Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 27/Number 4/Shadows Tremendous/Chapter 6

OR a moment not a sound broke the tense stillness. Sudo's face was twisted over his shoulder, and his beady black eyes, fixed steadily on Darrell's angry countenance, were blinking with extraordinary rapidity.

“Come to make clean honorable gentleman's room,” he said suddenly. “Find letter on floor. What do? I ask to know.”

The secret-service agent sprang forward, and snatched the paper from his limp fingers. “It wasn't on the floor!” he exclaimed savagely. “It was in—er—put away. What do you mean by prying into my things?”

The Jap shrugged his shoulders regretfully. His expression was one of injured innocence. “But yes, honorable sir,” he protested plaintively. “Here lay it beside of gripsack. I think only to make it safety.”

The secret-service agent glowered fiercely for a moment. “Did you read it?” he demanded, at length.

His voice was a wonderfully artistic blending of anger and nervousness. Sudo's shoulders went up again, and he tilted his head a little to one side.

“Not surely, honorable one,” he returned blandly. “Education pretty soon advance to read of English, but not yet, alas!”

Darrell stared for a second longer, and then burst into a laugh. “It wouldn't really matter if you had, Sudo,” he said, in palpably affected carelessness. “I was only fooling. This is trash—nothing important.” He crumpled the paper, and thrust it casually into his pocket. “I thought I stuffed it into the bag, but I must have dropped it outside, instead. Go ahead and straighten up if you want to.”

Clapping the smiling Jap reassuringly on the back, he found his handkerchief, and returned to the deck.

A little later, when he and Bellamy were alone, he took pleasure in informing his friend that the mouse had been caught.

“He took the bait, but whether he swallowed it or not I don't know,” he concluded. “There's only one thing for us to do now, and that's keep our faces closed about our affairs unless we happen to be alone in the middle of the deck in broad daylight.”

The astute little Sudo was not the only person aboard ship about whom Darrell was decidedly curious. Puzzling to begin with, the personality of Philip Carmen soon became something which absorbed a large proportion of the secret-service agent's thoughts. Watching him quietly and unobtrusively from day to day, the government official presently reached the conclusion that his lazy, languid, drawling pose was nothing more than a mask to hide the man's real self. What that real self might be even Darrell, with all his acuteness and ability at reading character, had so far failed to determine, for there was no question of Carmen's amazing cleverness.

To see him lying stretched out on a disreputable steamer chair he had unearthed from no one knew where, smoking innumerable cigarettes, or twisting the little blond mustache as he drawled out the details of some unusual experience, one would have set him down as a brainless fop. Yet, try as he might in every way short of downright questioning, Darrell had been utterly unable to discover his occupation, his reason for traveling on such a vessel as the Golden Horn, or a single vital fact about him. This might, of course, have been due to an airy, inconsequential nature. There were one or two things, however, which made Darrell reject that theory.

After three days of quiet observation and study, he became aware of a vague, haunting sense of familiarity. It was not nearly so strong as a remembrance. His wonderful memory, cultivated by years in the service, made it impossible for him ever to forget a face, no matter how altered or disguised it might be. It was rather a curious feeling that Philip Carmen resembled some one of whom he had heard or been told. It even reached the point where he felt quite certain that the man was associated with some phase of his official position; but there his mind balked, stubbornly refusing to reveal anything further.

This nagging sense of familiarity reached a climax the night before they were due at Magdalena Bay. There was a low, thin moon that faintly crested the ocean swells with silver. The three men were sitting together, as usual, on deck, Carmen spread out on his steamer chair, smoking the inevitable cigarette. They had been discussing the Panama Canal—a safe, comfortable subject—but a short time before he had relapsed into a silence which remained unbroken.

Whether it was the choice of subject or not, Darrell did not know, but he was possessed of a tantalizing feeling that the man's identity was close behind the curtain of his own memory, ready to leap forth at a phrase, perhaps even at a single illuminating word.

It was maddening, this mental struggle for recollection, and he was straining every nerve to clutch and pin down the elusive memory, when all at once he felt again that odd, intuitive thrill—that consciousness of being watched.

He did not stir or glance around, but a second later, as his eyes fell upon the winking end of Carmen's cigarette, he realized that this was the opportunity he had been wishing for all day. For an instant he hesitated, marshaling this thought. Then he bent toward the reclining one, chin resting in his cupped hands.

“Look here, Carmen,” he said, in a low, impulsive tone; “I've been thinking things over, and I'm going to put you wise to something. Very likely you won't care a cuss, but I'll feel a lot better to have you know before any one else. Bellamy and I aren't going to Panama at all. We intend to be put off at Magdalena Bay to-morrow.”

There. was the barest perceptible pause during which the cigarette missed a wink, but Carmen did not shift his position by so much as a hair's breadth.

“Magdalena Bay?” he drawled. “You amaze me.” One would never have gathered as much from his tone. “Would it be—a—indiscreet to ask why all this secrecy?”

There was the faintest touch of sarcasm in his voice, which did not escape Darrell. There was also the least hint of another emotion which quickened the secret-service agent's pulse.

“Not in the least,” he returned quietly. “You see, we happen to be engaged in something which we were not at all anxious to have generally known, especially among such a crew as Captain Coffin has gathered together.”

“Forgive me if I seem dull,” Carmen said apologetically; “but I'm afraid I don't quite—er—get you.”

“No doubt you've heard stories of treasure buried along this coast,” Darrell said, his eyes fixed keenly on the shadowy figure in the steamer chair.

This time the pause was a little longer, and the cigarette glowed brightly for several consecutive seconds.

“Treasure!” drawled Carmen, at length. “How very thrilling! And you have clews to something really valuable?”

“I think so. Of course, there's always a chance for exaggeration; but if it's what I believe, it should be almost priceless. You understand, I hope, why it was we kept our destination a secret? In a case like this, the fewer who know of it the better.”

Carmen drew himself up in the chair, and flung one arm loosely. back of his head. “Quite so,” he returned. “Very true. I congratulate you, and wish you luck.” He paused an instant, and then went on musingly: “So you'll go ashore with our genial bandit, Billy Boote? I wonder whether he'll prove any more communicative on dry land.”

“So you're wise to the blocks I've had in that direction?” Darrell thought grimly. “I wonder how you found out?”

Aloud he remarked, in a tone of indifference: “I scarcely think so. What his business there may be I haven't the faintest idea, but we're not likely to see much of each”

The sentence remained unfinished. From somewhere forward, high above the thud of waves against the sides, high above the rhythmical beat of the engine, sounded that harsh, familiar voice, roaring out the familiar lines, which, even in the repetition, seemed to lose nothing of their haunting, pulse-stirring deviltry:

Bellamy moved uneasily in his chair, and frowned. Coming just at this moment, the thing rasped his nerves.

“Roaring Billy seems to be living up to his name,” Darrell remarked coolly.

“The charm of the unexpected,” Carmen observed. His cigarette had gone out, and, with an almost pettish motion, he cast it aside, and lit a fresh one.

“Archer,” he went on, in the old-time lazy drawl, “your frankness has quite put me to shame. Here you've confided your plans to me, supposing that to-morrow we part, with little likelihood of ever seeing each other again. I suppose I'm a fool, but I've an idea that I can trust you both, so I'm going to tell you the truth. I've been sailing under false colors from the very beginning. Even the name I pass under isn't my own. I'm not bound for Panama, but Magdalena Bay.”

Darrell felt his heart begin to beat faster. He bent forward a trifle, his eyes fixed on the shadowy face of the reclining man, his every sense tense and alert.

“Are you really in earnest?” he asked incredulously.

“Very much so,” Carmen returned. “You see, I happen to be a secret-seryice agent, sent on here from Washington. My name is Knowlton Darrell!”