A Desperate Voyage

by E. F. Knight

There was a constraint in their manner, which he, watchful for the slightest suspicious indication, detected at once. They were as men who anticipated some momentous event, but who endeavoured to conceal their anxiety.

The consul produced a document, and laid it on the desk. "Read this over, please, Mr. Allen, and see that it is correct."

Carew glanced down it quickly with an eye trained to legal forms. "It is perfectly correct," he said.

"I have a gentleman in the next room who will witness your signature to this statement," proceeded the consul. He opened the door, and Mr. Norton entered the room.

The consciousness of impending peril came over Carew's guilty soul, but he seized the pen, and in a firm hand wrote the signature, "Arthur Allen, Barrister-at-law."

Mr. Norton now approached the table. He took up the pen as if to sign his name, glanced at the document, and then, raising his head, looked Carew full in the face. "I cannot witness this signature," he said. "It is a forgery!"

There was a complete silence for a few moments; then Carew, whose face was pale, but who betrayed no other signs of emotion, said quietly, "Explain your strange words, sir."

"It is no good; the game is up, Mr. Carew," replied Norton. "I have a warrant for your arrest, and the police are at the door."

"A trap has been laid for me, I see," said Carew, as quietly as before. "This is one of the absurd mistakes you detectives so often make; but I will soon clear it up. Of what am I accused?" Carew was astonished at his own courage in the presence of this extreme disaster, or rather—for it can scarcely be called courage—at his indifference to his fate. He felt as if he were the spectator of a tragedy which was being played by other men, and in which he was not himself an actor—a common state of mind with men in utmost peril.

"The charge with which I am immediately concerned," replied the detective, "and on account of which an extradition warrant has been issued, is the forgery of a client's name by the solicitor Henry Carew. In the meanwhile, look at these," and he threw on the table two photographs. Carew took them up. One, he saw, was a portrait of Arthur Allen, his friend whom he left to drown in the North Sea; the other was a photograph of himself which had been taken eight years back, when he was another man, when his conscience was still clear, and before his gambling losses had driven him from crime to crime; sin and suffering had yet drawn no lines on the face, the brow was free from care. He gazed gloomily at this presentment of what he had been and could never be again, and his mind wandered back with despairing regret to memories of guiltless days.