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The False Faces: Further Adventures from the History of the Lone Wolf

by Louis Joseph Vance · English · Gutenberg #9908 · 483,513 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The False Faces: Further Adventures from the History of the Lone Wolf

Author: Louis Joseph Vance


        
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9908]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9908

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, Tom Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES: FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE WOLF ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, Tom
Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE FALSE FACES

FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE WOLF

BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

1918




CONTENTS


I Out of No Man's Land

II From a British Port

III In the Barred Zone

IV In Deep Waters

V On the Banks

VI Under Suspicion

VII In Stateroom 29

VIII Off Nantucket

IX Sub Sea

X At Base

XI Under the Rose

XII Resurrection

XIII Reincarnation

XIV Defamation

XV Recognition

XVI Au Printemps

XVII Finesse

XVIII Danse Macabre

XIX Force Majeure

XX Riposte

XXI Question

XXII Chicane

XXIII Amnesty




I

OUT OF NO MAN'S LAND


On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as
still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where
they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests
which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards of
that debatable ground.

Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached with
the misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.

Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an
undetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,
alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darkness
and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lights
and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glare
and disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth,
littered with indescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants.
When this happened, the living had no other choice than to ape the dead,
lest the least movement, detected by eyes that peered without rest through
loopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.

Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as
rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might quench
out hate in the heart of man!

For it was raining hard--a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy
atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and
inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of
a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of
machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of
cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmering
curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches
and over all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus--for
want of any hint of slackening--it might rain for another twelve hours, or
eighteen, or twenty-four....

The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled and
winked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained
while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the British
barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned,
shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent detours to avoid the
unspeakable. Only once was his progress interrupted--when straining senses
apprised him that a British patrol was taking advantage of the false truce
to reconnoitre toward the enemy lines, its approach betrayed by a nearing
_squash_ of furtive feet in the boggy earth, the rasp of constrained
respiration, a muttered curse when someone slipped and narrowly escaped a
fall, the edged hiss of an officer's whisper reprimanding the offender.
Incontinently he who crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay
moveless.

Almost at the same instant, warned by a trail of sparks rising in a long
arc from the German trenches, the soldiers imitated his action, and, as
long as those triple stars shone in the murk, made themselves one with him
and the heedless dead. Two lay so close beside him that the man could have
touched either by moving a hand a mere six inches; he was at pains to do
nothing of the sort; he was sedulous to clench his teeth against their
chattering, even to hold his breath, and regretted that he might not mute
the thumping of his heart. Nor dared he stir until, the lights fading out,
the patrol rose and skulked onward.

Thereafter his movements were less stealthy; with a detachment of their
own abroad in No Man's Land, the British would refrain from shooting at
shadows. One had now to fear only German bullets in event the patrol were
discovered.

Rising, the man slipped and stumbled on in semi-crouching posture, ready
to flatten to earth as soon as any one of his many overshoulder glances
detected another sky-spearing flight of sparks. But this necessity he was
spared; no more lights were discharged before he groped through the wires
to the parapet, with almost uncanny good luck, finding the very spot where
the British had come over the top, indicated by protruding uprights of a
rough wooden scaling ladder.

As he turned, felt with a foot for the uppermost rung, and began to
descend, he was saluted by a voice hoarse with exposure, from the black
bowels of the trench:

"Blimy! but ye're back in a 'urry! Wot's up? Forget to put perfume on yer
pocket-'andkerchief--or wot?"

The man's response, if he made any, was lost in a heavy splash as his feet
slipped on the slimy rungs, delivering him precipitately into a knee-deep
stream of foul water which moved sluggishly through the trench like the
current of a half-choked sewer--a circumstance which neither suprised him
nor added to his physical discomfort, who could be no more wet or defiled
than he had been.

Floundering to a foothold, he cast about vainly for a clue to the other's
whereabouts; for if the night was thick in the open, here in the trench
its density was as that of the pit; the man could distinguish positively
nothing more than a pallid rift where the walls opened overhead.

"Well, sullen, w'ere's yer manners? Carn't yer answer a civil question?"

Turning toward the speaker, the man replied in good if rather carefully
enunciated English:

"I am not of your comrades. I am come from the enemy trenches."

"The 'ell yer are! 'Ands up!"

The muzzle of a rifle prodded the man's stomach. Obediently he lifted both
hands above his head. A thought later, he was half blinded by the sudden
spot-light of an electric flash-lamp.

"Deserter, eh? You kamerad--wot?"

"Kamerad!" the man echoed with an accent of contempt. "I am no German--I
am French. I have come through the Boche lines to-night with important
information which I desire to communicate forthwith to your commanding
officer."

"Strike me!" his catechist breathed, skeptical.

There was a new sound of splashing in the trench. A third voice chimed in:
"'Ello? Wot's all the row abaht?"

"Step up and tike a look for yerself. 'Ere's a blighter wot sez 'e's com
from the Germ trenches with important information for the O.C."

"Bloody liar," the newcomer commented dispassionately. "Mind yer eye.
Likely it's just another pl'yful little trick of the giddy Boche. 'Ere
you!" The splashing drew nearer. "Wot's yer gime? Speak up if yer don't
want a bullet through yer in'ards."

"I play no game," the man said patiently. "I am unarmed--your prisoner, if
you like."

"I like, all right. Mike yer mind easy abaht that. But wot's all this
'important information'?"

"I shall divulge that only to the proper authorities. Be good enough to
conduct me to your commanding officer without more delay."

"Wot do yer mike of 'im, corp'ril?" the first soldier enquired. "'Ow abaht
an inch or two o' the bay'net to loosen 'is tongue?"

After a moment's hesitation in perplexed silence, the corporal took the
flash-lamp from the private and with its beam raked the prisoner from head
to foot, gaining little enlightenment from this review of a tall, spare
figure clothed in the familiar gray overcoat of the German private--its
face a mere mask of mud through which shone eyes of singular brilliance and
steadiness, the eyes of a man of intelligence, determination, and courage.

"Keep yer 'ands 'igh," the corporal advised curtly. "Ginger, you search
'im."

Propping his rifle against the wall of the trench, its butt on the
firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly
to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he
unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and
trousers of shoddy drab stuff.

"'E 'asn't got no arms--'e 'asn't got nothink, not so much as 'is blinkin'
latch-key."

"Very good. Get back on yer post. I'll tike charge o' this one."

Grounding his own rifle, the corporal fixed its bayonet, then employed it
in a gesture of unpleasant significance.

"'Bout fice," he ordered. "March. Yer can drop yer 'ands--but don't go
forgettin' I'm right 'ere be'ind yer."

In silence the prisoner obeyed, wading down the flooded trench, the
spot-light playing on his back, striking sullen gleams from the inky water
that swirled about his knees, and disclosing glimpses of coated figures
stationed at regular intervals along the firing-step, faces steadfast to
loopholes in the parapet.

Now and again they passed narrow rifts in the walls of the trench,
entrances to dugouts betrayed by glimmers of candle-light through the
cracks of makeshift doors or the coarse mesh of gunnysack curtains.

From one of these, at the corporal's summons, a sleepy subaltern stumbled
to attend ungraciously to his subordinate's report, and promptly ordered
the prisoner taken on to the regimental headquarters behind the lines.

A little farther on captive and captor turned off into a narrow and
tortuous communication trench. Thereafter for upward of ten minutes they
threaded a labyrinth of deep, constricted, reeking ditches, with so little
to differentiate one from another that the prisoner wondered at the sure
sense of direction which enabled the corporal to find his way without
mis-step, with the added handicap of the abysmal darkness. Then, of a
sudden, the sides of the trench shelved sharply downward, and the two
debouched into a broad, open field. Here many men lay sleeping, with only
waterproof sheets for protection from that bitter deluge which whipped the
earth into an ankle-deep lake of slimy ooze and lent keener accent to the
abiding stench of filth and decomposing flesh. A slight hillock stood
between this field and the firing-line--where now lively fusillades
were being exchanged--its profile crowned with a spectral rank of
shell-shattered poplars sharply silhouetted against a sky in which
star-shells and Verey lights flowered like blooms of hell.

Here the corporal abruptly commanded his prisoner to halt and himself
paused and stood stiffly at attention, saluting a group of three officers
who were approaching with the evident intention of entering the trench. One
of these loosed upon the pair the flash of a pocket lamp. At sight of the
gray overcoat all three stopped short.

A voice with the intonation of habitual command enquired: "What have we
here?"

The corporal replied: "A prisoner, sir--sez 'e's French--come across the
open to-night with important information--so 'e sez."

The spot-light picked out the prisoner's face. The officer addressed him
directly.

"What is your name, my man?"

"That," said the prisoner, "is something which--like my intelligence--I
should prefer to communicate privately."

With a startled gesture the officer took a step forward and peered intently
into that mud-smeared countenance.

"I seem to know your voice," he said in a speculative tone.

"You should," the prisoner returned.

"Gentlemen," said the officer to his companions, "you may continue your
rounds. Corporal, follow me with your prisoner."

He swung round and slopped off heavily through the mud of the open field.

Behind them the sound of firing in the forward trenches swelled to an
uproar augmented by the shrewish chattering of machine-guns. Then a battery
hidden somewhere in the blackness in front of them came into action,
barking viciously. Shells whined hungrily overhead. The prisoner glanced
back: the maimed poplars stood out stark against a sky washed with wave
after wave of infernal light....

Some time later he was conscious of a cobbled way beneath his sodden
footgear. They were entering the outskirts of a ruined village. On either
hand fragments of walls reared up with sashless windows and gaping doors
like death masks of mad folk stricken in paroxysm.

Within one doorway a dim light burned; through it the officer made his way,
prisoner and corporal at his heels, passing a sentry, then descending a
flight of crazy wooden steps to a dank and gloomy cellar, stone-walled
and vaulted. In the middle of the cellar stood a broad table at which an
orderly sat writing by the light of two candles stuck in the necks of empty
bottles. At another table, in a corner, a sergeant and an operator of the
Signal Corps were busy with field telephone and telegraph instruments. On a
meagre bed of damp and mouldy straw, against the farther wall, several men,
orderlies and subalterns, rested in stertorous slumbers. Despite the cold
the atmosphere was a reek of tobacco smoke, sweat, and steam from wet
clothing.

The man at the centre table rose and saluted, offering the commanding
officer a sheaf of scribbled messages and reports. Taking the chair thus
vacated, the officer ran an eye over the papers, issued several orders
inspired by them, then turned attention to the prisoner.

"You may return to your post, corporal."

The corporal executed a smart about-face and clumped up the steps. In
answer to the officer's steadfast gaze the prisoner stepped forward and
confronted him across the table.

"Who are you?"

"My name," said the prisoner, after looking around to make sure that none
of the other tenants of the cellar was within earshot, "is Lanyard--Michael
Lanyard."

"The Lone Wolf!"

Involuntarily the officer jumped up, almost overturning his chair.

"That same," the prisoner affirmed, adding with a grimace of besmirched and
emaciated features that was meant for a smile--"General Wertheimer."

"Wertheimer is not my name."

"I am aware of that. I uttered it merely to confirm my identity to you; it
is the only name I ever knew you by in the old days, when you were in the
British Secret Service and I a famous thief with a price upon my head, when
you and I played hide and seek across half Europe and back again--in the
days of Troyon's and 'the Pack,' the days of De Morbihan and Popinot
and...."

"Ekstrom," the officer supplied as the prisoner hesitated oddly.

"And Ekstrom," the other agreed.

There was a little silence between the two; then the officer mused aloud:
"All dead!"

"All ... but one."

The officer looked up sharply. "Which--?"

"The last-named."

"Ekstrom? But we saw him die! You yourself fired the shot that--"

"It was not Ekstrom. Trust that one not to imperil his precious carcase
when he could find an underling to run the risk for him! I tell you I have
seen Ekstrom within this last month, alive and serving the Fatherland as
the genius of that system of espionage which keeps the enemy advised of
your every move, down to the least considerable--that system which makes it
possible for the Boche to greet every regiment by name when it moves up to
serve its time in your advanced trenches."

"You amaze me!"

"I shall convince you; I bring intelligence which will enable you to tear
apart this web of treason within your own lines and...."

Lanyard's voice broke. The officer remarked that he was
trembling--trembling so violently that to support himself he must grip the
edge of the table with both hands.

"You are wounded?"

"No--but cold to my very marrow, and faint with hunger. Even the German
soldiers are on starvation rations, now; the civilians are worse off; and
I--I have been over there for years, a spy, a hunted thing, subsisting as
casually as a sparrow!"

"Sit down. Orderly!"

And there was no more talk between these two for a time. Not only did the
officer refuse to hear another word before Lanyard had gorged his fill of
food and drink, but an exigent communication from the front, transmitted
through the trench telephone system, diverted his attention temporarily.

Gnawing ravenously at bread and meat, Lanyard watched curiously the scenes
in the cellar, following, as best he might, the tides of combat; gathering
that German resentment of a British bombing enterprise (doubtless the work
of that same squad which had stolen past him in the gloom of No Man's Land)
had developed into a violent attempt to storm the forward trenches.
In these a desperate struggle was taking place. Reinforcements were
imperatively wanted.

Activities at the signallers' table became feverish; the commanding officer
stood over it, reading incoming messages as they were jotted down and
taking such action thereupon as his judgment dictated. Orderlies, dragged
half asleep from their nests of straw, were shaken awake and despatched to
rouse and rush to the front the troops Lanyard had seen sleeping in the
open field. Other orderlies limped or reeled down the cellar steps,
delivered their despatches, and, staggered out through a breach in the wall
to have their injuries attended to in the field dressing-station in the
adjoining cellar, or else threw themselves down on the straw to fall
instantly asleep despite the deafening din.

The Boche artillery, seeking blindly to silence the field batteries whose
fire was galling their offensive, had begun to bombard the village. Shells
fled shrieking overhead, to break in thunderous bellows. Walls toppled
with appalling crashes, now near at hand, now far. The ebb and flow of
rifle-fire at the front contributed a background of sound not unlike the
roaring of an angry surf. Machine-guns gibbered like maniacs. Heavier
artillery was brought into play behind the British lines, apparently at no
great distance from the village; the very flag-stones of the cellar floor
quaked to the concussions of big-calibre guns.

Through the breach in the wall echoed the screams and groans of wounded.
The foul air became saturated with a sickening stench of iodoform. Gusts of
wet wind eddied hither and yon. Candles flickered and flared, guttered out,
were renewed. Monstrous shadows stole out from black corners, crept along
mouldy walls, crouched, sprang and vanished, or, inscrutably baffled,
retreated sullenly to their lairs....

For the better part of an hour the struggle continued; then its vigour
began to wane. The heaviest British metal went out of action; some time
later the field batteries discontinued their activities. The volume of
firing in the advance trenches dwindled, was fiercely renewed some half a
dozen times, died away to normal. Once more the Boche had been beaten back.

Returning to his chair, the commanding officer rested his elbows upon the
table and bowed his head between his hands in an attitude of profound
fatigue. He seemed to remind himself of Lanyard's presence only at 'cost of
a racking effort, lifting heavy-lidded eyes to stare almost incredulously
at his face.

"I presumed you were in America," he said in dulled accents.

"I was ... for a time."

"You came back to serve France?"

Lanyard shook his head. "I returned to Europe after a year, the spring
before the war."

"Why?"

"I was hunted out of New York. The Boche would not let me be."

The officer looked startled. "The Boche?"

"More precisely, Herr Ekstrom--to name him as we knew him. But this I did
not suspect for a long time, that it was he who was responsible for my
persecution. I knew only that the police of America, informed of my
identity with the Lone Wolf, sought to deport me, that every avenue to
an honourable livelihood was closed. So I had to leave, to try to lose
myself."

"Your wife ... I mean to say, you married, didn't you?"

Lanyard nodded. "Lucy stuck by me till ... the end.... She had a little
money of her own. It financed our flight from the States. We made a
round-about journey of it, to elude surveillance--and, I think, succeeded."

"You returned to Paris?"

"No: France, like England, was barred to the Lone Wolf.... We settled down
in Belgium, Lucy and I and our boy. He was three months old. We found a
quiet little home in Louvain--"

The officer interrupted with a low cry of apprehension, Lanyard checked him
with a sombre gesture. "Let me tell you....

"We might have been happy. None knew us. We were sufficient unto ourselves.
But I was without occupation; it occurred to me that my memoirs might
make good reading--for Paris; my friends the French are as fond of their
criminals as you English of your actors. On the second of August I
journeyed to Paris to negotiate with a publisher. While I was away the
Boche invaded Belgium. Before I could get back Louvain had been occupied,
sacked...."

He sat for a time in brooding silence; the officer made no attempt to
rouse him, but the gaze he bent upon the man's lowered head was grave and
pitiful. Abruptly, in a level and toneless voice, Lanyard resumed:

"In order to regain my home I had to go round by way of England and
Holland. I crossed the Dutch frontier disguised as a Belgian peasant. When
I reentered Louvain it was to find ... But all the world knows what the
blond beast did in Louvain. My wife and little son had vanished utterly. I
searched three months before I found trace of either. Then ... Lucy died in
my arms in a wretched hovel near Aerschot. She had seen our child butchered
before her eyes. She herself...."

Lanyard's hand, that rested on the table, clenched and whitened beneath its
begrimed skin. His eyes fathomed distances immeasurably removed beyond the
confines of that grim cellar. But he presently continued:

"Ekstrom had accompanied the army of invasion, had seen and recognized Lucy
in passing through Louvain. Therefore she and my son were among the first
to be sacrificed.... When I stood over her grave I dedicated my life to the
extermination of Ekstrom and all his breed. I have since done things I do
not like to think about. But the Prussian spy system is the weaker for my
work....

"But Ekstrom I could never find. It was as if he knew I hunted him. He was
seldom twenty-four hours ahead of me, yet I never caught up with him but
once; and then he was too closely guarded.... I pursued him to Berlin,
to Potsdam, three times to the western front, to Serbia, once to
Constantinople, twice to Petrograd."

The officer uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lanyard looked his way
with a depreciatory air.

"Nothing strange about that. To one of my early training that was
easy--everything was easy but the end I sought.... En passant I collected
information concerning the workings of the Prussian spy system. From time
to time I found means to communicate somewhat of this to the Surété in
Paris. I believe France and England have already profited a little through
my efforts. They shall profit more, and quickly, when I have told all that
I have to tell....

"Of a sudden Ekstrom vanished. Overnight he disappeared from Germany. A
false lead brought me back to this front. Two days ago I learned he had
been sent to America on a secret mission. Knowing that the States have
severed diplomatic relations with Berlin and tremble on the verge of a
declaration of war, we can surmise something of the nature of his mission.
I mean to see that he fails.... To follow him to America, making my way
out through Belgium and Holland, pursuing such furtive ways as I must in
territory dominated by the Boche, meant much time lost. So I came through
the lines to-night. Fortune was kind in throwing me into your hands: I
count upon your assistance. As an ex-agent of the Secret Service you are in
a position to make smooth my path; as an Englishman, you will advance the
interests of a prospective ally of England if you help me to the limit of
your ability; for what I mean to do in America will serve that country, by
exposing the conspiracies of the Boche across the water, as much as it will
serve my private ends."

The officer's hand fell across the table and closed upon the knotted fist
of the Lone Wolf.

"As an Englishman," he said simply--"of course. But no less as your
friend."




II

FROM A BRITISH PORT


"And one man in his time plays many parts": few more than this same
Lanyard. In no way to be identified with the hunted creature who crept into
the British lines out of No Man's Land was the Monsieur Duchemin who, ten
days after that wintry midnight, took passage for New York from "a British
port," aboard the steamship _Assyrian_.

André Duchemin was the name inscribed in the credentials furnished him in
recognition of signal assistance rendered the British Secret Service in its
task of scotching the Prussian spy system. And the personality he chose
to assume suited well the name. A man of modest and amiable deportment,
viewing the world with eyes intelligent and curious, his temper reacting
from its ways in terms of grave humour, Monsieur Duchemin passed peaceably
on his lawful occasions, took life as he found it, made the best of irksome
circumstances.

This last idiosyncrasy stood him in good stead. For the _Assyrian_ failed
to clear upon her proposed sailing date and for a livelong week thereafter
chafed alongside her landing stage, steam up, cargo laden and stowed,
nothing lacking but the Admiralty's permission to begin her westbound
voyage--a permission inscrutably withheld, giving rise to a common
discontent which the passengers dissembled to the various best of their
abilities, that is to say, in most cases thinly or not at all.

Yet they were none of them unreasonable beings. They had come aboard one
and all keyed up to a high nervous pitch, pardonable in such as must commit
their lives to the dread adventure of the barred zone, wanting nothing
so much as to get it over with, whatever its upshot. And everlasting
procrastination required them day after day to steel their hearts anew
against that Terror which followed its furtive ways beneath the leaden
waters of the Channel!

Alone among them this Monsieur Duchemin paraded successfully a false face
of resignation, protesting no predilection whatsoever for a watery grave,
no infatuate haste to challenge the Hun upon his chosen hunting-ground. In
the fullness of time it would be permitted to him to go down to the sea in
this ship. Meanwhile he found it apparently pleasant and restful to explore
the winding cobbled ways of that antiquated waterside community, made over
by the hand of War into a bustling seaport, or to tramp the sunken lanes
that seamed those green old Cornish hills which embosomed the wide harbour
waters, or to lounge about the broad white decks of the _Assyrian_ watching
the diurnal traffic of the haven--a restless, warlike pageant.

Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth
of a weirdly assorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a
night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers
came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing
offshore detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned
black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the
fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to
refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret
errands.

There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of
war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its
fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ashore
and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.

And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying
its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.

Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the
town gaol-yard.

One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _Assyrian_,
Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter
whence the sounds reverberated.

The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,
paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.

"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.

Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva,
known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.

"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"

"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our
nootral friends from Norway."

The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"

"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us
to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as
satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the
warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur
Duchemin?"

"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.

"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good
grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and said
about it and war, all in the same breath."

Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with
patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.

"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised
if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third
mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this benevolent
nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"

"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping
flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters
have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted
to depart this night."

Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of
crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the _Assyrian_
warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.

Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise,
the passengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty
minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would soon
after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were expected promptly
to assemble on deck, with life-preservers, and station themselves near the
boats to which they were individually assigned.

For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill
blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment
of life-belts.

A preoccupied company assembled in the dining saloon for what might be
its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension, conversation
languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who had been loudest
in complaining at the delays were notably unheard; even Crane, Lanyard's
nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally subdued. Reviewing that array of
sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard remarked--not for the first time, but
with renewed gratitude--that in all the roster of passengers none were
children and but two were women: the American widow of an English officer
and her very English daughter, an angular and superior spinster.

Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room, Lanyard
slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.

Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud with
clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now groping, like
a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness. Ashore a
few wan lights, widely spaced, winked uncertainly, withdrawn in vast
remoteness; those near at hand, of the anchored shipping, skipped and
swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin dance. To him who paced those
vacant, darkened decks, the sense of dissociation from all the common,
kindly phenomena of civilization was something intimate and inescapable.
Melancholy as well rode upon that black-winged wind.

At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the teakwood
rail and with importunate eyes searched the masked face of his destiny.
There was great fear in his heart, not of death, but lest death overtake
him before that scarlet hour when he should encounter the man whom he must
always think of as "Ekstrom."

After that, nothing would matter: let Death come then as swiftly as it
willed....

He was not even middle-aged, on the hither side of thirty; yet his attitude
was that of one who had already crossed the great divide of the average
mortal span: he looked backward upon a life, never forward to one. To him
his history seemed a thing written, lacking the one word Finis: he had
lived and loved and lost--had arrayed himself insolently against God and
Man, had been lifted toward the light a little way by a woman's love, had
been thrust relentlessly back into the black pit of his damnation. He made
no pretense that it was otherwise with him: remained now merely the thing
he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once
kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled
again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous
to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to
destroy and be in turn destroyed....

Two decks below, about amidships, a cargo port was thrust open to the
night. A thick, broad beam of light leaped out, buffeting the murk,
striking evanescent glimmers from the rocking facets of the waters.
Deckhands busied themselves rigging out an accommodation ladder. A tender
of little tonnage panted nervously up out of nowhere and was made fast
alongside. The light raked its upper deck, picking out in passing a group
of men in uniforms. Fugitively something resembling a petticoat snapped
in the wind. Then several persons moved toward the accommodation ladder,
climbed it, disappeared through the cargo port. The wearer of the petticoat
did not accompany them.

Lanyard noted these matters subconsciously, for the time altogether
preoccupied, casting forward his thoughts along those dim trails his feet
must tread who followed his dark star....

Ten minutes later a deck-steward found him, and paused, touching his cap.

"Beg pardon, sir, but all passingers is requested to report immedately in
the music room."

Indifferently Lanyard thanked the man and went below, to find the music
room tenanted by a full muster of his fellow passengers, all more or less
indignantly waiting to be cross-examined by the party of port officials
from the tender--the ship's purser standing by together with the second and
third officers and a number of stewards.

Resentment was not unwarranted: already, before being suffered to take up
quarters on board the _Assyrian_, each passenger had submitted to a most
comprehensive survey of his credentials, his mental, moral, and social
status, his past record, present affairs, and future purposes. A formality
to be expected by all such as travel in war time, it had been rigid but
mild in contrast with this eleventh-hour inquisition--a proceeding so
drastic and exhaustive that the only plausible inference was official
determination to find excuse for ordering somebody ashore in irons. Nothing
was overlooked: once passports and other proofs of identity had been
scrutinized, each passenger was conducted to his stateroom and his person
and luggage subjected to painstaking search. None escaped; on the other
hand, not one was found guilty of flagitious peculiarity. In the upshot the
inquisitors, baffled and betraying every symptom of disappointment, were
fain to give over and return to their tender.

By this time Lanyard, one of the last to be grilled and passed, found
himself as little inclined for sleep as the most timorous soul on board.
Selecting an American novel from the ship's library, he repaired to
the smoking room, where, established in a corner apart, he became an
involuntary and, at first, a largely inattentive, eavesdropper upon an
animated debate involving some eight or ten gentlemen at a table in the
middle of the saloon--its subject, the recent visitation.

Measures so extraordinary were generally held to indicate an incentive more
extraordinary still.

"You can't get away from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of
funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't
held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come
aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness.
There's a reason."

"And what," a satiric English voice enquired, "do you assume that reason to
be?"

"Search me. 'Sfar's I'm concerned the processes of the British Intelligence
Office are a long sight past finding out."

"It is simple enough," one of Crane's compatriots suggested: "the
_Assyrian_ is suspected of entertaining a devil unawares."

"Monsieur means--?" the Swiss enquired.

"I mean, the authorities may have been led to believe some one of us a
questionable character."

"German spy?"

"Possibly."

"Or an English traitor?"

"Impossible," asserted another Briton heavily. "There is to-day no such
thing in England. Two years ago the supposition might have been plausible.
But that breed has long since been stamped out--in England."

"Another guess," Crane cut in: "they've taken considerable trouble to clear
the track for us. Maybe it occurred to somebody at the last moment to make
sure none of us was likely to pull off an inside job."

"'Inside job?'" Dressler pleaded.

"Planting bombs in the coal bunkers--things like that--anything to crab our
getting through the barred zone in spite of mines and U-boats."

"Any such attempt would mean almost certain death!"

"What of it? It's been tried before--and got away with. You've got to hand
it to Fritz, he'll risk hell-for-breakfast cheerful any time he gets it in
his bean he's serving Gott und Vaterland."

"Granted," said the Englishman. "But I fancy such an one would find it far
from easy to secure passage upon this or any other vessel."

"How so? You may have haltered all your traitors, but there's still
a-plenty German spies living in England. Even you admit that. And if they
can get by your Secret Service, to say nothing of Scotland Yard, what's to
prevent their fixing to leave the country?"

"Nothing, certainly. But I still contend it is hardly likely."

"Of course it's hardly likely. Look at these guys to-night--dead set on
making an awful example of anybody that couldn't come clean. I didn't
notice them missing any bets. They combed me to the Queen's taste; for
a while I was sure scared they'd extract my pivot tooth to see if there
wasn't something incriminating and degrading secreted inside it. And nobody
got off any easier. _I_ say the good ship _Assyrian_ has a pretty clean
bill of health to go sailing with."

"On the other hand"--yet another American voice was speaking--"no spy or
criminal worth his salt would try to ship without preparations thorough
enough to insure success, barring accidents."

"Criminal?" drawled the Briton incredulously.

"The enterprisin' burglar keeps a-burglin', even in war time. There have
been notable burglaries in London of late, according to your newspapers."

"And you think the thief would attempt to smuggle his loot out of the
country aboard such a ship as this?"

"Why not?"

"Scotland Yard to the contrary notwithstanding?"

"If Scotland Yard is as efficient as you think, sir, certainly any sane
thief would make every effort to leave a country it was making too hot for
him."

"Considerable criminal!" Crane jeered.

"Undeceive yourself, señor." This was a Brazilian, a quiet little dark body
who commonly contented himself with a listening rôle in the smoking-room
discussions. "There are truly criminals of intelligence. And war conditions
are driving them out of Europe."

Of a sudden Lanyard--stretched out at length upon the leather cushions,
in full view of these gossips--became aware that he was being closely
scrutinised. By whom, with what reason or purpose, he could not surmise;
and it were unwise to look up from that printed page. But that sixth sense
of his--intuition, what you will--that exquisitively sensitive sentinel
admonished that at least one person in the room was watching him narrowly.

Though he made no move other than to turn a page, his glance followed
blindly blurring lines of text, and his quickened wits overlooked no shade
of meaning or intonation as that talk continued.

"A criminal of intelligence," some one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose
fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to the realm of fable."

"You took the identical words right out of my mouth," Crane complained
bitterly.

"Your pardon, señores: history confutes your incredulity."

"But we are talking about to-day."

"Even to-day--can you deny it?--men attain high places by means which the
law would construe as criminal, were they not intelligent enough to outwit
it."

"Big game," Crane objected; "something else again. What we contend is no
man of ordinary common sense could get his own consent to crack a safe, or
pick a pocket, or do second-story work, or pull any rough stuff like that."

"Again you overlook living facts," persisted the Brazilian.

"Name one--just one."

"The Lone Wolf, then."

"Unnatural history is out of my line," Crane objected. "Why is a lone wolf,
anyway?"

The Brazilian's voice took on an accent of exasperation. "Señores, I do not
jest. I am a student of psychology, more especially of criminal psychology.
I lived long in Paris before this war, and took deep interest in the case
of the Lone Wolf."

"Well, you've got me all excited. Go on with your story."

"With much pleasure.... This gentleman, then, this Michael Lanyard, as he
called himself, was a distinguished Parisian figure, a man of extraordinary
attainment, esteemed the foremost connoisseur d'art in all Europe.
Suddenly, at the zenith of his career, he disappeared. Subsequently it
became known that he had been identical with that great Parisian criminal,
the Lone Wolf, a superman of thieves who had plundered all Europe with
unvarying success for almost a decade."

"Then what made the silly ass quit?"

"According to my information, he won the love of a young woman--"

"And reformed for her sake, of course?"

"To the contrary, señor; Lanyard renounced his double life because of a
theory on which he had founded his astonishing success. According to this
theory, any man of intelligence may defy society as long as he will, always
providing he has no friend, lover, or confederate in whom to confide. A man
self-contained can never be betrayed; the stupid police seldom apprehend
even the most stupid criminal, save through the treachery of some intimate.
This Lanyard proved his theory by confounding not only the utmost
efforts of the police but even the jealous enmity of that association of
Continental criminals known as the Bande Noire--until he became a lover.
Then he proved his intelligence: in one stroke he flouted the police,
delivered into their hands the inner circle of the Bande Noire, and
vanished with the woman he loved."

"And then--?"

"The rest," said the Brazilian, "is silence."

"It is for to-night, anyway," Crane observed, yawning. "It's bedtime. Here
comes the busy steward to put the lights and us out."

There was a general stir; men drained glasses, knocked out pipes, got up,
murmured good-nights. Lanyard closed the American novel upon a forefinger,
looked up abstractedly, rose, moved toward the door. The utmost effort of
exceptional powers of covert observation assured him that, at the moment,
none of the company favoured him with especial attention; the author of
that interest whose intensity had so weighed upon his consciousness had
been swift to dissemble.

On his way forward he exchanged bows and smiles with Crane and one or two
others, his gesture completely casual. Yet when he entered the starboard
alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had
contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days'
association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his
esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other--not even the
Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name the Lone Wolf.

It was, furthermore, quite possible that the mention of his erstwhile
sobriquet had been utterly fortuitous.

And yet, one might not forget that sensation of being under intent
surveillance....

In his stateroom Lanyard stood for several minutes gravely peering into the
mirror above the washstand.

The face he scanned was lean and worn in feature, darkly weathered, framed
in hair whose jet already boasted an accent of silver at either temple--the
face of a man inured to hardship, seasoned in suffering, strong in
self-knowledge. The incandescence of an intelligence coldly dispassionate,
quick and shrewd, lighted those dark eyes. Distinctively a face of Gallic
cast, three years of long-drawn torment had served in part to erase from
it wellnigh all resemblance to both the brilliant social freebooter of
ante-bellum Paris and that undesirable alien whom the authorities had
sought to deport from the States. Amazing facility in impersonation had
done the rest; unrecognisable as what he had been, he was to-day flawlessly
the incarnation of what he elected to seem--Monsieur Duchemin, gentleman,
of Paris.

Impossible to believe his disguise had been so soon penetrated....

And yet, again, that gossip of the smoking room....

Police work? Or had Ekstrom's creatures picked up his trail once more?

Beneath that urbane mask of his, a hunted, wild thing poised in question,
mistrustful of the very wind, prick-eared, fangs agleam, eyes grimly
apprehensive....

A little sound, the least of metallic clicks, breaking the hush of his
solitude, froze the adventurer to attention. Only his glance swerved
swiftly to a fastened door in the forward partition--his stateroom being
the aftermost of three that might be thrown together to form a suite. The
nickeled knob was being tried with infinite precaution. On the half turn it
checked with a faint repetition of the click. Then the door itself quivered
almost imperceptibly to pressure, though it yielded not a fraction of an
inch.

Lanyard's eyes hardened. He did not stir from where he stood, but one hand
whipped an automatic from his pocket while the other darted out to the
switch-box by the head of his berth and extinguished the light.

Instantly a glimmer of light in the forward stateroom showed through
a narrow strip of iron grill-work set in the top of the partition for
ventilating purposes.

Simultaneously the door-knob was gently released, and with another louder
click the light in the adjoining cubicle was blotted out.

Mystified, Lanyard undressed and turned in, but not to sleep--not for a
little, at least.

Who might this neighbour be who tried his door so stealthily? Before
to-night that room had had no tenant. Apparently one of the passengers had
seen fit to shift his quarters. To what end? To keep a jealous eye on
the Lone Wolf, perhaps? So much the better, then: Lanyard need only make
enquiry in the morning to identify his enemy.

Deliberately closing his eyes, he dismissed the enigma. He possessed in
marked degree that attribute of genius, ability to command slumber at will.
Swiftly the troubled deeps of thought grew calm; on their placid surface
inconsequent visions were mirrored darkly, fugitive scenes from the store
of subconscious memory: Crane's lantern-jawed physiognomy, keen eyes
semi-veiled by humorously drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth
bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of
a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Thêléme at three in
the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly
figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ...
the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which
momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a petticoat
fluttering in its midst....




III

IN THE BARRED ZONE


Day broke with rather more than half a gale blowing beneath a louring sky.
Once clear of the bottleneck mouth of the harbour, the _Assyrian_ ran into
brutal quartering seas. An old hand at such work, for upward of a decade
a steady-paced Dobbin of the transatlantic lanes, she buckled down to it
doggedly and, remembering her duty by her passengers, rolled no more than
she had to, buried her nose in the foaming green only when she must. For
all her care, the main deck forward was alternately raked by stinging
volleys of spray and scoured by frantic cascades. More than once the crew
of the bow gun narrowly escaped being carried overboard to a man. Blue with
cold, soaked to the buff despite oilskins, they stuck stubbornly to their
posts. Perched beyond reach of shattering wavecrests, the passengers on the
boat-deck huddled unhappily in the lee of the superstructure--and snarled
in response to the cheering information that better conditions for baffling
the ubiquitous U-boat could hardly have been brewed by an indulgent
Providence. Sheeting spindrift contributed to lower visibility: two
destroyers standing on parallel courses about a mile distant to port and
to starboard were more often than not barely discernible, spectral vessels
reeling and dipping in the haze. The ceaseless whistle of wind in the
rigging was punctuated by long-drawn howls which must have filled any
conscientious banshee with corrosive envy.

Toward mid-morning rain fell in torrents, driving even the most fearful
passengers to shelter within the superstructure. A majority crowded the
landing at the head of the main companionway close by the leeward door.
Bolder spirits marched off to the smoking room--Crane starting this
movement with the declaration that, for his part, he would as lief drown
like a rat in a trap as battling to keep up in the frigid inferno of those
raging seas. A handful of miserables, too seasick to care whether the ship
swam or sank, mutinously took to their berths.

Stateroom 27--adjoining Lanyard's--sported obstinately a shut door.
Lanyard, sedulous not to discover his interest by questioning the stewards,
caught never a glimpse of its occupant. For his own satisfaction he took a
covert census of passengers on deck as the vessel entered the danger zone,
and made the tally seventy-one all told--the number on the passenger list
when the _Assyrian_ had left her landing stage the previous evening.

It seemed probable, therefore, that the person in 27 had come aboard from
the tender, either with or following the official party. Lanyard was
unable to say that more had not left the tender than appeared to sit in
inquisition in the music room.

By noon the wind was beginning to moderate, and the sea was being beaten
down by that relentlessly lashing rain. Visibility, however, was more low
than ever. A fairly representative number descended to the dining saloon
for luncheon--a meal which none finished. Midway in its course a thunderous
explosion to starboard drove all in panic once more to the decks.

Within two hundred yards of the _Assyrian_ a floating mine had destroyed a
patrol boat. No more was left of it than an oil-filmed welter of splintered
wreckage: of its crew, never a trace.

Imperturbably the _Assyrian_ proceeded. Not so her passengers: now the
smoking room was deserted even by the insouciant Crane, and the seasick to
a woman brought their troubles back to the boat-deck.

Alone the tenant of 27 stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible
indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on
board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason
brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation,
feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate
avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom the
mystery took precedence in his thoughts even to the personal solicitude
excited by last night's gossip of the smoking room....

With no other disturbing incident the afternoon wore away, the wind
steadily flagging, the waves as steadily subsiding. When twilight closed in
there was nothing more disturbing to one's equilibrium than a sea of long
and sullen rolls scored by the pelting downpour.

Perhaps as many as ten venturesome souls dined in the saloon, their fellows
sticking desperately to the decks and contenting themselves with coffee and
sandwiches.

Daylight waned, terrors waxed: passengers instinctively gravitated into
little knots and clusters, conversing guardedly as if fearful lest their
normal accents bring down upon them those Apaches of the underseas for
signs of whom their frightened glances incessantly ranged over-rail and
searched the heaving wastes.

The understanding was tacit that all would spend the night on deck.

Dusk at length blotted out the shadows of their guardian destroyers, and a
great and desolating loneliness settled down upon the ship. One by one
the passengers grew dumb; still they clung together, but seemingly their
tongues would no more function.

With nightfall, the rain ceased, the breeze freshened a trifle, the pall of
cloud lifted and broke, giving glimpses of remote, impersonal stars. Later
a gibbous moon leered through the flying wrack, checkering the sea with
a restless pattern of black and silver. In this ghastly setting the
_Assyrian_, showing no lights, a shape of flying darkness pursuing a course
secret to all save her navigators, strained ever onward, panting, groaning,
quivering from stem to stern ... like an enchanted thing doomed to
perpetual labours, striving vainly to break bonds invisible that transfixed
her to one spot forever-more, in the midst of that bleak purgatory of
shadow and moonshine and dread....

Sensitive to the eerie influence of the hour, Lanyard interrupted the tour
of the decks which he had steadily pursued for the better part of the
evening, and rested at the forward rail, looking down over the main deck,
its bleached planking dotted with dark shapes of fixed machinery. In the
bows the formless, uncouth bulk of the gun squatted in its tarpaulin. Its
crew tramped heavily to and fro, shivering in heavy jackets, hands in
pockets, shoulders hunched up to ears. Farther aft an iron door clanged
heavily behind a sailor emerging from an alleyway; he approached the ship's
bell, with practised hand sounded two double strokes, then turned and sang
out in the weird minor traditional in his calling:

"_Four bells--and a-a-all's well_!"

Even as the wind made free with the melancholy echoes of that assurance,
the spell upon the ship was exorcised.

Overhead, from the foremast crow's-nest, a voice screamed, hoarsely urgent:

"_Torpedo! 'Ware submarine to port_!"

Many things happened simultaneously, or in a span of seconds strangely
scant. The gunners sprang to station, whipping away the tarpaulin, while
their lieutenant focussed binoculars upon the confused distances of the
night. Obedient to his instructions, the long, gleaming tube of steel
pivoted smoothly to port.

From the bridge a signal rocket soared, hissing. The whistle loosed
stentorian squalls of indignation and distress--one long and four short.
Commands were shouted; the engine-room telegraph wrangled madly. The
momentum of the _Assyrian_ was checked startlingly; her bows sheered
smartly off to port.

A rumour of frightened voices and pounding feet came from the leeward
boat-deck, where the main body of the passengers was congregated, hidden
from Lanyard by the shoulder of the foreward deck-house. A number of men
ran forward, paused by the rail, stared, and scurried back, yelling in
alarm. At this the din swelled to uproar.

Scanning closely the surface of the sea, Lanyard himself descried a silvery
arrow of spray lancing the swells, making with deadly speed toward the port
bow of the _Assyrian_. But now both screws were churning full speed astern;
the vessel lost headway altogether. Then her engines stopped. For a
breathless instant she rested inert, like something paralyzed with fright,
bows-on to the torpedo, the telegraph ringing frantically. Then the
starboard screw began to turn full ahead, the port remaining idle. The
bows swung off still more sharply to port. The torpedo shot in under them,
vanished for a breathless moment, reappeared a boat's-length to starboard,
plunged harmlessly on its unhindered way down the side of the vessel, and
disappeared astern.

Amidships terrified passengers milled like sheep, hampering the work of the
boat-crews at the davits. Ship's officers raged among them, endeavouring
to restore order. Half a mile or so dead ahead a tiny tongue of flame spat
viciously in the murk. A projectile shrieked overhead, and dropped into the
sea astern. Another followed and fell short.

The U-boat was shelling the _Assyrian_.

The forward gun barked violent expostulation, if without visible effect;
the submarine lobbing two more shells at the steamship with an indifference
to its own peril astonishing in one of its craven breed, trained to strike
and run before counterstroke may be delivered. Its extraordinary temerity,
indeed, argued ignorance of the convoying destroyers.

Coincident with the second shot, however, these unleashed searchlights
slashed the dark through and through with their great, white, fanlike
blades, till first one then the other picked up and steadied relentlessly
upon a toy-boat shape that swam the swells about midway between the
_Assyrian_ and the destroyer off the port bows.

Simultaneously the quickfirers of the latter went into action, jetting
orange flame. In the searchlights' glare, spurts of white water danced all
round the submarine. A mutter of gunfire rolled over to the _Assyrian_,
abruptly silenced by an imperative deep voice of heavier metal--which spoke
but once.

With the lurid unreality of clap-trap theatrical illusion the U-boat
vomited a great, spreading sheet of flame....

Someone at the rail, near Lanyard's shoulder, uttered a hushed cry of
horror.

He paid no heed, his interest wholly focussed upon that distant patch of
shining water. As his dazzled vision cleared he saw that the submarine had
disappeared.

Unconsciously, in French, he commented: "So that is finished!"

Likewise in French, but in a woman's voice of uncommon quality, deep
and bell-sweet, came the protest from the passenger at his side: "But,
monsieur, what are we doing? We turn away from them--those poor things
drowning there!"

That was quite true: under forced draught the _Assyrian_ was heading away
on a new course.

"They drown out there in that black water--and we leave them to that!"

Lanyard turned. "The destroyers will take care of them," he said--"if any
survived that explosion with strength enough to swim."

He spoke from the surface of his thoughts and with a calm that veiled
profound surprise. The woman by his side was neither the American widow nor
her English daughter, but wholly a stranger to the ship's company he knew.

The training of the Lone Wolf had been wasted if one swift glance had
failed to comprehend every essential detail: that tall, straight, slender
figure cloaked in the folds of a garment whose hood framed a face of
singular pallor and sweetness in the moonlight, its shadowed eyes wide with
emotion, its lips a little parted....

With a shiver she lifted her hands to her eyes as if to darken the visions
of her imagination.

"They die out there," she said, in murmurs barely audible.... "We turn our
backs on them.... You think that right?"

"We play the game by the rules the enemy himself laid down," Lanyard
returned. "They would have sunk us without one qualm of pity--would, in all
probability, have shelled our boats had any succeeded in getting off. They
have done as much before, and will again. It is out of reason to insist
that the captain risk his ship in the hope of picking up one or two
drowning assassins."

"Risk his ship? How? They are helpless--"

"As a rule, U-boats hunt in pairs; always, when specially charged to sink
one certain vessel. It was so with the _Lusitania_, with the _Arabic_ as
well; I don't doubt it was so in this instance--that we should have heard
from a second submarine had not the destroyers opened fire when they did."

The woman stared. "You think that--?"

"That the Boche had specific instructions to waylay and sink the
_Assyrian_? I begin to think that--yes."

This declaration affected the woman curiously; she shrank away a little, as
from a blow, her eyes winced, her pale lips quivered. When she spoke, it
was, strangely enough, in English so naturally enunciated that Lanyard
could not doubt that this was her mother tongue.

"Then you think it is because...."

Of a sudden she wilted, clinging to the rail and trembling wildly.

Lanyard shot a glance aft. The disorder among the passengers was measurably
less, though excitement still ran so high that he felt sure they were as
yet unnoticed. On impulse he stepped nearer.

"Pardon, mademoiselle," he said quietly; "you are excusably unstrung.
But all danger is past; and there is still time to regain your stateroom
unobserved. If you will permit me to escort you...."

He watched her narrowly, but she showed no surprise at this suggestion of
intimacy with her affairs. After a brief moment she pulled herself together
and dropped a hand upon the arm he offered. In another minute he was
helping her over the raised watersill of the door.

Like all the ship the landing and main companionway were dark; but below,
on the promenade deck, the second doorway aft on the starboard side stood
ajar, affording a glimpse of a dimly lighted stateroom.

With neither hesitation nor surprise--for he was already satisfied in this
matter--Lanyard conducted the woman to this door and stopped.

Her hand fell from his arm. She faltered on the threshold of Stateroom 27,
eyeing him dubiously.

"Thank you, monsieur...?"

There was just enough accent of enquiry to warrant his giving her the name:
"Duchemin, mademoiselle."

"Monsieur Duchemin.... Please to tell me how you knew this was my
stateroom?"

"I occupy Stateroom 29. There was no one in 27 till after the tender came
out last night. Furthermore, your face was strange, and I have come to know
all others on board during our week's delay in port."

The light was at her back; he could distinguish little of her shadowed
features, but fancied her a bit discountenanced.

In a subdued voice she said, "Thank you," once more, a hand resting
significantly on the door-knob. But still he lingered.

"If mademoiselle would be so good as to tell me something in return--?"

"If I can...."

"Then why, mademoiselle, did you try my door last night?"

"It was neither locked nor bolted on my side. I wished to make sure--"

"So one fancied. Thank you. Good-night, mademoiselle...?"

She was impervious to his hint. "Good-night, Monsieur Duchemin," she said,
and closed the door.

Now Lanyard's quarters opened not on this alleyway fore-and-aft but on a
short and narrow athwartship passage. And as he turned away he saw out of
the corner of an eye a white-jacketed figure emerge from this passageway
and move hurriedly aft. Something furtive in the round of the fellow's
shoulders challenged his curiosity. He called quietly:

"Steward!"

There was no answer. By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving
in that deep gloom. He cried again, more loudly:

"I say, steward!"

He could hardly see, but fancied that the man quickened his steps: in
another instant he vanished altogether.

Smothering an impulse to give chase, the adventurer swung alertly into the
narrow passage and opened the door to Stateroom 29. The room was dark, but
as he fumbled for the switch, the door in the forward partition was thrust
open and the girl's slight figure showed, tensely poised against the light
behind her.

"Monsieur Duchemin!" she cried, in a voice sharp with doubt.

Lanyard turned the switch. "Mademoiselle," he said, and coolly crossed to
the port, drawing the light-proof curtains.

"This door was locked all day--locked when the firing alarmed me and I went
out to the deck."

"And on my side, mademoiselle, it was locked and bolted when last I was
here, shortly before dinner." "Whoever unfastened it entered my room during
my absence and tampered with my luggage."

"You have missed something?"

Gaze intent to his she nodded. He shrugged and cast shrewdly round his
quarters for some clue to the enigma. His glance fastened on a leather
bellows-bag beneath the berth. Dropping to his knees he pulled this out,
and looked up with a quizzical grimace, his forefinger indicating the lock,
which was uncaught.

"I left this latched but not locked," he said. "Perhaps I, too, have lost
something."

Opening the bag out flat, he sat back on his heels, with practised eye
inspecting its neat arrangement of intimate things.

"Nothing has been taken, mademoiselle," he announced gravely. "But
something--I think--has been generously added. I seem to have an anonymous
admirer on board."

Bending forward, he rummaged beneath a sheaf of shirts and brought forth
a small jewel-box of grained leather, with a monogram stamped on the
lid--"C.B."

"The lock is broken," he observed, and handed it up to the woman. "As to
its contents, mademoiselle herself knows best...."

The woman opened the box.

"Nothing is missing," she said in a thoughtful voice.

"I am relieved." Lanyard closed the bag, thrust it back beneath the berth,
and got upon his feet. "But you are quite sure--?"

"My jewels are all in order," she affirmed, without meeting his gaze.

"And you miss nothing else?"

"Nothing."

Was there an accent of hesitation in this response?

"Then, I take it, the thief was disappointed."

Now she glanced quickly at his eyes. "Why do you say that?"

"If the thief had found what he sought, he would never have presented it
to me, mademoiselle would never again have seen her jewels. Failing in
his object, after breaking that lock, and interrupted by your unexpected
return, he planted the case with me, hoping to have me suspected. I am
fortunately able to prove the best of alibis.... So then," said Lanyard,
smiling, "it would appear that, though we met ten minutes ago for the first
time--and I have yet to know mademoiselle by name--we are allies in a
common cause."

"My name is Brooke--Cecelia Brooke," she said quietly--"if it matters. But
why 'allies'?"

"It appears we own a common enemy. Each of us possesses something which
that one desires--you a secret, I a good name. (Duchemin, indeed, I have
always held to be an excellent name.) I shall not hesitate to call on you
if my treasure is again violated. May I venture to hope mademoiselle will
prove as ready to command my services?"

"Thank you. I fancy, however, there will be no need."

She moved irresolutely toward the communicating door, paused in its frame,
eyeing him speculatively from under level brows. He detected, or imagined,
a tremor of impulse toward him, as though she faltered on the verge of some
grave confidence. If so, she curbed her tongue in time. Her gaze dropped,
fixed itself abstractedly on the door.... "This must be fastened," she
said, in a tone of complete disinterest.

"I will speak to the chief steward immediately."

"Don't trouble." She roused. "It doesn't matter, really, for to-night. I
shall leave what valuables I have in the purser's care and stop on deck
till daybreak."

He gave a gesture of bewilderment. "You abandon your seclusion--leave your
secret unguarded?"

"Why not?" She shrugged slightly with a little _moue_ of discontent. "If,
as you assume, I had a secret, it was that for certain reasons I did not
wish my presence on board to become known. But it seems it has become
known: my secret is no more. So I need no longer risk being cut off from
the boats in the event of any accident."

Momentarily her gravity was dissipated by a smile at once delightful and
provocative.

"Once more, monsieur--good-night!"

After some moments Lanyard, with a start, found himself staring blankly at
a blankly incommunicative communicating door.




IV

IN DEEP WATERS


Following this abrupt introduction to his interesting neighbour, Lanyard
went back to his deck-chair and, bundling himself up against the cold,
settled down to ponder the affair and await developments in a spirit of
chastened resignation. That a dénouement would duly unfold he was quite
satisfied; that he himself must willy-nilly play some part therein he was
too well persuaded.

Not that he wished to meddle. If this Miss Cecelia Brooke (as she named
herself) fostered any sort of intrigue, he wanted nothing so fervently
as to be left altogether out of it. But already he had been dragged in,
without wish or consent of his; whoever coveted her secret--whatever that
was, more precious to her than jewels--harboured designs upon his own as
well. It was his duty henceforth to go warily, overlooking no circumstance,
however trifling and inconsiderable it might appear. The slenderest thread
may lead to the heart of the most intricate maze--and the heart of this was
become Lanyard's immediate goal, for there his enemy lay perdu.

It was never this man's fault to underrate an enemy, least of all
an unknown; and he entertained wholesome respect for Secret Service
operators--picked men, as a rule, the meanest no mean antagonist. And this
business, he fancied, had all the flavour of Secret Service work--one
of those blind duels, desperate and grim affairs of masked combatants
feinting, thrusting, guarding in the dark, each with the other's sword ever
feeling for his throat, fighting for life itself and making his own rules
as the contest swayed.

But what was this Brooke girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive
induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and blood of Secret
Service work?

Lanyard was fain to let that question rest. After all, it was no concern of
his. There she was, up to her pretty eyebrows in some dark, bad business;
and it was not for him to play the gratuitous ass, rush in unasked, and
seek to extricate her....

Through endless hours he sat brooding, vision blindly focussed upon the
misty, shimmering mystery of that night.

Ekstrom!... Slowly in his understanding intuition shaped the conviction
that it was Ekstrom whom he was fighting now, Ekstrom in the guise of one
of his creatures, some agent of the Prussian spy system who had contrived
to smuggle himself aboard this British steamship.

Out of those nine in the smoking room the previous night, then, he must
beware of one primarily, perhaps of more.

Four he was disposed, with reservations, to reckon negligible: Baron von
Harden, head of a Netherlands banking house, a silent body whose acute
mental processes went on behind a pallid screen of flabby features; Julius
Becker, a theatrical manager of New York, whose right name ended in ski;
Bartlett Putnam, late chargé d'affaires of the American embassy in Madrid;
Edmund O'Reilly, naturalized citizen of the United States, interested in
the manufacture of motor tractors somewhere in Michigan.

Of the other five, two were English: Lieutenant Thackeray, a civilly
reticent gentleman whose right arm rested in a black silk sling, making
a flying trip to visit a married sister in New York; Archer Bartholomew,
Esq., solicitor, a red-cheeked, bright-eyed, white-haired, brisk little
Cockney, beyond the military age.

There remained Dressier, the stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning
manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to
New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his
brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of
gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power
of shrewd intelligence; and Señor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires,
middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more
self-contained than most of his countrymen.

One of these probably ... But which?...

Nor must he permit himself to forget that the _Assyrian_ carried fifty-nine
other male passengers, in addition to her complement of officers, crew, and
stewards, that any one of these might prove to be Potsdam's cat's-paw.

Awesome pallor tinged the eastern horizon, gaining strength, spread in
imperceptible yet rapid gradations toward the zenith. Stars faded, winked
out, vanished. Silver and purple in the sea gave place to livid gray.
Almost visibly the routed night rolled back over the western rim of the
world. Shafts of supernal radiance lanced the formless void between sky
and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined
portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the
immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to
find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now
to port, now to starboard, as the _Assyrian_ twisted and writhed on her
corkscrew way.

Passengers whose fears had become sufficiently numb to permit them to
drowse, stirred in their chairs, roused blinking and blear-eyed, arose
and stretched cramped, cold bodies. Others lay listless, enervated by the
sleepless misery of that night. Crane found Lanyard awake and marched him
off for coffee and cigarettes in the smoking room.

Later, starting out for a turn around the decks, they passed a deck-chair
sheltered in a jog where the engine-room ventilating shaft joined the
forward deck-house, in which Miss Brooke lay cocooned in wraps and furs,
her profile, turned aside from the sea, exquisitely etched against the rich
blackness of a fox stole. She slept as quietly as the most carefree, a
shadowy smile touching her lips.

Crane's stride faltered. He whistled low.

"In the name of all things wonderful! how did that get on board?"

Lanyard mentioned the girl's name. "She has the stateroom next to
mine--came off that tender, night before last."

"And me sore on that darn' li'l boat because it brought aboard all the
nosey Johnnies! Ain't it the truth, you never know your luck?"

The American ruminated in silence till another lap of their walk took them
past the girl again.

"Funny," he mused, "if that's why they held us up...."

"Comment, monsieur?"

"Oh, I was just wondering if it was on that young lady's account they kept
us kicking our heels back there so long."

"I am still stupid," Lanyard confessed.

"Why, she might be a special messenger, you know--something like that--the
British Government wanted to smuggle out of the country without anybody
suspecting."

"Monsieur is a romantic."

"You can't trust me," Crane averred unblushingly.

When they passed the chair again it was empty.

At breakfast Lanyard saw the girl from a distance: their places were
separated by the width of the saloon. She had no neighbours at her table,
did not look up when Lanyard entered, finished her meal some time before
he did, and retired immediately to her stateroom, in whose seclusion she
remained for the rest of the day.

That second day was altogether innocent of untoward incident. At least
superficially the life of the ship settled into the groove of "business
as usual." Only the company of the _Assyrian's_ faithful convoys was an
ever-present reminder of peril.

And in the middle of the afternoon she passed close by a derelict, a
torpedoed tramp, deep down by the stern, her bows helplessly high in air
and crimson with rust, the melancholy haunt of a great multitude of gulls.

More than slightly to Lanyard's surprise he received no quiet invitation
to the captain's quarters to be interrogated concerning the burglary in
Stateroom 27. Apparently, the young woman had contented herself with
reporting merely that the communicating door had carelessly been left
unfastened.

For his own part, neither seeking nor avoiding individual members of the
smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their
company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him
scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again
aware of that covert surveillance.

But when--the evening chill driving him below to don a fur-lined
topcoat--the Brooke girl, coming up the companionway, acknowledged his look
of recognition with the most distant of nods, he accepted the apparent
rebuff without resentment. He understood. She was playing the game. The
enemy was watching, listening. After that he was studious to refrain from
seeming either to avoid or to seek her neighbourhood; and if he did keep a
sharp eye on her, it was so circumspectly as to mock detection. To the
best of his observation she found no friends on board, contracted no new
acquaintances, kept herself to herself within walls of inexorable reserve.

Dawn, ending the second night at sea, found the _Assyrian_ pursuing a
course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during
the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at
the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed,
a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly,
the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in
self-complacence; she had won safely through.

Unremitting vigilance was none the less maintained. No hour of the
twenty-four found either gun, forward or aft, wanting a full working crew
on the keen qui vive. The life boats remained on outswung davits; boat
drills for passengers as well as crew were features of the daily programme.
Regulations concerning light and smoking on deck after dark were rigidly
enforced. Fuel was never spared in the effort to widen the blue gulf
between the steamship and those waters wherein she had so nearly met her
end. By day a hunted thing, racing frantically toward a port of refuge in
the West, all her stout fabric labouring with titanic pulsations, shying in
panic from the faintest suspicion of smoke upon the horizon, the _Assyrian_
slipped into the grateful obscurity of night like a snake into a thicket,
made herself akin to its densest shadows, strained hopelessly not to be
outdistanced by its fugitive mantle.

And the benison of unseasonably clement weather was hers; day after shining
day, night after placid night, the Atlantic revealed a singularly gracious
humour, mirrored the changeful panorama of the heavens in a surface little
flawed. So that the most squeamish voyagers, as well as those most beset
with fears, slept sweetly in the comfort of their berths.

Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that
it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath
his pillow.

But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he
learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He
lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady
throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every
revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to
his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by
over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker
and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists,
principally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew,
Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial
fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender
store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.
But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or
to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of
his own raising, hagridden by passions of his own nurturing....

About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone,
when every other passenger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth)
Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile
to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut
his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.

Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing
with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant
of his presence.

Without moving, he watched in listless incuriosity till he saw her
straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself against some
crisis.

A man was coming aft from the entrance to the main companionway, impatience
in his stride--a tall man, of good carriage, muffled almost to the heels in
a heavy ulster, a steamer-cap well forward over his eyes. But the light was
poor, the pale shine of the aged moon blending trickily with the swaying
shadows; Lanyard was unable to place him among the passengers. There was
a suggestion of Lieutenant Thackeray--but that one was handicapped by one
shell-shattered arm, whereas this man had the use of both.

He demonstrated that promptly, taking the girl into them. She yielded
herself gladly, with a hushed little cry, hiding her face in the bosom of
his ulster, clinging to him.

This, then, was an assignation prearranged! Miss Cecelia Brooke had a lover
aboard the _Assyrian_, a lover whom she denied by day but met in stealth by
night!

And yet, after that first, swift embrace, their conduct became oddly
unloverlike. The man released her of his own initiative, held her by the
shoulders at arm's length. There was irritation in his manner. He seemed
tempted to shake the young woman.

"Celia! what madness!"

So much, at least, Lanyard overheard; the rest was a mumble into the hand
which the girl placed over the man's lips. She cried breathlessly: "Hush!
not so loud!"

And then she remembered to guard her own voice. In an undertone she spoke
passionately for a moment. The man interrupted in a tone of profound
vexation. She drew away, as if hurt, caught him up as he hesitated for a
word, returned, clung to the lapels of his coat, her accents rapid and
pitiful, eloquent of explanation, entreaty, determination. The man lifted
his hands to her wrists, broke her grasp, cut her brusquely short, put her
forcibly from him. She sobbed softly....

Thus swiftly the scene suffered disillusioning transition. The pretty
fiction of lovers meeting in secret was no more. Remained a man annoyed to
the verge of anger, a woman desperately importunate.

The wind, sweeping aft, carried broken snatches of their communications:

"... _all I have ... could not let you go_...."

"_Insanity_!"

"_I was desperate_...."

"... _drive me mad with your nonsense_...."

Lanyard sat up, scraping his chair harshly on the deck. Stricken mute,
the pair at the rail moved only to turn his way the pallid ovals of their
faces.

Heedless of the prohibition, he struck a vesta, cupped its flame in his
hands, bending his face close and deliberately lighting a cigarette.
Appreciably longer than necessary he permitted the flare to reveal his
features. Then he blew it out, rose, sauntered to the rail, cast the
cigarette into the sea, went aft and so below, satisfied that the girl must
have recognised him and so knew that her secret was safe.

But it was in an oddly disgruntled humour that he turned in--he who had
been so ready to twit Crane with his fantastic speculations concerning
the English girl, who had himself been the readiest to endue her with the
romantic attributes becoming a heroine of her country's Secret Service!
What if he must now esteem her in the merciless light of to-night's
exposure, as the most pitiable of all human spectacles, a poor lovesick
thing sans dignity, sans pride, sans heed for the world's respect, a woman
pursuing a man weary of her?

He resented unreasonably the unreasonable resentment which the affair
inspired in him.

What was it to him? He who had struck off all fettering bonds of common
human interests, who had renounced all common human emotions, who had set
his hand against all mankind that stood between him and that vengeful
purpose to which he had dedicated his life! He, the Lone Wolf, the
heartless, soulless, pitiless beast of prey!

God in Heaven! what was any woman to him?




V

ON THE BANKS


Unaccountably enough in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's
exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it
tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that
fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression.

And the fifth day and the sixth were like unto the fourth.

Constantly he caught himself on watch for the young woman, wondering how
she would comport herself toward him, unwilling witness though he had been
to that shabby scene.

But, save distantly at meal times, he saw nothing of her.

And though he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was
studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy
stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the
sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was
nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at
another encounter between the Brooke girl and her reluctant lover....

Then that happened which lent the business another complexion altogether.
Its second phase, of close development, drew toward an end. Subtle
underlying forces began to stir in their portentous latency.

The rapiers which thus far had merely touched, shivering lightly against
each other, measuring each its opponent's strength, feeling out his skill,
fell apart, then re-engaged in sharp and deadly play. Steel met steel and,
clashing, struck off sparks whose fugitive glimmerings lightened measurably
the murk....

On the sixth night out, at eleven o'clock as a matter of routine, the
smoking room was closed for the night, terminating an uncommonly protracted
and, in Lanyard's esteem, irksome sitting at cards. Well tired, he went
immediately to his quarters, undressed, stretched out in his berth, and
switched off the light.

Incontinently he found himself bedevilled by thoughts that would not rest.

For upward of an hour he lay moveless, seeking oblivion in that very effort
to preserve immobility, while the _Assyrian_, lunging heavily on her way,
moaned and muttered tedious accompaniment to the chant of the working
engines.

Despairing at length, and fretted by the closeness of his quarters, he got
up, dressed sketchily, and was shrugging into his fur-lined coat when he
heard the door to the adjoining stateroom open and close, stealth in the
sound of it.

At that he hung up his overcoat, and threw himself down with a book on the
lounge seat beneath the port. The novel was dull enough in all conscience;
for that matter no tale within the compass of the cunningest weaver of
words could have enthralled his temper at that time.

He read and read again page after page, but without intelligence.

Between his eyes and the type-blackened paper mirages of the past trembled
and wavered; old faces, old scenes, old illusions took unsubstantial form,
dissolved, blended, faded away: a saddening show of shadows.

His heavy eyelids drooped; slumber's drowsy vestments trailed lazily
athwart the sea of consciousness....

A slight noise startled him, either the shutting of the door to Stateroom
27, or the sound of the book dropping from his relaxed grasp. He sat up and
consulted his watch. The hour was half after twelve.

The ship's bell sounded remotely a single, doleful stroke.

He might have dozed five minutes or fifteen--long enough at least to leave
its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive,
almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of
something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something
vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened
labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable and ineluctable as miasmic
exhalations of a morass....

Lanyard passed a hand across his forehead. Had he been dreaming, then? Was
this merely the reaction from some bitter nightmare? He could not remember.

On sheer impulse he stood up, extinguished the light, opened the door. As
he did this he noted that a light burned in Stateroom 27, visible through
the ventilating grille. So the girl must have returned while he slept. Or
had she neglected to turn the switch when she went out? He could not be
certain.

On the threshold he paused a little, attentive to the familiar rumour of
the ship by night: the prolonged sloughing of riven waters down the side,
gnashing of swells hurled back by the bows, sibilance of draughts in
alleyways, groaning of frames, a thin metallic rattle of indeterminate
origin, the crunching grind of the steering gear, the everlasting
deep-throated diapason of the engines, somewhere aft in that tier of
staterooms a persistent human snore ... nothing unusual, no alarming
discordance....

Yet the feeling that mischief was afoot would not be still.

Lanyard moved down to the junction of the thwartship passage with the
fore-and-aft alleyway.

Here he commanded a view of the promenade-deck landing and the main
companionway, all in darkness but for a feeble glimmer of reflected
starlight through the open deck port on the far side of the vessel. Beyond
this the rail was stencilled against the dull face of the sea with its far
lifting and falling horizon; within, no more was visible than the dimmed
whiteness of the forward partition, the dense, indefinite mass of balusters
winding up to the boat-deck, and the flat plane of the tiled landing.

On this last, near the mouth of the port alleyway, half obscured by the
intervening balusters, something moved, something huge, black, and formless
swayed and writhed strangely, and in the strangest silence, like a dumb,
tormented misshapen brute transfixed to one spot from which its most
anguished efforts might not avail to budge it.

Lanyard ran forward, rounded the well of the companionway, and pulled up.

Now the nature of the thing was revealed. Blackly silhouetted against the
square of the doorway two human figures were close-locked and struggling
desperately, straining, resisting, thrusting, giving, recovering ... and
all with never a sound more than the deadened thump of a shifting foot or
the rasp of hard-won breathing.

For several seconds the spectator could not distinguish one contestant from
the other. Then a change in the fortunes of war enabled him to make out
that one was a woman, the other, and momentarily more successful, a man.
Slender and youthful and strong, she fought with the indomitable fury of
a pantheress. He on his part had won this much temporary advantage--had
broken the woman's clutch upon his throat and was bending her back over
his hip, one hand fumbling at her windpipe, the other imprisoning her two
wrists.

Yet she was far from being vanquished. Even as Lanyard moved toward the
pair, she drove a savage knee into the man's middle and, as he checked
instantaneously with a grunt of pained surprise, regained her footing and
planted both elbows against his chest, striving frantically to free her
hands.

Simultaneously Lanyard took the fellow from behind, wound an arm around his
neck, jerked his head sharply back, twisted his forearm till he released
the woman's wrists, and threw him with a force that must have jarred his
every bone.

The woman staggered back against the partition, panting and sobbing beneath
her breath. The man rebounded from his fall with astonishing agility, and
flew back at Lanyard. An object in his right hand gave off the dull gleam
of polished steel.

Lanyard, his automatic in his stateroom, in the pocket of the overcoat
where he had deposited it when meaning to go out on deck, lacked any means
of defense other than his two hands; but his one-time fame as an amateur
pugilist had been second only to his fame as a connaisseur d'art; and to
one whose youth had been passed in association with the Apaches of Paris,
some mastery of la savate was an inevitable accomplishment.

A lightning coup de pied planted a heel against one of the man's shins,
and his onslaught faltered in a gust of curses. Then the point of his jaw
received the full force of Lanyard's right fist with all the ill will
imaginable behind it. The man reared back, reeled into the black mouth of
the alleyway, fell heavily.

Even so, he demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for
punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the
gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward
him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second stride
tripped over a heavy body hidden in the shadows, and pitched headlong.
Falling, he was conscious of a flashing thing that sped past his cheek,
immediately above his shoulder. There followed an echoing thud against the
forward partition.

Picking himself up smartly, Lanyard crept several paces down the alleyway,
flattening against the wall, straining his vision, listening intently,
rewarded by neither sign nor sound of his antagonist.

That one must have been swift to advantage himself of Lanyard's tumble.
If he had not vanished into thin air, or gone to earth in some untenanted
stateroom thereabouts, he found in the close blackness of that narrow
passage a cloak of positive invisibility to cover his escape.

And there is little wisdom in stalking an armed man whom one cannot see,
with what little light there is at one's own back.

So Lanyard went back to the landing, stepping carefully over the obstacle
which had both thrown him and saved his life--the supine body of a third
man, motionless; whether dead or merely insensible, he did not stop to
investigate. His immediate concern was for the woman.

As he came upon her now, she stood en profile to the partition, tugging
strongly at something embedded in the woodwork close by her side, between
her waist and armpit. At the sound of his approach she looked up with a
tremor of apprehension quickly calmed.

"Monsieur Duchemin! If you please--"

Lanyard, in no way surprised to recognise the voice of Miss Cecelia Brooke,
stepped closer. "What is it?" he enquired; and then, bending over to look,
found that her cloak was pinned to the partition by the blade of a heavy
knife buried a full half of its considerable length.

"He threw it as you fell," the girl explained. "I was in the direct line."

"Permit me, mademoiselle...."

He laid hold of the haft of the weapon and with some difficulty withdrew
it.

"Who was it?" he asked, weighing the knife in his palm and examining it as
closely as he could without the aid of light.

There was no reply. Directly her cloak was freed, the girl had moved
hastily away to the body over which Lanyard had stumbled. He heard an
imploring whisper--"Please!"--and looked up to see her on her knees.

"Who, then, is this?" he demanded, joining her.

"Lionel--Lieutenant Thackeray. Please--O please!--tell me he is not dead."

Her voice broke; he saw her slender body convulsed with racking emotions.
Kneeling, Lanyard made a hasty and superficial examination, necessarily no
more under the conditions.

"His heart beats," he announced--"he breathes. I do not think him seriously
injured." He made as if to get up. "I will get a light--a flash-lamp from
my stateroom--or, better still, the ship's surgeon--"

Her hand fell upon his arm. "Please, no! Not that--not now. Later, if
necessary; but now--surely, you can help me carry him to his stateroom."

"You know the number?"

"It's close by--30."

"Find it, and light up. No--leave this to me; I can carry him without
assistance."

The girl rose and disappeared. Lanyard passed his arms beneath the
Englishman's body, gathered him into them, and struggled to his feet: no
inconsiderable task.

Light gushed from an open doorway, the third aft from the landing.
Staggering, the adventurer entered and deposited the body upon the berth.
Immediately the girl closed and bolted the door, then passed between him
and the berth to bend over the unconscious man. He lay in deep coma, limbs
a-sprawl, unpleasant glints of white between his half-closed eyelids, his
breathing stertorous through parted lips. Free of its sling, his wounded
arm dangled over the edge of the berth. In putting him down, Lanyard had
remarked that its sleeve had been slit to the shoulder, and that its
bandages were undone. Now, in amazement, he saw the arm was firm and
muscular, with an unbroken skin, never a sign of any injury in all its
length.

Gently the girl lifted the lieutenant's head to the light, discovering a
hideously bruised swelling at the base of the skull, blood darkly matting
the close-clipped hair.

She requested without looking round: "Water, please--and a towel."

Obediently Lanyard ran hot and cold water into the hand-basin in equal
proportions.

"Would it not be well now to call the ship's surgeon?" he suggested
diffidently.

"Is that necessary? I am something of a nurse. This is simply a bad
contusion--no worse, I believe. He was struck down from behind, a cowardly
blow in the dark, as he started to go up on deck. I had been waiting for
him. When he didn't come I suspected something was wrong. I came down,
found him lying there, that brute kneeling over him."

She spoke coolly enough, in contrast with the high excitement that inflamed
her eyes as she turned away from the berth.

"Monsieur Duchemin, are you armed?"

"I have this," he said, exhibiting the knife thrown by the would-be
murderer--a simple trench dagger, without distinguishing marks of any sort.

"Then take this, please." Extracting an automatic pistol from a holster
belted beneath Thackeray's coat, she proffered it. "You won't mind staying
here a moment, standing guard, while I fetch a dressing from my room?"

Before he could utter a word of protest she had slipped out into the
alleyway, shutting the door behind her.

When several minutes had passed the adventurer found himself beset by
increasing concern. This long delay seemed not only inconsistent with her
solicitude, but indicated a possibility that the girl had braved unwisely
the chance of a resumption of hostilities on the part of her late and as
yet anonymous assailant.

Darkening the room as a matter of common-sense precaution, Lanyard, pistol
in hand, stepped out into the alleyway in time to see the girl in the act
of rising from her knees on the landing, near the spot where Thackeray had
fallen. The light of her flash-lamp was blotted out as she came hurriedly
aft.

Perplexed, he turned back and switched on the light as she entered.

Her eyes challenged his almost defiantly.

"Was I long?" she asked, breathless. "I dropped something...."

Lanyard bowed without speaking. Instinctively he knew that she was lying;
and divining this in his attitude, she coloured and, disconcerted, turned
away. For a moment, while she busied herself arranging on a convenient
chair an assortment of first-aid accessories, he fancied that her
half-averted face wore a look of sullen chagrin, with its compressed lips,
downcast eyes, and faintly gathered brows.

But directly she needed assistance, and requested it of him in a subdued
and impersonal manner, showing a countenance devoid of any incongruous
emotion.

Lanyard, lifting the lieutenant's head and heavy torso, helped turn him
face downward on the berth, then stood aside, thoughtfully watching the
girl's deft fingers sop absorbent cotton in an antiseptic wash and apply it
to the injury.

After a little, he said: "If mademoiselle has no more immediate use for
me--"

"Thank you, monsieur. You have already done so very much!"

"Then, if mademoiselle will supply the name of this assassin--"

"I know it no more than you, monsieur!" She glanced up at him, startled.
"What do you mean to do?"

"Why, naturally, lodge an information with the captain concerning this
outrage--"

"Oh, please, no!"

At a loss, Lanyard shrugged eloquently.

"Not yet, at all events," she hastened to amend. "Let Lionel judge what is
best to be done when he comes to."

"But, mademoiselle, who can say when that will be?" He pointed out the
ugly, ragged abrasion in the young Englishman's scalp exposed by the
cleansing away of the clotted blood. "No ordinary blow," he commented;
"something very like a slung-shot or a loaded cane did that work. If I may
venture again to advise--unless mademoiselle is herself a surgeon--"

Her colour faded and she caught her breath sharply. "You think it as
serious as all that?"

"I do not know. Such a blow might easily fracture the skull, possibly bring
about a concussion of the brain. Regard, likewise, his laborious breathing.
I most assuredly advise consulting competent authority."

She did not immediately answer, turning back undivided attention to her
task; but he noticed that her hands were tremulous, however, dextrously
they finished dressing and bandaging the hurt; and deep distress troubled
the handsome eyes she turned to his when she rose.

"You are right," she murmured--"unquestionably right, monsieur. We must
have the surgeon in...."

But when Lanyard advanced a hand toward the bell-push, to call the steward,
she interposed in quick alarm:

"No--if you please, a moment; I must have time to think!" Her slender
fingers writhed together in her agony of doubt and irresolution. "If only I
knew what to do...."

Lanyard was dumb. There was, indeed, nothing helpful he could offer, who
was without a solitary tangible or trustworthy clue to the nature of this
strange business.

He owned himself sadly mystified. In the light--or, rather, the shadow--of
this latest development, his revised suspicions seemed unwarranted to the
point of impertinence; unless, of course, one assumed the unknown assailant
to be a rejected lover or wronged husband. And somehow one did not, in
the presence of this clear-eyed, straight-limbed, courageous young
Englishwoman, so wanting in self-consciousness.

And yet ... what the deuce was she to this man whom, indisputably, she
followed against his wish?

And what conceivable chain of circumstances linked their fortunes with his,
and that double burglary of the first night out with this murderous assault
of to-night?

Nor was to-night's work, considered by itself, lacking in questionable
features.

Why had Thackeray carried that sound arm in a sling? How had its bandages
come to be unwrapped? Not in struggles before being placed hors de combat,
for he had never had a chance to resist. Had his assailant, then, unwrapped
it subsequently? If so, with what end in view?

Why had this Miss Cecelia Brooke, surprising the thug at his work, joined
battle with him so bravely and so madly without calling for help?

What hidden motive excused this singular hesitation to summon the surgeon,
this reluctance to inform the officers of the ship?

What duplicity was that which the girl had paraded concerning her
procrastination when Lanyard had surprised her on her knees out there on
the landing?

If this were what Lanyard had first inclined to think it, Secret Service
intrigue, surely it was weirdly intricate when an English girl hesitated
to safeguard an Englishman by taking into her confidence the officers of a
British ship, British manned!

Nevertheless, and however much he might wonder and doubt, Lanyard would
never question her. Never of his own volition would he probe more deeply
into this mystery, take one farther step into the intricacies of its maze.

So, in silence, he waited, passively courteous, at her further service if
she had need of him, content if she had not, tolerant of her tacit prayer
for time in which to think a way out of her difficulties.

After some few moments he grew uncomfortably aware that he had become the
object of a speculative regard not at all unfavourable.

He indulged in a mental gesture of resignation.

Then what he had feared befell, not altogether as he had apprehended, but
in the girl's own fashion, if without material difference in the upshot.

"I am afraid," said she in an even voice, so quietly pitched as to be
inaudible to any eavesdropper. "This becomes a task greater than I had
dreamed, more than my wits can cope with. Monsieur Duchemin...."

She hesitated. He bowed slightly. "If mademoiselle can make any use of my
poor abilities, she has but to command me."

"We--I have much to thank you for already, monsieur, much more than I can
ever hope to reward adequately--"

"Reward?" he echoed. "But, mademoiselle--!"

"Please don't misunderstand." She flushed a little, very prettily. "I am
simply trying to express my sense of obligation, not only for what you have
already done, but for what I mean to ask you to do."

Again he bowed, without comment, amiably receptive.

She resumed with perceptible effort: "I can trust you--"

"You must make sure of that before you do," he warned her, smiling.

"I am sure," she averred gravely.

"You know nothing concerning me, mademoiselle--pardon! For all you know
I may be the greatest rogue in Christendom. And I must tell you in all
candour, sometimes I think I am."

"What I may or may not know concerning you, Monsieur Duchemin, is
immaterial as long as I know you are what you have proved yourself to me, a
gentleman, considerate, generous, brave, and--not inquisitive."

He was frankly touched. If this were flattery, tone and manner robbed it of
fulsomeness, rendered it subtle beyond the coarser perceptions of the man.
He knew himself for what he was, knew himself unworthy; and that part
of him which was unaffectedly French, whether by accident of birth or
influence of environment, and so impulsive and emotional, reacted in
spontaneous gratitude to this implicit acceptance of him for what he strove
to seem to be.

"Mademoiselle is gracious beyond my deserts," he protested. "Only let me
know how I may be of use...."

"In three ways: Continue to be lenient in your judgments, and ask me no
more questions than you must because ... I may not answer...." Her hands
worked together again. She added unhappily, in a faint voice: "I dare not."

That, too, moved him, since he had been far from lenient in his judgments.
He responded the more readily: "All that is understood, mademoiselle."

"Please go at once back to your stateroom, and as quietly as possible.
There is a bare chance you were not recognised, that nobody knows who came
to my aid to-night. If you can slip away without attracting attention, so
much the better for us, for all of us. You may not be suspected."

"Trust me to use my best discretion."

"Lastly ... take and keep this for me, till I ask you for it again. Hide it
as secretly as you can. It may be sought for, is certain to be if you are
believed to be in my confidence. It must not be found. And I may not want
it again before we land in New York."

She extended a hand on whose palm rested a small and slender white
cylinder, no longer and little thicker than the toy pencil that dangles
from a dance-card: a tight roll of plain white paper enclosed in a wrapping
of transparent oiled silk, gummed fast down its length and, at either end,
sealed with miniature blobs of black wax.

"Will you do this for me, Monsieur Duchemin? I warn you, it may cost you
your life."

He took it, his temper veering to the whimsical. "What is life?" he
questioned. "A prelude--perhaps an overture to that great drama, Death. Who
knows? Who cares?"

She heard him in a stare. "You place no value on life?"

"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have lived nearly thirty years in this world,
three years in the theatre of war, seldom far from the trenches of one
front or another. I tell you, I know death too well...."

He shrugged and put the roll of paper away in a pocket.

"You understand it must not be taken from you under any circumstance? As a
last resort, it must be destroyed rather than yielded up."

"It shall be," he said quietly. "Is there anything more?"

She shook her head, thoughtfully knuckling her underlip.

"How can I communicate with you in event of necessity after we get to New
York?" she asked.

"I shall stop for a week or two at the Hotel Knickerbocker."

"If anything should happen"--with a swift glance of anxiety toward the
motionless figure in the berth--"if anything should prevent my calling for
it within a week after our arrival, you will be good enough to deliver it
to--" She caught herself up quickly, the unuttered words trembling on her
lip. "I will write down the address of the person to whom you will deliver
it, and slip it underneath the door between our rooms--first making
certain you are there to receive it--if I do not ask you to return
the--thing--before we land."

"That shall be as you will."

"When you have memorized the address you will destroy it?"

"Depend on that."

"I think that is all. Thank you, Monsieur Duchemin--and good-night."

She extended her hand. He saluted it punctiliously with fingertips and
lips.

"If you will put out the light, mademoiselle, it may aid me to get away
unseen."

She nodded and offered him Thackeray's pistol. "Take this. O, I have
another with me."

Lanyard accepted the weapon and, when she had darkened the room, opened the
door, slipped out, and closed it behind him so noiselessly that the girl
could not believe he was gone.

Nothing hindered his return to Stateroom 29.

Fully two minutes after he had locked himself in he heard the distant
clamour of the annunciator, calling a steward to Stateroom 30.




VI

UNDER SUSPICION


He sat for a long time on the edge of his berth, elbow on knee, chin in
hand, unstirring, gaze fixed upon that little cylinder of white paper
resting in the hollow of his palm, in profoundest concentration pondering
the problems it presented: what it was, what possession of it meant to
Michael Lanyard, what safe disposition to make of it pending welcome relief
from this unsought and most unwelcome trust.

This last question alone bade fair to confound his utmost ingenuity.

As for what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true
focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too
momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the
most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which
England herself controlled.

Solely to prevent this communication from reaching America, Lanyard
believed, Germany had sown mines broadcast in all the waters which the
_Assyrian_ must cross, and had commissioned her U-boats, without fail and
at whatever cost, to sink the vessel if by any accident she won safely
through the mine-fields.

In the effort to steal this secret, German spies had sailed on the
_Assyrian_ knowing well the double risk they ran, of being shot like rats
if found out, of being drowned like neutrals if the ship went down through
the efforts of their compatriots.

It was the zeal of Potsdam's agents, seeking the bearer of this secret,
which had caused the rifling of Miss Brooke's luggage when she fell under
suspicion, thanks to her clandestine way of coming aboard; and through the
same agency young Thackeray had been all but murdered when suspicion, for
whatever reason, shifted to him.

To insure safe transmission of this communication, England had held the
_Assyrian_ idle in port, day after day, while her augmented patrols scoured
the seas, hunting down ruthlessly every submarine whose periscope dared
peer above the surface, and while her trawlers innumerable swept the
channels clear of mines.

To prevent its theft, Lieutenant Thackeray had invented the subterfuge of
the "wounded" arm, amid whose splints and bandages (Lanyard never doubted)
the cylinder had been secreted.

Finally, it was as a special agent, deep in her country's confidence, that
this English girl had smuggled herself aboard at the last moment, bringing,
no doubt, this very cylinder to be transferred to the keeping of Lieutenant
Thackeray or, perhaps, another confrère, should she find reason to think
herself suspected, her trust endangered.

Nothing strange in that; women had served their countries in such
capacities before; the secret archives of European chancellories are
replete with their records. Lanyard himself remembered many such women,
brilliant mondaines from many lands domiciled in that Paris of the so-dead
yesterday to serve by stealth their respective governments; but never, it
was true, a woman of the caste of Cecelia Brooke; unless, indeed, this were
an actress of surpassing talent, gifted to hoodwink the most skeptical and
least susceptible of men.

And yet....

Lanyard's train of thought faltered. New doubt of the girl began to shadow
his meditations. Contradictory circumstances he had noted intruded,
uninvited, to challenge overcredulous conclusions concerning her.

Would any secret agent worth her salt invite suspicion by making such a
conspicuously furtive embarkation, by such ostentatious avoidance of her
fellow passengers, by surrounding herself with an atmosphere of such
palpable mystery? Would such an one confess she had a "secret" to an utter
stranger, as she had to Lanyard that first night out? Would she, under any
conceivable circumstances, entrust to that same stranger that selfsame
secret upon whose inviolate preservation so much depended?

And would she make love-trysts on the decks by night?

Would a brother-agent take her in his arms, then reprove her with every
symptom of vexation for her "madness," her "insanity," her "nonsense" that
was like to "drive me mad"?--Thackeray's own words!

Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits for some plausible reading of this
riddle.

Was this Brooke girl possibly (of a sudden he sat bolt upright) a Prussian
agent infatuated with this young Englishman and by him beloved in spite of
all that forbade their passion?

Did not this explanation reconcile every apparent inconsistency in her
conduct, even to the entrusting to a stranger of the stolen secret, the
purloined paper she dared not keep about her lest it be found in her
possession?

Lanyard's eyes narrowed. Visibly his features hardened. If this surmise of
his were any way justified in the outcome, he promised Miss Cecelia Brooke
an hour of most painful penitence.

Woman or not, she need not look for mercy from him, who must ever be
merciless in his dealings with Ekstrom's crew.

To be made that one's tool!

The very thought was intolerable....

As for himself, possession of this paper meant that pitfalls were digged
for his every step.

If ever the British found cause to suspect him, his certain portion would
be to face a firing squad in dusk of early day.

If, on the other hand, these Prussian agents on board the _Assyrian_ ever
got wind of the fact that the cylinder was in his care, his fate was apt to
be a knife between his ribs the first time he was caught alone and--with
his back to the assassin.

Two courses, then, were open to him: the most sensible and obvious, to go
straightway to the captain of the _Assyrian_, report all that he knew or
surmised, and turn over the paper for safekeeping; one alternative, to hide
the cylinder so absolutely that the most drastic search would overlook it,
yet so handily that he could rid himself of it at an instant's notice.

But the first course involved denunciation of the Brooke girl. And what
if she were innocent? What if, after all, these doubts of her were the
specious spawn of facts misinterpreted, misconstrued? What if she proved to
be all she seemed? Could he, even though what he had warned her he might
be, the greatest rogue unhung, be false to a trust reposed in him by such a
woman?

As to that, there was no question in his mind; he would never betray her,
lacking irrefutable conviction that she was an employee of the Prussian spy
system.

Then how to hide the paper?

Kneeling, Lanyard drew from beneath the berth his bellows-bag, selected
from its contents a black japanned tin case containing a rather elaborate
though compact trench medicine kit, the idle purchase of an empty afternoon
in London. Extracting from its fittings a small leather-covered case, he
replaced the kit, relocked and shoved the bag back beneath the berth.

Then, standing over the hand-basin, he opened the leather-covered case. Its
velvet-lined compartments held a hypodermic syringe and needle, and a glass
phial of twenty-four one-thirtieth grain morphia tablets.

Uncorking the phial, he shook out all the tablets, replaced three, then
slid the paper cylinder into the tube; it fitted precisely, concealed by
the label of the manufacturing chemist, leaving room for six more tablets.
Lanyard inserted four on top of the cylinder, moistening the lowermost
slightly to make it stick, recorked the phial, and returned it to its
compartment.

Next he dissolved three morphia tablets in a little water in the bottom of
a glass, filled the syringe with the strong solution, fitted on the needle,
squirted most of the contents down the waste-pipe, and consigned the
remaining tablets to the same innocuous fate.

Finally he replaced needle and syringe in the case, let the glass which had
held the solution stand without rinsing, and put the open case upon the
shelf above the basin.

A light tapping sounded on the panels of his door.

"Well? Who's there?"

"Your steward, sir. Captain Osborne's compliments, an' 'e'd like to see you
in 'is room as soon as convenient, sir."

"You may say I will come at once."

"'Nk you, sir."

A summons to have been expected as a sequel to the surgeon's report after
attending Lieutenant Thackeray; none the less, Lanyard had not expected it
so soon.

Authority, he reflected, ran true to form afloat as well as ashore; it was
prompt enough when required to apply a pound or so of cure. Surely the
officers, at least the captain, must have been advised why this voyage
was apt to prove exceptionally hazardous; and surely in the light of such
information it had been wiser to set armed watches on every deck by night,
rather than permit the lives of passengers to be imperilled through the
possible activities of Prussian agents among them incogniti.

And now that he was reminded of it, was not this, perhaps, but a device of
the enemy's to decoy him from the comparative safety of his stateroom?

It was with a hand in his jacket pocket, grasping Thackeray's automatic,
that he presently left the room. The alleyway, however, was deserted except
for his steward; who, as he appeared, turned and led the way up to the
boat-deck.

Rounding the foot of the companionway, Lanyard contrived a hasty glance
down the port alleyway. The door to Stateroom 30 was on the hook; a light
burned within. Outside a guard was stationed, a sailor with a cutlass: the
first application of the pound of cure!

At the heels of his guide, he approached a door in the deck-house, devoted
to officers' accommodations, beneath the bridge. Here the steward knocked
discreetly. A heavy voice grumbling within was stilled for a moment, then
barked a sharp invitation to enter. The steward turned the knob, announced
dispassionately "Monseer Duchemin," and stood aside. Lanyard entered a
well-lighted room, simply but comfortably furnished as the captain's office
and sitting room; sleeping quarters adjoined, the head of a berth with a
battered pillow showing through a door a foot or so ajar.

Four persons were present; the notion entered Lanyard's head that a fifth
possibly lurked in the room beyond, spying, eavesdropping: not a bad scheme
if Thackeray had an associate on board whose identity it was desirable to
keep under cover.

The door closed gently behind him as he stood politely bowing, conscious
that the four faces turned his way were distinguished by a singular variety
of expression.

Miss Cecelia Brooke was nearest him, beside a chair from which she had
evidently just risen, her pretty young face rather pale and set, a scared
look in her candid eyes.

Beyond her, the captain sat with his back to a desk: a broad-beamed,
vigorous body, intensely masculine, choleric by habit, and just now in an
extraordinarily grim temper, his iron-gray hair bristling from his
pillow, and his stout person visibly suffering the discomfort of wearing
night-clothes beneath his uniform coat and trousers. Bending upon Lanyard
the steel-hard regard of small, steel-blue eyes, he drummed the arms of his
chair with thick and stubby fingers.

To one side, standing, was the third officer, a Mr. Sherry, a youngish man
with a pleasant cast of countenance which temporarily wore a look, rarely
British, of ingrained sense of duty at odds with much embarrassment.

Lastly Mr. Crane's lanky person was draped, with its customary effect of
carelessness, on one end of the lounge seat. He looked up, nodded shortly
but cheerfully to Lanyard, then resumed a somewhat quizzical contemplation
of the half-smoked cigar which etiquette obliged him to neglect in the
presence of a lady.

"This is the gentleman?" Captain Osborne queried heavily of the girl.
Receiving a murmured affirmative, he continued: "Good morning, Monsieur
Duchemin.... Thanks, Miss Brooke; we won't keep you up any longer
to-night."

He rose, bowed stiffly as Mr. Sherry opened the door for the girl, and when
she was gone threw himself back into his chair with a force which made it
enter a violent protest.

"Sit down, sir. Daresay you know what we want of you."

"It is not difficult to guess," Lanyard admitted. "A sad business,
monsieur."

"Sad!" the captain iterated in a tone of harsh sarcasm. "That's a mild name
to give murder."

Even had it not been blurted violently at him, that word was staggering.
The adventurer echoed it blankly. "You can't mean Lieutenant Thackeray--?"

"Not yet, though doctor says it may come to that; the poor chap's in a bad
way--concussion."

"So one feared. But monsieur said 'murder'...."

Captain Osborne sat forward, steely gaze mercilessly boring into Lanyard's
eyes. "Monsieur Duchemin," he said slowly, "Lieutenant Thackeray was not
the only passenger to suffer through to-night's villainy. The other died
instantly."

"In God's name, monsieur--who?"

"Bartholomew."

"Mr. Bartholomew!" A memory of that brisk little body's ruddy, cheerful,
British personality flashed athwart the screen of memory. Lanyard murmured:
"Incredible!"

"Murdered," the captain proceeded, "in Stateroom 28. Lieutenant Thackeray
and he were friends, shared the suite. Apparently Mr. Bartholomew heard
some unusual noise in 30 and left his berth to investigate. He was struck
down from behind as he approached the communicating door. The murderer had
got in by way of the sitting room, 26."

Mr. Sherry added in an awed voice: "Frightful blow--skull crushed like an
eggshell."

There was a pause. Crane thoughtfully relighted his cigar, and wrapped his
right cheek round it. The captain glared glassily at Lanyard. Mr. Sherry
looked, if possible, more uncomfortable than ever. Lanyard pondered,
aghast.

Ekstrom's work, of a certainty! This was his way, the way he imposed upon
his creatures. Ekstrom, ever a killer, obsessed by the fallacious notion
that dead men tell no tales....

And Bartholomew had been in this mess with Thackeray, both of them
operatives of the British Secret Service!

"Miss Brooke has given her version of the attack on Lieutenant Thackeray,"
the captain pursued. "Be good enough to let us have yours."

Succinctly Lanyard recounted the happenings between the moment when
premonition of evil drew him from his stateroom and the moment when he
returned thereto.

He was at pains, however, to omit all mention of the cylinder of paper;
that, pending definite knowledge to the contrary, was a sacred trust, a
matter of his honour, solely the affair of the Brooke girl.

The captain squared himself toward Lanyard, his face louring, his jaw
pugnacious.

"How did you happen to be up and dressed at that late hour, so ready to
respond to this--ah--premonition of yours?"

"I sleep not well, monsieur. It was my intention to go on deck and
endeavour to walk off my insomnia."

Captain Osborne commented with a snort.

"Why did you leave Miss Brooke alone before she called the doctor?"

"At mademoiselle's request, naturally."

"You'd been deuced gallant up to that time. I presume it didn't occur to
you that the young woman might need further protection?"

Lanyard shrugged. "It did not occur to me to refuse her request, monsieur."

"Didn't it strike you as odd she should wish to be left alone with
Lieutenant Thackeray?"

"It was not my affair, monsieur. It was her wish."

"Excuse me, cap'n." Crane sat up. "I'd like to ask Mr. Lanyard a question."

But Lanyard had prepared himself against that, and acknowledged the touch
with a quiet smile and the hint of a bow.

"Monsieur Crane...."

"U.S. Secret Service," Crane informed him with a grin. "Velasco spotted
you--had seen you years ago in Paruss--tipped me off."

"So one inferred. And these gentlemen?" Lanyard indicated the captain and
third officer.

"I wised them up--had to, when this happened."

"Naturally, monsieur. Proceed...."

"I only wanted to ask if you noticed anything to make you think perhaps
there was an understanding between Miss Brooke and the lieutenant?"

"Why should I?"

"I ain't curious why you should. What I want to know is, did you?"

"No, monsieur," Lanyard lied blandly.

"The little lady didn't seem to take on more'n she naturally would if the
lieutenant'd been a stranger, eh?" "How to judge, when one has never seen
mademoiselle distressed on behalf of another?"

Crane abandoned his effort, resuming contemplation of his cigar.

"Now we come to the point. Monsieur Lanyard, or whatever your name is."

"I have found Duchemin very agreeable, monsieur le capitaine."

"I daresay," Captain Osborne sneered. He hesitated, glowering in the
difficulty of thinking. "See here, Monsieur Duchemin--since you prefer that
style--I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. I'm a plain man,
plain-spoken. They tell me you reformed. I don't know anything about that.
It's my conviction, once a thief, always a thief. I may be wrong."

"Right or wrong, monsieur might easily be less offensive."

The captain's dark countenance became still more darkly congested.
Implacable prejudice glinted in his small eyes. Nor was his temper softened
by the effrontery of this offender in giving back look for look with a calm
poise that overshadowed his arrogance of an honest, law-abiding man.

He made a vague gesture of impatience.

"The point is," he said, "this crime was accompanied by robbery."

"Am I to understand I am accused?"

"Nobody is accused," Crane cut in hastily.

"You have found no clues--?"

"Nary clue."

"What I want to say to you, Monsieur Duchemin, is this: the stolen property
has got to be recovered before this ship makes her dock in New York.
It means the loss of my command if it isn't. It means more than that,
according to my information; it means a disastrous calamity to the Allied
cause. And you're a Frenchman, Monsieur--Duchemin."

"And a thief. Monsieur le capitaine must not forget his pet conviction."

"As to that, a man can't always be particular about the tools he employs. I
believe the old saying, set a thief to catch a thief, holds good."

"Do I understand," Lanyard suggested sweetly, "you are about to honour me
by utilizing my reputed talents, by commissioning a thief to catch this
thief of to-night?"

"Precisely. You know more of this matter than any of us here. You were at
hand-grips with the murderer--and let him get away."

"To my deep regret. But I have told you how that happened."

"Seems a bit strange you made no real effort to find out what the scoundrel
looked like."

"It was dark in that alleyway, monsieur."

The captain made an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an
effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by
a ring of the telephone. He swung around, clapped receiver to ear, snapped
an impatient "Well?" and listened with evident exasperation.

Lanyard's eyes narrowed. This business of telephoning was conceivably
well-timed; not improbably the captain was receiving the report of somebody
who had been sent to search Stateroom 29 in Lanyard's absence. He wondered
and, wondering, glanced at Crane, to find that gentleman watching him with
a whimsical glimmer which he was quick to extinguish when the captain said
curtly, "Very good, Mr. Warde," and turned back from the telephone, his
manner more than ever truculent.

"Mr. Lanyard," he said--"Monsieur Duchemin, that is--a valuable paper has
been stolen, an exceedingly valuable document. I don't know which carried
it, Lieutenant Thackeray or Mr. Bartholomew. But I do know such a paper was
in their possession. And to the best of my knowledge, we three were the
only ones on board that did know it. And it has disappeared. Now, sir, you
may or may not be deeper in this affair than you have admitted. If you are,
I'd advise you to own up."

"Monsieur le capitaine implies my complicity in this dastardly crime!"

Osborne shook his head doggedly. "I imply nothing. I only say this: if you
know anything you haven't told us, my advice is to make a clean breast of
it."

"I have nothing to tell you, monsieur, beyond the fact that I find you,
your tone, your manner, and your choice of words, intolerably insolent."

"Then you know nothing--?"

"Monsieur!" Lanyard cried sharply.

"Very good," the captain persisted. "I'll take your word for it--and give
you till we take on our pilot to find the real criminal and make him give
up that paper."

"And if I fail?"

"Not a soul on board leaves the _Assyrian_ till the murderer and thief are
found--if they are not one."

"But that is a general threat; whereas monsieur has honoured me by
making this a personal matter. What punishment have you prepared for
me specifically, if I fail to accomplish this task which baffles
your--shrewdness?"

"I'll at least inform the port authorities in New York, tell them who you
are, and have you barred out of the country."

"I want to say, Lanyard," Crane interposed, "this isn't my notion of how to
deal with you, or in any way by my advice."

"Thank you, monsieur," the adventurer replied icily, without removing his
attention from the captain. "What else, Captain Osborne?"

"That is all I have to say to you to-night, sir. Good-night."

"But I have something more to say to you, monsieur le capitaine. First, I
desire to give over to you this article which it will doubtless please you
to consider stolen property." Lanyard placed the automatic pistol on the
desk. "One of Lieutenant Thackeray's," he explained; "at Miss Brooke's
suggestion, I borrowed it as a life-preserver, in event of another brush
with this homicidal maniac."

"She told us about that," Osborne said heavily, fumbling with the weapon.
"What else, sir?"

"Only this, monsieur le capitaine: I shall use my best endeavour to uncover
the author of these crimes. If I succeed, be sure I shall denounce him. If
I succeed only in securing this valuable paper you speak of, be equally
sure you will never see it; for it shall leave my hands only to pass into
those which I consider entirely trustworthy."

"The devil!" Captain Osborne leaped from his chair quaking with fury. "You
dare accuse me of disloyalty--!"

"Now you mention it...." Lanyard cocked his head to one side with a
maddening effect of deliberation. "No," he concluded--"no; I wouldn't
accuse you of intentional treason, monsieur; for that would involve an
imputation of intelligence...."

He opened the door and nodded pleasantly to Crane and the third officer.

"Good-night, gentlemen," he said silkily. "Oh, and you, too, Captain
Osborne--good-night, I'm sure."




VII

IN STATEROOM 29


In spite of his own anger, something far from being either assumed or
inconsiderable, Lanyard was fain to pause, a few paces from the deck-house,
and laugh quietly at a vast and incoherent booming which was resounding in
the room he had just quitted--Captain Osborne trying to do justice to
the emotions inspired in his virtuous bosom by the cheek of this damned
gaol-bird.

But suddenly, reminded of the grim reason for all this wretched brawling,
Lanyard shrugged off his amusement. Beneath his very feet, almost a man
lay dead, another perhaps dying, while the beast who had wrought that
devilishness remained at large.

He comprehended in a wondering regard that wide, star-blazoned arch of
skies, that broad, dark, restful mystery of waters, that still, sweet world
of peace through which the _Assyrian_ forged, muttering contentedly at her
toil ... while Murder with foul hands and slavering chops skulked somewhere
in the darkened fabric of her, somewhere beyond that black mouth of the
deck-port yawning at Lanyard's elbow.

From that same portal a man came abruptly but quietly, saw Lanyard standing
there, gave him a staring look and grudging nod, and strode forward to the
captain's quarters: Mr. Warde, the first officer.

Lanyard recollected himself, and went below.

Still the sailor guarded the door in that port alleyway; but now it stood
wide, and Cecelia Brooke was on its threshold, conversing guardedly with
the surgeon. Even as Lanyard caught sight of them, the latter bowed and
turned aft, while the girl retreated and refastened the door on its hook.

Thus reminded of Crane's shrewd questions, Lanyard was speculating rather
foggily concerning the reason therefor as he turned down the passage to
his own quarters. What had the American noticed, or been told, to make him
surmise covert sympathy between the girl and the lieutenant?

He caught himself yawning. Drowsiness buzzed in his brain. He had an
incoherent feeling that he would now sleep long and heavily. Entering his
stateroom, he put a shoulder against the door, pushing it to as he fumbled
for the switch. The circumstance that the lights were no longer burning as
he had left them failed to impress him as noteworthy in view of his belief
that, by the captain's orders, Mr. Warde had been ransacking his effects in
his absence.

But when no more than a click responded to a turn of the switch, the room
remaining quite dark, Lanyard uttered an imprecation, abruptly very wide
awake indeed.

Before he could move he stiffened to positive immobility: the cool, hard
nose of a pistol had come into contact with his skull, just behind the ear.

Simultaneously a softly-modulated voice advised him in purest German: "Be
quite still, Herr Lanyard, and hold up your hands--so! Also, see that you
utter no sound till I give you leave.... Karl, the handkerchief."

Lanyard stood motionless, hands well elevated, while a heavy silk blindfold
was whipped over his eyes and knotted tight at the back of his head.

"Now your paws, Herr Lone Wolf--put them together behind your back,
prudently making no attempt to reach a pocket."

Obediently Lanyard permitted his wrists to be caught together with a second
silk handkerchief. He could feel a slight sensation of heat upon his hands,
and guessed that this was caused by the light of a flash-lamp held close
to the flesh. None the less he took the chance of clenching his fists and
tensing the muscles of his wrists.

"Tightly, Karl."

The bonds were made painfully fast. Still it did not seem to occur to his
captors to oblige their prisoner to open his hands and relax his wrists.
Lanyard perceived a glimmer of hope in this oversight: the enemy was
normally stupid.

"Now the lights again."

After a little wait, during which he could hear the bulbs being pressed
back into their sockets, the switch clicked once more.

"And now, swine-dog!"--the pistol tapped his skull significantly--"if you
value your life, speak, and speak quickly. Where is that document?"

"Document?" Lanyard repeated in a tone of wonder.

"Unless you are eager to explore the hereafter, tell us where we may find
it without delay."

"Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."

"You lie!" the German snapped. "Face about!"

Somebody grasped his shoulders roughly and swung him round to the light,
the nose of the pistol shifting to press against his abdomen.

"Search him, Karl."

Unseen hands investigated his pockets cunningly. As they finished, the man
who answered to the name of Karl became articulate for the first time,
following a grunt of disappointment:

"Nothing--he has it not upon him."

"Look more thoroughly. Did you think him idiot enough to carry it where
you'd find it at the first dip? Imbecile!"

For the purpose of this second search Lanyard's garments were ripped
open, and the enemy made sure that he carried nothing next his skin more
incriminating than a money-belt, which was forcibly removed.

"His shoes--see to his shoes!" the first speaker insisted irritably. "Sit
down, Lanyard!"

A petulant push sent the adventurer reeling across the cabin to fall upon
the lounge seat beneath the port. With some effort he assumed a sitting
position, while Karl, kneeling, hastily unlaced and tore off his shoes and
socks.

"Nothing, captain," was the report.

"Damnation!... Continue to search his luggage. Leave nothing unexamined.
In particular look into every hole and corner where none but a fool would
attempt to hide anything. This fine gentleman imagines we value his
intelligence too highly to believe he would leave the paper in plain
sight."

To an accompaniment of sounds indicating that Karl was obeying his
superior, this last resumed in a tone of lofty contempt:

"How is it you have abandoned the habit of going armed, Herr Lone Wolf?
That is not like you. Is it that you grow unwary through drug-using? But
that matters nothing. We have more important business to speak over, you
and I. You will be very, very docile, and answer promptly, also in a low
voice, if you would avoid getting hurt. Do you understand?"

"Perfectly," Lanyard replied, furtively working at the bonds on his wrists.

"Good. We speak together like good friends, yes?"

"Naturally," said Lanyard. "It is so conducive to chumminess to be caressed
with an automatic pistol--you've no idea!"

"Oblige by speaking German. Our ears are sick with all this bastard
English. Also, more quietly speak. Do not put me to the regrettable
necessity of shooting you."

"How regrettable? You didn't stick at braining those others--"

"Hardly the same thing. You are not like those English swine. You are
French; and Germany has no hatred for France, but only pity that it so
fatuously opposes manifest destiny. In truth, you are not even French, but
a great thief; and criminals have no patriotism, nor loyalty to any State
but their own, the state of moral turpitude."

The speaker interrupted himself to relish his wit with a thick chuckle. And
Lanyard's jaws ached with the strain of self-control. He continued to pluck
at the folds of silk while concentrating in effort to memorise the voice,
which he failed utterly to place. Undoubtedly this animal was a shipboard
acquaintance, one who knew him well; but those detestable German gutturals
disguised his accents quite beyond identification.

"For all that, you are not wise so to try my patience. I permit you five
minutes by my watch in which to make up your mind to surrender that
document."

"How often must I tell you," Lanyard enquired, "all this talk of documents
is Greek to me?"

"Then you have five minutes to brush up your classical education, and
translate into terms suited to your intelligence. I will have that document
from you or--in four more minutes--shoot you dead."

To this Lanyard said nothing. But his patient attentions to the
handkerchief round his wrists were beginning perceptibly to be rewarded.

"Moreover, Herr Lanyard, you will do yourself a very good turn by
confessing--entirely aside from saving your life."

"How is that?"

"Providing you persuade me of your good faith, I am empowered to offer you
employment in our service."

Lanyard's breath passed hardly through a throat swollen with rage, chagrin,
and hatred, all hopelessly impotent. But he succeeded in preserving an
unruffled countenance, as his captor's next words demonstrated.

"You are surprised, yes? You are thinking it over? Take your time--you have
three minutes more. Or perhaps you are sulky, resenting that our cleverness
has found you out? Be reasonable, my good man. Think: you cannot be
insensible to the honour my offer does you."

"What do you want of me?"

"First, that paper--thereafter to use your surpassing talents to the glory
of God and Fatherland. In addition, you will be greatly rewarded."

"Now you do begin to interest me," Lanyard said coolly.... Surely he could
contrive some way to slay this beast with his naked hands! He must play for
time.... "How rewarded?"

"As I say, with a place in the Prussian Secret Service, its protection,
freedom to ply your trade unhindered in America, even countenanced, till
that country becomes a German province under German laws."

"But do I hear you offer this to a Frenchman?"

"Undeceive yourself. Men of all nations to-day, recognising that the star
of Germany is in the ascendant, that soon all nations will be German,
are hastening to make their peace beforehand by rendering Germany good
service."

"Something in that, perhaps," Lanyard admitted thoughtfully.

"Think well, my friend.... Yes, Karl?"

The voice of the other spy responded sullenly: "Nothing--absolutely
nothing."

"Two minutes, Herr Lanyard."

Of a sudden Lanyard's face was violently distorted in a grimace of terror.
He lurched his shoulders forward, openly struggling with his bonds.

"But--good God!" he protested in a voice of terror, "you can't possibly be
so unreasonable! I tell you, I haven't got your damned paper!"

A loop of the handkerchief slipped over one hand.

"Be still! Cease your struggles. And not so loud, my friend!" The
peremptory voice dropped into mockery as Lanyard, pale and exhausted, sat
back trembling--and a second loop of silk dropped over the other hand. "So
you begin to appreciate that we mean business, yes? One minute and thirty
seconds!"

"Have mercy!" the adventurer whined desperately--and licked his lips as if
he found them dry with fear. Now both hands were all but wholly free. True:
he remained blindfolded and covered by a deadly weapon. "Give me a chance.
I'll do anything you wish! But I can't give you what I haven't got."

"Be silent! Here, Karl."

There was a sound of unintelligible murmuring as the two spies conferred
together. Lanyard writhed in apparent extremity of terror. His hands were
free. He sought hopelessly for inspiration. What to do without arms?

"Be grateful to Karl. He urges that perhaps you know nothing of the
document."

"Don't you think I'd tell if I did know?"

"Then you have one minute--no, forty seconds--in which to pledge yourself
to the Prussian Secret Service."

"You want me to swear--?"

"Certainly."

"Then hear me," said Lanyard earnestly: "_You damned canaille_!" And in
one movement he tore the bandage from his eyes and launched himself head
foremost at the man who stood over him.

He caught part of an oath drowned out by the splitting report of a pistol
that went off within an inch of his ear. Then his head took the man full
in the belly, and both went sprawling to the deck, Lanyard fighting like a
maniac.

Sheer luck had guided clawing fingers to the right wrist of his antagonist,
round which they shut like jaws of a trap. At the same time he wrenched the
other's arm high above his head.

Momentarily expecting the shock of a bullet from the pistol of the second
spy, he found time to wonder that it was so long deferred, and even in
the fury of his struggles, out of the corner of one eye caught a fugitive
glimpse of a tallish man, masked, standing back to the forward partition in
a pose of singular indecision, pistol poised in his grasp.

Then the efforts of his immediate adversary threw him into a position in
which he was unable to see the other.

Of a sudden the stateroom was filled with the thunder of an automatic, its
seven cartridges discharged in one brisk, rippling crash.

It was as if a white-hot iron had been laid across Lanyard's shoulder.
Beneath him the man started convulsively, with such force as almost to
throw him off bodily, then relaxed altogether and lay limp and still,
pinning one of Lanyard's arms under him.

Its visor displaced, the face of Baron von Harden was revealed, features
distorted, eyes glaring, a frozen mask of hate and terror.

His arm free, the adventurer rolled away from the corpse in time to see the
open window-port blocked by the body of the other spy.

Gathering himself together, he snatched up the pistol that dropped from the
inert grasp of the dead man, and levelled it at the port.

But now that space was empty.

He rose and paused for an instant, his glance instinctively seeking the
ledge above the hand-basin.

The hypodermic outfit was there, but minus the phial.

In the alleyway rose a confusion of running feet and shouting tongues.
A heavy banging rang on the door to Stateroom 29. Crane's nasal accents
called upon Lanyard to open.




VIII

OFF NANTUCKET


Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration
whatever. Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and
knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them. Their
bodies would dam the doorway hopelessly; insistent hands would hinder him;
innumerable importunate enquiries would be dinned at him, all immaterial
in contrast with this emergency, a catechism one would need an hour to
satisfy. And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that,
while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief
was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all
traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.

No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that
one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it
could only be through immediate pursuit.

Nor did the adventurer waste time debating the better course. With him,
whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils,
each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and
ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to
make the two seem one.

For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost
unbelievable rapidity. And that square opening of the window-port was
hardly vacant when Lanyard sprang to his feet; the fugitive had barely time
to find his own upon the outer deck before Lanyard leaped after him; the
first thumps upon the panels of his door were still echoing when he thrust
head and shoulders out of the port and began to pump the automatic at a
shadow fleeing aft upon that narrow breadth of planking between rail and
wall.

Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.

Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out
of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered
through the port.

Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the
shoulder of the superstructure.

As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on
the boat-deck at the head of the companion-ladder greeted him with pistol
fire. He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to
cope with this untoward development.

Overhead, at the side, a lifeboat hung on its davits, ready for emergency
launching, the gap in the rail which it filled when normally swung inboard
spanned only by a length of line. And the darkness in the shadow of the
boat was dense, an excellent screen.

Climbing upon the rail, Lanyard grasped the edge of the deck overhead and
drew himself up undetected by his quarry, whom he espied still holding
the head of the companion ladder, hidden from the bridge by the after
deck-house, standing ready to shoot Lanyard should he attempt to renew the
pursuit by that approach.

At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or
objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity
under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his
attention.

A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he
poised himself with athletic grace--the lower part of his face masked by
what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.

Lanyard heard him swearing in German.

Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a
patent cigar-lighter in the hands of the spy. And as Lanyard rose from his
knees after ducking beneath the line, a stream of fatter sparks spat from
the end of a fuse.

The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the
sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.

As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into
brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric-blue glare that must
have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.

A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief
passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the
after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.

Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in
his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space. In another
breath he might have had the fellow at a disadvantage. But the distance
was too great. Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the
bullets clearing narrowly--or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath
fanned his cheek.

Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action. Half blinded, Lanyard
clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill
and strength to effect a throw.

That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that
all but matched his own. The animal he embraced had muscles like tempered
springs and the cunning and fury of a wild beast in a trap. For a moment
Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a
rib-crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift
his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the
defensive.

Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master. The first phase
of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room
opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance,
seized Lanyard from behind.

The adventurer felt his arms grasped by hands whose strength seemed little
short of superhuman, and wrenched back so violently that his very bones
cracked. Fairly lifted from his feet, he was held as helpless as an infant
kicking in the arms of its nurse.

Released, the other spy stepped back and swung his left fist viciously to
Lanyard's jaw. Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let
go; his head dropped weakly to one side. The man who had struck him said
quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away,
striking him repeatedly.

For a giddy moment Lanyard was darkly conscious--as one dreams an evil
dream--of blows raining mercilessly about his head and body, blows that
drove him back athwartships toward a fate dark and terrible, a great void
of blackness. He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of
nausea. Beneath him his knees buckled. There fell one final blow, ruthless
as the wrath of God.

He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night
that yawned for him....

As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck
and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted
to the smoking-room door. His confederate was in the act of stepping across
the raised threshold. He followed, closed the door.

The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck-house and
pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....

The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.

He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths
unguessable. The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold
his breath.

Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate
duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended
in frigid purgatory. Against his ribs something hammered like a racing
engine. In his ears sounded a vast roaring, the deafening voices of a
thousand waterfalls. His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of
bursting wide.

Without warning expelled from those depths, he shot full half-length out of
water, and fell back into the milky welter of the _Assyrian's_ wake.

Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.

The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now
clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.

Already the _Assyrian_, forging onward unchecked, had left him well astern,
her progress distinctly disclosed by that infernal bluish glare spouting
from her after deck.

She seemed absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so
tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could
conceivably be that great liner, the _Assyrian_....

Temporarily a burning pain in his left shoulder drove all other
considerations out of mind. The salt water was beginning to smart in the
raw, superficial wound made by that assassin's bullet ... back there in the
stateroom ... long ago....

Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully
to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by
insensible degrees losing force.

Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it
seemed desirable to live as long as possible. Withal he was aware he could
not live. Whether careless or utterly ignorant of his fate, the _Assyrian_
was trudging on and on, leaving him ever farther astern, lost beyond rescue
in that weird, bleak waste. Even were an alarm to be given, were she to
stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too
late.

The cold was killing.

He felt very sleepy. Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end.
His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function
altogether. Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.

Yet the will to live persisted amazingly. Had Lanyard wished it he could
not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat. Vaguely he wondered how
people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human
power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's
self go down. Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....

Why should he care to go on living?

No reading that riddle!...

On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face
to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea.
The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly
opiate. The cold no more irked him, but seemed somehow strangely anodynous.
Imperturbably he envisaged death, without fear, without welcome. What must
be, must....

For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands. More than ever
sleepy, before he slept that last, long sleep he must somehow solve this
enigma, learn the reason why life continued so to allure his failing
senses.

Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat
lightning in a still midsummer night.

Death's countenance was kind.

That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic
motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and,
swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....

The deeps were yielding up their mysteries. Past him a huge pale monster
swept at furious pace, hissing grimly as it passed, like some spectral
Nemesis pursuing the _Assyrian_.

Indifferently he speculated concerning the reality of this phenomenon.

The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship.
She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted
visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even
that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the
immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as
he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that
guttered toward its swift extinction....

Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?

Like a blazing thunderbolt one word rent the slumbrous web of sentience:
_Ekstrom_!

Galvanised by the flood of hatred unpent by the syllables of that name,
Lanyard began again to swim, flailing the water with frantic arms as if to
win somewhither by the very violence of his efforts.

This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....

Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived. Unfair.... It
must not be!...

Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation. The swimmer, swung high
on the bosom of a great swell, saw a vast sheet of fire raving heavenward
from the _Assyrian_.

It vanished instantly.

When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship. He
imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror
indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some
gigantic hand plucked her under.

What had happened? Had the accomplices of the dead Baron von Harden set off
an infernal machine aboard the vessel? In the name of reason, why? They had
got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page
torn from the Book of Doom. Then why...?

And to what end had they exploded that light bomb on the after deck?

To make the _Assyrian_ a glaring target in the night--what else? A target
for what?...

Of a sudden all rational mental processes were erased from Lanyard's
consciousness. A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul. He
began to struggle like a maniac, fighting the waters that hindered his
flight from some hideous thing that was lifting up from the ocean's ooze to
drag him down.

He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.

The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the
face of the waters. A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge
him. He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk
beneath him. His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.

His most desperate efforts were all unavailing. He could not escape. The
thing came up too rapidly. Following that first mad thrill of contact with
it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air. Almost
instantly he was floundering in knee-deep waters that parted, cascading
away on either hand. Then, elevated well above the sea, he slid and fell
prone upon a slimy wet surface.

His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar
of metal.

Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him. His hands
passed over a riveted joint of metal plates. Looking up, he made out the
truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae-like periscope tubes
stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star-strewn sky.

Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him. He lay upon
its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge
round the conning tower.

He sobbed a little in sheer hysteric gratitude, that this miracle had been
vouchsafed unto him, that he had thus been spared to live on against his
hour with Ekstrom.

But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he
was too weak and faint. Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour,
panting.

With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back. Rousing, Lanyard saw several
figures emerge from the conning tower. Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless,
shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their
lungs with the sweet air. He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere
rattle from his throat.

Two came to the edge of the bridge and stood immediately over him, fixing
binoculars to their eyes, their voices quite audible.

A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring
together in the German tongue.

Death, then, was but a little delayed.

Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth
chattered uncontrollably.

Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught
broken phrases, snatches of sentences:

"... _sinking fast ... struck square amidships ... broke her back_...."

"... _trouble with her boats. There goes one over_!..."

"... _fools jumping overboard like cattle_...."

"_What's that rocket? Do the swine want us to shell their boats_?"

"_Why not? They're asking for it_!"

One of the officers lowered his glasses and barked a series of sharp
commands. The crew on deck leaped to attention. One leaned over the
conning-tower hatch and shouted to his mates below. A hatch forward of
the tower opened, and a quick-firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung
smoothly and silently up from its lair.

The other officer, looking down, started violently.

"_Verdammt_! What's this?"

The first rejoined him. "Impossible!"

"Impossible or not--a man or a cadaver!"

"Have him up and see...."

By order, two of the crew dragged Lanyard up to the bridge, supporting him
by main strength while the officers examined him.

"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.

"How the devil did he get out here?"

"From the _Assyrian_--"

"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck--"

"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck--or was thrown--"

A cry of alarm from the group about the gun, awaiting final orders to open
fire upon the _Assyrian's_ boats, interrupted the conference. The officers
swung away in haste.

"Hell's fury! what's that searchlight?"

"A Yankee destroyer--in all probability the one we dodged yesterday
afternoon."

"She'll find us yet if we don't submerge. Forward, there--house that gun!
And get below--quickly!"

During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard
caught the attention of an officer.

"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.

"Leave him here to sink or swim as we go down," snapped the officer--"and
be damned to him!"

With a supreme effort the adventurer sank his fingers deep into the arms of
the two men.

"Wait!" he gasped faintly in German. "On the Emperor's service--"

"What's that?" The officer turned back sharply.

"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered--"Personal
Division--Wilhelmstrasse Number 27--"

A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was
welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths. One officer had already popped through
the conning-tower hatch, followed by several of the crew. There remained
only those supporting Lanyard, and the second officer.

"Take him below!" the latter ordered. "He may be telling the truth. If
not...."

In the distance a gun boomed. A shell shrieked over the submarine and
dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard. The men rushed
Lanyard toward the conning tower. He tried feebly to help them. In that
effort consciousness was altogether blotted out....




IX

SUB SEA


When he opened his eyes again he was resting, after a fashion, naked
between harsh, damp blankets in a narrow, low-ceiled bunk inches too short
for one of his stature.

After an experimental squirm or two he lay very still; his back and all his
limbs were stiff and sore, his bullet-seared shoulder burned intolerably
beneath a rudely applied first-aid dressing, and he was breathing heavily
long, labouring inhalations of an atmosphere sickeningly dank, close, and
foul with unspeakable stenches, for which the fumes of sulphuric acid with
a rank reek of petroleum and lubricating oils formed but a modest and
retiring background.

Also his head felt very thick and dull. He found it extremely difficult to
think, and for some time, indeed, was quite unable to think to any purpose.

His very eyes ached in their sockets.

In the ceiling glowed an electric bulb, dimly illuminating a cubicle barely
big enough to accommodate the bunk, a dresser, and a small desk with a
folding seat. The inner wall was a slightly concave surface of steel plates
whose seams oozed moisture. In the opposite wall was a sliding door, open,
beyond which ran a narrow alleyway floored with metal grating. Everything
in sight was enamelled with white paint and clammy with the sweat of that
foetid air.

Over all an unnatural hush brooded, now and again accentuated by a rumble
of distant voices and gusts of vacant laughter, once or twice by a curious
popping. For a long time he heard nothing else whatever. The effect was
singularly disquieting and did its bit to quicken torpid senses to grasp
his plight.

Sluggishly enough Lanyard pieced together fragments of lurid memories,
reconstructing the sequence of last night's events scene by scene to the
moment of his rescue by the U-boat.

So, it appeared, he was aboard a German submersible, virtually a prisoner,
though posing as an agent of the Personal Intelligence Department of the
German Secret Service.

To that inspiration of failing consciousness he owed his life, or such
of its span as now remained to him, a term whose duration could only be
defined by his ability to carry off the imposture pending problematic
opportunity to escape. And, assuming that this last were ever offered him,
there was no present possibility of guessing how long it might not be
deferred.

Its butcher's mission successfully accomplished, the U-boat was not
improbably even now en route for Heligoland, beginning a transatlantic
cruise of weeks that might never end save in a nameless grave at the bottom
of the Four Seas.

Only the matter of impersonation failed to embarrass in prospect. A natural
linguist, Lanyard's three years within the German lines had put a rare
finish upon his mastery of German. More than this, he was well versed in
the workings of the Prussian spy system. As Dr. Paul Rodiek, Wilhelmstrasse
Agent Number 27, he was safe as long as he found no acquaintance of that
gentleman in the complement of the submarine; for, largely upon information
furnished by Lanyard himself, Dr. Rodiek had been secretly apprehended
and executed in the Tower the day before Lanyard left London to join the
_Assyrian_.

But the question of the U-boat's present whereabouts and its movements
in the immediate future disturbed the adventurer profoundly. He was
elaborately incurious about Heligoland; and several weeks' association
with the Boche in the close quarters of a submarine was a prospect that
revolted. Wellnigh any fate were preferable....

Uncertain footsteps sounded in the alleyway, paused at the entrance to his
cubicle. He turned his head wearily on the pillow. In the doorway stood
a man whose slenderly elegant carriage of a Prussian officer was not
disguised even by his shapeless wreck of a naval lieutenant's uniform, a
man with a countenance of singularly unpleasant cast, leaving out of all
consideration the grease and grime that discoloured it. His narrow forehead
slanted back just a trace too sharply, his nose was thin and overlong, his
mouth thin and cruel beneath its ambitious mustache à la Kaiser; his small
black eyes, set much too close together, blazed with unholy exhilaration.

As soon as he spoke Lanyard understood that he was drunk, drunk with more
than the champagne of which he presently boasted.

"Awake, eh?" he greeted Lanyard with a mirthless snarl. "You've slept like
the dead man I took you for at first, my friend--a solid fourteen hours, my
word for it! Feeling better now?"

Lanyard's essays to reply began and ended in a croak for water. The
Prussian nodded, disappeared, returned with an aluminium cup of stale cold
water mixed with a little brandy.

"Champagne if you like," he offered, as Lanyard, painfully propping himself
up on an elbow, gulped like an animal from the vessel held to his lips. "We
are holding a little celebration, you know."

Lanyard dropped back to the pillow, the question in his eyes.

"Celebrating our success," the Prussian responded. "We got her, and that
means much honour and a long furlough to boot, when we get home, just as
failure would have spelled--I don't like to think what. I shouldn't care to
fill the shoes of those poor devils who let the _Assyrian_ escape them off
Ireland, I can tell you."

Something very much like true fear flickered in his small eyes as he
pondered the punishment meted out to those who failed.

So the U-boat was homeward bound! Strange one noticed no motion of her
progress, heard no noise of machinery.

"Where are we?" Lanyard whispered.

"Peacefully asleep on the bottom, about five miles south of Martha's
Vineyard, waiting till it is dark enough to slip in to our base."

"Base?"

The Prussian hiccoughed and giggled. "On the south shore of the Vineyard,"
he confided with alcoholic glee: "snuggest little haven heart could wish,
well to the north of all deep-sea traffic; and the coastwise trade runs
still farther north, through Vineyard Sound, other side the island. Not
a soul ever comes that way, not a soul suspects. How should they?
The admirable charts of the Yankee Coast and Geodetic Survey"--he
sneered--"show no break in the south beach of the island, between the ocean
and the ponds. But there is one. The sea made the breach during a gale, our
people helped with a little Trotyl, tides and storms did the rest. Now we
can enter a secluded, landlocked harbour with just enough water at low
tide, and lie hidden there till the word comes to move again--three miles
of dense scrub forest, all privately owned as a game preserve, fenced and
patrolled, between us and the nearest cultivated land--and friends in
plenty on the island to keep all our needs supplied--petroleum, fresh
vegetables, champagne, all that. Just the same we take no chances--never
make our landfall by day, never enter or leave harbour except at night."

He paused, contemplating Lanyard owlishly. "Ought not to tell you all
this, I presume," he continued, more soberly, though the wild light still
flickered ominously in his eyes. "But it is safe enough; you will see for
yourself in a few hours; and then ... either you are all right, or you will
never live to tell of it. We radio'd for information about Wilhelmstrasse
Number 27 just before dawn, after we had dodged that damned Yankee
destroyer. Ought to get an answer to-night, when we come up."

Heavier footsteps rang in the alleyway. The Prussian made a grimace of
dislike.

"Here comes the commander," he cautioned uneasily.

A great blond Viking of a German in the uniform of a captain shouldered
heavily through the doorway and, acknowledging the salute of the rat-faced
subaltern with a bare nod, stood looking down at Lanyard in taciturn
silence, hostility in his blood-shot blue eyes.

"How long since he wakened?" he asked thickly, with the accent of a
Bavarian.

"A minute or two ago."

"Why did you not inform me?"

The tone was offensively domineering, thanks like enough to drink, nerves,
and hatred of his job and all things and persons pertaining to it.

The subaltern coloured. "He asked for water--I got it for him."

The commander stared churlishly, then addressed Lanyard: "How are you now?"

"Very faint," Lanyard said truthfully. But he would have lied had it been
otherwise with him. It was his book to make time in which to collect his
thoughts, concoct a bullet-proof story, plan against an adverse answer to
that wireless enquiry.

"Can you eat, drink a little champagne?"

Lanyard nodded slightly, adding a feeble "Please."

The Bavarian glanced significantly at his subaltern, who hastened to leave
them.

"Who are you? What is your name?"

"Dr. Paul Rodiek."

"Your employment?"

"Personal Intelligence Bureau--confidential agent."

"What were you doing on board the _Assyrian_?"

Lanyard mustered enough strength to look the man squarely in the eye.

"Pardon," he said coldly. "You must know your question is indiscreet."

"I must know more about you."

"It should be enough," Lanyard ventured boldly, "to know that I set off
that flare as arranged, at risk of my life."

"How came you overboard?"

"In the scuffle caused by my lighting the flare."

"So you tell me. But we found you half clothed, lacking any sort of
identification. Am I to accept your unsupported word?"

"My papers are naturally at the bottom of the sea, in the garments I
discarded lest their weight drag me down. If you have doubts," Lanyard
continued firmly, "it is your privilege to settle them by communicating via
radio with Seventy-ninth Street."

He shut his eyes wearily and turned his head aside on the pillow, confident
that this reference to the headquarters and secret wireless station of the
Prussian spy system in New York would win him peace for a time at least.

After a moment the commander uttered a non-committal grunt. "We shall see,"
he prophesied darkly, and went away.

Later, one of the crew brought Lanyard a dish of greasy stew and potatoes,
lukewarm, with bread and a half-bottle of excellent champagne.

He ate all he could stomach of the first, devoured the second ravenously,
and drained the bottle of its ultimate life-giving drop.

Then, immeasurably refreshed and fortified in body and spirit, he turned
face to the wall, composed himself as if to sleep, shut his eyes, adjusted
the tempo of his respiration, and lay quite still, wide awake and thinking
hard.

After a while somebody tramped into the cubicle, bent over Lanyard
inquisitively and, satisfied that he slept, retired, taking away the empty
bottle and dishes.

Otherwise his meditations were disturbed only by those echoes of revelry
in honour of the late manifestation of the Hun's divine right to do wanton
murder on the high seas.

The rumour waxed and waned, died into dull mutterings, broke out afresh in
spurts of merriment that held an hysterical note. Once a quarrel sprang up
and was silenced by the commander's deep, unpleasant tones. Corks popped
spasmodically. Again there were sounds much like a man's sobbing; but these
were promptly blared down by a phonograph with a typically American accent.
When that palled, a sentimental disciple of frightfulness sang Tannenbaum
in a melting tenor.

Everything tended to effect an impression that all, commander and meanest
mechanic alike, were making forlorn efforts to forget.

Devoutly Lanyard prayed they might be successful, at least until the
submarine made her secret base. If too much alcohol was bad, too much
brooding was infinitely worse for the German temperament. He remembered
one U-boat commander who, returning to the home port after a conspicuously
successful cruise, had been taken ashore in a strait-jacket.

Lanyard himself did not care to dwell upon those scenes which must have
been enacted on board the _Assyrian_ after the torpedo struck....

Deliberately ignoring all else, he set himself the task of reviewing those
events which had led up to his going overboard.

One by one he considered the incidents of that night, painstakingly
dissected them, examined their every phase in minute analysis, weighing for
ulterior meaning every word uttered in his presence, harking even farther
back to reconstruct his acquaintance with each actor from the very moment
of its inception, seeking that hint which he was convinced must be
somewhere hidden in the history of the affair, waiting only recognition to
lead straightway out of this gloomy maze of mystery into a sunlit open of
understanding.

In vain: there was an ambiguity in that business to baffle the keenest and
most pertinacious investigation.

The conduct of Cecelia Brooke alone bristled with inconsistencies
inexplicable, the conduct of the German spies no less.

To get better perspective upon the problem, he reduced the premises to
their barest summary:

A valuable dossier brought on board the _Assyrian_ (no matter by whom) had
come into the possession of British agents, with the knowledge of Captain
Osborne. Thackeray had secreted it in that fraudulent bandage. German
agents, apparently under the leadership of Baron von Harden, had waylaid
him, knocked him senseless, unwrapped the bandage, but somehow (probably
in the first instance through the interference of the Brooke girl) had
overlooked the document. Subsequently the Brooke girl had found and
entrusted it to Lanyard. (No matter why!) He on his part had exerted his
utmost inventiveness in hiding it away. Nevertheless it had been discovered
and abstracted within an hour.

By whom?

Not improbably by the Brooke girl herself. Repenting her impulsiveness,
after leaving Lanyard with the captain, from whom she had doubtless learned
the truth about "Monsieur Duchemin," she might well have gone directly to
Lanyard's stateroom and hit upon the morphia phial as the likeliest hiding
place without delay, thanks to prior acquaintance with the proportions of
the paper cylinder.

But why should she have assumed that Lanyard had not disposed of the trust
about his person?

Not impossibly the thing had been found by the first officer of the
_Assyrian_, searching by order of the captain--as Lanyard assumed he had.

But, if Mr. Warde had found it, he had not reported his find when
telephoning to Captain Osborne; or else the latter had gone to great
lengths to mystify Lanyard.

There remained the chance that the paper had been stolen by one of the two
German agents--by either without the knowledge of the other.

If Baron von Harden had found it--necessarily before Lanyard returned
to the room--he had subsequently been at elaborate pains to conceal his
success from both his victim and his confederate. Why? Did he distrust the
latter? Again, why?

If "Karl" had been the thief, it must have been after Lanyard's return,
and while the Baron was preoccupied with the task of keeping the prisoner
quiet, to let the search proceed.

In that event "Karl" had lied deliberately to his superior. Why? Because
the document was salable, and "Karl" intended to realize its value for his
personal benefit?

Not an unlikely explanation. Nor could this be called the first instance in
which the Prussian spy system, admirably organized though it was, had been
betrayed by one of its own agents.

This hypothesis, too, accounted for that most perplexing circumstance of
all, the murder of Baron von Harden. For Lanyard was fully persuaded that
had been nothing less than premeditated murder, in no way an accident of
faulty aim. Even the most nervous and unstrung man could hardly have missed
six shots out of seven, point blank. A nervous man, indeed, could hardly
have gained his own consent to take so hideous a chance of injuring or
killing a collaborator.

It appeared, then, that one of four things had happened to the cylinder of
paper:

Miss Brooke had taken it back into her own care. In which case Lanyard was
no more concerned.

Captain Osborne had secured it through Mr. Warde. This, however, Lanyard
did not seriously credit.

It had gone to the bottom when the _Assyrian_ sank with the body--among
others--of Baron von Harden.

Or "Karl" had stolen it.

Privately, indeed, Lanyard rather inclined to hope that the last might
prove to be the true solution. He desired earnestly to meet "Karl" once
more, on equal terms. And the more counts in the score, the greater his
satisfaction in exacting a reckoning in full.

But he anticipated. That chapter might only too possibly have been closed
forever by the hand of Death. As yet he knew nothing concerning the
mortality of the _Assyrian_ débâcle. He had not enquired of the officers of
the U-boat because they knew little if anything more than he. Their glasses
had discovered to them trouble with the lifeboats; they had spoken of one
boat capsizing, of "people going overboard like cattle." There must have
been many drownings, even with a United States destroyer near by and
speeding to the rescue.

A single question troubled Lanyard greatly. Officers and crew of the U-boat
had betrayed profoundest consternation upon the advent of that destroyer,
presumably a warship of a neutral nation. And that same ship had without
hesitation fired upon the submarine.

Was it possible, then, that the United States had already declared war on
Germany?

It seemed extremely probable; in such event these Germans would have been
notified instantly by wireless from the New York bureau of their country's
Secret Service; whereas, Captain Osborne, receiving the same advice by
wireless, might reasonably have kept it quiet lest the news stir to more
formidable activity those agents of the Wilhelmstrasse whose presence among
the passengers he must at least have strongly suspected.

Presently the closeness of the atmosphere began to work upon Lanyard's
perceptions. In spite of his long rest, a new drowsiness drugged his
senses. He yielded without struggle, knowing he would soon need every ounce
of strength and vitality that sleep could give him....

The din of an inferno startled him awake. Those narrow metal walls were
echoing a clangour of machinery maniacal in character and overpowering in
volume. Clankings, tappings, hissings, coughings, clatterings, stridulation
of a wireless spark, drone of dynamos, shrewdish scolding of Diesel motors
developing two thousand horsepower, individual efforts of some two thousand
valves, combined--or, declined to combine--in a cacophony like nothing
under the sun but the chant of a submersible under way on the surface.

Lanyard, gratefully aware of a current of fresh air sweeping through the
hold, rolled out of his bunk to find that, while he slept, clothing had
been provided for him, rough but adequate; heavy woollen underwear and
socks, a sweater, a dungaree coat, trousers of the same stuff, all vilely
damp, and a friendless pair of oil-sodden shoes: the sweepings of a dozen
lockers, but as welcome as disreputable.

Dressed, he turned aft through the alleyway, entering immediately the
central operating room and storm center of that typhoon of noise, a
wilderness of polished machinery in active being.

Of the score or more leather-clad machinists silent at their posts, none
paid him more heed than a passing, incurious glance as he crossed to a
narrow steel companion ladder and ascended to the conning tower. This he
found deserted; but its deck-hatch was open. He climbed out to the bridge.

The night was calm and heavily overcast, with no sea more than long, slow
swells. Through its windless quiet the U-boat racketed with the raving
abandon of the Spirit of Discord on a spree in a boiler factory. To the
riot of its internal strife was added the remonstrance of waters sliced by
the stem and flung back by the sides, a prolonged and stertorous hiss like
the rending of an endless sheet of canvas.

To eyes new from the electric illumination of the hold, the blackness was
positive, with the palpable quality of an element, relieved alone by the
dull glow of the binnacle housing the gyroscope telltale, from which the
faintest of golden reflections struck back to pick out a pair of seemingly
severed fists gripping the handles of the bridge steering wheel with a
singular effect of desperation.

For some moments Lanyard could see nothing more.

The mirthless chuckle of the lieutenant sounded at his elbow.

"So the good Herr Doctor thought he had better come up for air, eh? My
friend, the very dead might envy you the sincerity of your slumbers. We
have been half an hour on the surface, with all this uproar--and you are
only just wakened!"

"Half an hour?" Lanyard repeated thoughtfully. "Then we should be close
in...."

"Give us ten minutes more ... if we don't go aground in this accursed
blackness!"

A broad-shouldered body passed between Lanyard and the binnacle,
momentarily eclipsing its light. Down below in the operating room a bell
shrilled, and of a sudden the Diesels were silenced.

The dead quiet that followed the sharp extinction of that hubbub was as
startling as the detonation of high explosive had been.

Through this sudden stillness the submarine slipped stealthily, the hissing
beneath her bows dying down to gentle sibilance.

From forward the calls of an invisible leadsman were audible. In response
the commander uttered throaty orders to the helmsman at his elbow, and
those unattached hands shifted the wheel minutely.

Lanyard started to speak, but a growl from the captain, and a touch of the
lieutenant's hand on his sleeve cautioned him to silence.

There was a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to
swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward,
leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel
the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted
against the glow of the binnacle. The hands that gripped the wheel so
savagely were as steady as if carven out of stone. An atmosphere of
suspense enveloped the boat like a cloud.

Lanyard grew conscious of something huge and formidable, a denser shadow in
the darkness beyond the bows, the loom of land. Off to starboard a point
of light appeared abruptly, precisely as if a golden pin had punctured the
black blanket of the night. The captain growled gutturals of relief and
command. The hands on the wheel shifted, steering exceeding small. A second
light shone out to port, then shifted slowly into range with the first,
till the two were as one. Again the bell sang in the operating room, and
the vessel forged ahead quietly to the urge of electric motors alone. A
third light and a fourth appeared, well apart to port and starboard, the
range lights precisely equidistant between them. Between these the U-boat
moved swiftly. They swam back on either hand and were abruptly extinguished
as if the night, resenting their insolent trespass, had gobbled both at a
gulp.

The temperature became sensibly warmer and the salt air of the sea was
strongly tinctured with the sweet smell of pines and forest mould.

Up forward carbons sputtered and spat; a searchlight was unsheathed and
carved the gloom as if it was butter, ranging swiftly over the tree-clad
shore of a burnished black lagoon, picking out en passant several unpainted
wooden structures, then steadying on a long and substantial landing stage,
on which several men stood waiting.




X

AT BASE


As the U-boat, with motors dead and way lessening, glided up alongside
the head of that T-shaped landing stage and was made fast, the wireless
operator popped up from below, saluted the commander, and delivered a
written message.

Lanyard, instinctively aware that this was the expected report from
Seventy-ninth Street on Dr. Paul Rodiek, quietly pulled himself together
and took quick observations.

At best his chances in the all-too-probable emergency were far from
brilliant. Yet one might better perish trying, however hopelessly, than
passively submit to being shot down.

The lieutenant, waspishly superintending the work of crew and base guards
at the mooring lines, stood preoccupied within an arm's length; while the
landing stage was a fair six feet away. From its T-head to the shore, the
distance was nothing less than two hundred yards.

Desperate action and miraculous luck might take the Prussian by surprise
and enable one to snatch the service automatic from its holster at his
belt, leap to the stage, and shoot a way landward through the guards
clustered there; after which everything would depend on swiftness of foot
and the uncertain light permitting one to gain a refuge in the surrounding
woodland without a bullet in one's back.

It was a sorry hope....

With catlike attention Lanyard watched the hands holding that paper to the
binnacle light--large hands, heavy and muscular but tremulous with drink
and nervous reaction from the long strain and cumulative horror of the
cruise then ending. Their aim would not be good, except by accident. None
the less, if the report were unfavourable, their first gesture would be
toward the holster, signalling to Lanyard that the moment had come to
initiate heroic measures.

The Bavarian was an unconscionable time absorbing the import of the
message. Bending his face close to the paper, the better to make out the
writing, he read with moving lips, slowly, a doltish frown of concentration
clouding his congested countenance.

At length, however, he stood up, swaying a little as he folded and pocketed
the paper.

Lanyard relaxed. The man was too far gone in drink to be crafty, too sure
of his absolute power of life and death to imagine a need for craft. Since
his hand had not immediately sought the holster, it would not.

Turbid accents uttered the name of Dr. Rodiek.

Lanyard stepped forward alertly. "Yes, Herr Captain?"

"New York says it had no knowledge of your intention to leave England on
the _Assyrian_, but that you may well have done so. The Wilhelmstrasse will
know, of course. It has already been telegraphed. Pending its reply, I am
to detain you."

"How long?" Lanyard demurred.

"As you know, transatlantic communications must now go by land telegraph to
the Border, by hand into Mexico, thence by radio via Venezuela to Berlin.
All that takes time. Also, we may not signal New York but at stated times
of night. You will be detained another twenty-four hours at least, possibly
longer."

"My errand cannot wait."

"It must."

"You will obstruct the business of the Imperial Government at your peril."

"I would incur still greater peril did I let you go," the commander replied
nervously. "With these swine-dogs at war with the Fatherland, our lives are
not worth _that_ should this base be betrayed."

"Do I understand America has declared war?"

"Two days since. Did you not know?"

"The _Assyrian's_ wireless room was under guard: the captain published no
bulletins whatever."

The Bavarian gave a gesture of impatience.

"You will remain on board for the night," he announced heavily.

"Pardon!" Lanyard insisted with every evidence of anxious excitement.
"What you tell me makes it more than ever imperative that I reach New York
without an hour's avoidable delay. I warn you, think well before you hinder
the discharge of my duty."

"It is not necessary that I think," the commander replied. "My thinking has
all been done for me. Me, I obey my orders; it is not my part to question
their wisdom. Moreover, Herr Doctor, to my mind your insistence is to say
the least suspicious. Even had I discretion in the matter, I should hold
you. Therefore, you will keep a civil tongue in your head, or go below in
irons immediately!"

He swung on his heel, showing an insolent back while he conferred with his
subaltern.

And Lanyard shrugged appreciation of the futility of more contention
against such mulishness. Not that the Bavarian was not right enough! As to
that, one had really hoped for no better issue; but every shift is worth
trial till proved worthless; and he was no worse off now than if he had
submitted without complaint. Still one had Chance to look to for aid and
comfort in this stress; and Chance, the jade, is not always unkind to her
audacious suitors.

Even now she flashed upon Lanyard a provoking intimation of her smile.
He began to divine possibilities in this overt ill-feeling between the
officers; advantage might be made of the racial hostility of Prussian and
Bavarian.

The commander's attitude and tone were consistently overbearing, if his
words were inaudible to Lanyard. The lieutenant quite evidently submitted
only in form; his salute was punctiliously correct and curt; and as the
commander lumbered off down the landing stage, he grumbled indistinctly in
Lanyard's hearing:

"Dog of a Bavarian!"

"The good Herr Captain," Lanyard suggested pleasantly, "is not in the most
agreeable of tempers, yes?"

The high and well-born lieutenant spat comprehensively into the darkness
overside. After a moment of hesitation he moved nearer and spoke in
confidential accents. And the fragrant air of the night was tainted with
the vinous effluvium of his breath.

"Always he prattles of his precious duty!" the Prussian muttered. "Damn his
duty! Look you, Herr Doctor: months we have been on this cruise, yes, more
than three months out of Heligoland, penned together in this ramshackle
stinkpot, or isolated here in this God-forgotten hole, seeing nothing of
life, hearing nothing of the world but what little the radio tells
us--sick of the very sight of one another's faces! And now, when we have
accomplished a glorious feat and have every right to look for prompt recall
and the rewards of heroes, orders come to remain indefinitely and operate
against the North Atlantic fleet of the contemptible Yankee navy! The life
of a dog! And that noble commander of mine pretends to welcome it, talks
of one's duty to the Fatherland--as if he liked the work any better than
I!--solely to spite me!"

"But why?"

"Because he hates me," the lieutenant snarled passionately--"hates me even
as I hate him--he knows how well!"

He interrupted himself to define his conception of the commander's
character in the freest vernacular of the Berlin underworld.

Lanyard laughed amiably. "They are like that," he agreed--"those
Bavarians!"

Which inspired the Prussian to deliver a phosphorescent diatribe on the
racial traits of the Bavarian people as comprehended by the North German
junker.

"To be cooped up God knows how long in this putrescent death-trap with such
cattle," he concluded mutinously--"it passes all endurance!"

"I wonder you stand it," Lanyard sympathised--"a man of spirit and good
birth, as one readily perceives. Though the life of a secret agent is not
altogether heavenly either, if you ask me," he added gratuitously. "Regard
me now, charged with a mission of most vital moment--more than ever so
since the Yankees have shown their teeth--delayed here indefinitely because
your excellent Herr Captain chooses to doubt my word."

"Patience. Maybe your release comes quickly. Then he will regret--or would
had he wit enough. There is no cure for a fool." The sententiousness of
this aphorism was unhappily marred by a hiccough. "Anybody with eyes in his
head could see you are what you are...."

The last of the operating-room crew piled up the hatchway, saluted, and
hurried ashore to join in noisy jubilations. There remained on the U-boat
only the lieutenant with Lanyard, and two base guards detailed as anchor
watch.

"I must go," the lieutenant volunteered. "And believe me, one welcomes a
change of clothing and a dry bed after a week in this reeking sieve. As for
you, my friend, if it lay with me, you should receive the treatment due
a gentleman." A wave of maudlin camaraderie affected him. He passed an
affectionate arm through Lanyard's and was suffered, though the gorge of
the adventurer revolted at the familiarity. "I am sorry to leave you. No,
do not be astonished! No protestations, please! It is quite true. I know a
man of the right sort when I meet one, the sort even I can associate with
without loss of self-respect. It is a great pity you may not come with me
and make a night of it."

"Another time, perhaps," Lanyard said. "The night may yet come when you and
I shall meet at the Metropole or the Admiral's Palace.... Who knows?"

"Ah!" sighed the Prussian, enchanted. "What a night that will be, my
friend!... But now, it is too bad, I really must ask you to step below.
Such are my silly orders. I am made responsible for you. What do you think
of that for a joke, eh?"

He laughed vacantly but loudly, and, attempting to poke a derisive thumb
into Lanyard's ribs, lost his balance.

"What a responsibility!" said Lanyard gravely, holding him up.

"Nonsense, that's what it is. You have no possible chance to escape."

"Suppose I make one--tip you overboard, take to my heels--?"

"You would be shot like a rabbit before you got half way to the shore."

"Ah, but grant, for the sake of argument, that these brave fellows, the
guards, aim poorly in this gloom?"

"Where would you go? Into the forest, naturally. But how far? You may
believe me when I tell you, not a hundred yards. It's a true wilderness,
scrub-oak and cedar and second growth choked with underbrush, almost
trackless. In five minutes you would be helplessly lost, in this blackness,
with no stars to steer by. We need only wait till daylight to find you
walking in a circle."

"You can't mean," Lanyard pursued, learning something helpful every moment,
"there is no communicating road?"

"The main woods road, yes: but that is far too well patrolled. Without the
countersign, you would be caught or shot a dozen times before you reached
the end of it."

"Ah, well!"--with the sigh of a philosopher--"then I presume there's no way
out but by swimming."

"Over to the beach you mean? Well, what then? You have got a twenty-mile
walk either way through deep sand sure to betray your footprints. At dawn
we follow and bag you at our leisure."

"You are discouraging!" Lanyard complained. "I see I may as well go below
and be good. It's a dull life."

"Tell you what," giggled the lieutenant, leading his prisoner to the
conning-tower hatch and lowering his voice: "do just that, go below and be
nice, and presently I will come back and we'll split a bottle. What do you
say to that, eh?"

"Colossal!"

"Not a bad notion, is it? I like it myself. One gets weary for the society
of a gentleman, you've no idea.... As soon as my commander is drunk enough,
I will slip away. How's that?"

"Grossartig!" Lanyard approved, turning to descend.

"Wait. You shall see for yourself what it means to have the friendship of
a man of my stamp." The lieutenant raised his voice, addressing the anchor
watch: "Attention. Heed with care: this gentleman is my friend. He is
detained merely as a matter of form. I do not wish him to be annoyed. Do
you understand? You are to leave him to himself as long as he remains
quietly below. But he is not to come on deck again till I return. Is all
that clear, imbeciles?"

The imbeciles, saluting mechanically, indicated glimmerings of
comprehension.

"Then below you go, Dr. Rodiek. And don't get impatient: I will rejoin you
as soon as possible."

"Don't be long," Lanyard implored.

As he lowered himself through the hatch he saw the Prussian stumble down
the gangplank and reel shoreward.

Well satisfied with his diplomacy, Lanyard lingered a while in the conning
tower, closely studying and memorising the more salient features of the
Island of Martha's Vineyard and its adjacent waters and mainland as
delineated on a most comprehensive large-scale chart published by the
German Admiralty from exh

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