The Four Stragglers

by Frank L. Packard

But Locke's face, too, was white now with passion, as with a suddenly outflung hand he thrust the other away.

"I am not through yet," he said. "Denial, any attitude of pretended righteous indignation, or any other attitude that may suggest itself to you as the best mask to adopt, is hardly worth your while when attempted with one who once very narrowly escaped being one of your victims—with a man who once, because you feared he possessed the information that you know now he does possess, you tried to murder with cold-blooded deliberation."

"You?" Captain Francis Newcombe, with head thrust forward, his eyes narrowed, searched every lineament of Locke's face.

"Look well!" Locke spoke with scarcely any movement of the lips, in a cold, dead way, without inflexion in his voice. "Look well! It will do you little good. You never saw my face before. Shall I tell you where I first saw yours? It was in a thicket one night, a night during the great German offensive. There were four men there. Three of them sat together with their backs against the trees; the other lay face down on the ground a little distance away. A stray shell burst nearby. One of the three, a Frenchman, called it a straggler. 'Like us,' you said. I am the fourth straggler."

Captain Francis Newcombe drew slightly back. He made no other movement. He said nothing. His eyes remained riveted on Locke's face.

"I was almost done in that night," said Locke. "I'd had two days and two nights of it. I did not hear all you said—what particular place it was, for instance, that had been robbed. I heard of the share that each of you had played in the affair. I saw your faces. I heard the Frenchman, a self-admitted crook, hail you as a greater than himself—yes, as a greater even than any criminal in all France. I heard you check him with your name on his lips. I heard him call your attention to my presence there. I heard you say you had not forgotten—and in a flare of light I saw you with your rifle across your knees, its muzzle only a few feet away from my head. Then in the ensuing darkness I was lucky enough to be able to wriggle silently back a few yards in among the trees—and a second later I saw the flash of your rifle shot."

Locke stopped. His lips were dry. He touched them with the tip of his tongue.

The two men stood eying each other. Neither moved.

Locke spoke again:

"As I crawled out of that thicket I swore that I would pay you for that shot if it took all my life to bring you to account. I did not know your name, I did not know where you came from or where you lived; but I knew your face—and I was sure, as we are sometimes strangely sure of the future, that some time, in some place, you and I would meet again. But it was four years before we did; and in those four years, during which I have travelled a great deal on my father's business, no man's face, in a crowd, or merely in passing on the street, whether here or abroad, but that I searched in the hope that it might be yours. And then I saw you—in London—just a few days before we sailed. I followed you to your apartment, and I saw the other two—Runnells, and the Frenchman, whose name I discovered was Paul Cremarre. I secured an introduction to you at your club, and I learned from you that you were sailing within a day or so on a certain ship. I told you I was sailing on the same ship. Within an hour after I had left you at the club, I did two things: I booked passage on that ship; and I engaged a man who was recommended to me as one of the best private detectives in England. With the knowledge that you were a criminal, it was only a question of a short time then before the detective would unearth your record, or that you would be caught in some new venture; and meanwhile, leaving him to work up your 'history,' I crossed with you, and suggested the yachting trip as I did not intend to let you out of my sight again until you were trapped. And I think, but for the fact that you have been told now, that would have been accomplished even more quickly than I had expected. At one of the stops that I purposely made on the way down the coast on the Talofa, I received a letter from the detective mailed in London the day after we sailed. He said that developments had been such that he was working in conjunction with Scotland Yard, and that he expected to be able to send me a very satisfactory report within a day or so."