The Four Stragglers

by Frank L. Packard

"Yes," he said, "I think it is quite possible that he may be able to persuade me."

He turned abruptly away from the rail, making for his cabin, which was on the deck above and on the opposite side of the ship. And presently, halting in the lighted alleyway before his door, he turned the key in the lock and entered.

And then, just across the threshold, he stood for the fraction of a second like a man dazed—and the door, torn from his hand by a fierce gust of wind, slammed with a bang behind him. The cabin was on the windward side, the window was open, and outside the window, indistinct, shadowy, as though almost it might be an hallucination of the mind, a man's form suddenly loomed up. There was a flash, the roar of a revolver shot, muffled, almost drowned out in the thunder of the storm—and Captain Francis Newcombe lay flat upon the cabin floor.

The next instant he flung himself over beside the settee, and protected here from another shot, raised his head. The form had vanished from the window.

A cold fury seized upon the man. From his pocket he drew his own revolver, and covering the window as he backed swiftly for the door, wrenched the door open and made for the first egress to the deck. Too late, of course! The deck was deserted. He stood there, grim-faced, tight-lipped, straining his eyes up and down the length of the deck through the darkness, the rain beating into his face.

And then he began to run again—like a dog seeking scent. There were a dozen places up here where a man might hide—the juts of the superstructure, the great, grotesque, looming ventilators, the openings through to the other side of the deck. But he found nothing, no one—there was only the deserted deck, the drenching rain. And the howl of the wind metamorphosed itself into ironical shrieks.

Captain Francis Newcombe returned along the deck, and halted outside his cabin window. He examined it critically. It had been pried open from the outside—the marks were distinctly indented on the sill, as though a jimmy, or iron bar of some kind, had been used.

He stared at it, his jaws clamped. It was unpleasant. Some one on the ship had deliberately, premeditatively, attempted to murder him. There was something of hideous malignancy in it. To pry the window open, and wait there patiently in the storm for the sole purpose of ending a man's life! It hadn't succeeded because intuition, or, perhaps, better, an exaggerated instinct of self-preservation born of the years in which he had flaunted defiance of every law in the face of his fellow men, had prompted him, though taken unawares, to act even quicker than his assailant who lay in wait, and to fling himself instantly to the floor of the cabin.

Who was it? Why was it? Who, on board the ship, had any incentive, any reason, any cause to murder him? Save for Locke, the young American, he knew no one on board, barring Runnells, of course, except in the ordinary, casual way of shipboard acquaintanceship struck up since the ship had left Liverpool. It could not be any one of these—at least, not logically. And of them all, it certainly could not be Locke. The ship's company? Absurd! Runnells? Still more absurd! And so he had eliminated everybody, and yet somebody had done it!

He began to work with the window. Reaching inside he drew the curtains carefully together, and then lowered the window itself. When he re-entered his room, even providing he were still being watched, he would not be exposed in the same way as a target again!