A CLUE TO THE CULPRIT
With the call of the _Rayolite_ sounding in his ears, Henry had to
leave the nails for later consideration. He swept all the mass of
stuff back into his pocket and turned to his key. When he had taken
the message, he sent it up to the captain by a sailor. That done, he
stripped off the coat and searched it thoroughly. But nothing else
of interest was to be found. The coat was one of those dark blue
sailor jackets. There were dozens exactly like it on the _Iroquois_.
No name or identifying initials could be found in it. Henry was not
really sure whose coat it was. Both Black and Belford had been
wearing heavy sweaters. The coat might belong to either. It might
even be Mr. Sharp’s coat. Henry had grabbed it out of the wardrobe
when his own had got wet, with little thought as to who owned it.
Presently Belford came on duty. “I’m much obliged for the loan of
your coat,” said Henry. “I grabbed it and pulled it on yesterday
after I got wet, without stopping to ask your permission.”
Belford looked at the coat a moment, then looked inside. “It’s not
my coat,” he observed. “I have my initials sewed in mine. But you’d
be welcome to it if it were mine.”
Henry drew a deep sigh of relief. “So it’s not yours, eh? Then whose
is it?”
“That’s Black’s, I’m sure.”
“I think I’ll get a breath of fresh air,” said Henry.
“That won’t be difficult. It’s blowing a streak, but nothing like it
did yesterday.”
Henry left the radio shack and made his way to the bridge. “Captain
Hardwick,” he said, “when you find it convenient, I’d like to talk
to you privately.”
The captain looked at Henry sharply. “Come to my cabin at noon,” he
said.
All the morning long the commander remained at his post on the
bridge. The storm was easing up, but the high seas made the towing
of the _Rayolite_ difficult. Too much strain on the towing hawser
would cause it to part. With too little tension, the _Rayolite_ was
harder to handle. The captain, with his long experience, knew that
he dare not relax his vigilance for a moment, but when mess gear was
piped, he turned the control of the cutter over to Lieutenant Hill
with a few words of caution, and made his way to his cabin.
Impatiently Henry had been waiting for this move, and hardly had
Captain Hardwick reached his quarters before the lad was knocking at
his door.
“Well, Henry,” smiled the commander as the young wireless operator
entered the cabin, “what can I do for you?”
“Do you see this jacket?” asked Henry, with feverish eagerness,
pulling off the garment in question. “When I got wet yesterday while
that small boat was being cut loose, I ran into the stateroom and
grabbed this coat out of the wardrobe. I put it on in place of my
own wet one. This morning I got to feeling around in the pocket in
search of a pencil and this is what I found.”
From the pocket Henry drew out the entire mass of rubbish and dumped
it on the captain’s table. Then he sorted out the two finishing
nails and handed them to the captain. “They looked to me exactly
like the nail Mr. Sharp found in the damaged field coil,” explained
Henry.
The commander examined the nails with interest. Unlocking a drawer
in his desk, he drew out the nail Mr. Sharp had given him and laid
it beside the others. The three were identical, though of course the
one was bent.
“Whose coat is that?” demanded Captain Hardwick.
“I can’t say for sure, sir, but I think it’s Black’s. Belford says
it is.”
“I thought I gave orders not to say anything about this matter,”
said the captain severely, an angry frown wrinkling his forehead.
“I haven’t been talking about it. I merely asked Mr. Belford if the
coat was his. I didn’t tell him about the nails.”
“Who was with you when you found the nails?”
“Nobody, sir.”
“Nobody! Then how do I know that you really found them in the coat?
What was to prevent you from putting them in the coat yourself and
then bringing it to me, to throw suspicion on Black?”
Poor Henry! For a moment he looked heartbroken. Then he became
indignant. “Captain Hardwick,” he cried, “do you think I would do a
trick like that?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” replied the commander. “The fact
that you found two finishing nails in Black’s coat doesn’t prove
anything. There may be a dozen other coats on this ship with similar
nails in them. Don’t you see that it is one thing to assert
something and quite another to prove it? This is likely Black’s
coat, though you haven’t proved even that. But it doesn’t follow
that Black put the nails in his coat. Somebody else may have done
it, even if you didn’t.”
“Captain Hardwick,” protested Henry, “don’t you trust me at all?”
The captain smiled. “It isn’t a matter of trust, Henry. You come to
me with something you regard as evidence against Black. I’m glad to
have any evidence in the matter that is evidence, but we must be
sure that it is, before we use it. Don’t you understand what I am
driving at?”
“I see,” said Henry, drawing a breath of relief. “The finding of
these nails isn’t proof of anything. I grasp that all right. But
it’s—suggestive.”
“Now you are on exactly the right tack. It’s very suggestive. You
think that I’ve been a little hard on you, Henry. I want to be fair.
Now I’ll say that I think it much more likely that Black would have
had nails in his coat than that you would have had them about you.
Boys dressed to go visiting don’t ordinarily carry nails with them.”
Henry’s face evidently showed the relief he felt. The captain smiled
again. “It was quite right for you to bring me this coat,” he
continued. “I shall follow up this suggestion. Meantime I want you
to go on about your work and say nothing about the matter.”
Henry thanked the commander and withdrew from the cabin. Hardly had
he left before the captain punched his call-bell and sent Rollin to
summon the quartermaster. The latter was the captain’s prime
favorite and right-hand man among the non-commissioned officers.
“Quartermaster,” said the commander when his helper appeared,
“immediately after I go back to the bridge, I want you to slip into
the wireless stateroom without being observed, and search the place.
Keep your eyes open, especially for nails like this,” and the
commander held out the two nails Henry had given him. “Look in all
the nooks and corners, the bunks, and elsewhere, and notice anything
out of the ordinary that you find. Above all, as you value your job,
don’t say a word about this to any one.”
When Captain Hardwick passed to the bridge, he poked his head into
the radio shack. “Belford,” he said, “I want you in the chart-room.
And I want you, Black, to stick close to your instruments. Don’t
leave them for a second. The _Rayolite_ may be signaling us at any
time, and it’s important to catch her message instantly. The hawser
is likely to part at any moment if we aren’t careful. Harper is to
stand watch with you.”
Belford followed his commander up to the chart-room, where he was
put to work erasing lines from some old charts. The quartermaster
promptly seized his opportunity to slip into the stateroom, where he
locked the door, hung a cloth over the window, and got to work. For
more than an hour he searched everywhere and found nothing out of
the way. But when he got to work in the bunks, he found, tucked
securely away under the top mattress, a peculiar little hammer. He
put the room to rights again, uncovered the window-pane, picked up
the hammer, and, concealing it in the palm of his hand, stepped out
on deck.
He found himself face to face with the ship’s carpenter. A sudden
lurch of the ship threw them together. Laughing, each grasped the
other. As well as he could the quartermaster kept his fingers closed
over the hammer-head, but the quick eyes of the carpenter saw the
protruding ends of it.
“So you’re the fellow who borrowed that, are you?” he said. “I’ve
been hunting all over for that hammer. Why didn’t you tell me you
had borrowed it?”
For a moment the quartermaster was at a loss. He knew not what to
say. Then he asked the carpenter to come with him to the captain.
“Captain,” said the quartermaster, when they had mounted to the
bridge, “I have some things I would like to tell you. The carpenter
here can help explain them.”
The captain stepped to the chart-room and dismissed Belford, who at
once departed. Then the captain, the quartermaster, and the
carpenter stepped into the chart-room and closed the doors.
“I found this hammer under the mattress of the top bunk in the
wireless men’s room,” explained the quartermaster. “Black sleeps in
that bunk. As I came out on deck I bumped into the carpenter, here.
I thought that I had the hammer concealed, but he caught sight of it
in my closed fist. It seems he has been looking for this very hammer
for some days. It belongs in his tool kit.”
“When and how did you lose your hammer?” asked the commander.
“I was using it last Thursday. When evening mess gear was piped, I
had not quite finished the job I was doing, and I left it lying with
my work while I ate my supper. When I went back to finish the job,
the hammer was missing.”
“Where were you at work?”
“Close to the stairway where the men come down from deck, sir. I
pushed my work to one side, where it would not be in the way, and
stepped to the table. I wasn’t away from it half an hour.”
“The hammer was where any one could get it easily, was it?”
“Yes, sir. It was just beside the stairway. Any one going up or down
the stairs could have seen it, and it was necessary to take only a
step to one side of the stairway to reach it. Any one going up the
steps from supper could have picked it up easily without being
noticed.”
“What were you doing with the hammer?”
“I was making a case for the executive officer, sir. He wanted a
case with pigeonholes to hold some of his account books.”
“Then you were using small nails to fasten in the partitions with, I
take it.”
“Yes, sir, some long, thin, finishing nails. They were like these,
sir.” And the carpenter thrust his hand into his pocket, drew forth
an assortment of nails, and fished out a finishing nail that was the
duplicate of those Henry had so recently found.
“Give it to me,” directed the captain.
“It looks to me,” continued the commander, after the carpenter had
handed him the nail, “as though some one coming up to the deck after
eating must have picked up your hammer and perhaps some nails with
it.”
“I can’t say about the nails,—they were scattered about on the
case,—but there is no doubt some one got the hammer.”
“It looks as though young Black got it,” said the quartermaster.
The captain dismissed the two men. “I don’t want a word said about
this,” he warned them. “Be very careful that you do not mention it
to any one.”
The moment he was alone the captain turned to a calendar. “Last
Thursday,” he muttered to himself, “was the day we got back to New
York from Boston. Henry was on duty in the wireless house every
minute that evening. I don’t know that he even got any supper. I
must find out what Black was doing at that hour. I guess the best
way to do it is through the quartermaster.”
Again the quartermaster was called and instructed to find out from
the third-class wireless man, without arousing the latter’s
suspicions, at what time he ate his supper on the preceding Thursday
evening. That was not a difficult thing to do. Later in the day the
quartermaster engaged young Black in conversation and turned the
talk to the events of their run from Boston.
“You missed your supper the night we got in, didn’t you?” asked the
quartermaster.
“Not on your life,” said Black. “You don’t catch me missing anything
like that. I was one of the first fellows at the table.”
“I’ll bet I’ll be one of the first there this noon,” said the
quartermaster. “I’m hungry enough to eat a bear.”
He said good-bye to Black and reported to Captain Hardwick. When the
commander was alone, he said to himself: “The trail grows warm.
Black went to supper at the first pipe of the whistle. He likely
finished before the others, and went out. Nails and hammer lay
invitingly beside the stairway. Unobserved, he snatched up the
hammer and some nails, and thrust them into his coat. A little later
a nail of that same kind got into the wireless outfit. Later still,
nails and hammer are found in Black’s possession, or, what amounts
to the same thing.”
The captain frowned. “But Black was asleep when that nail got into
the wireless,” he commented. He pondered a moment. “By George! I
wonder if he _was_ asleep,” he exclaimed. “Everything hinges on
that. How am I going to find out?”