Commandeering Alison's taxicab with the promise of an extra tip, Staff
jumped in and shut the door. As they swung into Fourth Avenue, he caught
a glimpse of Ismay's slight figure standing on the corner, his pose
expressive of indecision and uncertainty; and Staff smiled to himself,
surmising that it was there that the thief had left his motor-car to be
confiscated by Iff.
Three blocks north on Fourth Avenue, and they swung west into
Thirty-third Street: a short course quickly covered, but yet not swiftly
enough to outpace Staff's impatience. He had the door open, his foot on
the step, before the taxicab had begun to slow down preparatory to
stopping beside the car waiting in the shadow of the big hotel.
Iff was in the tonneau, gesticulating impatiently; the chauffeur had
already cranked up and was sliding into his seat. As the taxicab rolled
alongside, Staff jumped, thrust double the amount registered by the
meter into the driver's hand, and sprang into the body of Ismay's car.
Iff snapped the door shut; as though set in motion by that sharp sound,
the machine began to move smoothly and smartly, gathering momentum with
every revolution of its wheels. They were crossing Madison almost before
Staff had settled into his seat. A moment later they were snoring up
Fifth Avenue.
Staff looked at his watch. "Ten," he told Iff.
"We'll make time once we get clear of this island," said the little man
anxiously; "we've got to."
"Why?"
"To beat Ismay--"
Staff checked him with a hand on his arm and a warning glance at the
back of the chauffeur's head.
"Oh, that's all right _now_," Iff told him placidly. "I thought we
might 's well understand one another first as last; so, while we were
waiting for you, I slipped him fifty, gave him to understand that my
affectionate cousin had about come to the end of his rope and--won his
heart and confidence. It's a way I have with people; they do seem to
fall for me," he asserted with insufferable self-complacence.
He continued to impart his purchased information to Staff by snatches
all the way from Thirty-fourth Street to the Harlem River.
"He's a decent sort," he said, indicating the operator with a nod;
"apparently, that is; name, Spelvin. Employed by a garage upon the West
Side, in the Seventies. Says Ismay rang 'em up about half-past two last
night, chartered this car and driver, to be kept waiting for him
whenever he called for it.... Coarse work that, for Cousin
Arbuthnot--very, very crude....
"Still, he'd just got home and hadn't had time to make very polished
arrangements.... Seems he told this chap he was to see nothing but the
road, hear nothing but the motor, say nothing whatever to nobody. Gave
him a fifty, too. That habit seems to run in the family....
"He called for the car around five o'clock, with Nelly. Spelvin says she
seemed worn out, hardly conscious of what was going on. They lit out
for--where we're bound: place on the Connecticut shore called Pennymint
Point. On the way Ismay told him to stop at a roadhouse, got out and
brought Nelly a drink. Spelvin says he wouldn't be surprised if it was
doped; she slept all the rest of the way and hardly woke up even when
they helped her aboard the boat."
"Boat!"
"Motor-boat. I infer that Cousin Arbuthnot has established headquarters
on a little two-by-four island in the Sound--Wreck Island. Used to be
run as a one-horse summer resort--hotel and all that. Went under several
years ago, if mem'ry serveth me aright. Anyhow, they loaded Nelly aboard
this motor-boat and took her across....
"Spelvin was told to wait. He did. In about an hour--boat back; native
running it hands Spelvin a note, tells him to run up to Hartford and
post it and be back at seven P.M. Spelvin back at seven; Ismay comes
across by boat, is driven to town....
"That's all, to date. Spelvin had begun to suspect there was something
crooked going on, which made him easy meat for my insidious advances.
Says he was wondering if he hadn't better tell his troubles to a cop.
All of which goes to show that Cousin Artie's fast going to seed. Very
crude operating--man of his reputation, too. Makes me almost ashamed of
the relationship."
"How are we going to get to Wreck Island from Pennymint Point?"
"Same boat," said Iff confidently. "Spelvin heard Ismay tell his
engineer to wait for him--would be back between midnight and three."
"He can't beat us there, can he, by any chance?"
"He can if he humps himself. This is a pretty good car, and Spelvin says
there isn't going to be any car on the road tonight that'll pass us;
but I can't forget that dear old New York, New Haven & Hartford. They
run some fast trains by night, and while of course none of them stops at
Pennymint Centre--station for the Point--still, a man with plenty of
money to fling around can get a whole lot of courtesy out of a
railroad."
"Then the question is: can he catch a train which passes through
Pennymint Centre before we can reasonably expect to get there?"
"That's the intelligent query. I don't know. Do you?"
"No--"
"Spelvin doesn't, and we haven't got any time to waste trying to find
out. Probabilities are, there is. The only thing to do is to run for it
and trust to luck. Spelvin says it took him an hour and thirty-five
minutes to run in, this evening; and he's going to better that if
nothing happens. Did you remember to bring a gun?"
"Two." Staff produced the pistol he had taken from Ismay, with the extra
clips, and gave them to the little man with an account of how he had
become possessed of them--a narrative which Iff seemed to enjoy
immensely.
"Oh, we can't lose," he chuckled; "not when Cousin Artie plays his hand
as poorly as he has this deal. I've got a perfectly sound hunch that
we'll win."
Staff hardly shared his confidence; still, as far as he could judge, the
odds were even. Ismay might beat them to Pennymint Centre by train, and
might not. If he did, however, it could not be by more than a slight
margin; to balance which fact, Staff had to remind himself that two
minutes' margin was all that would be required to get the boat away from
land, beyond their reach.
"Look here," he put it to Iff: "suppose he does beat us to that boat?"
"Then we'll have to find another."
"There'll be another handy, all ready for us, I presume?"
"Spare me your sarcasm," pleaded Iff; "it is, if you don't mind my
mentioning the fact, not your forte. Silence, on the other hand, suits
your style cunningly. So shut up and lemme think."
He relapsed into profound meditations, while the car hummed onwards
through the moon-drenched spaces of the night.
Presently he roused and, without warning, clambered over the back of the
seat into the place beside the chauffeur. For a time the two conferred,
heads together, their words indistinguishable in the sweep of air.
Then, in the same spry fashion, the little man returned.
"Spelvin's a treasure," he announced, settling into his place.
"Why?"
"Knows the country--knows a man in Barmouth who runs a shipyard, owns
and hires out motorboats, and all that sort of thing."
"Where's Barmouth?"
"Four miles this side of Pennymint Point. Now we've got to decide
whether to hold on and run our chances of picking up Ismay's boat, or
turn off to Barmouth and run our chances of finding chauffeur's friend
with boat disengaged. What do you think?"
"Barmouth," Staff decided after some deliberation but not without
misgivings.
"That's what I told Spelvin," observed Iff. "It's a gamble either way."
The city was now well behind them, the car pounding steadily on through
Westchester. For a long time neither spoke. The time for talk, indeed,
was past--and in the future; for the present they must tune themselves
up to action--such action as the furious onrush of the powerful car in
some measure typified, easing the impatience in their hearts.
For a time the road held them near railroad tracks. A train hurtled
past them, running eastwards: a roaring streak of orange light crashing
through the world of cool night blues and purple-blacks.
The chauffeur swore audibly and let out another notch of speed.
Staff sat spellbound by the amazing romance of it all.... A bare eight
days since that afternoon when a whim, born of a love now lifeless, had
stirred him out of his solitary, work-a-day life in London, had lifted
him out of the ordered security of the centre of the world's
civilisation and sent him whirling dizzily across three thousand miles
and more to become a partner in this wild, weird ride to the rescue of a
damsel in distress and durance vile! Incredible!...
Eight days: and the sun of Alison, that once he had thought to be the
light of all the world, had set; while in the evening sky the star of
Eleanor was rising and blazing ever more brightly....
Now when a man begins to think about himself and his heart in such
poetic imagery, the need for human intercourse grows imperative on his
understanding; he must talk or--suffer severely.
Staff turned upon his defenseless companion.
"Iff," said he, "when a man's the sort of a man who can fall out of love
and in again--with another woman, of course--inside a week--what do you
call him?"
"Human," announced Iff after mature consideration of the problem.
This was unsatisfactory; Staff yearned to be called fickle.
"Human? How's that?" he insisted.
"I mean that the human man hasn't got much to say about falling in or
out of love. The women take care of all that for him. Look at your Miss
Landis--yours as was.... You don't mind my buttin' in?"
"Go on," said Staff grimly.
"Anybody with half an eye, always excepting you, could see she'd made up
her mind to hook that Arkroyd pinhead on account of his money. She was
just waiting for a fair chance to give you the office--preferably, of
course, after she'd nailed that play of yours."
"Well," said Staff, "she's lost that, too."
"Serves you both right."
There was a pause wherein Staff sought to fathom the meaning of this
last utterance of Mr. Iff's.
"I take it," resumed the latter with a sidelong look--"pardon a father's
feelings of delicacy--I take it, you're meaning Nelly?"
"How did you guess that?" demanded Staff, startled.
"Right, eh?"
"Yes--no--I don't know--"
"Well, if you don't know the answer any better 'n that, take a word of
advice from an old bird: you get her to tell you. She's known it ever
since she laid eyes on you."
"You mean she--I--" Staff stammered eagerly.
"I mean nobody knows anything about a woman's heart but herself; but she
knows it backwards and all the time."
"Then you don't think I've got any show?"
"Oh, Lord!" complained Iff. "Honest, you gimme a pain. Go on and do your
own thinking."
Staff subsided, imagining a vain thing: that the mantle of dignity in
which he wrapped himself successfully cloaked his sense of injury. Iff
smiled a meaningless smile up at the inscrutable skies. And the moonlit
miles slipped beneath the wheels like a torrent of moulten silver.
At length--it seemed as if many hours must have swung crashing into
eternity since they had left New York--Staff was conscious of a
perceptible diminution of speed; he was able to get his breath with less
effort, had no longer to snatch it by main strength from the greedy
clutches of the whirlwind. The reeling chiaroscuro of the countryside
seemed suddenly to become calm, settling into an intelligible, more or
less orderly arrangement of shining hills and shadowed hollows,
spreading pastures and sombre woodlands. The chauffeur flung a few
inarticulate words over his shoulder--readily interpreted as announcing
the nearness of their destination; and of a sudden the car swung from
the main highway into a narrow by-road that ran off to the right. A
little later they darted through a cut beneath railroad tracks, and a
village sprang out of the night and rattled past them, serenely
slumbrous. From this centre a thin trickle of dwellings straggled along
their way. Across fields to the left, Staff caught glimpses of a
spreading sheet of water, still and silvery-grey....
On a long slant, the road drew nearer and more near to the shores of
this arm of the Sound. Presently a group of small buildings near the
head of a long landing-stage swam into view. Before them the car drew up
with a sigh. The chauffeur jumped down and ran across the road to a
house in whose lower story a lighted window was visible. While he
hammered at the door, Staff and Iff alighted. A man in his shirt-sleeves
came to the door of the cottage and stood there, pipe in mouth, hands in
pockets, languidly interjecting dispassionate responses into the
chauffeur's animated exposition of their case. As Staff and Iff came up,
Spelvin turned to them, excitedly waving his gauntlets.
"He's got a boat, all right, and a good one he says, but he won't move a
foot for less 'n twenty dollars."
"Give you twenty-five if you get away from the dock within five
minutes," Iff told the boatbuilder directly.
The man started as if stung. "Jemima!" he breathed, incredulous. Then
caution prompted him to extend a calloused and work-warped hand. "Cross
my palm," he said.
"You give it to him, Staff," said Iff magnificently. "I'm short of
cash."
Obediently, Staff disbursed the required sum. The native thumbed it,
pocketed it, lifted his coat from a nail behind the door and started
across the road in a single movement.
"You come 'long, Spelvin," he said in passing, "'nd help with the boat.
If you gents'll get out on the dock I'll have her alongside in three
minutes, 'r my name ain't Bascom."
Pursued by the chauffeur, he disappeared into the huddle of boat-houses
and beached and careened boats. A moment later, Iff and Staff, picking
their way through the tangle, heard the scrape of a flat-bottomed boat
on the beach and, subsequently, splashing oars.
By the time they had reached the end of the dock, the boatbuilder and
his companion were scrambling aboard a twenty-five-foot boat at anchor
in the midst of a small fleet of sail and gasoline craft. The rumble of
a motor followed almost instantly, was silenced momentarily while the
skiff was being made fast to the mooring, broke out again as the larger
boat selected a serpentine path through the circumjacent vessels and
slipped up to the dock.
Before it had lost way, Iff and Staff were aboard. Instantly, Bascom
snapped the switch shut and the motor started again on the spark.
"Straight out," he instructed Spelvin at the wheel, "till you round that
white moorin'-dolphin. Then I'll take her." ...
Not long afterward he gave up pottering round the engine and went
forward, relieving Spelvin. "You go back and keep your eye on that
engyne," he ordered; "she's workin' like a sewin'-machine, but she wants
watchin'. I'll tell you when to give her the spark. Meanwhile you
might 's well dig them lights out of the port locker and set 'em out."
"No," Iff put in. "We want no lights."
"Gov'mint regulations," said Bascom stubbornly. "Must carry lights."
"Five dollars?" Iff argued persuasively.
"Agin the law," growled Bascom. "But--I dunno--they ain't anybody likely
to be out this time o' night. Cross my palm."
And Staff again disbursed.
The white mooring-buoy swam past and the little vessel heeled as Bascom
swung her sharply to the southwards.
"Now," he told Spelvin, "advance that spark all you've a mind to."
There was a click from the engine-pit and the steady rumble of the
exhaust ran suddenly into a prolonged whining drone. The boat jumped as
if jerked forward by some gigantic, invisible hand. Beneath the bows the
water parted with a crisp sound like tearing paper. Long ripples widened
away from the sides, like ribs of a huge fan. A glassy hillock of water
sprang up mysteriously astern, pursuing them like an avenging Nemesis,
yet never quite catching up.
The sense of irresistible speed was tremendous, as stimulating as
electricity; this in spite of the fact that the boat was at best making
about half the speed at which the motor-car had plunged along the
country roads: an effect in part due to the spacious illusion of moonlit
distances upon the water.
Staff held his cap with one hand, drinking in the keen salt air with a
feeling of strange exultation. Iff crept forward and tarried for a time
talking to the boatbuilder.
The boat shaved a nun-buoy outside Barmouth Point so closely that Staff
could almost have touched it by stretching out his arm. Then she
straightened out like a greyhound on a long course across the placid
silver reaches to a goal as yet invisible.
Iff returned to the younger man's side.
"Twenty miles an hour, Bascom claims," he shouted. "At that rate we
ought to be there in about fifteen minutes now."
Staff nodded, wondering what they would find on Wreck Island, bitterly
repenting the oversight which had resulted in Ismay's escape from his
grasp. If only he had not been so sure of his conquest of the little
criminal ...! Now his mind crawled with apprehensions bred of his
knowledge of the man's amazing fund of resource. He who outwitted Ismay
would have earned the right to plume himself upon his cunning....
When he looked up from his abstraction, the loom of the mainland was
seemingly very distant. The motor-boat was nearing the centre of a deep
indentation in the littoral. And suddenly it was as though they did not
move at all, as if all this noise and labour went for nothing, as if the
boat were chained to the centre of a spreading disk of silver,
world-wide, illimitable, and made no progress for all its thrashing and
its fury.
Only the unending sweep of wind across his face denied that effect....
Iff touched his arm.
"There...." he said, pointing.
Over the bows a dark mass seemed to have separated itself from the
shadowed mainland, with which it had till then been merged. A strip of
silver lay between the two, and while they watched it widened, swiftly
winning breadth and bulk as the motor-boat swung to the north of the
long, sandy spit at the western end of Wreck Island.
"See anything of another boat?" Iff asked. "You look--your eyes are
younger than mine."
Staff stood up, steadying himself with feet wide apart, and stared
beneath his hand.
"No," he said; "I see no boat."
"We've beaten him, then!" Iff declared joyfully.
But they hadn't, nor were they long in finding it out. For presently the
little island lay black, a ragged shadow against the blue-grey sky, upon
the starboard beam; and Bascom passed the word aft to shut off the
motor. As its voice ceased, the boat shot in toward the land, and the
long thin moonlit line of the landing-stage detached itself from the
general obscurity and ran out to meet them. And so closely had Bascom
calculated that the "shoot" of the boat brought them to a standstill at
the end of the structure without a jar. Bascom jumped out with the
headwarp, Staff and Iff at his heels.
From the other side of the dock a shadow uplifted itself, swiftly and
silently as a wraith, and stood swaying as it saluted them with profound
courtesy.
"Gennelmen," it said thickly, "I bidsh you welcome t' Wrecksh Island."
With this it slumped incontinently back into a motor-boat which lay
moored in the shadow of the dock; and a wild, ecstatic snore rang out
upon the calm night air.
"Thet's Eph Clover," said Bascom; "him 'nd his wife's caretakers here.
He's drunker 'n a b'iled owl," added the boatbuilder lest they
misconstrue.
"Cousin Artie seems unfortunate in his choice of minions, what?"
commented Iff. "Come along, Staff.... Take care of that souse, will you,
Spelvin? See that he doesn't try to mix in."
They began to run along the narrow, yielding and swaying bridge of
planks.
"He hasn't beaten us out yet," Iff threw over his shoulder. "You keep
back now--like a good child--please. I've got a hunch this is my hour."
The hotel loomed before them, gables grey with moonshine, its long walls
dark save where, toward the middle of the main structure, chinks of
light filtered through a shuttered window, and where at one end an open
door let out a shaft of lamplight upon the shadows....