on
e ever had come to the bottom of his nature, but a more useful man upon the trail to handle the problems thereof, Sherry never could have found. He began to look to Lang already, as to a man capable of working a miracle.
Lang said at length: “I’ll see. I’ll see.”
He spoke rather like an impatient father, teased by questions, although as a matter of fact, Sherry had not said a word. And so they returned up the hill to the house of Wilton and found him in the garden with his niece. From a distance they heard his voice in a hard tone of irritation, speaking rapidly. Only in brief pauses could she have answered. They could not hear her voice, until they came out of the brush, and then they heard Wilton come to the fiery end of a sentence and heard the girl say distinctly, quietly: “No.”
It was a sort of key to all that had gone before. He had been storming at her about something, and she had been holding the fort of discussion with that single word: No.
“You won’t reason!” exclaimed Wilton. “You won’t listen to reason at all. You don’t want to hear me!”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
It amazed Sherry. He slowed and would have halted, but Lang took his arm and forced him on. They heard Wilton exclaim with greater emphasis than ever: “And what, under the name of heaven, could I possibly have had to do with it?”
To this she returned no answer at all, but pointed toward the two who were approaching. Wilton faced about on them with a start. And Sherry saw the girl watching them with the keenest curiosity. Then she turned and went off in haste. Looked at in full face she appeared a worn and weary woman, indeed, but, as she went off, with the turn of her neck and the lightness of her step, she looked more child than woman—a happy, careless child.
This thought of her made a great impression upon Sherry, for he was one of those men who do not reason very closely, who cannot go with mathematical precision from premise to premise, but with bursts of intuition his mind leaped ahead, as though a light had been cast on the future. So he saw Beatrice Wilton with new eyes, and wondered at her—and at himself.
Wilton was vexed, plainly.
“How long have you two been standing there?” he asked.
“We ain’t been standing,” said Lang.
Wilton waved a hand, as though he would have said that he doubted this, but the point was not worth further discussion. “You fellows have learned to walk silently, while riding the range,” he said. “Now, what do you want?” He corrected himself with a faint smile. “I forgot that you’ve been doing my errands. You found the man, did you? You found Fennel, as he calls himself?”
“We found him. We had a drink with him,” said Sherry.
“You drank with him!” cried Wilton. “But I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”
“He’s not exactly the poisoning kind,” said Lang.
“How does he look?” asked Wilton.
“I’ll show you,” answered Lang. He took out a pad of paper and a stub of soft pencil, and with that he rapidly worked up a sketch, as Sherry had seen him do a thousand times upon the range when his swift hand would jot down things big and small—the line of mountain against the sky—a bunch-backed cow with her tail to the blizzard—a coyote, lolling a thin tongue and laughing at the ranch dogs. Or perhaps it would only be a Spanish bayonet, distinguished for peculiar uprightness—or a close-up, as it were, of the dreadful thorns with which the cactus is armed. With half a dozen sweeping lines Pete Lang could show you a mustang bucking, a rider just lurching up from the saddle, out of balance. And so he now worked on the face of Fennel, the forehead covered close to the eyes with matted hair, the odd bulge of the forward part of the head, and the lower features masked with the scrub of beard. In that half minute of work he even was able to impart to this sketch the evil sneer of Fennel, the peculiar and working malice.
“By Jove, I know him!” exclaimed Wilton under his breath as he peered at the paper. Then he shook his head. “He’s a liar. He never was one of us,” said Wilton.
“One of who?” asked Sherry innocently.
His reward was a keen, stabbing glance.
“What did he talk about?” asked Wilton.
“About the value of silence,” answered Sherry, “which he said you would certainly pay for . . . as surely as ever a ship wore the name of the Princess Marie.”
The hand of Wilton froze in mid-gesture. Then slowly he raised it to his face. He looked like a man who had been struck by a mortal bullet. And so, without another word, he turned and went slowly toward the house.
XI
Now that they were left alone, Sherry stared after Wilton for only a moment, when he turned to Lang and said quietly: “Guilty, your honor.”
“Guilty as sin,” said Lang. “Guilty of what, I wonder? What’s this dirty rat, Fennel, got on Wilton? What’s Wilton done in the South Seas that you read about? I tell you what, kid, I’m beginning to get red-hot about this. I’m beginning to get red-hot all over. And I’ll never leave the trail until we’ve run it into some sort of a corner. Wilton guilty, the girl looking like she had fire in the hollow of her hand . . . the dickens is to pay up here, Sherry, what with the steel-lined room, and the rest.”
“Let’s take a walk and think this thing over,” said Sherry. “I never think so well as I do when my legs are moving.”
“It keeps the blood stirred up.” Lang grinned. “You think like a wolf, kid . . . with your teeth.”
However, he strode off at the side of Sherry, and they pushed back through the woods that grew close behind the house of Wilton where big spruce and pine were commingled.
“How do they ever get rain enough to keep them going?” asked Sherry.
“Where does the water come from to make this run?” countered Lang, and he pointed to a trickle of water so small that it made a mere silver gleam, winding along upon the ground.
“Where from?” murmured Sherry.
“You got no eyes,” answered the cowpuncher. “You can have a whole spring jumping out of the top of a hill, if there’s other higher ground anywhere around to send down the rain water. Look at them mountains over yonder . . . ain’t they catching the rain and filtering it down through the strata? And one of them strata turns up here like a leaky pipe and lets out some water. Hey, kid, this is real country.”
The clay rock, so narrow and slender that it rose above the town like a raised hand, now spread right and left and grew into a considerable plateau; the surface was very broken; the trees did not always stand straight, but jutted at considerable angles, at times, from the irregular surface of the land.
“This would make a first-class hole-in-the-wall country,” remarked Lang. “You could hide twenty men, out here, and they could thumb their noses at everybody that tried to find them. Look around, kid. Was there ever in all the world a better country for a murder?”
Sherry agreed with a nod, for they had come out from among the trees, at this moment, and found themselves at the edge of a bluff at least two hundred feet high. Just at its base the river curved close in. Sherry kicked a stone clear of the edge and they saw its dizzy drop, its disappearance, and the sparkling leap of the water around its fall, like the spring of a fish.
“Tap a gent on the head here,” said Lang, “and drop him where that stone dropped, and you’d never hear much report about him. Look where that water gets white.”
Racing along the base of the cliff, the water hardly showed the speed of the current, except that it was dark instead of limpid, but at a little distance farther from the town, the current struck rocks that jutted above the surface like the prows of swift ships, each spurning a bow wave, and covered with spray.
“That machine would eat a man pretty small,” suggested Lang, and Sherry agreed with a grunt.
They walked on. The surface of the ground grew more and more broken. It was chopped across the face by many small ravines, deep as a man, and sharp-sided.
“What’s the good of carrying on here?” asked Sherry. “Walking is one thing, but climbing is
another. Why you can’t talk at this work, let alone think.”
“You’d make a general,” said Lang ironically. “You’d fight in the dark.”
“Fight?” queried the big man.
“Tiny,” exclaimed the other, “you make me tired! You make me ache! Ain’t we here fighting for our lives?”
“I don’t follow that exactly,” said Sherry. “We fight to save the life of Wilton, as I make it out . . . and instead of keeping an eye on him, here we are, rambling away through the woods.”
“If we didn’t live under the nose of a tiger,” said Lang, “d’you think that he would pay a thousand a day? Ask yourself that, old son.”
It made Sherry glance briskly about at the trees.
“And if that’s the way of it,” went on Lang, “we ought to know the lay of the land out here.”
They went on in silence; in fact, it was such hard work that there was little opportunity for talk until at length something crackled through the branches over their heads. Lang stiffened, attentive.
“What the deuce was that?” asked Sherry.
“You shut up,” cautioned his companion. He had delivered that advice in a whisper, and now he commenced to stalk forward with a cat-like agility, pausing from time to time.
In one of those pauses, distinctly though faintly, Sherry heard a soft thud, such as might be made by an axe with a sharp edge, shearing through a tough, green branch.
Presently, peering around the corner of a large pine trunk, Lang beckoned Sherry to his side, and the big man looked around at a very odd sight.
In the center of a small clearing stood Beatrice Wilton, with a revolver in her hand, and, even as Sherry looked, she took quick aim, swinging the gun smartly up from the hip, and firing. The dim spurt of smoke was the only sound to tell that a bullet had been discharged—that and the same dull, quiet thud that he had heard before. He understood it now. It was the impact of a small-caliber bullet entering the trunk of a tree. A silencer appeared on the muzzle of the revolver.