“Gee!” whispered the boy joyfully. “I _knowed_ it was a case! I knowed
you didn’t mean what you said about not lettin’ me in on any more when I
broke this arm. Gee!”
“Go up on the deck and see all the sights you can, Shrimp,” smiled the
blind man. “See you later.”
The problemist sat down on the edge of the brass bed to go over the
situation again and make sure that there was not a loose end. He had
figured out on deck the only way, but he wanted to prove his reasoning
by mental tests. The master counterfeiter, cunning, desperate, could do
only one thing--eliminate the man he knew suspected him. And Thornley
Colton could do but one thing--“watch” every minute the head of the
gang. The success of the whole case depended on Colton’s alertness in
preventing the criminal from making one move that the problemist knew he
would make the instant the master rogue discovered all was lost. Yet the
presence of the man at the dénouement was _necessary_! Colton rose. He
must take a desperate chance, just as he had taken them many times
before.
He opened the door, and went down the narrow corridor, his brain
automatically counting the steps it had registered when he entered. He
stopped. He smelled the heavy licorice odour of the pectoral papers
again. For an instant a grim smile flashed to his lips. He had followed
the mind-processes of the man correctly once more. The smell of the
smoke was too obvious; it had been overdone.
A stateroom door opened before him.
“Got a match?” asked a voice, and Colton understood the disguising of
tone instantly.
The blind man held out his match safe; then the snarling whisper of the
man cut the stillness, and he felt a gun-muzzle jab viciously into his
ribs. “Get in here!” Colton quietly obeyed the order, and stepped over
the threshold into the stateroom that was filled almost to suffocation
with cigarette smoke.
“Put ’em over your head! Up!” The snarl changed to a sneer. “So you’re
the slick blind man that sister of mine talked about, eh? The lonehander
that makes boobs of the police and secret service? Well, little bat-eye,
I’ve been laying for you ever since I got wise to that slick fall trick.
Got a damn’ fine nose, eh, smelling that pec smoke I’ve been filling the
lower deck with ever since you and the kid came down.”
“Humour palls when the audience is forced to stand in so uncomfortable a
position,” said the blind man evenly.
He felt his own pistol snatched away.
“Back up a step, and you’ll find the bed!” ordered the voice.
The blind man sat down and waited patiently. When the other man spoke
again there was grudging admiration in his voice. “I’ve got to hand it
to you,” he admitted. “I didn’t think there was one man on earth that’d
get wise. Now I suppose you want the old man?”
“I want you first,” Colton told him.
“You got me!” laughed the man with the gun. “But you haven’t got me like
you got that sister of mine, have you? She wouldn’t say a word, would
she? Well, it’s a damn’ good thing she didn’t!”
“I knew that,” said Colton quietly.
“You didn’t think the wayward son could come back after ten years, with
a counterfeiting process that couldn’t be beat, and then get his father
in on the scheme to pass the phony money through his bank, did you? And
you didn’t know that staid old Dryden Nelson would ever become head of
the gang, and then slide out under the noses of the secret-service men.
I guess he’s the man you want to get, eh? Well, I’m the little man
that’s going to see that you don’t!”
“I will find him when the time comes.”
“You will, eh--you will!” Snarling viciousness dominated the voice.
“Well, you won’t! You, with your lone hand! Why, you poor boob, it’d
take a gang to get me!”
“I had about concluded you were just taking a chance on a word dropped
by Miss Nelson and a thing or two you might have heard of me,” Colton
said quietly. “I didn’t think you’d dare have any one near enough to get
real information. This is one of the games where I don’t play a lone
hand. The boat that’s been following us ever since we left the dock is
the revenue cutter _Proctor_, with Chief Whittson and his men aboard.”
The man ripped out an oath. “So that’s it!” he snarled. “Fooled me, eh?
Stand up! Put your hands behind your back! No funny work! I’ve tied men
before with one hand.”
Colton smiled at him sardonically. “If I am off the deck fifteen minutes
Chief Whittson and his men will board the _Carracas_, and nab the fake
owners of the bear. Quite a scheme, that. No one would ever suspect
ignorant, ragged-looking, brown men with a dancing bear as
counterfeiters, would they?” His tone was a burlesque of the man’s own.
“And what do you suppose the chief’ll do when he finds me here? Tied up
or dead makes no difference. I promised myself to get you, and get you
alone. But it’ll be just as good that way.” The mockery had died out of
his voice at that last sentence; there was a tinge of bitterness that
the man instantly recognised.
“Well, you couldn’t put him wise to _me_!” gritted the man. “So you
_are_ a lone-handed worker, after all. Get up!” he commanded. Colton
obeyed the jabbing gun-barrel. “I’m a single-hander, too!” went on the
counterfeiter. “We’re going up on the deck, and if there’s a move to get
me, out you go! This gun’ll be in my pocket, jamming your kidneys every
minute. Let ’em get the gang! I’m through with ’em! Let ’em have the
bear, too! It’ll be no good to anybody! I’ll see to that. But if you
even lift a finger to point me out----” He made a horrible gurgling
sound in his throat that was more than significant. “Come on!” he
ordered sharply.
They left the stateroom, Colton idly twirling his slim stick, the man at
his side talking commonplaces in a grim tone that made them anything but
commonplaces. To the passengers who saw them on the deck they were only
ship acquaintances, but the blind man felt the gun-muzzle now and then
in his side.
“We’ll stop here,” growled the man at the forward rail, overlooking the
open deck below. “I want to be where I can watch those men of mine. Put
your hands on the rail where I can see ’em!”
Colton quietly obeyed, resting his elbows on the wood and dangling his
cane over the edge. The crash of the wireless sender broke out; the
blind man felt his companion grow tense as his trained ears read the
dots and dashes. Then he knew that the message he had written so that
the man who was an expert telegrapher could not suspect had flashed to
the revenue cutter, “John Jones, 56 Cedar Street,” meant nothing but a
business deal.
Minutes passed. Below them the three ragged men lounged around the cage.
Four or five other men, of the crew off watch, stood around, scowling
vindictively at the bear cage and its sleeping animal. Then came the
thing that the blind man had been waiting for. He felt the big engines
slow down. Not a muscle of his body seemed to move, but the knuckles of
his right hand whitened as he gripped the end of his cane.
An oath came from the man at his side. “So you tricked----”
So sudden that it seemed but a whir in the light, the slim cane in the
hand of the blind man swished around, straight for the other man’s eyes.
There had been not a warning move but a lightning turn of the wrist. The
first instinct man has is to protect his eyes. The criminal obeyed it,
forgetting all else. He dodged with a gasp. Colton’s knees seemed to
give way under him, he spun around on the balls of his feet like a cat;
then his whole body straightened like a suddenly released whalebone, his
right fist found the jaw of the other, and the master counterfeiter fell
without a groan and lay still.
Colton’s whistle rang out shrilly. A screamed oath came from the deck
below. The sound of a struggle.
“Get the bear!” shouted Colton.
A shot rang out. Another. He could hear the big cage rattle and groan as
the dying animal thrashed out its life. Around the cage seven men were
struggling, the three ragged, dark-skinned men who had guarded the cage
and the four men who had been apparently lounging sailors.
The blind man listened for a moment, then he smiled a grim smile. “A
lone hand!” he murmured. “I hate assistants--but I’m not such an
egotistical fool as all that!”
On the port side of the boat he heard the scrambling of men to the high,
white deck. Then Chief Whittson’s voice came:
“Did you get him?”
Colton touched the unconscious body of the man near the rail just as he
would have touched the body of a snake with his foot.
“Where’s Nelson?” asked the chief eagerly.
“Down there in the false, canvas-covered top of that bear cage!”
“What!”
“Yes. Drugged! For God’s sake get that suffocating cover off, and send
for the ship’s doctor.”
The order was bawled to the men below. Willing hands ripped the cover to
pieces, and on a thin mattress, in a steel-floored, steel-meshed upper
compartment of the cage, was Dryden F. Nelson, white-faced, unconscious!
“By Heaven, he had his nerve with him to take that chance to get away!”
gasped the chief, in admiration. “It’s a new one! We’d never have
suspected a bear cage in a thousand years. And we had every way out of
the city guarded.”
“Yes!” The word came as a half groan, half snarl, from the man on the
deck, whom one of the secret-service operatives had just manacled. “He
had his nerve! He’s my father! And he’s the greatest counterfeiter of
them all!”
Thornley Colton leaned forward. He grasped a wrist of the man, and
almost pulled the arm out of its socket.
“You dirty, lying cur!” he said, and his tone was one that he had never
used before. “You forced that old man to serve you after he had
discovered what you were doing! You forced the girl who thought you were
her brother to protect you! By God, if ever a man deserved hanging
you’re the one!”
“He’s my father!” grated the handcuffed man. “If I go to jail he’ll go,
too! He knows I’m his son!”
“You dog!” Colton’s voice fairly shook with passion. “You fooled him
into believing that you were his rotten-hearted son that died ten years
ago. But you can’t fool me! You may look like Joe Nelson! You may
deceive even the eyes of a father! But I’m blind! Blind! I talked for an
hour with a school chum who played in the football game in which Joe
Nelson broke his wrist. You never had a broken wrist in your life! The
bones are perfect!” He turned to the chief. “Keep a careful guard on
that cage, chief, until we get to the cutter. I think there’s a million
or so dollars that this dog got from Nelson’s bank stuffed into that
mattress!”
“Damn you!” The man half rose to his knees as he shrieked it. “I tricked
them all! And you----”
“That’s the confession I wanted to vindicate Nelson,” said the blind man
contentedly.