Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 3

seemed an eternity to the agonized Wingate before once more Jaccard's knock sounded at the door.

“Come in!” he, in a kind of broken gasp. Then, with a terrible intensity of eagerness that his broken will power, his shattered pride, failed to mask: “Got it, have you?”

The captain nodded.

“Where is it?”

Jaccard touched his pocket with a tanned, muscular hand.

“Well, what the devil are you standing there for, and not giving it to me?”

“Beg pardon, sir”—the captain smiled oddly—“but—well—”

“Well, what?”

“I hate to say it, sir, but—”

“Say what, curse you?”

“I've got to ask you to pay me for it.”

“Pay you?” Wingate's lantern jaw dropped. His eyes went blank with amazement. “Pay you?”

“Well, why not, sir? After all, the morphine's mine, isn't it?”

“Why, you—you infernal scoundrel! You crook!” choked the millionaire. “On my own yacht! Pay you! I should say not!”

“Very well, sir—as you wish.”

Jaccard, half turning, laid his heavy hand on the door knob. Instantly Wingate sprang up, almost clawing for him.

“Here, man! Wait! What are you doing?”

“You understand me, I guess.”

“But, man,” pleaded Wingate, “even a criminal, a condemned murderer in the death cell, gets his tobacco. They don't sell it to him! If he has a toothache, they give him something to stop it!”

“You object to buying morphine, sir?”

“I do!” Something of manhood reasserted itself in Wingate. “It isn't the price. A few cents—pshaw! It's the principle.. I can't debase myself to dicker with you like that, on my own yacht. I might as well charge you for your food. Men don't do things like that—not on shipboard, anyhow!”

“Well, I do!” Jaccard asserted doggedly. “I happen to be in need of a little ready money, above my wages; and I've got a valuable commodity—for sale. Well, how about it?”

Jaccard's manner had changed—had grown coarser, more overbearing. Even yet Wingate seemed unable to comprehend the net tightening about him. He stood there, a strange and wasted figure in the mocking gay bath robe, trembling, unnerved, amazed.

“Of course,” half sneered the captain, “if your pride means more to you than relief from your—toothache—”

“You mean to tell me that you, my employee—”

Jaccard nodded. His face, till now bland and smiling, had assumed a rather sinister expression.

“I've got a few things to attend to, sir,” said he. “I told the engineers I'd only be gone a few minutes. If you don't want to buy—well, there's nothing more to be said about it.”

Jaccard half opened the door.

“Hold on! Wait!” gasped the wretched Wingate. “I—I'll buy; but, damn you, when we get to any port at all, I'll fire you, if it's the last thing God ever lets me do!”

“All right, sir! I was thinking of leaving you, anyhow. I don't care much for these nickel-plated, make-believe jobs. There's no kick to them. Besides, when we get back to port, I guess I'll be fixed so I won't be worrying much about anything. Now, sir, how many grains of morphine do you want?”

“Give me the whole damned bottle! Here!”

Wingate jerked open his desk drawer, ruffled the contents, found and hauled out a japanned metal box, and unlocked it with shaking fingers. He extracted a thick sheaf of currency, slipped off a ten-dollar bill, and dropped it on the desk.

“There you are!” he choked. “Now give me—”

“Sorry, sir,” negatived Jaccard, shaking a very decisive head; “but that chicken feed wouldn't buy the dust off a single tablet.”

“What?”

“I can't let such valuable stuff go at any such figure as that.”

“But, man, in the open market, morphine only costs—”

“Yes, but this isn't the open market, you see, sir,” the captain interrupted, raising his hand. “Not at all! Quite the contrary!”

“You—you mean you're going to hold me up?”

“I mean you've got to meet the price in this particular market, which is the only market open to you.”

“Why, you infernal scoundrel! You—”

“Look here, now! I don't care much for your line of talk. You'd better pipe down, or the market may close altogether!”

Wingate choked over incoherent words.

“This is highway robbery!” he finally managed to articulate.

“Hardly that,” smiled the captain. “Not at sea!”

“It's piracy, then! It's blackmail, grand larceny, extortion! It's conspiracy! And when I get you ashore—”

“All right! But a good many mighty interesting things are liable to happen before you do.”

“It—it's robbery at sea! That's piracy, and—”

“Oh, forget that! It's nothing but a case of supply and demand. I'm supply, and you're demand, and that regulates the price, doesn't it? Well, what say?”

The millionaire stared with horrified realization. For a moment he stood there, racked and shaking, tortured with the gnawing, intolerable agony of abstinence from his indispensable drug. Then, all at once, he laughed gratingly, horribly.

“I see!” he gulped. “It's all plain enough now! You got in here, into my cabin, some time when I was on deck. You stole all my morphine.” He swept a quivering hand at desk and lockers. “You and—I don't know who else, but I dare say it's Zanelli—you've got me trapped here!” His lip drew back in a vicious, canine snarl. “It's all a plot, a hellish conspiracy! I don't believe there's a damned thing the matter with the engine! You've simply got me caught, here, wherever this cursed island is, and now—”

“Now I'm selling morphine, sir, and you're buying it,” the captain smilingly interrupted. “You've got to have it—just got to! Good stuff, too, at times!” He drew a phial from his pocket, held it in his strong fingers, and critically surveyed it. “Great stuff! Worth any money, in a case like yours!”

At sight of the drug, Wingate's disjointed, half incoherent tirade wilted and died. His staring eyes fixed on the phial with pitiable craving. No martyr on the rack longs for release so passionately as an addict for his morphine. Wingate's claw-like hands trembled toward the phial.

“l pay!” he gasped. “This infernal toothache—anything—can't stand it! What price?”

“There, that's better!” said Jaccard. “I kind of thought you'd meet my terms. A man with a recurrent—toothache like yours, will give anything to get rid of it. Won't he, now?”

“For God's sake, man, stop talking!” The millionaire's voice rose to a reedy falsetto of agony. “Stop talking, and give it to me!”

All manhood lost, all self-respect gone by the board, he cringed, suppliant.

“Yes, yes—all right! But not till we come to terms, and I'm paid. Cash in hand, too!”

“Cash, yes! What price?”

“One thousand dollars!”

“No, no, no! A thousand, just for that little phial! No, no—it's impossible!”

“Who said anything about the phial? Per tablet, I mean.”

“One thousand dollars per tablet?”

“That's the figure—and it's a rising market, too!”

For a moment Wingate stared at Jaccard with dumb-smitten amazement. The incredible proposition could not immediately strike home; but as its full significance won to his dazed brain, he made a brutish, gulping noise, and flung himself at the captain.

Impotently the millionaire's weak fists battered that solid bulk. They did no more than dash the phial from Jaccard's hand. It fell to the cabin floor, rolled against one of the lockers, and stopped there. With an insensate, wild rage, Wingate tried to land some telling blow. Tortured nerves and outraged mind drove him on to make of himself a degrading, pitiful spectacle—how different from what he had been in those other, far-away days of splendid athletic achievement!

Jaccard hardly did him the honor of caring to ward off his blows. The sturdy sailor took them with indifference, as if Wingate had been a petulant child. Then, with an easy backward swing of the arm, he flung off his assailant.

“There, now!” he exclaimed. “That's enough mutiny! Assaulting a ship's captain on the high seas! I could make it warm for you, if I wanted to; but I won't. What's the use? You're not right in the head, as any court would soon find out.”

At the bitter gibe, he laughed unpleasantly; then he picked up the phial and smoothed down his trim white jacket, which the futile attack had slightly ruffled. An immaculate person, this Jaccard seemed.

With eyes of murderous hate, Wingate glowered at his tormentor from the berth where he had been thrown, and where he now half crouched.

“I see you don't want to buy any to-day,” continued the captain. “Guess you aren't in the market, are you?” He pocketed the phial and turned toward the door. With his hand on the knob, he added: “Well, any time you happen to want any, just remember that I've got all the available supply; and don't forget that to-morrow the price advances to fifteen hundred per tablet. That's all. Good day!”

The door swung and clicked. Jaccard was gone.

On the instant, Wingate leaped up, clutching at the door, pleading, babbling:

“Here! Wait—hold on! Come back!”

No answer. Wingate snatched open the door and peered into the main cabin. It was empty.

Disheveled, undone, beaten, and torture-racked in every nerve and muscle, the millionaire stood for a moment, peering with bloodshot eyes. A thin slaver was lagging from the corner of his mouth. His chest heaved like a spent racer's.

“Captain Jaccard! Oh, captain! Steward! Zanelli! Anybody!” he shouted in a choking voice.

Still no reply.

A silence as of the tomb, doubly impressive in that sweltering breathlessness of heat, hung like the leaden weight of destiny.

With a gulp, a gasp of mortal agony, Wingate staggered back into his cabin. He slammed the door, collapsed in his desk chair, and remained there motionless, his head lying limp across the desk on his thin and nerveless arms.