The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 5

  That was late in the afternoon and the last time we left the house.

  Breakfast and lunch had been largely makeshifts, but dinner that evening was a triumph, Osborne having supplied the house for my residence fairly well and Miss Maxon proving herself a miraculous cook. After we’d eaten, I took his share of the meal in to Hardridge, whom I found in a state of eager expectancy. He evidently remembered my promise that he’d be unbound at nightfall, and I didn’t disappoint him. Instead of standing over him with drawn revolver while he ate, as I’d done before, I simply released his hands and left him fumbling wildly but with stiff and awkward fingers at his gag. I wanted to get away from him before he could ask me in words the eager question that had been staring out of his overbright eyes all day.

  “Now, don’t be a fool,” I told him through the closing door. “You can’t get out, and you don’t want to get out, and you don’t want to make a noise. Be quiet, and you’ll be —— glad of it later.”

  And I bolted the door without locking it and then pressed a button that projected from the wall near the door jamb. I heard a pleased exclamation from Hardridge as the electric light came on within his cell. Thereafter he was silent, but, whether because of my advice or because Miss Maxon and I remained so close to the closet that he could hear our occasional movements, I do not know.

  For by then it was quite dark, and, after another little preparation for what was to come, I joined Miss Maxon in the dining-room. The partition between this room and the reception-room split the inner wall of the closet, and the house was so quiet that we could sometimes hear Hardridge breathe. We had turned on no lights save that within the closet; so from without the place no doubt appeared absolutely deserted.

  Everything was silent and dark. In the two hours that we sat there, I found time to go over several times every incident connected with my peculiar visit to Cragcastle. My interest—desultory at first but rapidly quickening—in the Chronicle want ad.; my carefully worded letter in answer and Osborne’s skillfully alluring and yet noncommittal reply; our meeting—I suppose I was one of some hundreds of applicants, most of whom were disposed of by the office boy; Osborne’s quick inspection, his clever cross-examination, his devious approach to the subject of the missing heir. Our agreement, and my arrival in masquerade at Cragcastle. My interview with Hardridge, not wholly unexpected, yet a very curious one, filled with much that needed explanation. My startling discovery of the presence of the girl, and her still more startling revelations. The conception and partial working out of my plan, the success of which hung on the next few hours.

  Throughout, I reflected, I had been fortunate; things had worked out very much as I had planned and expected. My first motive in the affair had been almost completely satisfied; only one question remained unanswered—that of the cause of Hardridge’s hatred of John Maxon. There remained my awakened desire to serve Miss Maxon, and in that I hoped that Fate—it is my egotistic conceit to sometimes regard myself as Fate’s co-conspirator—would help me.

  As for Miss Maxon, she would have been either more or less than the very natural woman she was had she not felt fear in those hours. Indeed, she had no tangible reason for placing confidence in me—rather the reverse. It was largely because of that fact that I had urged her to stay in Cragcastle. Sometimes I thought it was partly because of that fact that she had stayed. Perhaps she wanted to be on hand at the finding of the sapphire—if it were found. Well, my wish corresponded. If it were not found, I wanted her to know it and be sure of it.

  I had, in fact, a remarkably strong desire to stand well in the estimation of Miss Maxon. And I was meditating upon this and also upon the problems connected with the Ko Lao Hui when we both heard quick, nervous steps coming up the gravel path in front of the house. I whispered a wholly unnecessary warning to Miss Maxon to keep quiet. Neither of us made a sound, but both were on our feet when the key of the newcomer grated in the lock of the front door.

  WHEN—after the front door had opened and closed again—the hall lights were switched on by some one who seemed perfectly familiar with their surroundings, I was standing just within the dining-room door, with Miss Maxon perhaps a pace behind me. As the man for whom we had waited started down the hall, I heard the slightest stirring in the closet, which indicated that Hardridge was also alert.

  The visitor, however, passed the door of the closet without pausing and came on unhesitatingly down the hall. The parlor and the reception-room he had already passed; there remained but two possible objectives, the library and the room wherein Miss Maxon and I watched. That he should turn into the latter had been a chance I had been compelled to take; if he did, the adventure would be apt to end speedily and crudely. But great jewels, I had reasoned, are not often concealed in dining-rooms.

  Yet, as the girl and I held our breaths, he passed our door, too, without a glance at the obscurity beyond it.

  Though he could hardly have seen us had he looked our way, he was fully revealed by the hall light. The one look I had of him was hardly reassuring for the success of the game I had in mind. If we had ever looked alike, then I owed it to my self-respect to believe that Maxon had changed greatly. But, indeed, I suppose he had, for life stamps every face with life’s own mark, and Maxon’s face had become a danger signal of vice and cowardice. Now I was very glad I hadn’t worn my borrowed identity long.

  There was now only one door into which Maxon could turn, and he entered the library across the hall without hesitation, like one sure of his objective. I felt a touch on my arm and looked around into Miss Maxon’s eyes, very close. They seemed to flash me at once a warning and question, and I shook my head reassuringly. There was no chance of Maxon’s passing out except by the front door. To a man of his temperament nothing could be less attractive than the gloom and desolation of the black rocks that flanked the rear exit.

  The sound of Maxon’s movements had ceased. He had only been feeling for the switch, for now, peering obliquely down the hall, I saw the library lights flash on. It seemed that he crossed the room; there was another moment of silence and then a sort of rending, scraping sound.

  Which sound was, we afterward learned, the spring-impelled opening of a small door in the library wall and the tearing of the wall-paper that had been put on over it. Behind which door was a small vault, of which I suppose only John Maxon, Sr., had the knowledge and the key until he had passed it on to his son.

  Maxon had the sapphire—I knew so much from his low exclamation of relief. Hardridge must have heard it, too, for he stirred uneasily in his prison room. Miss Maxon’s breathing quickened, while I— Well, I held in my hand almost literally the key to the unexpected, and my egotism was pleasantly stirred.

  Maxon came out of the library, now with a quickened movement and on tiptoe. He passed our door, bent over, fleeing. We heard something. Was it a bolt that had been drawn? John Maxon stopped short.

  A door was flung violently open. It was the door behind which Hardridge, up to a scanty thirty seconds before, had been confined. And instantly I stepped out into the hall behind Maxon. In fact, I stepped out and Hardridge burst out at the same minute. The effect was that we faced each other in the well-lighted hall with Maxon midway between us.

  Hardridge looked—well, to exaggerate but slightly, like a devil’s nightmare come alive, crouching for the spring. For, of course, he instantly thought of me, whom he’d got into the habit of trying to kill.

  But he saw Maxon in the hall instead and then me over Maxon’s shoulder, and bewilderment flashed into his face and matched his rage. The doubt I’d tried to suggest to him, suddenly reinforced, checked his rush.

  I had intended, when I’d shaped matters so far, to put that doubt fairly in the form of a question, but John Maxon himself made it unnecessary, had answered that question before it was asked in a gesture of self-betrayal. He staggered back—threw up his hands.

  “Hardridge!” he croaked.

  Something in his right hand left a streak of light behind it, like
a shooting star.

  And Hardridge, arriving at the truth too quickly for memory or logic, recognizing his enemy by a species of instinct, would have leaped in dreadful silence at Maxon’s throat. But I jerked my revolver up and covered them both.

  “One minute,” I said. “Well, Maxon. Yes, I’m the man. I’m the man your tool, Osborne, picked to take your place here. Keep back, Hardridge. No, there’ll be no killing here—not till I find out what it’s all about, anyway.

  “Speak up, Hardridge,” I ordered, turning from Maxon’s twitching features to Hardridge’s inflamed and deadly face. “What have you against this man?”

  “That, —— him!” exploded Hardridge. “That traitor and thief! He stole the money that would have saved me from prison—me and the rest of us. That coward and cur! Why, blast you,” this directly to Maxon, “you knew that without that money we were lost. The—reformers—”

  “He has a license to talk, he has,” quavered Maxon, standing sidewise in the hall, alternately glancing apprehensively at Hardridge and beseechingly at me.

  Unhappy, indeed, was his situation, his only hope of life being in me, whom he’d planned to dupe to the same death that now threatened him.

  “Who was he?” I asked Maxon. “Come to the point, quick.”

  “He! He was a dirty gambling-house keeper and dive-keeper and worse. King of crookdom through his pull in the City Hall. And the money he says I stole was a slush fund to keep the politician crooks in office. Because the other side won and he went to San Quentin where he belonged, he blamed me—”

  “You whining sneak,” cried Hardridge, “you were thick enough with us while the going was good.”

  “That’ll do, the pair of you,” I said. “I quite understand.”

  I did, well enough. Details were missing, but they were unessential. These two were part of the ring that had in the old days debauched the city government of San Francisco. To me that crime constitutes one of the baser forms of treason, and I admit my finger twitched to shoot them both.

  Then I thought of the sapphire. I’d formed no definite plan as to acquiring it once John Maxon had taken it out of its hiding-place. Circumstances must guide me, and here were the circumstances.

  I SUPPOSE in a way I was responsible for what followed. I suppose that my apparent indecision encouraged Hardridge, and I may even have stepped a little to one side. But I know I didn’t plan the thing or even foresee it. I did have a peculiar flashing vision of that dark cañon at the rear of the house, that dark cañon with its smooth, steep, narrowing sides and its floor dipping ever more rapidly toward the jumping-off place at the end.

  Anyway, all of a sudden Hardridge started for Maxon. Maxon did the natural thing for him; he whirled and ran. I could hardly have stopped him if I had tried. He brushed me back against Miss Maxon and half-way through the dining-room door, and Hardridge tore after him without a word.

  There was a chair near the end of the wall, and Maxon had sanity enough left to push it before him through the window. He followed the chair head first, and Hardridge plunged through the opening after him.

  I was delayed a little in unlocking the door. I stepped out into a fantastic hollow of ragged rocks, flooded here at the ravine’s beginning with moonlight. There was a narrow pass to the right, but Maxon had missed that pass. And he and Hardridge were leaping like shadows straight down toward Land’s End.

  Maxon seemed to be straining to stop. Perhaps he saw the railing and memory came to him of what was beyond it. But his pace was so great and the grade was so steep that he could not check himself all at once, and he brought up against the railing with such force that it creaked and sagged outward under the impact. But it still held.

  And Hardridge clutched him. But, by the time I got close enough to see clearly, Maxon had seized Hardridge’s wrists and was prying them outward and slowly loosing Hardridge’s grip on his throat. He wrenched Hardridge’s hands away, and Hardridge gripped him around the body.

  But Maxon gripped him likewise and began to bend Hardridge’s body backward.

  “Oh, they’ll be killed. Can’t you— Oh!”

  Miss Maxon had come up, frightened, sobbing. She would have run up to them and thus put herself in danger, but I held her back.

  “My dear Miss Maxon! My dear Miss Maxon!”

  There was nothing else I could say.

  I turned and saw how very like an open door was the end of the cañon. Beyond that door the sky sparkled with stars, and the waters beneath the stars reflected their light. But the water at the base of the cliff must have been too unquiet to reflect it. I could hear it roaring as it surged over the rocks, and I imagined it stretching up white and hungry fingers.

  “Can’t you stop them!” cried Miss Maxon.

  One more look I took at the place where the two men had struggled. Then I stepped between Miss Maxon and that place and urged her gently back toward Cragcastle. For Hardridge, knowing himself overmastered, had suddenly yielded and somehow dragged Maxon with him under the railing. Maxon gripped the edge of the rock, but Hardridge tore his grip relentlessly away. And so there came an end to the bad beginning made many years before.

  I reflected, as I picked a way up the uneven cañon bottom, that the quivering woman whom I led would probably some day be mistress of Cragcastle, since her father was now heir to the Maxon fortune. In that case they could well afford the loss of the sapphire.

  WE PARTED at the base of the mountain, Miss Maxon and I. It was not late, and we could go different ways quite unnoticed into Mill Valley and thence to San Francisco. If the thing that had happened at Cragcastle were ever discovered, there was no possibility that she’d be connected with it, even in thought. While as for me….

  “I’m sorry you’re going back to China,” she said.

  Of course she would be, for I’d told her absolutely nothing of my errand there, unraveling the mystery of the Ko Lao Hui leadership. If she had known what was ahead of me, she would have been glad my eagerness to be at it was to be gratified.

  “You have been—well, fine,” she said.

  I murmured a few deprecating phrases.

  “And—wonderful. I’ve been trying to guess—how much of it all you had planned out ahead. The escape of Hardridge, for instance.”

  “Well?” I questioned noncommittedly.

  “You pretended it was accidental. But I found the string with which you pulled back the bolt of the closet door. That was no accident.”

  “Maybe not,” I replied.

  Frankly, it pleased me a little that she had discovered it.

  “And then you knew—that father would inherit—”

  “Miss Maxon,” I said, “there’s no pursuit so interesting as the pursuit of motives, and none as profitless.”

  She laughed a little.

  “To think,” she remarked, “that, when I think of you—as I shall quite often—I’ll always have to call you to myself just ‘that man.’ ”

  I suppose it had seemed to her a curious emission; however, names are so far accidents that they seem to count for but little in the scheme of things. And I’ve rather lost the habit of giving my true name to every one I meet in passing through this world as if I were some article of merchandise that needed to be perpetually tagged, ticketed and labeled. But there is no reason why I should not give it.

  “My name is Partridge, John Partridge,” I said as I released her hand.

  Undue Influence

  I WASN’T at all surprized when Sanderson came to me that morning on the after deck of the Antioch and told me that he’d been stripped of everything he possessed by Damron. Nor, for that matter, was I surprized at the use of the words, “feelin’ of wildness,” in describing his sensations during the process.

  Very early on the trip I’d noticed the two men, and I’d judged their acquaintance to be one of potential mischief. It was because of that I struck up my friendship with Sanderson, who was a retired rancher, honest, likable, far from stupid but of a rather nervous and
fluctuating temperament. Thus I learned that he’d recently lost his wife by death and had also recently been enriched by the discovery of oil on his ranch and its subsequent sale.

  Which latter fact, I thought, well confirmed me in my suspicions concerning his traveling-companion. Damron was a large man of almost too imposing presence, well-groomed and impeccably clothed. He was affable, a very fluent talker and unquestionably intelligent, but his smile was purely mechanical and very peculiar, a mere twisting upward of the corners of his lips. His smile never affected his eyes or any of the upper part of his face—it was clearly a danger mark.

  Sometimes I felt that Sanderson himself was none too trustful of Damron—but why, then, the apparent friendship?

  One evening—San Francisco was then five days astern—I leaned on the rail in front of the door of Sanderson’s stateroom, facing the prow. The sunset over the prow was magnificent, like a great dusky conflagration, and the Antioch was moving toward it quietly, as if she liked pushing through the low waves. From inside Sanderson’s cabin, which he had to himself, came the incessant murmur of a rather musical masculine voice—Damron’s voice.

  Now, while I was listening to that voice—the words, of course, were indistinguishable—I happened to glance downward, and I saw near my left foot, just at the edge of the scupper, something that was very peculiar to find on the deck of a ship five days at sea. The find had no meaning to me then, but I mentally filed it away, after a fashion I had. I remembered that the only wood nearby was that in the deck itself and in the walls of the staterooms. Some one had been boring either one or the other, for here were a dozen or so rounded flakes just as they had come from the auger or bit, whichever had been used. Some one had bored a hole and had thought to throw the residue overboard; the wind had blown these few flakes back.