Kitabı oku: «The Harbor of Doubt», sayfa 9
CHAPTER XXI
A PRISONER
When Code Schofield came to himself his first sensation was one of oppression, such as is felt after sleeping in an unventilated room. It seemed difficult for him to breathe, but his body was quite free and uninjured, as he found by moving himself carefully in all directions before he even opened his eyes.
Presently the air became familiar. It was a perfect mixture of flavors; oilskins, stale tobacco-smoke, brine, burned grease, tar, and, as a background, fish. His ears almost immediately detected water noises running close by, and he could feel the pull of stout oak timber that formed the inner wall of where he lay.
“Fo’c’stle of a fishing schooner!” he announced, and then opened his eyes to prove that he was correct.
He looked out into a three-cornered room occupied by a three-cornered table, and that ran as far back as the foremast. Above, fastened to a huge square beam, hung a chain-lamp so swiveled that it kept itself level however much the schooner kicked and wriggled. On the table, swinging his legs, sat a large, unpleasant-looking man.
“Wal, how are ye?” asked this latter, seeing his charge had recovered consciousness. Never having seen the man before, Code did not consider it necessary to answer. So he wriggled to find out if any bones were broken, and, in the end, discovered a tender knob on the right side of his head.
He soon recalled the visit to St. Pierre, the purchase of the bait, Pete Ellinwood’s fight, the general mix-up, and the blow on the head that had finished him. He sat up suddenly.
“Look here! What ship is this?” he demanded.
“You’ll find out soon enough when you go on deck. Hungry? I got orders to feed ye.”
“You bet I’m hungry; didn’t have any dinner last night in St. Pierre.”
“Two nights ago,” said the other, beginning to fry salt pork. “Nigh thirty-six hours you’ve laid here like a log.” Code doubted it, but did not argue. He was trying to puzzle out the situation.
If this was a fishing schooner the men ought to be over the side fishing, and she would be at anchor. Instead, feeling the long, steady heel to leeward and half-recover to windward, he knew she was flying on a course.
Breakfast swallowed, he made his way on deck. As he came up the companionway a man stood leaning against the rail. With a feeling of violent revulsion, Code recognized Nat Burns. A glance at a near-by dory showed the lettering Nettie B., and Schofield at once recognized his position.
He was Nat Burns’s prisoner.
“Mornin’,” said Burns curtly. “Thought you were goin’ to sleep forever.”
“It’s a hanging offense putting any one to sleep that long,” retorted Code cheerfully. “Luck was with you, and I woke up.”
“You’re hardly in a position to joke about hanging offenses,” remarked Nat venomously.
“Why not?” Code had gone a sickly pallor that looked hideous through his tan.
“Because you’re goin’ home to St. Andrew’s to be tried for one.”
Code glanced over his left shoulder. The sun was there. The schooner was headed almost directly southwest. Nat had spoken the truth. They were headed homeward.
“Where’s your warrant?” Code could feel his teeth getting on edge with rage as he talked to this captor who bore himself with such insolence.
“Don’t need a warrant for murder cases, and I’m a constable at Freekirk Head, so everything is being done according to law. The gunboat didn’t find you, so I thought, as long as you were right to hand, I’d bring you along.”
“Then you knew I was in St. Pierre?”
“Yes; saw you come in. If it hadn’t been so dark you’d have recognized the Nettie not far away.” Code, remembering the time of night they arrived, knew this to be impossible, for it is dark at six in September. He had barely been able to make out the lines of the nearest schooners.
A man was standing like a statue at the wheel, and, as he put the vessel over on the port tack, his face came brightly into the sun. It was ’Arry Duncan. Code had not been wrong, then, in thinking that he had seen the man’s face in St. Pierre.
“Fine traitor you’ve got there at the wheel,” said Schofield. “He’ll do you brown some day.”
“I don’t think so. Just because he did you, doesn’t prove anything. He was in my employ all the time, and getting real money for his work.”
“So it was all a plot, eh?” said Code dejectedly. “I give you credit, Burns, for more brains than I ever supposed you had. What’s become of Pete Ellinwood and the Lass?”
“Pete is back on the schooner and she’s gone out to fish. You needn’t worry about them. At the proper time they’ll be told you are safe and unhurt.”
Code said nothing for a while. With hands rammed into his pockets he stood watching the white and blue sea whirl by. In those few minutes he touched the last depth of failure and despair. For a brief space he was minded to leap overboard.
He shivered as one with an ague and shook off the deadly influence of the idea. Had he no more grit? he asked himself. Had he come this far only to be beaten? Was this insolent young popinjay to win at last? No! Then he listened, for Nat was speaking.
“If you give your word of honor not to try and escape you can have the run of the decks and go anywhere you like on the schooner. If not, you will be locked up and go home a prisoner.”
It was the last straw, the final piece of humiliation. Code stiffened as a soldier might to rebuke. A deadly, dull anger surged within him and took possession of his whole being–such an anger as can only come to one who, amiable and upright by nature, is driven to inevitable revolt.
“Look here, Burns,” he said, his voice low, but intense with the emotion that mastered him, “I’ll give no word of honor regarding anything. Between you and me there is a lot to be settled. You have almost ruined me, and, by Heaven, before I get through with you, you’ll rue it!
“I shall make every attempt to escape from this schooner, and if I do escape, look out! If I do not escape and you press these charges against me, I’ll hunt you down for the rest of my life; or if I go to prison I will have others do it for me.
“Now you know what to expect, and you also know that when I say a thing I mean it. Now do what you like with me.”
Burns looked at Schofield’s tense white face. His eyes encountered those flaming blue ones and dropped sullenly. Whether it was the tremendous force of the threat or whether it was a guilty conscience working, no one but himself knew, but his face grew gradually as pallid as that of his captive. Suddenly he turned away.
“Boys,” he called to the crew who were working near, “put Schofield in the old storeroom. And one of you watch it all the time. He says he will escape if he can, so I hold you responsible.”
Code followed the men to a little shanty seemingly erected against the foremast. It was of stout, heavy boards about long enough to allow a cot being set up in it. It had formerly been used for storing provisions and had never been taken down.
When the padlock snapped behind him Code took in his surroundings. There were two windows in the little cubby, one looking forward and the other to starboard. Neither was large enough to provide a means of escape, he judged. At the foot of the cot was a plain wooden armchair, both pieces of furniture being screwed to the floor. For exercise there was a strip of bare deck planking about six feet long beside the bed, where he might pace back and forth.
Both the cot and chair appeared to be new. “Had the room all ready for me,” said Code to himself.
The one remaining piece of furniture was a queer kind of book-shelf nailed against the wall. It was fully five feet long and protruded a foot out above his bed. In its thirty-odd pigeonholes was jammed a collection of stuff that was evidently the accumulation of years. There were scores of cheap paper-bound novels concerning either high society or great detectives, old tobacco-boxes, broken pipes, string, wrapping-paper, and all the what-not of a general depository.
With hours on his hands and nothing whatever to occupy him, Code began to sort over the lurid literature with a view to his entertainment. He hauled a great dusty bundle out of one pigeonhole, and found among the novels some dusty exercise books.
He inspected them curiously. On the stiff board cover of one was scrawled, “Log Schooner M. C. Burns; M. C. Burns, master.”
The novels were forgotten with the appearance of this old relic. The M. C. Burns was the original Burns schooner when Nat’s father was still in the fish business at Freekirk Head. It was the direct predecessor of the Nettie B., which was entirely Nat’s. On the death of the elder Burns when the May Schofield went down, the M. C. Burns had been sold to realize immediate cash. And here was her log!
Code looked over pages that were redolent of the events in his boyhood, for Michael was a ready writer and made notes regularly even when the M. C. was not on a voyage. He had spent an hour in this way when he came to this entry on one of the very last pages:
“June 30: This day clear with strong E. S. – E. wind. This day Nat, in the M. C. Burns, raced Code Schofield in the May Schofield from Quoddy Head to moorings in Freekirk Head harbor. My boy had the worst of it all the way. I never saw such luck as that young Schofield devil has. He won by half an hour. Poor Nat is heartbroken and swore something awful. He says he’ll win next time or know why!”
“Just like old man Burns!” thought Code. “Pities and spoils his rascal of a son. But the boy loved him.”
Code had not thought of that race in years. How well he remembered it now! There had been money up on both sides, and the rules were that no one in either schooner should be over twenty except the skippers.
What satisfaction it had been to give Nat a good trimming in the fifty-year-old May. He could still feel an echo of the old proud thrill. He turned back to the log.
“July 1: Cloudy this day. Hot. Light S. – W. breeze. Nat tells me another race will be sailed in just a week. Swears he will win it. Poor boy, what with losing yesterday and Caroline Fuller’s leaving the Head to work in Lubec, he is hardly himself. I’m afraid the old M. C. won’t show much speed till she is thoroughly overhauled. Note–Stmr. May Schofield’s policy runs out July 20th. See about this, sure.”
There was very little pertaining to the next race until the entry for June 6, two days before the event. Then he read:
“Nat is quite happy; says he can’t lose day after to-morrow. I told him he must have fitted the M. C. with wings, but he only grinned. Take the stmr. to St. John to-morrow to look after policies, including May Schofield’s. She’s so old her rates will have to go up. Won’t be back till day after the race, but Nat says he’ll telegraph me. Wonder what business that boy’s got up his sleeve that makes him so sure he will win? Oh, he’s a clever one, that boy!”
Here the chronicle ended. Little did Michael Burns know he would never write in it again. He went to St. John’s, as he had said, and completed his business in time to return home the day of the race instead of the day after.
The second race was never sailed, for Code Schofield received a telegram from St. John’s, offering him a big price for a quick lighterage trip to Grande Mignon, St. John being accidentally out of schooners and the trip urgent.
Though loath to lose the race by default, the money offered was too good to pass by, and Code had made the trip and loaded up by nightfall. It was then that he had met Michael Burns, and Burns had expressed his desire to go home in the May so as to watch her actions in a moderate sea and gale.
Neither he nor the May ever saw dry land again. Only Code of the whole ship’s company struggled ashore on the Wolves, bruised and half dead from exposure.
The end of the old log before him was full of poignant tragedy to Code, the tragedy of his own life, for it was the unwritten pages from then on that should have told the story of a fiendishly planned revenge upon him who was totally innocent of any wrong-doing. The easy, weak, indulgence of the father had grown a crop of vicious and cruel deeds in the son.
CHAPTER XXII
A RECOVERED TREASURE
For five days Code yawned or rushed through the greater part of Nat’s stock of lurid literature. It was the one thing that kept him from falling into the black pit of brooding; sometimes he felt as though he must go insane if he allowed himself to think. He had not the courage to tear aside the veil of dull pain that covered his heart and look at the bleeding reality. He was afraid of his own emotions.
It was impossible for him to go lower in the scale of physical events.
Nat was about to triumph, and Code himself was forced to admit that this triumph was mostly due to Nat’s own wits. First he had stolen Nellie Tanner (Code had thought a lot about that ring missing from Nellie’s hand), then he had attached the Charming Lass in the endeavor to take away from him the very means of his livelihood.
Then something had happened. Schofield did not know what it was, but something evidently very serious, for the next thing he knew Nat had crushed his pride and manhood under a brutal and technical charge of murder.
But this was not all.
His victim escaping him with the schooner and the means of livelihood, Burns had employed a traitor in the crew to poison the bait and force him to come ashore to replenish his tubs. Once ashore, the shanghaiing was not difficult.
Code had no doubt whatever that the whole plan, commencing with the disappearance of the man in the motor-dory and ending with his abduction from St. Pierre, was part and parcel of the same scheme. In this, his crowning achievement of skill and cunning, Burns had showed himself an admirable plotter, playing upon human nature as he did to effect his ends.
For it was nothing but a realization of Peter Ellinwood’s weakness in the matter of his size and fighting ability that resulted in his (Code’s) easy capture. Schofield had no shadow of a doubt but that the big Frenchman had been hired to play his part, and that, in the howling throng that surrounded the fighters the crew of the Nettie B. were waiting to seize the first opportunity to make the duel a mêlée and effect their design in the confusion.
Their opportunity came when the Frenchman tried to trip Pete Ellinwood after big Jean had fallen and Code rushed into the fray with the ferocity of a wildcat. Some one raised the yell “Police,” he was surrounded by his enemies, some one rapped him over the head with a black-jack, and the job was done. It was clever business, and despite the helplessness of his position, Code could not but admire the brilliance of such a scheming brain, while at the same time deploring that it was not employed in some legitimate and profitable cause.
Now he was in the enemy’s hands, and St. Andrew’s was less than a dozen hours away; St. Andrew’s, with its jail, its grand jury, and its pen.
Life aboard the Nettie B. had been a dead monotony. On the foremast above Code’s prison hung the bell that rang the watches, so that the passage of every half hour was dinged into his ears. Three times a day he was given food, and twice a day he was allowed to pace up and down the deck, a man holding tightly to each arm.
The weather had been propitious, with a moderate sea and a good quartering wind. The Nettie had footed it properly, and Code’s experienced eye had, on one occasion, seen her log her twelve knots in an hour. The fact had raised his estimation of her fifty per cent.
It must not be supposed that, as Code sat in his hard wooden chair, he forgot the diary that he had read the first afternoon of his incarceration. Often he thought of it, and often he drew it out from its place and reread those last entries: “Swears he will win second race,” “Says he can’t lose day after to-morrow,” “I wonder what the boy has got up his sleeve that makes him so sure he will win?”
At first Code merely ascribed these recorded sayings of Nat Burns to youthful disappointment and a sportsmanlike determination to do better next time. But not for long. He remembered as though it had been yesterday the look with which Nat had favored him when he finally came ashore beaten, and the sullen resentment with which he greeted any remarks concerning the race.
There was no sportsmanlike determination about him! Code quickly changed his point of view. How could Nat be so sure he was going to win?
The thing was ridiculous on the face of it. The fifty-year-old May had limped in half an hour ahead of the thirty-year-old M. C. Burns after a race of fifteen miles. How, then, could Nat swear with any degree of certainty that he would win the second time. It was well known that the M. C. Burns was especially good in heavy weather, but how could Nat ordain that there would be just the wind and sea he wanted?
The thing was absurd on the face of it, and, besides, silly braggadocio, if not actually malicious. And even if it were malicious, Code thanked Heaven that the race had not been sailed, and that he had been spared the exhibition of Nat’s malice. He had escaped that much, anyway.
However, from motives of general caution, Code decided to take the book with him. Nat had evidently forgotten it, and he felt sure he would get off the ship with it in his possession. Now, as he drew near to St. Andrews, he put it for the last time inside the lining of his coat, and fastened that lining together with pins, of which he always carried a stock under his coat-lapel.
As Schofield had not forgotten the old log of the M. C. Burns, neither had he forgotten the threat he made to Nat that he would try his best to escape, and would defy his authority at every turn.
He had tried to fulfil his promise to the letter. Twice he had removed one of the windows before the alert guard detected him, and once he had nearly succeeded in cutting his way through the two-inch planking of his ceiling before the chips and sawdust were discovered, and he was deprived of his clasp-knife.
Every hour of every day his mind had been constantly on this business of escape. Even during the reading, to which he fled to protect his reason, it was the motive of every chapter, and he would drop off in the middle of a page into a reverie, and grow inwardly excited over some wild plan that mapped itself out completely in his feverish brain.
Now as they approached St. Andrew’s his determination was as strong as ever, but his resources were exhausted. Double-guarded and without weapons, he found himself helpless. The fevered excitement of the past four days had subsided into a dull apathy of hurt in which his brain was as delicate and alert as the mainspring of a watch. He was resigned to the worst if it came, but was ready, like a panther in a tree, to spring at the slightest false move of his enemies.
Now for the last time he went over his little eight-by-ten prison. He examined the chair as though it were some instrument of the Inquisition. He pulled the bed to pieces and handled every inch of the frame. He emptied every compartment of the queer hanging cabinet that had been stuffed with books and miscellanies; he examined every article in the room.
He had done this a dozen times before, but some instinct drove him to repeat the process. There was always hope of the undiscovered, and, besides, he needed the physical action and the close application of his mind. So, mechanically and doggedly he went over every inch of his little prison.
But in vain.
The roof and walls were of heavy planking and were old. They were full of nicks as well as wood-knots, and the appearance of some of the former gave Code an idea. He went carefully over the boards, sticking his thumb-nail into them and lifting or pressing down as the shape of the nick warranted. For they resembled very much the depressions cut in sliding covers on starch-boxes whereby such covers can be pushed in their grooves.
At any other time he would have considered this the occupation of a madman, but now it kept him occupied and held forth the faint gleam of hope by which he now lived.
Suddenly something happened. He was lying across his immovable cot fingering the boards low down in the right rear corner when he felt something give beneath his thumb. A flash of hope almost stifled him, and he lay quiet for a moment to regain command of himself. Then he put his thumb again in the niche and lifted up. With all his strength he lifted and, all at once, a panel rushed up and stuck, revealing a little box perhaps a foot square that had been built back from the rear wall of the old storeroom.
That was all, except for the fact that something was in the box–a package done up in paper.
For a while he did not investigate the package, but devoted his attention to sounding the rest of the near-by planks with the hope that they might give into a larger opening and furnish a means of egress. For half an hour he worked and then gave up. He had covered every inch of wall and every niche, and this was all!
At last he turned to the contents of the box that he had uncovered. Removing the package, he slid the cover down over the opening for fear that his guard, looking in a window, might become aware of what he had discovered. Then, sitting on the bed, he unwrapped the package.
It was a beautiful, clear mirror bound with silver nickel and fitted with screw attachments as though it were intended to be fastened to something.
At first this unusual discovery meant nothing whatever to him. Then, as he turned the object listlessly in his hands, his eyes fell upon three engraved letters, C. A. S., and a date, 1908.
Then he remembered.
When he was twenty years old his father had taught him the science of navigation, so that if anything happened Code might sail the old May Schofield.
Because of the fact that a position at sea was found by observing the heavenly bodies, Code had become interested in astronomy, and had learned to chart them on a sky map of his own.
The object in his hand was an artificial horizon, a mirror attached to the sextant which could be fixed at the exact angle of the horizon should the real horizon be obscured. This valuable instrument his father had given him on his twenty-first birthday because the old man had been vastly pleased with his interest in a science of which he himself knew little or nothing.
Code remembered that, for a year or two, he had pursued this hobby of his with deep interest and considerable success, and that his great object in life had been to some day have a small telescope of his own by which to learn more of the secrets of the heavens. But, after his father died, he had been forced to take up the active support of the family, and had let this passion die.
But how did it happen that the mirror was here?
He recalled that the rest of his paraphernalia had gone to the bottom with the May Schofield. It was true that he had not overhauled his equipment for some time, and that it had been in a drawer in the May’s cabin, but that drawer had not been opened.
He pursued the train of thought no farther. His brain was tired and his head ached with the strain of the last five days. His last hope of escape had only resulted in his finding a forgotten mirror, and his despair shut out any other consideration. He had not even the fire to resent the fact that it was in Burns’s possession, and concealed.
It was his, he knew, and, without further thought of it, he thrust it into his pocket just as he heard the men outside his little prison talking together excitedly.
“By George, she looks like a gunboat,” said one. “I wonder what she wants?”
“Yes, there’s her colors. You can see the sun shinin’ on her brass guns forward.”
“There, she’s signalin’. I wonder what she wants?”
Code walked idly to his windows and peered out, but could not see the vessel that the men were talking about.
“She wants us to heave to, boys,” sang out Nat suddenly. “Stand by to bring her up into the wind. Hard down with your wheel, John!”
As the schooner’s head veered Code caught a glimpse of a schooner-rigged vessel half a mile away with uniformed men on her decks and two gleaming brass cannon forward. Then she passed out of vision.
“She’s sending a cutter aboard,” said one man.
