“Then ’e’s done it, and ’e means mischief for both of us! The ——’s bad enough for anything. I know ’im; and ’ere we are caught like rats in a trap.”
“That’s all right,” I said, and hunching my shoulder to the door and making a pivot of my right foot, I burst the thing open with a crash, the screws starting from their sockets and pattering upon a locker opposite like spent bullets.
As I did so, Hughes rushed past me and upon the deck, I after him. Nor were we too soon, for Mullen was making, as Hughes had evidently feared, for the dynamite hold. When he heard our footsteps he turned, and whipping out a revolver, raised it and shot Hughes right through the heart. The unhappy man flung up his arms and toppled over the ship’s side into the sea; but before Mullen could turn the weapon upon me I got in a blow straight from the shoulder, which took him well under the chin, and tumbled him backward to the bottom of the hold. I hit hard enough to have knocked him “silly,” and I was not surprised that he lay for a minute or two like one dead. Then he tried to rise, but fell back with a groan, apparently quite helpless.
“Are you hurt?” I inquired, kneeling on one knee, the better to look down into the hold.
He glanced up with a feeble attempt at a smile upon features cruelly contorted by pain.
“So you’ve won the rubber after all, although I’d arranged everything so cleverly, as I thought. You and Hughes, once locked securely in the cabin, and a fuse put to the dynamite, I ought by now to have been half a mile off in the dinghy, and on my way to join my sister at Gravesend. We should have slipped off quietly in the confusion of the explosion, for no one would know that it didn’t occur, as explosions have occurred before, through the carelessness of the man in charge. And you and Hughes, the only two people who could set matters right, would have gone to join the dead men, who tell no tales. Confess, now, wasn’t it a pretty plan, and worthy of an artist, friend Rissler?”
I started at the mention of my name, seeing which he burst into a mocking laugh.
“Is it possible? No, it can’t be!” he said. “Don’t, don’t tell me that you didn’t know I knew who you were. Why, you refreshing person, it was only because I did know that I pretended to fall into your booby trap. I only let you take Hughes’ place on board the hulk that I might get you into my power and rid myself of the pair of you at a sweep. And to think that you didn’t know that I knew! Why, man alive, I’ve known all about you from the first, and I could have sent you to join Quickly and Green long ago if I had minded. But they were mere bunglers, fit only to put out of the way, just as one would tread upon a spider or beetle,—whereas you’re really clever, and ingenious, and all that sort of thing, don’t you know, and you interested me. I don’t say that if you had had any one you were very fond of,—a wife, sweetheart, sister,—something might not have happened to them, just to let you know that I was keeping you in mind.
“Once or twice you played your cards quite prettily; but oh! how you bungled them at others! Still, I might have expected that from your books. What could be worse of their sort than they? I’ve read them all, though how I endured it I don’t know. There is one thing I couldn’t endure, however, and that is that you should write about me. Spare me that last indignity and I’ll forgive you the brutal, blackguardly, costermonger blows you struck me behind the Post Office.”
His eyes shone wickedly as he spoke, and then, for the first time, it occurred to me (I had been too fascinated by the man to think of it before) that he must have some motive for thus putting himself to the trouble of holding me in conversation at a time when he was, as I could see, suffering the keenest physical pain. What could his motive be?