Finding no pocket at his hips reminded him no doubt of his woman’s dress, for his hand slipped down to the side of his skirt, where it floundered about as helplessly as a fish out of water.
A woman’s pocket is, to the degenerate male mind, a fearful and wonderful piece of mechanism. The intention of the designer was apparently to offer special inducements to pickpockets, and so to construct the opening that the contents should either fall out altogether and be lost, or should be swallowed up by dark and mysterious depths into which no male hand dare venture to penetrate. The only way to get at anything which happens to be wanted seems to be to haul the entire pocket to the surface, very much as a fishing-net is hauled from the depths of the sea, and to turn it inside out in search of the missing article.
On the occasion in question, Mullen was in too much of a hurry to adopt this course, and, but for the seriousness of the situation, I could have smiled, as I held him at arm’s length, to see him diving and fumbling among those unplumbed depths. When at last he rose, so to speak, gasping, to the surface, his hand was clutching a pistol-barrel, but the butt had in some way caught the lining of the dress, and in order to extricate it he had to turn the entire pocket inside out. In doing so, a folded paper fell, unseen by him, to the floor, and this I determined at all costs to secure.
Before he could raise his arm to use the pistol, I laid a hand of iron upon his. As I gripped the fingers which were grasping the butt they scrunched sickeningly and relaxed their hold of the pistol, which I wrenched away and tossed upon the bunk. Then I closed with him that we might try a fall together. Twisting my heel behind his ankle I jerked him backwards and had him off his legs in a jiffy. We fell to the floor—he under and I above—with a crash, and as we did so my hand closed over the paper, to secure which I had thrown him.
Crumpling it up in a ball I made as if to rise to a sitting posture, and in doing so managed to slip it into a side pocket. The next moment I found myself pulled over on my back by Hughes, who asked excitedly if we were both mad that we thus courted inquiry by fighting like a couple of wild cats. If the sound of scuffling or firing were heard to come from the hulk an alarm would, he said, be raised, the coastguardsmen would row out to discover the cause, and everything would be lost, as Mullen and I would be called upon to give an account of ourselves, and he (Hughes) would forfeit his post.
Mullen was evidently of the same opinion, for though he was livid to the lips, and was trembling with hate and rage until his teeth chinked in his head like a carelessly-carried tray of china, he gave no sign of wishing to continue the contest.
Nor was I inclined to shut my eyes to the wisdom of Hughes’ counsel, for I was already conscious of the fact that by taunting Mullen and provoking him to blows I was doing my best to spoil my own game. There was all the difference in the world between his presence on board the hulk being discovered by the police as a result of a brawl, and his being arrested on information given by me and supported by proof of his identity.
Mullen was the first to speak. He was now no doubt convinced that he had not acted with his customary discretion, for he had even stronger reasons than I to wish to avoid a visit from the police. So long as it was a question of brains he might hope to hold his own, but let him once fall into their hands and they would hold him by the brute force of number, whereas in me he was pitted against a single foe whom it might not be difficult to outwit.
“I beg your pardon for what happened just now,” he said, “but before we go any further tell me where and when I have seen you before.”
“I saw you in the Southend train once. You ’ad a row with a bloke wot stunk the carriage out with a fusee,” I answered, doing my best to sustain the rôle I had assumed.