The S. S.Upsal, 2,000 tons, the Swedish ensign at her taffrail, her one black-spouting funnel still daubed with remains of war-time camouflage, lifted and plunged doggedly into the teeth of the September south-west gale that lashed her with cold rain from the streaming gray clouds which curtained close the foam-topped gray-green waves into which she crashed with recurrent walls of spray high above her forecastle, and which mingled in an indistinguishable whelm with the dirty murk of beaten-down smoke low upon the track of her bared and racing propeller. The men upon her bridge crouched, oilskins to their ears, behind the soaked canvas of the “dodger” which protected them, peering into the mist from which at any moment might emerge the towering bulk of a liner hurrying up-channel to the hungry ports of Europe. They were silent. Conversation was a futile effort in the buffeting blasts that stopped the words in their mouths. The only sounds were the crash and thud of green water that slid off in foaming cascades from the forecastle to the well, the harp-like moaning of the wind-tautened stays, and, in brief lulls, the sizzling of rain and spray upon the heated funnel and the creaking of boat-gear whose serviceable character in such a humble “tramp” was a phenomenon reminiscent of unwonted marine perils that had but recently ceased. No longer did her look-out scrutinize every flitting patch of foam in apprehension of the dreaded periscope. The violences of sea and sky were dangers as of yore. From the depths came now no menace.
The group upon her bridge was more numerous thanis customary on a cheaply run little freighter of her class. In addition to the second officer whose watch it was, and the look-out man on the opposite corner of the bridge were three others. Two of them, young men oilskin-clad like their companions, stood close together in an attitude which indicated a personal acquaintanceship independent of the working of the vessel. The third man held himself aloof, his back to them, staring over the troubled sea to a point on the starboard quarter. Somewhere in that direction, wrapped in the mists of rain and trailing cloud the last rocky outposts of England whitened the waves which surged and fell back about them in ceaseless and ever-baffled attack.
The buoyant twist and roll which accompanied the lift and plunge of theUpsal, the frequent racing of her propeller, indicated that she was running in ballast. Almost for the first time in her drab, maid-of-all-work career, indeed, theUpsalcarried no cargo. She was on a special mission. A Scandinavian salvage syndicate, having come to an arrangement with the underwriters of a few out of the hundreds of vessels which strew the bottoms of the entrances to the British seas, had chartered her to locate and survey a group of promising wrecks, preparatory to more extended operations. The two young men were their technical engineers; Jensen, the taller of the pair, and Lyngstrand, his assistant.
The third man, who stood aloof from them, was Captain Horst, the master of the ship. He was, of course, primarily responsible to his owners and not to the syndicate who had chartered his vessel. Until they reached the location of the wrecks the submarine engineers were merely passengers. Reticent and sombre as he had been since the commencement of the voyage, he ignored them now, stood apparently lost in abstract contemplation of the gray waste of sea. But one who could have looked into his face would have been impressed and puzzled by his expression. The cruel mouth under the little red moustache was curiously twisted. In the haggard eyeswhich roved around the restricted horizon was an oddly apprehensive uncertainty, unexpected in such a determined countenance. His glance looked down, apparently fascinated, upon the seas which raced below him as theUpsallifted on yet another crest, as though there were something strange in being so high above them—and then jerked up, automatically, to the horizon as in swift, instinctive doubt of impunity. A psychologist would have suspected that he allowed a fear of some kind, so long abiding as to have become a subconscious mental habit, the relief of free play when he knew himself unwatched.
The two submarine engineers paid no attention to him. They gazed across the untenanted sea ahead to where the white spray leaped, almost lantern-high, in unsuccessful embraces of the tall column of The Bishop. Then, when the lighthouse, loftily unmoved above the eager seas, ascetically alone in the wide desolation of foam-streaked gray, had slipped abeam, had receded into the mist behind them, when there was no object to claim the eye on all the tumultuous stretch of ocean ahead, Jensen turned to his companion and pointed downward. Lyngstrand nodded assent, and they both staggered across the wet, reeling bridge toward the ladder which led below.
The skipper, staring aft, his back on them, blocked their passage. Jensen touched him on the shoulder. He swung round abruptly, with a startled curse. Then, recognizing them, he moved aside grudgingly. His face was turned from them as they passed.
The two young men descended to the deck below. They were berthed in the saloon under the poop, but they took their meals in the charthouse immediately beneath the bridge, in company with the skipper who slept there. In addition to meal-times, the charthouse was a convenient refuge from the weather common to all of them. It was their objective now, and, just dodging a flying sea that fell with a heavy far-scattered splash upon the deck, they flung themselves inside and shut the door.Then, removing and hanging up their dripping oilskins, they slid round to a final seat upon the leather-covered lockers which filled the space between two sides of the walls and the screwed-down centre table.
“Filthy weather!” said Jensen, producing pipe and tobacco-pouch. “But we ought to get there to-night. We’re changing course now to the north-west. Feel it?”
In effect, even as he spoke theUpsalswung round to starboard. A long lurching roll substituted itself for the corkscrew plunges which had been the predominant motion, and the spray flung itself viciously at the port side of the ship to the exclusion of the other.
Jensen, having lit his pipe, produced a type-written sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a list of ships, followed by indications of latitude, longitude, and other particulars.
“No. 1—Gloucester City, 7,500 tons, Latitude 50 degrees 55 minutes North, Longitude 9 degrees 14 minutes West, 60 fathoms, torpedoed 20th September, 1918,” he read out. “Get the chart, Lyngstrand, and let us prick down its exact position.”
His fair-haired junior obediently spread out a chart of the exit to the English Channel upon the table.
“20th of September!” he said, reflectively. “That’s curious, Jensen! Exactly a year ago to-day!”
“Coincidences must happen sometimes,” replied Jensen with the superior indifference of three or four years’ seniority. “I see nothing remarkable in it.”
“It just struck me,” said Lyngstrand, apologetically. “No—I suppose there’s nothing remarkable in it—it might just as well have been any other day.”
Jensen threw a cursory glance at the chart.
“You’ve brought the wrong one,” he said, snappily. “This doesn’t go far enough north. Look in the drawer there—there must be another one.”
“It is up in the wheelhouse, I think, Jensen,” demurred the young man, mildly.
“Yes—I know—but old Horst is certain to have aduplicate. Look in the drawer and see!” replied Jensen, with an impatience invited by the docility of his junior.
Lyngstrand obeyed, rummaging among a number of charts in the drawer of the locker under Captain Horst’s bunk.
“Here we are!” he cried at last, unrolling one of them. “This is a special one, evidently! Someone has marked it all over with red ink.”
Jensen snatched it from him, spread it out. In fact, as Lyngstrand said, it was marked in many places with little red-ink crosses, and under each was a date. Jensen ran his finger across it, stopped just off the south coast of Ireland.
“By all that’s wonderful!” he cried in a slow, long-drawn accent of amazement, raising his head and looking at his companion. “He has marked our wreck!Look!—Fifty-fifty-five North, Nine-fourteen West—and there’s the date under it 20/9/18!”
“Then all those other crosses——?” queried Lyngstrand, in a voice of puzzled interest.
“They must be—— Wait a minute!” He compared some of them with the indications on his list. “Yes! They are wrecks, too—all torpedoed ships—look! this and this and this are marked on the chart! There are others not marked—but there are many more marks than there are ships on our list. They must be all torpedoed ships!”
“But why?” asked Lyngstrand. “Why has he got them all marked like this?—Where did he get this chart, I wonder?”
Jensen glanced to the bottom of the sheet.
“This is a German chart!” he exclaimed.
Lyngstrand stared at him.
“German——!” he began, and stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes in a long moment when suspicion defined itself as almost certitude. For that moment they forgot the sickly rolling of the ship threshing and wallowing on her way to one of those tragic little red crosses.They forgot everything except the slowly dawning possible corollaries of this discovery.
Before either could utter another word, the lee door of the charthouse opened and Captain Horst stood framed in the entrance. He glared across at them, his face livid with a sudden anger, his eyes blazing. Then, with a scarcely articulate but vehemently muttered oath, he sprang across the little room, snatched the chart from the table, thrust it into the drawer, locked it up and put the key in his pocket. He turned and scowled at them in a silence which they were too awed to break. His eyes, fiercely blue, seemed to search into their very souls. Theirs dropped under the intolerable scrutiny. He uttered an exclamation of angry contempt and, without further speech, walked out of the charthouse.
The two young men looked at each other.
“That is the second time this morning!” said Jensen, at last, glancing toward the door now once more closed on them.
“What is?” asked Lyngstrand, curiously.
“That he has cursed in German!—Lyngstrand! I am beginning to see into this!”
“But it’s impossible!” exclaimed Lyngstrand, his mind leaping to his friend’s deduction and then rejecting it. “He is a Swede, like ourselves!”
“He is a German!” said Jensen, positively.
“But he speaks Swedish without a trace of accent!”
“And other languages also, I expect—French and English, as well—better than you or I speak them, I have no doubt. Swedish would much facilitate service in the Baltic—and your German naval officer was linguistically well equipped for any possible campaign.”
“German naval officer!” echoed Lyngstrand, incredulously.
“I will bet on it!” asserted his friend.
“But—a German naval officer commanding a rotten little tramp like theUpsal?” said Lyngstrand, emphasizing his incredulity. “I can’t believe it!”
“Even German ex-naval officers have to live, my friend,” responded Jensen, axiomatically. “And—I ask you—what is open to them but to take service in the mercantile marine of other nations? There is no more German fleet—there are not enough merchant vessels left under the German flag to employ all their trained officers. On the other hand, all the Scandinavian nations have multiplied their trading fleets—they cannot find officers enough for them. A first-class seaman like Horst, speaking Swedish like a native, would find plenty of owners only too willing to employ him.”
“It sounds plausible,” agreed Lyngstrand, but somewhat doubtfully.
“Plausible!” repeated Jensen, scornfully. “It is more than plausible—the more I think of it, the more certain I am. Consider! Is Horst the typical rough merchant skipper? You know perfectly well he is not. You said yourself, the first evening we came aboard, that although he had the soul of a pig he had the manners of a gentleman. How does he speak Swedish—like a man who has spent half his life knocking about harbour drinking-shops? No! He expresses himself with that precise accuracy of the man employing a language well learnt, indeed, but nevertheless foreign to him—like you and I speak English, my friend. And his clothes!—Did you ever know the skipper of a tramp steamer wear a stiff white collar while at sea? Then his curt way of giving orders—no question about discipline, but you should see some of our Swedish forecastle-hands stare at him! One of them stared a moment too long just before you came aboard. He knocked him clean out!—He is a German naval officer, I will swear to it!—More than that, I am convinced that he commanded a submarine!”
“That chart, then——?”
“Is the chart of his sinkings!”
“By God!” said Lyngstrand, solemnly, setting his teeth and staring sternly at the charthouse wall. “If I were sure of it——!”
“What do you mean?” asked Jensen, struck by this sudden change from his friend’s ordinarily meek demeanour. “What has it to do with you?”
Lyngstrand turned to him with a bitter little laugh. He seemed, indeed, a different man.
“More than you think, my friend,” he said, briefly. “I am not good company for U-boat commanders!”
“But why?—You lost no one——?”
Lyngstrand’s serious eyes held his.
“You remember I went to America in 1917, Jensen? I met a girl there—we were betrothed. She was coming to Europe to me last year. She never arrived. Her ship—a neutral—a small Norwegian ship, theTrondhjem, on which I had arranged for her passage—was torpedoed in the Atlantic last September—spurlos versenkt!” He finished in a tone of bitter mimicry, and then suddenly hid his face in his hands through a silence which Jensen felt incapable of breaking. At last he looked up again. “If ever I trace the scoundrel who murdered her——!” The ugly menace in his voice supplied the final clause to his unfinished sentence.
“A difficult task!” murmured Jensen, sympathetically.
Lyngstrand glanced at the closed drawer of the locker.
“When I think that perhaps on that chart—one of those little red crosses——” He crashed his hand upon the table. “By God, Jensen! I would give something to have another look at it!”
Jensen laid a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“We will do our best, Lyngstrand, to see it again. But don’t torture yourself about it now. Come out on deck. The barometer is rising, and if the sea goes down to-morrow we shall want to keep clear heads for our investigation of theGloucester City.—Come!”
He rose and held out his friend’s oilskins, helped him on with them.
They went out and stood in the shelter of the lee-deck, watching the foam-froth sink down and melt in the depths of the malachite waves that rolled away from them, untilsoon after eight bells the white-jacketed steward clanged out his announcement of dinner.
They found Captain Horst already at his place at the table in the charthouse. It was significant of the unexpressed but clearly felt antipathy which in the past few days had grown up between the skipper and his passengers that he had commenced his meal without waiting for them. Jensen, however, was a level-headed young man who had not the least intention of jeopardizing the enterprise for which he was responsible by ill-timed open bad-temper. He nodded a greeting with a smile which totally ignored the strained circumstances of their last meeting.
“I think the weather is moderating, Captain Horst,” he said, pleasantly, as he sat down.
“Ja,” responded Captain Horst, gruffly, throwing a perfunctory glance through the unshuttered forward windows of the charthouse.
“We ought to reach the neighbourhood of our wreck some time to-night?” pursued Jensen in affable enquiry.
Lyngstrand had addressed himself in silence to the food the steward set before him, but he glanced up as though some undertone of significance in his friend’s voice had caught his ear.
“Thereabouts,” conceded Captain Horst in a tone which sufficiently indicated that he was disinclined for conversation.
But Jensen was cheerfully loquacious.
“I wonder whether we shall hit on some other wreck instead?” he surmised. “These seas must be strewn with them.”
Captain Horst shrugged his shoulders.
Lyngstrand looked up.
“If I were a German U-boat commander,” he said, with a quiet deliberation, his eyes straight on Captain Horst’s face, “I should not dare to sail over these seas again. I should see drowning faces sinking through every wave.”
His last sentence seemed to ring through the silence which followed it. Captain Horst sat impassive, but his brutal jaw looked hard and his cruel mouth thinned during the moment in which he returned Lyngstrand’s glance.
“Bah!” he said. “The dead don’t come back!” There was something of defiance in his harshly contemptuous tone. “They are finished with—for ever!”
The blood went out of Lyngstrand’s face as he bent down again to his plate.
There was no further conversation during the meal.
The afternoon was spent by the two young men, in company with the half-dozen divers under their orders, in overhauling the diving-dresses, air-pumps, etc., which might be required on the morrow.
The gale had obviously blown itself out. The western sky had cleared, the rain had ceased, the wave-tops were no longer torn in flying spume, there was less violence in the rolling surges in whose trough they wallowed. When, a little after four bells, they were summoned to tea, the sun was setting in a golden splendour that promised a peaceful dawn.
Excited by the prospect of the next day’s work, the two young men forgot their suspicions of Captain Horst, could talk of nothing but their plans for diving despite the after-swell of the gale which would surely still be running. The captain listened to their impatience with the ghost of a grim smile, but volunteered no part in the conversation.
“Do you propose to keep under way all night, Captain Horst?” enquired Jensen.
“No,” he replied. “By my dead reckoning we ought to be in the vicinity of the wreck at about eight bells to-night. I shall anchor then if the glass is still rising. To-morrow we will take an observation and get as close as we can to the position of theGloucester City—presuming that you have it correctly stated.”
His tone was perfectly indifferent, but Lyngstrandthought suddenly of that chart with the little red crosses—and particularly that cross on their indicated spot, 50° 55´´ N., 9° 14´´ W, with the fatal date of exactly a year ago—20/9/18. Surely it could not be mere coincidence! He thrilled suddenly with a dramatic perception. If—if it were so—if the man so calmly smiling at him had really sent theGloucester Cityto the bottom!—and now, on the anniversary of the crime, was coolly proposing to anchor himself as near as might be over her ocean grave, preparatory to disturbing it on the morrow!—No! He ridiculed himself. It was impossible! No man could have the iron will—he glanced straight into the blue eyes of the impassive Horst, read nothing—no man could stand the strain without betraying himself. The murderer brought back to the scene of his crime broke down into confession—and, if he were the murderer of theGloucester City, Horst was being brought back with ironic inexorability to the site of his assassination, brought back by those subtle, apparently normal, everyday circumstances from which there is no escape.
He wondered to what extent Horst had been informed of the purport of their voyage when theUpsalwas chartered. He could not, certainly, have been left in ignorance—but, on the other hand, he could not well refuse to navigate the ship without losing an employment which, however humble, was assuredly to be coveted by a man in his position. A penniless naval officer had poor prospects in Germany. Bah! (he thought to himself in a sudden revulsion) he was accepting Jensen’s unsupported surmises as though they were reality. The thing was impossible! Another glance at the hard but emotionless face opposite him reassured him. He banished his hyper-dramatic idea in a spurn of self-contempt for his too excitable imagination.
Conversation languished. There was no community of thought between the skipper and his passengers, and his presence was a check upon the mutual confidences of the two young men. Meals together were an ordealescaped from as soon as terminated, and Jensen and Lyngstrand speedily went out on deck again with the murmured allegation that the overhaul of their gear was not yet finished.
They did not come together again until some three hours later, when, her white anchor-light hoisted between her masts, theUpsalwas pitching at her cable to the heavy swell which rolled down upon her from the darkness of the night. The two young men had been yarning with the chief engineer in the pleasant warmth of the engine-room, when a glance at the clock reminded them that it was the hour when the steward brought biscuits and cocoa to the charthouse. Light-hearted as boys, their unpleasant thoughts of the captain dissipated by the cheerful talk in which they had been indulging, they scrambled up the iron-runged ladder from the warm, oily depths to the black, damp chill of the outer night.
In this sea-smelling gloom where the wave-tops ran past them with faintly phosphorescent crests, the unwonted stillness of the ship’s engines was suddenly vivid to their consciousness as she eased and tugged at her anchorage.
“Well, here we are!” said Jensen, stopping for a moment to peer around him.
“I wonder what lies beneath us?” queried Lyngstrand, developing his comrade’s thought. As he, too, probed the darkness where the cruel waves ran, easy familiars of the night, he had an uncomfortable little mental picture of theGloucester Cityfoundering, with torn side, into their chill depths—a year ago. What shrieks and cries had hushed, for ever, into the silence which encompassed them?
Both shuddered.
“Come along,” said Jensen. “Our cocoa will be cold.”
At the charthouse door they hesitated for a moment on an indefinable impulse, peeped through the unshutteredwindow which allowed a broad ray of light to fall across the deck.
Captain Horst was seated at the table, his head in his hands, his back to them. Spread out before him was the chart with the little red crosses. He sat motionless, staring at it, as though absorbed in reverie. The three cups of cocoa were steaming on the table. His was untouched.
For one wild moment Lyngstrand thought he might be able to surprise a glance at the chart. He turned the handle of the door as stealthily as he could. Slight as the sound had been, however, Captain Horst had heard it. When they entered he was stuffing something into his breast pocket, and the chart was no longer on the table.
They drank their cocoa in silence, Horst staring moodily at the floor, Jensen and Lyngstrand risking a glance of mutual comprehension. Suddenly two loud, sharp knocks broke the stillness—knocks that seemed to be on the charthouse wall.
Captain Horst raised his head.
“Herein!” he cried, automatically, obviously without thinking.
Jensen shot a swift look at his friend, eyebrows raised at this German permission of entry. Horst bit his lip, suddenly self-conscious. He repeated the authorization in Swedish.
No one entered.
Expectation was just passing into a vague surprise, when the knocks were repeated—three heavy blows, obviously deliberate, upon the after-wall of the charthouse.
Horst sprang up, with a savage curse of exasperation. He was self-controlled enough, however, to utter his thought in Swedish. “I’ll teach them!” he exclaimed, as he flung open the charthouse door. “Fooling around here!”
He disappeared into the night and they heard the trampof his heavy sea-boots as he ran round the charthouse. But no other sound woke upon his passage. The circuit completed, they heard his angry yell to the look-out man on the bridge above, heard the quietly normal response, the surprised denial. The interior of the charthouse was a hushed stillness where Jensen and Lyngstrand sat exchanging a smile of malicious enjoyment. Horst vituperated the stammering look-out man in a flood of ugly oaths that were plainly a break-down of nervous control.
The door opened again for his entry.
“Extraordinary thing!” he scowled across at them. “No one there! You heard them, didn’t you?” He seated himself with an angry grunt.
Before they could answer, the knocks recommenced in a sudden vehemence—not slow and deliberate this time, but in a rapid succession which quickened to a fast and furious fusillade from origins that seemed to play, flitting arbitrarily, all over the walls and roof. The charthouse reverberated with them. Their intensity varied at every moment from sharp, hammer-like blows to rapid, nervous taps from what might have been a feverishly agitated pencil. The wild and uncanny tattoo culminated in three crashing blows that seemed to be on the underside of the table itself. There was silence.
“What are you playing at?” cried Horst, glaring at them in fierce suspicion of a hoax.
For answer, they both lifted up their hands, obviously unoccupied, into the air. Even as they did so, the knocks started again, still rapid, but with a certain deliberate rhythm, and much less violent. Again they seemed to be on the underside of the table. Horst looked, with a scowl of distrust, under it to their immobile feet. The two young men glanced at each other, as puzzled and alarmed as Horst himself.
“What in the name of Heaven is it?” cried Jensen.
The knocks swelled suddenly louder as though in answer to his voice.
“Listen!” said Horst, holding up his hand. The colour had gone suddenly out of his face, his eyes fixed themselves in a recognition charged with vague fear. “It’s——!”
“Yes!” cried Jensen, “by all that’s wonderful——!”
“The Morse code!” Lyngstrand completed the sentence.
Once perceived, there was no doubt of it. That succession of irregular taps and pauses coming from the table as from a sounding-board was a plain language to all three of them, unmistakable, not more to be banished from cognition than the reiteration of spoken words.
“But,” cried Lyngstrand, “where does it come from?—We have no wireless—and even wireless could not produce that!”
“Listen!” Jensen reproved him. “It’s a message of some kind!” He glanced across to Horst who sat speechless, his face gray, his eyes terrified. “Not Swedish!—Take it down, Lyngstrand, while I spell it out!”
The young man feverishly produced pencil and paper from his pocket. “Listen!” he cried. “Good God! Do you catch it?”
Three sharp taps—three more widely spaced—three sharp taps again—the series was reiterated insistently—S—O—S!—S—O—S!—S—O—S!
“Ready, Lyngstrand?” queried Jensen in the sharp tone of a man concentrating himself for action. His comrade nodded.
Jensen rapped sharply upon the table the wireless operator’s signal of reception. In immediate answer the raps from the invisible source renewed themselves, continued evidently in a message. Lyngstrand jotted down the letters as Jensen spelled them out.
“‘s-t-e-a-m-s-h-i-p’—it’s English!” he interjected. “Got it?——” The raps had continued, noted by his brain and coalesced by it into definite words. “‘Gloucester City’——”
“What——?” ejaculated Lyngstrand, in incredulous amazement, as he rapidly wrote the words.
Jensen continued, his attention fixed upon the unceasing raps.
“—torpedoed 50-55 north 9-14 west—sinking fast—come quickly—done in——”
He glanced up to see Horst springing at them like a maddened animal.
“Stop that!” cried the captain. “It’s a trick!—it’s a trick!” In another second he had snatched paper and pencil from Lyngstrand’s hand.
A formidable series of violent crashes, emanating from walls, roof, and table, was the instant response to his action. He shrank back, appalled, crouching with eyes that searched the surrounding walls in agonized apprehension. “It’s a trick!—it’s a diabolical trick!” he muttered. “It must be!”
“Captain Horst!” said Jensen, with sternly level authority. “Be good enough to sit down and remain quiet. All matters relating to theGloucester Citycome within my province.”
Horst, his arms up as though to guard himself, went slowly backward to his seat but did not sit. There was madness in his eyes. “How could they know?” he said to himself in a sharp-breathed whisper, “—the exact words!——”
“What do you mean?” queried Lyngstrand, curiously. Horst replied without thinking, more to himself than to his questioner.
“The exact words of her call for help—a year ago! My wireless picked it up after we had left her——” He stopped suddenly, realized that he had betrayed himself.
“Then——!” cried Lyngstrand, jumping up from his seat and taking a step forward. His eyes, full of menace, searched the ex-U-boat commander’s face.
“Be quiet—both of you!” commanded Jensen, holding up his hand. The regular succession of raps had commenced again. Jensen listened to them, nodded.Then he himself rapped a message in English on the table—“who are you?”
Horst and Lyngstrand listened in dead silence as the answer spelled itself out upon the table.
“h-e-n-r-y s-m-i-t-h w-i-r-e-l-e-s-s o-p-e-r-a-t-o-r g-l-o-u-c-e-s-t-e-r c-i-t-y.”
Jensen turned a glance of wonderment to his comrade. Horst, reading the message as currently as the others, looked as though about to faint.
“Stop it!” he said, hoarsely. “Stop it!”
Jensen ignored him, rapped again upon the table—“where are you now?”
The answer came immediately.
“a-t y-o-u-r s-i-d-e”
The three of them sprang back simultaneously, as from the presence of a ghost. Their eyes probed empty air.
Jensen spoke aloud, still in English.
“Can you see us—hear us?”
The raps of the invisible hand upon the table replied at once.
“y-e-s”
“Mein Gott!” muttered Horst. “I shall go mad!” Jensen continued his colloquy.
“Where is theGloucester City?” He smiled to himself as though setting a trap for this unseen intelligence. “Is she still afloat?”
The raps recommenced without hesitation.
“y-o-u-r a-n-c-h-o-r f-i-x-e-d- i-n u-p-p-e-r w-o-r-k-s”
Lyngstrand uttered an ejaculation of awed astonishment. He looked to see the sweat pearling on Captain Horst’s forehead.
The raps spelled out, spontaneously, an explanatory afterward.
“w-e l-e-d y-o-u t-o i-t”
“We?” queried Jensen. “Who are ‘we’?”
“t-h-e d-r-o-w-n-e-d” The raps were decisive.
“Why?” Lyngstrand admired his comrade’s steely self-control. “Why did you lead us to it?”
“h-e c-a-n g-u-e-s-s”
“Who?”
“t-h-e m-u-r-d-e-r-e-r”
Both glanced swiftly at Horst. He was speechless, his face a study in blanched terror.
“h-e k-n-o-w-s” added the raps. There was something indefinably malicious about their sound.
“Stop it!” Horst’s voice was strangled, scarcely audible. “Stop it!”
Jensen was unmoved.
“How many of you?” he asked.
Lyngstrand, fascinated by this conversation with the unseen, was grateful for the question.
“t-h-r-e-e h-u-n-d-r-e-d a-n-d e-i-g-h-t g-l-o-u-c-e-s-t-e-r c-i-t-y h-u-n-d-r-e-d a-n-d f-i-v-e r-e-s-c-u-e-d o-t-h-e-r s-h-i-p-s f-o-u-r h-u-n-d-r-e-d a-n-d t-h-i-r-t-e-e-n i-n a-l-l”
“All men?” queried Jensen.
“t-w-e-n-t-y-f-i-v-e w-o-m-e-n”
“My God!” muttered Lyngstrand, in a sudden vivid remembrance that stabbed him like a pain. He glanced at Horst.
Jensen glanced also, and was merciless.
“Are you all here?” he asked.
“y-e-s” There was a little pause, “h-u-n-d-r-e-d-s m-o-r-e I d-o-n-t k-n-o-w d-r-o-w-n-e-d o-t-h-e-r s-u-n-k s-h-i-p-s a-l-l h-e-r-e”
Lyngstrand shivered, looked around him uneasily. Jensen’s voice scarcely betrayed a tremor as he pursued.
“What have you come for?”
“w-e h-a-v-e c-o-m-e f-o-r h-i-m”
“No!—no!” screamed Horst, suddenly. “No!—Ach, Gott, schütze mich!”
Both Lyngstrand and Jensen had a sense of inaudible mocking laughter in the air about them. There was an awful silence.
The raps recommenced spontaneously.
“t-e-l-l h-i-m t-h-e-y a-r-e f-i-l-i-n-g p-a-s-t h-i-m i-d-e-n-t-i-f-y-i-n-g h-i-m”
Jensen turned to Horst.
“You hear?” he asked, grimly.
But Horst, with a blood-curdling scream of terror, had flung himself at the charthouse door, thrown it open. They heard the hiss and sough of the dark seas. He plunged out, blindly, head-foremost. Then, just beyond the threshold, he stopped, recoiled, staggered back into the charthouse.
“No!” he gasped, hoarsely. “No!—I can’t face them! I can’t face them!—I can’t die!—I dare not!”
He shook in a palsy of the faculties. His eyes agonizedly sought their unsympathetic faces. The German submarine commander is a pariah among seafaring men, whatever their nationality. He realized it, hopelessly, as he met their hard eyes. With a sob of self-pity, he stumbled across to a corner of the charthouse, sank down upon the seat, covered his face with his hands.
Lyngstrand’s young features were sternly set as he glanced at him. Then he took a long breath, the preparatory oxygen-renewal of the man who dares an experiment that will tax him. He rapped the wireless “call-up” upon the table.
“Can the others communicate also?” he asked, loudly, in English. He, also, was trembling.
The answer came at once.
“o-n-l-y t-h-r-o-u-g-h m-e” There was a slight pause, then the raps recommenced again, “l-a-d-y h-e-r-e h-a-s a m-e-s-s-a-g-e f-o-r p-e-t-e-r” the raps hesitated “p-e-t-e-r f-u-n-n-y n-a-m-e c-a-n-t c-a-t-c-h i-t——”
Lyngstrand’s face went deathly white.
“Yes,” he gasped, just only able to speak, “—Peter—yes—go on!” He looked at the table as though expecting to see the hand that was rapping out the message. Tap-tap-tap, it came.
“p-e-t-e-r l-i-n-g-s-t-r-a-n-d”
“Yes—here!” he gasped. “Go on!—who is it?”
“m-a-r-y t-i-l-l-o-t-s-o-n”
He reeled against the table, clutched at it.
“My God!” he murmured to himself, his eyes closing, his teeth grinding upon one another in an agony of emotion. Then, with a supreme effort of self-control, he asked, loudly: “The message? Give it me!”
“s-h-e s-a-y-s s-h-e s-u-r-e l-o-v-e-s y-o-u s-t-i-l-l a-n-d i-s w-a-i-t-i-n-g f-o-r y-o-u”
“Mary!” The cry burst from him, sobbingly, on a note of poignant anguish. Jensen felt the tears start to his eyes. Horst cowered still, face hidden, in his corner.
There was a long moment in which Lyngstrand failed to bring another sound to utterance. He swayed as though about to faint. Then once more he mastered himself.
“What—what happened?” he asked, unsteadily. “How did she die? Was she torpedoed?”
“s-h-e s-a-y-s s-t-e-a-m-e-r t-r-o-n-d-h-j-e-m s-u-n-k g-u-n-f-i-r-e r-e-s-c-u-e-d s-m-a-l-l b-o-a-t b-y g-l-o-u-c-e-s-t-e-r c-i-t-y a-f-t-e-r-w-a-r-d t-o-r-p-e-d-o-e-d”
Lyngstrand reeled with closed eyes. He had a vivid vision of the torn wreck in the depths beneath them, carnivorous fish darting where their anchor grappled its untenanted bridge.
“Did—did they have a chance?” he asked.
“n-i-g-h-t w-i-t-h-o-u-t w-a-r-n-i-n-g” came the answer.
Lyngstrand drew another deep breath, glanced at the motionless Horst.
“And—and the man—the man who sank her?”
“k-a-p-i-t-a-n-l-e-u-t-n-a-n-t h-o-r-s-t” There was a terrible precision in those raps.
They ceased. There was a deathly stillness. Through long moments, not one of the three men in the charthouse moved. Then Lyngstrand turned slowly. He took three steps toward Captain Horst, stood over him. The only sounds were the creaking of gear as theUpsalrose and subsided on the swell, the swish and suck of the longwaves that ran past her in the darkness beyond the open charthouse door.
Lyngstrand’s mouth had set in a thin line. His lips, compressed, opened but slightly as he spoke.
“Captain Horst,” he said, with grim distinctness, “you are certainly going to die. I give you the privilege of the warning you did not extend to your victims.”
Horst looked up suddenly. His eyes, blue still, but crazed with terror, fixed themselves upon the gray eyes that met them pitilessly. His mouth moved under the little red moustache, but no sound came from it.
Lyngstrand continued, an edge of fierce contempt upon his hard voice.
“I even give you a choice: You can, if you like, go out there”—he pointed through the open door to the rayless night—“and throw yourself overboard——”
Horst sprang to his feet, recoiled into the extreme corner of the charthouse.
“No!” he screamed. “No!”
“—or I shall kill you myself,” pursued Lyngstrand, evenly.
Horst’s face contorted suddenly with demoniac passion. Jensen, who had approached and was watching him closely, saw his hand dart to the pocket of his jacket, and he flung himself forward just as the revolver cracked.
With a red-hot thrust through his shoulder, a sickening faintness in which the floor seemed to rise up to his knees, Jensen tottered back to the charthouse wall. Fighting for consciousness, he dimly saw his comrade hurl himself upon Horst—someone’s arm high in the air holding a revolver, another arm high with it, clutching at the wrist below the weapon.
Then commenced a terrible silent struggle where the only sound was the short gasps and sobs for breath of the two men swaying with the motion of the ship. They hugged close, face upon face, in a murderous wrestle where neither dared shift his grip. Both were big-framed, powerful, but Lyngstrand had the advantage of youth.They came, inch by inch, slipping on the floor, past Jensen leaning dizzily against the wall. He saw them through a red mist where the electric lamp glowed vaguely, unmoved like a nebulous start above the tensely locked embrace where life fought for human continuance.
Inch by inch, they moved onward. Jensen, his vision clearing, though impotent to move, saw now that Lyngstrand had the inner berth, that Horst was being gradually, slowly but surely, thrust toward the open door. He saw one of Horst’s hands free itself, grip at the door-post, cling to it. He saw the awful terror in the eyes that glared upon his relentless adversary.
Minute after minute the tense and silent struggle at the door continued. Still clutching at the door-post, Horst was gradually borne backward. His feet still in the charthouse, his body, save for that one gripping hand, was bent back out of sight into the darkness.
Suddenly his fingers relaxed their hold. Their feet tripped by the raised threshold of the door, both disappeared headlong in a heavy thud upon the deck outside.
Jensen heard a sharp exclamation, the gasp of bodies that are rolled upon—then the quick scuffling of feet. Agonized for his comrade, he dragged himself painfully toward the door. Just as he reached it one ghastly piercing scream rang through the night.
He gazed out to see two closely locked bodies disappear over the bulwark.
The dark seas lifted a foaming crest as theUpsalrolled.
The talk of the half-dozen men on the veranda of the Singapore club—a couple of merchants, a planter in town on business, an officer of an Indian regiment, a globe-trotting professor from an American university, and a sea-captain—had drifted desultorily from the specific instance of the famous Indian rope-trick, resuscitated by a British magazine that lay upon the club-tables and contested sceptically by the Anglo-Indian officer, to the general topic of the alleged ability of the Asiatic to make people “see what isn’t there.” The American professor, whose specialty, as he confessed, was psychology, manifested a pertinacious interest in the subject. But his direct questions to these habitual dwellers in the Middle and Far East elicited only contemptuous negatives or vague second- and third-hand stories without evidential value. Merchants, planter, and officer alike had quite obviously none of them seen any tricks upon which the professor could safely base his rather rashly enunciated theory of special hypnotic powers possessed by the inscrutable races, whose surface energies are so profitably exploited by the white man. He turned at last to the sea-captain who had sat puffing at his cheroot in silence.
“And you, Captain Williamson? You have voyaged about these seas for the best part of a generation—have you never been confronted by one of these inexplicable phenomena of which the travellers tell us?”
There was just a little of Oliver Wendell Holmes pedantry about the professor—a touch of that Boston of the ’eighties in which he had been educated.
Captain Williamson changed the duck-clad leg which crossed the other and smiled a little with his keen gray eyes. Caressing the neat pointed beard which accentuated the oval of his intelligent face, he replied thoughtfully:
“Well, Professor—I have. Once. Personally, though I saw the affair with my own eyes, I don’t even now know what to make of it. Perhaps your hypnotic theory might explain it.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Will you not tell us the story?” entreated the professor. “It is so rare to receive trustworthy first-hand evidence of anything abnormal.”
Captain Williamson glanced rather diffidently around upon his companions.
“Fire away, cap’en!” exclaimed one of the merchants, slapping him amicably on the knee. “You’ve always got a good yarn!”
“This happens to be a true one,” said the captain, with a smile of tolerance, “but, of course, you are under no compulsion to believe it!”
“Drinks all round on the one who doesn’t!” decreed the planter. “Go ahead! Don’t ask us to believe rubber is going to boom again, that’s all. Short of that, we’ll believe anything.”
“Well,” began Captain Williamson, his eyes following reflectively the long, deliberate puff of smoke he blew into the air, “perhaps some of you may remember Captain Strong—‘lucky Jim Strong’? Twenty-five years or so ago he was one of the best known skippers in the Pacific, celebrated almost. Men talked of him with a certain awe as of a man who had a good fortune that was nothing short of uncanny. He had been engaged in all sorts of desperate enterprises, frequently illicit, such as seal-poaching in the Russian preserves, gun-running under the nose of British cruisers, gold or opium smuggling despite the patrol-boats of the Chinese Customs Board, and always he emerged unharmed and gorged with profits. Only all the San Francisco banks put together, for he dealt with all of them, could tell you what he was worth, butit was certainly a very large sum. However wealthy he was, he apparently derived very little enjoyment from his money. He was always at sea in his ship, theMary Gleeson, of which he was both owner and skipper, and stayed in port only just long enough to discharge one cargo and pick up another. His personal habits were almost unknown, but of course a legend of eccentricity grew up around them as a companion to the legend of his supernatural luck.
“It happened, as the finale to sundry personal adventures with which I will not weary you, that about a quarter of a century ago I found myself sailing out of the port of San Francisco as first officer to theMary Gleeson. I was quite a young man and it was my first job as mate. We were bound to Saigon, in Cochin China, with a cargo of American arms and ammunition consigned to the French Government. At that time the French were still fighting to preserve and extend their conquests in that part of the world.
“The voyage across the Pacific was uneventful enough. We were a contented ship. The men were cheerful. The old uncertificated Scandinavian we had shipped as second mate was a conscientious officer. I was rather proud of my new dignity and anxious to justify it.
“As for Captain Strong, I unaffectedly liked him. Decisive but even-tempered, his quietly firm handling of the ship’s company won my respect, and there was no doubt of his first-class seamanship. He was utterly without that petty punctilious pride by which some masters try to conceal their lack of native dignity, and he would talk to me for hours during my watch. His conversation revealed a wide and intimate knowledge of men and affairs, and in particular of those intrigues by which the Great Powers were in those days—I speak of the ’nineties—pushing their fortunes at the expense of the Chinese races. Upon his own personal adventures and career, however, he was completely silent, and no stratagems of mine could lure him into speaking of them. Reserved as hewas upon this point, nevertheless, I felt that he regarded me with a distinctly friendly sentiment, and I cordially reciprocated it.
“At last we made the tall promontory of Cape St. Jacques, with its lighthouse and cable-station, and took on board the half-caste pilot who was to navigate us the sixty miles up the river to Saigon. I remember the trip up-stream with that clearness of the memory for all that immediately precedes a drama, no matter how long ago. It was early morning when he crossed the bar and, relieved from the direct responsibilities of navigation, Captain Strong and I sat in deck-chairs under the awning of the bridge and all day watched the dense, mist-hung, fever-infested forests of mangrove and pandanus slip past us on both banks of the river. The damp, close heat was suffocating and neither of us had much desire to talk, but I fancied that a more than usually heavy moodiness lay over the skipper. He was certainly not quite normal. He frowned to himself, bit his lip, and his eyes roved in an uneasy sort of recognition from side to side of the stream as we rounded reach after interminable reach. I felt that some secret anxiety possessed him, but of course I could not ask him straight out what it was. Rather diffidently, I did venture on one question.
“‘Ever been here before, sir?’ I asked.
“He shot a suspicious look at me, directly into my eyes, before he answered.
“‘Once.’
“The tone of the reply effectually checked any further exhibition of the curiosity it heightened.
“The worst heat of the day was over when we dropped anchor in the broad stream opposite the European-looking city of Saigon. The usual swarm of junks and sampans thronged around the quay, but the black Messageries Maritimes packet moored in the river was the only other steamship.
“To my pleasure, Captain Strong invited me to go ashore with him, and in a few minutes the gig was pullingus toward the rows of fine-looking Government buildings which stretch back from the quays. I don’t know whether any of you have ever been to Saigon and I don’t know what it looks like now, but in those days it looked like the disastrous enterprise of a bankrupt speculative builder when you got to close quarters. The town of Saigon had been burnt by the French in the fighting by which they had obtained possession of the place, and they had rebuilt it on European lines, shops, cafés, Government buildings, all complete. But a paralysis was on everything, the paralysis of the excessive administration with which the French ruin their colonies. The streets were nearly deserted, a majority of the shops empty. The only Europeans were slovenly, haggard military and the white-faced, dreary Government employees who sat at the cafés and longed for France. I was more depressed and disappointed at every step.
“We went up to the Government House and filled up a few dozens of those useless papers without which the French functionary dare do nothing, and received vague assurances that in a few days we should be allowed to unload the arms of which the French troops were in urgent need. Our business completed as far as possible, Captain Strong hesitated for a moment or two, biting his lip in that odd way I had noticed coming up the river. Irresolution of any kind was a most common phenomenon in him. Then suddenly, evidently giving way to a powerful impulse, I heard him murmur to himself: ‘Give ’em a chance anyway!’
“Throwing a curt ‘Come along!’ to me, he set off at a tremendous pace through the streets with the assurance of a man who can find his way about any town where he has been once previously. I followed him, puzzled by the words I had overheard, wondering whither he was going, and noting the native population with curious eyes. The Annamite men are a stunted, degenerate race, in abject terror of their white masters, but the women are many of them surprisingly attractive. I had plenty ofopportunity for comparison, for very soon we found ourselves among a swarm of both sexes at the station of the steam-tram which runs to Cho-lon, the Chinese town a few miles up the river.
“During the ride on the tram, Captain Strong did not open his lips. He stared steadily in front of him in a curious kind of way, like a man inexorably pursuing some allotted line of action.
“Arrived at Cho-lon, he struck quickly through the squalid streets of the Chinese town, looking neither to right nor left, and saying not a word. We had passed right through the town before he gave me a hint of our objective. Then he made a gesture upward as if to reassure me that we were near our journey’s end.
“Beyond the last houses, on an eminence backed by the primeval jungle, a Buddhist temple of pagoda fashion rose above us, the terminus of the rough track up which we were stumbling. As we drew near I saw that it was dilapidated, its courtyard overgrown, deserted evidently by both priests and worshippers.
“Was this what Captain Strong had come to see? Somewhat puzzled, I glanced at his face under the pith helmet. His lips were compressed, his eyes stern as though defying some secret danger. At the entrance gateway, festooned and almost smothered in parasitic vegetation, he stopped and stared into the desolate courtyard. Then, after a moment of the curious hesitation which I had already remarked that day, he entered.
“A deathlike stillness brooded over the place. The great doorless portal of the temple, flanked by huge and staring figures, confronted us, opening on to a black unillumined interior like the entrance to a tomb. Weeds grew between the flags of the threshold. An atmosphere of indefinable evil, as though the very stones held the memory of some awful calamity, pervaded the silence. I shuddered in a sudden sense of the sinister in this abandonment, and glanced involuntarily at my companion as if from hisface I might divine the cause. It was impossible to guess his thoughts. His jaw was locked hard, his face expressionless.
“Then I perceived that we were not alone. Slinking round the outer wall came a wretched-looking native. His long robe was torn and dirty. His yellow face, lit by two slanting beady eyes, was emaciated and sunken. His shaven crown was wrinkled to the top. The limbs which protruded from his gown were as thin as sticks. In his hand he held a beggar’s bowl. Remarking us, he stopped dead, watching us with his horribly bright, fever-like eyes. Instinctively, I don’t know why, I put him down as the last of the priests still haunting this once prosperous and now deserted temple.
“Captain Strong took no notice of him and advanced toward the portal. Somewhat apprehensively, I followed him and peered in, but the darkness, by comparison with the intense light outside, was so complete that I could see nothing. My curiosity getting the better of my nervousness, I stepped inside though, I confess, rather gingerly. After a minute or two, my eyes accustoming themselves to the gloom, I could see the great bronze figure of the Buddha towering above me, facing the door. Its placid face, uplifted far above the passions of men, looked as though it were patiently awaiting the day when this abandonment should cease and its worshippers return to adoration of its serenity. No precious stone now reflected the light from the door and the huge candlesticks on either side of it were empty, the days of their scintillating illumination long past.
“Captain Strong, I noticed, remained on the threshold, silhouetted black against the sunshine, but, emboldened by my impunity, I took another step forward or two. I recoiled quickly. Something stirred in the lap of the Buddha and a snake erected its head in a sudden movement. Its eyes gleamed at me from the shadow like two green precious stones.
“I swung round to shout a warning to Captain Strong.If there was one there were probably others of these deadly guardians of the divine image. There were. To my horror, I saw another snake uncoil itself from a crevice in the doorway, on a level with his neck, and draw its head back in the poise for the fatal dart. I don’t know whether he heard my inarticulate cry. His perception of the danger was simultaneous with mine. But he made no blundering movement of confusion. Swift as lightning his hand shot out and grasped the snake firmly close under the head, where its fangs could not touch him. Then with a quick jerk he flung it into the courtyard. The snake writhed away in a flash.
“Such a display of cool, swift courage I have never seen before or since. I ran out to him where he stood in the courtyard gazing after the vanished snake, and excitedly expressed my admiration. He turned round on me with a grim smile and shrugged his shoulders. The wretched priest, if priest he was, had approached and he smiled also, a foolish, exasperating, inscrutable smile, like an idiot enjoying an imbecile esoteric meaning which is a meaning for him alone. Yet at the same time I thought there was a suggestion of sly menace in that cringing grin.
“‘Come back into Saigon,’ said Captain Strong, ignoring him. ‘We’ll have a drink before we go on board.’ There was nothing in his manner to remind you that he had just escaped death by a fraction.
“I was not at all sorry to quit this unpleasant place, and I descended that rough path with considerably more alacrity than I had mounted it. Captain Strong was as coolly self-possessed as though walking down the main street of San Francisco.
“‘I must congratulate you on your luck, sir,’ I ventured, when we had gone a little distance. ‘Had that snake struck a second before——’
“‘Bah!’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘One can get tired of luck!’
“There was a violence, a sombre bitterness, in his tone which impressed me. I thought of all the miraculousgood-fortune which men attributed to him—a specimen of which I had just seen—and wondered whether he were really wearied of it. I could conceive it possible that a man of his type would find life very dull if assured beforehand of success and safety. It would be the struggle, the peril, which would appeal to him.
“He relapsed into a gloomy silence which I did not dare to break.
“We returned to Saigon on the steam-tram and shortly afterward we found ourselves seated on the deserted terrace of a café, trickling water through the sugar into our absinthe, for all the world as though we were in some bankrupt quarter of Marseilles. Natives thronged around us pestering us to buy all sorts of worthless trifles in their horrible pidgin-French—petit négrethey call it. Their ‘Mossieu acheter—mossieu acheter’ at every moment thoroughly exasperated me. But Captain Strong sat lost in a brooding reverie where he did not even hear them. His eyes looked, unseeing, down the wide street.
“Suddenly an insinuating voice whined into my ear some native words I could not understand, and repeated them with a wheedling insistence which compelled my attention. I looked round into an ugly yellow face whose malicious narrow-slitted eyes glittered unprepossessingly above his fawning smile. There was something in the face that seemed familiar to me and yet I could not place it. Under the conical bamboo hat all these Annamites looked alike to me. I waved him away, but he was not to be shaken off, reiterating over and over again his incomprehensible phrase.
“I glanced enquiringly at Captain Strong, whom I knew to understand many Chinese dialects.
“‘He’s a conjurer and wants to show you a trick,’ he explained, contemptuously, adding a curt word and nod of assent to the native.
“The Annamite beamed idiotically and stretched out his skinny hands over the little table.
“‘Vous—regarder,’ he said, evidently making the most of his French, and grinned insinuatingly at me.
“With a slow, snaky motion of his skeleton-like hands he commenced to make passes in the air about six inches above my glass. I watched him, at first idly, but gradually more and more fascinated as my eyes followed the sinuous movements of his hands. Presently, to my astonishment, I saw the glass, tall and fairly heavy—a typical absinthe glass, commence to rock slightly on its base. The direction of the passes altered to a vertical, up and down, as though his hands were encouraging the glass to rise. And sure enough, it detached itself from the table and, swaying a little unsteadily, rose into the air under the hands still some distance above it. It ascended slowly, as though he were drawing it up by a magnetic attraction, to an appreciable height from the table, say three or four inches. Then, as he changed the character of the passes again so that they seemed to press it down, it sank slowly once more to the table. The native, childishly pleased with this successful exhibition of his powers, grinned ingratiatingly at us both.
“Captain Strong threw a coin upon the marble top of the table. The fawning smile still upon his ugly face, the conjurer looked straight into the skipper’s eyes as he gabbled some native words of thanks. Then, instead of picking up the coin, he suddenly seized his benefactor’s hand in his skinny grasp and, using the captain’s forefinger like a pen, traced upon the table-top a large ellipse which commenced and finished at the coin. The action was performed so unexpectedly, and with such swift strength, that Captain Strong had no time to resist. The ellipse completed, he flung aside the captain’s finger and held both his hands outstretched above the invisible tracing. If I was astonished before, I was amazed now. Where the finger had passed over that marble glowed a flexible reddish-gold snake holding in its mouth, like a pendant on a chain, not the coin—but a brilliantly flashing jewel of precious stones fashioned into a curiouspattern. I heard a startled exclamation break from my companion, but before either of us could utter an articulate word, the conjurer’s hand had descended swiftly upon the table. A second later both jewel—or coin—and the conjurer had disappeared into the throng of watching Annamites.
“I glanced at Captain Strong. He was deathly pale and one hand was feeling nervously over the breast of his silk shirt. Then, after a long breath, he turned and smiled at me.
“‘Clever trick that!’ he said.
“The assumption of personal unconcern was so marked that I felt any remark of mine would have been an impertinence. But I could not help wondering what Captain Strong wore underneath his shirt.
“He paid the native waiter for our drinks and rose from the table without another word. We turned our steps toward the quay. The skipper was absorbed in thoughts I could not penetrate, but I noticed that the muscles of his jaw stood out upon his face and the heavy brows frowned over his eyes. Evidently the tone of his meditations was combative.
“Whatever they were, there was no hint of their purport in his voice as he turned to me.
“‘Come and have supper aft with me to-night, Mr. Williamson,’ he said, carelessly. ‘I meant to have invited you to dinner in town but that restaurant was really too depressing.’
“I thanked him, secretly astonished at the invitation. Captain Strong never compromised his dignity by sitting at table with his officers. He ate alone, in the beautifully fitted saloon under the poop. At the time, I wondered whether he had some reason for preferring my company to his customary solitude. But his manner expressed merely the courtesy of a superior wishing to give pleasure to a young officer.
“We had arrived on the quay and I was looking over the crowd of vociferating boatmen with a view to selectinga sampan for our return to the ship, when a sudden cry from the captain startled me.
“‘Look! Good heavens! look!—Don’t you see?’ With one hand he gripped me tightly by the shoulder, with the other he pointed to theMary Gleesonanchored in mid-stream. ‘Look!The yellow jack!’
“I gazed with him across to the ship and to my horrified astonishment saw that dreaded yellow flag which denotes the presence of yellow fever fluttering in the evening breeze. Shocked and alarmed, I asked myself who was the victim. There was no sickness among the ship’s company when we went ashore. But I knew well enough the swiftness of death in these latitudes.
“‘Quick! Get a sampan!’ ordered the captain.
“Privately, I doubted whether any boatman would venture into the tainted neighbourhood of a ship with yellow fever on board, and I was agreeably surprised to find that my only difficulty was to choose among the swarm that offered themselves. I could only conclude that they did not understand the meaning of the emblem. A moment or two later we were being propelled swiftly across the stream, our eyes fixed upon that fatal flag. The second officer stood at the top of the ladder to greet us as we climbed on board.
“‘All well, sir,’ I heard him report in a perfectly normal voice.
“‘What?’ ejaculated the captain in astonishment above me.
“‘All well, sir,’ he repeated.
“By that time I had joined the captain on the deck and we exchanged a puzzled glance. Then we looked around us. To our utter bewilderment, of the yellow jack there was no sign at all. There was not a rag of bunting about the ship.
“The captain bit his lip and wrinkled his brow. I could comprehend his perplexity. He turned sharply to the second officer.
“‘Svendson! Has any one been monkeying with the signal-flags?’
“‘No, sir!’ The prompt denial was both surprised and emphatic. ‘I have been on deck myself ever since you went ashore, sir.’
“‘H’m! All right!’ The captain shrugged his shoulders and turned to me. ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ he asked.
“‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, confidently.
“‘A most extraordinary hallucination!’ he said. ‘But don’t let it worry you. Come and have supper with me at six bells.’
“I could see plainly that he was much perturbed, and I myself felt very uneasy as I went below. Following upon the shock of the captain’s narrow escape from the snake in the deserted temple, the strange trick of the conjurer at the café and this hallucination, shared by both of us, of the most dreaded flag a sailor knows, combined to awake a primitive superstitious fear in me. My nerves were in a state of acute tension, and I found myself starting at the most ordinary sounds.
“The captain was normal and cheerful enough, however, when at seven o’clock I joined him in the beautiful saloon which he had had fitted regardless of expense with everything that could minister to his comfort. It was his one luxury. Despite the damp, stifling heat which makes Saigon one of the most uncomfortable places in the East, the cabin was pleasantly cool. Electric fans whirred at the open ports and underneath the large skylight hanging plants provided a refreshing mass of greenery. The Chinese steward stood by the side of the elegantly laid table, ready to serve his master. It was, as I said, the first time I had eaten with Captain Strong and I was rather impressed with the refinement of his private tastes.