RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
"The Mystery of the Glass Bullet," D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1931
ANSON VESTERMAN returned to his offices from the dock, where he had just seen his only daughter—said by the press to be the fourth biggest heiress in the world—off to England; went straight through to his private office and locked the door. He took a letter from his notecase read it, put it down, thought for a few moments then wrote a check on his private account for 250,000 dollars, scribbled a brief note, enclosed both note and check in an envelope, sealed and stamped it and put it in his notecase.
For some moments he sat quite still, staring before him, his lean, firm face looking old and very tired. Presently he reached out and drew towards him the silver-framed photograph which always stood on the right hand side if his desk. It was that of Richard Vanesterman, his son—his only son, Dick—dead in the far desert of Morsalbana. For a long time he studied the picture with a singular and penetrating-regard. It was a fine face at which he looked—calm, clear-cut, keen yet steady, with direct eyes, a firm mouth and a hint of ready humour about the lips. A handsome, capable-looking boy—self-reliant, disciplined, courageous, not unlike Col. Lindbergh in appearance.
"No—no—no!" said the multimillionaire suddenly and rose "I will do anything, everything, except believe them, Dick, my boy! But how is one to prove—"
He controlled the sudden spurt of violent emotion instantly, gently replaced the photograph, went over and unlocked the door; returned to his desk and spoke quietly into a telephone. A thin little man appeared. He looked entirely insignificant—until one noticed the angle of his jaw, and the bold, square almost brutally firm contour of his chin. This was Randolph's confidential personal secretary.
"Everything in order, Randolph?"
"Everything."
"Everything steadied as I directed—locked—battened down in case of sudden gales?"
"Exactly as you directed, sir."
"Any suggestions, Randolph?"
"None sir. You know better than I do—but from my point of view you will leave everything trimmed, watertight, unwreckable—if you go."
Vanesterman nodded. "Good—Yes, I am going. You are dead sure that things are all correct, for Alison? No danger?"
"Dead sure that she will go into no danger that you—or I—or any of your advisers—have been able to foresee and prevent in advance. The house, Maiden Fair Manor, is bought paid for and ready for her; Lady Cedar Blanchesson is waiting to receive and attend her; and every possible care and precaution has been taken!"
"Good." He thought intensely for yet a few moments more. "Good," he said again. He took out and gave to Randolph the letter he had just written.
"This can be mailed immediately after I've sailed," he instructed and stood up—tall, erect, lean, neatly grey- bearded, an admirable model of an elderly, big business American.
"Well—" he said, and offered his hand. "Well, au revoir, my friend!"
"Au revoir, sir," said Randolph, and said no more than that.
From his office, Anson Vanesterman's great car took him uptown, perhaps a mile. There he dismissed his chauffeur, walked a few blocks, then took a taxi which he paid off at the entrance to a restaurant. Half a minute later, he left the restaurant by another door and went quickly into a picture house almost adjoining. A minute later he left the picture house, took another taxi, and drove to a quiet street; Here he assured himself that no car, public or private, followed him. He paid off his driver and went quickly down a side street. Then minutes later he walked into the establishment of a rising young doctor not a mile from the big offices in which he had said au revoir to Randolph.
Nobody saw Anson Vanesterman come out of that doctor's again, and even if the place had been watched, few people in New York would have connected with the well-known Anson Vanesterman, a person who came out an hour later—a stooping, white-faced old man, gaunt and shabby. Several of his teeth were missing, he was clean-shaven, and very pale. Elaborate tattoo marks showed around his wrists, ending on the backs of his hands. He wore a fresh-coloured patch over one eye, and he did not look particularly clean. He seemed nervous and downcast, and his air and manner were almost those of a fugitive.
He went slowly away in the direction of the docks, quietly, even a little feebly, like a man stricken by some mortal malady, anxious only to be unnoticed and left to himself. Nearly "cut" next door to destitution, if not death—on the last rung but one of the social ladder.
An hour later he passed into the third class of a liner bound for England.
Nobody saw him go—or if they did nobody was interested in his departure. Not even a reporter recognised him.
So complete and perfect had been the change effected in the appearance of this man—probably the fourth millionaire in magnitude in the United States of America that his nearest friend, his dearest relative, could not have recognised him. He looked rather like some broken old sailor, long since rendered unsailorly by illness and, maybe, ill treatment, creeping humbly back to some dim home across the Atlantic where he might be allowed to die in peace.
And even if he had been detained and searched, his searchers would have found upon him nothing at all to connect him with Anson Vanesterman, except possibly two things. One of these was a big .45 revolver of an old, old pattern, well-worn, yet still capable of much more and very deadly wear—a weapon which would be very familiar indeed to those, who lived in the cattle States of the Far West many years ago. And the other clue to his identity was the worn-edged fragment of the photograph of a young man—a handsome, capable-looking-boy. Self -reliant, disciplined, courageous, and not unlike Col. Lindbergh in appearance—even more like Dick Vanesterman, dead and buried in a far desert.
So, three days after his 60th birthday, Mr. Anson Vanesterman left New York. Some days later he was reported in the daily press as "travelling in Europe."
MR. "SMILER" BUNN and Lord Fortworth were gentlemen of
extremely elastic conscience, who, in bachelor partnership, had
lived luxuriously upon their wits for many years, amassing during
that period a sum of money that was far from trivial. It would be
incorrect to the point of sheer carelessness to state that they
were not crooks, and it is not to be denied that each possessed a
past that would bear no closer inspection than a hurried glance.
Mainly because they had specialised in securing for themselves
the portable property, preferably in the form of very hard cash,
of those who had little, if any right, to the said property, they
had never clashed with the police; and they had now acquired a
technique in this particular profession so very perfect and
painless in its operation that it was extremely unlikely that
they would so clash.
There had been a period in the distant days of his youth when the difference between Mr. Smiler Bunn—then so-called by a few intimates—and a crook was so slight that it was imperceptible to the human eye. But he had long said goodbye to all that. And it is equally true that if the police of a long past year had been able to lay their prehensile hands upon Mr. Bunn's partner at the time when, as Lord Fortworth, a London financier and company promoter, he had "failed" with extraordinarily dismal completeness, he would never have been able to disassociate himself from the long-term penitentiary to which he would inevitably have been consigned, in time to partner Mr. Bunn—or anyone else.
Lord Fortworth was still wanted—but they did not want him quite so hungrily as they had needed him fifteen years before. Scotland Yard had more or less written him off as a total loss. But neither of the totally hard-boiled old adventurers had become utterly careless, and although each thought of the other in the old terms and names, they were not using the names of their youth. Thus, to the public at large. Smiler was Mr. Wilton Flood, a plump and kindly, middle-aged gentleman of private fortune who shared a luxurious London flat, a comfortable country house, and other benefits of like nature with another middle-aged party, apparently rich, called Mr. Henry Black. In appearance they were much alike in manner and character they differed to an extent which will duly make itself evident.
During their years of diligence they had naturally found themselves entangled in a good many dangerous complications; but a time came when the affair to which they usually referred as "that business with those man-eaters from Mors" ranked in their minds as incomparably the most appallingly dangerous and risky complication they had ever known.
It began, as far as they were concerned, one afternoon when they were riding home after a gallop on the downs. Both were very hungry, very saddle sore, very thirsty and, consequently, very curious-tempered.
Neither liked riding for riding's, sake, and both bitterly hated it, when, as now, they were doing it- in order to get themselves merely plump instead of frightfully fat.
"What sense is there in riding till you're so sore that you're practically crippled for life, just, to work off a few ounces of first-class weight—weight that cost probably as much as 50 pounds worth of sterling per ounce to put on—living as well as we live," snarled Fortworth, standing carefully in his stirrups.
"The doctor told you that you were digging yourself into your grave with your teeth, didn't he? And he advised a course of hard riding to cure you of your over-eating!" Mr. Bunn reminded him gloomily.
"Yes—and I told you he was a damned liar, didn't I. And, if you ask my opinion, this riding prescription is his revenge," said Fortworth sourly.
"There's never any sense in being-rude to your doctor," declared Mr. Bunn, "and the sooner you realise that the better for your body if not your soul—if you've got one."
Fortworth glared. "Got one—me got a soul? I suppose I've got a right to claim that I've got a good a soul as you."
"You can claim so, Squire," agreed Mr. Bunn, growing more good-humoured as his partner grew worse. "And I'll not deny it. You can claim that you've got curly golden hair, for that matter. But you'll have to keep your hat on while you're trying to prove it." He laughed.
"Claiming to have a soul as good as mine doesn't give it to you, Squire. As it happens I have studied you pretty closely during the past ten years or so and my observations have driven me to the conclusion that if you have a soul, you keep it mightily well concealed. Still, I should be inclined to concede that you have got a soul—a sort of soul. Pretty much about the average I'll say. But when you claim that you've got the same quality soul as—through no particular merit of my own—I happened to be born with—by sheer good luck—I feel that it's time to put you right. I've watched myself very closely for many years and it seems perfectly clear to me that, compared with the average soul, mine is—"
He was not allowed to conclude the highly promising description of his remarkable soul which he had so blandly begun, for at this moment there ran out from a. small thicket of trees by the side of the road some fifty yards ahead a man who looked like a gamekeeper. This one stared rather wildly up and down the road, and beckoned to the partners furiously.
MR. BUNN kicked in the ribs the great, raw-boned horse which
sulkily bore his weight.
"Get up, you great lumbering bone-shaking, razor-backed, scrimshanking old soldier," he admonished the animal. The horse rather intelligently tried one-leggedly to kick Mr. Bunn in return, naturally failed, and so lumbered forward at a heavy and sullen canter. (Evidently there was no love lost between Smiler Bunn and his steed—not an unreasonable state of affairs considering that Mr. Bunn hated riding the creature just as much as the horse hated being ridden).
Fortworth belaboured his unenthusiastic animal into a kind of a gallop after his partner.
"What's the excitement, friend?" asked Mr. Bunn as he dragged his horse to a standstill.
"Dead man in the spinney, sir—stone dead—shot, sir. He's been shot dead and only a few minutes ago, for he's still warm. I've just come on him!"
"Humph!" said Mr. Bunn, ponderously dismounting. "I've heard no shots! Better look into this, I suppose."
He hitched the reins over a gatepost and followed the gamekeeper into a small plantation just of the road. He studied with shrewd, 'hard eyes the body lying just far enough in among the trees to be invisible from the road. It was that of a well- built young man, with a dark, strong, good-looking face. He was neatly dressed in the easy style more suitable for travelling than for wear in cities. The cause of his death was quite obvious—a bullet hole immediately over the heart.
"Bullet's still in his body," observed Mr. Bunn, feeling in vain for any sign of its egress.
"You had better get along to the nearest call office and ring up the police!" he advised the keeper. "There's one a quarter of a mile down the road."
The man hurried off, while Mr. Bunn continued his examination, muttering to himself as he did so.
"Unless I miss my guess pretty badly, this boy—for he's very little more—is an American," muttered Mr. Bunn. "Now, who on earth would want to shoot a lad like this here in an English copse—and as far as I can see take off him everything he carried? Why, there's not a thing in his pockets—not a thing! Not even a box of matches, nor a handkerchief—Humph! Whoever shot him didn't mean to let people find out who he was..."
Scowling, he again sent his deft fingers quickly prying about the pockets and clothing of the still figure, took off a shoe, examined that, then replaced it, picked up and looked inside the hat, a rather wide-brimmed soft felt, shrugged as he pointed to where a name had been cut out of the inner band, and rose.
"Not a thing to tell us who he was or what he was doing here," he repeated. "But the clothes and shoes and hat are American-cut and pretty good quality."
He began to look about him. The ground was too hard to bear marks of footprints, and there was not the least sign of any struggle.
"It was pretty cold-blooded," said Mr. Bunn at last. "The killer whoever he may have been, cleaned up behind him in no uncertain fashion."
He walked across the field towards an ancient farm labourer with a hoe who had just worked himself into view from behind the wood.
"Have you heard any shots fired in the spinney this afternoon, uncle?" he asked.
"Shots, mister? Why, no. I ain't heard nothin'—and I been workin' in this field all the afternoon."
"Humph!" said. Mr. Bunn to that. "You deaf?"
"No, I hain't deaf—I can hear like a fox, I can!" declared the old chap.
"Well, have you seen, anybody go in or come out of that copse to-day, not counting the keeper?"
"Aye, I have, I seen a girt motor car stop over there by the gate and two gentlemen go out and come into the spinney. No business o' mine—there's no knowing what motorists be likely to do now-a-days from picking flowers to poachin' pheasants!"
"Did you see them leave the copse?"
"I seen one. He came out about a quarter of an hour after and went over to the motor car and drove off."
"Didn't you see the other?"
"No, I didn't. I reckon he'd gone on back to the car afore his mate."
"And you didn't notice anything else?" demanded Mr. Bunn.
"No sir. There wasn't nothing to notice. I were busy hoeing."
He gave the old chap half a crown, and with his partner went back to the gate. The tracks of the car were not discernible on the smoothly polished road, but by the gate Mr. Bunn picked up a scrap of torn paper. It was, indeed, four scraps each exactly of the same irregular size. A motor horn sounded down the read and Mr. Bunn slipped into a pocket the pinch of paper—quite obviously a thumb-and-finger nail pull from a letter which some one had torn up.
Then he hurried back to the body in the little wood, hastily slid off a large, loosely-fitting, rather curious-looking ring on the little finger of the dead man, pocketed it, and returned to the gate apparently to sooth with direful and blood-curdling threats his great clumsy weight-carrying horse which was fussing, because of the police car which had pulled up, with a dry whining of brakes, close by. A police superintendent, a sergeant, and a constable, in charge of the wheel, alighted, followed by the keeper, and, more or less curtly greeting Mr. Bunn and his partner, made for the copse, guided by the gamekeeper. Fortworth would have followed them, but was stayed by the large heavy hand of his partner.
"No, no—let them have the body to themselves for a bit, Squire! They'll only want to throw their weight about and be rude—and rudeness is a thing I hate. What do you think a country-side Supe and his merry men can do for that boy?... No, no, stay where you are and leave it to the old man—myself, in fact! There are one or two things I don't like the look about this!"
He glanced about him under preteens of talking violently at his violent horse. "This, for example," he said—and showed Fortworth in the palm of his hand a small bit of glass—round, rather thick, with a diameter of about a third of an inch. He put it away and showed something else: "Or this!" The second thing he exhibited was also an object of glass. But it was differently shaped—being in the form of a pencil about two inches long, one end cut off square, as a pencil is, the other end sharpening to a needle keenness.
"A damned nasty looking thing, hey?" he asked quietly. "Mister Murderer cleaned up pretty well—but nevertheless he overlooked one or two things... We shall see..."
Within ten minutes the superintendent and his men came out, carrying the body. Mr. Bunn opened the gate for them.
"Can we do anything?" he asked.
The superintendent, a pleasant but not particularly bright- looking man of middle age, shook his head. "I'm afraid not," he said. "Wait just a little—I shall want your names—until we have this poor fellow in the—" He broke off to look at a huge automobile which had slid silently to a standstill at the roadside.
The door swung open and a woman stepped out—a tall, shapely woman, beautiful in a rather full-blown way, no longer young, but not so old that she failed to look extraordinarily attractive. She was of the dark type, with that vivid colouring that needs very little assistance from cosmetics, and if her dark eyes were perhaps a trifle too noticeably sophisticated, they were also brilliant.
"Oh, has there been an accident? Can I be of any assistance?"
Her fine, practiced eyes swept round the little group, absorbing them all, then flashed to the wax-white face of the dead man. Mr. Bunn heard her breath come so sharply that it was almost a hiss, and he saw, too, how the beautiful challenging face was drained suddenly of every vestige of colour, so that the brilliant lips looked against their dead-white background like a red wound, and her eyes huge and inky-black.
"But—but he is dead! How fearful!" she said, and swayed back, gripping her hands.
"I am afraid so, madam," said the superintendent, and moved away to direct his men about disposing the body fitly in the car.
The woman looked at Mr. Bunn and his partner. Already her colour was returning.
"It was very kind of you to stop—" began Mr. Bunn.
"But there really isn't anything that you can do—" interposed Fortworth, and held back the door of her car, his eyes frankly full of admiration.
"Where shall I tell your man to drive?" said Mr. Bunn, brazenly.
She half-closed her eyes, studying them both.
"Oh, to Maiden Fain Manor! He knows, thank you." She leaned forward. "Tell me, please—what has happened? Who is that poor boy Has he been killed in some accident?"
Mr. Bunn answered swiftly, anticipating his partner. "It isn't quite clear at present," he said. "But I will call at Maiden Fain Manor to-night with what information I can get—if you wish it."
She thought, still studying him through those strangely half- closed lids. "Thank you, I should he most grateful," she said at last. "I—have been greatly shocked. He seemed so young and so good-looking—too young to die! If you will be so kind as to call I should be grateful. I am Lady Cedar Blanchesson. You are sure there is nothing I can do?"
The partners shook their heads, Fortworth closed the door and the great car swung forward.
"Fine woman, that" said Fortworth at Mr. Bunn's shoulder as they watched the car recede.
"Very," said Mr. Bunn, absently, and turned at the touch of the police superintendent.
"Now, gentlemen, if you will let me know your names and where I can find you, it will be of great service to me."
They told him and in return Mr. Bunn asked him if he knew anything of Lady Blanchesson of Maiden Fain Manor. The superintendent thought—looked puzzled.
"No—never heard of her. I know Maiden Fain Manor wall. Fine old place not two miles from here. But that's been sold to some rich Americans—a Mr. Anson Vanesterman. I understand that Miss Vanesterman was due to arrive today. Maybe Lady Blanchesson is a guest—joining the house party, or something of the sort."
He closed his notebook, politely thanked the partners for their help and moved back to the police car. That, too, Mr. Bunn and his fellow-adventurer watched out of sight. Then they turned to the horses.
"Well, there's a full-sized afternoon's adventure for you, Squire," said Mr. Bunn. "And maybe—a little more. We shall see—if we can get home on these ungainly quadrupeds without getting crippled for life! Come up, you decorated camel!" he concluded, to his horse, and swung himself into the saddle with a heave that made the great horse look malevolent and bitter.
IT was while the partners were taking their customary series of generous aperitifs, shortly after their return to Chalkacres Hall, the country house on Salisbury Plain which they had rented for their riding cure, that Mr. Bunn declared his intention of going very much more closely into the matter of the murder at the spinney than he would into any other affair.
"Why?" demanded Fortworth, with his usual, partner-like unreadiness to agree with any suggestion of Mr. Bunn. "Why go and entangle yourself all up with the police? It's inviting what you've deserved for years past! You'll make some fool blunder or other that will start that super or some smart detective inquiring about you and who you are and where you come from and what you do for a living arid things like that. And if you don't realise that you've got the kind of a past that will hardly stand the inquiry of a village idiot, much less a good detective, then you've got an idea about your past life that's as false as your own teeth! Man alive! Have some sense! Leave it alone! Can't you see you're asking for trouble. If it was trouble for yourself, I wouldn't mind. But you're asking trouble for me—and that's the sort of trick that raises my very gorge! It's uncalled for—it's meddling—it's unprofitable—and it dangerous! Count me out!"
"I always do—in the brain department of this partnership," said Mr. Bunn mildly. Then, with a certain sharpness in his tone he added, "Pass me the sherry! And listen to me." He took his second aperitif—and his big, red face and his hard jade eyes and his large bald head looked all the better for it. "Listen, Squire," he said. "I am not usually a sentimental man, though I admit freely that I am a clever one when I care to he. Well, now, I agree that with that shapely dame, Lady Blanchesson—very much my style that lady, very much so—about that poor lad who was killed: I liked the look of him—a nice, clean, clever face, a courageous face—and he was too young and too good looking to be shot in a copse like a rabbit! Like a rabbit! If had a son—and perhaps it's as well I haven't—I'd have liked him to look like that boy! Now, I'm going to find out who shot him and why—and I'm going to get a well-made, well-knotted, well- greased rope, round the killer's neck! And that's," he concluded, "that! Pass the sherry!"
Fortworth helped himself as he passed it, with a shrug.
"That's the sentimental side of it, Squire," said. Mr Bunn "Explained to you and finished with once and for all!"
He studied the golden fluid in his glass with a wise eye. "I see no money in the matter—at present," he resumed presently. "But I'm not working myself into hysterics about that. If there is money in it, that will be all right about that money. I shall see to it. If there isn't I guess I can afford, a holiday. So I'll just ask you, Squire, to pull yourself together and follow the old man as usual."
Fortworth shrugged again in a noncommittal sort of way. "That's the style," said Mr. Bunn sarcastically. "Be enthusiastic!"
He dipped a finger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket, and dropped gently oh the table between them the glass pencil-shaped object he had found in the copse.
"What do you make of that, Squire?" he demanded.
"What should I make of it?" said Fortworth sourly, evidently unable to "make" anything of it. "It looks to me like a bit of cheap jewellery. And I'm not fond of jewellery."
"No, not this soft," agreed Mr. Bunn blandly. "For unless I overshoot my mark, it was one of these things which made that murder; as quick and silent and painless as a stroke of lightning. It's a kind of bullet—a sort of baby shell. Look!"
He held it level with his eyes, then tilted it slightly. A minute bead-like bubble inside the glass slid in an oily sort of way from the lower end of the glass to the upper—much like the bubble in a spirit level.
"See, Squire? This thing's hollow and it's filled inside with some liquid."
"Poison!" said Mr. Bunn curtly.
"What is it—oil?"
"Maybe snake venom—maybe some chemical stuff that's even quicker!"
Fortworth scowled and looked dangerous, as he always did when he encountered anything a little too new for him to understand readily.
"Damn a man who'd use a thing like that!" he muttered. Mr. Bunn put the glass bullet down.
"Well, there it is—and it's plain enough to see how it works. It's as sharp-pointed as a needle and doesn't need to be fired at any great velocity to penetrate. Probably it's shot from a simple sort of spring pistol. It would drill through a man's skin just as easily as it would pierce a pound of butter. The point would break off—and whether the bullet touched a vital spot or not wouldn't matter. The stuff inside would be released and do the work it was meant to do. A wound in the arm, anywhere, would be as deadly with this damned thing as in the brain or the heart."
He finished his sherry. "That's how I figure it out. And I'm right, Squire? You can take it from me that I am very right!"
He cook out the small disc of glass. "And that's the base of the broken bullet—most of which they'll find in the boy's body!" he added. "I found it between his shirt and his skin—just over the heart.
"Now for the torn paper," he continued and produced it. "I'm not a fancy detective, I'll admit," he said.
"No—you're just a plain sharp," agreed Fortworth.
"Yes? Anyway, I shall be a very surprised man if those bits of paper don't tell me something about that crime. We'll see."
He sorted them out—four irregularly-shaped scraps, each covered with typed characters. For a long time the old rascal stared at them, his heavy, good-humoured face rather solemn. In his easy chair Fortworth watched him from behind a cigar. Then presently Mr. Bunn looked up, frowning, like a man who has made up his mind.
"Pass the sherry," he said curtly. Then he resumed his study of the typing on the paper scraps.
"We've been unlucky," he said presently. "Come and read 'em."
Fortworth rose reluctantly from his chair like a buffalo bull from a wallow and went across to peer over his partners shoulder, reading the fragments one by one as Mr. Bunn pointed.
No. 1 read:
lucky thing for
only guess at, anyway
take it or leave it
No. 2 read:
nesterman millio
stop at murder
help young Vanesterm
No. 3 read:
waterless and in
short of a million
allowed to wreck
get what's coming
No. 4 read:
Blanchesson, you will
say 50,000 dollars cold money
Col Carnac think
Foon and the hard
"Yes, 'Foon and the hard'," snarled Fortworth. "What d'ye think you'll get out of all that?"
Mr. Bunn shrugged. "I don't know. See?" He cocked a hard eye up at his partner. "I don't know how much I'll get out of it in the long run. But, Squire, I got something so far—in the short run!" He replaced the scraps in his notecase. "There are men—and you're a glorious example of 'em, Squire—that can not see a brick wall till they've fractured their faces against it! But me, I'm not one of 'em! Hey, come now, I'll ask you an easy one. Who dropped that pinch of a torn-up letter? The murderer or the murdered?"
"How should I know?" snapped Fortworth. "Where was it—did I—where did I find it?"
"By the gate, man, by the gate!"
"I know it. Well, don't that convey anything to the place where your mind ought to be?"
"No, it don't!" bawled the exasperated Fortworth. "It conveys nothing, you bumptious old blaggard! Nor to you either. Go on—I'll bite on it. Who dropped the scraps, anyway?"
"The murderer," said Mr. Bunn, blandly. "Obviously, you old fool, obviously!"
"I'm no fool!" declared Fortworth.
"No—not an ordinary fool—" agreed Mr. Bunn. "But you certainly are an extraordin—"
The door opened silently—as doors usually did when operated by that singular yellow person, Sing, the Chinese, who for many years past had functioned as private slave, cook and strictly personal thug to Mr. Bunn—who had originally bought him for five shillings from a policeman down by the West India docks in London. (The policeman on his way home had found Sing reposing completely unconscious in the gutter where he had been carelessly and untidily left by certain Chinese 'friends' when they had finished something which probably Sing himself had started.)
The man slid into the room, smiling the sort of smile that a cook interrupted in the middle of preparing a really elaborate dinner for a pair of really elaborate eaters would smile.
"Lady and gentleman wantee seeing you," he stated, in the sort of tone; that a cobra di capello uses when he says, "Come just six inches; closer and watch me turn you into an affair for a cemetery!"
"Lady Cedah Blanchesson and Col. Calnac," he added.
"Humph!" went Mr. Bunn and thought for a second. Then he continued. "All right, Sing—hold up the dinner—and if you ruin the fish, God help you!—and show them in!"
Rather hastily he gathered up what he described as the "clues" he had discovered.
"Pass the sherry," he said peremptorily to Fortworth. But Fortworth only grinned.
"There's none left!" he said, "not a drop, ha-ha! What d'ya think this decanter is? A widow's cruse or an artesian well or an oil gusher that never runs dry?"
"Pah!" said Mr. Bunn and turned to receive the lady who was so much his style, and her companion.
MR. BUNN and his partner had never been churlish to a handsome
woman in their lives—unless she had been churlish to them
first—and Lady Cedar had no reason to complain about the
quietly cordial reception extended to her, and, for that matter,
her companion, whom she introduced as Col. Carnac, the explorer!
Normally the hard-shelled old adventurers would not have unduly
disturbed themselves to welcome the Colonel, for he was not a man
of much attraction. He lacked charm, and he appeared to be
utterly devoid of blandishment.
He was very tall, extraordinarily thin, with a pallid, yellowish skin and long, drooping, iron-grey moustache, rather stringy, which at its thickest part, just above his lip, was of a peculiar greenish-brown tint—probably due to the cigars which he seemed incessantly to smoke. His eyes were black, beady and stone cold; he evidently was bald, for he wore a close- fitting dark toupee, and he seemed incapable of keeping his lips closed, for his white teeth were always visible, so that there was the effect of a perpetual forced and sardonic smile on his long face. He was extremely well-dressed, very soft spoken, with a perfect accent, completely self-possessed, and his manner was bland to the point of oiliness.
He accepted a whisky and soda as readily as at Mr. Bunn's invitation the Lady Blanchesson had nominated for herself a cocktail.
"That shocking discovery this afternoon has haunted me for ever since I left the place, Mr. Flood," she said, using the name under which Smiler Bunn at that period was quite comfortably making his way through life. "And as we had to pass your house this evening on our way to Grateley Station I could not resist calling to ask you if you had gleaned any more news about the poor handsome boy who was killed. And I brought Col. Carnac in with me because he is scientifically interested in criminology and the detection of crime."
She threw a brilliant glance at the colonel.
"Really, he is one of the best amateur detectives in the world," she said, and took a sip at her cocktail.
The colonel moved a hand like the claw of a bird—a large dangerous bird.
"Hardly that, my dear Cedar," he demurred mildly. "But an old soldier on retired pay must do something to save himself from becoming a vegetable. And since I grew too old for exploring I have discovered that I really do seem to have a sort of flair for picking up and linking together the loose ends of a crime!"
He shrugged, his white teeth showing in that peculiar fixed grin of his. "Lady Cedar was kind enough to call me and motor me over in the hope that you gentlemen might care to give me any information you may have gleaned in connection with the murder," he added.
The lady laughed quietly, finished her cocktail, glanced at the clock and rose.
"I am sure they will," she said, with a smile for each. "But I must go now. It is later than I thought and the London train will be in."
She hesitated a moment, then resumed. "I am meeting and bringing back to Maiden Fain a new and very lovely—and enormously wealthy—neighbour for you," she explained. "Miss Alison Vanesterman, the only daughter of Anson Vanesterman of New York."
"The millionaire multimillionaire, I ought to say—do you mean, Lady Cedar?" asked Mr. Bunn.
"Yes!"
"She is coming to stay with you at Maiden Fain Manor?" asked Mr. Bunn.
But Lady Cedar laughed a little, shaking her head. "O, no—it is quite the other way around. Miss Vanesterman is the owner of Maiden Fain and I am merely the friend she has chosen from among many to act as guide, counsellor and friend socially on her first visit to England. You will both fall in love with her—everyone does," she concluded, and was quite affectionately ushered to her car by the three gentlemen.
"A very lovely woman, Lady Cedar," said Mr. Bunn, motioning to the grim looking Colonel to replenish his glass.
"Very!"
"Life must be a niceish affair for a woman like Lady Cedar," continued "Smiler," in a slightly dull, thick witted sort of way that caused Fortworth to glance at him rather curiously. (He was not normally a dull man nor thick o' the wits.) "I mean, to be so beautiful and rich?"
"Rich! My dear sir!" The Colonel stared and showed his teeth more plainly than ever. "Rich! Why, she hasn't got two cents to rub together! She's as poor as—as—I am. Poorer—for I have at least my beggarly pension! That's why she is permitting her friend, Miss Vanesterman, to pay her so well for acting as a companion and social guide over here in England until Miss Vanesterman knows a little more about the—er—peculiarities of English social life!"
"Oh! Is that so?" said Mr. Bunn heavily. "You surprise me, Colonel."
He refilled his glass. Col. Carnac shrugged his shoulders.
"The way of the world," he said airily. "Light and shade, laughter and tears, wealth and poverty, ups and downs. First up, like the Vanestermans—then down, like that poor chap you discovered to-day. You were the first on the scene, I believe?"
Mr Bunn did not mention the gamekeeper.
"Never had such a shock in our lives, hey, Squire?" he appealed to Fortworth.
"No," said that ungarulous individual.
Col. Carnac leaned forward. "You had a good look round when you found him, of course?" he asked with some eagerness. "Did you find anything that struck you as likely—er—clues to the murderer? They always leave something forgotten, you know."
Mr. Bunn shook his head. "Well, no. I can't say we did, Colonel. Nothing. Not a thing. And, mind you, we looked carefully. One way and the other we are pretty well read up in this detective stuff—in fact, I'll go so far as to say that both my partner here and I feel we can claim to be not so slow at the amateur detecting ourselves. It's an interesting hobby and it gives one an outlet for one's brain power. But brain power wants something to—well, chew on. It wants a clue or two for a kind of kickoff. But it would have to be a mighty keen-eyed detective who could have found any clues in that spinney to-day. Hey, Squire?"
Fortworth, aware from the full-sized untruth of which his wolf-witted old partner had just been successfully delivered that prompt agreement was required, promptly agreed.
Col. Carnac stiffened in his chair.
"No clues?" he said, rather sharply. "But—my dear sir! Are you sure? Who was the man?"
"Who was he? Why, man alive, how should we know? If we knew that we should be halfway to finding the murderer!" ejaculated Mr. Bunn.
"But—didn't he have a card—an envelope—something of that sort on him? Even jewellery—brooch, watch, ring, something of that sort?"
Mr. Bunn's great face fell. "Why, to tell you the truth, Colonel, we didn't search him! Too busy fixing up to get the police and feeling for his heart-beats and so on!"
The Colonel's eyebrows worked a little. Yet his grin was not wholly ungenial as he stared at the partners.
"You should have searched him, you know?" he said. "At least, that is if you are really keen on detection!" He frowned, seeming to think. "How about footprints?" he said presently, and corrected himself. "No, no—the ground is hard everywhere. What was the cause of death?"
"We think he was shot from a distance," said Mr. Bunn—brightly.
"Ah! Why do you think so?"
"We couldn't see any signs of singeing on his clothing and he had a wound over the heart!"
"Ahaa!" The lean Colonel nodded. "Now we are moving a little! You thought he was shot and, of course, one of you looked around to see if there were any witnesses—labouring men in the neighbouring fields, for example, who had heard the shot?"
"Well, no—it never occurred to us," admitted Mr Bunn, rather gloomily.
The Colonel shrugged. "Never mind! But at least, you searched the ground immediately adjacent to the spot on which the body was lying?"
He leaned even further forward.
"My dear, sir, don't tell me you did not search every inch of the ground round about? Murderers drop things, you know. Read the account of almost any murder trial and you will learn much concerning the amazingly numerous oddly varied things dropped by murderers. Gloves, handkerchiefs, even electric torches, cigarette ends, match stubs, life preservers, sticks, hammers, pistols, knives, empty shells, live cartridges, tobacco ash. Oh, hundreds of things. Do you mean to tell me, my friends, that you found nothing of the sort? Honestly, now, did you search?"
His teeth glittered at them as he leaned forward, smiling most genially, and indulgently. Mr. Bunn looked, a little embarrassed as he returned the Colonel's smile. "Well; I'll say quite frankly that I—" he broke off and turned to his partner... "Didn't you give the ground a thoroughly good search while I was attending to that poor chap?" he demanded.
"No," said Fortworth, sullenly, "I didn't! It didn't occur to me to do so!"
Mr. Bunn raised his brows and looked at the Colonel significantly. "Nor did I search," he said slowly. "I couldn't do it all—and, anyway, the police were on the spot very smartly—very smartly indeed!"
Col. Carnac nodded. "Quite, quite. And so, really, to put the thing absolutely bluntly—in the friendliest possible way, of course—from the point of view of, say, a professional detective, you really know nothing about it except that you found the body and notified the police, just as nine hundred and ninety-nine ordinary country-loving gentlemen out of a thousand would do?"
Mr. Bunn nodded without hesitation.
"Well, yes, Colonel, that's about right! Hey, Squire—the Colonel's right, don't you think?" He indicated the refreshment tray, heartily inviting the Colonel to look after himself.
"The fact is," he continued, after a moment employed in selecting and lighting a cigar, "the fact is, now I've come in contact with somebody who has seriously studied detection as a science, I begin to realize what fools, what utter damned fools, my partner and I were ever to imagine that we amounted to much as amateur detectives!" He beamed at the Colonel. "That's frank at any rate," he added. "Anybody can have my share of the detecting—if it means that you have to have eyes like microscopes, wits like wolves, and the patience of Job! Good health. Colonel! And I wish you joy of your job—if you're setting out to track down the murderer of that man in the spinney!"
Col. Carnac finished his drink. "I shall do what I can!" he said' sombrely, and thought for a few seconds. "Like myself, you are, I believe, new to this neighbourhood. I have recently rented a little place not far from here—they call it Downland Holt—a white place a mile or two across the downs from here. I should be glad if you cared to drop in, in an informal sort of way, any time. There usually is a respectable whisky and soda at home. Possibly, something may occur to you later, about the murder—some little thing may come into your minds that would be of value to one engaged in a serious attempt to solve this really rather mysterious crime. I should be grateful if you cared to let me know of it."
He hesitated, studying them from behind his odd fixed and glittering grin. "Elaborate entertainment I am afraid I am not in a position to promise—but simple, hearty, old-fashioned hospitality, such as may be offered by an old soldier, a worn-out explorer, in fact, a rather tired old fellow with a weakness for the science of detection, I can certainly proffer!"
"Well said, Colonel!" replied Mr. Bunn, enthusiastically. "You can bank on us to pay you a call just as soon as, to put it in a modest kind of way, we think you can stand one—hey, Squire?"
The Squire agreed—and on that rather hearty note Col. Carnac left, warmly escorted to the beginning of his walk across the downs by both of the partners.
"NOT a bad kind of sportsman that, in spite of his looks," said Fortworth, resettling in the great armchair in which he was accustomed to await Sing's pronouncement that dinner was waiting to be devoured.
"Plain-looking sort of party," observed Mr. Bunn, rather absently.
"We can't all be matinee idols," said Fortworth, shortly. "Take yourself, for example—"
"Never mind about my matinée idolness, Squire,' responded Smiler good-humouredly. 'What's worrying me just at present is this murder in the spinney. I want to get some sort of sensible idea of the motive!'
"The motive man!" snapped Fortworth. "What d'ye mean, motive?"
"No murder was ever committed without a motive!" said Mr. Bunn.
"No—nor without a murderer, either!" responded Fortworth, annoyed at the subtle assumption of superiority exhibited by his partner. "What you need to do, according to my mind and the colonel's is to find the murderer!"
Mr. Bunn yawned, as he reached for the replenished sherry decanter. "O, him!" he said. "As far as the murderer is concerned I've solved the thing. I know him all right!"
Fortworth stared. "O, you do? Well, which was it? The gamekeeper—or the old farm labourer?"
"Just keep your voice down a trifle when you utter, Squire," said Mr. Bunn, softly. "Yes, I fancy I know the murderer—but I don't know why he did his murder—yet!"
"I'll believe that when you can prove it," said Fortworth bluntly.
"That will be all right!" promised Mr. Bunn, who rose softly and moved to the window. "Just switch off the light," he said.
Fortworth went to the switch and the room was black. Mr. Bunn moved the edge of the curtain the merest fraction of an inch, peering out, then stepped back.
"Grope you way over here, quietly, and just take a peep behind the scenes," he invited. He moved back and instructed Fortworth what to do. "Don't be clumsy about it," he said. "Just move the curtain enough to get a line on the outside with one eye. Handle it as if it was hot—for the murderer and a friend—is listening just outside now! Go easy—for if you give yourself away you are liable to collect one of those patent poison bullets in the face before you know what's happened!"
Fortworth did precisely as he was told. Through the tiny chink he saw standing outside, close up to the window, two men, clearly visible against the light of a rising moon. They stood in the attitude of men listening so that only their profiles were visible. One of these profiles was that of a man whom Fortworth had never seen before.
The other was that of the best amateur detective in the world—Col. Carnac. Fortworth retreated into the darkness of the room—and Mr. Bunn switched the light on.
"Hey, now," growled Fortworth, "how d'ye account for that? It looks to me as if Carnac suspects us of the darned murder!"
But Mr. Bunn shook his head.
"O, no," he said blandly. "It's the other way round. Col. Carnac committed the murder and he's got a nasty sort of feeling that we suspect it!"
Fortworth's rather savage temper went suddenly. His hard, heavy face flushed.
"O, is that so! Well, I'll take your word for it. But I guess I want to know what the hell right Carnac thinks he's got to spy around our windows, anyway!" He turned to the door. "I'll go and tell him what I think!"
But Mr. Bunn grabbed his arm.
"Forget that, old man! I give you my word that if you go out there and surprise those gents you are a dead man! Keep your temper, Squire—for I mean it."
"Maybe—but I'm going anyway! Damn it, man, have we got to put up with people listening in at our windows? They'll be under our beds next!"
He went out into the hall growling. Fortworth was not a man of rapid mentality, but anyone who told him that he was not surcharged with sheer bull-headed courage would be framing himself for a course of hospital technique.
He took a stick like a club from the hall-stand and made for the front door. Mr. Bunn came back from the desk drawer which he had snatched open and joined him. In Smiler's hand was a big blue automatic pistol. He shouldered past his partner.
"As you insist—like a fool—on going out I guess I'll take precedence as senior partner of this firm!" he said tersely and opened the front door so carefully that it swung back a few inches entirely without sound. Then, to Fortworth's amazement, he closed it again—for even as he had opened it he had caught a fleeting glimpse of a man disappearing out of the big porch.
"Easy—easy!" he warned. "We'll take the side door. Unless I miss my guess there's something in the porch that wasn't there a few minutes ago! And we'll hurry!" He ran with surprising quickness for one so big, for the side door and, followed by the bewildered but full furious Fortworth, hurried round to the front door.
"Yes!" he said sharply, as staring into the porch, lit by a single electric light, he saw a black metal box lying close up to the door—a box about the size of three big cigar boxes.
Mr. Bunn jumped for it, snatched it up, and pitched it with all his strength out into the night. It struck hard ground well out across the park and then there crashed out on the countryside the roar of an explosion so shattering and terrible that the reeking, poisonous blast of air rocked the partners on their feet where they stood, staring at the spot where the lurid fan-shape blaze of furnace red flame, shot with green and electric blue streaks, had soared up in the moonlight.
A chunk of metal went howling past Mr. Bunn's head to embed itself in the wall behind him. But he ignored that and pointed to a spot wide to the right of the explosion.
"See them? There they go!" Three dark blobs, like running men, already some distance from the house, were hurrying across the small park towards the road.
"A bomb—huh?" demanded Fortworth.
"Well, yes—unless you prefer to call it one of Col. Carnac's visiting cards," said Mr. Bunn, slowly. "Or, better still you might call it the gong after round one with our friends across the downs!"
The completely hard-boiled Mr. Bunn wasted no time standing outside the house staring across the park.
"Well, now we know where we are." he said thoughtfully and moved into the porch. "Better be getting indoors—if only for safety's sake!"
Reluctantly, his dour partner followed him.
"If that bomb had exploded in the porch it would have wrecked the place," observed Smiler, as they entered the hall. "And everything and everybody in it—including us. There was some pretty powerful dope in that little machine, and unless I badly miss my guess we shall find a hole in the park tomorrow big enough to park a battleship in."
Fortworth turned back. "We'll soon see," he declared, but Mr. Bunn stayed him. "See what?"
"This hole, man!"
"Hole? What do you want to see the hole for? At this hour— practically dinner time! Haven't you ever seen a hole before? I've no doubt it's a perfectly good hole—but if you go out there now and hang around admiring it, it looks to me as if you'll stand a fine chance of being one of the first things to help fill it. No, Squire—take good advice offered by a good adviser—leave the hole lie for the present. We've clashed with a genuine man-eater this time and we've got to go on tiptoe. How far do you figure those thugs ran? Not so far that they could not reach you with a bullet if you walked out there Nunno—this is where we need to use our brains, not our feet!"
He closed the door just as Bloom, the fat, unscrupulous butler who acted as general aid to Mr. Bunn's patent, indestructible valet, cook and all-round work-wizard, Sing, the Chinaman, entered looking agitated and panting like a non-runner who has been dashing about a little faster than usual.
"What's the matter, Bloom?"
"The explosion, sir—that frightful explosion in the park—I ran out to see what it—"
"What explosion?" asked Mr. Bunn and turned to his partner. "What's the man talking about? Do you know? What is all this about an explosion? I believe you're half-tight again, Bloom. D'ye think we shouldn't have been awakened if there'd been any explosions round about? And even if there was one—what's, that got to do with dinner, -Bloom—that's it, my man, why be late for our dinner because you've got hold of some cockeyed fancy about some explosion somewhere! Look at the time, man, the time. Only two minutes to go before the most important meal of the day, and instead of opening the oysters, here you are maundering about explosions and things. Dinner, Bloom, dinner—damme—later for the explosions!"
Bloom disappeared, and Mr. Bunn grinned faintly at his partner.
"No use letting the man frighten himself out of our service. And the less we know, officially, about the bomb, the better just at present."
They went into the dining room and settled themselves in a good tactical position to deal with what Sing, out in the kitchen, was preparing for them as fast as he could perform.
"WELL, what d'ye make of it all?" demanded Fortworth, as, a
little later, the trifling remains of the hors d'oeuvres
were being removed.
"Nothing—during dinner,' replied Mr. Bunn, and drank a large glass of wine. 'There's time for everything, Squire, and this is dinner time. So, if it's all the same to you, we'll postpone, the inquest on that hole in the park till a little later on."
But it was a full hour before, over their coffee and liquors, Mr. Bunn announced his conclusions—which were quite simple.
"It's perfectly plain to me that somebody was watching that little wood where we found the body—probably watching us. Maybe it was Col. Carnac—certainly it was somebody who had something to do with the murder. He either saw us pick up that paper or guessed we did. He may have seen us pick up that glass bullet—he'd probably have found out that he dropped one—and, one way and another, he must have known that we knew a lot more about that killing than we said. Now Carnac and Lady Cedar are the only people (bar the Police superintendent) we've spoken to. We told them what wasn't true. Then, very soon after somebody tried to blow us to rags. And if that somebody wasn't Carnac who else could it be?"
"Huh! Maybe it's as you say," grudged Fortworth, obviously not caring to take the trouble to figure it out for himself. "If we had told this Carnac plug-ugly the stark-naked stone-cold truth and shown him everything we found and handed all over to him and told him to get on with his detecting because we were stepping off I am prepared to bet my lunch to-morrow that no bomb would have been blown off at us to-night."
Mr. Bunn drank his liquor.
"Yes, that's so. I see it," he continued. "I was very quick as usual—I spotted the essentials like a flash, as is my way—but still I wasn't quite quick enough. No. If we had done that, or better still, have explained that we came on the scene after that gamekeeper, Carnac would have dismissed us from his mind at once as being just two ordinary damned fools that had blundered into this murder business by chance and were only too glad to blunder out again. It's a pity—a great pity. Must put that right at once. Pass the sauce..."
He pondered for a few moments, then rose, glancing at the clock.
"No time like the present," he said. "Come along; Squire—stir yourself."
"Stir myself! What d'ye mean, stir myself," growled Fortworth.
"We're going along to see Col. Carnac—to consult him as the 'best amateur detective in the country.' I'll explain as we go."
He touched the bell and ordered the car.
Fortworth stared. "Hey, have you got softening of the brain or what have you got?" he demanded. "There's a man who's made up his mind to wipe us clean off the face of the earth as soon as he can and you propose to walk into his—"
"Later—later for the argument, Squire," interrupted Mr. Bunn, good-humouredly. "We've dropped into a very deep, very ugly and dangerous bit o' trouble. That's perfectly plain to a man with any genius for solving mysteries—at a profit. I mean to solve this one—at a profit. But we've got to keep body and soul together if I'm going to do it—and that means we can't afford to fix ourselves up as a couple of targets for friend Carnac. If he sets out to get us he'll get us. He's that kind. We've got to sidetrack the colonel and sidetrack him quick. Leave it to me, old man and, as I said, stir yourself."
WHAT Mr. Bunn said usually went—after a fair amount of pretty acid conversation from his rather morose partner—so that within twenty minutes Sing had slung their big car across to Downland Holt, the house occupied by the colonel. It was a biggish, gloomy place, surrounded by trees on three sides, and with the exception of one or two outdoor servants' cottages, some distance away, it was the only house within a radius of perhaps a couple of miles. Long before the car of the adventurers had rolled to a standstill, the deep warnings of several big dogs had notified the occupants of this remote habitation that strangers were about.
The response to Smiler Bunn's ring was practically instant.
The door was opened silently, framing the figure of a manservant just as correctly dressed as if he were on duty at a big, busy establishment in the West End.
Mr. Bunn passed him a card.
"Kindly take that in to Col. Carnac, with my compliments," he requested of the man. "Offer him my apologies for calling so late and tell him that I wish to see him on a matter of vital importance—practically, you might say, a matter of life and death!"
"Yes, sir. I am sorry but Col. Carnac is not at home."
"O! Pity you hadn't said so at first," said Mr. Bunn.
"I am sorry, sir," purred the manservant. "His confidential secretary is in. If you wish I will announce your arrival to him."
"Very well—so be it!"
They entered a large and extremely well-furnished hall hung with a rattier unusually fine collection of trophies—weapons, big-game heads, antlers, horns and so forth. Before a huge, blazing coal fire, stood an enormous settee flanked by big armchairs and little tables, all within easy reach, across a soft, thick carpet, of a very large and beautifully carved cellarette. A luxurious place, stuffed full of aids through life. From the point of view of an 'arty' person whose notion of a tastefully furnished hall meant a place with an antique steel fire iron, an Oriental vase with one bluebell or daffy-down-dilly, in it an unserviceable spinning wheel and a Japanese print slightly out of true, it was an appalling room—but to a he-man battling as best he could through a she-world on a fairly frosty night it was as good an imitation of Paradise as was likely to be found in any quarter of the globe.
"Damme!" said Mr. Bunn, warming first his big hands and then his back at that outrageously huge fire. "This is a very cosy shop—very cosy, to be sure! I like that cellaret! It's a very fine bit of furniture. Wonder what he keeps in it? All sorts, I'll bet good money! I came here with a notion that the colonel was hard up, but this doesn't look as if—"
He broke off as, moving softly over the expensive carpets, a man entered—evidently the secretary. This one, like the butler, was "all correct" in a dinner jacket. But he was a "queer-looking customer," as Mr. Bunn later classified him. For he was tubby, but thin-legged—so that he looked like a kind of fat stork. His trousers were too tight—too narrow—for his upper works. He was like a black and white orange on two wooden knitting, needles.
But he was only remotely comic until one looked at his face—and his hands. The hands were absolutely appalling. For they were enormous—more than twice the size of any ordinary man's, very white, meticulously manicured, yet as coarse-grained as pig-skin, and the square-tipped fingers and the splayed thumbs were almost exaggeratedly those which the scientists associate with murderers.
Murderous hands! The hands of a strangler! Hands that, quite obviously, were so immensely powerful that they could enlap the neck, the pillar of a neck, of a Hercules among men, and squeeze his windpipe into his vertebrae without any real effort.
Mr. Bunn really was a man who noticed things quickly—though perhaps not so quickly as he was wont to claim—and he knew all about the hands of Col. Carnac's secretary before he looked at the man's face.
The naturally hard eyes were jade green Mr. Bunn observed as his own eyes met those of the man with the hands—the palest, stoniest eyes that the immensely experienced old adventurer had ever looked into—set under an enormous expanse of smooth white forehead crowned with a kind of cream- coloured hair, and lost in a huge white face like a skinned ham. The mouth was a wide, lipless, lividly pink straight line horizontally dividing the nose from the chin.
"You desired to see Col. Carnac, gentlemen?" said the secretary, advancing quietly toward them. "I am sorry that he happens to be dining out!"
His mouth was the most musical thing that the partners had heard for months. It was as if some such master of voice control as Caruso had sung it very softly and carefully and apologetically. A fluty sort of sound.
"But I am Mr. MacCorque, Col. Carnac's confidential secretary, and I shall be very glad to do anything in my power to assist you, gentlemen."
The viper eyes played over them.
"Thanks. We've called to discuss a very serious affair," said Mr. Bunn. "It is a shocking disappointment to us to miss the colonel."
"I am in Col. Carnac's complete confidence," fluted the man with murderous hands. "That is to say, gentlemen, that I am authorized to, receive confidences on the colonel's behalf."
Mr. Bunn who, keen judge of men as he was, never allowed anyone's appearance unduly to overawe him for more than a second or so, smiled. "That's good," he said. "Very good, indeed, Mr. MacCorque. For the thing's urgent. We'll put it to you."
Mr. MacCorque waved a great white hideous hand, genially indicating chairs, and took one himself.
"May I offer you anything?" he said, in the voice of an opera tenor slowly fading away.
"You may," said Mr. Bunn. "A cigar and a whisky and soda can hurt no man, hey?"
"They cannot," said the MacCorque, warmly. He touched a bell that conjured up a sly-looking footman and ordered for three. Mr. Bunn did not utter a word until the footman had finished. Then, prefacing his statement with the fair-and-square, man-to-man observation, "Good health!" he said: "We wanted to consult the colonel in his professional capacity of amateur detective! The best in the world, so Lady Cedar Blanchesson assured us."
Mr. MacCorque nodded slowly. "Yes?"
"We may as well begin at the beginning," continued Mr. Bunn. "My friend here, Mr. Henry Black, and I—my name's Wilton Flood—are down here for the Winter on a riding and walking cure. A little too fat, you understand. We ride hard over those downlands all day. Exercise—'slimming' in fact. For the sake of our livers, you understand, Mr. MacCorque. Well, to-day, riding home, we happened to light upon the victim of a murder. We did our best—helped a little—sent for the police and so on. When the police came, we handed over and left. Less than a couple of hours after that, as we were sitting having our aperitifs, maybe a couple, before dinner, damn me, Mr. MacCorque if some scoundrel or scoundrels unknown didn't try to blow us to shreds—left a bomb in our porch big enough to wreck Salisbury Cathedral. Luckily we spotted it and I threw it to a safe distance out in the park.... Why the bomb, Mr. MacCorque? That's what we want to engage Col. Carnac to find out. We haven't an enemy that could be called an enemy in the world. So—why the bomb?"
Mr. Bunn took a little natural stimulant from the vessel in his hand. "We felt we had to consult someone," he resumed, "and yet it hardly seemed a case for the police—the ordinary police, do you think?'
"The police—No!" said Mr. MacCorque, and his appalling hands closed in a slow, fond gripping motion as if he had all the necks of all the police in the world within his grasp. "The colonel—yes!" he continued. "Of course, I can offer no opinion—I am merely the secretary—but indeed I think you have done wisely to come here to consult the colonel. It is a thousand pities that he is dining out and may not be home till late!"
Mr. Bunn shot a fairly safe arrow in the dark.
"I suppose it wouldn't, by any happy chance, be Miss Vanesterman and Lady Cedar Blanchesson that he's dining with?" he asked. "Because, if so, I've a good mind to go on to Maiden Fain Manor and see him there. You see," he added, "Anson Vanesterman is an old friend of Mr. Black's and mine, and we'd like to welcome the little lady to England. Lady Cedar we've met, too, and admire."
"She is altogether admirable," said the MacCorque with a shade of sharpness in his perfect tenor.
"Sure," said Mr. Bunn. "And the Colonel being there will fit in," concluded Mr. Bunn, and proceeded also to conclude his drink. "I think we'll move along to Maiden Fain—"
The secretary, who looked like a murderer, thought for a moment.
"Yes," he said at last "I think that would be a good plan. I will, in any case, tell Col. Carnac that you called—in case you miss him. May I ask your address—so if the Colonel takes your case, he can get quickly into touch."
"Surely, surely—he knows it, anyway!" said Mr. Bunn, gave the address and left, with a breezy, "Au revoir," but without the formally of shaking hands.
"Didn't fancy shaking a hand that size, Squire," he explained to his partner as they rolled away to Maiden Fain Manor. "For it—both of 'em—looked kind of hungry for a throat! Good Lord, I never saw such a tough in my life—never—and I've seen one or two! That's a gentleman who would worry a lot about throwing a bomb at a man. He'd throw a complete bomb factory at a small child for fun or practice! I don't like, him. He's bad, he's ugly, and he's a. born strangler. We shall have to watch friend MacCorque, Squire."
Fortworth, for once, agreed. "The man made me bristle like a dog," he said flatly. "I don't know why—and I don't care why. But I want you to make a note of the fact that if ever it comes to a clash with the Colonel's crowd, Mr. MacCorque is reserved for me. I've got a gentlish nature—" and indeed he looked as gentle as a grizzly bear implicated in a hornet's nest—"but MacCorque rouses it to a trifle over full pitch!"
"Yes! He's yours, with pleasure, for all it matters to me!" said Mr. Bunn, without a trace of envy. "And now here's Maiden Fain where we meet Miss Vanesterman, Lady Cedar and our friend the Colonel!" He leaned forward to signal Sing Song.
"I've got a fancy that we'll do better to approach this house in a quieter sort of way than rolling up to the front door. We'll stick to the old technique—leave the car at the gates and kind of waft ourselves down on the place quietly, without a lot of fuss!"
IT was A noble old mansion that the two adventurers proceeded
to "waft" themselves down upon, as per schedule. Once it had been
owned by earls and such. But the earl stage had passed—as
it invariably does—and now few but a millionaire from a
country better endowed with brains and "brass" could afford
it.
The prowling partners—to whom such an approach to a place was far indeed from being a novelty—perceived quite easily that to explore the outside, and as much of the inside as might be visible to keen eyes through the windows, would be a long process. So they confined their attention to the most brilliantly lighted ground floor front windows.
At several of these they were unlucky—the curtains being fully closed. At others—two of them—they did rather better.
They went with the silence of leopards, examining each window. No little experience spread over many years as stark chevaliers d'industrie, the polite word for 'polite crooks,' had made them expert, big and fat though they were, as this form of nocturnal reconnoitre. It was as they stared through a careless chink in the curtains of a smallish room that they saw a girl enter suddenly, shut and lock the I door behind her, throw herself into a chair and, for the space of one minute, weep with a sort of fury. Then, the gust of tears over, she rose, threw her handkerchief on the carpet, gripped her slender white hands, shook them irritably, and, obviously pulling herself together, went across to a mirror and calmly began to efface the signs of those violent tears.
Mr. Bunn's fingers closed like a bunch of steel forceps on his partner's wrist.
"Miss Vanesterman, for a thousand pounds!" he said softly. "Can you beat her?"
"No," Fortworth admitted in a whisper, he couldn't. Certainly she was a beautiful, vivid, brilliant thing—probably not more than twenty, dark, with a perfect profile, tallish, slender, graceful as a deer and beautifully befrocked. But, even to the brace of slightly shady psychologists and cash-hounds peering in at her, it was obvious that she was angry almost to the point of desperation.
"Why so cross?" breathed Mr. Bunn into the ear of his crouching partner. "Surely she's got everything in the world worth having? Nothing to be cross about! So pretty and all."
He moved along. "She'll be going in a minute. Nothing more to see but the end of a perfect repaint and makeup!" he whispered.
The next window was blank—curtained and dark. But it was otherwise at the window beyond that. No attempt had been made to close the curtains of this window. They yawned apart a full two feet. In this apartment—a splendid room of great size, beautifully furnished, there were two people only—the Lady Cedar Blanchesson, in full evening dress, seated at a grand piano, and Col. Carnac standing near her. But Lady Cedar was not playing, nor was Col. Carnac merely lounging. On the contrary, the Colonel was gripping the white neck of Lady Cedar in both hands, and glaring down into her eyes with a look of menace so fierce and ugly that it was obvious to the partners that he was dangerously near the point of doing what he might better have left undone. For he looked as if he meant to kill her outright. His lips were moving rapidly. He was evidently talking at great speed. But the partners could hear nothing of what he was saying—and suddenly his lean fingers fell away from the lady's throat, and he lapsed into the posture of one who lounges at a piano waiting politely to turn over the music of a lady who is playing.
Lady Cedar's white fingers began to flutter over the keys and a distant door opened to admit the lovely American girl, smiling, vivacious, and trim, who not five minutes before the partners had seen biting her handkerchief in a passion of tears two rooms away.
"Huh!" said Mr. Bunn, drawing back. "Here's going to be a happy house! We'd better be getting inside! You quite clear about being an old friend—a long time ago—of Mr. Vanesterman? Anyway, say little—leave the lying to me!"
"Who better?" growled Fortworth cryptically, and followed him to the main door, where he rang the bell as importantly as if he were blowing horns outside the walls of Jericho—which, it will be recalled, fell down in every direction at the sound of music—probably modern, for those days. The two adventurers got away with it quite easily. Indeed, Miss Vanesterman came to the "two old friends of her father" as they instructed a rather hard-featured footman to announce them so very quickly that one might almost have imagined that she was in need of friends. They found her, as they expected, perfectly charming. Slim, dark, trim, with great dark eyes and a sensitive mouth, like a flower, that seemed as quick to smile, as the big, rather wistful eyes were to sadden.
Mr. Bunn, beaming on her, had only time to inform her that they had! known her daddy in the old days, "long before she was born," before she supplied at once the information they needed. "O, you mean when he was in the far West!"
"So we still seem to have a sort of Western look do we!" he said, "Well, well, I suppose we shall never shake it off—not that we want to! But you are right, Miss Vanesterman—it was in the West. Can you guess where?" She studied them. "Of course it's impossible to say where of all the hundreds of places my father adventured to but I'll guess—Texas!"
"Right first time!" smiled Mr. Bunn. "But why did you guess Texas?"
"Well, you look somehow to me as if you might once have been cattlemen! And I guessed Texas because I am quite accustomed to having old-timers come out of nowhere to our place in New York demanding confidently to see Silver Creek Slim!"
"As we used to call him," said Mr. Bunn reminiscently.
The dark eyes widened suddenly, and the smile vanished from the perfect lips.
She drew a quick breath and looked at them both for a few seconds with an intensity, a keenness so penetrating, so piercing that for a moment both felt that she had been playing with them and had dropped a bait in the name "Silver Creek Slim" which they had seized a little too quickly. If Mr. Vanesterman had never been known in his life as Silver Creek Slim then this girl had, in a space of seconds, nailed them, down as the impostors they were—at least as far as being old friends of her father was concerned. But her swift scrutiny ended, she smiled again—considerably to their relief.
"Welcome to Maiden Fain Manor," she said and offered a slim hand to each. "But you won't see daddy here for awhile. He is still in New York. But he's coming over soon, I hope. Now, let's go somewhere more comfortable and cosy than this. It's cold here—they don't understand how to get your houses really warm over here!"
So they went with her to the room they had already inspected—from the outside. She seemed surprised to discover that Lady Cedar and the Colonel were already acquainted with Mr. Flood and Mr. Black—just as Lady Cedar and Col. Carnac seemed to know that they were old friends of Mr. Anson Vanesterman.
"O, yes," explained Mr. Bunn blandly. "To tell the truth, although we set out at this late hour to try and make your acquaintance, Miss Vanesterman, we called at Col. Carnac's place on our way here."
"Called on me?' The Colonel was evidently surprised.
"Yes. We've got a case for you—If you care to look into the matter for us."
"A case!" Lady Cedar's voice was just a trifle wiry—steel wiry. The partners, in response, to Alison Vanesterman's smiling gesture, let themselves down into a pair of huge and very comfortable chairs.
"A case—yes. Somebody tried to blow us to rags a couple of hours ago. Put a bomb big enough to wreck a church in our porch—we were lucky to get it flung out of range just in the sick of time!"
"A bomb! Impossible! Surely?"
Mr. Bunn appealed to his partner. "It was a bomb, Lady Cedar," confirmed Fortworth. "And a very superior bomb at that! Dug a hole in the park the size of a locomotive!"
"And we want the Colonel, if he will, to look into the thing. It's a ready-made mystery—for, as near as I can figure it, we haven't got an enemy in the world. Plenty of friends—but no enemies!"
"Why, of course! I shall be most interested to look into the affair for you!" said the Colonel. There was no enthusiasm in his voice and his eyes were chill.
"It may sound wild—probably it is—but we were wondering whether by any chance it has anything to do with the murder of that young American in the wood this afternoon—"
"A young American! Murdered near here this afternoon!" exclaimed, Alison Vanesterman, and stood up suddenly staring at Lady Blanchesson. "What young American? Do you know his name. O, Cedar, why didn't you tell me! He—he might be a friend of mine!" She was extraordinarily moved.
"Don't you know his name? Didn't you inquire?" She turned from Lady Cedar to Mr. Bunn. "Don't you know?"
Lady Cedar went across to her swiftly.
"My dear, don't let it distress you—everything will—"
"But it does distress me, Cedar. I am half-afraid it may be some friend of mine. Lots of them at home knew I was coming here and lots of them are quite capable of coming over to greet me by way of a little pleasant surprise! O, won't you ever understand Americans?"
She touched a bell. "I shall go to him! Even if I don't know him he is a fellow countryman and that is enough for me. He belongs to somebody—"
"But, Alison, everything is being done to find out all about him! The Police will soon do that. Indeed, you are distressing yourself unnecessarily. How could I tell you to-night? What an omen that would have been—what a terrible greeting with which to meet you!"
She flashed a look, almost tigerishly angry, at the partners. "It was—really!—rather blundering and tactless of you, Mr. Flood, to blurt it out like that!"
But Alison Vanesterman knew her own mind.
"The big car at once," she said, sharply, to the man-servant. "Tell Morin that if there is the least delay he will lose his position! Send Julie for my heavy coat!"
She snapped it out with an incisiveness that startled the servant, who hurried out. Mr. Bunn caught a curious, flashing interchange of glances between the Colonel and Lady Cedar as Miss Vanesterman spoke.
"Hardly necessary to wait for your car, Miss Alison—ours is outside. We can run you into the town at once if you like!" said Mr. Bunn and saw acquiescence leap to her eyes even before she could speak.
"Tell Sing!" he said to Fortworth, who promptly hurried out. Mr. Bunn could be quick, too, when he felt it necessary.
"But, Alison—at this hour! My dear, really I do urge—" began Lady Cedar.
But the American girl cut her short.
"We seem to see these things differently, Cedar—I don't care a cent about the hour or the look of the thing—I'm going—are you coming?"
She was slipping into the big fur coat that a smart-looking French maid had brought.
"Where is he to be found?" she asked rather imperiously.
It was the queer-looking Colonel who was first to answer that.
"There is a mortuary in the town—he will be there!"
There was in the voice of this military explorer turned detective an odd, flattish, faintly malevolent note. Mr. Bunn's rather hard eyes went stony at the sound of it. But he only said, "Are you coming, Colonel?"
"I will follow in my car," said the Colonel, with his fixed smile, his eyes on the ladies who were already going out.
It was very dark and bitterly cold outside. The partners' big car was already drawn up close to the entrance, Sing waiting at the wheel, Fortworth at the door. Mr. Bunn heard Lady Cedar gasp slightly as Sing turned and his lean, Mongolian face, as hard as if it had been cut in yellow iron, was made fully visible in the electric light from the great porch.
"What's the matter, Lady Cedar?" he asked, as Miss Vanesterman stepped into the car.
"O, nothing—I didn't know your driver was a Chinese—just for a moment I mistook him for another person! That's all!"
She followed Alison into the car. Even as the partners followed in turn Col. Carnac's car slid past. The Colonel called something as he passed but only Cedar Blanchesson seemed to catch what he said.
"He's going on ahead to arrange things for you, I think!"
They followed the ruby gleam of the Colonel's tail lamp.
EVIDENTLY the grinning Colonel was a fast driver with a fast car for the red gleam disappeared very quickly.
Sing, sitting like a heathen idol at his wheel, muttered into the speaking tube, "Did Maser require the first car overtaken?"
Mr. Bunn thought not. "No—don't race. Just keep going reasonably, my lad!"
"I am so sorry I misjudged matters so badly, Alison darling," purred Lady Cedar. "I simply couldn't bring myself to tell you about a murder on your first evening!"
Miss Vanesterman nodded. "Oh, that's all right, Cedar. But, you know, I'm not a child. I shall be anxious and uneasy until I know who this young American is—and why he was killed. Did you see him?"
"Yes—this afternoon I chanced to be passing when they brought him from the wood!"
"Did you know him or have any idea at all about him! What was he like? Could you guess where he was from? Was he a New Yorker—or Middle West—or Far West—rich—well-dressed—or what would you guess?"
Lady Cedar's reply was instant. "I have never seen him before in my life," she said, her eyes fast on Mr. Bunn's face. But there was about as much expression on the face of the old adventurer as on a stone sidewalk. Yet he knew she lied. If ever a woman was on the brink of half-fainting from shock Lady Cedar had been so that afternoon when her eyes first fell on the dead face of the young American.
"I simply cannot conceive who he was or what he was, or what he was doing in that wood or why he was murdered there!" she added in her clear, silvery, extremely self-possessed voice. Alison Vanesterman turned to the partners.
"Nor you?" Mr. Bunn shook his head.
"No. I'm afraid it is going to be difficult, Miss Alison," said Smiler. "I understand from the Police superintendent that nothing at all was found on him that helps to identify him—not a thing!"
"He had been robbed?"
"Well—searched and every means of identification taken away!"
The girl was silent, thinking. Mr. Bunn noted the nervous tapping of her foot on the rug and breathed into the tube. The big car speeded up. She thanked Mr. Bunn with a little, nod. He leaned forward, whispering to her, regardless of the others.
Col. Carnac was awaiting them at the hospital, his fixed smile seeming a little shocking in that place and on that occasion.
"It is all right!" he said. "I have arranged things!"
Two minutes later Alison Vanesterman was looking down at the dead face of a man who only a fortnight before, in New York, had asked her to marry him. And though she had not felt for him all that she wanted to feel for the man she would marry yet she had been so near it that she had neither accepted nor refused him.
She had said, laughing a little, yet more than a little thrilled, "Oh, Gene, Gene, I don't know. I don't know. I—somehow—I hope so. When I come back from England I shall know better what I think about you. I will tell you then. I am very fond of you, only somehow, I just don't know whether I will marry you or not!"
But she knew now. He had not pressed her and she had been glad of that—so glad that she had kissed him and almost yielded to an impulse to promise then and there But she had not. And, strangely, she knew now, looking down at him, that her answer would have been "No!"
She had been nearer to loving him than to any other man she had ever met—yet, here in his presence for the last time, it was borne in on her that her deep liking for him had not been love as she wished to know it down. Her face was dead white—colourless from sheer shock. And her mind was misty, though in a dim and hazy fashion she was aware that they were all looking intently, most intently at her, not at the dead man. They were waiting for her to speak. She could feel that the whole atmosphere of that cold and terrible little chamber of death was one of keen and watchful expectancy. She must say something. She drew a long breath, steeled herself, for she was thinking of a thing.
"I grieve for him," she said at last and very slowly. "He is so young. But he is a stranger to me! I do not know him!" She turned away with a little gasping sound. "I was so afraid that he might have proved to be some dear friend," she said.
Lady Cedar's arms slid around her. "Don't let it distress you too much, my dear! These things—they crop up, for all one can do—"
They moved out. Mr. Bunn glanced at Col. Carnac as he and his partner turned to follow. The colonel was staring down at the face of the dead man with a fixed and sinister regard. If there was any expression at all in his eyes it was one of malign triumph—to which his everlasting and unreal smile added a touch of the diabolical. Mr. Bunn's eyes were like jade as he moved after his partner.
It was a silent run back to Maiden Fain Manor. Miss Vanesterman, a little to Mr. Bunn's surprise, did not ask either the partners or Colonel Carnac in. It was growing late and she was obviously tired: It seemed to the old adventurer more than a little odd that she said nothing at all about seeing them again, and Lady Cedar, evidently taking her cue from Alison Vanesterman was smoothly evasive to a rather clumsy hint from Fortworth that he expected they would probably soon meet out riding. So the partners said 'Good-night' and returned to their car.
The colonel joined them a moment later.
"A depressing first night for Miss Vanesterman," he said. "But it might have been worse," he added vaguely. "About this extraordinary bomb business—I shall be glad to look into it for you. Can't have folk running about the countryside leaving bombs like visiting cards. I would like to run over tomorrow and look 'round."
"Surely, Colonel, surely—so do, so do," Mr. Bunn said heartily. "We'll show you all there is to see—tell you all we know." He hesitated—then went on. "It flashed into my mind just now—when we were looking at that poor chap in the mortuary—that the attack on us might have some sort of connection with that murder."
"Why?" asked the Colonel. Mr. Bunn appeared to be a little uncertain.
"Well, for no particular reason, I admit It was just an idea. We—after that gamekeeper—were the first to discover the—"
"Gamekeeper!" said the Colonel sharply. "What gamekeeper? I understood you found the body and searched it—"
Mr. Bunn stared. "Lord, no. Where did you get that idea? It was a gamekeeper found him. The man came out of the wood as we were riding by and told us of his discovery. Not that it matters much, I take it. Anything there is to know will come out at the inquest."
The Colonel nodded. "Quite so... I shouldn't think the bomb business was in any way connected with the murder." He scowled, thinking. "No," he added. "There's no reason. One could conceive it possible if you had been the first to discover the body—for one could assume then that the murderer had dropped some vital clue, suspected you of picking it up, and so planned to obliterate it and you together. But this gamekeeper aspect alters all that. I should like to see him."
"He seemed a decent ordinary sort of chap," said Mr. Bunn. "Anything he may have noticed—clues and so on—he would have given to the Police Superintendent." He laughed and continued—"You'd think so, hey? Probably the man's got all his work cut out detecting poachers, without adding murder- detecting to his job. Well, there it is. We'll be seeing you tomorrow. Earlyish, if you can manage it. We're on a riding cure down here—too fat, according to the doctor's ideas—and we start out about eleven o'clock."
"I shall be there long before then—not later than ten," promised the Colonel and with a nod turned to his car.
"WELL, I suppose you've got some sort of crazy notion what
it's all about and what you're after," said Fortworth as their
car boomed homewards. "But I'll be damned if I have."
Mr. Bunn did not answer at once. He carefully selected and lit a large cigar, which he smoked for some minutes in absorbed silence. When at last he spoke it was to say—"I shall be glad of a spot of something to drink."
"Huh!" said Fortworth, not so scornfully, to that. "For here's a thing cropped up that is going to keep my brains—O, and yours, too—busy." He turned on his partner, his voice grim. "For unless I badly miss my guess there's something almighty ugly coming toward Alison Vanesterman—yes, Squire, something pretty bad."
He brooded for a moment.
"Have you ever been to a private view of the python being fed at the Zoo—and noticed the way he wakes up and gets himself ready and eases himself out of his loops and when he's quite ready, comes down on the rabbit or the goat or whatever it is?"
"Me? No, I haven't. Have you?"
"I have—and it's not such a pretty picture at that, Squire. Well, it looks to me as if there's something like that python getting ready to reach for that beautiful little soul, Alison. Getting ready—uncoiling, as you might say."
"Who?' demanded Fortworth.
"I don't know. I'm going to find out."
"Well, anyway, the murder had nothing to do with her. The man was a stranger to her."
Mr. Bunn turned his heavy head to stare at his partner.
"You were late on parade when the gift of observation was rationed out, weren't you?" he said.
"Man, I'd like to make a big bet that that poor fellow was one of little Miss Alison's best friends!"
"She said differently," said Fortworth acridly.
"Yes—I know, but—hey! What's wrong with Sing!" he exclaimed as the powerful four-wheel brakes bit on their drums, gripping so violently that the wheels locked almost instantly and the tires scrubbed themselves deep grooves in the surface of the straight road! across the small park surrounding their house.
The heavy car slowed a little, and stopped with a jerk.
"The fool's drunk or something!" snarled Fortworth and got out violently to say what he thought. But he said none of it for the Chinese pointed mutely ahead to where, not five yards in front of them there showed like a bar of iron in the glare of the head lights, a three-quarter-inch wire rope stretched taut across the road from one great tree to another—at about four feet from the ground.
Sing had seen it just in time. It he had not been slowing a little for the curve to the front of the house he could not have stopped. Mr. Bunn felt the rope, which, at intervals of about a foot, bore strong iron hooks dangling from it—went to the trees and examined the connections and came back.
"Yes," he said, in an absent sort of way. "It's as I said— something or somebody's getting ready to feed, like our friend the python, and he means to include us in his meal. If this little old yellow idol of mine hadn't had his eyes wide open—you (and me) might be hanging up to dry on that rope now, with a hook apiece through our throats—as it might be like a couple of pigs! Hey?"
He stared at the rope, smoking absently, for a moment. "Ugly..." he said presently. "Well, so be it. The old man must take care of himself as well as Alison and his thick-headed old partner!" He went off look at the end of the rope attached to the tree on the left.
But as he reached it a dark blur on the grass a few yards away caught his eye. He moved over to it, quietly. It was the body of a man, face down. He called to Sing who hurried over with a chauffeur's, flash light. They turned the body over.
It was that of Bloom, their butler.
"Huh!" said Fortworth thickly, glaring about him. What's the answer to this!' His harsh voice was thick with a sort of blind fury.
"The answer!" echoed Mr. Bunn. "It's all in those bits of paper we found near the wood—those bits and the letter they came from!"
Mr. Bunn and his partner, leaving Sing to disconnect the wire rope as best he could with his motor tools, examined the butler—expecting, not unreasonably, to find that the enemy who was striking so swiftly out of the dark at them and their establishment had killed him with rather complete thoroughness. But, evidently, Bloom was like his employers to the extent that though fat he was naturally tough. He was quite unconscious, and he had a torn lump over his left ear almost as large as his head—such a lump as might be caused by a viciously aimed hammer blow that, fortunately for its recipient, probably glanced as it landed. Bloom must have gone down like a pole-axed bullock and his attacker must have left him for stone-dead without troubling to look at him.
"He took the very dickens of a wallop," said Mr. Bunn, his thumbs gently exploring the contused area, "but there's nothing fractured—not that I can feel."
And he was evidently feeling pretty searchingly, for Bloom groaned under the enquiring pressure of his thumbs. "He'll be all right after a bit of a rest," said Fortworth, comfortably. "Be able to tell us all his news in the morning."
He turned glaring as Sing dropped, the loosened end of the wire rope with the metal hooks, clinking metallically. Between them they lifted Bloom into the car and ran down to the house. Within ten minutes they had the battered butler in bed and were downstairs in their comfortable smoking room. It needed only one intelligent glance around to perceive that the room had been ransacked—and that by people who, as Mr. Bunn put it, were "devilish smart ransackers"—though he added, "not quite smart enough!"
The old adventurer smiled as he prowled round the room. "Just tilt me out a little something to drink, Squire," he said over his shoulder. "Our visitors were after these 'clues'—that glass bullet and the bits of paper." He bent over a box half-full of cartridges which he took from a drawer—ordinary sporting 12-gauge cartridges, some English, some American, variously coloured. He selected a green one, twisted the brass base which rather unexpectedly unscrewed, slid the contents half out on to his hand, smiled and slid them back.
"YES—all intact," he purred blandly, and returned the box of cartridges to their place. He consumed his "little something" to drink in contented silence and glanced at the clock. "H'm—midnight," he said. "Twelve o'clock, in fact. We've had a dangerous day, Squire—and I'm not ashamed to say honestly that danger is a thing that—"
"Makes me savage"—snarled Fortworth—and looked it.
"Well, no, not savage," said Mr. Bunn mildly. "I was going to say hungry. I don't feel particularly savage, but I certainly feel half-starved."
Fortworth stared.
"But man alive, you ate a dinner not four hours ago that would have staggered the open dinner champion of the world!"
"I ate rather less than half you got away with," declared Mr. Bunn, and added peremptorily, "And, even so, what of it? That's it! What of it? Danger always makes me hungry. I've got a right to be hungry if danger has that effect on my appetite, haven't I?"
Fortworth yawned. "You got a right to all the victuals you can get," he agreed, genially, for he too liked his dinner. "And I hope you'll enjoy 'em. I wish I had half your appetite. Go to it, hold up to it, eat hearty! I'd give half I've got for your courage at this hour of the night Me, I'm going to bed!" he declared, trickled himself out a potion that would have buffaloed Bacchus, ate it alive, and went to bed. Mr. Bunn looked after him, not without a kind of indulgent affection.
"A rum 'un, the Squire," he said aloud. "Yes, a downright out and out rum 'un—always was, always will be. Got nothing—nothing in the world but the stark-naked, bull- headed courage of a rhinoceros—nothing else. Yet I like the surly old devil—always have, always shall. For he's reliable—according to what you rely on!... This time he'll need all the courage he's got—if I don't make a misfire in my fancy!"
He frowned, touching the bell. Almost instantly the soundless one, Sing, was with him, still in his chauffeur's uniform, even to the cap slanting far back over his head. When in strictly private life, Smiler and Sing never stood on ceremony. Each knew too much, far too much, about the other.
"Master?" He had a sparking plug in his hand—evidently he had been doing a little of his garage work in the warm kitchen. Mr. Bunn looked him over, for a few seconds. Lord, what a tough he looked! An idol, a graven image in a chauffeur's suit could look no tougher—if as tough. And yet the yellow rascal must be getting a bit long in the tooth—getting old—like himself and Fortworth. Still, a good lad, Sing—young or old, a good tough lad. Dangerous devil, too, in a way—yet tame as a barnyard duck if you treated him right—and didn't spoil him. Yes.
"Hey, Sing, I've got all hungry—and yet I've got no craving for the fancy stuff. Have you got any cold pie, and a few pickled onions and a pint of beer?"
Sing sort of staggered—for Mr. Bunn was a top rung gourmet and, as far as Sing knew, he hadn't eaten plain food for a plain quarter of a century.
"A fancy of mine, Sing," said Mr. Bunn: "I want something with a tang to it!"
"Pie, master, pickle onions, pint beer—yes, can do!"
"Go get," said Mr. Bunn briefly. Left alone he took out the poison-laded glass bullet the ring, and the scraps of paper and studied them again; then, after a few moments put them away.
He was uneasy—and uneasiness was a new sensation. All his life he had lived dangerously on his wits—if not always crookedly, at least, most riskily—and yet, for all the scores of adventures he had faced and successfully borne up under, he could not recall an affair which he had confronted with greater unease and grimmer foreboding than this mystery which, he sensed, was closing in upon that charming little American girl, Alison Vanesterman. He believed that there were forces concerned in it that were deadly and uncannily swift and unspeakably cruel. Forces, or people, that were as swift to strike as tropical vipers, and as callously—though, possibly, with not quite the same appalling precision.
People who struck at the merest suspicion that they were suspected of strange traffics. Twice that night, he and his partner and Sing had escaped an ugly death by no more than a hair-breadth—evaded traps that only failed because they obviously must have been most hurriedly conceived and arranged. Given a little time, the setters of those traps would inevitably "get" them.
"If I haven't blocked their game—as I think I have—" said Mr. Bunn to himself without much conviction. He stood up and looked at himself in a mirror—and he shook his head rather ruefully at what he saw.
"Yeh—getting old. And a bit unwieldy. You'll have to keep riding that bone-shaking iron-legged, lumbering great beast of a horse as hard as you know how if you're going to get your liver into some sort of discipline again!" he said. "Man, there's bags under your eyes like swallows' nests! Still, probably that's due to hunger—hunger and horse riding."
He sat down again.
"Still, something's got to be done, and I've got an idea that we haven't run up against the king-cobra of the piece yet Maybe I'm wrong—more likely I'm right. I've, got a notion that the bird with the ugly name is the man behind the bomb, and the meat hooks and so forth—Foon. That's the mainspring behind Colonel Carnac—and Mister MacCorque—and the Lady Cedar! If my instinct counts for anything these days! We'll see! Wish I were well out of it—but shall have to see, now I've kind of bogged down in it!"
Here Sing entered, bowed with pie, pickled onions, and a lot of beer.
"Set it down here, my lad!" said Mr. Bunn and commenced. "You did very well about that rope tonight, Sing," he said, through pie, "very well indeed. Take one of my cigars out of the box—in fact, take a couple. Had your supper?"
"Yes, Master," smiled the Chinese, palming all the cigars he felt he needed at the moment.
"Of course—silly question to ask. Well, Sing, I've got a notion that we've kind of got snarled up in a very nasty dangerous bit of work, and we've got to keep our eyes open and our ears at full cock and step gently. Understand? And, mind, we're not so young as we were! How old are you?"
Sing hadn't the faintest idea so he smiled blandly and replied. "Me allee same twainty-one, Master!"
Mr. Bunn laughed. "That's lucky for you, hey, you know a man's as old as he feels! Remember what I say—eyes open, ears cocked and step careful for there are vipers in the grass, my lad. Good night!"
Sing beamed back "Good-night" to the only living thing in the world he either loved or feared and was gone.
"A good lad, even if he is a bit of a natural-born crook!" said Mr. Bunn and crushed an onion totally to death. He finished his unusual meal, and settled down to think.
It was an hour later, long past midnight, when he sat at a writing desk and wrote a long cable. He rolled it up and put it away in another of his cartridge receptacles, then went to the window and peered out across the moon-blanched park.
He was restless—and restlessness was so entirely foreign to his nature plus many long years of patient self-training for rest, that he found it disconcerting. Something was telling him—hinting, playing with a light-fingered touch on his instinct—that there was deadly danger close at hand. Something faint and far and subtle, bred of his dangerous life—the same thing, whatever it is, that causes a sleeping tiger, far back in his lair, to wake suddenly, and throw up his muzzle and stare and listen.
But at last he slid back the curtain, stepped to the table, took a whisky and soda that would, have made a horse kick a hole in a house, dropped his cigar butt in the ash tray, yawned and then turned to a locked drawer. From this drawer he took a heavy large calibre automatic pistol, ugly but finely made, well-oiled, and loaded. He made sure of that.
"Humph!" he went, and eased the weapon carefully into the pocket of his dinner jacket. "Hate the things! Hate this violence! But what can a man do except defend himself when he's knocked down and trampled on!"
He sighed a little heavily as he went upstairs. "I feel blue—" he muttered. "Huh! Must be the pickled onions! Crazy thing to eat 'em."
He halted on the broad landing and hiccoughed. "That's the pie! I'll bet a hundred pounds to a penny that's the pie t Serve me—"
He stopped, listening. Somebody was knocking at the front door—knocking not loudly but persistently—a low, regular knocking with something of a suggestion in it that the knocker was quietly determined to knock until he was answered.
FOR fully five minutes Mr. Bunn stood tautly on the landing
listening to the knocking on the big front door of Chalkacres
Hall. Then he went a few steps down the stairs, in the dark
except for the glow from' one lone lamp on the landing. There he
paused, listening again.
Tap! Tap! tap! Pause. Tap! Tap! tap! Never louder, never softer than just that one monotonous, rather nerve-racking note.
"Somebody got their nerves well under control," he said to himself. 'And that seems to me to mean that it's nobody rushing here for help. Such as, say, little Miss Alison!'
Tap! Tap! tap! Mr. Bunn moved back to the landing, extinguished the light, and returned to sit quietly on the top stair of the first flight to listen and stare across the hall, at the door. The big automatic pistol hung from his right hand between his knees.
Tap! Tap! tap! It was soft, insistent, eternal. Mr. Bunn sat and listened to it through a darkness, cut obliquely across by a cold moon-ray through the south window of the hail. Presently, after the 20th repetition of the soft knocking, Mr. Bunn heard the faint whisper of feet coming towards the hall—from the direction of the servant's quarters. Only one man in the world moved as softly as that—Sing the Chinese.
"Sing!" Mr. Bunn only breathed it but Sing heard. In the moon- ray across the hall Smiler saw him check soundlessly and halt. 'Come up the stairs, Sing!' whispered Mr. Bunn. The faintest creak two-feet away warned Smiler that his henchman had arrived. 'Sit on the stairs, my lad!' said Mr. Bunn. 'D'ye hear that knocking on the door?'
"Yes, master, me going see who?"
"No. Stay where you are—for the old man's fey to-night. He knows who's knocking at the door, Sing."
"Yes, master?"
"Death, Sing. There's death in the porch beyond that door! I can scent him—like a hound, Sing, like a bloodhound. Are you armed? Got any weapons, in fact?"
"Yes, master!"
"Hey, have you? What you got?"
"Two death thorns, Master!"
"Huh! Go easy with those things, my lad! Go easy for they kill like a stroke of lightning."
Tap! Tap! tap!
Tap! Tap! tap!
A faint glow of light dawned on the landing, the sigh of a well-hung, well-oiled door thrown open came to them—and a sleepy voice—'What the hell next?' It was the sleeper Fortworth awakened.
"Sst!" Mr. Bunn hissed in the dark like a snake. He rose, moved up in the dark, and gripped his partner's pyjamaed arm. "Quiet, old man!... Listen!"
Tap! Tap! tap! Patient, unwearying, controlled, everlasting!
Tap! Tap! Tap!
"What the Hell's all this?" demanded Fortworth.
"Somebody knocking at the door!" said Smiler.
"Somebody knocking at the door? Well, what about it? Better let 'em in, and see why they're knocking, hey?"
"Come and listen for a few hours—that's what it feels like—and see if you want to let 'em in then," said Smiler, tensely. Fortworth, impressed in spite of his raw, bull-like courage, sat on the stairs with his partner and Sing, listening.
Tap! Tap! tap!
Mr. Bunn felt Sing's body suddenly go rigid beside him. There was something dreadful beyond the door. Mr. Bunn had known, it at once—now he knew that Sing had sensed it. He said nothing. The patient rhythm of the toneless sound was maddening.
Tap! Tap! tap!
"What is it, d'ye think?' came Fortworth's harsh whisper.
"Death... and I'm afraid of it!" said Mr. Bunn. "I think," he added. "Yet—it doesn't do to be afraid! Not these days!"
They heard him draw in his breath. "If that knock comes again I'm going to answer it... I guess I've got a right to some sleep, hey?"
They listened. Down in the hall the big grandfather clock solemnly ticked away the seconds, then suddenly almost alarmingly, and gonged out two sonorous notes.
"Two o'clock! And when I open the door—it will be after I've emptied this pistol through it!" said Mr. Bunn, very low. "Not that it would matter—for it's death out there waiting to come in!"
They listened. But the knocking came no more. They waited a quarter of an horn. But the knocker had wearied and gone away. "Well, that's that!" said Mr. Bunn at last. His voice sounded tired.
"Let it go—we'll turn in. Shall need all the sleep we can get if this sort of thing goes on!"
Fortworth laughed rather tensely. "Who do you reckon it was out there in the porch?" he asked.
"You can search me, Squire! But you won't find the answer just at present. I had a hunch that it was little old Mister Death himself—but the how and the why of it I don't know. But I do know that I've been fey to-night and it's a tiring business, this going fey! I'm for bed," he said—and went there.
But he stared from his window in an unlit bedroom for a long time before he slept.
Once he saw, or thought he saw, a form go slowly through the moonlight past his window. It seemed to him to be a buoyant tubby man with long, thin legs like a stork.
"And it might be Strangler MacCorque," he said to himself.
The figure prowled out into the park after awhile and disappeared.
Mr. Bunn drew the heavy curtains and switched on the light. "Well, well," he said. "We shall see—if we live long enough!... Mustn't forget that cable first thing tomorrow—nor to warn the gamekeeper!"
And so proceeded entirely to surround himself with bed.
Once asleep, Mr. Bunn was in the habit of going on sleeping. He could—and did sleep like Rip Van Winkle and wake all the better for it when the waking was good and easy. Death may have knocked at his door overnight, and being "fey," whatever he meant by "fey," were two things which might have oppressed him, while they were happening, but he was very much himself when, at 8 o'clock next morning, Sing, with a big cup of dark-oak coloured tea, roused him.
"Nice flosty morning, Master—velly nice for ridee horsee, allee same getting thin, not so fettee!" said the enduring Sing, cordially.
"That will be enough of that about my getting thin and riding horses," said Smiler, heaving himself up in bed. "If you had half my responsibilities you'd wilt like a frost-bitten dahlia, my lad! Any letters or telegrams received?"
"No, master."
"Very well, I'll send one."
Mr. Bunn drank his tea at a gulp, and shuddered as it hit his palate. And got out of bed. "I've got a cable I want sent at once. You can motor into the town with it now, while we have our first ride. After that, breakfast, my lad." He made motions of protest with his mouth... "Shockin' palate this morning, Sing," he said. "Oniony!... God bless my soul, what was I thinking of to eat that pie, onions and beer last night? Hey? Never mind! My own fault!"
He paddled downstairs in his pyjamas, got out his cable and dispatched Sing.
Then he returned upstairs, to get ready for the before- breakfast gallop insisted on by the doctor. Already he could hear the thud of the hoofs of the sullen steeds which to day were doomed—and knew it—to help him and his hefty partner toward their "cure."
He felt a good deal better a half-hour later, when, their stiffness worn off and the soreness "run in," they cantered not ungainly into a little group of early-morning riders over Salisbury Plain, that great grassy expanse which will always provide room for one in search of a real ride. The people Mr. Bunn and his partner joined were Alison Vanesterman, Lady Blanchesson, Col. Carnac and a fourth party, a stranger to the Bunn partnership. This one was, very obviously, a foreigner.
HE looked about half Chinese to Mr. Bunn—and he might as well have been that as anything else. Certainly he was neither American nor English. He was a man of middle height—and of light weight, Mr. Bunn noted not unenviously. He sat his horse like a man who had been bred on horseback. And he was handsome—Mr. Bunn looked again and thought again—yes, he was either diabolically handsome or awe-inspiringly ugly. His smile, over white, perfect teeth and on thin, well-cut lips, was attractive, and his manners were quite perfect. He was a man that a woman—or, for that matter, a man—must either like very much indeed—or hate very bitterly at first sight. It was Col. Carnac who introduced them—rather perfunctorily.
"Mr. Flood—Mr. Yung Foon!"
"Mr. Black—Mr. Yung Foon!"
Mr. Bunn pinched off an unenthusiastic smile.
"How are you, Mr. Foon? Nice riding on the downs this morning!"
Fortworth merely nodded. The Colonel amplified his introduction.
"Mr. Yung Foon is to be a fairly close neighbour of ours!" he said smiling. "His father is the famous Prof. Sow Foon, who recently purchased an establishment for the culture of snake venoms, just across the downs! As you are probably aware the professor is the finest authority in the world on snake toxins, their antidotes and so forth!"
Mr. Bunn beamed on the son of the venom professor.
"Wish I'd met your father about two years ago, Mr. Foon," he said cheerily. "I was out shooting, sat down to have a bit of bread and cheese and a few simple things—under a hedge. Sat on an adder. Got stung—bit, in fact. Laid up the best part of three weeks!... Now, supposing that had been one of these rattlesnakes, or cobras, or black mambas?"
Yung Foon smiled. "Oh, it might have killed you—or, on the other hand, if someone had been near, with the appropriate antivenom serum, it might have saved you three weeks—um—difficulty!"
He laughed again, touched his horse, and pulled in beside Alison Vanesterman.
He had spoken with the utmost civility, yet in some wizardly way he had contrived to convey an indifference about what happened to Mr. Bunn so clearly-cut and unmistakable that it was as nearly a direct and deliberate insult as it could be while seeming otherwise. Smiler's eyes hardened, and his heavy, good- humoured face set as he caught the momentary swift widening of Colonel Carnac's grin. But Alison Vanesterman touched her horse with her spur, and, calling to Mr. Bunn and Fortworth, to come to Maiden Fain to tea next day, galloped away, followed by Yung Foon, Lady Cedar and the Colonel. The adventurers looked after the party, then turned to stare at each other.
"Well, there they are—three of them mentioned in the paper scraps: Blanchesson, Col. Carnac, and Yung Foon. If the Foon mentioned was Yung, though it may have been the old un, Sow. And if by 'young Vanesterman' Miss Alison was meant—which is not very likely—there are all four of the mentioned folk!"
He pulled round his horse, frowning, like a man mentally struggling with a complicated puzzle.
"And how d'ye fancy the sound of the venom expert, Squire?" he asked presently with a curious hard gaiety in his voice.
Fortworth looked after the galloping party under shaggy brows.
"I don't fancy him at all. And I fancy his son even less. If I were fighting with him I wouldn't bother to fight fair. No. If I happened to find my foot on his face I'd just put my weight on that foot. More by instinct—and for the pleasure—than for any other reason: Just as if I got my heel on one his papa's pet snakes I wouldn't hurry to raise it. Damn it, he looked like a snake himself!"
"Eh! So he does!" said Mr. Bunn, surprised. "That's true. That's exactly true. Shape of his head or something. I've been wondering where I'd seen him before—now I know!"
"Where?" demanded Fortworth.
"O, years ago—before I met you. In South Africa. He was lying in the sun coiled up near a small bush. They called it a puff adder—but from the cut of its jib I'd say it was some sort of relative of the Foons!... Queer, that—for at the first peep almost anybody would call him handsome—"
"Yes—anybody but me!" grunted Fortworth.
"No doubt," said Mr. Bunn absently. "Well, we shall see more of them all before long or I'm no true prophet, Squire! Come on, kick that animal into making some sort of attempt to fidget along a little livelier!"
"I wouldn't advise him to start fidgeting with me on his back!" growled Fortworth menacingly, as they lumbered off across the turf.
It was not until after lunch that Mr. Bunn set off in the car, Sing driving, to find the gamekeeper, who had first discovered the murdered man. Fortworth, who had rather tired himself at lunch, made no objection at all to being left to keep an eye on the still semi-stupefied Bloom. Mr. Bunn had to leave the car by the roadside and as directed by a local rustic proceeded along a path through dense woodland to the cottage occupied by the keeper.
"Just keep your eyes open while you're waiting for me, my lad," he advised Sing tersely. "It was in the bit of woodland on your left that young man was murdered."
Sing nodded, and his owner went quietly away down the narrow, winding one-man track. Smiler went unhurriedly and silently. Why "silently" he never bothered to figure out in any detail. All he would have known about it, if he had troubled to ponder it at all—was that he was possessed of an instinct which impelled him at present to go all his ways quietly and most unobtrusively. Even on such a simple and commonplace matter as strolling through a wood for a chat with a gamekeeper.
He could not have said—indeed, he could hardly have guessed—why he was feeling so circumspect. But he knew just as surely as ever he had known anything in his life that he was like a man who is walking a tight rope over Niagara Falls—perfectly safe as long as he kept balanced on the rope—doomed if he over-balanced either side.
It was perhaps a quarter of a mile to the cottage, and the wood was ugly and overgrown, very ancient. The naked trunks of the trees were writhen and squat—very thick, and many of them quite rotten. He saw the cottage through the tree trunks from some distance away. A chained dog was barking angrily at his approach. "Humph! Man's got a good guard-dog—" he began, and then, suddenly, perceived; that the dog was not barking because of his approach—for he saw two men run swiftly out from behind the trees at the edge of the little clearing in which the cottage was set. He stepped soundlessly and swiftly behind a huge gnarled trunk and watched.
One of the men—Mr. Bunn recognized him as Yung or, as he already called this one in his mind "Yung" Foon—ran lightly toward the dog, a big black retriever, and poked the animal quite gently with a walking cane. The action was exactly that of the ordinary fool who pokes playfully at a dog to irritate or tease it.
But the dog dropped on its side as suddenly as though struck by lightning, uttered a queer, horrible sound, half-groan, half- howl, shivered convulsively and lay still, stone dead.
Mr. Bunn's jaw came forward as he crouched behind his tree.
Then "Yung" Foon and the other man, whom Smiler recognised at once as the white-faced man with the pigskin hands, MacCorque, went together to the cottage door, inserted a key and fumbled for a second.
The door opened and they entered.
Mr. Burnt, keeping cover behind, the trees, moved closer up. He was smiling—a little grimly, perhaps, but not without a touch of complacency.
"The luckiest hour in that gamekeeper's life," he said to himself. "That would sound queer to a person who didn't guess what the old man guesses—considering that he's got thieves in his hut. They'd have been murderers by now—if he happened to be at home! Which he isn't—or he'd have been out at She howl the dog!"
He waited, watching the yawning open door beyond the body of the dead watchdog.
Then a twig snapped lightly away to his right and a little ahead of him. He turned swiftly to see, also standing behind cover of a stark tree trunk, watching the cottage as intently as himself, a girl—Alison Vanesterman! "Little Miss Alison."
WHAT was Miss Vanesterman, only daughter of one of the richest
and most financially powerful men in America, doing
here—hiding behind a tree in an ancient English wood
intently watching two men burgle a gamekeeper's cottage? But it
was only for a moment that he was utterly puzzled. In the light
of what he knew, there was only one solution.
He waited, watching the cottage, with the tail of one eye on the girl. In less than a quarter of an hour both Yung Foon and the man MacCorque came out of the cottage and without hesitation went away through the woods at the back—in a direction exactly opposite to that from which the enquiring Mr. Bunn had come.
He saw them disappear, then backed on to the pathway, and watching Alison Vanesterman and utilizing the cover of the many tree trunks with some skill, had no difficulty in meeting the girl with all the appearance of a man taking an easy, quiet stroll through the woods for the sake to his health. She started as she saw him.
"Why, it is Mr. Flood!" He saw that she was pale—but he knew that she was perfectly self-possessed. The greetings and comments on the oddness of their meeting over, Mr. Bunn explained that he was intending to call and see Cooper, the gamekeeper, in order to glean an expert opinion about some shooting which he, Smiler, was thinking of hiring.
"Yes? But I don't think you will find Cooper at home. I, too, wished to see him, but it is very quiet and there seems to be nobody at home," she said.
Mr. Bunn shrugged.
"O, well, any time will do. I'll come again later."
She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. "If you are going back to the main road we will, go together, shall we?" she suggested.
Mr. Bunn's "Certainly" was a very hearty affair indeed. But beyond a commonplace or two Miss Vanesterman hardly spoke at all until they were nearly at the end of the pathway. Then she stopped abruptly, and speaking in the manner of one who has suddenly made a decision which one has been carefully considering, she said:
"Mr. Flood, will you tell me quite frankly why just before we entered that dreadful mortuary last night you whispered to me—so secretly, so confidentially—not to recognize that poor young man who was murdered?"
Mr. Bunn did not hesitate an instant.
"Why, because he had been murdered. And in England the less said by people before the inquest on a victim the better. It's notorious. Inquests in England are conducted on rather different lines from those in your country."
He watched her carefully. It sounded rather feeble—but not so feeble as it would have looked if he had hesitated—hung fire or played for time before answering an unexpected question.
"O! Is that all?" She seemed disappointed.
"Did you really know him, Miss Alison?" asked Mr. Bunn, trying to make it sound reasonably casual. She paled a little, and did not answer for some time. Her normally expressive eyes went blank like those of one thinking intently. She frowned a little—then suddenly her face cleared, and she looked at him with a curious determination.
"No," she said flatly. "I did not!"
Mr. Bunn thought like lightning, and then deliberately backed his instinct for detecting the unusual—an instinct which; one way and another, had done much to provide mm with a luxurious living for man years.
"Well, Miss Alison it must be as you say. You tell me you didn't know him. If I hadn't been an old friend of your father's in days long ago I would be content with that. But you're the second lady who saw that man and denied that she knew him—though she, like you, looked to me as if she did! Lady Blanchesson, when she saw him as they brought him from the wood!"
"But that wasn't true! She knew him quite well—" She stopped suddenly, aware of her slip.
Mr. Bunn seemed, unconscious of the fact that she had shown him, definitely that she, too, had known the dead man—but she had not overlooked that. She eyed him rather steadily, with a new interest.
"That was rather a clever little trap, Mr. Flood—it would seem cleverer still if you knew all the facts," she said composedly. "Yes, I knew him, too. Ah, very well, I knew him."
She caught her breath her eyes shining, then with that, irresistible and lovely air of confident trust which the American woman can use more effectively when she wishes to, than any other woman in the world, she said: "You see, old friend of Silver Creek Slim, I am not afraid that you should know for you will respect a confidence reposed in you in such tragic circumstances as these."
She touched his arm. "But nobody else is to know—no, not even the coroner at the inquest. If it could help him it would be very different—but it cannot."
Mr. Bunn nodded. "I understand!" he said. But he did not. "You can trust me, Miss Alison," he added and thought for a moment. "Now, I suppose you wouldn't care to tell me who he was."
She shook her head. "No."
"But you will write and tell his people—his parents, surely."
"He had no—" she stopped sharply. "I begin to realize that you are a good deal too sharp-witted for me, Mr. Flood," she said. "You have a knack of extracting information, You should have been a de—" Her expression changed. "Are you a detective? If not, what are you?"
Mr. Bunn laughed comfortably. "Do I look a detective, my dear?" he said. "No. I'm just a fat harmless old gentleman with enough money to live on who is trying to work the miracle of getting young and slender again by means of riding a clumsy great horse with legs like iron!" He reflected, still laughing quietly. "No, no detective. Just—as you say—a friendless old fat man who suspects that the charming little daughter of an old comrade of his may be in some difficulty which she can't confide to anyone—one who is sorry that he seems unable to do something to help her. That's all, my dear. You really do feel you can't tell me who that young man was?"
"No, no! I will tell nobody—nobody!"
"The police—The coroner?"
Her chin came forward
"Nobody!" she said. "They don't put people on the rack or send them to the torture chamber nowadays—and there's nothing else in the world to force me to tell anybody who he was!"
She meant it.
"That's all right, Miss Alison," said Mr. Bunn. "Nobody will worry you to tell—if I can prevent it."
He saw that, though apparently composed, she was near tears, and he warmed to her. She was charming, and behind the charm, he could sense a soundness, a genuine selflessness and an unspoiled nature, that he admired. She was extremely lovely—but he had not; the faintest desire to make love to her: she was enormously rich—but he didn't particularly need any of her money; and, in addition, she was, he knew, a thorough "good sort," a "white" girl; and he suspected somehow, lonely and friendless, for all her probable host of acquaintances, sycophants, hangers-on, and so forth.
He wanted to help her—so he gave her a warning.
"There's just one thing—if you'll let an old-timer offer one whisper of advice, my dear—" he said. "It's this. When a person has a secret to keep there is only one way to keep it. Silence, Miss Alison. Stubborn silence. Never discuss anything that relates to it—nor anybody connected with it. When one talks—particularly if one talks to hide things that press on one's mind—that is when the—" he chuckled—"when the beans are spilled—just one by one. Nearly all the exposed secrets in the world were given away by people talking to hide them! Yes, trust the old man—and remember, Miss Alison—stubborn silence!"
She was quick.
"Thank you," she said. "Yes, that's true. I realize it. Even in just saying the few words I did to you coming along the path I—gave something away."
But Mr. Bunn reassured her.
"Nothing to worry about, my dear—nothing to worry about. I'm no pryer." They moved slowly to the end of the woodland path.
"You've had a long walk, Miss Alison," said Mr. Bunn. "Let me offer you a lift." He indicated his car in the main road just beyond the gate from the field bordering the wood.
"Why, yes—thank you—I want to go into the town on my way home!" Mr. Bunn moved to open the gate.
A man who had been sitting on the bank, leaning against the gate-post, scrambled to his feet to open the gate for them—a broken down sort of person, not quite a tramp, yet not much better-looking. Their attention caught by his willing, almost eager, politeness, both Alison and Mr. Bunn looked closely at him.
He appeared to be some broken old sailor, though he looked, as if he had long since been, rendered unsailorly by illness or, maybe, ill-treatment. Drifting probably to some obscure haven, some unguessed last harbor where he might die in peace. His face was lean, clean-shaven and pale, one eye was covered by a dirty, flesh-coloured patch, and the thin, sinewy hand that held back the gate for Alison's passing bore on the back and around the wrist behind it a tattooed pattern such as sailors wear. He touched his shabby old service cap as Alison went by—and then quite suddenly, as if she had encountered some invisible barrier, she stopped, facing him.
"Thank you for opening the gate," she said, and clicked wide open the bag she was carrying. "Are you a sailor?" she asked, glancing at his tattooed hand. "But I don't think you look well enough to go back to the sea and help to work ships! You are tired, aren't you?"
"Yes, lady," came the- answer, in a curious husky voice, which held a queer fugitive touch of a Far West accent. Something in the man's appearance—and something more in his voice—touched Alison Vanesterman, who was experienced beyond most girls in the tricks of the beggar. She hesitated glancing at Mr. Bunn, who uttered with his customary bluntness: "What you want, old chap, is a good square feed! Hop up into the car next to the driver—and come along to my place and I'll see you get it!"
In his turn Smiler glanced at Miss Vanesterman.
"Can't bear the idea of a decent man going hungry, Miss Alison. Never could—never shall!" he said, apologetically.
The tramp, or near-tramp, said "Thank you, sir." But his one eye never moved from the fresh, lovely face of Alison. Impulsively she drew a fistful of banknotes from her bag, half proffered them, then suddenly drew back.
"No," she said. She stared, frowning. "Money isn't what you need," she said, and whispered, as it were to herself, something about "kindness." Her frown deepened. "You—you—" she turned to Mr. Bunn.
"He reminds me of somebody—I can't think who it is—it's somebody. And he looks so terribly lonely."
"Would you like to have a position—a—situation to work in a garden near here?" she asked, and added: "It would not be very hard—and there would not be anyone to bully a man! Just quiet and peaceful in pretty surroundings. Would you care for a situation like that?"
Her voice was an invitation—almost a caress. The gap- toothed mouth of the man suddenly went wry and quivering.
"Yes, lady," he said, very low.
"Very well," said Alison. "You are engaged to help in the gardens at Maiden Fain—my home, here. It is quite close by. Please tell the head gardener, MacPherson, that I have engaged you to do light work! Remember that, please. Light work! And I shall arrange it myself when I return—probably before you see MacPherson—if I am not delayed. What is your name?"
"Clarke, lady—Davy Clarke," said the waif huskily.
"Well, Davy—is it a bargain?" asked Alison.
"God bless you, your pretty face, your kind heart, little, lady, it's a bargain, yes!" said the man, hoarsely, and with some difficulty. Alison started—for suddenly there had started from the eye of the man one single liquid crystal that ran down his cheek to fall like a rain-drop on the back of his tattooed hand. She believed that he had been touched by an unexpected kindness. And so he had—but not quite in the way she thought. It was pride in her and sheer love and admiration for her that had started that tear.... his daughter, his girl, so lovely and so kind.
"Well, well, then that's all right, Davy," said Alison hastily. "Just go on to Maiden Fain Manor and ask for MacPherson, the head gardener."
Davy Clarke touched his hat and moved on.
"Probably had a lot of harshness to put up with in his time, Miss Alison," said Smiler quietly, as the car started. "They can stand any amount of the—um—rough stuff—but this kindness crumples 'em all up! Hey, Miss Alison?"
"O, yes, yes. I know. I have seen so many like that—Only this man Davy reminds me of somebody—and I can't—I just can't—think who! All I know is I want to be kind to him—and take care of him! Does that seem quite crazy to you?"
"Well—I'll have to say 'yes' and 'no' to that, Miss Alison," fenced Mr. Bunn.
"Why 'yes'?"
"I couldn't tell you off-hand—maybe prejudice! The roads are swarming with vagrants, at the best of times, and some of them are—queer!"
"Davy Clarke's all right!" said Alison, with conviction.
"What you say goes!" replied Mr. Bunn equably. "I'll admit I like the cut of his jib!" But, strictly to himself, he was saying:—"Still, why does the man go heeled?" For it had not escaped the roving eye of the old adventurer that there was under the left armpit of Davy Clarke a slight bulge that to an educated man hinted pretty broadly at some big-calibre lethal machine that might quite closely resemble a .45 or some such hard-featured device of precision and protection. He was an easy-going man, who liked his regular meals, was Mr. Bunn, but at least he could always be depended upon to notice trifles of that description.
By the time he had taken Alison Vanesterman into the town, waited while she visited one of the shops, driven her back to Maiden Fain Manor, and returned to Chalkacres, it was nearly aperitif time. Fortworth was not at home—he had gone down to the town in the roadster to get more cartridges, from the local gun makers, explained Bloom who was tottering rather groggily about the house. But before Mr. Bunn had started seriously on the aperitifs his partner returned.
"Here's a trifle of news for you," he said abruptly. "That chap, Cooper, the gamekeeper who found the body of the young American, was murdered this afternoon up in Grove Holde woods. At least, they think it's murder—considering that he was the principal witness at the inquest to-morrow."
Mr. Bunn scowled. "Yes—" he said slowly at last. "Yes, it was murder! I was there—or thereabouts! Stuck up like a graven image—or a blamed fool!"
For a few seconds, the partners stared at each other. Then Mr. Bunn finished his first sherry and took another.
"I tried to save that poor chap. I went out there to warn him this afternoon. I saw them kill his dog—but I thought he was safely away from home."
He turned his heavy, square red face from the decanter to his partner, his eyes, hard as green flint. "They are an ugly crowd. The worst we have collided with—the very worst, Squire! They kill like snakes—they strike blind like lightning!" he said, and Fortworth had never heard his normally bland voice so grave. "If we're going to do anything with this crowd—the folk behind these murders—we've got to do it quick. For at the first suspicion that we're up against them they'll lay out for us—and they'll get us, for how the devil can a man guard against murderers if he doesn't know who is his likely executor and who isn't?"
"Hump! Well, what are you going to do about it?" demanded his partner.
Mr. Bunn thought for a moment.
"Well, there's this—only crazy folk kill people for killing's sake. These folk aren't crazy—far from it They are after something big. Either that of they're protecting something they've already got something well worth having. We've got to find out what it is—quick!" He lit a cigar. "For this is only the beginning—I can see that clear enough with my natural gift for clear seeing and with what I've found out."
He sat back, his cigar end glowing, his hard eyes half shut.
"Let's see where we've got to," he muttered. "Here's a friend—and I'll guess a close friend of Miss Alison, though she won't admit it even to me, her best friend in this country if she only knew it—murdered in that wood, first of all. Why? I judge both that wolf Carnac, and that silky tigress Lady Cedar are behind that murder. They seem friends, those two, yet he looked pretty near strangling her last night. Why? They, and their friends the Foons, MacCorque and maybe others—know that a clue or two was spilt by the murderer and sooner than take the slightest risk of allowing the first party to find the body—probably the one to find the clues—as they rightly enough figure it—to appear at the inquest, they are prepared to kill that first party like a dog. Or dogs! When they thought you and I were the finders they tried to blot us out—clean out When they learned it was the game- keeper—they left us alone and killed him. Two principal witnesses—as you said just now. I was too late to warn him—by a few minutes—but I can put a rope around the necks of MacCorque and Young Foon for that murder just when I am ready. And Miss Alison will be my witness—when she's ready, but there is no hurry for that, just at present. No. We don't want to hang just two of these thugs—we want the lot! Lady Cedar among 'em if she's one of 'em!"
He smoked silently for a few minutes.
Presently he continued: "It's pretty certain they've written off my old partner and me as two old Simple Simons who care only about their dinners and their livers. That's good. Must keep 'em in that frame o' mind for a bit, while we kind of worm our way up round behind 'em—" He nodded solemnly where he sat in the luxurious chair, and repeated the phrase which he seemed to like—"That's it—must act simple and worm our way quietly up round behind 'em. And we must cast an eye round Snake- master Sow Foon's little establishment as soon as we can. Yes. For unless my natural genius has got badly snagged up that's where we shall find the king cobra of the doings, nicely curled up and tucked away out of sight!"
He stirred a little uncomfortably. "Don't fancy the job. Don't fancy it at all. Still—I shall have to tackle it ....Have you talked to Bloom?"
"Yes," said Fortworth. "But he knows nothing. He says he thought he heard people down the drive, went out, saw some men busy with that hooked rope, fancied one was like Sing—as far as he could make out in the moonlight—went forward to make sure and was knocked out with a loaded club before he could speak!"
Mr. Bunn nodded. "Um, I thought that's what it would be. He thought one was Sing, did he?"
His eyes gleamed. Young Foon was the only person in the neighbourhood likely to be mistaken for Sing by even the muzziest of butlers. Yes, Yung Foon.
"Well, that's that," he said. "We can do no more till after the inquest and I get some sort of answer to my cable to America. The best thing we can do is to lie doggo—till we're ready to act—devilish doggo—and then act quick. Might perhaps take a quiet; look round that place—the snake farm or venom distillery or whatever he calls it that this Sow Foon has got. Hey? We'll see. Meantime—pass the sherry!"
THE result of the inquest was exactly what might have been
expected—a verdict of "Murder against a person or persons
unknown!" The medical evidence showed that the unidentified man
had been killed by shooting with some unusual form of
weapon—the heart had been found full of shattered
glass—and the glass, itself, suggested the medical witness,
had probably been poisoned, for the heart had been found in a
condition so terrible that something more than the lacerations of
the glass must have been responsible.
Mr. Bunn and his partner gave their evidence as to the dead gamekeeper calling them to his aid, briefly and concisely, and were complimented by the coroner for their curt clearness, and for their quickness in getting in touch with the police.
It was all very brief and businesslike—but nevertheless Mr. Bunn recognized in a quiet, meek-looking little man who was sitting in an inconspicuous position well back from the front, one of the ablest Scotland Yard men of the present day. And, because, in spite of his slightly slow-seeming, heavy-headed manner, very little worth noting ever escaped the eyes of the hearty-like old adventurer, he saw, too, in an even more inconspicuous position than the Scotland Yard detective, and listening very intently to the evidence, the sailorish vagrant, Davy Clarke, who should have been working in the garden at Maiden Fain Manor.
Mr. Bunn was very thoughtful on the way back to lunch, and when he learned that no cable had yet arrived for him he seemed to become even a little sullen. But he was restored to his normal mood of good-humoured optimism by a lunch which would have restored a 2,000-year-old mummy—featuring, as it did, among other trifles of the sort, a big guinea-fowl en robe de chambre, or, in other words, an anxiously selected fat hen bird, boned, cut flat, spread with veal farce, tongue and truffles, rolled up and braised, allowed to get cold, then wrapped in puff pastry, baked, served with demi-glace sauce—and eaten with what Mr. Bunn eating it, described as "good appetite, clear conscience and a pint of first-class Burgundy, hey?"
"Let's see, now—we're going to tea with Miss Alison this afternoon," said Smiler, having totally bankrupted the lunch, "now it's no good going up to Maiden Fain Manor half-asleep, as you are already. We'd better have a little exercise. We'll take the roadster and run over the downs to Friarsmark and spend an hour looking around this snake-farm of Sow Foon's!"
Fortworth, annoyed at his partner's blunt statement that he was half asleep, directed a rather sour gaze across at him.
"You seem to me to be a whole lot fonder of snakes than I am," he stated.
"What good are you persuading yourself you're going to do over there? Charm the animals? You can take it from me that they won't answer to any charming you are capable of wishing on them. You're got no charm, man. Let coiled snakes stay coiled, that's my advice to you as a partner and as a friend. See? Why can't you sit quiet and wait for your cable like any other reasonable being would? You say you expect some interesting news in it—and you seem to think it may be here any minute. Well, why go snake- charming? My last word about venomous snakes is 'damn 'em'—I don't like-them and they don't like me. Leave 'em quiet—for only a fool will invite a coiled-up snake to straighten himself out on business. Me, I'm under doctor's orders to ride —and later on I'm going to have a slight ride! That will be exercise enough for me!"
Mr. Bunn smiled. "This would be a sweet partnership of ours if I took you at the valuation most folk would put on you," he said. "Can't you reason out simple things? Your logic's always sort of lop-sided. If you see a long ladder leaning against the side of a house with a broken roof you tell yourself, 'Huh, there's a longish ladder—evidently somebody's got to go down the well to-day.' Man alive, didn't you hear the evidence—that poor chap's heart was rotted with poison, the glass bullet we've got is full of something that looks to me mighty like snake venom—and here we have a scientific sort of venom laboratory not ten miles away over the downs. Don't any sort of notion kind of dawn on you about that?"
"That snake-farm is old stuff. Its been there years. It used to be run by some scientific institution. Anybody in the town will tell you that," growled Fortworth.
"Yes, I know—and now it belongs to Sow Foon," said Mr. Bunn. "Probably brought up-to-date. Well, please yourself. Do I go alone or don't I?"
Fortworth heaved himself up like a red-faced bull.
"My—! What an unpleasant old hound you can make of yourself when you want to!" he shouted in true partnerly style. "You know damned well I never allow you to go into danger on your own—why, I wouldn't trust you to roll a hoop in the convalescent section of a child's nursing home. You'd get into trouble some way or other!"
Mr. Bunn shrugged, beamed, finished his coffee and old brandy and Ordered the car. Then he turned to his partner.
"That will be all right about me being an unpleasant old hound," he said mildly, "I am a very popular man—as you ought to have noticed by this time! And I'll be more popular than ever by the time I've done with this mob of man killers."
MR. BUNN'S guess proved to be much more in accordance with the facts about Friarsmark House—as the adopted old manor and grounds, now a venom farm, was known locally—than Fortworth's knowledge, picked up in Salisbury.
There had been a time when, penuriously supported by a scientific society in London, it had mooned along in a half-and- half sort of way under the control of an ancient professor who contributed nothing new and very little that was old to what was already known about venoms. But all that had been changed within the last year or two since its sale to Sow Foon—or as an ancient rustic, tactfully interviewed by Mr. Bunn, described him, "the foreign gentleman."
"What like of a man is he—this foreign gentleman?" asked Smiler, rather ostentatiously putting his hand into his small change pocket.
"Well, I dunno," said the rustic dubiously. "He's never given me anything—nor took anything away from me. He's a rum- looking kind of a man, to be sure, but there's a lot of rum 'uns about. I never interferes with him and he don't interfere with me. Well-meaning man, by all accounts. He's remarkable handy with all them snakes of his, so they says."
"Huh! He's got a lot of 'em about the place, has he?"
The villager stared.
"The man's got millions of 'em," he said. "I never seen such a mess of snakes about a place in my life, all sorts and sizes and colors, and all of 'em rank pizenous. I'd as soon put my foot in a man-trap as put it in Mr. Foon's garden—sooner, in fact. You go and look, mister. He's got the place all surrounded by 'em. You can't get in—and as long as you don't try to get in you can't get hurt. Thankee, Mister!"
The garrulous one accepted the small alms which Mr. Bunn proffered and made full sail in the direction of the nearest inn.
"Make no secret of his poison brewery, anyhow," observed Mr. Bunn.
"No. Why should he? He passes as a scientist, I take it," said Fortworth.
It was a lonely spot—lonelier even than that occupied by Colonel Carnac's house. Set in the warm hollow between two high ridges of the chalk hills, facing south and entirely surrounded by a circular garden, it was a large house which not long since had evidently been restored and brought up to date regardless of expense.
The only point in which it differed oddly from any one of a thousand similar country houses was in the arrangement of the double-walled moat which completely encircled it.
The reason was fairly obvious, as Mr. Bunn explained it. "Evidently keep his livestock in that dry garden—much as they used keep fish in those wet moats you come across now and then."
He pulled the car up behind a clump of dense gorse, got out, took a pair of powerful field glasses and settled down, inconspicuous against the background of gorse, to survey the place Which lay apparently asleep in the bright sunshine, perhaps 250 yards down the slope from the by-road.
"Nothing much doing down there. Half the rooms seem to be shuttered up," he muttered. "But it's going to be a nasty passage for anybody who tries to get into that place quietly at night."
"Why? Looks easy enough."
"Think again, Squire," said Mr. Bonn. "Don't you see that there is only one way through the walls of that garden or moat—that passageway facing us. There's no front and back way. Anybody going or coming from this house can use that entrance—or he can nip over the wall and stroll among the snakes up to the house." He studied the layout for a long time in silence. "Yes, Sow Foon is better protected from intrusion by that pretty, circular garden, than by fifty watchdogs. There's a place down there—where those bushes are growing—where we might get a look from close quarters into the snakery. If we worked our way round through the gorse with a bit of care. Better have a quick slant at it, hey?"
Twenty minutes later, they were taking the said quick slant over the wall of a dry moat screened from observation from the house by a tall, ornamental yew-tree.
"Yes," said Mr. Bunn the instant they peered over. "He's restocked the place all right! Look at that painted worm!"
Immediately below them, half coiled on one of the big stones of a species of rock-garden lay a huge Russell's viper—its appalling, flat idiot-browed head raised, facing them. As they started at this, one of the ugliest and most poisonous of all the vile beasts that India so profusely spawns, the creature yawned. It was, of course, pure chance, but, as Fortworth observed later, it looked deliberate. They saw the silky lining of the gaping lipless jaws and the long, in-curving needle-pointed fangs as clearly as if they were within a foot of the brute.
"Hey, Squire—what d'ye make of that?" said Mr. Bunn. "How would you care to go creeping quietly across the garden of a dark night trying to worm into the house? With that specimen on sentry-go, so to put it—or that short fat chap and his pals—" he indicated a spot just past the Russell's viper where three South African puff adders were taking a sun bath. Probably the ugliest of all the vipers, certainly as venomous as any, the monstrous, swollen, gape-jawed beasts looked like monstrous slugs—except only where the lithe muscular necks joined the swollen bodies to the awful triangular heads.
Then, as they looked down, a very different type of snake appeared—weaving its rapid way among the stones—a long, slender, graceful thing that travelled with some of its body, high up off the ground, its slim head darting angrily from side to side as it went, its forked tongue flickering incessantly. It was another product of Africa—a black mamba, evidently angry about some snakish trouble.
"Not so damned ugly as the slugs—but I'd trust him no farther! Why, the place is just lousy with the beasts! They're giving me the willies! Have you seen enough, Squire? I have!" said Mr. Bunn. "Lord help us if ever we've got to cross this little bit of garden scenery at night!"
"Don't worry on my account," said Fortworth calmly as they circled round through the gorse to their car. "Nothing will ever persuade me to cross that garden of Eden either by day or night!"
"Huh!" was Mr. Bunn's sole comment on that. It was as if he knew then that before very long both he and his partner would be down in that garden creeping in pitch dark through that inferno of lance-fanged death-swollen horrors.
They went silently through the gorse cover, their footfalls soundless on the short downland turf so that there was practically no more than the seconds warning of their approach for a man upon whom they came abruptly as they rounded a gorse clump. Mr. Bunn was just in time to see him thrust some object into the bush and out again.
"Why, Clarke!" said Smiler, "what are you doing here? I thought you were working in the garden of Maiden Fain. This is no way to keep a good job, my man—no way at all!"
He manoeuvred to get a swift side glance into the bush as he spoke.
"Yes, sir," said the one-eyed man, civilly. "I'm going there to work, but Miss Vanesterman gave me a day or two to look around for some lodgings."
"Lodgings, hey?" Mr. Bunn moved back from the bush. He had seen what it was that the man with tattooed hands had thrust into the bush—a pair of binoculars. "Lodgings, is it? Well, I hope you get some comfortable ones, Davy," he said, and passed on.
"Friend of yours?" asked Fortworth as they passed out of hearing. "He's got a great chance of finding lodgings up here—why, there isn't half-a-dozen houses within, a couple of miles—and it's a good ten miles from his work!"
Mr. Bunn nodded. "He wasn't looking for lodgings—not now, anyway."
"Then what the devil's he doing up here?"
"Watching Friarsmark—same as us," said Smiler. "I put him down as a detective. That was a pair of field glasses he stuck in the bushes."
"Huh! Well, what's he after?"
But Mr. Bunn shook his head absently to that. "You can search me!" he said drily. "At present!" he added, and turned the car homewards.
They passed a car halfway. Col, Carnac was driving with Yung Foon sitting beside him. The Colonel waved a polite salutation to them as they passed.
"Calling on Sow, evidently," said Smiler, as they dropped down the hill. "Wonder if my cable's arrived yet."
He slung the car home like a projectile—to find the cable awaiting him.
FOR a long time Mr. Bunn sat brooding over the lengthy cable
he had just received. Twice he re-read it. Then he created for
himself a large quantity of whisky and soda and sat to pore over
the message yet once more.
"Got your goat, has it?" said Fortworth, watching him.
"Goat? What goat?" inquired Smiler so absent-mindedly that even his partner could see that he had only heard with his ears and not with his brains.
"What have you got—bad news or what? You're acting like a graven image sitting on a hot gridiron, man!" snapped Fortworth. "Isn't your wire what you expected?"
"No? Well, no—not quite. It makes all these people out to be all right. There's nothing against them, according to Tony."
"Nothing against them?" Fortworth sat up, glaring. "But that's absolutely ridiculous. How many times have they tried to murder us—for a start? I don't know what your brother Tony may or may not have or known against them—but I certainly know what I've got in for them. Toni's a very bright lad, I don't doubt, but, hang it, he doesn't know everything!"
"Maybe not. But you can't overlook the fact that he's one of the most important men in Blackertons—and I should figure Blackertons to be about the biggest detective agency in the world. If there were anything definite against them, Blackertons would know it. Yet Tony doesn't seem satisfied. He says he'll cable again."
Fortworth looked at the big wad of sheets which Tony had already sent and grunted approval. "Well, I'll say he certainly doesn't grudge expense."
"Just take paper and pencil and jot down what I call out will you, Squire. We get them sort of classified, anyway." They worked at this classification, Smiler dictating and amplifying from the cable. Presently each took what each obviously regarded as thoroughly well-earned refreshment, and Mr. Bunn read the result. It ran roughly as follows:—
Sow Foon—A half-bred Chinese. Highly educated, immensely wealthy, of great scientific ability. Possesses a great deal of property in America and Europe. Has recently purchased more in England. Travels a good deal to and from his various residences. Lives very quietly and unostentatiously, but has lectured on ethnology, geology and exploration. Is a recognized authority on snake venom antidotes and has invented the best and latest serums for treatment of victims of all species of venomous snakes and insects. Has financed many exploring expeditions. Only known connection with Vanestermans and Col. Carnac is that he shared with Anson Vanesterman the cost of an expedition to Mors, a desert region in South America, last year. Sow Foon's position was that of backer of Col. Carnac, leader of the Mors expedition, Anson Vanesterman being backer of his son, Richard Vanesterman, second in command of the expedition.
"Huh! Well, that seems to make Sow Toon out to be a respectable enough old bird!" said Fortworth reluctantly, as Mr. Bunn drew breath.
"I know better!" declared Smiler, and read on:
Yung Foon.—Sow's only son. Average type of wealthy son of wealthy father. Extravagant, fond of pleasure, fast though not out and out dissolute. Apparently unattached. Rumoured to be in love with Anson Vanesterman's only daughter—Alison—now visiting England.
Col. Carnac.—Formerly officer in an English regiment. Left the army at end of Great War and came to live in America with a friend, Col. John Heatherley, of the American Army. Heatherley died suddenly from effects of war gas and Carnac became an explorer. Made various expeditions, more or less successful. His expedition to Mors was his only complete failure. Has returned to England.
MacCorque.—Col. Carnac's secretary—said once to have been a missionary on the West Coast of Africa. Believed to have been dismissed for some minor irregularity connected with illicit trading with the natives.
Lady Cedar Blanchesson.—An English woman recently visiting America. Introduced to Alison Vanesterman by Col. Carnac and became close friend of the Vanestermans. Said to be the fiancée of the Colonel. Was popular in New York and seemed to be a fair average of good-class visiting English woman.
Anson Vanesterman.—Multi-Millionaire. Began his career in Far West cattle ranching. Struck oil and rose very quickly—has enormous holdings in oil, copper, real estate, railways, motors, banking and high finance. Notable as a "safety" player—no gambler. Very quiet, popular, unextravagant. Said never to have refused any appeal for charitable or national purposes. Had two children—son, Richard Vanesterman, and daughter, Alison. Formerly entertained a great deal, but almost entirely withdrew from social world after the death of his only son, Richard Vanesterman. Now travelling in Europe.
Alison Vanesterman.—Only daughter of Anson Vanesterman. Is now one of the greatest heiresses in the world. A charming girl, natural, unspoiled by wealth, not yet affianced, but said to be interested in a Jim Reymar, a special article writer and correspondent attached to the New York Daily Lens. She suffered a nervous breakdown at the death of her brother and has gone to England for a few months' change. Probably Anson Vanesterman will join her there.
Richard Vanesterman.—Was Anson Vanesterman's only son. Died a year ago during the Carnac-Vanesterman expedition to Central South America in search of the legendary ruined city of Mors in the Morsalbana desert. A magnificent example of American youth at its best. Lindbergh type. Capable, daring, with a fine record of hard work and splendid sports achievement behind him, yet modest, generous and ambitious. His own self- sacrifice—he gave his last two water rations to a member of the expedition who was in agony as the result of drinking from a desert waterhole that was deadly with natural arsenic. But for this he would probably have reached good water at the eleventh hour and so been saved like the rest of the party. His loss came near to breaking up Anson Vanesterman.
Mr. Bunn shook his heavy head as he finished reading.
"A bad job that. Thrown away—a real valuable life thrown away—just as it might have been if some little thing or other had broken in Lindbergh's aeroplane—some little gadget that he couldn't get at, hey? His last water rations. It calls for all of a man to do that. And him with all the world and all his life and sacks of money before him—if he hadn't given just that pint or so of water to a pal! Huh! No wonder it shook Anson Vanesterman and Miss Alison! Hey! What a world! Where one gives—999 are out to take...Why the hell could not Carnac and the others have pooled their last rations and helped out this boy Dick! Hey! That's what I want to know!"
"Huh! Can't you guess an easy-one like that," growled Fortworth. "They hung on to their because they were hogs—hogs, from their hair to their heels!"
Mr. Bunn nodded. "Maybe—maybe. We shall see—" He thought. "Well, there they are—all classified. All accounted for—as far as can be done within the limits of a quick cable. Toni's no slacker. But it tells us next to nothing—next to—" he stopped abruptly, and his hard eyes gleamed. In the setting of his red wine and weather worn face they looked almost like green flint. "Not so fast—not quite so blamed swift, my lad!" he muttered to himself, rose, and went to his cartridge cache, fumbled a second or two with a green shell, took something from it, and returned to his chair. It was the gold ring which he had taken from the finger of the first man murdered in Grove Holdewoods.
"Better order the car round," he advised his partner. "It must be about time we started for this tea at Maiden Fain. We'll go there via the town, I've got another cable to send."
IT was while Fortworth sat smoking a quiet cigar in their big car outside the post office when his partner was sending his second cable to his brother Tony that he began his brief acquaintance with that desolate wreck who called himself Major Sir George Blanchesson, D.S.O. This one attracted the dour Fortworth's attention for several reasons—the first of which reasons being his general appearance, the second being that he was offering for sale flowers—roses—and the third being the amazing fact that he was engaged in earnest conversation with a lamp post.
"The horse can't win, and you know it as well as I do! Look at the weight!" said Major Blanchesson, tapping the lamp post as a man taps the chest of one he has buttonholed. "You will lose your cash—even I know that and I've just done six months in Devizes Jail—where they don't allow anybody to study the form of the gees—unless it's my friend the chaplain. So be advised—"
Here he caught Fortworth's astonished eyes—and came forward completely unembarrassed.
"Nice roses, sir!—fresh picked today. Three-pence a bunch, sir. All fresh and fragrant! Picked 'em personally from the trees in the gardens as I passed! The lovely roses, sir— threepence a bunch."
His wavering, restless eyes wandered over Fortworth, Sing the driver, the car and caught the lamp post. "Just a minute," he said over his shoulder. "I'll prove that in half a jiff— roses sweet and fragrant—the beautiful roses, three-pence a bunch. Take your lady a few of the fair and fragrant roses, sir!"
Fortworth looked at the roses. They were a mixed collection from buds to over-blown blooms shedding their petals. He had no trouble in believing that their vendor had "lifted" them from the various gardens he had passed that day. Then he looked at the man and saw what was wrong with him. He was either a little mad or a little drunk—probably something of both. Yet he was a good- looking species of ruffian—in a debauched, worn-out sort of way. He carried himself with the incurable easy erectness of the lifelong soldier and his shockingly shabby clothes still retained the vague, almost ghostly echo of trimness that never deserts clothes which were once well-cut and of a perfect fit. His shoes were deplorable yet he was perfectly well-shaven and his red moustache was as trimmed and pointed as if he were about to go on another of the many parades which, quite obviously, he had attended in the past. Although palpably "down and out," he was as palpably one who had once been what the world calls a "gentleman."
"Damn the roses," said Fortworth politely, proffering a half- crown. "Man alive, the country's crawling with roses this time of the year. Can't you think of a better way of getting a living than that? Who are you anyway? What were you arguing the toss with that lamp post for? Been in the army haven't you? You ought to be in a hospital—or an inebriate's home or a jail or something!"
"My good man, I've been to all of 'em," said the rose-vendor, taking the half-crown. "Poisonous places? That lamp-post's a fool—he's backing a rank outsider in the big race tomorrow. He won't believe me—me—George Blanchesson—Major. George Blanchesson!—" his wavering voice rose a little—"Major George Blanchesson, D.S.O.—of the King's Own Ninth Rifles—the old Curse of Scotland!—Death Watch!!! He! Mad George—who does every damned thing in the world but tell lies—eats anything but his own words—drinks everything but cold water!"
He ended in a shout and wiped a sudden sweat from his forehead. "Mad as a March bullfrog!" muttered Fortworth and turned to Mr. Bunn as he came out from the post office. "Here's Sir George Blanchesson, late of the old 'Death Watch'—and Devizes Jail—trying to sell me some roses," said Fortworth. Mr. Bunn's eyes narrowed as they flashed over the man.
"Sir George Blanchesson, is it?" he said, most cordially. "How are you, Sir George? No relation of Lady Cedar, I suppose?"
"No relation!" The self-styled "Mad George", cackled. "Why, I married the she-wolf! In fact, I'm on my way to call on her now—if I can find her, I heard she was living this way. She owes me some money."
"Ah—it's a way some of the ladies have—this owing money," said Mr. Bunn, airily. He thought for a moment. "Maybe she is living in these parts. I fancy I've heard the name. I'd like to help you find her, Sir George, but just at present I'm rather rushed. But I'll tell you what—if you care to go to my house not far from here, Chalkacres Hall, and tell Bloom the butler there that Mr. Flood said you were to be entertained, he will do his best to look after you till we return. What dye say to that, Sir George?"
"Certainly—yes! Flood—Bloom—Chalkacres Hall. I'll be moving on Chalkacres at once. ...Care to buy any roses—fair and fragrant? No? O, very well ....We shall meet again, Mr. Flood."
They watched him go. A little way down the road a man who had been standing on the sidewalk looking at a newspaper quietly put away the paper and strolled in the same direction as the self- styled Sir George Blanchesson. Mr. Bunn stared intently, then abruptly commanded Sing, the Chinese, to leave the car and follow him. For himself he followed the rose-vendor and his shadower. They "hurried" a corner. Mr. Bunn waited a moment, then looked round the corner—to see that the man Blanchesson was now in conversation with his follower—or, maybe, his shadower, who seemed to be buying roses. The flowers changed hands, the two men talked a little longer, then moved off together. "Follow them, Sing, and keep yourself out of sight forgone of 'em is dangerous. I'll take the car over," said Mr. Bunn and returned to his partner.
"Did you notice who it was that followed that poor semi- demented ruin?" he asked.
"No," said Fortworth. "Who was it—if it matters?"
"Our friend MacCorque—the man with stranglers hands!"
"Huh, was it?" Fortworth shrugged. "Well, I don't imagine he'll want to strangle Blanchesson for his money!" he said without much interest.
Mr. Bunn said nothing to that. He drove on to Maiden Fain Manor. It was quite a small party that the partners met there—just their hostess, Alison Vanesterman, the vivid Lady Cedar, Col. Carnac and Yung Foon.
They took tea in a tree-shadowed corner of the smooth green lawn at the front of the great house and they talked idly about idle things. Once or twice the conversation switched on to the old days in the Far West with Silver Creek Slim—Mr. Bunn proved (to himself) rather cleverly fertile of stories about himself and Silver Creek—and all went well.
Even the Mongol-visaged Yung Foon, superbly arrayed by a firm of the best tailors in London, was genial and bland. It made itself entirely clear to the sinuously-enquiring and condor-eyed old adventurer that both Yung Foon and Col. Carnac were discreet worshippers at the shrine of Alison Vanesterman—and, more subtly, perhaps, that the adorations of the singular pair were far indeed from welcome to the American girl. If it were possible for one of the greatest heiresses in the United States of America to seem to be just a trifle afraid of any man in the world, Smiler Bunn would have thought that Alison Vanesterman was just a trifle afraid of Yung Foon. He caught the passing thought, locked it back in his mind, and continued to take his, tea—not a meal which normally he regarded with any wild enthusiasm. Once he saw, moving far at the back, past a clump of shrubs, the newly engaged under-gardener, Davy Clarke. Evidently Davy had found the lodgings he sought and had come to work. He had a garden broom in his hand.
Mr. Bunn grew thoughtful. "A broom in his right—and a revolver in his left armpit—hum!" he mused. "But come to that—who isn't armed—at this quiet little tea on this quiet old English lawn? I'll risk a hundred pounds Col. Carnac is not separated from a weapon by more than the thickness of his shirt! And I wouldn't bet even money that Yung Foon hasn't got one of these painted death-adders in his coat pocket! Fortworth's armed and I've no doubt I could produce a bit of an argument in the way of automatics myself—if pressed! And here I am, eating cucumber sandwiches, in the midst of smiles! And old Fortworth there blandishing on Lady Cedar!
"To whose husband he gave half a dollar not an hour ago!... Not but what I agree, she's a fine looking woman, lively, vigorous and handsome! Yes, it's a life—a life and a half! Well, we'll see if we can rouse 'em all up a little—though how can I watch four people at once, I wonder!"
He listened for a moment to "the conclusion of a story with which the Colonel seemed to be interesting several of those present—the not very thrilling story of one of his alleged adventures in amateur detection. Then he craned forward.
"Very neat, Colonel! I think you handled that little matter extremely well! It reminds me of a curious thing that happened to me not so long ago in San Francisco! I was out for an evening in the Chinese quarter with a man I had got acquainted with—he was a kind of reporter as he called himself, a special correspondent of a New York newspaper?"
Under their heavy half-closed lids his keen, greenish eyes noted how all of his listeners but one, Fortworth, seemed to tauten and become intent.
"A New York paper—what paper?" asked Col. Carnac.
"Eh?" said Mr. Bunn, rather dully, "what paper? Let me think— Yes. It was called the New York Daily Focus—no—Lens. That's it. The New York Daily Lens." He dropped his hand into his jacket pocket—where it connected comfortably indeed with the butt of an automatic pistol.
"I wouldn't know the man again if I met him, but curiously enough I can call to mind, his name. I admit that we were rather under the influence of some wonderful wine we had at dinner. I can remember the name, though not the face. He called himself—Jim—no, not Jim—Gene—that was it! Gene Reymar! Did you ever meet him—Gene Reymar?"
Mr. Bunn, lazy looking, but watchful as an intent and craftsome wolf, saw the sudden setting of the muscles of the two men listening. He saw Lady Cedar blanch. And, most particular of all, he saw Alison Vanesterman lean back in her cane garden chair with a long, long sigh, and lay still, with her eyes closed.
"Gene Reymar?" said Col. Carnac rather hurriedly. "No, I don't remember, ever meeting him."
"No—not I," said Young Foon, a little thickly.
"Nor I," said the Lady Cedar Blanchesson, with a white smile.
"What's the matter with Miss Alison?" said Fortworth sharply. "She's, fainted—she's slipping down in her chair!"
They all rose. But although she would probably never be nearer to it in her life. Alison Vanesterman had not fainted.
She sat up in her chair as they all went quickly toward her. "No—it's all right," she said. "It's nothing—this heat—your Autumn heat is just a bit different from ours and I suppose I haven't quite got used to it."
"I know," said Mr. Bunn sympathetically. "And let a man old and experienced enough to be your father prescribe for you, Miss Alison. A glass of champagne—a good champagne, not too dry—that's the thing for these heat attacks. I get 'em myself—and champagne's the medicine called for."
"O, very well!" Alison laughed rather faintly, and nodded.
Mr. Bunn touched a bell that was wired to the house and helped himself to a little whisky and soda—an example faithfully followed by the other men. The Colonel agreed that Mr. Bunn had recommended a truly sovereign remedy for heat attacks and instanced similar examples from his experience in India. Yung Foon produced reminiscences of Siam which also supported Mr. Bunn's prescription. Fortworth differed slightly—pronouncing in favour of a glass of good old brandy.
"You don't expect Miss Alison to start an old brandy at tea time, do you, man?" demanded Mr. Bunn severely.
In the slight discussion which followed the interesting story of what had happened to the man called Gene Reymar and himself in San Francisco was apparently forgotten. At least nobody showed sufficient interest in it to mention it again and Mr. Bunn was well satisfied to save a good lie. He had found out, or believed he had, what he wanted to know.
There was a percentage of guesswork about it, and a percentage also of intuition, but he had observed Alison Vanesterman very closely at the morgue, in Croye Holde Wood, and now in her own home, and he was convinced that the murdered American was Gene Reymar, the New York Lens special correspondent. It was a shade sketchy, but Mr. Bunn was apt to be sketchy in his reasoning and to plug the holes with experience. In any case, Tony's answer to his second cable describing the ring he had taken from the dead man and asking Tony to ascertain whether Reymar wore such a ring and where he was now, would settle the point definitely.
But in Mr. Bunn's prehensile mind it was already settled. He lit a cigar and rested with a certain appearance of somnolence in his comfortable garden chair, listening to the others. The champagne certainly restored Alison's colour and seemed to brighten her spirits. Mr. Bunn perceived very clearly that Col. Carnac and Yung Foon were evidently more than friendly rivals for the smiles of Miss Vanesterman. He leaned back smoking tranquilly and let them compete without interference, though his lips twitched behind the cigar smoke at the absurdity of the notion that either the elderly Carnac or the queer-looking son of Sow Foon stood the phantom of a chance of interesting a girl like Alison Vanesterman.
As Mr. Bunn asked himself—
"Why should they? The Colonel looks like a sixty-year-old card sharp—and t'other looks like a cross between an Eastern gigolo and a polite pirate! And she or her papa for her could buy them both and throw, them away and not notice they'd spent anything but small change! I wonder she lets them even try to flirt with her!"
Beside him the brilliant Lady Cedar gaily helped Fortworth pay her rather heavy compliments. And slowly Smiler's wonder diminished as he beamed and listened and watched—for there stole almost imperceptibly into his mind, something more than a faint glimmering of the notion that Alison Vanesterman was acting; that she did not really like these two men at all—that she only tolerated them because she was afraid of them.
Afraid of them! Well, she had a right to be afraid of them if she knew the sort of men they were (as she certainly did not or they would not have been there), mused Mr. Bunn. No—it was not that she was physically afraid of them.
There was some other reason. Now that the idea had come to him he marvelled that he had not seen it before. For there were a dozen little indications that the girl was fencing with them, trying to play one off against the other. She did it with extraordinary skill and ease—but the gimlet-souled old adventurer was not deceived, though most men would have been. Now, why should the daughter of one of the richest men in America be afraid of men like Col. Carnac and Yung Foon?
"Shall have to think that out," said Mr. Bunn very much indeed to himself. "And why, since they all know this man Gene Reymar should they all insist they didn't? Can understand Carnac and Foon—they're birds of a feather— but why little Miss Alison?" He pondered that. "Well—I'll ask her. Damn it, why not? Yes, I'll sit these swine out—and when they've gone I'll ask her."
He dropped his cigar stub, gave an excellent imitation of an elderly gentleman waking himself up a little, and turned to Lady Cedar.
"A curious thing happened to us today, Lady Cedar," as Fortworth lulled a little in his conversation. "Mr. Black and I met a namesake of yours in the town."
He saw her eyes dilate, then narrow like a cat's. "A man who called himself Major Blanchesson, late of—so he said—the Ninth Rifles—the old Death Watch."
She smiled—perfectly tranquil.
"Ah, yes? Did he say that they called him 'Mad George,' the man who did everything but tell more lies than necessary, ate everything but his own words, drank everything but cold water?" she asked.
"Yes!" Mr. Bunn laughed quietly.
"And," continued Lady Cedar, "did he say he wished to get some money from me—and that I was his wife?"
"Just exactly that," said Fortworth.
She turned to Col. Carnac. "It is the same man! He is quite harmless. Twice I have had to give him a few shillings to go away. He has lost half his wits, poor soul. He was my husband's soldier servant for a time in the Ninth Rifles—and it is his hallucinations that he is Sir George Blanchesson—my husband—who was posted as missing after the battle of Loos! He bobs up every now and then. It's impossible to be unkind to a man like that, don't you think?"
"Oh, yes, quite impossible," agreed Smiler. "It was pretty plain what was wrong with him. I just thought that perhaps I ought to mention it."
"O, thanks, yes," said Lady Cedar without much interest, and a rather careless smile.
Mr. Bunn resumed his reverie. "Huh, you got mighty little change out of her, my lad," he told himself frankly. "Though she lied!....Shall see presently."
Then the butler came across the lawn with a card on a salver which he presented to Alison. "The gentleman seems to know that you have guests, madame, and desired me to ask if he might be permitted to speak to you all!"
Alison Vanesterman took the card, read it and turned to her visitors.
"It is a reporter from one of the News Agencies," she said. "I hope nobody will mind? It is a good plan, I think, to be civil to reporters."
Naturally, nobody minded. So the butler went to fetch him.
He was a meek-looking, completely undistinguished man, of smallish-build, very ordinarily clad, who presently came out from the house piloted by the butler.
"Him—he doesn't seem to be a very smart reporter," murmured Lady Cedar as he came. Only Mr. Bunn, of them all, knew that the insignificant newcomer assuredly was not a "smart" reporter. He was the man from Scotland Yard whom Smiler had noticed in Court at the inquest—and there was no question at all that he was one of the cleverest detectives attached to that grim old institution on the bonny, bonny banks of that grim old river, the Thames.
IT was at least five years since the partners, had "swung" any transaction which was likely seriously to attract the attention of any enterprising official gentleman from Scotland Yard, and consequently it was with complete tranquillity that Mr. Bunn saw Detective-Inspector Wheel approach. And he had the advantage, carefully and patiently secured, of knowing that while he knew Mr. Wheel, the detective did not know him—or his partner.
In any case, it proved to be quite a simple inquiry which the deceptively meek-looking detective had called to make. He said so—very politely and with a suave easiness which doubtless was the result of much practice. He merely wished, he said, to ask. Miss Vanesterman if, she, or any of her friends, could aid the Press to the extent of stating whether she or any of them recognized the murdered American whose body they had viewed in the mortuary. He seemed to know all about that sudden visit.
Nobody hesitated at all to say at once that the man was completely a stranger—entirely unknown—to them. But even as he gave the detective his personal assurance, Mr. Bunn marvelled that Alison Vanesterman could so coolly deny that she knew the man. It was being made abundantly clear to the old adventurer that she must have some extraordinarily grave reason for her denials. In a vague sort of way the little detective thanked them all for answering so frankly. More vaguely still he explained that he well understood how Miss Vanesterman had felt it her duty as an American to call at the mortuary and satisfy herself that the victim was not a personal friend of hers.
And superlatively vaguely he explained—in response to Alison's invitation to have tea—that he had had tea already—at least, it would be ready for him when he returned—that is, if he wished to have some tea. In the end he accepted—vaguely—a whisky and soda. If Mr. Bunn had not known quite definitely that, as a result of the subterranean activities of Mr. Wheel many scores of artful, work- hating gentlemen were at that moment working as diligently as their wary-eyed guards could make them at that long-term penal country club called Dartmoor, he might have believed in the vagueness.
But as it was it made him uneasy.
"Look how the old bloodhound trails along to stick his muzzle right into the heart of things!" mused the astute old rascal, watching the detective absorb his whisky. "I'd bet a thousand pounds he doesn't know exactly why he's here—cheek by jowl, so to put it, with the murderers or instigators of the murder of that lad! Yet he's here! Hey? There's no getting away from that. He's here. Scotland Yard is among us—huh!"
His well preserved teeth sank unconsciously into the butt of his cigar. "For two pins I'd take him inside and tell him all I know and turn all the risk and trouble over to him. Just for peace and quietness... If it were not for Miss Alison: Why did she decline to recognize the man, anyway? Why?... That's it—why? Damn it! Why? Must think it out. There can not be a great many reasons why she—a grand little girl like Alison Vanesterman—should deny knowledge of a pretty special newspaperman and a personal friend in whom she was once 'interested' according to Tony. I guess I'll take a quiet turn in the garden and think it out hard!"
This he did, perhaps ten minutes later. He went strolling all by himself through the winding rose alleys, the old yew walks and shrubbery pathways of ancient Maiden Fain talking low to himself—puzzled and uneasy. Over and over, he asked himself—lengthily and profanely—why Alison should disclaim any knowledge of the dead man. He even; grew hot and angry about it. He stopped halfway down a long lonely pathway through a rhododendron shrubbery and put his inquiry to a lurking thrush some yards away.
"It's the key to the whole damned mystery," he said aloud, though not loudly. "If I can find out why she refused to know that dead reporter from New York I am perfectly certain that I shall thundering soon find out the rest. She was driven to it—am sure of that. It looks bad—but I know something about life, and faces, and even women!—and I'll swear the reason is nothing to that little girl's discredit. Anyway—I don't give a hoot if it is. I'm backing her—I'm for her. I like her—wish to God I had a daughter of my own like her—But—why the hell does she lie about this thing? That's what I want to know!" said Mr. Bunn, glancing at the thrush.
A man with tattooed hands and one eye that gleamed oddly appeared at his elbow so silently that he made Mr. Bunn jump.
"It is conceivable," said the apparition tensely, "that the reporter had discovered something so infinitely to the discredit of the Vanesterman family that Miss Alison preferred to repudiate all knowledge of him—and so, if necessary, of all he knew—or claimed to know! It may have been something which she might be ashamed for even the reporter himself to know!"
"But the man was dead!"
"Yes. And the girl may have been perplexed and panic-stricken, and, without arguing it all out nicely, have seized the obvious and safest way of—of—concealing any sort of clue to what the reporter knew. If he was a reporter!"
Mr. Bunn eyed the man with tattooed hands.
"Yes, I see that," he said. "Thanks for your hint, Davy Clarke. And, by the way, just who are you, Davy? A detective or what? You're no sailor, anyway. At least I never knew a sailor talk like you—or carry a big pistol where he could get at it so quickly, David Clarke."
But the man with tattooed hands shook his head.
"Just Davy Clarke, sir—hired under gardener here. And, strange as it may seem, sometimes even a sailor has some brains, and education. Think it over, sir. Ask yourself whether if you had some ugly secret in your past, and you, in the presence of a number of other people in a strange country, were asked if you knew anything of a newspaperman whom you believed knew your secret, would you be in a hurry to claim him as an acquaintance? Particularly if you suspected that all his papers—his secrets—had been stolen?"
Mr. Bunn shook his head. "No, I wouldn't. I would probably say I didn't know him from Adam, and that anything he may have written about me or my family was untrue—just to be on the safe side...Sure, friend Davy—you're right there."
He thought for a few second, staring at the garden. "But, that's all conjecture, Dave," he said. "I happen to have seen a good deal of Miss Alison. Now, I consider myself a judge of people, and if anyone tells me there's an ugly secret in her past life, I shall tell him that he's a particularly ugly liar!"
"I did not suggest that there might be a secret in Alis—in Miss Vanesterman's past!" said Davy Clark, a trifle sharply. "I said—or intended to say—in the past of the Vanesterman family!"
"Yes, you did. That's true, Dave. Well now, that leads us on a bit. You see, Dave, these things work out pretty well to a regular rule.
"Suppose my family has got a secret in its past—it hasn't, for, as luck would have it, we're a fairly steady-going lot—slow but honest, and we, the family, say, 'Well, there it is—the little skeleton's in the cupboard. We'll keep it secret'—and, that's the end of the matter. Well, there you are—all over and done with. A secret—why, damme, Dave, that's the meaning of the word! Now that secret is of no use to the family—it's like a lump of buried nastiness—not any good, no value, better out of the way. That right?"
"Entirely," said the man with tattooed hands.
"Now suppose somebody outside the family comes along and, by luck or design 'digs up' the secret, like a hyena a bone. Everything depends on the calibre of the man, or men—or women—who find it. If they're straight, they drop it like a hot coal, rebury it, and forget it. If they're crooked they may consider it worth while trying to trade on that secret. That right, Dave?"
Davy nodded.
"Well, in his country we call that blackmail," said Mr. Bunn. "And when possible we put the blackmailers out of business in no uncertain fashion! That clear?"
"Very," said Davy Clarke.
"Right. Now, Dave, look at it this way. Suppose that chap knew the Vanesterman secret—assuming there is one—and was coming here to see Miss Alison about it? He wouldn't come merely to mention that he knew the secret just as he might say it was a fine day. Now would he?"
Dave shook his head.
"So it looks likely that he would be coming to blackmail her—about the secret, if any. Don't it?"
"Yes," said Davy Clarke. "Well now, there's only one thing wrong about that, Dave," said Mr. Bunn blandly. "And it's this—that chap was no blackmailer. If faces—dead or alive—mean anything at all that chap was dead straight. You'll have to take that from me, Dave—I know about these things. I've got a gift that way. He was a man of some considerable character—I judge—and he wasn't the type to blackmail a girl. He was much more likely to be coming to warn the girl against blackmailers—again—" He broke off suddenly, his face brightening.
"It looks to me, Dave, old man, as if I'd collided with a pretty valuable idea. Suppose some blackmailers—bad, dangerous devils—were blackmailing a rich family, and a man—a newspaper reporter, if you like—bobbed up suddenly with certain knowledge that would prove that the secret they were trading on was harmless—not worth keeping a secret—what would the blackmailers—bad scoundrels—be liable to do to that man, if necessary, to keep him from telling their victim?"
"Kill him, you mean?" said Davy Clarke.
"I do mean that. And what happened to that chap?"
"He was killed."
"Sure!" said Mr. Bunn. He thought, staring at the one-eyed man.
"Well, there you are," he said at last. "Funny how easy it is to work out these little mysteries in your mind? only one doesn't always get the right answer! Still...." He produced half-a-crown. "Still—have a drink some time, Dave," he invited the gardener.
Davy Clarke took the money.
"Thank you, sir," he said. Mr. Bunn beamed on him. "You're an intelligent sort of chap, Dave," he volunteered. "Good luck to you..." and would have moved on, deeply in love with his new idea, but that one-eyed hired gardener stopped him.
"Beg your pardon, sir, but there's another way of looking at it!" he said, a singular gleam in his solitary eye. Mr. Bunn turned.
"Another way—? What d'ye mean? How can there be another way?"
"Well, sir, I may be wrong. But—look at it like this. For example .... Suppose some crooks knew a secret in the past of the Vanestermans and had agreed to announce publicly an untrue version of that secret in consideration of large sums of money paid by the Vanestermans."
"Yes, that's an easy one," said Mr. Bunn drily. "Next, suppose that with the crooks and the Vanestermans all entirely satisfied with the arrangement, some third person, a newspaper man, suddenly bobbed up and said to one of the Vanesterman family, 'I know the truth about that secret you have in your past!' What would happen?"
"Well—if they heard of it—the crooks would either invite him to join them and share the plunder—or let him do his blackmailing as a singlehanded concern—or kill him—snake eat snake, so to put it."
"Yes," said the gardener. "But does not any alternative occur to you?"
Mr. Bunn stared. "You've got a probing sort of mind, Davy. Did you know that? Just let me think. An alternative, you say?"
He thought. He walked quite a long way, thinking—then returned, soft-footed, to Davy Clarke.
"There's one alternative—at any rate one other reason (and a good one) why the crooks should kill the newspaperman," he said. "It's this, Dave—for what it's worth. Just assume that the Vanestermans are paying heavy blackmail to keep buried a secret which, say, charges one of them with a disgrace which the Vanestermans can't disprove—although it isn't true."
"Yes, yes," Davy Clarke's voice was keen.
"In other words, suppose the discreditable secret is a fake—on which bid Vanesterman is glad enough to pay."
"Go on, man—go on!"
"Now, suppose a keen newspaperman discovers the real truth about the faked secret. Discovers, in fact, that it isn't discreditable but is, say, creditable. He sets out to tell one of the Vanesterman family the glad news—comes all the way from America to England, say, to tell Miss Alison, and the crooks get to hear of his coming. Assume he's dead straight—assume he's in love with Alison if you like—I guess that would keep him straight. The crooks, as I say, get to know he's coming—to destroy their built-up fabric of lies! They can't buy him off, say—they can't disprove his sure! proof! Right! What is the only thing they can do—if they want to go on drawing their hush-money?" demanded Mr. Bunn.
"Silence him! Kill him!" said Davy Clarke.
"Correct! And, my God, that is how I think that young American met his death!" said Mr. Bunn, emphatically. "Yes! Yes!" he went on. "Between you and me, you tattooed old tough, I believe we've hit on it! I must think it out!
"It makes a lot clear to me—but I must think it out! I'm going now, but I want to keep in touch with you, Dave. You ain't much to look at, I'll own, but somewhere, under all that shabby- looking front of yours you've got some remarkable brains. Yes! I say so and I'm a rare judge of brains!"
He stared at the one-eyed man. "Now, Dave, you just sit tight here in Maiden Fain and keep that one eye of yours open. I'll see you lose nothing by it. And keep on thinking—and tell me what you think!... Are you all right for money? Say if you are not—tell me, Dave. What was it I gave you—half a dollar. Well, here—take this—" he passed a pound note. "And there's more where that came from. Dave—for a good thinker. Though there's no need to squander the damn money, mind. A pound's a pound—worth having, Dave. So don't play the fool with it." And Mr. Bunn beamed on the gardener and moved on.
Little he dreamed that before many weeks were over that silver half-crown of the British Mint, set next to a dingy one-pound Treasury note, would hang, framed, in the private library of Anson Vanesterman, billionaire, of New York, occupying a place which was the focus of everything in that superbly furnished and decorated room. It represented a sum of slightly over five dollars. No man living ever invested five dollars better than did Mr. Smiler Bunn when he bestowed this; kindly, comradely "tip" upon the one-eyed under-gardener, with the tattooed hands of a seafaring man, in the lonelier part of the great gardens of Maiden Fain Manor, England.
MR. BUNN abandoned his original intention of outstaying all
present, when, a little later he drifted, behind a large cigar,
on to the wide lawn to discover the Scotland Yard little man
chattering gaily (if somewhat vaguely) with Alison, Yung Foon and
Col. Carnac. Lady Cedar and Fortworth were not visible. So,
pleading urgent correspondence to be disposed of before the out-
going evening mail, Mr. Bunn made his urbane fare-thee-wells to
all present and meandered off in search of his partner—whom
he found with Lady Cedar in a palm conservatory not far off,
Cedar looking about as warm as a cream-colored vanilla ice,
Fortworth about the hue of ordinary raspberry syrup—an
admirable blend when required. But Lady Cedar's "au
revoir"—to both—was slightly odd. "Good-bye,"
she said, gaily enough. "But come again soon—you know, we
like you here."
Her electric eyes played over Mr. Bunn.
"You know, things are not always what they seem—and, sometimes the people who seem the least of all in need of friends are those who need them—need them—O! most desperately of all!" And, as Mr. Bunn noted, her fine eyes were those of a hunted woman, even as she spoke.
"SURELY, Lady Cedar," he said. "Surely I can't call to mind that either my partner, Mr. Black, or me ever turned down a party in need of a friend. Keep that in mind, Lady Cedar!"
She said, in a subdued, sighing sort of way, that she would, and so went back to the lawn. The partners found their way to their car, arid purred away to Chalkacres.
Fortworth had little to say—of Lady Cedar or anyone else. Mr. Bunn had nothing to say—of the one-eyed gardener or anyone else. So it was an oddly untalkative pair that, as the car ran sweetly down the long drive to Chalkacres, noted, as it were, from afar off, a man who came reeling drunkenly across the park toward the house.
Mr. Bunn, his hard eyes on that distant figure, pulled up.
"Unless my eyes are fooling me, here comes Sing!" he said. "And the lad is either half-tight or half-dead!" He started across the park, his hat tilted far back, his eyes like opaque glass.
"Damn it all, I don't like the look of the lad at all," he said. "He's coming in circles, so to say!"
The partners glared out across the park at the old "indestructible," as they usually termed the leather-like Chinese, with more than a little unease in their eyes. It was justified—for Sing was coming very groggily indeed. He reeled as he came, and once he fell. He picked himself up, stared about him, seemed to sense rather than see his direction home and thrust himself forward again, like a blind man walking.
A few more yards on he lunged senselessly forward again—but this time it was into the arms of his hard-bitten boss, Mr. Bunn, that he fell. "Why, Sing, my lad, what's all this?"
"Master!" said Sing. "Him handee's allee same clab's claws!" And with this cryptic utterance became unconscious.
Unconscious, this is to say, until enough of Mr. Bunn's sovereign remedy for all masculine ills, namely, champagne keyed up with old brandy in sufficiently vast quantities, had called— alcoholed—him back to life.
"Why, Sing, my lad—what have we here?" demanded Smiler, when, presently, the man's beady black eyes played about him with every sign of recognition.
"That man, MacClock, Master!" said Sing.
"Sure, sure," said Smiler. "No hurry—tell your tale, Sing—but take your time! Bloom can see to the dinner to- night! Hear that, Bloom? Set your best foot foremost, to-night, Bloom, or I'll amputate it!"
Bloom seemed to understand about that and disappeared, mumbling something about he could get a fracture of the skull and no sympathy while if that blasted Sing got so much as a sock on the simple jaw champagne and brandy ran like water, not to mention loving kindness! But that was not strictly correct.
Sing, the Chinese, had bitten or clawed his way unscathed through too many affairs with the partners to leave them unsympathetic when, carrying out orders given by one of them, he returned home like a blinded crab groping his way sidelong. So they gave him what they considered his due—and duly received in return his "report."
It was simple enough, and, in far plainer English than Sing's, amounted to this: The Chinaman had shadowed the weird one who called himself Major Sir George Blanchesson and Mr. MacCorque to a motor, which both had entered. The motor had departed for a destination unknown—with Sing glued to the back of it. At a spot not far from Downland Holt—Col. Carnac's lone residence—the car had stopped and Mr. MacCorque and the major had more or less frankly discussed certain matters—mainly the Lady Cedar Blanchesson. Probably because he felt that, in the retired spot he had selected, he was unlikely to be overheard, the man with strangler's hands had said quite frankly that he was very much in love with Lady Cedar Blanchesson.
The ex-Major of "the old Death Watch" had laughed a good deal about that, and also had notified Mr. MacCorque that a good many men of his acquaintance had suffered from much the same complaint.
"That," Mr. MacCorque had said, equably, "I can well understand. It is of no consequence to a man like me. I admire the Lady Cedar. It appears that, legally, she belongs to you. Am I right?"
"Yes. In a way, you are right. She married me—some time ago—she bears my name—she uses my title—she buys my roses—fair arid fragrant—well, no—pardon me, damn it—are you backing anything for the Caesarewitch? Excuse me?"
"Pull yourself together, you crazy loon," had been Mr. MacCorque's response to this, "and listen to me. I'll buy that lady from you, I'll give you a ten pound note for her forever—for you, you scum, you don't know how to. appreciate her. Don't be afraid. I am not without means, and I am prepared to marry her myself, take her away out other present environment and set her like a Queen in a place of which I know—an island, if that conveys anything to your rotten brains—and treat her like a goddess!... And nobody shall stop me. Well? A £10 note—or, if you prefer cash, Major Sir George Blanchesson, I can give you the money in small change!" The acrid contempt of the scoundrel with murderer's hands had kicked Blanchesson back to a ghost of what, once, he may have been.
"I don't think I quite care to swindle you, MacCorque, my man? Take her—" he had said with a sort of dignity—"a present from me! A delightful gift to a delightful recipient! And I wish her joy of you. She'll get none. You see, I know a good deal more about you and your sweet gang than you guess. One word to the police, my man, one word from me, the half-demented down- and-out, and where d'ye think you'd be—the whole of you."
There had been a sudden and most peculiar silence, explained Sing. Then the MacCorque had answered softly in his curious tenor:
"I don't suppose you know it, you poor fool, but you have just uttered your own death sentence," he said slowly, lingeringly. There had been such an appallingly murderous note in the voice of the peculiar person with the pigskin hands that Major Blanchesson, in spite of his impaired mind, had promptly leaped from the car and bolted. Pursuing him, MacCorque had caught sight of Sing crouched behind the car, and, promptly, had turned from the fleeing Major to attack Sing—with the one shouted word "Spy!"
Sing had closed with him avidly enough. And then they fought. Sing spoke with intense feeling of the extraordinary strength and shape of Mr. MacCorque's hands. It appeared, to his anxiously listening owner-driver, Mr. Bunn, that the MacCorque had succeeded in clamping one of his terrible hands around the Chinaman's neck. If it had been both hands, Sing indicated, things might have been desperate indeed with him. As it was, he had come out from the ugly life and death struggle which had followed, with barely his life.
Sing added that he was "velly solly," but he feared he had not quite killed the MacCorque. That one's hands were so large and so "velly stlong" that he, Sing, found he had not been able to deal properly with him. If "Master" had not forbidden him to carry weapons of any description, it would have been different. But, without as much as a simple knife to aid him, the Chink explained, he had found the MacCorque very difficult to handle. It had to do with the size and muscular strength of the hands, continually insisted Sing, holding up his yellow fingers. MacCorque's hands were twice the size of any reasonable hands. Sing's were, as Mr. Bunn noted, oddly, for the first time in all the years he had employed the man, the smallest and most elegant hands he had ever seen—ladies not excepted.
"Yes? And that'll be enough from you, tonight, Sing, my lad," said Smiler easily. "Small hands, big heart!" he invented. "You look to me as if every gland in your throat and neck had been squashed up into a kind of mash! Better get to sleep now my lad—and we'll see everything in the morning! Maybe I'll raise your wages, Sing! Must see about that!"
The partners left the indestructible to the slumber which he seemed to need, and went downstairs to play their usual sherry- flavoured prelude to dinner.
IT was over the succession of aperitifs that Smiler announced
that he was getting his ideas pretty neatly arranged.
"I'm bound to admit frankly, Squire," he observed, "that I am a very capable old cock, when I care to be. And the older I grow the more capable I get. That's where I am different from most of you. Take this murder business, for example. Now, I suppose, as far as it's concerned with this particular mystery—if it's concerned at all, which I doubt—your mind is a perfect ragbag of meaningless odds and ends of no value to you or anybody else."
He paused to take a little sherry, and blandly ignoring the fixed glare with which his easily irritated partner was regarding him, went on. "No, in my mind, the thing is shaping up as sweet as a nut—like a jig-saw puzzle half done. Everything is falling into position just as neatly and logically as—as well, as this drop of sherry I'm having before by dinner."
"I've about made up my mind that that American was murdered-by this bad gang—Carnac, the Foons, MacCorque & Co., because he knew the truth about some secret concerning which the gang are blackmailing the Vanestermans," he said softly. "And I've got an idea that part of the price they demand—or soon will demand—is Alison Vanesterman herself. For it's perfectly plain to me that the Colonel and this Yung Foon are just crazy about her. We shall see about that. Well, if I'm right, and I usually am, the question that flies up in my face at once is 'What is this secret.' And how comes it that only the Foons, the Colonel, maybe Cedar and Mr. MacCorque appear to know it—bar that young American, who's dead?"
He smoked for a few seconds in silence, his heavy red face set hard like that of one of the more solid faced of the marble busts of the old Roman Emperors to be seen in museums and other places which sculpture infests.
"Well, Squire, cast your mind back to those scraps of paper. There's not much to go on by 'em, I'll admit—at and rate, to a man with the average sluggish mind—but assuming a blackmailer's secret to exist it looks to me to be pretty plain that it is in some way connected with young Vanesterman. Hey?"
"I don't see that," said Fortworth. "I don't see it at all. It sounds to me like a guess. Anybody can guess—though few sensible folk do."
"All right," beamed Mr. Bunn. "Call it a guess. But just to help out this guess of mine let's look at the hints in those paper scraps that help me guess that guess. I take it, of course, that you've forgotten 'em. Well, I haven't—I know 'em by heart. Take the first:
'lucky thing for
only guess at, anyway
take it or leave it'
"Just keep the words 'Take it or leave it' in your—um—mind, Squire. And out of the second scrap which ran—
'nesterman millions
stop at murder
help young Vanesterman'
"—keep 'stop at murder' and 'help young Vanesterman' in your mind, and remember that young Vanesterman is now beyond help for he's dead. Pass the sherry."
He resumed after a brief pause. "The wording of the third scrap went like this—
'waterless and in
short of a million
allowed to wreck
get what's coming'
"You want to bear that in mind, particularly 'waterless,' Squire, for it was lack of water killed young Dick Vanesterman! The last scrap of paper goes—
'Blanchesson, you will
say 50,000 dollars cold money
Colonel Carnac think
Foon and the hard'
"Now, if this guess—so-called—by you—of mine is anywhere near the truth then with that truth to help me I don't mind saying that I can pretty well write the missing parts of that letter myself."
His eyes gleamed a little under their half-closed lids.
"Can you?" said Fortworth, incredulously. "Well, do so—that's it. Let's hear from you."
Mr. Bunn shook his head.
"I'm not quite ready," he said.
"No. I thought not," said Fortworth flatly.
"But I'll rough out my ideas in the form of say a telegram," said Mr. Bunn. "In a rough sort of way I figure that letter was written to that young American (I'll make another guess and call him Gene Reymar, a reporter on the New York Lens) by one of the gang and it said in effect: 'Reymar, you know the truth behind the secret that Anson Vanesterman is paying us to keep. We'll give you 50,000 dollars not to reveal it. If you refuse the money we shall not stop at murder to prevent your revealing it for you are not going to be allowed to wreck a great scheme and if you try you'll get what's coming to you.'"
Mr. Bunn stopped. "That, at present, is roughly, my reading of it," he said. "Well, Reymar came over to tell Miss Alison all about it, and they intercepted him and killed him!"
"Huh!" went Fortworth. "Maybe you're aiming at the right target after all. But can you hit the bull—the secret. That's the vital thing. What's the secret? Tell me the secret and I'll tell you if you're right!"
"Ah, there you have me, Squire," purred Smiler very blandly. "I don't know it—at present. But I begin to get a glimmer—" he broke off there, for it was at this point that the arrival of Major Sir George Blanchesson, DSO, was announced—rather dubiously—by butler Bloom.
"Afraid the gentleman's drunk, sir," he added.
"O, is that so?" said Mr. Bunn. "Well, I'll come out and take a look at him. Where is he?"
"Standing in the porch, sir," said Bloom.
But there Bloom was wrong.
The ex-major of the "Old Death Watch" was lying face down across the threshold of the open door—stone dead.
"What's this?" snarled Fortworth. "We'll see—" said Mr. Bunn and a second later pointed to the dead man's right hand. It was enormously swollen, completely shapeless, and appeared to consist of a kind of black jelly. The partners stared at each other.
"What did that?" growled Fortworth.
"I can't tell you that, Squire," said Mr. Bunn gravely. "A doctor will probably tell you it's bad blood poisoning. But I doubt if it will occur to him—as it does to me—that it was caused by snakebite—or, at any rate—by snake venom!"
Mr. Bunn checked Bloom as he went to lift the dead major.
"No, no—leave him lie. I want the doctor to see him as he is. We've got to be careful. I'll telephone for a doctor now."
He did so and went back to the hall.
"This can't go on, Squire," he said to Fortworth. "These folk are too damned dangerous—it will be us next. MacCorque knows where Sing comes from and we can't bluff the grinning Colonel by calling in his services again. (Not that he's done anything about that—or even pretended to.) This business has warmed up to a point where it's getting red hot."
"Why can't you call in the police, tell 'em all you know and let them clean up the lot?" demanded Fortworth.
Mr. Bunn shrugged.
"Because there's not enough proof to justify them in sweeping up the whole crowd at once," he said. "I can prove that Yung Foon and MacCorque killed the gamekeeper's dog and entered his house. But what have we got—solidly provable—against Carnac, or Sow Foon? How are we going to prove that the gang murdered that American, or the gamekeeper or this poor wreck here—"
"Come to that," growled Fortworth, "how dye know they did kill him?"
"Look at his hand—and his arm! Only a few hours ago his hand was apparently as sound as mine—now look at it! It couldn't be worse if he had been soaking it in acid ever since he left us in town. Venom—poison. Somebody loaded him up with enough poison to kill a dozen men."
"How did he get here then?"
"Probably because they caught him quite close to this house. It looks to me as if MacCorque got home after his fight with Sing just in time to send out somebody after the Major. They caught him, laid him out, shot this dose of venom into his wrist and left him maybe for dead. The pain rouses him and he staggers up to this place—for which he was aiming anyway—with no notion of what had been done to him, but in agony and probably too far gone to be scared!"
Fortworth nodded. "Yes, maybe you're right. What are—"
The telephone bell rang and Mr. Bunn went to answer it.
He was back almost immediately.
"A cable from Tony. That murdered American was Gene Reymar. The description of the ring was quite enough," he said. "That clears the way a bit." He frowned, thinking intently. "The man I want to get next to—the man we've got to get next to and quick—is the mainspring of this infernal machine—the brains of the gang—the man who never appears. This venom- master—Sow Foon. That's the man."
"What can you prove against him?" snapped Fortworth. "Compared with what he can prove for himself. He's known—famous, apparently—for his anti-venom."
"Yes. I've no doubt that he could prove that he's saved enough—hundreds of lives by his anti-stuff to make it look silly to charge him with supplying stuff to kill folk with. Still, we've got to get at him somehow. And unless we are going to get killed, leaving little Miss Alison to put up with a husband she hates she will have to tell us the truth about things—or all she knows. It's the only chance. For her own sake. I'm going up there now. You will have to wait here for the doctor."
"What, d'ye want me to tell him?" demanded Fortworth. "Just the plain truth—without adding any guesswork. Just explain how we met the poor devil begging in the town, felt sorry for him, and told him to call here for a square meal and a few cast- off bits of clothing. He thanked us—and the next thing we see of him is—like this. No need to mention his name yet—nobody will ask you. You aren't expected to know the name of every tramp on the road. Just stand put on what you know—and no more. And keep your eyes open—for we shall hear from friend MacCorque before long in no uncertain fashion. So watch out."
"You can bet all you ever owed I shall watch out!" growled Fortworth. "And if you feel you ought to shoot—shoot. We've got enough on them to justify that! I don't care for the look of things at all—I'm scared!"
He hurried out to get the car.
"Yes, scared," muttered Fortworth, staring after him. "Like hell you're scared! About as scared as a heavy goods locomotive!" He grinned sparsely. "Still, you're interested, I'll say that much. For you look like being late for your dinner—and it calls for something fairly fancy to drive you to taking the risk of missing your meals! I'll say that much for you, anyway!"
IT was while Mr. Bunn was still some distance from Maiden Fain Manor that he passed the grinning Colonel who, alone in his car, was driving at a deadly dangerous pace. He passed so swiftly that he did not appear to recognize Smiler. It occurred to the old adventurer that in the quick half-second during which he saw the man plainly that his ugly face was white and twisted with rage—but that was half a guess.
"Maybe the little lady has turned him down flat and chanced what may—or may not—happen about that," he told himself, and speeded up. But he had to slow down sharply just before the main gates of Maiden Fain for, just before he turned in, the driver of a huge black car coming from the opposite direction signalled that he, too was turning in through the gateway.
Mr. Bunn braked hard, giving the black car driver the precedence due to him by a few yards. So that as the huge car swung into the drive Smiler was able to see clearly its sole occupant who peered out at him. It was as if a yellow deaths head had framed itself in the window of the car—or so, in that brief moment, lit seemed to Mr. Bunn.
The face was that of an old man, old and haggard and seamed as only the face of a lean and ancient Mongolian can be. Bitter, beady black eyes, a wide mouth, thin-lipped -as a serpent's, and every bone of the face harshly visible under the wrinkled skin. It was the face of a man burnt-out, dying, yet kept alive by the unquenchable flame of some secret and terrible passion. Mr. Bunn named that passion instinctively. That was not difficult for there is no passion that so indelibly hall-marks the face of its possessor. Greed—rapacity—blind, unreasoning; unslakable thirst for more—and more—and yet more. It was the face of a being devoid of compassion, of charity, of comradeship, and of pity; no need, no suffering, no grief could ever stir this yellow ancient from his lust, divert him for the fraction of an inch from the trail on which, like a bloodhound, he had, years ago, forever laid himself.
All that, Smiler Bunn sensed in an instant—and he knew too that he was nearing contact with the "main-spring" of which he had spoken.
Sow Foon!
He stopped his car, his heavy good-humoured face hard and serious. His brows dragged themselves together, as he thought, and almost unconsciously his hand slid quietly to a pocket. He glanced about him, then quietly eased out from that pocket an automatic pistol which he examined with considerable care.
"Well, there's one honest little customer that will do what it's told to do—no more and no less," he said absently, and put the pistol away. Then he turned his car, and ran it close in under the hedge, with its nose pointing for home. He had always been most particular about having his car ready at all times to leave a place quickly. He even roared up his engine and switched off suddenly so that he should have such cylinders as were at the end of their compression stroke full of gas, he left his ignition well advanced, and his gears in a speed which would give him a swift take-off the instant he let in his clutch, after starting in gear with clutch out.
For he was particular about these matters, was Mr. Smiler Bunn. Then, as light on his feet as only a fat man can be, he took a couple of steps to the boundary bank surrounding the Maiden Fain estate, nipped over the fence and drifted into the woodland as silently and unobtrusively as a deer.
A few minutes later he was peering through the shrubs surrounding the lawn on which not so long ago he had taken tea with Alison Vanesterman and her guests. The autumn heat of the day was dying down now, and already the first spectral hint of the twilight was at hand. On the lawn by the tea tables stood Alison Vanesterman, little, lovely, yet somehow lone, facing the Foons—the son and that deadly apparition of the black motor, Sow Foon, his father. Mr. Bunn swiftly judged his distance, hesitated a second, then stayed where he was, listening.
"Ears like a hare—eyes like a damned old vulture!" he muttered. "I always had 'em—always shall!" But he reminded himself of that mainly to give himself confidence. "Yung Foon" was speaking—with low, passionate interruptions from Alison—and Mr. Bunn could catch only a few words. Yet these were enough for his keen, high-strung sense to catch the drift of what they said. He gathered that Col. Carnac that afternoon had asked Alison to be his wife. She had refused and after lingering for a time the Colonel had left in a white rage. Meantime Yung Foon had telephoned for his father to come over to Maiden Fain. He had judged that Alison would refuse the Colonel and he had also judged that she would not refuse him when, as he had just done, he proposed marriage to her. But Alison had refused him not less promptly than she had rejected the grinning Colonel, and evidently he had been pleading with her when his parent arrived—preparing to approve and congratulate. It was, judged by any modern, civilized standard or code, almost ridiculous. By what law or custom, of what strange Asiatic people—certainly not pure Chinese, though possibly approaching it—it was necessary that Yung Foon's immediate ancestor should be present at his betrothal, Mr. Bunn did not know—nor ever knew—nor cared.
All he cared about was that Alison Vanesterman was (for all they knew) alone with these two dangerous and incalculable Asiatics on the edge of dusk. He gently coaxed out from a tight pocket his automatic, and listened tensely.
Suddenly Sow Foon raised his hand slightly and Yung Foon was as suddenly silent. There was in that slight gesture of the elder man something so authoritative and compelling that Alison Vanesterman was silent too. Mr. Bunn craned carefully forward—for he was most desperately anxious to hear what any Asiatic in the world had to say which could chill to obedient silence the daughter of one of the richest Americans of the present day.
Sow Foon spoke. Mr. Bunn never realized quite how deep a breath of relief he drew as he understood that he could hear clearly what the man was saying. The voice of the venom-master was low and harsh and sibilant—but it came from the deep chest and was vibrant so that it reached to Mr. Bunn with perfect distinctness.
"Enough," said Sow Foon—and waited a full minute before he spoke -gain. "Think—think well, Alison!" he said, presently and waited again, waited so long that it seemed almost as if he would never speak again. Mr. Bunn saw the girl blanch and tremble. His heavy brows knotted in an ugly scowl and he slowly raised the dull-hued weapon of precision in his hand and sighted it dead on Sow Foon's heart.
Then he dropped it.
"No!" he said, "Easy—easy—easy's the word."
"Alison!" came the low, slow voice of Sow Foon. "You will marry my son. It is an honour that he desires to bestow upon you! You are young—you do not understand. But you are yet of the age of those who should follow the counsel, obey the instruction of those who are older than you! You will marry my son, and for you he shall set aside his favourite wives in the country where he is powerful and princely!"
"I will not!" said Alison Vanesterman.
"Will you not?" Sow Foon folded his hands. "Ah, will you not?" he said, paused and seemed to think deeply, staring down at the ground, like one rapt and devout. "Yet you will, Alison," he said presently. "And gratefully—even humbly. Even humbly, Alison. You shall come to him meekly with hands folded, head bent, even as I have stood before you. Hands folded, head bowed down, Alison..."
A vibrancy like the thick hiss of one of his own deadly beasts shot into the fabric of his deep voice. "Yes, even on your knees, your shapely knees, if he so desires it! Why not? Because your parent is a man of wealth? How can there be reason in that, when for every million, for every jewel, for every treasure that he can show I can match him two to one, two millions to his one, two jewels to his one, two treasures... and more. Do you question the blood of my son, child?
"How long has the blood of the Vanesterman's run pure? As long as that in the veins of my son, which has been untainted, undefiled for 2,000 years? I do not think you can recoil from my son because of his ancestry Alison... Yet, enough of that. It is enough. I, Sow Foon, say most gravely to you now, Alison, that you shall marry my son or I will blast the name of Vanesterman throughout the world!...
"Though the two living people, Anson and Alison Vanesterman thrust between themselves and me their shield of gold—even though the dead Richard Vanesterman endeavour to interpose his spectral form or force—I shall not be hindered. In the high places, in the far places, I will degrade and debase the name of Vanesterman. I will contrive to the certain end that in no place in all the world shall the name of Vanesterman be whispered—even down to the Kaffirs who crouch like animals in their huts, their kraals, among the miasmas of dark Africa—be whispered without it be linked up with the word 'cowardice!' And associated on the instant with the true story of the cowardice of Richard Vanesterman in the Desert of Morsalbana returning from the dead city of Mors! High or low, rich or impoverished, the noble and the mean, they shall all associate the name of Vanest—"
"O, stop! stop! stop!"
It was a cry of intolerable anguish that was torn from the girl.. Mr. Bunn, from his ambush, again was looking at Sow Foon as he appeared aligned with the sights of his pistol. Never had the old adventurer been nearer laying a man dead. His nerves were now so keyed up, so taut and sensitive, that he felt as it were with his whole body the infinitesimal, microscopic movement of the trigger of the deadly thing in his hand—like a venomous snake's head, moving fractionally to keep its deadly aim. It was impossible to press that trigger one hairsbreadth further without firing—impossible. Yet Smiler held his hand. He felt the cold sweat stealing down his cheeks as, with desperate care he lowered his sights.
"Not yet! Damn you, you old fool, not yet!" It seemed to thrill through his whole body, to trumpet deafeningly in his ears—this peremptory command to all his instincts to refrain from sending a bullet through the man Sow Foon. And so he crouched low in his ambush and saw the girl, wrought up, maybe half-hypnotised, her personality strangled by a stronger and incredibly more evil personality, drop half unconscious into a chair—and yet he did not shoot. His partner Fortworth would have emptied his pistol long before this and charged out on the Foons, raging—but the "old man" stood pat, though it called for every ounce of restraint in his body.
"There's a time for everything—a time for everything!" said Mr. Bunn, almost mechanically to himself. "It isn't time—it—"
A man ran out suddenly from behind the shrubs bordering the lawn with a weapon in the hand extended before him. It was the man Davy Clarke, with both eyes wide—and he came out to kill. But the Foons, father and son, crouched low behind Alison Vanesterman, and like lightning the son snatched from his pocket a thing like a rubber ball with a nozzle. Something jetted past Alison toward the man with the weapon, seemed to burst like a soft shell in his face, and he pitched forward, as instantly senseless as if he had been shot through the brain. He slithered to them, rolling over, so that Alison Vanesterman, half-dazed, stared down full at his face.
"Father!" she cried, and dropped on her knees beside him. It is doubtful whether the remarkable Mr. Bunn ever really understood why he did not shoot both Sow Foon and his son on the spot. Neither of them was more than ten yards from his ambush and he could have sent a bullet through each of them with absolute ease. And with no apprehension concerning the result. He had seen Anson Vanesterman (alias Davy Clarke) apparently killed stone dead in a space of one second by some strange weapon evidently as fearfully efficient as it was novel and he would have been instantly exonerated in any court of law, after the fact were explained, it he had shot both men then and there. Yet he did not shoot. His partner later Explained this by saving that he must have been "fey"—Fortworth's favourite though perhaps rather sketchy interpretation of the word "inspired."
But Mr. Bunn explained it more grandiloquently and perhaps more correctly when he said easily that "this act of genius, in fact, this masterpiece of clever restraint by me, was simply the natural, unconscious working of my remarkable technique—a technique it's taken me a lifetime lived pretty dangerously to learn. There I was," he said later, "behind those bushes, just crazy to blow the brains out of those Asiatic toughs—and I didn't do it. Why? Well, I wasn't alone. I had my invisible pal with me—a pal who will stick to me for the rest of my days because I created him—John Henry Technique his name is—and John was saying, in my soul, not my ear, 'Easy—easy—wait now—don't shoot!' I took his tip—and I was right!"
But for some seconds as he glared out from his covert he was on the razor-edge of firing. The Foons made no effort to go, nor to help Alison Vanesterman raise the body of the man with tattooed hands who so amazingly, to her, had proved to be her father, whom she had believed to be still in New York.
Then he heard Yung Foon say "Wait—wait—it is all right, Alison! It will be all right—he is not hurt!"
That was true. Within the next quarter of a minute—Anson Vanesterman sat up and looked dazedly about him like a man coming out from anaesthesia. The tall Sow Foon pointed to the v long- barrelled revolver lying on the grass. Yung Foon picked it up and handed it to him, with an air of deference and great respect which seemed incongruous between two such scoundrels. The elder man examined the old-fashioned weapon curiously, while aided by Alison Mr. Vanesterman rose slowly and went to a chair. The Foons exchanged a few words. Then the younger man turned to Alison and spoke gently. Mr. Bunn caught something about "thinking carefully—discussing with her father—decision to- morrow!"
But the girl pointed to their car.
"Take it now! My decision is never! Do what you wish! This at least is an end of two months of blackmail. Leave this place!"
They stared. Then Sow Foon spoke quietly to his son and the pair moved away.
"We shall return," said Sow Foon deliberately as he went. "When the flames of hysteria and anger have died down to the cold ashes of sober reflection and passionless reason."
They entered their car and went away. Alison turned to her father, slipping her arm around him.
"Are you all right now, my dear—could you walk to the house—or shall I get help?"
She broke off as Mr. Bunn moved out to them, looking very big in the fading light, and with his pistol still in his hand.
"Help is here, Miss Alison!" He glanced at "Davy Clarke" and beamed. "It never was quite so far from you as you thought! Though, thank God that puffball thing was evidently not meant to kill. How dye feel now, Dave—er—Mr. Vanesterman?"
The American stood up, one hand lightly on his daughter's shoulder.
"Why, it's odd—but I feel almost normal—a little exhilarated in that queer way one sometimes feels exhilarated after the gas the dentists use—but otherwise I find it difficult to believe I was unconscious not five minutes ago."
"It was some sort of gas they used," said Mr. Bunn. "Did you notice the sort of puffball affair he shot it from? Another of their little novelties, I make no doubt. If he had meant to kill you he would have used the same sort of venom-filled glass bullet that was used to kill Gene Reymar," he added slowly, watching Alison.
But before she could speak the old adventurer went on quickly. "But we've all got too much sense to discuss it here. I think we'd better get indoors to the most private room you've got and all have a friendly little chat there. Things—one way and another—want -talking over, if ever things did in this world! I'll say frankly I don't like the look of 'em!" They turned to the house.
"But you, father—how comes it that Davy Clarke is brought here—dressed like this—tattooed—disguised!" cried Alison, one arm linked in his, pressing it close to her.
Vanesterman laughed quietly.
"Why, my dear, because I thought much the same as our friend here thinks—I didn't like the look of things and I came to England by a boat that sailed just after yours, in order to keep an eye on my girl!"
He glanced at his hands. "The tattooing is not 'fast,' my dear. It will disappear—when washed with a certain chemical. But it was pretty good disguising—don't you think so, Flood?—when one's own daughter didn't recognize you!"
Mr. Bunn beamed.
"She recognized you with her heart—if not with her eyes. Giving you a soft job here proves that—near enough!"
Alison nodded. "That is exactly and perfectly true," she cried softly. "I did not recognize him with my eyes—but I knew the instant I saw him that he was somebody of tremendous importance to me!"
They passed into the big house. The girl took them straight to a very cosy room, rather small, which he used as a boudoir. She would have locked the door but Mr. Bunn gently stayed her.
"Before, you do that, my dear Miss Alison, I should like to prescribe for our father a good, hearty whisky and soda—he looks pale to my mind, and, anyway, a little natural warm stimulant can hurt no man—or men! Hey, Mr. Vanesterman?"
The millionaire agreed right heartily—and so it was over a pair of emptied and refilled glasses that Mr. Bunn presently said, flatly, that which he conceived it necessary to be said—by anyone who accredited himself with being a truly four-square friend of the family.
"I find that I can usually explain myself better from behind a cigar," he began, proffering a leather cigar case, almost as big as a small cabin trunk to Anson Vanesterman, "so, if Miss Alison has no objec—"
But Alison was already reaching for a match for the cigar which daddy dearly intended to do business with. All that duly seen to and satisfactorily settled, Mr. Bunn continued. And the easy, comradely, slightly saloon-bar urbanity which he had been using suffered a gradual change into something approaching grimness. Though he did not talk much at first, for even as he settled back into his comfortable chair his roving and ever-ready eye settled on a photograph in a heavy silver frame, set on a table close by what was evidently Alison's favourite settee.
He rose, walked over and inspected it. He took it up, without apology, and looked at it intently. The photograph was that of a young man and a long time he studied the picture with a keen and appraising regard. It was a fine face at which he looked—calm, clear-cut, keen yet steady, with direct eyes and a firm mouth, not without a hint of ready humour about the lips. A handsome, capable looking-boy—self-reliant, disciplined, courageous. Not unlike Col. Lindbergh in appearance.
He nodded gravely as he put the picture down. "Your boy, Vanesterman?" He turned to the girl. "Your brother, Dick, Miss Alison? Yes, I know. It is about him I want to speak to you both—if you will let me!"
He saw their lips tighten—he saw their face become polite masks—even as he expected. He moved slowly back to his chair.
"I am a queer old customer," he said slowly. "And one way and another, I suppose I prove that by my actions. But I mean well—and I never set out to be prying and inquisitive in a meaningless, wanton sore of way—I want to ask you to do me the favour of believing that about me—and my partner, Mr. Black—and my personal servant Sing... Yes." He smoked for a second or two in silence.
"In a second-hand sort of way my partner and I found the body of Gene Reymar—and we found one or two other things—'clues' I suppose folk would call them—little things which we have kept to ourselves but which we have followed up. Because of those things several attempts have been made to blot us out—utterly out Well, we are used to that, in a way. Needn't go into that, now. But they caused us to make a few inquiries." He paused for a few seconds, apparently to ensure the perfect combustion of his cigar and the masterly absorption of his whisky and soda.
"I won't—I'd sooner not—go into the details of those inquiries just at present," he resumed presently. "For one thing there isn't time—for another it isn't necessary at present. The result of our inquiries led us to the conclusion that you, Mr. Vanesterman, are being blackmailed by somebody—behind whom Sow Foon and Col. Carnac are acting—on account of some mystery connected with your boy, Dick Vanesterman. Wait a minute, please—let me finish. I see you are going to deny it—but think again—for God's sake, think again, Vanesterman! For although I think you and Miss Alison here (as far as her life is concerned) are safe enough as long as you pay—I've got to tell you that mine and Black's and Sing's are not. We are doomed men! The Foons and Carnac and his strangler MacCorque mean to get us—though we are not men easily got! Still—I am pretty well satisfied that they will get us—just as they got Reymar and that perfectly innocent and harmless gamekeeper, Cooper—unless we act quickly.. Still, leave that. The truth is this. We believe, my partner and I—as you, Dave, I mean Vanesterman, hinted—that there is some secret about Dick Vanesterman concerning which this gang is bleeding you. Now, there's this. As long as anybody cares to pay blackmail they're helpless. The instant they refuse to pay, then the blackmailer becomes helpless."
Vanesterman raised his hand.
"We assume all that to be true," he said.
"And still there remains the possibility that the blackmailer's silence may be cheap at his price!" Mr. Bunn! nodded affably. "Yes—maybe. But is the man who is being blackmailed the best judge of that?" and promptly answered himself. "No, he isn't—he's the world's worst judge."
He watched Vanesterman through the smoke of his cigar.
"Yes—that's true," said the millionaire, slowly. "He is—yet it's possible that some secrets are absolutely undivulgeable!"
Mr. Bunn got up, heavily, went across the room and picked up again the photograph of Dick Vanesterman. "I know that secret concerns this good-looking, this straight-looking boy," he said. "And I want to say this to you both. I am a judge of faces—I have lived queerishly by being a judge of faces for many years—and if any man, I care not a damn (pardon me, Miss Alison) who or what he is, pretends that there was ever in the life of this boy an undivulgeable—an unspeakable secret—I am prepared to tell him something to his face that—that I wouldn't whisper behind the back of a decent dog!"
He gripped the photograph so hard that he cracked the glass, as he leaned to Vanesterman.
"As I judge it, Gene Reymar found out the truth of this secret about your boy, Vanesterman. And, for some reason at which I can only guess, this gang tried to buy him off. He declined and came to England to tell Miss Alison here the truth of that secret. The gang knew it—intercepted him—tricked him—and shot him as coolly as a gamekeeper shoots a crow—And the blackmailer remains safe—and can continue to any price—even to the hand in marriage, if you call it marriage, of Miss Alison herself—"
"It could never come to that," said Vanesterman.
"No!" Mr. Bunn eyed him. "I see that! But it is coming devilishly close, my friend!" He studied the millionaire for a few moments, his heavy face red and lined, his eyes like green flint, his brows a black knot.
"If it were only a matter of money I wouldn't bother any more about it. But it isn't! Money is the least thing in this damned tangle. There's wish I had an Alison like you—if there's Alison's happiness, there's Dick's reputation, there's your peace of mind, Vanesterman, involved in it—and, after that, there's us at Chalkacres—my partner, my servant, and me—we're dead men there, we're, dead men all—unless we get the truth of all this, and get it quick! And there are more behind us—there's that chap, Wheel—the reporter, who called at tea-time on the lawn, Alison. He's no reporter, Alison—he's the best detective that ever parked himself at Scotland Yard. You can't dodge an organisation of pure-bred bloodhounds like that—not in the long run, Vanesterman. They'll get the murderer of Reymar in the end—and they'll get your secret, too. But why let them? Next thing the press will have it. Dye want that? I ask you, then, to tell me the secret about which you are being blackmailed—and once I know it, let me handle these blackmailing murderers that are making you pay!"
He ceased and waited. Alison Vanesterman, his face wry and aged, looked at Alison and after a lapse of many seconds the girl drew breath deeply and nodded.
Vanesterman sighed. "Very well. God knows I can endure, no more," he said, and turned to Smiler Bunn.
"I, too, Mr. Flood, consider myself to be a judge of men. And I believe you—all that you have said. Something of which was born of the hints I gave you when I was; Davy Clarke. It seems that our secret has caused the death of two men already—and may cause the death of more including yourself. The telling of it, you say, means that more murder will be checked. Well, then there is no time to argue! And it is necessary to trust! Very well. I, too, will stand on my belief in my ability to judge men—and I tell you the secret of this impossible blackmail. It is the story of an alleged great failure—the story of my boy, Dick—a story I have never believed but which I shall never be able to disprove. Listen!"
The millionaire, his face white, settled in his chair, looking steadily at Mr. Bunn, "I shall need few words," he said. "For I shall tell you this story nakedly, like a news item. And all that it means to me—and to Alison—I shall leave you to guess—or to fail to guess—as it may be.
"Something over a year ago an exploration expedition left New York in search of the ruins of the ancient city of Mors in the desert of Morsalbana in South America. It was commanded by Col. Carnac with my boy second in command. The cost was jointly guaranteed by Sow Foon, as Carnac's backer, and by me, as Dick's. The expedition failed. It came to a legion of desert—Morsalbana—they pushed in too far from water—and—many of the water holes upon which they relied proved to be so heavily charged with natural arsenic that no man could drink water from them and live. Several of the party died and the others were reduced to—spectres.
"I'm not going to be descriptive, Mr. Flood, -for you can picture these men quite easily for yourself. There they were—half-dead, half-insane from fatigue and privation, reeling across that appalling desolation of blinding heat and poisonous dust. Some died—as I said—and one broke down—my boy, Dick. I am repeating this from the only source available to me—or to anyone—namely, the report of Col. Carnac, one of the only three survivors who fought their way back to safety.
"This report—call it No. 1 Report—was to form the basis of a book by Col. Carnac faithfully describing the aims of the expedition, its experiences and the causes of its failure. But, with the exception of Carnac, and his secretary, MacCorque, of Sow Foon and his son, Yung Foon, Report No. 1 has never been seen by any living soul. For this reason—as soon as he had written it and had it formally witnessed by Yung Foon and MacCorque, the other survivors, he came to me and read it to me. He was in some distress—or he very skilfully feigned that distress. The part of the report which caused this distress was that part which gave the detailed circumstances of the death of my son."
Anson Vanesterman paused for a moment, thinking. His face was set hard, like ivory, and his eyes were full of wretchedness.
"There is no need to repeat the tragedy in detail," he went on, speaking with a curious, dragging difficulty. "But it was all set down in that formal report that Dick, at the very moment when he seemed, of all the members of the expedition, to be enduring all the horror and privation with the greatest fortitude and the coolest courage, broke down suddenly—lost his nerve utterly—and one morning was missing from the spot where the survivors had dropped down at nightfall for a few hours' sleep. They had yet three days of bitter struggle to come before they could hope to reach the nearest water and they had about a quart of water left (among four men) to do it on. That quart of water was missing also—said No. 1 Report."
Mr. Bunn's eye's grew stony and his mouth grim, but he said nothing.
"At the time Carnac read this report to me, and at this point of it, I thought him considerate and tactful. He paused to explain to me that in spite of the obvious and ugly inference to be drawn from the fact that Dick and the water were missing, he and his two companions resolutely declined to draw that inference."
"Overdone, by God! That's a lie, at least. Men in their position don't decline to draw inferences of that kind—" interjected Mr. Bunn, violently, then apologized for his interruption.
Vanesterman nodded and continued. "But, Report No. 1 continued, they were obliged to recognise the truth a day later, when pushing on in a last desperate and practically hopeless effort, they stumbled on Dick's body, and not five yards away from it lay the water-bottle, still containing nearly a pint. Near the bottle was the crushed body of a species of small but intensely venomous horned sand viper. Dick's body was almost unrecognizable. He had obviously been bitten and died there."
Again Mr. Bunn exploded. "A man die of snake-bite in a desert and yet leave a pint of water undrunk! Damn that for a tale! I beg pardon go on!"
"This discovery dispelled all doubt about the water that may have lingered in the minds of the survivors. Richard Vanesterman—continued Report No. 1—had lost his nerve, stolen the water and leaving the others to their fate, had made a dash for life which might have succeeded but for the snake bite."
Deeply moved, Mr. Vanesterman stopped again. Alison had risen and was staring out of the window across the darkening lawn, her back to the men.
"What did you do about their Report. No. 1?" asked Mr. Bunn. Vanesterman stared at him steadily. "It charged and, on the testimony of the sole three witnesses remaining: alive, proved that my only son died the death of a coward and traitor; No man living could controvert that evidence—bringing proof. What would any man in my position have done? The Vanesterman's are proud of their name—it will be an ill day for America when Americans lose family pride in their names and reputations. I was not going to have Dick's published—as—as—a coward and traitor throughout the world. So I persuaded Col. Carnac to sell Report No. 1 to me, and God forgive me, to prepare a second report!"
"How much did you pay for it?" asked Mr. Bunn.
"Ten million dollars down!"
"TEN—MILLION—DOLLARS!" In spite of his determination to interrupt no more, Mr. Bunn was so startled at the magnitude of the sum that he re-echoed the words automatically. He caught himself up at once. "I'm sorry! Go on—what happened then?"
"Col. Carnac prepared Report No. 2 and that part of the report which dealt with the circumstances of Dick's death was written by my direction—that was one of the rights I had bought. Report No. 2 has been made public in the press, though the book containing it has not yet been published. The circumstances of Dick's death as related in Report No. 2 are as follows:—"
But here Mr. Bunn broke in for the last time. "I know them," he said quietly. "Dick is said, in that report, to have given his ration of water to a poisoned man and lost his own life as a consequence. Is that right?"
Anson Vanesterman nodded. He still stared steadily at Mr. Bunn—but Mr. Bunn knew that he could not see, for the grey eyes were dim with the tears that even the millionaire's iron pride could not quite restrain. Again Mr. Bunn got up and went across to pick up the photograph of the boy and again he studied it with a minute and intensely keen regard. Finally he put it down.
"No! No! Damn it, no!" he half-shouted. "That isn't the face of a man who steals his comrades' last water. It's the face of a man who gives his last water! I say so—and I understand faces!"
"I, too, said so—in Report No. 2. But I can't prove it!" he said drearily.
Mr. Bunn's fist came down on the table with a crash. He was really moved. "Can't you! Well, I will! So help me God Almighty, I'll prove it! And before long, at that!"
He went across and poured himself a whisky and soda of truly staggering strength—as was his extraordinary custom in moments of extreme mental stress. "There's something all wrong—as you yourself know—about this. It's too slick—too easy for them. Their tale is too water-tight altogether—it hangs together too perfectly. Yet —now—I can see holes in it as big as torpedo holes in battleships. For instance, if this story is dead straight and true why did! they kill Gene Reymar for knowing the truth? Hey, Vanesterman? Well, now I'll tell you, though you probably have guessed it for yourself. But it helps me to say it aloud—I like to hear the sound of my own voice giving utterance. Take these reports. No. 2 is untrue—we can cut that out. No. 1 is Sow Foon's—he's really the mind at the back of this little organization—and if that's a true record then I'm no judge of a report So that we've got to come to the conclusion that behind No. 1 report is another set of facts which are the true facts—and the facts which Gene Reymar discovered, God knows how. They killed him because he knew the real truth and cams over here to tell Miss Alison—probably he had hopes about that, hey, my dear?"
Alison nodded.
"He wanted me to marry him in New York. I would not promise—I wish I had. It might have saved his life. I did not know he had any idea at all that my father was being blackmailed. But he must have had—one never knows what a good newspaperman knows. He evidently set out to find the real truth and succeeded. He knew that if he could bring me good news—news that he could prove Report No. 1 untrue—I would marry him if only out of sheer gratitude. Mr. Bunn nodded.
"Right. That settles it completely in my mind. Report No. 1 is a lie from, start to finish."
Vanesterman nodded. "I have always felt that—and I have said it But it has to be proved a lie!"
"Reymar did it, and if is was possible for him it's possible for us," declared Mr. Bunn. "And I'll go so far as to say that I've already got an opening or two in my mind. But I want to work them out a little more carefully before I say any more. How would it be if you rode over and took breakfast with us at Chalkacres tomorrow? My partner and I will have things pretty well cut and dried by then."
They promised that and so Mr. Bunn left. They wanted him to stay and dine, but he knew better. "Dunno—I know when three is a multitude and two is a joy," he said, "You just be happy together—and let the old man go his way and get on with his bit of work. Besides," he added. "I've got a very good dinner waiting at home for me—a first-class red mullet, we call it the woodcock of the sea, a rare good fish; a couple of ducklings au Porto—that par-roasted and braised in a casserole, with port wine sauce—and a few odds and ends of that kind. Trust the old man to battle along somehow for himself—while you are looking forward to breakfast after an early ride tomorrow!"
They watched his car steal down the drive.
"I like him, and he is very acute and clever! I feel sure; he's going to help put things right!" said Alison softly.
Vanesterman nodded. "I agree with you, my dear. He's a queer customer—has had a pretty mixed past, I should say, like your old daddy—"
Alison laughed. "Well, he's an old friend of yours—he knew you in Texas ever so long ago when you were Silver Creek Slim!"
The millionaire looked surprised and ashamed. "You don't say! Why, Alison, I'd forgotten him. Clean. It's a thing I don't like doing—forgetting a single one of the boys. I'm getting old, my dear!"
"You're not! You're just worried!" remonstrated Alison "And yet, somehow, I fancied I knew him—in a vague sort of way. He's very like a man I knew in Coyote City who steered a faro bank. It was square—but you have to say it just that way—it was square! With a kind of definite accent on the 'was'".
Mr. Vanesterman chuckled faintly. "Never mind! He's doing his best for us. And if I'm any judge of men he's square enough in this—this—awful business."
"He believes in Dick" said Alison quietly. "I would love him for that even if he were a pickpocket—and I suspect he and his friends are in dreadful danger—mainly on our account!"
Her father nodded. "Yes—so do I. They know something we don't. I shall be pretty frank with them to-morrow. If there is any danger coming to them because of us—or Dick—I guess I have a right to be in it!"
His lean, competent face was hard as he crossed to a table, picked up the ancient revolver and replaced it in its nest under his left armpit. "Meantime, my dear, we will have a nice quiet dinner—just ourselves together. Can you -put over a painless hint to Lady Cedar?"
"O, yes, Cedar would be the first to suggest it, daddy. I'll go and arrange it."
But neither she nor any of the servants could find Lady Cedar anywhere in that great house. And naturally it did not occur to them to telephone genial Mr. Bunn a Chalkacres Hall to inquire about her. And even if they had he probably would have evaded telling them, that on his way down Maiden Fain Manor carriage drive he had met the vividly full-blown lady, and seized with a species of inspiration, had stopped the car, greeted her cordially, informed her that she was in a position that threatened shortly to become so perilous that it might even end with her on a hangman's drop with a hangman's rope around her neck.
A woman, with an easy conscience would have smiled at that genial bit of conversation and contemptuously have dismissed Mr. Bunn as drunk or demented. But Lady Cedar did neither. On the contrary, she turned the colour of stone, and all but fainted. She had to snatch at the handle of the car door to hold herself up on suddenly falling knees.
"What do you mean?" Lady Cedar gasped.
"I'm afraid it will take too long to explain in this public place, my dear," said Mr. Bunn "Come along and dine with Mr. Black and me at Chalkacres and we'll explain over our wine."
She hesitated, staring at him. He saw the colour slowly come back to her face.
"Oh, very well. That will be nice," she said. "I expect Alison won't mind." She stepped into the seat beside Mr. Bunn.
"You know the answer to those riddles, Cedar," he replied. "And a little brutality more or less—for your own good—won't hurt you. Unless I miss my little guess you are used to brutality!"
She covered her face swiftly with her white hands.
"Ah! ah! am I not? Such brutality as you cannot guess at," she said, bitterly. Mr. Bunn, from the corner of an eye, saw that she was not acting.
"Ah, well, don't cry about it. You'll be all right in care of Mr. Black and myself. Just answer any questions we ask you over dinner—truthfully, mind—and we'll take care of you!"
She had a pretty virile spirit, and, in spite of her fears, it flared up again. "You are extraordinarily lofty and patronizing, Mr—er—Flood," she explained, not untruthfully. "Suppose I stop this car and leave you! As I can—for I imagine you are not kidnapping me!"
Mr. Bunn's face was set like cement as he promptly stopped the car, reached across her and swung open the door.
"There's your way, Lady Cedar!" he said. "Go if you want to. I'm not kidnapping you. But, before you go, listen to this—last night MacCorque, the man with gorillas hands, or some hireling of his, killed your husband, Major Sir George Blanchesson, because he wanted to be free to marry you—as Col. Carnac will never do. He will throw you to MacCorque! Also—that reporter who came during tea at Maiden Fain this afternoon is no reporter. He is, instead, about the best detective at Scotland Yard and he is engaged on the murders of Gene Reymar and gamekeeper Cooper—not to mention the attempted murder of Messrs. Flood and Black and their servants Sing and Bloom. And Gene Reymar knew the truth about Dick Vanesterman and the Morsalbana expedition—and, lastly, Cedar, my dear; I, know the truth about the truth that Gene Reymar knew! Am I a man to fall out with? I ask you—If you think so—so be it. There's your way—door open and all! I don't want to keep you against your wish! Never did that to a woman in my life!"
For a few seconds she thought. Then she put out a slim, white hand and drew the car door shut with a bang. Her face had softened.
"You carry too many guns for me," she said oddly. "I think you are going to save me from my own folly. Drive on, Mr. Flood! A few seconds ago I hated you. Now I am so grateful that I feel nearer loving you!"
"Yes?" said Mr. Bunn as he trod on his gas. "No need to love me. It's my partner who needs loving, Lady Cedar. A good fellow—one of the best. Sulky for lack of love. Nothing more—nothing less. He'll make you happy in less than no time. You play the straight game with us—we'll play the straight game with you. That clear? Good. Just as well—for it's five minutes to dinner time. Still, that's all right! This car can do ninety miles an hour. You watch me land us home to a well-earned meal, my dear—a red mullet, baked in buttered paper, a duckling au Porto, and a few little things of that kind! The whole well-earned! Mark that, Cedar!"
He laughed as the great car leaped forward toward it all.
Mr. Bunn did not think so much of Lady Cedar Blanchesson that he would have needed the aid of adding machines to amass the total of his good opinion—but he certainly thought none the less of her because, that evening she evinced not the slightest sorrow for the passing of her husband "Mad George," late of the Old Death Watch, now lying in the mortuary at Salisbury.
The doctor sent for by Fortworth had telephoned for an ambulance to that end, and after the briefest examination he had said that the man was diseased from his head to his heels and death could mean nothing to him but a cessation of pain and misery—the species of pain and misery one brings on oneself. He could not have lived another month!
But, however that may have been, the Lady Cedar spoke quite frankly about him.
"Of the dead say nothing ill," she quoted. "And indeed I will say no more of him than this, that he was a stark blackguard by nature, by instinct, by training, and by inclination! He was a scoundrel gifted—or cursed—with a happy knack of enlisting sympathy of the compassionate, the kindness of the generous, and the love of those who are foolish enough to love easily. He was a charming blackguard in his day—but he outgrew the charm instead of blackguardism."
She lifted her glass of Burgundy with a steady, and very beautiful hand, sipped it, replaced it and continued:
"Of the dead say nothing ill." she repeated. "Yes, if it is an ill thing to tell the truth, then I do an ill thing when I say that George Blanchesson snapped for me as a dog—a wealthy one—snaps at a bone. This at an age when it was almost impossible that I could be other than spotless, my experienced friends, and he turned me into the—the—perfectly delightful creature that now dines with you here! That is the truth! If it be ill to utter it—I can claim at least that I did not invent the habit of speaking or of glorifying the truth! I am what I am—but I am never voluntarily a liar and a hypocrite!"
She stared at them—her magnificent eyes like jewels. "So much for George Blanchesson—and so much for me! It would suit me the most perfectly at all if you never mentioned his name again!"
Fortworth raised his glass to her.
"And me!" he declared, almost violently.
Mr. Bunn's eyes twinkled as he raised and very carefully "took off" his wine.
"I hate being in a minority," he said. "It will suit me just as well to forget that vendor of stolen roses as it would probably suit him, to be forgotten!" (But he added the last of that entirely to himself).
So much for Mad George of the Old Death Watch.
It is entirely true that a man, sooner or later, reaps as he sows. It seemed, during the next hour, to Mr. Bunn that Lady Cedar resigned herself to the fact that she was due soon to be Mrs. Henry Black or, more exactly, Lady Cedar Black—why throw away a useful title?—from the moment it was so unanimously agreed that Sir George Blanchesson should be consigned to the utter oblivion which probably would have suited him best.
Mr. Bunn, enjoying his dinner, perceived that this was going to be good for Fortworth. It was going to soften him and make him genial and kind, and less prone to argue and quarrel with his partner. Any arguing and quarrelling required could be performed with his wife. Yes—Mr Bunn was going to like his partner even better as a married man. Meantime... the well-fed adventurer leaned back in his chair, surveying from behind his cigar smoke, and coffee steam and the jewel-like glow if his liqueur brandy, the conversational by-play of Lady Cedar and his partner.
BUT he neither listened carefully nor surveyed them seriously. For he had promised the Vanestermans good news in the morning and he was wondering where he was going to get it. He was physically comfortable—but that was where the comfort finished. And he was not so sure even of that. He felt fairly certain that Sing of the slender hands had temporarily put out of action Mr. MacCorque of the strangler's hands.
But one swallow is far indeed from creating a Summer. There was behind MacCorque the grinning Colonel, and no doubt other aids. There was, also Sow Foon, the venom master, and his son—and their aids. MacCorque would have told them all about Sing—they knew where Sing came from—and it was impossible to decide that they, these killers who killed so readily, so scientifically and so easily, should sit still and do nothing.
Sooner or later—probably sooner—the gang would start to get Sing and Sing's employer and Sing's employer's partner. They were bound to try.
Mr. Bunn renewed his old brandy and felt comforted because the blinds were drawn and the curtains drawn close. It was, he decided, a thankless business, whichever way one cared to look at it. With luck, Anson Vanesterman might be relieved of a blackmail which, formidable, even colossal as it was, yet was no more than a trifling drain on his immense resources. But one could not raise the dead—and no conclusion of the affair but that could make the millionaire happy.
There was no doubt that Sow Foon & Co. had a watertight case against Anson Vanesterman. He wondered what Vanesterman would do if Yung Foon or the Colonel persisted in including Alison as part of the price of substituting Report No. 2 for Report No 1; he wondered what truth, if any Gene Reymar had discovered to make him death-worthy in the eyes of the gang; he wondered many things as he brooded over his coffee and liquor.
He decided that Lady Cedar might as well be invited bluntly to tell all she knew—though he feared it was not much, and he was right. He broke in on the conversation between the lady and Fortworth, demanding this. His eyes were like dull green stone.
"I'm sorry to seem to butt in on a friendly conversation," He said, "but things are just a trifle concentrated. Squire—and if we're going to live through the night we might as well try to begin to understand what's what. I want to ask Lady Cedar to tell us a few things—and to answer a few questions."
"I don't see why she should be bothered," declared Fortworth—inclined to bristle.
"Maybe you don't, Squire," agreed Mr. Bunn blandly. "But I do. And I think she does."
She did. But Mr. Bunn's long, and patient questioning elicited no more from her than the facts that she had been introduced to the Vanestermans by the Colonel, who, in the main, had been friendly to her in New York. She did not dwell on the friendliness of the Colonel, nor did Mr. Bunn press her about it. She had borrowed money from the Colonel on board the liner on which she had made his acquaintance, and later, a good deal of money—so much that the total, coupled with a few rather ugly threats, had convinced her that Col. Carnac was not a man to quarrel with. He had desired her to do certain things—moderately harmless, they had seemed to her, and she had done them. Chief of these things had been to gain the post of companion to Alison during her stay in England, and to persuade her to select Maiden Fain Manor as a desirable estate to buy as an English residence.
These things she had accomplished, and, subject to certain minor matters, these were all the Colonel required of her.
"Yes?" interrupted Mr. Bunn. "Why did you decline to recognize Gene Reymar when you first saw his dead body being carried out to the Police car?"
She nodded to him.
"I thought you would ask that," she said, smiling queerly. "I have thought a good deal about that. Indeed, I am not quite sure about it now—but I think it was mainly due to an instinct of self-protection. I knew him. When I saw him brought out from the wood I recognized him at once. But something said to me that I should be wrong to say that I knew him. I did no want to be mixed up in the murder. I mentioned it all to the Colonel. He said I was right—but he insisted on my bringing him around to see you that night. He really has done some good amateur detective work, I believe."
She studied Mr. Bunn with doubtful eyes.
"I knew that Gene Reymar adored Alison Vanesterman. I guessed he had come over here with news of some kind for her. And I suspected that his news meant trouble for us." Her voice became a whisper. "I was afraid—afraid to make a mistake—and I was afraid that he had been killed by Col. Carnac or one of the Foons."
She caught her breath. "I don't think you men know what it is to be afraid—in the way that I have been afraid for so long... of the Colonel, that smiling tiger, of the Foons, those smooth vipers, of MacCorque, the vilest of them all. Yet I could do nothing else. I dared not do a thing that might offend the Colonel. You see, I have no money—except what he allows me.... O, I am no good—no good!" She reached for her liqueur—but her hand met Fortworth's and was held close.
"I am poor—poor, you understand. I was afraid to offend the Colonel. Do you think that I would accept the position of companion to anyone if I were not so penniless? I?... After all my grandfather was a Somebody—never mind whom or what—but at least I am entitled to say I am well bred!"
Mr. Bunn nodded.
"There's a lot of the well-bred who are poor, these days!" he said. "Yet I can't see why you, such a friend of the Colonel's, should be so poor when he has taken, not so long ago, something like a half or a third of ten million dollars —two million pounds—from Alison Vanesterman. Surely—a trifle for you out of that?"
"What!" said Lady Cedar. "Two million pounds!... Are you mad?"
"No, not very mad," said Mr. Bunn. "Didn't he give you anything at all of his sharks share of that?"
"Nothing," said Lady Cedar. "He has lent me, all told, the colossal sum—of fifteen hundred pounds—after all the trouble I had taken to become Alison's companion and to persuade her to get her father to buy Maiden Fain Manor! You see, they wanted the place Alison was to have for her change of scene—her English visit somewhere not too far from Sow Foon's place—"
"Why?" demanded Fortworth, heavily.
"I don't know—any more than I know why Mr. Vanesterman should have paid the Colonel, or Sow Foon, or both, that gigantic sum of money. Ten million dollars, you said. But, in the name of common sense, why?"
Mr. Bunn looked at her keenly.
"That's what we are trying to find out," he said mildly, for he saw that she knew nothing about the method or grounds of the enormous blackmail.
"Haven't you any idea at all of any reason why they killed Gene Reymar?" he asked.
Lady Cedar shook her head.
"None, except that possibly they feared Alison might accept him as a husband. She was rather interested in him in New York! The Colonel is in love with Alison—why he threatened to strangle me—gripped me—when I intervened as he was becoming too assiduous to Alison!"
Mr. Bunn smiled—widely, genuinely, profusely. He rose.
"Yes, my dear, you are a good sort. You may have had a rough passage till now but you've kept more of your—your natural nice thinking—than you know. I think my old partner has picked wisely and well! I'm glad of that—for you're a beautiful thing, Cedar—and I'll give you a wedding present that will dazzle the pair of you! I'm a man with a natural gift for summing people up—aunt that so, Squire."
Amazingly, Fortworth agreed. He was evidently in love—not quite himself.
"And I sum you up as a very charming sportswoman who has been more sinned against than sinning—what the devil's that!"
He turned like a startled tiger. His arm flickered and miraculously, there appeared in his great fist, a big blue automatic pistol. Somebody was knocking violently at the big main door. They could feel the walls of the room vibrate to that furious summons. "Who's that, at this hour of the night?" growled Fortworth.
The door opened to admit Mr. Ferdinand Bloom, pale and sober. "There's something—I mean somebody, knocking at the door, sair!" he said, one hand gripping the door post.
"Why advertise it to us? Go and see who it is!" roared Fortworth.
Bloom swayed.
"No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. It can't be done—I'm scared, sir!"
"What d'ye mean, scared? You're tight—not scared! What is there to be scared of, man?"
But before Bloom could answer, he was as it were plucked out of the picture by someone behind him—Sing, the "old indestructible," as Mr. Bunn oft-times called his super-valet. His neck was swollen enormously, his lips torn, his ears torn, but his deep slanting eyes were glittering with a queer light as he spoke.
"Bloom allee same dlunk and flightened, master! He no good! Me going!"
A fresh burst of knocking on the door jarred through the house.
"Me going, master!"
He turned from the door.
Mr. Bunn swung through the door after him. "Me going too, damn it all!" he said emphatically.
A stalk-legged but tubby man reeled into the hall as Sing swung back the door. He, too, bore abundant marks of recent personal battle, but these, like Sing, he appeared to ignore. His frightful hands hung low at his sides like clamps at the end of steel ropes.
"Lady Cedar Blanchesson is in this house," he said in a queer hoarse uncertain tenor that nevertheless was uncannily ferocious. "I have called to escort her home!"
"Ah, you have, have you? You have!" said Mr. Bunn, his fingers gripped round Sing's slender wrist. "You have a royal chance of escorting Lady Cedar, home, my lad," continued Mr. Bunn, flushing slightly. "You'll have to learn how to talk to folk a little more, MacCorque, before you find anybody likely to consign a lady to your care at this hour of the night. Keep those hands down, you alligator!" he roared suddenly, and stepped back.
"Master?" implored the Chink avidly at his side.
"O, all right," said Mr. Bunn, suddenly, and released his grip on Sing's wrist "Settle it among yourselves, you tigers!"
He stared, muttering, as MacCorque and Sing eyed each other.
"I'm fey—that's what I am. This means another inquest one way or the other. But Sing's got the lad's measure—for a fortune! Good luck to him; this night sees the finish of this affair—I know it—for I'm as fey as the devil. And glad I am—"
He broke off as Sing, having given Strangler MacCorque room and time to enter further into the big hall, banged the door too and wheeled like a fierce but slightly invalid cat on the MacCorque. And he, too, was not less fierce and at least as invalid. They gripped.
Mr. Bunn stepped quite clear of them. He had entirely made up his mind about them.
If Sing could win without his help, good. If he could not Mr. Bunn had decided quite deliberately, to shoot MacCorque before the man could strangle Sing. For Sing was valuable to Mr. Bunn—and MacCorque was a blot on the face of the earth—valueless.
Mr. Bunn was worked up to cruelty point. His blood, so to express it, was running red-hot in his veins—though within ten minutes it was to be like ice.
"Now, let's see what you can do, Sing, my son!" he said—and Sing and MacCorque fought.
They made it horrible. They had come within a fraction of killing each other earlier that afternoon. Now each meant to make a craftsman-like job of it. They were locked—like two very tired and rather rheumatic old gentlemen fighting to kill. They swayed weakly, they reeled and fell together. Sing was succeeding in keeping those dreadful hands clear of his throat. For a few minutes they wrought feebly—then suddenly the ladylike but steel-sinewed hands of the Chinaman dropped the coarse-grained, ugly, murderous hands of the killer, and flashed to MacCorque's swollen throat.
In a few seconds MacCorque was hooting for mercy—squealing for it—gasping for it—whispering for it.
Mr. Bunn relented—it was ugly. Better let the law have him after all.
"Enough, Sing, damn you, come off him!"
Mr. Bunn dragged his man back, and leaned over MacCorque. "Are you satisfied, you hound? Lady Cedar is not for you! Get up and get out!"
But MacCorque rolled his head from side to side and said nothing. Never again would he get up or get out from anywhere.
"By God, Sing, you've killed him! He's going to—"
But here the telephone bell yelled like a thing demented—or so it seemed to Mr. Bunn. He hurried to the instrument It was the butler at Maiden Fain who spoke—an uneasy man—even scared—so scared that he made several false starts before he could acquaint Mr. Bunn with the news that Miss Alison and Mr. Vanesterman were missing.
"Missing, man—what d'ye mean, missing!"
"Gone, sir. A note came for them just as they finished dinner. Miss Alison ordered her light car and they drove off. They took no chauffeur—one of the men had gone off duty, probably into the town, the other had gone to bed early with a cold. Miss Alison drove. They did not say where they were going. About a quarter of an hour ago a note came for me from Mr. Vanesterman in which he says he and Miss Alison have been suddenly called to America, and instructing me to carry on under Lady Blanchesson until I received fresh instructions. There is no address on the note. I am a little uncomfortable about it, sir—what with these murders lately. There's a note for Lady Blanchesson waiting here, too. The lodge keeper says he saw her driving out from Maiden Fain with you, and so I ventured to telephone to ask if she is at Chalkacres Hall, sir—"
"Hold on," said Mr. Bunn. He beckoned Lady Cedar, explained about the note awaiting her, and gave place at the telephone for her.
"It is Lady Blanchesson speaking, Bolton," she said, and continued without hesitation, "open the note and read it to me now."
It was, Mr. Bunn noted with some satisfaction, pretty clear proof that she was not very deeply entangled with the gang. She would never have risked allowing a sealed note for her to be read by the butler if she had feared the contents being known to others. But the message in her note was much the same as that in the butler's. Alison Vanesterman wrote—in a pencil scrawl evidently scribbled in great haste—that they were urgently summoned to America and asked her to carry on as usual till they returned.
Lady Cedar's face went taut as she listened.
"Read it again, Bolton!" she said, listened a second, then, "Begin again!" she ordered.
"Very well." she said presently. "You will carry on just as usual, please. I shall be home very soon. I don't think you need to be uneasy. Everything seems -quite normal. Mr. Vanesterman is accustomed to -make tip his mind very quickly. Good Slight, Bolton."
But her face was blanched as she turned from the telephone to the partners.
"There's something wrong!" she said.
"How dye know?" asked Fortworth.
"That note began 'Dearest Cedar.' Alison Vanesterman never in her life wrote me a letter or note of any description in which she called me 'Cedar.' She had a little affectionate intimate sort of nickname, pet name, whatever you like to call it, for me which she always used when writing a personal note of this sort. It was only in conversation before other people that she called me 'Cedar!' I—you know"—her fine eyes were full of. anxiety and something like terror as she concluded—"I don't believe Alison Vanesterman wrote that note at all!"
"Then who did?" asked Mr. Bunn.
She stared at him strangely. There was no mistaking the fear in her eyes now.
"I don't know, of course—but I nave an instinct that it was either Col. Carnac or Yung Foon!" she said. "Both of them are mad for her—neither would hesitate to kidnap her if he thought it might help him—for—" She checked, her face went whiter still.
"Or it may have been Sow Foon himself!" Mr. Bunn told himself. He bit on that idea.
"Suppose something—that detective from Scotland Yard—or the Police—has alarmed him and he decides that—that—" He finished it silently. "That the Vanesterman's are better out of the way!" He scowled thoughtfully. "Yes," he said, "that would be possible—once the Police get on to Sow Foon, Anson Vanesterman would be a deadly dangerous witness against him! I don't like it. We must get a move on. Get the car out, Squire!"
Fortworth glanced at Lady Cedar.
"Where are you going?" he growled.
"To Sow Foon's, fight our way in, and search there!"
Lady Cedar started. "You can't get in there. It's impossible—it's designed as much to keep people out as to keep the snakes in! The only entrance is barred at night! I know that!"
Mr. Bunn's mind flashed back to that yawning Russell's viper, to those sluggish poisonous beasts, the puff adders, to the huge black mamba with a head like a blunt, poisoned lance, to the hooded cobras—and his skin trawled on his body.
"You cannot—you simply cannot cross that moat place at night in the dark," shuddered Cedar Blanchesson. "I know it—I've heard Yung Foon talk of it. On such a hot night as this that pit will be crawling—carpeted—with the vile beasts—huge things—'specimens' Yung Foon called them.... O, you can't! It would be madness! It's not the vipers that strike low—you could protect yourselves from those with high boots or leather leggings—it's the mambas—the black mambas that can strike a man on horseback—and the hamadryads, the great king cobras, it's those you can't hope to escape!" She shuddered again. "You can't get through!"
Mr. Bunn and his partner stared oddly at each other. Then Smiler shrugged. "It makes me feel sick," he said slowly. "But just as sure as God I'm going through!"
He grinned like a tormented man. "Going through!" he repeated in a queer mechanical voice. "They are white people—a good sort of people, those Vanestermans,—me, I can tell 'em a mile off—and I tell you, I believe their lives are in danger—like ours here—"
He poured a whisky large enough to stun an ordinary man and touched the bell. "May as well give the old indestructible a chance to come along," he muttered, thought a moment, and stepped to the door.
Sing, the "old indestructible," was lying quite unconscious across the body of MacCorque.
Mr. Bunn went to the door leading to the servants' hall and bawled metallically for Bloom. He made a hasty examination of the Chinese, and sighed with relief as he rose.
"Nothing broken, thank God—but his neck's twice it's right size. All those glands are swollen up, I suppose." His eyes fell on the enormous, muscular hands of MacCorque, now hang limp on the floor, and he shrugged.
"I'd as soon have my neck in a vice!" he said. "Help Sing to bed, Bloom," he ordered the butler. "And he can have anything he wants that there is in the house."
He turned back to Lady Cedar and his partner, took out his automatic and made sure that it was loaded.
"I'll borrow yours, too, Squire, while I'm at it. I may need it if I get through the Zoological Gardens."
Fortworth stared.
"Huh, I guess I shall be needing it myself," he said.
"You! How d'ye mean?" demanded Mr. Bunn.
"What d'ye mean, 'How do I mean?'" snarled the Squire. "Do you figure I'm not coming? D'ye sum it up that I'm letting you go alone?"
Mr. Bunn shook his head. "In the old way, no, certainly not! I should expect you to come along. But now, with you practically a married man—that's right, I understand, aunt it, Cedar, my dear—you're exempt from this little affair."
"Exempt hell," roared Fortworth. "I guess Cedar would pretty soon drop me into the discard if I were that like of a turn-tail. No, I'm coming, if only to look after you! If Cedar wouldn't let me d'ye think I'd have any use for her? And if I sneaked out on the strength of a proposal of marriage which you regard as accepted before I've had the pluck to make it, damn it all, dye think Cedar, God bless her, would have any use for me! No, she wouldn't. Would you, Cedar?"
But the Lady Cedar only stared at them white-faced and said: "It is certain death!"
MR. BUNN shrugged. "Well, so it goes. We'd better be going to look at this certain death. Can do no good by stopping here. Maybe, if we put on our riding boots, wrap sacks around our thighs and don't let our hands dangle, we shan't I come across any of Sow Foon's fancy serpents that can reach high enough to hurt us!"
"Huh! Can but try!" grunted Fortworth. "Try anything once—and once only!" He went out mumbling something about his riding boots.
"He's not what you might call a blandishing sort of gent," said Mr. Bunn to Lady Cedar. "But he'll never in this world or the next let you down! No, my dear! Just make us each a stiff whisky and soda while we get our boots on, there's a good gal! Whisky's good for snakes!"
Quietly Lady Cedar did as she was told. She no longer tried to dissuade them, for she understood men and she knew nothing she could say would stop them. They intended to cross that moat of vipers—she knew it. Meekly, she prepared their drinks, as requested.
Half an hour later the two old adventurers were prowling like a couple of wolves around Sow Foon's stronghold, Friarsmark House. It was intensely dark, very hot, and the night was utterly still. More than once they climbed the wall above the moat, and leaned over to survey the house, and to listen. Two sides of the house were in darkness, one side showed three lighted ground floor windows, the remaining side showed only the built-on annex they had noticed before lighted.
"I should say that's Sow Foon's private laboratory or study or whatever you like to call it—and that Sow's there!" said Mr. Bunn. "We'll make for that—and somehow we've got to get him covered dead safe before he knows we're here."
They slid to the ground again, shapeless in their armour of sacking. "Remember, old man—we've got to be rough to-night. For once in a way. If in doubt, shoot! See that?"
"Yes, of course I see it, damn—" Fortworth snapped it off short as a low voice came at them out of the impenetrable darkness.
"You can't get there, my friends! All right! I'm Wheel—Detective Inspector Wheel of Scotland Yard! Not a reporter, as you thought this afternoon." They heard him chuckle unseen.
Mr. Bunn spoke into the darkness. "If you hadn't given your name in a voice I recognized, you'd have been a dead man by now, Inspector. You ought to be more careful!"
A shadow—a blackness slightly darker than the gloom about them moved nearer.
"Yes? I spoke to save your lives, I overheard you. You aren't the only ones watching Sow Foon, you know. But you can't get at him to-night. He's guarded by—some things—some things he understands better than we do. Tomorrow I shall have a search warrant. Leave it for to-night—but come and help tomorrow if you like."
"It can't be done, Inspector," said Mr. Bunn. "We believe there are friends of ours there—the Vanestermans! The Foons kidnapped or lured them here to-night They're there now, we think—God knows where they'll be to-morrow. It's now or never! Sow Foon may have a dozen different bolt holes from this place—he or his son may have left an hour ago—more—we must see now!.... now or never!"
"But man alive, you can't get to the house. The main entrance is barred with a big steel gate—very handsome but stained steel, nevertheless. And there's an armed man on guard—a sort of lodge keeper. And the only other way is across the moat—and the moat is crawling—carpeted—with big venomous snakes. Good God! Can't you smell them now? It would be suicide!"
"Shut up—unless you want to see a man be sick in the dark," snarled Fortworth. "We're going over," said Mr. Bunn. "Are you coming?"
"Coming! How the hell can I come—me with nothing but a pair of rubber-soled running shoes and thin flannel trousers on," asked the detective. "What are you men wearing?"
"Leather riding boots and sacks," said Smiler. "You stand by the main entrance and watch out. Shoot quick if you have to. Don't hesitate or they'll get you! I've got all the evidence you'll need for these blackguards. But, for God's sake don't shoot us! Can't expect a man clad in flannels to come—suicide that would be—but, mark you, Inspector, we do expect you to keep your eyes open! These people have got silent weapons that are wickeder than plain guns! So—if in doubt, shoot! It'll be you or them!"
He felt the detective grip his arm.
"But—there'll be a moon in an hour! Wait for it."
"No time," said Mr. Bunn curtly.
The detective must have known that to be true, for he answered, after a pause—"Very well—go to it. I'll do my best."
Mr. Bunn and Fortworth dropped into the moat together, Smiler's right hand ripping Fortworth's left.
"Hold up, man. For lord's sake—" He pulled hard and Fortworth was safely on his feet.
Mr. Bunn felt the sweat run down his face. If either of them fell now it was easily possible that he might fall face down on some uneasy coiled death only too ready to strike.
"Straight for the laboratory, Squire. Go slowish—feel for your footing. The place is full of rocks," breathed Smiler and stepped forward. He trod on something soft, yet lithe, and, in a flash, two hammer blows beat with a brutal force on his leg. It was a double death stroke. But he felt no pain, no prick.. The stout leather had held. There was a thick, hoarse, unspeakable hiss in the blackness at his feet a faint rustle and silence.
"God! What was it?"
"One of the snakes! But he wasn't man enough for the leather! Nothing like leather!" said Mr. Bunn. "Come on!" Hand in hand they moved towards the lighted windows. They seemed frightfully far off. For some yards they went without event Then a thing uttered a clear, almost whistling hiss high in the air before them and they froze where they stood. "If this thing hits, one of us is gone! His head's high up!" thought—Mr. Bunn swiftly and fought down a frantic desire to turn and bolt blindly for the wall.
But the beast did not strike. It went away—they heard its ugly hissing as it went. Slowly they groped on. From a little to their left a gross ugliness of hissing rose—a sibilant chorus of death—
"Right! Right! Quick! Keep your hands up!" Mr. Bunn, bathed in cold perspiration, dragged his partner to the right away from that hideous menace low down on their left. He stumbled on an unexpected boulder as he turned, thrust out a hand to save himself from falling, felt it touch a swiftly pouring, dry, smooth thing like a silky rope, and snatched it back with a shocking oath of sheer terror. But this thing did not strike—or if it struck it missed, for he felt nothing. He drew in his breath. "So far, so good!" he heard himself say to his partner—and it seemed to him that his voice was like that of a dying parrot.
"Stand still for a moment, Squire—I feel damned bad. It's no good making a rush for it Shuffle your feet a little—not too loud. It may scare 'em out of the way!" He began to mark time gently with his own feet, for it had come to him that somewhere he had read or heard that snakes will always get out of the way when they hear shod feet coming—except mambas, puff adders and hamadryads. "Now, old man—forward!"
They went forward—hand in hand like two children lost, in the woods. And nothing more moved—nothing hissed—not one of the rocks upon, which the beasts basked in the daytime intervened. It was, for the second half of their traverse of the moat, as if they walked on an innocent, green lawn in full daylight. They clambered up the far side of the moat "Done it!" exulted Mr. Bunn as he slid over the wall.
"Done it, yes, we've—oh, my God!" Fortworth groaned, snatching his hand from that of his partner. "Ah, you swine—"
He seemed: to fight something in the darkness—something that struck and swirled and was gone. "He's got me—in the groin and twice in the hand!" said Fortworth. "It was as big as a fire hose!" he added, like a man sobbing.
Mr. Bunn grabbed twice for his partner's hand before he seized it.
"There's an antidote!" he hissed very low. "Keep cool for just a second or two. Sow Foon can put you right! Come on! Quick!"
They headed for the lighted annex. There was a glass door to it—and it was open. No doubt for sake of the comparative coolness of the night air and in serene confidence of his impregnability Sow Foon had opened it.
Mr. Bunn glided to this door soundlessly, looked in and saw Foon alone in the big room, busy with two test tubes—pouring a heavy liquid from one to the other. It was a miracle—yet because, as he had truly said, he was "fey" to-night, if was uncannily exactly what he expected.
He dropped his partner's arm, ran in and jammed his pistol into the grim lined face of Sow Foon, the venom master. His appearance must have been dreadful—for Sow Foon quailed back from him like a man who sees an appalling vision.
"Watch the other door," snarled Mr. Bunn over his shoulder to his partner. "Kill anybody bar the Vanestermans that enters!
"Sow Foon!" said Mr. Bunn "Listen! We—have—crossed—your—moat. The—place—where—the—snakes are. My friend—that—man—was—bitten. Give.—him—now—an—anti- dote—a—serum— immediately—or—I—will—kill—you!"
He forced himself to speak slowly, with a sharp and careful distinctness—for the time was too short for mistakes.
Sow Foon's face looked like that of a man, or a devil, ten thousand years old, as he stepped back a little. And his smile was that of some obscene idol in a far temple.
"No!" he said. "I care nothing for the life of a thief by night—a burglar. I know you—pryers—listeners—embroilers— detectives! No. He has been bitten! It is good. Let him die!"
He stepped back one sharp pace and suddenly swept a row of bottles from a shelf to smash on the tiled floor. It was the mad malevolent act of an infuriated snake that bites itself in impotent fury.
"There are the serums!" he said. "And your friend is a dead man!"
He smiled malignantly. He had realized that, now he had been tracked, there was no hope for him. Nothing could save him from the gallows but a quicker death—such a death as he saw in the hard jade eyes of the man who had tracked him. There was no time to talk. Mr. Bunn pressed his trigger and smashed the man's left arm.
"Stand up! Stand up, you foreign dog!" he said, as Sow Foon reeled and recovered. "Give me a serum or you die even before my friend."
"What is life to me!" whispered Sow Foon. "The serums are all destroyed!" Mr. Bunn read the stark truth in the man's bitter eyes.
"Give me the serum—and go scot free!" he said—but his voice was thin with despair.
"It is too late! The serums are destroyed!"
He swayed back as he screamed it. Mr. Bunn thought he was falling back unconscious but, instead, it was to snatch a long stiletto from the bench, its tip stained dark as if it had been coated with dried gum. He flashed a frantic stroke at Mr. Bunn. And Mr. Bunn shot him where he stood—not the thousandth part of a second too soon, for the poisoned steel filched a scrap of cloth from Mr. Bunn's coat even as the frightful impact of his heavy bullet through the lung crumpled Sow Foon and checked the impetus of the murderous stroke.
"Damn you, you murderer!" sobbed Smiler, flung his pistol at the dead man's head, and swung round to his partner. He expected to see Fortworth in agony on the floor. But instead he was standing taut and eager at the half-opened door.
"Look out, man! They're coming!" he shouted wildly.
Mr. Bunn reeled back to snatch up his pistol from the pool of blood in which it lay. Dimly at the back of his mind, behind the red mist of murderous anger that had enveloped all his mental faculties he was aware that something was odd and unexpected about Fortworth. He had been bitten savagely by one of the monstrous poison bearers and normally he should by now be very near his terrible and, lacking the antidote, inevitable death. But he was not. Instead he was peering through the half-opened door of the laboratory, fierce and intent, with his pistol poised in his outstretched right hand, itself very much like the menacing head of a huge snake—except that it was stained with blood from the big fang punctures. No man bitten by a deadly snake ever looked less like dying than Fortworth.
Even as Mr. Bunn joined him, something smashed lightly on the edge of the door an inch from Fortworth's head. It was one of those hideous glass bullets. Yung Foon peered round an angle of the corridor wall to see the effect of his shot and Fortworth fired swiftly. It was a lucky snap rather than a deliberately good shot, for Yung Foon came pitching out from behind his angle to collapse across the floor of the corridor, shot through the neck. The bullet must have cut the great jugular vein for he seemed to spout a red veil of blood as he fell.
Another face showed behind the angle for the fraction of a second. It snapped back as the corridor reverberated to the double roar of the pistols and two bullets from the adventurers tore a chunk of plaster from the edge of the wall angle. There was a pause, and Mr. Bunn, coughing in the reek of smoke, stared. at his partner strangely.
"YOU—you ought to be half dead by now," Smiler said oddly. "If that beast had been poisonous you'd be dying right here! How d'ye feel?"
"Fine!" roared Fortworth, exalted, as ever, by the fighting. "I'm too tough for any damn snake!" he bellowed glaring with excitement. (There was a better explanation of the seeming miracle than that—but it was not till they were cooler that they thought of it).
"Good old partner—" began Mr. Bunn. "What's that? A trap! Look out for tricks—and if you see a hand with a thing like a big rubber ball in it jump back for your life and bang the door. They've got a kind of knock-out gas!" he explained hastily, staring at a white handkerchief attached like a flag to a stick which had been thrust from the angle.
"The white flag. They want to call it a day—whoever they are."
He bawled down the corridor that they saw the flag and ordered those who were exhibiting it to put their hands high over their heads and walk into the corridor. "If you don't want to fight, you won't get hurt," he shouted. "But the place is surrounded by police and you can take your choice. Fight to your finish—or surrender. Please yourselves!"
A man stepped into the corridor, followed by several others. Mr. Bunn summed them all up at a glance. They were men- servants—led by their chief, obviously an English butler. One or two had a foreign look, but none had the appearance of being scoundrels. They were all badly scared, and they gave the partners no trouble at all. Mr. Bunn and Fortworth saw that before they had spoken a dozen words.
"All right—you can explain yourselves to the Police later," said Mr. Bunn curtly. "What I want to know man are in the house."
The butler nodded. "Lead the way to them, my friend," said Mr. Bunn, and as the man turned he pressed the muzzle of his pistol into the butler's back just under the left shoulder blade.
"It's a pistol pressing against you," he said dourly, his left hand heavy on the man's shoulder. "Understand!" he went on. "No tricks. If you're straight you're safe! If any one tries any tricks I'll see that you go West, at any rate. Get on!"
They moved off, Fortworth following, walking sideways, his eyes on the others behind him. They would have picked up Yung Foon's body—"Leave it be for the Police," growled Fortworth.
At the next door Fortworth stopped Mr. Bunn.
"Just a minute," he said, opened the door and instructed the servants to go in and wait there till he returned. He looked—and was—too formidable and dangerous to disobey. They went in quietly. He locked the door and rejoined his partner.
"They're tame enough!" he said. "Go ahead."
The butler, pallid from the stress of the steel barrel at the back of his heart, guided them to a small drawing room, very luxuriously furnished. Alison and Anson Vanesterman were there. Both seemed to be sound asleep—Alison was lying on a great couch, nestled among the big cushions. She looked little and frail, pale and strangely childlike. One hand lay palm upward on the couch, half open. The other was half hidden under her white cheek. Anson Vanesterman lay lax in an easy chair. He, too was very white, and his tattooed hands dangled down over the arms of the chair.
The room was extraordinarily still—and somehow ugly. Mr. Bunn saw that it had no windows and for all its air of comfort, the corners of the ceiling were full of cobwebs. An odd room—a sinister room. An ugly thrill went like a blade of ice down Mr. Bunn's spine as he stared at the Vanesterman.
"Hold the man!" he said to Fortworth and- stepped swiftly to Alison. His teeth were set and his hard eyes gleaming—for he feared they were dead. Dead!
He turned to Fortworth as he went—rather as a tiger turns to snarl over its shoulder. "Hold him! Watch him!" said Smiler.
Fortworth felt the man quail and shudder at the menace in is partner's voice. He bent over the girl and shook her gently.
"Alison—it's all right, my dear—wake up."
But she did not wake up. Mr. Bunn watched her with a curious hungry intentness, and saw that she was breathing quite naturally, quite easily and regularly. He rose and crossed over to Anson Vanesterman. He, too, was breathing normally.
Mr. Bunn beamed. "All right. They're drugged."
He lifted Vanesterman's eyelid, sniffed at his half-opened lips, felt his pulse.
"They will be all right. They're not deep down," he said oddly and thought for a moment. "The sooner we get the inspector in here the better," he said, and eyed the butler sombrely.
"Send one of your men to show my friend the way to the main entrance," he said, "and come back here."
"Very good, sir."
"There's a steel gate. Have you got the key?"
"The man at the lodge has the key, sir. He is a queer character—he—"
"Will he give it up to your man when he demands it?"
"When he knows what has occurred here I think he will, sir."
Fortworth jerked his shoulders impatiently. "You can leave him to me," he said brusquely. "Get on!"
The butler went out, Fortworth on his heels like a grizzly. The butler was back again within a few seconds.
"Any more fighting men in the house?" asked Smiler.
"No, sir."
"Where's Colonel Carnac?"
"I understand from Mr. Yung Foon that the Colonel left some hour's ago, sir."
Mr. Bunn thought. "Ever seen visitors like this before?" he asked.
The butler hesitated.
"Once only, sir... None of the servants were allowed to enter this room on any account whatever."
"Huh! They missed nothing. It's a bad room." He sniffed. "I don't like the air in here. Is there a good room next door?"
"Yes, sir—the morning room. Very bright and comfortable."
"Any windows?"
"Yes, sir."
"Show me the way."
Mr. Bunn picked up Alison in his great arms as gently as if she were egg-shell porcelain, or a delicate child, carried her into the room adjoining, laid her on a couch there, threw wide open all the windows, and fetched Anson Vanesterman. Then he hesitated a moment eyeing the butler.
"You look as if you might be straight," he said presently. "I hope you are. You're doing yourself no harm, my man. Scotland Yard will be here in a minute or two and time's short for you to pile up a few points for yourself. So—for your own sake, not mine—if there's anything odd you've noticed about this house while you've been here—and that's how long?"
"Just on six months, sir—the Professor's son, Mr. Yung Foon engaged me in London—"
"Well, if you've ever noticed anything odd tell me—quick! It will pay you! Hey, now? Say what you have to say if anything—say it quick—and come clean, my lad!"
The butler blanched at the threat in Mr. Bunn's voice and began to speak almost desperately fast.
WHEN, ten minutes later, Fortworth and Inspector Wheel entered
the house, they found Mr. Bunn kneeling by the side of Alison
Vanesterman fanning her with a folded newspaper. Her eyes were
half open and she was holding tightly to Smiler's left hand.
"All right—it's all right, my dear! Don't fret—don't worry. It's the old man here—your friend, old Mr. Flood! Nobody's going to hurt you now—nor your daddy—no, no. Now wake up, try hard to wake up, there's a good little gal—that's the style—fine—fine—that's a good brave little gal!"
It was almost as if the old adventurer, who had known neither kith nor kin bar his brother Tony in America, for the last forty years, was crooning rather clumsily over a child of his own. He glared at the newcomers.
"Not so hellishly loud," he said in a savage whisper, "She's coming round!... That's my brave good little gal—fight for it, my dear—you're doing fine, splendid... damn it, stand back with those guns—d'ye want to scare her when she wakes?"
But it took more than the sight of a pistol to scare Alison Vanesterman when she was free from the numb grip of drugs. Almost immediately she sat up, Smiler's arm helping her.
She leaned close to him, quite trustingly. "Oh—oh!" she said, with the long lovely sigh of a waking child. "It is you—daddy's old friend—the big, red man—I hoped you would come—all the time I kept hoping you would come—"
"Surely, surely, my dear—surely the Old Man would come to take care of his little gal—" He turned to Fortworth. "Tell one of those loafing servants to bring a bottle of champagne like lightning—I suppose there's a decent wine in the house!" he commanded; patted Alison's hand and stood up.
"All's well, my dear!" he said, and turned to her father.
Lacking the elasticity of youth, Anson Vanesterman came more slowly out from the influence of the drug which, lightly but sufficiently, had enshackled them both for the past hour or so. Inspector Wheel, who had left the room after a swift glance to reassure himself that all would be well with them, returned as Fortworth came in with the champagne.
"Just a minute, Mr. Flood," he said. Smiler went out with him while Fortworth attended to the restorative prescribed by his partner.
"This is a grave business, Mr. Flood!... Two dead men here to be accounted for—and the Lord knows what else! How came it? that man, Sow Foon, in the laboratory has been shot to pieces—"
"Sure he has," said Mr. Bunn. "It was him or me! And there's another dead one at Chalkacres Hall—man called MacCorque! But I'm not worrying about it. I want to get the Vanestermans out of this.
"You'd better ring up the police and I'd send a few men to Downland Holt to detain Col. Carnac and everyone on the premises. Carnac murdered Gene Reymar—the first man killed in the wood. I'll be back as soon as I've got my friends comfortably and safely home. I just suggest all this, Inspector. You'll please yourself what you do—and do as you like. But if you're wise you will like. I'm not a detective—but I guess I've got a right to claim that I've got a natural genius for detecting. And I've detected quite a lot more in the last few days than anybody else. But you're welcome to the honor and the glory! Take it as a present from me—if you care to. This thing clears up both those other murders as well. My only concern now is the well- being of the Vanestermans! They've had a hell of a time during the last year—but the Old Man has got a pleasant surprise up his sleeve for them! Yes."
The Scotland yard man thought quickly. Then he nodded.
"I see," he said, and was no longer vague. "I think you're right, Mr. Flood. Go ahead!"
He had a sudden afterthought. "But how did you get through the snakes? You must have disturbed them, for I could hear them hissing in the dark—"
"It was unprintably awful! I've never been so scared in my life!" said Mr. Bunn, frankly. "My friend Black was bitten three times by the same beast—once in the groin—twice in the hand!"
"But—he's here—I mean, he's alive—how's that!"
Mr. Bunn thought. "I know. There's only two answers, come to think of it. Either the snake was non-venomous—which isn't likely for it wouldn't be here in that case. And the other is that the creature had just been de-venomed by Sow Foon. That's the only answer—and it's the right one. The beast wasn't in the moat—it seemed to get him as he climbed free of the moat. Maybe there's a pen or whatever you care to call it—some special place where Sow Foon kept his de-venomed devils! We shall see when it's daylight! What does it matter—the old fellow's punctured a little, maybe, but he's far from dead!"
Mr. Wheel agreed, and turned towards the corridor, where the body of Yung Foon still lay. He looked over his shoulder at the broad back of Mr. Bunn as he went.
"A couple of rum 'uns, that! But nobody's fools—they've got the pluck of a whole herd of rhinoceroses—and they're not so short of brains as to be noticeable! And he's got a pleasant surprise for the Vanestermans, has he? Well, maybe he has! He looks to me to be everything but a liar! Yes!"
He nodded and chuckled, agreeing heartily with himself about that. Then his face grew grim and anxious and he proceeded to concentrate on his grim labours.
It was in a small room, containing an electric furnace, connected with the laboratory, that he discovered almost immediately thereafter the body of Col. Carnac. Either Yung Foon or his father had dealt after their fashion with him. Whether they had quarrelled about Alison Vanesterman, or about the plunder, or whether they feared treachery on the part of the Colonel was never known definitely. But the Colonel had been in a deadly rage when he left Maiden Fain, and it was ever Mr. Bunn's belief that he had gone from Maiden Fain to Friarsmark, there to await the Foons and to insist on Yung Foon standing aside in the competition for Alison.
But the Foons were dangerous people. And the condition in which the Colonel was found made it abundantly clear that within a very few minutes he would have been disposed of. All the servants thought he had left—and indeed he had, but not in the manner they imagined.
Mr. Bunn sat facing Alison Vanesterman and her father while Fortworth slung their big comfortable car through the miles of darkness separating the stronghold of Sow Foon from Chalkacres Hall.
"I want you, Mr. Vanesterman, and you Alison, my dear, to prepare yourselves for a very pleasant surprise," he said slowly as the car rolled down the drive to Chalkacres.
"Is it about Dick?" asked Alison quickly. Mr. Bunn nodded and beamed on her in the rather dim light.
"Yes," he said. "It's about your brother Dick." Anson Vanesterman leaned forward suddenly. "You mean you've got hold of the real truth of the facts concerning his death in the Morsalbana Desert?" he asked.
"Well, I've got pretty close to it," said Mr. Bunn, comfortably.
"Can you prove them?" demanded Vanesterman—more sharply than he knew.
"Yes, I can prove them. Believe me, you will never again have to wear masks on your faces when people speak of Dick Vanesterman. No, sir!"
He peered out as the car slowed down. He swung back the door and stepped out.
"Come along, Alison... Steady now! Mind the step!" She might have been his own daughter.
Lady Cedar had heard the car and met them in the hall with outstretched arms. Her eyes were burning like jewels.
"O, come in, come in!" she cried. "I've so much to tell you—such good news!"
Mr. Bunn stared a little anxiously. But he controlled himself.
"That's good!" he said. "Come on, then. Leave the car, Squire!"
They all went into the comfort able smoking room. Lady Cedar's fine eyes darted to Fortworth.
"That detective, Wheel, rang up?" she said. "He said you had been bitten!"
Fortworth looked a little odd.
"Well, yes," he admitted.
"But they were poisonous!" she said, puzzled.
"Very likely—but so am I!"
"You're not!"
Fortworth reached a wavering hand for the decanter. The excitement was dying out now and he had been most horribly shocked that night.
"All right, Squire," said Mr. Bunn, and poured a tumblerful of stark naked Scotch. "Try that!"
Fortworth tried it gratefully. It seemed to answer—for he readied for a cigar.
"Go on, Cedar," he said, relaxing into a chair as big as a bed. She glanced at him, saw that all seemed well with him, and spoke intensely.
"MacCorque was not dead when you left—though you thought he was!" she said. "I went out into the hall with Bloom to see if anything could not be done—to—to make things more fitting—and he moved—and spoke.... I did my best to help him. But he was dying. He recognised me..."
She turned to Fortworth. "You know how it was with him, about me?" she appealed. Fortworth, that silent man, nodded.
"He worshipped you," said Mr. Bunn. "Yes—go on."
"He was dying—I did my best for him. And he confessed the whole truth to me about the end of the Morsalbana expedition and what happened about Dick Vanesterman." Her eyes shone. "He knew that he was dying, and he was grateful for the few little things I could do to give him the illusion of comfort," continued Cedar. "He said—" she hesitated.
"Better say it as he said it, Cedar," advised Mr. Bunn.
"Well, he told me that he had never hoped to die with me tending him! He said he had never expected much more than a parson and a hangman, and that he was glad it was me instead. He said that he knew loved Alison and because of that he wanted to tell me the truth about her brother Dick. It was all a deliberate scheme of Col. Carnac and Yung Foon to levy blackmail on Mr. Vanesterman. The expedition failed, he said, and they had eight of them left, who turned back. And Dick did not desert—or steal away at night with all the water that was left. On the contrary—it was Col. Carnac, Yung Foon and MacCorque who took all the water one night and stole away—leaving Dick and four other men behind. Dick had had less water than the others, too, for he had given half his ration to a man who had drunk from an arsenic well. He—MacCorque—admitted time and again that Dick had been splendid. But that made no difference. They left him, just the same.
"The three traitors came safely to a big water hole, and it was there that the idea occurred to them—Yung Foon thought of it—of inventing the lie about Dick Vanesterman's desertion, and blackmailing his people about it. He said that his father, Sow Foon, would arrange everything—for that is what Sow Foon if MacCorque swore it—a blackmailer on an enormous scale, a poisoner, everything, anything for money. He is colossally rich, but he will never be rich enough to be satisfied. So they agreed. And by way of precaution they went back into the desert to make quite sure that those they had deserted were dead—so that nobody would ever disprove their story.
"MacCorque said that—but he was failing then and confused—incoherent—I think he tried to convey that they found one or two of the deserted men still living and killed them—to make sure—it was something terrible they did—but that was all I could glean. He died then, quite quickly—I was holding him up—it was awful. But there was no doubt, no doubt at all—about Dick Vanesterman. He was, as MacCorque; put it, 'the best of the bunch,' and it was only became his father was a millionaire that the idea occurred to them of concocting an account of Dick's end which they knew Mr. Vanesterman would not allow to be published!"
She finished with a gasp. "Oh if only he had lived just a little longer!" she added a little hysterically. "There was something else he wanted to say—something about Dick—"
But Anson Vanesterman stood up. "You couldn't have done more if he had lived, Lady Cedar. You've cleared Dick's name and reputation! And that's more—far more—than ever we, Alison and I, ever expected to do, although we always believed that Dick died like a white man!"
There was no mistaking the passionate relief, the intense gratitude in his deep voice. "That confession—that revelation of the truth—has given me, and Alison, too, a new outlook—a new faith. It was unendurable to us to have to believe that Dick should have died deserting his comrades—it was unbearable that we could not prove his end to have been otherwise—we have grieved bitterly—suffered—"
"Just a moment," said Mr. Bunn abruptly, "I'll be back in a moment!" He rose and went out. It was or seemed to be such an exhibition of bad taste—so to break in on Vanesterman's most moving acknowledgments and admissions—that everybody was shocked. But Mr. Bunn was back almost instantly. His square, heavy face was redder, than ever, and his pale eyes blazed with excitement.
"YOU said, Vanesterman, that you believed Dick died a white man and that proof of it changed your and Alison's whole outlook on life—sure, sure, I understand that—but let me tell you something—remember I warned you I had a surprise!—let me tell you now that Dick did not die a white man! By the mercy of God Almighty, Vanesterman, he lived a white man—and here he is!"
He snatched back the door. And walking feebly, one arm round the shoulder of Bloom, and the other arm around the shoulder of that dour and indomitable old indestructible, Sing, there came slowly into that room, a young man, terribly emaciated, shamefully weakened, yet still with the clean-cut American face steady eyes, and firm mouth of the boy of the photograph—one who once was, and would be again, a handsome, capable-looking man—self-reliant, disciplined, courageous—Richard Vanesterman!
"Ah! Father!" he said in a lamentable voice. "Alison!"
There was in the united cry that greeted him a poignancy that cut like a blade to the hearts of the listeners. With a curiously mechanical effect Mr. Bunn, Lady Cedar and Fortworth moved swiftly out of the room, brushing Sing and Bloom before them.
"I'm sorry about that! I wanted to please them. I oughtn't to have sprung it on them quite so suddenly!" babbled Mr. Bunn, apologetically. "I didn't see that. It was very poor judgment. But we've all been worked up a bit to-night. Dye think they'll be all right?"
Lady Cedar's slim white hands gripped him, one to each shoulder, and shook him. Tears were running openly down her face.
"O, you!" she said, with a queer passion in her voice. "Men are all alike."
She turned to Fortworth. His huge arms enfolded her. Mr. Bunn studied them for a moment, then turned to his men.
"Very well done, my lads. I'll remember this," he said. "Sing, get to bed—you're all but in! Bloom, fetch the whisky! Help yourself freely on the way!"
Fortworth turned to his partner.
"But, man, where did you get him from—not a soul guessed!"
"I found him half-conscious in Friarsmark when you had gone to fetch Wheel. That butler took me to him. The servants understood he was a patient of Sow Foon's, undergoing a cure for some strange Asiatic disease. I had the idea of this little surprise then. I got him out of the house to Alison's car and the butler drove him over to this place to be given quietly in charge of Bloom until I returned. Cedar gave me a bit of a shock when she spoke of 'such good news.' I thought the butler had messed the thing up and that Cedar had seen Dick. But he did very well—he and Bloom between them!"
"Huh!" said Fortworth. "I suppose it's all right, but it was a bit too dramatic for my fancy. Still, you always were a dramatic old devil when you got the chance!"
SO except for the clearing up by the Police, ended the affair
which Mr. Bunn always afterward referred to as his "do with those
man-eaters from Mors."
Just as soon as they felt it fitting to intrude on the united family, Lady Cedar, Mr. Bunn and his partner went in to congratulate them. But old Mr. Wiseacre, as Smiler, in terrifically high spirits, insisted on referring to himself, would by no means permit that to be a long séance! One swift, shrewd glance at the three Americans showed him what was needed now.
"Well, that's that," he said in a voice that still vibrated with triumphant excitement though he deceived himself that it was Napoleonically curt and businesslike.
"All's well—no harm done except what can be repaired. And the sooner we set about the repairs, the better, hey, Davy Clarke! What the Vanesterman family needs more than anything else is sleep! Sleep and a little peace and quietness. They're going to get it. The car's ready and waiting outside and I'm here to run you all over to Maiden Fain! How's that?"
It was so stirringly sensible that they made it so. Fortworth would have come also—but was not permitted.
"No, Squire!" said, Mr. Bunn flatly. "Stay home, finish another whisky, take one up to bed with you, and sleep things off. A little drop of Scotch never hurt any man who's been bit about by serpents, devenomed or otherwise, the way he has, hey, Cedar?"
Cedar agreed emphatically. So, as the car rolled away. Fortworth took his prescribed medicine without much difficulty and did what Messrs. Bloom and Sing had already done—namely, crawled into bed and immediately told himself that he was "darned glad to get there."
So it was that just as the first faint livid light of dawn crept across the eastern sky Mr. Smiler Bunn let himself into the house, and entering the library, sat for a few moments alone in communion with himself, a trifle of whisky and a last cigar.
"A bad gang—well blotted out. Well, well, it just shows that there's no such thing as a perfectly faultless, watertight crime—though this was almighty near it. Yes—as near a master-crime as ever I came across. Only an accident blew it up, the accident that Gene Reymar fell in love with Alison—an easy accident, that—and somehow or other found out the truth about Dick. Lord knows how—but these New York reporters will find out any mortal thing from the mystery of the devil's income tax upwards—for I suppose he pays too, ha ha!—and if the gang hadn't killed Gene Reymar, I don't suppose I would ever have brought my natural gifts to bear on the thing at all. And the thing would have gone on till time hardened the Vanestermans to the point of declining to pay more blackmail and then Sow Foon would have played his last big card and—for as many millions of dollars as he could get—have worked out his scheme of restoring Dick Vanesterman to his people."
Mr. Bunn's face hardened.
"God, what a wicked thing it was. Sounds impossible—but it wasn't so to a man with the money, the brains and the scientific knowledge of the old Sow."
He rose, wearily.
"Yes—if ever a man knew about drugs Sow Foon did. You've got to know 'em to keep a man like Dick continuously under their influence for nearly a year without killing him or wrecking him forever. But it wasn't an ordinary drug—another of Sow's scientific novelties, I suppose, and the secret of it died with him—thanks to me. Good. I shall lose no sleep over it Even, so, it would have been a rough journey for all if Carnac and Young Foon hadn't fallen in love with Alison, too. They all fall in love with Alison—I'm in love with her myself—or should be if I was about 30 years—"
He laughed—perhaps just a shade "tightly." Then he, too, crawled into bed.
THERE was no difficulty about the casualties at Friarsmark.
The story which Dick Vanesterman was quite fit enough to tell in
a crowded Coroner's Court, a week later, definitely cleared up
any and every doubt about the two of men whom Mr. Bunn and
Fortworth and Sing had "cleaned up" so efficiently. They had been
stark murderers—even multi-murderers—and only a fool
would have suggested that the partners' deadly activities at
Friarsmark or Sing's at Chalkacres had been in the nature of
anything but sheer self-defence.
Dick's detailed account of the expedition made all clear. From the moment when, waterless and on the point of death, he and the deserted survivors had reeled to a standstill and fallen to die, in the bitter and poisonous desert of Morsalbana, to the point where he woke up a prisoner in one of Sow Foon's houses in Rio de Janeiro, he remembered only one thing—and that only as one remembers a nightmare. It was the return from the water-hole of Carnac, Yung Foon and MacCorque, to save him (for their own purposes) and to massacre the already dying men with him—in order to blot out the last living witnesses of the truth about the expedition. They had made very sure of that it had been a terrible story—ameliorated only, at its end, by Anson Vanesterman's quiet promise, publicly given, to place the dependents of those dead men, lying forever out in that impenetrable desert, beyond all reach of want.
Nobody claimed the snakes—so these sinewy participants in the affair were going to the Zoo to be held till some claimant, if any, rose.
MR. BUNN and Fortworth went over a little morbidly, to bid
them what Smiler cryptically described as a "sailor's farewell,"
the day before they were removed.
The brown cross-bred who had been gatekeeper for Sow Foon was no longer there, but they knew that. Inspector Wheel had explained about him long before this. There had been nothing against him, from Scotland Yard's point of view—nothing for him, from anybody else's. He had hung about till the police had told him he could go. Then, without speed, he had collected a bundle of belongings and had gone. Nobody knew whither and certainly neither of the partners cared.
Wheel had told them that of the two entrances to Friarsmark House they had chosen the safer when they elected to go through the pit of vipers.
"There was a queer kind of gun in the lodge—a simple sort of catapult thing that fired silently a magazineful of these glass bullets," the detective explained. "It's up in the museum at the Yard now. You can see it any time you care to come and let me show you round. That half-breed would probably have killed you both with, it—if you had tried to get through the gates!"
They looked around but they did not bother to go over the house—not even to see the room in which Mr. Bunn had found Dick Vanesterman drowsy under his drugs and from which Smiler had sent him in care of the butler to Sing and Bloom at Chalkacres there to await production for Smiler's great surprise.
"Well, there it is," said Mr. Bunn, and lit a cigar. "I shan't grieve if I never see the place again." His eyes gleamed. "Though I'm glad we called on Sow Foon when we did! Ready?"
A little laboriously they mounted their riding-cure steeds and headed for Maiden Fain Manor, where they were due to lunch.
IT was in the nature of a parting entertainment, for the
Vanestermans, not unnaturally, had had enough of England for a
time and were sailing for home the next day. It was but a mildly
festive affair for reaction had them all in its grip. But if
quiet it was happy. Dick Vanesterman looked already a new
man.
Whatever the secret drug of Sow Foon was that had enchained him so long, it, possessed this virtue, that it left one deprived of it with no sense of deprivation, no lust to renew its acquaintance.
Except for Lady Cedar, who also was going to America for a time, and Fortworth, they paired off and exchanged pairs, quite a good deal during the afternoon. For example, Mr. Bunn took a stroll with Dick Vanesterman, and it was during his stroll that Dick said yet again—"I owe you my life, Mr. Flood!"
Mr. Bunn's great hand closed on Dick's. "Consider that debt cancelled," he said. Dick shook his head, smiling.
"Easily said, Mr. Flood. That's the one debt that to me is forever uncancellable."
"So be it, my boy! Pay the bill when I present it!"
Dick shook his head ruefully, and gripped "Mr. Flood's" willing, hand. There was nothing much else to do.
With Alison it was just a trifle different. She was wholly frank. "You've saved Dick—you've saved something for my father to live for—and it means everything to me, Mr. Flood," she said. "Can't you think of something the Vanestermans can do for you? Do say there's something you want, please I Pretend there's something, if necessary."
The old adventurer chuckled and looked at her—trim, radiant, lovely little American as she was—at her very best, for Dick's sake, for life's sake, for everything's sake!
"Well, yes—there is a thing I'd like, my dear! But just tell me first—how old are you?"
"Twenty-one!" said Alison.
"It's a nice age," mused Mr. Bunn, and continued: "Have you got anything left on your mind—any worries, anything of that kind?"
"Not now."
"You're free, then—you've got your daddy—you've got Dick—you've got your health, your wealth, your youth and your beauty! And the world's before you, Alison—and all your life!"
"Yes, yes—but it's you we're talking about—what you want—what you would like!"
"I'm coming to that," continued Mr. Bunn, seriously. "I want, to hear that you've found somebody much about the style of your brother Dick, say, and married him, my dear! And presently all in good time, I'd like to be invited to act as godfather to some little Alison! I'll come to New York for that purpose, Alison—if you will promise me just that!"
She looked at him quietly. And she saw something on his square heavy, red face that told her he was entirely serious—that her promise would mean something to him. He looked lonely, she thought. Although he was so capable—so experienced—so easily and massively self-reliant and apparently self-sufficient, yet he looked for a moment somehow lonely—like; a man who has a secret hunger for something to protect, to guard, to care for. So she took both his hands and faced him.
"I promise you that," she said, stood impulsively on tiptoe and kissed him.
Mr. Bunn looked a little embarrassed. Many a bland, bald- headed moon had waxed and waned since a girl like Alison had kissed him.
Anson Vanesterman had Mr. Bunn and his partner too closely summed up to say much about his debt to them.
"You are too much a man of the world to care to hear me try to explain my notion of what you and your friend have done for me," he said. "But there's just one thing I should like to do, if you'll allow me? It's a queer, up-and-down, in-and-out world, this Flood, and—one never knows one's luck. There's the matter of these tips to Davy Clarke—"
He produced a soiled pound note and a shabby half-crown.
Mr. Bunn thought he was going to return them and laughed. "When I give a man a tip I give it," he said, with a relish. "It's his for himself whether he's a multimillionaire or a bum!"
"I know," said Vanesterman, rather meekly for him—not ordinarily a man of marked humility. "But I wanted to ask you if you would let me give myself the pleasure of investing this matter of one pound, two shillings and sixpence on your behalf over a period of a month or two—say three. You to receive anything it produces. I'll send you a strictly accurate record."
Mr. Bunn stopped him there. He knew, none better, just what Anson Vanesterman owed to his fortunate interference in the affair, and he knew moreover how difficult the situation was for Vanesterman. After all, the millionaire and his family had nothing more to offer than lifelong gratitude—and money. The first they had given—the second Vanesterman was trying to offer. Well—money was money.
Mr. Bunn and his partner had had to be up and doing about money far too many times in their curious careers to be high-hat about it.
"Surely, surely," he said right heartily. "I'd be interested—fascinated, in fact—to, see what you can do for me with 22 shillings and sixpence in three months."
Vanesterman's eyes brightened. "Good!" he said and offered his hand.
IT was three months later to a day when Messrs. Bunn and
Fortworth each received a letter from America by the same mail.
Each finished the refreshment at his elbow, each opened his
envelope, each studied its contents, and each uttered an
exclamation of satisfaction at almost identical moments.
"What's the matter—good news?" demanded Mr. Bunn, staring.
"Well—well, I suppose I—it's—O, damn it, yes! Very good news!" said Fortworth flatly. "Lady Cedar seems to have met a man of about her own age who appeals to her strongly—very strongly indeed. She says so frankly in this letter. But she feels tied to me... And she's wondering what I shall; do about -it."
"What shall you do?"
"Me? What shall I do—what would any gentleman do, man alive?—untie her of course! She's free—I'm going to cable her now, God bless her." He glowered as his partner chuckled. "What you laughing at?" he shouted. "Can't a man be chivalrous to a splendid woman like Cedar!"
"I was thinking more of you," said Mr. Bunn, tactfully. "Can you stand it? can you bear up under the loss of her—a magnificent woman like Lady Cedar?"
Fortworth nodded slowly. "Well—well, yes—I guess I can. I've been thinking a lot about it the last month or two—and I've been sort of feeling that maybe we were a bit impulsive to fix up so hastily. You see, Flood, there's a fairish gap between our ages—not that I should call myself old—but still she's certainly twenty years younger than I am and, come to think of it, I am no great believer in a man who is getting on towards middlish age marrying a young wife—even if she is a bit on the magnificent side. All the philosophers advise against it—I've been looking 'em up lately. Moreover, maybe I'm a bit set in my ways—like yourself. I won't go so far as to say I like you, but I certainly have got used to you and your ways—our ways. So I guess I'll make the sacrifice and give her her freedom! What's your opinion?"
"Why, Squire, I think you're right," said Mr. Bunn heartily—for he had begun to wonder just how he was going to battle along without this queer-tempered, contrary old partner of his.
"So be it," said Fortworth, resignedly, smiling one of his rare smiles. "I guess we shall blunder along somehow in the old way—"
"We ought to manage with this to help"—said Mr. Bunn. He passed his letter and pressed the bell.
Fortworth delayed sending his chivalrous cable to Cedar Blanchesson whilst he read the letter. It was from the financial house of Vanesterman & Son and in a brief, businesslike way stated that the sum of one pound, two shillings and sixpence handed to Mr. Anson Vanesterman by Mr. Flood had been employed in various speculative transactions by Vanesterman & Son, over a period of three months in accordance with Mr. Flood's wishes, and that Vanesterman & Son now had the pleasure of forwarding a cheque for the proceeds of such speculative transactions together with a strict accounting thereof. Fortworth looked at the cheque which Mr. Bunn without comment next proffered him. It was drawn by Vanesterman & Son, on the Bank of England, in favour of the partners for the sum of £377,506/19s/11d!
Mr. Bunn looked up at Sing who had answered the bell and was awaiting his commands. He spoke quite quietly to the faithful Chink—even, with a species of grave friendliness.
"Just bring that last couple of quart bottles of the champagne, there's a good lad," he said, in a curiously gentle voice.