The Flying Death - Samuel Hopkins Adams (story reading .txt) 📗

“You’d better sit down while I tell it over.” He threw his coat over a rock, and she perched herself on it daintily.

“First, a hundred packages of plug tobacco. All coastguards use plug, I believe. Then five dollars’ worth of prints of prominent actors and actresses in gaudy colours. The rest in Mexican lottery tickets,” he concluded lamely, his invention giving out.

“It wasn’t worth sitting down for,” she said disparagingly. “If you had intended to get something really useful, I might have let you keep it. Please!” The little hand went forth again.

Hastily he produced a ten-dollar bill and two fives. “You don’t mind having it in change?” he said anxiously. “You see, this is the first money I ever earned outside of my profession, and I mean to frame it.”

“If twenty dollars means so little to you that you can have it hanging around framed —”

“This particular twenty means a great deal to me,” he interrupted.

She rose. “I was going down to try a cast or two,” she said.

“With a net?” asked Dick. “I should like to see that.”

“There’s a fishing rod in the handle of the net,” she explained, ignoring the hint. “I keep the net rigged because I help my father collect. Entomology is his specialty, and there are a few rare moths here that he hopes to get.”

“Am I sufficiently introduced now to ask if I may walk along with you?”

“I’m sorry I was so—so snippy,” she said sweetly. “To make up for it, you may.”

“Are you here particularly for collecting moths?” he asked, stepping to her side.

“Yes, one or two kinds that my father and I are studying. I play butterfly in the winter and hunt them in the summer. Everyone here has a purpose. Father and I are adding to the sum of human knowledge on Lepidoptera. Mr. Haynes is spending his vacation with Helga. Helga is resting, before taking up her musical studies. You ought to have a purpose. What has brought you here?”

Now, Dick Colton, like many big men, was awkward, and like most awkward men, was shy about women. Therefore, it was with a sort of stunned amazement and admiration for his own audacity that he found himself looking straight into Dorothy Ravenden’s unfathomable eyes as he replied briefly:

“Fate.”

“Well, upon my soul!” gasped that much-habituated young woman of the world, surprised for a brief instant out of her poise. Quickly recovering, she added: “A fortunate fate for Helga, surely. Except for you, she and Mr. Haynes must have been drowned.”

“You knew her before, didn’t you?”

“Yes; we visit at the same house in Philadelphia, and father and I have been coming down here for several years. I know her well. If I were a man, I should go the world over for Helga Johnston.”

“She and Haynes are engaged, are they not?”

“No, not engaged,” said the girl. “She is everything in the world to Mr. Haynes; but she isn’t in love with him. He has never tried to make her. There is some reason; I don’t know what. Sometimes I think he doesn’t care for her in that way either. Or perhaps he doesn’t realise it.”

“Surely she seems fond of him.”

“She is devoted to him. Why shouldn’t she be? He has done everything for her.”

“How happens that?”

“It’s the kind of story that makes you love your kind,” said the girl dreamily. “When Mr. Haynes first came here he was a young reporter with a small income, and Helga was a child of twelve with an eager mind and the promise of a lovely voice. He gave her books and got the Johnstons to send her to a good school. Then as she grew up and he came to be ‘star man’ ( I think they call it) on his paper, he went to the Johnstons, who had come to know him well, and asked them to let him send Helga to preparatory school and then to college. It was agreed that she was not to know of the money that he put in their hands, and she never would have known except for something that happened in her freshman year. She held her tongue to save a classmate. They were going to expel her, when Mr. Haynes got wind of it, took the first train, ferreted out the truth, and went to the president.

“‘Here are the facts,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave them for you to act on, or I’ll take them with me for publication, as you decide.’

“The case was hushed up; but in the adjustment Helga found put about Mr. Haynes’ part in her education. Now he is arranging for her musical education. He has no family, nor anyone dependent on him; all his interests in life are centred in her. And the best of it is that she is worthy of it.”

“It must be a great deal to such a man to inspire such absolute trust in a woman as he has in her,” said Colton after a pause. “‘I knew he would come after me,’ she said when I asked her how she dared take so desperate a chance.”

Miss Ravenden nodded at him appreciatively. “Yes; you see it too,” she said. “You did something worth while when you saved those two. But what about your Portuguese? Do you really think he had anything to do with killing that poor sailor? Helga told me about it. What an extraordinary case it is!”

“What puzzles Haynes with his trained mind is surely too much for me,” said Colton. “It seems that the man—great heaven! What was that?”

From the direction of the beach came a long-drawn, dreadful scream of agony, unhuman, yet with something of an appeal in it, too. The pair turned blanched faces toward each other.

“I must go over there at once,” said Colton. “Someone is in trouble. Miss Ravenden, can you make your way to the house alone?”

The girl’s small, rounded chin went up and outward. “I shall go with you,” she said.

“You must not. There’s no telling what may have happened. Please!”

With a swift, deft movement she parted the heavy handle of her net-stock, disclosing an ingeniously set revolver, which she pressed into his hand.

“I’m going with you,” she repeated, with the most alluring obstinacy.

“Come, then,” said Colton, and her pulses stirred to the tone. He caught her by the hand, and they ran, reaching the cliff-top breathless.

Barely discernible, on the sand, a quarter of a mile cast of Graveyard Point where the wreck had struck, was a dark body. They hurried down into the ravine and out of it, Colton in advance. Suddenly he burst into a laugh of nervous relief.

“It’s a dead sheep,” he said. “I thought it was a man.”

He bent over it and his jaw dropped. “Look at that!” he cried.

Across the back of the animal’s neck, half-severing it from the head, was a great gash, still bleeding slightly. They peered out into the dusk. As far as the eye could see, nothing moved along the sand.