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:
“It seems that Brakely had told Captain Lee that pirate story, so it wasn’t hard to get Captain Lee in on it when we got to Marseilles. His plan was to get Captain Lee to take the Angela Lee to Querolle, and then for him and his crew to borrow the yacht for one or two trips to the Riviera.
“Brakely thought he could do this without exciting Captain Lee’s suspicions, leaving him there on the island with his own crew to hunt for the supposed pirate treasure. The idea was to pull off a few jobs in banks and hotels on the Riviera, so that the trip wouldn’t be a dead loss if we failed to find the treasure of the Gorilla.
“I swear that Julius Brakely had no intention of harming Captain Lee, and he did not know that Miss Mary Lee was doming along until we were almost ready to sail from Marseilles. He planned to deceive them, but not to harm them. We intended to keep them with us until we no longer needed the yacht and then to send them away with a story that the hunt for the pirate treasure was a failure.
“Then we would hunt for the Gorilla’s plant. If things went well we would have that and whatever money the gang got in its raids on the Riviera.
“We were bad off for navigators. We needed at least one more. It was too hard for a man of my age, the only navigator aboard. We would need one for the yacht trips up to the Riviera, as if trouble came up there it was important to have navigators who could make a clean and swift sailing job of it. We thought maybe we could pick up a sailor who knew something about navigation and get him in with us by a promise of big money.
“That is how we came to ship George Ranholm, in Marseilles. Things began to happen from that minute. Ranholm, we saw, wouldn’t consent to deceit even as to his rights to become a mate. But we made up our minds that he must be brought along, for fear that even what little he had learned might set him to talking.
“Ranholm was suspicious from the first, but we had him aboard and meant to keep him until we finished our jobs in those waters. Things went wrong from the time we learned Miss Lee was coming along on the yacht, and also on account of the sailor Ranholm.
“It turned out that we had to make a new set of plans, with a lot of lies and excuses, but we never gave up our intention of putting through everything we had planned. Julius Brakely got impatient and reckless, and began to fear that maybe he would finish with no money at all.
“Then we rushed things. I knew the game was up when Captain Lee got suspicious, after the yacht was taken out of the cove at Querolle, but Brakely was gone then and I couldn’t warn him.
“Brakely did not want Barney Masters to kill Captain Fawcett or Radd the cook. Masters did that on his own responsibility. Masters was plotting all the while to get command of things away from Brakely, and wanted to get rid of every man that stood in his way. If Masters had got the upper hand there would have been more killings, as he didn’t have the cool nerve of Julius Brakely, and thought of murder as the only way to beat a man.”
The confession went on in detail, telling of what Asa Joles knew about the siege; how Captain Lee acted after John Vernon dropped the hint that first aroused his suspicion, and how he took the commander of the Seabird into custody. Of the watch maintained for the reappearance of the crooks, and of the fight, with the Seabird’s company below decks, watching and shooting out the ports, none being able, on account of the crooks on the cliffs, to go on deck, haul up the anchors and steam away.
Miss Mary Lee read this confession to me as I lay on my bunk, my splintered leg propped up. She was acting as nurse to every wounded man aboard, including the crooks. The Seabird was out in the Mediterranean bound for Marseilles.
“This confession,” she said, “and the one I’m preparing from Throgg will reveal the whole plot. It will show too that the Angela Lee was stolen and destroyed, and father will collect his insurance.”
She meditated.
“Mr. Brakely didn’t plan murders,” she went on. “I was sure of that from the first moment we suspected him of crooked work, and Asa Joles and Throgg bear me out. Mr. Brakely’s plot got out of his hands. He couldn’t control the things he set afoot. I’m very sorry for him.”
“He’s not a killer,” I agreed. “The thing he did to Barney Masters wasn’t because Masters had tricked him. It—”
I didn’t finish, and was sorry I even hinted at the truth until I learned she understood.
Chapter XXXVI
The Sea Receives Her Dead
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’m very sorry for him.”
She shuddered, I suppose at thought of that killing and also at thought of the way Barney Masters used to look at her.
“I am also grateful to Brakely,” she added.
Hippolyte, still barefooted, for a pair of shoes couldn’t be found aboard ship to fit him, but shaved and dressed in clean clothes, walked past the open door.
“That man,” Mary Lee informed me, “never killed any one in his crimes. Mr. Brakely did him an injury in some way in. Paris, after posing as his friend and getting his secrets, but we haven’t got to the bottom of that yet. Mr. Brakely, of course, won’t talk at all. But Hippolyte spared him in the cave, when he realized that he was on the brink of his first murder. You told me how he dropped him to the floor.”
She shuddered again.
“No,” she went on, “Hippolyte isn’t a killer. And he hasn’t committed a crime since he went into the French army. From what he tells me of his experiences at Verdun he must be rated as one of the heroes of the war — though he doesn’t wish to be heroic about it. I get his stories only by keeping at him. He is one of the casualties of war — shell shock.
“If we can find his company commander and add to his story our account of how Hippolyte helped us at Querolle, I’m sure that the thefts of Le Gorille will be forgiven. He ran away from a military convalescent camp in southern France, and went to his old home on the other island.
“Then he slipped over to Querolle, no doubt to get the treasure he’d been hoarding up there for years. No one knows why he remained at Querolle. No one knows what went on in his mind during the terrible upheaval of nerves that left him a deaf mute. The man is sick, and shouldn’t be treated as a criminal.
“Father has the loot Hippolyte buried in his cave, and that will be turned over to the authorities with the money we recovered from the crooks, the proceeds of the robberies they committed during those few nights at Monte Carlo.
“We ought to receive some consideration for bringing in the gang and their stolen goods, and any influence that gives us will be exerted in behalf of Hippolyte and any of the others who appear deserving of mercy. Father has been counting Hippolyte’s treasure. He said he wanted you to see—”
Just then Captain Lee came in with a big dishpan out of the galley in his arms. He placed it on a chair.
Stacks of paper money, mounds of gold coins, and a heap of jewels — the toll taken from society by Le Gorille.
“The treasure of Caricar the Pirate,” I said with a grin.
The Lees laughed.
“I wonder if there ever was a pirate named Caricar?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Captain Lee replied. “That’s one of the things I must look up when I get ashore. Brakely won’t tell me. He simply grins when I ask him. Well, whether Caricar ever lived or not, it was a good story.”
“It certainly was,” I admitted; “and Brakely could tell it with a flourish.”
“Yes, indeed!”
Captain Lee took the dishpan and went away. Something came up a minute or so later that caused Mary Lee to repeat: