The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (6 page)

Which was, of course, not Osborne. Osborne was strictly an office worker. He might be imagined playing any sort of crooked game in the world—but through intermediaries only. His own physical participation and his own personal peril would always be missing elements. No; the man who would come to see to the safety of the Maxon sapphire would be the man who thought it his property—the man who, using Osborne as agent, had attempted to befool me to his own place under the Damoclean sword.

IV

LOOKING back, I’ve always felt the day that followed was one of the most remarkable of my life—and I speak of the day, not of the night with its element of tragedy. The day was remarkable for its very lack of that element—for its very unremarkableness. I hold that, with such a night as had passed fresh in our memories, with Hardridge imprisoned, with the arrival of the man whom Hardridge had vowed to kill presumably impending and with the girl’s fortune and possibly more than one life depending upon the dénouement, it was no commonplace thing that the day slipped by, to Miss Maxon and me, much like a pleasant holiday outing.

For I finally persuaded her to stay until the working out of my plan. Concerning which, by the way, I told her as little as possible. It’s always much easier to agree on an end than on the means, and it doesn’t always pay to tell everything even to the people in whose interest one may be working.

We talked about a great many things, mainly impersonal, and even took several short walks. One of those walks took us to the place that was then called Land’s End. It was Miss Maxon who suggested it; I knew nothing until then of the trap-like cañon at the rear of the house, with its wide mouth and narrow exit upon the sea. But we had no sooner arrived at the railing that guarded that exit, where we could look down some hundred feet into white surf, than Miss Maxon was seized with a violent fit of trembling and suggested that we return. It was the only sign of real agitation I saw in her that day.

That was late in the afternoon and the last time we left the house.

Breakfast and lunch had been largely makeshifts, but dinner that evening was a triumph, Osborne having supplied the house for my residence fairly well and Miss Maxon proving herself a miraculous cook. After we’d eaten, I took his share of the meal in to Hardridge, whom I found in a state of eager expectancy. He evidently remembered my promise that he’d be unbound at nightfall, and I didn’t disappoint him. Instead of standing over him with drawn revolver while he ate, as I’d done before, I simply released his hands and left him fumbling wildly but with stiff and awkward fingers at his gag. I wanted to get away from him before he could ask me in words the eager question that had been staring out of his overbright eyes all day.

“Now, don’t be a fool,” I told him through the closing door. “You can’t get out, and you don’t want to get out, and you don’t want to make a noise. Be quiet, and you’ll be —— glad of it later.”

And I bolted the door without locking it and then pressed a button that projected from the wall near the door jamb. I heard a pleased exclamation from Hardridge as the electric light came on within his cell. Thereafter he was silent, but, whether because of my advice or because Miss Maxon and I remained so close to the closet that he could hear our occasional movements, I do not know.

For by then it was quite dark, and, after another little preparation for what was to come, I joined Miss Maxon in the dining-room. The partition between this room and the reception-room split the inner wall of the closet, and the house was so quiet that we could sometimes hear Hardridge breathe. We had turned on no lights save that within the closet; so from without the place no doubt appeared absolutely deserted.

Everything was silent and dark. In the two hours that we sat there, I found time to go over several times every incident connected with my peculiar visit to Cragcastle. My interest—desultory at first but rapidly quickening—in the
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want ad.; my carefully worded letter in answer and Osborne’s skillfully alluring and yet noncommittal reply; our meeting—I suppose I was one of some hundreds of applicants, most of whom were disposed of by the office boy; Osborne’s quick inspection, his clever cross-examination, his devious approach to the subject of the missing heir. Our agreement, and my arrival in masquerade at Cragcastle. My interview with Hardridge, not wholly unexpected, yet a very curious one, filled with much that needed explanation. My startling discovery of the presence of the girl, and her still more startling revelations. The conception and partial working out of my plan, the success of which hung on the next few hours.

Throughout, I reflected, I had been fortunate; things had worked out very much as I had planned and expected. My first motive in the affair had been almost completely satisfied; only one question remained unanswered—that of the cause of Hardridge’s hatred of John Maxon. There remained my awakened desire to serve Miss Maxon, and in that I hoped that Fate—it is my egotistic conceit to sometimes regard myself as Fate’s co-conspirator—would help me.

As for Miss Maxon, she would have been either more or less than the very natural woman she was had she not felt fear in those hours. Indeed, she had no tangible reason for placing confidence in me—rather the reverse. It was largely because of that fact that I had urged her to stay in Cragcastle. Sometimes I thought it was partly because of that fact that she had stayed. Perhaps she wanted to be on hand at the finding of the sapphire—if it were found. Well, my wish corresponded. If it were not found, I wanted her to know it and be sure of it.

I had, in fact, a remarkably strong desire to stand well in the estimation of Miss Maxon. And I was meditating upon this and also upon the problems connected with the Ko Lao Hui when we both heard quick, nervous steps coming up the gravel path in front of the house. I whispered a wholly unnecessary warning to Miss Maxon to keep quiet. Neither of us made a sound, but both were on our feet when the key of the newcomer grated in the lock of the front door.

WHEN—after the front door had opened and closed again—the hall lights were switched on by some one who seemed perfectly familiar with their surroundings, I was standing just within the dining-room door, with Miss Maxon perhaps a pace behind me. As the man for whom we had waited started down the hall, I heard the slightest stirring in the closet, which indicated that Hardridge was also alert.

The visitor, however, passed the door of the closet without pausing and came on unhesitatingly down the hall. The parlor and the reception-room he had already passed; there remained but two possible objectives, the library and the room wherein Miss Maxon and I watched. That he should turn into the latter had been a chance I had been compelled to take; if he did, the adventure would be apt to end speedily and crudely. But great jewels, I had reasoned, are not often concealed in dining-rooms.

Yet, as the girl and I held our breaths, he passed our door, too, without a glance at the obscurity beyond it.

Though he could hardly have seen us had he looked our way, he was fully revealed by the hall light. The one look I had of him was hardly reassuring for the success of the game I had in mind. If we had ever looked alike, then I owed it to my self-respect to believe that Maxon had changed greatly. But, indeed, I suppose he had, for life stamps every face with life’s own mark, and Maxon’s face had become a danger signal of vice and cowardice. Now I was very glad I hadn’t worn my borrowed identity long.

There was now only one door into which Maxon could turn, and he entered the library across the hall without hesitation, like one sure of his objective. I felt a touch on my arm and looked around into Miss Maxon’s eyes, very close. They seemed to flash me at once a warning and question, and I shook my head reassuringly. There was no chance of Maxon’s passing out except by the front door. To a man of his temperament nothing could be less attractive than the gloom and desolation of the black rocks that flanked the rear exit.

The sound of Maxon’s movements had ceased. He had only been feeling for the switch, for now, peering obliquely down the hall, I saw the library lights flash on. It seemed that he crossed the room; there was another moment of silence and then a sort of rending, scraping sound.

Which sound was, we afterward learned, the spring-impelled opening of a small door in the library wall and the tearing of the wall-paper that had been put on over it. Behind which door was a small vault, of which I suppose only John Maxon, Sr., had the knowledge and the key until he had passed it on to his son.

Maxon had the sapphire—I knew so much from his low exclamation of relief. Hardridge must have heard it, too, for he stirred uneasily in his prison room. Miss Maxon’s breathing quickened, while I— Well, I held in my hand almost literally the key to the unexpected, and my egotism was pleasantly stirred.

Maxon came out of the library, now with a quickened movement and on tiptoe. He passed our door, bent over, fleeing. We heard something. Was it a bolt that had been drawn? John Maxon stopped short.

A door was flung violently open. It was the door behind which Hardridge, up to a scanty thirty seconds before, had been confined. And instantly I stepped out into the hall behind Maxon. In fact, I stepped out and Hardridge burst out at the same minute. The effect was that we faced each other in the well-lighted hall with Maxon midway between us.

Hardridge looked—well, to exaggerate but slightly, like a devil’s nightmare come alive, crouching for the spring. For, of course, he instantly thought of me, whom he’d got into the habit of trying to kill.

But he saw Maxon in the hall instead and then me over Maxon’s shoulder, and bewilderment flashed into his face and matched his rage. The doubt I’d tried to suggest to him, suddenly reinforced, checked his rush.

I had intended, when I’d shaped matters so far, to put that doubt fairly in the form of a question, but John Maxon himself made it unnecessary, had answered that question before it was asked in a gesture of self-betrayal. He staggered back—threw up his hands.

“Hardridge!” he croaked.

Something in his right hand left a streak of light behind it, like a shooting star.

And Hardridge, arriving at the truth too quickly for memory or logic, recognizing his enemy by a species of instinct, would have leaped in dreadful silence at Maxon’s throat. But I jerked my revolver up and covered them both.

“One minute,” I said. “Well, Maxon. Yes, I’m the man. I’m the man your tool, Osborne, picked to take your place here. Keep back, Hardridge. No, there’ll be no killing here—not till I find out what it’s all about, anyway.

“Speak up, Hardridge,” I ordered, turning from Maxon’s twitching features to Hardridge’s inflamed and deadly face. “What have you against this man?”

“That, —— him!” exploded Hardridge. “That traitor and thief! He stole the money that would have saved me from prison—me and the rest of us. That coward and cur! Why, blast you,” this directly to Maxon, “you knew that without that money we were lost. The—reformers—”

“He has a license to talk, he has,” quavered Maxon, standing sidewise in the hall, alternately glancing apprehensively at Hardridge and beseechingly at me.

Unhappy, indeed, was his situation, his only hope of life being in me, whom he’d planned to dupe to the same death that now threatened him.

“Who was he?” I asked Maxon. “Come to the point, quick.”

“He! He was a dirty gambling-house keeper and dive-keeper and worse. King of crookdom through his pull in the City Hall. And the money he says I stole was a slush fund to keep the politician crooks in office. Because the other side won and he went to San Quentin where he belonged, he blamed me—”

“You whining sneak,” cried Hardridge, “you were thick enough with us while the going was good.”

“That’ll do, the pair of you,” I said. “I quite understand.”

I did, well enough. Details were missing, but they were unessential. These two were part of the ring that had in the old days debauched the city government of San Francisco. To me that crime constitutes one of the baser forms of treason, and I admit my finger twitched to shoot them both.

Then I thought of the sapphire. I’d formed no definite plan as to acquiring it once John Maxon had taken it out of its hiding-place. Circumstances must guide me, and here were the circumstances.

I SUPPOSE in a way I was responsible for what followed. I suppose that my apparent indecision encouraged Hardridge, and I may even have stepped a little to one side. But I know I didn’t plan the thing or even foresee it. I did have a peculiar flashing vision of that dark cañon at the rear of the house, that dark cañon with its smooth, steep, narrowing sides and its floor dipping ever more rapidly toward the jumping-off place at the end.

Anyway, all of a sudden Hardridge started for Maxon. Maxon did the natural thing for him; he whirled and ran. I could hardly have stopped him if I had tried. He brushed me back against Miss Maxon and half-way through the dining-room door, and Hardridge tore after him without a word.

There was a chair near the end of the wall, and Maxon had sanity enough left to push it before him through the window. He followed the chair head first, and Hardridge plunged through the opening after him.

I was delayed a little in unlocking the door. I stepped out into a fantastic hollow of ragged rocks, flooded here at the ravine’s beginning with moonlight. There was a narrow pass to the right, but Maxon had missed that pass. And he and Hardridge were leaping like shadows straight down toward Land’s End.

Maxon seemed to be straining to stop. Perhaps he saw the railing and memory came to him of what was beyond it. But his pace was so great and the grade was so steep that he could not check himself all at once, and he brought up against the railing with such force that it creaked and sagged outward under the impact. But it still held.

And Hardridge clutched him. But, by the time I got close enough to see clearly, Maxon had seized Hardridge’s wrists and was prying them outward and slowly loosing Hardridge’s grip on his throat. He wrenched Hardridge’s hands away, and Hardridge gripped him around the body.