It was not such dirty weather as McClintock the boatman had prophesied.
Though the night was dark and the sky mantled in heavy cloud, the rain
was hardly more than a Scotch mist. That is to say, it was no rain at
all in the terms of the North. On the mainland the temperature was mild
to mugginess. But once away and under full sail, a decent little breeze
carried the boat smartly over the long rollers.
Napier had taken his place at the tiller. Half-way to the objective,
which had not yet been named, he added to the sense of the importance of
the expedition by proposing to double McClintock's fee as some
compensation for doing without his pipe for an hour or two after
landing.
Napier anticipated a tussle over this point. McClintock's grunt might
mean anything from pig-headed refusal to whole-hearted agreement.
"Naturally," Napier went on, with an air of being a deal more easy than
he felt, "when I wanted to overhaul Gull Island, I thought of the man
who took Julian and me there when we were boys."
"Gairrmans!" remarked McClintock, careful to abstain from the rising
inflection.
"What! Have you seen something?"
"Na, na; but I have na lookit." He took the pipe out of his mouth and
knocked the ashes into the sea. "They'll be verra gude at smellin' oot."
It was so he indorsed Napier's generalship, and accepted service.
The only notice taken of the observation seemed to hint at a further
acuteness for McClintock to reckon with. "I'll tell you the plan in two
words," Napier said, "and then we'd best not be talking for the next
couple of hours." When he'd landed Napier, McClintock was to lie low in
his boat, just offshore, for about an hour and a half, unless one of two
things happened. If McClintock should see a light on the rocks at the
top of the gorge, he might, if he liked, come and see what was up, but
if he should hear a pistol-shot, whatever length of time he'd been left
alone, he was to wait half an hour longer. If, by then, Napier had
neither appeared nor shown a light, McClintock was to get along back to
Kirklamont and raise the hue and cry--an extremity, he was to
understand, which Napier particularly desired to avoid. And that was why
he was going by himself, going with extreme caution, just to establish
the fact that there was no reason why they shouldn't come back by
daylight safely enough and go over the old ground together. For a last
word, Napier remarked that he hadn't forgotten McClintock had taught him
and Julian more than fishing and sailing, and here was a pistol he'd
best keep handy.
The old man slipped the weapon into the pocket of his reefer as casually
as though it had been another pipe. But he remarked that he was more at
home in these days with a knife, whether for oysters "or whatever."
There was no doubt that McClintock was not only enlisted, but interested
at last.
He brought his boat softly up on the spit of sand left by the tide, sole
landing-place of this nature on all the little rock-bound coast. The
only sounds abroad were the shrill _keep, keep_, of the sea-pie, and a
swish of wings out of the cliff.
Without a word being exchanged, Napier went over the side, through a
shallow ripple to the little beach, so narrow as to be hardly more than
a window of gravel at the foot of the cliff. In a sense this was an
advantage once he was piloted safely to the sand spit. He remembered he
had only to hug the cliff till he came to that place--scene of many a
wreck, where the cliff fell sharply in a chaos of boulders tumbling out
to sea. By bearing inland, Napier would cross at its narrowest the neck
of what he used to think looked like the wreckage of a pier. Quite
suddenly he would come into a gentler region, a gradual acclivity that
led through willow and heather and bracken up to the apex of the height
which, midmost of the island, commanded all points of the compass. If
there was an installation, it would be there masked from the mainland,
among the rocks at the top of the gorge. And if the installation was
there, Napier would find it, provided somebody did not first find him.
The night was warm for September, but till he landed, the wet breeze had
struck cold. Here, on the island, summer seemed to linger. The air was
still full of the sun-quickened scent of pines. The sweetness of thyme
was stronger than the faint bitter of bracken. But these things reached
Napier vaguely. Those admirable servants, his eyes, were well used by
now to this half-darkness; but they could do little for him in
comparison with the two other allies, his hearing and the quickened
power of the humblest faculty of all. As he felt his way with foot and
shoulder, the new significance in contact seemed to extend from living
flesh and nerve to the rattan stick he carried. The soft alternate
strokes, now right, now left advised him of the gorse clumps, of a
solitary stone-pine, or an occasional rock half submerged in coarse
grass and heather. Every few yards he stopped to listen. Yet he got over
the ground with a quickness that brought him a jolt of surprise when,
the ascent grown suddenly steeper and less verdured, he found himself
near the top of the hangar. He had reached the place where the bony
shoulders of the island rose naked above her mantle of green and
heather-purple.
Though he could see virtually nothing of the wide prospect daylight
opened out from this point, he was too well aware of the prodigies of
vision possible to trained eyes for him to risk showing any faintest
shadow moving on the sky-line. Before he came to the top he was making
his progress bent nearly double; crouching to listen, and then creeping
along on hands and knees.
The comparatively uniform surfaces of the mother-rock showed no sign yet
of dropping down to chaos. But Napier knew where he was. The tinkle of
water told him. In two minutes he was craning over the lip of the gorge,
staring into the murk beneath him.
A mere gulf of shadow.
No man in his senses would venture farther on a night like this, unless
he had in his memory one of those indelible maps that only youth knows
the secret of engraving. It was such a map that Napier turned back to as
he lay there in the dark, getting not only the detail, but the order,
clear again in his head.
The remembered call of the water came up insistent. Almost Napier could
imagine that he made it out, that nook, a few yards below, which had
always been the boys' first stopping-place. In the driest summer a
thread of pure fresh water trickled out of a fissure in the granite down
there among the ferns. In spring the trickle would swell to a torrent.
It would go boiling over the worn boulders till it plunged down that
last lap in noise and foam into the tiny lake, the small rock basin of
steel-blue water, smiling in the sunshine of memory, but even in that
light set warningly about with nearly perpendicular walls on three
sides. On this southern arc, more terribly furnished still, with rocks
of sharper tooth, calved later from the mother in labor of heat and
frost.
After quenching their thirst, the boys' next stopping-place would be
Table Rock, a third of the way to the bottom. There they would lie
stretched out to the sun and eat their sandwiches. Then they would crawl
to the far edge and peer over for that dizzy view of the great boss, the
outcrop of granite eighteen to twenty feet below them on the left. By
virtue of place or special constitution, it had possessed a power to
resist the forces of disintegration. It treated the very torrent
cavalierly, for it butted the torrent aside with that Giant's Head, and
then bent leisurely over to look at itself in the lake.
There were days when the jutting forehead, with its crown of heather and
veil of creepers interlaced, was seen more clearly mirrored in the water
than when looked straight down upon from Table Rock or from the opposite
cliff across the lake. Neither point of view gave one the smallest
inkling of what was under the veil, behind the brow of granite.
Napier sniffed the wet air for smoldering wood. No whiff, no sound.
What the devil had been in Greta's mind? The cause of her panic,
whatever it was, no longer inhabited here. Napier would feel his way
down as quickly as due caution would permit, and in less than forty
minutes he'd be back in the boat with McClintock.
All he had to do was to steer clear of Table Rock and follow the
watercourse till it bore away to the left. Any one who knew his ground
and kept to the right could easily enough let himself down to that
comfortable ledge under the Giant's Head. Sometimes you found bilberries
there. Anyway, you found the niche that sheltered you from rain. And
then you went on to the discovery that took your breath.
In the old days you waited for McClintock with beating hearts, even if
there were two of you. Gavan eight and Julian seven, would follow behind
the old sou'wester to the end of the curving gallery, where a drop of
some four feet landed you in the irregular-shaped stone chamber where
the smugglers long ago had hid the contraband. How did they get it round
the Giant's Head? you asked, remembering the narrow way. They didn't get
it round. They lowered it over the top. McClintock could show you the
grooves worn in the granite. Good days, those!
Wet and a little chilled, but without misgiving, Napier let himself down
among the rocks. He began the descent with a swing of the rattan to take
his immediate bearings. Before he brought the stick full circle, he
dropped the hand that held it. What was this against the side of his
knee? He bent down and found his face a few inches from a steel cable,
screwed taut, and straining aslant skyward. His eye followed the outline
of the twisted strand till it met a slender rod planted discreetly among
the rocks. Planted so discreetly that it was completely masked from
observation on three points of the compass and would not easily be
detected on the fourth. Napier could not make out the wire connecting
the farther one of the antennae onto this one above his head; but he knew
that it was there. He knew that he had set his knee against one of the
guys of a wireless. He moved only a couple of inches away from that
significant companionship and stood quite still.
Was this installation a pre-war dodge, abandoned now? And if not
abandoned--
He found himself making his way down with his right hand in his
pistol-pocket. Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set
up among the rocks.
He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious
snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution
redoubled.
With horror he remembered that old pastime--rolling the rocks down. How
they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the
reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one
of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the
slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness?
Wasn't, after all, the darkness an indispensable part of his plan? He
stood and listened. Behind the sound of falling water there was nothing,
not even a bird's note. The stillness was piercing. Under its penetrant
impact he shrank inwardly.
What was that?
Something had sprung out of the shadow. Lord! Nothing but an infernal
rabbit; and the damned fool had dislodged a few little stones.
Napier sat crouching in the gorge a good four or five minutes after the
last of that pop-popping died. He had pulled off his cap and thrust it
into his pocket. He wiped his forehead. Whew! nothing but a damned
rabbit!
He listened an instant, and then went on down in the murk and the fine
rain. Suddenly he stood still again. There wasn't a sound his ear could
verify. But he held his breath, while horror moved like a wind in his
hair.
He wasn't alone.
How he knew, he couldn't have told. He plunged his hand into his
revolver pocket, braced himself, and waited. Waited while the seconds
passed. Waited till that first strong impression weakened, till he had
silently called himself a few unpleasant names, and had drawn out of his
pocket the cap he told himself his addled pate needed more than the
protection of firearms. He went on in the act of settling the cap firmly
on his head. He had heard nothing, seen nothing, when a blow on the back
all but felled him. He saved himself from falling flat only by plunging
a few paces down the gorge. He managed to recover, and wheeled about,
his hand at his pocket. Before he could get at his pistol, that hand and
the other arm were seized in a powerful grip. His hobnailed boot did him
the instant service of bringing his assailant down on one knee. But
Napier was dragged along with him in those arms of iron. It flashed over
Napier that the aim of this dumb enemy was not so much to kill as to
disarm him.
It was a battle for a pistol. The conviction grew in Napier's mind that
he would already be lying dead there among the rocks but for the man's
strange caution. He didn't want that pistol to go off; and so they
wrestled in a nightmare of blind silence. Now one, and now the other,
regained his footing and then lost it; and now they both went rolling
down together till the rocks stopped them. And still no word was spoken.
Twice Napier had his fingers almost on the trigger, and twice his hand
was wrenched away. The last time a thick voice whispered, "_Drop_ it!
Don't you know you're a dead man if you make a sound?" The voice of
Bloom, Sir William's chauffeur! He had got Napier down again; the full
weight of the assailant's body was on Napier's head; his left arm pinned
under him. In that strangling darkness Napier told himself the end had
come. He was dead already. Why was he resisting? He knew why, when he
felt Bloom's teeth on his right forearm. He felt the pistol go from his
bruised side. He heard the drop among the scant herbage of the rocks.
It was over. Resistance had been battered out of him. He was quite sure
of that. Why didn't Bloom let him alone? Why was the fellow dragging him
down?
It suddenly occurred to him that they couldn't be far from Table Rock.
_Bloom was going to throw him over!_
He had loosed his hold on Napier's shoulder. Breathing heavily, he had
come round and straddled across his victim's body. He fastened his hands
in Napier's torn collar, pulled him up into a sitting posture, and
dashed his head against a boulder. Not quite squarely, for Bloom's foot
had slipped on the wet moss. He braced himself and took fresh hold. In
that second the impotence passed out of Napier's body. His sinews
hardened as he locked his maimed arms round the man. Before Bloom could
recover from the disadvantage of his stooping posture, Napier, in a
spasm of dying energy, had rolled with the chauffeur in his arms toward
the edge of Table Rock. More angry than frightened by the suddenness of
Napier's recovery, Bloom was striking wild.
"He doesn't know where he is!" Napier said to himself with exultation.
In a very convulsion of insane strength he gripped the panting body of
the German and flung it out over the edge of Table Rock.
He hung there listening.
But the blood flowed into his ears as well as into his eyes. No sound
reached him. He tried to crawl back toward the stream. On the way
unconsciousness, like an angel out of heaven, came down and covered him.
* * * * *
In spite of the tribute to McClintock's being able to do what he was
told, the old man had no mind to go home at the end of the time
stipulated without knowing something of what was keeping Mr. Gavan. And
so, some three quarters of an hour after that body had shot out into the
void, the fisherman, picking his way cannily down the gorge, slipped on
something soft. His questing hands felt blood, new spilt. A match, lit
in his sou'wester and instantly smothered, showed him enough. He drew
back behind a rock and waited there several minutes, listening. When he
got back to Napier, he had the sou'wester half full of water. He
sprinkled it over Napier's face. He poured whiskey down his throat. Aye,
that was better. Napier was presently able to say that a man who
attacked him had been thrown over Table Rock. The question was, could
McClintock get Napier back to the boat?
Oh, aye, McClintock could do that same. But Mr. Gavan had best bide
there a little longer; and here was the whiskey-flask to keep him
company.
Napier sent a whisper of remonstrance after him as the foolhardy old man
went down the gorge. Too well Napier knew where McClintock would be
going. And he hadn't warned him! Poor old McClintock! Napier lay there a
few minutes, and then crawled to the water. He bathed his head and drank
some more whiskey. He tried to stand but couldn't manage that, and went
on hands and knees. He had no clear idea what he was doing. But
McClintock was fumbling his way down there without a notion of the risk
he ran.
Presently Napier found he could stand, after a fashion. So he staggered
on till the stream turned to the left, and Napier, to the right, was
making his way round the Giant's Head down to the ledge beneath.
"McClintock!" he whispered, and steadied himself against the rock wall
to listen. McClintock must have gone in! Napier had no consciousness of
making any decision. He merely found himself feeling the way along an
inward-curving gallery when the pitch blackness in front of him opened
on a wedge of light, fierce, intolerable. As suddenly, the light was
gone.
If he had been quite clear in his head, Napier declared afterward, he
would have prudently retraced his steps.
As it was, a sense of blind compulsion was on him. For in that dazzling
instant he'd had a glimpse of McClintock. Poor old McClintock, whom
Napier had inveigled into this trap; McClintock, his heavy shoulder, his
sou'wester, and a bristle of beard stamped for an instant on that
blinding, impossible light. Streaks of it still leaked through the
blackness. Napier's outstretched hand came almost at once against
something soft, yielding. A double-felted curtain. He grasped it and
stared through, to find himself standing at the top of a carpeted
incline, looking down into a luxurious room, flooded with high-power,
electric light. In the glare McClintock, with a knife in his hand, stood
not ten feet from a man in shirt-sleeves seated at a table. The back of
the seated figure was turned partly away from the entrance; his head
bent; a green shade over his eyes. He was taking down a message. A metal
band over his crown, ear-caps set close to his head, held him oblivious
to all sound save that which the mysterious forces of nature were
ticking into his ears.
Not McClintock's wary approach, but Napier's less cautious movement of
the felted curtain, or some cooler air current penetrating the
overheated chamber, was responsible for that slight turn of the
harnessed head. It was Carl Pforzheim! His cry died on his lips as he
tore off the shade. But he couldn't in that lightning instant wrench
himself free of the apparatus, for the cord had become wound round his
neck. He presented a sickening impression of one struggling in a
man-trap, showing, as a wild animal might, a flash of bared teeth as he
strained out across the table and seized a revolver. The shot went
wild. For he had turned to face the descent of McClintock's knife.
Pforzheim fell sidewise against the pink wall of petrol tins, still hung
up by his _apparat_, and dribbling scarlet over the pink.
They spent the night with the dead body.
There were two good beds, but only one was slept in. McClintock mounted
guard. In the morning he went out and found the body of Sir William's
chauffeur. He buried him with Pforzheim.
The den was stocked with supplies, wine, cigars, food, books, cards.
There were very few papers, but they were worth coming for.