[Illustration]
The Flying Death
by Samuel Hopkins Adams
To
Schuyler C. Brandt
in token of a friendship which,
begun at old Hamilton,
has endured and strengthened,
as only college friendships can,
for an unbroken twenty years,
this book is dedicated.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE—THE INSOMNIAC
CHAPTER TWO—THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER THREE—THE SEA-WAIF
CHAPTER FOUR—THE DEATH IN THE BUOY
CHAPTER FIVE—THE CRY IN THE DUSK
CHAPTER SIX—HELGA
CHAPTER SEVEN—THE WONDERFUL WHALLEY
CHAPTER EIGHT—THE UNHORSED NIGHTFARER
CHAPTER NINE—CROSS-PURPOSES
CHAPTER TEN—THE TERROR BY NIGHT
CHAPTER ELEVEN—THE BODY ON THE SAND
CHAPTER TWELVE—THE SENATUS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN—THE NEW EVIDENCE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN—THE EARLY EXCURSION
CHAPTER FIFTEEN—THE PROFESSOR ACTS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN—THE LOST CLUE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—THE PROFESSOR’S SERMON
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN—READJUSTMENTS
CHAPTER NINETEEN—THE LONE SURVIVOR
CHAPTER ONE
THE INSOMNIAC
STANLEY RICHARD COLTON, M. D., heaved his powerful form to and fro in
his bed and cursed the day he had come to Montant Point, which chanced
to be the day just ended. All the world had been open to him, and his
father’s yacht to bear him to whatsoever corner thereof he might elect,
in search of that which, once forfeited, no mere millions may buy back,
the knack of peaceful sleep. But his wise old family physician had
prescribed the tip-end of Long Island. “Go down there to that suburban
wilderness, Dick,” he had said, “and devote yourself to filling your
lungs with the narcotic ocean air. Practise feeding, breathing and
loafing, and forget that you’ve ever practised medicine.”
Too much medicine was what ailed Dick Colton. Not that he had been
taking it. On the contrary he had been administering it to others. Amid
the unbounded amazement of his friends, who couldn’t see why the heir
of the great Colton interests should want to devote his energies
otherwhere, he had insisted on graduating from medical school, and,
with a fashionable practice fairly yearning for him, had entered upon
the grimy and malodorous duties of a dispensary among the
tenement-folk. There, because the chances of birth had given him a good
intelligence which his own efforts had kept brightened and sharpened,
because Providence had equipped him with a comely and powerful body,
which his own manner of life had kept attuned to strength and vigour,
and because Heaven had blessed him with the heart and the face of a
boy, whereof his own fineness and enthusiasm had kept the one untainted
and the other defiant of care and lines, he had become a power in the
slums. It was only by eternal vigilance that he had kept himself from
being elected an alderman from one of the worst districts in New York.
There came a week of terrible heat when the tenements vented forth
their half-naked sufferers nightly upon the smoking asphalt, and the
Angel of Death smote his daily hundreds with a sword of flame. Dick
Colton fought for the lives of his people, and was already at the limit
of endurance when Fate, employing as its dismayed instrument a
contractor with liberal views on the subject of dynamite, reduced the
dispensary outfit in one fell shock to a mass of shattered glass and a
mephitic compound of tinctures, extracts and powders. Only one thing
was to be done, and the young physician did it. He stocked up again,
attending to all details himself, using his own money and his own
energy freely, and proving to his own satisfaction that strong coffee
and wet towels about the head would enable a man to live and toil on
four hours’ sleep a night.
When, at length, a two days’ rain had drenched the fevered city to
coolness, Dick Colton drew a deep breath and said: “Now I’ll go to
sleep and sleep for a week.”
But the drugs which for so many weary days had filled his entire
attention declined now to be evicted from his thoughts. Disposing
themselves in neatly labelled bottles, all of a size, they marched in
monotonous and nauseating files before his closed eyes, each individual
of the passing show introducing itself by some outrageous and
incredible title utterly unknown to the art and practice of pharmacy.
To think upon sheep jumping in undulatory procession over a stone wall,
so the wisdom of our forebears tell us, is to invite slumber. To
contemplate misnamed medicine bottles interminably hurdling the bridge
of one’s nose, operates otherwise. From the family doctor Colton had
carried his vision to Montauk Point with him.
Now, on this cool September midnight he rose, struck a light, and found
himself facing two neat, little, beribboned perfume jars, representing
the decorative ideas of little Mrs. Johnston, the hostess of Third
House. It was too much. Resentment at this shabby practical joke of
Fate rose in his soul. Seizing the pair of bottles, he hurled them
mightily, one after the other, into outer darkness. The crash of the
second upon the stone wall surrounding the little hotel was rather
startlingly followed by an exclamation.
“I beg your pardon,” cried Colton, rather abashed. “Hope I didn’t hit
you.”
“You did not—with the second missile,” said the voice dryly.
“It was very stupid of me. The fact is,” Colton continued, groping for
an excuse, “I heard some kind of a noise outside and I thought it was a
cat.”
“Where did you hear it?” interrupted the voice rather sharply. “Did it
seem to be on the ground, or in mid-air?”
Colton’s frazzled nerves jumped all together, and in different
directions. “Have I been sent to a private lunatic asylum?” he inquired
of himself.
“Lest my manner of inquiry may seem strange to you,” continued the
voice, “I may state that I am Professor Ravenden, formerly connected
with the National Museum at Washington, D. C., and that your remark as
to an unrecognised noise may have an important bearing upon certain
phenomena in which I am scientifically interested.”
Dick Colton groaned in spirit. “Here I’ve told a polite and innocent
lie to this mysterious pedant,” he said to himself, “and of course I
get caught at it.” He leaned out of the window, when a broad, spreading
flare of lightning from the south showed, on the lawn beneath him, the
figure of a slight, compactly built man of fifty-odd, dressed with
rigorous neatness in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, and carrying a
broken lantern and a butterfly net. His thin, prim and tanned face was
as indicative of character as his precise and meticulous mode of
speech.
“Did I break your lantern?” asked the young doctor contritely.
“As I do not carry my lantern in the small of my back, you did not,
sir,” returned the professor with an asperity which reminded Colton
that he had put considerable muscle into his throw. “A loose rock which
turned under my foot upset me,” he continued, “and the glass of my
lantern was broken in the fall. The rising gale prevented my relighting
it. Your opportune light, I may add, alone enabled me to locate the
house.”
“Perhaps my unintended rudeness may be pardoned because of my
involuntary service, then,” said Colton, with the courtesy which was
natural to him.
There was a moment’s pause. Then, “If I may venture to impose upon your
kindness,” said the man on the lawn, “will you put on some clothes and
join me here? It is a matter of considerable possible
importance—scientifically.”
“Anything to avoid monotony,” said the other, rather grimly. “I’m here
for excitement, apparently.”
Worming his way into a sweater, trousers and shoes, he went downstairs
and joined his new acquaintance on the veranda.
“My name is Colton, Dr. Stanley Colton,” he said. “What is it you want
me for?”
“I wish the testimony of your younger eyes and ears,” said the other.
“Would you object to a walk of a third of a mile?”
“Not at all,” returned the other, becoming interested. “Shall I see if
I can rustle up a lantern?”
“No,” said the professor thoughtfully. “I think it would be better not.
Yes; decidedly we are better without a light. Come.”
He led the way, swiftly and sure-footedly, though it was pitch-dark
except when the lightning lent its swift radiance.
“I was out in search of a rare species of Catocala—a moth of this
locality—when I heard the—the curious sound to which I hope to call
your attention,” he paused to explain.
He hurried on in silence, Colton following in puzzled expectation. At
the top of a mound they stopped, and were almost swept off their feet
by a furious gust of wind which died down, only to be succeeded by a
second, hardly less violent. In a glare of lightning that spread across
the south, Colton saw the fretted waters of a little lake below them.
“We’re going to get that storm, I think,” he said.
No reply came from his companion. In silence they stood, for perhaps
ten or fifteen minutes. Then the wind dropped temporarily. Colton was
wondering whether courtesy to the peculiar individual who had haled him
forth on this errand of darkness was going to cost him a wetting, when
the wind dropped and the night fell silent.
“There! Did you hear it?” the professor exclaimed suddenly.
Colton had heard, and now he heard again, a strange sound, from
overhead and seeming to come from a considerable distance; faintly
harsh, and strident, with a metallic sonance.
“Almost overhead and to the west, was it not?” pursued the other.
“Watch there for the lightning flash.”
The lightning came, in one of those broad, sheetlike flickers that seem
to irradiate the world for countable seconds. Professor Ravenden’s arm
shot out.
“Did you see?” he cried.
Darkness fell as the query was completed. “I saw nothing,” replied
Colton. “Did you? What did you see?”
A clap of wind blew away the reply, if there was any. This time the
wind rose steadily. They waited another quarter of an hour, the gale
blowing without pause.
“This is profitless,” said Professor Eavenden, at length. “We had best
go home.”
Thankful for the respite, the younger man rose from the little
depression where he had crouched for shelter from the wind. With a
thrill of surprised delight, he realised that he was healthily sleepy.
The quick, hard walk, the unwonted exercise, and the soft, fresh
sweetness of the air, had produced an anodyne effect. But was the air
so sweet? Colton turned and sniffed up wind.
“Do you smell anything peculiar?” he asked his companion.
“Unfortunately I am troubled with a catarrh which deadens my sense of
smell,” replied the scientist.
“There’s a peculiar reek in the air. I caught it with that last shift
of wind. It’s like something I’ve come across before. There!”
“Can you not describe it?”
“Why, it’s—it’s a sickish, acid sort of odour,” said Colton hesitantly.
“Where have I—— Oh, well, it’s probably a dead animal up to windward.”
As they reached the house, he turned to the other.
“What was it you thought you saw?” he asked bluntly. “What are you
looking for?”
“I am not satisfied that I saw anything,” answered Professor Ravenden
evasively. “Imagination is a powerful factor, when the eye must
accomplish its search in the instantaneous revelation of a lightning
flash. As for what I am seeking, you heard as much as I. I thank you
for your help, and, if you will pardon me, I will bid you good-night
here, as I wish to make a few notes before retiring.”
Leaving the professor busied by candle light at the desk in the main
room, Dick Colton cautiously tiptoed up the stairs. At the top he
stopped dead. From an open door at the end of the hall issued a shaft
of light. In the soft glow stood a girl. Her face was toward Colton.
Her eyes met his, but un-seeingly, for he was in the shadow, and her
vision was dazzled by the light she had just made. Her face was softly
flushed with sleep and her dark eyes were liquid under the heavy lids.
She was dressed in some filmy, fluffy garment, the like of which Colton
did not know existed. Nor had he realised that such creatures as this
girl who had so suddenly stepped into his world, existed. He held his
breath lest the sweetest, softest, most radiant vision that had ever
met his eyes, should vanish. The Vision pushed a mass of heavy black
hair back from its forehead, and spoke.
“Father,” it said.
“Father,” she said again. Then with a note of petulance in the soft,
rippling voice. “Oh, Dad, you’re not going out again.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Colton in a husky voice that belonged to
someone whom he didn’t know. “Your father is downstairs. I’ll call
him.” But the Vision had flashed out of his range. The light was shut
out, and all that remained to him was the echo of a soft, dismayed,
frightened little exclamation.
Having delivered the message to Professor Ravenden, and received his
absent-minded, “In a minute,” the insomniac returned to his room.
Strangely enough, it was while he was striving to fix on the
photographic lens of his brain every light and shadow of that radiant
girl-figure, that the solution of the strange noise came, unsought, to
him. He went to the foot of the stairs to tell the professor, who was
still writing.
“I think I know what the sound was that we heard, Professor Ravenden,”
he said. “It was very like the rubbing of one wire on another.”
“Very like,” agreed the professor.
“Probably a telegraph or telephone wire, broken and grating in the
gale, against the others.”
The professor continued to write.
“Good-night,” said Colton.
“Good-night, Dr. Colton,” said the scientist quietly, “and thank you
again. By the way, there is no wire of any kind within half a mile of
where we stood.”
Two problems Dick Colton took with him as exorcisers of the
processional medicine bottles, when he threw himself on his bed and
closed his eye. It was not the sound in the darkness, however, but the
face in the light that prevailed as he dropped to sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT
BEFORE the dream had fairly enchained him Colton was buffeted back to
consciousness by a slamming of doors and a general bustling about in
the house. He sat up in bed, and looked out over the ocean just in time
to see a fiery serpent writhe up through the blackness and thrust into
the clouds a head which burst into wind-driven fragments of radiance,
before the vaster glory of the lightning surrounded and wiped it out.
“A wreck, I fear,” said Professor Eavenden in the hall outside. “I
shall go down to the shore, in case I can be of assistance.”
“Indeed you shall not!” came a quick contradiction from the room at the
end of the hall. “Not until I’m ready to go with you.”
It was the voice of the Vision. Colton observed that, soft as the tones
were, a certain quality of decisiveness inhered in them.
“Can’t Mr. Haynes bring you?” suggested the professor mildly. “I see a
light in his room.”
“He’ll have his hands full with Helga. Please wait, Dad. I won’t be ten
minutes.”
From downstairs rose a banging of doors, a tramping of feet and the
gruff voice of Johnston, the host, mingled with the gentle
remonstrances of his wife, in which a certain insistence upon rubber
boots was discernible. On the other side of Colton there was a swishing
and thumping, as of one in hasty search for some article that had
declined to stay put. “Where the devil is that sweater?” came in a sort
of growling appeal to whatever Powers of Detection might be within
hearing.
“Don’t swear, Mr. Haynes,” sounded in tones of soft gaiety from the end
room, and the sweaterless one responded: “The half of it hath not been
told you. Got a sweater to lend a poor man with a weak chest, Miss
Ravenden?”
“I’m just getting into my one and only garment of the kind,” was the
muffled answer.
A second woman’s voice, low, but with a wonderful, deep, full-throated
sonance in it, broke in:
“My dream has come true,” it said gravely. “The ship is coming in on
Graveyard Point. How long, Petit Père?”
“With you in a minute, Princess. Just let me get into my boots,”
returned the voice of the seeker, but so altered by a certain caressing
fellowship that Colton was half-minded to think he heard a new
participant.
“Are you dressed already, Helga?” demanded Miss Ravenden. “How _do_ you
do it?”
“I hadn’t undressed, Dolly,” said the other girl, gravely. “I knew—I
felt that something——”
She paused.
“Helga’s dreams always come to pass, you know,” said the man of the
elusive sweater half banteringly. “_What_ infernal kind of a knot has
that shoe lace tied itself into?”
“Pray God this dream doesn’t come to pass,” said the girl outside,
under her breath as she passed Colton’s door.
Another rocket and a third pierced the night and the response came, in
a rising glow of light from the beach. “The life-savers are at hand,”
observed the professor below. “Make haste, daughter. If we are—”
A burst of thunder drowned him out.
“This,” said Colton with conviction, as he dove into his heavy jersey
jacket and seized a cap from a peg, “is going to be a grand place for
an insomnia patient! I can see that, right at the start.”
As he ran out of his door he collided violently with a small, dark,
sinewy man who had hurriedly emerged from the opposite room.
“Don’t apologise, and I won’t,” said Colton as they clutched each
other. “My name is Colton. Yours is Haynes. May I go to the shore with
you? I don’t know the way.”
“Apparently you don’t know the way to the stairs,” returned the other a
trifle tartly. Looking at his keen, pallid and deeply lined face, the
young doctor set him down as a rather irritable fellow, and suspected
dyspepsia. “Everybody will be going to the beach,” he added. “If you
follow along you’ll probably get there.”
“Thanks,” said Dick undisturbedly. It was a principle of his that the
ill-temper of others was no logical reason for ill-temper in himself.
In this case his principle worked well, for Haynes said with tolerable
civility:
“You just came in this evening, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I seem to have met the market for excitement.”
By this time they had reached the large living-room, where they found
Mrs. Johnston presiding with ill-directed advice over the struggles of
her grey-bearded husband to insert himself into a pair of boots of
insufficient calibre.
“Twenty-five years o’ service in the life-savin’ corps an’ ain’t let to
go out now without these der-r-r-ratted contraptions!” he fumed.
A splendid, tawny-haired girl in an oilskin jacket stood looking out
into the night, her eyes vivid with a brooding excitement. She turned
as Haynes came in.
“Are you ready, Petit Père? I’m smothering in these things.”
Expressively she passed her hands down along the oilskins, which
covered her dress without concealing the sumptuous beauty of her young
figure.
Filled as was Colton’s mind with the image of another face, he looked
at her with astonished admiration. Such, thought he, must have been the
superb maids in whose inspiration the Vikings fought and conquered.
“If you knew what a gallant wet-weather figure you make,” Haynes
answered her (Colton wondered how he could ever have thought the face
disagreeable, so complete was the change of expression), “your vanity
would keep you comfortable.”
“Dinna blether,” returned the girl, smiling with affectionate
comradeship, and slipping her arm through his to draw him to the door.
“Father’s boots are on at last.”
“We’re to have company,” said Haynes. “Mr. Colton—I think you said your
name was Colton—wants to come along.”
“I’m sorry that you should have been awakened,” said the girl, turning
to him. “You don’t mind rough weather?”
“At least I’m not likely to blow away,” returned the young man
good-humouredly, looking down at her from his six-feet-one of height.
Inwardly he was saying: “You are never the daughter of that
weather-beaten old shore man and that mild and ancient hen of a woman.”
Haynes, who had caught up a lantern and was moving toward the door,
turned and said to him: “You had better keep between Mr. Johnston and
myself. What are you waiting for?”
“Aren’t there others coming? I thought I heard someone upstairs speak
of it.” He paused in some embarrassment, as he realised the intensity
of his own wish to see that dark and lovely face again.
“Oh, Dolly Ravenden. Her father will bring her,” said Miss Johnston.
“We shall meet them at the beach.”
With heads bent, the four plunged out into the storm. The wind now was
blowing furiously, but there was little rain. Over the sea hung a black
bank of cloud, from which spurted great charges of lightning. Colton,
implicitly following his guides, presently found himself passing down a
little gully where the still air bore an uncanny contrast to the gale
overhead. Hardly had they entered the hollow when Haynes checked
himself.
“Did you hear it?” he said in a low voice to the girl.
Colton saw her press closer to her companion, shudderingly. She poised
her head, staring with great eager, sombre eyes, into the void above.
“When haven’t I heard it, in my dreams!” she half whispered.
“There!” cried Haynes.
“Yes,” said the girl. “To seaward, wasn’t it?”
On the word, Colton, straining his ears, heard through the multiform
clamour of the gale aloft the same faint, strange, wailing note of his
earlier experience, not unlike the shrieking of metal upon metal, yet
an animate voice, infinitely melancholy, infinitely lonely.
“It chills me like a portent,” said Helga.
“Never mind, Princess,” reassured Haynes, in his caressing voice. “It
was stupid of me to say anything about it, and make you more nervous.”
“Nervous! I never knew I had nerves—until now.” She turned to Colton.
“Did you hear it too?”
“Yes. What was it?”
A furious flurry of the gale intervened. The girl shook her head.
Johnston in the lead now turned to climb a grassy knoll, and
conversation became impossible.
At the top they came in view of a score of busy figures outlined
sharply against a lurid background as the lightning spread its shining
drapery from horizon to zenith. Presently the four people from Third
House stood on the cliff overhanging the sledge-hammer surf, and
watched the life-saving crews of two stations, Bow Hill to the east,
Sand Spit to the west, play their desperate game for a hazard of human
lives. Straining their eyes, they could discern, in the whiteness of
the whipped seas, a dull, undefined lump, which ever and anon flashed,
like a magician’s trick, into the clean, pencilled outlines of a
schooner, lying on her beam ends, and swept by every giant comber that
rolled in from the wide Atlantic. She lay broadside to the surges,
harpooned and held by the deadly pinnacled reef of Graveyard Point.
CHAPTER THREE
THE SEA-WAIF
OF the scores of little capes that jut out from Montauk, there is none
but is ghostly with the skeleton of some brave ship. Three such relics
were bleaching their still vertebrate bones on the rocks where the
schooner lay trapped. It was only too evident that a like fate was
ordained to her, and that the promptest action of the life-savers alone
could avail the ten huddled wretches in her rigging.
What man could do, the crews of the two stations were doing; and now,
in a sudden lull of wind, they sent a life-line over her. One of the
men came over to the Third House group, and spoke to Helga Johnston,
bending so close that she shrank back a little.
“Can’t last—hour,” came to Colton’s ears in sentences disjointed by the
wind. “Old wooden—pound pieces. Get most of ’em—life-buoy—all right.”
At a word from Miss Johnston, Haynes shouted in Colton’s ear: “Come
down to the beach. When she smashes, some of ’em may come in there.”
“Not alive surely?” cried Colton, glancing at the surf.
“Yes,” the girl’s clear voice answered, with an accent of absolute
certainty. “We must watch.” Down a sharp declivity they made their way
to the gully, which debouched upon a sand beach. Johnston, the veteran,
who had preceded them, was gathering driftwood for a fire, with a
practical appreciation of the possibilities.
“Bear a hand, Helga!” he shouted. “And you, Mr. Haynes!”
Almost before he knew it, Colton too was hard at work dragging timber
to the centre marked by the lanterns. A clutch on his arm called his
attention to what was going on above him, as Johnston pointed seaward.
In the glint of the lightning, he saw clear against the windy void a
huddled mass, at which the waves leaped and clutched, as it moved
steadily shoreward. Another glimpse showed it risen above the reach of
the breakers. It was a breeches-buoy, bearing its first burden.
“Line’s working all right!” yelled the old coastguard. “They ought to
get ’em all in.”
Presently another traveller came in foot by foot over that slender and
hopeful thread, then a third and a fourth, until seven of the crew were
huddled on the cliff. Out went the breeches-buoy again, for there were
three lives yet to be saved, when in a broad electric glare a monster
surge could be seen sweeping the schooner up. There was a crash of
timbers, a wild cry, and the line fell slack from the cliff-head. Old
Johnston dropped to his knees on the sand and bared his head, but only
for a moment; for he was up again and had set the pile of fuel burning
with a cleverly placed twist of paper.
Up leaped the flames. A brilliant glow wavered and spread. Colton,
stupid with horror, stood entranced, while Johnston, Helga and Haynes
ran, as if to established stations, along the surfs edge, the old man
nearest the wreck, then Haynes, and finally the girl. Of a sudden,
Colton came to himself with a dismal and unaccustomed sensation of
being out of it. No one had asked him to help. He was just a guest, a
negligible quantity when men’s and women’s work was to be done.
“What a useless thing the average summer boarder must be!” he thought,
as he passed beyond the girl and bent his attention on the boiling
cauldron of the ocean.
He had not long to wait. On the foaming crest of a breaker something
dark appeared, and vanished in the smother of the surge as it whizzed
up the sand. Another instant, and it was rolling within a rod of the
young fellow, showing the set, still face of a man. Colton hardly had
to wade ankle-deep to seize the form; but the back drag tore at his
feet with a power that amazed and appalled him. To haul the man ashore
took all his unusual strength. As he threw the form over his shoulder
and ran toward the fire, he became aware of a man and a woman
approaching from the cliff side. Laying down his burden, he knelt
beside it. One look was enough. The man’s skull had been crushed like
an egg-shell. Mechanically he felt for the pulse, when Professor
Ravenden’s precise tones, rendered a little less pedantic by the effort
required to overcome the gale, reached his ear:
“Perhaps I can be of some service. I am not entirely unskilled in
medical subjects.”
Colton shook his head. “He’s beyond all skill,” he answered.
“Oh!” cried a voice from the darkness behind the professor, rising to a
shriek. “Look! Helga! Help her!”
At the same moment, Helga’s own ringing voice sounded in a call for
aid, abruptly cut short. Colton jumped to his feet and turned. He saw,
with a sickening recollection of the waves’ power, which he had just
experienced, the girl up to her knees in water, her strong young frame
braced back and her arms clasping a body. A fringed comber, breaking
heavily, was driving a vortex of white water in upon her. It boiled up
beyond her, and the two figures were gone. As Colton, with a shout of
horror, leaped forward, like a sprinter from the mark, he saw Haynes,
running with terrific speed, launch himself head foremost into the
swirl of waters, at a rolling mass there.
“Lord! What a tackle!” thought Colton as he ran. “Yet they say that a
foot-ball education is of no practical use.”
His own was to come swiftly into play. For though Haynes had caught
Helga about the knees, he had no purchase for resistance, and the
deadly undertow was dragging them out.
Colton had the athlete’s virtue of thinking swiftly in the stress of
action. His was the cool courage that appreciates peril and reasons out
the most advantageous encounter. The human flotsam was far beyond his
grasp now; but he figured that an approaching surge, sweeping them in
shoreward again, would give him his chance,—the only chance,—for the
recession in all probability would carry them beyond help. He must meet
them feet forward, as a trained player meets and falls upon a foot-ball
rolling toward him; thus he might get his heels into the sand, and so
anchor them all against the back-drift. If he could not—well, there
were no _materia medica_ bottles out there beyond the surf anyhow, and
an ocean lullaby would be the sure cure for all sleeplessness.
Fortunately the coming wave was a broad-backed one, on which the
tangled figures rode in plain view, and Colton saw, with that thrill of
pride in his fellow-being which courage wakes in the courageous, that
the girl’s arms still clasped her trove, clinging below the
life-preserver which was fastened around the man’s body. Calculating
the drift down the beach, Colton moved forward. In they
came—nearer—nearer—and to his amazement Colton heard a strangled shout
from the waves:
“Get Helga! Never mind me. Get Helga in!”
“I’ll get you too, or break something,” muttered the young man, as with
a rush and a leap he plunged feet forward to meet the onset.
It was Haynes that he caught, just above the knees. His heels sunk in
the sand. The surge spread, stood, receded. “Here’s tug-of-war in
earnest,” thought Colton, as he set the muscles which had helped to win
many a victory for his college. The next instant it seemed as if those
muscles must rend apart; as if all the might of the unbounded ocean was
straining to drag away his prize of lives. He set his face grimly
toward the savage waves. His chest was bursting. One heartbeat more he
would hold out. Human endeavour could go no further. That heart-throb
sledged against his ribs, passed and found the bulldog grip unrelaxed.
One more, then! surely the last; after that—abruptly the strain
slacked.
A sob of compressed breath burst from Colton. Oh, how good was the
full, deep inhalation that followed! How it filled the muscles and
inspired the will to the final effort! With a mighty heave he rolled
the three clear over his own body up the beach. Then he lay still, for
he was tired and sleepy and didn’t care what became of him. He had made
a touch-down—anyway. Why didn’t—somebody—pull—them off—him?
“I’ve got ’em!” twittered a voice in his ear, a dim and ridiculous
voice, that nevertheless was like old Johnston’s. “You saved the lot,
God bless you!”
“Let me get my arm under his shoulder,” said the calm and precise
accents of Professor Ravenden, also in that strange faraway tone.
Oh, thought Dick in sudden but dim enlightenment, they were
telephoning. Of course. That’s the way voices sounded over a ’phone
when the wire was working badly. But why should they be telephoning?
And how, at the other end of a wire, could they be hauling him, Dick
Colton, to his feet?
When consciousness came in on the full flood, Colton found himself
staggering toward the fire, with someone’s support. From out the
flickering circle of light an angel came to meet him. She seemed a
thing born of the wedding of radiance and shadows. The whiteness of her
face, rich-hued where the blood flushed the cheek, was enhanced by the
dusky masses of her hair. Her lips were parted, and her rounded chest
rose and fell palpably with her swift breathing. Her eyes, deep,
velvety with the soft glamour of questing womanhood in their liquid
depths, looked straight into his. It was his Vision of the hallway.
“Ah, it was splendid!” she said, and there was a thrill in the soft
drawl of the voice that went straight to his heart.
She moved forward toward him into the fuller glow of the fire, and
Colton, his hungry eyes fixed on hers, thought of the moon emerging
from behind a filmy cloud.
“How did you dare?” she pursued. “You saved them all! I—I—want you to
take this.”
Mechanically he stretched forth his hand to meet hers, and she pressed
into it something light and soft.
“It was nothing,” he said dazedly, wondering. “Thank you. I—my head
feels queer—but I—think—I—could—go to sleep—now.”
He lay gently down on the soft sand, which seemed to rise to meet him.
Half swooning and wholly engulfed in sleep, he stretched his great bulk
and lay gratefully down, and the _materia medica_ bottles trooped out
into the troubled night and were lost in its depths.
Dolly Eavenden stood and looked down, musing upon the strong-limbed
figure, and at the hand whose fingers, alone of all the frame, were
unrelaxed.
“I wonder if I’ve made a mistake,” she said with misgivings which were
strange to her positive and rather self-willed character. “Pshaw! No;
it is all right.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DEATH IN THE BUOY
HALF an hour’s sleep is short rations for a man who has experienced
little untroubled unconsciousness for five weeks. Colton struggled
angrily against the flask.
“I don’t want it, I tell you! Go to the devil and take it with you.” He
struck out blindly, angrily. A cool, firm hand, closed around his
wrist.
“You must get up,” said Helga Johnston’s voice firmly. “Swallow some of
this brandy.”
“I’m sorry,” said Colton penitently. “Did I curse you out? Please let
me sleep.”
The girl was quick-witted. “We want your help,” she said.
Colton sat up. She had struck the right note. Docilely he took the
brandy, and got to his feet.
Haynes came up and steadied him. “Miss Johnston and I have our lives to
thank you for,” he said briefly. “You’d better get home. Some of the
life-savers will help you.”
“No, I’m all right,” declared Colton. “Where’s the man Miss Johnston
saved? Let’s have a peep at him. I’m a physician.”
“Are you?” said Haynes eagerly. “Then I want you to look at one of the
men on the cliff, as soon as you’ve finished with Helga’s waif.”
Colton looked around him, memory now aroused. “Professor Ravenden!” he
said. “I want to thank him for getting me out.”
“He and Miss Ravenden have gone to the station,” said Helga, “to help
care for the rescued men. The captain and the mate have been washed in,
dead.”
“Oh,” said Colton blankly. His mind was still blurred. He looked at his
tight-clutched left hand and wondered if there was something inside.
Cautiously he opened it, looked, started, choked down an exclamation,
and thrust the hand into the pocket of his dripping trousers. Then he
walked over to the man whom Miss Johnston had saved.
Someone had stripped the life-preserver from the castaway’s body, and
as he lay sprawled upon the ground Colton noted the breadth and depth
of the chest, remarkable in so small a man. He was swart, so swart as
obviously to be of Southern European extraction. In spite of the sea’s
terrific battering, he apparently had escaped any serious injury, and
already had regained consciousness; but, to Colton’s surprise, kept his
head buried in his arms. From time to time a convulsive shudder ran
through him.
“Seems to be kind of crazy-like,” volunteered old Johnston, who stood
beside him. “Begged me, with his hands clasped, to help him out of the
light of the fire, first thing.”
“How do you feel, my friend?” asked the young doctor, bending over the
survivor.
The man lifted a dark and haggard face. “To a house! Take me to a
house! I weesh to go inside!” His voice was a mere wheeze of terror.
“We’ll get you to a house presently,” Colton assured him, presenting
the brandy flask to his lips, “Can you make out to climb that cliff?”
“Up there? So plain to be see? No, no!” cried the man vehemently,
roving the dark heavens with his eyes.
Colton looked at him in perplexity. The man got painfully to his feet,
and cupped a hand to his windward ear.
“I t’ink I hear eet again,” he whispered, and shook like a rag in the
wind.
“What are you talking about?” asked Colton.
“Somesing up zere,” said the stranger, thrusting both hands in an
uncouth and fearful gesture upward and outward.
“Oh, you’re not quite yourself yet,” said Colton.
“I tell you I hear eet!” broke out the man with extraordinary
vehemence. “I feel eet! What? I do not know. But when eet come back”—he
made a motion as of a winged creature swooping—“I fear an’ I jump into
ze waves.” A harsh tremour went through his frame and left him panting.
“You jumped?” said Johnston. “When she broke up?”
“No. Before. Before she break.”
“He’s crazy,” said the old life-saver. “What’d you jump for?”
“Eet come after me,” shuddered the man. Again he made that
extraordinary gesture. “Take me to a house—out of ze night.”
“Someone must go with him to the station,” said Colton.
“Let me,” Helga Johnston volunteered.
The stranger faced the girl, and advanced a swift step. It was a
meeting of satyr and goddess. Suddenly the satyr cast himself at the
goddess’ feet and kissed them. Startled, she drew back.
“Eet is you that safe me!” he cried, lifting wild and adoring eyes to
her. “I see you just before all go black. You walk out on ze wave to
reach me.”
“Come along, you!” cried old Johnston, lifting him to his feet. “No
such heathen goin’s-on for my Helga. Not that I think you know what
you’re doin’,” he added.
“You mustn’t go with him alone, Princess,” said Haynes quickly. “He
seems to be insane.”
“Father will go with me,” she replied; “though I’m safe enough. It
isn’t there the danger lies.”
“Helga,” said Haynes seriously, “I wish you wouldn’t let yourself be so
influenced by your dreams.”
“I’ll try not to, Petit Père,” said the girl gently. “But, look how it
has all come about. Yet I can’t see how a strange creature like that
could possibly influence all our lives.”
“You don’t half believe it yourself,” said Haynes positively.
“Sometimes I don’t,” she agreed. “But we who are born of the sea, dream
the sea’s dreams, you know, Petit Père.”
“Well, get into dry clothes as soon as you get to the station,
Princess. Oh, and get me that fellow’s name and address, will you?”
“Yes,” said the girl, as, with her father, she led her strange charge
away toward the Sand Spit station.
“Now,” said Haynes to Colton, “will you come up on the cliff and look
at my man?”
Together they clambered to the top. In the light of the dying fire they
saw the man stretched out near the brink of the cliff.
Another of the wrecked sailors and two life-savers stood over him. One
of the life-savers Colton recognised as the guard who had come over to
speak to Helga Johnston, a hulking, handsome fellow named Serdholm,
from the Sand Spit station. The other was a quiet-looking young fellow
of the Blue Hill corps, Bruce by name. As Haynes and Colton approached,
Bruce drew away a coat which was spread over the prostrate figure, and
lifted his lantern.
“He is dead,” said Colton at once.
“Yes,” replied Haynes; “but see how he came by his death.”
Rolling the body over, he exposed a deep, broad, clean-driven wound
through the back. “What do you make of that?” he asked.
Colton examined it carefully. “I don’t make anything of it,” he said
frankly, “except that the poor fellow never knew what struck him.”
“What did strike him?”
“A very large blade, sent home with tremendous force, apparently.”
“By some other person?”
“Certainly not by himself; and it doesn’t seem like accident. Was he
washed ashore this way?”
“Supposing I told you that the man left the ship, alive and sound in
the breeches-buoy, and got here in this condition.”
“Does the buoy carry more than one at a time?”
“No.”
“Then it isn’t possible.”
“Well, there’s plenty of evidence as to his arrival. Now let’s see
about his departure. Were you aboard when this man left the schooner?”
Haynes asked, turning to one of the two sailors at hand.
“Yes, sir. Me an’ Darky John came after him. We helped fasten him in.”
“Who else was there?”
“The Old Man, an’ Buckley the mate, an’ that queer Dago feller.”
“There wasn’t any fight or trouble about who should come first?”
“No, sir. The Old Man gave his orders. Petersen, here, he leaves fifth,
I think. ‘Good-bye, boys. See you later,’ he says, an’ off he goes.
Next I see of him, he lies here dead. What killed him or how, I don’t
know, no more than a blind fish.”
“Straight enough story,” commented Haynes, “particularly as Hawkins,
the coloured man, gives the same version. We’ll try the foreigner
later. I want to get to the bottom of this. If murder has been done in
mid-air, between the reef where the schooner lay and this cliff, it’s
about the strangest case in my experience.”
“How are you so sure it’s murder?” demanded Serdholm the life-guard.
“Anyone can make out murder if they’re looking for sensation hard
enough.” There was an undisguised hostility in his tone as he addressed
Haynes which surprised Colton.
“Why do you think it wasn’t?” asked Colton quickly.
“Did I say I thought it wasn’t?” retorted the guard. “Maybe it was; but
I’ve seen a sharpened stake shoved clean through a man in a surf.”
“You needn’t be so fresh about it, Serdholm,” put in the other guard.
“It’s true, though, what he says, Mr. Haynes,” he added. “And there was
plenty of driftwood afloat.”
Colton bent over the dead man again. “It’s almost too clean an incision
for anything except steel,” he said. “Besides, wood leaves splinters.”
“You saw the man come in?” Haynes asked Bruce.
“Helped to lift him out. Look!” He held out his hands, showing great
stains of blood.
“You didn’t see anything that would give a clue?”
“No, I didn’t see anything,” returned Bruce after a moment’s
consideration; “but some of the men thought they heard a scream, when
he was about halfway in. It was just after a lightning flash. They
thought a bolt might have gone through him.”
“Lightning doesn’t wound that way,” said Colton.
“No, I didn’t think so. But I thought I’d better tell you. Only in the
noises of a gale you can hear all sorts of voices.”
“They didn’t say anything about a kind of rasping, creaking sound?”
asked Haynes after a moment’s hesitation.
“No, sir,” said the man, surprised. “Nothing like that.”
Haynes turned away impatiently. “Come down to the Blue Hill station,”
he said to Colton. “We’ll see if Miss Johnston’s patient can throw any
light on this.”
During the walk Haynes was so deeply in thought and replied to Colton’s
questions so curtly that the latter fell into silence. At the door of
the station they were met by Helga.
“How’s your salvage, Princess?” queried Haynes. “Able to stand a
cross-examination?”
“More than able—willing,” replied the girl with a smile. “He’s been
telling us all about himself. Nothing queerer than he ever came ashore
on Montauk. I’m afraid the sea-water has got into his brain a little.”
“Tell us what he said.”
“In the first place, he is some sort of a travelling juggler and
magician. As soon as he is recovered he will give us a private
exhibition in honour of his rescue. He calls himself ‘The Wonderful
Whalley,’ though his real name is something like Cardonaro. An injury
to his hand stranded him in Maine, and he took passage on the _Milly
Esham_ because it was a cheap way to New York. Age, forty-two;
nationality, Portuguese; occupation, the theatrical profession.
Anything else, Petit Père?”
“Good work! Did he say anything of a man’s being killed on board!”
The girl’s face became grave at once. “No,” she said. “How was he
killed? Who was it?”
“A sailor named Petersen. He was stabbed, and came ashore dead.”
“The man has two enormous knives in sheaths fastened to his belt,” she
said, turning white. “He uses them in his performances.”
Haynes and Colton looked at each other.
“If he did it, he wasn’t responsible,” Helga went on impetuously. “He’s
such a pitiful creature—just like a dog, with his great eyes. I feel as
if we had saved a baby. And he is terrified like a baby.”
“At some phantom of the darkness?”
The girl nodded. “Something that he hasn’t even seen. He thinks it came
down from the upper air after him as the ship was going to pieces.
While the others were being taken off in the breeches-buoy he was
crawling down the main ratlines to escape from this thing. Finally his
fears drove him overboard.”
“Just as well for him,” said Colton. “If he had stayed he would have
been killed in the wreckage with the mate and captain.”
“Dr. Colton thinks the man is insane,” said Haynes. “What is your view,
Princess?”
“I think so too. But I think some strange thing has terrified him.
Perhaps one of the sails tore loose and blew on him. Or it may have
been the lightning.”
“That might be it, and in his panic he may have struck out and killed
Petersen by accident. But in that case, why should the other sailors,
who must have seen it, shield him? I guess the best thing is to put it
to him straight, concluded Haynes.
Followed by Colton, he went into the room where the suspect lay.
“See here!” began Haynes abruptly. “We want to know why you killed
Petersen the sailor.”
The stranger’s dark eyes widened. He stared at his questioner with
dropped jaw.
“Yes; why you killed him—with this.” Haynes touched the hilt of one of
the knives that protruded from the man’s belt.
“No, no!” protested the man. “I not got nothing against Petersen. I not
know Petersen.”
“You were on board when he left?”
“Yes; I see zem go—one—two—three—so many—seven. Not me; I haf to stay.
No one care to safe ze wonderful Whalley.”
“Did you see anyone fight with Petersen or strike him?” asked Colton.
“No; see nothing.”
After fifteen minutes of fruitless cross-questioning the investigators
called in the negro, Hawkins.
“Him kill Petersen?” repeated Hawkins. “No—sir—ee, boss! He wasn’t
nowheyah nigh when Petersen went off, safe an’ wavin’ his hand
goodbye.”
“Someone killed him,” said Haynes. “This man, yourself, Corliss and the
captain and mate were the only ones aboard.”
“That’s right, boss. Corliss and the Old Man and I stood right by and
saw him off. No, sir, if he wa’n’t killed by the lightnin’ or on the
cliff, somethin’ got him on the way in.”
“You think he may have met his death after he landed, then?”
“No, sir; that cain’t hardly be,” replied the negro after a moment’s
consideration. “Some of our crew was in a’ready. The life-savers was
there. Couldn’t anyone a-give it to him without the othahs seein’ it.”
“So, you see, he must have been dead when he left the ship. Now,
Hawkins, you’ll save yourself trouble by telling me what you know of
this.”
“’Fo’ Heaven, boss, I do’ know a livin’ thing!” And nothing more could
Haynes get from the negro. After dismissing him, Haynes said to Colton:
“You go around, and under pretence of looking after their injuries,
question all the sailors as to whether there was bad blood between the
dead man and any of his shipmates. I’ve got some work to do.”
At another time the young doctor might have resented the assumption of
authority, but now he was too deeply interested in the case. Half an
hour later he returned empty of results.
“Not a bit of trouble that I can get wind of. What’s that you’re
writing, a report for the coroner?”
“No; this will never get to the coroner. I’m certain it’s a murder; but
I’m equally certain that there’s no case against any individual. I’m
writing up the wreck for my paper.”
“Are you down here working?” asked Colton.
“No, I’m on vacation; but a reporter is always on duty for an emergency
like this.”
“You’re Harris Haynes of _The New Era_, aren’t you?” asked Colton.
“You’re the man that proved the celebrated Bellows suicide and saved
Dr. Senderton.”
“He saved himself by telling a straight story, even though it seemed
damaging, where most men would have tried to lie,” said Haynes. “Anyone
except a Central Office detective would have had the sense to know that
the letter was written to bear out a grudge. They never should have
arrested him.”
“I was one of the men called in on the case. You’ve shaved your beard,
or I should have remembered you.”
“Well, we shan’t have any such satisfactory result in this case,” said
the reporter. “Hello! What’s Bruce doing down here?”
The life-guard from the Bow Hill station came hurrying to him. “They’ve
just got in the life-line, Mr. Haynes,” he said, “and I examined it as
you told me. It’s blood-soaked in the middle, and there are
blood-stains all along the shoreward half. There’s nothing on the end
toward the ship.”
“Great Scott!” cried Colton, as the meaning of this poured light into
his mind. “Then the poor fellow was killed between the ship and the
shore!”
“It looks that way,” said Haynes, scowling thoughtfully. “No, by Jove,
it can’t be! I’ve missed a trick somewhere. There’s some other
explanation.”
“Mightn’t the blood-stains have got washed out?” suggested the guard.
“Why should half of the rope be clean and not the other half, then?”
countered Haynes. “You didn’t make a mistake as to which was the shore
end of the buoy rope?” he cried in sudden hopefulness.
“Bit o’ spar came in with the clean end,” returned Bruce briefly, and
that hope was gone.