Drowned Gold/Chapter 5

{{di|I}] SET the telegraph over to full-stop, and let the Esperanza float with the outgoing tide. I ran down to Martin's cabin, and rapped on the door. There was no response. I sent my steward for a master-key and felt the wards of the locks turn beneath my fingers, and tried to open the door that I had never entered since Martin, with his peculiar insistence on privacy, came aboard. It did not budge, and I surmised that it was bolted on the inside. I tried to thrust it inward with my shoulders, but it did not yield. I went to a window, and was tearing away the green shutters when the steward said, "A tug-boat, sir, is coming up astern and giving us a call."

I paused for a moment and looked at her. She was swathed in black smoke, as if in haste, and carried a bone in her teeth that bespoke her thrust. A man stood in the very peak of her bow who threw his arms up and down to attract attention. I hesitated for a full minute before I could recognize my chief engineer. It was Martin, all right, jumping up and down in his anxiety. The tug came panting alongside before I made clear his wrathful face. He came up the Jacob's-ladder thrown over for his convenience.

"Are you old Tom Hale's son?" he demanded, as he stood before me with clenched fists. "I'd never have thought that such a man could have—"

"Steady! Steady!" I called. "Let's get at the bottom of this."

I have been told that there is command in my voice. I don't know as to that, but I do know that it made him pause.

"What I should like to know," I continued, "is why you aren't aboard at sailing hour, and why you were seen but a few minutes before we cast off. There's something wrong about this"—and as his face became blank, I added—"Jimmy!"

His hands fell to his sides and he stood as if transfixed. Then his eyes fell upon the blinds that I had been tearing away with my fingers, and he made a step toward his cabin.

"I got a note from you asking me to come to an agency in Second Avenue, and that you wouldn't sail until you got another man," he said. "You put at the bottom of it, 'Urgent. Come at once. It's important for your work.' See! Here's the note itself."

He thrust into my hands a sheet of the identical note-paper that, being somewhat prone to extravagance, I used aboard the ship. The handwriting was not mine, but how should he know my handwriting when, to my knowledge, he had never seen it?

"Don't stop for explanations!" I shouted. "They shall be made later! Come and help me to smash in the door of your cabin. There's a man in there. Here! You two men stand by that window there, and two more by the next, and by the next one for'ard. If any one tries to climb through, get him!"

Jimmy seemed to understand and rushed after me as I returned to the door. Together we threw our entire weight against it, and the inside bolt snapped at the second impact, and we stumbled inside. A man tried to escape past us, but my steward caught him around his knees and brought him flat to the deck. Before he could regain his feet both Jim and I were on top of him.

"Let me alone! Let me alone! I'll get off the ship," he cried, with a somewhat foreign accent, that was not without a quaver.

Jim jerked him to his feet, and then, as if remembering those sacred precincts of his, said to me, "Hold him! Hold him! Don't let him get away until I have a look."

I caught our prisoner on one side, and my steward, who is still my personal attendant, by the way, caught him by the other. We whirled the man around and I got my first good full view of his face. For a moment I was puzzled as to where I had seen him, and then recollection came with a rush. He was one of the men who had done the carpenter work in altering the cabins for Jimmy's new laboratory, and had acted so curiously that the dock carpenter, a fairly good friend of mine, had fired him off the job, and replaced him with another man, declaring, "That mut is tangled in his upper rigging."

Jimmy ran through his cabin door, was gone for a minute or so, while we stood panting and turning deaf ears to the whining implorations of the intruder, and then came back in a blaze of fury. He ran his hands over the man's clothes, then tore open his coat, as if to take it from the man's body. He ran his hands into the pockets, and pulled out some papers, which he threw on the deck in disgust. He finally jerked the coat loose with one great rip that broke its back away, and then we saw, on the squirming back of our captive, a pocket in the very back of his vest between his shoulder-blades, from which projected a thin line of white. Jimmy gave an exultant shout and dragged these papers forth. He opened them to make his assurance complete, and I saw that traced on them were plans of a mechanism.

"Stand by there a minute!" Jimmy shouted over the rails to the skipper of the tug-boat; then, to me, "Bring him into my cabin till we go through him." The steward and I obeyed. Inside that cabin we stripped the man, while Jimmy ransacked his clothing and held the few papers of which he possessed himself.

"He can get his togs back on," the chief said, with a grin. We stood aside while the man, sullen and glowering, donned his clothing.

"Now we'll chuck him over on to the tug," said the chief.

We led our prisoner back out and told the tug's skipper that we had a man who wished to return to the dock, then somewhat roughly assisted our captive to her deck. Jimmy paid the tug for putting him aboard the Esperanza, and again we forged down the stream. I had no further chance to talk to him until late that night.

"That affair to-day proves how lucky it was that I remained on the ship to finish my work. I put it down as another score on my obligations to you," he said quietly.

"What do you make of it?" I asked. "Do you have any idea who that chap was?"

"Idea? I know!" was his emphatic assertion. "He was actually sent as a picked secret service agent from Central Europe to either buy or steal those plans. I was approached by three different men while we were in New York this time, all representing this same Government, I am certain. The first admitted it, and thus put me on my guard. The second I told very plainly that I would not offer or sell to any one until my own country had a chance at it,—and particularly because our own country seems to stand at this moment on the verge of war. That chap went away and returned with a man who came after dark, and of whose identity I was unaware until to-day, when I saw his picture in every newspaper that came to hand."

"The ambassador himself?" I exclaimed.

"None other! I'm dead positive. He didn't know how far I had progressed in my research, but had an astonishing knowledge of what I was attempting. And that isn't all; for he knew that I was intending to continue aboard the Esperanza, and that she was being altered to fit my needs."

"You know how that was discovered, don't you?" I asked, and told him of my recognition of the carpenter; but Jimmy had been so absorbed in his own affairs that he had not even noticed the men who did the work.

"Maybe it would have been wiser to keep him aboard," I said thoughtfully.

"I thought of that, but decided it wouldn't," Jimmy said. "I'd have had no peace of mind, and I'm right at a point where I can't carry any outside worry. But we shall have to keep a pretty close watch in Maracaibo, where probably some other spy will be waiting on the dock when we throw the first line."

Nodding sagely, he got to his feet, yawned, and stretched, and bade me good-night. Evidently he still desired to keep his own secret, although by this time I confess I had begun to experience a lively curiosity concerning it. I had rather tolerantly accepted his first statements that he was being watched, and taken the whole dose with a grain of salt, believing that one who suspects all men and everything about him might make a mountain out of a mere mole-hill; but that day had brought irrefutable proof that his work was actually of sufficient importance to cause a foreign government to go to the utmost extremes for its possession.

For three days we steamed steadily southward in most favorable weather, and, to my secret delight, Twisted Jimmy found ample time to devote to his private experiments, although I observed that he had not in the least increased his time for rest and sleep. I remonstrated with him in the utmost good-humor. His eyes glowed somberly, and, although we were alone, he looked furtively about him and leaned forward to whisper in my ear: "I can't rest now, because the end is in sight 1 I've almost got it! Work and patience will turn the trick."

We paced to and fro along the deck in the moonlight, and finally halted by the door of his den. He was in the midst of an inconsequential sentence when he broke off abruptly, stared at the door which reflected the light from its shining white panels, and again glanced all about, as if seeking some eavesdropper. To my utter astonishment he unlocked the door, switched on the light, and said, "Come in and have a pipe, Captain. Come in!"

It was the first time he had ever given such an invitation since we had become shipmates. It was the first time I had ever stepped over that threshold since he came aboard the Esperanza with his stipulation for complete privacy. Quite deliberately he closed the door behind me, reassured himself that the shades were closed, and turned toward me with a grim face. He examined every foot of the cabin and then said, "Sit still a moment while I—" He did not complete the sentence, but unlocked the door leading back into his laboratory, and there, also, switched on the light. I saw nothing but a long space entirely lined from walls to ceiling and floor with black cloth. Even the doors and windows had been sealed. From where I sat nothing was visible in this funereal setting other than a grotesque, intricate machine of polished brass, whose use I could not conjecture. I heard him moving restlessly beyond my sight, opening drawers, and then came the clinking of glass, sounding as if he had removed one test tube after another from a rack and inspected each one in turn. He came swinging out against the black background and for a long time critically examined the brass apparatus, seeming to study its polished surfaces as if to discover whether a hand had been laid thereon. As if reassured, he returned to the light, switched it out, came through into his cabin, locked the connecting door with the utmost care, and came close to where I was sitting.

"Listen," he said, in a half-mumbled undertone. "While I was out of here to-night some one tried to enter. There was a smear of grease or coal-dust where a man's finger had tried to turn the knob. As a precaution I have kept all the woodwork surrounding the knob and keyhole spotlessly white."

"No!" I exclaimed incredulously. "Are you positive?"

"Wait a moment," he answered, and again went to his laboratory, where a much stronger light than the one in the ceiling became apparent, and then I heard him chuckle.

"Come in here," he called, and I went into a room along one whole side of which were drawers and a bench covered with retorts and tubes, a huge machine with a small dynamo, and a rather odd equipment of polishing and grinding apparatus, such as might be seen in the workshop of a diamond-cutter. He was standing under a powerful light that shone downward, and now extended me a heavy magnifying-glass and a door-key.

"That is the key to the lock out there," he said. "Have a look. Somebody took an impression of it—not with soap, mind you, but with specially prepared wax, such as locksmiths use."

Under the glass it showed quite plainly.

"Which means," he added, "that whoever took that impression came aboard this ship prepared for the work; because otherwise he could not have obtained this wax aboard the ship, and could not have made it aboard the ship. Get me?" I was as angry as if I were his partner in enterprise. A sneak thief aboard my own ship! The thought was not comforting.

"Then who in the deuce— Say! It must have been a man from either the engine-room, a fireman, or a coal-passer, because it's not likely that any other hand would have left the smear."

"Quite true," he said quietly, and for an instant we eyed each other with the same thought in our minds. We had but one new man aboard, the engineer, John Klein. Truly it was a German name, but the man had himself told me that he was of American birth.

"That man is far too good an engineer to be aboard this packet, it seemed to me the first day I saw him work," Jimmy muttered, as if one of us had spoken Klein's name aloud. He turned to a drawer and drew from it a square of cloth of peculiar texture, that I surmised was of the material that analytical chemists use. He led the way out of the laboratory and turned off the light. He also turned off the light in the front cabin and whispered his instructions:

"The door swings pretty well back. When I open it you stand just outside it, so as to conceal what I am doing, while I take that smudge off the door. We'll find out whether it is grease, or contains coal-dust. I'll let you know to-morrow morning."

So I stepped out into the moonlight, and talked as if concluding a conversation about our cargo, looking the meanwhile to see if I could discover any lurking form. I did not; nor did I find any one after bidding Jim good-night and hearing the door close behind me. I paced forward, and then aft, staring up at the single big funnel that poured a heavy, writhing column of smoke over its rim to float slowly away as we ran from under it in the calm night. The ship was on such a steady keel that the wireless kite did not sway as it stretched between the two graceful masts. Her deck shone clean and white, and her paintwork glistened in the moonlight, for my old naval habit of keeping everything spick and span could not be overcome, although it proved an expensive luxury. With almost naval discipline and regularity, I could see the bridge officer pacing steadily from wing to wing as if for exercise. Through her ventilators and the open grate amidships, the cheerful sounds of engines that ran sweetly and the clang of the furnace doors came upward, a chorus that had always filled me with delight, like the infinite, familiar, small sounds of home. And yet, on that night, the Esperanza conveyed to me a sense of something foreign and distasteful, now that I knew she had a traitor aboard. We had been a "happy ship"; but now I felt that she was defiled. If I could have been certain of the traitor's identity I am not certain that I should not have been capable, on that night, of throwing him overboard with my own hands.

I slept uneasily in my cabin, which was abaft the chart-house and the bridge, and which I had most extravagantly made into a home more worthy of the captain of a luxurious liner than a mere freighter's skipper; for in my quick prosperity money had been very easy, and—I am somewhat luxurious in my taste and like physical comfort and decent surroundings.

Twisted Jimmy called me before my steward had arrived and I was not annoyed that he had disturbed me, because it was a final evidence that I had won his innermost liking. He actually sat on the edge of my bed—for a bed I had—and said, as if we had parted not more than ten minutes preceding: "Well, Tom, it's grease; no coal-dust in it at all. And what is more, Klein himself, at nine o'clock last night, readjusted some oil cups on the main dynamo after cussing out the oiler in charge. He wiped his hands on a piece of waste, said he felt rather out of gear, climbed up over the gratings, and went on deck. He was gone from the engines for about a half-hour, and came back in a rotten temper, and told the third that the engine-room looked like an Irish pigsty, and that if he could have his way he'd go through some of them down there with his boot. And I know the reason for that, I think! I changed the lock on my cabin door with my own hands, after that affair in the Atlantic Basin, because it doesn't do to take too many chances on an old lock!"