"Mr. Hade," said Brice, "for the second time this evening, I beg to tell you you are my prisoner. So are your crew. The house is surrounded. Not by Caesars, this time, but by trained Secret Service men. I warn you against trying any charlatan tricks on them. They are apt to be hasty on the trigger, and they have orders to shoot if—"
"My dear Brice," expostulated Hade, a trifle wearily, "if we were playing poker, and you held four aces to my two deuces—would you waste breath in explaining to me that I was hopelessly beaten? I'm no fool. I gather that you've marched my men off to jail. May I ask why you made an exception of me? Why did you bring me back here?"
"Can't you imagine?" asked Brice. "You say you're no fool.Prove it. Prove it by—"
"By telling you where I have cached as much of the silver as we've jettisoned thus far?" supplemented Hade. "Of course, the heroic Standish will show you where the Caesar cache is, down there in the inlet. But I am the only man who knows where the three-quarter million or more dollars already salvaged, are salted down. And you brought me here to argue me into telling? May I ask what inducements you offer?"
"Certainly," said Gavin, without a moment's hesitation."Though I wonder you have not guessed them."
"Lighter sentence, naturally," suggested Hade. "But is that all? Surely it's a piker price for Uncle Sam to pay for a gift of nearly a million dollars. Can't you better it?"
"I am not the court," returned Brice, nettled. "But I think I can promise you a fifty per cent reduction in what would be the average sentence for such an offense, and a lighter job in prison than falls to the lot of most Federal criminals."
"Good," approved Hade, adding: "But not good enough. I'm still in the thirties. I'm tougher of constitution than I look. They can't sentence me for more than a span of years. And when my term is up, I can enjoy the little batch of 1804 dollars I've laid by. I think I'll take my chance, unless you care to raise the ante."
Brice glanced around at the men who stood on the veranda.Then he lowered his voice, so as not to be heard by them.
"You are under courtmartial sentence of death as a spy, Mr. Hade," he whispered. "The war is over. That sentence won't be imposed, in full, I imagine, in times of peace. But your war record will earn you an extra sentence that will come close to keeping you in Atlanta Penitentiary for life. I believe I am the only member of the Department who knows that Major Heidenhoff of the Wilhelmstrasse and Rodney Hade are the same man. If I can be persuaded to keep that knowledge from my superiors, in return for full information as to where the 1804 dollars are cached—those you've already taken from the inlet—and if the mortgage papers on this place are destroyed—well—?"
"H'm!" mused Hade, his black eyes brooding and speculative. "H'm! That calls for a bit of rather careful weighing. How much time will you give me to think it over and decide? A week?"
"Just half an hour," retorted Gavin. "My other men, who took your silly band of cutthroats to jail, ought to be back by then. I am waiting here till they report, and no longer. You have half an hour. And I advise you to make sane use of it."
Hade got slowly to his feet. The smile was gone from his lips. His strange black eyes looked indescribably tired and old. There was a sag to his alert figure.
"It's hard to plan a coup like mine," he sighed, "and then to be bilked by a man with not one-tenth my brain. Luck was with you. Blind luck. Don't imagine you've done this by your wits."
As he spoke he shuffled heavily to the adjoining music-room, and let his dreary gaze stray toward its two windows. On the veranda, framed in the newly unshuttered window-space, stood four Secret Service men, grimly on guard.
Hade strode to one window after the other, with the cranky mien and action of a thwarted child, and slammed the shutters together, barring out the sinister sight of his guards. Gavin did not try to prevent him from this act of boyish spite. The master-mind's reaction, in its hour of brokenness, roused his pity.
From the windows, Hade's gloomy eyes strayed to the piano. On it lay a violin case. He picked it up and took out an age-mellowed violin.
"I think clearer when I play," he said, glumly, to Brice. "And I've nearly a million dollars' worth of thinking to do in this half hour. Is it forbidden to fiddle? Milo's father paid $4,000 for this violin. It's a genuine Strad. And it gives me peace and clear vision. May I play, or—?"
"Go ahead, if you want to," vouchsafed Gavin, fancying he read the attempt of a charlatan to remain picturesque to the end. "Only get your thinking done, and come to a decision before the half hour is up. And, by the way, let me warn you again that those men out there have orders to shoot, if you make a move to escape."
"No use in asking you to play my accompaniments, Claire?" asked Hade, in pathetic attempt at gayety as he walked to the hallway door. "No? I'm sorry. Nobody else ever played them as you do."
He tried to smile. The effort was a failure. He yanked the curtains shut that hung between music room and hall. Then, at a gesture from Gavin, he pulled them halfway open again, and, standing in the doorway, drew his bow across the strings.
Gavin sat down on the long hall couch, a yard outside the music-room door, beside Claire and the still stupefied Milo. The Jap took up his position back of them, alert and tense as a fox terrier. The three Secret Service men in the front doorway stood at attention, yet evidently wondering at the prisoner's queer freak.
From under the deftly wielded bow, the violin wailed forth into stray chords and phrases, wild, unearthly, discordant. Hade, his face bent over the instrument, swayed in time with its undisciplined rhythm.
Then, from dissonance and incoherence, the music merged into Gounod's Ave Maria. And, from swaying, Hade began to walk. To and fro, urged by the melody, his feet strayed. Now he was in full view, between the half-open curtains. Now, he was hidden for an instant, and then he was crossing once more before the opening.
His playing was exquisite. More—it was authoritative, masterly, soaring. It gripped the hearers' senses and heartstrings. The beauty and dreaminess of the Ave Maria flooded the air with loveliness. Brice listened, enthralled. Down Claire's cheek rolled a teardrop, of whose existence she was not even aware.
The last notes of the melody throbbed away. Brice drew a long breath. Then, at once the violin spoke again. And now it sang forth into the night, in the Schubert Serenade,—gloriously sweet, a surge of passionate tenderness.
Back and forth, under the spell of his own music, wandered Hade. Then he stopped. Gavin leaned forward. He saw that Hade was leaning against the piano, as he played. His head was bowed over the instrument as though in reverence. His black eyes were dreamy and exalted. Gavin sat back on the couch and once more gave himself over to the mystic enthrallment of the music. The Serenade wailed itself into silence with one last hushedly exquisite tone. Brice drew a long breath, as of a man coming out of a trance.
Simon Cameron had jumped into Claire's lap. But, receiving no attention from the music-rapt girl, the cat now dropped to the floor, and started toward the stairs.
At the same time, the violin sounded anew. And Gavin frowned in disappointment. For, no longer was it singing its heart out in the magic of an immortal melody. Instead, it swung into the once-popular strains of "Oh, Promise Me!"
And now it seemed as though Hade were wantonly making fun of his earlier beautiful playing and of the effect he must have known it had had upon his hearers. For he played heavily, monotonously, more like a dance-hall soloist than a master. And, as though his choice of an air were not sharp enough contrast to his other selections, he strummed amateurishly and without a shred of technique or of feeling.
Jarring as was the result upon Brice, it seemed even more so on Simon Cameron. The cat had stopped in his progress toward the stairs, and now stared round-eyed at the music-room doorway, his absurd little nostrils sniffing the air. Then, deliberately, Simon Cameron walked to the doorway and sat down there, his huge furry tail curled around round him, staring with idiotic intentness at the player.
Gavin noted the cat's odd behavior. Simon Cameron was far too familiar with Hade's presence in the house to give Rodney a second glance. Indeed, he had only jumped up into Claire's lap, because the fascinatingly new Secret Service men at the front door smelt strongly of tobacco,—the smell a Persian cat hates above all others. But now, he was gazing in delighted interest at the violinist.
At the sight, a wild conjecture flashed into Gavin's brain. With a sharp order to the Jap, he sprang up and rushed into the music room.
Leaning against the piano, playing the rebellious violin, was—Roke!
Rodney Hade had vanished.
The windows were still shuttered. No other door gave exit from the music room. There were no hangings, except the door-curtains, and there was no furniture behind which a child could hide unseen. Yet Hade was no longer there.
Roke laid aside his violin, at sight of Gavin and the Jap. At the former's exclamation of amaze, two more of the Secret Service men left their post at the front door and ran in. The tramp of their hurrying feet made the guards outside the open windows of the music room fling wide the closed shutters. Clearly, Hade had not escaped past them.
Folding his arms, and grinning impudently at the astounded cordon of faces, Roke drawled:
"I just dropped in to say 'Howdy' to Mr. Standish. Nobody was around. So I made bold to pick up the fiddle and have a little spiel. I ain't done any harm, and there's nothing you-all can hold me on."
For ten seconds nobody answered. Nobody spoke or moved. Then, Gavin Brice's face went crimson with sudden fury at his own outwitting. He recalled the musical afternoon at Roustabout Key which his presence had interrupted, and Roke's fanatical devotion to Hade.
"I begin to understand," he said, his voice muffled in an attempt to subdue his anger. "You and Hade were fond of the violin, eh? And for some reason or other you long ago worked up a series of signals on it, as the mind-reader with the guitar-accompanist used to do in the vaudeville shows. Those discordant phrases he started off with were your signal to come to the rescue. And you came. But how did you come? And how did he go? Both by the same way, of course. But—there isn't even a chimney-piece in the room."
Once more, Roke grinned broadly. "I ain't seen hide nor hair of Mr. Hade, not since this afternoon," said he. "I been spendin' the evenin' over to Landon's. Landon is a tryin' to sell me his farm. Says the soil on it is so rich that he ships carloads of it up North, to use for fertilizer. Says—"
"Sato!" broke in Brice. "Can you make him talk? MissStandish, will you please go somewhere else for five minutes?This is not going to be a pretty sight."
As the girl turned, obediently yet reluctantly, from the room, the Jap, with a smile of perfect bliss on his yellow face, advanced toward Roke.
The big man wheeled, contemptuously, upon him. Sato sprang at him. With a hammerlike fist, Roke smote at the oncoming pigmy. The arm struck, to its full length. But it did not reach its mark, nor return to the striker's side. By a queerly crablike shift of his wiry body, the Jap had eluded the blow, and had fastened upon the arm, above the elbow and at the wrist.
A cross-pull wrench of the Jap's body brought a howl of pain from Roke and sent him floundering helplessly to his knees, while the merest leverage pressure from his conqueror held him there. But the Jap was doing more. The giant's arm was bending backward and sideways at an impossible angle. Nor could its owner make a move to avert the growing unbearable torture. It was one of the simplest, yet one of the most effective and agonizing, holds in all jiujutsu.
Thirty seconds of it, and Roke's bull-like endurance went to pieces under the strain. Raucously and blubberingly he screeched for mercy. The Jap continued happily to exert the cross-pull pressure.
"Will you speak up?" queried Brice, sickened at the sight, but steeling himself with the knowledge of the captive's crimes and of the vast amount at stake.
Roke rolled his eyes horribly, grinding his yellowed teeth together to check his own cries. Then, sobbingly, he blurted:
"Yes! Lemme loose!"
"Not till you tell," refused Gavin. "Quick, now!"
"Second panel from left-hand window," moaned the stricken and anguished Roke. "Push beading up and then to right. He's—he's safe away, by now, anyway," he blubbered, in self-justification of the confession which agony had wrung from him. "All you'll get is the—the—"
And, the pain having eaten into his very brain, he yelled incoherently.
Ten minutes later, Milo Standish sought out his sister, in the upper room whither she had fled, in fear, to escape from the racket of Roke's outcries.
"Listen!" he jabbered boyishly, in utter excitement. "Brice made him tell how Rodney got out! How d'you s'pose? One of the old panels, in the music room, slides back, and there's a flight of stone steps down to a cellar that's right alongside our regular cellar, with only a six inch cement-and-lath wall between. It leads out, to the tunnel. Right at that turn where the old-time shoring is. The shoring hides a little door. And we never dared move the props because we thought it held up the tunnel-roof. It's all part of the old Indian-shelter stunts that this house's builders were so daft about, a hundred years ago. Hade must have blundered on it or studied it out, one of those times when he used to go poking around in the tunnel, all by himself. And—"
"Did Mr. Brice find him?" interposed Claire.
"Not he!" said Milo, less buoyantly. "Rodney had a good ten minutes start of us. And with a start like that, they'll never lay hands on him again. He's got too much cleverness and he knows too many good hiding places. But Brice found the next best thing. You'd never guess! Rodney's secret cache for the treasure was that walled-up cellar. It's half full of canvas bags. Right under our feet, mind you, and we never knew a thing about it. I supposed he was shipping it North in some way. Roke says that Rodney kept it there because, when he got it all, he was going to foreclose and kick us out, and then dispose of it at his leisure. The swine!"
"Oh!"
"The crypt seems to have been a part of our own cellar till it was walled off. It—"
"But how in the world did Roke?"
"He was with the crew. Rodney and he went together to the yacht for them. The Secret Service men didn't get him, in the round-up. He crept as close to the house as he dared. And he heard Rodney sounding the signal alphabet they had worked up, on the violin. He got into the tunnel and so to the cellar, and then sneaked up, and took Rodney's place at fiddling. He seems to have been as willing to sacrifice himself for his master as any dog would have been. Or else he counted on Brice's not having any evidence to hold him on.
"By the way, do you remember that conch, Davy, over at Roustabout Key? Brice says he's a Secret Service man. He and Brice used to fish together, off the keys, when they were boys. Davy volunteered for the war. And Brice made good use of him, over there, and got him into the Secret Service when they came back. It's all so queer—so—!"
"Is Mr. Brice still downstairs?" interrupted Claire, her eyes straying involuntarily toward the door of the room.
"No. He had to go. He left his good-byes for you. His work here is done. And he has to start for Washington on the 2 A.M. train from Miami. By the way, the best part of it all is that he says a fugitive from justice can't bring legal proceedings in a civil court. So Rodney can never foreclose on us or take up those notes of mine. Lord, but that chap, Brice, is a wonder!"
Vital as was the news about the notes and the mortgage, Claire scarce heard it. In, her ears, and through the brain and heart of her, rang drearily the words:
"He had to go. He left his good-byes for you. His work here is done."
His work was done! Yes. But was that to be all? Had the light in his eyes and the vibrant tremor in his voice as he talked with her—had these been part of his "work," too? Was it all to end, like this,—and before it had begun?
To her own surprise and to her brother's greater astonishment, the usually self-contained Claire Standish burst into a tempest of weeping.
"Poor, poor little girl!" soothed Milo. "It's all been too much for you! No one could have stood up under such a strain. I'll tell you what we're going to do: We're going to Miami, for a week or two, and have a jolly time and make you try to forget all this mystery and excitement. We'll go to-morrow morning, if you say so."
The Miami season was at its climax. The half-moon driveway outside the front entrance to the Royal Palm Hotel was crowded thick with waiting motor cars, whose occupants were at the hotel's semi-weekly dance. On the brightlit front veranda men in white and in dinner-clothes and women in every hue of evening dress were passing to and fro. Elderly folk, sitting in deep porch chairs, watched through the long windows the gayly-moving dancers in the ballroom. Out through wide-open doors and windows pulsed the rhythmic music.
Above hung the great white stars in the blue-black Southern skies. The bay stretched glimmering and phosphorescent away from the palm-girt hotel gardens. The trade-winds set the myriad dry palm-fronds to rustling like the downpour of summer rain.
Up the steps from the gardens drifted promenaders and dancers, in groups or in twos and threes. Then, up the stairway moved a slender, white-clad figure, alone.
Claire Standish had sought to do as her brother had wished, and to forget, in the carefree life of the White City, the happenings she had been through. Dutifully she had come to Miami with him. Dutifully, for the past three days, she had joined him in such gayeties as he had suggested. Dutifully, to-night, she had come with him to this dance. And all the time her heart had been as heavy as lead.
Now, getting rid of her partner on some pretext, she had gone out into the softly illumined gardens to be alone with the yearning and heartache she could not shake off. Then, fearing lest Milo, or some other of the men she knew, might come in search of her and wonder at her desire to mope alone under the stars, she had turned back to the hotel.
As she mounted the last stair to the veranda, a man in dinner clothes stepped forward from one of the porch's great white pillars, and advanced to meet her.
"There's a corner table at the Cafe de la Paix, in Paris," he greeted her, striving to control his voice and to speak lightly, "that every one on earth must pass by, sooner or later. The front veranda of the Royal Palm is like that. Soon or late, everybody crosses it. When I got back this afternoon, I heard you had left home and that you were somewhere in Miami. I couldn't find you. So I came here—and waited."
Claire had halted, at first sound of Gavin Brice's pleasantly slow voice, and she stood facing him, wide-eyed and pale, her breath failing.
"I had to go to Washington to make my report," said he, speaking low and fast. "I came back to you by the first train I could catch. Didn't you know I would?"
"Yes," she breathed, her gaze still lost in his. "Yes. I—I knew."
And now she realized she had known, even while she had told herself she would never see him again.
"Come!" he said, gently, holding out his hand to her.
Unashamed, under the battery of a hundred curious eyes, she clasped the proffered hand. And, together, they turned back toward the sheltering dimness of the gardens.
End of Project Gutenberg's Black Caesar's Clan, by Albert Payson Terhune