Lanyard, these reports related, had gone overboard, rather than submit
to arrest, after dark of a moonless night, when the Port Royal was
standing into Northeast Providence Channel, her position being
approximately midway between its jaws. Thus, if he dreamed to win to
land either in the North, where Hole-in-the-Wall Lighthouse sentinels
the southernmost point of Great Abaco Island, or in South, where Egg
Island Light warns of the perils lying off the northerly tip of
Eleuthera, the fugitive had undertaken a ten-mile pull against the drag
of the strong offshore current which was setting through the channel at
the time; a task which must have thwarted the stoutest effort of the
strongest swimmer, even assuming that the sharks with which those waters
swarm had been content to let him pass unmolested. Something which, the
consensus maintained, in the case of Lanyard, the sharks indisputably
hadn't.
That cry of "Man overboard!" had brought the Port Royal to a prompt and
a dead halt; the waters roundabout had been lavishly sown with
ring-buoys as well as with floating flares, guided by whose weird
illumination a life-boat quartered the theatre of the mystery for
upwards of an hour before the steamer called it in and proceeded.
Nevertheless the authorities who boarded her at Nassau, in their
disappointment indisposed to accept the suicide theory, insisted on a
thorough rummage of the vessel which accomplished little toward hushing
the murmurs of dissatisfaction with which, at length and empty-handed,
they took themselves ashore.
These doubters had at least one confrère of weathered judgment in New
York, who gave free tongue to his conviction that the Lone Wolf was one
wise bird and a tough fish to drown. And the faith of this one in the
will-to-live animating the hybrid monstrosity of his figure had good
justification in the outcome, when, one night more than a month after
the event of the alleged suicide, a glare beating directly into his face
roused him from the slumbers of an honest man to find that some marauder
had added the cool insolence of switching on the bedside lamp to the
felonious injury of housebreaking.
One who in his time had done much to make life a misery to men of wicked
ways, and more than once had figured as the target of an assassin's
weapon, the householder had long been accustomed to sleep with a pistol
ready to his hand. But his instinctive fumble for it drew a blank this
time; so, with such composure as he could command, he turned attention
to the agent of its confiscation.
This person had cheekily drawn up a chair to the bedside and made
himself at home in it, one of the detective's cigars between his teeth
and a highball of the detective's precious pre-Prohibition Scotch in his
hand testifying to amiable readiness to be sociable, provided his host
had no real objection to advance.
A semi-blinded stare was met by a smile that flashed teeth of notable
whiteness in a face deeply bronzed where it didn't boast a lush
overgrowth of beard. This last was sparely shot with grey, and so was
hair that also wanted shearing; but the rich complexion of the miscreant
was clear, his eyes were luminous with vitality, he had in every
particular the look of one who had consorted long and profitably with
Nature in her least sophisticated phases. As for his costume, it was
altogether shocking, comprising simply a cotton singlet, a coat without
much definite shape or colour, a pair of ragged trousers belted with an
end of rope, and foot-gear that would have kindled the envy of a
slapstick clown of the cinema.
"Well!" the detective summed up his scrutiny--"if that front didn't make
you the spit of the devil, I'd lay long odds you were none other than my
poor dear pal, the late Mike Angelo Lanyardi."
"It isn't sporting to bet on a certainty," the guest severely pointed
out. "And I'm sorry you think I'm late, my good Crane; but I'd rather
far be that than never."
"It would be a whole lot healthier for you to be never, in this
neck-o'-the-woods. If you haven't got sense enough to stay put in your
watery grave--"
"How shall an unquiet spirit withstand the temptation thus to revisit
these glimpses of the moonshine?" Lanyard sipped his drink with
unaffected relish. "Prime stuff, my friend! and I will be glad to fetch
you its fellow if you'll only be nice and forget for a time you're a
limb of the law whose sworn duty it is to pinch out of hand revisitants,
like me, from another and a wetter world."
"The devil himself couldn't twist the King's English into such ornery
knots," Crane declared. "I'm convinced: it is indeed the Lone Wolf who
lurks behind those lovely whiskers."
"You may be right," Lanyard admitted. "Unhappily, I for one can't
altogether share your certainty."
Crane made nothing of that, so let it pass. "Such behind the case," he
pursued, "a man-size slug of Scotch would be some solace to my
conscience."
"On your promise to be peaceable?" Lanyard stipulated, rising.
"Speaking as one who has seen you act up when your sense of
self-preservation was hitting on all six, I don't mind passing you my
word, you're in no danger of my starting any rukus without a gun."
"Or with one, I trust very truly."
"If you'd had the common decency to trust me at all, I wouldn't be
missing my gat this minute."
"Common decency not being the same thing, one takes it, as common
sense?"
"You don't have to worry," Crane insisted with an air of some
aggrievance. "If I can't round you up without a gun, you can run loose
and wild for all of me."
"On that understanding, then . . ." Lanyard tossed the weapon back to
the bed. "Forgive a simple precaution not inspired by any real doubt of
your good disposition toward an old friend, or your sporting attitude
toward a professional antagonist . . ."
The broad of his back was a shining mark for Crane as he strode away to
an adjoining room, where he made a light, and from which he presently
returned with a box of cigars and a musical glass.
Crane had not stirred. The pistol rested where it had fallen. Lanyard
tendered the drink and the open box.
"Astonishing," he mused, "what a sound taste in cigars one finds
prevalent among members of a venal and brutalized constabulary!"
He remarked in pained astonishment that the bed was quaking with Crane's
silent mirth.
"Don't mind me!" the detective protested: "it's myself I'm giving the
laugh, not you. I've been figuring for some time now, you were about due
to stage a gaudy resurrection; but this beats my craziest notions of
what the show would be like. I'm a pretty old mule of a dick, and a
tough audience for trick stuff, but I've got to hand it to you, Lanyard:
I've never yet been able to dope out what your next dodge would be nor
how you'd pull it. So, whenever you get all set to explain what the hell
you mean by sitting there and looking like that--well, you needn't be
afraid I'll walk out on you."
"You don't like my make-up?" Lanyard drew a long face over his
vestments. "Do you know? I rather fancied it. These jibs seem so
appropriate to my newly adopted calling. Behold in me, if you please, my
dear Crane, a seafaring man fully three weeks of age."
"That leaves a couple to be accounted for, then, since the night you
took to the big drink."
"There were two weeks before I became what I am," Lanyard confessed,
"when, not to put too fine a point on it, I was purely and beautifully a
beachcomber in those enchanting Bahamas."
"I've got a hunch this is going to be good." Crane grinned luxuriously
through cigar-smoke. "At least, I don't imagine you've got the crust to
think you stand any show of getting whatever it is you want out of me,
without coming through with a full account of yourself from then right
up to now."
"A stipulation of quid pro quo is always reasonable and in order,"
Lanyard agreed. "Yet I am afraid you may find my story a poor exchange
for what I wish to learn from you, my friend . . ."
"It's your risk. Shoot."
"You are wondering how I eluded the authorities at Nassau? That was
elementary. . . . On the other hand, one must admit one was dealing,
aboard the Port Royal, with gentry of small experience and less
imagination. . . . When I left my stateroom by way of its window, I
found myself with scant stomach for a long swim in black water: it
needs the hot blood of youth to contemplate without a qualm adventures
like that. There was a deck-chair nearby, and in it somebody's
steamer-rug; I folded up the one in the other, and cast them overboard.
In the darkness they passed for the shape of a man to startled eyes on
the main deck below; nobody questioned the alarm I raised of 'Man
overboard!' There was much excitement then; but other than the ship's
officers, nobody knew the unfortunate was a notorious criminal trying to
evade arrest, nobody else was looking for André Duchemin--and I was
careful enough to make myself insignificant. When the boat was lowered
to scour the seas for me, all hands honoured the performance with
undivided attention, it was easy to take refuge in one of the life-boats
swung inboard on its davits on the opposite side of the deck; I wormed
my way in under the canvas cover and lay snug till the Port Royal took
the pilot aboard outside Nassau and with him the police agents. It was
still quite dark; and as the blood-hounds swarmed up one side, the Lone
Wolf dropped down the opposite, unseen. There were a number of vessels
riding at anchor in the roadstead, and when I had put a good distance
between myself and the Port Royal I picked out a little schooner of
unkempt appearance, climbed aboard her while the anchor-watch snored,
and hid myself in her hold."
[Illustration: LANYARD WALKS COMPLACENTLY FROM UNDER THE VERY NOSE OF
THE POLICE.]
Lanyard paused to puff his cigar into a glow, and chuckled. "That was a
sorry shift, out of the frying-pan into the fire for the poor old Lone
Wolf. . . . The schooner turned out to be a rum-runner. Her owners
had put into Nassau for a night's carouse. In the morning they came
aboard, weighed anchor, and set sail. When I reckoned the time ripe to
declare myself, a jury of noble headaches sat on my case, decided that a
stowaway with so lame a story could be nothing but a spy of the United
States Internal Revenue Service; and, true to piratical tradition,
sentenced me to be marooned on a desert isle. That very night the foul
deed was done: the next sun rose to shine upon an outcast from humankind
squatting forlornly on the beach of a desolate cay, God only knew where,
and trying to recall his Robinson Crusoe . . .
"I had a thin time of it for several days, my friend! I lived frugally
on the fruits of the land, when and if found, and such creatures of the
shallow sea as I was able to snare with naked hands. The fruits were not
sustaining, and the raw seafood made me wretchedly sick.
"The cay was one of an endless chain--little islets, some nothing more
than rocks, some mere sandbanks dry only at low tide, separated by
narrow channels of no great depth. I made my laborious way from one to
another; but when at length I did stumble across a settlement it was
only a huddle of wattled huts inhabited by negro sponge-fishers, their
wives and progeny, who spoke a patois unintelligible to my ears, lived
in squalour indescribable, and discovered boundless contempt for a white
man in such plight. For all that, they gave me cooked food of a kind
into which I did not care to enquire too closely, being contented enough
to have it stay on my stomach.
"Their headman had enough English to strike a bargain with me. . . . I
had fled in my shirt and trousers, the only valuable I possessed was a
wrist-watch in a gold case. Sea-water had put it out of service, but the
negro coveted it with great lust, and agreed in exchange for it to
convey me in his boat to another island on which there were white men.
Thus it fell out that, some ten days after my dive into the harbour of
Nassau, I found myself on a cay of good size which served one particular
band of rum-runners as a secret rendezvous and dépôt.
"My condition at that juncture was so pitiable as to make my tale seem
credible; I posed as a French sailor who had been washed overboard from
a passing vessel during a blow that had recently swept the islands. The
rum-runners were a rough lot, but humane: they took me in, fed and
clothed me, would have let me kill myself with drink had I been so
minded, and raised no objection when I prayed for a chance to work my
passage on the first vessel that put in to take on a cargo for the
States. Having eaten their bread and salt, I shall not betray their
confidence: it is enough that I was set ashore not too far from this
city. And here I am."
Lanyard saluted the detective with his glass; and in an explosive grunt
Crane proclaimed that he would be everlastingly damned. "You went
through all that hell to come back here and stick your fool head into
the noose that's waiting for it!"
"My dear friend: I didn't like to dash your expectations . . ."
"Don't you realize what you're up against?--wanted for a dozen jobs
pulled off in the last six months! a price of fifty thousand cold-drawn
dollars on your head!"
"But, by all accounts, the Lone Wolf was drowned to death in the middle
of Northeast Providence Channel on the night of the fifth of June."
"Don't suppose anybody takes any stock in that yarn today, do you?"