Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926
- Автор: Bailey H. C., Bechdolt Jack
- Год: 1926
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926». Краткое содержание книги:
Brakely and I would probably fight the moment our feet hit the ground, if not on the raft when we got close in. Until we did get close in, I, as a sailor, had the fate of both of us in my hands.
My sail was up, and it was rigged stoutly. I looked aloft, found the pole star, and laid a course as best I could. I swung the raft onto it, a laborious job, for the breeze was unfavorable, and the craft a clumsy thing in the water. But we did go ahead on the course, by a tough job of tacking.
I knew that I couldn’t hold up long at that business. What I had been through began to tell. The breeze was strong enough to prove a constant pull on my muscles, managing the sail.
“Do you think you could do this?” I asked Brakely.
“If you’ll show me how,” he responded.
That took a long time, too, before he learned to make headway with a contrary breeze. It’s a job of shifting the sail so that craft makes her course by a system of zigzagging, but all the time getting ahead. I pointed out a star, and told him to keep working the raft toward that.
A man with his brains, with the sail in hand, learns what a raft will do when the sail is hauled one way and what to expect when he hauls it another. Brakely managed the sail while I sat by and smoked a cigarette. I took a drink of water, and laid down to sleep.
I slept about two hours, and felt much stronger. The sun was up when I took the tiller of my sail again. And by looking at my watch and at the sun, I was able to see that the course would be easier sailing now, for the breeze had hauled around astern.
“I think I kept her on,” Brakely said. He was eating food I had got out for him after getting my own breakfast. “That star disappeared, but I found another that seemed to be in a line above it. Knowing the direction we want to go, I’ve been steering by the sun since it came up. I don’t think we’ll miss the island.”
“It’s pretty much guesswork now,” I told him. “If you got off the course very far it might throw us way off the island.”
That was true, but if we weren’t too far off and night came, we would have the beams from the lighthouses. The flashes of a light can be seen in the sky a longer distance than land can be seen in daylight. Much depended on luck, but I was certain that we would pick up the big island somewhere on its long coastline.
“George,” Brakely said, “do you realize what a tough-looking white man you are?”
“Thanks to you and the liberties you gave me aboard the yacht,” I returned.
“Yes, that’s right. Well, it couldn’t be helped. You had me scared. I had to have you miss your shaves. You got out of captivity so much that I couldn’t take any more chances. That’s a fine set of whiskers you have.”
“I don’t mind the whiskers. It’s the dirty feeling I have. You wouldn’t let me take a bath, and it’s pretty hard for a man to even keep his face clean with handcuffs on.”
“That’s right,” Brakely agreed. “I’m not making fun of you, but when I took a good look at you in daylight this morning, I felt sorry that I hadn’t let you shave. You look fierce and ferocious.”
“You’re nothing to boast of yourself.”
“No, I suppose not. Fighting fire isn’t a clean job.”
I was a tough-looking customer. I hadn’t shaved since the afternoon I cleaned up in preparation for the entertainment aboard the Angela Lee in Marble Cove. I hadn’t had a bath since then either, except the ducking I got in the harbor at Monte Carlo.
My clothes were rumpled and wrinkled. I wore a hat that had belonged to some one on the Angela Lee, having picked it up while getting ready to abandon ship. It was a soft hat, a little too big for me, and I had to wear it hauled way down on my head.
Chapter XXVIII
Le Gorille
I noticed a couple of newspapers that Brakely had brought onto the raft. They were in a box of stuff he carried out of the galley on the Angela Lee, folded so that I could see that one of them was a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald.
I thought maybe I’d like to look at that when I got time, but Brakely had a different idea. He got the papers out of the box when he saw me looking at them, went behind me, spent a little time reading something in one of them, and tossed them overboard.
“What’s the idea?” I asked him. “I thought I’d like to look at that American paper.”
The papers were out of reach. He didn’t answer for a little while. Then I guess he decided it wouldn’t do any harm if he told me of something that had been worrying him.
“One of those papers has bad news in it for you,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“You’re suspected of being a notorious Paris thief — an Apache known as ‘Le Gorille.’ Gorille is French for gorilla.”
I looked around. He was smiling, highly amused.
“Yes, George, there was a piece in one of those papers about you. The police are hunting you.” He laughed. “They think you’re Le Gorille.”
“Stop your kidding.”
“It’s a fact. Now I happen to know about Le Gorille. Read about his doings in Paris newspapers, years ago. The police never captured him. They say he vanished by going into the French army during tire war — and was probably killed. But it seems that he’s turned up again — on the Riviera, at Monte Carlo, to be exact.
“The newspaper said a gendarme at Monte Carlo tried to arrest an American sailor, or a man he thought was an American sailor, but the man was snatched away from him by a gang of his friends. The policeman, however, got this man’s pistol away from him and got it into his own pocket before he was overcome. It seems that a few days later the private mark of Le Gorille was found on the pistol.”
I kept my thoughts to myself, and made Brakely think I looked on the thing as a joke of some kind.
“This little affair,” he went on, “happened on the causeway at Monte Carlo. Ah, George — didn’t you have a brush with a gendarme on the causeway?”
“You needn’t ask me,” I replied. “You’ve had a full report on that.”
“Yes, I have — and it’s very mysterious. As a matter of fact, it worries me a little. They say the Gorilla had a habit of leaving his mark on things, a funny-looking ‘G’ that the police know very well. The French are highly imaginative people, George. Even the thieves among them will go out of their way to do a job in a spectacular fashion, when it could just as well be done without trimmings. They like the bizarre.
“For instance, there is no reason for Le Gorille to leave his mark on places he robs — but he does that, or did. The paper discusses him now as though he had come back to life. They look for a resumption of his spectacular criminal career.
“They say he put his mark, that funny-looking ‘G,’ on his private effects, including his pistol, in a spirit of bravado, which isn’t uncommon among the Apaches in the underworld of Paris. It’s a sort of dare to the police. Anyhow, this pistol had, on the under side of the butt, Le Gorille’s mark. Now, what do you know about that?”
“I don’t know anything about it. I tangled up with a policeman on the causeway, as you know. Your men took me away from him, and politely socked me on the jaw. The only pistol the policeman could have got off me was the gun I took away from the fellow you had guarding me.”
“What kind of a pistol was that, George?”
“An automatic.”
“Automatic, eh? Well, George, the policeman didn’t get the automatic. One of my friends got that off you. The pistol the policeman got was a French army pistol.”