MYSTERIES MULTIPLY
Directing Kuroki to remove the ring and bring it along, Cleggett gave
his arm to Lady Agatha and led the way back to the Jasper B. Neither
said anything to the point until, seated in the cabin, with the
twenty-dollar bill and the ring before them, Cleggett picked up the
latter and remarked:
"You are certain of the identity of this ring?"
"Certain," she said. "I could not mistake it. There is no other like
it, anywhere."
It was a very heavy gold band, set with a large piece of dark green
jade which was deeply graven on its surface with the Claiborne crest.
"Was it," asked Cleggett, "in the possession of Reginald Maltravers?"
"It might have been, readily enough," she said, "although I had not
known that it was. Still, that does not explain...." She shrugged her
shoulders.
"There are a number of things unexplained," answered Cleggett, "and the
presence of this ring, and the manner in which it has come into our
possession, are not the most mysterious of them. The explosion itself
appears to me, just now, at least, hard to account for."
"The manner in which people get into and out of the hold of your vessel
is also obscure," said Lady Agatha.
"Nor is the motive of their hostility clear," said Cleggett.
He picked up the piece of paper money. Something about the feel of it
aroused his suspicions. He called Elmer, and when that exponent of
reform entered the cabin, asked him bluntly:
"Did you ever have anything to do with bad money?"
Elmer intimated that he might know it if he saw it.
"Then look at that, please."
Elmer took the torn bill, produced a penknife, slit the yellow paper,
and cut out of it one of the small hair-like fibers with which the
texture of such notes is sprinkled. After wetting this fiber and
mangling it with his penknife he gave his judgment briefly.
"Queer," he said.
"But what does that explain?" asked Lady Agatha. "Perhaps the Earl of
Claiborne came to this country and took to making counterfeit money in
the hold of the Jasper B., into and out of which he stole like a ghost?
Finally he got tired of it and blew himself up with a bomb out there,
leaving his ring with a piece of money intact? Is that the explanation
we get out of our facts? Because, you know," she added, as Cleggett
did not smile, "all that is absurd!"
"Yes," said Cleggett, still refusing to be amused, "but out of all this
jumble of mystery, just one certain thing appears."
"And that is?"
"That our destinies are somehow linked!"
"Our destinies? Linked?"
She gave him a swift look, and as suddenly dropped her eyes again.
Cleggett could not tell whether she was offended or not by his
expression of the idea.
"The same people," said Cleggett, after a brief pause, "who are so
persistently hostile to me are also in some manner connected with your
own misfortunes. Their possession of this ring shows that."
"Yes," she said, following his thought, "that is true--whoever set off
that bomb was also wearing this ring, or was very near the person who
was wearing it. And," with a shudder which conveyed to Cleggett that
she was thinking of the box on deck, "it COULDN'T have been Reginald
Maltravers!"
"Perhaps," said Cleggett, "someone was sneaking over from Morris's with
the intention of destroying the Jasper B., and was himself the victim
of a premature explosion as he crouched behind the rocks to await his
opportunity."
"But why," puzzled Lady Agatha, with contracted brows, "should a
dynamiter, anarchistic or otherwise, be holding a counterfeit
twenty-dollar bill in his hand as he went about his work?"
Cleggett brooded in silence.
"We are in the midst of mysteries," he said finally. "They are
multiplying about us."
He was about to say more. He was about to express again his belief
that they had been flung together by fate. The sense that their
stories were inextricably intertwined, that they must henceforward
march on as one mystery towards a solution, was exhilarating to him.
But how was it possible that she should feel the same sense of pleasure
in the fact that they faced dangers, seen and unseen, together?
Together!--How the thought thrilled him!
On deck, Elmer, before returning to the box of Reginald Maltravers,
suddenly and unexpectedly grasped Cleggett by the hand.
"Bo," he said, "I'm wit' youse. I'm wit' youse the whole way. Any
friend of the little dame is a friend of mine. She's a square little
dame. D' youse get me?"
"Thank you," said Cleggett, more affected than he would have cared to
own. "Thank you, my loyal fellow."
Cleggett established a watch on deck that night, with a relief every
two hours. Towards morning George returned, with Dr. Farnsworth and a
nurse. This nurse, Miss Antoinette Medley, was a black-eyed, slender
girl with pretty hands and white teeth; she gestured a great deal and
smiled often. She and Dr. Farnsworth devoted themselves at once to the
young anarchist poet, who had come out of his stupor, indeed, but was
now babbling weakly in the delirium of fever.
The night was not a cheerful one, and morning came gloomily out of a
gray bank of mist. Cleggett, as he looked about the boat in the first
pale light, could not resist a slight feeling of depression, courageous
as he was. The wounded man gibbered in a bunk in the forecastle. The
box of Reginald Maltravers stood on one end, leaning against the port
side of the cabin, and dripped steadily. Elmer, wrapped in blankets,
lay on the deck near the box of Reginald Maltravers, looking even more
dejected in slumber than when his eyes were open. Teddy, the
Pomeranian, was snuggled against Elmer's feet, but, as if a prey to
frightful nightmares, the little dog twitched and whined in his sleep
from time to time. These were the apparent facts, and these facts were
set to a melancholy tune by the long-drawn, dismal snores of Cap'n
Abernethy, which rose and fell, and rose and fell, and rose again like
the sad and wailing song of some strange bird bereft of a beloved mate.
They were the music for, and the commentary on, what Cleggett beheld;
Cap'n Abernethy seemed to be saying, with these snores: "If you was to
ask me, I'd say it ain't a cheerful ship this mornin', Mr. Cleggett, it
ain't a cheerful ship."
But Cleggett's nature was too lively and vigorous to remain clouded for
long. By the time the red disk of the sun had crept above the eastern
horizon he had shaken off his fit of the blues.
The sun looked large and bland and friendly, and, somehow, the partisan
of integrity and honor. He drew strength from it. Cleggett, like all
poetic souls, was responsive to these familiar recurrent phenomena of
nature.
The sun did him another office. It showed him a peculiar tableau
vivant on the eastern bank of the canal, near the house boat Annabel
Lee. This consisted of three men, two of them naked except for bathing
trunks of the most abbreviated sort, running swiftly and earnestly up
and down the edge of the canal. He saw with astonishment that the two
men in bathing suits were handcuffed together, the left wrist of one to
the right wrist of the other. A rope was tied to the handcuffs, and
the other end of it was held by the third man, who was dressed in
ordinary tweeds. The third man had a magazine rifle over one shoulder.
He followed about twenty feet behind the two men in bathing suits and
drove them.
Cleggett perceived that the man who was doing the driving was the same
who had watched the Jasper B. so persistently the day before from the
deck of the Annabel Lee. He was middle-sized, and inclined to be
stout, and yet he followed his strange team with no apparent effort.
Cleggett saw through the glass that he had a rather heavy black
mustache, and was again struck by something vaguely familiar about him.
The two men in bathing suits were slender and undersized; they did not
look at all like athletes, and although they moved as fast as they
could it was apparent that they got no pleasure out of it. They ran
with their heads hanging down, and it seemed to Cleggett that they were
quarreling as they ran, for occasionally one of them would give a
vicious jerk to the handcuffs that would almost upset the other, and
that must have hurt the wrists of both of them.
As Cleggett watched, the driver pulled them up short, and waved them
towards the canal. They stopped, and it was apparent that they were
balking and expostulating. But the driver was inexorable. He went near
to them and threatened their bare backs with the slack of the rope.
Gingerly and shiveringly they stepped into the cold water, while the
driver stood on the bank. The water was up to their waists and he had
to threaten them again with his rope before they would duck their heads
under.
When he allowed them on shore again they needed no urging, it was
evident, to make them hit up a good rate of speed, and back and forth
along the bank they sprinted. But the cold bath had not improved their
temper, for suddenly one of them leaped and kicked sidewise at the
other, with the result that both toppled to the ground. The stout man
was upon them in an instant, hazing them with the rope end. He drove
them, still lashing out at each other with their bare feet, into the
water again, and after a more prolonged ducking whipped them, at a
plunging gallop, upon the Annabel Lee, where they disappeared from
Cleggett's view.
While Cleggett was still wondering what significance could underlie
this unusual form of matutinal exercise, Dr. Farnsworth came out of the
forecastle and beckoned to him. The young Doctor had a red Vandyck
beard sedulously cultivated in the belief that it would make him look
older and inspire the confidence of patients, and a shock of dark red
hair which he rumpled vigorously when he was thinking. He was rumpling
it now.
"Who's 'Loge'?" he demanded.
"Loge?" repeated Cleggett.
"You don't know anyone named 'Loge,' or Logan?"
"No. Why?"
"Whoever he is, 'Loge' is very much on the mind of our young friend in
there," said Farnsworth, with a movement of his head towards the
forecastle. "And I wouldn't be surprised, to judge from the boy's
delirium, if 'Loge' had something to do with all the hell that's been
raised around your ship. Come in and listen to this fellow."
Miss Medley, the nurse, was sitting beside the wounded youth's bunk,
endeavoring to soothe and restrain him. The young anarchist, whose
eyes were bright with fever, was talking rapidly in a weak but
high-pitched singsong voice.
"He's off on the poems again," said the Doctor, after listening a
moment. "But wait, he'll get back to Loge. It's been one or the other
for an hour now."
"I spit upon your flag," shrilled Giuseppe Jones, feebly declamatory.
"'I spit--I spit--but, as I spit, I weep.'" He paused for a moment,
and then began at the beginning and repeated all of the lines which
Cleggett had read from the little book. One gathered that it was
Giuseppe's favorite poem.
"'I spit upon the whole damned thing!'" he shrilled, and then with a
sad shake of his head: "But, as I spit, I weep!"
If the poem was Giuseppe's favorite poem, this was evidently his
favorite line, for he said it over and over again--"'But, as I spit, I
weep'"--in a breathless babble that was very wearing on the nerves.
But suddenly he interrupted himself; the poems seemed to pass from his
mind. "Loge!" he said, raising himself on his elbow and staring, with
a frown not at, but through, Cleggett: "Logan--it isn't square!"
There was suffering and perplexity in his gaze; he was evidently living
over again some painful scene.
"I'm a revolutionist, Loge, not a crook! I won't do it, Loge!"
Watching him, it was impossible not to understand that the struggle,
which his delirium made real and present again, had stamped itself into
the texture of his spirit. "You shouldn't ask it, Loge," he said. The
crisis of the conflict which he was living over passed presently, and
he murmured, with contracted brows, and as if talking to himself: "Is
Loge a crook? A crook?"
But after a moment of this he returned again to a rapid repetition of
the phrase: "I'm a revolutionist, not a crook-not a crook--not a
crook--a revolutionist, not a crook, Loge, not a crook----" Once he
varied it, crying with a quick, hot scorn: "I'll cut their throats and
be damned to them, but don't ask me to steal." And then he was off
again to declaiming his poetry: "I spit, but, as I spit, I weep!"
But as Cleggett and the Doctor listened to him the youth's ravings
suddenly took a new form. He ceased to babble; terror expanded the
pupils of his eyes and he pointed at vacancy with a shaking finger.
"Stop it!" he cried in a croaking whisper. "Stop it! It's his
skull--it's Loge's skull come alive. Stop it, I say, it's come alive
and getting bigger." With a violent effort he raised himself before
the nurse could prevent him, shrinking back from the horrid
hallucination which pressed towards him, and then fell prone and
senseless on the bunk.
"God!--his wounds!" cried the Doctor, starting forward. As Farnsworth
had feared, they had broken open and were bleeding again. "It's a
ticklish thing," said Farnsworth, rumpling his hair. "If I give him
enough sedative to keep him quiet his heart may stop any time. If I
don't, he'll thrash himself to pieces in his delirium before the day's
over."
But Cleggett scarcely heeded the Doctor. The reference to "Loge's"
skull had flashed a sudden light into his mind. Whatever else "Loge"
was, Cleggett had little doubt that "Loge" was the tall man with the
stoop shoulders and the odd, skull-shaped scarfpin, for whom he had
conceived at first sight such a tingling hatred--the same fellow who
had so ruthlessly manhandled the flaxen-haired Heinrich on the roof of
the verandah the day before.