“Well, he was sittin’ with his eyes shut, and he heard these guys colludin’ together. He didn’t get more than half they said, but he got enough to make him want to hear more. Then they quit the bar and went into a back room with their lemon juice and cigarettes. Ten minutes after hell broke loose in that back room, and when Pap and the bartender got the door open there was the chaps, one on the floor shot through the head and the other two near done in. Two of them had set on the guy that was dead; but they hadn’t knocked him out before he began to shoot, and he’d pretty well riddled them with a Colt automatic pistol—”
“Them’s the things!” said Jude. “I’m savin’ up to buy one of them things on my own—twenty-five dollars—”
“Shut your head! Then they must have knocked it out of his hand and used the last shot on him.”
“His brains were all over the floor,” said Jude with relish. “Pap said they looked like white of egg beat up and enough to fill a puddin’ basin.”
“Pap spotted somethin’ else on the floor,” went on Satan, “a piece of paper folded double. He put it in his pocket while the fellers were bein’ lifted to the hospital, where they died that same night. He was on the square all right, takin’ that paper, and I’ll tell you why. Six months before that we’d spotted a wreck comin’ up from Guadaloupe. She’s so placed—as maybe you’ll see yourself one day—that a hundred ships might have passed her without spottin’ her, and bein’ out of trade tracks made her all the safer. These guys had been talkin’ about a wreck before they left the bar for the back room, and he reckoned it was our find they were onto. The piece of paper made him sure of that, and, takin’ it with the talk he’d heard, he reckoned he had got the biggest thing that ever humped itself in these waters. He said there was a hundred thousand dollars aboard her.”
It was a fascinating story, yet it seemed to Ratcliffe that Satan showed little enthusiasm over the business.
“You don’t seem very keen about it,” said he.
“Well,” said Satan, “it seems a bit too big, and that’s the truth. The hooker’s there right enough, but I don’t seem to see all that stuff aboard of her.”
“It’s there right enough,” said Jude.
“Then there’s the getting of it,” went on Satan. “That’s a tough job to tackle. Months of work, no pay, and the chance of bein’ let down at the end of it.”