The Transatlantique line steamer _Toulouse_ lay off the breakwater of
Vera Cruz, smoking fiercely, anchor up, passengers all aboard, ready to
sail for Havre. Her departure had been delayed nearly eighteen hours by
a fierce “norther,” which had not yet exhausted its fury. They had been
anxious hours for Brainard, who had gone aboard the night before, in the
expectation of sailing immediately. Now the black smoke pouring from the
funnel indicated that the captain had decided to proceed, and Brainard’s
spirits rose.
Nothing had been seen or heard of the stenographer and her companion.
Either they had lost the trail, or his friends at Jalapa had succeeded in
holding them there for almost two days, and had kept them away from the
telegraph, too.
Brainard was about to leave the deck, where he had been anxiously
watching the land, when his attention was caught by a small launch that
was rounding the end of the pier and heading for the steamer. His hands
tightened on the rail; he suspected what that launch might contain. He
noted that the steamer was moving slowly. Would the captain wait?
The _Toulouse_ had swung around; her nose pointed out into the Gulf of
Mexico, and her screw revolved at quarter speed. The launch approached
rapidly, and signaled the steamer to wait. Brainard could see the smart
French captain, on the bridge above, examining the small boat through
glasses. He himself could detect two figures in the bow, waving a flag,
and he smiled grimly at the comedy about to take place at his expense.
The screw ceased to revolve. As the launch came within hailing distance,
there was an animated colloquy in French between the officers on the
bridge of the _Toulouse_ and the man in charge of the launch.
“Some late passengers,” remarked the third officer, who was standing
beside Brainard. “A woman, too!”
Apparently neither the stenographer—for now he could recognize the young
woman—nor her companion, a stout, middle-aged, red-cheeked American,
understood the French language. They kept gesticulating and pointing to
Brainard, whom they had discovered on the deck. The captain of the
launch translated their remarks, and threw in some explanations of his
own. The officers from the bridge of the _Toulouse_ fired back vigorous
volleys of questions. It was an uproar!
Brainard, in spite of his predicament, burst into laughter over the
frantic endeavors of the two Americans to make themselves understood.
The captain tried his English, but with poor results. Finally, with a
gesture of disgust, he yanked the bell rope. Brainard could hear the
gong sound in the engine room beneath for full speed. The _Toulouse_
would not wait.
The steamer began to gather speed, the launch to fall behind, while the
woman at the bow shrieked and pointed to Brainard. The captain of the
_Toulouse_ merely shrugged his shoulders and walked to the other side of
his vessel.
“Some friends of yours?” the third officer said to Brainard, with a grin,
as the little launch fell into their wake and finally turned back toward
the inner harbor. “The lady seemed anxious to join you—might be a wife,
_non_?”
Apparently he knew enough English to enable him to conjecture what the
two Americans wanted. If, thought Brainard, the captain had known as
much English as his third officer, it might not have gone so happily for
him!
“The lady isn’t exactly my wife,” Brainard replied, with a laugh; “not
yet!”
“Ah!” the Frenchman said, with a meaning smile. “What you in the States
call a breach of the promise?”
“Exactly!” Brainard replied hastily, glad to accept such a credible
fiction.
“She seems sorry to let you make the journey alone, eh?”
“Rather!”
The story circulated on the ship that evening, and gave Brainard a
jocular notoriety in the smoking room among the German and French
business men, who composed most of the _Toulouse’s_ first-cabin list. It
was forgotten, however, before he emerged from his cabin, to which the
remains of the “norther” had quickly driven him. By this time—it was the
fourth day out—the _Toulouse_ was in the grasp of the Gulf Stream, lazily
plowing her twelve knots an hour into the North Atlantic, and the
passengers were betting their francs on the probable day of arrival at
Havre.
That evening, at dinner, Brainard ordered a bottle of champagne, and
murmured, as he raised the glass to his lips:
“Here’s to Melody—whoever and whatever and wherever she may be!”
His youthful fancy, warmed by the wine, played again with the idea of an
unknown mistress for whom he was bound across the seas with her fortune
in his grip. With the insistence of youth, he had made up his mind that
Melody must be a woman—what else could she be? He always saw her as a
young woman, charming, beautiful, of course, and free!
And yet she might well be some aged relative of Krutzmacht, or a fair
friend of his youth, to whom, in the moment of decision allowed him, he
had desired to leave his fortune; or some unrecognized wife, to whom, at
the threshold of death, he thought to do tardy justice.
“An old hag, perhaps!” the young man murmured with a grimace. “We’ll
see—over there!”
But his buoyant fancy refused to vision this elusive Melody as other than
young and beautiful. And he gave her the attractive shape and
personality of Señorita Marie. He began to think of her as living in
some obscure corner of the great world, waiting to be dowered with the
fortune that he had bravely rescued for her.
When Brainard felt that his stomach and his sea legs were both
impeccable, he descended to his cabin, bolted the door, pulled the shade
carefully over the porthole, pinned newspapers above the wooden
partitions, and proceeded to make a leisurely examination of the valise.
It was the first safe moment that he had had to go through the contents
of the bag thoroughly; and when the key sank into the lock, his curiosity
was whetted to a fine edge.
He had already made a careful count of the notes and gold left after his
devious journey to Vera Cruz. The sum was eight thousand dollars and
some hundreds. This he had entered on a blank leaf in a little diary,
under the heading “Melody, Cr.” On the opposite page he had put down all
the sums that he remembered to have spent since leaving New York, even to
his cigarettes and the bottle of champagne which he had drunk in honor of
his unknown mistress.
“Here goes!” he said at last. “Let’s see what Melody’s pile is, anyway.”
It took the best part of the night to examine thoroughly what the bag
held. Even after he had gone over every piece, Brainard, untrained in
business matters, could but guess at the full importance of his haul.
There were contracts and deeds and leases relating to a network of
corporations, of which the most important, apparently, was the Pacific
Northern Railway.
Despairing of understanding the full value of these documents without
some clew, Brainard contented himself with making a careful inventory of
them. The meat of the lot, he judged, lay in certain bundles of neatly
engraved five-per-cent bonds of the Pacific Northern, together with a
number of certificates of stock in the Shasta Company. In all, as he
calculated, there were eight millions of bonds and fifteen millions, par
value, of stock.
“Melody doesn’t look to me to be a poor lady,” Brainard muttered,
bundling up the bonds and stock, and packing them carefully away at the
bottom of the valise. “They are welcome to the rest, if they’ll let me
off with these pretty things!”
What was more, he had come across the name of Schneider Brothers,
bankers, Berlin, on the letterhead of several communications, indicating
that they had been the dead man’s foreign fiscal agents. That would be
of use to him, he noted, as he wrote the name in his little diary. Then
he went on deck, lighted a long Mexican cigar, and began to think. The
value of his haul made him very serious. Latterly his adventure had more
or less the irresponsibility of a boy’s lark about it, but now it assumed
larger importance. What he had done was a serious matter in the eyes of
the law, and he must justify his proceedings, not only to himself, but to
others. . . .
The days of the lazy, sunny voyage slipped away. As the vessel drew
nearer Europe, Brainard speculated more and more anxiously on what might
be waiting for him on the dock at Havre. Now that he knew how valuable
his loot was, he felt certain that old Krutzmacht’s San Francisco
enemies, who had tracked him to the dock at Vera Cruz, would hardly be
idle during the sixteen days that the _Toulouse_ had taken to cross the
seas. There had been ample time for them to hear from the stenographer
and their other agents in Mexico, to communicate with the French
authorities, to have detectives cross from New York by one of the express
boats and meet him at Havre. There would be a fine reception committee
prepared for him on the dock!
Cudgel his brains as he might, hour after hour, he could see no way out
of the predicament that was daily drawing nearer. After the incident at
Vera Cruz, he could not approach any of the officers of the vessel and
seek to enlist their help. He thought of bribing the sociable third
officer to secrete the contents of his valise, but he mistrusted his
volatile temperament. There was a Frenchwoman who sat next him at the
table, a dark-haired little person, clever and businesslike, who had been
very agreeable to Brainard, and had undertaken to teach him French. He
could tell his story to Mme Vernon, and ask her to assume charge of the
troublesome valise. But an instinctive caution restrained him from
taking any one into his confidence. He preferred to run his chance of
arrest, and to fight against extradition. Whenever he resigned himself
to this prospect, his sporting blood rebelled, and there rose, also, a
new sentiment of loyalty to the interests of his unknown mistress,
Melody. He had come too far in his venture to be beaten now!
“Whether the old man was straight or not, whether he really owned the
bunch of bonds and stock or not, it would be a pity not to get something
out of it for Melody. She’s not in the scrap,” he said to himself. “No,
I don’t chuck the game yet!”
His anxieties were quieted by another fit of seasickness on the day
before they were due to arrive at Havre. As she approached the coast of
Brittany, the _Toulouse_ lost the balmy weather which had prevailed since
they entered the Gulf Stream, and ran straight into a gale that was
sweeping over the boisterous Bay of Biscay. Brainard went to bed, to
spend altogether the most wretched twenty-four hours he had ever
experienced.
In his more conscious moments he gathered that the old _Toulouse_ was
having as hard a time with the weather as he was. Her feeble engines at
last lay down on the job, and the captain was forced to turn about and
run before the storm. It mattered little to Brainard, just then, whether
the ship was blown to the Azores, or went to the bottom, or carried him
into Havre, there to be arrested and finally deported to the United
States for grand larceny. He turned in his berth, thought of the
_Bourgogne_, and closed his weary eyes.
Toward evening the gale blew itself out, and the battered old _Toulouse_
was headed north once more across the Bay of Biscay. Sometime in the
night the engines ceased to thump, and Brainard awoke with a start. When
he had hurried into his clothes, and groped his way to the deck, he was
astonished to see ahead, through the gray fog of early morning, faint
lights and, farther away, the stronger illumination that came from some
city.
“Is it Havre?” he demanded of the third officer, whom he met.
“No, monsieur—St. Nazaire!” the Frenchman answered. “Monsieur will be
disappointed?”
“I don’t think so!” exclaimed Brainard.
It was, indeed, the port of Nantes. The captain had not chosen to risk
the voyage around the stormy coast of Brittany with his depleted coal
supply, and had taken the old _Toulouse_ to the nearest port.
“Here’s where Melody scores!” Brainard muttered, when he realized the
significance of the news. “Now for a quick exit to Paris, before the
telegraph gets in its deadly work and notifies the civilized world where
we are!”