‘How can I let you have what I have not got?’ retorted Don Manuel, clinging to straws, and wondering why the key was no longer on the outside. The next instant a solution occurred to him. Perhaps it was on the inside!
The same thought occurred, evidently, to the officer who was peering through the keyhole. There was no key on the inside.
‘Do you want to go to prison, Don Manuel?’ asked the officer.
‘Is it the law that one goes to prison for losing a key?’ answered the innkeeper.
‘One can go to prison for lying.’
‘Very well. I am lying. Now take me to prison.’
‘When did you lose the key?’
‘It has been lost for over a month.’
‘Why have you not had a new one made?’
‘Because I have three other cellars, and they, as you have seen, are nearly empty. I do not need the fourth.’
‘Have you another key that will fit?’
‘If I had, why should I not already have used it?’
‘Because you say you have no use for the room. And if you have no use for the room, why did you trouble to lock it in the first instance?’
‘I did not lock it,’ replied Don Manuel, his mind working furiously. ‘It was a drunken man I had. One night he nearly turned the place topsy-turvy, and locking doors was a part of his humour. I kicked him out, and found afterwards that he had gone off with one of the keys. The key to that door. Now are you satisfied?’
On the point of replying, the officer changed his mind. He regarded the door for an instant, noting its massivity, and also the narrowness of the passage outside it. A difficult door to force, this. Then, with a shrug, he turned away from it.
‘Well, well, it may be as you say,’ he remarked; ‘but if it is not, there will be a pack of trouble coming to you, Don Manuel. Now, then. The rest of the house. And quickly! Do you think I can stay here all night?’
They left the passage, and ascended to the upper floors …
But Mr Sims, on the other side of the locked cellar door, did not take the muzzle of his revolver from Miss Holbrooke’s throat till the search had been completed, the front door had been slammed, and the officer and his six men had left.
Then, swiftly and silently, he slipped to the door of the cellar and unlocked it.
‘Congratulations on your wisdom, Ben,’ he whispered sardonically. ‘You knew that time, didn’t you, that Miss Holbrooke’s life really was in danger. A single squeak, and she would be lying dead at this moment.’
The door closed.
‘’E’s Satan!’ gulped Ben.
36
‘The Last Resort’
This time Sims completed his ascent of the stone stairway, and he found Don Manuel waiting for him at the top with a large, self-satisfied smile.
‘Well, he has gone!’ the innkeeper exclaimed, rubbing his fat hands together. ‘We have fooled him beautifully!’
‘If so, whose fault is that?’ replied Sims, in a chilling voice. ‘Yours or mine?’
Don Manuel’s smile began to diminish.
‘Did I do nothing?’ he demanded.
‘You did quite a lot,’ answered Sims. ‘You made the officer thoroughly suspicious. And he has neither been fooled—nor gone!’
Don Manuel opened his mouth wide. Then he turned quickly towards the front door, but Sims called him back.
‘Don’t go there!’ he barked sharply. ‘Stay where you are! If we show we know he hasn’t gone, that will be the end of it.’
‘But—’
‘Listen, Don Manuel! Let me do the talking. You remember when we all left the cellar? I stayed behind, didn’t I? The reason I stayed behind was because I knew someone in the cellar had played me a silly trick and I had to explode it with a better one. The someone thought I had gone, and gave the trick away. Have you followed that?’
‘Yes, yes! You mean that idiot of a tramp—’
‘Well, follow this, also. Someone in this inn has played a silly trick on the officer, and he is trying to explode it in just the same manner. He’s outside at this moment, waiting for us to give our trick away—’
‘Oh, and whose silly trick was it, then?’ interrupted Don Manuel warmly.
‘The trick itself was mine, and I now retract in calling it silly. It was the only trick to play, owing to your own lack of wit on the doorstep. The silliness was your attitude regarding it and your explanation of it. And your subsequent belief that you had fooled the officer with your damned ridiculous story. I could have riddled that sailor fellow’s story in a second if I hadn’t chosen to let him give himself away, and the officer could have riddled your story just as easily if he had wanted to. Bah! I knew the officer’s game the moment he pretended to accept your explanation. He is a man of intelligence, and you hadn’t the intelligence to perceive it.’
‘I have the intelligence to perceive that you are worrying over nothing!’ retorted Don Manuel.
‘It is nothing, then, that he is waiting outside somewhere, with six men?’
‘You jump to conclusions! Suppose he isn’t? I am going to find out.’
‘How?’
‘There’s a room at the top where I can get a peep.’
‘Without being seen yourself from the road?’
‘I may not have your monumental brains, Mr Sims,’ said Don Manuel savagely; ‘but I am not a congenital idiot!’
He turned and disappeared up a flight of stairs. Sims lit a cigarette. In a minute the innkeeper returned, with a sullen expression.
‘You were right,’ he admitted at once. ‘I saw one of them. Dogs!’
‘Where?’
‘In the wood down the road. Like a shadow moving.’
‘And you still think I am worrying over nothing?’
‘Yes! For what can they do? They wait. So do we. What do we suffer? When they grow tired, they will go away.’
‘Or come back?’
‘Not they!’
‘You’re confident! Well, suppose you are right, we are still in our difficulty.’
‘How?’
‘If they do not move for an hour, nor can we.’
‘We don’t want to move.’
‘Wrong again, Don Manuel. We do want to move. We have got to move! The officer and his six men are merely our—local difficulty. Another difficulty—we might almost call it an international one—may come along at any second.’
Don Manuel cast up his eyes, and shook his head.
‘I do not understand you,’ he muttered, ‘and please do not reply, “You wouldn’t!”’
Sims smiled. ‘Sometimes I refrain from the obvious,’ he observed.
‘Well, your “international difficulty” is not so obvious!’
‘Then I will explain it. The officer outside is after the murderer of the two men near the coast. But others are after the kidnappers of Miss Holbrooke in the cellar below.’
‘But they do not know where she is!’
‘I have just learned that they may know! Your name and address, Don Manuel, were left behind on the ship from which we took Miss Holbrooke.’
‘Diablo!’
‘Which means that we must get Miss Holbrooke away from here at once. I should say, at a guess, that your inn is about the unhealthiest spot at this moment in the whole of Spain. Two more people know of it as well,’ he added.
‘Are there any who do not?’ cried Don Manuel. ‘What two more are these?’
‘You have a short memory. The officer spoke of two more Englishmen he was after—’
‘Yes, yes! Of course! The other suspects!’ Don Manuel paused, then sought Sims keenly with his beady eyes. ‘The two fellows you double-crossed, eh, Mr Sims?’
‘For our mutual benefit, Don Manuel,’ replied Sims, unruffled. ‘They would reduce your share as well as mine if they were with us.’
‘But they have not come here!’
‘No. And why have they not? And what will be their humour if they do come here? And—where are they at this mom
ent?’
This question, shot at the innkeeper, rebounded and struck the questioner. He paused abruptly, and thought, frowning, for several seconds. Then he said:
‘Yes, this is clearly the unhealthiest spot in Spain! The local police—Miss Holbrooke’s friends—Greene and Faggis—the girl—’
‘I forgot her!’ interposed Don Manuel, growing more and more uneasy. ‘Where the devil is she?’
‘Not half a mile away.’
‘What!’
‘That is another thing I discovered from our lunatic in the cellar.’
‘Half a mile—do you know the spot?’
‘I can walk straight to it.’
‘And what are you going to do about it?’
‘I am going to walk straight to it.’
‘Now who is the fool?’ cried Don Manuel, with exasperated triumph. ‘You will walk straight to it, and the officer will walk straight after you!’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ replied Sims.
‘You hope—? I give it up!’
‘It will be a blow to me if he does not walk after me. Believe me, I shall leave most suspiciously. And, while he is following me with all his men, you will be leaving this unhealthy spot—for ever, I should advise you—and taking Miss Holbrooke with you.’
Don Manuel looked at Sims hard. Then he looked towards the door behind which his six other ruffians had returned to their dice throwing. Then he looked at Sims again.
‘And where do I take Miss Holbrooke?’ he murmured.
‘I think you and I never repeat the name of the place,’ answered Sims, and now he also threw a glance towards the door, ‘saving by the definition, “The Last Resort.”’
‘So—it has come to that now!’
‘It was always intended to come to that, Don Manuel—though not,’ he added, as the innkeeper’s eyebrows shot up, ‘in this particular fashion. But if circumstances had not forced us to act now, we should undoubtedly have flitted to our last resort—the place only you and I know of! Begin with many, Don Manuel, but work down to a few. To those, in fact, who must remain, and to no others. It saves risk. It saves double-crossing. It increases the final share. Eh?’
‘I thought I was a devil,’ muttered Don Manuel, ‘but, Deos, by your side I am almost respectable!’ He closed his eyes, considered, and opened them again. ‘Well, devil or not, you are right. There is no hope here.’ He held up four fingers. ‘Four separate points of danger outside’—he added the thumb—‘and a leakage within! Someone helped that girl to escape, be sure of it.’ He closed his eyes once more, and now spoke with them closed. ‘Then there is, as you called him, the lunatic in the cellar. What do I do with him?’
‘I should like to have dealt with him myself,’ sighed Sims; ‘but, as I shall not be returning, you will have to deal with him yourself.’
‘Deal with him?’
‘Deal with him. In the most definite sense. In fact, kill him, Don Manuel. And when I say “kill him,” I mean that, also, in the most definite sense. If you propose to do it with a knife, see that you stick your knife into him fifty times. Forty-nine will not be enough. If you drown him, hold him under the water with a ton weight. Yourself, for instance. If you shoot him—no, he cannot be shot. I have tried that myself. I fancy the only certain way of really killing our lunatic is to cut him up into five pieces and to have one piece deposited in each Continent.’
Don Manuel grinned.
‘Leave him to me,’ he said.
‘Unfortunately, I have got to. But are you as confident that you can deal with Miss Holbrooke? That you can get her away from here without anybody knowing? Alive, of course.’
‘I shall think of something.’
‘Lacking your sublime faith, I shall think for you. When I leave, you will proceed to the cellar, and you will kill Ben. By the way, that is his name. Let everybody see you kill him. Then, get your men to put him in a sack, and say that the body must be taken away, to save suspicion when it is found. Volunteer to take it yourself. Send your men back to their dice. And then—’
He paused. Don Manuel frowned impatiently.
‘Well, and then?’
‘Then pour Ben’s body out of the sack, and put Miss Holbrooke’s in. When you go forth to do your good deed, the lunatic’s body will be in the locked cellar, and Miss Holbrooke will be in the sack on your back.’
‘She will make no objection, of course?’ queried Don Manuel, after a pause.
‘She has travelled innumerable miles without making any objection. Here is something to stop her complaints. And here is the cellar key.’
Sims handed two objects to Don Manuel. The innkeeper took them thoughtfully.
‘Yes, it is a good plan,’ he confessed. ‘But suppose some- one sees me with the sack?’
‘It is dark, and there will be no moon till after midnight.’
‘And I go to “The Last Resort”?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you meet me there?’
‘Naturally.’
‘You think I will not double-cross you?’
‘You are helpless without me. Alone, you would burst like a pin-cushion.’
‘And what will you do—meanwhile?’
‘I shall round up as many dangerous elements as I can, and see that our officer outside gets a good bag.’
‘What if this good bag should include you?’ suggested Don Manuel.
‘In that case,’ replied Sims, ‘you will be well advised to get rid of Miss Holbrooke, as you will have got rid of Ben, and to take a very fast boat to the North Pole. But I shall not be included in the officer’s bag. The bag will include, I imagine, Molly Smith—she will not escape a second time—and whoever happens to be at this inn when the officer returns to it. Every one in it at present, in fact, except our two selves, Don Manuel; and we shall not be in it. Now, is everything clear?’
‘It is as clear,’ nodded the innkeeper, ‘as an empty hive.’
A minute later, Mr Sims walked out of the inn to draw the police away, while Don Manuel, followed by his six ruffians, went down to kill Ben.
37
The Events on the Road
Before dealing with the events in the cellar, let us follow the events on the road, for the events on the road eventually led back to the cellar, to merge in a culmination not dreamt of in the philosophy of any of the participants.
The road was dark and dripping as Sims stepped out upon it, and the average traveller would have faced it with a sour expression; but Sims’s expression was the reverse of sour, and he even turned his head and called cheerily to the closing door.
‘That fool of an officer, Don Manuel, would give a lot to see what has just walked out of your locked cellar!’ he chuckled. ‘But he’d give more if he could see the next place I’m going to walk into!’
The fool of an officer, concealed under a spreading branch, heard the remark, as he was intended to. But he was not quite such a fool of an officer as Sims’s description assumed. When Sims swung by the clump of trees behind which he and his men were hidden, he thought rapidly for an instant, and then, picking out four of the men to accompany him, he signed the other two to stay. Both Sims and the inn were to remain under supervision.
Sims knew he was being followed, and was merely wrong in the matter of mathematics. He had reckoned on seven followers, and there were only five.
In contented ignorance he proceeded along the way, humming softly to himself. He heard many sounds. The rain made a steady, insistent patter on the road, and his boots scrunched at each long stride with the rhythm of a metronome. Every now and then a little stream of wind, stealing silently into the night and ending in a sudden flurry of discovery, shook the tree branches on either side of the road, and produced a violent dripping. Occasionally a little rustle, distinguishable only to the acutest ears, marked the fear or restlessness of some small creature. Sims’s own humming added its music to the orchestra.
But if he heard the footsteps of others as well as his own, if he hea
rd an occasional soft slither through the road-bordering trees, or a suppressed exclamatory whisper that marked some minor tragedy among the trees—a little unseen pool, a hole that caught a boot, a branch that swept a face—he gave no sign.
‘My ears are deaf,’ he reflected. ‘I know nothing. But I wish the damned fools would make less noise!’
The noise he complained of at that particular moment was the echo of his own footsteps.
Presently he recognised it as an echo. He recognised also the explanation of the echo’s clearness. The trees on either side of the road were now closely packed, forming tall walls of foliage through which he passed. He was walking through an outdoor passage, and sound could only escape above; on each side the walls of trees threw it back.
He increased his pace. There were two good reasons for this. The first was that he feared the thickness of the trees would force his pursuers out into the road, and then the farce of his pretended ignorance would be more difficult to keep up. They might even overtake him! That would be catastrophic!
The second reason was that he was thoroughly soaked, and he wanted to get the business over.
With an instinct that had helped him many times in the past, and was akin to the instinct of a blind man who knows when he is near a wall, Sims smelt the last lap of his journey. He knew as certainly as though he had been told that, only a little farther on, the empty cottage waited for him. It would be tucked away somewhere on the right—yes, the wall of trees seemed already to be thinning a little—and he vaguely recalled a roof or two while he had been chasing the confounded horse Don Manuel had lent him, when he had come upon Ben so strangely caparisoned. Yes, it would be about here. Undoubtedly, undoubtedly it would be about here. An accurate recollection of time and distance checked the deduction. In another half-minute …
Yes, in another half-minute—what?
It swept over Sims that he really did not know. He had embarked on this adventure partly through necessity, but partly, also, through self-confidence. ‘I can deal with any situation,’ was Sims’s motto, and his life had justified the motto. But he had to admit that it did help him to know what the situation was!
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