THE LONG SHOT
Lang had had an idea that his troubles would be mostly ended when he
reached Valparaiso. The first thing was to locate Morrison, who must
surely be there; he could take no steps before that. The explorer was
well known in the city, he knew, and between the hotels, the American
consulate and the Anglo-Saxon population it should be easy to get on
his traces.
It was still early in the day. He had drawn bad luck with his hotel,
which turned out to be an establishment likely to provide a minimum of
comfort at a maximum expense. However, it would do for a few days, and
he did not want to waste time in finding better quarters.
He had a list of the chief hotels, and he had thought of telephoning
to them all, but his first struggles with a Spanish central dissuaded
him from this plan. He went out and hired a horse-drawn cab by the
hour, and started through the rainy streets on his round of the
hotels.
He went first to the American houses, the Hotel New York and the Great
Western; then to the Prince of Wales and the Savoy, the English
hotels; and finally to the Berliner and the Santiago and the Imperiale
and the Kosmos. He drove from place to place as the day passed, and
his hopes darkened. Morrison was not known to be in the city. Several
of the hotel managers knew him, but did not remember having seen him
for at least six months.
He had great hopes of the American consulate, however. He found indeed
that the consul knew the explorer well, but had no idea that he might
be in Valparaiso. Sooner or later, however, Morrison would be sure to
call at the consulate, and the consul gave Lang a list of American
residents and foreign boarding houses where something might be
learned.
Lang spent the rest of that day in searching these out, and drew a
blank every time. He finished on the heights east of the city, where
he had ascended by one of the _escalidores_, having been forced to
abandon the cab. The sun had gone down; dusk was falling, and the wet
weather had cleared. Below him lay Valparaiso, a crescent of white
lights on the bay, with the red stars of riding ships farther out, and
beyond them again, vaguely perceived, the immensity of the Pacific.
He had come into temperate latitudes again, and a chill wind pierced
his thin tropical clothing. He had a sudden lonely sense of being
homeless and lost and in danger. He had broken into his last thousand
dollars. A little more and he would be “on the beach,” penniless in a
foreign land.
It was a sort of peril he had never had to face before, and the most
paralyzing to a man who has not been trained to meet the rough face of
the world. Lang felt his courage collapsing, and it was a medical
training that suggested the practical remedy of plenty of food and
drink. He returned to the lower town, located the best restaurant and
ate a good dinner, regardless of expense. Considerably cheered by
this, he went to bed early, with a pint of hot lemonade laced with rum
as a preventive of chill, and this treatment temporarily stunned his
discouragement and assured him a night of the sleep he needed.
Next morning he felt once more capable of grasping the situation by
its thorniest end. He called again at the consulate, and then circled
the business section by the water front, making inquiries at the
American warehouses and importing agencies, and passed the whole day
in these researches. He exhausted the field; he could think of nowhere
else to look. He began to doubt whether Morrison had ever come to
Valparaiso. And time was important.
He felt intensely worried, harassed, working in the dark. At a loss
what to do, he wandered the whole length of the long curving water
front. There were all sorts of vessels, and a tremendous rush and
noise. A big freighter from Australia was unloading; the squat, sullen
Indian roustabouts sweated and toiled. The mail boat he had come on
was still in the harbor, and he looked at her, wondering when he would
take that northward road again.
The end of the harbor shaded off into shacks, fishing boats, rotten
little wharves, and he turned back again. He was walking slowly when
his eye was caught by a gasoline cruiser moored beside a pier. He
thought he had seen it before, but it had been deserted then, and now
seemed to be making ready to go somewhere.
Lang knew a little of motor boats, and once had nearly bought one.
This craft must have been an elaborate and expensive cruiser at one
time, but was growing old and unkempt and paintless, as if she had
fallen on evil ways. She was named the _Chita_, must have been some
forty feet long, slim and shapely in lines, with a comfortable cabin
and a glassed pilot house, and it occurred to Lang that she would be a
most comfortable vessel for the expedition south, provided her engines
were in good order.
A man was working over them then, stooping over some adjustment. A
second man was stowing away boxes and small crates which a couple of
stevedores were unloading from a truck. He too was stooping, but he
straightened up and Lang met his eyes full.
It was rather intuition than recognition. The man had a full inch of
stubby black beard all over his chin and jaws; he wore a green jersey,
rough trousers and boots, and he looked every inch a Chilean sailor.
He met Lang’s eye stolidly; but some subconscious shock startled a cry
from Lang’s lips.
“What—Carroll?” he almost shouted.
The man at the engine looked up quickly—instantly bowed his head
again; but not before Lang had had a glimpse of a thin, sullen young
face that he knew for certain. Louie’s face was deeply browned and his
rather light hair dyed black, but he was a type hard to disguise. Lang
looked back at the deck hand, positive now.
“I’ve caught up with you, Carroll,” he said. “What are you doing here?
Where’s Morrison?”
He was astonished at his own coolness, for this was the crisis; the
collision that he had anticipated.
The man continued to stare unblinkingly.
“_No hablo ingles_,” he growled at last.
His assurance was so extreme that Lang would have doubted, but for
surely having recognized the young gunman.
“You can’t bluff it out, Carroll,” he insisted. “Louie the Lope, too.
I’ve got to have that money back now that you took off me in Panama.
What are you going to do about it? Are you ready to talk?”
The man spread out his hands with a furious, characteristic Chilean
gesture.
“_Malediction!_” he snarled, broke into a gust of unintelligible
Spanish, spat violently over the side, and turned again to the freight
he was handling.
Lang gazed, really almost staggered for a moment; then turned and
slowly walked away. He was no longer in the dark; he could see his way
now, and he wanted to think. He heard a step behind him, and a
triumphant voice spoke quickly in his ear.
“I’ve got ’em right with me. The old professor’s eating out of my
hand. Nothing doing, so far’s you are concerned, doc. They’ve got your
number. They know how you tried to double cross ’em, and they’ve got
no further use for you. You can go back to the States.”
It was all shot out almost before Lang could turn. Carroll turned back
to the cruiser with a malicious grin under his black beard, and in
that instant Lang believed his words implicitly.
They had the sound of truth; it was a revelation. For the first time
he grasped that the Morrisons must really think that he had tried to
forestall them, to beat them to the south. What else could they think?
His excited mind instantly reconstructed what must have happened.
Morrison and Eva had hurried to Valparaiso. Carroll, already on the
spot, had met them, induced them to hire this power boat, was
preparing, along with Louie, to go south with them. Their disguise was
reliable. Lang, knowing them well, had barely penetrated it.
The emeralds would be mined out of the ice. And then—— What he knew
for certain was that neither Morrison nor Eva would ever see
Valparaiso again.
That was if the ingenious plan worked. But Lang felt that he had the
checkmate now in his power. He vowed never to lose sight of that boat.
Sooner or later, before sailing, Morrison must come down to inspect
its readiness. A chance to speak to the explorer was all he wanted.
He walked away without glancing back, circled a block, came back and
established himself at a sidewalk café where he had a fair view of the
_Chita_, distant a hundred yards. Here he sat, sipping inferior
Chilean beer, intently spying.
A continual stream of boxes and crates and gasoline tins came down to
the boat. Carroll and his confederate were working hard; they appeared
and disappeared in and out the cabins, but no other visitor came near
the cruiser. Comparative quiet settled on the water front at
nightfall, and in the dusk Carroll and Louie departed, heading through
the business district.
Lang kept to his post, however, till nearly ten o’clock. He was very
hungry by this time and nauseated with beer, and he went back to his
hotel, pondering whether he could not lay a charge of assault and
robbery against his pair of enemies and have them extradited back to
Panama. He was afraid of taking any steps less he frighten them off,
for the important matter now was to keep them where he could see them.
He was back at his post of observation at eight the next morning, and
it was not until an hour later that Louie appeared, slouching lazily
down the quay, smoking the invariable cigarette. Carroll arrived a
little later; they took in no more cargo, but were busy about the
craft till noon, when they once more disappeared.
It was late in the afternoon before they returned, and they did not
stay long. They were gone again before six, but Lang perseveringly
remained at his café seat till late in the evening. Morrison had not
appeared. It might be that the boat would not sail for days. Indeed,
it seemed likely that the explorer would take as long a time for rest
and recovery as possible.
But, resolved to take no chances, Lang was at the wharf at eight the
next morning. Even as he approached afar off there seemed something
empty about the wharf. Startled, he quickened his pace, almost
breaking into a run. The slip was empty indeed. The cruiser was gone.
She might have been moved to another berth. He looked wildly up and
down. Desperately he snatched at an Indian dockman, pointing to the
empty place and struggling for Spanish.
“_Donde esta la—la gasolena-bota?_”
The _roto_ stared blankly, then waved an arm wide, and rasped out
something about “_el mar_.”
Providentially just then a young fellow passed whom Lang knew, one of
the clerks from an American agency on the water front, where he had
already inquired concerning Morrison.
“The boat’s sailed,” he interpreted, after a few words with the
stevedore. “Went out just about daylight, the fellow says. Oh, yes, I
know the _Chita_ well. She used to be a yacht, but was sold; she’s
been hired lately, and I heard that some American had her. Were you
trying to catch her?” he asked, looking curiously at Lang’s perturbed
face. “Not likely she’ll be gone far. I don’t know, though,” he added,
after another exchange with the dockman. “He says she took aboard a
hundred tins of petrol. Maybe the port officers will know where she
sailed for.”
“Ask him if he knows who were in her—how many people?” said Lang.
The stevedore did not know. He had not seen her sailing. Lang turned
away blindly, forgetting to tip the man or to thank the interpreter,
his mind a boiling blackness of rage and disappointment.
Carroll had tricked him again. It was his own fault. He should have
enlisted the police, the consul, some authority; or he should have had
a watch kept on the boat day and night. Once more his own insane
carelessness had ruined all.
There was only one chance now, and one fact stood out strongly from
his defeat. He would have to throw his last stakes on the board where
already the dearest lives to him on earth were risked. Far more than
treasure was at stake now, and to win he would have to reach the
glacier gate before the _Chita_.