Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/37

 Tommie Powell, alias Cardell. “Something darned funny about this. Got to keep an eye out for that swab.”

But not again throughout the afternoon could he find opportunity for renewing confidences with Miss Powell. It had now become a fixed appointment that he and Tommie should dine together; so he hoped, when they sat opposite each other at the table in the cozy side of the hotel, to resume that broken conversation. To his chagrin, after he had seated himself at the table she avoided it by sending word that she could not be with him that evening and he dined alone in anything but contented solitude. He did not see her leave the hotel. Furthermore, he did not see Giuseppe. The only man he saw whom he knew was the patient old gondolier whom he had retained, sitting, half asleep, in his repaired and revarnished craft, stolidly awaiting orders. At sight of him Captain Jimmy grinned and thought, “If I don't fire that old crab he'll keep on waiting forever. I don't know which one is the worst, he, Pietro, or that Giuseppe person.”

Then he loitered over the newspapers, was bored by their inanities, strolled out along the Schiavi, yawned, wished he had not made the appointment with Pietro, and finally dozed in a corner of the lounge until awakened by the guide, who came in, gently aroused him and said, “It's time we were going, signor, to see that very interesting, that remarkable, ceremony. I hope you are not annoyed because I was compelled to disturb you.”

“Oh, no. That is, not much.” Jimmy yawned as he arose and sought his hat.

“This way, sir. I've got a gondola waiting up here in the mouth of the first rio,” said Pietro when they reached the street, which at that hour had but few pedestrians. It was on the tip of Jimmy's tongue to suggest that they might as well take Tomaso, the veteran gondolier who sat expectantly waiting but who made no sign of recognition.

In silence they boarded the gondola. Pietro made a gesture as if their destination had already been fixed and the man adjusted the sash round his lean hips and bent his broad shoulders to the oar. Jimmy, still drowsy, was in no mood for conversation, and Pietro seemed for once to be content with silence, save that now and then he hummed a plaintive little Venetian love song as he stared thoughtfully upward into the velvet of the starlit skies that seemed far and obscure in a night of darkness. The gondola came to a stop, and Pietro briskly stepped out, offering his hand to Captain Jimmy to assist him up the landing steps opening into a narrow passageway, and then after a moment's pause said to the gondolier, “It is best for you to continue on through this rio and out into the Grand Canal by the Straw Bridge, where we will meet you in half or three quarters of an hour.”

And then: “This way, Signor Ware. It is so dark that you may have to guide yourself with a hand on either side, but the distance is not far.”

Jimmy plunged ahead into a passage between walls so high and dark that he might have believed his way led through a cellar but for the narrow belt of stars high overhead and the regularity of the cobblestones over which now and then he stumbled.

“This would have been a grand little place for a murder in the good old days,” he thought, and just then as if to remind him that perhaps the good old days hadn't entirely vanished something like the wings of a huge bat enveloped his head and shoulders, he heard a hoarse, muffled shout from Pietro, as if the poet-guide also had been attacked, and was jerked to the pavement and fallen upon by two men, one of whom deftly threw a loop around his legs and despite his hearty kicks succeeded in tightening it. Jimmy fought with all his strength to release his head, striking blindly with an arm that he got free and once bringing a grunt and a curse from the man with the cape.

“He hits hard and is strong. Help me here at his head,” he heard the man growl and then, as he tried to twist over to free his other arm a menacing voice: “Signor, if you don't surrender I'll knock your cursed skull in!”

The other man now had found that free arm in the darkness, pinioned it, and panting and perspiring, Jimmy's assailants got him down, forced his arms to his sides and bound them with anything but gentleness. Recognizing the futility of further effort, Jimmy suddenly lay still and listened. But a few yards away in the darkness he heard muffled oaths in a chorus, indicating that the agile Pietro had wriggled and twisted so alertly that he was still putting up a valiant fight; but one of Jimmy's captors suddenly