THE MESSAGE

[ill-004]

Suddenly he sprang upright

Frontispiece

THE MESSAGE

BY

LOUIS TRACY

Author of “The Wings of the Morning,” “The Wheel o’ Fortune,” “The Captain of the Kansas,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH CUMMINGS CHASE

New York

Edward J. Clode

Publisher

Copyright, 1908
By EDWARD J. CLODE

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Message

CHAPTER I

DERELICTS

“It’s fine!” said Arthur Warden, lowering his binoculars so as to glut his eyes with the full spectacle. “In fact, it’s more than fine, it’s glorious!”

He spoke aloud in his enthusiasm. A stout, elderly man who stood near—a man with “retired tradesman” writ large on face and figure—believed that the tall, spare–built yachtsman was praising the weather.

“Yes, sir,” he chortled pompously, “this is a reel August day. I knew it. Fust thing this morning I tole my missus we was in for a scorcher.”

Warden gradually became aware that these ineptitudes were by way of comment. He turned and read the weather–prophet’s label at a glance. But life was too gracious at that moment, and he was far too well–disposed toward all men, that he should dream of inflicting a snub.

“That was rather clever of you,” he agreed genially. “Now, though the barometer stood high, I personally was dreading a fog three hours ago.”

The portly one gurgled.

“I’ve got a glass,” he announced. “Gev’ three pun’ ten for it, but there’s a barrowmeter in my bones that’s worth a dozen o’ them things. I’ll back rheumatiz an’ a side o’ bacon any day to beat the best glass ever invented.”

All unknowing, here was the touch of genius that makes men listen. Warden showed his interest.

“A side of bacon!” he repeated.

“Yes, sir. Nothing to ekal it. I was in the trade, so I know wot I’m talkin’ about. And, when you come to think of it, why not? Pig skin an’ salt—one of ‘em won’t have any truck wi’ damp—doesn’t want it an’ shows it—an’ t’other sucks it up like a calf drinkin’ milk. I’ve handled bacon in tons, every brand in the market, an’ you can’t smoke any of ‘em on a muggy day.”

“Does your theory account for the old–fashioned notion that pigs can see the wind?”

The stout man considered the point. It was new to him, and he was a Conservative.

“I’m better acquent wi’ bacon,” he said stubbornly.

“So I gather. I was only developing your very original idea, on the principle that

“‘You may break, you may shatter, the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.’”

The ex–bacon–factor rapped an emphatic stick on the pavement. Though he hoped some of his friends would see him hob–nobbing “with a swell,” he refused to be made game of.

“Wot ‘as scent got to do with it?” he demanded wrathfully.

“Everything. Believe me, pigs have been used as pointers. And consider the porcine love of flowers. Why, there once was a pig named Maud because it would come into the garden.”

Had Warden laughed he might have given the cue that was lacking. But his clean–cut, somewhat sallow face did not relax, and an angry man puffed away from him in a red temper.

He caught scraps of soliloquy.

“A pig named Maud!... Did anybody ever hear the like?... An’ becos it kem into a garden.... Might just as well ‘ave called it Maria.”

Then Warden, left at peace with the world, devoted himself again to the exquisite panorama of Cowes on a sunlit Monday of the town’s great week. In front sparkled the waters of the Solent, the Bond Street of ocean highways. A breath of air from the west rippled over a strong current sweeping eastward. It merely kissed the emerald plain into tiny facets. It was so light a breeze that any ordinary sailing craft would have failed to make headway against the tide, and the gay flags and bunting of an innumerable pleasure fleet hung sleepily from their staffs and halyards. Yet it sufficed to bring a covey of white–winged yachts flying back to Cowes after rounding the East Lepe buoy. Jackyard topsails and bowsprit spinnakers preened before it. Though almost imperceptible on shore, it awoke these gorgeous butterflies of the sea into life and motion. Huge 23–meter cutters, such as White Heather II, Brynhild and Nyria, splendid cruisers like Maoona, errymaid, Shima, Creole, and Britomart, swooped grandly into the midst of the anchored craft as though bent on self–destruction. To the unskilled eye it seemed a sheer miracle that any of them should emerge from the chaos of yachts, redwings, launches, motorboats, excursion steamers, and smaller fry that beset their path. But Cowes is nothing if not nautical. Those who understood knew that bowsprits and dinghies of moored yachts would be cleared magically, and even spinnaker booms topped to avoid lesser obstruction. Those who did not understand—who heard no syllable of the full and free language that greeted an inane row–boat essaying an adventurous crossing of the course—gazed breathlessly at these wondrous argosies, and marveled at their escape from disaster. Then the white fleet swept past the mouth of the river, and vanished behind Old Castle Point on the way to far distant buoy or light–ship that marked the beginning of the homeward run. And that was all—a brief flight of fairy ships—and Cowes forthwith settled down to decorous junketing.

Away to the northwest a gathering of gray–hulled monsters had thundered a royal salute of twenty–one guns, and the smoke–cloud still lay in a blue film on the Hampshire coast. The Dreadnought was hauling at her anchors before taking a king and an emperor to witness the prowess of her gunners. The emperor’s private yacht, a half–fledged man–o’–war, was creeping in the wake of the competing yachts. Perchance her officers might see more of British gunnery practice than of the racing.

Close at hand a swarm of launches and ships’ boats buzzed round the landing slip of the Royal Yacht Club. The beautiful lawn and gardens were living parterres of color, for the Castle is a famous rendezvous of well–dressed women. Parties were assembling for luncheon either in the clubhouse or on board the palatial vessels in the roads. To the multitude, yachting at Cowes consists of the blare of a starting–gun, the brief vision of a cluster of yachts careening under an amazing press of canvas, and, for the rest, gossip, eating, bridge—with a picnic or a dance to eke out the afternoon and evening.

Arthur Warden soon turned his back on the social Paradise he was not privileged to enter. He was resigned to the fact that the breeze which sent the competitors in the various matches spinning merrily to Spithead would not move his hired cutter a yard against the tide. So, having nothing better to do, he sauntered along the promenade toward the main street. On the way he passed the one–time purveyor of bacon sitting beside a lady who by long association had grown to resemble him.

“Now I wonder if her name is Maria,” he mused.

Drifting with the holiday crowd, he bought some picture postcards, a box of cigarettes, and a basket of hothouse peaches. Being a dilettante in some respects, he admired and became the prospective owner of the fruit before he learned the price. There were four peaches in the basket, and they cost him ten shillings.

“Ah,” he said, as the shopkeeper threw the half sovereign carelessly into the till, “I see you have catered for Lucullus?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said the greengrocer affably. “Where does he live?”

“He had villas at Tusculum and Neapolis.”

“There’s no such places in the Isle of Wight, sir.”

“Strange! Has not the game–dealer across the street supplied him with peacocks’ tongues?”

The man grinned.

“Somebody’s bin gettin’ at you, sir,” he cried.

“True, very true. Yet, according to Horace, I sup with Lucullus to–night.”

“Horace said that, did he?”

The greengrocer suddenly turned and peered down a stairway.

“Horace!” he yelled, “who’s this here Lucullus you’ve bin gassin’ about?”

A shock–headed boy appeared.

“Loo who?” said he.

Warden departed swiftly.

“My humor does not appeal to Cowes,” he reflected. “I have scored two failures. Having conjured Horace from a coal–cellar let me now confer with Diogenes in his tub.”

Applied to Peter Evans, and his phenomenally small dinghy, the phrase was a happy enough description of the ex–pilot who owned the Nancy. Evans and his craft had gone out of commission together. Both were famous in the annals of Channel pilotage, but an accident had deprived Peter of his left leg, so he earned a livelihood by summer cruising round the coast, and he was now awaiting his present employer at a quay in the river Medina.

But Warden’s pace slackened again, once he was clear of the fruiterer’s shop. Sailing was out of the question until the breeze freshened. It was in his mind to bid Peter meet him again at four o’clock. Meanwhile, he would go to Newport by train, and ramble in Parkhurst Forest for a couple of hours. Recalling that happy–go–lucky mood in later days of storm and stress, he tried to piece together the trivial incidents that were even then conspiring to bring about the great climax of his life. A pace to left or right, a classical quip at his extravagance in the matter of the peaches, a slight hampering of free movement because the Portsmouth ferry–boat happened to be disgorging some hundreds of sightseers into the main street of West Cowes—each of these things, so insignificant, so commonplace, helped to bring him to the one spot on earth where fate, the enchantress, had set her snare in the guise of a pretty girl.

For it was undeniably a pretty face that was lifted to his when a young lady, detaching herself from the living torrent that delayed him for a few seconds on the pavement, appealed for information.

“Will you please tell me how I can ascertain the berth of the yacht Sans Souci?” she asked.

It has been seen that he was glib enough of speech, yet now he was tongue–tied. In the very instant that the girl put forward her simple request, his eyes were fixed on the swarthy features of a Portuguese freebooter known to him as the greatest among the many scoundrels infesting the hinterland of Nigeria. There was no mistaking the man. The Panama hat, spotless linen, fashionable suit and glossy boots of a typical visitor to Cowes certainly offered strong contrast to the soiled garb of the balked slave–trader whom he had driven out of a burning and blood–bespattered African village a brief year earlier. But, on that occasion, Arthur Warden had gazed steadily at Miguel Figuero along the barrel of a revolver; under such circumstances one does not forget.

For a little space, then, the Englishman’s imagination wandered far afield. Instinctively he raised his hat as he turned to the girl and repeated her concluding words.

“The Sans Souci, did you say?”

“Yes, a steam–yacht—Mr. Baumgartner’s.”

She paused. Though Warden was listening now, his wits were still wool–gathering. His subconscious judgment was weighing Figuero’s motives in coming to England, and, of all places, to Cowes. Of the many men he had encountered during an active life this inland pirate was absolutely the last he would expect to meet during Regatta Week in the Isle of Wight.

The girl, half aware of his obsession, became confused—even a trifle resentful.

“I am sorry to trouble you,” she went on nervously. “I had no idea there would be such a crowd, and I spoke to you because—because you looked as if you might know——”

Then he recovered his self–possession, and proceeded to surprise her.

“I do know,” he broke in hurriedly. “Pray allow me to apologize. The sun was in my eyes, and he permits no competition. Against him, even you would dazzle in vain. To make amends, let me take you to the Sans Souci. She is moored quite close to my cutter, and my dinghy is not fifty yards distant.”

The girl drew back a little. This offer of service was rather too prompt, while its wording was peculiar, to say the least. She was so good–looking that young men were apt to place themselves unreservedly at her disposal without reference to sun, moon, or stars.

“I think I would prefer to hire a boat,” she said coldly. “I should explain that an officer on board the steamer told me I ought to discover the whereabouts of the yacht before starting, or the boatman would take me out of my way and overcharge.”

“Exactly. That officer’s name was Solomon. Now, I propose to take you straight there for nothing. Come with me as far as the quay. One glance at Peter will restore the confidence you have lost in me.”

Then he smiled, and a woman can interpret a man’s smile with almost uncanny prescience. The whiff of pique blew away, and she temporized.

“Is the Sans Souci a long way out?”

“Nearly a mile. And look! We can eat these while Peter toils.”

He opened the paper bag and showed her the peaches. She laughed lightly. Were she a Frenchwoman she would have said, “But, sir, you are droll.” Being English, she came to the point.

“Where is the quay you speak of?”

“Here. Close at hand.”

As they walked off together she discovered out of the corner of her eye that his glance was searching the thinning mob of her fellow passengers. She guessed that he had recognized some person unexpectedly.

“Are you sure I am not trespassing on your time?” she demanded.

“Quite sure. When I said the sun was in my eyes I used poetic license. I meant the West African sun. A man who arrived on your steamer reminded me of Nigeria—where we—er—became acquainted.”

“There! You want to speak to him, of course,” and she halted suddenly.

He smiled again, and held out the bag.

“He is a Portuguese gin–trader—and worse. And he is gone. Would you have me run after him and offer peaches that were meant for you?”

“But that is ridiculous.”

“Most certainly.”

“I don’t mean that. How could you possibly have provided peaches for me?”

“I don’t know. Ask the fairies who arrange these things. Ten minutes ago I had no more notion of buying fruit than of buying an aeroplane. Ten minutes ago you and I had never met. Yet here we are, you and I and the luscious four. And there is Peter, sailing master, cook, and general factotem of the Nancy cutter. Don’t you think Peter’s wooden leg induces trust? He calls it a prop, which suggests both moral and physical support. By the way, have you ever noticed that wooden–legged men are invariably fat? And Cæsar vouched for the integrity of fat men.”

Though the girl began to find his chatter agreeable, she was secretly dismayed when she compared the gigantic Peter with the diminutive dinghy. She had never before seen so broad a man or so small a boat. But she had grit, and was unwilling to voice her doubt.

“Will it hold us?” she inquired with apparent unconcern.

“Oh, yes. When Peter was a pilot that little craft carried him and his two mates through many a heavy sea. Don’t be afraid. We will put you safely on board the Sans Souci. Now, you sit there and hold the bag. I’ll take my two at once, please, as I find room forrard.”

“Not much of a breeze for cruisin’, Mr. Warden,” grinned Peter, casting an appreciative eye over the latest addition to the Nancy’s muster–roll.

“We’re not bound for a cruise, Peter, worse luck,” said Warden. “The young lady wishes to reach that big yacht moored abreast of the cutter. So give way, O heart of oak! Thou wert christened stone, yet a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.”

Peter winked solemnly at the fair unknown.

“He do go on, don’t he, miss?” he said.

The girl nodded, for ripe peach is an engrossing fruit. She was enjoying her little adventure. It savored of romance. Already her slight feeling of nervousness had vanished. In her heart of hearts she hoped that Mr. Warden might prove to be a friend of the Baumgartners.

Under Peter’s powerful strokes the dinghy sped rapidly into the open waters of the Solent. At that hour there was but slight stir in the roadstead. Everybody afloat seemed to be eating. Each launch and yacht they passed held a luncheon party beneath awnings or in a deck saloon. Through the golden stillness came the pleasant notes of a band playing in the grounds of the clubhouse. A bugle sounded faint and shrill from the deck of a distant warship. Sitting in this cockleshell of a craft, so near the glistening water that one might trail both hands in it, was vastly agreeable after a long journey by rail and steamer. From sea level the girl obtained an entirely different picture of Cowes and the Solent from that glimpsed from the throbbing ferry–boat. The sea appeared to have risen, the wooded hills and clusters of houses to have sunk bodily. Already the shore was curiously remote. A sense of brooding peace fell on her like a mantle. She sighed, and wondered why she was so content.

Peter’s airy summary of his master’s habits seemed to have cast a spell on their tongues. For fully five minutes no one spoke. The wondrous silence was broken only by the rhythmical clank of the oars, the light plash of the boat’s movement, the strains of a waltz from the Castle lawn, and the musical laughter of women from the yachts.

Owing to the shortness of the dinghy, and the fact that the girl faced Warden, with Peter intervening, the two younger people were compelled to look at each other occasionally. The man saw a sweetly pretty face dowered with a rare conjunction of myosotis blue eyes and purple eyelashes, and crowned with a mass of dark brown hair. Accent, manner, and attire bespoke good breeding. She was dressed well, though simply, in blue canvas. Being somewhat of an artist, he did not fail to note that her hat, blouse, gloves and boots, though probably inexpensive, harmonized in brown tints. She was young, perhaps twenty–two. Guessing at random, he imagined her the daughter of some country rector, and, from recent observation of the Baumgartners, eked out by their public repute, he admitted a certain sentiment of surprise that such blatant parvenus should be on her visiting list.

For her part, the girl had long since discovered that her self–appointed guide was an army man. West Africa gave a hint of foreign service that was borne out by a paleness beneath the tan of the yachtsman. A regimental mess, too, is a university in itself, conferring a well–defined tone, a subtle distinctiveness. Each line of his sinewy frame told of drill, and his rather stern face was eloquent of one accustomed to command.

These professional hall–marks were not lost on her. She had mixed in circles where they were recognized. And she was prepared to like him. In her woman’s phrase, she thought it was “nice of him” not to question her. She was quite sure that if they met again ashore that afternoon he would leave her the option of renewing or dropping their acquaintance as she thought fit. Yet, for one so ready of speech after the first awkward moment outside the steamer pier, it was surprising that he should now be so taciturn.

When he did address her, he kept strictly to the purpose of their expedition.

“That is the San Souci,” he said, pointing to a large white yacht in the distance. “A splendid vessel. Built on the Clyde, I believe?”

“Ay, three hunnerd tons, an’ good for ten knots in any or’nary sea,” put in Peter.

“You know her, of course?” went on Warden.

“No. I have never before set eyes on her.”

“Well, you will enjoy your visit all the more, perhaps. From last night’s indications, you should have plenty of amusement on board.”

“Are there many people there, then?”

“I am not sure. The owners gave a big dinner party yesterday. The launch was coming and going at all hours.”

“What is that?” she asked inconsequently, indicating with a glance a small round object bobbing merrily westward some few yards away.

“It is difficult to say. Looks like a float broken loose from a fishing net,” said Warden.

“No, sir, it ain’t that,” pronounced Peter. “Nets have corks an’ buoys, an’ that ain’t neether.”

“You may think it absurd,” cried the girl, “yet I fancied just now that I caught a resemblance to a face, a distorted black face; but it has turned round.”

The boatman lay on his oars, and they all looked at the dancing yellow ball hurrying to the open sea.

“At first sight it suggests a piratical pumpkin,” said Warden.

“But I have been watching it quite a long time, and I am certain it is black on the other side. There! Surely I am not mistaken. And the people on that yacht have seen it, too.”

The girl’s face flushed with excitement. The thing had really startled her, and the two men were ready to agree that it now presented a mask–like visage, more than half submerged, as it swirled about in a chance eddy. That some loungers on a yacht close at hand had also noticed it was made evident by their haste to run down a gangway into a boat fastened alongside.

“After it, Peter!” cried Warden. “It is the lady’s trover by the law of the high seas. Bend your back for the honor of the Nancy. Port a bit—port. Steady all. Keep her there.”

In her eagerness, the girl tried to rise to her feet.

“Sit still, miss,” growled Peter, laboring mightily. “Judging by the position of that other craft, an’ from wot I know of Mr. Warden, there’ll be a devil of a bump in ‘arf a tick.”

“Starboard a point,” cooed Warden, on his knees in the bows. “Steady as she goes.”

Suddenly he sprang upright.

“Hard a–starboard!” he shouted, and leaped overboard.

A yell from the opposing boat, a scream from the girl, a sharp crack as an oar–blade snapped against the sturdy ribs of the dinghy, and the two boats shot past each other, Peter’s prompt obedience to orders having averted a collision.

“My godfather!” he roared, “’e ‘ad to jump for it. But don’t you worry, miss—’e can swim like a herrin’.”

Nevertheless, the girl did worry, as her white face and straining eyes well showed. Peter swung the dinghy about so nimbly that she lost all sense of direction. It seemed as if the laughing Solent had swallowed Warden, and she gazed affrightedly on every side but the right one.

“Oh, how could he do it?” she wailed. “I shall never forgive myself—“

Then she heard a deep breath from the water behind her, and she turned to see Warden, with blood streaming from a gash across his forehead, swimming easily with one hand. She whisked round and knelt on the seat.

“Quick!” she cried. “Come close. I can hold you.”

“Please do not be alarmed on my account,” he said coolly. “I fear I look rather ghastly, but the injury is nothing, a mere glancing blow from an oar.”

Even in her unnerved condition she could not fail to realize that he was in no desperate plight. But she was very frightened, and grasped his wrist tenaciously when his fingers rested on the stern rail. Yet, even under such trying circumstances, she was helpful. Though half sobbing, and utterly distressed, she dipped her handkerchief in the water and stooped until she could wash the wound sufficiently to reveal its extent. He was right. The skin was broken, but the cut had no depth.

“Why did you behave so madly?” she asked with quivering lips.

“It was method, not madness, fair maid,” he said, smiling up at her. “Our opponents had four oars and a light skiff against Peter’s two and a dinghy that is broad as it is long. To equalize the handicap I had to jump, else you would have lost your trophy. By the way, here it is!”

With his disengaged hand he gave her a smooth, highly polished oval object which proved to be a good deal larger than it looked when afloat. The girl threw it into the bottom of the boat without paying the least heed to it. She was greatly flurried, and, womanlike, wanted to box Warden’s ears for his absurd action.

“You have terrified me out of my wits,” she gasped. “Can you manage to climb on board?”

“That would be difficult—perhaps dangerous. Peter, pull up to the nearest ship’s ladder. Then I can regain my perch forrard.”

But Peter was gazing with an extraordinary expression of awe, almost of fear, at the unusual cause of so much commotion.

“Well, sink me!” he muttered, “if that ain’t Ole Nick’s own himmidge, it’s his head stoker’s. I’ve never seen anything like it, no, not in all my born days. My aunt! It’s ugly enough to cause a riot.”

CHAPTER II

HOW THE MESSAGE WAS DELIVERED

Owing to the return of the rival boat, Peter’s agitation passed unnoticed. A superior person was apologizing for the accident, though inclined to tax Warden with foolhardiness.

“You have only yourself to blame for that knock on the head, which might have been far more serious than it is,” he said.

“Will you kindly go to—Jericho?” said the man in the water.

The superior person’s tone grew more civil when he found that he was talking to one whom he condescended to regard as an equal.

“Don’t you want any assistance?” he inquired.

“No, thanks, unless you will allow me to use your gangway in order to climb aboard the dinghy.”

“By all means. I am sorry the oar caught you. But you annexed the prize, so I suppose you are satisfied. What was it?”

“A calabash, I fancy. You will see it lying in the boat.”

Peter, who was really fascinated by the carved face which drew the girl’s attention in the first instance, suddenly kicked it and turned it upside down with his wooden leg. The men in the second boat saw only the glazed yellow rind of an oval gourd, some twelve inches long and eight or nine in diameter.

“The pot was hardly worth the scurry,” laughed one of them.

“If Greeks once strove for a crown of wild olive, why not Englishmen for a calabash?” said Warden.

There was an element of the ludicrous in the unexpected comment from a man in his predicament. Every true–born Briton resents any remark that he does not quite understand, and some among the strangers grinned. The girl, still holding Warden’s wrist as though she feared he would vanish in the depths if she let go, darted a scornful look at them.

“The truth is that these gentlemen competed because they thought they were sure to win,” she cried.

“It was a fair race, madam,” expostulated the leader of the yacht’s boat.

“Y–yes,” she admitted. “My presence equalized matters.”

As the men were four to two she scored distinctly.

“Give way, Peter,” said Warden. “If I laugh I shall swallow more salt water than is good for me.”

He was soon seated astride the bows of the dinghy, which Peter’s strong arms brought quickly alongside the Sans Souci. By that time, the girl’s composure was somewhat restored. Warden obviously made so light of his ducking that she did not allude to it again. As for the gourd, it rested at her feet, but she seemed to have lost all interest in it. In truth, she was annoyed with herself for having championed her new friend’s cause, and thus, in a sense, condoned his folly.

It did not occur to her that the Sans Souci’s deck was singularly untenanted, until a gruff voice hailed the occupants of the dinghy from the top of the gangway.

“Below there,” came the cry. “Wotcher want here?”

The girl looked up with a flash of surprise in her expressive face. But she answered instantly:

“I am Miss Evelyn Dane, and I wish to see Mrs. Baumgartner.”

“She’s ashore,” was the reply.

“Well, I must wait until she returns.”

“You can’t wait here.”

“But that is nonsense. I have come from Oxfordshire at her request.”

“It don’t matter tuppence where you’ve come from. No one is allowed aboard. Them’s my orders.”

Miss Dane turned bewildered eyes on Warden.

“How can one reason with a surly person like this?” she asked.

“He is incapable of reason—he wants a hiding,” said Warden.

A bewhiskered visage of the freak variety glared down at him.

“Does he, you swob,” roared the apparition, “an’ oo’s goin’ to give it ‘im?”

“I am. Take this lady to the saloon, and come with me to the cutter yonder. My man will bring you to your bunk in five minutes, or even less.”

“For goodness’ sake, Mr. Warden, do not make my ridiculous position worse,” cried the girl, reddening with annoyance. “Mrs. Baumgartner wrote and urged me to see her without any delay on board this yacht. I telegraphed her early this morning saying I would be here soon after midday. What am I to do?”

“If I were you, I would go back to Oxfordshire,” he said.

“But I cannot—at least, not until I have spoken to her. I am—poor. I am practically engaged as companion—another name for governess, I suspect—to Mrs. Baumgartner’s daughter, and I dare not throw away the chance of obtaining a good situation.”

Warden, who was dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, did not reply at once, and Evelyn Dane, in her distress, little guessed the irrational conceit that danced in his brain just then. But the presence of Peter, and the torrent of sarcastic objurgation that flowed from the guardian of the Sans Souci, imposed restraint. It was on the tip of his tongue to suggest that, under the conditions, it would be a capital notion if they got married, and took a honeymoon cruise in the Nancy!—Long afterward he wondered what would have been the outcome of any such fantastic proposal. Would she have listened? At any rate, it amused him at the time to think that there was little difference between a lover and a lunatic.

But he contented himself with saying:

“I fear I am rather light–headed to–day, Miss Dane. Let us appeal to Peter the solid, and draw upon his wide experience. Tell us then, O pilot, what course shall we shape?”

Peter, rapidly restored to the normal by the familiar language coming from the rail of the yacht, glanced up.

“If I was you, sir, I’d ax monkey–face there wot time ‘is missis was due aboard. Mebbe the young leddy would find her bearin’s then, so to speak.”

“Excellent. Do you hear, Cerberus? When does Mrs. Baumgartner return?”

The watchman, taking thought, decided to suspend his taunts.

“Why didn’t you ax me that at fust?” he growled. “I’m on’y obeyin’ orders. Seven o’clock, they said. An’ it didn’t matter ‘oo kem here, if it was the Pope o’ Rome hisself, it’s as much as my place is worth to let him aboard.”

“That is final, Miss Dane,” said Warden. “There are two alternatives before you. I can either gag and bind the person who has just spoken, thus securing by force your admission to the yacht, or I can entertain you on the Nancy until seven o’clock.”

“But I ought to go ashore.”

“It is not to be dreamed of, I assure you. Cowes is overrun with excursionists. You will be much happier with Peter and me, and we are no mean cooks when put on our mettle.”

She yielded disconsolately. Dislike of the Sans Souci and every one connected with that palatial vessel was already germinating in her mind. If it were not for the considerations outlined in her brief statement to Warden she would have caught the next ferry to Portsmouth and allowed Mrs. Baumgartner to make other provision for her daughter’s companionship, or tuition.

“Give me a call when you are let off the chain,” said Warden pleasantly to the watchman, as the dinghy curved apart from the yacht’s side.

The girl colored even more deeply. Such behavior was not only outrageous, but it supplied a safety valve for her own ruffled feelings.

“I wish you would not say such stupid things,” she cried vehemently. “What would happen if that wretched man took you at your word? You would be mixed up in some horrible brawl, and wholly on my account.”

“He will not come, Miss Dane,” he said sadly. “Let me explain, however, that I prodded his thick hide with set purpose. He is alone on the Sans Souci; he blustered because he was afraid we meant to go aboard, aye or nay. Is it not extraordinary that such a vessel should be absolutely denuded of owner, guests, servants, and crew? That man is not a sailor. Unless I am greatly mistaken, he does not belong to the yacht in any capacity. What does it mean? You may take it from me that it is unusual, I might almost say phenomenal, for a valuable steam–yacht in commission to be deserted in that manner.”

“But he admitted that ‘they,’ meaning Mr. and Mrs. Baumgartner, I suppose, would return early this evening?”

“I am sure he is right in that. But where are the twenty odd domestics and members of the crew? When Peter and I went ashore at ten o’clock to–day the Sans Souci was alive with people.”

“I only know that Mrs. Baumgartner seems to have been thoughtless where I am concerned,” said the girl, absorbed in her own troubles.

Nevertheless, she brightened considerably when Warden assisted her to reach the spotless deck of the Nancy. By dint of much scrubbing and polishing, that taut little cutter had no reason to shirk the vivid sunlight. At the beginning of the cruise she had been fitted with a new suit of sails and fresh cordage. For the rest, Peter, and Peter’s fourteen–year–old son “Chris,” roused now from sound sleep in the cabin by his father’s loud summons, kept brass fittings and woodwork in a spick–and–span condition that would bear comparison with the best–found yacht in the roadstead.

Miss Dane was accommodated with a camp chair aft, while Warden dived into the cabin to change his clothes. The boy, after a wide–eyed stare at his employer, was about to busy himself with tying up the dinghy, when Peter bade him be off and see to the stove if he wished to escape a rope–ending. Chris was hurt. He had not expected such a greeting from his revered parent; but he disappeared instantly, and Peter imagined that his offspring was thus prevented from investigating the mystery of the gourd, which he took good care to leave in the bottom of the boat.

As for the girl, her mind was occupied to the exclusion of all else by the strange combination of events that brought her a guest on board the Nancy. She was not so much perturbed by the absence of Mrs. Baumgartner as by Warden’s manifest disapproval of the lady. A railway return ticket, sufficient money in her purse to pay for a room in a hotel, and the existence of a friend of her mother’s in Portsmouth, a friend whose good offices might be invoked if necessary, made her independent. But she did not want to go back defeated to Oxfordshire. Her father’s carelessness had left her practically at the mercy of a stepmother, who enjoyed the revenue of a fair estate until death. The settlement was not to the liking of either woman, and Evelyn was goaded into an endeavor to escape from it by the knowledge that she was regarded as an interloper in a house that would ultimately come into her possession if she survived the second Mrs. Dane.

The well–paid appointment offered by the Baumgartners was apparently an opening sent by the gods. She had been strongly recommended for the post by a friend, and there seemed to be no reason whatever why it should not prove an ideal arrangement for both parties. Yet Warden, unmistakably a gentleman, if rather eccentric in his ways, evidently did not view the mining magnate’s family with favor. That was a displeasing fact. Though she had no personal experience of the section of society which dubs itself the “smart set,” she gathered that the Baumgartners belonged to it, and it was a risky undertaking for a young woman to constitute herself part and parcel of the household of one of its leading members.

Her somewhat serious reverie was interrupted by the grateful scent of cooking that came from a hidden region forward. Warden reappeared in dry clothing. The cut on his forehead was covered with a strip of sticking plaster. He was bare–headed, and a slight powdering of gray in his thick black hair made him look more than his age.

“Our glass and china are of the pilot pattern,” he explained, placing a laden tray on the deck, “but we balance deficiencies in these respects by a high tone in our cuisine. To–day’s luncheon consists of grilled chicken and bacon, followed by meringues and figs, while the claret was laid down last week in Plymouth.”

“I am so hungry that I can almost dispense with the glass and china,” she admitted. “But won’t you let me help? I am quite domesticated.”

“What? Would you rob the cook of his glory? You must eat and admire, and thank the kindly gales that wafted Peter to the Indian Ocean when he was putting in his sea service, because he learned there how to use charcoal in the galley instead of an abominable oil lamp.”

“I was born in India,” she said with delightful irrelevance.

“Ah, were your people in the army?”

“No. My father was in the Indian Marine. But he retired when I was two years old—soon after my mother’s death. I lost him eight years later, and, having lived thirteen years with a stepmother, I thought it high time to begin to earn my own living.”

She fancied that this brief biography might encourage him to speak of the Baumgartners, but Warden’s conversation did not run on conventional lines.

“I find your career most interesting,” he said. “Now that we know each other so well I want to hear more of you. Promise that you will write every month until early December, and report progress in your new surroundings. Here is my card. A letter to the Universities Club will always reach me.”

She read:—“Captain Arthur Warden, Deputy Commissioner, Nigeria Protectorate.”

“Why must I stop in December?” she asked, with a smile and a quick glance under her long eyelashes.

“Because I return to Nigeria about that date, and I shall then supply a new address.”

“Dear me! Are we arranging a regular correspondence?”

“Your effusions can be absolutely curt. Just the date and locality, and the one word ‘Happy’ or Miserable,’ as the case may be.”

The arrival of Chris with a grilled chicken created a diversion. Peter had to be summoned from the galley. He explained sheepishly that he thought the meal was of a ceremonious character. They feasted regally, and all went well until the unhappy Chris asked his father if the vegetable marrow was to be boiled for dinner.

“Wot marrer?” demanded Peter unguardedly.

“The big one in the dinghy.”

“By Jove, we have never given a thought to the calabash that created all the rumpus,” cried Warden. “What about that black face you saw on it, Miss Dane? I didn’t notice it afterwards. Did you?”

“No. I was too excited and frightened. Your son might bring it to us now, Mr. Evans.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, miss, we’ll leave it till you’ve finished lunch,” said Peter, regarding Chris with an eye that boded unutterable things.

“But why, most worthy mariner?” demanded Warden.

“’Cos it’s the ugliest phiz that ever grew on a nigger,” was the astonishing answer. “It gev’ me a fair turn, it did, an’ I’m a pretty tough subjec’. It’s enough to stop a clock. If the young leddy takes my advice she’ll bid me heave it overboard and let it go to the—well, to where it rightly belongs.”

“It’s only an old gourd,” exclaimed Evelyn, looking from one to the other in amused surprise.

“Peter,” said Warden, laughing, “you have whetted our curiosity with rare skill. Come, now. What is the joke?”

“I’m in reel earnest, sir—sink me if I ain’t. It’s—a terror, that’s wot it is.”

“Bless my soul, produce it, and let us examine this calabash of parts.”

“Not me!” growled Peter, hauling himself upright with amazing rapidity. “Believe me, sir, I ‘ope you won’t ‘ave the thing aboard the Nancy. Get forrard, you,” he went on, glaring at the open–mouthed Chris. “Start washin’ them plates, an’ keep yer silly mouth closed, or you’ll catch somethin’ you can’t eat.”

There could be no doubt that the usually placid and genial–spoken Peter was greatly perturbed. To avoid further questioning, he stumped off to his quarters in the fore part of the cutter, and swung himself out of sight, while the girl endeavored vainly to estimate how he could squeeze his huge bulk through so small a hatchway.

Warden also stood up.

“After that there is but one course open to us,” he said, and drew in the dinghy’s painter until he was able to secure the gourd.

He was on his knees when he lifted it in both hands and turned it round to ascertain what it was that had so upset his stout friend. In reviewing his first impressions subsequently, he arrived at the conclusion that close familiarity with the features of the West African negro must have blunted his mind to the true significance of the hideous face that scowled at him from the rounded surface of the calabash. He paid heed only to the excellence of the artist—none to the message of undying hatred of every good impulse in mankind that was conveyed by the frowning brows, the cruel mouth, the beady, snake–like eyes peeping through narrow slits cut in the outer rind. Were not the lineaments those of a pure negro, he would have imagined that some long–forgotten doyen of the Satsuma school had amused himself by concentrating in a human face all that is grotesque and horrible in the Japanese notion of a demon. But there was no doubting the identity of the racial type depicted. Warden could even name the very tribe that supplied the model. A curious crinkled ring that had formed round the gourd near the upper part of its egg–shaped circumference suggested the quoit–shaped ivory ornament worn by the men of Oku. Oku used to be a plague spot in West Africa. It is little better to–day, but its virus is dissipated by British rule.

Warden’s kindling glance soon detected other important details. The raised ring, and certain rough protuberances that might have borne a crude likeness to a man’s face when the gourd was in its natural state, were utilized with almost uncanny ingenuity to lend high relief to the carving. Indeed, the surface had been but slightly scored with the artist’s knife. Half–lowered eyelids, a suggestion of parted lips and broad nostrils, some deep creases across the brutish forehead, and a sinister droop to each corner of the mouth—these deft touches revealed at once the sculptor’s restraint and power. The black skin was simulated by a smooth and shining lacquer, the ivory ring by a scraping of the rind that laid bare the yellow pith. No characteristic was over–accentuated. The work offered a rare instance of the art that conceals art.

And Warden felt that none but an artist worthy to rank with the elect could have conceived and carried out this study of some fierce negro despot. That it was a genuine portrait he did not doubt for a moment. It seemed to him that in its creation hate and fear had gone hand in hand with marvelous craftsmanship. The man who exercised such cunning on the inferior material provided by a rough–coated calabash was not only inspired by the pride of conscious power but meant to leave an imperishable record of a savage tyrant in his worst aspect. A great Italian painter, limning his idea of the Last Judgment, gratified his spite by placing all his enemies among the legion of the lost. This unknown master had taken a more subtle revenge. It was possible that the black chief, had he seen it, would have admired his counterfeit presentment. It demanded a more cultured intelligence than Oku society conferred to enable him to appreciate how plainly an evil soul leered from out a dreadful mask.

In no respect was the truth of the image more convincing than in the treatment of the eyes. A minute mosaic of chalcedony was used to portray white and iris and cornea. Small pieces of clear crystal formed the pupils, and the rays of light glinted from their depths with an effect that was appalling in its realism. Thus might the eyes of a cobra sparkle with vindictive fire. They exercised a diabolical mesmerism. Warden, rapt in his admiration of a genuine work of art, remained wholly unconscious of their spell till he heard a faint gasp of horror from the girl.

He turned and looked at her in quick dismay. All the roses had fled from her cheeks, leaving her wan indeed. Her own fine eyes were distended with fright. She, like Peter Evans, gave no heed to the consummate skill of the designer. She was fascinated at once by that basilisk glare. It thrilled her to the core, threatened her with immeasurable wrongs, menaced her with the spite of a demon.

“This is the most wonderful thing of its kind I have ever seen,” said Warden eagerly.

Though he was not yet awakened to the magnetic influence exercised by the vile visage he could not fail to note the girl’s consternation. He thought to reassure her by pointing out the marvelous craft displayed in its contriving.

“It is amazing in every sense,” he went on, bringing the gourd nearer for her inspection. “Although the calabash is of a variety unknown in West Africa, the face gives a perfect likeness of an Oku chief. There is a man in Oku now who might have sat to the sculptor, though he is far from possessing the power, the tremendous strength, of the original. Yet it seems to me to be very old. I cannot, for the life of me——”

A loud crash interrupted him. Chris, removing the remains of the feast, had gazed for an instant at the astounding object in Warden’s hands. The boy backed away, and tripped over a coil of rope, with disastrous result to the crockery he was carrying.

Warden’s voice, no less than the laugh with which he greeted Chris’s discomfiture, restored the poise of the girl’s wits.

“You obtained that for me, did you not?” she cried with a curious agitation.

“Yes, of course,” said he.

“Then give it to me, please.”

He was certainly surprised, but passed the gourd to her without further comment. She half averted her eyes, took it unhesitatingly, and tried to pitch it into the water. For its size, it was astonishingly light. Were it as heavy as she imagined, it must have dropped into the Solent several yards from the vessel. As it was, it flew unexpectedly high, struck a rope, and fell back on deck, whence it bounded, with the irregular bounce of a Rugby football, right into Warden’s hands again.

“That was a mad trick,” he said almost angrily.

“Oh, please, throw it away,” she pleaded.

“Throw away a rare and valuable curio! Why?”

“Because it will bring you nothing but ruin and misery. Can you not see its awful meaning? Throw it away, I implore you!”

“But that would be a crime, the act of a Vandal. It may be the chiefest treasure of a connoisseur’s collection. Would you have me ape some fanatic Mussulman hammering to atoms a statue by Phidias?”

“There is no beauty in that monstrous thing. It is—bewitched.”

“Oh really, Miss Dane—we are in England, in the twentieth century.”

He laughed indulgently, with the air of an elder brother who had forgiven her for an exhibition of pettish temper. He held out the calabash at arm’s length and viewed it critically. He saw immediately that the crown inside the ring was misplaced.

“Hello!” he muttered, “you did some damage, then!”

Closer inspection revealed that the fall had loosened a tightly fitting lid hitherto concealed by the varnish used as a preservative. He removed it, and peered within.

“A document!” he announced elatedly. “Perhaps, after all, your unaccountable frenzy was a blessing in disguise. Now, Miss Dane, we may learn what you termed its ‘awful meaning.’ But, for pity’s sake, don’t yield to impulse and rend the manuscript. You have cracked his chiefship’s skull—I pray you spare his brains.”

CHAPTER III

WHEREIN A STRONG MAN YIELDS TO CIRCUMSTANCES

Curiosity, most potent of the primal instincts, conquered the girl’s fear. As it happened, Warden was still kneeling. He sat back on his heels, rested the calabash against his knees, and withdrew a strip of dried skin from its cunningly devised hiding–place. It was so curled and withered that it crackled beneath his fingers when he tried to unfold it. Quite without premeditation, he had placed the calabash in such wise that the negro’s features were hidden, and this fact alone seemed to give his companion confidence.

“What is it?” she asked, watching his efforts to persuade the twisted scroll to remain open.

“Parchment, and uncommonly tough and leathery at that.”

He did not look up. A queer notion was forming in his mind, and he was unwishful to meet her eyes just then.

“It looks very old,” she said.

“A really respectable antique, I fancy. Have you any pins—four, or more?”

She produced from a pocket a small hussif with its store of sewing accessories.

“A genie of the feminine order!” he cried. “I was merely hoping for a supply of those superfluous pins that used to lurk in my sister’s attire and only revealed their presence when I tried to reduce her to subjection.”

“Oh, you have a sister?”

“Yes—married—husband ranching in Montana.”

Meanwhile he was fastening the refractory document to the deck. With patience, helped by half a dozen pins, he managed to smooth it sufficiently to permit of detailed scrutiny. The girl, wholly interested now, knelt beside him. Any observer in a passing boat might have imagined that they were engaged in some profoundly devotional exercise. But the planks were hard. Miss Dane, seeing nothing but wrinkled parchment, yellow with age, and covered with strange scrawls that seemed to be more a part of the actual material than written on its surface, soon rose.

“Those hieroglyphics are beyond my ken,” she explained.

“They are Arabic,” said Warden—“Arabic characters, that is. The words are Latin—at least to some extent. Epistola Pauli Hebraicis has the ring of old Rome about it, even if it wears the garb of Mahomet.”

He straightened himself suddenly, and shouted for Chris with such energy that the girl was startled.

Chris popped his head out of the fore hatch, and was told to bring his father’s Bible, for Peter read two of its seven hundred odd pages each day in the year.

Warden compared book and scroll intently during many minutes. Miss Dane did not interrupt. She contented herself with a somewhat prolonged investigation of Warden’s face, or so much of it as was visible. Then she turned away and gazed at the Sans Souci. There was a wistful look in her eyes. Perhaps she wished that circumstances had contrived to exchange the yacht for the pilot–boat. At any rate, she was glad he had a sister. If only she had a brother!—just such a one!

At last the man’s deep, rather curt voice broke the silence.

“I have solved a part of the puzzle, Miss Dane,” he announced. “My Latinity was severely tried, but the chapter and verse gave me the English equivalent, and that supplied the key. Some one has that—some one has written here portions of the 37th and 38th verses of the eleventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Our version runs: ‘They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword ... they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.’ The remainder of the text is in yet another language—Portuguese, I imagine—but my small lore in that tongue is of no avail. In any case my vocabulary could not possibly consort with the stately utterances of St. Paul, as it consists mainly of remarks adapted to the intelligence of a certain type of freebooter peculiar to the West African hinterland.”

“What do you make of it all?” she asked.

“At present—nothing. It is an enigma, until I secure a Portuguese–English dictionary. Then I shall know more. Judging by appearances, the message, whatsoever it may be, is complete.”

“What sort of skin is that?”

He lifted his eyes slowly. She was conscious of a curious searching quality in his glance that she had not seen there before.

“It is hard to say,” he answered. And, indeed, he spoke the literal truth, being fully assured that the shriveled parchment pinned to the deck had once covered the bones of a white man.

“The writing is funny, too,” she went on, with charming disregard for the meaning of words.

“It is pricked in with a needle and Indian ink,” he explained. “That is an indelible method,” he continued hurriedly, seeing that she was striving to recall something that the phrase reminded her of, and here was a real danger of the suggestive word which had so nearly escaped his lips being brought to her recollection. “You see, I have been able to identify the gentleman who served the artist as model,” and he tapped the gourd lightly. “Therefore, I am sure that this comes from a land where pen and ink were unknown in the days when some unhappy Christian fashioned such a quaint contrivance to carry his screed.”

“Some unhappy Christian!” she repeated. “You mean that some European probably fell into the hands of West African savages years and years ago, and took this means of safeguarding a secret?”

“Who can tell?” he answered, picking up the calabash and gazing steadfastly at the malignant visage thus brought again into the full glare of the sun. “This fellow can almost speak. If only he could——”

“Oh, don’t,” wailed the girl. “My very heart stops beating when I see that dreadful face. Please put it away. If you will not throw it overboard, or smash it to atoms, at least hide it.”

“Sorry,” he said gruffly, fitting the loose lid into its place. He disliked hysterical women, and, greatly to his surprise, Evelyn Dane seemed to be rather disposed to yield to hysteria.

“The more I examine this thing the more I am bewildered,” he went on, endeavoring to cover his harshness by an assumption of indifference. “Where in the world did this varnish come from? It has all the gloss and smooth texture and absence of color that one finds on a genuine Cremona violin. The man who mixed it must have known the recipe lost when Antonio Stradivarius died. Are you good at dates?”

The suddenness of the question perplexed her.

“Do you mean the sort of dates that one acquired painfully at school?” she asked. “If so, I can give you the year of the Battle of Hastings or the signing of Magna Charta.”

“The period of a great artist’s career is infinitely more important,” he broke in. “Stradivarius was at the height of his fame about 1700. Now, if this is the varnish he and Amati and Guarnerius used, we have a shadowy clue to guide us in our inquiry.”

“Please don’t include me in the quest,” she said decisively. “I refuse to have anything to do with it. Leave the matter to me, and that nasty calabash floats off toward the Atlantic or sinks in the Solent, exactly as the fates direct. Positively, I am afraid of it.”

“I really meant to take it out of your sight when I caught a glint of the varnish,” he pleaded.

But his humility held a spice of sarcasm. Rising, he tucked the gourd under his coat. He was half–way down the hatch when his glance fell on the little square of skin on the deck. Already the heat of the sun had affected it, and two of the pins had given way. He came back.

“I may as well remove the lot while I am about it,” he said, stooping to withdraw the remaining pins.

“Oh, I am not to be frightened by that,” she cried, with a pout that was reminiscent of the schoolgirl period.

He laughed, but suppressed the quip that might have afforded some hidden satisfaction.

“Gourd and document are much of a muchness,” he said carelessly.

The parchment curled with unexpected speed, and caught his fingers in an uncanny grip. Without thinking what he was doing, he shook it off as though it were a scorpion. Then, flushing a little, he seized it, and stuffed it into a pocket. Miss Dane missed no item of this by–play. But she, too, could exercise the art of self–repression, and left unuttered the words that her heart dictated. Being a methodical person, she gathered the pins and replaced them in the hussif. She had just finished when Warden returned.

“You don’t mean to say——” he began, but checked himself. After all, if he harped on the subject, there was some risk that the girl’s intuition might read a good deal of the truth into what she had seen and heard during the past half–hour. So he changed a protest into a compliment.

“Economy is the greatest of the domestic virtues. Now, a mere man would have waited until one of those pins stuck into his foot as he was crossing the deck for his morning dip, and then he would say things. By the way, Peter believes the breeze is freshening. Would you care for a short cruise?”

A delightful color suffused the girl’s face. “I feel like lifting my eyebrows at my own behavior,” she said, “but I must admit that I should enjoy it immensely. Please bring me back here before six o’clock. I wish to go on board the Sans Souci the moment Mrs. Baumgartner arrives.”

In response to Warden’s summons, Peter and Chris appeared on deck. The Nancy cast off from her buoy, her canvas leaped to the embrace of the wind, and soon she was slipping through the water at a spanking pace in the direction of Portsmouth and the anchored fleet, for the cutter could move when her sails filled.

Thenceforth the talk was nautical. Peter entertained them with details of the warships or the yachts competing in the various races. Once, by chance, the conversation veered close to West Africa, when Warden gave a vivid description of the sensations of the novice who makes his first landing in a surf–boat. But Peter soon brought them back to the British Isles by his reminiscences of boarding salt–stained and sooty tramps in an equinoctial gale off Lundy. No unpleasing incident marred a perfect afternoon until tea was served, and the cutter ran to her moorings.

The guardian Gorgon of the Sans Souci watched their return, and it was evident that his solitary vigil was still unbroken. About half–past six, when a swarm of yachts were beating up the roads on the turn of the tide, a steam launch approached the Sans Souci and deposited a lady and gentleman on the gangway. They were alone. The watchman helped them to reach the deck, a financial transaction took place between him and the gentleman, the latter disappeared instantly, and the watchman descended the ladder with the evident intention of entering the launch.

But he hesitated, and pointed to the Nancy, whereupon the lady, to whom he was speaking, looked fixedly at the cutter and her occupants.

“That is Mrs. Baumgartner, I am sure,” said Evelyn eagerly. “Will you take me across in the dinghy at once? Then, if necessary, I can reach Portsmouth easily this evening, as I shall have gained half an hour.”

She gave no heed to the astounding fact that if these people were really the yacht–owner and his wife they were absolutely alone on the vessel. Warden, unwilling to arouse distrust in her mind, bade Peter draw the dinghy alongside.

“Good–by,” he said, extending his hand frankly. “The world is small, and we shall meet again. Remember, you have promised to write, and, in the meantime, do not forget that if the Nancy or her crew can offer you any service we are within hailing distance.”

“You are not leaving Cowes to–night, then?”

“No. To–morrow, if the wind serves, we go east, to Brighton and Dover, and perhaps as far north as Cromer. After that, to Holland. But no matter where I am, I manage to secure my letters.”

Evelyn gave his hand a grateful little pressure. She was not insensible of the tact that sent Peter as her escort.

“You have been exceedingly good and kind to me,” she said. “I shall never forget this most charming day, and I shall certainly write to you. Good–by, Chris. Good–by, dear little ship. What a pity—“ she paused and laughed with pretty embarrassment. “I think I was going to say what a pity it is that these pleasant hours cannot last longer—they come too rarely in life.”

And with that she was gone, though she turned twice during her short voyage, and waved a hand to the man who was looking at her so steadily while he leaned against the cutter’s mast and smoked in silence.

There could be no doubt that the lady on the Sans Souci was Mrs. Baumgartner. No sooner did she realize that Miss Dane’s arrival was imminent than she threw up her hands with a Continental affectation of amazement and ran into the deck cabin. To all seeming, she bade the launch await further orders. Baumgartner and his wife reappeared, they indulged in gesticulations to which Warden could readily imagine an accompaniment of harsh–sounding German, and, evidently as the outcome of their talk, the launch steamed away.

Warden smiled sourly.

“If those people had committed a murder on board, and were anxious to sink their victim several fathoms deep before anybody interfered with them, they could hardly be more excited,” he thought. “Perhaps it won’t do my young friend any good if I remain here staring straight at the yacht.”

He busied himself with an unnecessary stowing away of the cutter’s mainsail, but contrived to watch events sufficiently to note that Mrs. Baumgartner received her guest with voluble courtesy. Baumgartner, a French–polished edition of the bacon–factor type of man, bustled the two ladies out of sight, and thenceforth, during more than an hour, the deck of the Sans Souci was absolutely untenanted.

Twilight was deepening; lights began to twinkle on shore; not a few careful captains showed riding lamps, although the precaution was yet needless; launches and ships’ boats were cleaving long black furrows in the slate–blue surface of the Solent as they ferried parties of diners from shore or yachts—but never a sign of life was there on board the Sans Souci. Peter, undisturbed by speculations anent the future of the young lady whose presence had brightened the deck of the Nancy during the afternoon, cooked an appetizing supper. He was surprised when Warden expressed a wish that they should eat without a light. It did not occur to him that his employer was mounting guard over the Baumgartners’ yacht, and meant to have a clear field of vision while a shred of daylight remained.

The progress of the meal was rudely broken in on by Peter himself. Although the placid silence of the night was frequently disturbed by the flapping of propellers, his sailor’s ear caught the stealthy approach of the one vessel that boded possible danger. Swinging himself upright he roared:

“Where’s that ugly Dutchman a–comin’ to? Quick with a light, Chris, or she’ll be on top of us!”

It was the Emperor’s cruiser–yacht that had so suddenly upset his equanimity. Returning to Cowes after convoying the yacht flotilla, she was now fully a mile away from her usual anchorage. But the Nancy was safe enough. The imperial yacht stopped at a distance of three cables’ lengths, reversed her engines, let go an anchor, and ran up to the chain hawser when the hoarse rattle of its first rush had ceased.

Chris lost no time in producing a lantern, and his father slung it in its proper place.

“It ‘ud be just our luck if we wos run down,” Warden heard him mutter. “That nigger’s phiz we shipped to–day is enough to sink any decent craft, blow me, if it ain’t!”

Warden, whose vigil had not relaxed for an instant, saw that some one was hoisting a masthead light on the Sans Souci. Her starboard light followed, and soon the yellow eyes of a row of closed ports stared at him solemnly across the intervening water. As the principal living–rooms of such a vessel must certainly be the deck saloons, he was more than ever puzzled by the eccentric behavior of her owners. Every other yacht in the roadstead was brilliantly illuminated. The Sans Souci alone seemed to court secrecy.

It has been seen that, in holiday mood, he was a creature of impulse, nor did he lack the audacity of prompt decision when it was called for. He showed both qualities now by hauling the dinghy alongside and stepping into it.

“Goin’ ashore, sir?” cried the surprised Peter.

They kept early hours on board, and Warden’s usual habit was to be asleep by half–past nine when the cutter was at her moorings.

“No. I mean to pay a call. Got a match?”

“Let me take you, sir.”

“No need, thanks. I’m bound for the Sans Souci. I may be back in five minutes.”

He lit a cigar, cast off, and rowed himself leisurely toward the vessel which had filled so large a space in his thoughts ever since he met Evelyn Dane in the street outside the steamer pier. His intent was to ask for her, to refuse to go away unless he spoke to her, and, when she appeared, as his well–ordered senses told him would surely be the case, to frame some idle excuse for the liberty he had taken. She had talked of returning to Portsmouth that evening, and it might serve if he expressed his willingness to carry her imaginary luggage from the quay to the railway station. She was shrewd and tactful. She would understand, perhaps, that he was anxious for her welfare, and it would not embarrass her to state whether or not his services were needed.

He was nearing the yacht when the red and green eyes of a launch gleamed at him as he glanced over his shoulder to take measure of his direction. There was no other vessel exactly in line with the Sans Souci, and the thought struck him that this might be the messenger of the gods in so far as they busied themselves with Miss Dane’s affairs. There was no harm in waiting a few minutes, so he altered the dinghy’s course in such wise that the launch, if it were actually bound for the yacht, must pass quite closely, though he, to all outward seeming, was in no way concerned with its destination. His guess was justified. While the tiny steamer was still fifty yards distant, the quick pulsation of her engines slackened. She drew near, and the figure of a sailor with a boat–hook in his hands was silhouetted against the last bright strip of sky in the northwest. She passed, and it demanded all Arthur Warden’s cool nerve to maintain a steady pull at the oars and smoke the cigar of British complacency when he saw Miguel Figuero and three men of the tribe of Oku seated in the cushioned space aft.

[ill060]

The presence of Figuero in Cowes was perplexing

Page [49]

He could not be mistaken. He knew the West African hinterland so well that he could distinguish the inhabitants of different districts by facial characteristics slight in themselves but as clearly visible to the eye of experience as the varying race–marks of a Frenchman and a Norwegian. Coming thus strangely on the heels of the discovery of that amazing calabash, the incident was almost stupefying. The presence of Figuero alone in Cowes was perplexing—the appearance of three Oku blacks was a real marvel—that all four should be visitors to the Sans Souci savored of necromancy. But Warden did not hesitate. He made certain that the strange quartette were being conveyed to the yacht; he took care to note that their arrival was expected, seeing that Baumgartner himself came down the gangway with a lantern to light the way on board; and then he pulled back to the Nancy. Ere he reached her, the launch had gone shoreward again.

“You’ve changed your mind, sir,” was Peter’s greeting.

“You were keeping a lookout, then?” said Warden.

“’Ave nothin’ else to do, so to speak, sir.”

“Well, jump in and take the oars. I shall be with you in a moment.”

Warden dived into the small cabin, rummaged in a box, and produced two revolvers. He examined both weapons carefully under the cutter’s light, and ascertained that they were properly loaded, whereupon one went into each of the outer pockets of his coat.

“Now take me to the Sans Souci, Peter,” he said. “When I reach the gangway, pull off a couple of lengths, and stand by.”

“What’s doin’?” asked Peter, who was by no means unobservant.

“Nothing, I hope. I may have to talk big, and twelve ounces of lead lend weight to an argument. But I am puzzled, Peter, and I hate that condition. You remember our nigger friend on the gourd?”

“Remember ‘im. Shall I ever forget ‘im?”—and the ex–pilot spat.

“Well, three live members of his tribe, and the worst Portuguese slave–trader and gin–runner now known in West Africa, have just boarded the Sans Souci. I don’t consider them fit company for Miss Dane. What do you say?”

Peter hung on the oars.

“W’y not let Chris come an’ look after the dinghy?” he said. “You may need a friendly hand w’en the band plays.”

Warden laughed.

“We are in England, Peter,” he replied; but the words had a far less convincing sound in his ears now than when he protested against Evelyn Dane’s unreasoning detestation of the carved gourd. One of the weapons in his pockets was actually resting on the crackling skin of a man who had been flayed alive—and most probably so flayed by ancestors of the negroes who were on board the Sans Souci at that instant. The thought strengthened his determination to see and speak to the girl that night. At all costs he would persevere until she herself assured him that she had no wish to go ashore. He even made up his mind to persuade her to return to Portsmouth for the night, and it seemed to him that no consideration could move him from his purpose.

Whereat Lachesis, she who spins the thread of life, must have smiled. Short as was the distance to be traversed by the dinghy under the impetus of Peter Evans’s strong arms, the cruel goddess who pays no regard to human desires had already contrived the warp and weft of circumstances that would deter even a bolder man than Warden from thrusting himself unbidden into the queer company gathered on the yacht.

The pilot was pulling straight to the gangway when a large steam launch whistled an angry warning that he was crossing her bows. He twisted the dinghy broadside on, and both Warden and he saw two officers in the uniform of a foreign navy step on to the Sans Souci gangway, where Baumgartner, bare–headed and obsequious of manner, was standing to receive them.

The Nancy’s boat was so near that her occupants could hear the millionaire’s words distinctly as he greeted the first of his two latest visitors. He spoke in German, and Peter was none the wiser, but Warden understood, and his errant fears for Evelyn Dane’s welfare were promptly merged in a very ocean of bewilderment.

“The Nancy for us, Peter,” he murmured. “As they say in the States, I have bitten off more than I can chew. Do you know who that is?”

“Which?—the little one?”

“Yes.”

“Mebbe he’s the skipper of the Dutchman yonder. That’s her launch.”

“He is skipper of many Dutchmen. Mr. Baumgartner addressed him as ‘emperor.’ Give way, Peter. We must watch and eke pray, but there are affairs afoot—or shall I say afloat—that it behooves not a simple official in the Nigeria Protectorate to meddle with. God wot! I have earned a captaincy and a year’s leave by serving my country in a humble capacity. Let me not lose both by an act of lèse majesté, and it would be none else were I to break in on the remarkable conclave now assembled on board the Sans Souci!”

CHAPTER IV

FIGUERO MAKES A DISCOVERY

“You don’t mean to say——” gasped Peter.

“I do. And the less notice we attract during the next five minutes the better I shall be pleased. Bear away to the nearest yacht, and let me apologize for being late.”

So, if there were eyes on board the Sans Souci that paid heed to aught save the coming of an august visitor, they would have seen nothing more remarkable than a small boat visiting at least two vessels in seemingly unsuccessful quest of one among the hundreds of yachts in the roadstead.

Following a devious route, the dinghy reached the cutter from the port side. Warden secured a pair of night binoculars, seated himself on the hatch, and mounted guard over the Sans Souci. The cruiser’s launch was still alongside, and the time passed slowly until the two officers descended the gangway and were borne swiftly in the direction of the Royal Yacht Club landing–slip. They had been on board three–quarters of an hour.

There was now so little movement afloat that the pulsation of the screw could be heard until it was quite near the private pier. Finally it was dominated by the strains of the Castle band beginning the evening programme with the “Boulanger March,” and Warden smiled as he thought how singularly inappropriate the lively tune must sound in the ears of the potentate hurrying shoreward.

The band broke off abruptly; after a brief pause it struck up again.

“The King, Gord bless ‘im!” said Peter loyally.

“No. That is not for the King. They are playing Heil dir im Sieger Krantz” said Warden, still peering at the Sans Souci.

“Well, it’s the fust time I’ve ever heerd ‘Gord save the King’ called that,” expostulated the pilot.

“Same tune, different words.”

Peter sniffed in his scorn.

“They’ll be sayin’ the Old Hundredth is a Dutch hornpipe next,” he growled.

The Prussian National hymn might have acted as a tocsin to Mr. Baumgartner, for a light was hoisted forthwith over the poop of the Sans Souci, and Warden discerned the tall forms of the three West African natives standing near the tubby man who manipulated rope and pulley. Figuero was not visible at first. Warden began to be annoyed. Could it be possible that such a social outcast could be left in Evelyn Dane’s company? Developments soon relieved the tension. A launch puffed up and took away the visitors, Figuero being the last to step on board. The noisy little vessel was succeeded by two boats filled with sailors and servants. Within a few minutes the yacht’s officers arrived, the deck saloons were brilliantly illuminated, and the Sans Souci became a jeweled palace like unto the host of her congeners in the Solent.

By this time Peter was as interested as his employer in the comings and goings of their neighbors.

“There’s more in that than meets the eye, Mr. Warden,” he said, rolling some tobacco between his palms preparatory to filling his pipe.

“Yet a good deal has met our eyes to–night,” was the quiet answer.

Peter worked his great hands methodically. He was not a man of many words; and when he expressed an opinion it was the outcome of calm deliberation.

“Tell me who them niggers an’ the other party wos, an’ I’ll do some fair guessin’,” he said. “Rum thing, too, that such a gazebo as that murderous–lookin’ swab on the calabash should cross our course just when it did. Were did it come from—that’s wot I want to know. Has there bin an earthquake? If looks count for anythink, it might have risen straight up from——”

“Peter,” broke in Warden, “I hope Chris is in bed?”

The pilot laughed.

“Time we wos, too, sir. May I ax w’ere his black nibs is stowed?”

“Among my traps. Forget it. I shall send it to London in the morning.”

“An’ a good job to be rid of it. I’ve seen some queer fish in the sea, from bottle–nosed whales an’ sharks to dead pigs who ‘ad cut their own throats with their fore feet by swimmin’ from a wrecked ship, but never before ‘ave I clapped my peepers on a fizzy–mahog like that.”

Twice had an unusually long speech betrayed his irate sentiment. He was deeply stirred. Warden, smoking and listening in silence, but never relaxing his vigilant scrutiny of the Sans Souci, felt that, in very truth, there must be some malign influence in the carved head on the gourd ere it would arouse the intense repugnance of two such different natures as those of the bluff, good–tempered sailor and the dainty, well–bred girl who had come so suddenly into his life.

He did not pursue the conversation. Though Evans was quite trustworthy, there was no need to make him a confidant in matters which might have the gravest bearing on an already troubled position in West Africa. The pilot’s carefully charged pipe was nearly empty when Warden surprised him with an abrupt question.

“What time does the first train leave for London in the morning?”

“Round about seven o’clock,” he said.

“You ain’t thinkin’ of chuckin’ the cruise, I hope, sir,” he went on, and the dejection in his voice showed that he was prepared for the worst.

“For a few hours, perhaps a night—that is all.”

“So you b’lieve they mean mischief?” growled Peter, jerking a thumb toward the yacht.

This direct and forcible reasoning was unexpected. Yet any level–headed man might have reached practically the same conclusions from the night’s happenings. They were clear enough to one versed in most of the intricacies and pitfalls of West African politics, nor did Warden endeavor to evade the point.

“I believe that there are people in London who should know what you and I know,” he said slowly. “Anyhow, let us turn in. Miss Evelyn Dane evidently sleeps on board. Perhaps the morning’s light may dispel some of the vapors that cloud our brains to–night.”

The early train from Cowes did not, however, carry Arthur Warden among the London–bound passengers.

A glimpse of Evelyn on the deck of the Sans Souci altered that portion of his plans. She waved a pleasant greeting, held up both hands with the fingers spread widely apart, and nodded her head in the direction of the town. He took the gesture to mean that she was going ashore at ten o’clock, and he signaled back the information that he would precede her at nine. Not until he found himself dawdling on the quay, killing time as lazily as possible, did the thought obtrude that he was extraordinarily anxious to meet her again. Of course, it irritated him. A smart soldier, with small means beyond his pay—with a foot just planted on the first rung of the administrator’s ladder in a land where life itself is too often the price asked for higher climbing—he had no business to show any undue desire to cultivate the acquaintance of young ladies so peculiarly eligible as Evelyn Dane. He knew this so well that he scoffed at the notion, put two knuckles between his lips, and emitted a peculiarly shrill and compelling whistle.

For its special purpose—the summoning of a boy selling newspapers—it was a sure means toward an end. It drew the boy’s attention, even evoked his envy. But it chanced also to be a krooboy call on the Upper Niger, and in that capacity it brought a lean, swarthy face to the window of a bedroom in a quiet hotel overlooking the quay.

Señor Miguel Figuero looked annoyed at first. His dark, prominent eyes searched the open space for one of the negroes whom he expected to find there, but his wrathful expression changed to blank incredulity when he saw Warden. The phase of sheer unbelief did not last long. He darted out of the room, and rapped sharply on a neighboring door.

“O Loanda, M’Wanga! you fit for get up one–time,” he shouted.

Crossing the corridor, he roused another dusky gentleman, Pana by name, with the same imperative command. Soon the four were gathered at a window and gazing at Warden.

“Dep’ty Commissioner Brass River lib,” whispered the Portuguese eagerly. “You savvy—him dat was in Oku bush las’ year. Him captain Hausa men. You lib for see him.”

“O Figuero,” said one of the negroes, seemingly their leader, “I plenty much savvy. I see him palaver in village.”

“S’pose we fit for catch ‘im?” suggested another.

“That fool talk here,” growled Figuero. “You lib for see him to–day—then we catch him bush one–time. I hear him give boat–boy whistle. Stick your eyes on him, you pagans, an’ don’t you lib for forget—savvy?”

They grunted agreement. The West African bushman has to depend almost exclusively on his five senses for continued existence, and there was little doubt that Arthur Warden would be recognized by each man at any future date within reason, no matter what uniform he wore, or how greatly his features might be altered by hardship or fever.

“Why he lib for dis place?” asked Loanda, the chief, who remembered Warden’s part in the suppression of a slave–raid and the punishment subsequently inflicted on those who aided and abetted it.

“No savvy—yet. I lib for watch—then I savvy,” said the Portuguese.

“O Figuero, I fit for chop,” murmured Pana, who found little amusement in gazing idly at an Englishman through a window when there were good things to eat in the hotel.

“All right. Go an’ chop, but remain in room till I come. Then I dash you one quart gin.”

Pana grinned.

“I chop one–time,” he said, and, indeed, the three looked as though they could tackle a roasted sheep comfortably.

Meanwhile, Warden opened his paper and took more interest than usual in the news. He learned that the emperor dined on board the imperial yacht and subsequently visited the Castle, being accompanied by Count von Rippenbach as aide–de–camp.

Warden did not pretend to have more than a passing knowledge of foreign politics, but he noted the name, the Count having undoubtedly been a party to the conference on the Sans Souci.

Another paragraph was of more immediate import, inasmuch as it tended to solve the mystery of the calabash. It ran:

“The emperor’s yacht, after watching the British fleet at gun practice off Selsey Bill yesterday, returned to the island and followed the racers during several hours. An alarming incident occurred when rounding the Foreland. Though a course was laid close in–shore, both charts and lead showed ten fathoms of water. Suddenly the cruiser struck. At first it was believed that she had run into some unknown sandbank formed by a recent gale, but examination revealed that she had collided with a sunken wreck, invisible even at low–water spring tide. No damage whatever was done to the stately vessel, which continued the cruise after a delay of a few minutes.

“A Sandown gentleman, passing the same spot later in his launch, found some floating wreckage. The pieces he brought ashore are believed to be parts of a ship dating back at least a couple of centuries, as there is no record within modern times of any wooden ship foundering in the locality. The gentleman in question decided to mark the exact spot with a buoy, and a diver’s services will be requisitioned when tide and weather are suitable, so there is some possibility that a number of antiques, together with a quantity of very old timber, will be recovered.”

Warden read the item twice. He found that the emperor was not on board his own yacht at the time. The remainder of the newspaper was dull. He threw away all but the page referring to Cowes, which he stuffed in a pocket, and, although he held his nerves under good control, he almost swore aloud when his fingers touched the roll of skin, whose very existence he had forgotten for the hour.

The minutes passed slowly until a gig from the Sans Souci deposited Miss Dane on the wharf.

Not wishing to become known to any of the yacht’s people if he could possibly avoid it, Warden strolled away a little distance as soon as the boat appeared in the Medina. Figuero, whose eyes had never left him for an instant since he emitted the telltale whistle, hurried to the door of the hotel and narrowly escaped being discovered when Warden turned on his heel.

The Portuguese, an expert tracker in the bush, was out of his element in Cowes, but he managed to slip out of sight in good time. He was safer than he imagined. Warden was looking at Evelyn Dane, and she made a pretty enough picture on this fine summer’s day to keep any man’s glance from wandering.

It gave him a subtle sense of joy to note the unfeigned pleasure of her greeting. Her face mantled with a slight color as she held out her hand.

“I am on my way home,” she cried, “but my train does not leave for half an hour. It is so good of you to wait here. I was dreading that you might row across to the yacht—not because I did not want to see you again, but Mr. Baumgartner made such a point of excluding me from any knowledge of his visitors last night that he would be positively ill if he guessed I had friends on board the Nancy.”

“And Mrs. Baumgartner——”

“She is a dear creature, but much in awe where her husband’s business affairs are concerned. She and I passed the evening together. She would not hear of my departure, but she warned me not to say a word about my afternoon’s adventures. Mr. Baumgartner is of a nervous disposition. I suppose he thinks all the world is watching him because he is a rich man.”

“There is method in his madness this time,” laughed Warden. “Let me tell you quite candidly that if some one told him my name and occupation and added the information that I kept a close eye on the Sans Souci between the hours of 5.30 and 9 p.m. last night, he, being of plethoric habit, would be in danger of apoplexy.”

They were walking to the station. Evelyn, unable to decide whether or not to take his words seriously, gave him a shy look.

“You knew I was safe on board,” she said.

For some reason, the assumption that he was thinking only of her caused the blood to tingle in Warden’s veins.

“That is the nicest thing you could have said,” he agreed, and she in turn felt her heart racing.

“Of course you are very well aware that I did not imagine you might not be differently occupied,” she protested.

“Let us not quarrel about meanings. You were delightfully right. It is the simple fact that before you were many minutes in the Sans Souci’s cabin—by the way, where were you?”

“In Mrs. Baumgartner’s state–room.”

“Ah. Well—to continue—I was nearly coming to take you away, vi et armis.”

“But why?”

“You have no idea whom Mr. Baumgartner was entertaining?”

“None.”

“The first person to reach the Sans Souci after yourself was the Portuguese land–pirate I mentioned to you yesterday. He was accompanied by three chiefs of the men of Oku. Do you recollect my description of the mask on the gourd?”

She uttered a startled little cry.

“Are you in earnest?” was all she could find to say.

“I was in deadly earnest about eight o’clock last evening, I assure you. Had it not been for a most amazing intervention you would certainly have heard me demanding your instant appearance on deck.”

“Then what happened?”

“I must begin by admitting that I was worried about you. I got into the dinghy, intending to see you on some pretext. A launch containing this precious gang crossed my bows, and I returned to the Nancy to—to secure Peter’s assistance. We were near the Sans Souci on the second trip when another launch arrived, and there stepped on board the yacht a gentleman whose presence assured me that you, at least, were safe enough. You will credit that element in a strained situation when I tell you that the latest arrival was the emperor.”

“The Emperor!” she almost gasped. “Do you mean——”

“Sh–s–s–h! No names. If walls have ears, we are surrounded by listeners. But I am not mistaken. I saw him clearly. I heard Baumgartner’s humble greeting. And the really remarkable fact is that Peter and you and I share a very important state secret.”

“I—I don’t understand,” she said, bewildered.

“Of course you don’t. Not many people could guess why the most powerful monarch on the Continent of Europe should wish to confer with four of the ripest scoundrels that the West African hinterland can produce. Nevertheless, it is true.”

“Then that is why Mrs. Baumgartner kept me closeted in her state–room nearly two hours?”

“Yes. By the way, has she engaged you?”

“Yes. She was exceedingly kind. The terms and conditions are most generous. I rejoin the yacht and meet her daughter at Milford next Wednesday. Then we go to Scotland for some shooting, and the Sans Souci returns to Portsmouth to be refitted for a cruise to Madeira and the Canaries during the winter months. Altogether, she sketched a very agreeable programme. But you have excited my curiosity almost beyond bounds by your description of the goings–on last night. My share of the important state secret you spoke of is very slight. It consists in being wholly ignorant of it. Can you enlighten me?”

“There is no reason why I should not. It will invest the Baumgartners with a romantic nimbus which, judging solely from observations, might otherwise be lacking.”

The girl laughed.

“They are pleasant people, but rather commonplace,” she said.

“Well, we can talk freely in the train.”

“You are not leaving Cowes this morning on my account?”

Perhaps her voice showed a degree of restraint. Though she was beginning to like Captain Arthur Warden more than she cared to admit even to herself, he must not be allowed to believe that their friendship could go to extremes.

“If you don’t mind enduring my company as far as Portsmouth, I propose to inflict it on you,” he explained good–humoredly. “Circumstances compel me to visit London to–day. Chris is now waiting at the station with my bag. I would have left the island by the first train had I not been lucky enough to see you earlier and interpret your signal correctly.”

“I only intended to tell you——”

“The time you would come ashore. Exactly. Why are you vexed because we are fellow–travelers till midday?”

“I am not vexed. I am delighted.”

“You expressed your delight with the warmth of an iceberg.”

“Now you are angry with me.”

“Furious. But please give me your well–balanced opinion. If peaches are good in the afternoon should they not be better in the morning?”

“I could eat a peach,” she admitted.

Figuero, who did not fail to pick up the newspaper thrown aside by Warden, followed them without any difficulty. When they stopped at a shop in the main street he took the opportunity to buy a copy of the torn newspaper. Mingling with a crowd at the station, he saw them enter a first–class carriage. His acquaintance with the English language was practically confined to the trader’s tongue spoken all along the West African coast, and he had little knowledge of English ways. But he was shrewd and tactful, and his keen wits were at their utmost tension. Hence, he was not at a loss how to act when he found that a ticket examiner was visiting each compartment. Seizing a chance that presented itself, he asked the man if he could inform him where the pretty girl in blue and the tall gentleman in the yachtsman’s clothes were going, and a tip of five shillings unlocked the official lips.

“The lady has a return ticket to Langton, in Oxfordshire, and the gentleman a single to London,” said the man.

Figuero did not trust his memory. He asked the name of the first–named town again, and how to spell it. Then he wrote something in a note–book and hurried back to the harbor. It was essential that he should find out what vessels these two people came from, for the presence of a Southern Nigeria Deputy Commissioner in Cowes was not a coincidence to be treated lightly.

Seated in a tiny boat in the harbor was a rotund, jolly–looking personage of seafaring aspect. He and the boat were there when the larger craft which brought the girl ashore came to the quay, but Figuero had taken no notice of Evelyn then, because he had not the least notion that Warden was awaiting her. Possibly the sailor–like individual in the small boat could slake his thirst for knowledge.

So he hailed him.

“You lib for know Capt’n Varden?” he asked, with an ingratiating smile and a hand suggestively feeling for a florin.

“I wot?” said the stout man, poking out a wooden leg as he swung round to face his questioner.

“You savvy—you know Capt’n Varden, a mister who walk here one–time—just now—for long minutes.”

“There’s no one of that name in these parts,” replied Peter, who thought he identified this swarthy–faced inquirer.

“Den p’raps you tell name of young lady—very beautiful young lady—who lib for here in ship–boat not much time past? She wear blue dress an’ brown hat an’ brown boots.”

“Oh, everybody knows her,” grinned Peter. “She’s Miss Polly Perkins, of Paddington Green.”

“You write ‘im name, an’ I dash you two shillin’,” said Figuero eagerly.

Peter was about to reply that if any dashing was to be done he could take a hand in the game himself, but he thought better of it. Taking the proffered note–book and pencil, he wrote the words laboriously, and pocketed his reward with an easy conscience.

“When Chris heaves in sight I’ll send him back for two pounds of steak,” he communed. “It was honestly earned, an’ I figure on the Captain bein’ arf tickled to death when I tell ‘im how the Portygee played me for a sucker.”

Figuero hastened to the hotel, saw that his sable friends were well supplied with gin and cigarettes, bade them lie perdu till he came back, and made his way to the quay again. Peter was still there, apparently without occupation.

“You lib for take me to yacht Sans Souci an’ I dash you five shillin’?” he said.

“Right–o, jump in,” cried Peter, but he added under his breath, “Sink me if he don’t use a queer lingo, but money talks.”

He used all his artifices to get Figuero to discuss his business in Cowes, but he met a man who could turn aside such conversational arrows without effort. At any rate, Peter was now sure he was not mistaken in believing that his fare was the “Portuguese slave–trader and gin–runner” spoken of by Warden, and he had not failed to notice the hotel which Figuero had visited so hurriedly.

There was a check at the yacht. Mr. Baumgartner had gone ashore, but would return for luncheon. So Peter demanded an extra half crown for the return journey, and met a wondering Chris with a broad smile.

“You’re goin’ shoppin’, sonny,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been earnin’ good money to–day. Sheer off for ‘arf an hour, an’ I’ll tie up the dinghy. I’ve got a notion that a pint would be a treat.”

Thus it came to pass that while Señor Miguel Figuero was puzzling, even alarming the millionaire yacht–owner with his broken talk of Captain Varden, Dep’ty Commissioner and leader of bush expeditions—alarming him so thoroughly that he never dreamed of associating Miss Evelyn Dane with the Polly Perkins of Peter’s juvenile memories—Arthur Warden himself was driving in a hansom from Waterloo to the Foreign Office, and wondering what new phase of existence would open up before him when his news became known to the men who control the destinies of Outer Britain.

CHAPTER V

A MAN AND A STORY—BOTH UNEMOTIONAL

Warden, running the gauntlet of doorkeepers and other human watch–dogs, was finally ushered into the presence of an Under Secretary. To him he detailed his business, and, lacking neither the perception nor the modesty that often characterize men of action, he had barely begun to speak ere he fancied that his recital did not command a tenth part of the interest it warranted. Few talkers can withstand the apparent boredom of a hearer, and Warden happened not to be one of the few. Condensing his account of the proceedings on board the Sans Souci to the barest summary, he stopped abruptly.

The Under Secretary, leaning back in his chair, rested his elbows on its comfortable arms, and pressed together the tips of his outspread fingers. He scrutinized his nails, and seemingly was much troubled because he had not called in at the manicurist’s after lunch. Nevertheless, being an Under Secretary, he owned suave manners, and the significance of Warden’s docket–like sentences did not escape him.

“Is that all?” he asked, turning his hands and examining their backs intently.

“Practically all.”

There was silence for a while. A clock ticked softly as if to emphasize the peace that reigned on the park side of Whitehall.

“But you make certain deductions, I take it?” murmured the official.

“I could hardly fail to do that, knowing West Africa as I do,” was the curt answer. Warden was really annoyed with the man. Without wishing him any positive evil, he wondered how far the Foreign Office cult would carry such an exquisite through a Bush campaign, with its wasting fever, its appalling monotony, its pathless wanderings midst foul swamp and rain–soaked forest—perhaps a month’s floundering through quagmire and jungle with a speedy end under a shower of scrap iron fired from some bell–mouthed cannon.

“Will you be good enough to favor me with them?” purred the other, now absorbed in his palms.

“If I had a map—” began Warden, almost contemptuously.

The Under Secretary rose with a certain languid elegance. He was really tired, having worked at the Macedonian gendarmerie regulations until three o’clock that morning. High on the wall, behind Warden’s chair, were several long, narrow, mahogany cases, each fitted with a pendent cord. The Under Secretary pulled one, and a large map of Africa fell from its cover.

“I am fairly well acquainted with the Protectorate, but now you can talk to scale,” he said, going back to his seat and resuming his nonchalant attitude.

Warden, still smarting under a sense of the evident insignificance of Britain beyond the seas in the eyes of its home–dwelling custodians, spoke brusquely enough.

“On the Benuë river, a tributary of the Niger, four hundred miles from the coast,” he said, “you will find the town of Giré in the Yola District. You see it is just within the sphere of British influence. Germany claims the opposite bank. Well, Oku is near Giré. Oku is not on the map——”

“I put it there myself yesterday,” broke in the Under Secretary.

Warden was gifted with keen sight. He swung round and gave the huge sheet on the wall a closer scrutiny. A great many corrections had been made on it with pen and ink. They were carried out so neatly that they resembled the engraved lettering.

For an instant his eyes met those of the Under Secretary; thenceforth a better understanding reigned.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Since you gave attention to the position of Oku so recently, I am half inclined to believe that not only my information but my opinions are forestalled.”

“We have been at cross purposes,” murmured the tired voice. “You are Captain Arthur Warden, who commanded the Oku punitive expedition thirteen months ago. Since early yesterday morning the Colonial Office, at my request, has been trying to discover your whereabouts—trying in vain, I gather—or you would have mentioned the fact. I really wished to consult you with reference to this very topic. It is all the more gratifying that chance should have led you to be a witness of events which were surmises on our part, and that your sense of duty should bring you here at the earliest possible moment.”

Warden positively blushed. It was a relief that the Under Secretary was obviously inclined to visit his manicurist that afternoon rather than wait till the morrow. Such preoccupation gave him time to recover. But he devoted no more time to silent theories anent the disgraceful apathy of the home authorities with reference to West African affairs.

“I cannot insist too strongly on the efforts that are being made by our neighbors to undermine British influence in that quarter,” he said. “Their traders pander to native excesses and humor their prejudices. Their pioneers are constantly pushing northward toward the shores of Lake Tchad. Arms and ammunition are being smuggled across the boundary at many points. Preparations are quietly in progress for a transfer of power if ever British authority shows signs of weakening. Therefore, I draw the worst auguries from the presence in Cowes of a clever and unscrupulous filibuster like Figuero, especially when he acts as bear–leader to three disaffected chiefs. Oku, as you know, is an insignificant place, but it has one supreme attribute that gives it among the negroes the importance of Mecca in the Mohammedan world. It is the center of African witchcraft. Its ju–ju men are the most noted in the whole continent. Their fetish is deadly and irresistible. They can compass the ruin of tribal leaders who are immeasurably more wealthy and powerful than any of their own men. I do not pretend to explain the reason—I can only state the fact—but there can be no gainsaying the simple truth that if men of Oku place their ban on any tribe or individual, that tribe or that man is doomed.”

“Can you give instances?”

“Yes. As far away as the river Akini, in the Yoruba District”—and this time Warden did not point to the map, though his words bridged six hundred miles miles—“there was a quarrel between the up–country traders and the shippers at Lagos. The merchants in the interior tried to close the trade routes, but the local chiefs refused to help them. By some means the traders secured the Oku ban on their side. The Yoruba natives resisted it.

“By Jove! both they and the factors at Lagos were glad enough to come to heel when every ounce of stuff was diverted into French Dahomey. There was no overt act or threat. Oku methods are too clever for that. The authorities were powerless. Hunger coerced the natives, and financial loss brought the people on the coast to terms. And this took place where we were paramount! Heaven only knows what excesses the Oku fetish has caused in inter–tribal wars. Why, when I attacked them, I had to break with my own hands every ju–ju token on the road. Not even our Hausa troops would pass them otherwise.”

“They had no ill effect on you, then?” said the other, smiling a little.

“None—at present.”

Warden himself was surprised when his lips framed the qualification. For no assignable cause his mind traveled to the lowering face on the gourd, then reposing in his portmanteau at Waterloo Station, and he remembered the curled scrap of tattooed skin in his pocket. He had not mentioned the calabash to the official. Though it bore curiously on the visit of the men of Oku to the Isle of Wight, he believed that such a far–fetched incident would weaken his statements. Since he was inclined at first to err so greatly in his estimate of the Under Secretary’s knowledge of West African politics, he was now more resolved than ever not to bring an extravagant toy into a serious discussion. Any reference to it would be ludicrously out of place. He was beginning to entertain a deep and abiding respect for the Foreign Office and its denizens.

The Under Secretary asked a few additional questions before he rose to fold up the map. Warden took the hint, and was about to depart when he received an unlooked–for piece of news.

“By the way, it is almost a certainty that Count von Rippenbach accompanied the Emperor in the visit paid to the Sans Souci?” said the official.

“I assume his identity solely from paragraphs in the newspapers.”

“It will interest you to learn that the Count has just returned from an exploring and hunting trip in the Tuburi region.”

Now, Tuburi lies in the no–man’s land that separates Lake Tchad from German West Africa, and Warden met the Under Secretary’s bored glance a second time with quick comprehension.

“I think,” went on the quiet voice, “I think it would be well if you kept the Colonial Office posted as to your movements during the remainder of your furlough. Personally, I expect no immediate developments. The Emperor is a busy man. He can only devote half an hour each year to affairs that affect the Niger. But, keep in touch. You may be wanted. I am exceedingly obliged to you. One learns so much from the men who have passed their active lives in lands which one has never seen except in dreams. I dream here sometimes, in front of that map—and its companions. Oh, I had almost forgotten. Do you know Mr. Baumgartner?”

“Only by sight.”

“That is useful. It might help if you were to meet him in some unexpected locality. And his yacht, the Sans Souci, you have noted her main features, such as the exact number of windows in her deck houses, or the cabin ports fore and aft of the bridge?”

“I watched her closely many hours last night, but I fear I missed those precise details,” laughed Warden. “I shall correct the lapse at the earliest opportunity.”

“That sort of definite fact assists one’s judgment. Paint and rig can be altered, but structural features remain. I recall the case of the Sylph, a foreign cargo–steamer loaded to the funnel with dynamite, and about to pass Port Said at a time when it was peculiarly important to the British fleet that the canal should remain open. She resembled a hundred other disreputable–looking craft of her class, but a lieutenant on the Cossack had seen her a year earlier at Bombay, and noticed a dent in the plates on the port bow. His haphazard memory settled a delicate and complicated discussion in Pekin. Good morning! Don’t forget to send your address.”

Standing in Downing Street to light a cigar, Warden glanced up at the stately building he had just quitted. His views on “red–tape” officialdom had undergone a rapid change during the past hour. It was borne in on him that generations of men like himself had come from the ends of the earth to that storehouse of secrets, and each was convinced that he alone could reveal the solemn tidings which might be the forerunner of modern Europe’s Battle of Armageddon. And the Under Secretary was called on to hear every prophet! From such a standpoint the presence in England of a half–caste Portuguese and three full–blooded negroes dwindled to insignificance. True, the Under Secretary had listened, and Warden almost shivered when he realized how narrow was his escape from committing the grave error of discounting his hearer’s sympathy and measure of comprehension.

It was not his business to ask questions, but he gathered that others than himself were alive to the dangers that might spring from a conference between semi–rebellious subjects of Britain in West Africa and the ruler of a mighty nation pent within cramped confines for want of colonies. Oddly enough, the bent plates of the dynamite–laden Sylph suggested a strange connection between the carved gourd and the strained position of affairs in the Cameroons. He had no manner of doubt that when the royal yacht crashed into a sunken wreck the previous day it liberated the calabash, which forthwith drifted into the Solent, and escaped notice until discovered by Evelyn Dane. Suppose she had not seen it? All their subsequent actions would have been affected. He might never have known of the strange gathering on board the yacht.

“Queer train of circumstances!” he thought. “If only I could use a pen, what a romance I might contrive with that as a beginning—and this,” he added, when, in searching for a box of matches, his fingers closed on the crisp roll of skin, “this as the frontispiece.”

He hailed a cab. He wanted to open the bag left at the railway terminus and deposit the gourd with the rest of his belongings in a small flat hired months ago as a pied–a–terre. His stock of cigars needed replenishing, and the weird document that had just made its presence felt reminded him that a Portuguese dictionary was lacking. A glance at his watch showed that he could not reach Cowes until a late hour, so he resolved to pass the night in town, go to a theatre, and return to the Nancy next morning.

From Waterloo, therefore, he telegraphed to Peter:

“Remaining here until to–morrow. Keep your weather eye open.”

He was sure that his friendly factotum would grasp the full meaning of the second sentence, but he would have been the most surprised man in London could he have known that Peter at that moment was plying the three men of Oku with gin.

An accident brought about a slight variation of his plans. It happened that no other passenger claimed the attention of the luggage–room clerk at Waterloo when the portmanteau was unlocked. Warden deposited the gourd on the zinc counter and groped among his belongings for something to cover it.

The attendant, who was watching him, uttered a gasping exclamation.

“Good Lord! sir,” he cried, “what sort of horrible thing is that?”

It was then that a hitherto undiscovered property in the gourd brought itself in evidence. No sooner was it placed on a smooth surface than it promptly wobbled into a half upright position, with the negro’s face on the upper part. Chance could hardly accomplish this movement. It was the designer’s intent, brought about by concealed weights, and Warden instantly remembered that the calabash floated much deeper in the water than would have been the case otherwise. A shaft of sunlight came through a broken pane in the glass roof, and fell directly on the scowling apparition.

The effect on the clerk was phenomenal. He grew livid, and backed away from the counter.

“Well, that’s the limit,” he muttered. “If I’d ha’ known old Hoof an’ Horns was so near to me since I kem on duty I’d ‘ave gone sick.”

Warden laughed, stuffed the gourd into the portmanteau, and hurried to the waiting cab. So preoccupied was he with other matters, he had not realized earlier that under the new conditions he would be in need of some portion of the bag’s contents.

It was no easy task to find a Portuguese–English dictionary. He tried half a dozen booksellers in vain, but ultimately unearthed a serviceable volume at a second–hand shop in Charing Cross Road. By the time he reached his flat, five o’clock, he was desperately hungry, having eaten nothing since breakfast.

His rooms looked dismal, and an apologetic hall–porter explained that if the gentleman ‘ad on’y sent a wire he’d ha’ tidied the place up a bit. Warden went to a restaurant, dined well, and returned at half–past six. There was still an hour or more of daylight, so he began to decipher the unsolved section of the strange manuscript. It was a longer job than he anticipated. Arabic characters, being largely phonetic, do not give a literal rendering of European words. Many pages of the dictionary were searched ere he hit upon the exact rendering of the blurred phrases. But the quest fascinated him. Before it was ended he found it necessary to consult an atlas and an encyclopedia.

At last, allowing for a margin of error in his guesses at tenses and other variants of root words, he completed a translation, and this is what he had written:

“I, Domenico Garcia, artist and musician in the city of Lisbon, am justly punished for my sins. Being desperate and needy, I joined in an attack on the Santo Espirito, homeward–bound from the Indies, and helped in the slaying of all the ship’s company. We attacked her when she left Lisbon on the voyage to Oporto, but a great gale from the northeast drove us far out to sea, and then the wind veered to the northwest, and cast us miserably ashore on the African desert. We abode there many days, and saw no means of succor, so we buried most of our ill–gotten gains in that unknown place and turned our faces to the north, thinking to find a Portuguese settlement in the land of the Moors. We died one by one, some from hunger, some from fever, some from the ravages of wild beasts. Six out of fifty–four men reached the town of Rabat in the train of a Moorish merchant. There we were sold as slaves. Three were dead within a month. We who were left, Tommaso Rodriguez, Manoel of Serpa and myself, were sent as presents over the caravan road to that cruel tyrant the black king of Benin. Rodriguez went mad, and was flayed alive for refusing to worship a heathen god. This message is written on his skin. Manoel of Serpa was drowned in the river which these monsters term ‘Mother of Waters,’ while I, though my life is preserved by reason of my skill in carving, am utterly bereft of hope in this world while filled with fear of God’s justice in the next. Christian, you who read these words, for which I have devised a cunning receptacle that may long survive me, if you would help an erring brother to regain salvation, go yourself, or send some trusty person, to the above–named town of Rabat. I hid there a great ruby which I took from a golden pyx found on board the Santo Espirito. It lies in the Hassan Tower, the tomb of an infidel buried outside the walls. A causeway leads to the door, which is three cubits from the ground, and my ruby is in a deep crack between the center stones of the sill of the third window on the left. I placed it there for safety, thinking that perchance I might escape and secure it again. Friend, I am many marches from Rabat but few from death. Find that gem of great price, and cause masses to be said for my soul in the Cathedral of the Patriarch at Lisbon. Inscribed by me, the unhappy Domenico Garcia, in the year 1634, to pleasure that loathly barbarian, M’Wanga, King of Benin, who holds that writing on a white man’s skin is most potent magic against fever, even while I, the alchemist, am yielding to its ravages.”

The violet–tinted gloom that marks the close of a fine summer’s day in London was filling the room with its shadows when Warden had written the last words of a fair copy. He lit a cigar, placed an easy chair so that he might sit with his back to the window, and was about to analyze the queer document which had fallen into his hands in such an extraordinary manner when he noticed that the face on the gourd, though tilted on the table exactly in the same fashion as on the counter of the luggage–room at Waterloo, appeared to be watching him. Now, no man of strong nervous power likes to feel startled, and that the stealthy menace in those evil eyes was startling he did not attempt to deny. He had not noticed previously that—no matter what the angle—so long as the eyes were visible they seemed to look fixedly at the beholder. Thinking that the waning light was deceptive, he sprang up and built some books into a V–shaped support that enabled him to set the scowling face in many positions. The varying tests all had the same result. The snake–like glance followed him everywhere. The very orbs appeared to turn in the head. In the deepening twilight they seemed to gleam with a dull fire, and Warden was absolutely forced to reason himself out of the expectation that soon those brutal lips would open and overwhelm him with threats.

“Confound you!” he muttered, scarce knowing whether to laugh or fly into a rage at the foolish fancy that led him to address a carven mask, “if you looked that way at poor Domenico Garcia it is not surprising that he should use his comrade’s skin as vellum. You black beauty! Are there any of your breed left in Nigeria, I wonder?”

[ill097]

The stealthy menace of those evil eyes was startling

Page [84]

It demanded almost an effort to sink into the chair and disregard the sinister object glaring at him from the table. He picked up the sheet of note–paper containing the translation and set his mind to its proper understanding. While intent on the intricacies of cases and genders—difficulties intensified by the use of archaic phrases and the Arabic script—he had given but passing thought to the general drift of the words. True, the reference to a river named “Mother of Waters” was amazing, because that was the native name for the Benuë, while a search through the encyclopedia showed that the seaport town of Rabat, in Morocco, was famous for its ruined monuments. But now, pondering each sentence, he became alive to their tremendous significance. Their very simplicity was the best witness to the underlying tragedy. A man who dismissed the massacre on board the Santo Espirito with the curt statement that he “helped in the slaying of all the ship’s company,” was not likely to use unnecessary adjectives. “Six out of fifty–four” was also a summary magnificent in its brevity. Garcia reached the sheer apex of the direct narrative style when he said that he and Rodriguez, and Manoel of Serpa, were sent as presents to the King of Benin “over the caravan route.” Those four words covered a journey of 2500 miles across mountains, deserts, and jungle–covered swamps, where road there was none, and towns, even the most wretched communities of savages, were hundreds of miles apart. The track probably led through Bel Abbas, Taudeni, and Timbuctu, traversing the very heart of the Sahara, a region so forbidding and inhospitable that even to–day it remains one of the secret places of the world.

And again, there was a grim humor discoverable in a man who, concentrating his life’s story into so few words, could yet indulge his mordant wit by writing: “I am many marches from Rabat but few from death,” and even poke a bitter jest at M’Wanga for his fantastic notion of a specific against backwater fever!

It was a forceful picture that Warden conceived when in his mind’s eye he saw the “artist and musician,” and ex–pirate, too, sitting in the shade of a giant tree near the king’s hut, and pricking out with needle and dyes, on parchment torn from the back of his dead comrade, the record of those terrible years. He could limn the hollow cheeks, the wasted frame, the fever–light in the dark eyes, and the melancholy smile that must have lifted the cloud of suffering for a little while when the concluding lines were written. Warden knew the scene so intimately that if he put pencil to paper, and Garcia’s long–forgotten shade were permitted to testify to the accuracy of the sketch, there could be no reasonable doubt that imagination must have come very near the truth.

Though the Portuguese did not say as much, it was not hard to guess that the “cunning receptacle” he had devised for his last manuscript was the graven image of M’Wanga himself. His artist’s eye had caught the possibilities of the curiously–shaped gourd, and, as he said in his own way, he had used his “skill in carving” as a means of preservation—perhaps of securing a certain measure of good treatment. No doubt the King of Benin, sitting on the state stool in front of his palace of mats and wattle, was greatly flattered by the portrait. He would appreciate its realism while missing its subtle irony. In the circle of subordinate chiefs and witch–doctors surrounding him there must have been many who hated the white man because he won the royal favor even for a moment. But they would be wary, and join loudly in the chorus of praise, for there was a grove near by in which the latest victims of M’Wanga’s wrath fouled the air with their dead bodies.

Garcia’s description of the black ruler as “King of Benin” puzzled Warden at first. Modern Benin was far enough removed from Oku and the upper reaches of the Benuë to render the title vague and seemingly mistaken.

Yet Garcia’s sparse record already promised an astounding truthfulness. Warden was quite sure he would discover some contemporary proof of the loss of the Santo Espirito. He believed that any one who visited the tomb of Hassan beyond the walls of Rabat would find the ruby placed there nearly one hundred and eighty years ago. Why, then, should the chronicler err in his allusion to M’Wanga’s rank?

M’Wanga’s counterfeit answered the unspoken question. Warden happened to look at the calabash, now hardly visible in the ever–increasing darkness. But the cruel eyes still glinted at him, and he could almost discover a sardonic grin on the thick lips.

“By Jove!” he muttered, “When that fellow reigned in Benin his empire spread as far as his reputation. I have no manner of doubt but he lived in the interior, where it is healthier than on the coast. Yes, you man–devil!” he added, leaping excitedly to his feet as a new and discomforting thought possessed him. “You did mischief enough during your evil life, and now you have resurrected yourself just in time to take a silent part in more of the wild doings in which you would have gloried.”

For he was spurred to this sudden outburst by the knowledge that not only did political trouble loom across the West African sky, but that he, and he only, was the Christian and friend to whom Domenico Garcia made his dying appeal. There was a ruby of great price to be won, and masses to be said in the Cathedral of the Patriarch at Lisbon. Could he refuse to fulfil the terms of that pathetic bequest? He had nearly six months of unexpired furlough at disposal, and the Under Secretary did not appear to have any dread of immediate developments in Nigeria, such as would demand the recall of officers to their duties. What argument would convince his own mind that he might justly decline an almost intolerable legacy?

Well, he would go into the pros and cons of a doubtful problem later. He was not a rich man, and the journey to Rabat and back would probably be very expensive. Certainly that ruby would look very well on the white throat of Evelyn Dane, though people might well wonder how the wife of a poorly–paid official could afford to wear a “gem of great price.”

The conceit so tickled him that he laughed, laughed all the louder, perhaps, because he was conscious that the black king of Benin was scoffing at him maliciously from the table. But the glee died in his throat when a thunderous double rat–tat shook the outer door of the flat, and Warden was prepared, for one thrilling instant, to fight a legion of ghosts and demons if need be. Then his scattered wits told him that His Majesty’s post demanded his appearance. He struck a match, lighted the gas, and went to the door, where a small boy, who seemed to be physically incapable of using a knocker with such vehemence, handed him a telegram.

It was brief and to the point:

“Sans Souci sailed 3 p.m. Niggers and friend left for London 6.30. Thought you would like to know. Peter.”

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN WARDEN SETS A NEW COURSE

Warden’s theatre–going that evening resolved itself into a stroll in the park and an early return to his chambers. Before going out, he had thrown a towel over the calabash, and told the porter not to touch anything in the sitting–room. The plan was effective; the man of Oku created no disturbance.

Oddly enough, the young officer was now beginning to understand the mesmeric influence which Evelyn Dane and Peter Evans acknowledged instantly—and with this admission came the consciousness that the negro’s mask lost its power unless actually in evidence. Hence, none of the vapors and misty fancies of the preceding hours interfered with his rest. He slept soundly, rose betimes, and ate a good breakfast—unfailing signs these of a sound mind in a sound body.

Yet he might have been puzzled if called on to explain why he deliberately placed the gourd in a sponge–bag, and put it in his portmanteau before returning to the Isle of Wight. His action was, perhaps, governed by some sense of the fitness of things. If it were ordained that the presentment of the dead and gone M’Wanga should scowl again at the world during a period when the fortunes of his country were at stake, it was not for Warden to disobey the silent edict. He was not swayed solely by idle impulse. In bringing the head to London he meant to please the only people who knew of its existence; he ignored their wishes now because he felt a tugging at his heart–strings when his thoughts reverted to the wretched history of Domenico Garcia. The instant he arrived at this decision it ceased to trouble his mind further.

Before going to the station he made a few purchases, and, being near Pall Mall, thought he would secure any letters that might happen to be at his club. Among others, he found a pressing invitation from Lady Hilbury asking him to call when in London. Now, he was, in a degree, a protégé of her ladyship. Her husband was a former governor of Nigeria, and her friendly assistance had helped, in the first instance, to lift Warden out of the ruck of youngsters who yearly replete the ranks of officialdom in West Africa. It was more than probable that Sir Charles and Lady Hilbury would be out of town, and a note written at their residence would show that he visited them at the earliest opportunity.

To his surprise, Lady Hilbury was at home, and insisted that he should stay for luncheon.

Behold, then, Warden installed in a cozy morning–room, exchanging gossip with his hostess, and his parcels and portmanteau given over to the butler’s care.

He was irrevocably committed to an afternoon train when Lady Hilbury electrified him with a morsel of news that was as unexpected as any other shock that had befallen him of late.

“By the way, an old friend of yours is staying with me,” she said—“Mrs. Laing—you knew her better as Rosamund Miller, I fancy?”

Warden schooled his features into a passable imitation of a smile. Mrs. Laing—the pretty, irresponsible Rosamund Miller—was the last person he wished to encounter, but he was quick to see the twinkle in Lady Hilbury’s eyes, and he accepted the inevitable.

“I shall be glad to renew the acquaintance,” he said. “It was broken off rather abruptly—at Government House if I remember aright.”

“Poor Rosamund! That was her mother’s contriving. She never really liked Laing, but he was what people term ‘a good match,’ and he has at least justified that estimate of his worth by dying suddenly and leaving his widow nearly two hundred thousand pounds.”

“A most considerate man,” murmured Warden.

“Then you have not forgiven her?”

“Forgive! What a harsh word from your lips. Pray consider. On your own estimate she owes me two hundred thousand thanks.”

“Arthur, I don’t like you as a cynic. I am old enough to be your mother. Indeed, it was my love for your mother that first led me to take an interest in your welfare, and I should be doing wrong if I hid from you the fact that it nearly broke Rosamund’s heart to throw you over.”

“I trust the lapse of years has healed the fracture,” he said.

Lady Hilbury looked at him in silence for a moment. She remembered the white–faced subaltern who heard, at her hospitable table, that Rosamund Miller had married a wealthy planter at Madeira—married him suddenly, within a month after her departure from the coast.

“Is there another woman?” she asked quietly.

“Not single spies but whole battalions. How I have managed to escape their combined charms all these years is a marvel. Seriously, Lady Hilbury, you would not have me take a wife to my special swamp, and I would not care to leave her in England drawing half my pay. All my little luxuries would vanish at one fell swoop.”

“I would like to see you happy, Arthur, and there is always the possibility of marrying some one who would demand no sacrifices.”

“Is Mrs. Laing out?” he inquired.

“Yes. Of course you want to meet her again?”

“I think not. I don’t mean to be unkind, but the tender recollections I cherish are too dear to be replaced by a fresh set.”

“That sounds theatrical—a sarcastic line out of some comedy of manners. If so, you shall have a wider stage than my boudoir. We lunch at one o’clock. It is 12.45 now, and Rosamund is always punctual.”

Warden, though raging at the dilemma, made the best of it.

“How long has Mrs. Laing been a widow?” he said.

“Nearly a year. Evidently your bush campaign shut out the usual sources of intelligence.”

He glanced at his watch.

“I really must catch the three o’clock train to Cowes,” he explained. “I am on Government service, and I suppose it would be quite impossible to arrange everything in a couple of hours. I am unacquainted with the formalities, but even a special license demands—“

“How unkind! Arthur, what has happened to you? How you are changed!”

“Never changed where you are concerned, Lady Hilbury!” he cried, sentiment for once gaining the upper hand—“you, to whom I owe so much! That, indeed, would be the wintry wind of ingratitude. Now, let me make amends. My behavior shall be discreet—my decorous sympathy worthy of a High Church curate. I was staggered for a few seconds, I admit, but the effects of the blow have passed, and my best excuse is that other things are perplexing me. I have no secrets from you, you know, so let me tell you why I am here.”

Sure of an interested listener in the wife of an ex–ruler of the great Niger territory, Warden plunged into an account of recent events. It was not necessary to mention Evelyn Dane in order to hold her attention. The first reference to Figuero and the Oku chiefs attained that end. No mean diplomatist herself, Lady Hilbury understood much that would perforce be hidden from all save those acquainted with West Africa.

“You will permit me to tell Charles?” came the eager question when he had finished.

“Of course. Why not?”

“There are those in the administration who are jealous of his record,” she said. “Not every one has his tact in dealing with natives. It is no secret that our relations with the emirs of the interior have been strained almost to breaking point of late——”

A motor stopped outside the house and a bell rang. Lady Hilbury bent forward. Her voice sank to a new note of intense conviction.

“You have been given a great opportunity, Arthur. It may come sooner than you think. Grasp it firmly. Let no man supplant you, and it will carry you far.”

Her ladyship’s manner no less than her earnest words told Warden that there were forces in motion of which he was yet in complete ignorance. It was sufficiently puzzling to find an Under Secretary so well informed as to the identity of certain visitors to Cowes, but when a woman in the position of his hostess—with her wide experience of the seldom–seen workings of the political machine—went out of her way to congratulate him on a “great opportunity,” he was thrilled with a sudden elation.

Thus, when his hand closed on that of Rosamund Laing, there was a flush on his bronzed face, a glint of power and confidence in his eyes, that might well be misinterpreted by a woman startled almost to the verge of incoherence.

When she asked where Lady Hilbury was, and if she were alone, the footman merely announced the fact that a gentleman had called and would make one of the luncheon party. Rosamund entered the boudoir with an air of charming impulsiveness practised so sedulously that it had long ceased to be artificial. For once in her life it abandoned her. Warden’s friendly greeting was such a bolt from the blue that she faltered, paled and blushed alternately, and actually stammered a few broken words with the shy diffidence of a schoolgirl.

The phase of embarrassment passed as quickly as it had arisen. Both the man and the woman were too well–bred to permit the shadows of the past to darken the present. Lady Hilbury, too, rose to the occasion, and they were soon chatting with the unrestrained freedom of old and close acquaintanceship.

Then Warden discovered that the lively impetuous girl who taught him the first sharp lesson in life’s disillusionment had developed into a beautiful, self–possessed, almost intellectual woman of the world. She was gowned with that unobtrusive excellence which betokens perfect taste and a well–lined purse. Certain little hints in her costume showed that the memory of her late husband did not press too heavily upon her. The fashionable modiste can lend periodicity to grief, and Mrs. Laing was passing through the heliotrope stage of widowhood.

Her exquisite complexion was certainly somewhat bewildering to the untrained glance of the mere male. Warden’s recollection, vivid enough now, painted a dark–skinned, high–colored girl of nineteen, with expressive features, a mop of black hair, and a pair of brilliant eyes that alternated between tints of deepest brown and purple.

The eyes remained, though their archness was subdued, but, for the rest, he saw a neck and forehead of marvelous whiteness, a face of repose, cheeks and ears of delicate pink, and a waved and plaited mass of hair of the hue known as Titian red. He found himself comparing her with Evelyn Dane, whose briar–rose coloring shone through clusters of delightful little freckles, and, somehow, the contrast was displeasing.

The conventional smile of small talk must have yielded to the strain, because Rosamund Laing noticed his changed expression.

“Dear me, what have I said now?” she asked. They were seated at table, at the end of a pleasant meal, and the talk had wandered from recent doings to a long–forgotten point to point steeple–chase won by Warden on a horse which Rosamund herself had nominated.

He recovered his wandering wits instantly.

“It is not anything that you have said, Mrs. Laing, but my own thoughts that are worrying me,” he said. “I have been trying to dodge the unpleasant knowledge that I must gather up my traps and fly to Waterloo. Lady Hilbury knows that I was en route to the Solent when I called—and—if I hesitated—which is unbelievable—she prevailed on me to stay by the overwhelming argument that you would appear forthwith.”

It was the simplest of compliments, but it sufficed. Rosamund imperilled her fine complexion by blushing again deeply.

“I was indulging in the vain hope that we might see you often, now that we are all in England,” she said.

“Captain Warden has still six months’ furlough at his disposal,” put in Lady Hilbury. “He is leaving town on business at the moment, but I shall take care he returns at the earliest date.”

He stood for a moment in a strong light when he was to say good–by. Mrs. Laing noticed the scar on his forehead.

“Have you had an accident?” she asked, with a note of caressing tenderness in her voice.

“Nothing to speak of. A slight knock on the head while swimming in the Solent—that is all.”

The door had scarce closed on him when Rosamund turned to her friend. She spoke slowly, but Lady Hilbury saw that the knuckles of a white hand holding the back of a chair reddened under the force of the grip.

“I dared not asked him,” came the steady words, “but—perhaps you can tell me—is he unmarried?”

“Yes.”

“And free?”

“My dear, I think so.”

The younger woman let go the chair. Her hands flew to her face to hide the tears that started forth unchecked.

“Ah, dear Heaven,” she murmured, “if only I could be sure!”

That evening, while the incense of tobacco rose from the deck of the Nancy, Warden learned from Peter the history of the hours immediately succeeding his departure from Cowes.

It was unutterably annoying to hear that Figuero had seen him in Evelyn Dane’s company, and he deduced a Machiavellian plot from the visit subsequently paid by the Portuguese to the Sans Souci. The journey to Milford indirectly suggested by the Under Secretary’s inquiry anent the appearance of the yacht now became a fixed purpose from which nothing would divert him. It seemed to be impossible that Mr. Baumgartner could fail to recognize the girl’s description, since comparison with Rosamund Laing had shown him that Evelyn was by far the most beautiful creature in England! He was sure that her life would be made miserable by suspicion, if, indeed, she had not already received a curt notification that her services were not required.

Peter’s afternoon with the negroes was evidently Gargantuan in its chief occupation—the consumption of ardent spirits.

“I never did see any crowd ‘oo could shift liquor like them,” mused the skipper of the Nancy. “It was ‘Dash me one bottole, Peter,’ every five minutes if I’d run to it. I stood ‘em three, just in your interests, captain, an’ then I turned a pocket inside out, sayin’ ‘No more ‘oof, savvy?’ They savvied right enough. Out goes one chap they called Wanger——”

“Do you mean to tell me that one of those three men was named M’Wanga?” broke in Warden, and in the darkness Peter could not see the blank amazement on his employer’s face.

“That’s it, sir—funny sort o’ click they gev’ in front of it. Sink me, but you do it a treat! Well, ‘is nibs comes back with two bottles, an’ we finished the lot afore I began to wonder if I was quite sartin which of my legs was the wooden one. But, bless yer ‘eart, there’s no ‘arm in them three niggers. I could live among ‘em twenty year an’ never ‘ave a wrong word wi’ one of em.

“Could you gather any inkling of their business from their talk?”

Peter tamped some half–burned tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with the head of a nail before replying.

“There was just one thing that struck me as a bit pecooliar, sir,” he said, after a meditative pause. “A joker ‘oo tole me ‘is name was Pana seems to be sort o’ friendly with a serving–maid in the Lord Nelson. She brought in the bottles I ordered, an’ each time Pana tried to catch ‘old of ‘er. The third time he grabbed her for fair, an’ sez: ‘You lib for Benin country w’en I king?’ At that one of ‘is pals jabbered some double Dutch, an’ they all looked ‘ard at me, but I was gazin’ into the bottom of a glass at the time an’ they thought I wasn’t listenin’. It never occurred to ‘em that I don’t swaller with me ears.”

“Were you present when Figuero returned?”

“Yes, sir, an’ a nasty cur he can be w’en he likes. He called ‘em all the different sorts o’ drunken swine he could think of, an’ tole me I was wuss, to go leadin’ pore ignorant blacks astray. My godfather! Five bottles of Ole Tom among three of ‘em, an’ me, ‘oo ‘ates the smell o’ gin, tryin’ to doctor my poison wi’ water! If you’ll believe me, sir, at supper–time I couldn’t bring myself to touch the nicest bit o’ steak that ever sizzled on the Nancy’s grid.”

“When did the Sans Souci sail?”

“Just before I sent you that telegram, sir. Chris saw the niggers an’ the Portygee off by train, an’ kem straight back to the dinghy. We pulled away to the cutter, an’ sighted the yacht steamin’ west, so I ‘bout ship an’ landed Chris near the post–orfis. The butcher ‘oo supplied their meat tole me this mornin’ that he was to send his bill to Plymouth.”

Warden, who was wont to take pride in his ability to be absolutely lazy when on a holiday, suddenly stood up.

“With this breeze we ought to make Plymouth by to–morrow morning?” he cried.

“Are you in earnest, guv’nor?” demanded the astonished Peter.

“Fully. Bring the cutter past the Needles, and as soon as St. Abb’s Head–light is a–beam you can turn in.”

Evans realized that his master meant what he said. Chris, who was in bed and sound asleep, awoke next morning to find the Nancy abreast of Star Point. They reached Plymouth in a failing wind about midday, but Warden’s impatient glance searched the magnificent harbor in vain for the trim outlines of the Sans Souci. As the cutter drew near the inner port both he and Peter knew that they had come on a wild–goose chase, no matter how assured the Cowes butcher might be of his account being paid.

It was a gloriously fine day, but Warden’s impatience brooked no interference with his plans. It even seemed to him that the elements had conspired with his personal ill luck to bring him into this land–locked estuary and bottle him up there for a week. Strive as best he might, he could not shake off the impression that he ought to be acting, and not dawdling about the south coast in this aimless fashion. He was quite certain that a dead calm had overtaken him, and, with this irritating because unfounded belief, came a curious suggestion of calamity in store for the Nancy if he tried to weather the Land’s End en route to Milford Haven.

“Go to Africa!” whispered some mysterious counselor in words that were audible to an unknown sense. “Go where you are wanted. Lady Hilbury told you that a great opportunity had presented itself. Seize it! Delay will be fatal!”

Peter, watching the young officer furtively as he trimmed the cutter to her anchorage, was much perturbed. Though a true sailorman, he seldom swore, for his religious connections were deep and sincere, but he did use anathemas now.

“I wish that d—d Turk’s Head ‘ad rotted in the sea afore ever it kem aboard this craft,” he muttered. “There’s bin nothin’ but fuss an’ worry every hour since that bonny lass set her eyes on it. Onless I’m vastly mistaken it’ll bust up the cruise, an’ here was Chris an’ me fixed up to the nines for the nex’ three months. It’s too bad, that it is”—and the rest of his remarks became unfit for publication.

It would be interesting to learn how far Peter would have fallen from grace if he were told that the calabash was even then reposing in a portmanteau, by the side of Warden’s bunk. Happily, he was spared the knowledge. It would come in good time, but was withheld for the present.

Warden, restless as a caged lion, did not, as was his habit, bring a folding–chair to the shady side of the mainsail and lose himself in the pages of a book. A purpose in life of some sort became almost an obsession. Fixing on the Sans Souci’s known objective at the extreme southwestern corner of Wales on the following Wednesday, he suddenly hit upon the idea of walking across Dartmoor and taking a steamer from Ilfracombe to Swansea. Once committed to a definite itinerary of that nature there would be no turning back. He counted on being able to accomplish the first stage of the journey easily in three days, which would bring him to Ilfracombe on the Tuesday. The only question that remained was the uncertainty of the steamship service, and a telegram to the shipping agents would determine that point in an hour or less.

So Peter brought him ashore in the dinghy, and the message was despatched, and Warden went for a stroll on the Hoe, of which pleasant promenade he had hardly traversed a hundred yards when he saw Evelyn Dane seated there, deeply absorbed in a magazine. A bound of his heart carried conviction to his incredulous brain. Though the girl’s face was bent and almost hidden by her hat, she offered precisely the same harmonious picture that had so won his admiration when she sat opposite to him in the dinghy on that memorable afternoon that now seemed so remote in the annals of his life.

A few steps nearer, and he could no longer refuse to believe his eyes. He recalled the exact patterns of a brooch, a marquise ring, an ornament in her hat. Seating himself, with a rapid movement, quite close to her, he said softly:

“More, much more, the heart may feel
Than the pen may write or the lip reveal.”

Evelyn turned with a startled cry. She was conscious that some one had elected to share her bench; at the first sound of Warden’s voice she was ready to spring up and walk away, without looking at him. Her bright face crimsoned with delight when she grasped the wonderful fact that he was actually at her side.

She closed the magazine with a bang, and held out her hand.

“This is indeed a surprise,” she cried. “How in the world did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t know,” he said, clasping her fingers firmly. “At least, that cannot be true. My ordinary eat–three–meals–a–day, keep–away–from–the–fire–and–you won’t–get–burned wits informed me that you were in far–off Oxfordshire, but some kindly monitor from within, unseen, unheard, yet most worthy of credence, led me here, to your side—may I say—to your very feet.”

Laughing and blushing, and vainly endeavoring to extricate her hand from his grasp—because truly she began to fear that he was drawing her towards him—her first uncontrolled action was to glance around and discover if any passers–by were gazing at them. Instantly she knew she had made a mistake, and the imprisoned hand was snatched away emphatically. If anything, this only added to her confusion, for it bore silent testimony to her knowledge of his loverlike attitude. But she gallantly essayed to retrieve lost ground.

“I was not an hour at home,” she explained volubly, “before Mrs. Baumgartner telegraphed and afterward wrote an entire change of arrangements. I am not going to Milford Haven. Miss Beryl Baumgartner came with some friends to a little place down the coast there, a place called Salcombe, I think, and the Sans Souci arrived there yesterday. They all come on to Plymouth this evening, and they wish me to be ready to go on board about nine o’clock, when we sail for Oban, only stopping twice on the way to coal.”

“Marvelous!” cried Warden. “You reel off amazing statements with the self–possession of a young lady reciting a Browning poem. No, I shall not explain what I mean—not yet, at any rate. The glorious fact prevails that you are free till nine.”

“Free!” she repeated, not that she was at a loss to understand him, but rather to gain time to collect her thoughts.

“Absurd, of course. I mean bound—absolutely bound to me for a superb vista of—let me see—lunch—long drive in country—tea—more driving—dinner.—Ah! let us not look beyond the dinner.”

“But——”

“But me no buts. I shall butt myself violently against any male person who dares to lay prior claim to you, while, should the claimant be a lady, I shall butter her till she relents.”

“Still——”

“I suppose I must listen,” he complained. “Well, what is the obstacle?”

She hesitated an instant. Then, abandoning pretense—for she, like Warden had lived through many hours of self–scrutiny since they parted at Portsmouth—she laughed unconcernedly.

“There is none that I know of,” she admitted. “I had never seen Plymouth, so I traveled here yesterday evening. My belongings are in the big hotel there. I am a mere excursionist, out for the day. And now that I have yielded all along the line, I demand my woman’s rights. My presence here is readily explained. What of yours?”

He hailed a passing carriage and directed the man to take them to the hotel.

“I don’t think I can really clear matters up to your satisfaction unless you permit me to call you Evelyn,” he said, daringly irrelevant.

Midsummer madness is infectious—under certain conditions.

“That is odd,” she cried, yet there was but feeble protest in her voice.

“To make things even you must call me Arthur.”

“How utterly absurd!”

“That is not my fault. The name was given me. I yelled defiance, but I had to have it, like the measles.”

“You know very well——”

“’Pon my honor, Evelyn, the greatest of your many charms is your prompt sympathy. In those few words you have reconciled me to my lot.”

“I think Arthur is rather a nice name,” she sighed contentedly. After all, it was best to humor him, and he was the first man who had ever won her confidence.

“I ask for more than pity,” he said. “Nevertheless, if I would gain credence I must propound a plain tale. List, then, while I unfold marvels.”

He was a good talker, and he kept her amused and interested, at times somewhat thrilled, by the recital of his doings in London.

They were in a carriage speeding out into the lovely country westward of Plymouth when he told her the strange history of Domenico Garcia. She shivered a little at the gruesome memory of the “parchment” which she had examined so intently, but she did not interrupt, save for an occasional question, until he reached that part of his narrative which ended in the determination of the previous night to sail to Plymouth forthwith.

“It is all very strange and mysterious,” she said at last. “You were coming to Milford Haven, I gather?”

“Yes.”

“And were it not for the impulse that brought me here you would now be on your way over Dartmoor?”

“That was my fixed intention.”

“Was it so very important that you should know all about the Sans Souci?”

“I would have said so to the Under Secretary.”

There was a pause. Warden deliberately passed the opening given by her words. In broad daylight, and whirling rapidly through a village, it behooved him to be circumspect. Between dinner and nine o’clock he would contrive other opportunities.

“Lady Hilbury must be very nice,” she went on, after a brief silence.

“You will like her immensely when you know her,” he could not help saying, at the same time thanking his stars that he had made no mention of Rosamund Laing.

There was a further pause. Evelyn fancied that her voice was well under control when she asked:

“Have you decided to carry out poor Domenico Garcia’s last request?”

“Before answering, will you tell me what you would do in my place?”

“I would go to Rabat, if it were in my power, and there were no undue risk in the undertaking. I don’t think I would be happy if I had not made the effort. Yet, Rabat is a long way from England. Would you be absent many weeks? Perhaps such a journey would spoil your leave. And then—things may happen in West Africa. You may be needed there.”

“Rabat is a half–way house to Oku, Evelyn,” he said. “I am going, of course, for two reasons. In the first instance, I want to set Garcia’s soul at rest about those masses which, it seems to me, can only be done by obeying the letter of his instructions. And, secondly, I mean to secure that ruby.”

This time she passed no comment.

He caught her arm and bent closer.

“If I bring it to you in Madeira you will not refuse to accept it?” he said.

“Now you are talking nonsense,” she replied, turning and looking at him bravely, with steadfast scrutiny.

“No. There would be a condition, of course. With the ruby you must take the giver.”

“Are you asking me to marry you?” she almost whispered.

“Yes.”

“After knowing me a few idle hours of three days?”

“I was exactly the same mind the first time I met you. I see no valid reason why I should change a well–balanced opinion during the next thirty or forty years.”

He felt her arm trembling in his clasp, and a suspicious moisture glistened in her fine eyes.

“I think, somehow, I know you well enough to believe that you are in earnest,” she faltered. “But let us forget now that you have said those words. Come to me later—when your work is done—and if you care to repeat them—I shall—try to answer—as you would wish.”

And then, for a few hours, they lived in the Paradise that can be entered only by lovers.

Not that there were tender passages between them—squeezings, and pressings and the many phrases of silent languages that mean “I love you.” Neither was formed of the malleable clay that permits such sudden change of habit. Each dwelt rather in a dream–land—the man hoping it could be true that this all–pleasing woman could find it possible to surrender herself to him utterly—the woman becoming more alive each moment to the astounding consciousness that she loved and was beloved.

Their happiness seemed to be so fantastically complete that they made no plans for the future. They were wilfully blind to the shoals and cross currents that must inevitably affect the smooth progress of that life voyage they would make together. Rather, when they talked, did they seek to discover more of the past, of their common tastes, of their friends, of the “little histories” of youth. Thus did they weld the first slender links of sweet intimacy—those links that are stronger than fetters of steel in after years—and the hours flew on golden wings.

Once only did Warden hold Evelyn in his arms—in a farewell embrace ere she left him to join the yacht. And, when that ecstatic moment had passed, and the boat which held his new–found mate was vanishing into the gloom, he awoke to the knowledge that he had much to accomplish before he might ask her to be his bride.

But he thrust aside gray thought for that night of bliss. He almost sang aloud as he walked to the quay where Peter was waiting, after receiving a brief message earlier in the day. He was greeted cheerily.

“I’m main glad to see you again, sir,” said the skipper of the Nancy. “Somehows, I had a notion this mornin’ that we was goin’ to lose you for good an’ all.”

Then Warden remembered the inquiry he had sent to Ilfracombe, and the reply that was surely waiting for him at the post–office, and he laughed with a quiet joyousness that was good to hear.

“Peter,” he said, “you’re a first–class pilot, but neither you nor any other man can look far into the future, eh?”

“No, sir,” came the prompt answer, “that’s a sea without charts or soundin’s an’ full of everlastin’ fog. But sometimes one can do a bit o’ guessin’, an’ that’s wot I’ve bin doin’ since Chris tole me he saw you an’ the young leddy a–drivin’ in a keb!”

CHAPTER VII

TWO WOMEN

Mr. Isidore David Baumgartner was in a state of high good humor. After wasting many hundreds of cartridges he had actually shot a driven grouse. True, the method of slaughter amounted almost to a crime. Traveling fast and low before the wind, the doomed bird flew straight toward the butts. Baumgartner closed his eyes, fired both barrels—the first intentionally, the second from sheer nervousness—and a cloud of feathers, out of which fell all that was left of legs, wings, and body, showed how a gallant moorcock had met his fate.

“There’s a clean hit for you, Sandy,” cried the little man delightedly. “It’s all knack. I knew I could do it, once I got the hang of it.”

“Man, but ye stoppit him,” replied Sandy, who doled out encouragement with a sour grin. The shattered carcass lay in full view on a tuft of heather. Two ounces of shot had riddled it at a distance of ten feet.

“I suppose the second barrel was hardly necessary,” said Baumgartner, more critically.

“It’s best to mak’ sure,” said the sardonic gillie, “but now ye’ve got yer ‘ee in, as the sayin’ is, mebbe ye’ll be droppin’ ithers, Mr. Baumgartner.”

He held forth the spare gun as a hint. Grouse were plentiful at Lochmerig, and three other men in the line of shelters were busy. Baumgartner forthwith excelled himself. Just as a novice at Monte Carlo may achieve several winning coups in succession, so did fortune favor one whom nature had not designed as a sportsman. He shot with blind confidence, and brought down half a dozen birds while they came sailing over the crest of the hill before a strong breeze that brought them to close range. That he rendered them for the most part uneatable did not trouble him in the least. Sport was merely slaying to him; his only trophies previously were some tame pigeons secured for practice.

So Baumgartner was well content. As he trudged down the brae to Lochmerig Lodge, discoursing learnedly to his companions anent the “stopping” qualities of his eighty–guinea pair of guns, his eyes roved over the beauties of loch and glen, and the day–dream that it would be well to pass the remainder of his days in this quiet haven cast its spell on his soul. Rich as he was, he owned no home except a garish mansion in New York. His career had been meteoric, full of lurid energy. Beginning with the lust of money, he had followed the beaten track of his order, and became obsessed with the lust of power. Yet his ambition needed spurring. Already the tremendous issues involved in the project which procured him the condescending patronage of an emperor were revealing their dangers. Here, in Scotland, surrounded by subservient friends and well–trained servants, he longed for rest. Lairdship was proving a subtle rival to West African adventure.

Moreover, he was married, and Mrs. Baumgartner was endowed with a will of her own and a tongue to bear witness thereto. She was learning to appreciate the easy tolerance of English society, which proved itself far more accessible than the Four Hundred of New York. Men and women of recognized social rank and pleasant manners were quite willing to shoot over the Lochmerig moors, play bridge in the Lodge, cruise on the Sans Souci, and generally live and amuse themselves at the millionaire’s expense. Mrs. Baumgartner was shrewd enough to see that the gain of a big slice of British territory in West Africa would offer poor compensation for the loss of the new career which was opening up an alluring vista to her dazzled gaze. For once, therefore, discord threatened in the household. In her daughter, too, she found a powerful ally. A month of close companionship with Evelyn Dane had completely changed the life–theories of a spoiled and affected girl of eighteen. Too young as yet to be jealous of Evelyn’s greater attractions, Beryl Baumgartner was alert enough to see that vulgar pertness was ludicrously inadequate as a means of winning male regard. Luckily, she became enthusiastically attached to Evelyn from the first hour. The wonderful faculty of hero–worship had survived the precocity of a too–indulgent rearing. It was stronger now than mere counsel. Beryl began to copy her new friend, and at once she began to improve.

It was, therefore, a very dark cloud that lowered over the Baumgartner sky when a family coach which brought visitors from the ten miles distant railway deposited at the hospitable door of Lochmerig Lodge, at one and the same moment, Mrs. Laing, Miguel Figuero, and Count von Rippenbach. As it happened, the three already knew each other slightly. They had met in Madeira during the previous winter. Figuero then acted as bear–leader to the count before he started on the hunting trip in the Tuburi hinterland which had come to the Under Secretary’s knowledge.

It was a surprise to both men when they encountered Mrs. Laing at Perth Junction. They passed several interesting hours in her company, and von Rippenbach, who spoke English better than Figuero, was a skilled cross–examiner. Thus, he soon hit upon a plausible explanation of the lady’s appearance in Inverness–shire. She was one of Mrs. Baumgartner’s social links with England. On his part, as a “distinguished foreigner,” he would be acceptable in a higher circle than that occupied by his host, but, when it came to Figuero, Mrs. Laing was puzzled—indeed, somewhat amused.

The man’s record was no secret. Tolerant Madeira did not ask how he had risen to seeming affluence. It helped him to spend his money, and was graciously blind to the darker pages of his history—nevertheless, those pages were an open book to local gossips.

Figuero, a shrewd and level–headed scoundrel, was the most taken aback of the trio at this unlooked–for meeting. He was aware of the love passages between Warden and Rosamund Laing; he feared Warden; and here was the woman whom Warden had once loved crossing his path at an awkward hour.

The situation might have provided harmless interest for a number of unimportant people at Lochmerig if Figuero had not recognized Evelyn Dane the instant he set eyes on her. Straightway the tiny rills of intrigue and suspicion flowing through the adventurer’s brain united into a torrent.

Seizing the first opportunity that presented itself, he drew Baumgartner into an unoccupied room, and closed and locked the door. Before the surprised millionaire could utter a word of protest, the West African fire–brand began to question him in his own tongue, since Baumgartner, despite his Teutonic label and semblance, had a Portuguese mother.

“Why did you fail to recognize the girl I described to you in Cowes?” he demanded fiercely. “Malediction! Are you mad, that you would risk our enterprise in this fashion?”

“You must neither address me in that manner nor talk in riddles,” growled Baumgartner. “What girl? How am I to know one among the ten thousand girls of a regatta week?”

“Riddles! It is you who are the conundrum, senhor. I tell you that this Englishman, Captain Warden, a Deputy Commissioner in Nigeria, is the man we have most to fear, yet you permit one who is probably his fiancée, and surely in league with him, to live in your house and spy on the actions of yourself and your friends. What will Count von Rippenbach think when I tell him? What will the Emperor say, after all the precautions we took that none should know——”

“Silence!” roared Baumgartner, who could hold his own in matters that demanded clear thinking and careful guidance. “You are too ready with some names, Senhor Figuero, yet too sparing of others that may explain your folly. Of whom are you speaking?”

“Of the young Englishwoman I have just met, of course. I am not good at catching these strange words, but I mean the good–looking one, the tall slim girl in white muslin, she with brown hair and Madonna eyes——”

“Do you mean Miss Dane?”

“Yes—that is she. I remember now.”

“My daughter’s companion! Nonsense!”

“It is true, I tell you. Am I likely to forget a face—and such a face! Did I not describe her dress? She must have left your yacht just before Warden met her. And they are lovers. How can I be mistaken? They went away from Cowes in the same train. I told you her destination. What was it? I have it written here,” and he hurriedly turned over the leaves of a note–book.

Baumgartner was undoubtedly impressed. Figuero’s earnestness was not to be gainsaid, and he had an unpleasant belief, now he came to recall the incidents of a busy day, that Evelyn Dane was dressed exactly as Warden’s unknown acquaintance was pictured.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese found the memorandum he sought.

“Here it is,” he snapped, all a–quiver with the doubts that threatened the destruction of his pet scheme of vengeance on the British power which had stopped the supply of slaves to the Sultan of Bogota. “Langton in Oxfordshire—that is the place. The railway official spelt it for me. A boatman told me he knew the girl, and gave me some outlandish name as being hers. Now I see he was fooling me. What was his motive? Was he also an emissary of Warden’s? Let me assure you, senhor, this thing begins to look ugly.”

Baumgartner’s heavy jowl lost some of the ruddy hue of the moors. Count von Rippenbach had been ready enough to apply the screw when his quondam confederate showed a degree of hesitancy in falling in with the proposal he came from London to make, and this latest complication would strengthen von Rippenbach’s hands beyond resistance. Already the lairdship of Lochmerig was becoming visionary, and the far–off hills of interior Africa grew more substantial in their dim outlines.

But the millionaire, though he might toady to a Scottish gillie for a crumb of recognition as a marksman, had not attained his present position by displaying weakness in face of a crisis.

“I believe you are the victim of a delusion,” he said, with some show of dignity, “but, even if you are right, we gain nothing by yielding to panic. What if Miss Dane is, as you say, Warden’s belle amie? Why should that be harmful? Does it not explain his visit to Cowes? Indeed, once we are convinced that they know each other, we can turn the circumstance to our own purpose. I am far from crediting an insignificant official of the Niger Company with the importance you seem to attach to him, but, granted he is a hostile influence to be feared, why not stalk him through an unsuspecting agent?”

“You don’t rate him high enough,” muttered Figuero. “He can sway those stupid niggers like no other man in Nigeria. He talks Arabic, and Hausa, and krooboy palaver as well as I do. He broke the Oku ju–ju when it was worth a thousand lives to touch a stick or a feather. If Warden gets wind of our project before we are ready, we will fail, and you realize what that means to all of us.”

A dinner gong came to Baumgartner’s aid. He wished to avoid any discussion on the last point raised by the Portuguese. It bristled with thorns. Von Rippenbach revealed some of its cactus–like properties earlier in the evening.

“You and I and the Count will go into other matters fully to–morrow,” he said. “As for Miss Dane, I shall clear up that difficulty without delay. Act as though you had never seen her before, and keep your ears open during dinner.”

So it came to pass that Evelyn, who was mightily astonished and perplexed by the arrival of the two men concerning whom Warden had told her so much, was still more bewildered when Mr. Baumgartner availed himself of a lull in the conversation at the dinner–table to say casually:

“By the way, Miss Dane, is Langton, in Oxfordshire, near your people’s place?”

“Yes,” she said, wondering what the question signified.

“I suppose, then, you passed through it on your way home after quitting the Sans Souci at Cowes?”

“Oh, yes. Langton is our station.”

“Ah! What a small world it is! A friend of mine, Mr. James G. Hertz, of Boston, is staying there now. I suppose you did not chance to meet him?”

“No. Our village is three miles away, and that is a long distance in the country.”

And, in truth, Mr. James G. Hertz, of Boston, who was buried in Boston, could tell of yet more impassable gulfs.

Rosamund Laing was sitting next to Figuero. She noticed the eager attention with which he followed this trivial bit of talk, though his limited knowledge of English rendered most of the lively chatter at the table unintelligible.

“Were you in Cowes during the regatta week, Senhor Figuero?” she asked.

It was a reasonable deduction from his presence at Lochmerig, but she little guessed the devilish purpose engendered in that alert brain by her aimless inquiry. The Portuguese felt that he was at a disadvantage among the gay throng gathered under Baumgartner’s roof. His nimble wits were dulled by the barrier of language. It put him outside the pale. Things might be occurring which he ought to know, but which were hidden from him owing to this drawback. In the beautiful woman by his side he might find an excellent go–between if only he could command her interest. Was that old flame quite quenched in her heart, he mused? She had married a rich man, but had she forgotten—did any woman ever forget—her first love? He thought not. At any rate, here was an opening provided by the gods.

“I lib for Cowes one–time, senora,” he murmured, “an’ I see somet’ing dere dat I tell you if you not vexed.”

“Why should I be vexed?” she said, smiling at the odd expressions, though she was quite conversant with the lingua franca of the coast.

“You ‘member dem Captain Warden?”

“Of course I do.”

“An’ you keep secret dem t’ing I tell you?”

“Where Captain Warden’s affairs are concerned, I shall certainly not discuss him or them.”

Figuero paid no heed to the intentional snub.

“You understan’ better w’en I tole you dem secret. You promise not speak ‘im any one?”

“Well—yes.”

“He fit for marry dem Mees Dane.”

“Don’t be idiotic.”

Mrs. Laing could not help it. She was so startled that she raised her voice, and more than one of her neighbors wondered what the sallow–faced stranger had said that evoked the outburst. Figuero looked annoyed. He was not prepared for such vehement repudiation of his news. Fortunately, the Honorable Billy Thring was giving a realistic account of his failure to secure an heiress during a recent wife–hunting tour in America—he tried lots of ‘em, he explained, but they all said he must kill off at least one brother and two healthy nephews before they would risk marryin’ a prize dude like him—so Rosamund’s emphatic cry passed almost unheeded amidst the laughter evoked by Thring’s exploits.

“You fit for chop,” muttered the Portuguese sarcastically. “You fit for fool palaver. You plenty–much silly woman.”

“But what you say cannot be true,” she half whispered, and the man’s astute senses warned him that it was dread, not contempt, that drew the protest from her lips.

“I fit for tell you Warden make wife palaver wid dem girl at Cowes. If you no b’lieve me, make sof’ mouf an’ ax Mees Dane.”

Then the woman remembered Warden’s anxiety to return to the Isle of Wight. He had not written to her or to Lady Hilbury during the past month, and this fact, trivial as a pin–prick before, now became a rankling wound.

“You keep dem secret?” went on Figuero, watching her closely.

“Why did you tell me?” she retorted.

“Coss I no want Warden marry dem girl. Savvy?”

“Do you want to marry her yourself?” she asked, with a bitterness that showed how deeply she was hurt.

He grinned, and wetted his thin lips with his tongue.

“You t’ink I tired goin’ by lone?” he said.

“What is your motive? Why do you choose me as a confidant?”

Figuero suddenly became dense.

“I tell you leetle bit news,” he said. “Dat is English custom. W’en we chop one–time palaver set. But you no say Figuero tole you dem t’ing.”

Rosamund did not reply. She endeavored to eat, and entered into conversation with a man near her. The Honorable Billy was ending his story.

“So I am still eligible,” he was saying. “I went to America full of hot air, and came back with cold feet. But I learned the language—eh, what?”

That night, in the drawing–room, Mrs. Laing carried out the opening move in a campaign she had mapped out for herself. If Figuero’s story were true, she would smite and spare not. If it were untrue, Evelyn would be the first to deny it, and Rosamund trusted to her own intuition to discover how far such denial might be credited.

A man who was talking to Evelyn was summoned to a bridge table, and Rosamund took his place unobtrusively.

“Then you really were on board the Sans Souci at Cowes, Miss Dane?” she began, with a friendly smile.

“Yes,” said Evelyn, at a loss to determine why her brief sojourn in the Solent should attract such widespread attention.

“And you met Captain Warden there?”

The attack was so direct and unexpected that the younger woman blushed and flinched from it. Still, she was not to be drawn into admissions like a frightened child.

“I met several people on the island,” she said. “Cowes is a crowded place during regatta week.”

“Oh, come now,” purred the smiling Rosamund, “one does not forget a man of Arthur Warden’s type so readily—and after a violent flirtation, too! You see, I know all about it. Little birds whisper these things. Arthur did not tell me when he came to see me in town. Of course, he wouldn’t, but there are always kind–hearted people willing enough to gossip if they think they are annoying one.”

There was sufficient innuendo in this brief speech to justify Mrs. Laing’s worst estimate of scandal–mongers. Not one barbed shaft missed its mark. If words could wound, then Evelyn must have succumbed, but the injuries they inflict are not always visible, and she kept a stiff upper lip, though her heart raced in wild tumult.

“The inference is that you are far more interested in Captain Warden’s visits to Cowes than I or any other person can pretend to be,” she said slowly.

She meant the cold–drawn phrase to hurt, and in that she succeeded, though her own voice sounded in her ears as if it had come from afar.

“Well, perhaps you ought to be told that he and I are engaged,” said Rosamund, stung to a sudden fury of lying. “Don’t imagine I bear malice. You are sweetly pretty, and Arthur is so susceptible! But he is also rather thoughtless. We were pledged to each other years ago, but were kept apart by—by a mother’s folly. Now I am free, and he came back to me, though I had to insist that at least a year should elapse between my husband’s death and the announcement of our engagement. All our friends know our sad story, and would forgive some measure of haste, but one has to consider the larger circle of the public.”

Then, indeed, Evelyn’s blood seemed to chill in her veins. The room and its occupants swam before her eyes, and the pain of repression became almost unbearable, yet she was resolved to carry off the honors in this duel unless she fainted.

“I gather that you are warning me against Captain Warden’s thoughtlessness, as you term it?” she said, compelling each word at the bayonet’s point, as it were.

“Oh, I was not speaking seriously, but we can let it go at that.”

“And you wish me to understand that you are his promised wife?”

“There, at least, I am most emphatic,” and Rosamund laughed, a trifle shrilly, perhaps, for a woman so well equipped with the armor of self–conceit.

“I suppose, then, that the late Mr. Laing has been dead a year, as I form one of that larger circle whose favorable opinion you court?”

For an instant Rosamund’s black eyes flashed angrily. She had expected tears and faltering, not resistance.

“I only meant to do you a good turn, yet on the raw,” she sneered.

“Pray do not consider me at all. By your own showing, I have no grievance—no locus standi, as the lawyers say—but, since you have gone out of your way to give a mere stranger this interesting information, I wish to be quite sure of the facts. For instance, let us suppose that I have the honor of Captain Warden’s acquaintance—am I at liberty to write and congratulate him?”

“That would place me in a false position.”

“Ah. Is there nothing to be said for me? You spoke of a ‘violent flirtation,’ I think. If I may guess at the meaning of a somewhat crude phrase, it seems to imply a possible exchange of lovers’ vows, and one of the parties might be misled—and suffer.”

“We women are the sinners most frequently.”

“I do not dispute your authority, Mrs. Laing. I only wish to ascertain exactly what I am free to say to Captain Warden?”

“Tell him you met me, and that I am well posted in everything that occurred at Cowes. And, for goodness’ sake, let me see his reply. It will be too killing to read Arthur’s verbal wrigglings, because he is really clever, don’t you think?”

Somehow, despite the steely tension of every nerve, Evelyn caught an undertone of anxiety in the jesting words. Her rival was playing a bold game. It might end in complete disaster, but, once committed to it, there was no drawing back.

“The proceedings at Cowes were open to all the world,” Evelyn could not help saying. “Even you, with your long experience, might fail to detect in them any trace of the thoughtlessness you deplore.”

“Then you have met him elsewhere?”

Evelyn, conscious of a tactical blunder, colored even more deeply with annoyance, though again she felt that her tormentor was not so sure of her ground as she professed to be. Every woman is a born actress, and Evelyn precipitated a helpful crisis with histrionic skill.

“The whole story is yours, not mine, Mrs. Laing,” she said quietly. “Perhaps, if you apply to your half–caste informant, he may fill in further details to please you.”

At that moment the Honorable Billy Thring intervened. He was one of those privileged persons who can say anything to anybody without giving offense, and he broke into the conversation now with his usual frank inanity.

“I find I’ve bin lookin’ for a faithful spouse in the wrong direction, Mrs. Laing,” he chortled. “Barkin’ up the wrong tree, a Chicago girl called it. What a thorough ass I was to spin that yarn at dinner with you in the room. Will you be good, an’ forget it? Don’t say I haven’t got an earthly before the flag falls.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” cried Rosamund, turning on him with the sourest of society smiles.

“It sounds like the beginning of a violent flirtation,” said Evelyn, yielding to the impulse that demanded some redress for the torture she had endured.

“Right you are, Miss Dane,” said Billy. “By gad, that clears the course quicker than a line of policemen. You see, Mrs. Laing, I really must marry somebody with sufficient means for both of us. I have expensive tastes, and my noble dad gave me neither a profession nor an income. So what is a fellow to do?”

“You flatter me,” said Rosamund tartly. “Unfortunately I have just been telling Miss Dane that I am hors de concours, as they put it in the Paris exhibitions.”

“That is the French for ‘you never know your luck,’ Mr. Thring,” cried Evelyn, with a well–assumed laugh. “Mrs. Laing may change her mind, too, not for the first time.”

Without giving her adversary a chance to retaliate, she darted away to join Beryl Baumgartner, and soon seized an opportunity to retreat to her own room. Once safely barricaded behind a locked door, she bowed before the storm. Flinging herself on her knees by the bedside, she wept as though her heart would break. It was her first taste of the bitter cup that is held out to many a girl in her position, and its gall was not diminished because she still believed that Arthur Warden loved her. How could she doubt him, when each passing week brought her a letter couched in the most endearing terms? Only that morning had she heard from him at Ostend, whither the Nancy had flown after making a round of the Norfolk Broads. He described his chances of speedy promotion once the threatened disturbance in West Africa had spent itself, and, oddly enough, reminded her of his intention to curtail his furlough so as to permit of a visit to Rabat in a coasting steamer before going to Madeira on his way to the Protectorate.

Not a word did he say of the Baumgartners, or their queer acquaintances of the Isle of Wight. It was tacitly agreed between them that Evelyn should not play the rôle of spy on her employers, and, indeed, until that very day there was little to report save the utmost kindness at their hands.

Why, then, it may be urged, did she weep so unrestrainedly? and only the virgin heart of a woman who loves can answer. She feared that Rosamund Laing was telling the truth when she spoke of a prior engagement. She knew that Warden had said nothing at Plymouth of meeting Rosamund in London, and she was hardly to be blamed for drawing the most sinister inference from his silence. Did he dread that earlier entanglement? He was poor, and she was poor; how could he resist the pleading of one so rich and beautiful as her rival?

In short, poor Evelyn passed a grievous and needlessly tortured hour before she endeavored to compose herself for sleep, and she was denied the consolation of knowing that the woman who destroyed her happiness was pacing another room like a caged tigress, and striving to devise some means of extricating herself from the morass into which Figuero’s tidings and her own rashness had plunged her.

CHAPTER VIII

SHOWING HOW MANY ROADS LEAD THE SAME WAY

Next day, her mind restored to its customary equipoise, Evelyn thought she would be acting wisely if she gave Warden some hint of recent developments. Too proud to ask for an explicit denial of Rosamund Laing’s claim, she saw the absurdity of letting affairs drift until the hoped–for meeting at Madeira. At first, she thought of resigning her post as Beryl’s companion, and returning to Oxfordshire, but she set the notion aside as unreasonable and unnecessary. Most certainly Warden should not be condemned unheard. Without pressing him for a definite statement with regard to Mrs. Laing, it was a simple matter to put the present situation before him in such guise that he could not choose but refer to it. So, after drafting a few sentences, and weighing them seriously, she incorporated the following in a letter of general import:

“Yesterday we had three new arrivals whose names must appeal to you powerfully. First, a Mrs. Rosamund Laing came here from London, and she lost no time in telling me, among other things, that she was aware of our meeting at Cowes. Her informant, I am sure, was Miguel Figuero, and you will be even more astonished to learn that he and Count von Rippenbach turned up by the same train as Mrs. Laing. The latter, by the way, said that you called on her at Lady Hilbury’s when in London. Is that true? There are some hidden forces in motion at Lochmerig which I do not understand. Mr. Baumgartner tackled me openly at dinner with regard to my journey from Cowes to Oxfordshire. We know from Peter that Figuero saw us together that morning, and your Portuguese friend evidently recognized me at once. But Mr. Baumgartner’s pointed reference to Langton as my destination was rather puzzling. How does it strike you? I expect my news will prove rather in the nature of a thunderbolt, and that is usually a very striking article. I assure you I am somewhat shaken myself. Mrs. Laing’s personal attributes remind one of those galvanic batteries you see at fairs in the country—the more you try to endure her magnetic influence, the greater your collapse.”

Before sealing the envelope, she re–read Warden’s latest letter. She even read it aloud, and the straightforward, honest, loving words assumed a new significance. Then she turned to her own effusion, and viewed it critically. To her surprise, she detected a jarring, somewhat cynical, note in those passages which she regarded as all–important. To her judgment, events in the near future would follow a well–defined course. Her lover would say whether or not he had met Mrs. Laing in London, and give the clearest reasons for his omission of her name from the subsequent recital of his adventures. Evelyn would count the hours until that reply reached her hands. Perhaps Mrs. Laing’s curiosity anent Warden’s skill in “wriggling” would then be sated. She might even give an exhibition of the wriggler’s art in her own behalf.

Evelyn refused to admit now that she had ever yielded to doubt or anxiety. The hysterical outburst of last night was natural, perhaps, under the circumstances, but quite nonsensical. Even Warden himself must be made to believe that Mrs. Laing was only indulging an exuberant sense of humor in claiming his fealty. Meaning, therefore, to tone down any apparent asperity in the paragraph referring to the three newcomers, she added a few lines beneath her signature.

“The Men of Oku have not yet appeared. I am longing to see them. They are really the most picturesque villains in the piece. I am just going for a stroll by the side of the loch, and I shall not be a little bit alarmed if I find a decorated calabash sailing in with the tide.”

There is nothing new in the fact that the most important item in a woman’s letter is often contained in a postscript, but never did the writer of a harmless and gossipy missive achieve such amazing results as Evelyn Dane brought to pass by the words she scribbled hurriedly after the magic letters “P.S.”

For others than Evelyn Dane were taking thought that morning. Baumgartner, von Rippenbach, and Figuero—locked in the library, and seated round a small table drawn well away from the door—were settling the final details of a scheme that aimed at nothing less than a very grave alteration in the political map of the world, while Rosamund Laing was planning an enterprise which should have an equally marked effect in the minor sphere of her own affairs.

Yet the fortunes of these five people gathered at Lochmerig, and of many millions in other parts of the earth, were absolutely controlled by one of those trivial conditions which appear to be so ludicrously out of proportion with ultimate achievement.

Baumgartner, being a rich man, objected to delay where his interests were concerned. Refusing to await the tardy coming of a country postman, he kept a groom in the village to which the mails were brought by train, and it was this man’s duty to ride in each day with the post–bag for Lochmerig Lodge and return some hours later with the first out–going budget. The house letters were dropped into a box in the entrance hall, and a notice intimated that the time of clearance was at noon. To an unscrupulous woman, such an arrangement offered the means to do ill deeds that makes ill deeds done. Rosamund, ready to dare anything now to save herself from contumely, actually set out to find Evelyn and taunt her into an admission that she had written to Warden.

“Miss Dane is not in the house, madam,” said the London footman on duty at the door. “She went out some time since—in that direction,” and he pointed toward the glistening firth that brought the North Sea into the heart of Inverness.

Mrs. Laing pouted prettily.

“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “I do hope she has not forgotten to write. I shall never find her in time. Did you happen to notice if she posted a letter?”

The footman sought inspiration by stroking his chin.

“Yes, madam,” he announced, after a pause. “I’m almost certain Miss Dane went to the box. Yes, I’m sure of it.”

Madam was very much obliged, and tipped him half–a–crown, informing him with a most charming smile that she did not on any account wish Miss Dane to believe that she was suspected of forgetfulness. It was then some few minutes after eleven, and this gracious lady was sympathetic enough to inquire if the footman did not become very tired of remaining on duty so many hours in one place.

“Oh, it’s nothing compared with London, ma’am,” said he. “Here we have sunshine—if the weather is fine—an’ fresh air all the time. I only came on duty at nine o’clock, an’ I go off at 11.30 for the first servants’ dinner.”

Mrs. Laing was talking to Billy Thring in the hall when the postman groom came to clear the letter–box. She darted forward with that irresistible smile of hers.

“I’m so glad I happened to be standing here,” she exclaimed. “I have just remembered that I have stupidly left out of a letter the very thing I most wanted to say. It would never have occurred to me if I hadn’t seen you. The letter is addressed to Captain Warden. May I have it?”

The man was Baumgartner’s servant. He had never before set eyes on Mrs. Laing, but he knew the Honorable Billy quite well, so he raised no objection to this smartly dressed lady’s eager search for her incomplete letter. Though her hands fumbled somewhat, she soon picked it out.

“Here it is!” she cried delightedly, “this one—Captain Arthur Warden, Poste Restante, Ostend. Now, that will save me a heap of trouble. It was so nice of you to come in at the right moment. You have saved me a lot of trouble.”

The groom grinned as he pocketed half–a–crown. Some ladies were easy pleased, to be sure. Even Billy Thring, experienced hunter of gilded brides, was bewildered by Mrs. Laing’s excited manner.

“Seems to me I’ve made a killin’,” he mused when she gushed herself away. “I s’pose old Baumgartner can be relied on. He is all there as a rule when he talks dollars an’ cents, but he’s a perfect rotter every other way. By gad, I’ll kid him into wearin’ kilts before the end of the month.”

The notion tickled him. He lit a cigarette and strolled out through the open door. A glorious sweep of moorland and forest spread beyond the loch, whose wavelets lapped the verges of the sloping lawn and gardens. A little to the left the Sans Souci lay at her moorings. A steam launch was tied to a neat landing–stage. A string of horses and moor ponies returning from exercise crossed a level pasture at the head of the loch. The letter–carrying groom was clattering down the broad carriage drive toward the distant station, and a couple of gardeners were cutting and rolling the green carpet of grass in front of the house.

“He talks of buyin’ this property,” communed the Honorable Billy, who was thirty–five and had never earned a penny in his life. “Can’t be ten years older than me, though he looks sixty, bein’ podgy. Now, why can’t I have a stroke of luck an’ rake in a stack? Then I might have a cut–in for the giddy widow.”

Evelyn’s trim figure emerged from a tree–shrouded path. She walked with a lithe elegance that pleased Mr. Thring’s sporting eye.

“Or marry a girl like that,” he added. The wild improbability of ever achieving any part of this fascinating programme brought a petulant frown to his handsome, vacuous face.

He strode up to one of the gardeners, a red–whiskered Caledonian, stern and wild.

“Where the devil is everybody?” he yawned. “No shootin’, no yachtin’, not a soul in the billiard–room—where’s the bloomin’ crowd?”

The dour Scot looked at him pityingly.

“Aiblins some are i’ bed,” he said, “an’ there’s ithers wha ocht to be i’ bed.”

“Bully for you, Rob Roy,” cried Thring, who never objected to being scored off. “Aiblins some people are cuttin’ grass wha ocht to be under it, because they don’t know they’re alive, eh what?”

“Man, but ye’re shairp the day,” retorted the gardener. “Whiles I’m thinkin’ there’s a guid pig–jobber lost in you, Maister Thring.”

“Pig–jobber, you cateran! Why pigs?”

“Have ye no heerd tell that fowk a bit saft i’ the heid have a wonderfu’ way wi’ animals, an’ pigs are always a fine mairket.”

“A bit heavy, McToddy. Trem yer whuskers an’ change yer trousies for a kelt, an’ mebbe ye’ll crack a joke wi’ less deeficulty.”

The under–gardener chortled, for the Honorable Billy could imitate the Scots dialect with an unction that was decidedly mirth–provoking.

“Ma name’s no McToddy,” began the other.

“Well, then, McWhusky. I ken the noo from yer rid neb that there’s michty little watter in yer composition.”

Snorting defiance, but not daring to pour forth the wrath that boiled up in him, the man pushed a mowing–machine savagely across the lawn.

“Routed!” smiled Billy. “Bannockburn is avenged!”

“What is amusing you, Mr. Thring?” asked Evelyn, who had walked over the grass unheard.

“I have just discovered my lost vocation,” he said. “I am a buffoon, Miss Dane, an idle jester. The only difference between me and a music–hall comedian is that my humor is not remunerative.”

“Why, when I left you last night you were on the verge of proposing to Mrs. Laing, a most serious undertaking.”

“Jolly nice woman, Mrs. Laing. No nonsense about her. We’ve bin together the last half hour, an’ I’m under the starter’s orders, at any rate.”

“Why not go in and win?” demanded Evelyn, taking a kindly interest in the Honorable one’s matrimonial prospects. If he and Mrs. Laing made a match of it, that would provide a very agreeable close to a disquieting incident.

“I’m afraid it’ll only be to make the runnin’ for some other Johnny,” sighed he. “I was gettin’ along like a house a–fire, when all at once she remembered she hadn’t said what she wanted to say in a letter to a Captain somebody at Ostend, an’ off she waltzed to her room. She’s probably writin’ sweet nothings to him now. Same old story—Billy Thring left at the post. Gad, that’s funny! See it, eh, what?”

Thring was so amused by his own wit that he did not notice the expression of pain and fear that drove the brightness from Evelyn’s face. But she herself was conscious of it, and looked away lest he should peer into her eyes, and wonder. So Mrs. Laing was writing to Arthur! She knew his address! How strange, how unutterably strange, that he had not once mentioned her name! The girl, as in a dream, affected to be watching a boy, the son of the village post–mistress, coming up the avenue. For the sake of hearing her own voice in such commonplace words as she might dare to utter, she drew her companion’s attention.

“Here is our telegraph messenger,” she said.

Thring glanced at his watch.

“It’s for me,” he announced. “There’s a chap at Newmarket who is the champion loser–finder of the world, an’ I’m one of his victims. This is Leger day, an’ if you wait a moment I’ll put you onto a stiff ‘un, sure thing. Then you must turn bookmaker at lunch, and win gloves right and left—in pairs, in fact. I’ll stand your losses if my prophet has gone mad an’ sent a winner.”

The boy made straight for him, and commenced to unfasten the pouch slung to his belt.

“See? I told you,” laughed Billy, opening the message.

Evelyn hardly understood him. She was grateful for the high spirits that prevented him from paying any heed to the tears trembling under her drooping eyelashes. Despite her brave resolve to disregard Rosamund Laing’s unbelievable story, a whole legion of doubts and terrors now trooped in on her. She asked herself how she could endure to live in the same house as her rival, for five long days, until Arthur’s answer came. Would he receive the two letters by the same post? Could there be any real foundation for her rival’s boast? The thought made her sick at heart. Fighting down her dread, she turned to Thring hoping to find a momentary oblivion in listening to his cheerful nonsense.

She found oblivion, indeed, but not in the shape she anticipated. Shading his eyes with one hand and holding the telegram in the other, her companion was gazing at it in a dazed way. His cheeks were bloodless, the hand gripping the scrap of flimsy paper shook as though he were seized with ague, his whole attitude was that of a man who had received an overwhelming shock.

“Mr. Thring!” she cried, startled beyond measure, “what has happened?”

“My God!” he wailed, with the tingling note of agony in his voice that comes most clearly from one whose lips are formed for laughter. “My God! And I was jesting about them only last night!”

“Oh, what is it?” she cried again, catching his arm because he swayed like one about to faint.

“Read!” he murmured. “Fairholme an’ the two boys! May Heaven forgive me! To think that I should have said it last night of all nights!”

Evelyn took the telegram from his palsied fingers, and this is what she read:

“With deepest regret I have to inform you that the Earl of Fairholme and his two sons were killed in the collision at Beckminster Junction last evening. Their private saloon was being shunted when the down express crashed into it. Letters found on his lordship’s body gave me your address. Every one here joins in profound sympathy. Please wire instructions. James Thwaite.”

Scarce knowing what she said, and still clinging desperately to the stricken man at her side, Evelyn whispered:

“Are they your relatives?”

And the answer came brokenly.

“Don’t you know? That’s Ferdy and my nephews! And two such boys! Straight an’ tall an’ handsome. Good Lord! was that the only way?”

Then she realized the horror of it. The crushed society butterfly, who was like to fall to the ground but for her support, was now Earl of Fairholme. Calling Brown to her aid, they led him inside the house. The butler, impelled to disobey his master’s strict injunctions, knocked at the library door, and told Baumgartner what had happened.

Von Rippenbach heard. He was a callous person, to whom the death of three Englishmen was of very slight consideration.

“The very thing!” he murmured. “Now you have your excuse. You can empty the place in twenty–four hours.”

Rosamund Laing, whose white brows wore unseemly furrows, was writing and thinking in her own room when a maid brought her the news. Before her on the table was Evelyn’s letter, and the sharp–eyed Scotch lassie saw that the lady nearly upset the inkstand in her haste to cover something with the blotting–pad. Rosamund was shocked, of course. Finding that Thring was leaving for the south almost immediately, she then and there wrote a sweetly sympathetic note, and had it taken to him.

“By the way,” she said before the maid went out, “have you seen Mr. Figuero recently? I mean the dark–skinned man who came here yesterday.”

Yes, he had just left the library with the master and another gentleman. Rosamund rose at once. If she were not greatly mistaken, Evelyn’s harmless–looking postscript had given her a clue to the mystery of Figuero’s presence in Baumgartner’s house. She knew her West Africa, and the bad repute of Oku was one of her clearest memories. Yet she turned back at the door, took Evelyn’s letter from her pocket, copied a portion of it, and locked the original in her jewel case.

The luncheon–gong sounded as she descended the stairs, so perforce she postponed the interview she promised herself with the Portuguese. And, for the success of her deep–laid schemes, it was as well. Sometimes there comes to the aid of evil–doers a fiend who contrives opportunities where human forethought would fail. Rosamund, embarked on a well–nigh desperate enterprise, suddenly found the way smoothed by Baumgartner’s wholly unexpected announcement that business considerations compelled him to leave Lochmerig forthwith.

“My wife and I would have tried to arrange matters satisfactorily for our guests,” he said, “but the gloom cast on our pleasant party by the unhappy tidings received this morning by one of our number renders it almost impossible for any of us to enjoy the remainder of a most memorable and delightful sojourn in Scotland.”

He delivered himself of other platitudes, but Mrs. Baumgartner’s dejected air and Beryl’s sulky silence showed plainly enough that the millionaire’s fiat was unalterable. Polite murmurs of agreement veiled the chagrin of people who had a fortnight or more thrown on their hands without any prior arrangements. The meal was a solemn function. Everybody was glad when it ended.

Rosamund met Figuero in the hall.

“I am going to the village,” she said. “Will you walk there with me?”

He caught the veiled meaning of the glance, and agreed instantly. When they were clear of the house, she commenced the attack.

“Why are you and Count von Rippenbach and three men of Oku in England?” she asked.

She did not look at Figuero. There was no need. He waited a few seconds too long before he laughed.

“You make joke,” he said.

“Do I? It will be no joke for you when Captain Warden informs the Government, if he has not done that already.”

“Why you say dem t’ing?” he growled, and she was fully aware of the menace in his voice.

“You told me what you were pleased to consider a secret last night. Very well, I am willing to trade. Captain Warden knows what you are doing. He probably guesses every item of the business you and the Count were discussing so long and earnestly with Mr. Baumgartner in the library before lunch. Oh, please don’t interrupt”—for Figuero, driven beyond the bounds of self–control, was using words better left to the Portuguese tongue in which they were uttered—“I am not concerned with your plots. They never come to anything, you know. If either Count von Rippenbach or Mr. Baumgartner had your history at their finger’s ends as I have, they would drop you like a hot cinder. Yet, I am ready to bargain. Help me, and I will keep my information to myself.”

“What you want, den?”

She glanced at him, and was surprised to see that his face was livid, almost green with rage and perplexity. It must be a grave matter—this jumble of hints in Evelyn’s letter.

“Can you read English?” she asked, after a pause.

“Yes, leetle piece—better as I can make palaver.”

“Read that then.”

She handed him the copy of that part of the fateful letter that alluded to himself and his affairs. He puzzled it out, word by word.

“Where him lib for?” he demanded.

“That was written by Miss Dane and intended for Captain Warden. I came by it, no matter how, and I mean to make use of it in some way.”

With a rapid movement, he stuffed the sheet of note–paper into a pocket.

“I keep dem letter,” he announced.

“Certainly. It is only a copy. Savvy? I have the real one safely put away.”

Figuero swallowed something. His thin lips were bloodless, and his tongue moistened them with the quick darting action of a snake. Rosamund, who was really somewhat afraid, trusted to the daylight and the fact that they were traversing an open road, with cottages scattered through the glen.

“You cannot humbug me,” she went on, “but I want to assure you again that I am no enemy of yours. Now, listen. I mean to marry Captain Warden, but I have reason to believe that he is engaged, promised, to Miss Dane. I am trying to stop that, to break it off. Can you help?”

“You ask hard t’ing—in dis place. In Africa, we get Oku man make ju–ju.”

She shuddered. The cold malevolence in his words recalled stories she had heard of those who had died with unaccountable suddenness when “Oku man make ju–ju.”

“I don’t mean that,” she cried vehemently. “Tell me what is taking place, and how it will affect Captain Warden. Then I can twist events to my own purpose. I can warn him, perhaps prove myself his friend. Above all—where are you going to–morrow? Mr. Baumgartner sails in the Sans Souci, I hear. Does Miss Dane go with him, or is she to be sent away because she is aware of your plans?”

Figuero did not answer during a whole minute.

He saw light, dimly, but growing more distinct each instant. Warden was a deadly personality in the field against him, and his active interference was now assured beyond cavil. But, with two women as foils, both beautiful, and one exceedingly well equipped with money, there was still a chance of circumventing the only man he feared.

“You steal dem letter?” he said unexpectedly.

“At any rate, it has not gone to Captain Warden,” was the acid reply.

“An’ you write ‘im. What you say?”

“Oh, nothing that affects the case.”

“You tole him me here?”

“No. That can wait,” which statement, as shall be seen, was strictly untrue.

“Well, den, dem yacht lib for—for somewheres to–morrow. Dem girl, Mees Dane, go wid me. You tole him dat t’ing as you say las’ night. I make wife palaver to dem girl.”

“What good will that do?” she said. “In a week, ten days, he will hear from her again.”

“No. I take dem letter. You gib me Captain Warden writin’, an’ I keep eye for dat. Savvy?”

“But can you carry out what you promised?”

“Two, t’ree months, yes. After dem yacht lib for Madeira, no. P’raps dem girl be wife den.”