The Sea Wolves/Chapter 29

looking back upon the many scenes which I have been able to set about the tragedy of Arnold Messenger and his associates, I mind me that I have spoken little—nor was other course possible—of the English and the European view of this most daring emprise, and of the means which the authorities in many countries took to combat it. Yet, for the fuller understanding of the ultimate issue, and for the realization of many things now lying in mystery, it is necessary that something should be said upon pages well back in the record, and upon certain episodes which are but mentioned in the writing.

For these things English newspapers are my clearest authority, and I find in them a very exact account of much that I have dealt with, and of other matters about which Messenger himself had no complete knowledge. He, on his part, was not able, until he met the Spanish woman, to understand how pursuit first came upon him; wanting the information simply because he did not know that the Irish mate of the tug Admiral was picked up, with Conyers, whom he had freed, by the steamer that loomed upon the horizon at the very moment the little vessel cocked her stern above the North Sea. Had this been plain to him he would have anticipated the sequence. The two men, being carried by the steamer to Bergen, wired thence news of the deed to London, and the whole city was stirred almost as by the story of a war.

To Capel, Martingale & Co. the tidings came as a blow which shook the house to its foundations. The head himself, shamed at the fall of his nephew, Sydney Capel, was henceforth little else but a broken man whose wits were gone. But his partners worked like slaves to avert their loss, and to hunt down those responsible for it. All the vast influence of the great firm was brought to bear upon governments and upon police. Skilled detectives left for Lisbon, for Paris, for Monte-Video. Cruisers were sent to scour the North Sea, the common belief being that Kenner's yacht was running for Holland or for Norway; other cruisers searched the Channel; others, again, the coast of Ireland, though these were few, since no man seems to have anticipated the yacht's flight round the capes of Scotland.

How it came about that the Nero sighted the Semiramis and pursued her I have already told; but the curious cessation of the pursuit at the moment of its seeming triumph is a mystery with the simplest solution. The vessel broke her screw-shaft when she was within an ace of victory. The huge mass of metal, rioting in the aft cabins, split skin and plates until the miracle stood that the ship continued to float. She was brought to Bordeaux with the utmost difficulty, and thence she sent home news of her work, though that was known already at the Admiralty, and other cruisers searched the French coast and the northern shore of Spain. It was one of these, as we have seen, which anchored ultimately in the very bay where the fugitives were harboured; and although its men came at length upon the wreckage in the cradle of the reef, they did not do so until the money was ashore, and the Englishmen were hid in the shelter of the castle.

From this moment the scent was, as goes the schoolboy saying, hot to excitement. The authorities in London waited to hear every day of the capture of the bullion and of the missing crew. Capel, Martingale & Co., who had recently negotiated a Spanish loan, brought pressure to bear at Madrid; and companies of soldiers were sent up from Vivero and Finisterre. With each of these there was an English detective, and for the better purposes of identification no less an agent than Mike Brennan, the former mate of the Admiral, was sent with the company of infantry which watched the burning of the bridge. He it was who had heard the daft lad Billy calling in the hills, and he had recognized the voice and answered the cry, to the fear and panic of the doomed muleteers.

When the end of the venture came, it was the general impression among the Spanish soldiers that all, with the woman, had perished in the great fire, which is talked of to-day in hushed whispers by the peasantry, and will be tradition to their children's children. But as there was a possibility that Messenger had escaped the search was continued for some weeks. The chasm was bridged again; sentries were posted about the whole amphitheatre of hills; the silent valley was searched from end to end; and the matter ended by the officer in charge of the troops sending to Madrid his emphatic opinion that the Englishmen never crossed the bridge, since there was no way of escape over the ramparts of the hills for man or for beast. The supposition that there was a possible passage through the tunnel never entered his head. Doggedly he formed an opinion, as Spaniards do, and no human argument would have turned him from it.

Thus it happened that London heaved a sigh of disappointment in the belief that a prince of rogues would not figure in her law Courts, and began to ask, What of the money? And it was consoled as, almost ingot by ingot, the bullion was restored to the firm from whom it had been stolen. Some of it was found in the inner lagoon of the woman's house; much in the valley below the goat-track, where the peril of the flight had begun; and the remaining cases—or rather their contents, for the cases were shivered to splinters—in the ravine and among the embers of the fallen bridge. When the amount thus regained was estimated at its value, the firm considered themselves the losers of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Of this sum a great part had been pillaged by the Spanish soldiers; the servants of the woman had not neglected to snap up what they could; Messenger had a fraction; the peasantry slyly pocketed many a sovereign, and continued for the best part of a year after the tragedy to spend their leisure in the valley of the disaster taming logs and cutting grasses in the hope that gold would be found. But the soldiers were sent to their quarters in the month following the supreme disaster, and they went willingly, as men who had accomplished a great work, and must recreate long, lest their strength should fail them or their energy become chronic.