IN WHICH MISS MARY BREWSTER SPEAKS HER MIND
Blind and helpless, gagged and bound, his eyes bandaged, Desmond felt
himself lifted up and carried swiftly along. Presently he heard the
sound of the sea and his bearers’ feet grinding on shingle. Then through
his bandage he was conscious of a brilliant light. He was flung
violently down and the cloth removed from his face.
Silhouetted against the garish light of an acetylene hurricane lamp in
the cheaply furnished living-room of a seaside bungalow, Clubfoot stood
before him. A hideous tweed cap pulled down until it rested on the tips
of his large projecting ears lent him a horribly grotesque appearance.
He looked like a great ape dressed in man’s clothes. Mary Brewster,
trussed up even as Desmond was, reclined in a chair. She had lost her
hat and her soft brown hair was disordered by the wind. Her small face,
pale and piquant, was enigmatic in its absolute serenity.
“He has not got the jewels, either, Herr Doktor!” said a voice.
Desmond could not turn to see the speaker. He glanced down at the pocket
of his overcoat where the packet had been. The parcel had vanished. It
had certainly been there when they had set out to walk to the bungalow.
Had that rascally pilot stolen it? It didn’t matter much now what had
become of it.
Clubfoot snarled out an order in German. Rough hands brutally searched
the Englishman’s clothes. Clubfoot looked on impassively.
“Nothing!” reported the voice.
“It must be there!” thundered Grundt, “unless one of you has stolen it.”
“The Herr Doktor was himself present when we seized the Englishman,” the
voice protested. “The Herr Doktor knows that nothing was found.”
“Ungag them!” ordered Clubfoot. “And clear out! Warn the pilot to have
the machine ready for instant departure!”
The order was obeyed, a door was softly closed, and Desmond nerved
himself to face what he divined was to be the crucial ordeal of his
career. Never had he been in so tight a place. It wanted hours to
daylight, and he was bound and helpless in a lonely district in the
hands of a ruthless and remorseless enemy.
“A false trail, eh?” said Grundt slowly, his nostrils twitching
ominously. “You’d play tricks with me, would you, you dog? Do you know
what I’m going to do with you, Okewood? I’m going to kill you, yes, and
the girl as well!”
Desmond felt his throat grow dry. “Not the girl,” he said in a low
voice. “She’s not even of the Service, Grundt!”
“It shall be a lesson to her to mind the company she keeps!” said Grundt
grimly, and produced an automatic from his pocket. He bent to examine
the magazine. Slowly he raised the pistol.
Then the girl spoke. “I shouldn’t do anything hasty!” she said. “Kill us
and your career is at an end. You speak of retiring voluntarily. One
shot and your retirement will be compulsory. And Stauber takes your
place!”
Clubfoot recoiled. “Stauber!” he muttered, frowning.
“You’ve made a mess of things in England, Grundt,” the girl continued
serenely. “Your employers, the big industrialists, granted you this last
chance. It rests with you whether you give your employers your own
version of this affair, or whether they take it from the English
newspapers. Do you understand me?”
Clubfoot stared at her like a man hypnotized.
In the same business-like manner Mary Brewster proceeded: “Kill us and
there’ll be such a rumpus that the echoes of it are bound to reach
Germany. You can’t suppress murder in England, Grundt. You’ve missed
your chance of getting the jewels, and what you’ve got to do now is to
put up the best explanation you can. I know that you have the reputation
of being the man that commands success. If you touch us, that reputation
is gone forever, for, you can take it from me, the whole story, the true
story, will then come out and you’ll be saddled with the greatest
failure of your career. And your rival, Stauber, gets your job . . .”
“That Schafskopf!” muttered Grundt. He seemed half dazed by the vigour
of the girl’s onslaught. Then, “What have you done with the jewels?” he
roared suddenly, recovering himself.
“They’re out of your reach!” said Mary Brewster.
“But you’re not!” snarled Clubfoot. “And you shall tell me where they
are. Herr Gott! You’re not the first woman whose tongue I’ve loosened!”
But it seemed to Desmond that, for all his bluster, much of Clubfoot’s
wonted assurance had disappeared.
The girl never flinched. “Make the best of a bad job, Grundt,” she said.
“Leave things as they are and return to Germany and you will hear no
word from us to dispute or disprove any story you like to tell those who
sent you. I repeat: You can kill us, you can torture us, but you’ll
never recover the jewels. Make up your mind to that and go—while you
can!”
The hairy hand that clutched the pistol faltered and slowly dropped to
the cripple’s side. Of a sudden he seemed to have grown older. For a
full minute he stood and glowered at Desmond—the girl he ignored. As the
two men faced each other, it seemed to the Englishman as though the
scroll of the years were unrolled and that, like him, Grundt was telling
over in his mind the many bouts which these two had fought out between
them. Then slowly, listlessly, the great hand went up and he thrust the
Browning into his breast pocket.
“I told your Chief, Okewood,” he said in his deep, stern voice, “that
this would be my last case. Though he has taken this trick, I think I
may let my decision stand. But tell him this from me—that, though he has
gained this trick, he has not won the game. The cards have been against
me throughout. I have played a losing hand, dealt me by the blinded,
besotted fools”—his voice hissed with anger—“who, in overthrowing my
master, destroyed our country. But do not forget that in politics
nothing is stable, that the enemies of to-day may be the friends of
to-morrow, and vice versa, Okewood—vice versa!”
He broke off, and for an instant the dark, expressive eyes rested on the
young man’s face.
“Do not fall into the error of believing that I am grown sentimental in
my old age, my young friend,” he resumed. “I have always been a
Realpolitiker, and in this instance I have bowed my head to the
unanswerable logic of your companion just as in different circumstances,
should my interest, or the interest of those I serve, have required it,
I should have had no hesitation in putting the pair of you to death.
Your luck is in to-night, Herr Major. You can tell your Chief that you
owe your life to a woman’s tongue!”
On that he turned and left them, and limped, a lonely defiant figure, to
the door, where the night received him and swallowed him up.
“My dear,” cried Desmond when the door had closed behind him, “you’re a
marvel! In all the years I’ve known him such a thing has never happened
before. You beat him fair and square! It was like a miracle the way you
laid him low! How on earth did you come to think of it?”
“The man’s a mass of vanity like the rest of you,” little Miss Brewster
ejaculated scornfully. “A little knowledge, a little intuition, a little
bluff”—she smiled rather wanly. “You men take each other too seriously,
anyway . . .”
“But what has become of the chamois leather packet with the jewels?”
demanded Desmond.
“It is in a rabbit-hole by that German aeroplane,” said Miss Brewster.
“When you would not heed my warning about that odious-looking pilot, I
took the packet out of your overcoat pocket—I thought the jewels would
be safer with me than with you. And as that man attacked you from
behind, I let the packet slide into a rabbit-hole at my feet and they
saw nothing in the dark. It seemed to me it was time I took charge.
They’ll never find that packet in the dark. But I know the spot, and
when it’s light and we’re free, we’ll . . .”
Her head drooped suddenly forward. She had fainted. Out of the night
resounded, loud and challenging, the roar of propellers . . .
At noon next day the Chief received Desmond Okewood and Mary Brewster.
They found Francis Okewood in the office with a grey-haired man of
distinguished appearance who was in the last stage of restless anxiety.
It was to him that the Chief, having received it from the hands of Mary
Brewster, presented the chamois leather packet sodden with damp and
stained with Kentish marl. With trembling hands he examined the seal,
and, having found it intact, muttered a broken phrase of thanks and
fairly bolted from the room, carrying the packet under his arm. The
Chief shook his head and laughed.
“Cabinet Ministers have great responsibilities,” he remarked, “only they
are too fond of shoving them off on other people’s shoulders. And now,
Miss Brewster, to hear your story.”
But Mary Brewster, who had faced The Man with the Clubfoot unabashed,
was tongue-tied in the Chief’s rather forbidding presence. It was
Desmond who ultimately narrated their adventures of the night ending
with their release at dawn by an astonished fisherman who, on his way to
inspect his lobster pots, had answered Desmond’s cries for help.
“They drugged and kidnapped the pilot I had engaged for you,” the Chief
said after Miss Brewster had taken her leave, “and slipped their man in
his place. I have here a telegram from Brussels about it. There’s been a
leakage somewhere which,” he added grimly “is being investigated. In the
mean time, thanks to you, Okewood, and to this young lady, with whom I
intend to hold some converse regarding her future career, we’re rid, it
would seem—for the present at any rate—of Clubfoot and his gang.”
His manner grew reflective. “I wonder,” he said, “when and where we
shall see him again!”
A silence fell on the three men. Each felt that a fourth was present,
invisible save in the mind’s eye—a vast figure of a man who, with
misshapen foot drawn up beside him, leaned on his crutch-stick and
glared at them defiance from savage, cruel eyes . . .
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
--Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public
domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and
dialect unchanged.
--In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the
HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)