THE POSSIBLE REASON
At that last word, spoken with an emphasis which showed that it awoke
no very pleasant memories in the speaker, Miss Raven looked
questioningly from one to the other of us.
"Marooned?" she said. "What is that, exactly?"
Baxter gave her an indulgent and me a knowing look.
"I daresay Mr. Middlebrook can give you the exact etymological meaning
of the word better than I can, Miss Raven," he answered. "But I can
tell you what the thing means in actual practice! It means to put a
man, or men, ashore, preferably on a desert island, leaving him, or
them, to fend for himself, or themselves, as best he, or they, can! It
may mean slow starvation--at best it means living on what you can pick
up by your own ingenuity, on shell-fish and that sort of thing, even
on edible sea-weed. Marooned? Yes! that was the only experience I ever
had of that--it's all very well talking of it now, as we sit here on a
comfortable little vessel, with a bottle of good wine before us, but
at the time--ah!"
"You'd a stiff time of it?" I suggested.
"Worse than you'd believe," he answered. "That old Yankee skipper was
a vindictive chap, with method in him. He'd purposely gone off the
beaten track to land us on that island, and he played his game so
cleverly that not even the Quicks--who were as subtle as snakes!--knew
anything of his intentions until we were all marched over the side at
the point of ugly-looking revolvers. If it hadn't been for that little
Chinese whom you've just seen we would have starved, for the island
was little more than a reef of rock, rising to a sort of peak in its
centre--worn-out volcano, I imagine--and with nothing eatable on it in
the way of flesh or fruit. But Chuh was a God-send! He was clever at
fishing, and he showed us an edible sea-weed out of which he made good
eating, and he discovered a spring of water--altogether he kept us
alive. All of which," he suddenly added, with a darkening look, "made
the conduct of these two Quicks not merely inexcusable, but devilish!"
"What did they do?" I asked.
"I'm coming to it," he said. "All in due order. We were on that island
several weeks, and from the time we were flung unceremoniously upon
its miserable shores to the day we left it we never saw a sail nor a
wisp of smoke from a steamer. And it may be that this, and our
privations, made us still more birds of a feather than we were.
Anyway, you, Middlebrook, know how men, thrown together in that way,
will talk--nay, must talk unless they'd go mad!--talk about themselves
and their doings and so on. We all talked--we used to tell tales of
our doubtful pasts as we huddled together under the rocks at nights,
and some nice, lurid stores there were, I can assure you. The Quicks
had seen about as much of the doubtful and seamy side of seafaring
life as men could, and all of us could contribute something. Also,
the Quicks had money, safely stowed away in banks here and there--they
used to curse their fate, left there apparently to die, when they
thought of it. And it was that, I think, that led me to tell, one
night, about my adventure with the naughty bank-manager at Blyth, and
of the chests of old monastic treasure which I'd planted up here on
this Northumbrian coast."
"Ah!" I exclaimed. "So you told Noah and Salter Quick that?"
"I told Noah and Salter Quick that," he replied slowly. "Yes--and I
can now explain to you what Salter was after when he appeared in these
parts. I read the newspaper accounts, of the inquest and so on, and I
saw through everything, and could have thrown a lot of light on
things, only I wasn't going to. But it was this way--I told the Quicks
all about the Blyth affair--the truth was, I didn't believe we should
ever get away from that cursed island--but I told them in a fashion
which, evidently, afterwards led to considerable puzzlement on their
part. I told them that I buried the chests of old silver, wherein were
the other valuables taken from the vaults of the bank, in a churchyard
on this coast, close to the graves of my ancestors--I described the
spot and the lie of the ruins pretty accurately. Now where the
Quicks--Salter, at any rate--got puzzled and mixed was over my use of
the word ancestors. What I meant--but never said--was that I had
planted the stuff near the graves of my maternal ancestors, the old De
Knaythevilles, who were once great folk in these parts, and of whose
name my own Christan name, Netherfield, is, of course, a corruption.
But Salter Quick, to be sure, thought the graves would bear the name
Netherfield, and when he came along this coast, it was that name he
was hunting for. Do you see?"
"Then Salter Quick was after that treasure?" I said.
"Of course he was!" replied Baxter. "The wonder to me is that he and
Noah hadn't been after it before. But they were men who had a good
many irons in the fire--too many and some of them far too hot, as it
turned out--and I suppose they left this little affair until an
opportune moment. Without a doubt, not so long after I'd told them the
story, Salter Quick scratched inside the lid of his tobacco-box a
rough diagram of the place I'd mentioned, with the latitude and
longitude approximately indicated--that's the box there's been so much
fuss about, I read in the papers, and I'll tell you more about it in
due process. But now about that island and the Quicks, and how they
and the rest of us got out of it. I told you that the centre of this
island rose to a high peak, separating one coast from the other--well,
one day, when we'd been marooned for several weary weeks and there
didn't seem the least chance of rescue, I, my French friend, and the
Chinaman crossed the shoulder of that peak and went along the other
coast, prospecting--more out of sheer desperation than in the hope of
finding anything. We spent the next night on the other side of the
island, and it was not until late on the following afternoon that we
returned to our camp, if you can call that a camp which was nothing
but a hole in the rocks. And we got back to find Noah and Salter Quick
gone--and we knew how they had gone when the Chinaman's sharp eyes
made out a sail vanishing over the horizon. Some Chinese fishing-boat
had made that island in our absence, and these two skunks had gone
away in her and left us, their companions, to shift for ourselves.
That's the sort the Quicks were!--those were the sort of tricks they'd
play off on so-called friends! Do you wonder, either of you, that both
Noah and Salter eventually got--what they got?"
We made no answer to that beyond, perhaps, a shake of our heads. Then
Miss Raven spoke.
"But--you got away, in the end?" she suggested.
"We got away in the end--some time later, when we were about done
for," assented Baxter, "and in the same way--a Chinese fishing-boat
that came within hail. It landed us on the Kiang-Su coast, and we had
a pretty bad time of it before we made our way to Shanghai. From that
port we worked our passage to Hong-Kong: I had an idea that we might
strike the Quicks there, or get news of them. But we heard nothing of
those two villains, at any rate. But we did hear that the _Elizabeth
Robinson_ had never reached Chemulpo--she'd presumably gone down with
all hands, and we were supposed, of course, to have gone down with
her. We did nothing to disabuse anybody of the notion; both I and my
friend had money in Hong Kong, and we took it up and went off to
Singapore. As for our Chinaman, Chuh, he said farewell to us and
vanished as soon as we got back to Hong-Kong, and we never set eyes on
him again until very recently, when I ran across him in a Chinese
eating-house in Poplar."
"From that meeting, I suppose, the more recent chapters of your story
begin?" I suggested. "Or do they begin somewhat earlier?"
"A bit earlier," he said. "My friend and I came back to England a
little before that--with money in our pockets--we'd been very lucky in
the East--and with a friend of ours, a Chinese gentleman, mind you, we
decided to go in for a little profitable work of another sort, and to
start out by lifting my concealed belongings up here. So we bought
this craft in Hull--then ran her down to the Thames--then, as I say, I
came across Lo Chuh Fen and got his services and those of two other
compatriots of his, then in London, and--here we are! You see how
candid I am--do you know why?"
"It would be interesting to know, Mr. Baxter," said Miss Raven.
"Please tell us."
"Well," he said, with a queer deliberation. "Some men in my position
would have thought nothing about putting bullets through both of you
when we met this afternoon--you hit on our secret. But I'm not that
sort--I treat you as what you are, a gentlewoman and a gentleman, and
no harm whatever shall come to you. Therefore, I feel certain that all
I've said and am saying to you will be treated as it ought to be--by
you. I daresay you think I'm an awful scoundrel, but I told you I was
an Ishmael--and I certainly haven't got the slightest compunction
about appropriating the stuff in those chests on deck--one of the
Forestburnes stole it from the monks--why shouldn't I steal it from
his successor? It's as much mine as his--perhaps more so, for one of
my ancestors, a certain Geoffrey de Knaytheville, was at one time Lord
Abbot of the very house that the Forestburnes stole that stuff from!
I reckon I've a prior claim, Middlebrook?"
"I should imagine," I answered, guardedly, "that it would be very
difficult for anybody to substantiate a claim to ecclesiastical
property--of that particular nature--which disappeared in the
sixteenth century. What is certain, however, is that you've got it.
Take my advice--hand it over to the authorities!"
He looked at me in blank astonishment for a moment; then laughed as a
man laughs who is suddenly confronted by a good joke.
"Hah! hah! hah!" he let out at the top of his voice. "Good! you're a
born humorist, friend Middlebrook!" He pushed the claret nearer. "Fill
your glass again! Hand it over to the authorities? Why, that would
merit a full-page cartoon in the next number of _Punch_. Good, good!
but," he went on, suddenly becoming grave again, "we were talking of
those scoundrelly Quicks. Of course we--that is, my French friend and
I--have been, and are, suspected of murdering them?"
"I think that is so," I answered.
"Well, that's a very easy point to settle, if it should ever come to
it," he replied. "And I'll settle it, for your edification, just now.
Noah and Salter Quick were done to death, one near Saltash, in
Cornwall, the other near Alnwick, in Northumberland, several hundreds
of miles apart, about the same hour of the same evening. Now, my
friend and I, so far from being anywhere near either Saltash or
Alnwick on that particular evening and night, spent them together at
the North Eastern Railway Hotel at York. I went there that afternoon
from London; he joined me from Berwick. We met at the hotel about six
o'clock; we dined in the hotel; we played billiards in the hotel; we
slept in the hotel; we breakfasted in the hotel; the hotel folks will
remember us well, and our particulars are duly registered in their
books on the date in question. We had no hand whatever in the murders
of Noah and Salter Quick, and I give you my word of honour--being under
the firm impression that though I am a pirate, I am still a
gentleman--that neither of us have the very slightest notion who had!"
Miss Raven made an involuntary murmur of approval, and I was so much
convinced of the man's good faith that I stretched out my hand to him.
"Mr. Baxter!" said I, "I'm heartily glad to have that assurance from
you! And whether I'm a humorist or not, I'll beg you once more to take
my advice and give up that loot to the authorities--you can make a
plausible excuse, and throw all the blame on that bank-manager fellow,
and take my word for it, little will be said--and then you can devote
your undoubtedly great and able talents to legitimate ventures!"
"That would be as dull as ditch-water, Middlebrook," he retorted with
a grin. "You're tempting me! But those Quicks--I'll tell you in what
fashion there is a connection between their murder and ourselves, and
one that would need some explanation. Bear in mind that I've kept
myself posted in those murders through the newspapers, and also by
collecting a certain amount of local gossip. Now--you've a certain
somewhat fussy and garrulous old gentleman at Ravensdene Court--"
"Mr. Cazalette!" exclaimed Miss Raven.
"Mr. Cazalette is the name," said Baxter. "I have heard much of him,
through the sources I've just referred to. Now, this Mr. Cazalette,
going to or coming from a place where he bathed every morning, which
place happened to be near the spot whereat Salter Quick was murdered,
found a blood-stained handkerchief?"
"He did," said I. "And a lot of mystery attaches to it."
"That handkerchief belongs to my French friend," said Baxter. "I told
you that he joined me at York from Berwick. As a matter of fact, for
some little time just before the Salter Quick affair, he was down on
this coast, posing as a tourist, but really just ascertaining if
things were as I'd left them at the ruins in the wood above this cove
and what would be our best method of getting the chests of stuff away.
For a week or so, he lodged at an inn somewhere, I think, near
Ravensdene Court, and he used sometimes to go down to the shore for a
swim. One morning he cut his foot on the pebbles, and staunched the
blood with his handkerchief, which he carelessly threw away--and your
Mr. Cazalette evidently found it. That's the explanation of that
little matter. And now for the tobacco-box."
"A much more important point," said I.
"Just so," agreed Baxter. "Now, my friend and I first heard of the murder
while we were at York. In the newspapers that we read, there was an
account of a conversation which took place in, I believe, Mr. Raven's
coach-house, or some out-building, whither the dead man's body had been
carried, between this old Mr. Cazalette and a police-inspector, regarding
a certain metal tobacco-box found on Salter Quick's body. Now I give you
my word that that news was the first intimation we had ever had that the
Quicks were in England! Until then we hadn't the slightest idea that they
were in England--but we knew what those mysterious scratches in the
tobacco-box signified--Salter had made a rude plan of the place I had told
him of, and was in Northumberland to search for it. Then, later, we read
your evidence at the opening of the inquest, and heard what you had to
tell about his quest of the Netherfield graves, and--just to satisfy
ourselves--we determined to get hold of that tobacco-box, for, don't you
see, as long as it was about, a possible clue, there was a danger of
somebody discovering our buried chests of silver and valuables. So my
friend came down again, in his tourist capacity; put up at the same
quarters, strolled about, fished a bit, botanized a bit, attended the
adjourned inquest as a casual spectator, and--abstracted the tobacco-box
under the very noses of the police! It's in that locker now," continued
Baxter, with a laugh, pointing to a corner of the cabin, "and with it are
the handkerchief, your old friend Mr. Cazalette's pocket-book----"
"Oh! your friend got that, too, did he?" I exclaimed. "I see!"
"He abstracted that, too, easily enough, one morning when the old
fellow was bathing," assented Baxter. "Naturally, we weren't going to
take any chances about our hidden goods being brought to light. We're
highly indebted to Mr. Cazalette for making so much fuss about the
tobacco-box, and we're glad there was so much local gossip about it.
Eh?"
I remained silent awhile, reflecting.
"It's a very fortunate thing for both of you that you could, if
necessary, prove your presence at York on the night of the murder," I
remarked at last. "Your doings about the tobacco-box and the other
things might otherwise wear a very suspicious look. As it is, I'm
afraid the police would probably say--granted that they knew what
you've just told us so frankly--that even if you and your French
friend didn't murder Salter Quick and his brother, you were probably
accessory to both murders. That's how it strikes me, anyway."
"I think you're right," he said calmly. "Probably they would. But the
police would be wrong. We were not accessory, either before or since.
We haven't the ghost of a notion as to the identity of the Quicks'
murderers. But since we're discussing that, I'll tell you both of
something that seems to have completely escaped the notice of the
police, the detectives, and of you yourself, Middlebrook. You remember
that in both cases the clothing of the murdered men had been literally
ripped to pieces?"
"Very well," said I. "It had--in Salter's, anyway, to my knowledge."
"And so, they said, it had in Noah's," replied Baxter. "And the
presumption, of course, was that the murderers were searching for
something?"
"Of course," I said. "What other presumption could there be?"
Baxter gave us both a keen, knowing look, bent across the table, and
tapped my arm as if to arrest my closer attention.
"How do you know that the murderers didn't find what they were seeking
for?" he asked in a low, forceful voice. "Come, now!"
I stared at him; so, too, did Miss Raven. He laughed.
"That, certainly, doesn't seem to have struck anybody," he said. "I'm
sure, anyway, it hasn't struck you before. Does it now?"
"I'd never thought of it," I admitted.
"Exactly! Nor, according to the papers--and to my private
information--had anybody," he answered. "Yet--it would have been the
very first thought that would have occurred to me. I should have said
to myself, seeing the ripped-up clothing, 'Whoever murdered these men
was in search of something that one or other of the two had concealed
on him, and the probability is, he's got it.' Of course!"
"I'm sure nobody--police or detectives--ever did think of that," said
I. "But--perhaps with your knowledge of the Quicks' antecedents and
queer doings, you have some knowledge of what they might be likely to
carry about them?"
He laughed at that, and again leaned nearer to us.
"Aye, well!" he replied. "As I've told you so much, I'll tell you
something more. I do know of something that the two men had on them
when they were on that miserable island and that they, of course,
carried away with them when they escaped. Noah and Salter Quick were
then in possession of two magnificent rubies--worth no end of money!"