XVII
Sea-wise Bahaman corespondents of American press services were of one mind concerning Lanyard's disappearance from the Port Royal, arguing that the known conditions of time and tide ruled it out of all consideration as a sane attempt at escape. The stories they cabled North were accordingly published, for the most part, under headlines something in this sense:
LONE WOLF SUICIDES AT SEA
Lanyard, these reports related, had gone overboard, rather than submit to arrest, after dark of a moonless night, when the Port Royal was standing into Northeast Providence Channel, her position being approximately midway between its jaws. Thus, if he dreamed to win to land either in the North, where Hole-in-the-Wall Lighthouse sentinels the southernmost point of Great Abaco Island, or in South, where Egg Island Light warns of the perils lying off the northerly tip of Eleuthera, the fugitive had undertaken a ten-mile pull against the drag of the strong offshore current which was setting through the channel at the time; a task which must have thwarted the stoutest effort of the strongest swimmer, even assuming that the sharks with which those waters swarm had been content to let him pass unmolested. Something which, the consensus maintained, in the case of Lanyard, the sharks indisputably hadn't.
That cry of "Man overboard!" had brought the Port Royal to a prompt and a dead halt; the waters roundabout had been lavishly sown with ring-buoys as well as with floating flares, guided by whose weird illumination a life-boat quartered the theatre of the mystery for upwards of an hour before the steamer called it in and proceeded. Nevertheless the authorities who boarded her at Nassau, in their disappointment indisposed to accept the suicide theory, insisted on a thorough rummage of the vessel which accomplished little toward hushing the murmurs of dissatisfaction with which, at length and empty-handed, they took themselves ashore.
These doubters had at least one confrère of weathered judgment in New York, who gave free tongue to his conviction that the Lone Wolf was one wise bird and a tough fish to drown. And the faith of this one in the will-to-live animating the hybrid monstrosity of his figure had good justification in the outcome, when, one night more than a month after the event of the alleged suicide, a glare beating directly into his face roused him from the slumbers of an honest man to find that some marauder had added the cool insolence of switching on the bedside lamp to the felonious injury of housebreaking.
One who in his time had done much to make life a misery to men of wicked ways, and more than once had figured as the target of an assassin's weapon, the householder had long been accustomed to sleep with a pistol ready to his hand. But his instinctive fumble for it drew a blank this time; so, with such composure as he could command, he turned attention to the agent of its confiscation.
This person had cheekily drawn up a chair to the bedside and made himself at home in it, one of the detective's cigars between his teeth and a highball of the detective's precious pre-Prohibition Scotch in his hand testifying to amiable readiness to be sociable, provided his host had no real objection to advance.
A semi-blinded stare was met by a smile that flashed teeth of notable whiteness in a face deeply bronzed where it didn't boast a lush overgrowth of beard. This last was sparely shot with grey, and so was hair that also wanted shearing; but the rich complexion of the miscreant was clear, his eyes were luminous with vitality, he had in every particular the look of one who had consorted long and profitably with Nature in her least sophisticated phases. As for his costume, it was altogether shocking, comprising simply a cotton singlet, a coat without much definite shape or colour, a pair of ragged trousers belted with an end of rope, and foot-gear that would have kindled the envy of a slapstick clown of the cinema.