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 wounded were being cared for on the cliffs above Hippolyte’s cave, and Miss Mary Lee, Captain Lee, John Vernon, and a sailor off the yacht were in the cave with Brakely and me. Lamps had been fetched from the Seabird, and Captain Lee was setting my broken leg.
It was the pain of that operation that brought me out of the stupor.
Mary Lee’s face floated above me in the lamplight. It was still and calm and beautiful, and that alone told me that our struggles were over. She was watching her father’s operation on my leg, and occasionally she winced with sympathy for the pain she knew I must feel. She saw that my eyes were open, and she bathed my forehead with a damp cloth. Julius Brakely lay near by, and he seemed to be sleeping.
They told me not to talk, but I persisted in asking questions, when I wasn’t grating my teeth in agony. The story of what had happened came to me in fragments.
When Brakely opened his eyes he stared at John Vernon, and I knew he understood now. This was the man Mary Lee loved, and who had for several years left his work in a studio in Paris to pose as a Frenchman and a sailor merely to be near the girl. Alonzo Lee understood too, and all his objections had vanished under the stress of this adventure.
The man he trusted and admired, the man he favored as a son-in-law had turned out to be a crook who lived a double life — and why shouldn’t he let Mary Lee pick her own husband after such a miserable failure as he had made of it?
There was a kind of a grim smile on Julius Brakely’s face. He had lost at all points, but he was a man who would smile at it. John Vernon was working on him, bandaging his chest. Mary Lee did the same to Brakely that she did to me — bathed his forehead at intervals. I noticed that every time her face hung over his own he closed his eyes, and didn’t open them again until she turned away.
They worked with stuff from the medicine and surgery chest of the Seabird.
“Where is the deaf mute?” I asked.
“Up on the cliffs — helping,” Mary Lee replied. “You mustn’t talk. You need rest very badly.”
“Do you know who he is?” I persisted.
“Yes,” she told me.
“I’ll bet he’ll run away.”
“No — I’ve had a talk with him. I’ve assured him that no harm will come to him. He will be forgiven, I’m sure — when we tell our story, and when his war record is made known. I speak French and the sign language too. I made him understand.”
“How did you know who he is?”
“We have a full confession from Captain Fawcett,” the girl replied. “And Charles Throgg has been bursting to tell all he knows too. It’s a sensational story—”
She broke off suddenly, with a quick glance toward Brakely; and remembering, too, I suppose, that she was going against her own admonitions for quiet on my part.
“Say, Miss Lee,” I said, “Is Captain Fawcett — is that his right name?”
“You really must be quiet, George!”
“Tell me that much, please.”
“No, his name isn’t Fawcett.”
“I knew it! In the beginning I ought to’ve known something was wrong. I know a Captain Albert Fawcett—”
She motioned her head toward Brakely, and, out of consideration for his feelings, I kept my mouth shut.
It was long after dark, and I suffered the tortures of the damned from the trip across the island, it being a difficult job for the men who earned me in a blanket, when I dropped asleep. It was a peaceful sleep too, for all hands were safe aboard the Seabird.
Chapter XXXV
Plots and Killers
The confession of the man we had known as Captain Albert Fawcett, after it was all written out by Miss Mary Lee and in response to questions from Captain Lee, read:
“My name is Asa Joles. I am fifty-eight years old, and my home is in New York City. Up to the time I was forty-five I was a sailor, the last three years being master of several coastwise vessels.
“I was a heavy drinker, and got in with a crowd of smugglers in the West Indies. Later I mixed up with thieves and burglars in New York, and left the sea. I have been arrested several times, under various names, but never convicted.
“I met the man I later knew as Julius Brakely in the company of other crooks in New York. We got friendly when he learned I had been a seafaring man. As confidence grew in each other he let me know more about himself and a certain job he had in mind.
“He was known in New York society as Julius Brakely, and from what I learned he came of a very fine family. He had spent all the money he inherited, and for two or three years had been stealing, being known to crooks as ‘The Bobber,’ due to his habit of disappearing for weeks at a time and then bobbing up in our hang outs.
“He told me he lived the life of a society man until his money was gone, then he would come back to us and get more by stealing. He was known among crooks in London and Paris too.
“The job he told me about was digging up the ‘plant,’ as crooks call buried money and jewelry, of a Paris thief known as the Gorilla. In Paris he had met the Gorilla, and had wormed his secrets out of him. He and the Gorilla had had trouble, but I never did know rightly just what it was, except that it was serious and that the Gorilla would kill him if they met.
“He thought the Gorilla was dead though, it being said among the thieves of Paris that he had gone into the army and was never seen since. Brakely told me that this man had a fortune in stolen money and jewels planted on an island in the Mediterranean, the little island of Querolle, near the island where the Gorilla originally came from. He thought it worth while to go hunt for it, but was broke.
“The details he gave looked good. We talked it over with other crooks, some of whom had been to sea, mainly Barney Masters and Charlie Throgg, who both had engineer’s papers. We got them in it, and then bamboozled” — that’s the word Asa Joles insisted on using — “a ship captain named Albert Fawcett, master of his own vessel, the Seabird, into going off on a treasure voyage.
“Julius Brakely told Captain Fawcett a clever story of pirates, and the captain got excited about it. Captain Fawcett had no family, and the adventure appealed to him. We worked it so that we picked the crew, all crooks except a cook named Radd, and a galley boy called Splinters, both of whom Captain Fawcett insisted on taking along. We all sailed from New York in the Seabird.
“In a drunken fight three days out of New York, Barney Masters killed Captain Fawcett. Julius Brakely nor no one else of us had anything to do with that, and it frightened most of us — but we were in it, and had to go through with it. We buried Captain Fawcett at sea.
“Then I took Captain Fawcett’s name and posed as him after that, so that we didn’t have to change the ship’s papers. By threats and promises of big money we got Radd and Splinters to say they would join us — made them swear to it with their hands on a dagger.
“The stories we told of getting most of the crew in Mediterranean ports were lies. Every man of them came aboard in New York, and as sailors they were a scurvy lot.”
Mary Lee told me that Captain Fawcett insisted on putting things in that maybe weren’t important, and they thought too that that would make it more legal. The confession went on:
“But as crooks, this crew was wise and capable. On the way across to Gibraltar we got to talking of what we could do with that gang if we had them ashore on the Riviera. To land them there in the regular way was dangerous, as we had no passports. The only way to be safe about it was to take them in as sailors.
“Then Julius Brakely said that the Seabird would be a suspicious looking craft to take into ports like Monte Carlo and Nice. It wasn’t long before Julius Brakely had a plan to get a yacht. He knew Captain Alonzo Lee, and they were close friends. Captain Lee had a yacht tied up at Marseilles.