The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (8 page)

But I don’t think any of this was suggested in the start I gave at Sanderson’s information.

“What?” I cried. “Consolidated Air Power! Is that what you’re carping about?”

My tone roused Sanderson from his lethargy; he turned on me in a flash.

“Yes. Why? Do you know—”

“Why, of course. Why didn’t you tell me before? For a man to have fortune thrust upon him and then go weeping over it!”

It was touching how the old man caught at my words.

“What’s that? Don’t be joking, man.”

“It’s you that’s the joke. No wonder Damron wouldn’t let you tell everybody; it’s too good a thing to let everybody in on. Wasn’t that what he told you?”

“Yes, but— On your word of honor,” cried Sanderson, gripping my arm, “is it all right?”

“On my word of honor,” I replied, “your brother-in-law is no more nor less than a pneu-alchemist. You said it yourself; he’s turning air into money. The man who’s selling Consolidated Air Power is the man I want to meet. I haven’t your amount of money, and maybe five thousand is too little for Damron to monkey with, but it’s five thousand spot cash. As a friend of mine, won’t you help manage it?”

Of course, Sanderson’s reaction from despair threw him into a mood that made him willing to promise me anything.

A crook in the company of his dupe rarely encourages other acquaintances; so it was only natural that Damron had so far held aloof from his fellow passengers. That afternoon I met him formally, however, and, though Sanderson would not confess to him that he had told me anything about Consolidated Air Power, he had no objection to telling Damron confidentially that I had five thousand dollars loose cash that I was anxious to invest.

I smiled inwardly as I noticed how Damron’s interest in me quickened after he had that information. Still it was two days before the dénouement came which I planned, notwithstanding that I always did my best in our conversations to play the financial simpleton. Despite that crooked twist in his soul of which his twist-lipped smile was the outward symbol, Damron was a very clever man. It was hard to make him believe that I was the sort of trustful bird for which the Air Power net had been laid.

But I relied upon his cupidity and merely went on playing the simpleton—except for one preparatory step that I took the same day Sanderson told me how he had been fleeced. That afternoon I took a bundle of very useful keys I always carry with me, on the principle that an honest man has the right to all the facilities used by thieves, and with one of them I opened the door of Damron’s stateroom. When I came out, I was quite sure I had left everything behind quite as it should be.

It was the second evening thereafter, in Sanderson’s stateroom, that Damron introduced to me the stock of Consolidated Air Power. We had just had dinner together, a very congenial trio. After we had entered the stateroom, Damron excused himself for a moment, as I had expected he would, and, through the one wall that separated us, we heard him stirring around for a moment in his own cabin.

He began to talk on the subject of investments immediately upon his return.

BREATH of violets! Mingled somewhat with clover, fragrance of the meadow and hillside. Surely there could be nothing in the mild and gentle reminder of Springtime that began to pervade the air of the stateroom to cause Damron, launched in the full flood of eloquence, to hesitate, pale, waver in his speech and show every sign of a man distraught by a sudden and mastering fear.

He had taken his seat on the side of the cabin opposite the wall of his own stateroom. Sanderson sat near the berth; I had brought a camp-stool in from the deck and sat with my back against the door. The ship was running on a very even keel; if it hadn’t been for the vibrations of the screw and the rhythm of the pistons, we might have fancied ourselves back in the big world again instead of on that detached fragment of it known as the
Antioch.

And up to a certain point Damron’s talk helped to complete the illusion. Trickery and thieving always seem to me to belong to the mainly good but complicated world of clay, rather than to the sea, which is changeable, sometimes terrible, but always clean, simple and honest.

Damron began by a rather loose discussion of energy in general. From that he passed to the gradual tapping by mankind of various reservoirs of energy, each release meaning a forward step in the march of civilization. And so he came naturally to his major premise, which was, of course, that the greatest and cheapest supply of energy remained as yet untouched—the energy of the air.

It was at that point that the smell of violets in the room began to be distinguishable. That is, by me, who had been expecting it. Damron didn’t get it yet, nor did Sanderson; both were too deeply absorbed in Damron’s talk.

He had the gift of words. He understood the art of moving minds, and he used it. Leaning back in that chair with an inspired face, he brought into that cabin the winds of the world—those winds which are everywhere and come from everywhere, and he set them to work.

He brought into that cabin the industries of the world and showed them revolutionized. And he had started to deal—using sketchy touches that I admired—with the recently perfected air motor that was to turn the trick—a device, I believe, of vast, scientifically shaped funnels for the concentration of power and a new form of battery for its storage—when he first became conscious of that violet breath, which reacted upon him like the breath of doom itself.

He faltered, as I’ve said, grew pale, glanced obliquely at me and seemed from the uneasiness that grew in his eyes to catch for the first time some significance in my position squarely before the door.

I rather felt sorry for the rogue—it’s a weakness I have—but my eyes fell on old man Sanderson, sitting there enthralled again by Damron’s eloquence, and my heart hardened. Unmercifully Damron had fleeced him, and the winds of life are seldom tempered to the shorn old. For not the first time in my life I felt grateful for that sort of ultra-roguery that must needs load its dice as well as unfairly throw them. Had Damron relied entirely upon wordy persuasion, I believe he would still have had his way with Sanderson, and there would have been small chance of recourse.

However, as Damron’s voice trailed away, I put in a word:

“It’s fascinating. Transmutation, air turned into gold—Sanderson, didn’t you tell me you’d purchased some stock in this scheme?”

Sanderson started, looked reproachfully at me and uneasily at Damron.

“I did tell him about it,” he mumbled apologetically to Damron. “He had some money he wanted to invest. I thought you wouldn’t mind—”

“Oh, of course not,” replied Damron, trying to cover his sudden accession of fear with cordiality. “We don’t want publicity now,” turning to me, “for a plain reason; it’s a matter for careful handling and international financing. However, you’re an exception; Sanderson and I both seemed to arrive separately at the same conclusion. I was going to offer to let you in—”

“Thanks,” I replied rather carelessly. “What a peculiar odor, in the middle of the Pacific!” I sniffed the air.

“I was just going to speak of that,” rejoined Damron quickly. “Somehow, I feel ill. The air in this cabin—”

“Will clear presently, I’m sure.” And I shot him a significant glance that checked him in the very act of rising from his chair.

Sanderson, possibly catching my glance, certainly observing the change in Damron’s manner, glanced from one to the other of us, puzzled.

“It’s a queer smell,” he began, “but I don’t see—”

“There was nothing like this the other night when you bought the stock, was there?” I asked.

“No, there wasn’t. Why?”

“Sanderson told me a peculiar yarn about that night,” I explained to Damron. “The way he felt, you know.”

Carelessly I brought my hand, which was in the side pocket of my coat, forward until it rested upon my thigh. In that position the outline of the revolver I held in it could be seen under the folds of the cloth.

“He spoke,” I said, “of a ‘feelin’ of wildness.’ I suppose he also had a ‘buzzing in the head.’ ‘Ideas swarmed but were hard to grasp.’ In fact, he seemed to have ‘a very close approximation to an alcoholic jag.’ ”

“What do you mean?” asked Damron with a sudden note of savagery.

“Why—I beg your pardon,” I smiled. “I don’t know how I came to do it. But unconsciously I was quoting from a scientific article I was reading in the ship’s library the other day, headed ‘Is Oxygen an Intoxicant?’ There seems to be a doubt. But as to its exciting effects, none at all.”

“How the devil does this concern me?” asked Damron angrily. “Let me—”

“Sit down,” I ordered tensely.

He obeyed. I went on as naturally as I could.

“Nothing, except that it was an interesting article. There seems to be room for quibbling. But in law there’s such a thing as undue influence, and it isn’t usually hard to prove in the case of worthless security. Heavens, how I am wandering. Surely there must be something wrong with the air of this stateroom.”

Without taking my eyes from Damron, I got up, reached back of me over my head and opened the round port-hole.

“This fragrance must come through the wall somewhere,” I said. “There’s nothing in this stateroom to make it. But now—what was I talking about?”

“What, indeed?” snarled Damron.

“Oh, yes—about Sanderson’s condition the night he bought Consolidated Air Power. Would you say, now, that he was in fit shape to exercise sound and proper judgment? Then you,” I laughed deprecatingly, “are so full of natural enthusiasm—while he’s an old man! Don’t you think you rather overrode him? Why, ——, Damron, what do you say to giving him back his bonds, which are at least a perfectly safe investment, and taking back your stock, which is no doubt of greater—but, well, shall we say, ephemeral—value?”

Damron’s face fairly blazed with the helpless but venomous anger of the discomfited crook. He raised his voice—

“I’ll see you in ——.”

“Come, come,” I said; “the play’s ended. Shall I ring this bell and send for the captain? Sanderson, what do you think of your investment now?”

“Why, why—” began Sanderson plaintively. His quick old eyes had been flitting between Damron and me, and he’d followed our talk anxiously and with growing depression. Now he was sitting with his head bowed and a broken look on his face. “I guess I’ve been bilked, Mr. Partridge, and I think I can figure out how it happened. But I’d rather have stood it than—”

“Than what, Sanderson?”

“Than have him arrested. Lord, man, have ye yourself a wife and that wife a family name, that ye can feel what ’twould be like?”

As it happened, his personal appeal to me was a high miss, but I’m no policeman. Curiosity is my principal motive in these affairs—strengthened in this case by regard for Sanderson. And I saw that the word “arrested” rather feazed Damron.

“How about that little bargain now, Damron?”

Damron’s eyes had flickered sidewise to a tiny, almost unnoticeable aperture in the wall of the stateroom, just at the level of the floor—an aperture just large enough to contain a rubber tube, through which the telltale scent, released by Damron himself, was flowing. He brought them back to mine with a frightened jerk.

“——, yes, if that’s all,” he wilted.

Which, of course, wasn’t exactly the way I wanted the thing to end. Landing penniless on the China Coast was too good a fate for Damron, but there really was room for quibbling concerning the purpose and use of the three steel cylinders of liquid oxygen Damron had brought with him on board the
Antioch.
Otherwise I might merely have notified the captain of my find in Damron’s stateroom.

However, it was vastly more interesting to half empty the last of the cylinders, add essence of violet to the odorless, colorless and tasteless liquefied gas and watch the effect when that volatile perfume cried out “discovered” to Damron’s guilty brain.

Fair Loot

KNOWLEDGE is, I think, most often found in unfrequented ways, which is the one reason I was standing that morning on the Pei-Ho River dike of the farming village of Sz-Chuen.

Perhaps once a year a white man came that way, but I’d spent the night there annoyed by no other sign of curiosity than the surreptitious piercing of a peep-hole in the wall of my room—the mask called Eastern phlegm had slipped a minute.

And no one had followed me from the little, brown, mud-walled town except a ragged conjurer, who squatted before me on the dike with his earthen bowl and magic wand.

I’d seen the trick of my fellow itinerant many times before. It was the old one of transforming dry earth into mud by means of the wand, which was apparently solid, and a singsong formula. But it was well done, and at the end I handed him a
tungtse.
Then I turned to the river, which was a wide and lazy stream at this point, dotted with brownish-white junk sails, which stood out very plainly against the light green of the paddy-fields reaching back from the opposite bank.

More interesting to me, however, because I intended to hail one presently, were the junks with bare masts being tracked up-stream against wind and current. They were muscular fellows, these trackers, and powerful-voiced, their primitive chanting carrying to me in bursts of song from at least two
li
away—but I was brought back to myself by an apologetic shuffling on the part of the conjurer, whom I thought I had dismissed.

“What do you want?” I asked in Pekingese.

He
ke’towed
almost to the earth, his soiled China-blue blouse falling open with the movement, showing a lean, starved chest.

“Master goes to the north?”

It was an impertinent question, and needless besides, for in that country a white man’s course is marked out before as well as behind him.

“Does the river flow south? If you do not know where I go, the naked children of Sz-Chuen are better fakirs than you.”

The conjurer bowed again; then he turned his shaved poll and slant eyes sideways till he was looking down-stream.

“From him who sees much that is hidden, plain things are sometimes veiled,” he replied in his professional drone, his eyes returning respectfully to the buttons of my khaki coat. “But I smell the coming of another
Megwa
who also goes north this twice memorable day. For that you put this into my hand instead of upon the ground—” he held up the copper coin—“I give you these words: beware of him, for an evil spirit is in him that must be killed.”