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:
The thugs from the cliffs might swarm down on us at any moment. It was a miracle that they weren’t there now. I couldn’t stay Brakely’s hands without fighting him, so I turned my face toward the cliffs, to fight off attack from that quarter.
When Julius Brakely came to my side I knew that Barney Masters was dead.
Brakely looked into my eyes without saying a word, and then turned toward Throgg. But I certainly didn’t mean to stand by and let him commit murder by the wholesale. I followed him.
“Don’t worry,” Brakely said, divining my fears; “I’m just taking a look at him. This one isn’t worth the trouble.”
I hauled a blanket over the body on the ground.
Brakely took one of the guns. I held the other.
“I guess they didn’t hear him yell,” he said, pointing to the cliffs. “They don’t seem to be coming.”
It was strange, and still the yell might have sounded extraordinarily loud to us and be inaudible on the cliffs, if the men there were sheltered by rocks. It had been a husky cry that came from Masters’s throat. Anyhow there was as yet no response from the cliffs.
We turned to Throgg. He was conscious, but laid there whimpering in terror. Brakely kicked him in the ribs, not very hard.
“Get up,” he said.
Throgg got up, and stood cringing.
My eyes were on him. The pistol was in my right hand, hanging down. Brakely stood at my right, too. Suddenly he snatched the gun away from me, turned the muzzles of both my way and said:
“Back up, George.”
Of course, I backed up. Rage seized me, too, for he was going back on his bargain.
“Stand right where you are,” Brakely said, “and listen. The Lees are out of danger, with that rat dead. I can promise you they won’t be harmed. I’ll take charge of things here now, and these fellows will be glad to knuckle to me. Won’t they, Throgg?”
Throgg rolled his eyes toward the bulging blanket.
“Y-yes, sir!” he answered warmly.
“This gang likes a winner,” Brakely went on. “As soon as they see me with a brace of guns in my hands, and one of them pulls back the flap of that blanket and takes a look, they’ll grovel on the ground in front of me, and beg me to get them off this God-forsaken island. I know.
“I’m so sure of it that I’m going to send Throgg up the hill to tell them what’s happened. I’ve kept my bargain with you, George. I’ve lifted the danger off the Lees. I promise you that I’ll do nothing worse than perhaps set them ashore on the island here. I want the Seabird, and I think I can easily capture it without injuring the Lees.
“After we’re gone, you have the island to yourselves. You have the raft, and the two boats from the Angela Lee must be somewhere about. You can go over to the big island, or out to the lighthouses, and get help. I won’t care then. We’ll be at sea — and I’m sport enough to be willing to take my chances there. It’s a race, but I’ve already got my plans laid for winning it.”
He smiled at me.
“Once again you and I are enemies,” he continued. “Thank you for all the help you’ve given me, and don’t blame me because I’m trying to fight my way out of a hole that’s worse than death. There’s been an awful crash in my life, George. I’m trying to save what I can out of the wreckage.
“I ask nothing of any one except a chance to make a race for it. I’ll fight for that chance. Now I’m going to let you go. I know you’re my enemy and I know that you’ll start right in to get the best of me as soon as you’re out of sight — but I’m going to let you go. I’m responsible for you being in this mess, and I’m going to give you a chance. If things had gone as I intended, you would have been sent on your way with a big pile of money, and been no wiser.
“But you know too much now, George. I’ve got to get a start before I let you get where you can spread the news. Now here’s the idea. You have my promise that the Lees won’t be harmed. They’ll be put ashore on this island — that’s all — and there will be no great hardship in that. You’ll soon be taken away.
“You have your watch, George. Look at it.”
I accommodated him. He looked at his own watch.
“Note the time,” he went on. “You have ten minutes to get off into the woods. At the end of ten minutes, if I catch you prowling around, I may have to kill you. I won’t kill you unless I have to, and that’s one job I certainly don’t want — but if you try to spoil my plans, it’s your life or mine. That’s the way it shapes up. Good-by, George — and for God’s sake, don’t make me kill you!”
I could tell by the look of him that he meant what he said. As he saw it, his back was to the wall. Brakely was fighting for his life, and there had been a melancholy ring in his words.
At that he was giving me a chance that a crook like Barney Masters wouldn’t give. I could see his point of view. I didn’t doubt his word in respect to the Lees. Brakely’s game had shaped up now so that all he wanted was a chance to race for his life.
“Can I ask Throgg a question?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“What became of Jean Vernet, that French sailor off the yacht?”
Throgg looked at Brakely.
“Tell him,” Brakely ordered.
“He got away from us, last night on the cliffs,” Throgg told me. “He made Barney think he’d be one of us, if we paid him big. We turned him loose, but didn’t give him no gun. He sneaked off. He’s on the island some place, if he didn’t swim out to the Seabird.”
Brakely made a motion with his guns. He’d been watching the hills leading up to the cliffs.
“I hear some of them coming, George,” he said to me. “Beat it!” He called after me: “I give you ten minutes from now. Don’t attempt to show yourself after that, George.”
I didn’t answer him. When I got out of his sight, I turned off at an angle and started on a run for Hippolyte’s cave.
Chapter XXXII
Parleying for High Stakes
It took me maybe half an hour to get there, and I was so weak from the trial of running, coming as it did on top of the excitement and hardships of several days, that I sank to the floor the instant I got inside the cave.
Hippolyte wasn’t there. The ashes in his rude stove were cold, as though there hadn’t been a fire there in a long time. I crawled over to the big hollow stone into which the water eaved down from the wall. The bowl was running over, and I drank deeply of the cool water.
Had Barney Masters and his crowd finished the deaf mute? Had they caught him prowling around the island, and made a quick job of it with their guns? Hippolyte, I knew, had no firearms.
I didn’t think that I was physically able to make the uphill and downhill trip to Marble Cove, and then to put up any kind of a fight. I didn’t think that the Lees were in much danger now, yet I couldn’t give up this other job — that of trapping the crooks.
But I was so weak that my legs wobbled when I stood up. The cave was chilly. I laid down on Hippolyte’s grass bed and pulled his rush blanket over me, to rest and think.
A man’s purpose is no good if he hasn’t got the strength to carry it out. When I looked back at what I’d been through, I didn’t wonder that my condition now verged on collapse. The last real sleep I had had was in this very cave.
I had gone out of this to a series of struggles and excitements. While held prisoner aboard the Angela Lee, in irons, unable to struggle, it might seem that I had nothing else to do but sleep — but my slumbers there were just a long series of dozes from which I would emerge with a start.
The excitement and the danger were never off my mind altogether. My nerves had been taut for several days, and I had worked hard physically in getting off the Angela Lee, and to this island, to say nothing of the exactions since arrival. No wonder I dropped asleep there in Hippolyte’s cave.