The Box with Broken Seals

CHAPTER IV

The two men — Crawshay and Sam Hobson — still a little breathless, stood at the end of the dock, gazing out towards the river. Around them was a slowly dispersing crowd of sightseers, friends and relations of the passengers on board the great American liner, ploughing her way down the river amidst the shrieks and hoots of her attendant tugs. Out on the horizon, beyond the Statue of Liberty, two long, grey, sinister shapes were waiting. Hobson glanced at them gloomily.

“Guess those are our destroyers going to take the City of Boston some of the way across,” he observed. “To think, with all this fuss about, that she must go and start an hour before her time!”

“It’s filthy luck,” the Englishman muttered.

The crowd grew thinner and thinner, yet the two men made no movement towards departure. It seemed to Crawshay impossible that after all they had gone through they should have failed. The journey in the fast motor car, after a breakdown of the Chicago Limited, rushing through the night like some live monster, tearing now through a plain of level lights, as they passed through some great city, vomiting fire and flame into the black darkness of the country places. It was like the ride of madmen, and more than once they had both hung on to their seats in something which was almost terror. “How are we going?” Crawshay had asked perpetually.

“Still that infernal half-hour,” was the continual reply. “We are doing seventy, but we don’t seem to be able to work it down.”

A powerful automobile had taken them through the streets of New York, and lay now a wreck in one of the streets a mile from the dock. They had finished the journey in a taxicab, and the finish had been this — half an hour late! Yet they lingered, with their eyes fixed upon the disappearing ship.

“I guess there’s nothing more we can do,” Hobson said at last grudgingly. “We can lay it up for them on the other side, and we can talk to her all the way to Liverpool on the wireless, but if there is any scoop to be made the others’ll get it — not us.”

“If only we could have got on board!” Crawshay muttered. “It’s no use thinking of a tug, I suppose?”

The American shook his head.

“She’s too far out,” he replied gloomily. “There’s nothing to be hired that could catch her.”

Crawshay’s hand had suddenly stolen to his chin. There was a queer light in his eyes. He clutched at his companion’s arm.

“You’re wrong, Hobson,” he exclaimed. “There is! Come right along with me. We can talk as we go.”

“Are you crazy?” the American demanded.

“Not quite,” the other answered. “Hurry up, man.”

“Where to?” “To New Jersey. I’ve got Government orders, endorsed by your own Secretary of War. It’s a hundred to one they won’t listen to me, but we’ve got to try it.”

He was already dragging his companion down the wooden way. His whole expression had changed. His face was alight with the joy of an idea. Already Hobson, upon whom the germ of that idea had dawned, began to be infected with his enthusiasm.

“It’s a gorgeous stunt,” he acknowledged, as he followed his companion into a taxicab. “If we bring it off, it’s going to knock the movies silly.”

Katharine, weary at last of waving her hand to the indistinct blur of faces upon the dock, picked up the great clusters of roses which late arrivals had thrust into her arms at the last moment, and descended to her stateroom upon the saloon deck. She spent only a few minutes looking at the arrangement of her things, and then knocked at the door of the stateroom exactly opposite. A thick-browed, heavy-looking man, sombrely and professionally dressed, opened the door.

“Are you wanting me, Doctor Gant?” she asked.

The doctor shook his head.

“The patient is asleep,” he announced in a whisper.

Katharine stepped inside and stood looking down upon the pale, almost ghastly face of the man stretched at full length upon the bed.

“Why, I remember him perfectly,” she exclaimed. “He was in Number Three Ward for some time. Surely he was a clerk at one of the drygoods stores down-town?”

The doctor nodded.

“Very likely.”

“I remember the case,” Katharine continued,— “appendicitis, followed by pneumonia, and complicated by angina pectoris.”

“You have it precisely.”

Katharine’s eyes were full of perplexity.

“But the man is in very poor circumstances,” she remarked. “How on earth can he afford a trip like this? He was on the free list at the hospital.”

The doctor frowned.

“That is not my business,” he said. “My fees are paid, and the steamer tickets appear to be in order. He probably has wealthy friends.”

Katharine looked down once more at the sleeping man. His face was insignificant, his expression peevish, his features without the animation of any high purpose.

“I really cannot understand,” she murmured, “how he became a friend — a friend—”

“A friend of whom?” the doctor enquired.

Katharine reflected and shook her head.

“Perhaps I was indiscreet,” she confessed. “I dare say you know as much about him as I do. At what time would you like me to come and help you change the bandages?”

“I shall change them alone,” the doctor replied.

“I prefer to.”

Katharine glanced up in surprise.

“Surely you are not in earnest?” she asked. “What else am I here for? I suppose you realise that I am fully qualified?”

The doctor unbent a little.

“I am perfectly well aware of that. Miss Beverley,” he said, “and it may be that there are times when I shall be glad of your help, and in any case,” he went on, “I shall have to ask you to take a share in the night watching. But the surgical part of the case has been a great responsibility, and I couldn’t afford to have the slightest thing in the world happen to one of my bandages.”

Katharine nodded.

“You are thinking of Nurse Lynn,” she observed. “But really I am very careful.”

“I am sure of it,” the doctor acknowledged, “but so long as I am here, with nothing else to do and a very heavy fee if by any chance I bring my man through, I may just as well see to these things myself. At any moment I might need your help, and I am very happy, Miss Beverley, to think that I shall have some one like you to fall back upon. My great hope,” he went on, “is that we may get him across without a touch of the angina.”

“Will he ever get well?” she asked.

The doctor shook his head doubtfully.

“One can never tell,” he said. “It is just one of these cases which are very close to the borderland. With luck he may pull through, may even become a fairly strong man again, but he doesn’t look as though he had much of a physique. Sometime or other the day will come when life or death for him will depend entirely upon his will.”

She nodded and moved away. “My stateroom is just opposite, if you want me at any time, doctor,” she said.

He bowed and closed the door after her. Katharine made her way into her cabin, sat on her steamer trunk and looked around a little helplessly. The confusion of thought in which she had come on board was only increased by this introduction to doctor and patient. A presentiment of strange and imminent happenings kept her seated there long after the dressing bugle had sounded.

The City of Boston was four hours out of harbour, with her course set direct for Liverpool. The passengers, of whom there were only a very moderate number, had taken possession of their staterooms, examined their lifebelts, eaten their first meal, and were now, at eight o’clock on a fine June evening, mostly strolling about the deck or reclining in steamer chairs. There was none of the old-time feeling that a six-days’ holiday was before them, a six-days’ freedom from all anxiety and care. Even in these first few hours of their enterprise a certain strain of suppressed excitement was almost universally noticeable. There was no escaping from grim facts, and the facts were brought home to them all the time by those two businesslike destroyers flying the Stars and Stripes, and whose decks were swept continually by a deluge of green salt water. Amongst the few people who conversed there was but one subject of conversation, a subject which every one affected to treat lightly, and yet which no one managed to discuss without signs of anxiety.

“This thing will get on all our nerves before we are over,” Brand, a breezy newspaper man from the West, observed. “What with boat drill three times a day, and lifebelt parade going on all the time on the deck, one doesn’t get a chance to forget that we are liable to get a torpedo in our side at any moment.”

“Oh, these little gnats of Uncle Sam’s will look after us!” a more cheerful confrère observed. “Come into the smoking room and I’ll buy you a drink.”

A good deal of courage seemed to be sought in that direction, and presently, although the afterglow of the sunset was still brilliant, the decks were almost deserted. On the starboard side, only a man and a woman remained, and gradually, as though with a certain unwillingness, they drifted closer together. The woman, who wore a black and white check coat over her blue serge steamer dress, and a small black hat from which she had pushed back the veil, was leaning over the side of the steamer, her head supported by her hand, looking steadily into the mass of red and orange clouds. The man, who was smoking a cigar, with both hands in his ulster pockets, seemed as though he would have passed her, but without turning her head she held out her hand and beckoned him to her side.

“I was beginning to wonder whether you were an absentee,” Katharine remarked.

“I have been making friends with the captain,” Jocelyn Thew replied.

“Please arrange my chair,” she begged. “I should like to sit down.”

He did as he was asked, arranging her rugs with the care of an old traveler. All his movements were very deliberate, even the searching way in which his eyes swept the long row of empty chairs on either side of them, and the care with which he fastened two open portholes above their heads. Finally he accepted her invitation and sat by her side.

“I have seen you once before,” she observed, “just before we started.”

“Yes?” he murmured.

“You were standing on the upper deck,” she continued, “a little away from the others. You had your glasses glued to your eyes and you watched the dock. You had the air of one looking for a late arrival. Do you know of any one who has missed the boat?”

“I think so.”

“A friend?”

“No, an enemy,” he answered equably.

She turned her head a little. It was obvious that he was speaking the truth.

“So you have enemies?”

“A great many,” he acknowledged, “one in particular just now. Perhaps,” he went on, “I should say an opponent.”

“If that is so,” she remarked, after a moment’s pause, “you should be glad that he missed the boat.”

Jocelyn Thew smiled.

“I am,” he admitted. “It was part of my plan that he should miss it.”

She moved uneasily in her chair.

“So you haven’t finished with adventures yet?”

“Not just yet.”

There was a brief silence. Then she turned her head a little, leaning it still on the back of the chair but watching him as she spoke.

“I have seen my patient,” she told him. “I have also had some conversation with the doctor.”

“Well?”

“I am beginning to think,” she continued, “that you must be a philanthropist.”

“Why?”

“You hinted,” she went on, “that your friend was in poor circumstances. You did not tell me, though, that you were paying the whole expenses of this trip, just so that the man should see his home and his family before he died.”

“I told you that the care of him was a charge upon me,” Jocelyn Thew reminded her. “That amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? I was clever enough, anyhow, to get a good nurse at a small fee.”

“I am not at all sure,” she replied, “that I shall not charge you something outrageous. You are probably a millionaire.”

“Whatever you charge me,” he promised, “I shall try to pay.”

The two journalists, refreshed and encouraged by their libation, strolled past arm in arm.

“Queer sort of voyage, this, for a man on the point of death,” the Westerner observed. “They brought a chap on here, an hour before we sailed, in an ambulance, with a doctor and a hospital nurse. Had to be carried every foot of the way.”

“What’s wrong with him?” the other enquired.

“He was only operated upon for appendicitis a fortnight ago, and they say that he has angina pectoris amongst other complications. They brought him straight from the hospital. Seems he’s crazy to get back to England to die.”

The two men passed out of hearing. Jocelyn flicked the ash from the cigarette which he had lighted.

“Sounds a queer sort of story, the way they tell it,” he observed, glancing at his companion.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “Men have done this sort of thing before — but it isn’t often,” she went on, “that a man has done it for the sake of another man.”

He smiled.

“You have the old-fashioned idea of man’s devotion to woman. Can’t you believe that there may be ties between two men stronger even than between a man and the woman he loves?”

“I can believe that,” she assented, “but the men must have something in common. I should find it hard to believe, for instance, that they existed between you and the man downstairs.”

He shrugged his shoulders very slightly.

“You forget,” he observed, “that a man does not look at his best after such an illness as Phillips has had. You find him, perhaps, a little insignificant. You are probably aware of his vocation and station in life.”

“I am.”

“And these things,” he went on, “make it difficult for you to believe that there is any great tie between us two. Yet it is the exception which proves the rule, you know. I will not say that your patient has ever saved my life or performed any immortal action, yet believe me he has courage and a grit you would scarcely believe in, and I am speaking seriously when I tell you that not only I but others are under deep obligations to him.”

He rose to his feet with the air of one who has closed the subject. Katharine also threw off her rugs.

“You are going to walk?” she asked. “Please take me with you. I don’t know why, but I feel restless this evening.”

They paced side by side up and down the deck, pausing now and then to watch the destroyers and indulging in a very spasmodic conversation. At their fourth promenade, as they reached the stern extremity of their deck, the woman paused, and, holding to the railing with one hand, looked steadily back towards New York. The colour was fading slowly from the sky now, but it was still marvellously clear.

“Are you homesick for what lies beneath those clouds?” he enquired lightly.

She took no immediate account of his words. Her eyes were fixed upon one spot in that distant curtain of sky. Suddenly she pointed with her finger.

“What’s that?” she asked. “No, the mast’s dipping now — you can’t see. There — the other side.”

He followed her outstretched finger, and slowly his fine black eyebrows grew closer and closer together. Far away, at a certain spot in the clear evening sky, was a little speck of black, hidden every now and then by the mast of the ship as she rolled, but distinctly there all the time, a little smudge in an amber setting, too small for a cloud, yet a visible and tangible object. Katharine felt her companion’s arm tighten upon hers, and she saw his face grow like a piece of marble.

“It’s a seaplane,” he muttered, “coming from the New Jersey coast.”

Through that mysterious agency by means of which news travels on board ship as though supernaturally conveyed, the deck was crowded in a very few moments by practically every passenger and most of the officers. Every form of telescope and field-glass was directed towards the now clearly visible seaplane. Speculations were everywhere to be heard.

“Come to warn us of a submarine,” was the first suggestion.

“They’d use the wireless,” was the prompt reminder.

“But seaplanes can spot the submarines under the sea,” one of the journalists reminded the bystanders. “They’re a better escort than any destroyer.”

“She can’t come all the way across the Atlantic, though,” Brand observed.

“It’s some new device of Uncle Sam’s they are testing, perhaps,” his friend suggested. “Gee! You can hear her now quite plainly. There are two of them in the car — a pilot and an observer. Wonder what the captain thinks about it.”

The captain on the bridge was talking to his chief officer. Fragments of their conversation were apparently overheard, for it was soon rumoured around that the captain had expressed his opinion that this was simply part of some maneuvres they were carrying out from the New Jersey Aviation Station. Jocelyn Thew watched the blue fire about the mast.

“I wonder whether that’s she talking to us,” he observed. “One would have to be pretty nippy with one’s fingers to work aboard on one of those small things.”

“Do you suppose she is bringing us a message?” Katharine asked.

He shook his head.

“They could do that by wireless from the shore,” he replied. “Hullo, we’re slowing down!”

The little crowd was now bubbling over with excitement. The speed of the steamer had, without a doubt, been slackened, and a boat was being lowered. Brand and his companion, immensely happy, were already dotting down their notes for the wireless. The seaplane was gently skimming the water almost alongside, and barely fifty yards away. The pilot and his companion were clearly visible. The passengers lined the whole length of the steamer, leaning over to watch the dénouement of this strange scene.

“It’s a newspaper scoop,” one man suggested.

The idea was not favourably entertained.

“No newspaper would be allowed to make use of a Government seaplane,” Brand pointed out. “Apart from that, they wouldn’t dare to stop a steamer out here.”

“There’s the boat!” some one else exclaimed, pointing to one of the ship’s lifeboats which had shot out towards the plane. “She must be going to pick one of the men up!”

The steamer was merely drifting now, and its strange visitor had alighted upon the water, rushing along a little way in front and leaving two long, milky paths of white foam behind. Both the pilot and the passenger were drenched by every wave. They watched the latter as he was taken off, and their eyes followed the return of the lifeboat. Almost immediately afterwards the plane, increasing its speed, rushed across the surface of the water and rose again.

“Prettiest sight I ever saw in my life,” Brand declared enthusiastically.

“We live in wonderful times,” his friend agreed, looking longingly at the wireless office. “I guess we must get a look at this chap, anyway,” he added. “He’s the first man who has overtaken an American liner so far from land like this before.”

The man who clambered a few minutes later up the ladder of the steamer had not the appearance of one who has performed a heroic action. His clothes had shrunk upon his body, and the sea water was oozing from him in all directions. His face was blue with cold and almost unrecognisable. Nevertheless, Jocelyn Thew, who was one of the most eager of the sightseers, attained a certain measure of conviction as he shut up his glasses with a snap and turned to his companion.

“An Englishman,” he observed.

“Do you know him?” she asked curiously.

“I can’t go so far as that,” he admitted, “but—”

“But he was the man for whom you were looking before the steamer started,” she declared confidently.

“Seems a little rough luck to be caught up like this out in the ocean,” he grumbled. “I don’t know that the man’s likely to do me any particular harm,” he added, “but I’d just as soon he wasn’t on board.”

Meanwhile, the captain had hurried his belated passenger into his room, and the ship saw no more of him that night. By degrees the excitement simmered down. Jocelyn escorted his companion to the gangway and bade her good night.

“I am not at all sure,” she protested, “that I am ready to go down yet.”

“You must show a little interest in your patient,” he insisted.

“But the doctor has already as good as told me to keep away.”

“Gant is a peculiar fellow,” he told her. “By this time he has probably changed his mind and needs your help. Besides, I am anxious to hear what they say in the smoking room concerning this extraordinary visitor.”

She looked around. They were absolutely alone.

“Who is he,” she asked, “and what does his coming mean to you?”

“His name is Crawshay,” Jocelyn replied. “He is an ex-Scotland Yard man who came over here to work for the English Secret Service.”

“What does he want here?” she whispered, a little hoarsely.

Jocelyn raised his cap as he turned away.

“Me,” he answered. “He’ll probably be disappointed, though.”

.