The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (7 page)

But Maxon gripped him likewise and began to bend Hardridge’s body backward.

“Oh, they’ll be killed. Can’t you— Oh!”

Miss Maxon had come up, frightened, sobbing. She would have run up to them and thus put herself in danger, but I held her back.

“My dear Miss Maxon! My dear Miss Maxon!”

There was nothing else I could say.

I turned and saw how very like an open door was the end of the cañon. Beyond that door the sky sparkled with stars, and the waters beneath the stars reflected their light. But the water at the base of the cliff must have been too unquiet to reflect it. I could hear it roaring as it surged over the rocks, and I imagined it stretching up white and hungry fingers.

“Can’t you stop them!” cried Miss Maxon.

One more look I took at the place where the two men had struggled. Then I stepped between Miss Maxon and that place and urged her gently back toward Cragcastle. For Hardridge, knowing himself overmastered, had suddenly yielded and somehow dragged Maxon with him under the railing. Maxon gripped the edge of the rock, but Hardridge tore his grip relentlessly away. And so there came an end to the bad beginning made many years before.

I reflected, as I picked a way up the uneven cañon bottom, that the quivering woman whom I led would probably some day be mistress of Cragcastle, since her father was now heir to the Maxon fortune. In that case they could well afford the loss of the sapphire.

WE PARTED at the base of the mountain, Miss Maxon and I. It was not late, and we could go different ways quite unnoticed into Mill Valley and thence to San Francisco. If the thing that had happened at Cragcastle were ever discovered, there was no possibility that she’d be connected with it, even in thought. While as for me….

“I’m sorry you’re going back to China,” she said.

Of course she would be, for I’d told her absolutely nothing of my errand there, unraveling the mystery of the Ko Lao Hui leadership. If she had known what was ahead of me, she would have been glad my eagerness to be at it was to be gratified.

“You have been—well, fine,” she said.

I murmured a few deprecating phrases.

“And—wonderful. I’ve been trying to guess—how much of it all you had planned out ahead. The escape of Hardridge, for instance.”

“Well?” I questioned noncommittedly.

“You pretended it was accidental. But I found the string with which you pulled back the bolt of the closet door. That was no accident.”

“Maybe not,” I replied.

Frankly, it pleased me a little that she had discovered it.

“And then you knew—that father would inherit—”

“Miss Maxon,” I said, “there’s no pursuit so interesting as the pursuit of motives, and none as profitless.”

She laughed a little.

“To think,” she remarked, “that, when I think of you—as I shall quite often—I’ll always have to call you to myself just ‘that man.’ ”

I suppose it had seemed to her a curious emission; however, names are so far accidents that they seem to count for but little in the scheme of things. And I’ve rather lost the habit of giving my true name to every one I meet in passing through this world as if I were some article of merchandise that needed to be perpetually tagged, ticketed and labeled. But there is no reason why I should not give it.

“My name is Partridge, John Partridge,” I said as I released her hand.

Undue Influence

I WASN’T at all surprized when Sanderson came to me that morning on the after deck of the
Antioch
and told me that he’d been stripped of everything he possessed by Damron. Nor, for that matter, was I surprized at the use of the words, “feelin’ of wildness,” in describing his sensations during the process.

Very early on the trip I’d noticed the two men, and I’d judged their acquaintance to be one of potential mischief. It was because of that I struck up my friendship with Sanderson, who was a retired rancher, honest, likable, far from stupid but of a rather nervous and fluctuating temperament. Thus I learned that he’d recently lost his wife by death and had also recently been enriched by the discovery of oil on his ranch and its subsequent sale.

Which latter fact, I thought, well confirmed me in my suspicions concerning his traveling-companion. Damron was a large man of almost too imposing presence, well-groomed and impeccably clothed. He was affable, a very fluent talker and unquestionably intelligent, but his smile was purely mechanical and very peculiar, a mere twisting upward of the corners of his lips. His smile never affected his eyes or any of the upper part of his face—it was clearly a danger mark.

Sometimes I felt that Sanderson himself was none too trustful of Damron—but why, then, the apparent friendship?

One evening—San Francisco was then five days astern—I leaned on the rail in front of the door of Sanderson’s stateroom, facing the prow. The sunset over the prow was magnificent, like a great dusky conflagration, and the
Antioch
was moving toward it quietly, as if she liked pushing through the low waves. From inside Sanderson’s cabin, which he had to himself, came the incessant murmur of a rather musical masculine voice—Damron’s voice.

Now, while I was listening to that voice—the words, of course, were indistinguishable—I happened to glance downward, and I saw near my left foot, just at the edge of the scupper, something that was very peculiar to find on the deck of a ship five days at sea. The find had no meaning to me then, but I mentally filed it away, after a fashion I had. I remembered that the only wood nearby was that in the deck itself and in the walls of the staterooms. Some one had been boring either one or the other, for here were a dozen or so rounded flakes just as they had come from the auger or bit, whichever had been used. Some one had bored a hole and had thought to throw the residue overboard; the wind had blown these few flakes back.

My rather idle speculations were interrupted by the cessation of Damron’s voice and the opening of the door of Sanderson’s stateroom.

I’d placed myself so I could glance at the two men as they came out without turning my head. Sanderson came first, his wrinkled old face looking a little excited. Damron followed, put out his hand and opened the door of his own stateroom, which was next forward to Sanderson’s. Smiling his peculiar smile, he nodded to Sanderson, shot him what I took to be a cautioning glance and disappeared within.

Sanderson glanced toward me, but my attention was apparently forward. So he stood for a moment hesitant, the salt air whipping color into his rather pallid cheeks and flapping his loosely fitting black suit around his shrunken but still wiry old frame. Then he glanced at the door through which Damron had just passed, and I saw a queer change come over him.

His expression changed completely. Perplexity, distrust, dislike came into his look—and something else, too. Fear, I thought, as if he felt himself being drawn into an abyss. It was the same look I’d caught on his face twice before; I couldn’t understand it.

I turned and spoke—

“Oh—good evening, Mr. Sanderson.”

He started in his nervous fashion.

“Good evening. I was just goin’ in to dinner. Are you?”

He seemed glad to see me. I saw that his eyes, naturally clear blue as the sky under which he’d lived, were slightly bloodshot.

“Presently,” I replied. “Not just now. Let’s enjoy the sunset. Will you smoke?” I handed him the mate to my own cigar, and he put it carefully away.

“After I eat, thank ye,” he smiled. “But the sunset now, with all my heart. Don’t the old boat seem to be enjoyin’ it, too; seems like she’s alive.”

It’s a commentary on poor old human nature that the discovery of that common thought moved me definitely to intervention.

“I don’t believe, Mr. Sanderson, you have my card.”

I usually carry them of several sorts. I fished out the one most frankly descriptive of myself and handed it to him. It read:

JOHN PARTRIDGE

Specialist in the Unusual

He looked at it with puzzled eyes, started to grin uncertainly, and then the idea seemed to slowly dawn upon him that I’d had a purpose in giving it to him. He glanced up at me, more curious than startled.

“Eh? What? A funny business!”

“Well, perhaps,” I agreed. “But, I assure you, one of unlimited possibilities. The unusual is everywhere. Even on board the
Antioch,
” I concluded significantly.

He seemed to catch that significance, and I believed his eyes quickened.

“What d’ye mean?” he asked receptively.

“Frankness,” I replied bluntly. “Can you trust me or not? Or rather, do you want to? That man, there.” I nodded toward the door of Damron’s cabin. “What’s between you? Why do you pretend what you don’t feel—friendship? And why are you afraid of him?”

It was a frontal attack on reticence, but I’d preceded it by a certain amount of friendly sapping. Sanderson blinked his eyes away from me, considering the confidence. He turned to the rail and studied a bottle-green wave that rose along the side of the
Antioch;
he looked astern, where the sea was slate-colored under the clouds and where the long smoke wreath trailed after the ship, pressed down by the wind over the waves. Then he gave me another long look and spoke quizzically:

“Well, as to likin’ him, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but as to gettin’ along with him, that’s simple. He was my wife’s brother, and I don’t feel like doin’ anything else. As for bein’ afraid of him, why, I reckon you exaggerate a little there.”

“Oh, very well,” I said with a note of finality.

“But he’s the darnedest talker,” he went on quickly.

“I’ve noticed that,” I encouraged him.

“The darnedest— Did ye ever meet a man who could make ye see plain that two and two make five or that the world’s hollow and we’re on the inside of it or that ye can coin gold out of sea-water or—” with an angry snort—“out of fresh air?”

I caught his emphasis on the last absurdity.

“Out of fresh air,” I mocked. “A sort of p-n-e-u-alchemy, eh?”

“Why, yes, that’s about what it comes to. But, pshaw, I’m forgettin’. It ain’t supposed to be told yet.”

“A family secret, it seems,” I scoffed carelessly. “Well, I suppose you’ve plenty of cash or collateral on board, that your brother-in-law finds it worth his while to teach you high finance?”

NOW, he might have got angry at that question, but I judged that he really wanted to confide in me. Also I rather relied upon his native instinct to make him trust me. I really liked the old man pretty thoroughly, liked his evident unworldliness, his countryman’s habit of quick friendship and the simple candor that spoke from his pale-blue eyes. And I hoped that he sensed that liking.

I suppose he did, for within five minutes he had confessed to the possession on board the
Antioch
of seventy-five thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds, the total price of his ranch.

He admitted, too, that it had been at his brother-in-law’s urging that he had brought the bonds with him. In fact, that he had gone with his brother-in-law from their hotel room to the safe-deposit vault late the night before the
Antioch
sailed to get the bonds. Damron had urged it on the ground of a newly discovered chance for a big-paying investment, which he would explain on the
Antioch.
I couldn’t help but feel, under Sanderson’s half-shamefaced manner while telling of the folly, a touch of utter mystification as to why he had perpetrated it.

That interview with Sanderson had been two days ago. It is plain why it didn’t amaze me that, from being afraid he was going to deal with Damron, he had dealt with him—and in that dealing had lost everything he had. The “feelin’ of wildness” he described, with the accompanying imposition of Damron’s will, had evidently possessed him before. Moreover, in mulling around for an explanation, my mind chanced to revert to the tiny grains of wood I’d observed on the deck before Damron’s door.

“Maybe it’s all right,” Sanderson tried to encourage himself. “But I wish I had it back, all the same. Maybe he’ll trade back.”

We were standing well astern on the promenade-deck. It was a gloomy morning with a leaden sea. A stout wind heeled the ship to starboard, but on the lee side of the deck a dozen or more passengers lounged against the rail or lay in steamer chairs. Two young men, athletically inclined, paced each other at a racing stride around the cabins, but they stayed forward, and Sanderson and I were practically alone.

I didn’t reply for a moment. Instead, I watched astern where the hungry gulls followed the ship, swooping down now and then on either side or behind the churning wake, where the long log-line dragged. Their wild, mournful cries seemed rather in tune with the morning and with Sanderson’s distress.

“I suppose it was a legal enough transaction—papers signed and everything,” I hazarded.

“And witnessed by a man Damron called in from the deck,” replied Sanderson rather bitterly.

He turned to the rail and leaned upon it, looking down into the water and giving me a good chance to study him. His weather-worn old face had gone very haggard, and his eyes were bleary. He had evidently passed a bad night. Had it not been that he had described himself to me as a strict teetotaler and that there was absolutely no smell of liquor on his breath, I might have conceived a very commonplace explanation for both the cheat and his present condition.

As it was, I must look for another explanation and another form of influence. Hypnotism suggested itself to me, but only as a passing thought; things occult have always failed to interest me. Wonders and problems enough there are in the natural world without going beyond it. And it was at that point I thought of the flakes of wood.

Anyway, there was only one present course to pursue.

“You haven’t told me yet just what this precious stock is that he sold you.”

“Well, I ain’t supposed to. But you might know for sure. It’s Consolidated Air Power—five hundred shares of it.”

That told me a lot—placed Damron exactly. I don’t dabble in stocks, but I read the papers, and I knew that a week before the
Antioch
had sailed a fraud order had been issued against Consolidated Air just too late to catch the promoter, who had disappeared. Doubtless it had been Damron under another name. Resuming his real name, he had attached himself leechlike to his brother-in-law and had succeeded in getting enough out of him to start life again in the Eastern Hemisphere.