“It may have slipped around under his back.”
“It isn’t there at all.”
I ran into the tent, where Jones, having exhausted the resources of the injured man’s clothing, was searching among the blankets on which he lay. There was no key. I went out to the men again, bewildered. The dawn had come, a pink and rosy dawn that promised another stifling day. It revealed the disarray of the deck—the basins, the old mahogany amputating-case with its lock plate of bone, the stained and reddened towels; and it showed the brooding and overcast faces of the men.
“Isn’t it there?” I asked. “Our agreement was for me to carry the key to Singleton’s cabin and Burns the captain’s.”
Miss Lee, by the rail, came forward slowly, and looked up at me.
“Isn’t it possible,” she said, “that, knowing where the key was, some one wished to get it, and so—” She indicated the tent and Burns.
I knew then. How dull I had been, and stupid! The men caught her meaning, too, and we tramped heavily forward, the girl and I leading.
The door into the captain’s room was open, and the axe was gone from the bunk. The key, with the cord that Burns had worn around his neck, was in the door, the string torn and pulled as if it had been jerked away from the unconscious man. Later on we verified this by finding, on the back of Burns’s neck an abraded line two inches or so in length.
It was a strong cord—the kind a sailor pins his faith to, and uses indiscriminately to hold his trousers or his knife.
I ordered a rigid search of the deck, but the axe was gone. Nor was it ever found. It had taken its bloody story many fathoms deep into the old Atlantic, and hidden it, where many crimes have been hidden, in the ooze and slime of the sea-bottom.