Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 62, No. 2, October 3, 1931

Three Red-Headed Men on Board, and One a Killer! But One Had Been Murdered, and Another Attacked—

I

Through the muffled, monotonous beat of the engines, the slow strokes of a deep-toned hell sounded faintly. Midnight, at sea. As the U. S. Army transport Shiloh solemnly lifted and dropped in her silent passage through the ebony, tropical waters, silvered and greenish-crested by the high, white moon, three hundred and fifty soldiers slumbered in her hold. Three hundred of them were raw recruits, bound for service in Canal Zone forts. The other fifty were previous service men, soldiers returning to their posts in Panama after having been on leave in the United States.

Aft, where the men were quartered, the heavy, foul air was oppressive with heat. It was, moreover, pitifully stale, having been taken in and out of many lungs. A small, yellow bulb beside an iron ladder, leading through a hole to the main deck above, cast a little area of sickly radiance. Stretching away on all sides from this splotchy patch of illumination were dim, densely shadowed forests of steel. They were the bunks, tier after tier of them, in which the soldiers slept.

The sounds of midnight possessed the place. Aside from the murmurous rumble of the propeller shaft far down next to the keel of the ship, whose constant noise was more felt than heard, there were snores, heavy breathings, and restless creakings of springs as men tossed in their sleep.

Recruit Baxter, on the bottom bunk of a tier deep in the blackness of a corner of the hold, wooed sleep vainly. No matter how much he twisted and turned, he found slumber just as distant as ever, the heat just as intense, the air as suffocating, and the mattress as lumpy.

It was agonizing, he thought, to want to sleep so much, and yet not be able to. He stared up into the darkness, and envied the man in the bunk above him. His springs had not creaked in ages.

Baxter resolutely closed his eyes again. This time he would go to sleep. He certainly needed it.

Hardly had he settled himself, however, when a premonition leaped full grown into his mind that some one was close to him, peering down at him, bending over him. With a jerk, his eyes unshuttered themselves. Only blackness above.

He lay quietly for a moment, waiting and listening. Except for the thrust of the propeller and the snorings of sleepers all around him, there was no sound.

Suddenly a grip of steel enclosed his throat. He writhed and twisted, and endeavored to cry out. But the fingers around his windpipe tightened relentlessly. His unborn cry reduced itself to a desperate gasping for breath.

His hands tore furiously at the arms and fingers of the midnight strangler. There was no doubt about the intentions of the unknown assailant. Murder was in his squeezing grip.

Baxter was no weakling. Before enlisting in the army, his muscles had been hardened by years of a man’s work. This stood him in good stead now. He discovered that he was stronger than the person whom the darkness shielded. Desperation, always the best ally of a man fighting for his life, spurred him to supreme effort. Slowly and surely, struggling against the time when his tortured lungs must collapse for want of air, he finally managed to loosen the terrible, constricting grip.

“Help!” he yelled. “Murderer! Catch him!”

Sounds leaped through the hold. Awakened men, startled, sat up in their bunks and called out. Then, after a moment of swiftly increasing disturbance, lights flashed in the ceiling, chasing the shadows to more obscure hiding places. Tousled-headed men, in tiers, blinked at one another.

“What’s going on down here?” demanded an authoritative voice gruffly. “Who’s making all the disturbance?”

All eyes turned toward the voice and saw the corporal of the guard descending the iron ladder leading into the hold. He was known to the previous service men as Corporal Frank, a soldier who had served three years in Panama, and who now, after a leave in the States, was returning to his regiment for a second three years.

The corporal walked swiftly to Baxter, who had climbed out of his bunk.

“Somebody tried to choke me!” cried the recruit, tenderly fingering his throat.

Frank looked at him with suspicion.

“You’ve had a nightmare, Red! Who would want to choke you?” he laughed.

“Nightmare, huh?” Baxter pointed to the harsh marks on his neck.

“Goshamighty!” exclaimed an old soldier, who was leaning interestedly out of a near-by bunk. “Go tell the O. D. about it, recruity! Maybe we got some nut on board! No telling who he’ll pick on next!”

The gray-haired old buck shivered despite the heat, and worriedly drew his red face, colored by uncounted thousands of tropical beers, back into his bunk.

II

Wherever there are soldiers, there is a guard. Along with inspection, that important military function is never forgotten, whether the soldiers are in their forts, or merely transients on a transport. Each day at sea, usually late in the afternoon, guardmount is held, and a new guard takes over the various posts throughout the ship. There is the refrigerator to be protected from ungry raiding parties; enlisted men must be kept from those parts of the ships reserved for officers. Recruits generally furnish the rank and file of the guard, while previous service men like Corporal Frank make up the noncommissioned personnel. Then, from the commissioned officers on board, one is designated to be the Officer of the Day.

Captain Freeman, neat, despite the sultriness, in his well-pressed blouse and gleaming Sam Browne belt, was the Officer of the Day. The lights in the ceiling of the O. D.’s office up forward on the main deck brightened his silver-gray hair. Little, pleasant wrinkles gathered at the corners of his gray eyes as he talked to Sergeant Flaherty, who sat alongside the desk.

Flaherty was an old noncommissioned officer, with many years of service. He had been back to the United States on leave, and was now returning to his post in Panama.

He was a portly man, and seemed to mind the all-pervading heat terribly. His woolen olive-drab shirt was open at the throat, displaying a little tuft of blond hair which topped his massive chest. With a huge, khaki bandanna, he kept continuously mopping perspiration from his big, shining bald head.

Captain Freeman went directly to the reason why he had summoned Flaherty from the sergeant’s cabins on the stern of the ship.

“Sorry, Flaherty, to haul you out of bed at this hour of the night.” Freeman glanced at his watch. “It’s after midnight,” he added ruefully.

He took a gray sheet of paper from the top of the littered desk and offered it to the sergeant.

“Here. Read this,” he said grimly. “We have a murderer on board.”

Flaherty stared at the officer and then dropped his blue eyes to the paper.

“It came in early this evening,” Captain Freeman explained. “I’ve been working on it ever since. But,” he confessed wearily, “it’s got me stumped.”

A little twinkle lighted up his gray eyes.

“You know the traditional army procedure, sergeant, when an officer is stumped? He calls in the best sergeant he’s got, tells him the problem, and orders him to solve it. And usually these sergeants manage to make good. Lord knows how they do it, but they do.”

Sergeant Flaherty cussed inwardly. He knew what was coming.

“So, Flaherty,” concluded the captain, “I’m stuck, and you’re it. The old army game, sergeant. You know the problem. There’s a murderer on board. Find him.”

Flaherty mopped his bald head and blinked.

“Really, though, sergeant,” the officer smiled understandingly, “you ought to do better than I. You’ve been in direct contact with the men. You know them. And whatever investigations you make won’t cause as much suspicion, or embarrassment, as mine would.”

Captain Freeman’s smile faded and his manner became serious again.

“This fellow Horning,” he said, “must be a pretty bad customer. Here’s tin account of what he did. Rotten, and bloody as the devil. I got it out of one of the old newspapers lying around on board.”

Flaherty’s blue eyes widened as they skimmed through the clipping.

Sergeant Flaherty ceased his reading, and lifted his bald head to stare into Captain Freeman’s sober features.

“You expect me to find this man, sir!” he exclaimed.

“I certainly do!” retorted the captain grimly. “He’s too dangerous to have around loose. He probably has a mad streak in him.”

The captain jerkily dabbed at his face with a handkerchief.

“What if he should go completely mad? Sergeant, can you imagine what a man like that could do in a hold packed with unsuspecting soldiers?”

Flaherty mopped his head nervously, and he emitted a low whistle.

“Phew, captain! An army transport is no place to have a murderer loose. It’s too small. Too many opportunities, should he suddenly decide to do some more killing.”

“Exactly,” agreed Captain Freeman, reaching for the pile of thin, white booklets on his desk.

“In this pile,” he continued, “is the service record of every man on the ship. Naturally I didn’t run across any labeled ‘Horning’.”

The officer selected three booklets and turned back to Flaherty.

“This Horning must have some brains,” he commented, “even if he is mad. Not every man having but a little money, and desiring to escape the United States, would think to change his name, enlist in the army, and ask for foreign service. Once out of the country he could desert wherever and whenever he pleased.”

Captain Freeman glanced at the service records in his hands.

“If Horning is on board, his record must be one of these three. I’ve looked through all of them, but only three contain physical descriptions fitting the one we received by radio. All three belong to recruits.”

The captain focused his glance to read the names typewritten on the covers.

“The first recruit’s name is—”

At that moment the door leading from the deck into the office opened. Corporal of the Guard Frank and Recruit Baxter entered.

Captain Freeman’s gaze swept from Corporal Frank to the recruit and lingered. His eyebrows lifted, and he glanced obliquely at Sergeant Flaherty.

“One of the recruits!” he muttered under his breath, tapping the service records at the same time.

Sergeant Flaherty had already judged as much. The soldier beside Corporal Frank had fiery red hair, which had a disordered look as though its owner had just been roused out of bed. An undershirt revealed muscular shoulders plentifully sprinkled with light brown freckles.

“What’s the trouble, corporal?” demanded the captain, sizing up Recruit Baxter’s disheveled appearance.

“This man claims he was choked, sir.”

“What!” cried the officer and the sergeant at the same instant. They looked at Baxter and then stared at each other. Murderer on board!

“What happened, man?” cried Freeman, fascinatedly eying the livid finger marks on Baxter’s neck.

“I was lying in my bunk, sir. I couldn’t sleep, it was so hot and close. All of a sudden these hands came out of the dark and grabbed my throat. If I hadn’t been awake they would have choked me to death before I knew what was happening to me. As it was, they nearly got me. But I managed to pull them away. Then they vanished. I hollered for somebody to catch whoever it was, but when Corporal Frank turned on the lights nobody was around. All the men were in bed.”

Captain Freeman turned to the corporal. Frank was a short, dark, wiry Italian. His black hair gleamed like patent leather below his campaign hat. His jet eyes, glittering in the lights of the ceiling, returned the officer’s gaze.

“What time was this, corporal?”

“Just now, sir. I was going by the hatchway, on my way around to inspect the sentries on post, when I heard a racket down below in the hold. I climbed down the ladder, switched on the lights, and saw this recruit yelling his head off.”

Captain Freeman nodded at Flaherty to take charge of the questioning.

“When did your sister get married?” the sergeant shot at Baxter.

Blue eyes met blue eyes, and invisible sparks seemed to generate from the clashing.

“I never had a sister,” replied Baxter slowly.

After taking a final piercing stare, Flaherty waved his khaki bandanna.

“All right,” he said, “you can go.”

III

After Baxter’s departure, Captain Freeman stared at the sergeant.

“Whew!” he muttered. “What do you make of it, Flaherty?”

“I don’t know,” replied the old soldier honestly.

“Good Lord!” breathed the captain, wiping his face again. “This is serious business, sergeant,” he added anxiously. “We’ve got to find that man — and find him quick! Good Lord! My head would be in a basket if there was a murder on board.”

“Corporal Frank,” he said bitterly, eying the noncommissioned officer of the guard, who stood nervously rubbing his hands together, “you’re responsible for this!”

Frank’s eyes widened, and he fell back in astonishment. A tremor of fear vibrated in his voice.

“I, sir?”

“Yes, you!” accused the officer savagely. “Didn’t you bring me that cursed radio from the wireless office?”

Corporal Frank smiled in relief, and ceased rubbing his hands, one against the other.

“Yes, sir,” he admitted, “but I was only doing my duty, sir. I was told to take the message to the officer of the day.”

“I know it!” answered Freeman. “I was only joking, corporal.” The officer frowned furiously.

“By the way,” he changed the subject abruptly, as a forgotten detail of duty occurred to him. “Did you inspect the men’s luggage, as I told you to?”

“Yes, sir. Right after I delivered the radio to you, sir. I gave each man’s baggage a thorough examination. There isn’t a drop of liquor on board, sir.”

“Well, that’s one good thing, anyway!” grumbled the officer of the day. “If they had had any booze they’d have been foolish not to have drunk it all before now. Silly, prohibition! Must be upheld even on a ship in mid-ocean. Lot of damn’ nonsense!”

Sergeant Flaherty had been sitting quietly doing some thinking. He wished Corporal Frank would stop the confounded hand rubbing. It made him nervous.

“Captain,” he said, “you mentioned that there were two more men besides Baxter. Who are they?”

“Recruits Shelby and Winters,” the officer read from the covers of the service records.

“I’d like to see ’em,” said Flaherty. “Something’s fishy somewhere. Why should a red-headed murderer pick on another red-head to choke in the middle of the night?”

IV

Recruit Shelby stepped into the office with a frightened, worried air. He had taken time to comb his rusty red hair, which he had plastered down smoothly on the flap top of his lean, cadaverous face. His small, close set, greenish eyes turned, with ratlike caution, from Captain Freeman to Sergeant Flaherty.

The sergeant beetled his sandy eyebrows and hurled a question at him.

“When was your sister born?”

“Well,” hesitated Shelby, staring at the sergeant like a hypnotized sparrow returns the gaze of a snake, “one was born in 1900. Jane was born in, let me see—”

“How many sisters have you?” snapped Flaherty.

“Three,” replied Shelby sullenly.

“Hump!” grunted the sergeant. “Go back to bed.”

“He’s a nasty customer,” offered the corporal of the guard, when Shelby had gone.

“What’s that?” demanded Flaherty sharply. “How?”

Corporal Frank shrugged his shoulders.

“He was in the big crap game we had in the hold this afternoon. He lost all his money and accused Recruit Winters of shooting with loaded dice.”

At the mention of Winters’s name, Sergeant Flaherty gave the captain a glance from beneath lowered eyebrows.

“Winters was the big winner,” the corporal continued. “The game broke up in a slugging match between Shelby and him. The crowd parted them before they got very far. Shelby threatened that he’d get Winters for the crooked dice, and he looked as if he meant it.”

“Good night!” groaned Captain Freeman. “These red-heads will drive me crazy! I’ll never have another in my outfit again as long as I live!”

Winters appeared next at the door. He was a raw-boned soldier, who ambled rather than walked. He had neglected to brush his hair, which was bushy, and so dark as to be nearly brown. He seemed not at all disturbed by the midnight summons, and smiled familiarly, showing huge, buck teeth. A smear of freckles crossed the bridge of his bulbous nose and ended on his prominent cheek bones.

Flaherty was about to shoot a question at him when Corporal Frank interrupted.

“I shall go around and inspect the guard again, sir,” he said to the officer of the day.

Captain Freeman absently waved his hand in permission. His mind was taken up with studying the recruit in front of him. Corporal Frank silently stepped out into the darkness of the deck and carefully closed the screen door behind him.

“When were you in the Bronx last?” demanded Flaherty sullenly, keenly eying the none too intelligent face of Recruit Winters.

“Well, sarge” — he showed all his buck teeth in a grin and drawled the answer in a nasal voice — “I didn’t hardly ever go near the Bronx. It was kind of out of the way for us New Yorkers who lived on the East Side. I guess the last time I was there was when Al Smith ran for President. That was, now—”

“That’s enough!” snorted Flaherty disgustedly. “Al Smith wasn’t elected. I guess you know that?”

“I guess I do!” grinned Waters. “I had to beat up a dozen guys on account of it.”

“All right! All right! Beat it back to bed.”

“Thanks, sarge! Anything more. I can do for you...?”

Recruit Winters backed clumsily through the screen door. His hand lingered on the jamb for an instant. Sergeant Flaherty glared at him, so he retreated hastily.

“What do you think, sergeant?” began Captain Freeman.

Flaherty’s chair hit the floor with a bang. Before the officer’s startled eyes he charged for the door.

“Holy smoke!” he cried over his shoulder. “I must be getting paralysis of the brain, sir. Did you see that good-luck ring on Winters’s finger? It had a diamond in it, too! I’ll get him back here and find out about that!”

As Flaherty shot through the door the officer seized the newspaper clippings on his desk. The body of the murdered Roy Davega had been stripped of a good-luck ring containing a diamond! Was the slow-moving, dumb-looking Winters the killer? Was it he who had tried to choke his red-headed fellow recruit, Baxter, in the stealth of night? Why?

Mystified and worried, the officer tried to sit still in his chair as he waited for Flaherty to return with Recruit Winters. Perspiration speckled Captain Freeman’s face. If anything serious happened while he was officer of the day, he would be in a tight spot officially.

Sergeant Flaherty found the deck deserted. He hesitated for a moment, somewhat surprised. He had expected to see Winters’s figure walking toward the stern of the ship. The recruit had hardly had time to gain the aft hatchway and disappear.

Flaherty paused another moment to drag the khaki bandanna from the hip pocket of his breeches and mop his bald head once again. The tropical night was glorious. Tilted low against the horizon, a pattern of diamonds among the countless star jewels scattered prodigally across the black velvet dome of the sky, was the Southern Cross. A cool sea breeze blew in Flaherty’s face.

Except for the steady throb of the propeller shaft, the ship was soothingly quiet. Practically no lights gleamed anywhere on the transport, so the Shiloh passed, gently swishing, through the sea and the night, like some luminous creation through a black, silver-shot void.

Flaherty was tucking away his handkerchief when the thought struck him that Winters, instead of going all the way to the stern, might have left the deck amidships, where there was a staircase leading down into the hold.

Evidently that was what Winters had done. There might still be time to catch up with him before he reached the maze of bunks in the darkness of the hold.

Hastening amidships, Flaherty found the passageway which led to the stairs descending into the hold. In another moment he was traveling a narrow, dimly illuminated corridor whose red-painted floor, broken occasionally by the high sills of bulkhead doors, stretched to the stern of the ship where the shadows of the soldiers’ sleeping quarters finally blotted it out. Recruit Winters was not in sight.

The sergeant was stepping over the sill of the last bulkhead door when his descending foot struck something which brought his heart to his throat. That which his foot had met was soft, and yet not wholly yielding.

Flaherty’s fingers trembled as they struck a match. When the flare of light penetrated the bulkhead’s shadow the sergeant’s blue eyes widened and his lips parted slowly in horror. Stretched out on the floor, face downward, was the body of a soldier. The back of his woolen, olive-drab shirt was drenched with blood which, even as Flaherty watched, continued to ebb slowly from several wounds.

Although the very attitude of the body, its outflung fists clenched in death’s hopeless grasp, told the sergeant that the soldier was dead, nevertheless Flaherty bent to turn him over.

A strangled exclamation shot through the old sergeant’s lips. Here was the man he was seeking! There was no mistaking the buck teeth, revealed by lips which had frozen parted after writhing in death agony. Across the bulbous nose, the smear of freckles yellowish now in the pallid face, stood out startlingly.

“Heaven protect us!” muttered Flaherty, rising slowly from the body. “Winters!”

He stared up and down the dim, silent corridor in fear. Somehow he almost expected to see a sinister shadow flit among gaunt stanchions and bulkheads and hear a maniacal laugh in the ominous silence. Nothing moved anywhere; there was no sound save the muffled, continuous beat of the propeller shaft and the swishing of water against the side of the ship, coming through an open porthole near by.

Fascinated, awed, full of horror, Flaherty’s gaze returned to the body. The murderer had attacked again, not with his hands closing a windpipe, but with a savage knife; not Recruit Baxter, but Recruit Winters — and this time he had been successful.

Flaherty swallowed hard on the lump in his throat. Murderer on board! Baxter choked and Winters slain with a knife. Both red-headed.

Then another thought smashed into the sergeant’s brain and sent his gaze swiftly probing across the hands of the dead man. No sparkle, no dull gleam of gold rewarded him. The good-luck ring which Winters had worn on leaving the office was gone.

V

Flaherty straightened as his mind, dazed by this last discovery, reeled dizzily through a maze of contradictory facts developed in the past hour of this most eventful night. From the description given in the radio message, the murderer sought by the New York police must be one of three men, Recruits Baxter, Winters, and Shelby. Unknown hands in the dark had attempted to strangle Baxter to death. Winters had been struck down, evidently by a knife. That left Shelby.

But Winters had been wearing a good-luck ring, similar to the one stolen from Roy Davega’s body by John Horning, the brother-in-law. Why did Winters’s murderer take that ring from Winters’s body? Why was Baxter choked? Only one man of the three, Baxter, Winters, Shelby, could be the murderer, John Horning. Which one was it — the choked Baxter, the murdered Winters, or Shelby? If Winters were Horning, who killed him, and why?

Questions and cross-questions leading to nothing. The more Flaherty thought, the more mystified and completely baffled he became. One thing he knew. Winters’s murderer had to be found at once. Two men attacked in the space of an hour, and one of the two killed. A murderer on board, and apparently on a rampage of death. Who would be next?

That question spurred Sergeant Flaherty’s wits. He would go into the hold. He wanted to see the sullen-faced Shelby again.

He was turning to go down the corridor when his eye, glancing toward the porthole close at hand, caught a tiny, brilliant flash in the tropical “air catcher,” a metal tube made in the shape of a scoop and inserted in a porthole in order to deflect the breeze, made by the ship’s passage, into the hold. His groping hand closed on a ring!

With fingers that trembled, he examined it. A diamond scintillated in the center of a raised swastika. By match light the sergeant made out the initials engraved on the inner band. “R. D.” — Roy Davega.

As he handled the ring, Flaherty became aware that his fingers slid on its smooth, gold surface. By the light of another match he bent to find the cause and discovered that there was a thin coating of grease-like substance on it. For a second he looked at the ring curiously, and then he put it to his generous, Hibernian nose. His sandy eyebrows knitted perplexedly. From the greasy smear on the ring came a pungent odor, strangely familiar, yet perversely baffling in its refusal to be catalogued.

Finally, Flaherty stowed the ring in his pocket, cast one more look at the corpse, and turned to make his way to the stern where the soldiers slept. As he strode rapidly along, constantly glancing all around, he reached a conclusion about the ring. The murderer of Winters had thrown the ring through the porthole, intending it to lie on the ocean’s bed forever. Unknown to him, the ventilator had caught it.

Flaherty found the hold in darkness save for the bulb that glowed dimly beside the iron ladder. Waiting for a moment until his eyes became used to their surroundings, he managed finally to make out the shadowy outlines of the numerous tiers of bunks whereon the men slept. His ears were keenly alive to sound, but all they heard were the normal noises of the night, the breathings of many sleepers and occasionally a brief, restless creak of springs.

Then, suddenly, he caught another sound, the furtive squeak of a door being closed cautiously. It came from the opposite side of the ship, and instantly Flaherty knew its source — the wash room. Some one had either just entered or left it.

With his heart once more pounding in his massive chest, the sergeant cut swiftly and silently through a black aisle between tiered bunks. Who was the softly stepping unknown, secretly opening doors in the middle of the night?

Only the closed door of the wash room, partially obscured by shadow, met Flaherty’s gaze. Stepping inside, he found the place empty. A single, unshaded electric bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling showed only rows of white wash bowls against a wall, on which mirrors were fastened.

Flaherty stared at his face in a mirror and was startled to find it drawn and strained. It seemed like another’s face staring back at him, the blue eyes wide with the horrors and mysteries of the night. He cursed mentally, and wished fervently that mirrors retained their impressions. Then they would reveal the face of the one who had just quitted the wash room and melted so swiftly and silently away.

Flaherty’s roving gaze hesitated at a wash bowl. Its top and sides were wet, eloquent signs that the bowl had been used recently. Drawing nearer to it, the sergeant’s eyes widened and stared at that which streaked the undrained splashes of water at the bottom of the basin. Blood! Bright red, fresh blood!

With hammering pulses, Flaherty whirled and dashed for the door. He had just missed the murderer, who had undoubtedly visited the wash room to wash from his hands the gory evidences of his crime!

The hold was as unsuspicious as before. Nothing moved, and the only sounds were those made by the sleepers and the propeller shaft.

Flaherty was moving to the wall to throw the switch that would illuminate the place, when a tiny glow, deep in the wilderness of bunks, appeared momentarily and vanished.

Padding like a big cat now, the sergeant groped his way to the spot. He sucked in his breath at what he saw. The dark bulk of a soldier, apparently on his knees, was bending over a trunk locker. His cupped hands carefully shielded a small flash light, whose beam was directed into the tray of the trunk.

The soldier gasped as Flaherty’s big hand dropped on his shoulder. The light went out, and he struggled viciously and silently against the sergeant’s hold. But Flaherty’s massive body was padded with bands of muscle tough as steel, and hardened by years of regular army service and compaigning.

Gradually he forced the unknown’s arm behind his back, the old army hold, learned by Flaherty during the grim, relentless days of the Philippine Insurrection. The soldier moaned in pain as his shoulder bones cracked audibly under the inexorable pressure that would break an arm unless the victim surrendered.

And surrender he finally did, standing motionless and silent in the dark. Still maintaining his punishing grip with one fist, Flaherty groped with his other hand for the light. Finding it, he pressed the button. In the glare was Recruit Baxter!

The recruit’s white face was fixed in hard, defiant lines. His blue eyes gleamed steadily and inscrutably. Above his face, his red hair flamed in a disordered mass.

“Baxter!” Flaherty’s voice was low and hoarse in his amazement and suspicion. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” replied the soldier defiantly. “Let go of my arm! You’re breakin’ it!”

Flaherty directed the beam of the flash light into the open trunk locker. What he saw on the tray made him start violently. A blood-stained, white handkerchief was wrapped tightly in a small, compact bundle. Beside the handkerchief was a newspaper clipping, an exact duplicate of the one Captain Freeman had. Flaherty’s gaze flickered across the black headline: Double Killing in Bronx.

As he took up the handkerchief, he received another mental jolt. The blood stains were dry!

Unwinding the cloth, he extracted a black clasp knife, thick with blood.

As he placed the gruesome articles into a pocket, he realized that the knife was surely not the one which had slain Winters. Blood did not dry that fast. But Roy Davega and his wife—

Flaherty now picked up the clipping. A grease spot on a corner of it focused his attention. Impelled almost by instinct, he lifted the paper to his nostrils and smelled the spot. Faint, yet definitely distinguishable, came the same, pungent, exasperatingly familiar odor he had smelled on the ring. Again his memory strove to place it, and again it failed.

“Come on!” he said grimly to Baxter, who had been silently awaiting the sergeant’s pleasure, meanwhile watching his every move with tight, calculating gaze.

Flaherty turned the flash light to illuminate their way out of the morass of bunks. Its beam shooting along, picked suddenly out of the darkness the figure of a soldier leaning over a bunk on which another soldier was sleeping.

Flaherty’s heart leaped into his throat. Into his mind came a vivid picture of the strangling hands reaching out to choke Baxter earlier in the night.

The soldier straightened in a flash, and whirled full into the light. Flaherty saw the face of Corporal Frank, the corporal of the guard.

“Frank!” he cried. “What are you doing?”

“S-s-sh!” cautioned the corporal, placing a finger to his lips and looking down significantly at the sleeper. “It’s Shelby. I was going around on my inspection tour of the guard when I heard the door of the wash room open softly. I saw Shelby come out and look carefully all around him. His actions seemed suspicious, so I follow him. He put something under his pillow and got into bed. I thought I had better wait until after he got asleep to see what it was. I was just about to look, sergeant, when you flashed the light on me.”

Corporal Frank rubbed his hands nervously, and stared curiously at Baxter.

Without waking the sleeper, Flaherty’s hand slid under the pillow. When it came out it brought with it a clasp knife wet with water.

Flaherty stared at it under the brilliant glare of the flash light. So that was what had been washed in the bowl in the wash room! Flaherty studied it more closely. At the edges of the knife, small drops of water still remained, and under minute inspection, these drops showed flecks of pink.

What drew Flaherty’s attention more were the traces of water on the black bone handle of the knife. They had the grained look of water on top of greasy surfaces.

Flaherty bent to smell. Again that faint, pungent, irritatingly familiar odor!

The sergeant’s heavy hand fell on the sleeping man’s shoulder, and when Shelby’s green, close-set eyes popped open, he commanded, “Come on, Shelby! Get dressed and come with us!”

VI

The little office of the Officer of the Day was crowded. Captain Freeman sat at his desk, his confused, worried gaze turning from one to the other of the redheaded recruits. They sat side by side against the far wall, Baxter was sober-faced. Much of his defiance had vanished. Shelby dribbled with fear, his ratty eyes jumping wildly about the room. Flaherty himself sat in his former seat beside the captain’s desk, while the dark-faced Corporal Frank, grave and awe-struck by the night’s developments and the present proceedings, eyed the recruits and their questioners in turn.

The officer of the day shook his gray head dismally, and muttered at the man beside him.

“Lord, Flaherty! What a terrible thing! Murder right here on board a transport! I’ll never hear the last of it! Oh,” he groaned, “why did it have to happen during my tour of guard?”

Flaherty mopped his perspiration-dotted bald head with the khaki bandanna, and replied in undertone.

“I don’t know, sir. But we’ve got the murderer here. I’m sure of that. But,” he added lugubriously, “the thing is to pin him down.”

“Yes, yes, Flaherty! Get to the bottom of the whole wretched, horrible business! It won’t look so bad to Washington if we can clear things up. We’ve got to do it!” he concluded in desperate earnestness.

Flaherty sighed. In some ways the solution seemed obvious, and in other ways it was wholly baffling. He had found Baxter with a knife clotted with old blood and a newspaper clipping describing the Davega murders. Surely those were strong evidences for the belief that Baxter was John Horning, the red-haired brother-in-law sought by the New York police. But then, the murdered Winters had had in his possession the good-luck ring of Roy Davega. And, who had attempted to choke Baxter to death in the middle of the night as he lay in his bunk, and why?

That Shelby had murdered Winters over a quarrel arising out of a gambling game seemed fairly logical, but what reason did Shelby have for removing the good-luck ring and throwing it through a porthole, evidently hoping that it would be lost?

Through everything, like the theme of a musical composition, haunting, mysterious, unsolvable, went the unknown, pungent, strangely familiar odor. With links more compelling than steel, it bound the three redheaded recruits together. It was on Winter’s ring, on Baxter’s newspaper clipping, on the haft of the knife found underneath Shelby’s pillow. A sinister, yet homely odor, it loomed in Flaherty’s mind as the motif of a crime more strange and twisted than any he had ever heard of, or read. And here he was, a plain, old, regular army sergeant trying to untwist the tangled skeins so that they made a logical pattern.

He turned on Shelby again. The action was sufficient to drive the recruit forward in his chair, his small eyes alive with fear, his lean fists clutching the chair arms until the whites of the knuckles glowed.

“I tell you I didn’t do it!” he cried. “I never saw that knife before!”

The same old story. Shelby had repeated it over and over, each time more wildly than the last, as he saw disbelief remain firm in the faces watching him.

Flaherty turned wearily to Baxter, and found the recruit licking dry lips. Sensing that Baxter was struggling with himself to say something important, the sergeant wisely kept silent.

“I am Horning!” he blurted out at last. “Yes, John Horning!”

Captain Freeman stifled an exclamation. Flaherty leaned forward, his blood racing through his veins. Corporal Frank began to rub his hands together as if with nervousness.

“Go on,” said Flaherty softly.

“I’m looking for the man who killed my sister and my brother-in-law,” he cried fiercely. “He’s in the army somewhere. And, by God, I won’t stop until I find him!” Baxter, or Horning as he named himself, clenched his fists and a gust of terrible passion contorted his face. Although his teeth were rigidly clamped together, his words pushed between them with deadly emphasis. “I’ll — kill him!”

The diamond in the good-luck ring flashed white fire as Flaherty drew it from his pocket and silently displayed it to Baxter’s gaze.

The recruit leaped to his feet, his face livid, his blue eyes glittering madly.

“Roy’s ring!” he cried hoarsely. “Then... then...”

As he hesitated, he looked as if he were about to hurl himself at the old sergeant. “Then her murderer is... on board this ship!”

The recruit’s wild eyes glared around the room. Shelby forgot his own fears to stare at him in awe. Corporal Frank rubbed his hands, one upon the other, more vigorously, as his black eyes shifted fascinatedly from the ring to Baxter’s face, and back to the ring again.

“This ring was on Winters’s body,” said Flaherty grimly.

“Winters!”

The bitter cry burst from a soul, long harrowed.

“He’s dead!” said Baxter dully, sinking dumbly into his chair. “Some one else killed him!”

The eyes he now turned toward Flaherty were flat, lusterless.

“Several years ago,” related Baxter, or Horning, in a lifeless voice, “my sister had a love affair with a man. None of us in the family knew him, or his name, Helen never told us. When we learned that this man had got into trouble in New York and had joined the army to escape from the police, we knew why Sis didn’t tell us about him. He was no good.

“Then Helen met Roy Davega and married him. This other man had been sent to Panama for service. Sis worried a lot that some day he would come back and kill her for not waiting for him. He was like that.

“About three weeks ago, I came home to find Helen crying into a newspaper. I looked, and saw an item about some soldiers being up from Panama for leaves of absence. Then, when I got home that... that night and saw the horrible, terrible thing that had happened, I knew. The soldier had come back.

“If you don’t believe me,” said the recruit earnestly to Flaherty, “look at that knife. I kept it in my trunk, even getting up nights to look at it, building up the hate and fury in my heart so that when I found the murderer, I could slash him to death as viciously as he slashed my sister.”

The longer blade of the knife opened obstinately, the sticky blood in the groove striving to hold it fast. Flaherty’s lips tightened as he read the letters etched on the steel blade: “PROPERTY U. S. SIGNAL CORP.” It was a knife that a soldier was apt to carry. The sergeant knew that thousands of such knives were stolen each year by enlisted men.

“So I changed my name and joined the army,” Baxter was saying. “I didn’t care about the police. I wanted to find the dirty murderer and kill him myself. But now,” the recruit concluded, his shoulders drooping wearily, “he is dead.”

A thought stole into Flaherty’s mind and stuck persistently, disturbing him mightily. According to Baxter, the man who had murdered his sister and brother-in-law was a soldier with several years’ army service. Winters had been a recruit, whose total army service was less than two weeks.

Flaherty was still puzzling over these disjointed facts when he looked up to see Shelby standing excitedly beside the desk.

“Look here, sergeant!” he cried, holding up the good-luck ring. “This wasn’t Winters’s ring. Only this afternoon he won it, with those crooked dice of his, in a crap game we had.”

Flaherty was on his feet, shaking Shelby like a bulldog shakes a rat.

“What?” he roared. “Don’t lie to me! Who did Winters win that ring off of?”

VII

Before the frightened Shelby could answer, Corporal Frank crossed the room swiftly and took the ring.

“He won it from me, Flaherty,” he said, his lean, dark face supporting a serious, anxious expression.

Flaherty released the whimpering Shelby and stared long and hard at the corporal of the guard.

“Why didn’t you tell me so before, corporal?”

Every man in the room waited breathlessly for Corporal Frank’s next words. Captain Freeman’s fingers drummed nervously on his desk. Shelby forgot his whimpering, and Horning, alias Baxter, gripped the arms of his chair, ready to launch himself at the corporal’s throat.

“I was not certain,” Frank answered steadily, “that it was my ring. A man must be sure in such a serious matter as this. I saw the ring in a pawnshop window near the Army Base in Brooklyn, the day before we sailed. I liked it and bought it, never dreaming it had such a horrible history.”

The corporal shuddered.

“During the dice game this afternoon, I went broke,” he confessed. “I pledged the ring to Winters, hoping to regain my losses. But I didn’t,” he smiled faintly. “So poor Winters kept the ring. That’s all I know.”

Flaherty looked deeply into the corporal’s dark eyes, but they never wavered before his keen stare.

The old sergeant turned to Captain Freeman and shrugged.

“Now, sir,” he asked hopelessly, “where are we?”

While Captain Freeman gnawed his under lip, and his finger tips beat a savage tattoo on the desk top. Flaherty’s thoughts seemed to spin around in circles. What Corporal Frank had said was plausible. The soldier murderer of the Davegas might easily have sold the ring for cash. But...

Suddenly Captain Freeman’s voice barked irritatedly.

“Corporal Frank! Stop rubbing those damned paws of yours together all the time! What the hell’s the matter with you anyway?”

“Tropical itch, sir,” said the corporal of the guard apologetically. “I had a bad case of it on my hands when I was stationed in Panama. It’s come back again since the transport hit tropical waters, sir.”

While the captain grunted surlily, a vivid flash seemed to light up Flaherty’s brain. His command rang through the room.

“Let’s see your hands, corporal!”

Frank extended them wonderingly. All in the room looked on perplexed as the sergeant suddenly bent to smell them. He straightened, and transfixed the corporal with a cold, blue stare.

“That’s all, corporal,” he said grimly. “Sit down.”

He turned to Captain Freeman and said, “I’ve got to go out for a moment, sir. I won’t be gone long. Please do not allow any one to leave this office until I return.”

“Right!” breathed the mystified Captain Freeman, staring after the broad back of his sergeant.

A few minutes later, Flaherty was back. He had brought with him two husky guards, pistols belted to their hips, and Captain Edwards, the portly, dignified, transport’s surgeon.

Flaherty nodded to the guards.

“All right, men! Take him!”

Frank, corporal of the guard, cursed, and lunged out of his chair. But the guards were upon him, relentlessly holding him between them.

The ship’s doctor took one of Frank’s dark, sinewy hands and smelled it.

“Yes, sergeant,” he said gravely, as he straightened. “That is the ointment I gave him this afternoon when he came to me with a bad case of tropical itch on his hands. He is the only man I have treated on this voyage.”

From the pocket of his shirt, Flaherty took a packet of letters, yellowed by age and tropical damp. He thrust them at Horning, alias Baxter, the recruit.

“My sister’s letters!” cried Horning, his eyes staring at the faded handwriting. “She must have written them to him when he was in Panama!”

With a mad cry, he hurled himself at Corporal Frank, who cringed back for the protection of his guards. Flaherty stepped between.

“I thought so,” said the sergeant dryly. “I found them at the bottom of Frank’s trunk locker.”

He turned to the bewildered Captain Freeman and jerked his thumb at the captive.

“There’s your murderer, sir. He is the one who killed Winters. He is also the man the New York police want.”

“But... but...” stammered the captain. “Sergeant, how...?”

Flaherty shrugged his old, thick, sloping shoulders.

“Simple, now, sir. That ointment smell was the key that unlocked the whole problem. I should have recognized it before. But I never had the tropical itch myself, so I never used any of this ointment, although I must have smelled it often on others.

“Frank gambled in the dice game and lost. He pledged the ring, which he took from Roy Davega’s body, to Winters for cash, hoping to recoup his losses and redeem the ring. But he only lost that money, too.

“He went on guard late in the afternoon. As corporal of the guard, it was his duty to carry radio messages to you. He read the one front the New York police. He realized then that he had better get the ring back.

“Meanwhile you ordered him to inspect all baggage for liquor. What a shock he must have received when he opened Baxter’s trunk and found on the tray the knife he had used to kill Baxter’s sister and brother-in-law! It was there that he left his first smear of the ointment which he was using to grease his hands in order to ease the burning torment of the itch. He left it on the newspaper clipping.

“Now he became frantic with worry and fear. He knew that Baxter was seeking vengeance. The corporal decided to strike first. It was his hands that had reached out of the night to choke Baxter. He failed because Baxter had fortunately been awake, and was too strong for him.

“You will remember, captain, earlier in the night, when Winters came into this office to be examined, Corporal Frank hastily excused himself and left. When Winters left here, Frank followed him and struck him down from behind. He had to get the ring before you, or I, or Baxter, noticed it. He flung it through the porthole, doubtlessly thinking it was gone forever and that he was safe at last. But the ventilator caught the ring, and I found it. On the ring was the second smear of ointment.

“Frank went to the wash room to clean the blood from the knife. Then he probably became aware that I was in the hold. Panic-stricken, he left without thoroughly cleansing the knife. He hit upon the idea of planting it under Shelby’s pillow. He knew that Shelby had threatened Winters during the dice game. But the water had not washed off the third smear of ointment.”

Flaherty mopped his bald head with the khaki bandanna.

“That’s all, sir.”

Captain Freeman had been listening open-mouthed to Flaherty’s piecing together of the jumbled happenings of the night.

“Flaherty,” he remarked at last, “I don’t know what the army would do without you old noncoms to solve the officers’ problems!”