Wyndham Martyn - The Secret of the Silver Car

There broke on Trent's astonished gaze a flash of sunlight that made him blink painfully. And the terrifying noise of high explosive hurt his ears and that swift dreadful sucking of the air that followed such explosions was about him again in its intensity. He had been dug out of his tomb for what?

The doctors thought him a very bad case. Of course he was delirious. He stuck to a ridiculous story that he was imprisoned in a tomb with one William Smith, a private in the 78th Battalion of the City of London Regiment and that H. E. had mysteriously disinterred him. H. E. did perform marvels that were seemingly against known natural laws but Private Trent was obviously suffering from shell shock.

When he was better and had been removed to a hospital far from the area of fighting he still kept to his story. One of the doctors who liked him explained that the delusion must be banished. He spoke very convincingly. He explained by latest methods that the unreal becomes real unless the patient gets a grip on himself. He said that Trent was likely to go through life trying to find a non-existent friend and ruining his prospects in the doing of it. "I'll admit," he said at the end of his harangue, "that you choose your friend's name well."

"Why do you say that?" Trent asked.

"Because the muster roll of the 78th shows no fewer than twenty-seven William Smiths and they're all of 'em dead. That battalion got into the thick of every scrap that started."

Trent said no more but made investigations on his own behalf. Unfortunately there was none to help him. The ambulance that picked him up was shelled and he had been taken from its bloody interior the only living soul of the crew and passengers. None lived who could tell him what became of his companion, the man to whom he had revealed his identity, the man who possessed his secret to the full.

When he was discharged from the service and was convalescing in Bournemouth he satisfied himself that the unknown Smith had died. Again luck was with Anthony Trent. The one man – with the exception of Sutton whose lips he was sure were sealed – who could make a clear hundred thousand dollars reward for his capture was removed from the chance of doing it even as the knowledge was offered him. The words that he would have spoken, "Hail Cæsar, I, being about to die, salute thee!" had come true in that blinding flash that had brought Anthony Trent back to the world.

But even with this last narrow escape to sober him Trent was not certain whether the old excitement would call and send him out to pit himself against society. He had no grievance against wealthy men as such. What he had wanted of theirs he had taken. He was now well enough off to indulge in the life, as a writer, he had wanted. He had taken his part in the great war as a patriot should and was returning to his native land decorated by two governments. Again and again as he sat at the balcony of his room at the Royal Bath Hotel and looked over the bay to the cliffs of Swanage he asked himself this question – was he through with the old life or not? He could not answer. But he noticed that when he boarded the giant Cunarder he looked about him with the old keenness, the professional scrutiny, the eagerness of other days.

He tipped the head steward heavily and then consulted the passenger list and elected to sit next to a Mrs. Colliver wife of a Troy millionaire. She was a dull lady and one who lived to eat, but he had heard her boasting to a friend on the boat train that her husband had purchased a diamond tiara in Bond Street which would eclipse anything Troy had to offer. Mrs. Colliver dreaded to think of the duty that would have to be paid especially as during the war less collars were used than in normal times.

It was with a feeling of content that Anthony Trent paced the deck as the liner began her voyage home. Two years was a long time to be away and he felt that a long lazy month in his Maine camp would be the nearest thing to the perfect state that he could dream of when he heard, distinctly, without a chance of being mistaken, the voice of Private William Smith shouting a goodbye from the pier.

Trent had a curiously sensitive ear. He had never, for example, failed to recognize a voice even distorted over telephone wires. William Smith had one of those distinctive voices of the same timbre and inflection of those of his caste but with a certain quality, that Trent could not now stop to analyze, which stamped it as different.

All Trent's old caution returned to him. It was possible that the man whom he had supposed dead had come to see the Cunarder off without knowing Anthony Trent was aboard. But the passenger lists could be inspected and even now the law might have been set in motion that would take him handcuffed from the vessel at quarantine to be locked up in a prison. He was worth a hundred thousand dollars to any informant and he could not doubt that the so-called Smith had gone wrong because of the lust for money to pay his extravagances. It was inevitably the reason in men of the class of Smith and Despard.

He was obsessed with the determination to find out. He would track the man he had known as Smith and find out without letting him be any the wiser. A hundred ideas of disguise flashed across the quick-working brain. He tried to tell himself that it was likely that the voice might have proceeded from an utter stranger. But this was false comfort he knew. It was Smith of the 78th City of London regiment who was on the pier already growing inch by inch farther away.

The second officer tried to stop him and a passenger grasped him by the arm as he climbed the rails but they tried vainly. He dropped as lightly as he could and picked himself up a little dazed and looked around. He could see a hundred faces peering down at him from the moving decks overhead. He could see a crowd of people streaming down the pier to the city. And among them was the man he sought.

"One moment, sir," said a policeman restraining him, "what's the meaning of this?"

"Just come ashore," Trent smiled. The policeman loomed over him huge, stolid, ominous. The man looked from Trent in evening dress and without hat or overcoat, to the shadowy ship now on her thousand league voyage and he shook his head. It was an irregular procedure, he told himself and as such open to grave suspicion. But he was courteous. Trent was a gentleman and no look of fear came to his face when the officer spoke. The man remained close to Trent when he approached the few groups of people still on the pier. To every man in the groups the stranger contrived to ask a question. Of one he asked the time, of another the best hotel in Liverpool.

"It may seem very strange," said Trent pleasantly to the perplexed policeman, "but I did an unaccountable thing. I thought I saw a man who was in the trenches with me in France during the war and saved my life and I sprang over the side to find him and now he's gone."

The policeman waved a white gloved hand to the people who had already left the landing stage.

"Your friend may be there, sir," he said.

"You don't want to detain me, then?" Trent cried.

"It's dark, sir," said the policeman, "and I could hardly be expected to remember which way you went."

At the end of the short pier was a taxicab stand and a space where private machines might park. Anthony Trent arrived in time to see a huge limousine driven by a liveried chauffeur with a footman by his side begin to climb the step grade to the street. As it passed him he could swear he heard Smith's voice from within, saying, "It's the most rotten luck that I should be a younger son and not get the chances Geoffrey does."

Trent could not see the number plate of the big machine. He could note only a coat of arms on the door surmounted by a coronet. He had no time to ask if any of the dock laborers knew the occupants. He sprang into the sole taxi that occupied the stand and commanded the driver to overtake the larger car. So eager was the man to earn the double fare that he was halted by a policeman outside the Atlantic Riverside Station. The time taken up by explanations permitted the coronetted limousine to escape.