Лоуренс Трит - Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938

A voice hack in the shadows rumbled, “What’s going on there, Ferris? Who are you talking to?”

Ferris glanced over his shoulder, “It’s a mug who wants to see you, Cap’n Hardesty. I told him nobody could come aboard and he says he’s bloody well coming just the same.”

A new element came into the unseen voice. “Let him come aboard, Ferris. I’ll talk to him if he wants to see me.”

Ferris stepped to one side and Dell walked across the deck toward the voice. His feet made hollow sounds on the steel deck. The voice had moved. It spoke again just ahead of him. “Follow me to the bridge deck. My cabin is up there.”

Dell saw the man materialize as he climbed the flight of narrow steps. He was huge with long apelike arms and immense shoulders.

Dell followed, his muscles tightening. There was something off color about this packet, his nerves told him. He became surer as he reached the bridge deck. Something hard jammed into his ribs and a voice growled. “So you would butt in. Just walk straight ahead through that door and I’ll have a look at you.”

The room at the back of the pilot house was big. A heavy bed was clamped to the floor. A huge chest of drawers was built into the bulkhead. Light from the bulb in a brass ship’s lantern cast a feeble glow.

The fellow was whiskered to the eyes. Red lips made a line through the grizzled red of his beard and mustache. He had a little knob of a nose and bright little blue eyes.

His voice had a note of hoarse triumph as he said, “So it’s the bloody Mr. Breen. You pushed your ugly mug into something that doesn’t concern you, Breen, and now you’ll damn well have to take the consequences.”

“So you’re Hardesty.” Dell said softly. “And you know all about me. That’s damned interesting. Do you mind telling me what it’s all about?”

“I’ll tell you before I heave you over the side out at sea,” Hardesty growled. “I don’t like nosey landlubbers, Breen. I’ve got no use for damned pavement pounders like you. It’ll be a pleasure to tell you what it’s all about before I heave you over the side with a length of anchor chain lashed to your feet.”

He came closer and peered at Dell. “I don’t like your face, Mr. Bloody Breen,” he snarled. “I don’t like your face or your sneaking ways. I like you a bloody sight less than anyone else I know.”

Dell braced himself. Hardesty would be a tough man to take. He looked as though he would rat her mix in a barroom brawl than eat. And right now he was on the business end of a young cannon.

Dell did not realize how lightning fast the big man could move until he saw the hairy fist start. He tried to duck and caught the blow like the smash of a sledge hammer on the side of his face. As he went down he felt it club him again. After that he knew nothing for awhile.

Hammering pain in his head woke Dell Breen. He stared up at the brass ship’s lantern and worked his jaw. The whole side of his face felt paralyzed and dead. His jaw was all he could move at first. Hardesty had trussed him up with the efficient skill of a sailor.

He rolled his body and found he was not lashed to anything. He lay on his side and surveyed what he could of the room. A locker of some kind with a full-length mirror built into its door was in the opposite wall. He rolled over to it and tried to break it with his feet and found that when he kicked out, the cords that bound his wrists to his ankles bit into the flesh until the blood started to flow. After the second kick his arms felt numb and dead and he hadn’t made any impression on the mirror.

He rolled over again and saw a derby hat resting on a chair. He pictured the round hard hat perched on the top of Hardesty’s great shock of red hair and grinned feebly. Then the grin faded as a new thought came to him.

He rolled across and bumped the chair until the hat fell off. It rolled across the room and Dell had to roll after it. He was bathed in perspiration by the time he got it.

The next move was even more difficult. He found he could hold a cramped position on his knees as long as he kept his wrists close to his ankles. Perspiration ran into his eyes and almost blinded him as he worked the hat into a corner, turned it and worked his head into it.

It came down around his ears and flopped over his eyes. He went across the room in a series of little hops on his knees. He saw himself in the long mirror and grinned. He looked as though he had gotten his head into an iron kettle with a rim on it.

He put his head down and butted the mirror like a goat. His head began to ache more violently as he butted. The hat was down so far over his eyes that he couldn’t see now. Rage began to mount in his throat and made him forget his headache. He threw everything he had into the last butt and heard glass crackle and crunch as his head went through.

For a second he held his breath. He had a sudden horrible picture of himself caught with a sliver of glass in his jugular, bleeding to death with his head in a jagged trap.

He worked his head back gingerly. His head came out but the hat remained wedged in the splintered glass. He got the rim in his teeth and jerked savagely and a long sliver of glass came out with the hat.

He rolled over and got the sliver of glass in his hands. A jagged edge of glass under his thigh bit through his clothes and through the skin. He could feel warm blood trickle down his leg. But he had the sliver of glass in his hands. It cut his fingers as he sawed at the cords.

It took him ten minutes to get free. He stood up and surveyed himself in the top half of the mirror. There was blood on his face, trickling down from the edge of his scalp where a piece of glass had bitten through. He looked at his hands. Three fingers were badly cut.

Looking around he saw a bathroom. Inside he found a medicine chest and located a bottle of iodine. He poured it over his cut fingers and swore as the stuff burned like a flame.

He opened the door of Hardesty’s stateroom and listened. Far forward somewhere a man was singing, Abel Brown the Sailor . Far-off traffic rumbled heavily. The air was thick and warm and pungent with a mixture of a hundred waterside smells. But after the heat of the enclosed stateroom the night air felt almost cool. That, and the rage that mounted in him, brought steadiness and returning strength.

He went very softly down the companionway to the lower deck. He hugged the deck house, his feet making no sound as he padded on the balls of his feet. He was behind the sailor on the gangplank watch before the man heard him. Even then the fellow was not suspicious. He turned slowly, his voice more curious than alarmed, “Who’s that?”

Dell said, “A guy with something for you,” as he stepped forward on his right foot and pivoted, throwing all the weight of his shoulders into the left hook to the sailor’s stomach. The man doubled up with the breath leaving him in a loud, “Woosh.”

“That’s for you,” Dell snapped. “And this is for that louse of a captain, in case I don’t get a chance to give it to him myself.” He brought the right no from the hip in a crushing uppercut and the sailor shot back against the rail and flopped down on the deck.

The fellow who was singing Abel Brown the Sailor forward, stopped suddenly and yelled. “Hey, what’s going on there?” His feet made loud, clanging noises on the steel deck as he ran.

Dell went down the gangplank in a series of leaps. The board had enough spring in it to give him momentum. He cleared the space between the gangplank and the shed in a long, spring-propelled leap. He made for the street with the second sailor’s voice following him in a string of startled, “Heys!”

Walking up the street in hard, angry strides he thought it over. He was still as much in the dark as ever. But he did know now that Hardesty knew something. He knew also that Hardesty had been tipped off that a detective had entered the game. He cursed his own stupidity at not remembering that he had been hired in a public bar and that even then, someone had probably been tailing the Arnolds and Benedict.