AN OLD FRIEND.
Hitherto events had moved so swiftly that I hadn't had time to look
calmly at the situation, but once we settled down in the car and Barwon
Heads dropped into the dust behind us, I began to think rather
seriously. It was perfectly obvious, even to a more clouded intelligence
than mine, that there was something mysterious, if not shady, about my
prospective employer. Despite his assurance that the law was on his
side, I had grave doubts. If everything was perfectly square and above
board why the deuce didn't he report the affair to the police and give
them the task of looking after him, instead of hiring me at an
exorbitant wage? He seemed anxious to fight shy of publicity in any
shape or form and, though he had been very cordial, even familiar with
me, his very apparent frankness and joviality had awakened my
suspicions. There was something fishy going on, and that something,
whatever it was, centred round the piece of wood that I had so casually
kicked out of the sand. It struck me all of a heap that nothing had
really begun to happen until I had unearthed it. As soon as Bryce had
seen where I was sitting, he had started to run inshore, the other man
had stationed himself behind the rocks, the curtain had been rung up and
the play had begun. Now the question was what part did the piece of wood
play in the game? Bryce, I felt sure, could clear the mystery up with a
word, but I was certain that it would be long before he would say that
word.
The car was all and more than he had said. It had speed, it was
comfortable, and its mechanism was far less complicated than any I had
yet seen. We ate up distance in fine style. Bryce seemed to have no
nerves at all, for more than once he tore round corners on two wheels
while I clung to the side of the car and swore at him. He grinned
cheerfully over his shoulder at me and asked me if I were nervous.
I laughed back at him with as much _sang-froid_ as I could muster. I had
no objection to risking my life once in a while when there was good pay
at the end of it, but I couldn't see the sense of tempting Providence
just for the sheer fun of the thing. Of course, if we did spill, it
would be all right with Bryce--he was so fat that he'd just bounce--but
I was slimmer, and I knew from experience that I had very brittle bones.
Once in the Solomons, when a wild boar charged me, I lay for weeks in a
trader's hut waiting for an obdurate fracture to knit up again. Some
idea of the furious pace at which Bryce pushed the car along can be
guessed from the fact that we did the fourteen miles in something over
twenty minutes. It had been quite half-past eleven when we left the
Heads, and the clock in the car wanted a few minutes to twelve when we
sailed over the bridge and up Moorabool-street. We cleared a stationary
tram by inches, twisted in an S curve to avoid a farmer's waggon and
then, with a heart-rending grind, Bryce threw over his clutch and slowed
down to a snail-like crawl of ten miles an hour.
"This asphalt paving makes a great motor track," Bryce said to me, "but
there's speed-laws in existence here. That's the trouble of it. When a
man has a nice track he's interfered with, and when there isn't anyone
to meddle with him it's ten to one that he's crawling over something
like a corduroy road."
"Corduroy!" I said, and sat up and looked at him. I knew what he meant.
Any man who has ever travelled the heart-breaking log-roads of the
interior New Guinea goldfields does not need to be told what 'corduroy'
is. It is an ever-present memory, an astonishment and a nightmare. Bryce
did not speak from hearsay--the note in his voice told me that--but was
talking from experience garnered at great cost, both of money and
energy.
"Corduroy," he repeated after me. "Doesn't that sound familiar to you,
Carstairs?"
"It does," I said with emphasis. "But how the deuce----?" And then I
stopped dead. Bryce? Bryce? What was familiar about that name? Bryce and
New Guinea and----. I had it. And Walter Carstairs.
"Ever heard of Walter Carstairs?" I questioned.
"The minute I heard your name I knew you," Bryce said. "Ever heard of
Walter Carstairs? Why, he was the best friend I ever had. He saved my
life in the early days of the Woodlarks."
"According to the Dad," I said, looking him straight in the face, "it
was the other way about."
He laughed happily. "Jimmy, I'm losing my memory if that's so. But
whatever happened to him? I lost sight of him the last ten years or so."
"You would," I answered. "He stuck to the Islands. He had a life's work
planned out, but he got cut-off in the Solomons before he had reached
finality. I carried it on after that, came all the way from the Klondyke
to take it up. I got through but it took every penny I had, and that's
why this morning when I came across you I only had a boot and a half to
my feet."
"Well, well," he said kindly, "that's all changed now."
"I don't know so much about it," I told him. "You might have been the
best friend the Dad ever had, but that doesn't say you're going to keep
me. What I get I work for. I'll take charity from no man living."
Again he laughed, and his fat face crinkled up into little rolls of
flesh until he looked as if he had double chins all the way up to his
eyes. I knew now why he had been so familiar with me earlier in the day.
He was a sunny-natured old chap always, even in the hard, toilsome New
Guinea days, and I suppose his heart went out to me as the son of an old
comrade in arms, doubly so--perhaps because I had saved his life. On the
whole I rather wished I hadn't. It complicated matters so. It made me
feel bound to give him a hand, whether his enterprise was shady or not.
If he had turned to me then and said, "I suppose I can count on you all
right?" I would have been torn between duty and inclination. He did
nothing of the sort. He made no reference to his offer of service, in
fact he seemed to have completely forgotten it, and I thought it just as
well to say nothing. The way he forebore from seizing a perfectly
obvious advantage sent him up fifty per cent. in my estimation, and by
the time we had reached the heart of the city I was quite willing to do
anything he asked me.
"I'll park the car," he said, "and then we'll go off and have some
dinner."
"Will we?" I said and eyed my tattered raiment ruefully. "I don't fancy
I'm dressed for dinner."
"Um!" he said. "You're not. I'd quite overlooked that. That bars a
public dinner. I don't fancy you'll be able to make much of one if you
come down to my place. The cook's away. I didn't expect to be back so
soon."
"Cook or no cook," I told him, "if you've got anything eatable in the
house I'll guarantee to turn it up right. Give me the run of the kitchen
and put me next to the meat-safe, and you'll see wonders. I don't know
how you feel, but I'm so hungry that I'd make a meal off a pair of kid
boots."
"In that case, Carstairs, I think I'd better take you home and see what
sort of a culinary expert you are."
With that he twisted the car about and headed out for the eastern
suburbs. The place was unfamiliar to me at the time--I hadn't the
faintest idea of the street the man lived in--and in the face of what
happened later I made no enquiries. As a matter of fact the rush of
events crowded all such petty details out of my mind.
"Can you drive a car?" he asked abruptly.
"I can drive anything but an Andean mule," I told him. "I tried once in
the Chilian foot-hills, but after the animal dislocated my shoulder I
sort of lost heart."
"I gather from the retiring modesty of your last remark," he smiled,
"that you consider yourself an expert as regards all other forms of
animal and mechanical traction."
"Quite so. I can always do anything on principle, and I've yet to meet
the job that I'm unwilling to tackle!"
He glanced sideways at me. I didn't like the look he gave me. There was
too much of appraisement in it, something that was alien to the nature
of the man, a sort of cold, calculating shrewdness that made me wonder
again if I had not been mistaken in my estimate of him and the extent of
his good-nature.
"If you keep on admiring me instead of looking where you're going," I
hinted, "you'll end up in a funeral. That motor-bus isn't the sort of
thing I'd care to hit."
He twisted the wheel over a fraction and edged out beyond the motor-bus
before he replied. "Life is full of thrills," he remarked when at last
we reached the comparative security of open space. There was a challenge
in his voice that I thought it well to ignore.
"It is," I agreed. "Too much so."
For all the lightness of his speech and the careless ease with which he
took unnecessary and avoidable risks I had a feeling that there was deep
design under everything he did. Though I couldn't have proved it if I'd
been asked, I felt sure that he was trying my nerve. After all there's
no better test of that than the crowded traffic of a big city. I've met
men who'd cheerfully face a crowd of howling cannibals and yet would
develop a very bad case of jumps if asked to cross a street roaring and
humming with traffic. Yes, clearly he was testing me.
With a jerk that nearly shot me out of my seat the car pulled up. I
stared about me. We had stopped outside a substantial red-tiled house,
built in the bungalow fashion. There was a well-kept lawn in front of
it, with here and there a trim flower-bed to relieve the monotony of the
expanse of grass.
"This is the place," Bryce said. "Just slip down and open that gate,
will you?"
He gesticulated towards a six-foot gate at the side of the house. From
my position in the car I could see that it opened on a path that ran
round the side of the building and almost certainly led to the garage.
Accordingly I slipped out on the road, walked up to the gate and found
that, by standing on tip-toe, I could just reach the catch at the top. I
swung it back, pushed with my weight against the erection and the gate
came open.
As I turned to come back to the car I caught sight of a man standing on
the opposite corner. He was engaged in lighting a cigarette in the cup
of his hands. He seemed to be taking an undue time over it, and that and
something that I could not put a name to in his attitude convinced me
that he was watching us. His hands were so cupped that they hid his
face, but I received an impression, that was almost a certainty, that he
was watching Bryce and myself through his fingers. Perhaps my prolonged
stare convinced him that I was fully aware of his presence and its
meaning. At any rate he twisted on his heel so that his back was turned
to us, dropped the match he had been playing with and ostentatiously
struck another.
"That gentleman across the road, the one with his back to us, is keeping
your house under surveillance," I said to Bryce. "I suppose he's afraid
the place'll run away."
"Afraid I'll run away, more likely," Bryce answered. "Evidently he
doesn't want to be identified next time we meet. But he needn't worry
over that; I wouldn't know him from a bar of soap. We'll leave him alone
for the time being, Carstairs, and get this machine in. I don't see any
reason why we should let this gentleman delay our dinner."
"No more do I. Let her out."
I stood on the step of the car until it had passed the entrance in
safety, then I went back and made the gate fast. But before doing so I
just couldn't resist taking a peep at the Roman sentry figure of a man
opposite. He was staring straight at the gate--as if that was going to
help him in any way--but he was pretty alert. The moment he sighted me
he wheeled about and walked off in another direction. But, quick and all
as he was, I caught a passing glimpse of him. He had on a blue serge
suit, a rather cheap affair as well as I could judge at that distance,
and a black felt hat. Somehow I got the impression, though I was too far
away to say anything with certainty, that he was not so much sallow as
sunburnt. It was more than likely that he had not got a good look at
me--in that case he would not know me again, as I flattered myself that
there was nothing very distinctive about me. Still, as that marksman
behind the rocks must have been taking stock of me for some considerable
while, I realised that no definite advantage would accrue from the fact
that one of the gang might not be able to identify me. I had no means of
ascertaining how many there were in the organisation, and something
warned me not to display too much interest in Bryce's presence. When I
walked down the path and discovered him backing the car into his garage
I made no comment on the situation beyond telling him that the spy had
gone temporarily out of business and was at present taking a
constitutional down the street.
"All we can do then," Bryce said, "is to let him depart in peace and
trust that nothing happens. I wouldn't like any of that bunch to be cut
off in the midst of their sins. I've got another end mapped out for
them."
"If you figure me in on that, you're mighty mistaken," I said to myself.
"I'm the first line of defence, but I'll be hanged if I'm going to carry
the war into the enemy's country."
I needn't have been so cocksure about it, for as will shortly be related
that was just exactly what I did do.