She walked away like an agitated hen, and Jim smiled grimly.
“Poor old soul,” he said, “let’s hope she never finds out what I really wanted her clothes for.”
“So it was you up in the bow,” I remarked.
He nodded. “Didn’t you guess? Dick, I feel I’ve treated you rather scurvily. Let’s go and have a drink and I’ll put you wise. I saw Kelly that night,” he began, when we were comfortably settled, “and at first he laughed as I thought he would. Then after a while he didn’t laugh quite so much, and later still he stopped laughing altogether. Finally I made a suggestion. If these men were what they said they were, the two big chests below, which common report had it were filled with Bibles, would prove their case. I suggested, therefore, that we examine these two chests. They would never know, and it would settle the matter. He took a bit of persuading, but finally we went below to where the passengers’ luggage is stored. There were the two cases, and there and then we opened one. It was packed—not with Bibles—but with nitroglycerin.”
Jim paused and took a drink, then lit a cigarette thoughtfully.
“I don’t think that I have ever seen a man in quite such a dreadful rage as Kelly was,” he went on gravely. “There was a clockwork mechanism which could be started by turning a screw on the outside of each box, and the whole diabolical plan was as clear as daylight. There was enough stuff there to sink a fleet of battleships, and when they had cleared off in the yacht with the gold we should suddenly have split in two and gone down with every soul on board. There would have been no one left to tell the tale, and these cold-blooded murderers would have got clean away. That was the little plot.”
He smiled grimly.
“I had no small difficulty in preventing James from putting the whole bunch in irons on the spot, but finally I got him to agree to a plan of mine. We changed the cargo around—he and I. Their chests containing nitroglycerin we filled with gold; and the specie boxes we filled with nitroglycerin and some lead and iron as a make-weight. And then we let the plan proceed. We banked on a holdup and the wrecking of the wireless. We thought they’d send over a boatload of armed men, and transfer the stuff to the yacht—and in fact they did. Further, we banked on the fact that they wouldn’t fool around with a fat, hysterical old woman, or a man in the throes of fever. Good girl—that Miss Armstrong; she kept her mother below all the morning in great style. And that, I think, is all,” he ended, with a quizzical glance at me.
“But it isn’t!” I cried. “What made that stuff blow up, if it had been taken out of the boxes with the clockwork mechanism?”
“Well, old Dick,” said Jim, “it may be that the Reverend Samuel kicked one of the boxes a trifle hard in his jubilation. Or perhaps he dropped his Corona inadvertently. Or maybe something hit one of those boxes very hard like a bullet from a gun. Come down to my cabin,” he added, suddenly.