Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926

From the quay at Marseilles I stepped into a mystery that whirled rapidly into a mad and ghastly carnival

Chapter XXIV The Horror of the Seas

It didn’t seem to me that it would take the police long, if they were interested or any way suspicious, to trace this affair to the Angela Lee, the yacht on which I, George Ranholm, was captive of Brakely and his thugs. The policeman would want revenge for the rough treatment the gang handed him in seizing me from him while he was attempting to arrest me, and he would tell a colorful story — not forgetting to mention that the sailor he was after was armed.

Would they learn that I had said at the Café de Paris I was pursued by cutthroats? If they did, and if the mere mention of crooks were enough to get them started, they would make things uncomfortable for Brakely, the pseudo society millionaire.

Would Brakely be able to smooth things over by saying it was merely an escape of his crew? If he could convince the police that the rumpus developed from too much liquor and that the sailors simply rescued one of their comrades from arrest, the police would probably be willing to overlook it.

No doubt Brakely, known as a rich American society man, had influential friends at Monte Carlo, among the guests in the hotels. He’d fix it some way. If the police demanded money, he’d be ready with it.

Anyhow, the hours went by with no sign that the yacht was being made ready for sea. Neither were there any visitors that I became aware of, but, of course, many persons could come aboard without me knowing it. When I laid down to sleep that night I was convinced that the affair had either blown over of its own accord or that Julius Brakely had smoothed it over.

We were still in port next morning, all that day and all that night — and all the next day, too. It was the most monotonous experience I had ever had — nothing to do but sit on the floor with my knees hunched up, or lie down as comfortably as I could, or walk about to the music of the chain on my legirons.

I saw absolutely no chance of escape. I had failed in getting word to the authorities of the mysterious doings and the murder at the island of Querolle.

And, of course, my thoughts turned almost altogether to Querolle. My next struggle with Brakely and his gang would take place there. My only hope of starting anything depended on some chance which might cause my captors to take me out of the hold. But they wouldn’t do that as long as we were in port.

It was very late on the fourth night after our arrival at Monte Carlo that the monotony was broken by signs that the yacht was being made ready for sea. I heard heavy objects being moved about on the decks above, and some word passed to the man on guard duty outside my door assured me that cans of gasoline were being brought aboard. I heard talk, too, of fresh water and provisions.

Once, when my door was opened by the guard, who often looked in, I heard talk between our crew and the crew of a lighter. I knew that there was a concern at Monaco which dealt in stores and provisions for yachts, and the lighter was from its dock no doubt.

There was no sleep for me after that.

Querolle, Miss Mary Lee — was she still on that island with her father?

I had often wondered how the Lees were faring there with Captain Fawcett. Of course, I no longer put any stock in Brakely’s insinuations that Berivou, Captain Lee’s mate; Fanier, his engineer, and the others of the yacht’s crew were probably in league with the crooks.

That had been part of his trick to get me aboard the yacht and out to sea before I could discuss my suspicions with the Lees. I was certain that Captain Fawcett was the only enemy of the Lees at Querolle, with the possible exception of Splinters, the galley boy, who probably was dominated by the skipper of the Seabird.

John Vernon, my new friend who was also imprisoned, had told me of giving Miss Lee a warning in the hurried moments before he slipped back aboard the yacht. She would tell her father of this. He would warn his officers and crew. Captain Fawcett and Splinters would be watched closely, and the odds were greatly against the captain. Splinters himself would turn on Captain Fawcett if given half a chance. He had been a friend of Radd, the murdered cook.

And lurking in the background, creeping about the cliffs and peering down upon the little ship in Marble Cove, trailing them whenever they went ashore, was Hippolyte, the deaf mute, with his big hands and powerful limbs.

Hippolyte had given every sign that he was my friend. He was the sort of man who once having bestowed his friendship would cling to it with a doglike devotion. He would understand that I had been the victim of a trick. He knew that the girl must be protected.

No, I wasn’t greatly alarmed as to the welfare of Miss Lee and her father at the moment. Their danger lay in the return of this gang of crooks to Querolle.

There were two or three hours of inactivity, after the stores and provisions were aboard. Then some one for whom they had evidently been waiting came aboard.

“They’re back,” I heard a man say to my guard.

Some of the crew had returned from some mission ashore.

And then they got the Angela Lee under way as quickly as possible.

She went out of the harbor under the power of her engine, and I had an idea that enough gasoline had been put in to enable her to make the trip that way. This gang wouldn’t bother with sail if they didn’t have to.

We were at sea again, bound for Querolle.

There was no indication that they intended to take me out of the hold. Hours went by, hours of stirring about and hours of drowsing. My routine was the same at sea as in port.

They had given me a pillow and a blanket. They gave me plenty of food and cigarettes. The cigarettes left one soft spot in my heart. Only a man who has been in that position, with nerves on edge, with intermingled hope and despair of the future, with a feeling that disaster might fall at any moment, can understand what the cigarettes meant to me. My guard held the match for me whenever I wished to light one. I wasn’t permitted to have matches with me.

Of what went on aboard the Angela Lee all that day and up to midnight I didn’t know, and I am even unable to say whether I was asleep or awake when the big commotion broke out in the passage outside. I know I was lying on the floor, wrapped in the blanket, but sleeping for me had become a series of fits and starts.

I heard feet running in the passage and out again, excited words. I didn’t hear what the words were, but it seemed to me that my guard left with the man who had come tearing in. I got up hurriedly and tried the door. It was locked.

The stir had transferred itself to other parts of the yacht, but the excitement was enough for the sounds of it to reach me. They all seemed to be racing aft — the men from the crew’s quarters over my head. Danger, pregnant in the air, communicated itself even to that isolated hold. I began to hammer on the door with my handcuffed hands.

None answered.

The motion of the Angela Lee was smooth and even, with just the faintest suggestion of a quiet swell on the sea. The danger couldn’t be from wind. I heard no sounds that indicated the pumps were being employed. The possibility that such a stoutly-built craft might spring a leak in that sea was remote, hardly to be considered, as she hadn’t struck anything.

I continued to hammer on the door — and added yells to the din.

And then I smelled it. Smoke.

The pungent odor held a tale of flaming wood, and paint, and oil — and in just a moment the reek of flaming gasoline gained the ascendancy and told me the story.

“Turn me loose!” I yelled, hoping some one would hear. “I know how to fight a fire aboard ship! Hey-y-y! Turn me loose!”

No answer. All hands were aft, fighting the fire, which was somewhere near the engine — and the gasoline tanks, too!

I could hear muffled cries. I strained my ears, but could not hear the noise of the gas engine. The engine was out of business, and the Angela Lee was drifting. I yelled myself hoarse, but none answered.

The only sound I heard close by was when men came into the passage to get chemical fire extinguishers which hung on the walls there. They paid no heed to my clamor, and left me there alone.

The smoke was increasing in volume.

Disaster moved swiftly. The passage of time became an unknown quantity for me, and I couldn’t have said whether a minute or an hour elapsed between the outbreak of the fire and the explosion of the gasoline tanks. There were two explosions.

The Angela Lee lurched violently, going down at the head and righting herself slowly. I realized, still beating on the door and crying out, that the smoke had become almost suffocating.

It seemed as though I had been forgotten by every one. I supposed that John Vernon was in the same fix.

Chapter XXV Captain of the Raft

There must have been a rush for the boat deck, judging by the cries that now filled the night and which came to me through the passage and the open transom.

And then, as I waited for some sign that I wasn’t to be abandoned, a kind of a frenzy came over me — the frenzy that comes to a doomed man denied a fighting chance for his life. I shrieked, and hauled at my irons until the flesh of my wrists and ankles was cut.

I don’t know how long it was after that that Julius Brakely opened the door.

I had kept up an incessant clamor against the stout walls and door and my hands were bleeding.

“Sinking,” he said. He stared at me, as though doubtful of my identity.

I calmed down the instant the door was open. An opportunity to struggle for his life has that effect on a man. I was a sailor again, and I was on a ship going down, and I seemed to realize that I was the most capable sailor aboard.

“How’s she sinking?” I asked, as Brakely got at my irons with the keys.

“Stern first,” he said. “Gas tanks went up — tore a hole in the side, below the water line.”

I could now feel the yacht settling astern. My irons were off and Brakely and I were rushing down the passage.

“Where’s Vernet?” I demanded, not forgetting even then to conceal John Vernon’s identity.

“He’s in one of the boats,” Brakely told me. “We had him quartered aft — turned him loose before the explosion. You’ll go in the other boat. We want a real sailor in each boat — understand?”

The smoke was thick, but the fire hadn’t come very far forward yet. We reached the forward deck, Brakely first.

“Well, I’ll—”

That was all he said, and he began shooting out to sea just as I got to the deck.

Both boats were in the water, and the men in them were rowing as fast as they could away from the doomed yacht.

Brakely emptied his pistol, but without result so far as I could see. He ran to the rail and reloaded the gun, but gave shooting up as a hopeless task. The moon, on the wane, shed only a dim light. The glare from the burning yacht suddenly disappeared, as incoming water drowned the flames. The Angela Lee, drifting, had swung around so that the fleeing lifeboats were astern.

“That’s the work of Barney Masters,” Brakely said.

“All right,” I rejoined. “To blazes with your differences with Barney Masters! We’re on a sinking ship. Tell me about that hole. Have we got any chance if we get the pumps going?”

“Not a chance in the world. The hole — I took a look at it after the explosion—”

With his hands he spaced off the approximate size of the hole. Too big for the pumps to catch up with. Besides that, flames had leaped up again near the quarter deck. The fire had been merely retarded for a moment.

“It’s a raft for us,” I said.

“Raft?”

“Life raft. There’s one on each deck, if they haven’t pushed ’em overboard.”

“That’s right,” Brakely said. “Come on.”

Brakely still had the gun in his hand, but I grabbed him by the arm and spun him around.

“Come on nothing,” I said. “It’s you who’ll do the coming on. I’ll command that raft, and you’ll obey my orders if you want me to fetch you out of this mess.”

He looked at me and smiled. He was dirty, and his clothes were tom from the work he had done fighting the fire.

“All right, George,” he said.

“And I’ll take that gun, too,” I told him. “I don’t propose to have you around me with a loaded gun.”

He backed up a step and shifted his eyes.

“Hand it here,” I told him, “or we’ll fight it out on the deck, and maybe go down with the ship.”

He answered me by tossing the gun overboard.

“Now we’re man to man,” he said. “What are your orders, captain?”

“Go below, and fetch up sail cloth and rope, and any sticks you can find for masts,” I told him. “I see the raft over there. I’m going into the galley — grub and water.”

We separated.

I judged that we probably had a half hour — maybe a little more — to get clear of the Angela Lee. The flames weren’t doing much on account of the water that poured into the ship and through some of the passages. But, of course, the fire might get a clean sweep any moment, and come roaring forward with a speed that would trap us.

It was impossible to get at any of the instruments or charts, which were in the quarters aft, if Barney Masters hadn’t taken all of them. The fire was burning briskly around there now. Brakely and I would have to put off to sea on a raft with no navigating instruments, but that was a small thing in the face of all we had to be thankful for — a life raft strong and seaworthy, a calm sea, and a position that would undoubtedly result in us being picked up within a few hours.

Indeed, ships might be bearing down on us now, drawn by the glare of our fire in the sky. The glances I stole out to sea while going back and forth at my tasks did not reveal any ship lights however.

The men who had left us there to die were out of sight now.

“Are you sure Vernet, the French sailor, was in one of those boats?” I asked Brakely.

“Yes. Masters worked that nicely. He got that sailor in, then beat it the moment my back was turned. He’ll need the sailor — if he makes Querolle.”

“They’ll be picked up.”

“Not if they can help it. You don’t understand, George, but Barney Masters will not let himself be picked up. He’s bound for Querolle, and God help Mary Lee if he gets there!”

I stared at Brakely.

“Is that why he abandoned you?” I asked.

“That — and something else.”

“Then we’ll head toward Querolle,” I said.

We got the raft in the water, and Brakely was passing down various articles to me. I exchanged places with him.

“A matter of sailor’s pride,” I told him, working on the deck of the yacht with Brakely on the raft. “The captain should be the last to leave a sinking ship.”

With the raft loaded, I went over the side. We pushed off, easily, being on the lee side. The Angela Lee flamed tremendously.

Chapter XXVI We Were Alone

A short piece of plank from the lumber room was the only thing in the shape of an oar I’d been able to find, and I paddled the raft away as fast as I could with that. A light swell running with the breeze helped us, but even at that it took us some little time to get far enough off so that we should be out of danger if the mainmast fell our way.

The raft consisted of two light booms with a thin but stout flooring between, built so that the flooring was probably six inches above the water. It was safe enough so long as the wind remained quiet. We had loaded it pretty heavily.

The fire was now sweeping forward and aloft on the Angela Lee. The most of its havoc up to this was confined to holds and the officers’ quarters, it having been held back considerably by the incoming water, but it was above that now and the breeze caught it. The sails were furled, the yacht having been under engine power, and the flames were running up the sails and rigging of the mainmast on the after deck.

The water was dragging the ship down astern. She had been settling only gradually while we were aboard, but I knew that when the flood in her holds reached a certain point she would go speedily.

Suddenly I reached over and felt of Brakely’s pockets.

“What’s wrong, George?” he asked.

“I just happened to think,” I told him, “that that gun you threw away might not have been the only one you had. I see it was now.”

He laughed.

“It sometimes takes you a long time to think of things,” he said; “but you do think of them.”

I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or a slam.

Brakely was looking toward the yacht. An exclamation of wonder escaped his lips.

“Beautiful!”

It was a wonderful sight. The flames raced along the halyards, and these pitched ropes were like oily fuel. They reached the foremast, and were licking up the furled sails there. One rivulet of flame ran down the forestay with the speed of lightning and clear out on the bowsprit.

The burning ropes and sails, with the fire blazing up, too, in the ’midship house and with the quarters aft a regular furnace, the ports glowing from the inferno that now raged the length of the hull below decks, made the yacht look like a ship painted in fiery colors against a dark background.

We didn’t know when the masts might fall. It depended on the work of the flames around their stumps below. I paddled again, and got clear of that danger with the help of the swell.

The fire now put us in the spotlight. The lifeboats were beyond the illumination, but to the crowd in them we would be visible, if they weren’t on the other side of the yacht. The Angela Lee, drifting, might have come between us. We didn’t know. If it hadn’t, Barney Masters would know that we had escaped from the death he meant should overtake us.

I remembered the glimpse I got of Barney Masters’s face when I first looked at the fleeing lifeboats. He wore a horrible grin, meant for Brakely, I suppose, and this impressed me with the sinister qualities of the man.

The stakes must be good in this game — big.

“Is Barney Masters likely to come looking for you,” I asked Brakely, “if he sees you’re clear of the yacht?”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “He’ll understand we’re on a raft — lucky he forgot the rafts. He won’t think we’ll be able to make Querolle on this raft. He’ll make speed for Querolle. And I don’t see,” he added, “how you expect to make Querolle on this.”

“We’ll bear that way,” I told him.

I depended on being picked up by some ship, telling my story to the captain, who would see that the lives of a rich American and his daughter were in danger at Querolle. Things would move pretty fast then, with the wireless to work with, and no doubt whatever ship picked us up would speed to Querolle.

But I said nothing about this. If Brakely thought that was on my mind, he gave no sign.

The mainmast of the Angela Lee went down with a crash and a shower of embers. It fell aft, the settling yacht being tilted that way, and smashed the wheel and quarter deck to smithereens. The mast was of steel and, with the sails and rigging burned off it, showed no sign of fire. The weight of it hurried the inevitable doom of the yacht. She was settling fast. Her taffrail was down to the sea.

There wasn’t such a glare of light now. I was rigging a mast on the raft.

“How many of those fellows did the explosion knock off?” I asked.

“None,” Brakely said. I was surprised. “We didn’t lose a man. I saw it coming — saw the fire reach the tanks — and ordered all hands away. Our fight had been to keep the flames away from there. We lost it. The gas tanks went up, but we were out of danger. Nothing to do but take to the boats. The water pouring in checked the fire for awhile and gave me a chance to look at the damage. I saw it was no use. She was gone.”

“How’d the fire start?”

“Carelessness — I think.” He spoke reflectively. “Yes — carelessness. There was liquor aboard. They were all drinking more or less. Some of Barney Masters’s men were on duty in the engine room. But I think both Throgg and Masters were asleep. They looked scared and surprised when I first saw them.

“I hardly think Masters pulled that trick — the fire. I think he just took advantage of it when it came along. The engine men were probably drinking and smoking. Lots of oil around the engine room — a dangerous place to smoke. But they were probably sneaking a cigarette, and the thing started.”

“You did a good piece of work,” I said, with the admiration of a sailor, “in saving all hands from the explosion.”

“Thank you, George. But I don’t mind telling you that if I had known what was in Barney Masters’s mind, there’d be a whole bunch of frying carcasses aboard the Angela Lee at this minute.”

I believed him. The glint in his eyes and the set of his jaw told me that he wouldn’t hesitate to wipe out Barney Masters and the crew who had double crossed him. I wondered what would happen if we all did meet on the island of Querolle.

My mast was up, and I was working at the roll of sail cloth.

“Brakely,” I said, “what kind of a game are you playing anyway? I don’t see—”

He raised a hand and smiled amiably.

“Now, George,” he said, “you and I have been thrown together on this raft, with nothing around us but water and sky. We’ve got to pull together for the time being. The state of your mind, which I’ve been watching pretty closely since we’ve been together, makes us enemies. There was a time when I had hopes. But no use to speak of that now.

“Under ordinary circumstances, you’re a constant threat to me. That’s why I wanted to keep an eye on you — wanted you with me on this voyage. But, George, we are enemies compelled to work together. Ashore — that’s another story. That being the case, you will pardon me if I don’t play right into your hands by telling you of my affairs.”

“That’s natural,” I said, and went on with my work.

“But,” Brakely assured me, “you ought to be told that both of us have every reason to get to Querolle as fast as possible. In a way, we have the same object there. I want to save Miss Lee from Barney Masters as much as you do — and I don’t want to see any harm come to her father either. If things had gone the way I first intended, they wouldn’t be in danger. I have more reasons for getting there than you have, but that one reason we have in common. We must protect Miss Mary Lee.”

“We’ll go to Querolle — some way,” I promised him.

The Angela Lee reached a state where the weight of the water pulled her down with increasing speed. All of a sudden her stem went skyward, and a burst of flame appeared in the fo’c’s’le. She hovered there a moment with the forepeak aloft and blazing like a torch.

Brakely and I stood on the raft watching, me with a coil of rope in my hand. We seemed to be losing something — at least I did. A sailor feels that way about any ship going down. A sinking ship is a death at sea, a melancholy thing at night with the sky dark.

The Angela Lee went down with a sputter of doused flames, leaving only a cloud of steam which soon vanished.

I looked all around. No lights. Julius Brakely and I were alone on the sea.

Chapter XXVII “A Tough-Looking Customer”

“What are you going to do,” Brakely asked me, “sail this raft on a course, or keep it going any old way until you sight a ship?”

“That depends,” I told him, “on how much you remember.”

“What do you mean?”

I kept on working at my mast and sail, explaining:

“I’ve got no instruments, and can’t get position — unless your memory’s good. For instance, did you sail a straight course?”

“Yes, we laid a course; and I think we kept on it pretty well, better than we did on the way up.”

“Can you give me the point you steered on the compass?”

He did that.

“And how many hours sailing time did we have until the fire broke out?”

He calculated it, and told me right down to minutes, as he remembered the sailing time and the time of the fire.

“What was the speed of the Angela Lee?”

He was able to give me that, too, and, of course, the speed would be the same hour by hour, as the sea had been smooth and the breeze light. The yacht had made big distance, for she had been under engine power all the way. We weren’t very far from the big island inside one of whose bays Querolle lay.

“Now figure up,” I told him, “your total distance.”

He worked that out in his head. The figures bore out what I suspected when he told me the yacht’s speed — Querolle was within striking distance, thanks to the yacht’s powerful gas engine.

“Then,” I told him, “I’ve got a general idea of where the Angela Lee went down.”

“So have I,” Brakely rejoined; “and I know we’re not so very far from Querolle.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

I didn’t want to tell him any more about that than I could help, as I had begun to think of running up to one of the lighthouses on the big island and getting help there, if we weren’t picked up by a ship.

If we sighted the island, I knew that Brakely would attempt to take command. An effort of mine to attract the attention of a ship or to approach the lighthouses meant a battle.

“If the sky stays clear,” I informed Brakely, “knowing our general position now, I’ll be able to sail by the stars and sun.”

“You won’t need the stars after daylight,” he rejoined calmly, “as we’ll sight the island before another night.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it, George — if you try. You’d better believe me when I tell you that if you want to do a service for Mary Lee, you’d better make for Querolle as fast as you can.”

“That’s what I’m going to do.”

And I meant it. If I could pick up help on the way, from a ship or from the lighthouses, so much the better — but the lifeboats, filled with strong men with oars, had a big advantage over us. I couldn’t lose too much time. The thing for me to do was get my feet on the island of Querolle, and take things as they came after that.

Brakely and I would probably fight the moment our feet hit the ground, if not on the raft when we got close in. Until we did get close in, I, as a sailor, had the fate of both of us in my hands.

My sail was up, and it was rigged stoutly. I looked aloft, found the pole star, and laid a course as best I could. I swung the raft onto it, a laborious job, for the breeze was unfavorable, and the craft a clumsy thing in the water. But we did go ahead on the course, by a tough job of tacking.

I knew that I couldn’t hold up long at that business. What I had been through began to tell. The breeze was strong enough to prove a constant pull on my muscles, managing the sail.

“Do you think you could do this?” I asked Brakely.

“If you’ll show me how,” he responded.

That took a long time, too, before he learned to make headway with a contrary breeze. It’s a job of shifting the sail so that craft makes her course by a system of zigzagging, but all the time getting ahead. I pointed out a star, and told him to keep working the raft toward that.

A man with his brains, with the sail in hand, learns what a raft will do when the sail is hauled one way and what to expect when he hauls it another. Brakely managed the sail while I sat by and smoked a cigarette. I took a drink of water, and laid down to sleep.

I slept about two hours, and felt much stronger. The sun was up when I took the tiller of my sail again. And by looking at my watch and at the sun, I was able to see that the course would be easier sailing now, for the breeze had hauled around astern.

“I think I kept her on,” Brakely said. He was eating food I had got out for him after getting my own breakfast. “That star disappeared, but I found another that seemed to be in a line above it. Knowing the direction we want to go, I’ve been steering by the sun since it came up. I don’t think we’ll miss the island.”

“It’s pretty much guesswork now,” I told him. “If you got off the course very far it might throw us way off the island.”

That was true, but if we weren’t too far off and night came, we would have the beams from the lighthouses. The flashes of a light can be seen in the sky a longer distance than land can be seen in daylight. Much depended on luck, but I was certain that we would pick up the big island somewhere on its long coastline.

“George,” Brakely said, “do you realize what a tough-looking white man you are?”

“Thanks to you and the liberties you gave me aboard the yacht,” I returned.

“Yes, that’s right. Well, it couldn’t be helped. You had me scared. I had to have you miss your shaves. You got out of captivity so much that I couldn’t take any more chances. That’s a fine set of whiskers you have.”

“I don’t mind the whiskers. It’s the dirty feeling I have. You wouldn’t let me take a bath, and it’s pretty hard for a man to even keep his face clean with handcuffs on.”

“That’s right,” Brakely agreed. “I’m not making fun of you, but when I took a good look at you in daylight this morning, I felt sorry that I hadn’t let you shave. You look fierce and ferocious.”

“You’re nothing to boast of yourself.”

“No, I suppose not. Fighting fire isn’t a clean job.”

I was a tough-looking customer. I hadn’t shaved since the afternoon I cleaned up in preparation for the entertainment aboard the Angela Lee in Marble Cove. I hadn’t had a bath since then either, except the ducking I got in the harbor at Monte Carlo.

My clothes were rumpled and wrinkled. I wore a hat that had belonged to some one on the Angela Lee, having picked it up while getting ready to abandon ship. It was a soft hat, a little too big for me, and I had to wear it hauled way down on my head.

Chapter XXVIII Le Gorille

I noticed a couple of newspapers that Brakely had brought onto the raft. They were in a box of stuff he carried out of the galley on the Angela Lee, folded so that I could see that one of them was a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald.

I thought maybe I’d like to look at that when I got time, but Brakely had a different idea. He got the papers out of the box when he saw me looking at them, went behind me, spent a little time reading something in one of them, and tossed them overboard.

“What’s the idea?” I asked him. “I thought I’d like to look at that American paper.”

The papers were out of reach. He didn’t answer for a little while. Then I guess he decided it wouldn’t do any harm if he told me of something that had been worrying him.

“One of those papers has bad news in it for you,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“You’re suspected of being a notorious Paris thief — an Apache known as ‘Le Gorille.’ Gorille is French for gorilla.”

I looked around. He was smiling, highly amused.

“Yes, George, there was a piece in one of those papers about you. The police are hunting you.” He laughed. “They think you’re Le Gorille.”

“Stop your kidding.”

“It’s a fact. Now I happen to know about Le Gorille. Read about his doings in Paris newspapers, years ago. The police never captured him. They say he vanished by going into the French army during tire war — and was probably killed. But it seems that he’s turned up again — on the Riviera, at Monte Carlo, to be exact.

“The newspaper said a gendarme at Monte Carlo tried to arrest an American sailor, or a man he thought was an American sailor, but the man was snatched away from him by a gang of his friends. The policeman, however, got this man’s pistol away from him and got it into his own pocket before he was overcome. It seems that a few days later the private mark of Le Gorille was found on the pistol.”

I kept my thoughts to myself, and made Brakely think I looked on the thing as a joke of some kind.

“This little affair,” he went on, “happened on the causeway at Monte Carlo. Ah, George — didn’t you have a brush with a gendarme on the causeway?”

“You needn’t ask me,” I replied. “You’ve had a full report on that.”

“Yes, I have — and it’s very mysterious. As a matter of fact, it worries me a little. They say the Gorilla had a habit of leaving his mark on things, a funny-looking ‘G’ that the police know very well. The French are highly imaginative people, George. Even the thieves among them will go out of their way to do a job in a spectacular fashion, when it could just as well be done without trimmings. They like the bizarre.

“For instance, there is no reason for Le Gorille to leave his mark on places he robs — but he does that, or did. The paper discusses him now as though he had come back to life. They look for a resumption of his spectacular criminal career.

“They say he put his mark, that funny-looking ‘G,’ on his private effects, including his pistol, in a spirit of bravado, which isn’t uncommon among the Apaches in the underworld of Paris. It’s a sort of dare to the police. Anyhow, this pistol had, on the under side of the butt, Le Gorille’s mark. Now, what do you know about that?”

“I don’t know anything about it. I tangled up with a policeman on the causeway, as you know. Your men took me away from him, and politely socked me on the jaw. The only pistol the policeman could have got off me was the gun I took away from the fellow you had guarding me.”

“What kind of a pistol was that, George?”

“An automatic.”

“Automatic, eh? Well, George, the policeman didn’t get the automatic. One of my friends got that off you. The pistol the policeman got was a French army pistol.”

“He didn’t get it off me.”

Brakely was silent a little while, sitting there behind me.

“I don’t think he did,” he said presently. “I don’t think you had such a gun on you — don’t see how you could have. What I think is, the policeman got it off one of the other fellows, in the scrimmage — and that’s what I’d like to sift. I’d like to know if there’s a man in that crowd — those fellows with Barney Masters — who has anything to do with Le Gorille. Of course, none of them is Le Gorille himself—”

“How do you know?”

“Well, the physical description of Le Gorille doesn’t fit any of them. The Apache is a man with unusually long arms and a tremendous chest development — I suppose his physical peculiarities earned him his sobriquet.”

Hippolyte!

I was certain of it now. The deaf mute’s pistol had been taken from me by the gendarme, but I kept my mouth shut about that. Brakely was exceedingly mystified, and I suppose that when this news came out he thought it best to cut short his visit in Monte Carlo. What had looked like a drunken escapade of sailors took an unexpected turn, and though the police wouldn’t think the Paris Apache came off a handsome American yacht, they might want to question the sailor as to where he got the pistol.

I guarded my secret. Le Gorille was on the island of Querolle, and somehow I felt that he was my friend.

Brakely lay down to sleep. I handled my sail as deftly as I could, crowding it for all possible speed, which at best wasn’t much. I hoped to get a landfall before the sun went down.

A fight lay ahead, and complications too due to the enmity that now existed between Julius Brakely and Barney Masters. It was hard to say whether this would prove an asset or an obstacle to me in my enterprise of rescuing Alonzo Lee and his daughter from all the sinister forces in action against them.

The sun kept us warm even in the stiffening breeze, which was balmy and pleasant. We had suffered from chill during the night, but the autumn in that climate is warm so long as the sun shines.

Our danger from the weather lay in one of the sudden storms for which the Mediterranean is known among sailors — danger of the raft foundering and the sun being obscured so that we would lose all sense of direction. But the breeze held steady, almost astern, and there were no signs of the shift that precedes a gale.

We suffered neither for food nor water, for the Angela Lee had been heavily provisioned. Brakely had stood by while the lifeboats were being loaded, and, of course, Barney Masters had no chance to get rid of the stores that were left. When the boats were launched and Brakely went into the hold to release me, Masters had no time to destroy the stores on the yacht, even if the thought occurred to him.

All hands were in the boats, and their hope lay in the speed with which they got out of range of Brakely’s gun. Anyhow, Barney Masters no doubt thought there was no escape for Brakely and me, and he didn’t care if he did leave food and water. We had enough on the raft for a week’s full rations.

There was no sign of a ship anywhere around the horizon.

I gave up hope in that direction. I thought that we were below the steamship tracks, and would run across no ships except one perhaps bound for some port on the big island. Sailings to and from that island were few and far between.

Brakely slept, with his head pillowed on a life preserver.

I didn’t lose sight of the fact that we were likely to become active enemies at any moment. Just now each would do all he could to save the other, for our immediate hopes were the same. What would Brakely do when we got a landfall?

He’d think himself capable then of managing the raft, if he had the island itself to make for. He’d no longer need me to keep the raft on its course, if the weather remained favorable.

Brakely woke up about noon, yawned, and stretched himself.

“Well,” he said, “I feel like lunch, George.”

“Suits me.”

He handed food to me, and I could eat and sail the raft at the same time now. By a system of calculation in which I employed my watch and the sun, I never was far off in my sense of direction.

“That story you told me about Caricar the pirate,” I said to Brakely, “it was an interesting yarn.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“You got Alonzo Lee with that story, too?”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I don’t see why you wanted Alonzo Lee with you at Querolle.”

“That is a mystery, isn’t it? Have a cigarette.”

“Thanks.” He held a match for me. “I suppose Mr. Lee has been hunting for Caricar’s treasure?”

“Yes,” Brakely agreed, “and perhaps he’s found it.”

I grinned, and turned so that our eyes met directly.

“Are you going to stick to that yam?” I asked him. “Buried treasure — pirate gold! Huh?”

“Perhaps the treasure isn’t so much of a dream as you think,” Brakely rejoined. “Anyhow, that’s my story, George, and I’m going to stick to it.”

I knew that Brakely was too clever to be pumped by me, but it was a subject that I couldn’t abandon.

“It wasn’t a fair thing to drag Miss Lee into such a mess,” I suggested.

“I agree with you. But it’s her own fault. Whatever happens, George, I want you to understand that I didn’t want Miss Lee down here. Her presence complicated things. I had to make a complete new set of plans.

“She put it over her father, pumped him — and when he told her of a voyage in quest of buried treasure, he couldn’t get rid of her. She abandoned all her plans for the winter, and stuck with him. But, of course, we shall get her out of it.”

“I hope so.”

Chapter XXIX Suspended Hostilities

About three o’clock in the afternoon I asked Brakely to relieve me at the tiller. He had offered to do that at intervals ever since he woke up, but I put him off until three. I had a particular object in that. I laid down for a little sleep, and had it on my mind to wake up in about two hours. I hit it pretty close.

It was exactly ten minutes past five when I sat up on the raft. I took a quick look at the horizon. No land in sight. Then my eyes traveled clear around the circle. No sign of a ship.

Brakely turned around and saw that I was awake.

“I’m getting worried,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m afraid we’ve missed the island.”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s certainly no sign of it yet.”

“I want you to play square with me, George,” he said earnestly. “Are you really trying to make the island — did you lay the right course for that — or are you keeping off it until you can sight a ship?”

“I’m doing my best to make the island.”

That was the truth.

“Barney Masters and his gang are there now,” he reminded me. “They had oars and sails too. Those boats were equipped for that, and they’re much easier to handle and twice as speedy as this raft. They had that French sailor with them, Vernet — and he’d do all he could to fetch them to Querolle.”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, “he might want to keep that crowd away from the Lees.”

“Barney Masters would make him hit Querolle,” Brakely assured me. “He’d put a time limit on it. He’d say, if we don’t pick up the island at a certain time, overboard you go. Vernet’s life wouldn’t be worth a sou if he tried any tricks.”

That was probably true.

“And Vernet,” Brakely continued, “knows the Mediterranean like a fisherman knows a duck pond. He’s been cruising on yachts in this sea for years, I understand. He’ll be able to calculate where the Angela Lee went down, the same as you did. Barney Masters and I sailed the ship together, and Barney had the figures to give him. He’d compel Vernet to make Querolle.”

I got up and took a good look.

“Well,” I said, “I’m trying to make it.”

We ate supper. I was comforted by the continued good weather. I took the sail for an hour, then asked Brakely to relieve me. He hesitated a moment, but obeyed reluctantly. I had it in mind to make my request a command, but he saved me from that by taking the tiller.

A tenseness had sprung up between us. We watched each other. I wondered if he thought of the same thing I did. Night came early on that fall day, and I stood on the raft scanning the horizon as darkness fell.

The man working the sail was at a disadvantage. He had to sit down to do it properly, and he was forward, facing ahead. The other man could remain behind the helmsman and on his feet. I wanted Brakely to be at the tiller when the lighthouse was picked up.

It was too dark now for a landfall. I depended on the lights that stood on the hooks of land inside of which was the island of Querolle. I knew there would be no moon, and this was an advantage, for the darker the sky the greater distance would the flashes be visible. The sky was clear, but lighted only by the stars.

About eight o’clock Brakely said:

“Take her, will you, George?”

He looked around at me, and I answered:

“No. You stick to your job. I’ll stand the lookout watch.”

And we knew then that each had the same thing in mind.

He made a movement as though to get up on his knees.

“Sit right where you are,” I ordered him.

He obeyed, with a shrug of his shoulders. It wasn’t time for him yet to start hostilities. If he did win a battle with me he’d be in a bad fix. We exchanged no words now except what concerned the sailing of the raft.

At twenty minutes of nine I picked up the light.

It was on our starboard side. I saw then that we would probably have missed the big island altogether in daylight, for we were steering a course which would take us far east of it. Night and the light had saved us.

I didn’t say anything about the light to Brakely for a minute, just stood there thinking. Yet I had to tell him how to change course, so I might as well tell him of the light.

“I got it,” I told him.

“What?” His eyes got busy then.

“The light.”

He saw its flashes in the sky too, and laughed happily though a little nervously. I told him how to manage the sail so that we’d bear toward the light. He did a good job of it, but I had to watch him every minute, for it was harder sailing on the altered course. And I had other reasons for watching him.

Julius Brakely would now feel himself capable of making the island of Querolle alone, for he had learned how to manage the raft and sail. The light offered him a definite object to steer for. He might think that his own security lay in hurling me into the sea.

I discovered that bad luck in the shape of a contrary wind was offset on the altered course by the rip of a current that now bore us toward the light at a faster clip. That current might veer in a direction unfavorable at any moment, but just now it was what a sailor would pray for.

“George,” Brakely said after awhile, “I’ll make a bargain with you. I think you saved my life on the Angela Lee. I couldn’t have got off on a provisioned raft, and I’d have probably bungled around until the fire caught me. All right. Now, no matter what game I’m playing with that gang at Querolle, I’ll promise you to do all I can for Alonzo Lee and Mary Lee if you won’t try to run the raft up to one of the lights.”

“I’ll think about it,” was the only answer I made.

“You’d better. If I see you’re making for the light, to get help there, I’ll have to put up a fight. One of us is going into the sea. It might be me, it might be you. It might be both of us.

“No telling what might happen if we put on a battle. We may slip off, and the raft drift away. It’s man to man. And you’ll have to admit that I can put up a pretty husky fight. Now what do you say if we pull together, and make Querolle with no stops?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“All right.”

I knew that he would attack me the first opening he got.

“Perhaps you don’t believe my promises,” he suggested.

“I have nothing to say about that,” I told him.

The current carried us toward the light, but nothing but the beams of it in the sky was visible yet.

“I wouldn’t promise,” Brakely said, “that I might not have to kill you at Querolle, if you operate there as I think you will. You will try to round up all of us, Barney Masters and his gang and me too. I’d be a fool if I promised to let you round me up. It may be your life or mine at Querolle. Aren’t you willing to take a chance on that, if I agree to pull with you until we drag the Lees out of danger?”

It was a fair proposition, and of course an effort to run up to one of the lights meant a fight. It was hard to say what might happen if we fought. Brakely wouldn’t be an easy man to overcome, unless I hit him on the head from behind as he sat there on the raft. Maybe I was justified in doing that, but I didn’t have any intention of seeking that kind of an advantage.

“I might agree with you,” I told him.

“If you give me your word, I’ll trust you.”

“I’m not ready to do that yet.”

It was hours afterward that I gave Brakely my promise, and we had a lot of talk meanwhile. I became convinced that the welfare of all concerned lay in both Brakely and myself getting to Querolle. He knew Masters and his crowd. He had a personal object in defeating them. With that job off our hands, with the Lees out of danger, then Brakely and I would probably have our struggle — and the best man win.

I had Hippolyte in reserve too, to employ against Masters and against Brakely.

We made our bargain. The outcome of a fight on the raft was so uncertain that it looked like the wisest thing to do.

So we kept clear of the lights, steering in between the hooks of land about four o’clock in the morning — both dead tired from our battle with contrary breezes and shifting currents which we encountered as we got closer to the island. We had battled with both the sail and the piece of plank used as a paddle, but we made it.

It was just breaking day when Brakely and I set foot on the island of Querolle.

Chapter XXX Allied Enemies

Fagged out, but we had no thought of sleep.

We dragged the raft up on the beach, high and dry, and cached our provisions behind a cluster of rocks. I watched Brakely closely, but he seemed intent on going through with his bargain. Maybe he thought he could work things so that I would become his accomplice not only in rescuing the Lees, but in helping him to get away with the game he played. He watched me too.

We snatched a hurried meal, and set off into the woods. Each of us picked up a few rocks of formidable weight, but easy to carry in our pockets. Before long each of us was armed with a club too.

I kept my eye peeled for Hippolyte — Le Gorille — who was likely to be found wandering around the island almost anywhere and at any time, if I had judged rightly his furtive character. Brakely, of course, had no suspicion of the deaf mute’s presence on the island. Hippolyte became again my reserve force.

We had landed on the island almost directly across from Marble Cove, where we had last seen the Seabird. Foamy Cove, in the cliffs of which was Hippolyte’s cave, was off to the right. The hill I thought of as Signal Hill, the highest on the island, and on top of which I had first encountered the deaf mute, lay between us and Marble Cove.

Brakely knew about that hill too, and we made for it.

“We’ll take a look at the Seabird, if she’s still there,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re going to run into.”

And neither did I.

The sun came up while we were ascending Signal Hill, came up with a promise of a clear, warm day. The chill oozed out of my bones.

I discovered now that my feet were in bad shape, due to wearing my shoes so long. They tired quickly. I could tell by the way Brakely walked that he was in a similar fix, though he hadn’t suffered from imprisonment in irons. But we never thought of stopping.

We got to the top of the hill. The Seabird still lay in Marble Cove.

There was no sign of any one on her decks, though if things had gone well with those we left there Alonzo Lee should have with him on the craft Miss Mary Lee, Berivou, the mate of the Angela Lee; Fanier, the engineer, three sailors, the cook, and the engineer’s helper off the yacht. There was a possibility that Captain Fawcett and Splinters had been driven ashore, if Captain Lee had caught them at any tricks, or even that they had suffered a worse fate.

Absolutely no hint could we see of the presence at Querolle of Barney Masters and his evil crew.

“Wonder if Masters got here?” I said.

“I can’t believe that he didn’t,” Brakely replied, “knowing what he was up to.”

“You mean Miss Lee?”

“Miss Lee — and something else.”

The something else was the stakes for which Brakely and Masters would fight; and though I dismissed all thought of the treasure of Caricar the pirate, the idea of treasure — wealth of some sort — persisted in my mind.

We were lying on the hilltop, still in doubt as to whether we ought to show ourselves, thinking of Barney Masters.

Then suddenly we heard the report of a pistol, off in the direction of Marble Cove.

“That was a shot,” I said.

“It certainly was!”

“Did you see any smoke?”

“No,” Brakely rejoined. “The automatics those fellows carry don’t belch smoke.”

We waited, scanning the cliffs around the cove and the decks of the ship. I detected a movement on the cliffs.

“There — on the cliffs!” I said, pointing. “A man—”

Another shot sounded. The man on the cliffs skulked out of view. Brakely hadn’t seen him. Suddenly a puff of smoke came from one of the ports of the Seabird, then the report of a third shot reached our ears. The distance was such that the smoke of a shot would be seen first.

“There’s a fight on,” I said, “between the people on the ship and Barney Masters’s gang on the cliffs.”

“No doubt about it,” Brakely agreed. “The Lees and their people are beleaguered on the ship.” He drew a long breath of satisfaction, and I was impressed by his sincerity. “We got here in time, didn’t we, George?”

“We had. It wasn’t likely that Mary Lee had yet fallen into the hands of Barney Masters. The crooks hadn’t been able to creep up on the Seabird. Their presence was detected, and a fight was on. How long the struggle had lasted we didn’t know.”

“Well,” Brakely said, “we’ve got the lay of the land now. I just got a glimpse of one of those fellows on the cliffs. Looked like a fireman who worked in Masters’s black gang. If that’s true, there’s no doubt as to which side is in possession of the ship. And it means that we’ve got to attack Masters and his gang from behind.”

“All right — let’s go.”

We were a little rested now, and we hurried down the hill. I saw no sign of Hippolyte.

On our way over to Marble Cove I wondered if I hadn’t ought to tell Brakely about the deaf mute, and make an attempt to enlist him in the fight. Brakely and I faced tremendous odds — two weary men armed with stones and clubs against a crowd of thugs armed with guns.

But I realized that I still had to face a struggle with the man now at my side. I relied strongly on him in the present emergency — relied on his cunning and stealth to wage a winning fight against even those odds — but the time might come when my own victory would depend on the surprise of Hippolyte’s appearance.

I kept up a sharp lookout for the deaf mute, but said nothing about him.

The nearer we got to Marble Cove the more cautiously did we proceed. Close to the slopes running up to the cliffs we picked our way step by step, darting behind trees and rocks, and remaining under cover for long intervals, listening and watching. It was our object to attack one or two of the gang separately, whip them, and seize whatever guns we could.

I don’t think an Indian could have gone through the woods more stealthily than we did, and the nature of our progress accounts for the way in which we blundered into Barney Masters and his right hand man, Charles Throgg.

I saw them first. They were asleep in a little natural den formed by rocks and brush, one of the many covers with which this island abounded. I first saw their stocking feet, and beckoned to Brakely.

We crept into position. Yes, they were asleep, perhaps after a night on the cliffs. We could see both their faces. There was no sound from the cliffs above. Those up there were lying quietly no doubt, waiting for a shot at some of the people on the Seabird.

Brakely and I took a good look at our surroundings before we made a move.

“You take Throgg,” Brakely whispered. “Leave Masters to me.”

There was a murderous gleam in his eyes.

“Don’t kill him,” I urged.

He did not reply.

This was no time and place, with those odds against us, to plead for the life of a thug, one of whose motives in leaving Brakely and me to die on the yacht was to get his dirty hands on Miss Mary Lee. We crept toward them.

Barney Masters awoke and sat up. He took in the situation at a glance, for Brakely and I, getting close, had been compelled to get out from cover. He shook Throgg violently, yelled, and leaped to his feet. Throgg was up in an instant too.

And the fight was on.

Chapter XXXI Strongest Man Is Master

If it had not been for the threat from the cliffs above this would have been a leisurely job for Brakely and me, for we were in action the instant we saw Masters was awake. They got on their feet all right, but had no chance to get their guns before their hands were busy in an attempt to stay our attack.

They had been sleeping close together under a blanket. They wore trousers and shirts, but their shoes and coats were off. Their guns were in their coats, which lay behind them.

I selected Throgg, and knew at the outset that my work would soon be done. Masters hadn’t yelled the second time, for Brakely had him by the throat.

Throgg was lean and not overly strong. His cadaverous face was twisted with fright. It was almost a shame to hit him, but it had to be done. I took one clean crack at him while his hands were raised feebly, and he went down in a lurching tumble. I sprang on top of him; searched his trousers pockets for a gun, found none, then rolled him off the coats on which he had fallen. From them I got two guns. Throgg was insensible.

I turned toward Brakely and his victim.

Mention of Brakely’s speed in a fight has already been made, and he was fighting now with hate in his heart. He had his hands on a crook who had double crossed him and one who had designs on a girl whom it was certain Brakely loved.

No matter what Brakely’s game had been, no matter what lay at the bottom of the mystery, he did love Mary Lee, and his game included no design on her.

Looking at the awful thing going on there, I knew how futile it would be for me to utter a protest. I couldn’t hazard the welfare of the besieged company in the cove by fighting in defense of Barney Master’s life.

The thugs from the cliffs might swarm down on us at any moment. It was a miracle that they weren’t there now. I couldn’t stay Brakely’s hands without fighting him, so I turned my face toward the cliffs, to fight off attack from that quarter.

When Julius Brakely came to my side I knew that Barney Masters was dead.

Brakely looked into my eyes without saying a word, and then turned toward Throgg. But I certainly didn’t mean to stand by and let him commit murder by the wholesale. I followed him.

“Don’t worry,” Brakely said, divining my fears; “I’m just taking a look at him. This one isn’t worth the trouble.”

I hauled a blanket over the body on the ground.

Brakely took one of the guns. I held the other.

“I guess they didn’t hear him yell,” he said, pointing to the cliffs. “They don’t seem to be coming.”

It was strange, and still the yell might have sounded extraordinarily loud to us and be inaudible on the cliffs, if the men there were sheltered by rocks. It had been a husky cry that came from Masters’s throat. Anyhow there was as yet no response from the cliffs.

We turned to Throgg. He was conscious, but laid there whimpering in terror. Brakely kicked him in the ribs, not very hard.

“Get up,” he said.

Throgg got up, and stood cringing.

My eyes were on him. The pistol was in my right hand, hanging down. Brakely stood at my right, too. Suddenly he snatched the gun away from me, turned the muzzles of both my way and said:

“Back up, George.”

Of course, I backed up. Rage seized me, too, for he was going back on his bargain.

“Stand right where you are,” Brakely said, “and listen. The Lees are out of danger, with that rat dead. I can promise you they won’t be harmed. I’ll take charge of things here now, and these fellows will be glad to knuckle to me. Won’t they, Throgg?”

Throgg rolled his eyes toward the bulging blanket.

“Y-yes, sir!” he answered warmly.

“This gang likes a winner,” Brakely went on. “As soon as they see me with a brace of guns in my hands, and one of them pulls back the flap of that blanket and takes a look, they’ll grovel on the ground in front of me, and beg me to get them off this God-forsaken island. I know.

“I’m so sure of it that I’m going to send Throgg up the hill to tell them what’s happened. I’ve kept my bargain with you, George. I’ve lifted the danger off the Lees. I promise you that I’ll do nothing worse than perhaps set them ashore on the island here. I want the Seabird, and I think I can easily capture it without injuring the Lees.

“After we’re gone, you have the island to yourselves. You have the raft, and the two boats from the Angela Lee must be somewhere about. You can go over to the big island, or out to the lighthouses, and get help. I won’t care then. We’ll be at sea — and I’m sport enough to be willing to take my chances there. It’s a race, but I’ve already got my plans laid for winning it.”

He smiled at me.

“Once again you and I are enemies,” he continued. “Thank you for all the help you’ve given me, and don’t blame me because I’m trying to fight my way out of a hole that’s worse than death. There’s been an awful crash in my life, George. I’m trying to save what I can out of the wreckage.

“I ask nothing of any one except a chance to make a race for it. I’ll fight for that chance. Now I’m going to let you go. I know you’re my enemy and I know that you’ll start right in to get the best of me as soon as you’re out of sight — but I’m going to let you go. I’m responsible for you being in this mess, and I’m going to give you a chance. If things had gone as I intended, you would have been sent on your way with a big pile of money, and been no wiser.

“But you know too much now, George. I’ve got to get a start before I let you get where you can spread the news. Now here’s the idea. You have my promise that the Lees won’t be harmed. They’ll be put ashore on this island — that’s all — and there will be no great hardship in that. You’ll soon be taken away.

“You have your watch, George. Look at it.”

I accommodated him. He looked at his own watch.

“Note the time,” he went on. “You have ten minutes to get off into the woods. At the end of ten minutes, if I catch you prowling around, I may have to kill you. I won’t kill you unless I have to, and that’s one job I certainly don’t want — but if you try to spoil my plans, it’s your life or mine. That’s the way it shapes up. Good-by, George — and for God’s sake, don’t make me kill you!”

I could tell by the look of him that he meant what he said. As he saw it, his back was to the wall. Brakely was fighting for his life, and there had been a melancholy ring in his words.

At that he was giving me a chance that a crook like Barney Masters wouldn’t give. I could see his point of view. I didn’t doubt his word in respect to the Lees. Brakely’s game had shaped up now so that all he wanted was a chance to race for his life.

“Can I ask Throgg a question?” I said.

“Go ahead.”

“What became of Jean Vernet, that French sailor off the yacht?”

Throgg looked at Brakely.

“Tell him,” Brakely ordered.

“He got away from us, last night on the cliffs,” Throgg told me. “He made Barney think he’d be one of us, if we paid him big. We turned him loose, but didn’t give him no gun. He sneaked off. He’s on the island some place, if he didn’t swim out to the Seabird.”

Brakely made a motion with his guns. He’d been watching the hills leading up to the cliffs.

“I hear some of them coming, George,” he said to me. “Beat it!” He called after me: “I give you ten minutes from now. Don’t attempt to show yourself after that, George.”

I didn’t answer him. When I got out of his sight, I turned off at an angle and started on a run for Hippolyte’s cave.

Chapter XXXII Parleying for High Stakes

It took me maybe half an hour to get there, and I was so weak from the trial of running, coming as it did on top of the excitement and hardships of several days, that I sank to the floor the instant I got inside the cave.

Hippolyte wasn’t there. The ashes in his rude stove were cold, as though there hadn’t been a fire there in a long time. I crawled over to the big hollow stone into which the water eaved down from the wall. The bowl was running over, and I drank deeply of the cool water.

Had Barney Masters and his crowd finished the deaf mute? Had they caught him prowling around the island, and made a quick job of it with their guns? Hippolyte, I knew, had no firearms.

I didn’t think that I was physically able to make the uphill and downhill trip to Marble Cove, and then to put up any kind of a fight. I didn’t think that the Lees were in much danger now, yet I couldn’t give up this other job — that of trapping the crooks.

But I was so weak that my legs wobbled when I stood up. The cave was chilly. I laid down on Hippolyte’s grass bed and pulled his rush blanket over me, to rest and think.

A man’s purpose is no good if he hasn’t got the strength to carry it out. When I looked back at what I’d been through, I didn’t wonder that my condition now verged on collapse. The last real sleep I had had was in this very cave.

I had gone out of this to a series of struggles and excitements. While held prisoner aboard the Angela Lee, in irons, unable to struggle, it might seem that I had nothing else to do but sleep — but my slumbers there were just a long series of dozes from which I would emerge with a start.

The excitement and the danger were never off my mind altogether. My nerves had been taut for several days, and I had worked hard physically in getting off the Angela Lee, and to this island, to say nothing of the exactions since arrival. No wonder I dropped asleep there in Hippolyte’s cave.

When I woke up Julius Brakely was standing in the doorway, and there was a movement of men and boats in the cove below.

I could see the warm sunlight through the vines at the door, and didn’t think I had slept long. I got to my feet as Brakely advanced a step. His eyes, accustomed now to the gloom, bored into mine. I stood waiting for some sign of his purpose, preparing to fight my way out, no matter what the odds. There was no way of retreat.

“George,” he said, “how did you know about this cave?”

“I found it,” I told him.

“Found it, eh?” The line of his white teeth appeared as his lips curled in a mirthless smile. His voice was low, and I got an idea that he didn’t want the men in the cave to hear. “Just stumbled across it, eh?” folding his arms and looking at me doubtfully. “That’s a lie,” he asserted evenly. “You fled to this cave from the Seabird, after the scrape over Radd. Who told you about this cave?”

“No one. I just found it.”

“Is Le Gorille on this island?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” he rejoined, wagging his head. “I’ve learned a few things since we parted. The first time you made a break on the yacht, you had a French army pistol. The brainless boob you flashed it on never thought of that until this morning. He told me. Did you get that pistol from Vernet? Did he pass it down to you from the boat deck, that first night out?”

“No.”

“But you had a French army pistol. That was the gun the gendarme got off you at Monte Carlo. It was the Gorilla’s gun.”

“I don’t know the Gorilla. Where would I meet him?”

Brakely meditated. I saw that he was very tired and unstrung, too. He was as strong a man as myself, and as young, but he had begun to break under the strain of what we had been through together. If he was unarmed, it would be an even match — if we were permitted to fight it out between ourselves.

There was no sound from the cove now except the restless stir of the water.

“Tell you what I’m going to do,” Brakely informed me. “I’ve got work to do around this cove. You know more than I thought you did. I’m afraid of you, but I’m going to spare you once more. I’m simply going to tie you up, so you can’t sneak up behind me.”

I didn’t mean to submit to that.

“Tie you up, and plant you somewhere in the woods,” he went on. “Got to do it. I can’t find Vernet; don’t know whether he’s on the island or on the Seabird. I never paid much attention to that fellow, but he’s got me worried now. If he gave you Le Gorille’s pistol, he’s a little too wise to be at large. If you found the gun here in this cave — well, George, I wish you’d come clean about that.”

“I’ll tell you nothing.”

“All right. I didn’t think you would. That’s why I’m glad I found you. I didn’t know about this cave myself.” His eyes had been busy ever since he stepped in. “It’s very cleverly concealed. I sent some of the boys around to the cove in the boats — the boats off the Angela Lee. We had a conference after you went away.

“They’re my men again. They took a look at the twisted face under that blanket, and groveled, as I said they would. I took a look at things over at the other cove, and left some men to watch the crowd on the Seabird. Sent the others around here.

“I thought I’d walk across the island, and see if I could find you and Vernet. I’ve got to fix you fellows so you can’t make a move against me. I need sleep, and I can’t sleep with you and Vernet running loose — now that you know more than I thought you did. I’m going to tie you up. I may handle Vernet in a different way.”

I began to get the idea. Some of Brakely’s gang had come to the cove in boats. He had walked to the cliffs above, and, searching, had found the path leading down to Hippolyte’s cave. The gang had business of some sort in the caves below. Did Brakely’s men know that he was in the cave above?

Had he some reason for concealing this cave from them? Would he attempt to dispose of me quietly, and not let them know he had found this cave? A man could come down to it from the cliffs without being seen from the cove. They were waiting for him to show up.

Le Gorille, the Paris Apache — Hippolyte — was more than an incident in this game, too. Brakely was deeply concerned over the possibility of the Gorilla being on the island. He must have seen that this cave bore numerous signs of long occupation.

Indeed, there was a bright gleam in Brakely’s eyes — a gleam that comes in the eyes of a man scenting victory. He had penetrated a secret that had long baffled him.

Did this cave hold treasure?

“You’ve got pretty good sense, George,” Brakely was saying. “You’ve nothing but your bare hands to fight with. I’ve got two guns on me. I have a gang in the cove below. I’ve got to tie you up. For God’s sake, don’t make me kill you!”

He really dreaded that thought. Brakely wanted the thing he had come here for. He wanted to get it quietly, if possible — but I labored under no delusions that his aversion to killing me would stop him if he thought such a job offered the only chance of winning out.

“If you’ll lie down quietly,” he told me, “I’ll fix these ropes on you so you’ll be comfortable.” He had brought ropes along in the expectation of running across me somewhere. “I’ll protect you, if you’ll be reasonable and—”

Chapter XXXIII To the Death

I sprang on him.

I was surprised at my own strength and ferocity. It seemed that I realized this was to be a fight for a final decision, and the weakness of nerve and muscle I felt before I fell asleep had utterly vanished.

Yet so intent did Brakely seem to be on keeping the secret of this cave from the men below that he emitted no cry for re-enforcements nor made any effort to get at his guns.

He fought off my attempts to get one of the guns, however.

And I guess he thought that he could handle me alone and with bare hands. He was the kind of a man who would think that, for he didn’t know what fear was, and he had whipped me to a standstill in my cabin aboard the Seabird, while we were still in Marseilles harbor.

Anyhow, we fought man to man in the gloom of the cave.

The surprise of my sudden leap gave me an advantage, and I banged my fist into Brakely’s face before we fell into a clinch. I threw him against the rock wall, and with a back-handed blow knocked his head against that surface. These setbacks fogged Brakely’s brain, but they warned him, too, that he had a tough job on his hands.

He summoned all his strength, clung to me until he got his head back, then tore into me. Then I learned again what a wonderful fighting man he was. He laid me on the floor with a blow that seemed to shatter my brain into a thousand pieces, but I fought off insensibility.

I give him credit for not leaping on me then and there and finishing his job. His instinct for fair play ruled him even then. I got slowly to my feet, and for a few seconds, seeking a respite, kept Hippolyte’s big stone water bowl between us. My brain cleared in those few seconds.

Brakely, in a pinch, could resort to his guns or summon help from below. This strengthened his confidence as he came after me with a grin on his bleeding face.

We punched each other, but neither went down. The walls saved both of us from that several times. We fought, clinched for breathing spells, and fought again. Neither sought to use anything but the weapons nature had given him. I knocked him down, and sprang on top.

Over and over we rolled. Each of us suffered in that encounter, and I know I was glad to get out of reach for a moment. We broke apart and struggled to our feet. It’s a funny thing, but neither of us bit or clawed. I was fighting for my life, but something in the way he fought induced similar instincts within myself.

Our last clinch came to a finish with Brakely’s arms around my body. He lifted me. I beat him on the head and shoulders with my fists while in the air. All his strength was in the movement that now engaged him. He flung me. I went down across the stone water bowl.

My left leg was curled underneath. It snapped, below the knee.

I felt a sickened sensation in the pit of my stomach, and, endeavoring to rise, collapsed helplessly on the rock floor. The leg was broken.

Brakely stood over me, breathing furiously.

I never learned what he intended to do, for suddenly the cave grew lighter as the vines parted at the door.

Brakely wheeled to face Hippolyte.

“Le Gorille!” he cried, with a ring of dread in his tone.

The deaf mute came at him with a snarl.

The style of the Gorilla’s attack gave Brakely no chance to employ his guns. Two blows landed by Brakely fell off the deaf mute’s head like drops of rain water. He never paused. In an instant he was close in, and his long, powerful arms encircled his victim.

Brakely struggled like a wild man, but his arms were pinioned. All he could do was drag Hippolyte to and fro. The embrace of Le Gorille tightened. They surged this way and that. I kept out of the way as much as I could, dragging my broken, leg from place to place, but never for a moment at rest.

A foot came into violent contact with my injured limb, and I shut my eyes in a spasm of pain. When I looked again Brakely was gouging the deaf mute’s bare feet with his shoe heels, and trying to fasten his teeth in his neck. Hippolyte squeezed harder.

“Don’t kill him!” I yelled.

Then I thought of Hippolyte’s affliction, and thereafter held my tongue.

Brakely was shouting for help now — weakly, so tight was the embrace — and pounding at the bare feet of his tormentor. I heard a bone crack, then another. Brakely’s body sagged. Hippolyte peered with a fiendish grin into the bulging eyes close to his own, saw something there, and let his victim slip to the floor. Brakely groaned, but did not stir.

There were sounds of excitement from the cove now. Hippolyte looked down at me. I pointed to the door. He raced out before I could tell him of the guns in Brakely’s pockets.

I crawled to Brakely’s side, got the pistols, and, despite the pain, dragged myself to the door.

It was then that I learned of Hippolyte’s preparations for defense, in case of an attack from the cove.

On top of a ledge that ran above the path, and under still another ledge that formed the brow of the cliffs, he had strewn bowlders. He was up there now, darting about and chattering like a creature of the jungles in the strange throaty gurgles that escaped him in moments of excitement.

And he was turning loose the bowlders on the men trying to get up the cliffs in answer to Brakely’s cries. It was a furious bombardment, and Hippolyte alternated his attack with the bowlders with smaller rocks flung with unerring accuracy. Two of the thugs fell senseless to the beach below.

I began firing. I hit only one man — Throgg, in the shoulder. He dropped like a wounded muskrat down the cliffs.

The sound of my guns must have taken the heart out of the thugs, for sight of me peering down at them was sufficient notice that Brakely, whose cries they had heard, was out of commission. Our fortress was impregnable from below. They scuttled for cover in the nooks and crannies of the cliffs.

I realized that we had them now, for no man could stick his head out without exposing it to my fire. Hippolyte continued to send his bowlders crashing down. He gurgled gleefully, though the rocks plunged harmlessly into the cove.

“Brakely’s dead!” I shouted. “If you fellows surrender and toss your guns into the water, I won’t shoot again! If you don’t, I’ll kill every man who sticks his head out!”

I knew their positions must be highly uncomfortable, and of course they didn’t know that I lay above with a broken leg. They seemed to be considering my proposal.

Charles Throgg, wounded, whined an appeal to his mates to surrender. Three others lying Injured on the beach, one with his leg in the water, said nothing. One of them, when he did speak, cursed Throgg.

I continued to shout at them, but they refused to answer. Then I remembered the caves at the waterline. Their position wasn’t so uncomfortable as I first thought.

Hippolyte was up to something. He crawled around to one side of the cliffs, on precarious footing at times, until he stood directly above the lifeboats from the Angela Lee — the boats in which the crooks had come to the island and to Foamy Cove.

He sent a shower of big rocks toward the boats. Most of the rocks fell in the water, but presently his work told. The bottoms of both boats were smashed out. The boats lay half out and half submerged in the water — useless.

The net was tightening.

Brakely stirred behind me, but he was too weak and the agony of his broken ribs too intense to permit of attack. I didn’t expose myself to a shot by peering out at the caves below, and Hippolyte showed remarkable skill in keeping under cover on the ledges.

The men below began to answer my questions. We were still parleying on the terms of surrender when John Vernon shouted at me from overhead.

I looked up, but all I could see was Hippolyte’s beard waving at me from the ledge and his grinning face. I answered Vernon, telling him the situation in as few words as possible.

I was suffering terrible agony from the broken leg. The foot had got twisted and I couldn’t straighten it. I was talking to John Vernon when merciful insensibility overtook me.

Chapter XXXIV After the Battle

When I came into full consciousness the cave was crowded. I had had moments of half-sensibility, but all that happened meanwhile came to me from the lips of others.

John Vernon took word to the Seabird that their besiegers had suffered a severe reverse. He shouted it from a cliff, and then attacked the two men left on the cliffs to watch the craft. Those on the Seabird hadn’t known so few men remained there. Vernon was armed with one of the pistols he took from me in the cave, but, of course, I don’t remember him taking it.

Matters were cleaned up at Marble Cove, and then the company from there moved against the stragglers in the caves of Foamy Cove. There were only three unwounded men among the crooks ashore, as two of them were still suffering from wounds I inflicted on them aboard the Angela Lee — one with a broken jaw and the other with a shattered arm.

John Vernon, after his escape, had encountered Hippolyte, with whom he made friends. Hippolyte abandoned his cave after Barney Masters and some of his men made a trip into Foamy Cove, and had been living in the woods. He was hungry. So was John Vernon.

They hadn’t see Brakely and me on the island until Hippolyte, wandering about, saw the men in the cove and crept down to his cave in time to save me from whatever fate Brakely meant to deal out. Vernon appeared from the woods after he heard the shots in Foamy Cove.

At any rate, Barney Masters lay in a grave on the island of Querolle, the three unwounded crooks were in irons in the brig of the Seabird, together with Captain Fawcett, who had been taken prisoner soon after the Angela Lee made her flight. Splinters, the galley boy, had become a trusted member of the company commanded by Captain Lee.

The wounded were being cared for on the cliffs above Hippolyte’s cave, and Miss Mary Lee, Captain Lee, John Vernon, and a sailor off the yacht were in the cave with Brakely and me. Lamps had been fetched from the Seabird, and Captain Lee was setting my broken leg.

It was the pain of that operation that brought me out of the stupor.

Mary Lee’s face floated above me in the lamplight. It was still and calm and beautiful, and that alone told me that our struggles were over. She was watching her father’s operation on my leg, and occasionally she winced with sympathy for the pain she knew I must feel. She saw that my eyes were open, and she bathed my forehead with a damp cloth. Julius Brakely lay near by, and he seemed to be sleeping.

They told me not to talk, but I persisted in asking questions, when I wasn’t grating my teeth in agony. The story of what had happened came to me in fragments.

When Brakely opened his eyes he stared at John Vernon, and I knew he understood now. This was the man Mary Lee loved, and who had for several years left his work in a studio in Paris to pose as a Frenchman and a sailor merely to be near the girl. Alonzo Lee understood too, and all his objections had vanished under the stress of this adventure.

The man he trusted and admired, the man he favored as a son-in-law had turned out to be a crook who lived a double life — and why shouldn’t he let Mary Lee pick her own husband after such a miserable failure as he had made of it?

There was a kind of a grim smile on Julius Brakely’s face. He had lost at all points, but he was a man who would smile at it. John Vernon was working on him, bandaging his chest. Mary Lee did the same to Brakely that she did to me — bathed his forehead at intervals. I noticed that every time her face hung over his own he closed his eyes, and didn’t open them again until she turned away.

They worked with stuff from the medicine and surgery chest of the Seabird.

“Where is the deaf mute?” I asked.

“Up on the cliffs — helping,” Mary Lee replied. “You mustn’t talk. You need rest very badly.”

“Do you know who he is?” I persisted.

“Yes,” she told me.

“I’ll bet he’ll run away.”

“No — I’ve had a talk with him. I’ve assured him that no harm will come to him. He will be forgiven, I’m sure — when we tell our story, and when his war record is made known. I speak French and the sign language too. I made him understand.”

“How did you know who he is?”

“We have a full confession from Captain Fawcett,” the girl replied. “And Charles Throgg has been bursting to tell all he knows too. It’s a sensational story—”

She broke off suddenly, with a quick glance toward Brakely; and remembering, too, I suppose, that she was going against her own admonitions for quiet on my part.

“Say, Miss Lee,” I said, “Is Captain Fawcett — is that his right name?”

“You really must be quiet, George!”

“Tell me that much, please.”

“No, his name isn’t Fawcett.”

“I knew it! In the beginning I ought to’ve known something was wrong. I know a Captain Albert Fawcett—”

She motioned her head toward Brakely, and, out of consideration for his feelings, I kept my mouth shut.

It was long after dark, and I suffered the tortures of the damned from the trip across the island, it being a difficult job for the men who earned me in a blanket, when I dropped asleep. It was a peaceful sleep too, for all hands were safe aboard the Seabird.

Chapter XXXV Plots and Killers

The confession of the man we had known as Captain Albert Fawcett, after it was all written out by Miss Mary Lee and in response to questions from Captain Lee, read:

“My name is Asa Joles. I am fifty-eight years old, and my home is in New York City. Up to the time I was forty-five I was a sailor, the last three years being master of several coastwise vessels.

“I was a heavy drinker, and got in with a crowd of smugglers in the West Indies. Later I mixed up with thieves and burglars in New York, and left the sea. I have been arrested several times, under various names, but never convicted.

“I met the man I later knew as Julius Brakely in the company of other crooks in New York. We got friendly when he learned I had been a seafaring man. As confidence grew in each other he let me know more about himself and a certain job he had in mind.

“He was known in New York society as Julius Brakely, and from what I learned he came of a very fine family. He had spent all the money he inherited, and for two or three years had been stealing, being known to crooks as ‘The Bobber,’ due to his habit of disappearing for weeks at a time and then bobbing up in our hang outs.

“He told me he lived the life of a society man until his money was gone, then he would come back to us and get more by stealing. He was known among crooks in London and Paris too.

“The job he told me about was digging up the ‘plant,’ as crooks call buried money and jewelry, of a Paris thief known as the Gorilla. In Paris he had met the Gorilla, and had wormed his secrets out of him. He and the Gorilla had had trouble, but I never did know rightly just what it was, except that it was serious and that the Gorilla would kill him if they met.

“He thought the Gorilla was dead though, it being said among the thieves of Paris that he had gone into the army and was never seen since. Brakely told me that this man had a fortune in stolen money and jewels planted on an island in the Mediterranean, the little island of Querolle, near the island where the Gorilla originally came from. He thought it worth while to go hunt for it, but was broke.

“The details he gave looked good. We talked it over with other crooks, some of whom had been to sea, mainly Barney Masters and Charlie Throgg, who both had engineer’s papers. We got them in it, and then bamboozled” — that’s the word Asa Joles insisted on using — “a ship captain named Albert Fawcett, master of his own vessel, the Seabird, into going off on a treasure voyage.

“Julius Brakely told Captain Fawcett a clever story of pirates, and the captain got excited about it. Captain Fawcett had no family, and the adventure appealed to him. We worked it so that we picked the crew, all crooks except a cook named Radd, and a galley boy called Splinters, both of whom Captain Fawcett insisted on taking along. We all sailed from New York in the Seabird.

“In a drunken fight three days out of New York, Barney Masters killed Captain Fawcett. Julius Brakely nor no one else of us had anything to do with that, and it frightened most of us — but we were in it, and had to go through with it. We buried Captain Fawcett at sea.

“Then I took Captain Fawcett’s name and posed as him after that, so that we didn’t have to change the ship’s papers. By threats and promises of big money we got Radd and Splinters to say they would join us — made them swear to it with their hands on a dagger.

“The stories we told of getting most of the crew in Mediterranean ports were lies. Every man of them came aboard in New York, and as sailors they were a scurvy lot.”

Mary Lee told me that Captain Fawcett insisted on putting things in that maybe weren’t important, and they thought too that that would make it more legal. The confession went on:

“But as crooks, this crew was wise and capable. On the way across to Gibraltar we got to talking of what we could do with that gang if we had them ashore on the Riviera. To land them there in the regular way was dangerous, as we had no passports. The only way to be safe about it was to take them in as sailors.

“Then Julius Brakely said that the Seabird would be a suspicious looking craft to take into ports like Monte Carlo and Nice. It wasn’t long before Julius Brakely had a plan to get a yacht. He knew Captain Alonzo Lee, and they were close friends. Captain Lee had a yacht tied up at Marseilles.

“It seems that Brakely had told Captain Lee that pirate story, so it wasn’t hard to get Captain Lee in on it when we got to Marseilles. His plan was to get Captain Lee to take the Angela Lee to Querolle, and then for him and his crew to borrow the yacht for one or two trips to the Riviera.

“Brakely thought he could do this without exciting Captain Lee’s suspicions, leaving him there on the island with his own crew to hunt for the supposed pirate treasure. The idea was to pull off a few jobs in banks and hotels on the Riviera, so that the trip wouldn’t be a dead loss if we failed to find the treasure of the Gorilla.

“I swear that Julius Brakely had no intention of harming Captain Lee, and he did not know that Miss Mary Lee was doming along until we were almost ready to sail from Marseilles. He planned to deceive them, but not to harm them. We intended to keep them with us until we no longer needed the yacht and then to send them away with a story that the hunt for the pirate treasure was a failure.

“Then we would hunt for the Gorilla’s plant. If things went well we would have that and whatever money the gang got in its raids on the Riviera.

“We were bad off for navigators. We needed at least one more. It was too hard for a man of my age, the only navigator aboard. We would need one for the yacht trips up to the Riviera, as if trouble came up there it was important to have navigators who could make a clean and swift sailing job of it. We thought maybe we could pick up a sailor who knew something about navigation and get him in with us by a promise of big money.

“That is how we came to ship George Ranholm, in Marseilles. Things began to happen from that minute. Ranholm, we saw, wouldn’t consent to deceit even as to his rights to become a mate. But we made up our minds that he must be brought along, for fear that even what little he had learned might set him to talking.

“Ranholm was suspicious from the first, but we had him aboard and meant to keep him until we finished our jobs in those waters. Things went wrong from the time we learned Miss Lee was coming along on the yacht, and also on account of the sailor Ranholm.

“It turned out that we had to make a new set of plans, with a lot of lies and excuses, but we never gave up our intention of putting through everything we had planned. Julius Brakely got impatient and reckless, and began to fear that maybe he would finish with no money at all.

“Then we rushed things. I knew the game was up when Captain Lee got suspicious, after the yacht was taken out of the cove at Querolle, but Brakely was gone then and I couldn’t warn him.

“Brakely did not want Barney Masters to kill Captain Fawcett or Radd the cook. Masters did that on his own responsibility. Masters was plotting all the while to get command of things away from Brakely, and wanted to get rid of every man that stood in his way. If Masters had got the upper hand there would have been more killings, as he didn’t have the cool nerve of Julius Brakely, and thought of murder as the only way to beat a man.”

The confession went on in detail, telling of what Asa Joles knew about the siege; how Captain Lee acted after John Vernon dropped the hint that first aroused his suspicion, and how he took the commander of the Seabird into custody. Of the watch maintained for the reappearance of the crooks, and of the fight, with the Seabird’s company below decks, watching and shooting out the ports, none being able, on account of the crooks on the cliffs, to go on deck, haul up the anchors and steam away.

Miss Mary Lee read this confession to me as I lay on my bunk, my splintered leg propped up. She was acting as nurse to every wounded man aboard, including the crooks. The Seabird was out in the Mediterranean bound for Marseilles.

“This confession,” she said, “and the one I’m preparing from Throgg will reveal the whole plot. It will show too that the Angela Lee was stolen and destroyed, and father will collect his insurance.”

She meditated.

“Mr. Brakely didn’t plan murders,” she went on. “I was sure of that from the first moment we suspected him of crooked work, and Asa Joles and Throgg bear me out. Mr. Brakely’s plot got out of his hands. He couldn’t control the things he set afoot. I’m very sorry for him.”

“He’s not a killer,” I agreed. “The thing he did to Barney Masters wasn’t because Masters had tricked him. It—”

I didn’t finish, and was sorry I even hinted at the truth until I learned she understood.

Chapter XXXVI The Sea Receives Her Dead

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’m very sorry for him.”

She shuddered, I suppose at thought of that killing and also at thought of the way Barney Masters used to look at her.

“I am also grateful to Brakely,” she added.

Hippolyte, still barefooted, for a pair of shoes couldn’t be found aboard ship to fit him, but shaved and dressed in clean clothes, walked past the open door.

“That man,” Mary Lee informed me, “never killed any one in his crimes. Mr. Brakely did him an injury in some way in. Paris, after posing as his friend and getting his secrets, but we haven’t got to the bottom of that yet. Mr. Brakely, of course, won’t talk at all. But Hippolyte spared him in the cave, when he realized that he was on the brink of his first murder. You told me how he dropped him to the floor.”

She shuddered again.

“No,” she went on, “Hippolyte isn’t a killer. And he hasn’t committed a crime since he went into the French army. From what he tells me of his experiences at Verdun he must be rated as one of the heroes of the war — though he doesn’t wish to be heroic about it. I get his stories only by keeping at him. He is one of the casualties of war — shell shock.

“If we can find his company commander and add to his story our account of how Hippolyte helped us at Querolle, I’m sure that the thefts of Le Gorille will be forgiven. He ran away from a military convalescent camp in southern France, and went to his old home on the other island.

“Then he slipped over to Querolle, no doubt to get the treasure he’d been hoarding up there for years. No one knows why he remained at Querolle. No one knows what went on in his mind during the terrible upheaval of nerves that left him a deaf mute. The man is sick, and shouldn’t be treated as a criminal.

“Father has the loot Hippolyte buried in his cave, and that will be turned over to the authorities with the money we recovered from the crooks, the proceeds of the robberies they committed during those few nights at Monte Carlo.

“We ought to receive some consideration for bringing in the gang and their stolen goods, and any influence that gives us will be exerted in behalf of Hippolyte and any of the others who appear deserving of mercy. Father has been counting Hippolyte’s treasure. He said he wanted you to see—”

Just then Captain Lee came in with a big dishpan out of the galley in his arms. He placed it on a chair.

Stacks of paper money, mounds of gold coins, and a heap of jewels — the toll taken from society by Le Gorille.

“The treasure of Caricar the Pirate,” I said with a grin.

The Lees laughed.

“I wonder if there ever was a pirate named Caricar?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Captain Lee replied. “That’s one of the things I must look up when I get ashore. Brakely won’t tell me. He simply grins when I ask him. Well, whether Caricar ever lived or not, it was a good story.”

“It certainly was,” I admitted; “and Brakely could tell it with a flourish.”

“Yes, indeed!”

Captain Lee took the dishpan and went away. Something came up a minute or so later that caused Mary Lee to repeat:

“I’m so sorry for him,” meaning Brakely — “so sorry!”

Brakely was just passing the door at the time.

His injuries consisted of a couple of broken ribs, and he had been squeezed in such a way that his breathing hadn’t been right since. We thought the ribs must be pressing against his lungs some way, but we wouldn’t know just what ailed him until we got to a port and a doctor. He occupied a room near mine, in the ’midship house.

He was able to walk about a little at a slow and painful gait, but a fight for him was out of the question. The other prisoners were secure in their quarters, and things had been fixed so that Brakely could not communicate with them.

Every one of the ship’s company had been warned to watch him, mainly to see that he inflicted no harm on himself. He hadn’t shown the slightest sign of anything like that. He held his head high and proud despite his injuries. When he and Hippolyte met they simply looked at each other mildly, with no sign that their ancient grudge would ever again burst into flame.

Brakely paused at my door, and looked intently at Mary Lee. Since things had gone wrong with him, the few times he addressed her he had given no hint that he was thinking of his love for her and the days when he was her suitor.

“Miss Lee,” he said now, very quietly, “I wish you hadn’t said that. Sympathy is the last thing I wish for. I am on my way to face a charge of having committed one murder with my own hands and of being an accomplice in two others.

“My head hasn’t been lowered a peg by that. I played a game and lost, and I’m man enough not to squeal nor to dodge my responsibility for everything that happened in the game I myself started. For the first time I feel a little disheartened and wilted. Pity! I can stand anything but that—”

He stopped speaking suddenly, bowed, and passed on, as though regretting this display of emotion, the first I had ever seen in Julius Brakely. The life seemed to have gone out of him.

The girl stared at the empty doorway.

Julius Brakely came up missing. None saw him take the leap. He had been very clever and stealthy about it, on such a little ship, where we thought it impossible for him to try a thing like that without being intercepted by some one in the space to which his movements were restricted.

But he was gone. He simply wasn’t on the ship when a search was started for him, nor did they find him or any written word of explanation. But I thought I understood. One word of pity from the girl he loved and who did not love him—

The Seabird was manned by sailors off the lost Angela Lee. That night I told one of them to ask Miss Mary Lee if she minded coming in and reading to me a few minutes. I was nervous and unstrung. The sailor returned to me presently.

“M’sieur,” he said in his precise English, “I have found Mlle. Lee, but I did not think that you would wish for her to be disturbed. She is standing with M. Vernon on the quarter-deck, and they are staring back at the sea — very quiet and very solemn. I did not think—”

“Thanks,” I assured him. “You did right in not disturbing her.”