Page:Weird Tales v01n04 (1923-06).djvu/89

88 "N-no," I reluctantly confessed, "not so very many."

"What induced you to measure this one?"

"Well, I was shadowing somebody," I said quietly. At last she had given me an opening.

"Whom, pray?" she demanded, her smile brightening expectantly.

"You—if you don't mind," I announced.

"Me!" She laughed deliriously for a moment.

"It's hardly a laughing matter," I said, with forced seriousness when she was still. "I've been working on this case for years."

She sobered with a suddenness that suggested ugly thoughts, perchance remembering something of her kaleidoscopic past. The hazel eyes saddened a little. It was evident that she was rummaging among happenings which it gave her small pleasure to review. I waited. Maybe I was not quite the yokel she had thought me.

"Do you mean you're a detective?" she presently asked.

"I mean just that, madam," I said evenly.

"By whom are you employed?" she questioned tentatively.

"By Henry Fayne," I casually replied.

"That is the lie of an impostor," quickly asserted the woman; "Henry Fayne is dead."

She rose from the stone shelf and prepared to desert me. Anyhow, I had won my point. I had succeeded in annoying her.

But I concluded I could hardly let the matter so end, even as affecting a woman like Leanor. Nobody can afford to be openly rude.

"Wait," I said; "let's be good sportsmen. You tilted at me and I retaliated. Honors are even. Why not forget it?"

She was greatly relieved; and besides, forgetfulness, of all things, was what she sought. After a moment, deep wells of laughter again glistened in her splendid eyes. These and the smiling young mouth somehow seemed to give the lie to the fiasco she had made of life. What a pity, I thought, that she had chosen to fritter away her life in this fatuous, futile fashion.

I had thought that I should feel only contempt for such a woman as Leanor, but as we walked down the hill she told me something that penetrated a hitherto unknown weak spot in my armor. So I all but pitied the woman I had prepared to despise.

As if to take strength from them, she kept her eyes on the wild flowers she had gathered, as she pronounced the well-nigh unbelievable words I now set down.

The craze for the blinding white lights, and the delusion of equally white wines, were surfeited. The gilt and tinsel of the truly tawdry had palled. The mask of allurement had fallen from the forbidding face of the artificial and empty. Life itself had become for Leanor a vacant and meaningless thing. She had seen too much of it in too brief a space.

She concluded with a seeming contradiction, a veiled regret that her frenzied explorations had exhausted all too soon the world's meager store of things worth while, and there was a bitterness in her voice which contrasted unpleasantly with her youth and beauty as she said plainly, though with little visible emotion, that she had reached a point where life itself often repelled and nauseated her.

We had reached the sanitarium by this time, an interruption not unwelcome in the circumstances, and I left the strange woman alone with her tardy regrets and sought my own quarters, sympathetic and depressed, yet thanking my lucky stars for the happy dispensation that had made me an adventurer instead of an "adventuress."

That evening, Leanor and I planned a trip to Devil's Channel, and I strolled down to the beach in search of such a shallow-draught cayuco as could maneuver its way over the reefs that barred larger craft. Boteros of divers nationalities abounded, and among the many my questioning gaze finally met that of a vagabondish-looking fellow countryman in a frayed sailor garb. In odd contrast to his raiment, and swinging from his belt in a sheath which his short coat for an instant did not quite conceal, I caught a single glimpse of a heavy hunting knife with an ornamented stag-horn handle.

His name was Sisson, he told me, but he spoke Spanish like a native. His uncarded beard was a thing long forgotten of razors. He was unmistakably another of those easily identified tramps of the tropics who, in an unguarded moment, unaccountably lose their grip on themselves and thenceforward go sliding unresistingly down to a not unwelcome oblivion.

Sisson did not importune me, as did all the other boatmen; he did not even offer me his services; and it was because of this evidence of some lingering vestige of pride, coupled with the fact that he had an eminently suitable cayuco, that I decided to employ him.

T THE narrow gateway of Devil's Channel the water is so shallow, and there so frequently occur tiny submerged sand-bars, that only the minutest of sea craft can skim over the gleaming rifts and gain entrance. This was confirmed for the nth time when I felt the specially made keel of our tiny cayuco scrape the shiny sand in warning that we were at last entering the canyon-like waterway.

Leanor and I were both plying our splendid oarsman with well-nigh every imaginable question about the gloomy, spooky-looking channel before us.

"Aren't we nearing the place yet?" Leanor presently asked.

"Farther in," drawled Sisson, the bearded giant of a boatman, glancing carelessly at the ascending cliffs on either side.

Twisting my body round in the wee native cayuco, I noted that the perpendicular walls of the shadowy strait that lay before us seemed drawing together with every pull of Sisson's great arms. Leanor's pretty face was radiant with expectation. Though bored of the world, there was at least one more thrill for her ahead.

Five minutes slipped by. Sisson rowed on steadily.

"There she is!" the boatman said suddenly, for the first time evincing something like a normal human interest in life. One of his huge, hairy hands was indicating an alkali spot on the face of the right-hand wall a stone's throw ahead. "Just opposite that white spot is where it always happens."

He released his oars and let them trail in the still water. It looked peculiarly lifeless. Our small shell gradually slowed.

"Seems to be all smooth sailing here today, though," I ventured.

"Overrated, for the benefit of tourists," opined Sisson. "The water's eaten out a little tunnel under the west wall, but there's no real danger if you know the chart."

"How many did you say were drowned when that launch went down?" again asked Leanor. Her great dark eyes were sparkling again now with a keen new interest in life—or was it the nearness to potential death?

"Eleven," drawled Sisson. "The engineer jumped for it and made a landing on that bench of slate over there, and right there"—he smiled reminiscently—"he sat for seventy-two hours, with 'water, water everywhere, nor any drop'—"