Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

“But not in this cursed island or at the hands of a rascally Jew. The day will be an unlucky one if it comes here, my man. Put your best foot foremost, and say that it shall not.”

My words were Greek to him, of course; and he answered me with a strange oath and an expression of opinion upon Portuguese and others which was quite valueless. My own curiosity now turned, however, to consider the odd fact that the sentry remained motionless, and that Okyada did not appear to have exchanged a single word with him. Who, then, was the man, and what kept him in that grotesque attitude? At a distance of fifty yards from the light I could not have told you, but at twenty yards I understood. The wretched man was as stone dead as his comrade who lay upon the path. A bullet from an unknown rifle had shot him through the heart as he stood in ambush waiting for me. So much I hazarded on the instant. The truth must be made known to me upon the yacht’s deck.

I name the yacht, and this is to tell you in a word that, coming out of the pit, we espied her, lying off the headland—a picture of life and light upon the still water. There below, upon the shore, stood the friends who had known so many anxieties, suffered upon my account such weary days of waiting, such long hours of strenuous labour since I had left them. And now I had but to scramble down the rugged cliff side and clasp their hands, and to tell them that all was well with me. But nine days away from them, I seemed to have lived a year apart, to have changed my very self, to be a new man coming into a living world of action from a grave of dreams.

And what voice more earthly could I have heard than that of the unsurpassable Timothy McShanus crying, “Me bhoy!” in tones that might have been heard upon the mountain top?

No, indeed, and Timothy was the first to greet me, and I do believe there were tears of gladness in his eyes.

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Dr. Fabos Hears the News.

We rowed to the yacht without an instant’s delay and made known the good news to the crew. Their cheers must certainly have been heard by half the population of Villa do Porto. Quite convinced that the Jap would fetch me out of the trap, Captain Larry had ordered a supper to be prepared in the cabin, and hardly were we aboard when the corks were popping and the hot meats served. It was touching to witness the good fellows’ delight, expressed in twenty ways as seamen will—this man by loud oaths, another by stupefied silence, a third by incoherent roaring, a fourth by the exclamatory desire that he might not find salvation. A man learns by misfortune by what measure of love his friends estimate him. In my case I learned it upon the deck of the White Wings, and have never forgotten the lesson.

Okyada, be sure, was the hero of the hour, and we had him down to the cabin immediately, and there pledged him in our saki that comes to us by way of Rheims. So much there was to tell upon both sides that neither side knew where to begin. Strangely elated myself, and suffering from the reaction of the nerves which sets a man walking upon air, I told them very briefly that I had been trapped to the hills, not by stratagem, but by force, and that if they had come an hour later, it would have been to a sepulchre. On their side, the strident voice of Timothy related twenty circumstances in a breath, and unfailingly began in the middle of his story and concluded with the beginning.

“We presented ourselves to the authorities as ye ordered us to do, and bad cess to them, they had no English at all to speak of. That was after me friend, Larry, had hunted the innkeeper round the town for to keep him humble in spirit. I went to the Consul’s man and says I, ‘’Tis an Englishman I am upon the high seas though of another nation ashore, and treat us civilly,’ says I, ‘or be damned if I don’t wipe the floor with ye.’ ’Twas a mellow-faced party, and not to be made much of. The gendarmes were no better. There was wan av them that had a likeness to the Apostle John, but divil a word of a sane man’s gospel could I get out of the fellow. The tale went that ye had gone to St. Michael’s, and ’twas by your own will that ye went. I made my compliments to the man who said it, and told him he was a liar. Ean, me bhoy, your friend Fordibras and his friend the Hebrew Jew have bought this island body and soul. The very cable shakes hands with them. We had to go to St. Michael’s to send a bit of a message at all.”

I interrupted him sharply.

“Did you send the cables, then, Timothy?”

“Would I be after not sending them? And me friend in his grave! They went the day before yesterday. ’Twill be like new wine to Dr. Ean, says I, dead or alive. So we sailed to St. Michael’s. Your fine fellow of a Jap, he was alone twenty hours in the hills. Man, he has the eyes, the ears, the feet of a serpent, and if he’s not a match for the Jew divil, may I never drink champagne again.”

I assented a little gravely. His news meant very much to me. You must know that, before I landed at Villa do Porto at all, I had entrusted to Timothy and to Captain Larry certain messages which were to be cabled to Europe in the gravest emergency only. These messages would tell Scotland Yard; they would make known to the Government and to the Admiralty, and even more important than these, to the great diamond houses, that which I knew of the Jew, Val Imroth, and of his doings upon the high seas. From this time forth the warships of three nations would be scouring the ocean for such witnesses to my story as only the ocean could betray. If, from one point of view, I welcomed the thought, a shadow already lay upon my satisfaction. For if Imroth were arrested, and with him the man known as General Fordibras, what, then, of Joan and her fortunes? These men, I believed, were capable of any infamy. They might well sacrifice the child to their desire for vengeance upon the man who had discovered them. They might even bring her to the bar of a Court of Justice, charged as an accomplice in these gigantic thefts they had committed so many years. To this end they had put my stolen jewels about her neck, and so baited their devilish trap from the earliest hours. I am convinced now that their ultimate object was murder—when it could be safely done, and when the whole of my story was known to them.

“You sent the cables two days ago, Timothy—and what then?” I asked him, not wishing to make too much of it before them. “Have you had any reply from Murray?”

Captain Larry intervened, pointing out that the cables had been sent from St. Michael’s.

“We had to get the ship back, sir,” he said. “I was determined not to leave this place without you if we waited here a twelvemonth. As for the authorities, it was, as Mr. McShanus says, all blubber and fingers, and the General’s money hot in their pockets. When we got back from St. Michael’s, the little Jap came down to the harbour with his story. You were up in the hills, he said, and there was a spring to be dammed to get you out. He had done what he could, rolling the rocks into the water with his own hands until he could hardly stand upright for fatigue, but we sent a boat’s crew up last night and another to-night, and they played bowls with the stones like the good men they are. I would have gone down with your servant, but he’d the conceit to go alone. It’s natural to such a man—no words, no fuss, just a coil of rope about his waist and a couple of revolvers in his hands. He took the Scotch boatswain because he says Scotchmen give nothing away—‘Honourable Englishmen too much tongue,’ he says. I left it with him, because I believe he spoke the straight truth. When he had gone up we posted a couple of men on the shore here, and Mr. McShanus and I took our stand at the cliff’s head. We hadn’t been there more than half an hour when the first of the rifle-shots was fired. We saw a number of men on the hill-side, and they had fired a rifle for a signal, as we supposed, to others on the shore below. By-and-by we heard another rifle-shot, but saw no one. A little while after that you came down.”