The Stolen War Secret/Chapter 9

O ONE who knows South Street as merely a river-front street, whose glory of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horse-car now ambles slowly uptown and trucks and carts are all day long in a perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day and deserted and even vicious-looking by night.

But there is another fascination about South Street that does not appear on the surface to the casual observer, and it was that fascination I saw now.

Perhaps there has never been a serious difficulty in Latin-America which has not, in some way or other, been connected with this street whence hundreds of filibustering expeditions have started. Whenever a dictator is to be overthrown, or half a dozen olive-skinned generals are banished and become eager for a share in the official gold lace again, the arms and ammunition dealers in South Street can give, if they choose, an advance scenario of the whole film—tragedy or comic opera. Real war or opera bouffe, it is all grist for the mills of those close-mouthed individuals.

We met Burke at the subway-entrance, in a state of great excitement.

“What’s the news?” asked Kennedy eagerly.

“I’ve been following up Morelos,” replied Burke as he hurried us along down the street. “I’ve just learned that the Revolutionists are preparing to ship a large amount of arms and ammunition down to Mexico as well as a lot of machinery for the making of money for the rebels. According to the information I have, it is to go on a tramp ship, the Arroyo, tonight. The papers are all made out and she is supposed to sail with the tide tonight, carrying a cargo of corn and oats.”

“Is Morelos going, too?” asked Craig.

“I think not. But if we can catch them red-handed, the laws against gun-running are pretty severe—a matter of a possible ten years’ imprisonment, a fine and forfeiture of the cargo. What I want to do is to scout about and when they begin to move the stuff in trucks, or just before, swoop down on them.”

Burke had led the way to a dingy café which we entered. Through a half open door which disclosed a dirty back-room we could catch a glimpse of several men seated about a round table. Only a glance was sufficient to identify them as the typical oily plotters of war.

Morelos, however, who was seated with his back toward us, seemed to be of a different stamp from the others. He was an athletic-looking man, comparatively young, with a well-formed head covered with black hair, crisp and curly, skin the color of a well-smoked meerschaum and a small black mustache which masked a mouth that was cruel even when it was smiling. His eyes were large and brilliant and extraordinarily piercing.

There was an air of suppressed excitement in the back-room of the café, and, having satisfied himself that Morelos was there, Burke quietly motioned to us to follow him out again before we were ourselves observed.

“Where is the ship?” asked Kennedy as we gained the street and followed Burke, keeping as much as possible in the shadow.

“Up the river a few piers,” he answered. “Let us look it over and see what they are doing.”

It was a foggy and misty night on the water, an ideal night for the gun-runner, and fortunately, such a night as aided us in watching their mysterious preparations.

On the Arroyo every one was evidently chafing. Below decks I could imagine that the engineer and his assistants were seeing that the machinery was in perfect order. No doubt men were posted in the streets to give warning of any danger and report the approach of the big lumbering trucks which were to convey the arms from the storehouse, wherever it was, to the ship.

Kennedy strained his eyes to peer through the fog. Out in the river was a tug, watching, to give warning of a possible police-boat. It was dreary waiting, and we drew our coats more closely around us as we shivered in the night-wind and tried to brace ourselves against the unexpected.

“I have notified the police-boat Patrol to be ready on the river for the signal,” whispered Burke hoarsely, in answer to our questions as to what preparations he had made for the emergency.

THE minutes sped by and lengthened into hours. At last the welcome muffled rumble of heavily laden carts disturbed the midnight silence of the street.

At once a score of men sprang from the hold of the ship, as if by magic. One by one the cases were loaded. The men were working feverishly by the light of battle-lanterns—big lamps with reflectors so placed as to throw the light exactly where it was needed and nowhere else. They were taking aboard the Arroyo dozens of coffin-like wooden cases and bags and boxes, smaller and even heavier. Silently and swiftly they toiled.

It was risky work, too, at night and in the tense haste. Once there was a muttered exclamation. A heavy case had dropped. A man had gone down with a broken leg. It was a common thing with the gun-runners. They expected it. The victim of such an accident could not be sent to a hospital ashore. He was carried, as gently as the rough hands of the men could carry any thing, to one side where he lay silently waiting for the ship’s surgeon who had been engaged for just such an emergency. There was no whimper.

Scarcely a fraction of a minute had been lost. The last cases in this load had been taken aboard, and the tug was crawling up to make fast and tow the ship out into the stream the moment the next consignment arrived and was loaded. Already the trucks were vanishing, empty, one by one, in the misty darkness, as muffled as they came, going back for the last load.

“Come,” cried Burke, springing out of the shadow of the warehouse where we had been crouching. “We shall catch them at both ends—on the ship and at their storehouse.”

He had leaped up on a pile of timber alongside the dock and was blowing shrilly on his police-whistle.

SUDDENLY lights flashed through the fog on the river. There was the Patrol shooting out from a bank of fog that swirled around a slip several piers away and ranging up alongside of the Arroyo before it had a chance to make a get away.

All was excitement, shouts, muttered imprecations

“ them—they’ve put one across on us!” shouted some one on the ship.

“We can leave them to the police,” cried Burke, hurrying us now along the street in the direction of the trucks, going for their second load. “I want Morelos.”

It had all happened so suddenly that the gun-runners had no chance to cover up their retreat. As we ran down the street we could see the trucks standing before a building on, the block above the dingy café in which we had first seen the plotters.

Without pausing, Kennedy and Burke dashed up to the door, while from the direction of the ferry we could hear a couple of policemen hurrying toward us. We entered unopposed. The conspirators had taken to their heels at the first sounds of Burke’s whistle and the blasts of the police-boat.

IT WAS a ramshackle building to which we came, reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when no subsidy or free tolls were necessary for the American merchantmen who flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven seas.

On the ground-floor was an apparently innocent junk-dealer’s shop, in reality the meeting-place of those whom we had been seeking. By an outside stairway the lofts above were reached, hiding their secrets behind windows opaque with decades of dust.

It was really a perfect arsenal and magazine into which we entered. The long room was dusty and cobwebbed, crammed with stands of arms, tents, uniforms in bales, batteries of Maxims and mountain-guns and all the paraphernalia for carrying on twentieth century guerrilla warfare.

As we reached the top of the steps, Burke ground out an oath. The loft was deserted. A moment later he had sprung down the steps again, and, joined by the policemen who had answered his call, made a dash into the café in the back room of which we had seen Morelos.

Kennedy, however, did not follow, for in the light of a dim oil-lamp he had seen that this was the real secret meeting-place of the Revolutionist junta. It was a chance not to be missed and he lost no time in rummaging through the warlike paraphernalia in search of anything that might lend a clue to the cases which had brought us into this strange adventure.

Far in the rear of the loft, underneath some old and dirty tarpaulins, he at last unearthed a letter-file and carried it closer to the light.

“This will interest Burke,” he exclaimed, as he ran over hastily a number of letters and bills which showed how the Junta had been carrying on its contraband traffic in arms in violation of the embargo that had been established both across the border and at the gulf-ports of Mexico.

“Hulloa—what’s this?”

He had drawn out from the file several letters in a dainty foreign hand on the embossed notepaper of the Vanderveer. They were addressed to Morelos. One, evidently the latest, began:

“Valcour!” I repeated mystified.

“Yes,” exclaimed Kennedy. “Don’t you see it all now? The beautiful little Frenchwoman was a Constitutionalist spy working among the Federals. It was her plan to steal that invention of Sinclair’s from them and hand it over to her lover Morelos.”

“And they discovered the plot,” I added hastily.

“Not so fast, Walter,” cautioned Kennedy.

“Then you think Morelos got it after all—and sacrificed his lover?” I asked, recalling that cruel mouth under the black mustache.

“I think nothing—yet,” he answered, tucking the letter-file under his arm. “Let us find Burke.”

“Confound the luck!” ejaculated a familiar voice as we stumbled down the poorly lighted stairs from the loft to the street a moment later and ran into the detective. “Morelos slipped through our fingers, somehow. He wasn’t on the Arroyo—I knew that. I thought we’d get him here or at the café—but he was too old and slippery at the game.”

“Perhaps that may prove some compensation,” remarked Kennedy, quietly handing over the letter-file. “I have kept out only these notes.”

“Whew!” whistled Burke as he read the notes from Valcour. “That puts a new light on the whole affair.”

“Without shedding a ray, yet, on the perpetrator,” added Kennedy. “Do you realize that we don’t even know how she met her death?”

Burke nodded.

“I shall have to leave this end of the affair to you entirely, for the present, Burke,” said Kennedy with a glance at the Junta headquarters and a sweep of his hand down the street toward the captured ship. “I shall be at the laboratory early in the morning, if you want me. But I can’t see that we can help you down here, now, at all.”

IT HAD been a strenuous night, though only partly successful, and I was glad of Kennedy’s decision to get at least a few hours’ rest in our apartment after what we had gone through during the past few days.

Kennedy retired when I did, but he could not have slept very long, for, although I was awake early, he had gone already and left a brief scrawl that he would be at the laboratory.

“I wish you’d get Leslie on the wire,” he greeted me a few minutes later when I rejoined him, “and ask him to drop in as soon as he can.”

I did so and then gazed curiously on his table, littered with chemicals, jars, beakers and test-tubes.

As nearly as I could make out, he had been examining the little buff cylinder on the end of a reed.

I watched him break off a little piece and pour on it a dark liquid from a brown glass bottle. Then he placed it under a powerful microscope.

“Microscopically,” he remarked slowly, “it consists almost wholly of minute clear granules which, as you see, give a blue reaction with iodin [sic]. They are starch. Mixed with them are some larger starch granules, too, a few plant cells, fibrous matter and other foreign particles—and then there is that acrid, numbing taste, you recall.”

He appeared to be in deep thought.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Aconite,” he replied, “of which the active principle is the deadly poisonous alkaloid aconitin.”

Kennedy had opened a standard work on toxicology and indicated a passage for me to read:

I had scarcely finished reading when Dr. Leslie entered.

“Have you discovered anything yet?” he asked anxiously.

“I am convinced that the murders have been committed by the use of aconite,” replied Kennedy slowly.

Dr. Leslie looked at him keenly a moment.

“Then you’ll never be able to prove anything in the laboratory,” he remarked.

I glanced at him quickly, as the diabolical nature of what had taken place sank into my mind. Here was a poison that defied detection, a criminal so clever that he might never be brought to justice.

Kennedy, however, appeared unruffled.

“There are more ways of catching a criminal, Leslie,” he said quietly, “than are set down in the text-books.”