The Bandbox

Staff sat spellbound by the amazing romance of it all… A bare eight days since that afternoon when a whim, born of a love now lifeless, had stirred him out of his solitary, work-a-day life in London, had lifted him out of the ordered security of the centre of the world’s civilisation and sent him whirling dizzily across three thousand miles and more to become a partner in this wild, weird ride to the rescue of a damsel in distress and durance vile! Incredible!..

Eight days: and the sun of Alison, that once he had thought to be the light of all the world, had set; while in the evening sky the star of Eleanor was rising and blazing ever more brightly…

Now when a man begins to think about himself and his heart in such poetic imagery, the need for human intercourse grows imperative on his understanding; he must talk or – suffer severely.

Staff turned upon his defenseless companion.

“Iff,” said he, “when a man’s the sort of a man who can fall out of love and in again – with another woman, of course – inside a week – what do you call him?”

“Human,” announced Iff after mature consideration of the problem.

This was unsatisfactory; Staff yearned to be called fickle.

“Human? How’s that?” he insisted.

“I mean that the human man hasn’t got much to say about falling in or out of love. The women take care of all that for him. Look at your Miss Landis – yours as was… You don’t mind my buttin’ in?”

“Go on,” said Staff grimly.

“Anybody with half an eye, always excepting you, could see she’d made up her mind to hook that Arkroyd pinhead on account of his money. She was just waiting for a fair chance to give you the office – preferably, of course, after she’d nailed that play of yours.”

“Well,” said Staff, “she’s lost that, too.”

“Serves you both right.”

There was a pause wherein Staff sought to fathom the meaning of this last utterance of Mr. Iff’s.

“I take it,” resumed the latter with a sidelong look – “pardon a father’s feelings of delicacy – I take it, you’re meaning Nelly?”

“How did you guess that?” demanded Staff, startled.

“Right, eh?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know – ”

“Well, if you don’t know the answer any better ’n that, take a word of advice from an old bird: you get her to tell you. She’s known it ever since she laid eyes on you.”

“You mean she – I – ” Staff stammered eagerly.

“I mean nobody knows anything about a woman’s heart but herself; but she knows it backwards and all the time.”

“Then you don’t think I’ve got any show?”

“Oh, Lord!” complained Iff. “Honest, you gimme a pain. Go on and do your own thinking.”

Staff subsided, imagining a vain thing: that the mantle of dignity in which he wrapped himself successfully cloaked his sense of injury. Iff smiled a meaningless smile up at the inscrutable skies. And the moonlit miles slipped beneath the wheels like a torrent of moulten silver.

At length – it seemed as if many hours must have swung crashing into eternity since they had left New York – Staff was conscious of a perceptible diminution of speed; he was able to get his breath with less effort, had no longer to snatch it by main strength from the greedy clutches of the whirlwind. The reeling chiaroscuro of the countryside seemed suddenly to become calm, settling into an intelligible, more or less orderly arrangement of shining hills and shadowed hollows, spreading pastures and sombre woodlands. The chauffeur flung a few inarticulate words over his shoulder – readily interpreted as announcing the nearness of their destination; and of a sudden the car swung from the main highway into a narrow by-road that ran off to the right. A little later they darted through a cut beneath railroad tracks, and a village sprang out of the night and rattled past them, serenely slumbrous. From this centre a thin trickle of dwellings straggled along their way. Across fields to the left, Staff caught glimpses of a spreading sheet of water, still and silvery-grey…

On a long slant, the road drew nearer and more near to the shores of this arm of the Sound. Presently a group of small buildings near the head of a long landing-stage swam into view. Before them the car drew up with a sigh. The chauffeur jumped down and ran across the road to a house in whose lower story a lighted window was visible. While he hammered at the door, Staff and Iff alighted. A man in his shirt-sleeves came to the door of the cottage and stood there, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, languidly interjecting dispassionate responses into the chauffeur’s animated exposition of their case. As Staff and Iff came up, Spelvin turned to them, excitedly waving his gauntlets.

“He’s got a boat, all right, and a good one he says, but he won’t move a foot for less ’n twenty dollars.”

“Give you twenty-five if you get away from the dock within five minutes,” Iff told the boatbuilder directly.

The man started as if stung. “Jemima!” he breathed, incredulous. Then caution prompted him to extend a calloused and work-warped hand. “Cross my palm,” he said.

“You give it to him, Staff,” said Iff magnificently. “I’m short of cash.”

Obediently, Staff disbursed the required sum. The native thumbed it, pocketed it, lifted his coat from a nail behind the door and started across the road in a single movement.

“You come ’long, Spelvin,” he said in passing, “’nd help with the boat. If you gents’ll get out on the dock I’ll have her alongside in three minutes, ’r my name ain’t Bascom.”

Pursued by the chauffeur, he disappeared into the huddle of boat-houses and beached and careened boats. A moment later, Iff and Staff, picking their way through the tangle, heard the scrape of a flat-bottomed boat on the beach and, subsequently, splashing oars.

By the time they had reached the end of the dock, the boatbuilder and his companion were scrambling aboard a twenty-five-foot boat at anchor in the midst of a small fleet of sail and gasoline craft. The rumble of a motor followed almost instantly, was silenced momentarily while the skiff was being made fast to the mooring, broke out again as the larger boat selected a serpentine path through the circumjacent vessels and slipped up to the dock.

Before it had lost way, Iff and Staff were aboard. Instantly, Bascom snapped the switch shut and the motor started again on the spark.

“Straight out,” he instructed Spelvin at the wheel, “till you round that white moorin’-dolphin. Then I’ll take her.” …

Not long afterward he gave up pottering round the engine and went forward, relieving Spelvin. “You go back and keep your eye on that engyne,” he ordered; “she’s workin’ like a sewin’-machine, but she wants watchin’. I’ll tell you when to give her the spark. Meanwhile you might ’s well dig them lights out of the port locker and set ’em out.”

“No,” Iff put in. “We want no lights.”

“Gov’mint regulations,” said 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 I didn’t know but somethin’ had happened to you – ”

“No,” said Iff coolly; “you can see I’m all right.”

“And Eph, sir? Where’s my husband?” she shrieked.

“Oh,” said Iff, at length identifying the woman. “You’ll find him down at the dock – dead drunk in the motor-boat,” he told her. “If I were you I’d go to him right away.”

“But whatever will we do for a place to sleep tonight?”

“Help yourself,” Iff replied with a generous wave of his hand “You’ve all Pennymint to ask shelter of, if you can manage to make your husband run the boat across.”

“But you – what’ll you do?”

“I’ve another boat handy,” Iff explained. “We’ll go in that.”

“And will you rebuild, sir?”

“No,” he said gravely, “I don’t think so. I fancy this is the last time I’ll ever set foot on Wreck Island. Now clear out,” he added with a sharp change of manner, “and see if you can’t sober that drunken fool up.”

Abashed, the woman cringed and turned away. Presently she broke into a clumsy run and vanished in the direction of the landing-stage.

“You’ve accepted the identity of Ismay,” commented Staff disapprovingly, as they moved off together to rejoin Eleanor.

“For the last time,” said the little man. “Until I get aboard Bascom’s boat again, only. It’s the easiest way.”

“How do you mean?”

Iff nodded at the blazing building. “That wipes out all scores,” he replied. “What they find of Cousin Artie when that cools off won’t be enough to hold an inquest over; he will be simply thought to have disappeared, since I won’t return to this place. And that’s the easiest way: we don’t got any use for inquests at the wind-up of this giddy dime-novel!”

The light of the great fire illumined not only all the island but the waters for miles around. As Bascom’s boat drew away, its owner called Staff’s attention to a covey of sails, glowing pink against the dark background of the mainland as they stood across the arm of the Sound for the island.

“Neighbours,” said Mr. Bascom; “comin’ for to see if they can lend a hand or snatch a souvenir or so, mebbe.”

Staff nodded, with little interest. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see Iff and his daughter, on the opposite side of the boat. Iff was talking to her in a gentle, subdued voice strangely unlike his customary acrid method of expression. He had an arm round his daughter’s shoulders; her head rested on his…

Staff looked away, back at the shining island. He could not grudge the little man his hour. His own would come, in time…

THE END