THE TRIPLE MIRROR
It was the regular Saturday night dance at the club, a brilliant
spectacle, faces that radiated pleasure, gowns that for startling
combinations of color would have shamed a Futurist, music that set the
feet tapping irresistibly—a scene which I shall pass over because it
really has no part in the story.
The fascination of the ballroom was utterly lost on Craig. “Think of
all the houses only half guarded about here to-night,” he mused, as we
joined Armand and McNeill on the end of the dock. I could not help
noting that that was the only idea which the gay, variegated, sparkling
tango throng conveyed to him.
In front of the club was strung out a long line of cars, and at the
dock several speed boats of national and international reputation,
among them the famous _Streamline II_, at our instant beck and call. In
it Craig had already placed some rather bulky pieces of apparatus, as
well as a brass case containing a second triple mirror like that which
he had left with Armand.
With McNeill, I walked back along the pier, leaving Kennedy with
Armand, until we came to the wide porch, where we joined the
wallflowers and the rocking-chair fleet. Mrs. Verplanck, I observed,
was a beautiful dancer. I picked her out in the throng immediately,
dancing with Carter.
McNeill tugged at my sleeve. Without a word I saw what he meant me to
see. Verplanck and Mrs. Hollingsworth were dancing together. Just then,
across the porch I caught sight of Kennedy at one of the wide windows.
He was trying to attract Verplanck’s attention, and as he did so I
worked my way through the throng of chatting couples leaving the floor
until I reached him. Verplanck, oblivious, finished the dance; then,
seeming to recollect that he had something to attend to, caught sight
of us, and ran off during the intermission from the gay crowd to which
he resigned Mrs. Hollingsworth.
“What is it?” he asked.
“There’s that light down the bay,” whispered Kennedy.
Instantly Verplanck forgot about the dance.
“Where?” he asked.
“In the same place.”
I had not noticed, but Mrs. Verplanck, woman-like, had been able to
watch several things at once. She had seen us and had joined us.
“Would you like to run down there in the _Streamline?_” he asked. “It
will only take a few minutes.”
“Very much.”
“What is it—that light again?” she asked, as she joined us in walking
down the dock.
“Yes,” answered her husband, pausing to look for a moment at the stuff
Kennedy had left with Armand. Mrs. Verplanck leaned over the
_Streamline_, turned as she saw me, and said: “I wish I could go with
you. But evening dress is not the thing for a shivery night in a speed
boat. I think I know as much about it as Mr. Verplanck. Are you going
to leave Armand?”
“Yes,” replied Kennedy, taking his place beside Verplanck, who was
seated at the steering wheel. “Walter and McNeill, if you two will sit
back there, we’re ready. All right.”
Armand had cast us off and Mrs. Verplanck waved from the end of the
float as the _Streamline_ quickly shot out into the night, a buzzing,
throbbing shape of mahogany and brass, with her exhausts sticking out
like funnels and booming like a pipe organ. It took her only seconds to
eat into the miles.
“A little more to port,” said Kennedy, as Verplanck swung her around.
Just then the steady droning of the engine seemed a bit less
rhythmical. Verplanck throttled her down, but it had no effect. He shut
her off. Something was wrong. As he crawled out into the space forward
of us where the engine was, it seemed as if the _Streamline_ had broken
down suddenly and completely.
Here we were floundering around in the middle of the bay.
“Chuck-chuck-chuck,” came in quick staccato out of the night. It was
Montgomery Carter, alone, on his way across the bay from the club, in
his own boat.
“Hello—Carter,” called Verplanck.
“Hello, Verplanck. What’s the matter?”
“Don’t know. Engine trouble of some kind. Can you give us a line?”
“I’ve got to go down to the house,” he said, ranging up near us. “Then
I can take you back. Perhaps I’d better get you out of the way of any
other boats first. You don’t mind going over and then back?”
Verplanck looked at Craig. “On the contrary,” muttered Craig, as he
made fast the welcome line.
The Carter dock was some three miles from the club on the other side of
the bay. As we came up to it, Carter shut off his engine, bent over it
a moment, made fast, and left us with a hurried, “Wait here.”
Suddenly, overhead, we heard a peculiar whirring noise that seemed to
vibrate through the air. Something huge, black, monster-like, slid down
a board runway into the water, traveled a few feet, in white suds and
spray, rose in the darkness—and was gone!
As the thing disappeared, I thought I could hear a mocking laugh flung
back at us.
“What is it?” I asked, straining my eyes at what had seemed for an
instant like a great flying fish with finny tail and huge fins at the
sides and above.
“‘Aquaero,’” quoted Kennedy quickly. “Don’t you understand—a
hydroaeroplane—a flying boat. There are hundreds of privately owned
flying boats now wherever there is navigable water. That was the secret
of Carter’s boathouse, of the light we saw in the air.”
“But this Aquaero—who is he?” persisted McNeill.
“Carter—Wickham—Australia Mac?”
We looked at each other blankly. No one said a word. We were captured,
just as effectively as if we were ironed in a dungeon. There were the
black water, the distant lights, which at any other time I should have
said would have been beautiful.
Kennedy had sprung into Carter’s boat.
“The deuce,” he exclaimed. “He’s put her out of business.”
Verplanck, chagrined, had been going over his own engine feverishly.
“Do you see that?” he asked suddenly, holding up in the light of a
lantern a little nut which he had picked out of the complicated
machinery. “It never belonged to this engine. Some one placed it there,
knowing it would work its way into a vital part with the vibration.”
Who was the person, the only one who could have done it? The answer was
on my lips, but I repressed it. Mrs. Verplanck herself had been bending
over the engine when last I saw her. All at once it flashed over me
that she knew more about the phantom bandit than she had admitted. Yet
what possible object could she have had in putting the _Streamline_ out
of commission?
My mind was working rapidly, piecing together the fragmentary facts.
The remark of Kennedy, long before, instantly assumed new significance.
What were the possibilities of blackmail in the right sort of evidence?
The yeggman had been after what was more valuable than jewels—letters!
Whose? Suddenly I saw the situation. Carter had not been robbed at all.
He was in league with the robber. That much was a blind to divert
suspicion. He was a lawyer—some one’s lawyer. I recalled the message
about letters and evidence, and as I did so there came to mind a
picture of Carter and the woman he had been dancing with. In return for
his inside information about the jewels of the wealthy homes of
Bluffwood, the yeggman was to get something of interest and importance
to his client.
The situation called for instant action. Yet what could we do, marooned
on the other side of the bay?
From the Club dock a long finger of light swept out into the night,
plainly enough near the dock, but diffused and disclosing nothing in
the distance. Armand had trained it down the bay in the direction we
had taken, but by the time the beam reached us it was so weak that it
was lost.
Craig had leaped up on the Carter dock and was capping and uncapping
with the brass cover the package which contained the triple mirror.
Still in the distance I could see the wide path of light, aimed toward
us, but of no avail.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Using the triple mirror to signal to Armand. It is something better
than wireless. Wireless requires heavy and complicated apparatus. This
is portable, heatless, almost weightless, a source of light depending
for its power on another source of light at a great distance.”
I wondered how Armand could ever detect its feeble ray.
“Even in the case of a rolling ship,” Kennedy continued, alternately
covering and uncovering the mirror, “the beam of light which this
mirror reflects always goes back, unerring, to its source. It would do
so from an aeroplane, so high in the air that it could not be located.
The returning beam is invisible to anyone not immediately in the path
of the ray, and the ray always goes to the observer. It is simply a
matter of pure mathematics practically applied. The angle of incidence
equals the angle of reflection. There is not a variation of a foot in
two miles.”
“What message are you sending him?” asked Verplanck.
“To tell Mrs. Hollingsworth to hurry home immediately,” Kennedy
replied, still flashing the letters according to his code.
“Mrs. Hollingsworth?” repeated Verplanck, looking up.
“Yes. This hydroaeroplane yeggman is after something besides jewels
to-night. Were those letters that were stolen from you the only ones
you had in the safe?”
Verplanck looked up quickly. “Yes, yes. Of course.”
“You had none from a woman—”
“No,” he almost shouted. Of a sudden it seemed to dawn on him what
Kennedy was driving at—the robbery of his own house with no loss except
of a packet of letters on business, followed by the attempt on Mrs.
Hollingsworth. “Do you think I’d keep dynamite, even in the safe?”
To hide his confusion he had turned and was bending again over the
engine.
“How is it?” asked Kennedy, his signaling over.
“Able to run on four cylinders and one propeller,” replied Verplanck.
“Then let’s try her. Watch the engine. I’ll take the wheel.”
Limping along, the engine skipping and missing, the once peerless
_Streamline_ started back across the bay. Instead of heading toward the
club, Kennedy pointed her bow somewhere between that and Verplanck’s.
“I wish Armand would get busy,” he remarked, after glancing now and
then in the direction of the club. “What can be the matter?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
There came the boom as if of a gun far away in the direction in which
he was looking, then another.
“Oh, there it is. Good fellow. I suppose he had to deliver my message
to Mrs. Hollingsworth himself first.”
From every quarter showed huge balls of fire, rising from the sea, as
it were, with a brilliantly luminous flame.
“What is it?” I asked, somewhat startled.
“A German invention for use at night against torpedo and aeroplane
attacks. From that mortar Armand has shot half a dozen bombs of
phosphide of calcium which are hurled far into the darkness. They are
so constructed that they float after a short plunge and are ignited on
contact by the action of the salt water itself.”
It was a beautiful pyrotechnic display, lighting up the shore and hills
of the bay as if by an unearthly flare.
“There’s that thing now!” exclaimed Kennedy.
In the glow we could see a peculiar, birdlike figure flying through the
air over toward the Hollingsworth house. It was the hydroaeroplane.
Out from the little stretch of lawn under the accentuated shadow of the
trees, she streaked into the air, swaying from side to side as the
pilot operated the stabilizers on the ends of the planes to counteract
the puffs of wind off the land.
How could she ever be stopped?
The _Streamline_, halting and limping, though she was, had almost
crossed the bay before the light bombs had been fired by Armand. Every
moment brought the flying boat nearer.
She swerved. Evidently the pilot had seen us at last and realized who
we were. I was so engrossed watching the thing that I had not noticed
that Kennedy had given the wheel to Verplanck and was standing in the
bow, endeavoring to sight what looked like a huge gun.
In rapid succession half a dozen shots rang out. I fancied I could
almost hear the ripping and tearing of the tough rubber-coated silken
wings of the hydroaeroplane as the wind widened the perforation the gun
had made.
She had not been flying high, but now she swooped down almost like a
gull, seeking to rest on the water. We were headed toward her now, and
as the flying boat sank I saw one of the passengers rise in his seat,
swing his arm, and far out something splashed in the bay.
On the water, with wings helpless, the flying boat was no match for the
_Streamline_ now. She struck at an acute angle, rebounded in the air
for a moment, and with a hiss skittered along over the waves, planing
with the help of her exhaust under the step of the boat.
There she was, a hull, narrow, scow-bowed, like a hydroplane, with a
long pointed stern and a cockpit for two men, near the bow. There were
two wide, winglike planes, on a light latticework of wood covered with
silk, trussed and wired like a kite frame, the upper plane about five
feet above the lower, which was level with the boat deck. We could see
the eight-cylindered engine which drove a two-bladed wooden propeller,
and over the stern were the air rudder and the horizontal planes. There
she was, the hobbled steed now of the phantom bandit who had
accomplished the seemingly impossible.
In spite of everything, however, the flying boat reached the shore a
trifle ahead of us. As she did so both figures in her jumped, and one
disappeared quickly up the bank, leaving the other alone.
“Verplanck, McNeill—get him,” cried Kennedy, as our own boat grated on
the beach. “Come, Walter, we’ll take the other one.”
The man had seen that there was no safety in flight. Down the shore he
stood, without a hat, his hair blown pompadour by the wind.
As we approached Carter turned superciliously, unbuttoning his bulky
khaki life preserver jacket.
“Well?” he asked coolly.
Not for a moment did Kennedy allow the assumed coolness to take him
back, knowing that Carter’s delay did not cover the retreat of the
other man.
“So,” Craig exclaimed, “you are the—the air pirate?”
Carter disdained to reply.
“It was you who suggested the millionaire households, full of jewels,
silver and gold, only half guarded; you, who knew the habits of the
people; you, who traded that information in return for another piece of
thievery by your partner, Australia Mac—Wickham he called himself here
in Bluffwood. It was you—-”
A car drove up hastily, and I noted that we were still on the
Hollingsworth estate. Mrs. Hollingsworth had seen us and had driven
over toward us.
“Montgomery!” she cried, startled.
“Yes,” said Kennedy quickly, “air pirate and lawyer for Mrs. Verplanck
in the suit which she contemplated bringing—”
Mrs. Hollingsworth grew pale under the ghastly, flickering light from
the bay.
“Oh!” she cried, realizing at what Kennedy hinted, “the letters!”
“At the bottom of the harbor, now,” said Kennedy. “Mr. Verplanck tells
me he has destroyed his. The past is blotted out as far as that is
concerned. The future is—for you three to determine. For the present
I’ve caught a yeggman and a blackmailer.”