Despite the reason for his captivity, there was a certain desperate gallantry about Cray, as Drake led him off, handcuffed, to the captain’s cabin. He even managed to whisper, as they climbed the steep iron stairway to the boat deck:
“A pretty job, Drake; if your feet didn’t look it, nobody’d take you for a dick. Only thing is you got the wrong man.”
“Have I?” Drake asked. “Have I? Maybe it’s Quayle should be wearing these.”
Cray kept silent at that, as if reluctant to tell; as if, now the enemy had appeared in his true form, he were changing his whole tune; as if those under the law’s suspicion must close up their ranks and stick together.
“Quayle—there he is in the cabin,” Drake went on. “I’ll be bound, he’ll be glad to see us. You see, Quayle’s my partner, Cray.”
Drake and the old captain were alone. Quayle had taken Cray away, had locked him up, was keeping an eye on him. Drake had remained with Bain. He was talking jerkily, as if thinking back over this business, partly because he rather plumed himself on the way it had been managed and partly because he feared, should he stop, what would follow. Old Captain Bain, there, lips moving, eyes downcast was probably going over the sins of a long and pettily wicked life. Probably, as soon as he got the chance, he’d pour out a flood of confessions and would incriminate himself hopelessly in a dozen dark matters.
Drake, a one idea man, busy with that one idea, didn’t have time, or, to do him justice, inclination for the rôle of father confessor to the captain of the Cora. So he talked, like a man talking against time, elliptically, as things came into his head. And the captain half listening, heard:
“Began at Dip’s American Bar. Bless you, we at the Yard have known your little game for years, Captain. Began at Dip’s, when this robbery thing broke, we traced a motor car within a mile of his place. From then on, well, it was chance and luck and, if I may say it, psychology. We came aboard, Quayle and I, separately. We looked about, used our eyes, wormed in where we could. We had no idea what the man was like, what he had done before. We just played a hunch that he was aboard. Began with you—
“Remember that little note I brought you, ostensibly from Dip? Well, that told me a lot. Bless you, Bain, you aren’t the murdering, thieving sort. I ruled you out, right then. But, to go on. You remember when the thing broke aboard? That first message?”
“Yes,” the old man nodded glumly, “I won’t forget. ’Twas as if some big, horrible eye was lookin’ all over, slow but steady. An’ I knew that sooner or later it’d stop on us; and then, o’ course—”