He had already carefully bestowed his valise of treasure under the cosy lounge berth by the great portholes, and his rugs and wraps covered it.
Leaving the ox-eyed woman there on watch, Fritz Braun hastened to join the steward, an old friend of the days of the pharmacy and its secret international smuggling trade. He had tossed his false beard overboard and tied a sea-cap with ear-flaps upon his head. "Just as well to drop 'Fritz Braun' forever now," he laughed. "'Mr. August Meyer' has his passports in his pockets! So, here's for a new life. I am born to a new name and safe, even in Germany."
It was only when Sandy Hook light was far astern that August Meyer gave up the wild potations which even astounded Heinrichs. "One doesn't go away on a vacation every day," joyfully cried August Meyer. "One more bottle of the Frenchman's sparkling wine, and then to turn in and wake far out on blue water!" The fool, safe in his own conceit, forgot the curse of Cain branded upon him now. But the vengeance of God was following him out on the dark waters!
The lonely gulls, screaming and soaring at daybreak, skimming the waters of New York Bay, dipping and struggling over each bit of flotsam, rested upon the fragments of a broken trunk floating idly along upon the sunlit waters.
There was nothing to indicate the previous contents of the package which had been shattered by the screw of a passing vessel; there was neither mark nor token of its past history.
And so it floated idly up and down, borne hither and thither by the veering tides, while far below, on the ooze, the heavy irons still weighted down the corpse of the man who had been lured to his death by the noblest impulses of the human heart.
And the sun came gaily up, upon the day of repose, God's own appointed day of rest, the glittering beams played upon the closed windows of the stately old mansion, where nothing remained to tell of a "deed without a name" save a heap of dead ashes in the blackened grate of the laundry furnace. The pathway of the criminal seemed covered to all mortal eyes.
The cautious patrons of the "Valkyrie," stealing in by the side entrances, talked in whispers of the re-opening of the pool-room, and the sleeping "blind tiger."
"Come around any evening next week, after the Fourth," was the message given to the "safe" patrons, "and we will be happy to accommodate you."
There was no human being in the offices of the Western Trading
Company save the janitor, busy at his semi-annual clean-up, and the
Monday holiday approached with no suspicion of Randall Clayton's
disappearance.