第 18 页

There was a fearful malignity in his tone which made the girl shiver. Crouched in the cover of the little cabin, she listened to the chug-chug of the engine as it faced the running stream. Presently, she heard the man call, "Lock ahoy!" The launch slowed speed and stopped, and then went on again cautiously. She heard the rattle of the lock gates closing. Higher and higher the launch rose, until it was level with the edge of the lock. The man at the wheel uttered a few commonplace remarks, and now they were clear of the lock gates and going slowly and steadily upstream.

West of Temple the river turned abruptly, and the left bank was black with overhanging trees. It was toward such a patch that he sent the launch. Peeping round furtively, she guessed rather than saw a wooden bungalow, so near the water's edge that its stoep was supported on piles driven into the river bed.

"Get out," said the man roughly, and she obeyed.

He followed her, and, taking a key from his pocket, inserted it in the lock and with considerable difficulty opened the door. Stopping long enough to secure the launch, he followed her, bolting the door behind him, Striking a match, he looked round and found a candle.

She was in what was apparently one of the two small rooms the bungalow held. It was well furnished, but every article was inches deep in dust. On the weather-stained walls hung a number of Medici prints; the windows were curtained with heavy velvet, lustreless under their coatings of dust.

"You know this place, I guess? Used to be Shelton's," said the man, suddenly communicative.

Shelton's! An unaccountable fear gripped her. It was as though the spirit of the man who had made this place his home, who from here had gone about his dangerous and finally fatal work, brooded over the place.

The man consulted a watch on his wrist and then walked round the room, looking at the windows. When he drew one of the thick curtains aside, she saw that they were heavily shuttered. Clay Shelton had worked and schemed here in the black of the night. At this very table, where the tiny footsteps of mice showed in the dust, his marvellous pen had produced signatures so like the originals that the men whose names were forged were baffled and could not tell them apart from their own.

"I'm going out to see to the boat— stay here!"

Her captor closed the door softly behind him and the key turned. She heard the whirr of the launch's engines; and might have realized that she was being left alone. But for the moment her thoughts were concentrated upon the dusty room and the man who was once its occupant.

This was the home of the Gallows Hand!

She shivered. Some uncanny trick of light and shade seemed to people this room with tangible shapes that moved and leered at her. So vivid was the illusion that she closed her eyes for a second.

She was standing directly opposite the door which she thought must lead to the bedroom, and when she opened her eyes again, they fell upon the handle of the door, and she saw with a start of fear that it was turning. Slowly, slow... and then the door moved inward, and round its edge crept a long yellow hand.

Chapter 27

SHE shrank back, her eyes staring with horror at the terrifying apparition. Then a cuff came into view, stiff and white, with a little enamelled link and the end of a black sleeve.

"Don't be alarmed."

It was Jackson Crayley!

Presently he came into view; his long face was lined, his yellow moustache drooped dismally. He was wearing a dinner jacket, and the incongruity of his appearance in this place of dust and desolation would at any other time have made her laugh. For his monocle was fixed in his eye and the thin yellow hair still parted neatly in the middle.

He stared round the room fearfully.

"Where's that fellow?" he asked.

"He has gone," she said steadily. "Mr. Crayley, why am I here?"

He rubbed his chin and she thought his hands were trembling, but that may have been her fancy.

"I don't know," he said awkwardly. "You'll be all right here, young lady."

There was a pause, during which he surveyed her, the lugubrious expression of his face never lightening. And then it slowly dawned upon the girl that he was more frightened than she. From time to time he glanced nervously behind him, and once she saw him hunch up his shoulders in a gesture of fear, and saw that it was the grotesque shadow which the candle had thrown upon the wall which had momentarily scared him.

"He's gone, has he?" he said, referring to her departed custodian. "Deuced awkward!"

He cleared his throat with an effort.

"I'm afraid you're in rather an awkward position, Miss Nora," he said, "deuced awkward!"

He paused as though to collect his thoughts, and added:

"I don't suppose anybody's been in such a perfectly awful position as you're in."

The repetition of those inane words brought a fugitive smile to the girl's face.

"Well, I can't be in a very bad position, Mr. Crayley, now that you are here to look after me."

He did not meet her eyes.

"Sit down, won't you?"

He pulled a long silk handkerchief from his sleeve and dusted a chair.

"I've got to have a little talk with you, and I suppose by the time it is through you'll think I'm an unutterable cad."

Obediently, she seated herself, wondering what was coming.

"The only way you can get out of this fearful difficulty is— marriage," he began disjointedly, "and, really, when you come to think of it, one fellow is as good as another fellow— I mean one chap's as good as another chap— I mean, as a husband."

"I don't understand you, Mr. Crayley, I am not thinking of marriage, and if I were—"

"Exactly," he nodded wisely, as though he had anticipated what she was about to say, though in point of fact he had done nothing of the sort. "If I ask you to marry me, you'll be fearfully upset?"

"To marry you?" She wasn't upset, but she was very much surprised.

"That's it," he said doggedly. "You marry me tomorrow, and everything is as right as rain. You'll have somebody to look after you and all that sort of thing."

She shook her head.

"I could never marry you, Mr. Crayley," she said, and the look of dismay on his face was almost comical.

"You'd better— by Jove, you'd better!" he said urgently. "I'll tell you the truth, Miss Nora: I've no more wish to marry than you have. But I should be fearfully relieved if you would marry me, because"— his unsteady hand went up to his lips, and again he looked left and right and lowered his voice—"it would be better for you if you did what I told you," he said, in an agitated voice. "You promise me on your sacred word of honour that you will marry me to-morrow, and I will look after you— I swear I will! If you don't"— he mopped his streaming forehead with a gay bandanna handkerchief—"Lord! I don't know what will happen!"

Her bewilderment showed in her face, and he made matters no clearer by his incoherent attempt at explanation.

"I'm the merest child, the merest cipher. I hate the whole cursed business! I hate it, I hate it! God! If I could only get away! If I could only leave this blasted river and country! I nearly did once, when I was in Italy— actually got on a boat at Genoa, but hadn't the pluck."

He drooped his shaking head.

"Hadn't the pluck," he muttered. "God! What a cur I am!"

She waited awhile, and when he did not speak:

"I don't know what all this is about, Mr. Crayley, but I feel that somehow you are trying to be friendly with me. But marriage is impossible— absolutely impossible. Won't you help me get away from this place? Why have I been brought here?"

Suddenly his head came up and he raised his finger in warning.

"Stay here," he whispered, crossed to the door, tried to open it and finding it was locked, hurried with long strides across the room and passed into the room from which she had seen him emerge, closing the door behind him. Now she heard the murmur of voices, so low that, though she crept a little nearer, she could distinguish no words. Three people were talking, deep-voiced men, one of whom spoke in a hissing whisper.

Then Crayley raised his voice.

"Can't do it, can't do it! My God! I can't do it!"

She heard one of the men growl something fiercely, and then the shuffle of feet, and she tiptoed back to the place where she had been when he left her. If she could only get through the door or one of those windows, the river held no terror for her; she could swim like an otter, and if she had not been paralyzed with fright, she would have taken her chance on the way up the stream.

The door handle turned slowly, and Crayley slipped into the room. If he had looked worn and ill before, he was ghastly now. Again his shaking finger warned her to silence. He was listening intently, and presently it seemed that he was satisfied that the two who had spoken with him in the darkness were gone.

There was something else in that haggard face she had not seen before; a strange, queer resolution, a certain definite set to a face which had been almost without character.

"Sit down and take no notice," he said, and found a dusty chair for himself, which he brought to the table. "You've two hours to decide," he said, "and then they are coming back."

"Who are they?"

He shook his head.

"Nobody you know. They are the Terrible People."

"Are you in their power?"

He nodded vigorously.

"In their power— yes, I'm all that!"

He seemed to find a difficulty in speaking, in breathing, even. Once or twice his hand went up to his scrawny throat. He wore a big black intaglio ring on the little finger of his left hand, and it was shaking so violently that it was a gray blur and she could not distinguish the figure that was carved.

"Would you marry me to save your life?"

She shook her head.

"I don't want to hurt your—" she began.

"You're not hurting me," he said roughly. "That doesn't hurt a bit! And for God's sake don't worry about my feelings. But would you marry me to save your life? Would you marry me—" he lowered his voice.

She heard and shuddered.

"I wouldn't marry you in any circumstances," she said.

"You're in love with somebody else, are you?"

He seemed to be interested, as if, in his curiosity, he had discovered something that for the while took his mind from the fearful prospect ahead of him.

"I— I don't think so," she said. "I hope to marry some day."

There was a wistful expression in his face that made her choke, and then, unexpectedly, he rose and tiptoed back to the inner room. He was gone five minutes, and when he returned she saw he was carrying a long army revolver, the chambers of which he examined as he turned.

"Come along," he said.

She obeyed without question, followed him into the little room which, as she had suspected, was a bedroom, and through a narrow passage to an open door. A waning moon rode in the sky; she saw a pathway apparently across an endless meadow, but, as it proved, to a narrow road that ran parallel with the bungalow.

"Just wait here."

"Here" was a rickety little garden gate. She followed him with her eyes until he vanished in the dark, then she heard his voice calling her, and she went stumbling across the weed-grown garden, until she reached another path, covered with round pebbles that crunched under her weight.

He was at the water's edge, bending over something. She heard the rattle of a chain, and then:

"Can you see the end of the punt? I haven't a light, and we'd better not show one, anyhow."

It was pitch black, for the bushes met over their heads. Stooping, she felt the steel-bound edge of the punt and felt gingerly with her foot for the bottom. She found it at last.

"Get well to the back," he whispered, and she picked her way along the well until she reached the farther end. The punt lurched for a second, and then began to move.

"Can you use a paddle? You'll find one near you." He was still speaking in whispers.

She nodded, though she knew he could not see her, and, groping, found the paddle-handle and began to back water. In a few seconds they were in midstream.

"Down river," he whispered.

On her right she saw dimly the dark bulk of the bungalow.

"No noise," he whispered warningly.

Very gingerly she swept the paddle to and fro, not taking it from the water, but turning its sharp edge to bring it back into position. They were passing through a stretch of river that held neither bungalow nor houseboat. Ahead of them was the black outline of a hill.

It was the hill she remembered having seen as she came up the river.

A small river launch was passing downstream, and they were just in time to catch the lock. Crayley did not speak again until they were clear of Temple Lock and making their way round the bend to Marlow. He came to the end of the boat where she was sitting.

"There is only one danger," he said. "If they have missed us, they've got an electric canoe near Temple Lock, and they could easily cut across—"

Something palely white, like an elongated swan, shot out from the bank on their right.

"Paddle!" His voice came in a sob. "To the bank— we can run."

The thin, white, sleek thing was moving swiftly. When they were still half a dozen yards from the Bucksbank, it streaked alongside. Somebody leant over and gripped the girl by the arm, and she screamed. In another second she was pulled sprawling across the power-canoe, one foot dragging in the water. She struggled desperately, but her strength was no match for the man who held her. And then, in a moment of inspiration, she remembered a jujitsu trick, and, catching her assailant under the chin with the palm of her hand, thrust his head back. For a second he released his hold, and like lightning she dropped into the water, dived beneath the canoe, and struck out for midstream.

She saw the flash of a lamp and saw something else— a red and green light coming from Marlow. A launch! Rising to the surface, with all her strength she screamed again, and as the electric canoe turned in her direction, dived, coming up behind and to the right of it. The canoe swung round, but now the green and red lights were nearer. She heard a man shout, and a beam of white light shot out from the launch. There was a shot— another— She heard the whine of the bullets overhead. Something struck the water dose at hand and flung a wisp of spray to her face.