"It will be about long enough for you to reconsider yours," Nettle rejoined promptly. "You are relying on the crew of that destroyer not being aware that there are two women on board your ship. You think that if they saw me on deck they will have taken me for Miss Maynard, and that with her rescue assured they will ask no questions about me."
"And they won't," said Brant, though there was a note of interrogation in the assertion. "How are they to know that I shipped a d——d wild-cat at Weymouth?"
"That is the hole you have dug for yourself to tumble into," returned Miss Nettle Jimpson sweetly. "You thought you were being funny at my expense in allowing the torpedo-boat to nearly catch you, but you overdid your joke, Captain Brant. That ship is the Snipe, with my young man as acting gunner. You let her come so close that we were blowing kisses to each other half an hour ago. When my Ned steps on to your deck five minutes hence he'll ask for me, if he's still the affectionate youth I've educated him into. And you won't be able to gammon him with any yarn about my having jumped overboard. He knows jolly well I'm not built that way."
Brant looked up at her, mouthing and gibbering; then he spat on the deck, and, turning away without a word, flung his Derringer over the rail into the sea.
And the helpless Cobra, her poison-fangs drawn, lay on the swell like a wilted weed while the Snipe, vomiting black fury from her three funnels, swooped down.
Mr. Montague Maynard passed the decanter, and beamed upon his guests—Mr. Vernon Mallory and Reggie Beauchamp. Through the open window they could catch glimpses of Leslie Chermside, who had taken a lover's privilege to leave the dessert table early and join Violet on the Manor House lawn. Somewhere out there in the twilight there were also Aunt Sarah and Enid Mallory, the elder lady listening for about the twentieth time to the adventure of the younger in the grotto at The Hut—an adventure which had been the direct cause of her great-niece's rescue.
"Roughly speaking, then, this is what you make of it," Mr. Maynard was saying. "From first to last Levison's murder was a job put up by Travers Nugent in order to render my future son-in-law the bait for getting Violet on to the Cobra?"
"That is established from the mouth of Pierre Legros, from Brant's brutal frankness to Violet, and by Nugent's evident intention to kill Sergeant Bruce, Legros and myself the other night," replied Mr. Mallory. "He would not have embarked on wholesale murder, which must have been brought home to him, unless he had known that the game was up, and that his only resource was flight."
"Yes, that is all clear enough," the Birmingham magnate assented. "But what I am most concerned with, as I like the chap and he is going to marry my daughter, is Chermside's extraordinary conduct in being frightened into bolting on to that infernal steamer. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, he being obviously innocent of the crime. I shouldn't like to think that Violet was going to marry a fool or a coward."