The Black Bag

by Louis Joseph Vance

Kirkwood said something beneath his breath—a word in itself a comfortable mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and groaned: "O Lord, I just dassent!" With which, thanking the bureau of information, he set off at a quick step down Grey's Inn Road.

The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city—and the voice of the milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly if a trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it known, was that the Alethea would not attempt to sail before the turn of the tide.

For this was his mission, to find the Alethea before she sailed. Incredible as it may appear, at five o'clock, or maybe earlier, on the morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood, normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn, and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel in distress; according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar, or Kirkwood's own admirable faith in the girl were justified of itself.

Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property (whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam's or her son's): he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would attempt to leave London by a water route, in the ship, Alethea, whose name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs.

Kirkwood's initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the haystack—the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to the wharves of 'long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line the Thames, that one called Alethea; of which he was so deeply mired in ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between Tilbury and all the world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht (steam or sail), schooner, four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine.

A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find himself a passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the Alethea....

London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound asleep when at length he paused for a minute's rest in front of the Mansion House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday's tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned frequently.

With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh's frailty. An early cabby, cruising up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse, explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby.

"Jump in, sir," he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated the latter's demands. "I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to me."

The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another's guidance. Once in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as reckless of the cab's swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight glaring full in his tired young face.