Island Gold/Chapter 3

loath to leave him. What he had told me of the fate of his friend, the man called Dutchy, made me feel a trifle apprehensive of his own safety. And I had a kind of feeling that, for all his apparent calm, he was frightened. On looking back at my interview that night with the beach-comber in his wretched shack, I realize there must have been something unusually sweet about his personality. Its flavour seemed to linger; for I left him, as I have said, reluctantly, and I have thought of him many times since.

The back door led straight into a kind of open shed which, from the stove and stacked-up wood-pile, I judged to be Doña Luisa's cooking-place. The shed gave on a dusty yard, small and narrow, smelling horribly of poultry, with a high mud wall. In this wall I saw—for the moonlight made everything as bright as day—a wooden door. On reaching it I found that it was locked.

For a moment I had a mind to go back to the front and home by the way I had come. But I felt doubtful as to whether I should be able to follow in the opposite direction the intricate route by which Doña Luisa had brought me, and I had no desire to be lost in the negro quarter at night. So without much ado I scaled the mud wall and, dropping to earth on the other side, found myself in the plantation of which the beach-comber had spoken.

Here I was alone with the noises of the tropical night. Of human beings there was neither sound nor sign. However, I had Adams's directions firmly in my head; and by following them to the letter came back at last without incident, but very hot and sticky, to John Bard's bungalow.

The verandah was empty, the house very quiet. I looked at my watch. It was half-past eleven. Bard had gone down to the Club for his usual evening rubber of bridge, but I had excused myself, for I had meant to write letters. I knew it would be at least an hour before Bard returned; for he was a late bird. So I went through to my room, had a sponge down, and changed into pyjamas and made my way to the living-room.

It was a delightfully airy apartment, one side, glazed, opening on to the verandah, the other walls distempered a pale green. There were native mats on the floor and comfortable chairs stood about the room. I went over to the writing-desk in one corner, switched on the reading-lamp, and lit a cigar. Then I pulled out of my pocket the package which I had received from the beach-comber.

The outer covering was a piece of greasy flannel which looked as if it had been tom off an old shirt. With my knife I slit up the stitches—it had been lightly tacked across with thread—and pulled out a narrow pad of oil-silk folded once across. Spread out, it made a piece roughly about nine inches long by six wide. Across it stood written some lines hastily scribbled in indelible pencil. The hand was crabbed and irregular, the writing indistinct and, in some places, almost completely effaced. But I could distinguish enough to recognize that both the hand and the words were German.

At this I felt my pulse quicken. A faint instinct of the chase began to stir in my blood. For three long months I had dawdled deliciously; for, in turning my face towards the sunshine of the New World, I had deliberately turned my back on the thrills and disappointments, the dangers and the ennuis, of the Secret Service. This almost undecipherable scrawl, with here and there a German word clearly protruding itself (I could read “Kiel” and “Siehst Du”), and, above all, the indelible pencil, in whose pale mauve character gallant young men wrote the real history of the war, brought back to me with vivid clearness memorable moments of those half-forgotten campaigning days. I fumbled in a drawer of the desk for Bard's big magnifying-glass, drew up my chair, and set myself stolidly—as I had so often done in the past!—to the deciphering of what is in all circumstances, easily the most illegible handwriting in the world.

In truth, no writing is harder to read than the German. In his intercourse with the foreigner, the brother Boche, it is true, not infrequently employs the Latin character. But, for communications among themselves, the Germans continue to use their own damnable hieroglyphics. I have often wondered to see how the most unintelligent German will read off with ease a closely written scrawl of German handwriting looking as though a spider, after taking an ink-bath, had jazzed up and down the page.

This particular specimen of the Hun fist was a proper Chinese puzzle. Where in places it was beginning to be decipherable, the heavy indelible ink had run (under the influence of damp, I suppose), and where the writing was not a mass of smears, it was illegible in a degree to make one despair.

Well, I got down to it properly. My knowledge of German (which I know about as well as English) was a great help. Finally, with the assistance of Bard's magnifying-glass, a deduction here and a guess there, after nearly an hour's hard work, I produced what was, as nearly as I could make it, an accurate version of the original. My greatest triumph lay, I think, in establishing the fact that an unusually baffling row of cryptic signs at the bottom of the thing was, in reality, four bars of music.

But when I had set it all down (on a sheet of John Bard's expensive glazed note-paper), I scratched my head, and, despite my aching eyes, took another good look at the original. For I could make no sense of the writing at all.

The message (for such it seemed to be) was signed with the single letter “U.” And this is what I got:

Blankly I stared at this doggerel. Then I took down from the rack another sheet of paper and jotted down a rough English translation:

Leaning back in my chair, I cast my mind over the strange tale I had heard that night from Adams, the story whispered in the fierce noon-day heat of the calaboose of San Salvador: of the ship which had brought the solitary white man and his gold out of the Unknown to Cock Island; of the man's death and of the message he had left so oddly behind him. And lest any one should think that I was paying too much heed to a rambling yarn told me at second-hand by a drunken outcast, a yarn, moreover, based on a statement by a Kanaka deck-hand, let me say at once that my whole training in the Intelligence had taught me never to reject any statement, however improbable it sounded, until it had failed to withstand an elaborate series of tests. Indeed, the major fascination of this poorly paid and sometimes dangerous profession of ours is the rare delight of seeing emerge, out of some seemingly impossible tale, a solid basis of fact.

And, behind the beach-comber's rambling story, there were certain solid facts which, from the moment of discovering that the message was in German, I could not afford to neglect. When William the Second launched the World War like a big stone dropped in a pond, the ripples reached to the uttermost ends of the earth. In many a lonely island of the Seven Seas there had been, I knew, mysterious comings and goings, connected with gun-running, submarine work, and dark conspiracies of all kinds. Did this scrap of stained oil-silk, picked off a lonely grave in the Southern Seas, lead back to a secret adventure of this kind? I decided that it might.

I turned to the message again. It was obviously written by a German and for a German, it was fair to presume ... for some specific German, furthermore, who would hold the key to the conventional code in which this message was almost certainly written. Consequently, the solitary stranger of Cock Island had expected to meet a German on the island; ergo, the island was a meeting-place, some secret rendezvous of the busy German conspirators in the war. This was borne out by the remarkable evidence laid before Adams by Dutchy on their visit to Cock Island to prove that some gang of desperadoes from San Salvador had previously been there. The names mentioned by Dutchy were undoubtedly Spanish—Black Pablo and Neque, for instance—but there might have been Germans with them. El Cojo was also Spanish, to judge by the name; but apparently he had put in an appearance later and had not visited the island.

To what did the message refer? What would the solitary German, with the hand of Death at his throat, wish to tell the man whom he was to have met? Might it not be, as Adams had said, the whereabouts of the gold brought to the island by the Unknown, which, from the conversation of Adams's fellow prisoners at the calaboose, was apparently still on the island? Various geographical indications in the message—the Sugar-Loaf, the Lorelei (the latter the well-known crag on the Rhine), seemed to confirm this.

But the message had remained in its bottle on the grave until, months later, Adams and Dutchy had found it. It was, therefore, to be presumed that the unknown German's friend, probably some one in El Cojo's gang, had not kept the appointment. Why?

I stared in perplexity at the dead man's scrawl. Every one of my deductions, I perceived all too clearly, led to a question to which I was unable to supply an answer. I began to regret that I had not read the message at Adams's hut and cross-examined him on it before I left him. But I realized I should never have been able to decipher the scrawl by the flickering light of the oil-lamp in the shack. I resolved to go down to the negro quarter and see Adams again in the morning.

I suddenly began to feel restless and rather unhappy. I know the symptoms. In me they always presage a burst of activity after a spell of idleness. This infernal riddle had altogether upset me. I had no desire to go to bed; the very idea of sleep was repugnant to me.

I measured myself out a peg of whiskey and splashed the soda into it. My eyes, roaming round the room, fell on the upright piano in the corner. I crossed to the instrument and, opening the lid, put on the music rest the little square of oil-skin. Then, summoning back to my mind with an effort the hazy musical knowledge of my early school days, with considerable deliberation I picked out on the piano the notes indicated in the four bars of music appended to the end of the message.

I got the melody at once, or rather one movement of a melody which was dimly familiar to me. It fitted itself to no words or voice in my mind; but as I hummed it over, a silly little jingle, I suddenly had a mental picture of a cheap German dance-hall, such as you find in the northern part of Berlin, with a blaring orchestra and jostling couples redolent of perspiration and beer. I knew the tune; but it was the words which were wanted to complete the dead man's message. And they came not.

I was laboriously pounding the piano with one finger when I heard Bard's heavy step on the verandah. The next moment he came into the room, a big figure of a man in a tussore silk suit with a Panama hat. Somehow the sight of him made me feel easier in my mind. That sublime sense of superiority, which we British suck in with our mother's milk, is a heartening thing when you find it in your fellow Britisher abroad thousands of miles from home. And John Bard, though, with his small pointed beard and rather pallid face, he looked like a Spaniard, was through and through British. Trader, merchant, financier, and, on occasion, statesman, his massive body bore scars which told of thrilling years spent among the cannibals and head-hunters of the Pacific islands.

But long years of exile had only served to make John Bard more resolutely British. An uncompromising bachelor, abstemious in his habits and puritanical in his outlook, his mental attitude towards his fellow man in this tiny republic of the Spanish Main was exactly what it would have been had he been a London suburbanite suddenly translated from his native Brixton to these distant shores. He was an eminently common, sensible person who was generally reputed to run the miniature republic of Rodriguez in which he had elected to settle down after his adventurous life.

His unshakeable phlegm lent him a reposeful air which I believe was the first thing that drew me to him when, a few months before for the first time for many years, I had met him again in a New York hotel. Six months' leave, unexpectedly offered, found me at a loose end, and I gladly accepted his invitation to travel down by one of his ships and visit him in his Central American home. His cheery self-possession, as he stepped through the open doors of the verandah, seemed to put to flight the unpleasant shapes which my mind's eye had seen rising from the little piece of oil-silk.

Bard crossed the room without speaking and filled himself a glass of soda-water from a syphon on the side-table. He tossed his soft Panama hat on a chair and brushed back his closely cut crop of iron-grey hair from his temples. With his glass in his hand, he dropped into a seat at my side.

“There's a yacht in the harbour,” he said. “That's what made me late. She's called for some stuff they've got waiting for her at the Consulate. Fordwich—that's the Consul, you know—is down with a go of fever, so I went round with his clerk to see about this consignment. Whew! But it's warm walking!”

“What's the yacht?” I asked.

“Name of Naomi. She's come through the Canal”—“the Canal” in these parts is, of course, the Panama Canal—“and is going across to Hawaii, I believe!”

He yawned and stretched his big frame. He drained his glass and stood up.

“Heigho,” he said, “It's after two. I'm for bed!”

Now between John Bard and me existed that sort of uncommunicative friendship which is often found between two men who have knocked about the world a good deal. Though I could tell by Bard's elaborate affectation of nonchalance that he noticed I was preoccupied, I knew he would never demand the cause of this. If I wanted his advice, I should have to ask for it.

“Bard,” said I, “just a minute. Who's El Cojo?”

I pronounced it in the English fashion, but Bard gave the word its rasping Spanish aspirate as he repeated it.

“El Cojo?” he queried. “That's a nickname, isn't it? What is he? A bull-fighter, or a cigar?”

“I gather,” I remarked, “that he's a gentleman of fortune!”

Bard laughed.

“The production of that type is an old industry in these parts, my boy,” he riposted. “And even I don't know 'em all. I never heard of your pal. Is he a citizen of this illustrious republic?”

I shook my head.

“I haven't an idea,” I answered. “I only know that a man called Black Pablo is mixed up with him...”

John Bard whistled softly.

“'Dime con quien andas, decirte de quien eres,'” he quoted. “That is to say, tell me whom you go with and I'll tell you who you are. If your pal is a friend of Black Pablo, then he's 'no friend o' mine'!”

“Why?”

“Because,” said John Bard slowly, and I noticed that his mocking air had altogether disappeared, “because Black Pablo is the greatest scoundrel on this coast ... and that's going some! During the war, when, after a good deal of pressure, our most illustrious President ultimately kicked out Schwanz, the German Consul, Black Pablo became Germany's unofficial agent. He was mixed up with running guns for the Mexicans to annoy the Yanks, and supplies for the Hun commerce raiders to worry the British, and every other kind of dirty work. As long as he was merely a smuggler, a cut-throat, and a hired assassin, as he was before the war ... Bien! I had nothing to say to him. But when the fellow had the blasted impudence to come butting into our war on the wrong side, by George! one had to do something. The Americans were devilish decent about it, I must say, and, with their support, we ran the skunk out of here That was around January, 1918, and I have never heard of our friend since. But I'll give you a word of advice, young fellow, my lad. If you come across Black Pablo, give him a wide berth. And mind his left! He keeps his knife in that sleeve!”

I pointed at the open cigar-box.

“Light up, John Bard,” said I, “for I want to tell you a story and get your advice!”

So, while in the garden trees and bushes stirred lazily to a little breeze before dawn, I told him, as briefly as might be, the story I had heard from Adams. My host never once interrupted me, but sat and smoked in silence till my tale was done. Even after I had finished, he remained silent for a spell.

At length he said musingly,

“Cock Island, eh? Yes, it surely would be a good spot for a quiet rendezvous.”

“You know it, then?” I asked eagerly.

“Aye,” he averred. “I know it by name. But I was never there. It lies off the beaten trade routes, you see. But I remember hearing once that it had been a port of call for some of the old buccaneers, like Kidd and Roberts, who plied their trade in these parts. And so you think there's German gold hidden there, eh?”

“This”—I held up the fragment of oil-silk—“looks as if it might answer that question. If only one could read it,” I added. And I spread it out before him. We put our heads together, under the lamp, while I read over my rough translation! Then Bard, shrugging his shoulders, leaned back in his chair and blew out a cloud of smoke.

“What are you going to do about it, Okewood?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “if there were any sort of certainty about its not being absolutely a wild-goose chase...”

“You'd go after it, eh?”

“It'd be a devilish amusing way of finishing up my leave.”

John Bard smiled indulgently.

“It might be more exciting than amusing,” he said, “if Black Pablo has anything to do with this affair.”

“Do you think there is anything in it?” I asked.

“In the latter stages of the war,” my host replied, “I heard vague rumours about some island off the coast where German commerce raiders used to rendezvous for supplies. But I never heard this island named. It seems to me that the first thing to be done is to see your friend, Adams, again. After all, he's been to the island. He might be able to tell us more about it. Besides...”

He broke off and flicked the ash from his cigar. His manner had suddenly become rather grave.

“Besides what?” I demanded.

“If Black Pablo and his friends are after that plan, or whatever it is, Adams is in pretty considerable danger, Okewood.”

“He knows it himself, I believe,” I replied. “I didn't like leaving him to-night, Bard, and that's a fact. He seemed to be frightened about something. There was a man in the lane outside the hut who was singing and...”

“A man singing?” Bard queried sharply.

“Yes, to a guitar,” I answered, surprised by his tone. “He sang very well, too!”

John Bard rose to his feet suddenly. He stepped to the verandah and held up his hand for silence.

“Were you followed when you came back from Adams's?” he asked me.

“No, not as far as I know.”

Bard was listening intently. All was quiet in the gardens below save for the murmuring of the sea-breeze in the palms.

“Get into your clothes and come along, Okewood,” he said, turning away from the window. “And leave that damned plan behind.”

“Why, what...”

“Hurry, man, or we shall be too late.”

“But, damn it, Bard, explain!” I cried in exasperation.

“Black Pablo is renowned all along the coast for his exquisite singing to the guitar. Be quick, be quick, old man, and don't forget your gun!...”