The After House Part 8

"Go over each man. Leave them their pocket-knives; take everything else."

The men lined up. The situation was tense, horrible, so that the miscellaneous articles from their pockets--knives, keys, plugs of chewing tobacco, and here and there, among the foreign ones, small combs for beard and mustache unexpectedly brought to light, caused a smile of pure reaction. Two revolvers from Oleson and McNamara and one nicked razor from Adams completed the list of weapons we found. The crew submitted willingly. They seemed relieved to have some one to direct them, and the alacrity with which they obeyed my orders showed how they were suffering under the strain of inaction.

I went over to Singleton and put my hand on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Singleton," I said, "but I'll have to ask you for your revolver."

Without looking at me, he drew it from his hip pocket and held it out.

I took it: It was loaded.

"It's out of order," he said briefly. "If it had been working right, I wouldn't be here."

I reached down and touched his wrist. His pulse was slow and rather faint, his hands cold.

"Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Yes," he snarled. "You can get me a belaying-pin and let me at those fools over there. Turner did this, and you know it as well as I do!"

I slid his revolver into my pocket, and went back to the men. Counting Williams and the cook and myself, there were nine of us. The cook I counted out, ordering him to go to the galley and prepare breakfast.

The eight that were left I divided into two watches, Burns taking one and I the other. On Burns's watch were Clarke, McNamara, and Williams; on mine, Oleson, Adams, and Charlie Jones.

It was two bells, or five o'clock. Burns struck the gong sharply as an indication that order, of a sort, had been restored. The rising sun was gleaming on the sails; the gray surface of the sea was ruffling under the morning breeze. From the galley a thin stream of smoke was rising. Some of the horror of the night went with the darkness, but the thought of what waited in the cabin below was on us all.

I suggested another attempt to rouse Mr. Turner, and Burns and Clarke went below. They came back in ten minutes, reporting no change in Turner's condition. There was open grumbling among the men at the situation, but we were helpless. Burns and I decided to go on as if Turner were not on board, until he was in condition to take hold.

We thought it best to bring up the bodies while all the crew was on duty, and then to take up the watches. I arranged to have one man constantly on guard in the after house--a difficult matter where all were under suspicion. Burns suggested Charlie Jones as probably the most reliable, and I gave him the revolver I had taken from Singleton.

It was useless, but it made at least a show of authority. The rest of the crew, except Oleson, on guard over the mate, was detailed to a.s.sist in carrying up the three bodies. Williams was taken along to get sheets from the linen room.

We brought the captain up first, laying him on a sheet on the deck and folding the edges over him. It was terrible work. Even I, fresh from a medical college, grew nauseated over it. He was heavy. It was slow work, getting him up. Vail we brought up in the sheets from his bunk.

Of the three, he was the most mutilated. The maid Karen showed only one injury, a smas.h.i.+ng blow on the head, probably from the head of the axe. For axe it had been, beyond a doubt. I put Williams to work below to clear away every evidence of what had happened. He went down, ashy-faced, only to rush up again, refusing to stay alone. I sent Clarke with him, and instructed Charlie Jones to keep them there until the cabin was in order.

At three bells the cook brought coffee, and some of the men took it. I tried to swallow, but it choked me.

Burns had served as second mate on a sailing vessel, and thought he could take us back, at least into more traveled waters. We decided to head back to New York. I got the code book from the captain's cabin, and we agreed to run up the flag, union down, if any other vessel came in sight. I got the code word for "Mutiny--need a.s.sistance," and I asked the mate if he would signal if a vessel came near enough. But he turned sullen and refused to answer.

I find it hard to recap calmly the events of that morning: the three still and shrouded figures, p.r.o.ne on deck; the crew, bareheaded, standing around, eyeing each other stealthily, with panic ready to leap free and grip each of them by the throat; the grim determination, the reason for which I did not yet know, to put the first mate in irons; and, over all, the clear sunrise of an August morning on the ocean, rails and decks gleaming, an odor of coffee in the air, the joyous lift and splash of the bowsprit as the Ella, headed back on her course, seemed to make for home like a nag for the stable.

Surely none of these men, some weeping, all grieving, could be the fiend who had committed the crimes. One by one, I looked in their faces--at Burns, youngest member of the crew, a blue-eyed, sandy-haired Scot; at Clarke and Adams and Charlie Jones, old in the service of the Turner line; at McNamara, a shrewd little Irishman; at Oleson the Swede. And, in spite of myself, I could not help comparing them with the heavy-shouldered, sodden-faced man below in his cabin, the owner of the s.h.i.+p.

One explanation came to me, and I leaped at it--the possibility of a stowaway hidden in the hold, some maniacal fugitive who had found in the little cargo boat's empty hull ample room to hide. The men, too, seized at the idea. One and all volunteered for what might prove to be a dangerous service.

I chose Charlie Jones and Clarke as being most familiar with the s.h.i.+p, and we went down into the hold. Clarke carried a lantern. Charlie Jones held Singleton's broken revolver. I carried a belaying pin. But, although we searched every foot of s.p.a.ce, we found nothing. The formaldehyde with which Turner had fumigated the s.h.i.+p clung here tenaciously, and, mixed with the odors of bilge water and the indescribable heavy smells left by tropical cargoes, made me dizzy and ill.

We were stumbling along, Clarke with the lantern, I next, and Charlie Jones behind, on our way to the ladder again, when I received a stunning blow on the back of the head. I turned dizzy, expecting nothing less than sudden death, when it developed that Jones, having stumbled over a loose plank, had fallen forward, the revolver in his outstretched hand striking my head.

He picked himself up sheepishly, and we went on. But so unnerved was I by this fresh shock that it was a moment or two before I could essay the ladder.

Burns was waiting at the hatchway, peering down. Beside him on the deck lay a bloodstained axe.

Elsa Lee, on hearing the story of Henrietta Sloane, had gone to the maids' cabin, and had found it where it had been flung into the berth of the stewardess.

CHAPTER VIII

THE STEWARDESS'S STORY

But, after all, the story of Henrietta Sloane only added to the mystery. She told it to me, sitting propped in a chair in Mrs. Johns's room, her face white, her lips dry and twitching. The crew were making such breakfast as they could on deck, and Mr. Turner was still in a stupor in his room across the main cabin. The four women, drawn together in their distress, were huddled in the center of the room, touching hands now and then, as if finding comfort in contact, and rea.s.surance.

"I went to bed early," said the stewardess; "about ten o'clock, I think. Karen had not come down; I wakened when the watch changed. It was hot, and the window from our room to the deck was open. There is a curtain over it, to keep the helmsman from looking in--it is close to the wheel. The bell, striking every half-hour, does not waken me any more, although it did at first. It is just outside the window. But I heard the watch change. I heard eight bells struck, and the lookout man on the forecastle head call, 'All's well.'

"I sat up and turned on the lights. Karen had not come down, and I was alarmed. She had been--had been flirting a little with one of the sailors, and I had warned her that it would not do. She'd be found out and get into trouble.

"The only way to reach our cabin was through the chart-room, and when I opened the door an inch or two, I saw why Karen had not come down. Mr.

Turner and Mr. Singleton were sitting there. They were--" She hesitated.

"Please go on," said Mrs. Turner. "They were drinking?"

"Yes, Mrs. Turner. And Mr. Vail was there, too. He was saying that the captain would come down and there would be more trouble. I shut the door and stood just inside, listening. Mr. Singleton said he hoped the captain would come--that he and Mr. Turner only wanted a chance to get at him."

Miss Lee leaned forward and searched the stewardess's face with strained eyes.

"You are sure that he mentioned Mr. Turner in that?"

"That was exactly what he said, Miss Lee. The captain came down just then, and ordered Mr. Singleton on deck. I think he went, for I did not hear his voice again. I thought, from the sounds, that Mr. Vail and the captain were trying to get Mr. Turner to his room."

Mrs. Johns had been sitting back, her eyes shut, holding a bottle of salts to her nose. Now she looked up.

"My dear woman," she said, "are you trying to tell us that we slept through all that?"

"If you did not hear it, you must have slept," the stewardess persisted obstinately. "The door into the main cabin was closed. Karen came down just after. She was frightened. She said the first mate was on deck, in a terrible humor; and that Charlie Jones, who was at the wheel, had appealed to Burns not to leave him there--that trouble was coming.

That must have been at half-past twelve. The bell struck as she put out the light. We both went to sleep then, until Mrs. Turner's ringing for Karen roused us."

"But I did not ring for Karen."

The woman stared at Mrs. Turner.

"But the bell rang, Mrs. Turner. Karen got up at once and, turning on the light, looked at the clock. 'What do you think of that?' she said.

'Ten minutes to three, and I'd just got to sleep!' I growled about the light, and she put it out, after she had thrown on a wrapper. The room was dark when she opened the door. There was a little light in the chart-room, from the binnacle lantern. The door at the top of the companionway was always closed at night; the light came through the window near the wheel."

She had kept up very well to this point, telling her story calmly and keeping her voice down. But when she reached the actual killing of the Danish maid, she went to pieces. She took to s.h.i.+vering violently, and her pulse, under my fingers, was small and rapid. I mixed some aromatic spirits with water and gave it to her, and we waited until she could go on.

For the first time, then, I realized that I was clad only in s.h.i.+rt and trousers, with a handkerchief around my head where the accident in the hold had left me with a nasty cut. My bare feet were thrust into down-at-the-heel slippers. I saw Miss Lee's eyes on me, and colored.

"I had forgotten," I said uncomfortably. "I'll have time to find my coat while she is recovering. I have been so occupied--"