“Here goes!” he said at last. “Let’s see what Melody’s pile is, anyway.”
It took the best part of the night to examine thoroughly what the bag held. Even after he had gone over every piece, Brainard, untrained in business matters, could but guess at the full importance of his haul. There were contracts and deeds and leases relating to a network of corporations, of which the most important, apparently, was the Pacific Northern Railway.
Despairing of understanding the full value of these documents without some clew, Brainard contented himself with making a careful inventory of them. The meat of the lot, he judged, lay in certain bundles of neatly engraved five-per-cent bonds of the Pacific Northern, together with a number of certificates of stock in the Shasta Company. In all, as he calculated, there were eight millions of bonds and fifteen millions, par value, of stock.
“Melody doesn’t look to me to be a poor lady,” Brainard muttered, bundling up the bonds and stock, and packing them carefully away at the bottom of the valise. “They are welcome to the rest, if they’ll let me off with these pretty things!”
What was more, he had come across the name of Schneider Brothers, bankers, Berlin, on the letterhead of several communications, indicating that they had been the dead man’s foreign fiscal agents. That would be of use to him, he noted, as he wrote the name in his little diary. Then he went on deck, lighted a long Mexican cigar, and began to think. The value of his haul made him very serious. Latterly his adventure had more or less the irresponsibility of a boy’s lark about it, but now it assumed larger importance. What he had done was a serious matter in the eyes of the law, and he must justify his proceedings, not only to himself, but to others. . . .
The days of the lazy, sunny voyage slipped away. As the vessel drew nearer Europe, Brainard speculated more and more anxiously on what might be waiting for him on the dock at Havre. Now that he knew how valuable his loot was, he felt certain that old Krutzmacht’s San Francisco enemies, who had tracked him to the dock at Vera Cruz, would hardly be idle during the sixteen days that the Toulouse had taken to cross the seas. There had been ample time for them to hear from the stenographer and their other agents in Mexico, to communicate with the French authorities, to have detectives cross from New York by one of the express boats and meet him at Havre. There would be a fine reception committee prepared for him on the dock!
Cudgel his brains as he might, hour after hour, he could see no way out of the predicament that was daily drawing nearer. After the incident at Vera Cruz, he could not approach any of the officers of the vessel and seek to enlist their help. He thought of bribing the sociable third officer to secrete the contents of his valise, but he mistrusted his volatile temperament. There was a Frenchwoman who sat next him at the table, a dark-haired little person, clever and businesslike, who had been very agreeable to Brainard, and had undertaken to teach him French. He could tell his story to Mme Vernon, and ask her to assume charge of the troublesome valise. But an instinctive caution restrained him from taking any one into his confidence. He preferred to run his chance of arrest, and to fight against extradition. Whenever he resigned himself to this prospect, his sporting blood rebelled, and there rose, also, a new sentiment of loyalty to the interests of his unknown mistress, Melody. He had come too far in his venture to be beaten now!
“Whether the old man was straight or not, whether he really owned the bunch of bonds and stock or not, it would be a pity not to get something out of it for Melody. She’s not in the scrap,” he said to himself. “No, I don’t chuck the game yet!”
His anxieties were quieted by another fit of seasickness on the day before they were due to arrive at Havre. As she approached the coast of Brittany, the Toulouse lost the balmy weather which had prevailed since they entered the Gulf Stream, and ran straight into a gale that was sweeping over the boisterous Bay of Biscay. Brainard went to bed, to spend altogether the most wretched twenty-four hours he had ever experienced.
In his more conscious moments he gathered that the old Toulouse was having as hard a time with the weather as he was. Her feeble engines at last lay down on the job, and the captain was forced to turn about and run before the storm. It mattered little to Brainard, just then, whether the ship was blown to the Azores, or went to the bottom, or carried him into Havre, there to be arrested and finally deported to the United States for grand larceny. He turned in his berth, thought of the Bourgogne, and closed his weary eyes.