The British Mysteries Edition: 14 Novels & 70+ Short Stories. Sapper
bunch of armed men came pouring over the side, and then disappeared below, only to come up again in a few minutes carrying a number of wooden boxes, which they lowered into the boats alongside. They worked with the efficiency of well-trained sailors, and I found myself cursing aloud. For I knew what was inside those boxes, and one was so utterly helpless to do anything. And yet I couldn't help feeling a sort of unwilling admiration; the thing was so perfectly organised. It might have been a well-rehearsed drill instead of a unique and gigantic piece of piracy.
I stepped back a few paces, and looked up at the bridge. The skipper was there and his three officers—covered by another of the parsons. And the fifth member of the party was the Reverend Samuel Longfellow. He was smiling gently to himself, and as the last of the boxes was lowered over the side he came to the edge of the bridge and addressed us.
"We are now going to leave you," he remarked suavely. "You are all unarmed, and I wish to give you a word of advice. Should either of the gunners on my yacht see anyone move, however innocent the reason, before we are on board, he or both of them will open fire. So do not, Captain Kelly, be tempted to have a shot at me, because it will be the last shot you ever have. You will now join your crew, if you please."
In silence the skipper and his officers came down from the bridge, and the speaker followed them. For a moment or two he stood facing us with an ironical smile on his face.
"Your brother in the Church," he remarked, "thanks you for your little gift to his offertory box." Then he turned to one of the other parsons beside him. "Is it set?" he asked briefly.
"Yes," said the other. "We'd better hurry. What about that woman up there?"
"Confound the woman!" answered the Reverend Samuel. "A pleasant journey, Captain Kelly."
He stepped down the gangway into the second boat, and pulled away towards the yacht.
And then for the first time I remembered Mrs. Armstrong. She was cowering down with her hands over her ears, the picture of abject terror. But now curiosity overcame her fright and she knelt up and stared at the yacht. Her pink parasol was clutched in her hands, and tragic though the situation was, I could not help smiling.
A mocking shout from the yacht made me look away again. The scoundrel who called himself the Reverend Samuel Longfellow was standing beside the boxes of gold and pearls which had been stacked on the deck. He was waving his hand and bowing ironically, with the six other blackguards beside him, when the last amazing development took place.
Literally before our eyes they vanished in a great sheet of flame. I had a momentary glimpse of the yacht apparently splitting in two, and then the roar of a gigantic explosion nearly deafened me.
"Get under cover!" yelled the skipper, and there was a general stampede, as bits of metal and wood began falling into the sea all round us. Then there came another smaller explosion as the sea rushed into the yacht's engine- room, a great column of water shot up, and when it subsided the yacht had disappeared.
"What in heaven's name happened?" said one of the Americans dazedly.
I said nothing; I felt too dazed myself. And unconsciously I looked towards the bows. Mrs. Armstrong had disappeared.
The skipper sent away a boat, but it was useless. There was a mass of floating wreckage, but no trace of any survivor.
I met Mrs. Armstrong on deck half an hour afterwards. "Dreadful! Terrible!" she cried. "How more than thankful I am I didn't see it!"
I stared at her.
"You didn't see it?" I said. "But surely—"
And then I heard Jim's voice behind me.
"Mrs. Armstrong, I have a dreadful confession to make. Mrs. Armstrong, Dick, was good enough to lend me some clothes this morning, so that we could have a rag when crossing the Line, and I've gone and dropped her parasol overboard."
"We're nowhere near the Line," I remarked, but fortunately the good lady paid no attention.
"What does it matter, Mr. Maitland?" she cried. "To think of anything of that sort in face of this awful tragedy!"
She walked away like an agitated hen, and Jim smiled grimly.
"Poor old soul!" he said, "let's hope she never gets an idea of the truth."
"So it was you up in the bows," I remarked.
He nodded. "Didn't you guess, Dick? Let's go and have a drink, and I'll put you wise."
"I went and saw Kelly that night," he began, when we were comfortably settled, "and at first he laughed as I thought he would. Then after a while he didn't laugh quite so much, and presently I made a suggestion. If these men were what they said they were, the two big chests below would prove their case. Let us examine these two chests and see. So finally we went below to where the passengers' luggage is stored. There were the two cases, and there and then we opened one. It was packed—not with Bibles—but with nitro-glycerine."
Jim paused and took a drink.
"I don't think," he went on gravely, "that I have ever seen a man in quite such a dreadful rage as Kelly. There was a clockwork mechanism which could be started by turning a screw on the outside of each box, and the whole diabolical plan was as clear as daylight. There was enough stuff there to sink a fleet of battleships, and when they had cleared off in the yacht with the gold we should suddenly have split in two and gone down with every soul on board."
He smiled grimly.
"I had no small difficulty in preventing James putting the whole bunch in irons on the spot, but finally I got him to agree to a plan of mine. We changed the cargo round—he and I. Their chests containing nitro-glycerine we filled with gold, and the specie boxes we filled with nitro-glycerine and some lead and iron as a make-weight. And then we let the plan proceed. We banked on the fact that they wouldn't fool around with an hysterical old woman or a man in the throes of fever. Good girl, Miss Armstrong; she kept her mother below all the morning. And that, I think, is all."
"I'm hanged if it is!" I cried. "What made that stuff blow up, if it had been taken out of the prepared boxes?" Jim drained his glass.
"Well, old Dick," he said, "it may be that the Reverend Samuel dropped his Corona inadvertently. Or maybe something hit one of those boxes very hard—perhaps a bullet from a gun fired from this ship. Come down to my cabin."
I followed him, and he shut the door. On the bed was lying Mrs. Armstrong's pink parasol. Through a hole that had been split in the silk near the ferrule stuck out the muzzle of an Express rifle. Jim took it out and cleaned, it carefully, then he looked at the parasol.
"Beyond repair, old man. And since I told the old dear I'd dropped her gamp overboard, well—"
He rolled it up loosely, and threw it far out through the port- hole.
IX. — THE ROTTENNESS OF LADY HOUNSLOW
AND now, in order to keep things in their correct chronological order, I must put down the story Jim told us himself only a month ago. It was news to me, and it happened while I was otherwise occupied in Cairo. Of which—more later.
But before I give his story I must mention quite briefly the circumstances which led up to it.
* * * * *
Lady Hounslow, wife of Sir George Hounslow, is a very wonderful woman, as is only right and proper in the wife of a Cabinet Minister. She has the gift, as all the world knows, of giving just the right dinner-parties to just the right people. She also has the gift of flirting so mildly that not even the most censorious can really call it flirting; and she does it with just the right man. Private secretaries adore her—she is so impartially charming to them all; under-secretaries ask her advice, and not infrequently take it. And, of course, her labours on behalf of charity are too well known to need description.
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