The Bandbox - Louis Joseph Vance (read along books .TXT) 📗

Bascom stubbornly. “Must carry lights.”

“Five dollars?” Iff argued persuasively.

“Agin the law,” growled Bascom. “But—I dunno—they ain’t anybody likely to be out this time o’ night. Cross my palm.”

And Staff again disbursed.

The white mooring-buoy swam past and the little vessel heeled as Bascom swung her sharply to the southwards.

“Now,” he told Spelvin, “advance that spark all you’ve a mind to.”

There was a click from the engine-pit and the steady rumble of the exhaust ran suddenly into a prolonged whining drone. The boat jumped as if jerked forward by some gigantic, invisible hand. Beneath the bows the water parted with a crisp sound like tearing paper. Long ripples widened away from the sides, like ribs of a huge fan. A glassy hillock of water sprang up mysteriously astern, pursuing them like an avenging Nemesis, yet never quite catching up.

The sense of irresistible speed was tremendous, as stimulating as electricity; this in spite of the fact that the boat was at best making about half the speed at which the motor-car had plunged along the country roads: an effect in part due to the spacious illusion of moonlit distances upon the water.

Staff held his cap with one hand, drinking in the keen salt air with a feeling of strange exultation. Iff crept forward and tarried for a time talking to the boatbuilder.

The boat shaved a nun-buoy outside Barmouth Point so closely that Staff could almost have touched it by stretching out his arm. Then she straightened out like a greyhound on a long course across the placid silver reaches to a goal as yet invisible.

Iff returned to the younger man’s side.

“Twenty miles an hour, Bascom claims,” he shouted. “At that rate we ought to be there in about fifteen minutes now.”

Staff nodded, wondering what they would find on Wreck Island, bitterly repenting the oversight which had resulted in Ismay’s escape from his grasp. If only he had not been so sure of his conquest of the little criminal ...! Now his mind crawled with apprehensions bred of his knowledge of the man’s amazing fund of resource. He who outwitted Ismay would have earned the right to plume himself upon his cunning....

When he looked up from his abstraction, the loom of the mainland was seemingly very distant. The motor-boat was nearing the centre of a deep indentation in the littoral. And suddenly it was as though they did not move at all, as if all this noise and labour went for nothing, as if the boat were chained to the centre of a spreading disk of silver, world-wide, illimitable, and made no progress for all its thrashing and its fury.

Only the unending sweep of wind across his face denied that effect....

Iff touched his arm.

“There....” he said, pointing.

Over the bows a dark mass seemed to have separated itself from the shadowed mainland, with which it had till then been merged. A strip of silver lay between the two, and while they watched it widened, swiftly winning breadth and bulk as the motor-boat swung to the north of the long, sandy spit at the western end of Wreck Island.

“See anything of another boat?” Iff asked. “You look—your eyes are younger than mine.”

Staff stood up, steadying himself with feet wide apart, and stared beneath his hand.

“No,” he said; “I see no boat.”

“We’ve beaten him, then!” Iff declared joyfully.

But they hadn’t, nor were they long in finding it out. For presently the little island lay black, a ragged shadow against the blue-grey sky, upon the starboard beam; and Bascom passed the word aft to shut off the motor. As its voice ceased, the boat shot in toward the land, and the long thin moonlit line of the landing-stage detached itself from the general obscurity and ran out to meet them. And so closely had Bascom calculated that the “shoot” of the boat brought them to a standstill at the end of the structure without a jar. Bascom jumped out with the headwarp, Staff and Iff at his heels.

From the other side of the dock a shadow uplifted itself, swiftly and silently as a wraith, and stood swaying as it saluted them with profound courtesy.

“Gennelmen,” it said thickly, “I bidsh you welcome t’ Wrecksh Island.”

With this it slumped incontinently back into a motor-boat which lay moored in the shadow of the dock; and a wild, ecstatic snore rang out upon the calm night air.

“Thet’s Eph Clover,” said Bascom; “him ’nd his wife’s caretakers here. He’s drunker ’n a b’iled owl,” added the boatbuilder lest they misconstrue.

“Cousin Artie seems unfortunate in his choice of minions, what?” commented Iff. “Come along, Staff.... Take care of that souse, will you, Spelvin? See that he doesn’t try to mix in.”

They began to run along the narrow, yielding and swaying bridge of planks.

“He hasn’t beaten us out yet,” Iff threw over his shoulder. “You keep back now—like a good child—please. I’ve got a hunch this is my hour.”

The hotel loomed before them, gables grey with moonshine, its long walls dark save where, toward the middle of the main structure, chinks of light filtered through a shuttered window, and where at one end an open door let out a shaft of lamplight upon the shadows....

XVII HOLOCAUST

For a period of perhaps twenty seconds the man and the girl remained moveless, eyeing one another; she on the floor, pale, stunned and pitiful, for the instant bereft of every sense save that of terror; he in the doorway, alert, fully the master of his concentrated faculties, swayed by two emotions only—a malignant temper bred of the night’s succession of reverses capped by the drunkenness of his caretaker, and an equally malignant sense of triumph that he had returned in time to crush the girl’s attempt to escape.

He threw the door wide open and took a step into the room, putting away his pistol.

“So—” he began in a cutting voice.

But his movement had acted as the shock needed to rouse the girl out of her stupor of despair. With a cry she gathered herself together and jumped to her feet. He put forth a hand as if to catch her, and she leaped back. Her skirts swept the lamp on the floor and overturned it with a splintering crash. Instinctively she sprang away—in the nick of time.

She caught a look of surprise and fright in the eyes of the man as they glared past her in the ghastly glow of the flickering wick, and took advantage of this momentary distraction to leap past him. As she did so there was a slight explosion. A sheet of flaming kerosene spread over the floor and licked the chairboarding.

Ismay jumped back, mouthing curses; the girl had already slipped out of the room. Turning, he saw her flying through the hall toward the main door. In a fit of futile, childish spite, unreasonable and unreasoning, he whipped out his pistol and sent a bullet after her.

She heard it whine near her head and crash through the glass panes of the door. And she heard herself cry out in a strange voice. The next instant she had flung open the door and thrown herself out, across the veranda and down the steps. Then turning blindly to the left, instinct guiding her to seek temporary safety by hiding in the wilderness of the dunes, she blundered into somebody’s arms.

She was caught and held fast despite her struggles to free herself: to which, believing herself to be in the hands of Mrs. Clover or her husband, she gave all her strength.

At the same time the first-floor windows of the hotel were illumined by an infernal glare. All round her there was lurid light, setting everything in sharp relief. The face of the man who held her was suddenly revealed; and it was her father’s.... She had left him inside the building and now ... She was assailed with a terrifying fear that she had gone mad. In a frenzy she wrenched herself free; but only to be caught in other arms.

A voice she knew said soothingly: “There, Miss Searle—you’re all right now....”

Staff’s voice and, when she twisted to look, Staff’s face, friendly and reassuring!

“Don’t be afraid,” he was saying; “we’ll take care of you now—your father and I.”

“My father!” she gasped. “My father is in there!”

“No,” said Iff at her side. “Believe me, he isn’t. That, dear, is your fondly affectionate Uncle Arbuthnot—and between the several of us I don’t mind telling you that he’s stood in my shoes for the last time.”

“But I don’t,” she stammered—“I don’t understand—”

“You will in a minute,” Staff told her gently. At the same time he lifted his voice. “Look out, Iff—look out!”

He strove to put himself between the girl and danger, making a shield of his body. But with a supple movement she eluded him.

She saw in the doorway of the burning house the man she had thought to be her father. The other man, he whose daughter she really was, had started to run toward the veranda steps. The man in the doorway flung up his hand and, clear and vicious above the crackling of the flames, she heard the short song of a Colt automatic—six shots, so close upon one another that they were as one prolonged.

There was a spatter of bullets in the sandy ground about them; and then, with scarcely an appreciable interval, a second flutter of an automatic. This time the reports came from the pistol in Iff’s hand. He was standing in full glare at the bottom of the veranda steps, aiming with great composure and precision.

The figure in the doorway reeled as if struck by an axe, swung half-way round and tottered back into the house. The little man below the veranda steps delayed only long enough to pluck out the empty clip from the butt of his pistol and slip another, loaded, into its place. Then with cat-like agility he sprang up the steps and dived into the furnace-like interior of the hotel. A third stuttering series of reports saluted this action, and then there was a short pause ended by a single shot.

“Come,” said Staff. He took her arm gently. “Come away....”

Shuddering, she suffered him to lead her a little distance into the dunes. Here he released her.

“If you won’t mind being left alone a few minutes,” he said, “I’ll go back and see what’s happened. You’ll be perfectly safe here, I fancy.”

“Please,” she said breathlessly—“do go. Yes, please.”

She urged him with frantic gestures....

He hurried back to the front of the hotel. By now it was burning like a bonfire; already, short as had been the time since the overturning of the lamp, the entire ground floor with the exception of one wing was a roaring welter of flames, while the fire had leaped up the main staircase and set its signals in the windows of the upper story.

Iff was standing at some distance from the main entrance, having pushed his way through the tangle of undergrowth to escape the scorching heat that emanated from the building. He caught sight of Staff approaching and waved a hand to him.

“Greetings!” he cried cheerfully, raising his voice to make it heard above the voice of the conflagration.

“Where’s Nelly?”

Staff explained. “But what about Ismay?” he demanded.

Iff grinned and hung his head as if embarrassed, rubbing a handkerchief over the smoke-stained fingers of his right hand.

“I got him,” he said simply.

“You left him in there?”

The little man nodded without reply and turned alertly to engage Mrs. Clover, who was bearing down upon them in the first stages of hysterics. But at sight of Iff she pulled up and calmed herself a trifle.

“Oh, sir,” she cried, “I’m so glad you’re safe, sir! I was asleep in the kitchen when the fire broke out—and then I thought I heard pistol shots—and