SAND.
A panel is not beaten into shape by force but by recurrent blows, light
and accurate, and by the same cumulative process, Van Diest and his
colleagues sought to shape the will of Richard Frencham Altar to their
intention.
The fact that their effort had so far failed in no way discouraged the
belief that eventually it would succeed. There was no doubt in their
minds but that in time he would be brought to speak, but Cranbourne's
unexpected disclosure that the opposition knew of their captive's
whereabouts robbed them of their most valuable asset. Time, so to
speak, was no longer to be relied upon and they were compelled to
resort to a more expeditious method.
True it would be easy to remove the captive elsewhere but easy matters
are apt to go wrong on performance. A clue might be provided where at
present no clue existed. If Torrington brought a charge it would be
based on hypothetical evidence and come to nothing. On the other hand
unpleasant suspicions would certainly be aroused and neither Van Diest
nor Hipps greatly desired to attract the attentions of the Police.
If Barraclough could be persuaded to disclose the secret all would be
well. He would be generously rewarded not only for his confidence but
also for a guarantee to disclose none of the privations to which he had
been subjected. The affair would end in an atmosphere of sweet accord.
Torrington's crowd would be knocked out of business and a spirit of
peace and harmony would descend like a benison upon the hard working
trio.
Could any solution be more satisfactory, but there was a fly in the
ointment. Barraclough's resolution strengthened with adversity, he
kept his tongue behind locked teeth and said precisely nothing.
At nine o'clock that night the Dutchman's big Rolls Royce delivered him
and Ezra Hipps at Laurence's abode and Laurence himself came out to
meet them.
"Well?" said Hipps.
But Laurence shook his head.
"Nothing doing at present."
"Has he had any food?"
"Not today. He's weak enough in all conscience."
"Sleep?"
"Damn little. He dropped off two or three times and I got the chaps to
spray him with cold water. That kept him lively. Blayney and Parker
are sleeping in the room now and taking shifts to watch him at night.
Awfully sorry, you two, but I've done my best."
"I'll get right up," said Ezra P. Hipps. "Say, Auriole'll be along
presently. Tell her to stand by. She may come in useful."
He marched heavily up the stairs and entered Richard's room.
Blayney was on duty sprawling watchful on a camp bed, his elbows
propped on a kit bag.
"Get out, you," said Hipps, and the man obeyed. Then he turned to
Richard.
The last few days had wrought a desperate change in his looks. Caverns
had sunk in his cheeks and his eyes were ringed with black. That he
stood in earnest need of a shave heightened the pallor of brow and
temples.
He was seated, cramped rather, in an upright chair with chin down. His
left hand beat a tattoo on the table top and he sucked the thumb of his
right hand like a badly trained child at a make-belief meal.
"Taste good?" asked Hipps. "If I'd known you'd a fancy that way I'd
have brought along a soother."
Richard removed his thumb and said, "Go to Hell!" very distinctly.
Hipps walked a few paces toward him and remarked:
"Still pretty fresh, I see."
"Leaking badly, but still afloat," came the reply.
"Durn me! but you're a sound citizen, Bud. I respect sand but I
despise a fool."
"All right you do," mumbled Richard sleepily.
"Pretty tired?"
"Not sufficiently wide awake to listen to your talk, damn you!"
The American smiled nastily.
"Maybe not, but this is a case of having to. Say! ever been in one of
those big machine shops and seen a giant flywheel swizzling round at
three hundred revs. a minute? Guess you wouldn't be gink enough to put
out a hand and try to stop it. Never saw any machine yet that develops
more power than I can."
Richard shrugged a shoulder; it was too great an effort to shrug both
of them.
"And I guess you ain't going to stop the fly-wheel of my destiny."
"You've had a sample," he replied with a touch of spirit.
Hipps came a step closer and hooked his foot round a leg of Richard's
chair.
"Know anything about the third degree?" he demanded.
"What you've shown me."
Richard's voice sounded far away and disinterested.
"Show you some more. Stand up! Stand up! I can't bear a drowsy man."
And he kicked the chair half across the room. "Don't hang on to that
table--stand on your legs," and grasping Richard by his shirt front he
forced him into an upright position and held him there. His voice
hardened and rasped like a cross cut file as question after question
boomed out with the relentless quality of minute guns.
"A year ago you went travelling."
"You say so." The replies were barely audible.
"During that time you tumbled on your find."
"If I did, I did."
"When was it you struck?"
"That's my affair."
"I've made it mine. When was it you struck?"
"During the six months," said Richard with a twinkle of dying humour.
"That answer won't do."
"Only one you'll get."
"I'm pretty close behind you, Anthony Barraclough."
Again the twinkle came and went as Richard gave answer.
"Still behind?"
"Anthony Barraclough, I've a complete list of the places you visited."
"Been buying a pocket atlas?"
"The actual places."
"Fine!"
"And I could hazard a guess where the locality is. Like me to try?"
"If it amuses you any."
The American's voice rose and filled the room, reverberant as thunder.
"P'r'aps it isn't so far away after all."
And out of the wreckage of his resources, Richard Frencham Altar
brought up his big guns for a final effort at counter battery.
"P'r'aps it isn't, p'r'aps it is," he cried. "Why, you blasted fool,
you'll get nothing from me--nothing. If you know so damn much go and
find the place yourself."
Ezra Hipps seized him by the shoulders and flung him back against the
wall.
"We mean to find out."
"Not from me--not from me," Richard repeated, but the power which had
upheld him was dwindling fast. He knew, knew beyond question that in a
few more moments the truth would be shaken out of him unless he could
devise some means of slackening the strain. And then he had an
inspiration.
"You fool! You fool!" he cried. "Can't you see what you've done, you
and your idiot crew? As you've driven health from my body so, by your
blasted privations, you've driven memory from my head."
He tottered drunkenly toward a chair and sat down all of a heap.
"What's that?" demanded Hipps, with real alarm.
"I can't remember," Richard laughed hysterically. "I can't remember
what you want to know," and his head fell forward into his hands.
For nearly a minute, Hipps looked at him in silence and his face was
very white indeed. Then with the breath escaping between his teeth he
turned away.
It was sheer lunacy on the part of Richard to peep through his fingers
to judge the effect of his words. For it is an established truth that
the nerves of a man's back are sensitive to another's gaze.
Ezra Hipps swung round so quickly that Richard failed to cover his face
in time. The mischief was done.
"Very clever," said the American and laughed. "Very clever and I
nearly bought it, but not quite." He seized Richard's wrist and
twisted it downward. "A word of advice against the future, Mister
Barraclough. Next time you're working a crumple-up don't let the chap
you're pulling it on see you looking at it between your fingers." He
strolled up to the door whistling pensively and halted with his hand on
the latch. "I'm doubting if you're going to be a whole lot of use to
us for you're a tough case. When it comes up at Committee my thumb
points down."
He went out and the bolt shot home behind him.
For a long while Richard rocked in his chair muttering. He felt very
lonely and his throat ached, his head ached--he ached all over--a
childish desire to snivel possessed him and could not be subdued. If
only there had been a shoulder, some sweet, kind, soft shoulder to soak
up the tired angry tears that fell and fell. A kindly shoulder, a
gentle voice to drive away the horror of these nightmare days. Was all
sweetness gone out of the world? Was the world no more than four
square walls peopled with devils who asked and asked and asked? Was
there nothing else but greed of money, hatred, want, and damnable
persecution? A voice within cried aloud: "Why suffer it all? Why bear
the brunt of other men's adventure?" Five thousand pounds. Was it a
fair price for breaking one's body against rocks, for shattering one's
soul against man unkind?
Wild uncontrollable resentment seized him and in its wave tossed him
against the door of his prison battering at the panels with bare fists
and shrieking aloud in a voice he could not recognise as his own.
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen! You've made a mistake. I'm not Bar'clough,
nev' met him. Richard Frencham Altar I am--father shot
himself--Torrington paying me five thousand--keep it up for three
weeks--but you've made the course too stiff. I can't stay the
distance. I can't stay the distance."
His knees gave way beneath him and he fell to the floor beating the
boards and blubbering like a school-boy.
But there came no answer from the hollow empty house and presently the
paroxysm passed and he looked up slowly seeing, as it were, a vision of
himself false to every tradition of manhood he had held most dear.
"Coward!" he said. "Rotten blasted coward! Three weeks and this is
the last day." He looked at his watch. "Only another hour and then
I'm free to speak. Stick it for another hour. Stick it for another
hour."
And the very saying of the words seemed to increase his stature, swell
his chest, revitalise his manhood.
When a moment later the door opened and Van Diest chanting his
perpetual hymn came quietly into the room he found Richard rocking on
his heels beside a chair beating time to the music with a shaking
forefinger while from his parched lips he emitted a pathetic pretence
at whistling the same tune.
"S'bad," muttered Hugo Van Diest. "S'bad business. Must tink all the
time and be worried by dese things. For God's sake you don't fidget.
You tink all the suffering was wit you, but it was inside of me where
the pain live."
"Ha ha!" said Richard.
"Discomfort is nutting. I haf before me the prospec' to be beat. It
wass the torture to be beat. You know that."
"Not yet."
"Mus' be taught."
"Ha ha!" said Richard again and banged the dish cover against the table
implements of a foodless tray that had marked the hour of a meal time.
"Don't fidget!" roared Van Diest, emitting a cloud of tobacco smoke.
"Don't smoke!" Richard countered in the same tone.
"I shmoke on purpose."
"And I fidget on purpose."
With a sweep of the hand he sent the tray with a crashing to the floor.
"Ach! Ach! Ach!" cried Van Diest, and was almost choked with a
violent attack of coughing.
"I make you to speak! I make you to speak! What if I burn you with my
cigar--what if I----" he stopped abruptly and dropped his voice almost
to a whine. "You don't know how goot I make myself to you. I wass a
very kind man. At my home I keep the birds."
"Poor darlings," said Richard.
"The canaries; and you look what I haf here. A portrait of my little
granddaughter Sibelle. She sit on my knee the Sunday afternoon and
listen to the tale of Hansell and Grethel. She call me Grandparkins."
Richard swept the photograph aside with the back of his hand.
"I'm not sitting on anyone's knee, Grandparkins," he said.
A bright purple ran over Van Diest's features in blotches and streaks.
He rose to his feet and held out a quivering forefinger.
"You pay very heavy to make fun of my heart, Mister Barraclough. If
you haf any senses at all you know that all mens wass the two mens--the
home man and the business man--and the one hass nothing to do with the
udter."
"Leave it at that," said Richard. "I'm not feeling altogether at home
just now."
"That was your last word?"
"My last word."
"So!" said Van Diest. "So!" His eyebrows went up and down and he
seemed lost in thought for a moment. Finally: "You go into the bedroom
now please."
He gave the order slowly and to Richard's hypersensitive ears it held a
threat of real and imminent danger. It sounded as the burial service
must sound to a man who stands upon a trap with a knotted cord around
his throat.
"No!" said Richard. "No!"
"The bedroom."
"No!"
An impasse. They stood like duellists trying to read intention in each
other's eyes.
Hugo Van Diest made the mistake of his life when he abandoned mental
force for violence. The hand he raised to strike Richard across the
face never reached its mark; instead he felt himself go tottering
backward across the room. There was not much force in the blow Richard
struck, but the science was good and he put his weight into it. Van
Diest took it on the point and as he measured his length on the floor
he saw Richard make a dash for the door which had remained unlocked
during the interview.
Ezra P. Hipps caught him on the landing outside and put on a jiu-jitsu
armlock which closed the argument and sent Richard staggering toward
his bedroom beaten it is true, but absurdly enough triumphant.
"Listen you," he gasped, his back against the panel. "You think I can
be made to speak--you're wrong--You think I can be tortured and beaten
and bullied into giving up the secret. You're wrong--wrong. There's
something inside of me that'll lick you, lick you hollow. Do your
damndest, my lads, my breaking point is outside your reach." And as a
Parthian arrow he said "Blast you!" and banged the door.