The Best Wadsworth Camp Mysteries. Charles Wadsworth Camp
he had feared. The weight of his responsibility in urging the man here against his will crushed Miller. He forced the question out.
“Tony! Tony! Were you struck?”
They swayed from the forest to the beach. Far away the riding light of the Bart burned steadily. The peaceful water mirrored the stars.
Miller swung Tony around.
“That place is full of snakes,” he said thickly. “Tell me—”
He shook the man.
“Tell me! Tell me!”
Tony did not answer. Miller had a cold fear that he could not. He tightened his grasp.
“What happened? Pull yourself together, man!”
It was a long time before Tony spoke. When he did finally, the words came with difficulty, disjointed, almost unintelligible.
“The avenue—something moved. It was dark—frightened—in the path—I got off—”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“What happened in the path!”
“Don’t know. I couldn’t go on.” The man’s voice rose to a cry. “I couldn’t move—”
“Nothing touched you? Nothing held you?” “No. I was alone, and I couldn’t move—couldn’t see. But I could hear. I heard the rattle.”
He paused, gasping for breath.
“I heard it crawling—crawling. It rattled twice.”
“But you screamed. How—”
“I don’t know. It hurt, but I shouted. I heard you coming. I could move. I ran.”
Miller let him go. He walked to the boat and lighted the lantern, trying to tell himself it was stark fear that had held the man captive.
Tony pushed off, stepped in, and took the oars. He rowed unevenly. The boat made slow progress.
Miller raised the lantern to examine the native’s face. But his eyes did not reach the face. They were arrested by the knotted hands on the oars. He was unwilling to credit what he saw there. The manner of Jake’s death on that same path came back and chilled him. For there were abrasions on Tony’s wrists, too, and the man could not tell how they had come there. He was sure of only this :—no one had touched him. He dropped the oars.
“I can’t row, Mr. Miller. My wrists hurt.”
He thrust his wrists in the salt water. He carried them to his face. He pressed them against his eyes. All at once he commenced to sob, painfully, grossly.
Lowering the lantern. Miller waited for this shocking breakdown to rack itself out. He could not doubt what Tony’s wrists had shown him. For the first time he surrendered to a sense of insufficiency and, for the moment, of utter helplessness.
CHAPTER XII
THE CONQUERING INFLUENCE
When they reached the Dart Miller lighted the saloon lamp himself. Sitting on a locker, he directed Tony to come to him and to place his hands, palms up, on the polished mahogany table. Then he leaned forward to examine the wrists more carefully. Immediately he started back with an exclamation. The abrasions were disappearing. Even in this brilliant light he had had to look closely to detect that which fifteen minutes back had struck him like a blow in the uncertain glimmer of a lantern.
He questioned Tony. He went over the entire experience once more, but Tony could tell him nothing further. It was all vague in his mind. The thing that was clearest, that persisted, whose memory still terrified, was the fact that he had stood in the darkness, off the path, unable to move, held apparently by an immaterial but plenary force, while the snake had approached.
When Miller had finished Tony bent his head.
“Now,” he asked in that thick voice which always gave the impression of a thing disused, “can’t we go from Captain’s Island?”
Miller thought for a moment, knowing he would stay, yet striving to be honest with himself. He admitted that he craved cheerful surroundings and experiences ranging within his own comprehension. He did not deny that a feeling of inadequacy to combat the atmosphere of Captain’s Island had grown, had tonight assumed disconcerting proportions. But he was aware of no bending of his will. He understood more clearly than ever why Anderson and Molly had stayed on at the coquina house in the face of nervous and physical breakdown. Any other course would have confessed their weakness, would have earned his contempt. He found himself looking forward impatiently to tomorrow night which he would spend there, perhaps in the room where Noyer had committed the murder on which so much of the island’s superstition was based. In other words he wanted to bring matters to a focus in order to persuade Molly, Anderson, Tony, and himself that they were the victims of nerves, or of some subtle material fact to which at present no clue appeared. For he would not harbour the possibility of the supernatural’s convincing him at the end.
Underneath this healthy, combative instinct, moreover, lay a stronger force which held him to the place—one whose birth and growth and expression troubled him scarcely less than the graver problem. When, yielding incredibly to his impulse, he had held the girl, according to his will and against hers, in his arms; when, her resistance swept aside, he had placed his lips on her elfin ones, he had accepted from Captain’s Island a personal problem on whose solution, he realised, his happiness depended precariously. Molly and the others eliminated, he could not leave the inlet now. So he faced Tony with a certain pity, because he understood the man’s devotion.
“No, Tony, we can not go from Captain’s Island yet. I shall stay until all the cards are on the table,”
Under his breath Tony muttered one word :
“Death!”
“What’s that?” Miller demanded sharply.
“Can’t fight what you can’t see. Captain’s Island’s full of it. It’s always meant death. The other night—”
“Your stories!” Miller said. “All right, Tony. After your experience this evening on top of Jake’s death I can’t keep you. I can’t expect to convince you by laughing at your stories again. In the morning you can go to Sandport, and, understand, I don’t blame you. We part amicably.”
Tony opened his arms in a gesture of despair. He went back to the kitchen.
“That means, Tony?” Miller called.
An angry rattling of pans came to him. But he knew what it meant. If they got through here with whole skins he would take the fellow North with him.
He slept very little that night. The wearier his brain grew with the puzzle the wider awake it held him. He placed the mystery in the scales with logic and commonsense, but the scales would not balance. The few facts that presented themselves only increased the fantasy of the unknown. From the cases of Jake and Tony an alliance appeared to exist between the island’s two radical attributes—its commonly accepted supernatural atmosphere and its poisonous snakes. Both of these unaccountable adventures, one of which had ended fatally, had occurred in the same place—that piece of forest between the shore of the inlet and the ruins. What was the connection between the violent and fatal force that lurked there and the wearing manifestations of the coquina house, and, for that matter, with the oppressive air one breathed after dark at Morgan’s—even here on the Dart?
When, for relief from these questions to which no answer would come, he turned to his own problem, the girl, he only found more to trouble, more to mystify. From the first her presence had led him to answer to unexpected and, he felt, inexplicable impulses. And tonight she had come to him with a veiled warning that the piece of woods was unsafe.